A Planet Too Far: Beyond the Stars, #1

by Nick Webb

  “So I can stay with you?” Mari thought at Sym.

  Mari felt Sym’s happiness that she would ask. “I’d like it if you did.”

  An image of an amphibious biped appeared in Mari’s mind. She had learned about them in school when she’d learned about the symbiotes; her classmates had called them the “frog people”. Their skin was red, their cheeks expanded, and their hands were webbed for swimming purposes, but they also had faces like humans. This particular face was an attractive one. Friendly, Mari might have said.

  Grief flooded Mari, and it took her a minute to realize it wasn’t hers.

  “I’m sorry,” Mari thought.

  “And I’m sorry about your mom.”

  Mari looked down at the water. Sym was all she had. Sym, and a planet. After everything, Mari had made it to a planet.

  The other hosts were jumping, barely splashing as they hit the surface. It was getting dark, so Mari couldn’t see them well at first, but they turned on lights as soon as they made it underwater, and every host had a green halo around them. Mari looked up at the sky and saw the beginnings of stars. She’d never been able to see stars from space.

  “Ready?” Sym thought.

  “Yeah,” Mari whispered aloud.

  She jumped into the water.

  Q&A with Rory Hume

  This is a very powerful world you’ve created, full of conflict and danger. The way you’ve positioned humans is fascinating‌—‌and scary. How did you come up with the concepts?

  Normally, when I write, I get a couple images in my head and make the story a bridge to connect them. For “Symbiosis”, I didn’t wait for the images to come to me; I wrote a list of things I like to either read or write in stories, and I played “what if?” until the main characters sprung into my head. Mariana Soto and her physicality in particular was the one who shaped the universe. I knew she was too big and too small for her place, and it didn’t take me long to figure out humanity mirrored and influenced Mari. That’s one of my favorite things about sci-fi: small stories in as big a space as we know.

  What is your background, and have you been writing long?

  I’ve been writing nearly as long as I could string words together! A lot of that time was spent honing craft, especially in the recent past, but I was also having fun and figuring out self-expression in quieter corners. I’m happy to keep some stories in my metaphoric desk drawers‌—‌my actual desk doesn’t have drawers‌—‌but I thought the SFF community looked pretty exciting right now, and I’m hoping to connect with it more in the future.

  Do you have other stories in the works?

  Nothing specific is in progress currently, but it never takes me long to get new ideas.

  If readers want to find you, is there a place we can send them?

  @roryhumewriting on Twitter!

  War Stories

  by Samuel Peralta

  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:

  mors et fugacem persequitur virum

  nec parcit inbellis iuventae

  poplitibus timidove tergo.

  - Horace, Odes

  SOME SAY YOU can’t go forward into the future without letting go of the past. Sometimes, it’s the past that won’t let go of you.

  Gravity will do that to you, too. You ride up to the starships in shuttles that burn against the g-forces, but gravity‌—‌it doesn’t let you go. Not easily. One gravity, two gravities, three gravities press you back into your inertial restraints, the memory of the last tour made tangible, pulling you back.

  You get past Saturn, past Jupiter, past Mars‌—‌you think you’re finally headed home. And suddenly all the weight you carry is there, a system-sized gravity well of life and death, of comrades lost or left behind, of half-truths and lies, of choices made; all these fill your bones, marrow-cold and heavy, weighing on you like a war story.

  But you don’t really want to hear about war. You don’t want to know about how the machine gun fire from Warthog armor drowns out the screaming as you mow down the enemy, or how loud your heartbeat sounds when a hunter-killer drone shines a ranging laser on your position. You don’t want to know about the taste of ash and soot, the smell of blood, the scorching heat burning the small hairs on your body as a flash grenade detonates in the trenches.

  You want to hear about courage and honor. You want the medals, the bugles, the drums. You want to hear about starships on fire off Orion’s shoulder, plasma beams glittering as they slice through inertial drives.

  I’m sorry.

  * * *

  We’re waiting at the pickup point, about fifty clicks from where the drop-ship let us off, eight months ago. It’s me and about half the crew I came to Titan with. That’s pretty par for the course. Sometimes, in the mess tents, we forget and set up plates for those who aren’t there anymore. We don’t forget again.

  We’re mingling with other squads, here from different missions, our only commonality that we fight on the same side of this war.

  Two hours to departure. From here a shuttle will take us up to the starship Miyazaki, where we’ll go into hyper-sleep for the longest leg of the journey. For some of us, it’s to Europa, for others, to Deimos. Already, other ships are on their way here from those settlements, bringing our replacements.

  It’s my third tour. I’m one of the lucky ones.

  I scan the faces of the soldiers around me, but I don’t see Sharkey around.

  Sharkey and I aren’t from the same mission team. We’d met on the Aldrin station on Deimos. All the cubs were at the terminals, reading anything that was sent to them, sending out their messages home. I was passing by, finishing a Molson Canadian lager when a private got up without warning from their seat and ran into me, upsetting what was left of my drink.

  She was more distraught than I was over it, but I’d let her buy me a replacement. Hey, however you can get it. On her station uniform, the stencilled patch spelled out A. CHERENKOV. Her name was Anya, but her crew called her Sharkey, so I did.

  We made a pact to see each other again, if we made it.

  I decide to circle around, see if I could find her, if she did.

  As I trudge through the encampment, I’m surrounded by snatches of stories from groups of soldiers, familiar and unfamiliar voices mingling like a congregation prayer.

  * * *

  A group is in a circle, cleaning their plasma rifles as I pass by.

  One of them is talking: “So we’re on Arwen Colles, by what looks like the dried up remains of a river. It’s quiet and there’s time, I duck into the trees for a piss. I’m done with my business and headed back through the brush and all of a sudden there’s the barrel of a plasma rifle poking right in my ribs. It’s this zook, except he’s as shocked as I am. He’s charging up his piece, but it malfuncks on him, and I zap him five‌—‌boom boom boom boom boom‌—‌before he can get the lead out. Alt history.”

  That gets a laugh from the company.

  * * *

  Sharkey and I had gotten to talking at the bar, and by the second lager she’d told me about how the last mail on her message list‌—‌and the reason for my spilled drink‌—‌had been from her Mars-based ex, suing for full custody of their daughter, who for the duration of the tour was with her parents.

  “He might as well shoot me,” she said.

  She bit her lip. I offered her a cig-cap, and she pinched it under her nose, inhaling in the vapors. I didn’t know really what to say, but I knew this was probably a good time to change the subject. What she’d said reminded me about Luther Myers, a guy I knew from my second tour, so I said, I’d been shot once, and memorably.

  “Yeah?” she asked.

  “See, there was this guy in my squad, Luther. First tour, didn’t know any better, not listening to anything you said. He was just a kid, right? We were on a march into the Ettenmoors, about a day’s travel across the plains from the drop point. Sarge called a break right at the edge of Eryn Vorn, heavy jungle with no sunlight, snakes, vines, quicksand, you
name it. It would be slower going from here, you see, night vision, the works. While we were checking gear, Luther went off and started playing with an Aetna flaregun.”

  She cocked her head. “Aetna?”

  “They’re the ones that shoot re-usable flares. After you launched your flares, you track them to where they fell, pick them up when they’d cooled enough, and use them again. So Luther was standing maybe twenty feet away from me, holding an Aetna and zapping imaginary zooks in the jungle. And I told him, knock it off. He loaded, and fired the flare straight at me.”

  “Holy mack.”

  “Hit me square in the body armor. The goddamn heat through the chest plate insulation was just bearable, and I was cursing and tearing off my armor, and Luther stood there laughing as the flare sputtered and died.”

  “What did you do about it?”

  “Cursed him out and said he’d better not sleep that night, or I’d shoot an Aetna up his ass.”

  It worked; she laughed. “For real?”

  I took a swig. “No, not really. There were zooks in that jungle, and Luther took a sniper hit to the temple.”

  She thought about that for a moment, then took a swig of her own.

  “War is hell,” she said.

  When hyper-sleep time came, Sharkey and I had chosen parallel sleep pods. After we woke, she told me that she wouldn’t mind hooking up again, after both our tours were over.

  * * *

  Another group I pass is cleaning out the last of their rations.

  “So Rizzo was driving us back to the base, we’re the lead in a convoy. I’m the guy behind the driver, right? What happened next is a blur. The guy riding shotgun, Johnson, yells ‘Truck right!’ and Rizzo swerves right, but there’s two bombs on the road, not just one, and we hit the second with a BOOM! The truck cartwheels and slams into the ground. Rizzo is dead, Johnson is dead, and I’m there with my goddamn arm blown off. Just because I’m the guy behind the driver.”

  * * *

  When I find Sharkey, she’s with a group sitting by the temporary comm station. She was talking, so I hang back, listening in.

  “It was about halfway through my tour,” she was saying, “We were out on a rescue mission in Chusuk Planitia for an advance patrol that hadn’t reported in. We were headed east on our first pass when out of nowhere we were hit by gunfire. We lost control of the spinner, hit the surface at speed. It was twisted metal everywhere, the smell of burning. I was shouting ‘Get out, get out!’ but my leg couldn’t move, and I had to drag myself out when suddenly I was hauled up. I looked up, and I was in between two zooks, and there were more of them, all around, kicking at my crew.

  “Well they tried to stand me up but I couldn’t, my left leg was bad off, and when I fell back down again they started shouting at me, and one of them jammed their handgun to the back of my head and I thought, here it is, I’m going to die. He pulled my helmet off and that’s when they realized I was a woman.

  “They tore off my weapons belt, examined my medical vest, and then they started shouting. Not at me, but at each other. It kept going for a little while, but then the guy with the handgun put it away. I think they realized this had been a medical mission, and that pretty much saved my life, I guess. They tied up my leg, threw me on a truck, and three of them took me to a hospital in the nearest zook town.”

  She took a whiff off of a cig-cap.

  “Anyway, on the truck on the way to the hospital, that was when it happened. I was in the back, on the floor because I couldn’t sit right. And there’s the guy with the handgun on the side bench, guarding me, and he’s looking at me like he still can’t believe I’m a woman. I wasn’t really thinking about anything in particular. I was thinking, I’m alive, and were my crew still alive, was anyone else still alive. And then this zook lowers himself from the bench to the ground, and he starts to kiss me.”

  Someone says, “Damn.”

  “I know,” says Sharkey. “I mean, there I am, cut up and bloody, with my leg in a tourniquet and sitting in a pool of blood and dirt, and this is all he can think about? And before I know it, he’s tearing at my uniform and starting to paw me. At that time I’m not doing anything, I’m thinking if I do something, am I going to die? And here he is groping me, pushing me to the ground, pulling the zip down to my pants.”

  “So what did you do?”

  She inhaled another vape.

  “I grabbed his hand, put it on my crotch, then snapped it back and broke his wrist.”

  “He screamed, of course. The truck stopped. I zipped up my suit, the others came running and when they saw him, cursed and switched him to the front of the truck, and we continued on. But no one ever touched me again.”

  * * *

  That’s when she sees me. She gets up, crosses the group, and hugs, saying nothing.

  “Sharkey,” I say, hugging her back. “Sharkey. I missed you.”

  She nods, and although she wasn’t before, she is suddenly crying.

  What we both know, in that moment that we are holding each other, that we didn’t know a moment before, was that we are, the two of us, alive. It’s a gift.

  Someone else in her group starts telling a story‌—‌but just then the shuttle breaks through the clouds above us, looming like the hand of God.

  Through the roar of the retro-rockets I shout to her that I have to get back to my squad, that we’d meet up again on the Miyazaki.

  She nods, but it’s a long time before she lets go.

  “Thank God,” she says.

  * * *

  Funny thing, that.

  On our final mission before tour end, our squad receives orders to move in on a specific set of coordinates on Titan. We mobilize and head out, all we know is that the enemy had taken the target, and that we had to take it back.

  It turns out to be this church in Echoriath Montes. There’s even a goddamn cross on the top of the tower, and a bell in that tower. The guys hesitate for a second, and I know what they are thinking, we’re going to hell for this.

  Still, we’ve got orders.

  We surround the place, cover all the exits. We train our howitzers on the windows, and then we hit them with everything we’ve got, plasma charges spitting out smoke like there’s no tomorrow. We’re raining fire on that church like God’s own wrath.

  When the zooks pour out we let go with the Weyman J77 machine rifles, yelling obscenities, shells spraying all over the place like they’re fireworks, firing until there’s nothing moving.

  Sarge waves us forward, and we close in.

  As we cross the threshold I remember, and here’s the kicker, I remember that this is a place of worship, and for some reason I remember my Nana, who used to take me to church; I make the sign of the cross.

  * * *

  Thank God.

  But does God have anything to do with it?

  The odds were always against me surviving for a fourth tour. War is like Russian roulette; you pull the trigger, and if that chamber is a blank, it only means that the next time you pull the trigger, the odds have shifted considerably against you.

  On my first tour, I was brought to the trauma centre at Faramir Colles, which was nothing more than three trailers at the base of a hill.

  An hour earlier I’d been sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with my regiment, when suddenly a spinner crashed through the perimeter. The sentries opened fire as everyone dived for cover, but it was too late. It turned out the spinner was loaded with explosives, primed to go within a minute after it had crossed the gates. Jack Eastbrook stood his ground, coolly firing at its tires. He hit one, the spinner veered away, but not enough‌—‌then it went off.

  There was blood everywhere, Eastbrook had all his limbs blown off. But he was still alive when the med vehicle got there.

  I had shrapnel in the legs, and they took out every excruciating piece in one of those trauma centre trailers. I screamed throughout. But they stopped me from bleeding to death, augmented me with cybernetic implants so I could walk ag
ain, fight again, kill again. As long as they could keep me alive they could keep on replacing my limbs, almost until I became indistinguishable from the zooks we were fighting.

  I’ll take trailer number two for five hundred, Jack.

  In trailer number three, quietly, Eastbrook died.

  * * *

  I watched an old vid-reel once, about day-to-day life in a field military surgical hospital. In one episode there’s this doctor talking to a chaplain.

  He says, “Father, William Sherman was wrong.” Sherman was a general in the Union Army in the first American Civil War.

  The doctor is saying, “War isn’t Hell. War is worse than Hell.”

  And the priest says, “How so?”

  The doctor says, “Only sinners go to Hell.”

  And the priest goes, “And war?”

  “War is full of the innocent,” says the doctor. “Civilians, children, old people. Doctors and nurses. Factory workers. Soldiers. Almost everyone‌—‌except maybe for the weapons-makers and some generals‌—‌almost everyone in war is an innocent.”

  * * *

  In the hyper-sleep hall on the Miyazaki, I fold my uniform neatly and put it in the drawer underneath. Now fully clad in a sleep-suit, I haul myself into the pod and wait for the fluid that would come in and cover us before we went into hyper-sleep.

  “Sam.”

  It’s Sharkey, on my right.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you. It didn’t happen that way.”

  I nod.

  “I mean, not all of it.”

  “I know.”