by submission | Aug 4, 2015 | Story |
Author : David Botticello
“One last bit of business for the day,” barked the ship’s loudspeakers, “I must to inform all crew and travelers that one of our esteemed passengers is a Sunsprite. Please take all necessary precautions,” the Captain’s voice trailed off before quickly adding, “with all due respect, of course.”
Fred, one of the few Korna out this far, had never met a Sunsprite before. They’re flame spirits—near-mythical creatures born on a world too enamored of its star’s corona, who wander the universe in search of new experiences. He supposed it wasn’t exactly odd, therefore, to meet one on a passenger shuttle. Still, it was a new experience for Fred. This Sunsprite—Edwina, she called herself—almost glowed with a terrifying reddish light that filtered through the metalforme cooling vents of her otherwise formfitting encounter suit.
Some races can tolerate a star’s heat for a short time, but not many. Sentient beings are fortunate that the universe is a vast and empty place, full of dark expanses to hide from the deadly radiation shed by the stars. But Sunsprites, they love the light. Even now, as in their primitive years, they bathe in their sun’s radiation for health and leisure.
First contact with the Sunsprites saw a Tellerian ambassador incinerated by a handshake. His Colarian manservant went into a coma for weeks from radiation poisoning just by standing in the same room. They’re fearsome, flighty beings. We leave them alone, when we can.
Still, Edwina was a lovely creature. She stayed mostly to her cabin, but a few times ventured forth in one of those isolating suits of theirs. She would gaze at the star simulations in the Navigation Lab or lounge before the great window—heavily shielded of course—of the Observation Bay. Fred was able to strike up a conversation. She smiled, chatting easily as she luxuriated in the faint light of the nearest star, a dull pinpoint against the black of space.
Well, one thing led to another and, after all, a Korna of Fred’s age could survive her radiation—for a short while, at least. Alone in Fred’s cabin, she stripped off her encounter suit while Fred gazed in awe, idly wondering how much of his life he was sacrificing for the experience. She shivered for an instant at the cold of the vessel against her skin, but soon began to slink around the room, waves of warmth wafting from her body. Even as heat filled the room, and Fred muffled a choking cough, he watched Edwina inspecting his belongings curiously. A mischievous twinkle rose to her eye. The creature picked up a Fred’s largest telerometer, specially alloyed against the heat of space-travel. She inhaled a deep breath. Fred saw it coming,—he’d always say so, at least—but how do you stop a being that lives in starlight? The device was already melting in her hand when her breath coursed over it, reducing its finely-tuned parts to an ugly slag. “Oh dear,” she sighed innocently, turning to him with a sly grin. He didn’t invite her back.
But to this day, when the drinks are flowing and there’s a crowd to hear, Fred’ll tell of his encounter with a Sunsprite. “They call themselves Oomoon. We call them Lightbathers. Fire elementals. Star-children,” he’ll start. Then like as not, Fred’ll tell you about their little home planet, legendary Earth, orbiting its sun unnaturally close for any normal life to spring up. Then he’ll shake his head, muttering. No creature should enjoy the stars that way.
by Julian Miles | Aug 3, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I woke to one of those ‘phantom impacts’ on the bed. The source of the bump was one of the legs of the spider looming over me. I will admit to squealing a little before grabbing my glasses to restore things into perspective.
The glasses allowed me to focus on the gigantic purple spider filling my bedroom. My squeal, which had been ebbing, climbed into a full-blown shriek.
A huge pair of mandibles swung down in front of my face and my shriek fainted dead away.
“Youthling, you have averred a policy of peaceful co-existence with my siblings all of your life. Many have not.”
The voice emanating from this monster arachnid did not alarm me as much as a sudden awareness of distant bedlam.
“Please excuse the disturbance. We are dealing with transgressors.”
I found a voice. It wasn’t my grown up one, but it had to do: “Transgressors?”
“The many who sorely afflicted my kin are being judged. We are the Avengers of Uttu.”
I swallowed hard before asking: “Uttu?”
“She who wove the net upon which the universes hang. We are her blessed, journeying the webs between the suns to bring her scattered kindred home.”
I took a moment to think slightly faster than my hyperventilation, then slowed breathing and imagination.
“You’re taking all the spiders to arachnid heaven?”
“I do not accurately parse the terms ‘arachnid’ or ‘heaven’, but derivation by context leads to confirmation of your query.”
“You will be leaving afterwards?”
“Assuredly. We have many planets yet to visit.”
“So why are you in my bedroom?”
“The sibling that you prevented your progenitor from crushing with a tome yesterday asked me to thank you.”
“They remember?”
“Other than threats, only for a short while. I was impressed by the level of recall, which indicated repeated interventions by yourself.”
“Repeated? I though spiders didn’t live very long?”
“They live many cycles. They just do not stay in one location for long. Otherwise their uncharacteristic longevity would be noticed by your elders.”
I had a moment of wonder and horror: “Spiders live for centuries but we haven’t noticed because they were actually a part of a covert alien ecosystem in temporary residence on our planet, which is about to depart forever?”
“Correct.”
I just stared. I may have gibbered a bit.
“My vessel is ready. Farewell, youthling.”
It backed out of my room without touching a thing. In the darkness of the hallway, the glow of eight violet eyes receded, then vanished.
I fainted.
As nightmares go, I thought it was new paradigm. Until I turned on the news the following day.
That was two months ago. While a lot of people had squished a spider, a strange commonality was that there seemed to be only one person in each home or office who did that. We’ve got a new view of the universe, a massively reduced population, and a lot of single-parent families.
Governments and religions are having a hard time arguing against the sudden outbreak of Uttu shrines and anti-Uttu cults, but everyone expects sectarian violence soon.
Ecologists are quietly watching and guessing what the sudden loss of spiders will do to the world, apart from make arachnophobes happy.
Me? I had to mop up my father.
Now I care for my mother: waking up to find a giant purple spider hacking her husband to pieces was a little much for her mind.
We, like everyone else, just get by. And worry about every other creature that has had an ancient divinity associated with it.
Especially the species that humanity has rendered extinct.
by submission | Aug 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Another Ezerfol battle cruiser came in from the inner system and joined the other vessels surrounding the Earth ship. The latter was the UESS Curtis Newton commanded by United Earth Defense Captain Anton Tao. Tao and his crew were wanted by the militaries of both Earth and Ezerfol. The former wanted them for disobeying orders, destroying the Curtis Newton’s hyperwave transponder, and going rogue; the latter for stealing one of the Ezerfol’s most sacred religious relics and somehow destroying 23 starships over seven months that had been scouring the HD 10180 system to retrieve their property.
“I can disable the Earth ship without destroying it,” said the chief weapons officer of the Ezerfol command ship in what to a human would sound like a series of high-pitched screeches.
“No,” replied the captain. “The Artifact has already been sullied by the loathsome touch of alien hands. If we were to damage it ourselves, or even destroy it…”
The captain didn’t need to continue. Simply allowing the religious icon to be stolen in the first place had already placed the fate of the Ezerfol race in the next life in a precarious position. To inflict further indignity on the holy object, it was said, might compromise even making it to the next life. Indeed, the repeated defeat of one ship after another by this one vessel of the technologically inferior human race had been interpreted by more than one religious authority as evidence that the Ezerfol were already under divine censure. Prior to the theft by the Curtis Newton’s crew, every encounter with Earth’s space navy had resulted in a resounding defeat for the humans.
“They are not responding to our hails,” said the communications officer. “Nor am I detecting any attempt by them to contact any other human ship or base by radio, laser, or hyperwave.”
“Captain, the ship seems…dark,” noted the command ship’s executive officer. “There’s no light coming from any of the porthole windows.”
“There!” said the weapons officer. “Their cargo bay doors just opened and something came out! Captain, we have to risk firing on–”
The Ezerfol officer’s recommendation was cut off by the bridge going completely dark. The bridge had viewscreens but no windows. At the same time, the artificial gravity failed. So did life support. It took about 26 hours for all 2,200 Ezerfol on the nine ships to die.
The lights on the Curtis Newton slowly came back up. Even with the few pieces of tech the ship had left safely stowed away in Faraday cages during combat missions, there was always about a day or two of repair work that had to be done by candlelight afterward.
“How long will it take to rig up another EMP bomb, Kelly?” Captain Tao asked his chief engineer.
The woman brushed back her red hair getting a streak of dark grime on her forehead in the process and sighed. “Well, sir, we’ve got enough explosives and a couple of armatures left. But we’re getting low on stator winding. Give me a week and I can have a bomb ready. After the next hit we need to resupply.”
“There’s an Ezerfol supply depot in orbit around this system’s largest gas giant. We’ll hit it next. Take out an important enemy resource and resupply ourselves at the same time. Krishna, how long to get to that planet?”
“Let me find a window facing the right direction and I’ll ask my ‘navigation computer,’ sir,” the officer said with annoyance holding up the antique sextant.
Tao laughed. “To defeat a technologically superior enemy, you have to get primitive.”
by submission | Jul 31, 2015 | Story |
Author : David Botticello
When the Nezzan ambassador abruptly walked out of a Council session, nobody really thought much of it. It was a time-honored method showing political irritation. Not that the Nezzan had ever used it before. They were a quiet species—fundamentally reasonable we thought—but quiet. Ideal citizens, really.
The Nezzan introduced themselves into galactic society in the usual way. First encountered by a long-distance cargo hauler that had wandered off course, they were eager to meet new races and participate in our burgeoning community. They joined the League of Free Worlds. They traded interesting variations on the most current technologies. They became active members of our polity, spoke at our councils, and joined even our most idealistic causes.
Usually, it’s the little cultural quirks that cause friction. One race worships the color red. Another hoards natural fabrics “because they’re fuzzy.” Every so often an ambassador gets offended, often as a political ploy, and then there’s an apology, some commiseration over Illyrian wine, and an economic concession. The affairs of state go on.
The Nezzan fleet attacked exactly as their ambassador’s shuttle debarked. We checked. The offensive was cold, strategic, and planned in alarming detail. But the Nezzan were never the most powerful of races; with only moderate technology and a below average birth rate, their ability to wage war was nothing special. To be sure, they caused serious damage to a few worlds—the attacks were particularly unpredictable, and therefore, effective—but the Nezzan never had any real chance against our Coalition Fleet.
We sent messages. What grave offense had set the Nezzan on their murderous course? The Nezzan gave no response. We sent envoys, but they were turned away at the edge of Nezzan space. So we turned inward to our own resources, but our great scholars and xenologists just shook their heads and shrugged. The Council voted to send Senior Mediator Drelax to search for answers and seek out peace. He made it past the border by virtue of his venerable reputation, but then sat daily in a conference room, in the finest government building of the largest city on the Nezzan homeworld, alone. It was not until the last day of his visit that Drelax was joined by the Nezzan’s most esteemed ambassador, Nax Nioryl. He, too, said nothing. Nioryl perched on the edge of the table and smiled pleasantly, implacable as a neutron star. After an hour of Drelax’s entreaties—begging for peace, or armistice, or at least some measure of explanation, the defeated senior mediator rose to leave, turning to Nioryl for one final question: simply, “Why?”
The Nezzan ambassador stared back wordlessly.
Still, we finally got an answer, of sorts. Two days ago a Nezzan heavy cruiser parked in low orbit over a primordial world deep inside the League’s territory. It deployed a plasma cannon of alarming scale and magnitude, carving intricate lines of ancient Nezzan calligraphy into the crust of Colmar Prime. As we gaped at the images coming in, great glowing scars in the planet’s the now-boiling surface, we realized this was Ambassador Nioryl’s response. Loosely translated it reads:
“Why? . . . Because life grows. Because gravity pulls. Because the stars burn.”
by submission | Jul 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : William Ovide Richardson
On a clear day, the tower was a perfect filament of white, stretching from its mile-wide root before you to its faded terminus directly over your head.
The human mind is not accustomed to seeing straight lines at such massive scales. It interprets them as curves, and since the tower was 35,000 kilometers long and perfectly rigid and straight, it seemed to hang overhead, as though before it was lost to sight in the haze of the atmosphere it bent at the end like a light standard. To a conventional mind, unaccustomed to such counterintuitive sights, it could be as jarring as the view from the inner surface of one of the larger Stanford Tori, which seemed like an arch over a curved strip of solid ground, punctuated at the noon position by a luminous suspended cylinder that seemed to float weightless, and which the mind would simply not allow to be as massive as it actually was. The brain was trained and evolutionarily predisposed to understand ‘up’ as a place where incalculably huge things simply didn’t hang like that.
If you stood in front of the tower, that bizarre and disorienting apparent curve would confront you, and several thoughts would come to your mind unbidden. The first you might dismiss as hackneyed and obvious: this was the tower of Babel. It was a monument to human arrogance and hubris and God or nature or chaos or whatever would make us pay for it. Those who laboured for the consortium at all strata, from executives to lawyers to engineers to migrant labourers, would tell you that whatever your beliefs, that thought was perfectly normal. Some of them even believed it.
The second was sheer awe at the scale of human potential. We fight. We forget our lessons every generation, and most of us never learn them at all. We succumb to superstition, incompetence, and the endless blights of stupidity and mean-spiritedness. Nonetheless, this. Somehow we can achieve Olympus, Pedestal, Canaan, Luna, and the utterly mindblowing Tower and the masterstroke of political organization of the Consortium.
Once those thoughts crossed your mind, you would turn, because knowing what was there, you’d have to turn to look after your mind processed the second thought. The idea that the Tower Consortium was a miracle would necessitate it. You’d turn to see the airbase, operating military aircraft around the clock. Beyond that, warships passed, and in the seaport, the derricks of the shipyard turned and swung where the massive landing craft, fully equipped for long-duration seabasing, underwent construction and refits.
The scale of the operation was staggering, of an order to impoverish superlatives, and so was its opposition. Newton’s laws are, of course, immutable. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If some optimistic segment of humanity decided to buck the dark-age warnings of the fearful and build a tower to the stars, then those who thought any of a thousand contrary things–either that we should be satisfied with our God-given dominion, or that we were testing God’s (apparently finite) patience, or that we ought to simply read the stories bronze-age nomads wrote, or whatever else– would come together to tear it down, bound by the basic laws that govern the motion of everything from events to baseballs to force their own prophecies to come true.
And so, war. No more justification required. No more explanation needed for the now constant air, sea, and space battle being waged mere hundreds of miles away from where you now stood. The Consortium’s superiority was incontestable, but it was limited in manpower, while its enemies were legion. It was only a matter of time until this stroke of human genius came tumbling back to Earth, incomplete. Something had to change. Humanity had to improve; we needed to be objectively better.
That was a project much larger and far more daunting even than the Tower, and it was already underway.
