Beyond the Stars: At Galaxy's Edge: a space opera anthology

by Nick Webb

  He took a deep breath to try and clear his head. He drew himself up as tall as possible. The Alpha Dog.

  “Roy!” Jensen screamed as loud as he could. “Sit! Now!”

  Roy just stared at him, but the growling slowly stopped. He didn’t budge, much less sit.

  “Sit, Roy. Now.”

  Something seemed to penetrate the brain behind those wild eyes. Roy’s flanks crept toward the deck, millimeters at a time. Finally, he sat.

  When Jensen made for the hatch, Roy started to get up.

  “No.” Jensen said. “You stay. Me go.”

  Finally, Jensen lurched out the door and slapped the control panel. The hatch slid shut, hiding Roy’s baleful stare. Jensen thought his balance would get better on his way to the bridge, but it just got worse. He felt feverish and all the bite wounds on his body started to throb.

  Once he got to the main controls, he keyed open the manual operation panel and set the launch order. The drop ship had a built in timer that tracked the best launch window to rendezvous with the Skip-Ship in orbit out there. The screen read 7:48:32 and counting. A little less than eight hours and they’d be home free.

  Once they launched, everything was automatic. Back up into the belly of the Skip-Ship and into stasis. A few months of sleep until they hit the Skip Gate in this corner of the Universe. Then they’d blip into existence just on the far side of Saturn for the final glide home.

  His stomach suddenly hitched and he threw up all over his boots.

  “Jensen? Are you feeling ill?” Moira said. Her voice sounded tinny and faraway.

  “No shit, Moir‌—‌”

  The deck swam up to meet him and he fell into the blackest sleep he’d ever known. He dreamt of whispering voices speaking a language he could never hope to understand.

  * * *

  Seemed hot in his sleeping quarters. And his bed felt rock hard.

  With a start, Jensen awoke on the steel deck of the bridge. Sweat soaked the fabric of his jumpsuit and his mouth felt like a dry riverbed.

  “Moira, what happened?” He could hardly force the words out. He stood, keeping one hand on the wall.

  “Moira?”

  The eerie silence threatened to release a wild panic he could feel building in his belly. Jensen reached for his rifle... Not there. Now how in the hell did that happen?

  The emergency weapons locker stood open. Everything gone. That made his heart start to hammer. Black dots swam in his vision and Jensen couldn’t tell if it was adrenaline or the poison from the creatures.

  Well, maybe not poison. He did wake up. Moira would be proud of him for figuring that out. Whatever it was had kept him down long enough to make him mica-hedgehog food if he’d been in the open. Their little bites weren’t intended to kill, apparently. They just put you to sleep so you could be eaten alive.

  When he gathered his wits enough to check the control screens, he saw why Moira hadn’t answered him. Coolant alarms were blaring red bands across all the screens, but the sound had been muted. Someone‌—‌something had screwed with the cooling system that kept Moira’s giant computer brain alive.

  The ‘dumb’ backup systems that ran the ship’s operations had survived. That was a relief. The countdown to launch read 15:42 and counting.

  He’d been out for over seven hours.

  Jensen checked all systems and saw that the lower hatch was stuck open. Security cameras showed a rock jammed in the track.

  Unarmed, Jensen felt exposed when he got to the hatch. He grabbed a fire extinguisher, a poor weapon really, but the weight of it made him feel better. He was relieved to discover an actual rock jamming the door, not one of the creatures curled up in the track. He didn’t need his extinguisher/club.

  A quick peek outside‌—‌Roy lay there on his side, unconscious. His legs and body twitched like he was having a nightmare.

  Figure about fourteen minutes to launch. Enough time to go out there and get Roy. If he wanted to. Jensen wasn’t too sure. The creatures had obviously affected Roy. He said they talked to him, which meant they might have found a way to connect with the dog’s mind.

  In the end, though, Jensen looked out there and saw his partner. The partner who had kept him out of ambushes, saved his life by putting his own body in harm’s way, shared body heat with him in that frozen fighting hole during his first combat assignment. Keeping sharp eyes on the jungle, Jensen sprinted out to where Roy lay. When he reached the dog, Roy immediately opened his eyes.

  He’d been had.

  The rustle from the jungle made Jensen’s body break out in gooseflesh. Hundreds. No, thousands. They lined the launch pad. Most were the size of the ones that attacked him and Roy. Some were bigger, maybe half the size of Roy.

  Jensen looked down at his dog. At least his teeth weren’t bared. The look in Roy’s eyes was unlike anything Jensen had ever seen before. A certain... intelligence.

  “Roy. We need to go back to the ship.”

  “No,” Roy growled/said.

  “Why not?”

  The creatures advanced across the pad and Jensen tried to figure his odds of beating them in a race back to the door. He wouldn’t have bet half a credit on himself to win.

  “They not hurt you. I say,” Roy said.

  The creatures parted like a living wave as they reached Roy and Jensen. They went around them and started scampering up the ramp. They were entering the ship.

  Jensen stared at Roy.

  “Roy. What is this?”

  “They say ‘Green is food.’”

  Roy nodded his head toward the jungle, an almost human gesture.

  “Yeah. I see that. They’re eating it. So?” Jensen said.

  Roy stood and walked toward the ship. He stopped and looked back over his shoulder. “But you. Good food.”

  Jensen watched in horror as the little creatures climbed into the ship. They poured over each other like water, cramming through the hatch at a terrifying speed.

  “No.” Jensen moved toward the ship.

  One of the creatures wheeled and let out those little shrieks that reverberated inside Jensen’s skull. They advanced on him, their sharp beaks snapping.

  Rapid-fire barking brought it all to a stop. Roy stood between Jensen and the creatures. Those closest to him actually balled up into little rocks again.

  These creatures still went by the law of the jungle. The animal with the biggest teeth is king. They went back to boarding the drop ship. Roy stood on the ramp and wagged his tail at Jensen.

  “Me go. You stay.”

  Roy turned and went inside. The door slid shut and the ramp retracted. The rumble of prelaunch warm-up snapped Jensen out of his stupor and he ran for the jungle. He dove into the heavy brush just before the bellowing rockets shook this world for the second time.

  The entire jungle trembled at the drop-ship’s furious power.

  A million insects and one lonely primate watched that ship scream into the sky, headed back to Earth.

  Where the good food lived.

  Q&A with Michael Ezell

  Why a K9 team in space?

  I was a K9 handler in the United States Marine Corps, and I’d always wanted to write a story about a dog handler. I figured bureaucrats of the future would love the cost-effectiveness of a single Marine with a dog sent to tackle a problem an entire team of scientists should be handling.

  Where else can we find your work?

  “The Sharks of Market Street” - Appeared in Girl at the End of the World, Vol. 2 - Fox Spirit UK

  (I love the girl in this story with all my heart. She’s a badass.)

  “Bones of a Righteous Man” - Fantasy for Good - Nightscape Press

  (I was honored to be in the same book as Piers Anthony, a guy I started reading in Junior High! I’m listed in the “Weird Fantasy” section. Don’t hold that against me.)

  “The Clockwork Hooker and the Mysterious Bearded Girl” - On Spec Magazine Summer 2015 Issue.

  (No... Not that kind of hooker. I ough
ta wash your mind out with soap.)

  Please support these and other hardworking publishers who keep short form Sci-Fi and Fantasy alive!

  Do you do any other forms of writing?

  I’ve optioned a Sci-Fi screenplay, and won a couple of screenwriting contests. Alas, I still haven’t cracked the screenplay market with a sale... yet.

  Who are some of your favorite writers?

  I love reading stuff that makes me incredibly angry that I didn’t write it. Know what I mean?

  So in that regard, Stephen King’s “The Stand” and William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” piss me off quite a bit. Every time I read them. Again.

  Do humans write like that? I’m not entirely certain Gibson isn’t a Replicant. And King survived being run over by a van, so he’s for sure a Terminator.

  What’s the hardest part of writing for you?

  Really, it’s not the actual writing. It’s the marketing. I suck at it. Big time. My wife says I should have a bigger web presence. I told her that didn’t help the spider in the bathroom she made me squash. She was not amused.

  I reluctantly started a blog:

  www.sinisterwriter.com

  The Epsilon Directive

  by David Bruns

  THE PROTESTERS CALLED us ‘genocide squads.’ The military designated us as Epsilon Units. But inside the Corps we called ourselves ‘Erasers.’

  Names aside, everyone agreed that we existed for only one purpose: to kill Scythians. Every last one of them.

  And we were good at our job.

  By the time I was drafted, the war was in the mop-up stages. I’d grown up hearing about the great fleet battles and how my siblings fought with honor. I’ll never really know since none of them came back. Still, war was the family business, a proud tradition of military service that went back generations. The day I turned eighteen, the admiral‌—‌my father‌—‌made me pancakes for breakfast then took me to the local armory to enlist.

  The proudest day of my life‌—‌his words, not mine.

  I can still recall my feelings as I filled out the draft form. Dread, fear... and ultimately, shame. My finger hovered over the check box labeled CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR, while my father joked with the Marine recruiter about the new uniform regs. I tried to force my finger to touch the screen, but I couldn’t make myself do it. I signed the dotted line and shoved my fists into my pockets instead.

  My father wore his uniform that day so he could administer the oath. He shook my hand afterward. “Your brothers would be so proud of what you’re about to do.”

  I put my fists back in my pockets and made a noise that I suppose he took as agreement.

  That’s the short version of how I came to be riding in the back of Fury, a Revenge-class assault craft, as a member of Eraser Seven. Normally, a ship of this size would carry six armored and battle-loaded Marines, but it’d been modified for Epsilon sweep missions. We carried three Marines plus a pilot and provisions for two weeks in space.

  Our mission was pretty simple‌—‌just the way Marines like it. After the fleet battles broke the back of the Scythian forces, the enemy scattered like rats all over the known galaxy. We were there to find the survivors and kill them. Simple.

  Our job was made so much easier when the United Earth Federation, following the massacre at Delphi, voted to suspend the Geneva Convention for the balance of the Scythian War.

  “Entering orbit around Talos 5,” Mambo called back to me from the cockpit, not bothering to use the intercom. The pilot’s real name was Gwyneth, but she insisted we call her Mambo, even off duty. “Light ‘em up, Noogie.” It says something about Marines that I’d been a part of this Eraser Squad for a year and they still called me ‘noogie,’ short for “new guy.”

  I grumbled to myself as I booted up the Zeron unit. Specially modified to search for Scythian life signs, the Zeron allowed us to scan planets for the enemy from high orbit, giving one Eraser Squad the capability to search an entire solar system in only a few weeks.

  The Talos system was well outside settled space, and so far, devoid of any humanoid life forms, including Scythians. Talos 5‌—‌this system was so far off the beaten path that no one had even bothered to name the planets‌—‌was our last stop before we headed back to the rendezvous point. We’d eaten all the decent freeze-dried meals, and the air had taken on a taint of recycled ozone that clung to the back of my throat.

  I connected my sensor package with the ship’s nav system. “Commencing scan, Mambo.”

  She raised her hands from the controls. “She’s all yours, Noog.” The ship banked gently as it entered a preset search pattern. I settled back in my seat and crossed my arms. For a planet this size, a full scan took about eighteen hours.

  On the other side of the Zeron, Hercules stirred in his bunk. Standing close to two meters tall in his socks, Hercules was easily the most deadly human I’d ever met. During my first week on the job, when enemy contact was still pretty common, I’d seen him rip the armored carapace right off a Scythian soldier’s face and kill the alien with his bare hands. Hercules had one mission in life: to kill Scythians. Not for the first time, I wondered what all these Marines were going to do when they disbanded the Erasers. The rumors were rampant that this was our last run. I hoped so‌—‌although I’d never say it out loud to this crew.

  Hercules flexed his massive biceps and ripped out a long, vibrating fart that would take the atmospheric scrubbers at least thirty minutes to dispel.

  “For love of Mike, Hercules. Go in the can if you’re gonna do that!” Gunnery Sergeant Madeline Jolly threw a shoe across the cabin that bounced off Hercules’ quivering pecs.

  “Sorry, Gunny.” Hercules hung his head. “It just slipped out.” Mambo feigned choking in the front of the ship.

  Gunny peered over the Zeron, fixing her flat, gray stare on me. “How’s it going, Noog?”

  I pretended to make an adjustment to the system, uncomfortable as always in her gaze. “Nothing yet, Gunny. It looks like this run might be a goose egg.” I attempted a smile.

  She slitted her eyes. “They’re out there. I can smell them.”

  The only thing I smelled was the inside of Hercules’ colon, but I just nodded, glad to have her turn her attention away from me. If you met Gunnery Sergeant Jolly as a civilian, you might think she was someone’s middle-aged mother. Looks are deceiving. Despite the unfortunate surname of Jolly, the woman had all the emotional warmth of an arctic sunrise. Gunny was the heart of Eraser Seven, a legend in the Corps. In three years on the job, she’d lost only one team member‌—‌the sensors guy that I replaced. I guess the fact that they still called me New Guy after a year meant I was never going to measure up to my predecessor.

  I went into sensors thinking that I’d serve out my enlistment far from the killing. A nameless drone on a fleet battleship somewhere, patrolling empty space. In training, I studied hard, finishing at the top of the class. They neglected to tell us that the top three students in each class were assigned to Epsilon Units.

  That was my life: closet conscientious objector turned draftee with a front row seat to some the most brutal slaughter of aliens you could ever imagine.

  Nearly two hours later, the Zeron chirped. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gunny’s gray bob snap up like a bird dog on point. We were passing over the mid-latitudes, and the signal showed up next to a large body of water. “Gunny, I got a hit!”

  I took manual control and refined the scan. Six humanoids, with one bright trace that indicated a Scythian presence. A second, fainter Scythian trace popped up, then disappeared.

  “Looks like five humans and one Scythian,” I said.

  “What the hell are they doing all the way out here?” Hercules asked. “Hostage situation?”

  Gunny stood behind me, close enough that I could smell the stale sweat on her uniform. When I looked up, she was pinching her lips between her fingers. “Let’s go check it out.” She patted me on the shoulder. “Good work, Noogie. Feed the coordi
nates to Mambo and let’s go hunting.”

  * * *

  Sometime in the second decade of war, an organized movement of conscientious objectors called The Society emerged across the United Earth Federation. By that point, it was pretty clear we were going to win the war and The Society advocated for an end to the draft and peace negotiations with the Scythians. I knew about The Society because I’d done a ton of research on them‌—‌secretly, of course‌—‌and even attended a few meetings. I’d even made a pledge to become a member when I turned eighteen. We know how that ended.

  So when we approached the walled compound on Talos 5, I knew exactly what the five-sided bronze bell hanging from a post meant. This was a Society outpost.

  “What’s that?” Hercules raised the eyescan on his helmet and tapped the muzzle of his rifle against the bell. “Dinner bell?”

  “That’s a symbol that represents the fusion of Earth’s five major religions,” said a voice from behind the wooden door. “I would appreciate it if you would not touch it with a weapon of war.”

  “Gunnery Sergeant Madeline Jolly, ma’am. UEF Marines. We’re here to take the alien you’re harboring into custody.”

  A small window in the door opened up and a pair of blue eyes peered out. “You mean you’re here to kill him.”

  “We’re carrying out the lawful orders of the UEF, ma’am.” I knew the kind of glacial stare Gunny was laying on the person behind the door, but the blue eyes never flinched. “You’re aware of the Epsilon Directive?”

  “I am,” the voice shot back. “And your directive also forbids you from harming any humans in the execution of your duties. I believe you call it ‘collateral damage.’”