At the Helm: A Sci-Fi Bridge Anthology (Volume 1)

by Rhett C. Bruno

  “Dan, it’s incredible out here!”

  “You are in danger, Orion.”

  Dan took control and my tether began to reel me back in. It yanked me forcefully, causing my leg to smack against the ship’s metal surface. Somehow as I tumbled away I managed to grab onto the surface of the ship. I jammed the tether in between a pair of shielding plates and gathered my balance.

  “I’m not going back,” I decided. I angled my head so that I could study the reflection of Alpha Centauri B in my visor. The arms of its light reached out toward me as if to take me in their embrace.

  “That is not an option,” Dan replied. “In nine hundred seventy-two minutes I am required to see you back into Life-Chamber 1287.”

  “I know but I just ... I can’t do it. I wish I could, for you, I really do, but I won’t die dreaming. After seeing all of this, how could I ever go back to sleep?

  “It is your directive.”

  “It was.”

  “There must always be one thousand inhabitants aboard the Hermes. Never more. Never less.”

  “And there will be again soon. You’ll make sure of that like you always do. I don’t know many things for sure, Dan, but I think that men are meant to be born in liquid, not die in it.”

  I glanced down, noticing that my tether was about to pull itself free. I rifled through what was left of the tools and found a cutting torch. With my arm outstretched I swung myself in a wide arc around the area where it was stuck so I could get a proper angle.

  “Orion, please allow me to help you return to the Hermes. As the active Monitor, your continued health is imperative.”

  I switched on the torch and started cutting through the tether.

  “You’ve helped me more than you know. I hope you’ll be equally as helpful to Inhabitant 2781. She’ll have plenty of questions.”

  “Orion, what are you doing. If you sever your connection you will expend your oxygen supply in approximately fifteen minutes.”

  “She’ll want to know what Earth was like.” The tether was inches away from snapping. I paused for a moment and stared down at it, verging on tears. “She’ll want to struggle with your riddles.”

  The tether snapped. The length of it was tugged back toward the open airlock and the recoil sent me hurtling through space in the opposite direction.

  “Orion, your connection has been lost,” Dan said.

  I didn’t panic. I was too busy smiling at the thought of hearing his puzzles. It didn’t take long for the Hermes to begin distancing itself from me. For once, I could see its entire outline; from the bulge of the Living Ring to the two aligned engines sticking out like an outstretched arm.

  “Goodbye, Dan. I’ll miss our talks,” I continued.

  “Orion ... you ... are ...” Dan’s voice spoke, but whatever he said next was muddled by static.

  I should’ve been more terrified then I was, drifting through the endless void all by myself. It was hard to be when the view was so incredible. It took some effort to turn my head as I spun head over foot, but once I did I saw Alpha Centauri B again, piercing the blackness. Passing across it was a small, brownish orb growing larger by the second. The first planet I ever saw with my eyes—Luxar. I was headed straight for it.

  “Do you think they’ll ever send anyone here?” I asked the silence, so used to always being answered right away. Dan said nothing. The Hermes was already out of sight and even if he wanted to he couldn’t have turned it around in time to save me. The oxygen meter in my helmet had already begun to beep that it was dangerously low.

  I tried to tune out the noise and focus on the advancing planet. It was ... magnificent. And as I stared I had no doubt that I was right where I belonged. After glimpsing the infinite universe which lay beyond the Hermes’ metal walls, I couldn’t end my life sealed in a chamber. My long sleep was approaching. The one I had chosen.

  I could hear Dan speaking in my head, reciting a riddle he’d told me a few years back that I was never able to solve. “What grows both longer and shorter with each passing minute,” he’d said. “The young take risks with it, and the old cherish it.”

  I didn’t get it at the time, but I finally understood.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rhett C. Bruno is the author of the Amazon-bestselling space-opera series The Circuit, as well the Sci-Fi thrillers Titanborn and From Ice to Ashes.

  By night he is an author for Random House Hydra. By day he is a Syracuse graduate working at an architecture firm in Connecticut. He’s also recently earned a certificate in screenwriting from the New School in NYC, in the hopes of one day writing for TV or video games.

  Rhett resides in Stamford, Connecticut, with his fiancee and their dog, Raven.

  You can find out more about his work at www.rhettbruno.com. If you’d like exclusive access to updates about his work and the opportunity to receive limited content, ARCs and more, please subscribe to his newsletter.

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  GAO YAO ENGINE

  BY RACHEL AUKES

  The guard handed me a manila envelope containing my wallet and watch and handed me a bag of brown pill bottles. “Instructions are in the bag. Follow them or else you’ll regret it. Your eighty-year sentence is complete. You’re free to go,” he said and pointed at the door. My shoes squeaked on the linoleum as I walked across the floor. My muscles spasmed just before I stepped outside and shaded my eyes against the day’s bright light. The sun looked no different than the day I went in. But that was eighty years ago.

  It was also today.

  My clothes still fit. I looked the same. Yet, in my mind, eighty years had passed.

  They called it the Gao Yao Engine and it today’s most advanced biotechnology. Induced time manipulation. The Chinese had come up with the idea. They designed the system to save money and turn criminals into productive citizens. All the old prisons were eliminated. The Gao Yao Engine powered an entirely new worldwide prison system.

  Drugs, nothing like the methamphetamine that got me in here in the first place, had slowed my mind down while the doctors uploaded their own “corrective” programming. It had felt like I served an eighty year term. But, I’d been in prison for only three hours.

  By year twelve, things had gotten rough. I’d wanted to die, begged them to let me die, but they’d ignored me. Just kept pumping the drugs through my system. By year sixty, I had arthritis so bad that waking up was a daily lesson in misery. By year seventy, cataracts had clouded my vision, preventing me from reading, which had been the one thing that had kept me sane.

  And, I woke up to find that none of it had been real.

  Phantom pains echoed in my joints. Everything I looked at was in exaggerated colors. A headache throbbed behind my eyes. Another spasm racked my muscles. They’d said muscular anxiety would be a possible long term side effect. I climbed into the waiting taxi.

  “312 Eisenhower Street,” I said before rifling through the plastic bag. I didn’t bother reading the dosage instructions. I opened each of the three pill bottles and popped the drug cocktail intended to keep Gao candidates from losing it once they were tossed back into the real world. I leaned back and felt the pills work their magic.

  I sensed someone watching me and I opened my eyes. “What?” I growled.

  “Is the Gao treatment as bad as they say?” the driver asked.

  I closed my eyes again. “Yeah. It’s bad.”

  “I have a nephew that’s had a couple brushes with the law. I keep telling him he’s got to behave or else they’ll Gao him. But he don’t listen. He’s young and stupid. What’d you get caught for?”

  “Possession of illegal substances,” I replied.

  The driver continued. “So does it work? They say you can’t go near crime without getting sick. That true?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to find out yet.”

  The interminably long ride ended with the driver still asking questions like he was Anderson Cooper. I didn’t leave him a tip and headed into my dump
of a house. I half-expected to see everything covered in years of dust and my goldfish floating corpses, but the house was exactly as I’d left it this morning.

  I headed straight for the drawer with the hidden back and reached for my stash. As soon as my fingers touched the plastic, a wave of nausea swept over me. I tried again and found myself lurching to the sink to puke.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand before laughing uncontrollably and without humor. They’d really done it. I was still me, but they were in my head, too, and I hated them for it.

  Slamming the drawer closed, I headed outside and to the bar.

  • • •

  It took me three months to adjust to having two realities shoved into my brain. I learned what I could control and what the Gao programming controlled. I turned in my best friend, the neighborhood’s biggest drug dealer, to the cops two weeks after I was Gao’d. Things got a bit easier each day after that.

  “What do you want me to do with this punk?”

  I cracked my neck from side to side before examining the man bleeding on my floor. Two of my henchmen held him to keep him from collapsing. If he was conscious, he showed no signs.

  “Put a bullet in his head,” I said. “And leave his body out for his friends to find him first.” I took a step closer, careful not to touch him or risk the Gao nausea. “No one sells drugs in my neighborhood. No one except me.”

  I motioned to my boys to take him away, and I looked through my office window to watch the manufacturing line below. A muscle spasm shot through my body, but I was used to it. Instead, I smiled. My empire was growing.

  I couldn’t touch drugs after I’d been Gao’d, and that helped me keep my head on straight. I couldn’t get my hands dirty, and that kept me off the cops’ radar. I’d always known I could run the business twice as good as my old buddy could. He enjoyed sampling his own stuff too much, and without the Gao programming, I would’ve been just like him.

  No, I knew I could do it better than he’d done. I’d just needed to a plan, and that was easy enough. After all, I’d had eighty years to work out the details.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rachel Aukes is the author of the Fringe Runner Series and the Deadland Saga.

  Rachel was raised on a farm in Iowa where she boasted the small town’s largest (and only) comic book collection, and she’s still addicted to stories with bad ass heroes and heroines. She’s served as VP of Technology at Wells Fargo and as director of IT Strategy for Aviva North America (She’s currently at W. R. Berkley as a change agent). She’s also taught at Upper Iowa University for over a decade, warping the minds of tomorrow’s workforce.

  She also loves flying airplanes. Nothing beats a sunset flight around the countryside.

  You can find out more about her work at www.rachelaukes.com. Join her mailing list to be the first to hear about new releases and have the opportunity to win all sorts of great prizes, such as signed books or advance copies of upcoming titles!

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  BROOD COMPANY

  BY HALL & BEAULIEU

  He was all alone but not at all alone.

  There were voices all around him, some hopeful—cheerful even. But most were tinged with trepidation and fear.

  The Body Mover crossed over the invisible boundary into the Lawless Zone and a hush came over the ship.

  Donovan Vance was hunched over as far as his shoulder harness would allow. His hands were cupped, his palm chip displaying a small but clear image—a young, curly haired girl, the carbon copy image of the beautiful woman next to her. He shook his head subtly and closed his hand, his middle finger tapping the center of his palm. The image vanished.

  “Okay, listen up boys.” The normally harsh, throaty voice of the Grand Marshall was now soft, soothing, like one would speak to their dog before a leaving on a long trip. “I’m not going to lie to you. You know the mission. Sounds simple, but I assure you, it isn’t.”

  He paused for a moment, making sure his words sunk in.

  “We’ve got twenty-seven missing persons and an abandoned ship. I know what you’re all thinking and I can’t say I disagree. This could be another Elektra malfunction.”

  It’d been all over the stream for weeks. Several had been murdered and NanoDream Electronics had issued a factory recall on the shipbrain, Elektra Five-Seven-Niner. The technology had always sounded too good to be true but for a short time it appeared to live up to the hype. Having an artificial intelligence capable of running all functions of a starship was a dream come true, one that turned out to be a nightmare. Reports had been flooding in from across the Tri-Star System—the machine had come alive. One thing was common amongst the stories; Elektra was seductive, a beauty beyond words, and people always ended up dead on ships where she was installed.

  “Elektra or not,” he continued, strength returning to his words “she’s just an unthinking machine and you are the best damn soldiers the TSS has to offer.” He slapped Vance hard on the shoulder to drive his point home. “We’re going to do this thing like we have every other thing: With Excellence!”

  One solider, the leader Andrew “Fetus” Embrāyo, repeated the mantra but the dread-soaked air in the launch bay was mostly filled with murmurs. The pep talk did little to cut tension.

  The GM didn’t even appear to have believed his own words. He turned, his head a bit lower than normal and stepped through the blast doors to the bridge. The door hissed shut and the soldiers abandoned their hushed tones now that the Grand Marshal was gone.

  “This is your first op, ain’t it, Vance?”

  Vance swallowed back vomit and nodded.

  “Pretty messed up sitch though. Think the shipbrain is really on a murder spree?”

  Another nod.

  There were five soldiers in the launch bay. Brood Company. The Star-System Elite Guard only employed the best of the best. They utilized small but highly efficient strike forces and Brood was their newest.

  Donovan “Dreadnaught” Vance had spent years in special operations. He’d run personal security for the Chancellor, herself. While under her employ he’d been directly responsible for preventing three assassination attempts. He was known as a hero in certain circles and for a moment in time had been in high demand in the personal security industry. But that was behind him now. This was his first time out of S-SEG training. He was a rookie in comparison to these guys and if they knew anything of his past accomplishments they didn’t seem to care.

  “It’s gonna be okay, man,” said Trigger. “This ain’t our first rodeo. Stick close by and you’ll be fine.” He patted his rifle for emphasis, then kissed it. The man loved his guns.

  Vance tapped his palm and cupped his hands again. His girls. Everything he did, he did for them. He’d had big dreams—a grand vision for how his life would play out. Everything had been going perfectly, too. He was on track to retire early with a big pension but all that changed when he’d gotten Deidra pregnant without permission from the capital. Even though he’d had some powerful connections, he lost his position and was forced to seek a position in the military. Sure, they could have had an abortion but he knew that wasn’t the answer. He’d created something and it was his job to care for it, to love it. And it became a she and she was his world. He didn’t regret his decisions for a single moment but as he looked around he had to admit that he’d never expected to end up in a place like this. In order to provide for his little miracle he was light years away from her, crossing into the lawless zone.

  Dismissing the projection, he took a deep breath and straightened his back. He couldn’t go into this mission already defeated. He forced himself to focus on something else.

  “How long you think we have left?” Vance asked Trigger.

  “Honestly? I thought we shoulda been there by now.”

  As if the ship had responded to their conversation, there was a slight tremor and the hatch began to open. The only thing separating the soldiers from the dark vacuum of space was a four-yar
d wide airlock.

  “Brood Company,” said a voice over the speaker system. “We’re hoping this is not a military operation but we have to be prepared for whatever comes our way. Suit up and lock and load, airlock opens in five.”

  Vance’s breathing was labored as he pulled his suit over his boots. He fitted his oxygen tube to the small tank on his side and made a few minor adjustments to its dial. He felt the airflow against his skin, cool against his sweat slick body, and welcomed it. HUD readout was normal. He picked up his NS-12 rifle and gave it a once over. Safety off. He checked his thigh reserve. Several full magazines. He loaded one in and, hearing a click, was satisfied. He strapped it to his hip beside his handgun and waited patiently for the airlock to release.

  “Boys,” said the GM, his gruff voice returning to the room. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

  The Company turned to see the Grand Marshall projecting a video from his palm. “The good news is it doesn’t look like this is an Elektra incident.” He paused, then pulsed his fingertips, expanding the image. “The bad news is that this thing is overrun by slugs.”

  The video showed a port side camera feed of the abandoned hauler. Vance could see fat, wet, cylindrical shaped creatures crawling over the surface of the craft, leaving slimy residue in their wake.

  “If the outside looks like that I’m not sure what we’re going to see when we get in,” he continued. “The vessel has no exterior shielding, so to open fire on it could risk the lives of anyone inside. We are going to need you boys to enter in through here.”

  He pointed to a spot on the screen resembling a loading dock.

  “I’ve got a slicer drone working on gaining entrance. Should have the lock cracked in just a minute. Those slugs aren’t doing you any harm on the outside of that ship. For the sake of anyone on board and for your ammo count, fight the urge to blast them. As I said, there’s no telling what you’ll find inside. Might need every bullet you’ve got.”