“Your testimony is unfinished, Ensign Duffy. Sit.”
Duffy’s knees, already wobbly from stress, buckled, dumping him back down in the witness chair. He faced the unblinking Commodore Brice and her investigative panel.
This isn’t a trial. They promised me I wouldn’t be on trial. Which was true. Besides, I haven’t done anything wrong.
“Approaching coordinate J-14. Instability detected. Awaiting your instruction, Clawson.”
Safe in the Pangaea lander, Commander Rex Clawson monitored ANNIE’s progress across the desolate rocky landscape of planetoid Decimus. The drone feed indicated ANNIE stood at the precipice of a yawning gorge. Coordinate J-14 lay 9.5 meters ahead horizontally but 135.6 meters straight down.
“We’ll be late, Harold!” Beatrice scolded as Harold zipped toward the nearby star. “I told you we needed to leave early!”
“We would’ve been fine if it weren’t for that construction on the Tarangian Way!” Harold snapped back, purple facial tentacles writhing angrily. “Who reduces an intergalactic byway to one lane? Traffic was stopped completely!”
July 4th, 2050
I didn’t think my husband and I would qualify for the program. Things don’t usually go our way, especially since Gavin’s release from active duty and the months of trauma that followed. He sits next to me, his fingers playing with his ID badge. The word ARMY is emblazoned across it.
Helios gripped his resume. After an hour of waiting, the paper was somewhere between crumpled and wilting.
He attempted to smooth it out on his lap. It didn’t help. Maybe the Boss wouldn’t notice…
He glanced over the details listed under Education and Activities. Graduated from Celestial Gasses Academy—middle of the class.
“Oh no! Oh no! Nixie, what have I done?” Jope yanked his hands away from the control panel. Lights blinked along the dash, but he pressed fists to his eyes and leaned his weight against the harness. He couldn’t bear to look at the teleportation platform across the cabin. It was ominously, horribly silent.
Read it now
The tracking device sizzles and melts as my cybernetic eye’s laser bores into it. After a moment, it’s nothing more than fried wires and chalk-like powder. Destroying it is probably too little too late in deterring whoever must be following us, but I certainly won’t make their job easier.
The tracker is
The green sun of Lilen rose over the city of Shooshun. Its warm rays pierced a certain upper-story window of a certain stone house near the outermost edge of the city’s innermost ring. Soft green light shone on the face of a young Lilenite as she slept among piles of silky-soft furs.
Read it now
“Absolutely not!” My bass voice shook the room. “I refuse.”
King Elrose Pendrake VI merely grinned. “Oh, don’t be like that, you big lizard. Wasn’t it you who taught me not to refuse something without knowing what I’m refusing?”
“That’s different. I know exactly what kind of nonsense you’ll be involving me in.”
Cooling my jets on a passenger transport from the outer planets to Mars, I was looking forward to conducting my research on pre-android robots from a safe, but observable, distance from Earth. Naturally, that’s when it happened.
The radio crackled and the captain of a passing freighter, leaving Mars for the outer quadrants,
While I’ve faced plenty of crises aboard the spaceship Oceania, I’d never been charged by a rhino before.
Seconds from impact, I dodged the furious beast’s horn, lunged, and scooped her into my arms. “Take it easy,” I murmured, scratching behind Rhino One’s ears.
The Oceania was transporting a dozen Sumatran rhinos…
Watching the one-yen coin tumbling seemingly endlessly midair, Ren Izumi said,
“Winner gets to update the signal tower’s hardware down on the planet. Fresh air after three months, ah! The loser has to stay here and overhaul the ship’s decrepit ventilation system. I call one.”
Himari Tanaka smiled. “Is that Toshiko-san’s lucky coin?”
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