Free Short Stories 2013

by Baen Books

  "On Blogespacial!. I was just...thinking out loud."

  Ernesto had trained with milspec 3D printers in citizenship class, trained with them so often that he dreamed about them, and about what they could do. Not just what they were born to do, but what they could do, if they were free to choose. When his number came up and Ernesto went to war, he'd vowed to do it on the front lines, sweating over a Seabee's shovel if he had to. He wasn't made to lounge in a safe, air-conditioned room, twitching a joystick from ten thousand miles away. That didn't make him a coward, and it didn't make him a fool, regardless of what anyone said.

  "I was just trying to get a discussion started."

  Lamplighter rested his palm on Ernesto's shoulder. "Well, you did that, son."

  Ernesto swept his gaze the length of the assembly bay.

  "You still want to make that call?"

  "I have to, sir." His dad was counting on him for Saturday. He deserved to know that Ernesto was going to disappoint him. Again.

  #

  Ernesto flicked his cloudnode off. The conversation with his father hadn't gone well. The less he thought about the shouting the better. He rubbed his thumb across the cloudnode's controls. He flicked it alive and typed out a message.

  Maybe next time you're in San Diego you'd like to have lunch. I know this great Mexican joint. They'll treat you like family.

  Ernesto stared at the blinking cursor, heart pounding, index finger hovering over the send glyph. He stared at the virtual display for the longest time before he switched off and pocketed his cloudnode. Who was he kidding? He couldn't make any promises. Especially not that one. Not after talking to his dad. Not anymore.

  #

  Lamplighter leaned against the fantail rail. The ocean churned white behind him.

  Ernesto zoomed in on Lamplighter's face.

  Lamplighter frowned. "Power that down. We need to talk. Off the record."

  "But you said--"

  "Turn it off."

  "Yes, sir."

  "What's eating you?"

  "Sir?"

  "You heard me."

  "It's nothing."

  "Earlier, I asked you a question. You danced around it." Lamplighter pinned Ernesto to the deck with his gaze.

  Ernesto shuffled his feet. "I wouldn't say that, sir. I said I hadn't given the topic enough thought."

  "Have you now?"

  "Umm... Too much, probably."

  "Well, let me make this easier for you. In three days, maybe five if the seas don't lay, we're going to launch a mission to 4660 Nereus. On it will be a payload designed by a bunch of space-crazy kids. Kids on Space Blog."

  "Blogespacial!, sir."

  "Whatever. You kids dreamed it up."

  "We had help."

  "Nevertheless, it's your project. Your mission."

  "With some modifications to the budget, sir."

  "Of course." Lamplighter leaned forward. "By December that payload will begin to dig in, and it will begin to replicate itself. Every two years--"

  "One point eight two years, sir."

  "Okay. Anyway, the asteroid will pass close enough to Earth that we can reprogram the payload, and the factory it's built, reprogram it on every pass, adjusting as we need to, so in forty years--"

  "Thirty-nine, sir."

  "Will you stop interrupting?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "In thirty-nine years, when 4660 Nereus passes within..." Lamplighter glared at Ernesto.

  "One point two million kilometers."

  "Right. The nearest approach in six hundred years, and we'll have everything we need. Everything, ernesto2003, that we need to get to Mars, will be there waiting, a hand's breadth away, cosmically speaking. Everything needed to get to Mars in style, and free for the taking." Lamplighter smiled. "Free, to whoever can lay off their boneheaded squabbling and get there first."

  "Yes, sir." Ernesto glanced at his shoes. "But you'll be... umm."

  "Dead. But you won't, Ernesto. 2003."

  "I hope not, sir. I'd like to see what happens."

  "I expect you will do more than see it, son. And I'd like to ask a favor."

  "Anything, sir."

  "Take me with you. Take me with you, if only in your fevered imagination and your mad, improbable dreams."

  Ernesto gazed far, far out to sea. He looked anywhere, everywhere, anywhere but at Lamplighter's shadowed face. "Yes, sir."

  "Now I'll ask you one more time, and I expect a straight answer. What, ernesto2003, do you want more than anything in the world?"

  "Hang on." Ernesto fished in his pocket for his cloudnode. He closed his eyes and pressed the send glyph. It wasn't ten seconds before the device twitched in his fingers. It took twice as long for Ernesto to screw up the courage to look. He stared at cosmicgrrl's reply.

  It's a date. I absolutely love, love, love Mexican.

  "Well, son?"

  Ernesto's heart felt as if it might leap out onto the deck and race away on a trail of burning fire. When Ernesto glanced up he found Lamplighter watching—the sun pressing low against the western sky, close enough to touch, the Pacific churning behind Lamplighter, a long trail of foam, sun-kissed and endless in his wake.

  "I, Ernesto Suarez, wish to be the richest man on Mars."

  "Truly?"

  "Or the poorest. It doesn't really matter."

  Lamplighter turned and gazed toward some unseen, farthest shore. The last rays of the sun lit the parting clouds as the stars began to rise.

  "It wouldn't matter to me either, son."

  Ernesto closed his eyes, not fighting the tears, but letting this singular moment, this calm, pregnant moment unfold around him, like wind embracing stone.

  "I know. Sir."

  #

  September 15, 2081

  Mars

  Diego Suarez clasped the cinerary urn to his chest. It was ugly, and crude, and until this morning, the most precious thing in all the world.

  "That's an impressive show and tell," Mrs. Singh, his fourth grade teacher, said.

  "That's the tell. This is the show." Diego held the urn out at arm's length.

  "It's a nice urn, Diego."

  "My granddad printed it, on 4660 Nereus. Right before he died. Died saving people he'd never even met. Grandma Suarez says they were people he didn't even like. That's the story."

  "You must be very proud."

  "I'm supposed to be. But I'm not. Look!" Diego upturned the urn on the teacher's desk. A thin dusting of ash trickled out, not enough for one man, let alone two. "It's all a lie. Everything everyone ever told me was a lie." He had to stare at the bulletin board because if he didn't he'd choke on the nasty lump swelling in his chest, swelling exactly where a Lamplighter's heart was supposed to be. And wasn't.

  Mrs. Singh held out her hand. "May I see that?"

  Diego handed her the urn. Mrs. Singh took it, cupping it in her hands like it was a fresh oxygen charge and she was just back from a long walk. She closed her eyes and ran her fingers up and down the ugly, lying pot, touching, feeling, searching its surface for something Diego couldn't see. A single tear ran down her cheek.

  She spoke without opening her eyes. "Tomorrow we'll take a field trip. To hydroponics. Tonight, I'd like you all to look up calcium phosphate, and be ready to discuss. Class dismissed." She ran her fingers over the urn one last time before she opened her eyes and handed it back to Diego. "You won't believe me, Diego, but this was the best show and tell. Ever."

  #

  Diego's grandmother scowled when he handed her grandpa's and Mr. Lamplighter's urn. Not that he believed the lie anymore. It was just a nasty 3D-printed pot, the sort Diego could crank out in half an hour on a bad day. It was a lie. He never should have taken it without asking permission but he'd forgotten about show and tell until the last minute and he was desperate to show up Chandra Patel for once.

  "She really said that?" His grandmother watched Diego's face like she'd never noticed it before. "Padma Singh said that?"

  "Yeah."
<
br />   "And she cried?"

  "Not crying, really. Just a tear. It wasn't a big deal."

  His grandmother glanced out the viewport. Diego couldn't see what she was looking at. Everything looked red, and sharp, and normal.

  "Well." His grandmother shifted in her chair. "I don't mind telling you, Diego." His grandma cradled the urn like a baby. She closed her eyes and Diego began to worry that she'd fallen asleep, or worse.

  "Grandma?"

  His grandmother cracked one eye open, then the other, pinning Diego to the carpet with what his dad called "that damned Lamplighter look".

  Diego shifted from foot to foot. "Don't mind telling me what?"

  "That I am shocked, shocked, shocked." Grandma Suarez held out the urn for Diego. "Now go put this back where it belongs."

  ###

  Copyright © 2013 by Patrick O’Sullivan

  Dog's Body

  by Sarah A. Hoyt

  I drove into Goldport, Colorado at sunset, with the mountains in front of me and the sky a welter of red and gold behind them. And with a sense of doom in my heart.

  Yeah, so I’m that geeky guy who makes his living investigating cryptids and writing about them for a website. For all those of you not up on the lingo, that means I hunt down reports of Big Foot, the Ohio Wolfman, Utah’s Bear Lake Monster, Denver’s Lizard Man, the south east’s supernatural panthers and all the rest, and then I take pictures if there are any to take, and report on what I found.

  There was no reason to feel any particular dread of this one trip, either. Goldport was just the sort of isolated mountain town from which crazy reports came. Three hours by winding mountain road from Denver, it had been a mine town while silver boomed, then become all but a ghost town till the early twentieth century when the University of Colorado had moved one of its branches there – the infamous CUG. The surplus of educated people had, in turn, attracted a trickle of technical entrepreneurs which had turned into a flood sometime in the Eighties.

  Now Goldport, holding on to its rugged image, was a mixture of white collar geeks, the students who would become white collar geeks, and the people who catered to their interests and needs. It was rumored to have the best comic shop west of the Mississippi River, the best microbreweries in the world, and one of the best “weird and geeky” presses anywhere in the universe.

  In other words, it was just the sort of place where the front page of the paper would publish pictures of a dragon flying in a snow storm. Mike, my old college roommate and buddy who runs the cryptid site, gets clippings and scans of stuff like that three times a week, usually from places like Goldport, or from Brazil. Brazil either has an instability in its reality field or its papers enjoy spicing up readers’ lives with crazy reports.

  The problem with the Goldport photo was that neither Mike nor I, nor Millie – Mike’s wife – could find anything in the picture to show that it was Photoshop.

  Look, even the best image manipulators screw up, okay? There will be a hint of shadow gone wrong, somewhere the light doesn’t hit right. There will be some pixels out of place. But this picture didn’t have any of those, and the dragon didn’t look like a drawing or a figurine, not even a really well done one. It looked real, like something you could see flying by your window on a Saturday afternoon in January. That is, if dragons existed. This photo just might prove that dragons existed.

  So Mike and Millie had asked if I’d come out. A day’s driving, because we were based in Kansas. The cyrptid website had been what Mike and I had started when we were laid off from our dot.com jobs after the bust. It had been born of an afternoon discussion on strange animals, and where they could be hiding, why there were never any decent pictures taken, and whether there could be any truth in rumors of things like the Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot. We’d hashed it back and forth, pulled out the scientific articles for and against, and finally decided to start the website for discussion.

  It had taken off in an unpredictable way, and now Mike and Millie and I got our livings from it. One of us would drive or fly off to verify sightings, then come back, get one of our scientists – the ones who worked for pizza and beer – to give their view of the whole thing, and put it up.

  As a result we were both sensational and scientific, and we’d managed to become the go-to- resource for cryptids for everyone from educators to your corner nut.

  What we’d never managed to do was prove that even a single one of the sightings of odd animals was true. Which was why I was on my way to Goldport, on the track of that weirdly real picture, and why it was so odd for me be scared as I drove down the very clean streets of this white-bread mountain town. Thousands of times and nothing had gone wrong… It wouldn’t go wrong now in this clean-cut, straight-laced city.

  Oh, sure, it had rougher patches, like the run-down motel row I was driving past, but that didn’t make it rough. And there was no reason, no reason on Earth that I should be feeling dread.

  Perhaps it was that oh-so-very-real photo, or the fact that once we started digging into it, we’d found other odd reports in the local press. There was a black panther that showed up now and then, but no one could quite track down. There was a report of a room-sized roach. There were way more deaths by misadventure involving wild animals than there should be, and a few years back there appeared to be a reign of terror run by komodo dragon of unusual size. Then there were reports that had to be a joke, of a squirrel in a beret, smoking Galoises and carrying a little red book.

  Taken one at a time, it was easy to shrug off all the reports and say that whatever it was was in fact impossible. But all of them together—

  I started to shrug my shoulders to ease a feeling of tension and cold in the middle of my back, then forgot it all as a large, golden dog surged in front of the van. It ran into my path so close that I had to stand on the bakes to stop from running it down. As I stopped, I realized the dog had come around to the driver’s side of the van and also that it was not only beautiful and well groomed, but that it looked like an Afghan hound, a rare breed. I only knew what it was because a friend of mine had owned one of these growing up. Obviously this was no feral mutt. And it was stretching, paws on the window.

  I opened the door and said, “What is it boy? What—” I couldn’t say anything more, because the dog had nuzzled the door a crack, and forced himself in, jumping onto the space in front of the passenger seat.

  Reaching over, to open the passenger door wide, I said, “Come on, boy. You can’t mean to get in here. I’m not your owner. I don’t want to be accused of steal—” Before I opened the door, I saw people come running out of the side of the road towards the van. There was a little wooded area out there, what seemed to be a camping ground of some sort, and they were running out of there, from where, at a guess, the dog had come.

  You know how sometimes your body makes decisions before informing your brain what is going on? Mine took a split second to ditch the idea of opening the passenger door, and hardly any longer to close the door on my side and step on the gas and take off out of there like I meant it.

  I was probably a mile down the road, before I thought through what I’d seen. This was a beautiful, well cared for dog, without a collar. A dog who had just forced himself into my car, despite not knowing me. A dog who looked terrified. And the people running out of the wooded area looked… not like the kind of people who would own a really expensive dog. More like the kind of people who would steal a really expensive dog and hold him for ransom. Or perhaps use him in dog fights – even though I couldn’t imagine anyone using an Afghan hound for that. These weren’t exactly your vicious dogs.

  But the thing is that the pursuers looked just like the kind of people who would try. I’d only got a quick impression of twenty or so people, all running out, all … well… all male and all rough-looking. It was enough. On the other hand, I thought, as I took the first right turn haphazardly, and then a left turn into a tree-lined street with largish houses – if they were really rough characters, they woul
d be after me. Could they have got my license plate number?

  “Damn,” I said. “They’re probably after me. I just managed to involve myself in a local dispute. And they probably do own the dog.”

  “They don’t,” a voice said from in front of the passenger seat.

  I cast a quick glance to the side, veered all over the road, said, “Oh, my,” and bit down on a more vigorous exclamation, because huddled on the floor of the passenger side was a girl. She was blond and slight, and for just a moment I thought she was young – very young, like fourteen or fifteen. But then I focused on her face, because the rest was naked and I really didn’t want to look at it, and, my face burning, realized that she was in her late twenties, maybe around my age. The face had that mature look, and the eyes – strangely warm brown eyes – had a look of grave seriousness. She still looked scared

  Still?

  Yeah. I had no doubt that those almond-shaped eyes had belonged to the Afghan hound. Which meant I had been wrong in calling the dog “boy.” I pulled to the side of the road. Turned off the ignition.

  “You shouldn’t stop,” she said. She had a low voice, raspy, which made me think of dark coffee and nutmeg. “They might have got the license plate.” She was huddled, sitting down, hugging her knees, managing to hide as much of herself as was possible. “They will be looking.” Her hair was very long, covering most of her back, and it was the exact color of the hound’s fur. Her face was peaked, oval-with-a-pointy-chin and managing to betray both elegance and a sort of artlessness that has nothing to do with youth.

  I opened my mouth, closed it. How does one argue with a girl who was a dog just moments before? Nothing in my ten years of hunting down cryptids had prepared me for this. I started the car again and took off down the street. “Where do I go?” I asked.

  “Somewhere public,” she said. “Somewhere with a lot of people. It will be less likely they’ll come after us in public. Of course, I’ll have to shift, and they’ll claim they own me.” The little, raspy voice had a sad undertone.