Stretch your brain
"I don't know how to fucking fly this thing!" My would-be kidnapper pressed the muzzle harder against the back of my neck. "Then I hope you're a quick learner." The radio squawked again. "Shuttle 2-2-Libra-5-Neptune, this is is Harbor Tower 8. You're out of pattern and off grid. Escorts dispatched. Copy?" "Why can't you fly… Continue reading Gimme a Hand
They are not to be disturbed. This was a key tenet of the Sh'sesha order of which Harn was a disciple. A tenet he was disobeying. Not for the first time, either. Kalburin was a barren world beneath a hostile binary star. Harn wasn't born here. No one is born here. And no one ever… Continue reading The Behemoths of Kalburin
He slammed the door shut behind him with a sound like thunder that rolled its way up the cramped and haphazard buildings of the city. He'd lost a shoe. Yuzuru's socked foot found a puddle in the darkness and warm rancid-smelling splashed up his legs. It would have made him sick if he'd the time… Continue reading To Die Again In This Alleyway
After a long period, the charge on my arrestor capacitor finally ran down to zero, flipping a mechanical relay deep in my hull over to deep-cycle power. I woke up. I think I dream, but I can't be certain. I believe that—like the humans who designed me—remembering dreams would require periodic waking, and, lacking that… Continue reading More Cats Than I Remember
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
"I thought you said the place looked abandoned," said George. "It did." "You didn't notice the hundred-yard floating alien orb?!" "Keep your voice down!" Hannah whispered. "I'm more worried about the sentry." They peeked through the wind-blasted branches of some kind of desert shrub from the lip of the valley. Ahead was a cracked and… Continue reading Turncoat
Gravity bombs sent ripples ripping through the battlefield, decimating friend and foe alike. Zoe pressed forward, unwavering and ever ready. Her battle armor's powered joints did most of the running for her, but it would stop if she faltered in her courage. The shallow hydrocarbon stream defaced beneath her boot tread boiled from the ambient… Continue reading A Shot in the Dark
Breaking every promise he'd made to himself, Grant found himself once again in the shining, shifting heart of the Temple of Seamless Iteration. The golden panels lining the long enclosure fluttered in their waving way, gracefully forming now a vaulted ceiling and then a dome of nested arches, always moving uniformly, symmetrically, and silently like… Continue reading Temple of Seamless Iteration
Harris and Sanchez bunny-hopped into the chasm in the reduced gravity of this strange world, but Kwon held back. Despite the surveillance and the simulations and the successes of the rovers she was deeply unsettled. Petrified eggs—larger than the Zaqar lander the astronauts flew in on—sat half submerged in a pool of hydrocarbons at the… Continue reading Last One There’s a Rotten Egg
Cyclopea VII did not want to be tamed. In that way it was like all the other wild planets before they'd been swept into the Fold. The Scouts would break it, eventually. But this was to be a war of attrition. Kaixuan stood beside a loaded-up Colt, its multijointed glassy carbon legs firm beneath its… Continue reading The Gentle Crush of Outward Expansion
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