When you’ve been studying the ocean for so long, it’s hard to remember what it’s like above it.
Tag: sci-fi
One Last Journey
Photo by Kasey McCoy on Unsplash This is yet another prompt from the lovely Space Wrecks bot on Twitter. Its an automated bot that generates a short blurb inspired by … Continue reading One Last Journey
Low Tide
Photo by Giovanni Arechavaleta on Unsplash This story was inspired by these images by Yun Ling. This story also contains the use of Fae/Faer for the character Din; here is … Continue reading Low Tide
Herxes Station
They were all here for the same reason. Not just music; that was implied by the posters, the homemade shirts, the thin station hallway packed full of stitched-together styles and clashing hairdos. Most of these people were miners, haulers, maintenance workers – the ones that did the work so others could live. Even with the small boosts to pay last quarter, these were thankless tasks, and the crowd was clearly a sea of comrades in arms, all frustrated beyond a doubt and looking for an out.
Out in the Field
A conversation with a stranger in the middle of the night.
Old Wounds, Fresh Faces
The rain was heavy with purpose, landing with resounding thuds all around them; Taks thought it might be trying to cleanse the ground of battle, to remove old sins from the soil and soak the earth with hope instead. Maybe it was sick of the old world’s scars and wanted to wipe the slate clean.
With what had happened here, that was a losing battle in itself.
“Taks, damnit!” Marta bellowed as the tarp Taks had been holding slipped and flapped in the wind. “Hold it steady! Hog’s teeth, I don’t want to spend all night at it!”
Their mind was wandering again. Taks half-yelled an apology that was eaten by the storm and groped in the dim light for the tarp’s edge. Their fingers connected with the Orb’s eerie metallic surface, centuries of detail exposed to the brutal elements; it still felt hot even after so much time. They helped Marta stake down the rest of the tarp in embarrassed silence, covering the gaping hole in the Orb’s top; of the field’s choices, this one had the most intact structure, which wasn’t saying much.
The Swirling Dark – a Void Cavalcade story
This story takes place in my scifi setting for the game “The Void Cavalcade” that I GM. The party has just pulled off a heist to kidnap a local crime magnate, an alien named Rekkis. This tells what happened to them after the party turned them in…
The Void Cavalcade
Earth isn’t gone. But sometimes, we wish it was.
When all this started, we’d just achieved long-range spaceflight with the Cleave drives – my great-grandparents were on one of the first cruisers out to the Alpha Centauri system. Kind of a big deal, getting to escape the solar system like that. We’d managed to colonize a few worlds in our backyard, but ideal they weren’t; if we could get our ships to cut through interstellar space the way they did in our neighbourhood, we might have a better chance at finding a liveable world.
Terraforming? That’s a fool’s errand. Best you can hope for is to change a series of icy moons into windy dustballs that snow like the devil’s dandruff, or make a bunch of dry rocks into slightly moist ones. ‘Course, other folks in the galaxy might have other notions, but they weren’t around then; it was just humans trying to find a new home in the badlands.
The Distance Between Us
The station wheeled through the void carelessly, metal carapace groaning and creaking against the sheer vacuum that surrounded it. The Jovian moon of Callisto swirled in the darkness below, framed by the gigantic sphere of gas and storms that was Jupiter. The rings glinted in sparkling sunlight, sunlight that had careened through space at such unimaginable speeds just to shine against all these tumbling, hurtling rocks. Even the other moons twinkled in the distance, hot white sparks against the deep black canvas behind.
It all looked so fake.
Niké stared hard out of the viewport, trying to convince their brain that what they saw was reality. Those huge, unimaginably strange bodies outside, so alien compared to the cool Martian sand they grew up on. So cold and barren, devoid of life or shelter. Niké squinted their eyes. Still doesn’t look right, they conceded.
“Niké!” The old caretaker bot shouted down the connector.
“Yeah,” Niké responded distractedly, eyes glued to the surreality of such an immense spectacle. The unfathomable vastness was just wrong-
“Nee-Kay.” Came the synthesized voice again, stressing the syllables. It always got their attention, and not for good reason.
“What, Tink.” Their reply was flat.
The Four of Us
Even here, in the deepest void of space, there was comfort in moving through nothing.
The ship’s engines rumbled pleasantly; more than that, the feeling of the engines running, matter being converted to plasma to be ejected through narrow cones, the heat and pressure of it all – these were feelings no person could ever truly feel. The sensation of electricity coursing through the hull; automated drones, each one feeling as if a part of her body; the cold, pressure-less void trying to rupture the skin of her hull.
She felt more and more like a vessel, a Ship, than a physical being every day.
Par’terre. Comms.
