Category Archives: Stories

The Last Colonial Ship

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In thirty minutes the sun’s last photons would arrive at the planet. After that perpetual twilight would overtake the world. The lingering heat would dissipate over the next few days and after that The End. Taro stopped long enough to catch the streaks of fire rising into the last clear blue sky this planet would ever have. He raced against the colonial ships rocketing away. He raced against the photons charging to the planet. Down one street, through a back alley, hopping over a stray cat, he came to Ami’s door and banged away “Ami! Ami!” From the balcony she peered down. “I got a pass on the last ship!” He waved the slip of paper.

Ami disappeared from the balcony without a word. For a moment, Taro felt that she might not come. The front door’s metal hinge whined and scraped against the pebbled pathway. She stood before him like a water reed quivering in the wind and he embraced her half-afraid that a strong gust might snap her in half.

“I can’t run,” she said.

“Climb on my back!” He helped her up. He held onto the ticket – he wouldn’t trust it to his pockets and he charged through the alley kicking up puddles. The streets in front of him contained more trash than people. Empty buildings cast long shadows cutting the light into tiny slivers.

“How did you get the pass?” Ami asked.

“Lucky.”

They arrived on Fourth and Harvard. The line went around the block, across the street, and into the park. A giant colonial cruiser waited there. The military checked everyone’s papers. “They’re going to catch us,” Taro thought. “But, I’ve got to try.”

“Papers,” the officer said. Taro handed them to him. Every bead of sweat running down his face grew heavier and new droplets oozed from his neck, but he kept his equanimity. “This is your wife, Mr. Weston?” The officer turned to Ami.

Her eyes widened. Her lips opened and she seem to say, “What?”

“Yes,” Taro said. He drew her close. “Elle’s my wife.”

The officer raised a small scanner from the paper to the happy couple. “There’s missing information on this document. Can you provide proof of marriage?” They had to be strict. It was just his job. “Rings?” He glanced at their hands.

“I’m sorry,” Ami said. “We were married just recently but with the jeweler gone, we couldn’t get rings.”

“I understand, no marriage license though?” The officer asked.

“We were in a rush,” Taro said. He brushed his brow again. “We had to run all the way here.”

“Your wife’s not sweating.”

“I’m not very strong, but Taro, I mean Johann, my strong Taro, carried me here.” Ami tugged his arm. “Honey, I can get the papers.”

The sweat on Taro’s face turned cold at the notion of her leaving. After everything he had done just so they could get on the last cruiser. The sky moved from daylight to night without the sunset to mark the change.

“No, it’s perfectly fine,” the officer said. He tipped his hat and left. The line marched forward. The pitch black night became a canvas for twinkling stars and a giant nebula smeared across the horizon. The moon appeared as a hole in the sky.

“Taro.” Ami tugged on his sleeve. “Why did you do it?”

“Why did you do it?”

Behind them a fight broke. It looked like David and Goliath and David was the officer checking tickets. The irate Goliath threw the officer into the street. “We had our papers stolen by some punk! How much? For me and my wife!”

“Don’t listen,” Taro said as he put his arm around Ami. She sipped from his embrace like a flower carried away by the wind. “Ami!” She ran to the officer. Taro dashed out of line rueful of losing their place.

“Wait!” She stopped, panting.

“Mrs. Weston?” the officer said getting up.

“My name’s not Weston.” Ami held the ticket out.

“Honey!” Taro snatched the ticket and held her. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t lie, Taro! I can’t!”

“She’s a bit delirious with everything happening,” Taro told the officer.

“You’re that punk! He stole my ticket!”

“Sir, I don’t know what your talking about!”

Johann raised his fist; they were twice the size of Taro’s. “Stop it!” Ami stepped between Taro and Johann. Johann threw a punch striking Ami across her cheek. The papers where her body collapsed fluttered around her like petals off a dead stem. Taro crumpled to his knees. He touched her face but the life left her eyes and she too had joined the darkness of the world.

“My name is Johann Weston. This is the real Elle, not that little twig. I want on that goddamn ship…what the hell are you doing?”

“Sir,” the officer said. “We still have laws. You’re under arrest for murder.” The officer read him his rights. He fought until tased into silence and then hauled away into the night. “Mr. Weston,” the officer said holding the paper out for Taro. “I’m sorry for your loss.” He walked back to the throng gawking at their little melodrama and continued checking papers.

THE END

Notes: I’ve always been curious about what the end of our planet would look like to the people on the surface of the planet. What would it be like if our sun died out? What would we see? What would we try to do? This is a much simplier take on what we would do. I’m sure there would be a lot of looting and rioting in the streets. There’ll always be those people who can get out and those who can’t.

After I wrote this, I saw an episode of Galaxy Express 999 that had a very similar story about a man and woman who refused to leave the planet until he finished writing the history of their world before it was destroyed. He gave Tetsuro that last book and asked him to carry it out into the stars, so that others may remember that they lived on that dead planet. Tetsuro and Maetel escaped, of course, but the man and his woman didn’t. The colonial ship they were to take didn’t make it either. I think a volcano firing out debris blew it up. Sucks to be them.

Generation Z

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I remember being eight years old and rummaging through the steering room of our yacht. I came across some old registration papers for a man named Benjamin Ohne. I know for a fact that we have no relation to him, and when I showed my mom, she took the papers out of my hands, and I never saw them again. There’s a conspiracy between parents and grandparents to hide this truth from us, not just me, but all of us younger than twenty. I keep asking the same question though: Why did we give up the land for the ocean? I used the Fleet’s network and did a search but all I could find was current news and old historical documents. Nothing about the last 20-30 years. There’s a gap no one wants to fill, and it’s time I took matters into my own hands.

We live on a yacht and water wraps the entire horizon of our world. Our ship is one of many in a rag-tag fleet of boats made of other yachts, skiffs, whalers, a Mississippi steamer, several dozen Chinese junks, an icebreaker, a super tanker, and a few old U.S. destroyers. An aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Enterprise, is the center of our fleet. I had heard that she used to launch F-15s and other cool looking jets, but nowadays I see the deck used more as a vast clothes line for laundry than for landing jet planes. We live in the Atlantic; we’re not going anywhere. Sails replaced engines. The wind steers us. Ropes tether us together just in case we stray too far, and you don’t want to stray too far.

Every night, while everyone’s asleep, I go topside and sit on the deck. I listen to the water lapping against our yacht’s hull and let the warm night breeze brush against my skin. I feel like I should be able to hear birds, but for some reason, I haven’t heard one or seen one since I was six.

On the horizon I see the lights of the Enterprise flicker on. She is a bright beacon in an otherwise dark world. I hear the motor of an old biplane whirling to life and see it run along the deck of the Enterprise and shoot into the sky. It flies into the darkness and vanishes into a large silhouette. It can’t be, I think. But it is. Land ho.

I head below deck quietly and shake Aaron awake. “Dude, we’re near land.”

“I’ll make breakfast,” Aaron says.

“Don’t wake mom and dad.” I slip back into my room and change. There’s a satchel of stuff I lug back to the dingy attached to the end of our yacht house. There’s enough supplies for a day or two, but we won’t stay out long. My brother comes out with some algae and fish. We eat while we work ensuring everything is ready. I untie the boat and we shove off.

The sky changes gradients of blue. The fleet is a spec where the sun rises. My arms burn, but the sight of buildings illuminated by dawn pushes me on. The answers are coming.

We paddle by the Statue of Liberty. The ocean narrows into a river. Buildings line either side of us and bridges span across the water. On the bridge, cars wait with open doors for their owners to return. It looks like their drivers left them in haste. Aaron pulls out my dad’s binoculars and scopes out the land.

“There’s nobody here,” he says.

“Take over for a sec, I want to see.” I gaze into the abandoned city. Trash tumbles through where people used to walk. In some places new life buds through the asphalt. Along the water, we spy a harbor with tall fences. Barbed wire lines the top of them making it impossible to climb over. What happened here? Why did our grandparents leave this all behind?

Aaron and I beach our boat on the sands and set foot on dry land. There’s no rocking or swaying. Solid. Dry. Ground. I had only been on dry land once before, when we were on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific a couple of years back, but this is Aaron’s first time. How strange, no birds still. Just the wind howling and water sloshing against our dingy.

We wander around the beach. Trash lies around us — old cups of Starbucks coffee, crumpled sheets of the New Yorker, cups, bottles, cans, and shopping bags from Macy’s, Neimann Marcus, and FAO Schwartz. Someone’s cellphone is buried in the sand; the battery’s dead. There’s blood on the back of it; I drop it and wipe my hands against my shirt. I know its been dried for years, but still. There’s danger here in the silence.

“Mikey!” All my senses tingle. I take off in the direction of his voice and grab a plank of wood stuck in the gravel as I run by. A wall of rock obscures my brother. “Mike!” I run faster around the rock wall; Aaron stands alone holding something metal and rectangular in his hands. My heart slows; I lower the stick, but I am conscious that the city scrutinizes our every move.

“What is it?”

“It’s a broken camera.”

He hands me the machine. I open the side flap and pop out an SD card. “Nice. Come on!” We head back to the boat. I take out my backpack and pull out a netbook. The kinetic charger’s plugged into the back so I know there’s juice. The SD goes into the side slot and to my surprise the machine detects it. Double-click. I get a file directory. DSC3843.jpg. Open file.

A man and woman pose together with the city skyline behind them.

“Hey Mike,” Aaron says.

“Hold on.” DSC3844.jpg. The photo is an image of a dark and blurry man. DSC3845.jpg. More blurry figures but the cameraman’s made progress down the street. Whoever he is, he’s in a hurry or being chased. The woman from before is running and mostly off-frame. DSC3846.jpg. Is this a joke? The picture is of a boy. His mouth bloody. He snarls at the camera. His tiny hands curled and ready to kill. DSC3847.jpg. The woman lying on the floor. A group of people are helping to calm her. No, wait…

DSC3848.jpg. “Holy shit.”

“Mike! Let’s get out of here.”

I face the city. Aaron stands on the boat gripping an oar. They’re everywhere. Decomposed human bodies amble to us. A woman’s ribs show through her tattered peace-symbol T-shirt. A man’s skin flakes off and his jaw is missing. They’re falling over the edge of the sidewalk, crashing into the sand dunes. They crawl towards us. I jump out of the boat and push it back into the river. I’m stepping on something hairy. My toes touch what feels like a muddy nose. Tree branches wrap around my legs.

No, a hand grips my leg. I’m pulled under. I see below the water for an instant. Skeletal faces snap their jaws at me.

My brother grabs me by the scruff of my neck. A ghoul bites into my leg. I scream. Aaron pulls me into the boat and behind me, a ghoul rises from the river. Its skin blue and gray. The eyes missing. Jaw agape wailing silently. He stumbles to us. Aaron clobbers his head with the oar. The waterlogged gray-matter squishes and flies apart. Hands grip the side of our dingy pulling at it.

I grab an oar and jab the water. Aaron does the same. We paddle back to the middle of the river. The ghouls swarm the river bank and collapse into the water.

We row hard and fast.

The city is alive. Ghouls roam the streets. Some run. Most linger or limp. Where did they all come from? They all seem to be attracted to us. We pass under a bridge. Corpses rain over the edge of it. The ghouls explode into parts as they hit the water. “Don’t look! Keep rowing!” My arms are on fire, but I can’t quit now, not with Aaron onboard.

Open water at last. I lie back. My leg throbs. Pain shoots through my body. Aaron takes over the rowing. I tend to my wound. The blood oozes out black; the bite mark looks gangrene. Without the adrenaline I can really feel the pain now. “I’m not feeling so hot,” I say.

Off in the distance, the whine of a motor draws closer to us. Aaron shouts and waves his hands. I see blurry figures alongside our boat, but I know they’re not ghouls. They move with intelligence.

“Aaron! Thank God!” That’s my mom.

“Michael! Keep it together, son!” That’s dad.

“We’re going to have to take his leg off. Now.” That’s Doctor Winters. “Get him to bite on this.” Dad sticks a metal handle in my mouth. Hot pricking sensations bite at my leg. Deeper and deeper. I howl and gnaw at the metal stick in my mouth. A saw buzzes. Blood splatters. Then a splash. “Let’s get him to the Enterprise.”

I open my eyes. How much time passed? My leg itches but when I go to scratch there’s just the bed linen and the mattress underneath. Doctor Winters and my dad come to my bedside. “Good to see you awake son,” Winters says.

My dad hugs me. “Thank God.”

“What were those things?” My dad won’t answer.

Doctor Winters obliged my curiosity: “Some people call it Judgement Day, everyone else has no idea how it happened or why it happened, but fifty years ago the entire world changed when the dead woke up and claimed the land. Some of us were there, some of us were children.” He eyes my father squarely. “This generation’s lucky enough not to know that horror, but I reckon we can’t hide it forever. You’re all gonna have to know.” He handed me my netbook. The photos are still on the desktop.

“Just tell them the truth, son,” Winter says.

THE END

Notes: Okay, this was inspired by a dream I had last night. It goes something like this: I’m investigating a downed airplane and buried in the floorboards of the plane is a digital SLR camera. I pry the camera free, pull out the SD card, and carry it back to some little computer and view the images on it. What’s on the film? The undead. Whoever owned this camera shot pictures of them up close and personal. A kid with blood oozing from his mouth – that’s the only image I remember from the dream and the one I put in the story. This isn’t the first time I’ve had a zombie dream. I don’t consider them nightmares.

I’ve studied dream analysis before. Neuroscientists, believe dreams are a survival mechanism. Dreams are  like a computer randomly sampling files on your harddrive and coming up with a new one. It doesn’t make a bit of sense, but common symbols crop up in dreams such as a dark, shadowy figure chasing after you.  Another common one is falling from a great height (or lucidly flying). It’s the brain trying to cope with surviving horrific things. I guess after so much Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil, the Walking Dead, and World War Z, zombies are the dark and shadowy figures of my dreams. And I usually have a shotgun in hand.

Bring on the Apocalypse. I’m ready.

Life Out There

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I’m over half a century old but I’d like to think that I’m still young at heart. Henry Glover’s my name. Back in my youth I used to work for corporations like Celestine Mining and Winthrope Unlimited doing a lot of asteroid drilling. I was doing eighteen hour days. I’d get home real late and Emily, my darling wife, would have dinner. It’s eat, shower, sleep, repeat. I had enough of that life. A man’s spirit shouldn’t ever be broke. “Live free or die,” that’s what my great-granddaddy used to say during the Revolution.

When I was a kid, I dreamt of seeing the stars and living out amongst them. I didn’t think I’d be doing tedious work. A couple years back there was a gold rush in the Typhani System. It turns out the asteroids were rich in all kinds of minerals — gold, silver, copper, nickel, and aluminum. I swung by there just in time to get my share of the action. I hit a huge silver vein and managed to dig out and smelt the whole thing into bricks. I choose to invest instead of squander it. I quit my job and headed into the great frontier. I could go anywhere, everywhere. It’s all frontier — from here to infinity.

You might think that my wife tried to talk me out of this adventure. Hell no, Emily’s along for the ride. I inculcated my two kids, Jasmine and Alan, with the right way of thinking, but they ain’t just indoctrinated, they’re smart and can think for themselves in a pinch. We live on the MCS Benjamin Franklin, a starship I built with my own two hands out of post-Revolution era flyers. Now, I know you might be thinking, Henry’s it’s a junker, a hodge-podge of shit you welded together, but it ain’t. The computer system is a state of the art QuantaFlex system. There’s a family room with a 360 degree view of space. Emily’s got her own work room for her crafts and projects. I’ve got my sitting room. The kids can use the family room or their own room for games and school.

Alan’s my eldest. He’s sixteen, smart as a damn wick, but that ain’t because of his schoolin’. Sure, public school’s a great place to make friends, but it ain’t no place to teach a child. He can learn his numbers, history, readin’ and writin’ there, but I taught him the skills that will take him further. He’s a handy kid; knows how to fix a broken computer, can stabilize a thruster, and knows the parts of our old Mark I FTL drive. He can handle himself most of all.

It was that day, March 24th. I’ll never forget it. We entered the Endris Beta system. We had been cruising along for hundreds of thousands of kilometers, not a trace of anyone or anything in sight. Jas mapped using the deep sensor sweep as we crossed the void. There’s a good penny to be earned in producing quality maps. We sent a drone to scout the nearby asteroid belt. Seemed to be a relic from a dead planet, smashed to dust eons ago and filled with valuable minerals.

I turned to my boy Alan, “Saddle up pardner, we’re taking the minerpod out.” The boy was obsessed with the thing. It’s a small conical pod with a carbon-fiber chain attached at the apex to the Franklin. It’s got thrusters to move on its own but it can’t go too far. I use it to take samples of asteroids. Research scientists at universities and corporations pay a pretty penny for a slab of rock. They could easily send their own Finders out to scour the galaxy, but they don’t have the money to cover the space. Us regular folks looking to make a buck can do the work for ‘em.

I sat down with Alan in the cramped pod and taught him the controls. There’s a joystick to guide the laser drill and an holo-screen that displays the target. You line up your target, aim, and shoot just like a video game. Once we’ve bored under the surface of the rock, we extract a sample. It’s delivered into a container and stowed away. I taught him how to use the thrusters to maneuver the pod about, but I’d lower the chain close to the rock and make sure he stayed tethered.

“I got it, pop,” he said. Just to prove it he showed me how to turn on the engine without me ever saying how. He operated the drill and centered it but didn’t fire. Computers and ships come naturally to Alan. I reckon some day he’d make a damn fine engineer, but don’t wanna say anything yet. Let the boy figure it out on his own.

We returned to the Franklin. Alan suited up and got back into the pod. I let the tether out and he maneuvered the ship into place. I tapped into the minerpod’s onboard camera. We found an asteroid a couple miles long and began to drill. Inside were traces of gold, silver, and other rare minerals. It was an auspicious start.

Alan and I were so busy that I didn’t see’em on the radar screen. Jas ran into the room hollerin’ about a ship.

“What kind of ship?” I asked her.

She didn’t have a clue. I should’ve sensed trouble right then and there, but I gave the controls to her. “Watch your brother,” I said and headed up to the family room. Through the skylight, I saw a massive ship, one of the old Jupiter freighters with her nose pointed at us. Behind it, ice crystals and debris ballooned from the wake of its jump. I knew Jupiter style boats were the mainstay of pirates. Most of them were constructed by the Chinese, post-Revolution, and unsavory types took to it cause they were cheap, easy to fly, and could jump light years.

How the hell did they know we were here? “Jasmine!” I yelled. “Reel your brother in! Get him on the ship!”

You know how bullets sound when your inside of a space ship? It’s like rain hitting a tin roof. The Franklin’s got a strong hull to bounce bullets, but I watched one of our winglets and engines get tore up. I slid down the ladder and shut the family room hatch just as the glass shattered. We’ve got a strong midsection to the ship, so even if they blow off all the parts sticking out we should be fine.

Jas is in the other room screaming. Emily comes in wondering what’s going on. I shove my face against the porthole window. The tether’s snapped. The minerpod’s floated off. “Alan, Alan!” I call over the radio. The rain plucks our tin roof and our ship twists. I’m losing sight of him and the asteroid belt. “Alan! Respond!”

Our radio whistled and blew static. A chinaman babbled on in his gookspeak. The Jupiter freighter kisses the backside of our boat. Em and Jas screamed; it hurt me to hear ‘em like that. We twisted through space going God-knows-where, and Alan’s in the rocks. It don’t get worse than this.

The anti-gravity failed. Cups, plates, utensils, books, pictures, all the things that made up our quaint little home lifted off and floated about. My daughter doesn’t got her space legs and she’s flailing trying to understand her new derangement. Em’s anchored herself down and gets Jas under control. I swim to the porthole and catch a glimpse of the asteroid belt as we tumble away. The freighter’s girth hides Alan from us.

I get on the radio and turn on my babelfish. “My son’s out there. Help me get him back.” The software translates and transmits.

My answer. A hailstorm thunking against our hull. This time I heard a hiss. The computer beeped at us. We’re venting atmosphere.

“Em! Go plug ‘er up!” I’m headed off to the cockpit. I trust Em and no sooner have I said it she’s on her way. I take Jas with me to the cockpit. We fire the methane rockets and stabilize the Franklin. I know the Jupiter’s got a blind spot right below her, and with Jas’ help we get right under her blazing guns and reorient ourselves to be parallel to her underside.

Em enters the bridge. Her hair’s disarrayed and she’s a bit pale. Near death’ll do that to you. “Get the O2 tanks,” I told her. “I’m cutting the power.”

“Life support?” she asked.

“Everything.”

I turn each system off one at a time until only the lights remain. Em’s got us on the O2 tanks and I shut off life support and the lights. A flashlight and portable radio tuned to my son’s channel’s were the only hardware I got on.

We waited in silence. Instead of methane I use compressed air to make adjustments to keep us parallel to the freighter’s bottom.

“Dad, look!”

Jasmine reached across my face and pointed out the window. My gaze followed her finger. A man in a spacesuit swung over the hull and bounced towards us. He had an ARC-7 railgun. He fired against our hull and shattered the window.

“Out of the cockpit! Out! Out!”

I pushed Em and Jas through the door. The glass cracked with each rail strike. I swam through the hatch and sealed it just as the glass blew out. I felt the suction of space grabbing at my legs, just for a moment. Leaning against the bulkhead, I heard the bastard stepping about our cockpit.

The radio whistled into life. “You surrender. Give over ship and come peaceful.” I hated the way gooks talked — in starts and stops, sputtering each of our words, mangling them.

Sparks flared around the sealed cockpit door. Laser cutters. They were ready to space us. Em held Jas tight. In all my twenty years, I never knew Em to give up the ghost, but I saw it in her eyes. I ordered Em to shut the porthole window and I dashed below deck to shut the hatches just incase they blew those windows out too. When I returned I found my wife hunkering over the minerpod’s LCD. I forgot that it ran on its own generator. The blue glow from the screen bathed their faces, and for a moment even though we were going to die, they seemed tranquil.

The minerpod camera looked straight into the Franklin’s cockpit. Three men stood inside working on the door. Alan! God bless him. He struck one of the pirates with a laser. The other two turned and shot at him. The camera shook and static filled the screen.

We were speechless. My wife, daughter, and I huddled around the screen. I slapped the monitor. “Alan!” I called into the radio.

The picture cleared up. Two men were dead and a third floating off into space. The boy fended them off.

“Dad, I can lead ‘em off,” Alan radioed.

“No, Alan, you’ve done enough.”

“Once they start chasing me, go hide in the asteroid field.”

“Alan!”

“Tell mom and Jas I love ‘em.”

Emily pulled the radio from my hands. “Alan, no!” Snippets of static teased us, made our hearts jump. I glanced out the porthole window and the Chinks pulled away. Alan did it. I fired the ship’s compressed air hurdling us towards the asteroid field. Sure enough the freighter had no idea we’d gone. From the porthole window, I saw that they were chasing him.

We watched the minerpod’s monitor. Alan sped the small ship into the void. Around the edges of his view I saw streaks of bullets whizzing by. “Come on boy, shake ‘em off.” The screen turned to static.

Through the porthole, I saw the freighter’s railguns streaking in the midnight ocean. There wouldn’t be no explosion. If he was hit, the ship would just fall to pieces and his body would float out into space. Moments later, a flash. I knew they kicked their FTL on and dashed out. I sent out a distress signal and waited with Em and Jas. The radio clicked and sizzled. Em clutched it tight hoping that one of the outbursts would be followed by Alan’s voice. I had to pry the walkie-talkie out of her hands and we let it float in the middle of us.

The women shed their tears. The drops squeezed out from their eyes and floated in orbit of the radio. I wept too. So many tears gathered like little glass crystals that I was mesmerized by them. The LCD screen lit them up like little stars.

I lost my boy, but I kept my life, my freedom, and my family.

THE END

So back in January I started writing down a timeline of events for a sci-fi universe I was crafting piecemeal, and I realized that the first two stories I wrote (Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 and Relativity) have a place in that same sci-fi universe. I thought it might be cool to continue building this sci-fi universe through these short stories on Courne Supremacy and it might give me a stronger sense of how things played out. Expect more but it won’t be any kind of linear order. I think I leave clues here and there in the text so the reader can piece together when each of these stories took place.

Relativity

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I met Ashley in fifth grade. Her family moved here from America. Her father had a new job overseeing the giant terraforming project here on Olympus Mons after repairing the environmental disaster on Earth. The other kids teased her for being small, for being from Earth, and for being the new kid. They threw stones at her and called her names like “Tory.” My folks and I came from Luna, so I had gone through being called a “Tory” myself even though we had nothing to do with the Terrans or Martians. Even three hundred years after the war, Martians can still be huge douchebags about winning. The kids tossed rocks at her; I stood in front of them and let each one hit me until they stopped.

They ran. I chucked a rock and smacked one of them right in the small of his back. My dad arrived just in time to catch me in mid-swing. He ran through the kids fleeing from my pitching arm. He chewed me out. Finger waggling. A grounding on the spot. The old man could be a hardass. When I stepped away he saw Ashley standing behind me. This scared little girl cowering behind me for protection. He clamped his hand down on my shoulder. “Nevermind what I said.”

My father always said I had mettle. Being ten I didn’t know what that meant. When I asked him to explain, he’d just laugh and say, “Explain? Son, you show me every day what it means and that’s how I know you’ll be alright no matter what happens.”

Ashley didn’t hang out much on the playground. She preferred being indoors curled up by a window with a good book. I didn’t gravitate towards her because the other kids shunned me for being a “Tory,” but because there was something intangible I felt when I was with her. I sat in the library reading books by her side. She loved history and consumed everything about the Martian Revolution. We learned about Admiral Amanda Rhodes and she introduced me to Admiral John Paul Jones from the American Revolution. We studied General Mingxia Oy Yang and she told me about George Washington. She made them sound alive and full of mystery and intrigue.

Rhodes Park never meant much to me. I rode my bike there Saturday mornings to pitch little league games. One Saturday I arrived late and ran by the statue of Amanda Rhodes. I never really noticed the silvery statue but it was her gazing out into the stars. I realized, Ashley made me appreciate the world. One afternoon we walked home and I took her to the base of the statue. We sat there and read until sunset.

Ashley and I talked about everything together. We wanted to go to the stars. The Flower Blossom, the largest man-made structure in the entire known universe, was being constructed out there at Alpha Centauri. In the library we could get time-delayed feed of the construction.

The day we graduated from middle school, I walked, hand-in-hand with her, back to her home. I chatted away. Summer vacation arrived. I planned our holiday all out. With the oceans formed, we could swim and make sand castles on the beach. We could roam free across the grassy countryside. I intended to enjoy every moment basking under a shaded tree with her by my side. Summer heralded a new world.

We arrived at the front gate of her house. In all my reverie, I didn’t realize she let go of my hand. She came to a stop behind me, tears trickling down her cheeks. She used her hand and wiped her eyes dry. “We’re moving,” she said.

A jumble of questions and exclamations in my mind kept me from saying anything. After a moment of silence, I whispered: “Where?”

“Alpha Centauri.”

She still had a month on Mars, but for a week she visited her grandparents back on Earth. When she jumped back she began packing. We still had days together, but each day drew closer to the last time I’d ever see her again.

The day before her transport left, I knocked on her front door around seven in the morning. The sun had just come up and the weather was warm. She poked her bed-head out of her window and joined me soon after with her hair still in disarray. The dew was still heavy on the grass when we traipsed through the open fields. There wasn’t a cloud in the blue sky, and I could see the snow covered peak of Olympus Mon, and a row of cranes constructing skyscrapers at the base of the mountain-volcano.

We picnicked in the shadow of volcano and the city daring to match it in height and size. The flowers bloomed and their fragrance and pollen filled the air. It was a mixture of beauty and sneezing. My eyes watered; I told her it was the ragweed. Her eyes watered, but I knew she didn’t have any allergies.

“One day, I want to come back and see Olympus Mons, when it’s all built up,” she said.

“I want to see Alpha Centauri when they put the last pedal on it.”

“It’s four light years away. The transport’s too big to use a jump drive. They say it has something called a warp drive.”

“It distorts space, right?”

“And travels close to the speed of light.”

“It’ll be like hours for you then.”

“And it’ll be years for you.”

We were silent at that prospect. It wasn’t just space separating us. It was time as well.

“Just four years by Earth Standard Time. That’s like two years locally,” I mused.

“I’ll send videos. Only if you promise to show me Olympus Mons. I want to see it from the top of Alliance Tower.” She pointed at the tall glass and metal spire, a thin obelisk standing before the wide and domineering volcano. “It’ll be two miles high. You could see everything.”

“It’s a promise.”

We went back to Rhodes Park that evening and sat under the statue of the Admiral. We sat there until the stars came out. The moons over Mars shone bright. We caught up with the constellations until she said the words I dreaded hearing:

“It’s time for me to go.”

I took my time escorting her home. She didn’t rush along either. Her house was the unlit one on the street. Most of the stuff had been taken earlier that day while we wandered around town. She stood close to me. The crickets sang us their lullaby. She hinted with her closed eyes. Now or never. We kissed.

I couldn’t sleep that night. When dawn broke, I headed out to the launch field. You couldn’t get too close, the radiation and fumes would kill you. Even early in the morning, a lot of people were there for the launch. We waved and cheered as the transport took flight and breached the atmosphere. My phone rang, I got a picture: Mars from orbit. “See you in four. -A.”

After she left, I counted the hours. I did the math on my own. She would be there in maybe a day, but those hours for her were different for me. Each morning I’d go out to where you could see the city and snap a photograph. I’d show her the four years she missed here in time lapse. I graduated high school while she traveled. The Alliance Tower opened to the public that fourth summer. I camped out at the city waiting for the first doors to open. I went up to the observatory deck first and witnessed the sun rise. I filmed the whole thing for her. To my surprise, my phone tweeted. One new message. “Just arrived. -A”

I sent the video to her a month later. It’s funny how near instant communications and relativistic travel works. I could talk with her as if we were in the same room, but four years separated us now. I told her about starting college. She told me about starting high school. I showed her my video of the Alliance Tower being built. She sent me a video of the Blossom being constructed in space. Her face hadn’t changed.

“Tell me everything I missed,” she said.

As time went on, my schedule and life changed. We stopped talking and instead traded texts or e-mails, and even then the space in which they arrived became longer and longer. New people had come into my life. As I’m sure, new friends came into her life. We hung on by a bare thread. When my new friends left me alone for the night, I wanted her to be there. Sometimes my eyes would play tricks on me. I’d see her sitting in the cafeteria, or I’d see a girl reading in the library and mistake her for Ashley. At these times I’d send messages to her and she’d write me back.

One day I received a new text from her. “We need to talk.” That night, I logged in and we met up in a video IM.

“You’re handsome,” she said to me.

“You’re pretty.”

“I’m moving again.”

“Back?” What was four more years?

“Altair. Sixteen-point-one light years from here.”

I did the math. “I’ll be 37.”

“I’ll still be 16 going on 17.” She averted her eyes from me. I hated physics with every fiber of my mind. “I know you’ll be alright. Just like when you stood up for me. Remember?”

We talked for another couple of hours. Catching up one last time. She ended the call; it was her bedtime. I looked up the flight times for her transport and imagined the sixteen years to follow as an insurmountable obstacle. I could jump on a transport too, but the amount of money was beyond my means. Be brave, I thought. Be brave.

I graduated from the Polytechnic Institute at Olympus Mons and got a job building starships with my aerospace degree. It was her absence that got me into studying relativity and building new jump drives. I married. My wife Stephanie and I had two children: Ashley and Terrance. Twenty years separated us and what could have been, but I vowed that my children wouldn’t be separated from their loved ones in the same way. Sometimes, during my lunch breaks, I’d go to the starport, and even though I knew she wasn’t coming back to Mars, I poured my eyes over the people exiting those transports. Maybe, just maybe, I kept thinking.

I was on the construction site when I got a tweet on my old cellphone. “Greetings from Altair. -A.” She sent me a picture of herself on the new starbase at Altair. She was seventeen. I was thirty-seven. I sent her a photo of my wife and kids. I told her I built starships.

I got my last text from her when I was forty-one. “Graduated! I’m going to Paradiseworld to work.” She attached a picture of herself dressed in her robes surrounded by her happy parents.

Paradiseworld. It was officially named Elysia. Everyone from around the galaxy set sail for this second earth. No pre-industrial civilizations lived on the planet surface. Just wildlife, nature, and absolute beauty. It was also one hundred light years from Mars. I would be 121, if I lived that long. She’d be 22 going on 23.

I snapped a photo of myself with one of our new transports behind me. It would need several jumps and could make it there, and if I could, I’d have taken it there to meet her. “Congratulations, Ashley.” I didn’t know what else to say. I was old enough to be her father now. I was in love with my wife. My children were growing up and falling in love themselves. My life was established here and yet I kept talking with this ghost. “Ashley, live free and fearless. I love you always.” I sent the message and turned off the phone for good.

I spent the next twenty years focused on building ships that used our enhanced jump drive technology. Perhaps when she gets to Paradise, she can see these ships I helped design delivering people a hundred light years in the wink of an eye. Lovers will never have to be separated by distance and time again. I could even go and see her again, but I am in my twilight. I sometimes think back to when my father said I had mettle. I never did anything brave, but maybe the bravest thing was to let her go. She’s only a phantom of my youth. A girl in my dreams. A memory.

THE END

Thoughts: Last week’s story was partially inspired by the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2. Well this week’s is inspired by another song called One more time, One more chance. It’s from an animated film I saw this past week called Five Centimeters Per Second. It’s a love story about two people and the distance between them physically, temporally, and emotionally. It inspired me to write this story. I guess I like sappy stuff like that. Definitely, go check out the movie. Yes, it’s anime, but the imagery and story are beautifully done.

Also, I hope I got all the ages right. It’s rather difficult when writing about people moving through time relativistically.

Brandenburg Concerto No. 2

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[I'll end each story with some of my thoughts just so you can get an idea of where it came from. I've edited the story somewhat so hopefully most of it is spelled correctly and grammatically correct. icon smile Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 Stories ]

Admiral Amanda Rhodes held onto a railing on the bridge of the MCS Yorktown. Behind her Jacob counted down from ten. The starship shuddered and quaked as the engines spun to life. When Jacob uttered “zero,” the rattling hit an apex. The bridge or rather reality itself bulged and pinched and rubber banded back to normal.

“Initial FTL test complete,” Jacob said. “We’re about two light years from Mars. A little beyond the Oort Cloud. Twenty-four hours until we return. Hey Amanda, I’m getting a signal from within the cloud.”

“Viking, Pioneer, or Voyager?”

“Signal unknown.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. If anything was going to be this far out, it would be something they sent here more than a hundred years ago.

He shrugged.

“Take us in the cloud,” Amanda said.

Jacob fired the methane rockets and for the next four hours they maintained an evasive course dodging stray, spiraling rocks. The signal intensified. Whatever the object was it was stuck against a drifting asteroid.

Jacob focused the scanners on the object. Hovering over top the circular computer console in the center of the bridge, light rays formed a hologram of a chicken egg. Amanda cupped the egg in her hands and looked at it from different angles. “Bring it onboard,” she said.

The Egg sat in the Yorktown’s cargo bay. A decontamination team scrubbed it down and verified that it was free of biohazards and radiation. During the inspection, one of the engineers accidentally opened it. Security responded with raised rifles, but the engineer standing by the door held his palm up. He approached the door and gingerly pulled out a small container.

“What is it?” Amanda asked over the PA. She stood in an office overlooking the cargo bay.

“Not sure,” the engineer radioed back. “It’s clean though.”

Amanda assigned Jacob to collect the contents of the Egg. His report concluded that the pod used a ramscoop to gather hydrogen and propel itself towards strong radio signals. “I think it hit the Oort Cloud trying for Earth,” he told her.

Later that night, Amanda joined Jacob in the cargo bay. He glanced up to greet her but went back to studying the artifact in his hands.    A square looking object that looked like a computer tablet attracted Amanda’s attention. Several alligator clips connected it to a small generator.

“That ought be charged. Give it a try,” Jacob said.

Amanda touched the glossy surface. After a musical tweet a computer desktop appeared with one glowing icon in the middle. She touched it with her fingertip.

To her surprise, the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 played for her, and a fullscreen video began by panning across a vast city of organically shaped skyscrapers. Little cars zipped along the streets. A small group of people waved and exclaimed a greeting in a language she did not know.

The next scene was an alien head — one of them up close. Its nose, blunt. The eyes, cat-shaped. They had four fingers on each hand. Four toes on each foot. Yellow, orange, pink, and red aliens greeted them with smiles and waves. This aside, the beings looked humanoid.

Another scene began. A whiny string instrument faded in and trumpets and drums accompanied it. A procession of women in long silky gowns and hairdos adorned with flowers waved as they approached the camera. Crowds of people cheered. Behind the rows of women clad in diaphanous silk, a large beast with the body of a rhino and head of a horse pulled a carriage. Sitting on top of the carriage was an elderly woman dressed in flowing satin. She wore a sparkling tiara. The camera dollied up and revealed a large palace with arcades and gold gilded statues.

“It’s like Versailles,” Jacob said. He laughed. “They’re Frenchmen! I always knew they were aliens!”

“Shhh,” Amanda hissed as she watched. “Hey, here, do your thing.” She pulled Jacob over. The video presented them with a grid and points of light appearing on it. He scrutinized the image developing on the computer tablet.

“They’re pointing to Sol. Alpha Centauri. They’re pointing to stars around us. All a couple light years away.” He tapped the screen. “That’s where they are! Twenty-some light years out. Orders?”

Amanda smiled. “Wake everybody up and fire up the FTL.”

Jacob ran past Amanda and in a matter of minutes he brought the FTL back to full power. The general alert sounded and crew members rushed back to their stations still yawning and rubbing sleep from their eyes. A yeoman pushed a coffee cart around the bridge pouring an extra large cup full for each groggy crew member.

“I have a fix on the location,” Jacob said. “It’s about twenty-three light years away.  We’ll have to make two jumps.”

“Do it.”

Everyone on the bridge held onto the nearest thing they could find. The ship trembled and the engines roared and at the acme died away as abruptly as it started. “Second jump,” Jacob announced. This time the engines whined fiercely. “Come on baby, you can do this.” The entire ship shuddered once more. “All clear, shutting down engines. We’re going to need some time before we make the return trip, Admiral.”

The central computer beeped. The ship’s digital eyes scanned the visible hemisphere of the planet and presented it as a partial model. “Send the drones,” Amanda ordered. Several little blips appeared around the virtual planet. The drones filled in the blanks and built an entire model of the world as Amanda walked around the globe.

“We’re picking up a transmission. It’s coming from orbit,” the communications officer said.

“Play it.”

Amanda recognized the language as the static-filled message played back. The sound clip looped over the bridge’s speakers and even though Amanda didn’t recognize the spoken word, she understood the intonation. The voice was clear and solemn until the end of the message when the woman’s voice cracked. Amanda could feel the tears running down her face. She knew the horrible knowledge that the alien woman carried.

Amanda took control of a drone. She dived through the atmosphere and unfolded its wings to fly across the planet at supersonic speed. Using the semi-pellucid globe she found a landmark and directed her drone to fly over it. In front of her, floating over the central console, the drone’s HUD displayed showing the clouds and land rushing by. The shell of a city burgeoned in front of her. The twisted columns and bent spires recalled to Amanda the organic looking skyscrapers in the video. Crushed cars lined the streets; derelict ones piled up together.

“Any signs of life?” She asked an engineer who was piloting another drone on the planet surface.

“Just animals. A pack of dogs is what it looks like.”

A nuclear blast leveled these buildings. She recognizes the radial explosion ballooning out from the center of the city. The drone relied the high amounts of radiation in the vicinity. She had done the same on Earth, but it seemed to have happened a long time ago for this planet. The clouds of ash and dust cleared across the sky letting the sun through. Vines crept and wrapped around the side of the skeletal buildings. Saplings cracked and bored through the asphalt. Nature healed the wounds of man and reclaimed the land for herself. Eventually, even Earth would cover up the violence she committed and she hoped that history would make her a footnote or better yet forgotten.

She set the drone back to autopilot and closed the hovering HUD. “You have the conn, Mr. Sanders,” she said to the man flying the second drone. Her office was adjacent to the bridge and she could escape there when things became too much for her. Through a small capsule shaped window she watched the planet revolve. In the background, the alien video played. Bach’s symphony filled the lonely office with its boisterous and soaring melody. She had half a mind to turn it off, but the music was the only kind thing she shared with the dead civilization below. Jacob entered her office. She often let him get away without announcing himself.

“There’s signs of advanced spacecraft on the surface. I think one of them picked up Voyager years after it left our solar system. They analyzed it and sent the Egg back to us. This mess here is somewhat more recent.”

“I’m not allowed to forget, am I?” Amanda asked the planet below.

She felt Jacob’s hand touch her shoulder and give her a gentle squeeze. She clasped her hand over his. “Don’t forget Amanda, you gave us a chance on Mars. Without it who knows how long the fighting would have kept going.” She closed her eyes. She ordered the final strike on Earth. It ended the colonial revolution for Mars just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Second World War.

“We’re so alike. I wanted to meet them. I thought it would vindicate everything I had done. I ended the war so we could make progress, but they’re too much like us. How many other stars, Jacob? How many other tragedies?”

“Hey,” Jacob said shaking her. “We’re not all tragedies. We’re still around. Don’t forget that.”

Amanda pushed herself away from the window ledge. “Leave a beacon. Upload the video to it. Let everyone that comes here see who they were and what became of them and let’s make sure it never happens to us.”

Thoughts: I had this idea a while back for a first contact story. I feel if the day ever came where we made first contact it wouldn’t be with guns blazing but rather it would be low key. Our scientists expect any alien civilizations to meet Voyager before they meet us. I’d imagine we’d find a radio signal or a time capsule from an alien race long before we met them face to face. By the way, the characters Amanda and Jacob actually do have a history for me. I wrote about their other escapades during the Martian revolution for my NaNoWriMo story.