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Who Fears Death has won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel! See the full list of winners here.
And where was I when this awesome news was announced? In a maximum security jail in Chicago visiting one of my students who'd gotten into some trouble. I needed to make sure he was ok. He was. As much as he could be. He’s maintaining. 
It was good to see him. He said he was enjoying the latest book I’d sent him- a copy of His Dark Materials. Regardless, seeing him there made my heart ache and eyes burn (as it did back in April). He’s a brilliant young black man.
I came out of there fighting sadness. So many young men of color, predominately black, locked up like animals. I'd noticed when I walked in that on the controls on the wall (which featured several buttons), the one marked "trouble" was flashing and beeping. Apparently (my student told me), someone had just been stabbed and was in bad bad condition.
So, I got into my car sat there for a few moments and then looked at my cell phone (you can't bring your cell phone into the jail). Even as I picked it up, it buzzed as it received another text. When I flipped it open, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. For several minutes I was in a sort of mental turmoil as my sadness battled my extreme happiness. I drove to my mother's house in a sort of shock (had to pick up Anyaugo). 
Happy Flower by Anyaugo Okorafor
But when I got there, my family had already heard the news from my editor and I could do nothing but give in to the happy dancing and confetti throwing. Now, week later, I sit here smiling. 
I am really proud of this novel. I worked so hard on it. It worked so hard on me. This is beautiful. 
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Rise in Excellence

Rise in excellence, working hard on my next Novel 'N'. It is difficult to fully incorporate into the writing system of this planet but it is coming along regardless of the tendency to psychically project on paper and Microsoft word only to end up having my words visible only in the 5th dimension.

Anyway, I didn't come here today to talk about my challenges; other beings from my world already think I am a social-media-retard because I just won't mentally induct everyone into following me. I am here to wish everyone well and to remind those that have not checked out my website to do so....and no, there are no undercurrent 5th dimensional sentences in this post. Science Fiction Renpet Sci-Fi - www.renpetscifi.com

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Yesterday's Rant

In all reality, Sci-Fi represents the young mind of man attempting to conquer natural events and occurrences through experimental reasoning(disguised mental alchemy) and inventions(manipulation of physical material through external mechanisms). In truth, it is all mind or just is. Future this and that, warps and time, are the incessant rumination of children who created terms to explain the unknown just so they can later supposedly conquer their own creation. Of course, most current technology comes from the blue-print of the inner-workings of plants and the biology of man. Look at cars, they were once Sci-Fi and now they available for all people. Look at them close, they have eyes - lights, mouth - grill, limbs - wheels, organs - engines. The cars of the past reflected bulky dinosaurs while the ones of our age look like a new species of insects and fish. Listen, lift the veil up every so often, expose the truth. Sci-Fi has only been 'coined' recently in 1851.
I am not going to lie, I use the term because of all the hub-bub behind it, the anxiety of something being untouchable and the clamor of folks looking to be learned or advanced. So much fun to see all that play out. Envisioning yourself as something more and then snatching it away from yourself...ah, the art of self-seductive/inductive b.s.
Truthfully, I would just say I am a mental alchemy writer or a mind scribe, but damn, I do not have the patience to mentally induct people over time to believe in my b.s., so sci-fi is the perfect answer. It even sounds shiny when you say. SCIIII-FI....like air getting sliced with a thin blade. One thing...the 'SCI-FI' I write about is not external. Let's pull another Voodoo move like we did with the plagurized Saints(energies of nature) time to rock some veils and kill some Vampires...Enjoy the rant!!!! Rise in Excellence!!!!! www.renpetscifi.com
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Alien Encounters II

My wife and I flew down from Maryland (boy, were our arms tired) to attend Alien Encounters II in the ATL. Last year, we attended "I"; "II" did not disappoint us.

Thursday featured a very moving tribute and discussion at the Hammond's House about L.A. Banks who passed away this summer. Leslie was a phenomenal writer and overall good person. She touched a lot of lives and broke many barriers for speculative fiction writers of color.

Friday, was devoted to "Griots" with a lively panel discussion and readings featuring the authors and artists from the book. Much love goes to the Davis and Saunders dynamic duo for putting together the first Sword and Soul Anthology.

Saturday afternoon was the most informative, entertaining and inspirational lecture I have been to in years. Scholar Kevin Sipp took us on a musical journey from ancient African drummers and chants to George Clinton's Mother Ship and the Hip Hop folks via "Black Noise Navigators". Brother Sip well-presented his extensive knowledge of Black music and how it has evolved to inspire and encourage us to live "outside of our bodies" and dream the fantastic.

My only regrets were missing Sunday's events due to travel plans; but we certainly plan to attend next year's Alien Encounters III.

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I was pleased to attend the authors' discussion and book signing at Auburn Avenue Research library. This Alien Encounters topic was "Beyond Twilight and Harry Potter: Speculative Fiction for Young Adults of Color." The dicussion was timely, interesting, and important. I'm sad that I missed the other sessions, I was knee deep in finishing Breaking Free. Sadness. But what I heard at this panel was awesome.

If you'd like to read the rest of this blog post. Visit:

http://www.aliciamccalla.com/blog/59-alien-encounters-panelists-tackle-tough-issues-that-impact-ya-black-speculative-fiction

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I Know I Don't...

I know I don't post or comment much on this site. That in no way is an indication of how I value being a member of Black Science Fiction Society. From reading forum and blog posts, as well as group posts and coments, I have gained invaluable insight and have been introduced to great writers I would never have encountered if not for this group. I felt I've become a much stronger writer since joining this group. Since I joined, I can give some credit to the Society for getting two short stories published--including one in Genesis magazine.
I'm glad I joined. Thanks for having me.
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PROBE Giveaway

An erotic, science fiction tale of betrayal and rebirth.

"In the instant
before he lifted her face to his strange puckered mouth she saw them. Stripes of
brown and orange all over his body, and a dozen suction caps lined his chest..."

Allandra has always dreamed of life on other planets. But this mission she'll find more than she ever dreamed of. From the mind of Valjeanne Jeffers, author of the Immortal series, comes an erotic tale that's out of this world.

Good afternoon fam :) I've decided to give away 4 copies of a pdf of PROBE. PROBE is the first installment of a space opera I'm working on. So I'll give a copy to the first 4 folks that email me at sister24moon@gmail.com

 

Have a beautiful day :)!

 

 

 

 

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Money Matters

African-Americans Wield Considerable Consumer Power
Source: marketwire.com

African-Americans' buying power is expected to reach $1.1 trillion by 2015, according to 
The State of the African-American Consumer Report, released today, collaboratively by 
Nielsen, a leading global provider of insights and analytics into what consumers watch 
and buy, and The National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a federation 
of more than 200 Black community newspapers across the U.S. This growing economic 
potential presents an opportunity for Fortune 500 companies to examine and further
understand this important, flourishing market segment. Likewise, when consumers are 
more aware of their buying power, it can help them make informed decisions about the 
companies they choose to support.
"Too often, companies don't realize the inherent differences of our community, are not aware 
of the market size impact and have not optimized efforts to develop messages beyond those 
that coincide with Black History Month," said Cloves Campbell, chairman, NNPA. "It is 
our hope that by collaborating with Nielsen, we'll be able to tell the African-American 
consumer story in a manner in which businesses will understand," he said, "and, that this 
understanding will propel those in the C-Suite to develop stronger, more inclusive strategies 
that optimize their market growth in Black communities, which would be a win-win for all of us."

And who will get this profit.....them or us???


This is still the challenge of the Black Age. To break the boycott and secure victory in the war for minds and market shares.
How many of us here buy Black on purpose? Sell Black on demand? Praise Black on recognition? :lol: 

To this end ONLI STUDIOS is bringing its Chicago centric distribution experiment to a conclusion. It has been a success and will be re-organized 
to a more official practice over the next six months. We gratefully appreciate the few indie publishers that allowed us to purchase their products wholesale to test in this situation.
We recently re-organized our annual Black Age Convention to a partnership with the DuSable Museum which gives direct support to the Black Age products we sell there and has it as a feature in its annual Arts & Crafts Festival. The DuSable Museum hosts thousands of paying visitors from around the world weekly. We will win the war for minds & market shares!!!

www.blackageofcomics.com

www.onlistudios.com

www.dablackage.blogspot.com

"Indie today: Black Age forever!!!!!!" :cheers: 

There is no power in this game like a rack dedicated to the Black Age! When was the last time you were able to spin through a rack of 
Black Age greatness and then go look at the works of the so out of styled mainstream? Talk about a let down.

We feature racks in NY Harlem at the Hue Man Book Store

Chicago at the DuSable Museum of African American History along with several other locations.
User avatar
Punkin
BLACK SUPER POWERED ADVENTURER
 

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Black's and our love affair with Japan.

i have been creating for myself and other professionally  for over 15 years now, primarily in the pen and paper role playing gaming business. i have had the opportunity to be exposed to a great many artistic styles over the years from 70's sci fi to steampunk and I have taken pieces from them all to create my style. I happily include anime and manga in my bowl full of influences as I have been reading and watching since the early eighties. 

 

However, over the last few years, I have noticed that young people have increasingly incorporated the Japanese Aesthetic into their art. This in and of itself is not a problem, as I have clearly illustrated, we artists incorporate a great deal of what we have picked up through observation into our work. My issue lies elsewhere and it is a problem I have on the Macro with a great many of us black creators and on the Micro specifically with the black anime and manga crowd. A have observed that lot of us black artists tend to gravitate toward a few mindsets.

1.Either we reject our cultural artistic heritage in favor of a more eurocentric asthetic." MACRO"

2.We celebrate the aesthetics of asian artists, particularly the Japanese "MICRO"

3. We overcompensate by Egyptifying our work, when Egypt was just one of the great many advance African civilizations

 

4 We use the urban expressionism and the visually artistic elements of  hip hop culture to express ourselves. 

 

While I have either large or small issues with each one these manifestations, I find our celebration of all things Asian, TO THE EXCLUSION of our own culture ghastly to say the least. II have meet very well respected artists of African decent who have extolled the artistic and social virtues of the Japanese the exclusion of all others. Some I have talked to have visited Japan , basically, as tourists or in finite programs. So they ultimately have no idea what day to day life is for people of non Japanese decent. 


While it is fine to like an aesthetic, it is my personal belief that no aesthetic holds rank superiority over another.So when these individuals essentially viliify anything not having to do with ASIA artistically, they not only pigeon hole themselves as artists, they fail to see what their own culture contributes to the artistic mix. Thus these people are just as maliformed artistically as a guy who thinks that western art styles are the end all and be all. Or a black guy who feels he has to create a black version of the popular white superhero.


We should sit back as artists and examine what truly motivates us. We as black people suffer from Stockholm Syndrome and it is no surprise that we don't like anything that looks like us  but gravitate towards things created by people who  look totally opposite. 


We just have to be honest about this as artists, so we can use our art to examine who we really are. 

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Yes! This October the Street Journal Crew will be center stage in the biggest convention in the world, the New York Comic Con at the Jacob Javitz's Center for the NEW YORK RE-RELEASE of their highly coveted book, "Street Journal," and this time we are bringing along some guest. After our success on our first showing, the Street Journal Crew has come back for another appearance, and there is a lot in store. Copies of our original behind the scenes book (the prequel to the story) will be available, along with the first and second issue, and get this, there will be a special limited print alternate New York Cover available but that is on a first come, first serve basis since the demand is high, so join us at Booth 2750 from October 13th to 16th, and join in the fun…you don't want to miss this!
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CILF Haibun continued yes it gets worse

It’s a trying day when your thoughts of superiority are proven false. When your races ego is crushed in an instant with just one message. It went to the United Nations during a meeting of the general body. How they knew when to send it is beyond me but of course these are smart creatures remember. The actual contents of the letter were never revealed but the gist of it was released by the media. It appeared that the Congress of Intelligent Life Forms (CILF) was going to annihilate all indigenous life forms on the planet earth in order to make way for the Intergalactic Monument for Interspecies Peace and Coexistence. Though as done in the case of their previous projects and the ecocides they would pick the top five species on each planet and relocate them to a reservation on another planet. The species would be judged on criteria of intelligence, efficiency, level of civility, and complexity. The leadership of humanity sat comfortably knowing full well that mankind was the most dominant of the species on earth and that the humans would no doubt be picked. “Why who else would they chose?” the politicians chuckled. Imagine their surprise when the listings were finally released.

Superior species:
Ants, bees, elephants, grass, trees…
No human beings

All of humanity was outraged and soon afterwards a committee was formed to appeal the decision from CILF. Not long after the committee who submitted the appeal, the committee disappeared and was never heard from again effectively ending all attempts at diplomatic solutions. The only thing left to do was for humanity to prepare to defend itself. Humanity prepared to do what it did best, fight. War, is mankind’s favorite pastime. As you would expect the atmosphere was rather giddy as soldiers were trained and planes were and tanks were built. Mankind actually looked forward to it. “If they weren’t going to live they weren’t going to die without a fight” they thought.
As time passed earth came to one-hundred percent military readiness. They were ready for the attack and waited for the fateful day in which the proof of their superiority or the their annihilation would come from one bloody battle. But to the humans disappointment the battle never came. The CILF knew the human strength was in was and even though they could still easily defeat them they decided on a different approach. Instead of using the power of war to whip out humanity why not the power of love? So one day while the humans sat around patiently cleaning their guns waiting. CILF fire a single barrage of missiles into the earth’s atmosphere. The missiles glided through the sky releases behind it a stream of gas. No one knew what the gas was until a strange thing start happening… people began to make out.

Oxycotin gas
In the air guns drop
so do pants

That is right CILF released a concentrated human love hormone into the atmosphere inducing a lust like trance in which humanity would never recover from. That is right CILF made mankind sex itself to death and sex itself to death mankind did. The whole affair was video documented by the CILF war cancel for future analysis of sex based warfare. The documentary was viewed by the public and was nominated by the Academy of Sensual Species for the award for best full participation orgy of a now extinct species. The documentary can still be viewed at the Library of Interspecies Coordinated Killing or your local intergalactic adult film store.


Aliens questions
War library or sex shop?
Will wife want to watch?

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Pledge Of A Grievance

I pledge allegiance to myself
Take your flag and fuck yourself
A nation under God and indivisible
But you act like I'm invisible
You chose the colors white, blue, and red
And idolize men who are already dead
The only dead president's I care to see
Are coming home from the bank with me
All the songs we were taught to sing
Are only words that don't mean a thing
America the beautiful, I can't tell
On every corner there's crack for sell
I say fuck 'em all, high class dope boys
But they run the country with dangerous toys
So worried about Clinton getting his dick sucked
And you wonder why the country's fucked
Liberty and justice for all, my ass
Cut the games and give some cash
You've been covering shit up for so long
Oh, say can't you see what the hell's going on

(c) Shayla Price
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Excerpt from Supernature by H.V.Lyons

Here is a brief excerpt from my soon to be released book Supernature. I hope you enjoy it.

 

Excerpt from Chapter 1

 

It’s 9:00 am on the Fourth of July weekend and the temperature is already in the upper nineties.

Highway Patrol Officers Cliff Johnson and Brad Williams are on patrol down Route 377, also known as Dry Lake Road.

In the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest of Arizona the sky is clear and blue but the air is still. There are only faint sounds of life: a few birds, a few bugs, but mostly stillness.

“Quiet,” Officer Williams comments, as he drives the vehicle.  Equally unusual is the fact that he already has to crank up the AC.

Officer Johnson doesn’t reply beyond a grunt of agreement, looking out onto the monotonous stretch of desert-like land that they have been assigned to patrol ever since the two Hernandez kids went missing.

Normally during this time of year this area is teaming with life. The forest is home to over 400 species of wild life and it spans over two million acres of untainted wilderness with more than thirty lakes and reservoirs and more than 680 miles of rivers and streams.

Once two separate forests, Apache-Sitgreaves is now managed as one. It runs along the Mogollon Rim, which defines the southwestern edge of the Colorado Plateau, the White Mountains in east-central Arizona and extends partially into New Mexico.

A favorite forest for tourists, hikers and nature lovers, the Apache-Sitgreaves terrain ranges from a desert-like environment on the outer perimeter to an interior of thick rich vegetation. The heart of the forest is lined with aspen, maple, and pine trees and is populated by deer, wild turkeys, elk, eagles and osprey. Among the smaller animals found in the area are rattlesnakes, squirrels, roof rats and black widow spiders. During the summer months the sounds of the forest usually play like a living orchestra. Birds sing, crickets chirp, frogs croak all playing their part of a natural ensemble. All this while hawks slowly circle over head and rabbits quickly scurry through the bush. But today the music is silent, the sounds are few and the feeling in the air is has an eerie stillness to it and the two patrol officers can’t help but feel uneasy in what has been their normal route for about four years now. 

This long deserted highway that is now under Officer Williams’ and Johnson’s jurisdiction stretches through the Sitgreaves portion of the forest from the small frontier town of Holbrook all the way to the mountain community of Heber-Overgaard.

Patrolling Route 377 may be part of their daily routine now but it wasn’t always. Originally, their job was to assist vacationers who were lost or had car trouble along the thirty-three miles of road.  But over the past two years things have changed because of the unusual high number of missing persons being reported in and around the area. In addition, many ranchers along the outskirts of the forest as well as the neighboring Native American communities have complained about missing cattle, unexplained horse and livestock mutilations, and other strange occurrences. Last year’s incident with the Hernandez kids put everyone on alert. A five-year-old little boy and his seven-year-old sister disappearing without a trace and two hysterical parents was more than enough for people to decide that this area needed to be watched closely. And with no bodies or evidence of foul play ever recovered, it only served to keep every one more on edge.  So Officers Johnson and Williams set out early each morning, driving their white and blue Crown Victoria police interceptor up and down Route 377 and keeping their eyes peeled for anything out of the norm.

Today it’s early on a holiday weekend and nothing seems particularly noteworthy except for the heat and the unusual stillness in the air. They’re traveling south down Dry Lake Road towards its intersection with Route 277, with Brad driving and Cliff riding shotgun. It’s a dry stretch of road lined with small shrubs, cactus and rocky sand. There is no real tree line in this part of the forest which is more desert-like than anything. The largest shrubs found in the area only grow to about five feet.

Cliff, a few years younger than Brad at age 32, reaches for the patrol car’s radio as his partner, muscle-bound and athletic, drives. He takes a sip of coffee in his right hand then clicks on the mic in his left saying, “Dispatch this is forty-nine.”

“Go ahead, forty-nine,” replies the voice over the radio.

“Heading south on Route 377. All’s quiet, nothing to report.”

“Ten-four, forty-nine.”

Cliff runs a hand through his close-cropped blond hair, still staring out of the window as he takes another sip of coffee, “Sand, nothing but sand as far as the eye can see. Damn, I’m getting tired of this,” he mumbles in between sips of coffee and adjusting his six foot muscular frame in his seat.  Yet all of his cop’s intuition tells him that something isn’t quite right out here, and he keeps his eyes fixed on the passing outskirts of that forest that had swallowed those kids.  Cliff didn’t have children, but having helped raise his younger siblings had fostered a protective side to him that made him want to get his hands on--

“What’s the matter with you?” asks his partner, a friendly African-American with ten years on the force.  Officer Williams could sense that something was wrong. 

“Nothing,” Cliff answers, eyes still fixed on that eerily still forest.

“Nothing? You barely said a word all morning. What’s eating you?”

“Nothing,” repeats Cliff, still staring out of the passenger side window.

“Come on, how long have we known each other, five, six years? You don’t think I don’t know when something’s bothering you?”

Cliff takes another sip of coffee and mutters, “It’s nothing--I’m alright.”

In an attempt to lighten things a bit Brad comments, “You know they say when you’re having problems it’s always good to talk to an elder,” Cliff turns and frowns at Brad, “and since I’m the oldest you should feel comfortable confiding in me,” he glances over at Cliff and flashes a wide grin.

“You gotta be kidding--you’re only six years older than me Bradley,” says Cliff as he turns back to the window.

Brad’s brow furrows with frustration as he lifts his blue baseball style cap and scratches the barely-there, closely cropped wool on his head.  He replaces the cap and mutters, “Just trying to help,” before focusing back on the road ahead and drives on.

Officer Williams is trying not to take things personally, knowing this dry stretch of desert road, bleak forest and now a brooding partner could easily get you down if you let it.  They’ve been driving in silence for twenty minutes and have just passed a sign which reads, ‘DESPAIN RANCH ROAD NEXT RIGHT.’

Brad glances over at his partner and observes Cliff still staring out of the passenger’s side window at the bushes whizzing by along the plain two lane stretch of road.

Brad decides to give it another go and launch full-steam ahead into a conversation.

 “You know you and Doris really should have come by the barbecue last night, we had a ball. Pat kept asking, ‘where’s Cliff and Doris? Where’s Cliff and Doris?’” Cliff says nothing but continues to sip his coffee, “we didn’t shut the grill down till 12:30,” he again glances over at his partner waiting for a response, but nothing. 

Undeterred Brad continues, “Woodberry came, Hernandez was there, Singletary came over, Brown and his wife showed up. Simmons came with another new girlfriend, I think that’s the third one this month, and even the Sarge came through for a while. Oh and you’re not going to believe this but Pepper showed up. You know that muscular dyke from the SWAT unit? And she brought her girlfriend with her, a drop dead gorgeous blonde with big tits. I had to stay at the grill so Pat wouldn’t catch me staring at her. But no Cliff and no Doris.”

After another slow sip Cliff mutters, “Doris and me had a fight.”

Progress!

With a slight grin Brad replies, “What! Again? What is it with you guys anyway? And I bet it was over something stupid, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, you’re right it was.”

“All right what was it this time?”

Cliff looks over at Brad’s grinning, mahogany-brown profile then takes another sip before explaining, “It’s like this. We were going to come to your party. I was already dressed and watching the end of the heavyweight ultimate fighter match. She’s in the bedroom taking forever to get ready. Then she comes out, stands in front of the TV and asks me if her new dress makes her look fat.”

Brad winces and interjects, “Wait a minute let me guess, you said, YES.”

Cliff shrugs his shoulders and looks at Brad like a little puppy that soiled the carpet and replies, “Well, yeah!” Brad bursts into laughter as Cliff tries to explain, “Well it did make her look fat. What was I going to do lie?”

“Then what happened?”

“She threw a beer can at me. Hit me right in the back of the head. That shit still hurts,” says Cliff as he reaches under his cap and rubs a spot on the back of his head.

Brad laughs even more, “And I bet the two of you spent the rest of the night making up, right?”

A long devilish grin forms across Cliff face, “Man it was great!”

“You know it never fails with you guys. I think you both are crazy. I think you guys just start fights just so you can have make-up sex.”

“Come on man you have to admit, make-up sex is great!” 

“Yeah I’ll admit that but me and Pat never fight as much as you guys. You guys are crazy.”

“Come on man we’re not that bad.”

“Are you kidding me? What about last year’s Christmas Party?”

“Okay, we were both a little drunk.”

“Halloween?”

Cliff gives a devilish smile and says, “We made up after that.”

“And Cancun?”

“Come on now you can’t talk. What about that time we caught you and Pat at Sunset beach?”

“What?”  Brad’s dark-brown eyes widen in mock innocence.

 “Last year in Jamaica? You remember now?”

“Oh boy, here we go again. If I told you once I’ve told you a thousand times we weren’t doing anything. We were just holding each other.”

“In the nude?”

“It was a clothing optional beach!”

“Okay, and?”

“Nothing, we were just enjoying each other’s company,” says Brad in a sheepish tone of voice.

“I’ll say you were enjoying a whole lot more from where I was standing.”

“Oh shut up. It’s bad enough you saw my wife naked.”

“And that’s not all we saw. Doris couldn’t stop laughing,” replies Cliff as he begins to laugh out loud.

“Alright, alright, that’s enough,” says Brad in a serious tone.

“What’s the matter is somebody getting sensitive?”

“Well how would you like it if someone caught you and your wife--?”

Brad trails off, glancing out of the driver’s side window for a moment, before putting his eyes back on the road.

“You and your wife doing what?” interrupts Cliff.

“Nothing.”

 “Ah hah, I got you! Come on, admit it already! The two of you were doing it on the beach weren’t you?”

“Oh grow up. Hey, what about the time you tried your uncle Bill’s Viagra and had a five-hour erection? Now that was funny,” Brad begins to laugh uncontrollably, “I’ll never forget the phone call: ‘Hello, Brad? It’s getting bigger! It hurts and it won’t go down’,” Brad laughs so hard he has to wipe tears from his eyes.

All mirth dissolves from Cliff’s face.

“Hey, that wasn’t funny. That really hurt.”

Brad chuckles, “I bet it did. I don’t know why you took that stuff in the first place. And how did they make that thing go down anyway?”

“I had to go to the hospital man; you know how embarrassing that was?”

“I can imagine.”

“Yeah after the doctors stopped laughing they pulled out this super long needle and stuck me.”

“Stuck you? Where at?”

“In my dick! Can you believe that! In my dick! It hurt like hell!”

“What? They stuck it in your dick?”

“Yeah, they said they had to drain out all the blood.” Brad begins to laugh even louder while slapping the steering wheel with his hands.

As Brad shakes his head, laughing heartily, something catches Cliff’s eye through the passenger side of the patrol car.  At first he thought it might be some rags strewn by the side of the road but as the vehicle approached, he knew it had to be a body.  A small body.  Could it be a child?  Another kid? 

He reaches over and nudges Brad’s muscular forearm, pointing. “Hey, hey, hold on a sec. Slow down partner.”  The urgency in his voice causes Brad to sober up immediately.

Brad slows the vehicle and now they could both see a small framed figure lying on the ground about 200 yards off the side of the road partially obscured by some shrubs.

After slowing down the vehicle Brad leans over his partner to get a closer look while pulling the car off of the road.

“What is that? Is it a body?” asks Brad.

Cliff still squinting replies, “Jesus I think it is,” he swings open the door just as the car comes to a stop and jogs off toward the figure on the ground. Brad jumps out and follows. As the two men approach the figure they notice a bare-footed young woman in her early thirties lying on her stomach. She’s very pale with short dark hair, wearing a pair of badly torn jeans and a ripped tee shirt, both lightly splattered in blood. Her eyes are closed and the left side of her face is in the dirt. Parts of the woman’s face and arms are dark red, dry and clearly sun burnt. She is also covered in dozens of small cuts and scratches.  As the two officers examine her they also notice that her feet are dirty, bleeding and blistered. On her right cheek and on her right forearm there are what appear to be large reddish swollen abscesses both about the size of golf balls. The abscesses are dry, peeling and slowly leaking a yellowish puss. Cliff looks down at the woman and softly calls out to her. “Miss, can you hear me? Miss?” There’s no response. The woman just lies there very still and breathing slowly, showing little sign of life. Cliff kneels down and checks her neck for a pulse with two expert fingers, “She’s alive! But just barely, better call it in.”

Brad unhooks his portable radio from his belt and calls the dispatcher as he briskly walks around the area looking through the bush, “Dispatch, this is car forty-nine, over.”

“Go ahead forty-nine,” the radio crackles back.

“Ah, we have an eleven forty-seven on route 377 about one mile south of Despain Ranch Road, requesting Medevac ASAP, over.”

“Ten-four forty-nine, requesting Medevac for eleven forty-seven, route 377, one mile south of Despain Ranch Road, there’s already a chopper in the area, ETA about twenty minutes, do you copy?”

“Ten-four Dispatch, twenty minutes.”

Brad walks back over to Cliff and the woman and hunkers down next to them, “Chopper will be here in twenty. What do you think happened to her?”

“I don’t know. Her breathing is very slow and she’s covered in all these cuts almost like she’s been in a fight with a cat.”

“Damn, she does look real tore up,” adds Brad.

Cliff looks at the wounds and twists his face, “Have you noticed that odor?”

“Yeah, smells like she was sprayed with vinegar,” Brad slowly scans the area around the woman, “strange, this is real strange. You hear me partner?”

Cliff looks up at him slowly, “I know what you mean.”

For fifteen minutes the two officers sit with the female while they wait for the medical helicopter to arrive. They check her back pockets for any signs of identification and repeatedly check her pulse and breathing. As Cliff kneels by the girl’s side Brad searches the surrounding area for any clues as to what might have happened. He follows some partial tracks from the woman leading south but only manages to find blood spattered foot prints in the sand. While kneeling down to study one print he stops and looks around slowly. The silence they noticed earlier seems especially oppressive now.  “What could have happen out here?” He thinks to himself.

He begins to scan the area more intently. There’s nothing around, normally in this part of the forest there are birds over head, flies buzzing around, even the occasional scorpion scurrying by. But today there’s nothing but silence. The stillness unnerves Brad and he stands up and begins to make his way back towards Cliff and the woman.  Just then Brad’s radio crackles to life, “Car forty-nine, Car forty-nine this is Medevac two, do you read?”

“Go ahead Medevac two this is forty-nine, what’s your ETA?”

“We are five minutes out forty-nine, Just thought you should know we just flew over a camper off the side of the road about two miles south of your position. Appears to be abandoned, could belong to your Vic.”

“Ten-four Medevac two, we’ll check it out as soon as you clear station.”

“Ten-four forty-nine.”

Brad approaches Cliff and knees beside him, “Chopper will be here in five.”

“Great.”

“The chopper spotted a camper down the road. Could be where she’s from. We should check it out when we’re done.”

“Right!”

“How is she?”

“Still no response, no movement, nothing, and her breathing is getting even slower.  You find anything?”

“Naw, no clues, but…I don’t know, it seems a little weird but remember I mentioned how quiet it is out here?  Something’s not right.”

Cliff slowly looks around and scans the area then turns back to Brad, nodding, “Yeah it’s pretty quiet today isn’t it?”

“Yeah, a little too quiet if you ask me. It’s giving me the creeps.”

“I know exactly what you mean.  Like, it’s kind of--”

“--Dead,” his partner finished.

In the background the low rumbling sound of the four bladed Bell 407 helicopter can be heard approaching.  The sound steadily grows louder as the red and white chopper slowly appears overhead. The pilot hovers for a minute while he looks for a clearing to land. Brad covers his eyes and Cliff angles his broad, muscular frame in an effort to shield the young woman as the machine kicks up a cloud of dust. The skilled pilot softly lands the helicopter just in front of the officer’s patrol car on the side of the road. As the engine slows to an idle, two paramedics dressed in bright orange jump suits jump out, one carrying a medical kit and the other a portable gurney. Both wear pilot helmets and multi-pocketed vests loaded with bandages and other small medical tools. They run over to the two officers and their victim.

Dave, a short stocky seven-year veteran of the Medevac service, crouches beside the young woman on the ground. His partner Nancy, a thin light skinned young woman with freckles, quickly runs to the other side and applies the inflatable bag of a portable blood pressure machine onto the woman’s left arm.

Dave examines her body, being careful not to move her too much as the extent of her injuries are as yet unclear. While wearing protective gloves he examines the abscesses on her face and arm.

 “Damn! I’ve never seen anything like this before. How long has she been like this?”

Scratching his head Brad responds, “Don’t know, we’ve been here for about twenty minutes. Don’t know how long she’s been lying here before that.”

While closely examining her burnt skin Dave then says, “Must have been at least an hour by the look of these sunburns.”

Cliff then jumps in, “Have you noticed the odor? Kind of like vinegar.”

Dave leans closer to the woman and sniffs, “Seems to be coming from these big sores.”

Suddenly a steady beeping emits from the blood pressure machine. Nancy checks the LED display and calls out its readings.

“Blood pressure’s 55 over 40!”

Dave looks up, “Not good, not good at all”

“Is that very bad?” asks Cliff with a look of concern.

“Yes it is, very low, probably due to dehydration. She could slip into a coma if we don’t get her some fluids and to a hospital ASAP!”

Nancy pulls an IV bag of clear fluid out of her medical kit and attaches it to the woman’s arm.

Dave pulls out a small light from his vest and shines it into the woman’s eyes as he pulls them open with his other hand, “Her eyes are dilated and her breathing is erratic and with the low blood pressure she’s in real bad shape. We have to get her out of here now. Come on, give us a hand.”

“Where’re you going to take her?” asks Brad.

“The trauma center at Lincoln Hospital in downtown Phoenix. We can be there in about thirty-five minutes.”

Dave gently lifts the woman over to one side as his partner Nancy slides the portable gurney under her back. The two officers assist the paramedics in lifting the woman up and carrying her to the waiting helicopter. After securing her inside of the copter the two officers back away and watch as it slowly rises into the air and speeds off.

Brad turns to Cliff and says,” I don’t know what’s going on but we need to check out that camper.”

“You’re right, let’s get a move on it. Someone has to know what happened to her.”

The two officers enter their patrol car and speed south down Route 377 with lights flashing and sirens blaring. About two miles down the road they come upon a thirty foot motor home parked about 200 yards off the side of the road among some light brush. Brad spots the camper’s tracks and follows them up to the rear of the vehicle. He cuts the engine and kills the lights as the two men cautiously step out of the patrol car.

With their hands on their weapons they slowly approach the right side of the motor home. The camper, a Bigfoot 3000 series Class C motor home built around a Ford E-450 chassis, is white with brown stripes and has the side door wide open, broken and hanging off the bottom hinge. The windows along the side of the motor home are also broken. Brad and Cliff exchange knowing glances, silently encouraging one another to proceed with caution.  As the officers approach the camper they notice debris scattered around the campground: torn clothes, broken furniture, and trash.

 

Cliff moves alongside the camper and presses his back against the wall of the motor home on the left side of the open door, Brad approaches from the right. Both men draw their weapons as Brad yells out toward the opening, “This is the police, is there anyone in there?” After a pause he continues, “Is there anyone in there?” after no reply he motions to Cliff as he aims his gun toward the dark interior. Cliff, with both hands on his weapon quickly swings into the motor home as Brad follows.

Inside, to the right there’s a small dinette and the cab of the vehicle with a small bunk bed on top. Dishes and papers cover the floor.  Bloodstains are splattered all over dishes and up the walls in no particular order; some stains are even on the ceiling.  To the left there’s a small bathroom, with a missing door, and a narrow hallway leading to the back bedroom, also splattered with dried blood.  Cliff looks at Brad grimly and mutters through clenched teeth, “Jesus, what the hell happened in here?”

“Looks like one hell of a fight,” Brad replies, his voice barely above a whisper.

The two men slowly and carefully walk around the ransacked area, shuffling through broken dishes and torn papers. After finding nothing more than broken furniture and splattered blood on the walls, Cliff, with his gun held up and pointed, cautiously moves toward the rear of the camper. He moves down the narrow hall with Brad following close behind. They cautiously push the bedroom door open and gasp at the horror within. Lying on a blood-soaked bed are the remains of a white male in his early thirties. The thick stench of blood and death hang heavily in the hot Arizona air.  There are no legs, just a right arm, a head, and most of a badly mangled torso torn from the rib cage down with the spine still intact. The head is disfigured and covered with gashes and scrapes similar to the ones the young woman had. The man’s face is cut up and the left eye is hanging out of its socket by a few veins. The left arm is missing and appears to have been ripped out at the shoulder. In the right hand is a Glock-19 9mm semi-automatic handgun and on the bloodied bed are about fifteen 9mm shells. The room is in a shambles and bullet holes pepper the walls.  Flies swarm the inside of the room and crawl all over the body. Brad and Cliff struggle for breath at the horrific sight. In their line of work both men have seen death but nothing as grisly as this. This body was ripped apart!

Brad’s eyes widen and his mouth drops open in shock, before he quickly whips out a handkerchief and covers his mouth and nose. Cliff steps back from the bed with the back of his hand over his mouth, trying to control a gag reflex. He re-holsters his gun and unclips his radio. “Dispatch, this is car forty-nine, over.” There’s a moment of no reply so he tries again. “Dispatch, this is car forty-nine, over.”

“Go ahead forty-nine,” the voice on the other end answers back.

“Dispatch we have a one eighty-seven on Route 377 about four miles north of Route 277”

“Ten-four forty-nine, one eighty-seven on Route 377”

“Requesting CSI, possible connection with earlier eleven forty-seven.”

“Ten-four forty-nine, notifying CSI, please stand by.”

As Cliff holds the radio Brad re-holsters his gun and moves around the bed, being careful not to disturb anything. On the left nightstand at the head of the bed he finds a photograph and calls his partner over to look at it.

“Looks like this is our Vic’s place alright.”

Cliff looks down at the picture. It’s a photo of a couple in their early thirties sitting under a tree with a little boy. The woman is the same one they found up the road.  She has an air of quiet confidence about her, with excellent posture and an aura of strength.  The man by her side is clearly the same one as the one on the bed—at least, what is left of him. 

“And we have another problem on our hands,” comments Cliff.

“What’s that,” says Brad as he examines the photo closer.

“What’s wrong with that picture, Brad?”

“Ah, shit! Where’s the kid?”

“Right, hopefully he got away like his mother.”

“Cliff, remember what shape she was in?”

“I know. How old do you think he is?”

“Looks about eight or nine.”

Cliff’s jaw tightens and he shakes his head.

“Jesus, Doris has a niece that old.  You remember Tammy?” He shakes his head again and looks away.  As he does so he happens to glance at the floor by the night stand and notices a black rectangular object. 

 “What’s this?” After pulling on rubber gloves Cliff picks up a battered and bloodstained black wallet and looks inside. “Damn!”

“What you got there, partner?”

“Looks like our Vic here is an FBI agent.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Naw, Agent Allen Henderson, look for yourself,” he holds the open wallet for Brad to see. 

There was a photo of a nondescript man in glasses and a white collared shirt.  It appeared to be the same man in the photograph on the nightstand and in the messy pool of blood, bone and the remnants of organs on the bed.

“Man, this case keeps getting weirder and weirder. And did you notice the odor in here?”

Cliff nods his head, “Sure did, vinegar.”

“Just like the woman.”

Cliff’s radio squawks to life, “Car forty-nine, Come in forty-nine.”

“This is forty-nine go ahead,” Cliff answers.

“CSI in route to your location. ETA thirty minutes. Command advises to secure the area.”

“Uh, ten-four dispatch. Please advise command that victim is FBI and we may also have a missing child.”

“Ten-four, forty-nine, will advise.”

“Well looks like we’re stuck here for awhile. Better make the most of it.”

“So much for a quiet holiday.”

Both officers leave the motor home and walk quickly to their patrol car. Cliff snatches several rolls of caution tape out of the car and hands a few to Brad.  The two hurriedly rope off the area around the camper attaching the tape to the trees and brush around the camper. They work quietly while wondering to their selves what could do such mangling damage to the man inside. 

Cliff keeps thinking about the little boy somewhere out there, with a dad who clearly died fighting and a mom who seemed about to lose the fight for her life.

After they finish they return to their vehicle, lock the doors, and wait without another word for the Crime Scene Investigators to arrive.

After about ten minutes another patrol car pulls up behind theirs. Driving it is Officer O’Brien, a young two-year rookie and in the passenger seat is Watch Commander Lieutenant Maddox. The gray haired Maddox is a twenty-year veteran who was part of the investigation of the disappearance of the two missing Hernandez kids that Brad and Cliff worked on. He’s a pot bellied stone-faced bull of a man with a head of white hair who’s known for being tough on the officers under his command but for some reason he seems to have a soft spot for both Brad and Cliff.

After seeing the newcomers exit their vehicle Brad and Cliff exit their own.

“Lieutenant,” says Cliff as he nods to the approaching Maddox.

“Johnson, Williams,” Maddox nods back, “so what do we have?”

Brad and Cliff slowly glance at each other for a moment.

“Well? What is it?” Maddox asks impatiently.

Cliff steps forward, “Lieutenant, we have a real mess in there,” he says as he points toward the camper, “first we found this unconscious woman up the road and then we traced her back here and find a bloody massacre.  We also think there might be a missing little boy! This is the craziest thing we’ve even seen!”

“Alright, alright calm down,” Maddox turns to O’Brien, “Let’s check it out to see how bad is really is.”

Cliff glances over at Brad.

“You want to know how bad it is. Lieutenant it looks like someone put that guy through a wood chipper!” shouts Brad, “I mean he’s missing his whole body from the waist down!”

Maddox and O’Brien give each other a glance of disbelief.

O’Brian looks at Brad and comments, “Come on guys.”

Cliff and Brad just stare at him in stoic silence.

Seemingly unconvinced about the level of savagery reported, Maddox and O’Brien move to enter the motor home to examine the scene for their selves. After barely five minutes the two men hurry out of the camper with a look of repulsion on their faces. O’Brien vomits beside the camper, and then gasps, “Who or what could have done that?”

Maddox, mopping the sweat from his forehead, nose and upper lip looks at Brad and asks, “No other clues? No sign of what happened to the boy?”

The heat was starting to weigh down on them.  The heat and the silence.  Brad removes his blue baseball cap to wipe perspiration from his brow before pulling the hat low over his brown eyes. “No, nothing,” he replies.

“You know the feds are going to be all over this one. They don’t like it when something happens to one of their own.”

“You think it could be some kind of terrorist attack?” asks Cliff.

Maddox looks at Cliff and says, “Don’t know. These days anything’s possible. Remember when those terrorists cut that guy’s head off on the news? You never can tell these days. But what I do know is that we’re going to need more help out here.”

Maddox glances over at Cliff and says, “Johnson, Get on the horn and call Air Search and Rescue we need some eyes in the sky if we’re going to have any chance at finding that kid.”

Just then in the distance a faint siren could be heard growing steadily louder. Maddox stares south down Route 377, “Sounds like the cavalry’s finally here.”

 

 

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Individualized Tactical Surface Vehicle. That was the name the Gray Armor gave to the thing that was a large green metal sphere resting atop a pair of backward bending legs. It was taller than the height of five men standing shoulder on shoulder. Projecting from its spherical portion were twin tubes, which the Gray Armor instructor referred to as being likened to muskets, only the tubes shot fire instead of solid shot.Annan and the four other captives assigned as part of his Squad watched half fearfully, half in wonder as a hatch opened beneath the sphere. They all wore brown, form fitting garments of an odd stretchy material that was utilitarian, yet more comfortable than any clothes woven by human hands. A ladder lowered from the hatch and the Gray Armor climbed into the vehicle. Seconds later, the ITSV’s sphere rotated about. A low, whirring sound emanated from the vehicle as it put one leg in front of the other.It was a good thing the Gray Armor told them ahead of time that he was going to operate the vehicle. Otherwise, any unexpected motion from this behemoth was liable to cause a panic. Of course, three of the Squad members outside of Annan had military experience, which tempered their disquiet.William Ross, the ship captain who had been briefly tortured by the drone, Ahmed, a Hausa cavalry officer, and Kofu, a full time fisherman, part time soldier. There was a woman among them named Femi. Of course she was not a warrior. Yet despite that deficiency she carried herself with as much emotional resilience as the men.Annan got on well with Ahmed and the comely young maiden. Ross was another matter. Thanks to Kofu’s briefing and Annan’s gradually resurging memory, the latter was now aware that he and the bearded white man had a history. Well, any black person who was on the big boat, before the appearance of the Light, had a history with the whites among them.The blacks naturally harbored acrimony toward those who were transporting them to slavery in another land. The whites would not have felt particularly fraternal toward these Africans who rose against them in revolt. Yet, with both groups sharing a common captivity, past grievances were grudgingly put aside.Not so, it seemed, for Ross. Hatred was etched into the former captain’s craggy features with a hammer and chisel. Though Ross was as contemptuously silent toward Annan as he was toward the other Africans, the former captain bore the latter a special animus. Not only had Annan led the shipboard revolt, but he had struggled with the captain, subsequently wresting the man’s weapon out of his grasp. That was after the captain had shot at him and missed…then the Light shone overhead. After that…nothing.Annan cut a malicious eye toward Ross. Too bad I didn’t have time to beat you to death with your own weapon.At first, Annan’s control of the ITSV was typified by stuttering fits and starts. A Gray Armor instructor was squeezed in the cockpit with him, providing sometimes impatient tutelage of the vehicle’s operation.Eventually, Annan came to understand the controls. There was a stick…the Gray Armor called it a control lever…that guided the vehicle’s motion. There was a computer that told him the ITSV’s status. There was a communicator switch that Annan could toggle to talk to other ITSV operators. There were screens below the window that showed everything that was in front, back and on the sides of the ITSV. Finally, there was a second lever with a thumb button that operated the fire weapons.It was all so simple. Soon after, Annan became proficient in piloting the vehicle.Of the operators in his Squad, Ahmed was fastest in learning to pilot the machine. In the land of the Hausa, horses figured prominently in warfare. His expert equestrianism easily carried over to an expert handling of another, radically different type of conveyance.What came as a surprise to Annan and his male Squad mates was Femi’s progress. The woman’s sex had been no hindrance to her ability to operate an ITSV as well as a man.“Your skill amazes me,” Annan praised, watching Femi descend the ladder jutting from the machine’s exit hatch. She had just completed a complex battle maneuver.Femi lowered her eyes. “I’m no more or less of an operator than the others. Well…maybe more.”The Asante’s brow arched in surprise. He broke into a grin when he realized he had been fooled by the woman’s false display of humility.Femi smiled and suddenly the sunsets Annan longed to see on Earth dimmed to dull twinkles next to her beauty. “Your turn,” she reminded. “Perhaps you can match my performance.”“Perhaps?” Annan playfully turned his nose up. It was initially strange for him, competing with a woman. But the more Annan perceived Femi as the competent operator she was training to be, the less her sex mattered to him. Eventually, men and women were going to go war. If they were to survive whatever battlefield they were plopped down in, humans, male and female, needed to fight together.Many of the men continued to be resistant to the idea of women being soldiers.The Gray Armors, of course, cared not for human ideas of gender roles. Their only concern was making sure every human they put in a war machine knew the basics of its operation.The most inveterate chauvinist had no choice but to accept this new Gray Armor-imposed reality.Annan gripped the rungs, threw a wave to Femi and climbed into the cockpit.Annan’s Squad as a whole were catching on quite a bit faster than the other Squads…which was still much too slow for Gray Armors unaccustomed to training blank slates. In many cases, those blank slates recoiled in babbling terror at the very sight of ITSVs. Some refused to board the vehicles and had to be forced into cockpits at the agonizing prodding of drone-issued light beams or Gray Armor force. It wasn’t just the machines that contributed to the humans’ angst, but the strange generality of their circumstances. It remained exceedingly difficult, despite their time on the Battle Fortress, for the humans to grasp the sheer alienness of their surroundings.The whites clung to the familiar comfort of their Christian God to help them cope with these mysteries. The blacks, too, sought solace in their medley of beliefs. Rarely a ‘night’ sailed by when prayers, songs, and all manner of spiritual invocations did not drift mournfully through the level where the humans were confined. And now, confronted with that which their minds continued to have trouble processing, the humans were required to learn skills far removed from the simplicity of their previous lives.The Gray Armors provided no indications of sympathy or understanding of the humans’ plight. All they saw was a species trailing a prodigious learning curve. They would bring these primitives up to speed on an ITSV’s technology as ordered and accept no excuses or failures.
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Resurrection Blues

I hate it when I wake up, dead.

It usually means my day is going downhill from there. I'm a pessimist by nature and you would be one too, if you were working on this rock. Brennan 326. Hot, one hundred and eighty degrees in the shade, a three-gee, metal-rich hellhole. Even in this suit, I can feel the twin suns beating down on me and I weigh over three thousand pounds. The all-encompassing, amniotic, shock-absorbing, nutrient-rich, resurrection fluid of my exo-suit tastes like hot bacon grease and is always the worst part of waking up. Taste bacon? You've been dead. When you've been alive awhile, you can almost forget about it.

I've been here for over 2 years. I've died, let me check, 9 times this year, a new personal best. Much better than last years dismal 27 deaths. The Resurrection Corp's job is to stop the invasion of our mining colonies in this sector by the Dalrothi, an intelligent machine species from outside of our galaxy. They take over our automated facilities and ignore us. I don't think they even consider us living or sentient beings, by their standards. When the job looks as if it will take more resources than the Imperium is willing to spare, they don't send large armies, they send a surgical strike. Superhuman, nearly indestructible, but the most dangerous thing is that we can be killed and it doesn't take unless you destroy us completely.

We are a self-renewing army. The ultimate expression of the man-sized weapon technology of the Imperium. As long as twenty percent of me and my suit remains, our combined nanites will gather up materials from the environment and rebuild me; If I suffer a rail-gun wound, an hour, lost limb, two hours, missing head, 3 days. I have been completely rebuilt while I was here. Every bit of me. Every memory, nightmare, explosion... Sometimes, I think that I can remember other things, planet thoughts, hearing Brennnan 326 in my dreams. I am composed almost completely of the atoms of this world now.

Our dropship was shot down by a hot plasma cannon which nearly vaporized all of the ship and part of me, from the waist down. It was... unexpected. I lay dead on the planet's surface for three months. The Dalrothi were known for using slug or kinetic-kill weapons for planet defense. I guess the lab boys were right, they can learn. There were twenty of us. We could've taken the planet in a week, with no permanent losses. Alone would take a little longer.

There was never a thought of not completing the mission. I didn't know what this facility made and I didn't care; likely secret and above my pay grade. The auto-factory sends whatever it mines from this planet into orbit by gravity sling, a magnetic railgun system, to await pickup by Imperium transports that come periodically through the system. When the factory stopped transmitting, teams were sent to investigate, no one returned; that's how we drew this shit detail.

As I approached, two dozen of two thousand sentry drones remained. I lost fifteen lives and two years to get here. After I sat for an hour and regrew my left arm, (damn, that hurt) I got up to see exactly what twelve hundred square miles of factory looked like from the inside. The facility's cargo entrance was easy to open, peeling the door back barely caused me to breathe hard. Inside, the place was spotless, like so many of the technologies of the Imperium, nanomachines used every drop of matter for building something and the positive side effect is a shiny, dust-free environment. I walked for two days, across mirrored floors, before I reached a control center. There was no hurry, I had already taken two years to get here. If this facility were high on the list, another team would have been dispatched. As long as my transponder worked, they would not send another. The Imperium was large and patient.

Having arrived at the control center, the Dalrothi tech was easy to dismantle and I performed an analysis on the hardware. After this, until they upgraded again, we can disrupt their tech planet-side, with a tailored electromagnetic pulse and not even stop on hell-holes like this one. I found the last hot plasma cannon on the roof of the facility and after resting and regrowing my right leg, destroyed it. Optimistic, I reasoned I might get to be outside of this suit for a year or two before returning to duty. After dismantling and storing the specifications for the Dalrothi tech, I found the materials which were not being sent into space and re-calibrated the computers for business as usual.

Once I was ready to get off Brennan 326, I was shocked to find not a single transport ship, not a shuttle, not even an escape pod. Oh. This was a robotic facility; no need for anyone to fly or escape. They flew in on their own and left that way. Until now, I never even considered how I was going to get out of here. I could attempt to damage my transponder, except it would have to be a permanent solution otherwise it would repair itself. A new thought; vaporization, hmmm. Then there would be no need for a pickup. I ruminated on escaping my private hell.

A day later, I realized my mistake. I could get off this planet by riding the gravity sling. Yes, it would generate more than two thousand gee forces to propel its load into orbit, turning me, inside of my suit, and in less than a second, into a fine boneless soup. When the planet indicated that the facility was back online, they would send a transport to pickup the equipment and my boneless corpse. I should wake up in about two months when the transport cargo ship arrives. What's one more death for the road? I really hate bacon.

995 words
Thaddeus Howze © 2010, All Rights Reserved
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A Review of Warriors of the Four Worlds!

Check out this very thoughtful review by superlative filmmaker and writer H. Wolfgang Porter!"Warriors of the Four Worlds" by Ronald T. Jones is the Sci-fi Adventure/Drama about the interaction between three interstellar species and how their relationship collapsed with tragic consequences. Humans, Vingins and Zirans are three species which could not be more different in their cultural let alone physical make-ups. Throw in disparate philosophies for living and you have a potentially volatile mixture. However, the relationship lasts for hundreds of years as the pacifistic Vingin are a technologically advanced species whose symbiotic relationship with their predatory Human and Ziran allies are the glue holding things together.The story opens during the final phase of a genocidal war in which the Human Race is engaged in what they do best, killing. The enemy, a murderous interstellar species called the Tacherins are on the verge of being anihillated after attacking Vingin space. Having found Humanity to be an implacable and merciless foe, the Tacherins make ready to fight to the last of their species. More than willing to give the enemy what they want is Commander Lev Gorin. Gorin is the standard 'hard as nails with a conscious' commander readers have come to know and love. However, unlike prominent members of this archetype Lev Gorin has no problem with genocide if it will protect his species and allies.Under the Commander's leadership, the war reaches its inevitable conclusion. but before Humanity can claim final victory, their allies the Zirans suddenly take the field crushing the last of Tacherin resistance. With the war ended, Humanity's great war machine is ordered dismantled and their millions of warriors are sent back to the four Human Worlds to begin the peace.Yet, the Ziran's military force not only stands to despite the lack of an enemy they have been secretly building their forces. This information comes to the now retired Lev Gorin who is the CEO of a successful security business. However, civilian life has taken the edge off the former Commander and he ignores it. Yet when a human hit team shows up on his manicured lawn, Lev Gorin is drawn into a dark world of intrigue where human fanatics pave the way for the end of humanity at Ziran hands! With just a rag-tag group of former military men and women, Gorin must convince the Human Race to rise in their own defense before it's too late.Initially, Wo4W seemed to be yet another pat 'Humans run roughshod over an inept enemy' type of story. The initial battle sequences though detailed and exciting, seemed all was too easy. Humans had the superior tech and cunning which equaled to a bloodbath on the enemy side. Yet, that wasn't the case.As the story unfolded, an immediate sense of menace undercut the victory parties and orgies engaged in by the victorious Humans. It became clear all was not well after a meeting with the Ziran General, the Vingin Representative and the then Commander Gorin. Distain and jealousy reeked from the General and as a reader, I could tell right off no good would come from it. When it came down to the Zirans attacking the now disarmed humanity, there was no surprise.That Humanity was able to mount an immediate though much reduced offense, lacked surprise either. Though this lent to the pat feeling, it didn't detract from the story because there were plenty of clues presented to let the reader know Humanity wasn't rolling over completely just because they were told to! When the conflict begins in earnest, initially the Humans again have the advantage despite being significantly outnumbered. However, that doesn't last long after humans themselves begin to derail the resistance!From there, Commander Gorin's 'easy days' come to an end. Gone is the pat feeling and in enters the 'are we going to survive this at all?' stage. Grim realities of war, losses of family and comrades begin to take their toll on all the characters as humanity's chances of surviving genocide dwindle.Ronald T. Jones has created a gritty, 'boots-on-the-ground' war epic with intrigue and a thoughtful approach to a warrior's journey towards his own sense of humanity. Warriors of the Four Worlds is without doubt a page-turner and more than worthy of a trip to the small or large screen.H. Wolfgang Porter
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Hayward's Reach

From the ansible memoires of Exalted Scout, Glendale Mokoto, Hero of the Exodus Wars and the Fall of Earth. These are an amalgam of the earliest recordings before he was presumed lost one hundred years ago.

 

Two hundred years ago, I was nothing special. I had no extraordinary abilities or talents. I was not blessed with superhuman strength like members of the New Order, genetically manipulated to be the perfect human specimens, trained and bred to be the ultimate warrior protectors of the human race.

 

I did not augment my mind with sentient mechanical intelligence like the Cognoseti, who became human predictors of the future of man. It was their wisdom that discovered the Earth's greatest hidden secret; that we were not the first creatures on Earth to evolve into sentience. These human machine hybrids would later house the first true machine-descended intelligences in human history.

 

I did not mingle my DNA with those of animal species to garner advantages lost by the development of our bigger brains. The Transformed, whose malleable DNA allows them to absorb genetic traits of other species, would lead our Humanity in the exploration of new worlds after we lost our home in the Sol System.

 

You see, I was just a baseline human, good genes, nice teeth, good skin, and until it fell out in my fiftieth year, a nice head of hair. Two hundred years ago, I was also the most celebrated hero; indeed, I was the last hero of the Exodus of Man. They named a starship after me, they named a continent after me, they named thousands of children after me. And to me that is a strange thing, seeing how I did not actually survive the experience.

 

To ponder this, and to explain why you are now able to know any of this, you have to know a bit more about Old Earth.

 

I remember the stink of the war. It got up into your nose and never left. You could smell the burning flesh, the expended rounds, the fear, exhilaration, the bloodlust, the sheer terror of the Henrenki boiling up out of the ground in every major city on the planet.

 

I remember the fighting, the endless fighting, the bravery of those young men, their ceaseless dying, wheat before the scythe. When we retreated, the Henrenkai came, wave after wave, like the ocean filling in the beach of our dead. I remember them swarming over our positions, and even with machine guns blazing, bullets tearing into their nacreous, resilient flesh, they kept coming.

 

Things looked hopeless until the New Men appeared, with their mysterious talk about the Art of War, talk of the brush strokes of their weapons, their mastery of the battle-dance. In those days, all we knew of war was the spastic struggling of the uninitiated to battle. We had been too long at peace. Our struggles for survival, even before He came, all but absorbed our attention. But even after generations of peace, we were still a warlike species and returned reluctantly to the field of battle. Every man woman and child was armed because this was a war without quarter and without mercy.

 

When the Cognoseti revealed His existence, He rose from the oceans, the Ancient Enemy of all who live in our galaxy. We did not know He was legendary. We did not know what scars He and His kind had swept across the face of the galactic empire. We did not know what He wanted, only that He destroyed all that we had, with malice and forethought. We did learn one thing: when He rose from the Pacific Ocean, we realized the nature of our enemy, He had the might of an entire world, buried within our own.

 

Mechanically-sentient, He created weapons like the Henrenkai from His very flesh, the organo-mechanical body in which He fell to Earth billions of years ago and hid in the iron core of our planet. He hid because He was pursued by the greatest species our galaxy had ever spawned. He hid and waited until they passed away or forgot; we are not sure which. When He arose again, He had been all but forgotten by everyone in the galaxy. How could they not; nearly three billion of our years had passed while he slumbered.

 

So we were forced to fight Him on our own, tiny simians against a god-like machine who had tried to enslave an entire galaxy. He fought us on land, sea, air, and even in space. What could we do against an enemy so incredibly powerful? He destroyed a third of the human race and had barely awakened. We lost all hope.

 

Then we received a signal from space. It appeared on every communication band, every wavelength, every technology, all at once. If you were watching anything, listening to anything, it appeared and told you to be ready. A prophecy had sent them back to us, and it was now time to leave our world. They told us to gather as much of our world as we could carry. We did not understand, but we gathered our resources, every animal, every plant, every insect we thought we could find and catalog. We even set aside entire islands, marked with force fields to make them stand out.

 

We had no idea of what the Sjurani were capable back then. We did not know what to expect, but their message gave us hope, so we fought on.

 

I remember the first time I saw their ships. They blotted out the sun. We fought a retreating battle to their designated pick up points, and they gathered us up with tractor beams, entire cities, whole islands. It was rumored they took the entire African continent. They landed in their reptilian regalia and fought alongside us, as terrifying as the Henranki in their own way. Garishly colored in silks and metal, reptilian, festooned with gem-encrusted scales, loud, large, and boisterous; think of Old Earth fraternity boys armed with plasma cannons and rocket launchers and you will know something of the Rex, a warrior-breed of the Sjurani. They helped us hold the line against the Ancient Enemy while we fled. They claimed they were dinosaurs who had been born on Earth millions of years in the past. We were too desperate to care. And too foolish to realize why that was more important than we knew at the time.

 

Evacuation took two weeks, and I and my battle-brothers stayed and fought until the very last ships were leaving the planet. Hundreds of millions were moved to ships every day, each scarred with the loss of someone or something precious.

 

The Sjurani told us He was soon to waken. Once that happened, we would stand no chance at all. The Ancient Enemy had only one agenda, and that was leaving the Earth. And we could never allow that. Our planet's gravity well was the only thing that prevented Him from opening a gateway to another Universe.

 

But we could take the fight to Him: A suicide mission. We fought to reach the Ancient Enemy and infiltrated Him with the help of Sjurani technology. We carried into Him an antimatter weapon, created by the Sjurani, with the force of a billion Hiroshima bombs. A weapon far more powerful than anything Humanity could ever create. His arrogance in being shielded from outside, made him believe he was invulnerable. Once inside His armored shell, we could use short range teleportation to penetrate deep into His neural network. Three groups entered the alien machine. Even if all three were successful, they told us our weapons would not kill Him. But we could wound Him, perhaps even lobotomize Him, for a time.

 

This would allow the two hundred million humans who agreed to stay behind to cover the final retreat. The West Coast of North America was destroyed in this final battle. The Rocky Mountains are all that remain of that coastline. One billion humans left the Earth in that two week period with some of the most terrifying fighting ever seen in any war, any conflict.

 

Once the antimatter was placed, I, the last survivor of three dozen of the finest warriors of two races, made my way to the surface, killing everything in my path. I waited. The never-ending supply of Henrenkai continued to boil forth from the Ancient enemy. In that last moment before detonation, I lay down my exhausted weapon and the Henrenkai stopped, confused by the act.

 

With seconds remaining, I assumed the battle occurring in space had interrupted my teleport, and I resolved myself to dying, free of anger and the corruption of war. I vowed never to wage war again. My death would keep my promise.

 

I opened my arms and the battle-enraged Henrenkai charged me, their razor sharp talons poised to shred flesh from bones. In those final seconds, time slowed as I watched them. Close to me, I studied them in a way I had never before. Their anatomy was a marvel: Bones of carbon fullerenes, talons sharper than the sharpest steel. Wide, predator-set eyes, excellent for determining the distance to me, their prey. I could smell their hot breath, a cinnamon overtone, and I closed my eyes, ready for death. No fighting, no resistance. I felt the antimatter as it detonated. A shockwave swept through me. I could feel it in my very atoms.

 

Suddenly, I could see the blast wave of energy and could feel my atoms snatched away protectively within the teleport sheath. I felt my body dying as the waves of antimatter, converted to gamma rays and cosmic radiation, were transformed into the most powerful kind of destruction in our universe, in the perfect release, the ultimate annihilation of matter. No man can ever say he sat in the heart of a star and lived to tell others of it. Neither could I. It would have been breathtaking if I had a breath to take.

 

In that eternal second, I violated causality and was in two places at one time. I was trapped in the containment field, experiencing a quantum reality, existing in two places and in neither. I was onboard the ship in a viewing chamber teleported, so they thought, to allow me, with the remnants of my species, to see the death of my world. Such a weapon would destroy the Earth as we knew it. I watched, both detached at a distance and intimately aware of the death throes of my home planet.

 

For a moment, as I violated causality, I could be anywhere and any when; I moved through time and space, and I could see the Ancient Enemy's arrival on Earth three billion years ago, fleeing, He crashed into a small planet in an unidentified star system with a small yellow star. I could feel His terror, I could feel His near dissolution, His flesh, burned with a fire like a solar flare, tearing His substance apart. He submerged Himself into our planet, and the rocky surface extinguished those flames and His terror subsided. He sank into our world, and His screams grew quieter, until after an eon, He slept and forgot.

 

As I stood there in the middle of the greatest energy release since His arrival, I realized He would not die. He would survive just as He did before. Our work was almost in vain. His massive, nearly indestructible bulk would provide one benefit. Those who remained behind would not be wiped out from the weapon. They would be stranded on a world still trying to kill them. The thought was terrible, and the last thing I remembered.

 

I was the last human to leave the Earth two hundred years ago, an unwitting and unwilling hero of a war we all but lost.

 

I woke several years later on our way to Toranor, a system of Gaian super-worlds created by a race of highly-advanced beings called The Precursors. No other race in the galaxy has ever come close to their level of technological capability. They were as far beyond even our Sjurani benefactors as we were beyond ants.

 

The Toranor star system had trillions of sentients living in harmony in what was called the jewel of the Corvan Empire. Now homeless, Humanity and the Sjurani were offered a place on one of their lesser worlds. I knew I would never call this place home. I had seen too much, done too much. There would be nothing for me here.

 

All that I valued died with Earth.

 

I asked what a single man could do in an Empire of sentients with magnificent technologies, making our human achievements, even in the year of our Lord 2475, seem like children's toys? How could I distinguish myself?

 

By providing the one thing all Empires need: New boundaries. I became a Scout. I was told the role of a Scout was a solitary one. I would be provided a robot companion if I desired. My job would be to map stars toward the center of the galaxy for planets capable of being terraformed by the Mariovel at some point in the future. I was promised the knowledge of the Empire at my fingertips and all the time of my life to read and learn it.

 

It was then the Sjurani revealed to me that I had died during the teleportation. They had never tried to teleport during an antimatter explosion. No one ever had. My mind was able to be reconstructed, but my body had died. They took my mind and placed it within a robotic shell that mimicked my own form so well that I was never aware of the change at any time.

 

I was angered at first. I walked around for almost a year, on Galtan II, our new home, knowing something was different, but not knowing what. Galtan II was like all of the worlds of Toranor, beautiful, diverse, fantastic. The knowledge that all of these worlds were created by a sentient species that was not God, boggled the imagination. Imagine a star system with twenty habitable worlds. The knowledge would turn our ideas of science and religion on their ears.

 

Galtan II boasted a forest that spanned the entire equatorial band of the planet, one giant forest whose myriad trees were connected by their root system into one organic supercomputer, a single hive mind which could separate segments of itself to communicate with other forms of life. One of the most amazing world-minds in this part of the empire. Yes, there were others. Since the Botani did not choose to live in the colder parts of the planet, we were offered the other two thirds of the world to live responsibly on. With the technology of the Sjurani supporting our own, we could be good neighbors.

 

The Sjurani told me that what they did, they did for love of my heroic sacrifice. They created an entire technology around saving my life. I learned later they held my psychic resonance in an energy field that consumed the energy of a world for years. I felt guilty once I learned what was done on my behalf.

 

I learned that my condition, once successful, because of my heroic stature, spurred a whole division of baseline humans to make the transition to the robotic. We were called The Transcended. They gave up their flesh to become the first robotic-human hybrids. Were there consequences? Certainly, but none of them ever considered it an unfair trade, except perhaps for me. I would have liked to have had the choice.

 

When I was appointed a Scout, the Corvan empire made a starship for me; since I was no longer a living organic, they made something faster than had ever been created before. I named it Hayward's Reach after a small seaside town where I lived the quiet life of a writer before the end of the world came for us all. Before activating the ship, the greatest generals, admirals, and Sjurani Rex came to see me off. They said wonderful things, heroic things about me and my sacrifices. I didn't listen.

 

All I could hear was the loneliness. No, the alone-ness that space offered me. I thanked them. I climbed aboard my ship and synchronized my ansible to an ansible station here on Galtan II which would relay my reports. Since an ansible could only be paired once, something about quantum entanglement, it was the most critical thing I could do unless I wanted to communicate relativistically.

 

My pilot was a Conscentia, a sentient intelligence housed in the mechanical body of a woman. She was the first of her kind, a mechanical version of myself. I started life as a man and became a machine. She started a machine and became a woman.

 

Her name was Pele. She named herself after the mythical goddess of the legendary Hawaiian Islands that are no more. When I asked her about her name, she said once she had studied human history. The tale of the Hawaiians fascinated her, and she had taken it upon herself to study all of the notes on Earth's Polynesian cultures. Our ship was equipped with a distillation of all of the knowledge of the human race. We would also have an upstream of new ideas and achievements when time and bandwidth permitted. When I asked her why she was coming with me, she said since she would never get to see Hawaii, the next best thing was to discover a place like it somewhere else.

 

She arranged our path through the empire and indicated we would reach the edge of the Empire in as little as three jumps and three months using their Gate system. After that, we would be on our own, moving at approximately thirty-two times the speed of light. It would take us three thousand years to cross the galaxy. We would be taking the scenic route, flying through as many star- dense systems as possible. We were the fastest things in the Empire, streaking away from all that I knew, and I was glad to be doing it. It was unlikely we would survive the journey across the galaxy. The Sjurani estimated we might live for four hundred years with careful maintenance. We promised to change our oil regularly. Pele laughed. The Sjurani just looked quizzically at me.

 

Sitting down, I called up a data-screen. The words were queued up from earlier in the day, waiting for me. Pele was sitting at the nav station monitoring the ebb and flow of the aether. I read out loud as would become a tradition for the two of us in the decades to come: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair..."  

 

I had always wanted to read A Tale of Two Cities, and at that moment, it seemed appropriate. I never had the time before. Taking my companion's hand, this new season of light illuminated our souls as we fled into the core of the galaxy, to see things no man had seen before. I, once being the most ordinary of men, had transcended the human experience for something never done before. It was, indeed, the best of times.

 

Hayward's Reach © Thaddeus Howze, 2011, All Rights Reserved

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