Stretch your brain
Space is a big place. Remarkably, unfathomably, soul-crushingly big. And all that space is essentially empty. The black vastness is not somewhere you want your ship to break down. That's why there's a mandate all ships are obligated to respond in good faith to any distress signals of space origin (once you make planetfall you're… Continue reading Answering the Stravinsky
All the windows were boarded shut from the inside. Jacinthe didn't even bother with the front door. Instead she walked around the sun-scorched and weather-beaten house, expecting very little and generally having her expectations met. The midday brightness baked the earth. The heat almost seemed to rise up from the cracks in the yellow-white clay.… Continue reading Anachronic Lag
The red-eyed double suns glared down on the scrap planet Lunhili. An acidic rain drizzled down from diffuse clouds, turning to steam upon the scorched bodies of dead starships and reenacting memories of their glory days when they'd navigated the likes of the Omega Nebula in the name of humanity. But those days were over.… Continue reading Bury the Truth at the Lunhili Graveyard
After six days, the recycled, re-purified, re-sterilized urine was beginning to taste like what it actually was, but Louisa remained patient and unmoving. Cold but not shivering. Tired but not sleeping. Alert and ready. She was a professional, if a grave robber could be such a thing; and if not, she was at least experienced.… Continue reading War Within the War
"It's a star; a black dwarf." "I already told you, that's impossible." She reminded him that for a white dwarf to cool to the cosmic background radiation temperature it would take a quadrillion years—70,000 times the current age of the universe. "You can recite numbers all you like, but I'm telling you it's a black dwarf."… Continue reading Risks and Rewards
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