I’ve been happily “indie” publishing since Independence Day of 2011, and I’m thrilled that several of my books have reached bestseller status. If you’re a WOOL fan, look for my Karma of the Silo: the Collection, set in Hugh Howey’s universe. Or dip your toe in by grabbing the first part free: The Sky Used to be Blue. Thriller readers will enjoy AIRBORNE, based on A.G. Riddle’s series The Atlantis Gene. Or pick up my first published book, RUNNING, a fast-paced drama with politics, suspense, and some slightly sexy bits.
In addition to writing, publishing other authors, and producing the Beyond the Stars space opera anthologies, I sing. My husband and I dabble in lots of different styles including jazz, standards, Broadway, and opera. Recently, we performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and traveled around the world after selling our Connecticut home. Now we’re checking out the West Coast and thinking about where to land next.
I’m gearing up to publish my own collection, Fitzgerald’s Funny Sci-Fi Shorts, as well as the next anthology in this series—Beyond the Stars: Unimagined Realms, which will be released in August. I also have not one, not two, but three trilogies in the works. Who knows what will get written first? Will it be the Space Pirate Saga about a family of traders who get sucked into a war for territory? The tale about the mind-reading counselor in Star Crimes who solves mysteries and metes out punishment in space? Or Rocks, the dystopian saga set on a post-apocalyptic island where the women are in charge and the men are auctioned off to the highest bidder?
Catch up with me on Facebook (where you’ll see me way too often) or on my website, www.PatriceFitzgerald.com. I love to hear from fans!
The Good Food
by Michael Ezell
THE DROP-SHIP’S RETROS kicked in hard, blowing away rich black soil that had crept onto the landing pad over the decades since someone had last been there.
Self-adjusting struts scraped against the ferrocrete surface as the ship’s weight settled onto the planet. The specially treated ferrocrete didn’t allow plants to grow on the half-mile square, otherwise it would have been taken over long ago. Aggressive green life rose up all around the landing pad. A jungle world, ruled by trees and vines, populated solely by insects. Until today.
Inside the drop-ship, Jensen unbuckled himself from the pilot’s couch. He giggled out loud in the empty cabin. Pilot. More like a glorified gardener sent to spread some new shit around the back forty. The computer did all the—
“Touchdown, Jensen. You may move about the cabin now.”
“Yeah, thanks, Moira,” Jensen said.
The words came out a little garbled. His throat felt like he tried to swallow a jellyfish. Hypersleep phlegm. All this tech and they still couldn’t solve that one. The eggheads who sent him assured him it would clear up within thirty-six hours of waking. Going on three days now and he still sounded like a four-pack-a-day smoker.
“What’s the distance to the anomaly line?” Jensen said.
“Three-point-seven miles from the center of the pad. It has gotten closer, Jensen.”
“Yeah, I know. I read the brief.”
“Just making conversation. You don’t have to be crabby.”
Supposedly, they modeled the ship’s AI on Moira Tiernan, the designer of these long-range ships. Jensen always envisioned her as a woman who’d insist on paying her half of the dinner tab and give you a hearty handshake at the end of the date.
“Shall I begin the wake up procedure for Roy?” Moira said.
“Sure. Bet he’s gonna pee all over every tree in sight,” Jensen said.
“Doubtful. There is no significant buildup of waste during stasis.”
“Yeah, yeah! Geez, Moira, it’s a figure of speech. Let in some light, will ya?”
Jensen stood and stretched his back as Moira opened the reentry shields over the thick windows. The odd bluish tinge to the sunlight streaming in made the bridge feel like the inside of a fish tank. He’d been told, even shown photos, but still...
Not even Moira interrupted this first silent stare at Seed World Four-Seven-Alpha. A lush primordial jungle, with small insects buzzing, flitting, jumping, carrying on a furious pace of life. Two centuries of terraforming had paid off.
But just a bit over three miles from here, the greenery ended on a neat line that ran arrow-straight for a quarter mile. A mass extinction that photos from Four-Seven-Alpha’s lone monitoring satellite couldn’t explain.
The clickety-click of toenails on the deck announced Roy’s arrival. The dog looked like Jensen felt. Groggy, a little off center, and in need of a good stretch.
“Hey, boy!” Jensen put out a hand and Roy trotted over. Big for a Belgian Malinois, Roy’s shoulders came up to Jensen’s waist. Jensen scrubbed the reddish-blond fur behind the dog’s ears and Roy responded with a deep play bow that stretched his back. Vertebrae crackled and Roy shook himself like he’d just come in from a rainstorm.
He nuzzled Jensen’s hand, flipped it up with his nose. Jensen laughed and scrubbed between Roy’s ears again. “You’re gettin’ soft, trooper.”
Roy trotted over and put his front paws on the window ledge to look out into the jungle. A flexible speaker implanted in the dog’s neck turned throaty growls into an approximation of human speech using a few basic words and phrases.
“Go pee.”
Jensen cocked an eyebrow at the camera in the cabin ceiling. “Moira? Anything to say about that?”
“The lower hatch is open. Tell that mutt not to urinate on my flanks.”
* * *
Cold, crisp, the air tasted oddly like a fruit flavored gum from back home. He’d been more than a little leery of stepping outside without a helmet, but Moira called him a pussy. A pussy! A damn computer shouldn’t be able to talk to a decorated veteran like that. Sure, there was enough oxygen to keep him alive here, but what if the plant extinction had something to do with an airborne pathogen?
Moira reminded him that whatever killed off the plants hadn’t harmed anything else. The insects were still alive.
So off he went with Roy, but he still wore his combat suit and carried a maglev rifle. Damned if he would let a smartass computer shame him into getting killed. He tried to keep his combat edge, but the three-mile walk through gorgeous flora eventually had him admiring his surroundings. Sweet smelling tube flowers at least two feet across, their petals every color combination Jensen’s brain could process, and some it couldn’t, with yellow stamen thicker than his arm. More plants no higher than his ankle with flowers the size of his pinkie nail. He let Roy range ahead and mark his new territory. And the dog had a lot to mark. Trees and vines arched up into a canopy that displayed its own rainbow of fruits above Jensen’s head. Which the millions of bugs here put to good use. Making more bugs.
The combat suit generated a mild electromagnetic field that kept the bugs away, but pretty soon Jensen didn’t have to worry about it. When he reached the edge of the jungle, he noticed the insects seemed to stay behind an invisible line about three feet back from the last plants.
As seed planet catastrophes go, this one didn’t seem too bad. Looked like they just got the mixture of early insects wrong. Sometimes the smart boys back home guessed wrong. The genetic alterations made to plants that grew under this bluish light could very well have made them tasty to an insect that would otherwise ignore them. But what the hell did a grunt know about those things? He was just here to take samples and report back. The clean, straight line of demarcation had Jensen feeling antsy, though. What insect ate everything in a perfect line like that? Space locusts?
The rich soil where the jungle stopped appeared churned up, as if a well-disciplined platoon of wild hogs had come through here. But Seed World Four-Seven-Alpha had no life bigger than a dragonfly before Jensen and Roy arrived. The introduction of larger species had to be carefully controlled over decades to ensure a stable food chain.
Jensen selected a silver tube off his belt and knelt to scoop up a soil sample. He’d let Moira do all the brainwork.
/>
Ping-ping!
The motion alert on his suit made Jensen snap to his feet. A vibration on his upper left chest pointed him toward whatever set off the sensor. Not Roy. Judging from the sound of crashing underbrush and snapping branches, the dog was exploring the jungle about fifty feet to his right.
Gun up, moving heel-to-toe, stable shooting platform.
He scanned for movement over the sights. Insects flitted behind him, but his motion alert was set to Combat Spec. It would only register something larger than two feet in length.
And as far as Jensen knew, the only two things in this star system that met that criterion were Roy and him.
He whispered into his throat mic. “Roy, here.”
Within moments, Roy stood at his side, ears up and forward, eyes locked ahead.
“Attack us?” Roy’s neck speaker said.
“No,” Jensen said.
“Attack them?”
That had actually been Jensen’s first instinct. In his world, when you knew where all the good guys were, you shot at anything else that moved. Especially when you’re light years from home and backup.
However, he worked for the Science Wing right now—Better than being mothballed after the war—and none of those pinheads had ever seen combat. They just wouldn’t understand if he killed some life form out here. Ours or otherwise.
“No. Only look. Go now,” Jensen said.
Roy obeyed without hesitation. He slunk off into the brush to the left. Jensen stayed in the green, away from the line of dark soil and rocks three feet to his right. Unsure of exactly which side he should watch, he just stayed put and waited—
Roy’s frantic barks set Jensen in motion like a starter’s pistol. He hustled through the brush, snapping twigs and crushing plants and flowers. He skidded to a stop next to his dog, finger a millimeter from the trigger.
The hollow boom of Roy’s barking had brought all the flitting insects to a halt. The dog stood in the green, but had his eyes locked on the dark soil. Out there. In the dead zone.
“Off!” Jensen yelled.
Roy stopped barking. He circled Jensen, excited and whining. “Move. Something move,” Roy said. “Out there.”
Ping-ping!
The suit alarm and Roy’s renewed barking made Jensen flinch so hard he almost shot off his own foot. Did he really see that? A mound of dirt out there. Had it been there before? He hadn’t really paid attention. It looked freshly churned up, but so did all the soil close to the line.
“Off!”
Roy stopped barking again. He came to the heel position without being told.
“Something move. Talk.”
“Talk? Talk to you?” Jensen said. That gave him the creepies.
“Yes. Bad feel,” Roy rumbled.
The dog trembled against Jensen’s leg. Whatever pinged his motion sensor and churned up that dirt had Roy worried. Jensen had seen the dog leap into a gun pit full of Rhotellian Marines with heavy weapons and kill three men with his teeth. Nothing scared that dog.
Except whatever the fuck this was.
“Okay, we’re heading back. We have samples for Moira to analyze, anyway,” Jensen said.
The two soldiers backed away together.
* * *
“This soil contains an abundance of a substance very much like mica, with atoms arranged in hexagonal sheets. But... it is not mica.”
Moira’s clipped voice rang off the stainless walls of the ship’s tiny galley.
“Well, what is it, then?” Jensen said.
“I don’t know,” Moira said.
Blowing on the cup of rancid black coffee did nothing to make it anything less than molten. Jensen dumped reconstituted cream into the tarry black liquid and took a sip.
“Blech. Whaddya mean? You know everything.”
“Hardly. I know only what my human programmers have told me,” Moira said. For a computer, she put on the human style snark pretty well.
“Yeah? That makes two of us. So what’s the big deal? An alien rock is bound to have alien minerals, right?” Jensen said.
He tossed Roy a piece of soy jerky. The dog gave it a half-hearted sniff, but didn’t eat it. Since they got back, he’d done nothing but lay there with his head on Jensen’s foot.
For a computer, Moira had a wide range of ways to express her exasperation with Jensen. She actually sighed.
“Early samples of soil from Seed Planet Four-Seven-Alpha indicate only trace amounts of this unknown substance, along with low readings of fossilized plant material. That’s the main reason we chose Four-Seven-Alpha. If plants grew here before, it stands to reason—”
“Which is all very fascinating. I just want to know what gave me and my dog the creeps out there,” Jensen said.
“I have no way of knowing what would cause an irrational psychological response in a human, much less a dog. What I do know for sure is that the soil is now riddled with this material that was once scarce. That, Jensen, would be called an anomaly in any basic high school science course.”
The food printer beeped and Jensen eased Roy’s head off his foot. He stroked the dog’s neck. “Shake it off, big boy. We got za on the way!”
He went to the printer and retrieved a pepperoni pizza. A disk of repurposed proteins dripping with orange oil. The first old Italian chef who came up with pizza would have killed himself if he saw this in the future. When Jensen sat down again, Roy put his head right back on his foot.
“Jensen?” Moira sounded a little put out.
Even Roy looked up when Jensen just kept eating.
“Good food?” Roy growled/said.
Jensen tossed a piece on the floor and Roy snapped it up.
“Are you going to act like a juvenile, or are you going to discuss this with me?” Moira said.
Fake pepperoni grease ran down Jensen’s chin. No expense spared for the troops. “Were we discussing? I thought you were just insulting me.”
“This is why the real Moira argues against manned missions. You need to keep emotion out of the equation.”
“Blah, blah, blah. Lots of mica. What’s the deal?” Jensen said.
“As I said, it is not mica. Although it appears crystalline, it has a component I cannot identify. But I am unable to rule out the possibility that it is some type of unknown biological material.”
“Like... it’s alive?” Jensen stopped eating.
“No. I believe it may be waste, of a sort.”
“Waste? As in The Stinky Torpedo? Do I even wanna know what kind of thing would shit mica?”
“Of course you do. And we’re going to find out.”
* * *
Jensen had tried the old military joke. “Who is ‘we’? You got a mouse in your pocket?”
For all her sighs and tsks, Moira apparently hadn’t been programmed with a human sense of humor.
The giant ferns and squatty fruit trees made him feel like the star of some old holo serial where the heroes traveled back in time. But the wet jungle smell and the trickle of sweat down the middle of his back reminded him of shipping to an uprising back home. Colombia. Nasty, nasty fighting.
Twitchy now. Rifle already up, though he didn’t know what he was looking for. The fact that Roy stayed glued to his hip didn’t help matters. He didn’t have the heart to order the dog out front. The canine’s normally perky ears had been laid back against his sleek skull since they left the ship.
“Okay, Roy?”
The speaker vibrated so quietly. “No.”
A dragonfly the size of a sparrow swooped across Jensen’s vision and one wing struck the bridge of his nose—
The high-pitched whine and sonic cracks from his maglev rifle filled the air. Plant life around them exploded in green gobs of juice and fiber. Only a split second, but thirty high explosive rounds had sprayed across the landscape.
“Damn it. Teach me to keep my finger away from—”
“Jensen, report.” Moira’s insistent voice in his ea
rpiece.
“Just trimming the bushes a little. Relax, Moira,” Jensen said. Last thing he needed right now was some damn computer—
Roy suddenly began to whine and pace about. He eyed the jungle ahead, near the line of demarcation.
“What?” Jensen said. “Roy, what is it?”
“Bad.”
And then the dog was gone, running toward the dead zone.
“No, here! Roy, damn it, heel!”
Jensen ran blindly, following his dog’s crushed path through the virgin undergrowth. When he ran out of the jungle and spotted Roy, Jensen almost wished he hadn’t found him. Standing with hind feet on the green vegetation, and front feet on the black soil, Roy quivered in place. He stared at the horizon, at nothing at all.
At first, Jensen didn’t notice the little brown lump against Roy’s foot. Then it grew out of the churned soil and leaned against the dog’s foreleg. It looked like an overgrown hedgehog, with sleek brown hair. No, not hair. Shiny stuff, looked hard on the surface.
“Roy, here,” Jensen whispered.
Nothing happened.
One foot at a time, Jensen shuffled toward Roy and the little creature. His rifle stayed up, but he didn’t really know what he would shoot. If he fired now, he’d take Roy’s leg off at the shoulder.
“Roy.”
Nothing. The dog just shivered in place and stared at the horizon while that freaky little thing rubbed on his leg.
Jensen reached out to grab Roy’s collar. The thing against Roy’s leg looked up, revealing a tiny little face amid all the crystalline “hair.” Big brown watery eyes, in what looked like a leathery gray face. It didn’t seem aggressive at all. In fact, it looked cuter than any kitten Jensen had ever seen.
Best of Beyond the Stars Page 5
