Chapter 1 Contact You wouldn’t think a one-and-a-half meter tall Tabisee would pack enough punch to make an adult Human stumble backward, but Saura does. Don’t get too impressed: Human spacers are such lightweights that a mild shove from a grav-dweller will send us staggering. Part of the reason for that is we don’t resist. […]
Tag Archives: #space
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 […]
When I told Saurubi Cerros Syrhas my story, how raiders had attacked my world, killed the adults and took the children as slaves, she looked at me with her great, amber eyes and declared, “Obvious you were not where the Mother Universe intended you to be.” I was shocked. Sickened. Angry with her cold analysis. […]
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 […]
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 […]
I dream. I dream every time I sleep. It terrifies me. The Earth Alliance Marines thought it put a fire in my belly, a little bit of psycho in my head. They said it gave me a purpose. They put me on the frontier, enforcing EA law on the stations, asteroid colonies, junker cities and […]
The hard reality of space Space is not a nice place. It’s cold. It’s lonely. It does not know compassion and it does not forgive. It makes you hollow by stealing the things you know and the people you love. It eats your body and sucks away your memories. It twists time so that everything […]
