Tag: science fiction

prompt: Start your story with someone making a cup of tea — either for themself or for someone else.

available at Reedsy

Cara watched the water reach a boil in the animal skin bag over the open fire. She kept a close eye to ensure the flame never reached higher than the water. She’d crisped one bag that way already and wasn’t looking for a repeat.

When the water reached boiling, she removed the bag from the fire and poured it carefully into the hand-carved wooden mug, soaking the crushed dried leaves waiting there. She let it steep for a few minutes before taking a tentative sip.

Nodding her approval, Cara sipped at her “tea” until she reached the dregs at the bottom. I should figure out a way to make a strainer, she thought.

The last leftovers of the creature she’d eaten the previous few days constituted her breakfast. That, combined with the stimulant properties of the leaves gave her the energy to hunt. She’d named the creatures “piradeer” because they looked like a cross between a pig, a rabbit, and a deer.

They were not frightened by her presence, but she worried that as time went on, they would begin to fear her. For now, “hunting” involved picking a couple of the bitter berries (that made her sicker than she ever wanted to be) and finding a piradeer. Once spotted, she need only show the fruit to the animal and lead it back to the cave.

About the size of a medium dog and gentle, she found that she could calm them by scratching behind the long ears, and then a tight hug around their thin neck put them out. The butchering was bloody and difficult, but she’d gotten efficient during the months she’d been stranded.

Cara looked out on the area outside her cave. The area to her right was flat and mostly clear. If she was still here in thirty more days, she’d build a paddock and see if she couldn’t domesticate the piradeer. They didn’t move far, but they moved in loose herds to fresh grass.

It would require work on her part not just to build the paddock, but to collect fresh grass for them every day. She’d been so lost in her thoughts that she’d neglected to knock out the piradeer that was now sleeping calmly under her scratching fingers, its pig-like snout twitching with each breath.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and rendered it unconscious with a squeeze of its neck. A tear ran down her cheek. No matter how many times she did it, it never got easier. 

Aside from the bitter leaves she used for tea, every other plant she’d come across made her violently ill, even in tiny tastes. The pseudo-tea leaves, however, were far stronger than coffee or actual tea. She learned that two of the fingernail-sized leaves were the right amount to give her energy without the shakes.

The meat smoked over the fire, her food for the next few days. The meat was gamey and a bit grainy, but she’d grown used to it. Cara picked up a stick and charred the end in the fire, before adding another mark to the wall. She wasn’t sure how long the days were here, but they felt longer than twenty-four hours. Still, this was the two-hundred-twenty-sixth mark she’d made.

There had been many days before that, sitting first at the wreck, then moving out when her supplies dwindled. The cave was a lucky find. It was two days travel from the wreck, and Cara hadn’t been sure where she was going. The lower oxygen levels caused her to tire easily at first, and her thinking was often clouded. It also made starting the fire more difficult, or at least she rationalized the entire day spent getting it going that way. Cara hadn’t allowed it to go out since.

She’d acclimated over time, and guessed that now she could return to the wreck in a single day or less. The hide of the creature that now cooked in the smoke of the fire lay before her. She scraped the back with the knife that constituted her entire collection of useful modern tools. Muscle memory took over, allowing her mind to wander while she scraped.

Her emergency radio sat quiet in the corner of the cave, the green light indicating that it was listening, the slow blinking of the orange light indicating every time her ship in orbit sent a distress call. Folded neatly beneath the radio was her flight suit, a massive rip in the right leg. How she didn’t die in the crash was still beyond her.

She stopped scraping and rubbed the scar on her right calf which itched when she thought about it. Cara was glad for the warmth of the weather, as she hadn’t anything other than her undergarments to wear. She wondered if she should make a needle and try to sew some hide clothes.

The scraping finished, she hung the skin over a rock near the fire. She wasn’t ready to sleep yet, so she grabbed a bone from the pile and began carving with her knife. Making a needle would probably take a good deal of practice and now was as good a time as any.

Cara woke the next morning and stoked the fire, adding another log. After tea, her next chore was to find more dried wood. While her tea steeped, she saw movement in the underbrush outside the cave. The piradeer were moving to the clearing near the cave.

“Hey, guys,” she said.

A few of them stopped and looked her quizzically, their ears perking up. She sipped her tea and watched them go about their calm business. While they ate, they seemed to take turns coming to the mouth of the cave, sniffing at the fire and deciding it was not good or sniffing at her and showing a great deal of curiosity.

She scratched behind their ears as they came around, and soon she had a dozen of them lying around her, in a state somewhere between waking and sleep.

Cara finished her tea and rose to set her mug on the rock outcropping she thought of as her “shelf” when the radio crackled to life. “Exploratory Vessel Andrews, this is Rescue Vessel Sunrise, do you copy?”

She picked up the radio and responded. “RV Sunrise, EV Andrews, Dr. Cara Meeks. I’m on the planet’s surface. From the downed shuttle, look for the smoke of my fire.”

“Roger, Dr. Meeks, we’ll be there to pick you up in less than an hour.”

The curious piradeer had risen and were surrounding her and she found herself scratching them as they got close enough. “Thanks, Sunrise. Take your time, I’m in no hurry today.”

prompt: Write about a character whose intuition is always right — until one day it isn’t.

available at Reedsy

His calm was not born of insouciance, but of clarity; he already knew what would happen and how it would play out. He waited outside the Lord High General’s office, letting the harried couriers and lesser generals bustle about. A subtle feeling led him to move to the other side of the entryway as the door swung violently open where he had just been.

“The Lord High General calls for the Royal Seer, Terkannan!” The guard that opened the door and barked it out hadn’t even noticed Terkannan until he was halfway through the door.

He approached the broad desk and bowed. “Lord High General, I am at your service.”

The general’s voice was hoarse from non-stop meetings since the first light of dawn. “The primitives in this system, here,” he said, pointing at a star chart. “You’ve seen the reports, what is your assessment?”

Terkannan closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Not that he needed to, but it helped maintain the mystery of his line; long bred for intuition to the point of being nearly precognizant. “They are savage, brutish creatures, capable of only violence. This has led them to fight each other, making the strongest among them their leader. Strong they are, too…far superior to our raw abilities, but that’s what weapons are for.”

The general nodded in assent and motioned for the seer to continue.

“Due to their violent nature, they will advance only slowly if at all…assuming they do not do us the favor of wiping themselves out first. Worst case, they may advance rudimentary armor in a few hundred qot. We can use this to our advantage, as we have the technology and weapons to make us…that is…you, Lord High General, the leader of them all.”

“Strategy?” the general asked.

“Overwhelming show of force. As they gather in groups, find the largest gathering first and kill the leader and fighting capable males outright and capture the rest. This demonstration, using their own methods, will make you their undisputed leader.

“From there, it is a simple matter to assimilate bordering groups and grow an army of the creatures organically. They will be fanatically dedicated to you and do your will. They will also make good slaves for mineral extraction.”

“Thank you, Terkannan. The other generals are concerned by the strength of the beasts, while the scientists want to study them, and at least one princess wants to protect them. Bah! That entire system is wealth for the empire, and a million of those beasts on chains in front of our armies will secure our place in the galaxy forever.”

“Exactly as you say, Lord High General.” Terkannan bowed and left the general’s office to return to his own study.

As he walked through the city toward the library, activity around the fort increased. Shuttles were already transporting troops to the waiting ships in orbit. A quarter of a qot to board and prepare the fleet, then three quarters there. The system would be under the empire’s control in just over one qot. Which leaves another nine-hundred-ninety-nine to plan for. This would be the empire’s greatest turning.

Terkannan entered the library and climbed the steps to his study. It was quiet here, and he could shut out the world around him. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath; not for show, but to clear his mind, let his intuition wander. Suspicion niggled at the back of his mind. Something was missing, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

He was trying to let intuition guide him to the missing piece, when he felt he should stand and face his comms. He stood for only a moment when it chimed, and the Lord High General’s assistant showed up on the screen.

“How may I help?” Terkannan asked.

“The Lord High General requests your attendance on this campaign.” The assistant didn’t wait for a reply but disconnected immediately. As with all things the general did, this was an order, not a request.

Terkannan took the bag he had packed the previous day, knowing he would need it but not why. He made his way to the fort and turned left at the sign that pointed to the right for shuttles. A short way down the road he met the general’s staff, boarding a private shuttle, and let himself in.

He was shuttled to the command ship and settled into his cryopod. The general wouldn’t board until just before they left and wouldn’t have time to consult him anyway.

He woke to a cacophony of alarms and shouting. Something had gone wrong, in the worst possible way. Terkannan made his way to the bridge, and the sight that filled the screens was unbelievable.

This was the same planet, but it was ringed with artificial satellites, cities that lit up the night skies, vast amounts of pollutants in the atmosphere. It shouldn’t be possible. He knew they would never advance.

“Did someone get here before us?” the general barked out.

“Scans show the same creatures,” one of the deck officers responded.

“Hundreds of qots to get to crude armor!” The general’s face was distorted with rage as he rose and towered over the seer. “You said they would never advance!”

“Perhaps, Lord High General, I let logic try to explain the reason for my intuition, but I stand by it. An overwhelming show of force and they will follow you blindly.”

The general grunted and sat back down. He pulled up a holographic globe and picked the brightest spot on the night side. “We’re setting down there,” he said. “Set a course and lock it in. The fighters can flatten a landing area for us.”

“Lord High General,” the comms officer said, “we’re getting even more radio wave transmissions from the planet, all across the spectrum. Should we analyze before we—”

“No. Take us in.”

The fighters flew in ahead of the formation and began blasting the strange towers to flatten the land for the fleet. The response from the creatures was immediate.

Flying machines harried the fighters, tearing holes through them with projectile weapons, and finally destroying them with flying bombs. The fleet came over the horizon, flying machines at their backs, and we met head-on with missiles firing from the area of the destruction.

Terkannan felt the unsurety that had bothered him fall away. The general’s ship, and the fleet along with it, would die here. His fate was to sink with the ship in the deep water off the coast they were approaching.

#

“In this evening’s news: We are not alone, but we may not be safe. An alien invasion in Europe destroyed much of the Benelux before NATO troops were able to bring them down. Thousands dead and many more missing. An underwater salvage is underway in the North Sea to recover as many of the alien ships as possible. Here’s Dr. Silva from the European Space Administration to tell us what they hope to learn from the wreckage.”

prompt:  End your story with someone finding themselves.

available at Reedsy

Sometimes it’s easier to pretend that everything’s fine. This wasn’t one of those times. Still, I put on a smile and went through the motions until the end of the workday.

When I left at the end of the day I went straight home to try and straighten the whole mess out. I pulled out my phone and looked at the twelve messages I’d received over the course of the day.

Each message was, supposedly, sent from my own number. That’s easy enough to spoof, I guess, if one knows how. What concerned me were the intimate details contained in each message. Things that I’d not told anyone or written down anywhere…ever.

I read over the last message again, trying to make sense of it. It left more questions than answers.

Your bank password will be given to you tomorrow morning. Trust me, this is for your own good. You’ll find things a little tight until payday, but when the auto trade happens on Nov 22, three years from now, you’ll never have to work again. You’ll even have enough to buy J a house, even though she doesn’t even know you feel the way you do about her. When you do, don’t let her know it was you. Let it be anonymous for her and her kids.

I went to my laptop and logged on to my bank account…or tried to anyway. Not only had my password been changed, but I got an alert on my phone that someone unauthorized had attempted to access my account.

After spending twenty minutes on hold, I was connected with a service rep. They told me I had changed my password three times in the past few hours, and the account was now locked for further changes for a twenty-four cool-down.

The call ended with them trying to hint that maybe I was having a dissociative episode and might benefit from medical help. I’m sure they thought they were being gentle and subtle about it, but it hit like a hammer.

Was I going crazy? How would I have disturbed my own meeting this morning with a text to myself? Was someone trying to convince me I was going insane? Who would do that?

I was left with questions I couldn’t answer. Rather than continue the fruitless conversation with myself, I settled in for a Friday evening of binging streaming video. At least those passwords hadn’t been changed.

I finally got to sleep despite the nagging worry that my life had been hacked in some unrealistically deep way. My sleep was not restful. When I was woken by a text message notification, I didn’t feel like I’d slept at all.

The text message contained my new bank password, and login credentials to a stock trading site connected to a national broker with an office in town. It concluded with, “The good pruning shears are in the kitchen junk drawer—don’t know why. I’ll answer your questions Monday. I know it won’t do any good but be careful tomorrow.”

Not that I had any reason to, but I checked the kitchen junk drawer. I didn’t see any pruning shears in there. Of course, it was a mess. I dug into the drawer, and under the top layer of odds and ends…there they were. Missing for the entire summer, yet this person knew where they were.

I logged in to my back account and noticed it was short a thousand dollars. I checked the transaction history and found an in-person withdrawal that happened while I was in the meeting that had been interrupted by the text message. I looked at the record of the withdrawal and found that it was verified with ID, debit card, and thumbprint. On top of that, I knew all the tellers at the bank by name, and they knew me, as I was there on a weekly basis.

It was looking more impossible the further I went. I’d only added thumbprint verification for cash withdrawals a week prior, as soon as the bank offered it. Whoever this was, had a passable ID, my debit card with the chip, and my thumbprint.

I checked in my wallet, and found that my debit card was, indeed, still in my possession. Still in a haze of feeling violated, I checked the stock trading site. I had three transactions. The first was a deposit of one thousand dollars that included a free five-year membership. Next was an automatic purchase order for GryTek at nine dollars, which had triggered yesterday at noon, resulting in the purchase of one hundred shares after the trading site took their fees. The third was an automatic sell order of the GryTek at nine thousand dollars.

Here again, the transaction records showed that the transactions had been made in person with ID, and that certainly looked like my signature. I checked through the terms and conditions. The agreement was binding and there was no provision for refund. That money was gone.

Should I get the police involved? Someone with my debit card in hand, and my thumbprint, withdrew my money from the bank, and then bought a hundred shares in a nobody company. It would sound like buyer’s remorse…like I wanted to back out of a hasty decision.

I spent the day going in circles, trying to decide how to handle the situation. No idea I came up with was satisfactory. At some point I turned on the TV and let some documentary series play, until I fell asleep there.

The morning came and I woke feeling not refreshed, but like I had at least gotten some sleep. I showered and dressed, planning to spend the day trying to research identity theft, to see if it had ever been done so completely.

The phone rang around noon and I answered, hoping for the thief, but got a coworker instead.

“Could you swing by the office? You missed a signature on one page of your benefits packet. I need to get them out to FedEx this afternoon, but without your signature you’ll miss out on your revenue sharing.”

I drove to the office and handled the paperwork. I sat into the car and had no sooner started it than changed my mind about heading straight home. I got back out of the car and crossed the street to the park.

I walked to the bench by the water where I sometimes ate my lunch and sat facing the river. I wanted to clear my mind, let rationality take over.

The river made a pleasant burbling in front of me; the sunlight sparkled off the water in bright shards. I took a deep breath, letting the fresh air of the park calm me. I’m not sure how long I sat there, but I rose and headed back out of the park as the sun hung low in the sky.

I hadn’t even made it out of the park when my mind began to race again, going in circles as I stepped into the crosswalk. A screech of tires and loud honk made me jump. The last thing I felt before everything went black was my knee shattering against the bumper.

When I woke in the hospital, my entire body felt like a giant bruise. I could only see out of one eye. I reached up with a hand in a cast, only my pointer finger free, and felt at the bandage covering my eye.

The TV at the other end of the room was tuned to a news channel. They were talking about a hundred-fold increase in the stock price of a little-known scientific instrument company that had just signed deals with every major smart phone maker.

I found the remote by my other hand. That hand wasn’t in a cast, although that elbow was immobilized. I turned up the volume.

“The announcement of the deals signed by GryTek early this morning signaled a meteoric stock rise. The CEO has said that they plan a series of stock splits, to normalize their stock prices over the next few years. The first came as a surprise this morning when they made a one to five split.”

I muted the TV. It seemed I now owned five hundred shares of GryTek. I muted the TV, turned my head to the left…and there I stood, smiling.

“Hey, there I am. I couldn’t remember what room I was in,” the other me said. “I know this is weird but hear me out.”

We looked like identical twins, although I noticed a small wrinkle near the corner of other me’s eyes I knew I didn’t have. “What…what is this?”

“GryTek just had the first of several stock splits. Over the next three years, that one hundred…well, five hundred now…shares will turn into twenty thousand. They reach their peak at nine thousand and four dollars a share before they collapse completely.

“For the next three years, their name will be in the news constantly. They make a sensor that ends up in every smart phone and smart watch, until they get pounded by a patent suit.”

“How…who…?”

“I’m you, four years from now. I had this same conversation with myself, on your side, four years ago. Last year…three years from now for you…I retired. A few safe real-estate investments and I’m set for life.”

“If you’re from the future, how does this all work? Causality, I mean?” I asked.

“Hell if I know. I didn’t invent this, just stumbled on it by accident…you’ll see. Was there a version of me that didn’t have a future me come back and make that investment? Maybe. That might have been the me that started all this.”

“But you have my debit card…?”

“Of course. It doesn’t expire for another four years for you, next month for me.” Other me stood. “It’s time for me to go.”

I noticed a slight limp as other me walked a few steps away then faded away into thin air.

prompt:  Start your story with an unusual sound being heard.

available at Reedsy

It started with a low rumble that continued far too long to be normal. As it continued, the frequency rose and the amplitude spiked in increasingly shorter intervals, causing the volume to pulse faster and faster as the rumble climbed into a ringing, rising tone.

In all the years that the Gravity Wave Research Center had been recording and converting gravity waves to sound waves, this anomaly was a first. The duration and non-randomness of it pointed to the possibility of intelligence behind the still-increasing waves.

“I’m telling you, it’s the collision of a pair of pulsars. I’m working on the model now.” Andre typed away at his laptop, heavily chewed pen in his teeth.

“I don’t think so,” Liz said. “We’re either looking at something made by…someone…or we have a whole new thing to learn about in cosmology.”

Andre raised his hands to either side of his face with a mocking grin. “Aliens!”

Liz sucked her teeth at him. “Okay, be that way. Where’s the data from KGOT?” The Kuiper Gravity Observer Telescope was the furthest gravity wave telescope humans had deployed yet, in hopes of getting more and better data.

“Huh?” Andre removed the pen from his teeth. “You sure it’s in position for that?”

“Pretty sure.” Liz pointed to her monitor, where a solar system map with the position of every planet and every man-made object outside of Earth’s orbit. “We picked it up first at Jupiter…JGOT. Then us, at the same time as the message from JGOT. Then Mars is here, where MGOT picked it up twenty minutes after us. That gives us a general direction.

“Following that back, it takes us directly to KGOT.”

“Wonder if there’s a comms issue. I’ll look into that,” Andre said. “In the meantime, can we turn down the speakers? It’s giving me a headache.”

Andre sent a system test message to the gravity telescope near the Kuiper belt, knowing it would be an eight-hour round trip. That out of the way, he went back to work trying to make his model of colliding pulsars match the gravity waves they were still seeing going on close to three hours now.

“Um, Andre, I think you should really check the logs for the KGOT.” Liz’s voice was tense with worry.

Andre switched tasks to look at the logs. They showed that the telescope was sending its regular messages every half-hour for the entire time that they had been recording the anomaly.

“How…how could we pick it up here, but not there? I wonder if there’s a malfunction.”

“Maybe—,” Liz started, but fell silent as the wave ceased. “It’s done. Whatever it was.”

“I’m still trying to get these models to match. It may not be colliding pulsars, if the results I’m seeing are any indication.”

As the hours passed, Liz and Andre worked hard on trying to make some sense out of the strangeness of the wave. They had given up on hearing anything more from the anomaly, until an alert from KGOT showed up.

“Liz! KGOT started picking it up…uh…around four hours ago.”

“Can you give me a more precise time?”

“Yeah, according to the logs, it started at 01:13:22.93114 Zulu.”

Liz entered the data into her solar system model showing the track of the gravity wave. “That would mean it came from—”

“From what?”

“Inside the solar system. Jupiter L4 Lagrange point to be exact.”

“Impossible. There’s not enough matter in the entire solar system for a wave like that, much less the Trojans there.” He returned to his model. “It would take at least a supermassive black hole to generate a wave of that magnitude and duration.”

The videoconference phone chimed with its annoying song. Andre answered and looked to the screen. “Yeah?”

“Hey gravity nerds, I take it you have something big, right?” The screen didn’t show the caller, but a visual telescope view that looked warped, out of focus somehow.

“Hey Janice, what do you have?” Liz asked. “Need help to focus your telescope?”

“Nope. It’s focused perfectly.”

Andre snorted. “If that’s the case, why does it look smeared?”

“Let me zoom out.” The warped look stayed confined within a circle in the middle of the view, limned with a sparkling, blue light. Beyond the light, the rest of the view looked normal.

“Where…where are we looking?” Andre asked.

Liz answered, “Jupiter L4, I bet.”

“Ding! Ding! Ding! You win a prize! I knew you were the smart one.”

“Stow it, Janice. Any idea what it is?” Liz asked.

“Well, this is going to be huge, but I thought I’d show you guys first. I recorded this about ten minutes ago.” The view zoomed back in on the warped, distorted look through the center of the anomaly.

The warped view slowly began to redraw itself as a software algorithm tried to compensate for it. “Either I’m off my rocker or it’s a gateway…to a bunch of other gateways.”

Where once was an image of smudges of light, there was an image of hundreds of glowing circles with distortions at their centers. There were no other lights in the view; no stars, no reflecting nebulae, just the glowing circles.

“There’s no way this is natural,” Liz said.

“Well, maybe,” Andre said. “But still, I think you were right when you said we’d have something new to learn about in cosmology.”

“Just wait,” Janice said. “Here comes the good part.”

A bright shape, like an elongated triangle, came out of one of the glowing circles and moved into another. With no sense of scale there was no way of determining its speed.

“If those are the same size as the one here,” Liz said, “that ship is the size of the moon. I first estimated its speed as three-quarters C, until I realized that the gates…or whatever you want to call them…seem to heavily warp space in their vicinity.”

“What does that have to do with the velocity of the ship?” Andre asked.

“It’s three-quarters C relative to our view, but with the way the space between the gates is warped, the distances we think we see between them can be completely wrong. They may be right beside each other with the ship traveling at a leisurely fourteen thousand kilometers an hour. We just don’t know.”

Ho—how many gates do you see in there?” Andre asked.

“From this vantage point, we count just shy of seven hundred,” Janice said. “I think it’s safe to assume thousands.”

“What…or who made these?”

“That’s the real question,” Liz said. “That’s what’s going to keep us up at night until we know.”

prompt: Set your story during a sudden change of season.

available at Reedsy

Habitat Nine, known colloquially as “Hab-9,” was a test platform for colonization. Agé, the largest moon around the gas giant Xevioso, second planet in the Kal system, teemed with life; slender plants that grew tall in the light gravity, a healthy micro-biome, and small creatures similar to nematodes on Earth.

Although Agé orbited Xevioso once every nineteen hours, it was almost tidally locked to the gas giant. The moon completed one rotation relative to its parent in a period of 413 Earth days, while the Xevioso system orbited its star every 204 Earth days.

“We should get the last of the crops in,” Tara said. “We’re nearly halfway to facing planet-side.”

The rising Xevioso filled the sky with its splendor. Swirls and bands of color adorned the gas giant; browns, oranges, and yellows, along with a deep purple band that marked its equator.

Lev looked at the planet looming in the sky. “It won’t be as bright, but at least it won’t be four hundred days of darkness. The way Xev reflects, the only dark times will be when we’re on the backside of the planet; same as now.”

“We have some low-light crops to test out during the planet-side transition.” Tara pulled her light jacket tighter around her shoulders. “The wind is picking up. When was the last time the ventgrass was checked?”

“It’s been a few days. We should do that before it seeds again.”

The native plants of Agé were compatible with humans and their crops, apart from a highly toxic, stiff, grass-like plant found only around the steam vents that dotted the landscape. The “ventgrass” contained high levels of a novel alkaloid and spread its tiny seeds on the slightest breeze. When dropped too far from a steam vent, the seeds didn’t germinate, instead decaying and poisoning the ground on which they landed, dotting the ground with centimeter-sized dead spots.

“Let’s start with that, then.” Tara shrugged into her hazard suit, checking that her mask made a good seal, and her filters were fresh. She was glad to get into the suit, adding another layer of protection against the chilling fingers of the wind.

As they neared the steam vent, their worst fears were confirmed. “It’s gone to seed already,” Lev said.

“That’s way too fast.” She turned on her radio to the habitat. “Tara to Hab-9. Close and seal all doors, use only air locks, do not leave without protective gear. Ventgrass is seeding. Run the air purifiers on full power, wipe down all surfaces. Any symptoms of alkaloid poisoning are to be treated as an immediate emergency.”

The responses back from the habitat were quick and clipped. Everyone there knew their job and the dangers it entailed. Countless drills had prepared them for a situation like this.

Tara placed a plastic bag over one of the clumps of ventgrass and dug it out at the roots.

“They must be seasonally reactive.” Lev burned the remainder of the ventgrass with a small torch. “With this wind, the entire crop is ruined.”

“Yeah, there’s no telling how much seed has settled on the vegetables, and we can’t dig the tubers without contaminating them.”

“They’re all seed crop now, if they survive.”

They returned to the habitat in silence. After moving through the decontaminating airlock, they shed their hazard suits. The wind increased through the following hours and days, the chill it carried turning into biting cold.

Over the following days, Tara and Lev returned to the vent. The ventgrass doubled, then trebled its rate of growth as the winds grew icier. The steam from the vent turned to fine snow in the wind, carrying the seeds farther than they could travel on their own.

A layer of ice formed as the snow fell and was constantly groomed by the undying winds. The temperature dropped well below freezing, the sky taken up by the swirls of the gas giant overhead. When Xevioso stood between Agé and the sun, the planet’s edge was limned in light surrounding the inscrutable dark of its surface, with bright stars in the small bits of sky not taken up by its looming presence.

By the end of the second week, the winds had receded, returning to the gentle breezes they were accustomed to. The ground had gone hard and frozen at the surface, under a layer of ice onto which a growing powder of constant snow fell.

“We have two hundred days of this?” Lev asked.

“It looks that way.” Tara studied the soil from the roots of the ventgrass she had brought into the lab. The nematode-like creatures were unaffected by the toxins. One of the micro-organisms they fed on seemed to thrive on those same alkaloids, converting them to non-toxic hydrocarbons.

“So much for the low-light crops. We can’t plant, even if the ground wasn’t frozen,” Lev sighed. “I’m not even sure we’ll get a full season of growing, since we have to clean everything up after all the seeding.”

“We don’t have to,” Tara said. “That’s up to these guys.” She held a Petri dish grown grey with the bacteria-like organisms in question.

Lev gave her a doubtful glance. “How long will that take? When we landed it was already a hundred days into the sun-side cycle.”

“And it was lush. I have a feeling this will happen faster than either of us expect. Just like the sudden change in temperature.”

“So, what’s the plan?”

“We grow a bunch of this and spread it as soon as we can. It slows down at sub-freezing temperatures but doesn’t die.”

“So, the grey slime eats the alkaloid, and the nemagétodes eat the bacteria, right? A combined nitrogen-fixer. Maybe alkateria and nitrotodes….”

“Those names are terrible.” Tara didn’t feel like going over yet again how Lev’s acceptable name for the ventgrass was not license to name everything else, so she gave it a rest. “That’s it, essentially. After the pseudo-bacteria break down the alkaloids, the pseudo-nematodes eat them and release nitrogen in the soil.”

“And you’re pretty certain it happens fast?”

“Yep. How long do the dead spots last?” Tara asked.

“Usually a few weeks.”

“Not the ones in our crops. We amended the soil, and these guys are still trying to repopulate. I meant in the native plants.”

“Well,” Lev said, “you get some permanent black spots on the leaves, but the ground cover usually fills back in within a couple days.”

“Exactly. Now, since we have a couple hundred days of cold, why don’t we get to work building new soil amendments with these guys?”

“By the way,” Lev asked, “what are we calling the seasons? I was thinking stellum and planetum. Just need to figure out when stellumnar and planetumnar solstices are.”

“Um, Lev, what’s wrong with summer and winter?” Tara asked.

Lev shrugged. “Boring.”

prompt: Write a story that involves sabotage.

available at Reedsy

Wallace walked toward the silent slab of alien metal that hung over the edge of the city, his tool bag hung over his shoulder. After the failed attempts of the combined militaries of the world, it had become obvious that the aliens were now running the show. Like most others, Wallace wasn’t happy about that.

He looked at the strange paper he held. It had writing in the alien’s language and English stating that he was ordered, as a subject of the Empire, for a work detail on the ship. Grabbing the corner of the sheet, it glowed yellow. The cashier at the minimart had tried it, and it did not respond for her.

On reaching the park indicated on the paper, he joined the queue being checked by the large alien machines, looking like oversized turnstiles surrounded by a thin support structure and bristling with unmistakable gun barrels, and unarmed humans in military uniforms. As each person in the queue was vetted, they filed into a cube-shaped device hovering an inch above the grass.

The machines made a strange noise, followed by, “Work pass, please.”

Wallace held the paper by the corner, letting it glow. The machine made another strange noise, then said, “Next.”

He started toward the cube and was stopped by one of the human soldiers. “Here ya go,” he said, handing Wallace an MRE and two bottles of water. “The best thing in there is probably the gum, but the rest is better than starving,” the soldier said.

Wallace took the offered items and thanked the soldier. As he stepped into the cube, he felt as though he were in an elevator going down at high speed. He struggled to keep himself upright and walk without bouncing and stumbling around. He wasn’t the only one.

He made his way to the wall and leaned against it. The short, stocky woman next to him did the same. She turned toward him, her golden-brown skin looking wan in the pale light, her dark brown hair looking black. Her deep brown eyes raised to meet his; pale blue. “What kind of work for you?”

He looked at his pale hands, all pink undertones washed out by the unflattering light. The strands of blonde hair that fell in front of his eye appeared grey. “I’m a mechanical and electrical engineer. I don’t know what they want from me, though. Not like I had a choice. The Empire commands, blah blah blah…pain of death, blah blah blah….”

“True,” she said. “No choices. I’m a biochemist. No idea what they want with me.”

“Wallace,” he said.

“Isabella.”

They fell silent, not really having anything else to talk about. It wasn’t until his ears began to pop that Wallace realized they were rising. He ripped open the MRE and dug through until he found the gum.

It tasted like sugar and cardboard and was like trying to chew leather until it warmed up.

“Good idea,” Isabella said and followed suit.

The cube docked inside the larger ship, the walls disappearing into nothing. Wallace wondered at it. Did they go into the floor, too fast to see? Were they made of some strange material that required energy to remain solid?

He was quickly pulled out of his wondering by the aliens that were standing around waiting for them. They were at least nine feet tall, slender, bipedal, with two long arms extending from their mid torso, with two small, seemingly unusable arms extending from what he thought of as their narrow shoulders, and another two from their hips.

There was little he could see to differentiate them from each other. In the dim light they all looked a pale, yellow grey with six black eyes above a lipless mouth and nothing that suggested ears or a nose. They were covered with a fine, downy fur that was thickest down their torso midline.

They wore no clothes beyond a sash below their upper arms, on which were alien symbols. The one that approached him handed him a small device on a soft cord that felt like silk and mimed putting it over its head.

“Put this on,” it said. “This is your translation device for spoken and written language. Do not lose it. Follow me.”

Wallace realized that the creature was making strange sounds, but the device was converting it to English. He put the device around his neck and followed the strange being.

It took him a few minutes to find a walking gait that didn’t have him tripping over himself in the low gravity. Once he was moving confidently, he began to pay more attention to his surroundings. Aliens they may be, but electricity is electricity, and the conduits began to make sense to him.

He noticed that there were places in the corridors where the gravity felt lightest and moving away from them it slowly increased. At those places, there was always a light brown conduit with bright yellow stripes going into the floor, and markings on the floor in the alien script.

As they passed one, he paused and pointed the translator at the marking on the floor. “Caution, gravity plate below. Do not remove while powered,” the device said.

“Gravity manipulation?” he asked.

“Yes,” the alien answered.

“If you can do that, what do you need from me?”

The alien opened a door into a workshop where a ground vehicle sat next to an identical one that looked like it had been crushed. Devices in various states of destruction sat on workbenches, two feet too tall for a human to work at, if not for the crude stepladder chairs that flanked them.

“You will work on improving these devices to work in high gravity.”

“Why me?” Wallace asked. “Surely your engineers can figure it out.”

“You can withstand the gravity of testing, and you are used to engineering in high gravity, so you will save us time.” It pointed at a bench on the far side of the room. “Start on the device there,” it said. “That is your critical work for the day.”

“Can you at least tell me your name?” Wallace asked.

It made a strange noise that he had no hope of repeating. “Ah, okay, I’ll just call you Lurch. I’m Wallace, by the way.”

Ignoring him, Lurch pointed to a large button on the wall. “When you wish to test at high gravity, that button will sound the alarm to clear the lab, then the gravity plate in the center of the test floor will turn off, subjecting the area to your planetary gravity.”

With that, the alien left him on his own. Wallace put his tool bag, MRE, and water bottles on the workbench and began to inspect the device he was meant to be working on.

It was a basic relay, an electromagnetic switch. Run low-voltage power through the coil and it pulls the switch closed allowing a high-voltage current across the switch. Remove the low-voltage signal, the switch opens back up.

He tested the resistance across the switch when closed. Even at the most sensitive setting, his meter could not detect any resistance. It was a superconductor. There was a spool of the same material sitting on the workbench. It felt no more substantial than aluminum foil, although it was far thicker.

In the low gravity, it was stiff enough to maintain its shape, but it would never hold up in full gravity. It would be simple to fix with a piece of light gauge mild steel, assuming the magnet was strong enough to hold it. He wasn’t about to call it done, though.

He moved to the gravity plating and placed his high-voltage meter near the cable. It was well-shielded, not giving him any readings. He grabbed the relay, pushed the large button above his head, and moved to the gravity plate.

After a few seconds of the alarm, he felt like he was again on solid ground. The metal of the switch drooped and warped, no matter which way it was turned, even when placed at ninety degrees.

There didn’t seem to be any fasteners holding the gravity plate in the floor, and he found it easier than he expected to lift out. Beneath it, he found devices he couldn’t identify, but the power connections were clear, and it was obvious that the power continued beyond the plate.

Continuing to experiment, he disconnected the power from the plate and attached his high-voltage meter. He returned to the button and hit it again. The meter hummed and he looked at it only long enough to read that it was seventeen kilovolts before pushing the button again.

After reconnecting and allowing the power to return to the gravity plating, he began looking through the materials on the workbench. As he had guessed, there was no mild steel. There was, however, the spool of superconducting ribbon. It was easy enough to cut a piece off with his snips. He stuffed it in the bottom of his tool bag for study. It would certainly give humanity a big boost if they could copy it.

Wallace considered the device under the gravity plate. There was a large amount of electricity powering it, and high-voltage systems tend to not withstand feedback very well. Coupled with how everything seemed to be engineered to very close tolerances without any thought of over-engineering, it was likely that he could rig something up.

He set to work with the materials on the workbench and had a voltage amplifier built in less than an hour. Wallace sat, eating his high-calorie meal, playing with the superconductor while trying to figure out how to place it where it would both be hidden, and would not go off while he was in the ship.

Finally, it came to him. He grabbed the now-tasteless gum from the plastic MRE bag where he had stuck it while eating and began to chew it again. While doing this, he poured the MRE salt packet into one of the bottles of water and shook it up. Saltwater was a far better conductor than clear water.

After turning off the gravity again, he lifted the floor plate and dropped down into the space beneath it where the hardware was. The actual emitter, if that’s what it was, lay beneath the hardware, while the floor plate was just a covering.

He placed the amplifier under the adjoining floor plate, in a space too small for the aliens to easily see or get to. One end of the amplifier was attached to the mechanism’s power output, with the other connected to a lead of the superconductor held above the floor by using his gum to tack it to another insulated conduit.

The bottle of saltwater was placed on the other side of the space, and he poked a small hole in the base of it. When the water was high enough, the power inlet would arc to the water, and from there to the amplifier. He just hoped it was enough.

He turned the gravity modifier back on and sat on the floor putting his tools away when the door opened and the alien he called ‘Lurch’ came in.

“Have you found the solution?” Lurch asked, looking at the warped and mangled relay on the workbench.

“I have,” Wallace said, “but I don’t have the materials here to fix it.” He continued with the meticulous process of putting his tools in his bag in just the right way.

“What material are you needing?”

“Mild steel, twenty-four gauge,” he said, zipping his bag.

“You will provide some of this when you return in six of your hours,” Lurch said. “Now it is time for you to leave, so we may go into our night cycle.”

Wallace shrugged the bag over his shoulder and followed the alien back out to the other humans standing inside a square on the floor. He recognized it as the floor of the cube. Just as they had disappeared before, the walls suddenly appeared around them, and the cube began descending; only the popping of his ears making that apparent to him.

When he stepped out of the cube, he noticed he wasn’t the only one glad to be back on solid ground with full gravity. Wallace began walking away, trying to decide where to go. He wasn’t coming back in six hours, that much was certain.

A tap on his shoulder stopped him, and he turned to see Isabella. “Hey, Isabella, right? What did they have you doing?”

“Mostly testing the nutritional value to humans of some foul-smelling paste,” she said. “They left me alone in a lab, and I left them a little present.”

“What’s that?”

“When someone moves the waste container, they’re going to have a little fire in the lab. Stunning how little care they give to things like potassium.” She winked.

“Yeah, I uh…tried to burn out their gravity system. Hopefully, sometime in the next hour or less, their whole system will be overloaded.”

They reached the edge of the park, about to go their separate ways, when they realized everyone around them was fixated on the ship. Wallace turned in time to see the ship begin to list to one side, rise, and speed away toward the hills as it began to distort, as though an unseen hand was crushing it in just before it fell from the sky.

As the dust settled, the two of them looked around. People were cheering and celebrating. The machines that had been standing guard were silent. Wallace realized, with a sickening lurch of his guts, that the ship had crashed in an inhabited area.

“All those people,” he said.

Isabella grabbed his hand and led him away. “Come now, grieve later,” she said. “They thought the war was over, but we’ll show them it’s just begun.”