Free Stories 2018

by Baen Books

  Right! She stood and did a forward flip over the console. She looked for the three alien red dots to coincide with red targeting Xs in her mindview.

  An alien tendril suddenly wrapped itself around her throat, catching her unaware, and yanked her hard backwards and up to the captain’s chair. Dee was stunned briefly, which was long enough for the Chiata to drop from the captain’s station that floated overhead and drag her down. It slammed her into the deck plating, hard.

  “Motherfucker!” she shouted in pain. Quickly she bit on her mouthpiece to get a new shot of stimulants, pain killers, and oxygen. The immediate burst of energy and strength enabled her to pull herself up to all fours and then to her knees wrapping the tendril around her left forearm.

  “Let . . . me . . . the fuck . . . go!” she shouted. Then as the alien pulled her closer, Dee managed to bring her blade down across the tendril, freeing her throat. But just as quickly, another set of tendrils darted at her. One wrapped up her left leg and the other darted through her armor on her left bicep and out the back side. The alien tossed her about, ripping her arm off just above the elbow. Dee screamed in pain and anger, and went full auto with her rifle whether it was targeting anything or not.

  Skippy jumped free into the fray and Dee lost track of where he was as the Chiata tossed her about like a rag doll. The muzzle flashes from her rifle lit the room and the faint purple ion trails of the hypervelocity rounds left small sparks and explosions where they impacted against the dome or equipment or consoles. The next five or ten seconds was a mad whirlwind of Dee firing her rifle, cursing the aliens, and being shoved about. She also fought against the random flinging with her jumpboots but that was only somewhat effective. Had she been in her mecha this would have been a much easier fight.

  “Shit!” she screamed. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  Finally one of her rounds hit home on the alien’s midsection, knocking it backwards and off balance. Dee went to swing her blade and then saw the stump the suit had sealed off where her arm used to be. A tendril darted in at her faceplate and her pilot’s reflexes enabled her to catch it with her right hand just as it pushed into the transparent armor and into her cheek below her left eye. She squeezed at the tendril with all the strength in her suit and it burst, squirting the glowing alien blood into the wound and all over her face.

  “Fuck this!” she said as she popped her grenade tubes.

  Thwoomp, thwoomp, thwoomp!

  “Your move, asshole!”

  The Chiata realized what she had just done, and flung her across the room against the dome in the general direction the grenades had gone. The alien did its best to run in the opposite direction. And finally, Dee’s targeting Xs locked to the three Chiata in the room. She rolled up and released her rifle trigger filling the room with the spittapping of automatic rifle fire. It was quickly drowned out by three very loud and very close explosions.

  Dee felt what must have been thirty scalding hot knives rip through her body and something slammed against her so hard it felt like she’d been slapped by a hovertank in botmode. The personal health status emergency screen popped up in her mindview and she could see before her the likeness of herself with no left arm, no legs, and several trauma spots across her torso. There was also a spot underneath her left eye that was marked as trauma.

  “Warning, life signs are critical. Immunoboost and stimulants are being administered,” her suit told no one in particular.

  Dee! Major Moore! You need to snap back to the Madira med bay! Bree told her.

  Not till we have the ship!

  Then out of her periphery she could see the tuning forks of the alien megaship that jutted out like giant snail antennae above the dome began to arc lightning bolts across from one to the other. The blue beam zig-zagged out into space and across to one of the alien ships tearing a hole in it. The targeted ship was so far in the distance that Dee could barely make it out even with the zoom of her busted suit at full.

  She looked over at the command console and saw Skippy flickering in and out of reality space and attached to the weapon controls. Skippy had hacked the ship. The deck vibrated against her suit from mecha pounding in her direction. Company was coming and she was done. Maybe it was time to flash out.

  “Boss! Apple1! You are a mess!” USMC Captain Jose “Monopoly” Rayes stood over her in his FM-13X in bot mode. “Madira! Apple1 is down. Initiating emergency snap-back routine.”

  “Wait! Monopoly! Captain! Do we have the ship?”

  “Yes, ma’am. The Buckley-Freeman superweapon is about to go online!” Monopoly told her. “We need to get you out of here, ma’am. I wish you would have waited on us.”

  “I did. See, here you are.” She did her best to smile.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Skippy, you coming?” Dee could barely manage a whisper, but the little bot suddenly was crawling into place. Dee rolled her head to the right and could see the remnants of a Chiata’s tendril dripping onto the deck. With her remaining hand she clutched the severed appendage just as the sound of bacon frying filled her ears and there was a flash of light and then she was looking up at the inside of the U.S.S. Sienna Madira II’s med bay.

  # # #

  “What the hell is that?!”

  “It’s an alien tendril, or at least it's part of one.” Deanna told the young female tattoo artist as she sat back in the chair. It was Spring Break and Miracle Strip outside the window was covered with college kids in their minimalist beach attire and there was one hell of a party going on. Dee was enjoying being back on Earth, even if it was just for a weekend pass. Her father had her grounded until she had been cycled through post traumatic stress counseling. So, she had a couple weeks to get her shit straight. She looked down at her new toes sticking out of her flip-flops and approved of them.

  I should paint them. Black. Fingernails too, she thought to her AIC. And maybe I’m gonna shave my head on the sides.

  Your father would love that, Bree replied in her mindvoice.

  I’m not going to ask him.

  Like they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  Stop that. I’ve had enough of that apple shit. Apple1 died with Davy Rackman and Nancy Penzington. It’s time for me to be reborn.

  Dee looked over at her friend and fellow Armored E-suit Marine Rhondi Howser and smiled. “That hurt Gunny?”

  “Can’t hurt as much as having your legs blown off, but it has to be close!” Rhondi was lying face down with her naked rear face up. The tattoo artist had her cheeks spread apart and was touching up or adding details—Dee wasn’t sure which, and was too drunk to care—to the snake that curled about her body. The needle was very near Rhondi’s very sensitive spots. Dee imagined it hurt like a mother. But Rhondi had insisted that the only painkillers they could use was tequila. Dee had accepted the challenge. And now both of them were shit-faced.

  “Uh, ma’am, it’s really not optimal for me to tattoo you while you’re drunk.”

  “But not illegal?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Thanks for your concern.”

  The tattoo artist hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Ma’am, what do you want me to do with this alien thingy?”

  “See how it still glows?” She shrugged, pointing at the Chiata tendril chunk.

  “Uh huh.” The young lady acted as if she didn’t want to touch the disgusting looking thing.

  “I want you to grind it up in some green and red ink. And I want you to put four vertical tick marks with a diagonal fifth—one like keeping score—just under my left eye here. Then I want another set of five just like that beside it,” Dee explained.

  “I um, I see. You know this stuff might wear off some day. I can add some nano fluorescent spheres to the ink so it will glow forever if you’d like. You really don’t even need this nasty alien thing in there,” the tattoo artist told her.

  “The alien thing goes in. Keep that ink set aside for me and me alone. I’ll pay you whatever you need to do that.”
Dee said. “I plan to be back. Often.”

  “Here.” Rhondi passed the bottle back over to her. “Don’t eat the worm. Its mine.”

  “We can always get another bottle,” Dee accepted it and killed a significant portion of what was left in the liter container.

  “Jesus, you Marines are fucking nuts. You know the ink doesn’t take as well when you’re drunk?” The man working on Rhondi’s sensitive areas laughed, as he went over them again.

  “Ooh-fuckin’-rah,” Rhondi grunted through the pain. Dee could see tears running down her cheeks, but at the same time her friend was laughing.

  “What are these tick marks keeping score of?” The girl getting ready to work on Dee asked.

  “Those fucking glowing green motherfuckers killed the man I love and they killed my big sister.” Dee swigged from the bottle until it was empty, sucking the worm at the bottom into her mouth. She bit down on it, tasting the gooey slime as it squirted from it without hesitation. “Each mark is for an alien I killed. Keep that ink ready, ’cause, I’m gonna kill every goddamned one of them.”

  “And there’s a lot of them,” Rhondi added. “You’ll have to beat me to some of them, Major!”

  “You sure you don’t want some pain meds, ma’am? I mean, right under the eye right there is gonna hurt.”

  “Not as much as a tat up the crack of your ass!” Rhondi snorted.

  “No, thanks. Me and pain, well, that’s all I’ve got left.” Dee tried but couldn’t keep the tears from forming in the corner of her eyes. She choked them back as best she could but they were coming out. “The tank is empty, except for the pain. I’ll just have to run on that for now.”

  “I, uh, I am sorry for your loss,” was all the girl could manage to say.

  Dee just nodded and laid her head back against the headrest of the tattoo chair while she waited. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a poster of a young punk guy with blue glowing eyes. She forced herself to focus on the writing. It was an advertisement for eye lens implants.

  “Hey, can you get those to look like fire?” Dee asked.

  An Eagle’s Flight

  Brendan DuBois

  In the small windowless room, the only sound was the hiss of static coming from a nearby speaker. It was late July and although the air conditioning at the Center was working heroically to fight off the heat, Walt Sinclair’s sweat-soaked shirt was sticking against his back as he listened to the scratchy words coming out of the gray metal speaker box—complete with NASA meatball logo—near the desk’s edge. He was trying to sit still in an old government-issued metal chair next to the desk, but it was hard to do. His legs had fallen into a nervous jerking game of their own accord, rising up and down, up and down, as the mission proceeded, as procedures were followed, as items on the checklist got ticked off.

  He was in a small, windowless room at the Center, and for Christ’s sake, he wished he was out in the trenches, getting the visuals and direct mission feeds second by second, but his job this Sunday afternoon was to baby-sit a VIP visitor sitting near him, in a battered wheelchair, eyes closed, dozing during one of the most exciting days of Walt’s life He was an old man, and wore a cheap black suit, white shirt and skinny black necktie. On one of the lapels of his worn suit was an American flag pin. Save for bushy white eyebrows, he was bald, and age spots and freckles dusted the top of his head. His jowls were full and saggy, like the tendons holding them up had dissolved over the years. His name was Oscar Morrow and the Center’s personnel held him awe, for in addition to his NASA work, he had also spent years with that agency’s predecessor, NACA, the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics. In his worn and wrinkled hands, he carried a black ebony cane, like being in a wheelchair was just a temporary setback, and that he was ready for that day when he could miraculously walk again.

  Walt had done a quick check on the old man’s background before meeting up with him, and found out that despite the wheelchair, he still maintained his pilot’s license Walt couldn’t imagine what kind of chicanery kept that license up-to-date, so the guy still had pull, even though—as his aunt would like to say—he looked like he belonged in God’s Waiting Room. His lips were pink and moist, and with the man’s eyes closed, Walt kept close look at his chest, to make sure it was rising and falling regularly. A hell of a thing, to have this visitor die here, on this day of days!

  From the speaker on the desk came a burst of static, and voices:

  “Eagle, Houston. If you read, you're go for powered descent. Over.”

  A pause, and then another man’s voice, faint and hard to make out through the static.

  “Eagle, this is Columbia. Houston just gave you a go for powered descent.”

  Oscar’s eyes slowly opened up. “What’s going on?” he asked, his voice dry, raspy, weak.

  Walt’s legs were still trembling. “They just gave Eagle a go for powered descent.”

  The old man nodded, looked about the tiny room. Stained green carpeting, bare white walls—save for two framed photographs of the Moon—and not much else, save for the desk, Walt’s chair, Oscar and his wheelchair.

  As he did in other moments of stress, Walt played with his class ring, spinning it around his right hand ring finger. It was a class ring from M.I.T., where he had gotten his degrees in aeronautical engineering, and the affectionately called “brass rat” had soothed him over the years after leaving school, every time he faced stress, like today.

  As a child he had grown up on the Oregon coast, and the Moon had fascinated and entranced him, pulling him to a career in aviation and space. Service in the Air Force had never panned out—claustrophobia, he couldn’t stand being in enclosed spaces!—but he had done the next best thing: If he couldn’t fly in space, at least he could write the procedures and create the designs to support those who did.

  Like the old man before him, who had flown in lots of aircraft over the years, but whose age had barred him from space travel. In that way, Walt guessed the two of them were alike, although on opposite ends of the age scale. In the hours since he was introduced to him by his department boss—who had said “Treat him nice and give him anything he wants . . . he doesn’t look it but under those wrinkles, he’s an honest to God steely-eyed missile man”—Walt had begun to like Oscar. Oh, he dozed in and out, he regularly passed gas—which in this small room was becoming quite pungent—but the stories he told . . .

  If only the old man had asked to be out in the trenches!

  Oscar shifted his cane about. “Keep an ear open, son, you bet things are gonna start moving fast.”

  Walt managed to find his voice. “Thanks, I will.”

  The old man stared straight at him, and his weak voice changed, becoming that of a teacher, an instructor, someone who had done and seen it all. “You getting excited?”

  Walt just nodded.

  “I can see why . . . but think of it . . . there’s nothing more you and anybody else can do in this building. The training . . . procedures . . . all been checked and re-checked, eh?”

  “Damn right.”

  He flopped a hand. “Then it’s up to the X factor . . . Eh? The one part of everything that can’t really be tested to the core . . .”

  Walt was going to ask him what he meant, when the speaker came to life again. The second faint voice, still nearly buried in static: “Eagle, this is Columbia. You're go for PDI and they recommend you yaw right 10 degrees and try the high gain again.”

  A wait. “Eagle, you read Columbia?”

  A third man’s voice: “Columbia, Roger, we read you.”

  Walt realized his sweated-out shirt had to be shrinking, because it was oh so very tight against his chest. The old man gently tapped his cane up and down.

  “Mr. Morrow, you know, we could—”

  “Please, call me Oscar.”

  “Oscar, you could be someplace else besides here, you know. You could see a lot of what’s going on.”

  He shook his head. “With these eyes? Be a waste of time.”


  “But we could hook you up with earpieces, so you could hear everything that’s going on, not just from the public comm.”

  Oscar smiled, his teeth the glaring white of dentures. “Nope, just satisfied to be sitting with an eager young pup like you, hearing just the minimum, just enough to visualize what’s going on out there.” A pause. “But I do thank you and your bosses, for allowing me here, for you to escort me.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Ah, no, you’re not thinking that for real, are you. I know you, what you want . . . you’d rather be out there with your folks, the ones you worked twelve hour days with, six or seven days a week . . . instead of babysitting an old fart like me. Am I right?”

  It was like he was back in school again. The glare of the eyes, the sharp voice, the confidence that came from knowing what was going through a student’s mind.

  “Sorry, yes, I wish I was out there,” Walt admitted. “That’s where I belong.”

  More voices were exchanged over the speaker, and Walt listened to the LM pilot rattling off items from the descent checklist: “DECA Gimbal AC, closed. Circuit breaker. Command override, off. Gimbal enable. Rate scale, 25.”

  “True,” Oscar said. “And I admire you for it. Coming to work every day, dodging the war protesters, trying to ignore those that say the money’s being wasted . . . saying money spent here should go for housing and the poor and everything else . . . hell, most of your generation probably don’t even look up at the Moon any more, they’re too –--“

  Walt twisted his M.I.T. ring even more. “They’re too stupid, that’s all. They don’t understand.”

  The old man gently smiled. “Understand what, son?”

  Walt hesitated, but went ahead, knowing he could trust revealing what he believed to Oscar. “We can’t stay earthbound forever. We’ve got to get out into space.”

  “They say it’s too expensive just to go out and explore,” he said quietly, repeating the old arguments. “There’s other priorities. The poor, ending the war, civil rights . . .”