Mr. Tolliver’s Offer

by Edward M. Erdelac -

Kes stared at the disease-ridden corpse with its alien parasite. He practically rubbed his hands together. So much to be done. So much to study and record. This would make his career.

He was so intent on the body that he almost didn’t notice the door open.

Damn! He had to be more careful. He should’ve locked it. He drew the sheet over Croix hastily and turned to regard the well dressed, tall, dark skinned man who entered.

“Who’re you?” Kes demanded. “This room’s quarantined. You’ve got to leave.”

“My name’s Tolliver, Dr. Kes. And let me preface any further discussion by telling you I know who is under that sheet, and what is within them.”

Kes’ stomach bottomed out.

“What?”

“You’re a talented physician to be toiling down here for the masses and the ZMB,” Tolliver said, strolling across the room to the bed. “I could list your qualifications, but you yourself know your skills are being underutilized, patching up brawling kelp farmers and Enforcers and checking immigrants for syphilis. Your area of expertise is research. Not much call for it here though, is there? Until yesterday, that is.”

Tolliver stared at Kes. The covered body of Croix was between them now. Tolliver reached out and lifted the sheet, staring impassively at the putrid body beneath, which was spotting the white coverlet with yellow grease as the various pustules on the skin burst of their own accord.

He replaced the sheet.

“Do you think the ZMB is going to let you keep sole credit for your discovery? What if I could provide you with state of the art equipment in a private lab space offworld, with unlimited funding for your research?”

“Who are you?”

“I represent parties interested in preventing an impending health crisis of a highly sensitive nature, doctor. They feel they could use someone with your knowledge, especially as it pertains to hitherto unknown lifeforms.”

“What? What kind of a health crisis?”

“I’m only at liberty to speak about it should you say yes to my offer, Doctor. If you do, I can have you and your discovery offworld within the hour.”

“What about Inspector Considine and the Peace Council?”

“Not your concern, nor mine either.”

“What if I refuse?” Kes asked, looking sideways at Tolliver.

Tolliver frowned and clasped his hands behind his back.

“If you refuse….”

Kes held up his hand. A smile broke across his face. “Never mind. I’m being dramatic, I guess. You’re pushing the right buttons, Mr. Tolliver. I’ll have questions of course, but….yes. Yes, I’m interested. I want this.”

“Very good, Dr. Kes,” said Tolliver, slipping the tiny black stingpistol back into his sleeve behind his back. “Let’s talk arrangements.”

Visit Home II—No Picnic

by H. A. Titus - 

"Hey, boss." Reeder poked his head into the cramped office.

Darcy raised one groomed eyebrow. "Make it quick, Reeder."

"Look, I gotta go topside for a while. Family stuff." He hoped Darcy wouldn't ask exactly what kind of 'family stuff'. People generally got creeped out when he told them about his brother's…disease…even when Reeder didn't mention that he thought Danyel was possessed.

Darcy sighed, shuffled through the stacks of paper on his desk. He tapped his computer screen. "I don't know. I don't have many people to fill your shifts."

"Please? It's kind of an emergency." He hated how he sounded on the verge of begging.

"Is someone sick?"

"Yeah, my brother. He's not doing well at all." Not a lie. Not a whole truth, either.

Darcy sighed. "All right. And before you go—" He flicked a message at him. "One more delivery for the wizard Galileo. The sender specifically asked for you. Have fun on your trip."

Reeder glanced at the address. Galileo, Wizard's District, in the same writing as the last time. "Oh yeah. It'll be a real picnic."

More Bedtime Stories

by Greg Mitchell -

Dressler awoke on rock. Vision blurry, he heard the drip, drip, drip of water echoing in a cavern. Above, he glimpsed wet stalactite, glistening with reflected ethereal light.

Am I dead?

His head ached, but his thoughts were his own. Private once more, as they ought to be. The monster in his mind was dead—he could feel that. He’d done it. He’d killed the blasted devil.

But where am I?

Groggy, he stood, covered in cuts and bruises, sopping wet. Looking about, he saw he was in a cave, a giant lagoon at his feet. Was he still underwater? Had he floated up into some kind of air pocket after the blast? Kneeling to the edge, he peered into the water—

“Ah!”

A host of fish-like “angels” floated just below the surface, all of them staring back at him. He fell back on the seat of his pants, backing away. “No, no!”

{Wait} a soft voice implored him psychically, patient and kind.

“Where am I? What do you want?”

{You were foolish to come here}

“Yeah,” he said at length, standing again, feeling in no immediate danger. “I know. I’m…sorry.”

{We guard the Trench. There are many secrets in the depths that man should not know. We were trying to warn you, when you evaded us}

“It was a mistake…I didn’t know…”

{The dark can be deceptive and alluring. We understand how weak you can be, more than you do, it seems}

At the time Dressler was about to take offense, the angel’s soft voice soothed his heart. {But we also see how strong you can be. You have killed a terrible foe. And you did it at great personal sacrifice}

“How did you know?” he asked, then shrugged it off. “Forget it. I don’t want to know.”

{You have impressed us—one most in particular} A lithe feminine hand emerged from the lit waters. In its scaly palm, a tiny mess of tentacles, dark green in color, and squirming comfortably.

“What is that?”

{He doesn’t have a name. He believes in being defined by one’s actions. By your act of bravery, he recognizes you as kin. As family}

“He…thinks we’re related?”

{Of a sort. You would sacrifice your life to save your people from a wayward of our kind. He would like to return your generosity}

“I don’t understand.”

{Take him to your child. Fix him to her breathing port—her mouth. He will breathe into her. She will be cured of her ailment. He would consider it an honor to die so that his kin might live}

Dressler stepped forward. “Wait, die?”

{This act will be his last. He can save her, but he will die in the process}

“I-I can’t,” he said, painfully.

{But you must. That is what family does and he considers you family now. Do not dishonor him}

Dressler focused on the writhing thing in the outstretched hand, gently writhing, waiting for him to accept its sacrifice.

Carefully, he extended a hand in gratitude.

#

“Daddy? Tell me about the angels. The ones who saved me. And Crazy!”

Dressler pulled the covers to Edilyn’s neck, red light from the small bunker window painting her face in soft contrast. The sound of dirt and grit brushed against the pane glass, a constant white noise that Dressler found pleasant and reassuring these days.

“Come on, Lyn.” He grinned. “How many times have I told you that story?”

“Not enough.”

There had been five Approachings since bringing back Edilyn’s cure. The little squirmy angel did it, breathing new life into his daughter, clearing her ash lung, and softly giving up his spirit in the process. Dressler didn’t know what “peaceful” looked like on an angel, but he’d liked to think he’d seen it.

Lyn was fine, running and playing again, living life. Dressler returned to hunting, even had a new partner. Yulaura was a pistol, a rough and tumble sort that kept Dressler on his toes, and so far, had shown no signs of being under some evil angel’s thrall.

He liked that best about her.

Life had returned to a modicum of normal, but Lyn still wanted to hear the stories.

“Please, Daddy,” she begged, healthy and full of life, his every prayer answered.

Maybe Trebs—as barking mad as he was—had been right: His faith had been rewarded. Dressler had never considered himself a man of faith before that day at the bottom of Eclectia’s oceans, but Life had a funny way of changing things.

“Okay,” he laughed easy, before kissing her cheek. “I tell you the story. One more time.”

The Last Fight (Part II)

by Greg Mitchell

{Awake}

Dressler opened one eye. The other felt tight. Swollen shut. Crazy’s dead. Would he be next?

Boots clanked on metal and he drew his head up, feeling it pound—full of thoughts, but not his own. He saw Trebs circling him, wiping Crazy’s blood off his knife. The killer bore no satisfaction on his face, in fact very little recognition that he’d murdered a good man at all.

{Welcome, believer}

“Trebs,” he muttered. “I’m gonna kill you…”

When Dressler wavered to weak feet, he realized Trebs had not addressed him. Beyond the killer, through the front viewport, Dressler beheld a crimson-colored fleshy mass, adorned in writhing tentacles. Large suckers from one giant appendage were fixed to a corner of the glass. A single baleful eye held him in place. Dressler’s mind pulsed and swelled. He gripped at his temples, gnashing his teeth.

{Welcome, believer}

“Why…do you call me that?”

{It is what you are} the Beast thought to him.

“You’re the angel?”

{Your kind must name everything}

Woozy, Dressler got out through grit teeth, his heart burning from betrayal. “Why did you bring me here? My daughter’s cure—”

“Don’t let the fish look fool you,” Trebs spoke up, and Dressler wondered if he were somehow hearing what the “angel” was speaking to his mind. “This thing is the real fisherman.”

He would kill Trebs. He’d settled that in his mind now. He’d killed a man before, out of anger and booze. He’d never killed clear-headed, but for Trebs, Dressler knew it was worth a try.

“You got me down here,” Dressler spat. “Why? What now?”

{Your faith feeds me}

Dressler massaged his forehead, the throbbing blood vessels there, and thought he might pass out. “Faith…what? I don’t…I don’t have faith.”

{No? Wasn’t it faith that led you down here?}

“You lied to me.”

{Faith is faith}

A deep chuckle rumbled from Dressler’s throat, passing his clenched teeth. “You went to all of this…why? For a snack?”

It was Trebs who answered, “Do you realize how many people it’s lured down here? The angels up top, they try and keep this place sealed up, to keep guys like this from getting out. The angels, they can influence your mind—project thoughts, Dress. But that’s not the only tricks they got. They can siphon thoughts, too. Emotions. Memories. Good ones, or bad.”

Dressler leveled his good eye at the monster outside the viewport, seething in contempt for the creature that had toyed with him, dangling Edilyn’s life before him as bait.

Trebs continued, “All that anxiety you got for Lyn, it was like a beacon to him!”

{Your misery called to me}

“So, I’m the delivery,” Dressler snapped, cutting hard eyes at Trebs. “And what were you, the delivery boy?”

Trebs smiled, opening his mouth to answer, but the Beast cut through.

{He is the entree}

Trebs quickly closed his mouth, swiveling to face the monster. “What?”

{You have pain, too, human. Fear of your father. It drives everything you do. It always has}

“Wait, wait!” Trebs waved his hands, stepping closer to the glass. “We had a deal! I was supposed to bring you Dressler and more!”

{I healed your body by stimulating your mind. Stopped your bleeding. Sped up your body’s natural restorative properties. Your life belongs to me, to do with as I see fit. Your faith has fed me, human, but I find it lacking. I am done with you now}

“Wait!” Trebs commanded once more, his voice shrill. At once, the seam in his leg that the bug had inflicted days before—the wound that would have, should have, cost him his life—opened up as though someone had pulled a zipper on it. Blood cascaded down the grievous rip and Trebs collapsed, gasping in pain and fear. “No! No, no, no!”

Dressler closed his fists, finding that, when once he held nothing but hatred for the bug hunter, now he felt pity. Undone, Trebs passed out from shock, and died in silence.

{He was but a tasting. Your faith is much stronger. I will gorge myself on it. Or…}

Infuriated, and feeling increasingly helpless to do anything about it, Dressler ventured, “Or what?”

{I could dine on your mind all at once, or feed off your pain a little at a time, allowing you to continue in your pitiful existence. Better yet, perhaps…you could fulfill the other human’s role…bring other faithful to me. Offer their minds to me in your stead and sate my thirst}

Images of Edilyn flashed before his eyes. When she was born, crying and naked and vulnerable, needing him to cradle her in his arms. Protect her from the terrible world she’d been born into. That’s all he’d wanted to do—save her life to bring some purpose to his own.

{Return to the surface, human. I will fulfill my promise and heal your daughter. You can live out the rest of your days with her…only do not forget our arrangement. Bring me others with strong faith like yours. Feed my hunger}

Edilyn would be safe, while Dressler would be damned. A monster, dragging jelly rollers into the ocean, to the consumptions of their minds—their very souls.

But Edilyn would be safe.

“No,” Dressler said, praying his daughter would understand. He wouldn’t be there to explain it to her. He would be long dead by then, unable to tell her that there were things worth fighting for. Worth dying for.

Edilyn was worth dying for.

But the destruction of this leviathan was worth more.

I’m sorry, Lyn. Don’t forget your old man.

{What are you doing?}

Dressler hopped over the back of Crazy’s empty chair at the deck, his hands hovering over the strange consoles. He’d never piloted before, but he only needed to know enough to charge. Following the instructions the best he could, flipping a number of toggles, Dressler finally powered the sub to life.

{You can’t run from me}

“Not trying to.”

In the process of rummaging through controls, music blasted through speakers. More of Crazy’s “hip hop”. Something called “Power” by K-West. He didn’t know if K-West was a great composer of ancient days or not. Dressler didn’t know much about culture. Didn’t know much about a lot of things.

He’d done the best he could.

Dressler pulled back on the yoke, arcing in the water. He felt the monster roaring furiously in his mind, but he pushed it aside. His brain hurt, swelling with rage, blood running out of his nose. The Thing was ever-present in his thoughts, drowning out his own, but he focused on Edilyn. Her laugh, her smile, her hand in his, her arms around him.

Tentacles snapped, slapping the sub. Glass cracked, alarms screamed, and sparks and hissing steam shot out of paneling. Dressler ascended higher and higher, then slammed against the yoke as one of the alien arms snatched his propeller. The sub lurched hard to the right and he was thrown from the seat, crashing to the floor next to Trebs’ lifeless body. Poor Trebs. All talk, and too dumb to know when to shut up.

Dressler picked himself off the floor and slid back into the seat, juking the sub, breaking loose of the tendril.

{You will not escape}

“You don’t seem to get it,” Dressler huffed, wheeling the sub around, aiming his viewport at that single glaring eye. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Reaching across the console, Dressler cranked the music up, its thumping beat moving in time to his heart. He grinned, eyes squinting back tears—

—and flooded the throttle.

The beast grew larger in the viewport as Dressler plummeted hard and fast. He screamed, cried, shouted, and laughed all at once. A female automated voice warned him the ship was in danger of exploding, and he was glad for it.

“You wanna feed on my faith? I hope you choke on it!”

The Beast screamed in his mind, as the ship pierced the eye. Dressler heard a pop, a sizzle, and was thrown backwards when the cockpit exploded. Water punched through the glass, carrying him away as the ship tore apart, carrying him into black oblivion.

Test Results

by Edward M. Erdelac -

It was morning when Considine received the call from the ZMB. He didn’t bother picking up. Whatever the result of Croix’s scan, he wanted to hear it on the spot. He showered, dressed, picked up a stimgulp from the shop at the north junction of his habitation ring, walked to the ZMB facility, and smoked.

The fish were roiling above his head through the observation bubble in the central axis, but he barely paid any attention. He’d lived in Zirconia six years now. Most of the time he forgot the city was underwater. It really wasn’t that different from living on Avenir. Oh, a little dingier, but really, the air was less stagnant, and there was a better class of people down here. Not in the traditional sense of class, but in the one that mattered.

The Zirconian Medical Bureau was a blazing white bank of pods and corridors that stood out starkly in its contrast to the rest of Zirconia. He went in, and found the receptionist, a cyborg woman jacked into her flat, monitor-less desk terminal by a hardwire running from her left eye port.

“Yes?”

“Inspector Stanlon Considine. I received a call.”

“Yes Inspector, one moment.” She blinked, her one human eyelid closing, the eye beneath flitting sympathetically back and forth beneath as the cyborg eye transmitted pages of data into her mind.

The eye opened again, lovely and brown.

“Doctor Kes is waiting for you in the Imagery Lab. To your left, six doors down. Just follow the placards.”

“Thank you.”

She smiled, her teeth chrome.

Doctor Kes proved to be the very same doctor who had tended to Croix’s cuts and bruises following his rough ride to the surface.

“Inspector, I have some exciting news this morning.”

“Exciting?” Considine repeated innocently, though he had expected some kind of excitement.

Considine proceeded to a terminal and ran his hands over the interface, calling up a colorful holoprojection in the shape of a human form, the features replaced with throbbing blobs of color and hints of a blue skeleton.

“What am I looking at, Doctor?”

“Results of Mr. Croix’s internal scan. Do you see it yet?”

Considine said nothing, but watched as the trembling doctor turned the image of the body with a sweep, tapped and zoomed in on the lower spine.

“See that discoloration there? Sort of intertwined with the spinal column?”

“No,” Considine admitted.

“Well it’s there. A foreign object. An organism. Parasitic, I’d say, that’s why he’s dying. It’s feeding off of him. Has been for some time, breaking down his immune system, sucking the pigment out of his hair even. Look at the size of it! It spans from the lower lumbar right up into the base of the brain. How long must it have been there….”

He traced it with his finger, and Considine did think perhaps he saw something, some snake-like thing spiraling up the vertebrae, pulsing ever so slightly independent of the rest of Croix’s internal workings, whatever they were.

“What is it?” Considine asked, swallowing.

“No idea, unless I remove it,” he looked hopefully at Considine.

“Can you remove it? It looks pretty well lodged in there.”

“Not without killing him. But…he is dying.”

“He’s not dead yet. How did it get inside him?”

“After I detected it, I examined him, noticed a small scar in his lower back. Much too small for this thing to pass through – that’s why I can assume it’s grown for some time.”

“But where could he have picked it up?”

“I have no idea. Not here in the city. Out in the open sea maybe, maybe even up top. I’ve never seen such a creature.”

“Any danger of contagion?”

“No. When I detected it, I held over your Enforcer for scanning, just to be sure.”

Brendermeyer. Considine smiled thinly. So he’d never made it to his comedy show, poor lug.

“He’s completely healthy,” Kes went on. “The normal MB immunizations prevent the viruses he’s carrying. Croix’s dying because this thing has sapped his defenses. He’s picking up everything floating around that we don’t even notice anymore. Every impotent bug and fever.”

“What happens when Croix dies?”

“It’ll die with him. It has no way to exit the body that I can see.”

“Is he still conscious?”

“Yes. He’s completely lucid.”

“Doctor, have you told your colleagues about this discovery yet?”

“No,” Kes said, biting his lip.

Considine nodded. New species, new medical phenom, Kes wanted people calling this thing after him. He hadn’t invited his colleagues in until he could fully study and register the thing.

“Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”

“I’m in total agreement,” Kes said with forced nonchalance.

“Where is Croix?”

“Right this way.”

The Last Fight (Part I)

by Greg Mitchell -

“Move!” Crazy hollered, his meaty fists wrapped around Trebs’ wrists. The knife in Trebs’ left hand wavered centimeters from the pilot’s gray-white beard. Dressler stood back, hardly able to comprehend the order of events. In a span of seconds, Trebs had pulled a knife and lunged for the sub pilot, just as they reached the meeting place with the angel that had Edilyn’s cure. Crazy held his own—and rightly so for he was three times the size of Trebs—but the bug hunter was nearly superhuman in power. A sweaty sheen draped over his face and his eyes were glassy and mad.

“Trebs, stop!” Dressler shouted, futilely. “What are you doing?”

Trebs didn’t answer, his beady gaze directed on Crazy. Unrelenting, he leaned on the blade.

“A gun…” Crazy grunted, struggling. “Cockpit…Under the pilot’s seat…”

Dressler thought to run across the sub to find it, but acted instead, lunging on his co-worker—his guide down here into this aquatic hell—and wrapped around his arms. Pulling with every ounce of strength hard work had given him, Dressler roared, “Let go! Get off of him!”

“The jelly roller’s…snapped!” Crazy barked, his thick arms visibly shaking, giving in.

Dressler put Trebs in a chokehold and pried him off the pilot. Trebs merely flexed his trim arms, and Dressler was thrown backwards, hurtling across the card table where they’d shared drinks moments ago. He collapsed the table, dashing the ceramic mugs to the floor where they popped. Dazed, he pushed himself to his knees, feeling warmth spreading down his temple. Blood dripped from his stubbled chin, dotting the floor.

Getting his senses together, he looked back to Crazy still bravely wrestling with the knife. The ogre was on the floor now, on top of Trebs, trying desperately to turn the blade back on his attacker. Trebs never faltered, his face blank and expressionless, his eyes distant but intelligent. Like a machine.

“Gun!” Crazy shouted once more. This time Dressler did not hesitate. He clattered out of the small cabin, bouncing against the handrails, clanking down the hall, racing for the cockpit. His heart rammed hard in his chest and he thought of Edilyn.

I’m never going to see her again.

He tripped into the cockpit, falling face-first on hard metal. From his vantage point he glimpsed the simple handgun holstered underneath the pilot’s seat. Scrambling on hands and knees, he undid the latch and drew the gun. Checked to see it was loaded. Cocked it and rushed back to his friend.

Re-entering the cabin, he saw Crazy, spread on the floor.

Unmoving.

Trebs stood over him, bloodied knife in hand, barely breathing hard.

“Dress,” he stated simply, Crazy’s life dripping off the knife’s edge.

A blossom of red spread on Crazy’s barrel chest, intermingling with his frizzy beard. The man’s eyes were cold, lifeless.

No…

“Dress,” Trebs said once more, snapping him to.

Dressler ignored the man. Bared his teeth and raised the gun, firing. Trebs ducked impossibly out of the path of the bullet and it ricocheted off the wall deeper into the room, throwing sparks. “I’ll kill you!” Dressler screamed.

He shot again, but Trebs moved fast and leapt, tackling Dressler backwards, smacking his head on corrugated flooring. He saw stars, then only black.

On the Eve of the End

by Greg Mitchell -

The sub was on autopilot. Crazy had since outmaneuvered the angels at the top of the Boatic Trench, hiding within a series of underwater coral caves. It’d been tense for nearly twenty minutes as Dressler, Trebs, and Crazy nestled in the coral, no lights on, running on minimal power. The sub had been quiet as a tomb, filling Dressler with dread. At last, the angels moved on and the sub resumed its underwater quest.

Now they were lowering their way towards the meeting place, where Trebs’ angel contact was leading him. It occurred to Dressler more than once to ask why, if the angels had invited him to the ocean depths, the ones closer to the surface were so intent on keeping them away. The couple times he’d posed that same question to Trebs, his co-hunter had simply said “Trust me.”

It was a lot to go on trust, but every time Dressler thought of returning to dry land, he only had to think of Edilyn.

Crazy sipped at a mug of steaming drink, the same as Dressler and Trebs tended. The three of them sat around a small card table in the sub’s hold, taking a moment for themselves while the autopilot finished its journey. The coffee break was equal parts celebration that they’d dodged the angry angels and a time of quiet reflection. A strange sort of bond had been formed through the experience, and Crazy was feeling chatty.

The large man went on, pleasantly enough, talking about his various adventures piloting the oceans. Dressler nodded in and out of the conversation, enjoying the man’s stories when he was listening, but mostly thinking of home and how much he stood to lose if this little sojourn went south.

“So you’re a bug hunter, huh?”

Dressler blinked, realizing that Crazy had addressed him. “What? Oh. Yeah.”

He sipped at his drink. “Thought only criminals took that job.”

Dressler shrugged.

“I don’t mean to offend,” Crazy quickly added. “If that’s the case, then that’s your own business. Just saying you don’t look to me like much of a criminal.”

“No, it’s okay,” Dressler said. “I…served some time.”

Trebs blanched. “You never told me that.”

Of course he hadn’t. He didn’t tell anyone, save his employers. “It was about three years before Lyn was born. My daughter,” he added, realizing he’d not told Crazy her name. He felt as though the man had earned that much—risking all he had to escort Dressler on this fool’s errand. “It was a bar fight. I was lit up and mad about something. Guns got involved…I got a lenient sentence on account that we both were drunk and no one could tell who started shooting first. But…”

Crazy nodded, listening with a sympathetic ear. “You’re not that man now,” he said, not asked.

Dressler felt a thin smile emerge. “No. My daughter changed all of that.”

“Kids have a way of doin’ that.” Crazy buried himself in his mug again, thoughtful.

“You have any kids?” Trebs asked the pilot, suddenly, and it felt as though the man was a third wheel, butting in on a private conversation, though he’d been there the whole time.

“Used to,” Crazy answered, and left it at that.

Proximity alarms bathed the cabin in red. Crazy simply rose, slow and steady.

“What’s that?” Dressler asked, his heart starting to race.

“We’re here,” Crazy announced, like they’d reached the end of a leisure tour. “Now it’s time to see what the fuss is all about.”

“Yes,” Trebs stood, solidly. “It is.”

That’s when Trebs pulled the knife.

Jurisdiction

by Edward M. Erdelac -

Considine settled in front of the console and keyed in the call to Chief Inspector Gorsh on the Peace Council.

After a moment the screen flickered and the ‘Connecting’ icon appeared.

Considine stared at his reflection in the dark screen. Broad, meaty old face, sharp, squinty blue eyes, graying hair. The bronze badge pinned to the lapel of his drab topcoat.

Then his own visage was replaced by the head and shoulders of another man, scrawny, balding, wearing a dress uniform.

“Stanlon,” Gorsh acknowledged, then went back to sifting through something on his desk just out of frame. “Been waiting for your report. What’s the word on the incident in the habitation ring?”

“We extracted Croix without any casualties aside from his cabin seal. I understand the engineers are already reattaching it to the outer seal. Croix’s in custody, but I can’t get a thing out of him. He’s a lunatic apparently.”

“Obviously.”

“I’m letting the psychs have him once the doctor’s finished sewing him up.”

“No that won’t be necessary. Peace Council wants him in relation to another matter. What about the pilot…what’s her name?”

Considine raised his eyebrows, but continued.

“Arden Pacoy. She’s just a hauler trying to make a little dosh on the side. Had no idea what she was carrying. Didn’t even know her contact’s name on Avenir. But she did say the perp wore a Morgenstar company cap. I’ve got her sifting through personnel pix, looking for a match.”

“So you make it to be an inside job?”

“Like we expected.”

“Alright. Good show as always, Stanlon. Forward me your findings and we’ll take over up here. Oh and, you can prepare Croix for extradition in about two hours. I’ll scramble a shuttle.”

“Certainly.”

Considine watched the image of his old partner wink out. Gorsh had done well for himself. They’d all thought him mad to request duty on Zirconia, but there’d been too much politics on Avenir mucking about. Still were, apparently. Why did they want to extradite a nobody like Croix? His records showed he’d never set foot on Avenir, and he was further removed from the higher ups in the bomb plot than even his clueless courier, Arden Pacoy.

Arden. Time to check on her. He rose from the telecam and exited the booth to see Jelly standing there.

“Doctor wants a word, Inspector,” he said.

Making the Run

by Greg Mitchell -

Dressler settled in the seat of the sub, his thoughts a jumble. He was really doing it—going down to the depths of Eclectia’s waters. Trebs sat beside him in the cockpit, uncharacteristically quiet. A serene smile stretched across the resurrected hunter’s face, one that Dressler didn’t understand. He didn’t share Trebs’ newfound faith or security.

At the controls of the underwater vessel was Crazy. His hands roved like wild over the console as he chewed a fat wad of tobacco. Music blared from the sub’s speakers, some long lost ancient genre called “hip hop”, Crazy said. The hairy man bebopped his head, but the rattle gave Dressler a headache.

“This is the classic stuff!” Crazy guffawed. “This was back when folks knew what music was all about. Now it’s all just noise and drek.”

“If you say so,” Dressler replied loudly to be heard over the bass.

Crazy chanted along with the music, and Dressler’s eyes wandered to the viewport to his left. His ears popped as they descended deeper into the ocean and wondered how long this would take. How long did it take to speak to some angels and get a cure for Edilyn?

“You’re nervous,” Trebs seemed to pick his thoughts. The man leaned over with a knowing nod. “Don’t be. Believers are rewarded.”

Yeah, Dressler worried. That was the problem. I’m not a believer, not as such. Would the angels find him wanting? Would his doubts and Sheba-blamed practicality steal away the love of his life? He saw his daughter’s face in his mind’s eye, left behind on the surface with her aunt. Meryl, his older sister, with four screaming, joyous, healthy children.

He only had Edilyn.

What was he saying? That’d he rather see one of his sister’s children die than his own? Was he saying Meryl had some to spare?

I’m horrible.

“Whoa!” Crazy bellowed. At first Dressler thought he was injecting some flavor into his sing-along, then he glimpsed it. Glowing, ethereal, vaguely humanoid, but wrong somehow. Fish-like. Alien. Other.

An angel.

She—he assumed it was a she—filled his port, startling him. But she was not alone. More joined her, swimming around the sub. Suddenly, he felt words worming their way through his mind. Words of warning. Turn back now, and You don’t belong here.

“Told ya!” Crazy snapped, shaking his bushy mane. He must have been hearing them too. “Told ya they wouldn’t want us poking around.”

“It’ll be fine,” Trebs said, still calm. Still smiling. “It’s a test, that’s all. Scaring off the unfaithful.”

“It’s working!” Crazy said.

“No!” Dressler snapped. “I paid you for a job. Keep going.”

“I am, I am, relax. And hold on!”

The sub lurched forward, evading the angels, swirling down into the dark abyss of the Boatic Trench.

Delivered

by H. A. Titus -

This was the thirteenth door he'd knocked on.

Reeder took a deep breath and rapped the door with his knuckles. He knew that the wizards could hear him. He could hear the knocks echoing around in the hollow space behind the door, just as it had behind all the other doors.

As he waited for an answer—not that he expected one, there had been no answers at the other doors he'd tried—he looked down at the square of folded paper he held.

Galileo, Wizard's District was written in wiry, slanted letters.

"No address, no directions—serve him right if I up and dumped it somewhere," Reeder muttered under his breath.

He looked up, prepared to knock again. A thick brown face fringed with a static-y mop of yellow-white hair stared at him from two inches away, if that.

Reeder yelped and jumped back.

The man's fingers twined around his arm and jerked him inside the room. Reeder flinched as the slamming door brushed his heels.

The wizard poked his face close again. "Got a message for me?"

"You—you're Galileo?"

"Wouldn't have opened the door if I wasn't," the old man snapped.

Reeder thrust out the letter. The wizard grabbed it, stuffed a handful of credits into Reeder's hand, and shoved him back out the door, nearly taking off Reeder's nose as he slammed it again.

Reeder stared at the acid-splattered metal. "You're welcome."

A Creature of Words

by Jeff Chapman -

A rocksnout slithered over the rocks on the eastern lip of the Zircon trench, a rift in the ocean floor that plunged for kilometers and yawned to a kilometer at its widest point as it zagged along the edge of the continental shelf. Four legs on the rocksnout’s underside ended in four-fingered feet that gripped the rocks on which the female rested while she pumped water through her mouth and over her gills. Her mottled black and brown body tapered for two meters from a wide, flat snout, one meter across, to a forked tail only centimeters wide. Three dorsal fins rose from her back and a pair of pectoral fins jutted from her sides. Bony crenellations that mimicked lichen-encrusted stone covered the top of her snout and at its tip three luminescent tendrils wiggled with the current.

The eyes on either side of her snout took in the smallest specks of light and tiny holes arranged across the underside of her snout picked up the electrical impulses of beating hearts. She was ninety seasons old and ready to mate for the first time. She heard the low thrumming of a male somewhere in the deep ocean night. She picked out the subtle variations of tone and rhythm in his thrum, a rocksnout’s version of speech. She responded. She called herself Thrawto.

With a swish of her tail, she glided over the ocean floor. It seemed odd to swim, to fly over unbroken fields of sediment. She spent most of her life crawling over rocks on the wall of the trench, searching for caves and crevices that afforded a lair to wait for prey to investigate the glowing tendrils at the tip of her snout. There was no room to swim in the caves and it was not wise to swim in the depths of the trench.

Thrawto swam for hours until hunger gnawed at her stomach. Something glowed on the horizon to her left, a gathering of the bright, winged ones, she assumed. Their accumulated light would blind her and she would not eat them. They passed their thoughts and meant no harm.

She sank to the bottom behind an outcropping of rock encrusted with the browns and greens of sea lichen, a favorite of the grazing fish on which rocksnouts thrived. Thrawto nestled in the silt to wait.

A heartbeat, large and strong with an unfamiliar rhythm, approached. Thrawto tensed, ready to attack or flee or hide. Tremors rippled through the silt. This creature crawled over the ocean floor, a lumbering target.

It emerged from behind the rocks in front of her. An odd creature, she thought. A pulsing stream of bubbles rose from its bulbous head. A single, glowing eye stabbed the night. A hump protruded from the creature’s back and a limb emerged from each corner of its body. No wings, no webbing, no fins or tail. Thrawto readied to strike. She had eaten stranger animals in the trench.

The creature leaned toward her, peering at Thrawto’s worm-like appendages with its single eye that emitted a shaft of blinding light. Her eyes squeezed shut on impulse. In perfect coordination, her legs pushed and her tail snapped. She shot forward, grabbing a lower appendage near the body, hoping to sever the limb and immobilize the creature before it fought or fled. Her jaws worked from side to side and her rows of serrated teeth cut like a double-edged saw. The flesh tasted strange and no sweet blood flooded her mouth. It grunted and thrashed and slapped her bony snout, but amid the screams, she heard sounds and rhythms repeated.

“Kazzeee. Kazzeee.”

Words?

Thrawto relaxed her jaws and the creature fell away, flailing its arms, trying to swim most ineffectually. No blood fumed from the jagged wounds in its hide. How curious. A storm of silt enveloped the struggling animal and snuffed its light. Thrawto gave a kick with her tail and left the odd creature to its fate in the deep ocean night.

The Pilot

by Edward M. Erdelac -

Arden Pacoy was heavyset and dark-skinned, obviously annoyed to have been pulled out of pre-flight checks to sit and wait in the dim, rusty interrogation room when she should have been earning her daily bread.

As soon as Inspector Considine entered, she said, “What’s this all about? I’m due on the flight deck in fifteen minutes.”

“Put a lid on it, Ms. Pacoy. You didn’t complete your pre-flight. Your company’s already bumped you. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

“Is your office going to compensate me for time lost? I’ve got a kid to feed…”

“You’ll be lucky if you fly again.”

“Why what’s this about?”

“Tell me how you know Almer Croix.”

She blinked, then shrugged.

“Never heard of him.”

“Well he’s heard of you,” Considine said. “This morning he tried to blow up one of the habitation rings. He demanded safe passage to Avenir and picked your name off the flight duty roster as his preferred pilot.”

“It was probably random!” she exclaimed.

“If it was random he would’ve asked for any old pilot. He demanded to see the duty roster, and asked specifically for you.”

“Well, I don’t know him….he might’ve been a customer.”

“A customer? Aren’t you a company pilot? Your only customer is the people who own your ship.”

She pursed her lips.

“You’re taking side jobs?”

She nodded slowly.

“So you flew cargo for Almer Croix?”

“Not specifically for him. The way it works is, people pay for cargo space on my supply runs.”

“Does the company know you’re renting out space on their freighter?”

“I have a kid to feed, like I said. Besides, the space I leave for independent cargo is negligible. It doesn’t detract much from the company runs.”

“Would they see it that way?”

She bit her lip.

“What was the cargo?”

“I don’t peek. That’s part of the arrangement.”

“Even if it’s high explosive detonite?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, I never take suicide cargos. That’s my stipulation.”

Considine studied her face. She had blanched at the mention of the explosives. She was scared. It was obvious.

“Why would he ask for you?”

“I don’t know! I swear! Because he’d dealt with me already, I guess.”

Or maybe because had he gotten on board her ship she could’ve delivered him to somebody sympathetic on Avenir, no need for a transmission that they could’ve intercepted.

“I’m willing to believe you didn’t know what you were hired to deliver. But I want to know who your contact on Avenir was. We know the detonite went missing from a shipment bound for Sheba from Morgenstar Munitions. But we don’t know who lifted the detonite in the first place. It’s likely the same person who delivered it to you on Avenir.”

“I don’t know his name.”

“Could you pick out his face?”

“I don’t know. But he had on a Morgenstar cap.”

Considine pushed back the chair and stood. He took out his pack of cigarettes and offered her one. This was a break. There was a slim chance the perpetrator on Avenir was just wearing a Morgenstar cap. They weren’t exactly the height of fashion. More likely the man who’d delivered the package to her was the same who stole it. If he was an employee of Morgenstar that would make sense. If he was an employee he’d be on record.

She took the cigarette and put it in her lips quick so he wouldn’t see her hand shake.

“I’m going to hold you here just long enough for you to go through some pics. After that I’ll release you.”

“What about the company?” she asked, leaning in to take his light. “Are you going to report me?”

He lit her and then himself, sucked in the fishy smoke and blew it through his nose. She was just one freighter pilot trying to scrape by on a pittance.

“You’ve got a kid to feed,” he said.

She closed her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me, Arden. If you’ve lied, he’ll be an orphan.”

He went outside without another word, letting the hatch clang behind him. The cigarettes didn’t go with the canned air. He dropped it and ground it out with his boot.

“Any luck?” asked Galveston.

He’d asked Jelly Galveston and Brendermyer to stay suited up for the time being, watch the prisoners. The other Enforcers had gone back to their day jobs.

“Yeah, Inspector, can we go home? I’ve got a gig tonight at the Starboard I gotta get ready for.”

Brendermyer worked as a comic there.

“I’ve seen your act, Brendermyer. You’re in no rush. You stay here and guard the door. Jelly, let’s go see if Croix is ready to talk.”

“Come on!” Brendermyer whined as they went off to the hyperbaric chamber where Croix was decompressing.

“How about you, Jelly? Got some place to be?”

“Nossir,” said Galveston. “My brother can hold down the dock while I’m on duty.”

“Good. Put it in a call to Morgenstar Munitions on my authorization and have them send a transtat of their personnel files. Males only. When it comes in, see that Ms. Pacoy has a chance to go through it.”

“Yessir,” said Galveston, going off.

Ale O’Clock

by Grace Bridges -

Eleon McManus loped through the lush open area of Zirconia’s sector B3. The curved window to his right formed a sky beyond, which glimmered with occasional schools of fish in the murk.

Passing a fruit tree, he longed to snag an orange. But these plants passed down from Earth were too rare, and he didn’t want the Enforcers to chuck him in the slammer, not when he had some time off tomorrow.

He slipped through the last of this sector’s forest and reached the stairs to the residential pods that overlooked it. After climbing up to the third level, he swung onto the walkway that rattled with his steps. He paused a moment, then raised his hand to a buzzer.

Half a minute later, the door unsealed with a whoosh and Gryphon Sylt looked out. “Mac! Sight for sore eyes. Come in!”

Eleon passed through the thick rubber-rimmed frame into his friend’s abode. “How’s life, Sylt?” He peered at the other man’s haggard face. “What’s going on?”

Gryphon shrugged, a wild, flailing maneuvre. “System’s down again. All the history’s inaccessible. And I have no apprentice to help write down what’s in my head.”

“Can’t the system be fixed?”

“It’s not graded as essential. There’s not enough spare manpower from the IT department.”

Eleon didn’t know what to respond, so he wandered to Gryphon’s kitchenette and poured two lavabush ales from the plastic barrel in the coolstore.

Gryphon sighed. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe it doesn’t matter, as long as we survive.”

Eleon pushed a glass into his hand. “We’ll lose our identity if we don’t remember where we came from.”

“Oh, I’m writing down what I can, never fear. It’s not a lost cause. Only almost.”

“Well then.” Eleon lifted his drink and the two clinked together. He took a sip and grimaced at the slightly bitter taste. “Here’s to happy writing!”

Spark of Hope

by Mary Ruth Pursselley -

Celia tucked her left foot under her other leg, trying to get comfortable on the rigid bench in the lecture hall. The professor marched onto the platform in front, and the class grudgingly opened their books.

Celia smirked and reached discreetly into her book bag. Eclectian History was always torturously dull; that was why she came prepared. She slid an art book from the library out of her bag and opened it over top of her history book.

“You’re not worried about exams?” someone nearby whispered.

“Yeah, right.” Celia replied as the professor welcomed everyone to ‘today’s exciting lecture’. He sounded excited alright, droning on in a nasal, monotone voice about the guest he was pleased to welcome…

Wait a second—guest speaker? That was a change of pace, at least.

“He has dedicated his life to the study of Eclectia’s history, excavating remains of our early civilizations.”

Celia perked up.

“His findings are among the most significant contributions to history museums on Avenir, as well as the Christchurch museum and our own Zirconia Museum.”

Celia sat forward and scanned the lecture hall, looking for the guest. A cluster of students blocked her view to the right, and since she couldn’t see anyone unfamiliar elsewhere she assumed the guest was sitting past them. She wished the professor would hurry with his introduction.

Finally, he held out a hand and smiled—well, Celia could imagine it as a smile if she tried. “Class, please welcome Mr. Robin Corpsman,” the professor said, backing away from the podium.

Celia’s heart stuttered as the guest speaker took the platform. He was much younger than she had expected—probably only fourteen or fifteen Foundings old—and he was tanned, rugged, and rakish. Celia wasn’t the only one who noticed, either, judging by scattered whispers from her female classmates.

“Well, your professor said it: I’m Robin Corpsman—you all can call me Robin—and I’m an archeologist.” His voice was a pleasant baritone.

Celia propped her chin in her hand and listened intently for the entire hour as Robin talked about his work collecting artifacts across Eclectia’s surface. He and Celeste were in the same line of work, but he was obviously making way more money than she was, and living a far better life. He was practically a celebrity, travelling and giving presentations at different museums. He had even been invited to the Avenir to speak, while Celeste lived planetside in misery, fighting just to make ends meet.

Celia wondered... what would it take for Celeste to get into Robin’s position?

The end-of-class bell interrupted the question-and-answer session at the end of Robin’s talk. Celia knew she’d never fight her way through the bevy of girl classmates in time to talk to Robin before she had to be in art class, but she had to find a way to talk to him before he left Zirconia.

He’d brought her a spark of hope that maybe she and Celeste could be together again. No way was she going to let him leave and take that spark with him.

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?

Communiqué

by Mary Ruth Pursselley -

Celia heard the light thud of something small dropping into the delivery box on her dorm room door. Dropping her art book on the bed, she walked to the door and pulled out the palm-sized package. It was coated in a film of dust that came off gray on her hand. The sending address was landside, Adagio.

Celeste!

Celia tore the end off of the package and tilted it up. A square audio chip dropped into her hand. Celia crossed the room to the wall player and stuck the chip in the slot. Her roommate Valla wasn’t around, so she could listen in private.

The low-grade chip made the recording sound metallic and slightly twangy, but Celia still almost cried when she heard her sister’s voice.

“Hey, Baby Sis, it’s me. I thought you might have heard about the earthquake we had here this morning, so I wanted to let you know I’m alright. I think a couple buildings collapsed on the other side of Adagio, but the one I live in is real strong so don’t worry, okay?

“I hope school’s still going good. You keep studying hard, girl. The superintendents send me your reports every semester, so I know you’re doing great. Just keep it up.

“And since I know you’d ask if you could, things here are fine. Business is good, and I’m doing real well. Listen, I’m about out of time on the recording chip, but I miss you and I love you, Baby Girl. I love you tons. Talk to you soo—”

The time on the chip ran out, cutting the last word short.

Tears streaking her face, Celia slammed her hand against the wall next to the audio player.

“How dumb do you think I am, Celeste?” she snapped at the speaker, as if Celeste could hear her. “You think I’m not going to worry about you living on a volcano, breathing the ash that killed Mom?” She held up the envelope in her hand. “You think I can’t recognize a north-side address and know you’re probably living in some shack not fit for a centipede?”

She jerked the chip out of the player and threw it viciously onto her bed. If Celeste were here, Celia decided she’d slap her until her head spun.

She’d hug her next, though. She missed her too much not to.

Extraction

by Ed Erdelac -

Inspector Considine called the team in at 0300.

Considine had traced the illegal sale of some mining explosives to an ex-grit-breather named Croix, but somebody had tipped him off and he was barricaded in his cabin with the stuff, threatening to blow the entire southeast habitation ring into the Boatic Trench if he wasn’t given safe passage to Avenir.

There was a negotiator cooing at him like a babe through his door com, but Croix sure as hell wasn’t going to Avenir.

At 0305 as he laid out his demands, the Enforcers had suited up on the north end of Zirconia. Haj began passing out standard-issue GTL’s and pneumatic pistols, but Wilfort pointed out Croix’s cabin pod on the outer edge of the habitation ring and laid out the standard extraction plan. No need for hardware, but Haj was trigger happy and brought his pneumatic along anyway.

At 0310 Croix and the negotiator were arguing over the details of the shuttle that would take him up to Avenir. He wanted to pick the pilot himself from the duty roster. At the same time, the team was already wet, gripping the handlebars of a six-man sea-sled and puttering the long way around the city. Haj spotted an angel, a bioluminescent ghost stroking its way across the blue-black. He tried to take a shot at it, but Galveston, the pilot, warned him not to, and backed the warning with a meaningful tap on the diving knife on his belt. He was the only believer on the team—Jelly, they called him—short for Jelly Roller, the name some called the ones who attributed divinity to the angels.

At 3:17 Croix had the duty roster and was combing it for a name he knew. The team had ditched the sea-sled and cut their external suit lights, freefalling to the habitation ring, being careful not to bang their equipment against the hull. They hand over fisted their way to Croix’s outer shell connection joints and broke out their ratchets.

At 3:19 Croix selected Arden Pacoy as his getaway pilot. Considine made a mental note to nab Pacoy for questioning and checked his watch while the negotiator assured Croix his shuttle had been scrambled on floating launchpad B and was just about fueled and ready.

3:20 Croix was pacing his cabin, getting impatient. The team could see him through the portholes, a wiry, unshaven man with the terminally dirty, red-eyed look of a grit-breather. He hadn’t lived in Zirconia long enough to shake the look yet, long enough to know about the emergency surfacing apparatus installed in every habitation pod. The automatic release controls were on the wall beside Croix’s bunk, hid by a gaudy antique hula girl lamp. In the event of some catastrophe, the controls blew the explosive bolts that held the inner titanium pod in place, and the air-filled sphere would shoot to the surface like an inflatable toy. Of course, the ride wasn’t a smooth one by any means. It was fast and dangerous and survival wasn’t even guaranteed. Even if you lived through the ascent, you still had to get to a hyperbaric chamber or your blood would bubble up in your veins. The team was doing it the old fashioned way, from the outside. They’d bypassed the safety casings and were halfway through loosening the shell bolts. Brendermeyer was moonlighting as a comic in the Starboard Bar. He started to tell a joke about how many grit-breathers it took to empty a CO2 scrubber, but the punchline was lost at 3:22.

3:22. Croix asked the negotiator if Pacoy was ready to go yet, but received no answer. Considine and the negotiator had retreated beyond the emergency airlock in the outer hall and sealed it. The team popped the last of the bolts and Croix’s buoyant cabin was released from the outer hull container. The lights in Croix’s cabin turned red and the air inside lifted it away from the rest of the ring.

“Thar she blows,” said Brendermeyer over the team’s inter-suit com as the silvery sphere of the inner cabin rocketed away from the rusty outer hull and went tumbling end over end surface-ward.

Croix was tossed and shaken like a shoe in a clothes dryer. He’d be too battered and bloody to remember his own name, much less trigger the twelve pounds of HE detonite the Peacekeepers found in the shambles of his cabin when it bobbed to the surface approximately five seconds after the team had launched it.

Considine flicked the purple stub of a cigarette off the bobbing submersible and watched the cyanotine ash mingle with its distant relatives already drifting in the hot air. The medics carried Croix below. In about two hours he’d have words with the skinny grit-breather, when he’d been released from the decompression chamber.

For now there was Arden Pacoy to talk to.

The Ultimate Trophy

by Deborah Cullins Smith -

Jacian slipped into the bulky protective gear for his trek into the world beyond Zirconia’s shell. His heart pounded and his blood sang with anticipation of the venture before him. Cassie had bought that sappy line about making contact—she bought it hook, line, and sinker, as the old earth saying went. If all went well, she wouldn’t know his true intentions until it was too late. He smirked as he snapped and zipped his way into layer after layer of the pressurized gear that would enable him to walk on the floor of the ocean.

Cassie stuck her head in the changing room.

“Are you ready, Jace? We’ve got to hurry if you’re going to make it out there and back before the first shift arrives.”

Cassie had arranged to work this midnight shift alone, but it would only be seven hours before her relief crew started showing up. She had insisted he must be back—and gone—well before anyone else could find him in this restricted area.

“Yeah, Cassie,” he said, forcing that beguiling sweetness into his voice, even as he secured a short harpoon and a hunting knife to the side of his air tank. His body faced away from Cassie, so she couldn’t see what he had done. He still needed her to work the control panel and open the exit valves. Once he was beyond the city limit, she wouldn’t be able to stop him. If she called for help, she’d be in trouble for her part in helping him get outside. But she wouldn’t raise the alarm. Jacian had chosen her carefully. He had watched her for several weeks before trying that abortive attempt to sweep her off her feet.

She’ll never know what she missed, he thought contemptuously.

His thoughts turned to the hunt before him. After all, they were just beasts out there. No matter what the scientists and wizards said.

Jacian thought of the mounted insect heads on the walls of his father’s office. There were huge horned creatures, some with enormous glassy eyes; others sported pincers jutting from armored jaws. His father boasted to his business associates of his hunting prowess, but Jacian knew that his father had never killed in his life. The trophies—and the stories of the hunts—were bought and paid for. His father was a liar—a phony.

But Jacian was going to outdo him. Jacian was going to bring back a trophy for his own wall that would put his father’s collection to shame.

Jacian wanted the head of an angel.

Other Side of the Glass

by Karina Fabian -

The grouchy man in a lab coat looked away from the scanner he was holding and scowled down at her.

"What's she doing here?" he demanded in a grouchy voice.

Grandmother squeezed her hand. "Gerald, this is Trancy. She came with me to see the angels today."

The grouchy man curled up his nose like she smelled weird, but she'd taken her shower. He scolded her grandmother. "This facility is open twenty-five hours a day, thirty days a month--except for two hours every nine days."

"Which is when the biggest groups of angels gather," Grandmother replied. "This is when they're their most interesting."

"She can watch them on the vids like everyone else."

"She won't bother anyone."

Trancy smiled. She knew that tone. No one said "no" when Grandma used that tone.

And neither did Mr. Grouchy. "She'd better not." He sniffed in her direction, then turned away.

She decided she didn't like him.

Nonetheless, she did her very best to stay quietly at Grandmother's side while she helped the other researchers set up. Now and then, Grandma explained what they were doing, and how elusive the inhabitants of Eclectia's waters had been.

"Elusive?" Trancy rolled the word on her tongue.

"We don’t see them much," Grandmother defined.

"Except for times like these!" one man said cheerfully and bent down to point at one end of the window.

She watched the Angels, mesmerized, as the researchers started their observations.

"Looks like a school of thirty--a little bigger than lately, but not unusually so. Juveniles and adults."

"I still think we're on the path to some kind of maturation grounds."

"Then why do they stop? Every time?"

"We're a threat."

"We've not done anything to the Angels. No, we're just a curiosity--there! Look! The adult directs their attention to us."

"Which holds to my theory that they are training them to recognize us as a threat. See that one, racing from one end of the window to another? Obviously a territorial behavior. Five to one, one of them will press their mouth to the tank in some kind of display! In ten…nine…"

A moment later, credit chips passed hands. The same thing happened again as someone predicted that one would lash its tail against the tank.

But something else caught Trancy's eye.

"Grandma, we've seen that one before!" She pointed to one angel, whose fins had delicate yellow piping, lingering a ways from the rest.

Grandmother followed her gaze. "Why, I think we have--but not in a school."

Mr. Grouchy growled. "You just want to kill my migration theory! Well, we've got it recorded; we'll check. They're moving on to Crendal's group now.

"Bye!" Trancy waved.

The entire group gasped as the yellow-striped Angel waved back.

Pressure

by Travis Perry -

Ernsto slammed his palm into the airlock emergency override switch, flattening the wide red button, mechanical creaking erupting from the door hinges as it swung open, a half-meter of water still in the lock, water pouring into the hallway as he stepped out. The enforcer he’d paid off stood there, his mouth gaping open.

“Whadinell you doin’!” squeaked the man’s voice.

Ernsto glanced behind him. The angel was floundering in the draining water. The lip of the lock would keep all of it from leaving, so if it were just a matter of breathing water, he knew she’d be fine. But there was another problem—pressure. Her body was struggling to adapt between the deep ocean pressure she’d spent her whole life at and the one atmosphere of air pressure used by humans living in Zirconia—a near-vacuum from her point of view.

He’d brought her into the lock anyway. After all, the reward had been for an angel, “dead or alive.” He could ignore the waves of pain from her he could actually feel, but he found in some unexpected part of himself that he didn’t want to.

“Get me a pressure tank. Now,” he barked at the enforcer.

“You didn’t pay me for that!” The man’s blue eyes set deep into his piggish pink face widened into whites.

Ersto took three quick steps, still in his pressure suit, but his helmet off. The long knife on his belt he pulled and he held it to the man’s throat. “You will get me a pressure tank, or I will skin you alive.” His voice rasped in a whisper—he let the keen edge of the knife do all his shouting for him.

The enforcer started to move. “Hurry back or I swear by the depths, I will find you.” The man, sufficiently motivated, rushed off.

Ernsto slowly turned back toward the lock and dispassionately watched the angel flounder.