The Mythmakers: An Impulse Power Story

by Robert Appleton

  What? Where? The memory of Arne’s beautiful face branded her daze. She followed a diagonal trail flaming through the pallid sky. The thought of him re-entering her world lifted her then threw her to ground. Now he’d have to die in front of her eyes as well. Too much all at once. She couldn’t watch but she had to. Her indifferent stupor had made her feel like she was already dead. She shuddered. That wasn’t the Steffi Savannah she knew.

  The slow-burning streak coughed awful black smoke rings. The ship appeared as a smouldering grey cigar as it left the upper atmosphere. Paler smoke rings in its wake seemed almost rhythmic, rather like enormous sound waves. Steffi’s frown set and ached. She couldn’t quite quench a queer excitement in her stomach. Something bizarre was happening to the vessel.

  The midsection snapped and hovered beside the two halves. Its grey exterior peeled away, revealing a reflective bubble-like surface. The dark blue interior of this bubble contrasted with the pale purple sky. It appeared very much like…the sea? An extraordinary idea occurred to Steffi.

  Loch Ness? Did the bubble contain…Loch Ness?

  More sections separated in quick succession, each pared down to a bubble of unique size and colour. Some were minute, almost empty; others had the consistency of forests. The biggest one floated off across the ocean, toward the icy peaks. It resembled a snow globe as big as a New Vegas hotel. The partial mountain slope inside it seemed perfectly still.

  No words. Rex placed a gentle arm over each woman’s shoulders. Somewhere in the fear and awe, Steffi wanted to prod herself awake. This was all so far beyond impossible there had to be a twisted nightmare driving it. But the myths floated. They chose directions. Loch Ness headed straight down for the ocean. Bigfoot’s forest sailed overhead, its acres of dark soil and gangly roots blotting out the sun for half a minute. It lowered behind them, miles away toward the horizon.

  The last will and testament of a doomed ship.

  A dozen medium-sized spheres floated far out to sea. Two others headed to Steffi’s left, sticking to the coastline. Both contained green vegetation. The larger appeared more colourful; when it dipped low enough for her to see grass as well, a glimmer of turquoise water blinded her. She pulled away from Rex and whispered between snatched breaths, “Arne!”

  She bolted in that direction. Rex called after her, but she didn’t hear what he said. The flat terrain seemed paved, not empty. Her chest was tight but her limbs felt surprisingly loose. Running in her heavy boots gave her excitement a wonderful clinking rhythm. The lagoon bubble touched down many miles away, either in the sea or on the sand. Too many questions traffic-jammed in her brain, so she concentrated on the rhythm instead. A delirious countdown to…

  The bubble faded in a few terrifying moments. Would everything inside fade with it? But the green was still there, and the dark hump on the horizon to her left where the redwood forest had landed lifted her heart again. No spheres, but the contents had survived. She readjusted herself to the rhythm. Antsy magic now swirled in the cold alien wind.

  No lagoon. Most of the lakeside trees and the grassy perimeter were now beneath the sea. For one horrible moment she thought the alien navigation had screwed up, dumping them all in an icy grave. The beach looked deserted. Vegetation fluttered in a light sea breeze.

  She approached the pocket of green, shaking with exhaustion and trepidation. The purple sand and earthly plants looked ridiculous together. Nothing about the place seemed right.

  “Cap. Cap! Over here!”

  She couldn’t be sure where the voice was coming from. She glanced behind her but Rex and Alex were dots in the distance.

  “Cap! Captain Savannah! Your two o’clock!”

  Now then. That sounded more…scientific?

  “Flyte!” She stumbled and fell face first down the embankment. Spitting sand, she glimpsed Flyte and Gerty running toward her over the grass. Gerty was naked, a perfect slip of a girl who kept falling, as though she’d never learned how to run. Flyte wore only his thermal undersuit.

  He threw his arms around Steffi. “Am I glad to see you,” he announced with the sweet verve of a long-lost brother.

  “Me too. You’ve no idea.”

  But the moment passed and she began to scan the shoreline. Plenty of heads bobbed about in the choppy sea. A few large fish surfaced close by, their green and gold tails shimmering delights. Former residents of the lagoon, or indigenous fish?

  Gerty stepped aside to wave to her kin playing in the water. Her legs looked badly chapped, even wrinkled. Steffi swallowed hard. Had something bad happened in the descent? What if they hadn’t all made it? What if the heat had burned away part of the lakeside, the part with…?

  No, don’t even think it.

  She noted how playful the voices were and how incongruous that was with her fear.

  “Flyte, can I ask you something?”

  “Anything.”

  She pulled back to look him in the eyes. “I need you to…I mean you have to tell me…is Arne…?”

  “Is Arne what?”

  The words tumbled off her tongue. “Is Arne alive?”

  “Yeah, he’s around somewhere.”

  She gasped. Just like that—a Beach Boy’s answer to a life or death question.

  “He was on his own,” Flyte added, “watching them do somersaults. Over there.” He pointed her to a slender promontory to the left, away from the vegetation. “He’ll flip when he sees you, though.”

  Flyte’s quick wink dispelled all the agony of her ordeal. Such a fleeting gesture. She wanted to cry but the tears were stubborn. An exotic perfume filled this odourless world. Ditching her boots and suit on the grass, she felt light as a feather while she peered through tree trunks, hoping for one glimpse of him. The beautiful people were in their element. Loud splashes and high-pitched screams of delight drew her to a group of six in the water on her side of the promontory. She smiled to herself and tried to steady her heavy breathing.

  Splash.

  She stopped dead in the shallows. A woman, one of the brunettes, had just somersaulted through the air. Huh? Without jumping from a rock? Steffi blinked and looked again. One of the men did exactly the same thing. Not jumping in, but taking off from and landing in the water. How? What was propelling him? She gasped when a redheaded woman leapt up…

  …tail and all.

  “Hello, Steffi Savannah.”

  She reeled back, gawping at the perfect form of the man standing before her. Chiselled shoulders and pectorals, flexing abs, wavy blond hair straight out of Surfin’ USA, and the most handsome face any man ever had. She recoiled half a step when he moved in. Still in shock after what she’d witnessed, Steffi watched for dangerous hidden depths in the blue of his eyes.

  “Why do you flinch?” he asked.

  “You’re not human.”

  “You already knew that.”

  “But…why didn’t you tell me what you were?”

  “I wanted to show you instead. This is not exactly what Hans Christian Andersen had in mind, but it will do.”

  She glanced at the mermaids and mermen frolicking in the alien sea. They seemed so…at home. “What will this mean for us? For you and me?”

  “We are life-mates, Steffi Savannah. Nothing can come between us.”

  She paused, trying to fathom the extraordinary biology—the transformation from legs to—

  “Let me show you.” He drew her close. Steffi’s burning desire devoured the ancient innocence of his eyes. Their body heat touched and effervesced. Arne cupped her face in his hands. With supple, deep longing, he kissed her like she’d never been kissed in her life.

  She wanted it to last forever.

  “Arne?” she whispered in his ear.

  “Mm?”

  “I love you.”

  He laid his head on her shoulder, then glided his fingers through the loose, breeze-drawn strands of her hair. “And I love you.”

  In that moment it was as though her long years spent stubbornly alone drifted out of reach
and faded in the tickling fizz of surf on sand.

  Without warning, he lifted free and sprinted into the white and sapphire sea. He submerged twenty feet from her. Steffi licked her lips, tasting the lingering passion. And when he shot up like a glistening dolphin against the purple midday sky, his green and gold tail curled majestically. She giggled with wonder.

  A merman.

  Her merman.

  The others clapped or splashed their tails around him. A whistle from behind swung her toward the foot of the embankment. Rex and Alex were standing there alongside Flyte and Gerty. They all waved.

  She looked farther afield, to the silhouette of the great redwood forest, then to the emerald woodland a long way up the coast. The land of the unicorns? Ecosystems transplanted by alien technology to an alien world. She sucked in a lungful of sea air. It tasted a little of sweet fruit from the partially submerged trees. A food source to get them started?

  Would other mythological creatures come to eat from these trees? Might they be willing to share their own sustenance? For they were no longer elusive legends; they were now the natural inhabitants of this new planet. They would thrive and wander, evolve to create their own nature. She tingled at the thrilling possibilities.

  The sun began to set over the ocean. The end of their first day on… What about a name? Someone who deserved the honour? Someone they could dedicate their survival to?

  Only one name sprang to mind. An easy choice. The last choice she’d get to make as captain of the Albatross. Steffi crouched and raked up a handful of purple sand. Letting it run through her fingers, she dedicated it to the selfish cynic who’d given her life to save a ship full of myths.

  “Planet Aurora.”

  Then she stripped naked and bounded into the icy waves.

  About the Author

  English author Robert Appleton maintains he was born a century too late. His love of science fiction began with boyhood jaunts through the worlds of Wells, Verne and E.R. Burroughs. Then he found Patrick O’Brian’s maritime epics and vowed to sail the seas. A natural adventurer, he often writes stories set in Earth orbit, or survival-themed odysseys on alien planets. Dogged Englishness abounds! But like those authors’, his tales are tinged with romance and the excitement of discovery.

  When he isn’t reading, Robert can be found either gliding on the sea in his kayak or racing around the football pitch like a madman.

  To catch up with him, visit his author website www.robertappleton.co.uk or his Mercurial Times blog http://robertbappleton.blogspot.com.

  The invaders thought they had crushed humanity. They messed with the wrong species.

  Metal Reign

  © 2010 Nathalie Gray

  An Impulse Power Story

  Francine Beaumont is tired. Tired of waiting for an armada of Imber ships to finish off what’s left of humanity. Tired of fear and privation. Tired of living like a rat, feeding off what scraps the cat lets her have.

  When the chance comes to hit the Imbers where it really hurts—right at their fuel supply—she takes it. One stealth cruiser. One pilot. A cargo hold filled with explosives. A suicide mission for sure, but better that than doing nothing.

  As the ship’s cook, John O’Shaughnessy knows everything that goes on aboard the warship. And something is definitely up with his Frankie. If she thinks he’s going to let her carry out this crazy plan of hers alone, that stubborn woman has another think coming.

  Frankie thinks she’s gotten away clean…until her instincts tell her she’s not alone on her mission. Still, it’s a shock to find her peace-loving John standing there with eyes that spell murder. Now is a hell of a time to discover they’re more than friends. But there’s no turning back…

  Warning: Space invaders were seriously harmed in the making of this story.

  Working together is unavoidable. Falling in love…inevitable.

  Hearts and Minds

  © 2010 J.C. Hay

  An Impulse Power Story

  Syna Davout thought it was supposed to be a simple smash-and-grab job—smash onto a luxury yacht, grab the cash, and split the proceeds with the client. Unfortunately, the client failed to mention that she’s the diversion for an assassination attempt that destroys the yacht and leaves her with a passenger she never expected. A fugitive telepath caught in the middle of a revolution.

  Galen Fash thought his days were numbered. The fledgling revolution on his homeworld needs him to buy them time, with his life if necessary. The last thing he needs is to get involved with a pirate captain-for-hire whose larger-than-life emotions draw him like a moth to a flame.

  Inexorably, Syna is dragged into a war that isn’t hers, and they both discover—between knock-down-drag-outs—that their whole is far stronger than the sum of their parts. Dodging the enemies that want them both dead will be hard enough. First, they have to survive each other…

  Warning: this book contains Space Vikings, gossipy AIs, boxing-as-foreplay, rogue telepaths and a demanding pirate captain who likes to be in charge. The author will not be held responsible for a desire to punch your partner in the jaw, or a sudden awareness of latent psionic ability.

  Enjoy the following excerpt for Hearts and Minds:

  She stopped at a ship’s closet long enough to grab a tool belt and two pairs of leather gloves. “No padding in these, but at least you won’t get burned if something’s too hot. Come on, I’ll need your help down in engineering.”

  Galen slipped the gloves on as the ship settled onto one of the rocks in the planetary ring. The whine of anchor drills resonated down the corridors and set his teeth on edge. The drills would make it hard to lift off quickly, but it also kept them securely fastened to the rock. An important modification in a zero-g environment and, he knew, completely off the book on a ship this size. Like the mass drivers, for that matter. He wondered how many other modifications he’d see when they reached the engineering department.

  Department turned out to be a dramatic overstatement. The entirety of engineering consisted of two long, narrow access corridors down either side of the main power plant. It was barely big enough for one person, let alone the two of them side by side. Heat from the power plant leaked through the walls and left him mopping at his forehead in a futile effort to keep pace with the sweat that soaked him.

  Beside him, Syna fared little better. Her ginger hair matted against her skin, and perspiration beaded on the side of her neck. Galen had a sudden urge to kiss her, to taste the salt on her skin, hear the tiny gasp of surprise that she thought he hadn’t heard when she’d kissed him in the gym. Had there been more room in the cramped corridor, he’d be tempted to try.

  Gods, what was this woman doing to him?

  “Are you going to help or just stare down my shirt?”

  Galen blinked, smiled. “Is there a way I can do both?”

  She shoved a curl of hair out of her face, pink leaching into her cheeks. “Just hold this.” She indicated the wires in her hands with a jut of her chin. He had to shift closer to reach and found himself too conscious of the way she pressed back against him as she worked. He willed his body not to respond and hoped it wasn’t too distracted to ignore him. She mumbled something as she flattened her back against him.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Close your eyes,” she whispered. His pulse lurched erratically until blue-white plasma illuminated the space, and he realized she’d issued it not as a come-on, but a warning. His eyes snapped shut and focused on the red-yellow afterimage of the welding lance drifting quietly behind his eyelids. “Two more, then I think we’ve bypassed it.”

  “That’ll bring the shields up to full?”

  “It’ll bring them back to where they were before we started this venture, which is something. Stay out of the aft-most cargo hold—I had to reroute power from its environmental controls.”

  “Is that safe?”

  The welder sparked again, the light savage even through his closed eyes. The smell of ozone and charged particles drifted through
the air. Combined with her shampoo, it made her smell like a spice field after an electrical storm.

  “Yeah, just don’t go in there. Not much choice in the matter, the starboard field’s influx coupler got slagged. I don’t just carry those around with me.” The welder flared again. “That should finish that.”

  Galen opened his eyes cautiously. “You can’t ask Bree?”

  Syna shook her head. “No. There’s no pickups in here, and no speaker for her to respond through. I have to do it from the hall.”

  He grinned. “Ooooh, unchaperoned. I like it.”

  She laughed, her blush renewed. Warmth flooded out from her, her emotions a sea he wanted to swim in. She has no idea how sexy she is, he realized. On impulse, he leaned forward and kissed her.

  She froze for a heartbeat and a flicker of panic went through him, then her hand tangled in his hair and tugged him closer. Her body crushed against him and any control he’d aspired to evaporated. The heat of her body soaked through his skin, suffused him as he lost himself in her.

  She broke the kiss long enough to take a breath, then tugged his hair back to bite along his jawline. The combination of teeth and tongue overloaded Galen’s senses. His knees lost any sense of strength they had, and he reached out for support with one hand.

  There was a soft pop and a whiff of electrical smoke. She pulled up from the kiss and touched her nose-tip to his, a quiet smile playing across her mouth. “Please tell me you didn’t just rip out my lovely bypass.”

  He looked to his hand, tangled in the wiring, as if it were an alien on the end of his arm. “I…am going to go ahead and say yes.”

  She slid her hand between them. His nerve endings went crazy as he felt the back of her hand slide past his hips, and she grinned at him, heavy-lidded eyes sparkling with mischief. Her hand retraced its route with agonizing slowness and when it came up, presented him with the hand welder. “Then you get to fix it.”

  He let out a ragged breath. “You’re going to kill me.”

  “Later. If you’re very good.” She backed farther down the corridor to give him access to the panel he’d wrecked.