Saboteur

by Jeff C. Carter

Facilities Admin Kelix Tremonti looked at the report on her desk and rubbed her temples.  The nascent undersea vent beneath Port Xenia was mirrored in her rumbling stomach.  She popped an antacid into her mouth and swallowed, dropping it into the scalding rift below. 

Why hadn’t she taken the job at Zirconia? She thought for the millionth time.  She ran through her mantra of self justification; Zirconia practically runs itself.  An Admin can’t make a name for herself there.  Port Xenia is a work in progress, a place where a Facilities Admin could build a career.  She shook her head in disgust.  If that seafloor vent erupted it would cut more than just her career short.

“Mr. Tolliver to see you,” her secretary announced through the intercom. 

Tremonti dumped the report into a drawer and sat up straight. “Send him in.”

The door opened to reveal Mr. Tolliver, a tall, well built man with dark skin and a glowing smile. Everything about him seemed to shine, from the exquisite fabric of his luxury suit to the polished jewelry on his fingers. 

“Mr. Tolliver, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said.

“Please, call me Anansi,” he purred.

“I hope your trip was a pleasant one.  Is this your first visit to Port Xenia?”

“As a matter of fact it is, and I had no idea how charming it would be.  Such potential!”  he gushed.

Good, he wants to get straight to business, Tremonti thought. “We like to think so.  I am eager to hear more about your group’s proposal.”

Mr. Tolliver beamed his winning smile and gestured towards the door. “Might we tour your great city while we talk?”

Tremonti stood and reached for her hard hat out of habit.  She looked at Mr. Tolliver’s magnificent suit and hair and decided to leave the helmets behind. She led them in a circuitous route, avoiding the passageways with water stained walls, the dank chambers of stale air and the alcoves dotted with stubborn pale blossoms of mold.

“We believe that Port Xenia is well positioned for development.  It is already the entertainment destination for nearby Trinity.  Why isn’t it drawing in people from everywhere?” he asked.  “After all, you can deliver an experience that Zirconia simply can’t.”

“What did you have in mind?” she asked.

They approached the cool undulating light of the first view port. “Port Xenia has the highest per capita angel sightings.”

Tremonti barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes. “That’s debatable.  Your group…they’re not affiliated with the Blue Liberation Front, are they?” She steered Mr. Tolliver away from the view port so that he would not see the grey seeps of sewage that occasionally welled up on deep sea currents.

“Certainly not, but they make some good points, don’t they?  The oceans belong to the angels.  That’s what drives tourism.  Imagine a system of tunnels running through the city where angels swam freely among the citizens.  Think of the industry that would promote.”

A burning wave shot up to the back of Tremonti’s throat and she choked it down.  Was this guy a crackpot? “That is certainly…ambitious.  The engineering challenges would be tremendous.  The amount of money...”

Mr. Tolliver cut her off. “We want to make Port Xenia the jewel of Eclectia, a place where people can have a true native experience in comfort and style.  It will be an embassy for Avenir, a university for the wizards, and the only tourist destination in the Ceti system.  We need someone who knows this city like the back of her hand, someone with vision and ambition.  What do you say?”

They stood before the wide glass wall of the observation deck and bathed in the blue green light of the seemingly infinite expanse beyond.  Glittering submarine traffic darted in all directions, a jumble of shining submersibles and bioluminescent creatures.

“We’d need to seriously reinforce the outer hull before we began restructuring anything inside.”

“I’m sure you know what’s best.  Do we have a deal?” Mr. Tolliver smiled and extended a hand.

Maybe these wackos will be good for something before the money runs dry, she thought.  She shook his hand and felt her stomach finally settle down. “It’s a deal.  If you don’t mind waiting here for a moment, I’ll check on our shuttle for the tour outside.”

Mr. Tolliver nodded and waited until Tremonti was gone.  He pulled a handset from his wrist that crackled briefly as it sent a short signal burst up to Avenir station. He dropped the winning smile from his face, discarding it like a garment no longer needed.  The warbling tone in his ear announced that an encrypted channel was now open. 

“It’s done.”

Leviathan

by Jeff Carter -

An ominous sound rang through the cramped cockpit as the submersible fell away from Port X. Dr. Kwame Singh’s stomach trembled with vertigo and anticipation. He looked up through the synthetic diamond window for a final glimpse of the known world and saw nothing but the blizzard of shrimp feeding off sewage.

The bathysphere sank like a rock and his pulse began to race. Everything was happening so quickly. His ‘Evolutionary Theology’ had spread through a subsection of the Wizards like wildfire. Their methods were sloppy yet their results were stunning. The Syncretization project fused the remaining saints of Ancient Earth to the whales and angels of Eclectia. A less auspicious experiment ended with a group of drunken bug hunters throwing someone into a volcano to appease the goddess Pele. Evo-Theo took the blame and the Peace Council was considering a moratorium on the entire field.

A siren rang as he sank towards the point of no return. The shell of the bathysphere groaned under the pressure. The life support systems whined under the volcanic heat.

The Wizards of Avenir were on Approach, hoping to make some weak and fleeting contact with the Angels. No one knew what type of spectrum the Angels broadcast on, but Dr. Singh bet it was still subject to the physics of signal attenuation. He was determined to go straight to the source, even if that meant plunging into the Black Water.

Violent currents of supercritical fluids slammed the submersible with scorching jets of chemicals. Kwame struggled to keep his head from smashing against the hull. Sweat soaked through his clothes and he struggled to breathe the thickening air.

He wasn’t the only one searching for signals underwater, but he knew something that they didn’t know. He had learned from the miners of Sheba how to boost receiver sensitivity. A mind under great stress received the clearest signals. Something ripped loose from the sub with a shriek. The external lights imploded and the power inside died.

He drifted silently through the darkness, staring at a view bleaker than the void outside Avenir. A speck of light flickered in the distance. It flew towards him like a torpedo and it was getting larger every second. Kwame had seen holos of angels but this thing was massive and it had vastly more limbs.

The creature flared open like a supernova, fiery red tentacles shooting out to engulf the bathysphere. The walls of the sub shrieked and Kwame shrank against the hull, trapped and helpless. A throbbing red glow filled the ship. Something pressed against the window. It was a bottomless black eye, piercing him with its gaze.

A vision was injected into his mind—Rudra Tandava-Armageddon-Ragnarok! He felt the seas boil! Mile high whips of lava lashed the sky! The whole world burned and shattered into cold and merciless vacuum!

Kwame screamed and opened his eyes. The creature was gone. Power returned groggily throughout the sub. As the ship limped upwards he felt the vision singed into his mind. The devastation had felt so vivid, so real. Had he received a genetic memory of the destruction of Sheba, or a warning of what was to come?

Evolution

by Jeff Carter -

Dr. Kwame Singh basked in the shimmering blue light and felt the pulse of ocean currents against his skin. Even though he was 30 km beneath the surface of Sheba, he felt as though he were in the oceans of Eclectia. The miners had used the blue mineral pectolite to gild the walls of their cathedral with every color of the sea. The rhythm of the waves came from a circle of drummers beating a slow and somber cadence. Since a lifetime of inhaling grit and ash had rendered them unable to sing, they offered up prayers with drums made from the shells of giant sea snails.

He thought of his frustrating time in dank Port Xenia. The study of Theological Drift had come to a halt around the same time as the Avenir. His parents and grandparents had made their contributions, charting the fracture, conglomeration, and slow dissolution of Ancient Earth religions. The long journey across the void had opened space for a spiritual Cambrian explosion. Kwame intended to capture it by pioneering a new field called Evolutionary Theology.

The colonists of Port Xenia were wistful about the so-called ‘angels’ they rarely glimpsed through the portholes, but there was nothing ecstatic or transcendent in their middling culture. The first true believers he met were the miners on their pilgrimage from Sheba. Their hair was unkempt and their skin was like leather, but their eyes were tranquil and electric. These men and women had contact with the ‘angels’ more frequently and intensely than Dr. Singh had ever observed.

He had followed the miners back to Sheba and discovered the cathedral that they had built by hand. A bright light carved across the ceiling, interrupting his reverie. Supervisor Braun was stomping towards him, his helmet light glaring. “Third shift is starting. Break it up.”

As the miners shuffled out they genuflected to the statues of patron saints that had been streamlined with fins and curving fluke tails. The supervisor looked at his chronometer and scowled. “Isn’t there an abbey topside for this? If they don’t spend less time banging drums and more time working, the technology we depend upon will fail.”

Dr. Singh smiled with dawning understanding. “They risk freezing vacuum and hellish inferno every day to feed their families. Do you really think it is just technology that they depend on?”

Day is Dead

by Jim Tesla -

The day is dead, thought Tane. He’d killed it—routinely and without flinching—like he did every day, every single day that foisted itself upon him now, like a whore set on draining off life. There it lay, the day, exhausted, behind him, a memory of pulses and feelings and at least one big mistake. It was a “one big mistake” that hung there, in his recent memory, hung and wouldn’t let go …

Tane jabbed at the fire, added a log. Some called him a hunter; others, a fool.

Port X was home to him, but no, this was home—volcanoes silhouetted against a yellow-grey horizon, ash puffing under his feet with each forward step, him scrounging for enough water to stay alive, just stay alive. He stroked his gun.

A fire had spread today through a forest not far from here. The crackling had alerted Tane while he slept, the crackling and the high-pitched screams. He’d watched it burn, spear in hand, ready for whatever ran toward him from the trees. He’d gotten three giant beetles and a centipede the size of a python, and taken them to the drop-off point, one at a time. It had taken most of the day.

When he got paid, he’d go to Adagio, not Port X, and buy ammunition. It wasn’t good to be seen in Port X anymore, and it wasn’t good to be without ammo. The hunter was still the hunted—the predator, the prey.

He’d grown more capable and fearless since starting this job, and he nursed a grudge. It was the grudge that set him apart. Like most hunters in this dag-forsaken land, he’d made a few enemies. And he knew how to use a gun.

The day was dead.