THE HOT CHICK
& Other Weird Tales
Charles Christian
REVIEWS OF CHARLES CHRISTIAN’S WRITING
“Christian’s strength is the abandon with which he brings together the fantastic and the mundane.”
Vector
“Christian delivers the goods economically, effectively and with immense dignity and compassion. In a nutshell; the man can write!”
Dave Kelso-Mitchell
“Christian’s style is sparse and urgent and makes me, for one, wish he would now tackle a crime novel. Norfolk noir anyone?”
Trevor Heaton, EDP Weekend supplement
“Christian’s style is far from hard, drawing the reader in with an easygoing narrative, plenty of dialogue and buckets of wry humour. But what I found most was heart.”
Wayne Simmons
“What I will say is I love the way Christian writes. It is smooth and elegant without being overly literary. Sometimes it feels as though literary authors can be shoving how clever they are down your throat, but Christian eases you along and makes it very difficult to put the book down.”
R B Harkess, author
REVIEW EXTRACTS OF ‘SECRET CARGO’ by Charles Christian
“Boom..and there it is. The Secret”
“This author never fails to surprise me”
“Enjoyable even if you’re not a sci fi geek”
“Twisty turny fun”
“Classic short story”
“Small but crafted”
“Compact but compelling!”
“Another wonderful journey into Charles’ imagination”
“Science fiction has never been as real as this”
REVIEW EXTRACTS OF ‘TOMORROW’S GHOSTS’ by Charles Christian
“...a wonderful way with short stories”
“...keeps you turning those pages, and when you do, you are not disappointed”
“...his skill at creating imagery with words is second to none”
“...would love to read other titles”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Christian is a former barrister and Reuters correspondent turned award-winning technology journalist, newsletter publisher, blogger, science fiction author, storyteller and keynote speaker.
His dystopian sci fi and urban fantasy stories are Gothic tales for the 21st century - with a sense of humour and a topical twist.
Charles lives in Norfolk with his wife, Jane, three dogs and two horses.
Published by UrbanFantasist.com, Oak Lodge, Darrow Green Road, Denton, Norfolk, IP20 0AY
www.urbanfantasist.com
ISBN 978-1-907043-08-6
© Copyright 2014
The right of Charles Christian to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher/author. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s/author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
For Jane, who made it all possible.
CONTENTS
Kastellorizon
The End of Flight Number 505
Already Gone
This is the Quickest Way Down
More Important than Baby Stenick
The Last Train Home
Waiting for my Mocha to Cool
Confessions of a Teenage Ghost-Hunter
The Hot Chick
A Baretta for Azraella
Taking Tea with the General
Empire State of Mind
By the Steps of Villefranche Station
Acknowledgements
Would You Like More SFF & H?
Also by Charles Christian
THE HOT CHICK
& Other Weird Tales
Charles Christian
Kastellorizon
I AWAKE WITH A JOLT. There must have been a sand fly crawling across my face and for a moment I am disoriented. Is this the same beach of my childhood dreams and childhood nightmares? I look around. Next to me lies a dark-skinned woman, she is asleep and in her arms she is cradling a heavy calibre machine gun. Overhead an enormous sun, an alien sun the colour of yellow ochre, blazes down through a cloudless, cerulean blue sky. No, this is an entirely different nightmare.
This is how it begins . . .
When I was a kid, this was when I was still back on Earth, I used to live by the ocean. Our house was in the Old Town, by the crumbling fisherman’s wharf, and every day Aimee, my sister, and I would make our way along the foreshore and up into the New Town, perched on a headland overlooking the beach, to attend our school.
If the tide was out, on our way back home we’d cut across the beach and spend many an hour playing on the sands or else exploring newly-exposed rock pools. Our favourite destination was an outcrop of rocks that, depending upon the ebb and flow of the tides, would sometimes be just a few boulders peeking above the surface of the beach, yet at other times, particularly after a stormy spring tide, would be revealed as a maze of gullies, crevasses and pools.
For us, with the unlimited imaginations of the young, this was no ordinary collection of rocks, but a fantasy kingdom, our own private realm, to be mapped, explored and then fortified with sandcastles and barricades of driftwood to keep out the encroaching sea.
Sometimes we would picture ourselves as Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table on a quest to recover the Holy Grail. I can still see Aimee now, swinging a makeshift sword - usually a piece of driftwood - around in the air before bringing it down on the head of some imaginary enemy. ‘Take that, foul beast!’ she’d yell, as the fearsome dragon or crab, as it actually was, would scuttle away to safety at the bottom of a rock pool. Poor Aimee; she had a slight lisp, and sometimes I couldn’t resist teasing her about it. ‘What’s foul beef; an overcooked joint of meat?’ I’d ask and then run for cover as Aimee would come chasing after me with the stick.
On other days our adventures would take us to a desert island, in the midst of the Indian Ocean, where we’d search for Captain Flint’s buried pirate treasure. And oh, what treasures we’d find! Looking back, I fear our parents must have despaired at the endless collections of bits of rusty old iron, sea shells, pieces of wood and oddly-shaped stones we’d bring home. No matter how many times it happened, Aimee was always disappointed by these stones. Looking back, I realise she must have thought they were gems; the way they looked so shiny and richly-coloured lying in the water, only for each and every one of them to dry out and reveal itself to be just another mundane pebble.
And then came the fateful day she uncovered that bloody thing . . .
I was a year older than my sister and, one day a week, had started taking additional lessons in computing immediately after school. It was only for an hour and if it was a fine day and the tide was out, on my way back home I would often catch up with my sister still playing on ‘our’ island.
This particular day I had just begun the descent from the New Town towards the beach. The tide was out and in the distance I could make out a tiny figure, my sister, moving across the outcrop of rocks. As I looked on,
the figure halted and stooped over, as if to peer more closely at something. There was a blinding orange flash, followed by the crack of an explosion, and when the smoke had cleared, the figure had vanished.
Of course, I ran as fast as my young legs could carry me, scrabbling down the steep cliff path and racing across the beach, but by the time I arrived, the emergency services were already there and it was far too late for me to see or do anything. The area was cordoned off with police crime scene tape and my sister was lying dead, beneath a ice blue PVC tarpaulin.
At the subsequent coroner’s inquest we learned that she’d discovered a still-live hand grenade, left over from one of that century’s earlier wars. The suggestion was she’d found it at the bottom of a recently-exposed rock pool, but had been too young or innocent to realise that even a rust-encrusted relic of a bygone conflict could still pose a mortal danger to anyone touching it.
I never played on those rocks again. How could I, what with the memories of my sister and those blast-seared and cracked stones providing an ever-present reminder of how and where she had died.
Then there were my confused emotions. The obvious grief she had died. Regret that I had not been with her that day. Perhaps if I had, I might have prevented the accident. And then there was a heady dose of guilt, tinged with my worm-like sense of relief that I had been absent that day and so had avoided sharing Aimee’s fate.
They say we must all make sacrifices to the gods of computing and I certainly paid my dues that day. My tangled feelings aside, Aimee’s death was to be my rite of passage, ending forever childhood days and setting me on course for adulthood. I threw myself into my studies with a desperate enthusiasm (my grief counsellor said I was in denial and sublimating my true emotions, although at the time I didn’t understand what he meant) as I knew I had to get out of that place with its constant reminders of earlier, happier days.
And so I moved on from small-town school to big-city university and eventually into the world of science and research. It was a career path that would ultimately take me to the stars. Literally.
High overhead, the dirty orange glow of Aldebaran fills out the sky, but despite the star’s enormous size, it grows cold on our planet - Kastellorizon - as the evenings draw in. Lakshmi, she’s my partner, cuddles up close to me in the sleeping bag while we wait for our supper to grill over a camp fire. It’s been a hard week (the weeks are always hard out here as the atmosphere may be breathable, but the air is thin), but we’re ahead of quota for abstracting minerals from the planet’s ever shifting sands and we’re taking this camping trip by way of a little R&R. Back at base I know my team can get on without me for a few days besides, it will be weeks before the next freighter, bound for the Sol home system, arrives.
The irony of my situation is not lost on me. Having grown up by the seashore and spent my early years trying to escape from there, half a lifetime later I find myself 60 light years from Earth on a planet, about the size of Mars, that is little more than a few lumps of red rock amid an ocean of sand. It is on one of those rocky outcrops we are now camped - the tidal forces tugging at this planet making it unsafe to tarry for too long on the sand dunes that cover the remainder of the surface.
Supper is ready. We’ve been grilling sandworms, one of the few higher life forms to be found on this planet. You fish for them like eels only these swim in the sand. You split open their hardened skins and then cook the flesh. With enough seasoning, and a little imagination, they taste a bit like chicken.
As we eat, Lakshmi and I talk about what we’d do if we ever made a really big find. ‘Sharna (that’s Sharna Marriott who is Lakshmi’s best friend on the base) says you can now buy apartments on Titan with 24/7 views of Saturn’s rings. They even have their own private orbiter pod moorings. ‘Go on, think about it,’ she adds, giving me one of her special this-is-my-appealing-face-how-can-you-possibly-resist-me looks, ‘It’ll be great.’ She knows I’m not convinced about living in an enclosed habitat but we both agree we can never go back home. Space-time dilation means everyone we have ever known or loved back on Earth is already long dead.
What are we searching for? Like the rest of the crew on the mining rig (and, if the gossip coming over the Net is anything to go by, just about everyone else working out here in deep space), when we have some spare time, we head out on a flyer and rake around the dusty purlieus of this barren waste searching for anything that could make our fortunes back on Earth. The biggest diamond in the galaxy would do nicely, but we’d settle for just a couple of interesting fossil remains or even that holiest of holy grails: a genuine alien artefact which could be sold for top dollar to the right collectors.
‘Lao Chang,’ says Lakshmi, ‘said he saw a plume of smoke two days ago in the dawn light. And nobody’s ever come up with a plausible explanation of why some of our stores keep going missing.’
I say nothing. Lakshmi smiles and kisses me on the forehead; she knows I’m sceptical about the rumours the planet is inhabited. And with good reason. Since mankind first took to the stars, no other intelligent life forms have ever been encountered.
The next morning Lakshmi is first out of the sleeping bag and wants to start exploring as soon as possible. She was born in the Himalayas not far from Kathmandu and doesn’t feel the effects of the planet’s thin air as much as me.
‘Come on,’ she says, as she pours the dregs of the breakfast coffee into the recycler, ‘I’m feeling lucky today.’
I can understand why. The tides have ebbed during the past week, causing the dunes to recede and expose more of this outcrop than either of us have ever seen before. From the crest of a hill we gaze down on a canyon that probably last saw the light of day a million years ago. ‘It’s on days like this,’ I remark, ‘you can see why the first expedition christened this planet Kastellorizon.’
‘Never been there,’ replies Lakshmi. ‘It’s in the Greek Dodecanese, isn’t it?’
‘Yup. It has distinctive outcrops of red rock that look from a distance like they could be the ruins of a fortress. There again,’ I add, ‘it was also the first expedition that reported seeing campfires and so started the rumour this place was inhabited by an indigenous people.’
‘The so-called “Orizontals”. You better believe it, they are out there and one day we’ll find them,’ says Lakshmi with a no-nonsense tone in her voice.
But, after such a promising start to the day with all that new territory to explore, by noon my spirits - and strength, we must have walked miles - are starting to flag. Lakshmi is still full of energy. ‘Your ancestors were all Sherpas,’ I tell her.
She laughs. ‘Come on,’ she says, pointing towards the deepest part of the newly exposed canyon wall. ‘I can see three caves down there. And bring the flashlight.’
We scramble down the canyon, but there is nothing in the first cave except a cold, musty smell. The second is no better. And, at first, there appears to be nothing in the final cave. But then, just as we are turning to leave, the flashlight beam reflects off something lying amid the debris on the floor.
We brush away the soft sand to reveal a highly polished, metallic egg-shaped cylinder about 15 inches in length. As Lakshmi bends down to pick it up, I suddenly have a flashback to what had happened to my sister all those years ago. ‘Careful,’ I say, ‘it may be a bomb’.
Lakshmi gives me one of those you-old-fusspot looks and pulls a spectrometer from one of the pouches on her tool belt. As she studies the readings, her face lights up with a smile. ‘This thing is almost 100 percent pure gold. I don’t care how smart the aliens were who made it, but nobody makes bombs out of gold. It’s a far too rare and precious metal.’ She’s right; we’ve been prospecting on this planet for two years and never found a single trace of gold.
And with that she reaches down and pulls the golden egg out of the ground.
It must be the sudden movement that starts it, some kind of motion sensor perhaps, for almost immediately we hear a faint whirring sound emanating from the egg. There i
s a click as a small panel we’d not noticed before slides open on the shell.
Inside a green diode breaks into life and flashes once, twice and then three times. We hold our breath as, after a pause, the amber diode next to it starts to flash once, twice, three times. Next, after a space of what may be 30 seconds but feels a lot longer to me, a red diode begins to flash. Once, twice, three times. Then a fourth flash. And finally a fifth flash, only this time the light stays on. I look across to Lakshmi. Despite the coolness of the cave’s interior, I can see by the glow over the red light that her face is bathed in sweat.
Suddenly the red light blinks out. There is another click as the panel closes. And then nothing. Just silence.
We both give a sigh of relief. ‘I don’t know what that was all about,’ says Lakshmi, ‘but I think it was a dud.’
‘Maybe it has a flat battery?’ I reply. We both laugh, with nervous relief.
We have about six weeks if we are to get off this planet on the next freighter back to the Sol system to plan our retirement after discovering the egg. Contacts are made. Negotiations commenced and a substantial price agreed. We will never have to work again. But then the egg’s original owners come calling.
It turns out the device is not a dud after all, but part of a carefully prepared early-warning system to alert its owners of the arrival of another space-faring race—mankind—with designs on taking over the known galaxy. From the blogs posted over the Net, it emerges our egg is not the only alien artefact to have been discovered in recent times. Details are sparse, but it seems all of them act the same way: a few apparently harmless flashing lights and then nothing. And, because we are all trying to clandestinely unload them on the black market, nobody spots the similar patterns in their behaviour.
Far from being the forgotten relics of an extinct civilisation, they are marker buoys belonging to someone or something who does not want anybody trespassing on their turf.
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