by Scott Azmus
I’m still out of breath. Sweat stings my eyes. “I can’t let you kill her.”
He looks me up and down. His lips twist into a sneer. “Gone native, have you?” He swings the autoblaster at my head. I duck under, but its beam cleaves the air. I can’t tell where it hits Pella’s dome because flames erupt from everywhere at once.
He kicks and I fold around his boot. I can’t breathe. He laughs and, gun pointing aloft, trots to the only portion of the dome not yet ablaze.
I roll and gulp the desiccated air. When I get up, I shield my eyes and gaze to the top of the dome. He and Pella fight in a rush of meshed limbs. I run to the dome’s base, but there is no handhold. I back away and trip over a forgotten pile of rocks. My hands close on them.
The first stone hits a meter short. The second arcs way over their heads. The third slams into Father’s side, sending him toppling from the dome. He hits. I hear his breath gush from him.
“Pella!” I shout. She stands, her eyes even with the flame tips rising all around her. Smoke pours from the tunnels beneath. There’s still a chance. I sprint for the nearest tunnel, but Father rises to block me. I drop and swing my legs behind his knees. He falls and rolls for cover.
“No!” I shout, but I can’t stop him. He rolls into the crab pit. He screams each time their poisoned tails stab. My fingers coil around his forearm and I pull him clear. The scorpion crabs plop to the sand with their last trickles of venom. There is nothing I can do. I back away.
Flames crackle behind me. I look up. There is someone I can save. Pella.
Inside the dome, I leap from beam to beam. Three times the flames push me back, but I press on. At the top, Pella has erected a narrow, cross-shaped box. It is a Vrin coffin. It rests upon a raised platform on which I instantly recognize carvings of both human and Vrin life cycles. She stands beside it as if in prayer.
I charge toward her. She stops me. Her talons needle my chest. “You must go. This pyre will take me home and the stones will retain enough heat to protect the eggs from pilferage. Your father’s kind have destroyed an empire. You have given this world to the Vrin. Thank you.”
She pushes me. I fall and fight the sand blast as the inferno sucks air from all sides. Later, after Rob welcomes me to the landing craft, we watch Pella’s blaze all the way to orbit and all the way out of the system.
I look out across the veranda. The grandchildren are quiet. The family will not disturb me. The sun sets. I dream. The blaze brings new life to a dying world. It is beautiful.
Preface: Dining Out
I wrote this extremely short piece for Tom Brown at XOddity Magazine. Unfortunately, XOddity disappeared before the story ever saw print.
Lucky for me.
I wouldn’t want to get sued by the five-star chefs at Port Isére’s Summit Garden Café!
Dining Out
At the request of our Terran readers, we recently dined at Port Isére’s Summit Garden Café. Because the restaurant is situated near Isére’s deep space ejection head, we came prepared for the hustle and bustle of departing Galactics—righteous Riani, haughty Vrin, clever Brect—and the general air of chaos one often finds near a major celestial travel nexus. To our surprise, we found a relaxed atmosphere, professional waitstaff and cooks, and an owner who takes pride in the active provisioning of his establishment.
While the gleaming fixtures lent the dining area something of a clinical air, the effect was softened by a modest sound system and a mural of inlaid narwhal and elephant ivory. Recessed screens detailed changing specials along with local departures and arrivals. A Ministry of Trade Seal boasted that all meats were freshly cut on the premises.
The appetizer menu included stuffed crêpes, Brect pâté terrine, and (best) dwarf Hamadian bark oysters. Embellished with spikes of fresh tawnris, the nearly extinct mollusks were shucked and bathed in champagne immediately prior to service.
Our next course brought a vegetable mélange in clear broth. The house salad, composed of endive, tomatoes, and slivered shripe followed. Presented on an iced platter, it was closely followed by hot bread redolent of garlic and daubs of genuine froft oil. Crisp and crunchy, the salad was a perfect counterpoint to the earlier bark oysters.
The evening’s entrée choices included a selection of offworld specialties. After much contemplation of the rapidly changing menu—rack of Kheperan, perhaps a courier on urgent business, flashed briefly across the screen—we selected the Vrin Marsala and a Rianan brochette with wine and juniper. Both were served with savory pearl bleems and generous dollops of Rappunzelfish caviar. The unexpected amalgam added a sprinkle of color contrast and a lively bite.
Although the Vrin shoulder steak proved a tad unyielding, the Rianan brochette was spectacular. Composed of marbled dark flesh on a bed of rice and topped with warm Dür cheese for zest, the dish was a work of balance and harmony for the eye and palate. The velvety sauce enhanced each delicate flavor while also serving to mellow the Dür’s distinctive piquancy.
As we found the top-brand dessert cordials well selected but pricey, we avoided temptation by opting for an early lift to orbit. While the Vrin could have benefited from a more useful reaping, the Rianan brochette was to die for. We only hope that, come Monday morning, no one misses either traveler when they fail to report.
Preface: Cooler by the Lake
This story is new to this anthology. I sailed a bit as a teenager. My friends André, Erick, Kimberly, and I spent many a day out on San Francisco Bay or on down the California coast as far as Morro Bay. I was pretty good at hauling lines, throwing together a simple meal (underway), climbing a mast or holding the rudder to a set course. It wasn’t until I had worked my way up in ship size (quite a bit) that I learned to really enjoy a day out on the water.
André and Erick had a Hobie 16 and their father actually purchased and lived on a 42-foot “Garden-Porpoise ketch.” I later received the balance of my shiphandling training in the 563-foot, U.S. Navy Spruance Class destroyers USS Leftwich (DD984) and USS Ingersoll (DD990).
I have been in typhoon-driven seas, with Leftwich healing over as much as 42 degrees off the coast of Japan. I have conned warships through every possible evolution. It wasn’t until my first stint navigating across the Pacific Ocean—and being the officer MOST responsible for finding Hawaii…when and where we all expected to find the Hawaiian Islands—that I really appreciated the immensity and vitality of our oceans. Sure, I’d already been to the Persian Gulf and down across the Equator and back, but that was the first time I wasn’t just along for the ride.
Cooler by the Lake
This isn’t what I thought it would be. From the shore, it looks so free, so joyous, yet the impish winds never hold constant. The lakeshore always obstructs just when everything appears in good order. And why does everything have to happen so quickly?
Besides all that, the small catamaran is a deathtrap of tensioned cables, marginally buoyant hulls and a swinging and rightfully named “boom.” If I have my way, I’m done manning her “tiller” or her “lines.” I have no ambition of ever again swinging above the lake swells in Ahlen’s makeshift “trapeze.” After pulling and hauling and heaving on any given line, I flex the kinks out of my back and look at my hands. Red, raw, my fingers no longer bend to my will.
Would I ever learn to sail? Sure. Just take away the cold. The windchill. The water. Why not just stick with fiction and simply sail to the stars?
Running toward the lake’s dark center, squatting in a body-warm puddle middling “aft” on the Hobie 16’s “trampoline,” I fight to disguise each shiver and to answer Ahlen’s every buoyant grin and shout. Faking the rush I never receive, hiding my terror each time we air a hull, I can’t wait to give up my turn at the tiller.
“Next time, shift your weight to windward!” he shouts above the wind. “Get comfortable with leaning over the side as we heel. The way you back off every time there’s the least threat to our stability makes me sick. If you ease the main or turn into the wind one more
time, I might just have to kick your lazy ass.”
“I’m just afraid of—”
“Everything! You’re afraid of everything!”
Steady, irreverent blue eyes dare protest.
Along the shore: immense, ancient, stately, the redwoods hold their cathedral hush as a ragged shroud of coastal haze penetrates each gulley and footpath. Away from the cobbled beach, warm meadows and clearings give way to massive Douglas firs and western hemlocks. Red huckleberry, blackberry, and thimbleberry shade ferns and leafy redwood sorrels, mosses and mushrooms.
“You’re afraid of taking control. Of using the wind to your advantage. When we’re running, turn downwind. When beating upwind, ease the mainsheet and head up gently. When on a reach, either head up or sheet out to keep close to level. Speed is our friend!”
Right. Speed is our friend. He sees nothing at all concerning about the possibility of flipping a boat going, conservatively (or so he tells me), twenty knots with the windward hull either out of the water or skipping along the surface. One accidental plunge and we’d be flying!
As the west wind dies down with the sun, we veer toward the boat ramp. Accompanied by light but steady breezes, we float the boat on its trailer and haul out as the sun sets and, just now, I’m not ready to leave. The night is coming on cool and lovely and well full of stars. Why hadn’t I thought to bring a telescope?
I feel an odd intuition in the back of my mind and gaze west. I straddle a beached log. Ahlen sits above me on a knob of speckled granite.
The waters of the lake reflect a burst of brilliant, iridescent green. Shadows, as though cast by a vast picket fence, spear from the redwoods and the whole western part of the sky roils with fire.
Standing, almost tripping over scattered driftwood and snarls of old fishing line, I look up to see a bright ball with a long twisting tail drive toward us across the sky. It looks quite near, as if nearly upon us, but I can’t immediately gauge range or rate of closure. Several lesser knots of dazzling green parallel the thing’s line of flight in much the same way lesser aircraft escort Air Force One or homeward-bound moon shuttles.
Has a plane disintegrated mid-flight? My heart races. Red green blue, the blazing objects tumbling somersaulting do not look real.
Ahlen pulls me toward his battered Subaru, but I hesitate. All around the parking lot shadows are shrinking in length without the least visible shift in direction. One of the brighter fragments may soon pass directly overhead.
Images press at my subconscious. Blinking rapidly, mouth dry, I see the Earth-Moon system at a distance and from some point above their mutual orbital plane. I see an unfurling tatter of golden web. As a jumble of iridescent stellar flight paths sweep at me, I check my stance against a perceived surge of brisk deceleration.
Shrieking as it passes overhead, hints of structure glow within shifting phosphorescence. Parallel lines. Concentric arcs. Sequential glints of adamantine clarity. Hissing and trailing sulfurous fumes, the objects spall white-hot flakes of iridescent metal.
I snap a look back toward the lake. The lake’s almost linear contour parallels the Kimberley fault’s intersection with the 700-mile Cascadia subduction zone. As deep vibrations cut the air, the lake surface shivers and dances. Where superheated particles plunge deep, surging steam sometimes gives way to rapid-fire views of fresh, elongated pits in the underlying bedrock.
A dazzling shard takes out Ahlen’s car and most of the boat ramp and visitor’s center. The ground cantilevers up and sideways and flings me violently off my feet. Sprawling, I gag on whiffs of caustic gas. Beach grit rasps chin and cheek and cuts at my hands while at the same time seeming less and less able to support my weight. Fighting the squelch and rush of churning water, I barely raise up on elbows when a final object clobbers the ridge enclosing the lake’s southern and most distant shore. Heat spills from secondary fragments as a low-pitched, resounding thrum rolls down the shoreline. One of the smaller objects cuts two complete rolls to the left before impacting the back side of that same ridge.
A sense of commingled pain lances at me. Swallowing hard, letting out a whimper, thoughts spin and briefly gain focus…elsewhere. I sense vast intelligence but undercut with fear and pain and an acute sense of collapse.
Supporting one another, fighting flash blindness, Ahlen and I limp and sometimes crawl toward the shattered tree line. Somehow, the intervening redwoods have not burst aflame. Even so, the persistent, nauseatingly sweet smell of charred fern and forest ground cover will always stay with me.
“Did you see all those fish?” asks Ahlen.
“What are you talking about? What fish?”
“At the very instant that thing hit. All the fish jumped clean out of the water. The flyover must have attracted them. Or the impact may have sent shock waves through the lake.”
According to Ahlen’s cell phone, the disintegration and crash took exactly one minute, thirty-two seconds. He had taken three chance selfies. One showed the seared remains of his sailboat, devoid of all rigging. The next showed his upended deck shoes and a blur of angry, emerald sky. The last hinted at structure and out-of-place linearity within an object’s tangled mass as it caromed over the ridge. As to the forward-facing video, no single frame reveals the least detail as to what kind of aircraft had gone down so spectacularly.
An hour before sunrise, the light of a crescent moon cuts between the trees to cast long, slanting wedges through the mists. As we pick our way south, cold and stiff, we find scattered wreckage. A rack of melted copper cones resembles the lower jaw of some great, metal beast. Laminated armored glass encloses strange electrical and mechanical components. Partially melted metal—aluminum? titanium?—has congealed across the golden leaves of what may have been anything from an engine filter to a radiative heat sink to flight manual.
Looking ahead, moving behind a screen of trees, I catch glints of silver and prismatic beams of pure, single-wavelength color and find accordioned sheets of thin metal. Small, indistinct numerals or print characters of some kind decorate a thick, brass-colored disk. Ahlen finds something like a folding pocket knife and another pair of mangled parts that look like seat buckles. I shudder to think that we might we soon startle across the remains of passengers and crew.
The sun breaks the horizon as Ahlen draws another fragment from a snarl of shattered branches. “This is interesting. Look how it moves.”
The rod holds a set of gears and adjustable counterweights. Linked shafts have odd looking adjustment nuts and set screws. There must be several hundred pieces of mangled metal and glass scattered along the tree line.
I kick a piece of bubbled slag. Fire has exposed the honeycomb core of what may have been one of the aircraft’s control surfaces. An access cover reveals more lines of undecipherable text. Copper cones dilate to reveal a multitude of ultra-thin petals. Quite cold, fresh surfaces of each super-light alloy, where torn or shredded, quickly grow frost crystals out of the stolen vapor of our voices.
And so it goes until we top the lake’s far ridge. Silent helicopters have taken station at all points of the compass. Heavy cranes pluck objects from the impact crater before pivoting to deposit each load in mammoth dump trucks. Large, twisted chunks mound one truck bed. Pieces of fuselage or maybe just sheets of bright metal stack the next.
“How could they get here so fast?” I ask. “And why I am not seeing ambulances? Or, for that matter, a scattering of body bags?”
“They must have been tracking every incoming fragment.”
“But how?”
“Who knows? Those helicopters have on-station times of just a few hours at most. If this thing is more spacecraft than airplane, it would make sense that NASA or someone else tracked its decaying orbit. Remember when the Chinese space station came down?”
Ahlen pries at a canister’s elastic seal and I find myself warning against the release of hazardous materials.
“Relax.” He jerks a thumb across his shoulder. “Do you see any of those guys wearing hazmat s
uits? Or even air masks?”
The canister yawns open with a reluctant hiss and he displays something that may be an artfully twisted screwdriver or push drill. Another tool’s corrugated handle holds a ring that may be useful for blowing soap bubbles. Hold it up to a chunk of granite, however, and I swear I can see well into the boulder’s grainy interior.
A thin rod forms a dazzling bead of suspended plasma.
Popsicle-shaped wedges pierce or cut anything we offer.
He straddles a knot of wreckage. Much like the jaws of an ordinary adjustable wrench, a gleaming cylinder supports feathery flanges that embrace all manner of awkward-seeming nuts and bolts.
One object, when held securely in the palms of two cupped hands, sends out silent waves of some kind that make me shiver and my hair stand on end. Again, I sense an odd answering whisper through my thoughts. Images of these tools in use. Soft, minutely scaled hands. Visions and flashes of a golden sail. A fast-approaching blue-brown orb. Clouds and oceans and land masses.
Ahlen grips my elbow and retrieves a tool from my grasp. I can’t recall what I’ve been thinking. Or how long since I’d mentally, you know, checked out.
Three objects remain. One looks like an ordinary suction cup. When pressed to any surface, be it boulder, metal fragment or the flesh of my forearm, the weight of each gives way. No weight. No sense of mass. No problems with inertia.
Ahlen’s cell phone pings. His phone usually picks up crime stories and local “get out” events such as concerts and films. My iPhone apps usually capture astronomy news or ads for used telescopes.
Reading directly from the glowing face of a 5.7-inch retina screen, we find: “U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Functional Component Command for Space (JFCC Space), through the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), tracked the remains of a North Korean JV-21 rocket body and unmanned capsule as its decaying orbit forced atmospheric reentry over the North American west coast (vicinity Northern-California). Details to follow.”