Beyond the Stars: At Galaxy's Edge: a space opera anthology Read online

  Contents

  The stories herein...

  Foreword (Jennifer Foehner Wells)

  The Good Food (Michael Ezell)

  The Epsilon Directive (David Bruns)

  Just an Old-Fashioned Lust Story (Christopher J. Valin)

  The Quarium Wars (E.E. Giorgi)

  Re/Genesis (G. S. Jennsen)

  Second Place (Nick Webb)

  Last Pursuit (Piers Platt)

  Relic Hunter (Chris Fox)

  Procurement (Adam Quinn)

  One More Star, Shining (Anthea Sharp)

  Tabitha’s Vacation (Michael Anderle)

  Elvis Has Left the Building (Caroline A. Gill)

  Acknowledgments

  About the Editor

  What people are saying about the Beyond the Stars series:

  Great stories, great writers and a blisteringly good collection.

  I really don’t know why I’m surprised anymore to find that the quality of every story is so good!

  Every one of these stories is excellent. All of them stretch your mind into thinking new thoughts and seeing old thoughts in new ways.

  I enjoyed every story in this collection... in fact, I loved most of them... and I’m excited to see more by these authors.

  Great book that entertained and left me thinking. Thanks for the chance to discover these new worlds!

  Beyond the Stars

  Space Opera Anthologies

  DARK BEYOND THE STARS

  BEYOND THE STARS: A Planet Too Far

  BEYOND THE STARS: At Galaxy’s Edge

  BEYOND THE STARS: New Worlds, New Suns (April, 2017)

  BEYOND THE STARS: Unimagined Realms (August, 2017)

  Beyond the Stars

  At Galaxy’s Edge

  a space opera anthology

  Foreword by

  Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Patrice Fitzgerald, Series Editor

  Astral Books

  an imprint of

  eFitzgerald Publishing, LLC

  The stories herein...

  The Good Food (Michael Ezell)

  In a far corner of the galaxy, uninhabited Seed World Four-Seven-Alpha experiences a loss of plant life that can’t be explained by satellite imagery.

  When a deep space Marine Scout and his modified K9 are ordered to investigate, they discover something that makes them redefine the term “uninhabited.”

  The Epsilon Directive (David Bruns)

  In the aftermath of the war, Eraser Squads were formed for one reason: to rid the universe of every last Scythian. When Tom, a reluctant Marine, tracks down a lone Scythian being harbored by a group of human conscientious objectors, his own conscience gets the better of him.

  Just an Old-Fashioned Lust Story (Christopher J. Valin)

  When the galaxy’s greatest bounty hunter decides to help his target spend her husband’s money instead of doing his job, his employer sends the next five best scumbags after them both. As one would imagine, bloodshed ensues.

  Can even the best of the best survive against such odds and still protect the woman he lo—uh, lusts after?

  The Quarium Wars (E.E. Giorgi)

  A deadly attack by the hands of General Zika leaves an entire planet dead and an open quest for Quarium—the most sought-after molecule in the Old System. As Hyleesh walks the shores of the destroyed planet searching for answers, he finds the most unlikely of survivors.

  Re/Genesis (G. S. Jennsen)

  In a future too distant to measure, a hyper-evolved breed of humans calling themselves Anadens rule multiple galaxies and alien species with an iron fist. But a small group of dissidents are willing to pursue any and all measures, no matter how extreme, to return freedom to the universe. Now one rebel Anaden will make the ultimate sacrifice in order to break the reigning Directorate’s stranglehold on civilization—however many times it takes.

  Second Place (Nick Webb)

  The second man to step foot on Mars now wants to go back. And be the first man to die on Mars.

  But dying isn’t always easy.

  Last Pursuit (Piers Platt)

  Just one final target stands between a weary assassin and a life of freedom and wealth. But time is running short: the mark knows that he’s coming, and he’s not the only contractor on the job...

  Relic Hunter (Chris Fox)

  Wesley Voncamp the 16th is the best relic hunter in the galaxy. Well maybe not the best. Or the 100th best. But he’s a relic hunter, after a legendary prize. All he needs is a crew, a ship, and his allergy medicine.

  Procurement (Adam Quinn)

  Captain Jareyn Brook’s Interstellar Emergency Service operates far from the red tape of the capital world of Meltia—and that’s exactly how she likes it. But when her ship is destroyed and a government subcommittee threatens to shut the IES down entirely, Brook will have to brave the depths of the Meltian bureaucracy to save her command from legal destruction.

  One More Star, Shining (Anthea Sharp)

  After escaping Earth, and the rigid expectations of Society, Liza Roth makes a new life for herself as an asteroid miner on the outer edges of the galaxy. It’s a grim and dusty living, and she never expects to fall in love, let alone dream of a better life ahead. But when tragedy strikes, Liza must decide whether to bury herself in the ashes of the past, or find the strength to move forward and light her own way into the future.

  Tabitha’s Vacation (Michael Anderle)

  Tabitha, a Queen’s Ranger and follower from before the Queen left Earth to take the fight to the Kurtherians, is sick.

  She’s sick of being bored.

  It has taken Tabitha and her team thirty years to get her assigned system to be good—mostly—with the idea of law and order. Her boss understands that she needs a vacation. One that doesn’t involve just lying around on the beach and sipping fruity drinks. And he knows the right place to send her...

  Bectal’s World, your typical planet of scum and villainy.

  Elvis Has Left the Building (Caroline A. Gill)

  Humans need machines to fly beyond the limits of our galaxy, to explore the stars.

  That’s the Rora’s assignment: colonize the next Entertainment planet. One old AI and a crew of five humans serving five-year terms as captain aboard a cargo spaceship that’s more junker than transport. Together, human and machine fly straight and true for their distant goal.

  Until space sickness changes their schedule.

  Until madness consumes the ship.

  Foreword

  by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  I SPEND A lot of time contemplating what kind of future I want to portray in my stories. Will it be the nearly utopian kind of future depicted in the Star Trek franchise where the antagonists are primarily non-human? Or will it be dark and gritty like Battlestar Galactica where every character is their own worst enemy? The Star Trek approach gives us hope for a better future for all, but is it realistic? Galactica, on the other hand, paints humanity with the darkest brush, rarely giving us even a glimpse of joy.

  Humans will always have their foibles. They will be misled, misinformed, act rashly, especially when afraid. The human gestalt will always be complex and fallible, no matter how good and true our intentions may be. Bringing these failings to life through story in a way that may help us learn to do better is the author’s job.

  Of course I want to imagine a future with total social equity, where we have relieved all of society’s ills, but I�
��ve often wondered if that is plausible. Like the brave little Dutch boy, we plug the hole in the infernal dike with our fingers, but just as we congratulate ourselves for a job well done, another tiny rivulet of water springs to life just out of reach. Or we run out of fingers. Or help takes too long to come. Or the leak isn’t noticed until it’s too late and has already become a flood. But perhaps it isn’t a dike at all. Perhaps it is the hull of a ship, leaking precious air.

  Taking what we know about the human condition and transporting that to Mars, or even as far as the stars, doesn’t change that. Humanity is still tribal, no matter how fast our jets, ships, and internet connections can take us around this blue globe. And aliens, should we ever have the pleasure to encounter them, will have their own set of problems, which may be unfathomable to us. The clash of these paradigms will raise the stakes, the drama, and the impact of the inevitable disasters. Xenophobia, eternally a significant problem worldwide, may be the only thing that can unite us as a species against an external intelligence, even if that intelligence turns out to be friendly.

  In John Scalzi’s Hugo-nominated novel Old Man’s War, men and women of every nationality, sexual orientation, and skin shade work together to protect human colonized worlds from alien species who want to claim those precious worlds for themselves. On the other hand, The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey delivers a future where our entire solar system has been colonized, but humanity fails to unite against an alien threat, instead using this ancient alien artifact as a weapon to destabilize the delicate balance of power, pitting faction against faction in a deadly, politically charged environment where many humans are used as pawns and ultimately lose their lives. Similarly, Dan Simmons’s Hugo Award winner Hyperion tells the tale of a future where Earth is already dead and a group of men and women are sent as pilgrims to placate a mysterious creature called the Shrike in order to preserve the hegemony of mankind spread across the galaxy.

  Exploring possible futures like these through story, illuminating our humanity in the face of new extraordinary challenges, is the space opera writer’s job. Through an author’s mind we experience humanity pushed to its limits firsthand, expanding our potential, revealing what is possible. These may be stories of personal triumph, cautionary tales, descriptions of futility in the face of an uncaring universe, and so much more. In them we learn what potential futures may await us.

  It is often said that readers lead a thousand lives. By reading science fiction we can lead those lives with challenges we could never face during our brief existence on Earth. In the following pages you will find your chance to live a dozen more lives within tiny little universes that will exist only for you for a very short time. May they open your eyes, your heart, your mind.

  Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Indiana

  July 14, 2016

  About Jen

  As a child growing up in rural Illinois, Jennifer Foehner Wells had the wild outdoors, a budding imagination, and books for company. Her interest in science fiction was piqued early on when a family friend loaned her a Ray Bradbury compilation, among loads of other wonderful sci-fi books. Jen currently lives an alternately chaotic and fairly bucolic existence in Indiana with two boisterous little boys, two semi-crazed cats, and a neurotic chihuahua mix. You can find her on Twitter, extolling science and sci-fi fandoms, as @Jenthulhu. To find out more about Jen, visit: www.jenthulhu.com.

  The Good Food

  by Michael Ezell

  THE DROP-SHIP’S RETROS kicked in hard, blowing away rich black soil that had crept onto the landing pad over the decades since someone had last been there.

  Self-adjusting struts scraped against the ferrocrete surface as the ship’s weight settled onto the planet. The specially treated ferrocrete didn’t allow plants to grow on the half-mile square, otherwise it would have been taken over long ago. Aggressive green life rose up all around the landing pad. A jungle world, ruled by trees and vines, populated solely by insects. Until today.

  Inside the drop-ship, Jensen unbuckled himself from the pilot’s couch. He giggled out loud in the empty cabin. Pilot. More like a glorified gardener sent to spread some new shit around the back forty. The computer did all the‌—‌

  “Touchdown, Jensen. You may move about the cabin now.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Moira,” Jensen said.

  The words came out a little garbled. His throat felt like he tried to swallow a jellyfish. Hypersleep phlegm. All this tech and they still couldn’t solve that one. The eggheads who sent him assured him it would clear up within thirty-six hours of waking. Going on three days now and he still sounded like a four-pack-a-day smoker.

  “What’s the distance to the anomaly line?” Jensen said.

  “Three-point-seven miles from the center of the pad. It has gotten closer, Jensen.”

  “Yeah, I know. I read the brief.”

  “Just making conversation. You don’t have to be crabby.”

  Supposedly, they modeled the ship’s AI on Moira Tiernan, the designer of these long-range ships. Jensen always envisioned her as a woman who’d insist on paying her half of the dinner tab and give you a hearty handshake at the end of the date.

  “Shall I begin the wake up procedure for Roy?” Moira said.

  “Sure. Bet he’s gonna pee all over every tree in sight,” Jensen said.

  “Doubtful. There is no significant buildup of waste during stasis.”

  “Yeah, yeah! Geez, Moira, it’s a figure of speech. Let in some light, will ya?”

  Jensen stood and stretched his back as Moira opened the reentry shields over the thick windows. The odd bluish tinge to the sunlight streaming in made the bridge feel like the inside of a fish tank. He’d been told, even shown photos, but still...

  Not even Moira interrupted this first silent stare at Seed World Four-Seven-Alpha. A lush primordial jungle, with small insects buzzing, flitting, jumping, carrying on a furious pace of life. Two centuries of terraforming had paid off.

  But just a bit over three miles from here, the greenery ended on a neat line that ran arrow-straight for a quarter mile. A mass extinction that photos from Four-Seven-Alpha’s lone monitoring satellite couldn’t explain.

  The clickety-click of toenails on the deck announced Roy’s arrival. The dog looked like Jensen felt. Groggy, a little off center, and in need of a good stretch.

  “Hey, boy!” Jensen put out a hand and Roy trotted over. Big for a Belgian Malinois, Roy’s shoulders came up to Jensen’s waist. Jensen scrubbed the reddish-blond fur behind the dog’s ears and Roy responded with a deep play bow that stretched his back. Vertebrae crackled and Roy shook himself like he’d just come in from a rainstorm.

  He nuzzled Jensen’s hand, flipped it up with his nose. Jensen laughed and scrubbed between Roy’s ears again. “You’re gettin’ soft, trooper.”

  Roy trotted over and put his front paws on the window ledge to look out into the jungle. A flexible speaker implanted in the dog’s neck turned throaty growls into an approximation of human speech using a few basic words and phrases.

  “Go pee.”

  Jensen cocked an eyebrow at the camera in the cabin ceiling. “Moira? Anything to say about that?”

  “The lower hatch is open. Tell that mutt not to urinate on my flanks.”

  * * *

  Cold, crisp, the air tasted oddly like a fruit flavored gum from back home. He’d been more than a little leery of stepping outside without a helmet, but Moira called him a pussy. A pussy! A damn computer shouldn’t be able to talk to a decorated veteran like that. Sure, there was enough oxygen to keep him alive here, but what if the plant extinction had something to do with an airborne pathogen?

  Moira reminded him that whatever killed off the plants hadn’t harmed anything else. The insects were still alive.

  So off he went with Roy, but he still wore his combat suit and carried a maglev rifle. Damned if he would let a smartass computer shame him into getting killed. He tried to keep his combat edge, but the three-mile walk through
gorgeous flora eventually had him admiring his surroundings. Sweet smelling tube flowers at least two feet across, their petals every color combination Jensen’s brain could process, and some it couldn’t, with yellow stamen thicker than his arm. More plants no higher than his ankle with flowers the size of his pinkie nail. He let Roy range ahead and mark his new territory. And the dog had a lot to mark. Trees and vines arched up into a canopy that displayed its own rainbow of fruits above Jensen’s head. Which the millions of bugs here put to good use. Making more bugs.

  The combat suit generated a mild electromagnetic field that kept the bugs away, but pretty soon Jensen didn’t have to worry about it. When he reached the edge of the jungle, he noticed the insects seemed to stay behind an invisible line about three feet back from the last plants.

  As seed planet catastrophes go, this one didn’t seem too bad. Looked like they just got the mixture of early insects wrong. Sometimes the smart boys back home guessed wrong. The genetic alterations made to plants that grew under this bluish light could very well have made them tasty to an insect that would otherwise ignore them. But what the hell did a grunt know about those things? He was just here to take samples and report back. The clean, straight line of demarcation had Jensen feeling antsy, though. What insect ate everything in a perfect line like that? Space locusts?