"You are the Deathmind." Tul shivers, though the humid blackness that envelopes him is warm. A salivating steel maw. The solitary red point of light shifts in an implacable way. "A weak statement, more so for its implications than its approximations." It hurt just to hear the Deathmind speak, like its voice turned Tul's bones… Continue reading Deathmind
Tag: Aliens
Fluke
Far away, in a galaxy which we have not yet catalogued, in a time we could call the present—though to do so would be at the midpoint of a span terminating at impractical at one end and meaningless at the other—there is a planet that we shall call Fluke. On planet Fluke, there are things… Continue reading Fluke
Garden of the Lightflowers
I missed home. I missed my garden. So I planted a new garden, right in the middle of everything in an unused emptiness. I added nutrients to make it fertile and put in scaffolding, a trellis of sorts, to give it structure. I love my new garden. I grow lightflowers—uninspired, I know. No braided vines… Continue reading Garden of the Lightflowers
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Seek Vengeance
General Welkar took the podium. "Congratulations, cadets. You are still here. When I addressed this group a year ago, you numbered more than a thousand. And now? Thirty. Those others did not share your grit, your intellect, your skill, or your boldness. They quit. They were cut. Some believed they had no limits, and they… Continue reading If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Seek Vengeance
Multigenesis
The dust got into everything; wrinkles in the rubber gaskets, the edges between a helmet and a visor, under the plastic joints around an elbow or between the proximal and distal phalanges of a thumb. Everything. It doesn't matter how much compressed air you got blasted with in the airlock or if you were diligent… Continue reading Multigenesis
Best-laid Plans
Even through the filters, the air reeked of sulfur. Yellow starlight punched swirling holes through the cloud cover and baked the gases out of the strange crystalized rocks that covered the region—a product of the crash, surely. Tavish watched the ship's entrance from his perch atop a stone column across the steam-filled gorge. Three days… Continue reading Best-laid Plans
An Abundance of Audacity
It took them a long time to figure it out—long in human terms, anyway; generations—and longer still to put that revelation to use, but even so, the humans did it first. From orbital stations around the brown dwarfs of Epsilon Indi and the white dwarfs of Sirius and Procyon, from Rigel and Regulus and sentimental… Continue reading An Abundance of Audacity
The Legacy We Deserve
They skipped from star to star like a stone on the surface of a placid lake. At each bright point they gorged themselves, ripping through the magnetic flux lines like a cellophane wrapper and exposing the sticky, savory flesh within, fattening up for the next jaunt. The next long winter of the vacuum. In some… Continue reading The Legacy We Deserve
Fragments of Mutiny
Do the cave eels of Europa hunt by vision, or sound? Heat, maybe? He hoped it wasn't heat. Bay stood still in the ice cave for a long time, waiting until he was absolutely sure the crew had departed. There'd been a mutiny—not against him; he was just a general staff member, and a junior… Continue reading Fragments of Mutiny
Dust to Dust
For all his political posturing and his penchant for charismatic public overtures, Leon Brault was having second thoughts. It wasn't an ideological shift he was experiencing, but an awareness of his survival instinct. He was close enough now to see the Artifact with his own eyes, separated only by a few kilometers and 4mm of… Continue reading Dust to Dust
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