by Roi R. Czechvala | Feb 21, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
It didn’t bother me at first. Killing them I mean. They had come to our home world with plans of conquest. I can’t even dignify what happened by calling it a war. They claim we fired first, which was true, but nobody asked them to just zip into our atmosphere without knocking first. Besides, you’d have thought that the orbiting mines of the PLeiaDeS, the Planetary Defence Satellites, would have made them change their minds.
They were like hydras. Strike one down; two more appeared in their place. They were relentless, always moving, never slowing, always onward, crusading. Spreading like a great plague.
We are pacifists my family, but even my sainted grandmother hugged me the day I took my oath and joined the Corps. She told me to “be good” and to “kill every last one of the bastards.”
I’ll never forget my first combat drop. I nearly shit my pants when I leaned out the open hatch and saw them below us. It was impossible to make out individuals, there were so many. It was as if their army was just a vast undulating sea. With no more individuality than a drop of water.
If I was scared then, it more than doubled when we hit the deck and engaged. I unslung my rifle and laid into them with a green ribbon of plasma. Still they came.
We were confused by their intentions at first. They were unarmed, so we were hesitant to fire at first, but we soon learned that they had weapons far more devastating than our mere blasters and pulse cannons.
They could enter our minds.
It was one thing to fire into the faceless hoard, vaporizing them in mid stride. It was altogether something different when the faces became friends, family… my wife. The bastards got to her too, and I was the one who had to reduce my own beautiful bride to an unrecognizable lump of charred meat. Later things got so bad; I would have eaten that burnt flesh. I vomited until I passed out.
I was miserable for days, but had to push on. We had the weaponry, but they had ever growing numbers as more and more of our people were overcome by their sinister power. One year flowed into two. We no longer fought their onslaught; we fought to stave off the inevitable. The mindless smiling faces of the ones whom we loved. We mowed them down, believing that in death they escaped a living horror. Towards the end we resorted to singularity Turing devices. Too little too late.
It became a war of attrition. Our men abandoning their posts, some took their own lives; the worst fate was to become one of them. A mindless grinning drone.
Finally they found me. Hiding like a coward in the basement of an abandoned farmhouse shitting myself in fear. I knew there was no way out. I stuck the muzzle of my blaster against my chest. There was a faint whine and a whiff of singed hair. The power cell was totally drained.
I curled up in a tight ball, expecting a rain of cruel merciless blows. Instead, I felt gentle hands pulling me to my feet. They talked to me, they talked and they talked. They took me back to their ship. They cleaned me up. They fed me. They weren’t so bad after all.
After spending time with them I now understand what they want. I understand.
“I’m sorry to wake you… Would you like to buy a copy of The Watchtower?”
by submission | Feb 20, 2011 | Story
Author : Matthew Callaway
It looks like snow, except there’s no snow here, no rain. The foamy droplets float down from the decontamination sprayers as a ship lands, speckling the faceplate of my respirator. When I was a kid seeing snow was like seeing a planet for the first time. Every ice crystal glimmering, the trees bent over from the weight of frozen branches. No trees on this planet. I wonder what season it is on earth right now. My display says its October back home, I think that’s Autumn, the colors are pale in my memory. We left when I was so young it feels like a less of a home now than this sand pile, or that last rock. The droning hum of the landing craft is just above me now.
“Look alive!” The boss bellows at me from inside the comm booth. What a prick, I’ve got it under control. The ship settles into the docking lock, not gonna get a scratch on her shiny hull. All thats left is the particle scrub and ‘Welcome to Splendora’.
This ship looks like thousands of others, sleek but utilitarian, the whole thing rings like a bell when the mag locks engage. Like the bell between classes at school, before the frontier, before the remote classrooms, skipping from one new found rock to another, and the lonely light years started piling up between me and what once felt so much like home. My brother went back and became a droid mech, they’re practically outnumbering people there now, droids I mean, not mechanics. Then you have ‘people’ like me.
My shield plated arms slide under the ships’ drive core to disconnect the cables and clasps to free the device, a couple thousand kilos of metal and glass is like a toy in my hands, twenty degrees or seven hundred, as was now the case. The glow of the reaction inside shines off the blueish tint of my elbow joint. You can get them to look basically unaugmented, of course, but the company only pays for basic. A message flashed on my view the other day, news from home, another heart for Mom, she says the new one loves me just as much and I should visit sometime.
The sun’s setting again, must be about lunch time, this core is clear and humming. Snapping closed the panel I can almost smell the air outside my respirator, for a moment I smell the mildew of a leaf pile.
“You ever go to the Vega system?” Keplen, who was actually born on Splendora, offers me a cigarette and tries to bait me into asking about his lucky streak at the Vega Casinos, and with the well tanned ladies of the Vegas’ asteroid colonies.
“‘Hear it’s a good time, didn’t you make the trip a few months ago?” Taking the bait, and the cigarette from his extended mechanical arm. There was a deep gash on his forearm plate where he caught a bit of plasma, as they say, in a bar fight. Another great one I’ve heard twenty times. He might get it repaired if it wasn’t such a great story. I display some images of Vega across my view to color the tale as it rambles along. It makes me want to see a cruiser from the inside again, but not one to Vega. If I’m going that far I might as well go all the way. I’m sure these arms can rake leaves, or shovel snow if it takes me a few months to get there.
by submission | Feb 19, 2011 | Story
Author : Ron Wingrove
Discovery of the Omniflower should have been one of the greatest of the 23rd century. It happened on a distant planet, to a ragged crew from an equally-shabby exploration ship. Anybody who could cobble together an FTL drive went into exploration. Most never made it back.
The landing was hard with the heavy gravity, but the ship got down safely. The captain had one important question to ask his science officer.
“There air outside?”
“Yes sir, but…”
“It’ll do… MAC!” A dirty face appeared round the hatch to Engineering.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Make sure nothing broke after that bump. We’re going for a walk.”
The crew was met just outside a settlement by an alien. Yellow skin, vaguely human. The captain was a more casual than the movies liked.
“Kwishath ack narothdack?”
“Sure, man. We come in peace, and leave in pieces, and stuff. Yeah.”
“Astana retoothka? Squirly a chondack?”
“Yep, that too… What the hell is that?”
“That” was a short plant that appeared by the alien’s feet. It grew from a seedling to a small bush, put out some blue leaves and one fruit, then died back to nothing in the space of a few seconds. Totally calm, the alien bent down to pick the blue fruit. He broke it open, removed something from inside, and handed it to the stunned captain.
“So, what’s this? ‘English-Narothdack phrasebook?’ You gotta be kidding me!”
Flicking through the pages, the captain looked for one specific phrase, and found it in a chapter marked Social Colloquialisms for Informal Occasions.
“What in God’s name is going on? Kveesta unacktra ban de plositch?”
Plositch was the closest the language could come to God.
It meant “Small blue plant that provides us with all we need.”
With the phrasebook, the alien explained to the spacefarers. It was called the Plositch, and popped up wherever something was needed. Dinnertime? One would open with your favourite food. Nighttime? A larger one, with a bedroll. Predator attack? A long one would open containing a spear. All you had to do was imagine a flower opening nearby, and what it would contain. The captain named them Omniflowers.
A week later, and it was time to go. Efforts to make the omniflower grow anywhere other than the surface failed, but there were no limits to what it could make. When Mac dropped his ancient pocket watch in a stream and wished for a new one, it was discovered that the plant could produce complex mechanisms, and the captain figured out a way of making some serious money. The ship’s library had pictures of collectables, and the omniflowers produced crates of small “antiques.” A moment of whimsy produced a large gold watch. It fitted nicely into a pocket of the captain’s jumpsuit, just right for timing the lift-off.
“5… 4… 3, first stage ignition… 2… 1… Lift-off, we have lift-off, retracting landing gear…” A pause. “Altitude 35,000 meters, standby for second stage ignition…”
“Hey, that’s not right!” The captain’s shout made everyone turn and stare. Instead of a watch, his hand held a pile of greenish slime. A second later, it had dried to dust.
“Oh, bad luck, captain. The things made by the plants can’t leave the surface either. That means those crates are gone, too.”
“Second stage ignition in 5… 4… 3… 2, first stage shutdown complete… 1…” An ominous silence. “Second stage ignition failure! Mac, what’s up with your engines?”
Mac went deathly pale.
“Boss? The second stage fuel pump! Needed replacement, but we didn’t have one…”
“Yes?”
“I replaced it with one from a plant.”
by submission | Feb 17, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
I’m in my office, the big one on the top floor, minding my own business and he just walks in without knocking. Hey, we might have just had a revolution but there’s still a right and a wrong way to do things. For example, storming into my office with a sour look on your face and then yelling at me with a tone of voice I don’t appreciate is not the best way to stay on my good side.
“Fred,” he says, “we have to rethink the Copacetitron. We have to turn it back on, now.”
“What?” I shout at him. He’s not supposed to call me Fred, not anymore, nobody is. I didn’t risk my life leading the Eight Departments against the Kindlys of the Serious Commission so I could be called Fred. Comandante, now that’s a title fit for a man of my accomplishments. That’s what I’m supposed to be called, whether or not I told anybody that yet.
“Fred…” (again with the Fred!), “Fred, I know that shutting down that evil, mind bending machine was the whole point of our uprising, but listen, we have to turn it back on, right now. I don’t know, maybe we can turn it down gradually over the next couple of weeks. I just know that turning it off suddenly was the wrong move.” That whole not calling me Comandante thing is totally a crime. Ignorance of the law is no defense, regardless of whether or not I told anybody about it. The law flows out of me like my exhaled breath, the steaming exhalations of the Comandante.
He’s got that look in his eye, I know it pretty good, like he’s going to keep talking. I let him go, he can dig his own grave as deep as he wants it for all I care. “Look, just look outside,” he says and I do.
I knew he was off but looking outside just proves it. The city looks better than it ever did. The lovely fires are bringing out dramatic shadows and angles I never could have imagined. Down the way, I can even see a guy crucified up on the hands of the big clock. Now that must have been damn hard to do and I almost tear up thinking about all the ambitious go-getters we got down there.
“Fred!” he says again, louder this time. I’m going to have to say something to him, that much is clear. He starts walking towards me with some kind of look in his eye I can’t identify. Better safe than sorry, I always say. That’s why I put together this fine club, a stick anyone of Comandante level would be glad to call his own. It’s got a bunch of nails through it at odd angles. Its lack of symmetry really stirs the soul. Anyway, I start hitting him with it (I really should give my club a proper name like, I dunno, Darlene or something). All kind of roses bloom on his face. I think maybe I hit him for too long, mostly because my left arm cramps up something fierce.
I look down at him, my little brother, the brains behind our rebellion. What happened to him? We shut down the evil Copacetitron that was, we all knew, messing with our heads in a manner most indelicate. For some reason, he just couldn’t deal with the reality of our liberation. Oh well, you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. We were free now and we had to start acting like it.
by Patricia Stewart | Feb 16, 2011 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“Tell me again, Welin, why you have to lie to the Captain?” asked the temporal assistant. “It doesn’t seem right,” she added with disgust.
“You’re not seeing the big picture, Molly. It’s not about a single ship; it’s about what happens afterwards. Malum’s great, great grandfather was working in the engine room of that ship. By killing Alexander Pravus five years before he fathered Malum’s great grandmother, we’ll ultimately prevent Malum’s birth, and save the lives of millions of innocent people that have been butchered since he’s seized control of the planet. I would prefer to have killed Malum as a child, but his scientists have set up temporal blockades that go back more than a century.”
“What if Pravus survives the sinking,” countered his assistant. “Have you thought of that? There is no guarantee everyone will die.”
“It’s a chance we’ll have to take. Please, Molly, it’s now or never. His henchmen could discover our laboratory at any time.”
With tears beginning to form in her eyes, she acquiesced. “I hate you for making me do this,” she cried. “Do you even know what you’re going to tell him?”
“Yes, Molly. I have it all worked out. Now please, time is running out.”
“Okay, damn you. Clip on your wings before I change my mind.”
Minutes later, a ghostly image appeared over the Captain’s bunk. “Captain Smith, wake up” it sang softly.
The groggy captain rubbed his eyes as he struggled to comprehend what he heard. “Who is it?”
The semitransparent apparition floated in mid-air, its wings beating rhythmically in slow motion. “Why have you shut down the engines?”
Suddenly terrified as he realized it wasn’t a dream, Smith’s trembling fingers clutched the covers to his chest. “It…it..it’s too dangerous,” he answered.
“No, Edward, it’s not. Would God ask me to come to you if it were dangerous? You must believe me. It’s your destiny to complete this voyage as quickly as possible. Now, go to the bridge, and resume your original heading and speed.”
“But, Gabriel, please. It isn’t safe,” Smith pleaded.
Welin raised his voice and pointed an accusatory finger at the frightened captain. “Do not question the Holy Father. Do as he commands, or suffer his wrath. Now, GO, or spend eternity in damnation.”
Reluctantly, but obediently, Captain Smith scurried form the bed, put on a robe, and headed toward the bridge.
At 11:40 PM, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg. From that instant forward, no one remembered the original voyage, where the Titanic had steamed into New York harbor 18 hours behind schedule. Instead, the new reality was that the Titanic took 1,517 souls to the bottom of the Atlantic, including Alexander Pravus.
Although Dmitry “The Slaughter” Malum was never born, there were unforeseen consequences in the new timeline. Adolph Hitler wasn’t killed in WWI and subsequently rose to power, America reached the moon before the Soviet Union, the European Union collapsed, and then, in a desperate maneuver to lash out at the entire world, North Korea unleashed The Doomsday Plague. By 2048, there were no humans alive to invent time travel to rewrite history a second time.
