All those glinting implants tracing over the surface of her skin, all that tech and there wasn’t room for one stinking comm link on or in her? She said she could not risk an external distraction while linked in to a ship. “War ship?” I ventured a guess. She nicked me lightly with a claw. […]
Tag Archives: science fiction
Spacertown Every planet, station, platform, or flotsam island in EA space has a Spacertown. That’s all they’re ever called. The management wants to ensure that when we skinny, gravity-sensitive, hairless—from the depilatories we use to keep our hair from clogging our ship filters—Human misfits vent from our ships, we can find the place as quickly […]
I was a bit taller than the average spacer, a result of my planetside origin. I had not been destined for the deep dark, but life has a way of reaching down and taking what it wants, then destroying any pathway back. Sometimes it gives a few kindnesses, like a Space Fleet Admiral and his […]
On Naming Worlds… Let’s face it, the settling of worlds is a serious business. Colonists have to be a sturdy, determined lot. There’s not a lot to laugh at when you’re meeting the unexpected and unpredictable. It could kill you. Oh sure, all the planets are checked out by the Colonization Bureau, but they can’t […]
Humans try to put a face on the snarling maw of darkness that is space. They try to tame it. It’s too big for that. Once you wander away from the safety of the herd, the wolves slink in. Then there is only one law in space; kill or be killed. Learn who your friends […]
Before the Whooex Union we had happily blundered into other alliances’ star systems all the time; but, since we were Stone Age technology compared to theirs, it hadn’t really mattered. We had an open field out toward the Crab Nebula, so we weren’t trying to move into anyone’s space. Once we joined the Whooex, the […]
When Humans finally met aliens we didn’t encounter just one species. We met a whole Union of Stars. And it wasn’t our dazzling charm that drew them to us: it was our mode of space travel. In the mid-twenty-first century, we found a crashed alien ship on one of Saturn’s moons and the real Human […]
Do I mind dark, tight places? No. I’m from a small ship and that description covers at least seventy-five percent of my environments. The other quarter is endless horizons, like the dockring on a station or the Deep Dark. Given a few minutes to adjust, I can hack the shift between the two. That’s not […]
I like my life. Even if Saurubi and I are down to eating energy pills to survive, or recycling our own piss to the point where it’s dangerous, it’s okay. We made the stupid decisions that got us there. And we’ll make the stupid or brilliant play that gets us back out again. No one […]
