Shifting Dimensions: A Military Science Fiction Anthology

by Justin Sloan

  CRACK!

  The door gave way, and Riot rushed into the small room. Her eyes swept around the chamber as she quickly took stock of the arsenal. There was a rack of electric batons on one wall, shelves of non-lethal sprays, a table with dozens of tranquilizer handguns. All of this, however, paled in comparison to what was in the last rack on her left. Riot wasn’t exactly sure what the thick, blue rifle would shoot, but it looked amazing, like an oversized nerf gun and a paintball gun had had a love child.

  “Stop!” The two wardens rushed into the room. To Riot’s surprise and delight, the wardens were none other than Ashton and Chambers.

  Riot lifted the rifle from the rack. She hit what she guessed was the safety and pointed it at the wardens, who nervously eased away from the point of her barrel.

  “Slade.” Riot didn’t take her eyes off the wardens. “What does this do?”

  “I don’t know, but let’s test it on the mean one.” Slade pointed at Warden Chambers.

  “Hey, let’s all calm down, now.” Warden Chambers held his electric baton in front of him, like that was going to help somehow. “There’s no reason to do something we’re all going to re—”

  THUMP!

  A high-pitched hum came from the rifle, followed by a loud thwack. Something akin to a concentrated shock wave left the barrel and struck the warden in the groin, sending him flying back through the open door and into the hall beyond.

  “Wow!” Riot looked at her weapon with newfound respect. “You didn’t tell me you had toys like this!”

  “Are you going to shoot me?” Ashton looked around with wild eyes, trying to make a decision as to whether to run or not.

  “No, silly.” Riot handed rifles to Slade and Jessup. “You’re going to take us to the exit.”

  THUMP! THUMP!

  Slade missed with her first shot, but hit the guard at the set of double doors with the next. The guard’s body lifted off the ground and slammed against the steel bars that separated the Institute from the outside world.

  Past the steel bars was a long hall with a set of double doors that Ashton promised them would lead to the outside courtyard.

  “Hurry up.” Jessup pressed the barrel of his rifle into Ashton’s back. “We don’t have all day.”

  “Okay, okay.” Ashton fumbled with the keys, his hands, wet from the sprinklers, frantically trying to find the right key to open the gate.

  The music playing over the speakers died.

  “We only have a few minutes left before they get here.” Riot whipped her drenched hair out of her face. “Ray and his buddies have been captured.”

  “How do you know that?” Slade asked, shivering in the cold water that sprinkled from the ceiling. “How can you be sure?”

  Before Riot could answer, a prerecorded female voice came over the loudspeaker. “Attention: It is important to remain calm. Patients are asked to remain in their rooms, or if you are in any of the common areas, please return to your room in order to avoid death or dismemberment. Wardens are asked to meet at the entrance to begin the sweep. Thank you all in advance for your compliance.”

  “Music’s over.” Riot lifted her rifle, taking aim down the barrel at whoever would round the corner first.

  CLICK!

  “Got it!” Ashton swung open the cell-like door.

  “Hurry! Get through!” Riot pulled the trigger as she caught the first sign of movement down the hall, catching a warden in his right leg as he turned the corner. His body slammed against the floor and skidded to a halt against the far wall.

  “The key for the double doors—now!”

  Riot heard Jessup yell the command, but her attention was on covering their escape. Ashton, Jessup, Slade, and Riot jumped through the steel bar door, then Riot slammed it closed as wardens took up positions at either corner of the hall.

  Riot watched Slade out of the corner of her eye. The young girl was mirroring her, move for move. Riot knelt, making herself as small a target as possible. She placed the barrel of her rifle through the bars.

  “Hurry, let’s go!” Jessup was yelling at Ashton as he fumbled to find the final key to their freedom.

  “Hey, do you think they have rifles to—”

  THUMP! THUMP!

  Wardens peeked around the corner with their own rifles, showering Riot’s end of the hall with projectiles. The steel bars in front of her shook under the pressure of the concussive rounds.

  Riot gritted her teeth and shot back. Not that there was much to shoot at. The wardens were firing blindly, only offering Riot a target of their rifle and hands.

  “We got it, we got it!” Jessup’s voice found her over the rain of rifle fire.

  Riot looked over at Slade to tell her to run, but the young girl’s body was slumped halfway to the exit doors. A round had found its way through the bars.

  “Go, go!” Riot yelled to Jessup as he moved to come back down the hall and pick up Slade’s body. “I’ll get her, just cover me.”

  “Ahhhhhhhh!” Jessup pressed his trigger like a madman, but most of his rounds struck the steel bar that groaned under his barrage, though his heart was in the right place.

  Riot ran to Slade’s body. She lifted the girl, who felt like nothing, onto her shoulder. One hand on Slade, one hand on her rifle, she and Jessup walked backwards down the hall, exchanging fire with the wardens.

  The wardens had become desperate now. They crouched and fired, making their way to the steel barrier between the two.

  Riot and Jessup walked out of the Institute, firing wildly. As soon as Riot crested the threshold into the outside world, she found herself alone. Slade, Jessup, Ashton, the Institute, the wardens chasing them, the green grass and the forest welcoming her was all replaced by something from a nightmare.

  Riot looked down at her empty hands as her brain struggled to reason out what was happening to her. A dull buzzing was the only thing she could hear. She was in some long forgotten city. Skeletons of buildings that once would have marked vibrant city life lay in various forms of destruction around her.

  The alien ships she remembered so vividly, but yet had seemed so far away at the Institute, hovered in the sky. The alien’s foreign tanks and assault vehicles were rolling down the street away from her, no more than a half mile ahead.

  “What the freakhola,” Riot said out loud. “I knew I was right. Why did I have to be right?”

  To her right, her glance caught a motion from around the corner of one of the few remaining buildings still standing. A figure Riot instantly recognized was walking toward her.

  “I should have known it was you.” Riot shook her head. “How many times have I—”

  Before Riot could get the words out, as she was still wrapping her head around the truth, she smelled the gas.

  “Oh, f—”

  Riot fell unconscious.

  “YEA, tho I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because I am the evilest one in the valley.”

  “Can you stop saying that?”

  Riot came to and her rambling ended as her brain processed three things: she had one hell of a headache, there was a pounding coming from a steel door in front of her, and she was about to vomit.

  She leaned forward, releasing the contents of her stomach all over her white uniform pants legs and shoes. She couldn’t remember exactly what she had eaten, but it had been spicy.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  The pounding became louder, and with each blow, a new shudder of sharp pain echoed through her skull.

  “I’m going to murder whichever girl scout’s selling cookies at this hour.” Riot muttered to herself as she spat out the last of her stomach bile. “Ugh, what did I eat? It tastes like grandma’s casserole mixed with cat litter and hot sauce.”

  She examined her surroundings. She sat chained to a steel chair secured to the floor, the only piece of furniture in the padded room. There was just one way in, and one way out: a metal door from where the hammering appeared to be coming from.
One other person stood in the room with her—a nervous-looking kid holding a black baton.

  He trembled as his dark eyes shifted from the door to Riot, and back to the door.

  “You look like you’re going to need a diaper change.” Riot head-motioned toward the door. “I’m guessing you’re not too excited to have whoever’s on the other side break through?”

  At once, a siren wailed and red lights flashed in the room, accompanied by a tranquil, prerecorded female voice. “Attention: It is important to remain calm. Patients are asked to remain in their rooms, or if you are in any of the common areas, please return to your room in order to avoid death or dismemberment. Wardens are asked to meet at the entrance to begin the sweep. Thank you all in advance for your compliance.”

  JONATHAN YANEZ

  JONATHAN YANEZ CHUGS caffeine like a Viking and attacks the keyboard like a Space Marine. When he’s not hammering away at his next book, you can find him spending time with his family or throwing around weights at the gym. He lives in California with his wife, daughter, Huskies, and cat.

  HE’S WRITTEN over a dozen sci-fi and fantasy novels. His list of bragging topics include winning the Jack London Award, being nominated as the president of the California Writer’s Club, helping open a local bookstore and having his work optioned for film.

  AUTHOR NOTE

  HEY, you awesome reader. If you’re reading this now it means I’m dead and—naw I’m just kidding to be dramatic. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read Riot’s crazy story. And thank you again for being brave enough to read this author note.

  WRITING in the Seppukarian Universe has been a blast. When I was first approached by Justin Sloan, or maybe I begged to write a story with him the details are hazy, I jumped at the chance. I was looking to collaborate with a group of talented authors and here I am.

  RIOT HAS BEEN a blast to write. I’ve had an idea for a character like her for a long time and was going to insert her into my urban fantasy series but she was perfect for the Seppukarian Universe so here she is. This is also a shameless plug to go checkout my urban fantasy series, The Vampire Project. Yeah I know, subtle right?

  IF YOU LIKE Riot you can probably tell she’s a cross between a female Deadpool and Captain Malcolm Reynolds of the starship Serenity. You’ll get to see more of her leader side when she charges with her Marines into battle during her spinoff trilogy.

  OH, you heard me right. Riot is going to get her own trilogy titles, The War Wolves. Book one in the trilogy is already written and I’m on book two. We’re hoping for a late November release for all three so be sure to keep in touch.

  ANOTHER REALLY COOL piece of info is that The War Wolves trilogy will have a cover illustrator doing the books instead of a normal cover designer. What’s the difference you ask? Well an illustrator makes one of a kind art from scratch where a normal cover designer manipulates photo stock images. Cool right? So not only will the book’s content be one of a kind but the cover will as well.

  ALL RIGHT I’d love to chat more but I have some space Marines to lead into battle. I mean Riot does. I love connecting with fellow readers so please feel free to join my Facebook page or visit my website.

  CATCH you on the other side,

  APOCALYPSE DREAMS

  BY GEORGE S. MAHAFFEY JR.

  EX NIHILO

  As she crouched, chained inside a weapon’s bay inside the Syndicate ship on the twenty-second day of her imprisonment, Haskell contemplated all the many ways she’d been lied to by her favorite science fiction movies. The well-orchestrated dog fights, the explosions without oxygen, the lasers, the sweet deflector shields? All of it was bullshit.

  She kicked herself because she should’ve known better. She’d been an engineering student working for the resistance back on Earth before the aliens kidnapped her. She should’ve known that the realities of space combat were dictated more by Newtonian physics and the harsh realities of orbit dynamics than kick-ass technology and sleek fighting machines. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t give a damn about any of it, but at the moment she was peering through three inches of translucent material that functioned as a window, watching a smaller, faster, silver-skinned craft preparing to fire a directed energy weapon at the ship in which she’d been imprisoned. None of it was happening the way she thought it would and the strangest thing was that she felt like she’d been here before. Whether it was déjà vu or something else, Haskell believed she’d been seated in the exact same spot before, waiting for the Syndicate ship to get smacked down.

  “WE’VE GOT ANOTHER ONE INCOMING!” she shouted as the ball of directed energy was fired by the other ship. The Syndicate ship returned fire, unleashing a counter-measure, a projectile munition that rocketed out, but unfortunately missed both the ball of energy and the silver-skinned enemy craft. Haskell knew what was going to happen next. The ball of directed energy from the enemy ship slammed into the side of the Syndicate ship with great sound and fury. CRACKBOOM!

  The impact lifted Haskell off the ground.

  She felt herself flying back through the air and then—

  WHACK!

  A long, silver chain around her wrist snapped taut.

  She was yanked down and crumpled hard against the floor’s metal grating. She lay there for several seconds, dizzy, disoriented, friction sparks raining down from the blast, banners of smoke filling the air, the screams of men and aliens echoing. Instinctively, she knew that a man was going to ask: “You okay, girlie?”

  Haskell looked up to see a fellow prisoner, a ferret-faced man called Fincher, who’d been kidnapped by the aliens roughly around the same time as her. Fincher was surrounded by several other human males and four alien prisoners who were tethered to a Syndicate weapons battery, a machine that utilized a piston to hurl torpedo-like projectile munitions, countermeasures, out into space, including the ones that continued to miss their targets. Fincher moved to the end of his chain and helped Haskell to her feet.

  “Just so you know, I’m suing George Lucas,” Haskell hissed, dusting herself off.

  Fincher arched an eyebrow. “Come again?”

  “The guy who created that old movie, ‘Star Wars.’ First thing I’m doing when I get back to Earth is suing his ass.”

  “Yeah, he’s probably long dead so…”

  “Then I’m going after his great grandkids.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “Unreasonable expectations.”

  “I’m pretty sure that ain’t a viable cause of action, Haskell.”

  “The hell it isn’t,” she replied. “None of this is what we thought it would be. And why hasn’t the Syndicate figured out how to destroy that cruiser outside that’s rattling our cage?”

  “That’s none of your concern,” growled one of the other male prisoners, a bald knuckle-dragger named Blaine Pope, who was manning the weapons battery. “Besides, you keep asking questions like that, you’re gonna get us all killed.”

  Haskell swapped looks with Blaine and considered her place. She was one of the few female prisoners aboard, twenty-one and multiracial (a “Quarter-rican” as Fincher liked to say), with long limbs and short hair. She’d been a grunt before, laboring at a supply outpost for the resistance in Baltimore. She was used to being bossed around by men. Ordinarily she would’ve backed down, kept her mouth quiet and stalked off, but this time was different. She had the overwhelming sensation that she’d lived through this very moment one or more times in the past and in each of those instances she’d done precisely that. She’d wilted and it had gotten her nowhere. Well this time would be different, she thought. This time, she’d stand up for herself.

  Blaine jabbed a finger in her direction. “What do you have to say now, engineer?”

  Instead of folding up like a pocket knife, Haskell held Blaine’s gaze. “Well, I guess I say you know you’ve reached rock bottom when you’re being lectured on etiquette by a dude who regularly has sex with an alien prostitute.”

  “It was one time and no
money changed hands!” Blaine thundered, his cheeks reddening.

  “That doesn’t make it any righter!” Haskell shouted back.

  Blaine took a step toward her when footfalls echoed. Haskell looked sideways to see two Syndicate soldiers entering the bay, clad in their blood-red armor, faces hidden behind battle helmets with smoked visors, two short-barreled rifles in their hands. She didn’t remember this happening before and immediately wondered whether she’d somehow altered events simply by refusing to back down to Blaine.

  Her gaze ratcheted up from the rifles to the visors worn by the alien soldiers. That was the thing she hated most about the scuds. There was no way to read the bastards because you couldn’t see their eyes. The rifles angled up and Blaine stumbled back, gesturing at Haskell, trying to save his own ass.

  “It was her!” he shouted. “She was the one that was asking the questions!”

  Haskell turned to the aliens and stared them down. She was in uncharted territory and decided to play the only card she had. “That’s right,” she said, steeling herself, giving no ground. “I’m the one talking smack. You know why? ‘Cos I’m the only one who knows how to save this ship.”

  As if on cue, another explosion echoed off in the distance, the ship’s hull groaning.

  The Syndicate soldiers turned from the sound of the explosion back to Haskell who said, “If you want to save this ship, you need to listen to me.”

  The soldiers exchanged a look and then they made the strange clucking sounds Haskell had heard before when they were communicating. Some of the scuds, including the two before her, had translation devices fixed to their helmets that allowed them to understand what the humans were saying. Haskell gestured toward the weapons battery and the soldiers lowered their rifles. One of them tapped a button on her chain that extended it, giving her more room to move. She breathed a sigh of relief and moved toward the battery as Fincher flanked her.

  “I take it you know what you’re doing?” Fincher said under his breath.