Stretch your brain
Jules stood alone in the Proteus desert on Empyrean. He'd never been first before, not in any of the trillions of light cones. Good. He was at the front then, making a real change. He wouldn't be alone for long. But as the seconds dragged on he didn't know what to do with himself. Always… Continue reading Something to Fight For
The Empress of the SUGRA Skies sunbathed at a hangar on Eta Convex while Sawyer watched from the shadows. He stood to stave off the urge to sleep. He could rest when he was back on board, after the next jump, but not now. Not while there were hands other than his own touching the Empress. The… Continue reading Ghosts of Tomorrow
Petty Officer Lars Lamont helped get the clamp in position and then got out of the way. He didn't like it, but the Kid had to learn sometime. The whole cohort was at Lars' least favorite part of the training: practicum. He had to babysit while they did the wrenching on the Kólga's FTL drive. They… Continue reading Storm Shelter
The pilot made Lula feel extremely uncomfortable. The pilot likely felt nothing at all for his part. Him? Was the pilot a man? Not in the philosophical man-or-machine sense, but biologically. She'd assumed he was a man based on his bulk and the breadth of his shoulders, but she supposed those were not meaningful indicators.… Continue reading Special Cargo
The Milky Way rang like a bell, but only Kenza Ziani could hear it. The construction of the Resonance Stations had been her life's work—more than a life's work in some ways. Her brain was still her own with only minor alterations, but she'd regrown numerous new bodies around it through the long years. Twenty,… Continue reading Paradox Resolved
"Ma'am, with all due respect, am I to understand—" Admiral Canty dismissed him with a wave of a pixelated hand—the heavy encryption on the 'tangle feed tended to make the holos look blocky. "You aren't to understand anything, Captain." It wasn't often that someone could make Tanner's rank sound derogatory. The Amphinome, the ship under his command,… Continue reading The Worst Kind of Enemy
The Second Cold War was colder than the first, the stakes higher, the players more numerous. But it picked up in the most memorable arena of the First: the Moon. NASA and JAXA maintained a joint science outpost in the Avogadro crater on the far side, and it was from there that Comet Calvillo-Ōtsuka-Folts was… Continue reading The Solovyova Object
Captain Brecht stood just outside the bunk module of the Veneration. The terminator line split Jupiter in half beyond the crystalline viewport. The massive body now blocked line-of-sight with Earth, and the tumult of its magnetosphere scrambled any stray signals. They were on their own. Time to tell the kids. She entered the bunks, dialed up… Continue reading New Destination
A swell of nausea pulled Private Elowen Dextre out of darkness. The spinning in her head was a very specific sensation: gravity flux. She felt she was strapped to a flight chair, but her arms and legs were restrained, too. She opened her eyes, and the sight before her gave her stomach a new reason… Continue reading 88 More
She sat alone in the observatory, drinking coffee and watching the 11-dimensional universe unfurl itself around her ship like a kaleidoscope exploding inside a mirror maze during a fireworks show. It was so very strange. The coffee, that is; not foldspace. She never used to like coffee, let alone without an aggressive amount of cream… Continue reading Accidental Ambassador
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