Holy Science Fiction, Batman!

As the lift rose up to the main deck, Angel cleaned the gore off of the sword. “How long until we're in orbit? Are the solar sails still holding?” she asked the empty air. Aeolus formed into an image at her side. An average height man with Grecian features and tousled dark hair and dark eyes, some how Angel knew this was what the man whose mind was forced into the ship's mainframe looked like in his prime. This time he wore a flight suit similar to hers, sans insignia of rank.

“Three minutes until we are past the lunar ring and entering Earth's orbit,” the ship said into her mind, directly stimulating her auditory processing cortex via the neural-link. “I have hacked into the manifest. The cargo at the bay above the one with the plasma damage is holding repair materials.”

Angel's eyebrow arched and the cyborg tipped her head slightly to the left as she looked over at the hallucination of her ship's consciousness. There was no sense of fuzziness in the image as she turned her head. Aeolus was getting better at the mutual interface. There was the queer feeling that came with her blind spot being overrode but even then the image held true. It was almost as if she could reach out and touch him. “Secondary sail is holding steady, primary sail is at eighty percent capacity. The tertiary sail is still locked in its bay,” he said as he took a step forward. It was eerie to see the sight of a man walking and hear no sound of foot steps.

“Monitoring the coronal stability, we have three to four terra-cycles before the next major CME,” he said stopping at the door of the lift. The sliding doors hissed open and he turned to face Angel. “It is possible to regenerate one of the clones,” Aeolus said as Angel stepped past his image and into the main corridor. “There is a regeneration tank though it would not be clear how much memory he retains from the process,” the ship continued.

“Dregan is dead,” Angel said, “I killed him myself.”

“If the clones retained that much memory, Dregan is not dead but in stasis,” Aeolus replied. Angel looked over at the manifestation of the ship's consciousness with shock. “What was the point of origin of those clones?” Aeolus went curiously still, as though suddenly turning into a statue. His dark eyes turned bright with light as he was sifting through data. They darkened again and the hallucination began to walk forward to the bridge.

Angel began to walk quickly after the hallucination. “Aeolus, you can do this with out messing with my neural network,” she said. “Just tell me.”

“Better to show you,” he answered.

“Damn it, Aeolus, what are you on about?” she demanded in an exasperated tone. The doors to the bridge opened. As they did, the main screen came up with an image of Earth. Aeolus made a gesture at the screen and it shifted. The image of Earth rotated along its meridian until the continent of Antarctica appeared. Angel stepped on to the bridge as it zoomed into research locations stationed on the continent and the seed vault. A marker came up on the seed vault. It blinked with an almost frantic quality, though there were times where it went out all together.

“Aeolus, what am I looking at?” she said.

“Your man's heart rate, as best I can get it through his neural-link. His is not synchronized with any others,” Aeolus answered, turning to look at Angel as she staggered to a chair and sat down. “It's at the outer limits of my reach right now, but as you watch, the signal will become stronger.” Angel stared at the screen.

“He may be compromised just like the clones,” she said weakly.

“You were in search of seed,” Aeolus said, “Of multiple biological origins.” As they communicated, the signal moved from cutting out every so many seconds to a steady but rapid pace. “I can connect with his neural-link in a few moments. The communications array was easy to configure to make long range contact.”

Angel looked over at Aeolus. She could see a fleeting look of resignation on his face. The last twenty years with him had left its mark. The old adage of the captain being married to their ship was strong here, though it was not a union that either would have chosen first. Initially Angel was clipped and angry with everything. Aeolus could read her anger and maintained silence until the late hours of night where her neural-link was active. In her sleep, she reached out desperately for the neural-net satellite network and found resounding silence with no hope of even a faint ping of Dregan's unique signal.

One night, Angel was deep in 'sleep' and inside a frantically constructed array of screens, all blank. Then in her 'dream' there was the sound of someone entering the monitoring room she had. All of the screens lit up with data. None of it made sense to her as she tried to find Dregan's signal. “He's not on board. I can't reach that satellite network because they're too low power to send data out this far,” said a voice behind her. Angel whipped around in her command chair, one that was a memory of the command chair of the ship. Standing before her was a man who was shrouded in shadow. Aeolus' voice was pleasant but the shock of hearing it when she was listening for a ping to indicate she had located her lost lover's signal on the neural-link satellite net made her feel fear.

“I am Aeolus,” he said. “You are my captain. I thought it time to introduce myself. My last captain did not have the … luxury of an interface like this.”

Angel looked back at the screens with a scoff at the mention of the previous captain whom she personally kicked out an airlock for his screaming tirade that she was to service him in a personal manner. The combat unit was not a pleasure unit, though that training was part of her background. She was resolved to only allow that sort of physical contact from one person and that person she wasn't sure was alive or dead.

“Your history is extensive,” Aeolus said and Angel scoffed again. “I am pleased to meet you, Angel,” he said. Angel looked over sharply at the name she had been given by the non-persons of the lower levels of society Earthside as she was their avenger and protector from the roving bands of bandits, criminals, and the peacekeepers.

“What did you call me?” she demanded sharply.

“Your name,” Aeolus said, “You are one of two combat units that have a name. The other is Dregan, a previous generation of another line who suffered from synchronization sickness and developed an independent sense of self from the cohort. Your cohort didn't survive the Gauntlet. It was in the classified files that were on your transport ship. I regret to inform you that you launched your handler out the airlock. I suspect, however, that will not trouble you.”

For the first time in months since she arrived, Angel laughed. The stasis pod was enough to keep her body still as she 'slept' but within the created spaces of her mind, her laughter rang. The shadow of Aeolus smiled.

The memory of their first conversation whipped through Angel's mind at lightning speed even as Aeolus observed it. “Aeolus, I will not abandon you,” she said, “We've kept each other sane and the rest of the crew as well. If you can connect with Dregan via the neural-link, you can do it with the same stealth that you used to monitor me before our first conversation. Observe, determine his state. We will know if he is compromised through a complete system check. They do them often enough Earthside when we're connected to the net that it wouldn't make a change to his state to make him aware that you're connected to him.”

“The storm of all storms will burn Xenogen to the ground. Project Morpheus will permanently be offline as will all of the others. This is a rescue mission,” Aeolus said, “The next major CME is going to strip away large parts of the magnetosphere even as it sets us hurling past the outer planets. They're going to be helpless. If we're lucky, the sails will hold long enough for us to get through the Oort cloud. After that we can continue on inertia. If my calculations are correct, there is a cold version of Earth beyond the Oort cloud circling a brown dwarf. It may be close enough to be warm enough to be habitable.”

“How sure are you of this?”

The hallucination smiled. “You've been calculating this and searching for that brown dwarf the entire time you've been up here,” Angel said in mild disbelief.

“I was named for the god of winds,” Aeolus, “I promised them that I was going to return on the storm of all storms. I may not be walking around like you are, but this is my body and coming back instead of relaying data so that Xenogen could build their shelters and leave the rest of humanity to die is my revenge.”

“God,” Angel breathed, “You're willing to sacrifice eight billion people?”

“Not all of them,” Aeolus replied, “We need some of them to keep the species alive.”

Angel shook her head in amazement. “Three hundred and fifty years in stasis, with the latter part of it being forcibly machine linked and fighting to stay sane, you change your outlook on humanity. To them, I am like unto a god. Ageless and terrifying. I was the first of you and you and Dregan are the last. I can reprogram him. I could reprogram you.”

Angel stared at the hallucination of the ship's consciousness in horror. “If you were another Xenogen combat unit, I would have. Just as I did with Maeson,” he continued, “Maeson was a lower level combat-communication unit. His neural-link was of a lower grade than yours. It was easy to supplant the loyalty to the corporation with loyalty to the crew. I will disperse the other combat units, what you'll have left are the cannon fodder. Some of them may have enough of themselves left that they'll be willing to leave Earth.”

Science #$%@ Fiction

Angel wormed her way out of the suit and opened the repair kit. As she rifled through the contents of the kit, Aeolus said to her through the neuro-link, “Second gen units are non-combat. Are you sure those were combat units and not clones intended for service and support in the event of a cme breeching the system?”

“Aeolus, it was Dregan. With memories,” she answered flatly, her voice echoing in the empty hallway. She checked her plasma pistol. “I need to get back in there and take down the rest of the units before I can make the repairs. Is there something bigger than this thing that I can use?”

“There is heavy artillery but it is inadvisable given the plasma breech. The potential for more shearing of the protective exoskin of the ship is high if you go in there with anything higher than level three use,” the ship answered.

“Aeolus, they're here to drive us straight into the sun. They're sans-neuro-link. If they had one, then you'd pick up on them immediately as more than just a presence in the hold. The units trained with out neuro-links are explicitly wet works. They're here to kill all of us and plunge you into the sun. That was the goal of this ship, to destroy everyone on board, broadcast final data, and get rid of the evidence of whatever the hell they're working on. Now where's the rifles at?”

“Compartment six, level twenty two, captain.” Angel turned and began to run down the corridors of the space ship until she came to the space where the gear she was looking for was stowed. “Checking on the status of the crew, they remain in stasis. The cat, however, is prowling and may approach you.” She ran up a flight of steps for the section she was in was typically under the influence of the gravity system. Moving from level twenty to twenty two was a rather straight forward affair, if it wasn't for the fact that the stairwell was massive.

“Aeolus, kick off the gravity in this stairwell,” she said, looking up at the landing a few hundred feet above her.

“Captain?”

“Don't quibble about it, just do it,” she snapped as a plan came together in her mind. The gravity system for that stairwell sector went off and Angel pushed off of the platform she was on. As she grabbed the base of the one above her, she pulled herself up and through it's railing. She reached the doors into the next corridor and pushed the button to open them. They hissed open partly. “Oh goddamn it,” she muttered. In the zero g situation, Angel could possibly push herself between the partly open doors but the corridor would drop her to the deck. Deciding that falling about eight feet wasn't ideal, she worked her way down to the correct orientation and maneuvered herself into the gap. On the left side, she felt the pull of gravity, on the right side she didn't. It was a strange sensation but she ignored it to push hard on the doors. Slowly, they opened farther. “Gravity in the stairwell goes back on as soon as I get through the door. Once she had forced the door open enough for her to worm her way through the system in the stairwell kicked on with a mechanical whine. “That didn't sound good,” she said.

Aeolus was doing his best to track the hostile party on board. With out the neural-link systems installed, he had to rely on thermal imaging. As of the moment they remained on the other side of the cargo bay bulkhead, moving through the area in something of a search pattern. “Captain,” Aeolus said tersely, “If these hostile units are as enhanced as you are, they may be able to force a bulkhead as a collective ...”

“I know, Aeolus,” Angel replied, “Which is why I need something stronger than this piss poor plasma pistol.”

“I'm not sure if I can handle a fire fight on that level,” the ship answered.

“Well, where the hell can I draw them off to so that I can put them down and get to work on repairs,” the cyborg snapped.

“Calculating, please stand by,” Aeolus answered.

Angel muttered to herself, “Fuck standing by, I need those rifles.” As she reached compartment six, she saw a sign that said 'Security only.' “Oh really?” Angel said at the keypad. She punched in her command code. The system blinked and then went red, denying her access. She punched in her code again and was denied again. “Aeolus, open up this door,” she said.

“I'm sorry, captain, the chief security officer on board has the only code to this door,” he answered.

“Override the stupid code,” she said.

“I can not do that, captain,” Aeolus answered with a tone of regret, knowing that the design flaw was a major problem at the moment.

“Fine, I'll override the code myself?”

“Captain?”

Angel took a step back and kicked the panel as hard as she could. The system wasn't designed for a cyborg to give it a direct hit with something blunt, though the plasma shielding remained in place as it dangled half off the corridor wall. Angel looked at the wires and where they connected with the control panel. She pulled out the knife she wore at her back and began twisting away screws that held a secondary control panel in place for the door behind the digital one. “Some motherfucker thought that redundancy was a nice touch here,” she muttered.

She dismantled the second control panel, following the tangled nest of wires into a control node for the door. “Captain, I advise caution, there are some very high voltage lines in that node,” Aeolus said. Angel looked at the wires in her hand and into the rat's nest of wires before her. She saw that a yellow wire lead from the two control panels into the heart of the tangle. With a mighty pull, Angel ripped not only the yellow wire but the small box it was connected to out of the mass of wires before her. A red and a green wire came off of it into the snarl.

“Aeolus, red or green?”

“Captain?”

“Pick a damn color,” she snapped.

“The red line is higher voltage than the green line...” he started when Angel muttered to her self, “Red it is.” As she disconnected the red wire, the door opened with a soft whooshing sound. “Whoever engineered this is fired,” she said as she walked into the security suite.

“That would be ship 362N, the one who did this run prior to me.”

“They have ships engineering ships?”

“Well, yes. Who knows the body better than the one inhabiting it?”

Angel shook her head and counted the lockers before her at the end of the security suite. She found the locker she was looking for and discovered it was empty. She started opening lockers and finding most of them empty. “Aeolus, we've got a big problem,” Angel said, “Security doesn't have shit in it.”

“Logical, 362N was a pacifist.”

Angel sat down in a chair at the chief security officer's desk. She looked at the desk and began to rifle through the drawers. As she turned in the chair to investigate the rest of the office, she found, bolted to the floor, an ancient style of chest with an antique key lock. Angel turned back to the desk. “Was this chest part of your manifest?”

“Yes, personal effects of Chief Security Officer Maeson,” he answered. Angel found a key inside the desk and tried the lock. When the lock opened, Angel threw back the lid. Inside, she found something unusual. A primitive weapon formed of a blade with dual edges and a handle. It lay upon a tartan patterned cloth. “Remind me to apologize to Maeson for taking this,” Angel said. Beneath the sword was a shape that felt familiar. Angel lifted up out of the chest the cloth and discovered a disassembled plasma rifle. “Oh Maeson, you tricksy bastard,” Angel said with a smile, “And you said that you didn't like plasma weapons. Calling them inelegant and yet you had one stowed away. I knew I liked you for a reason.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

An author I respect gave some really good advice to me years ago. If you're having trouble working on one project, switch to something else for a little bit. So, here's some cheezy science fiction. If this runs longer than a few posts, I am probably going to put the whole thing together into a single file and publish it as an e-book. Lemme know what y'all think.

A little science fiction. Or something.

Something science fiction

Some more science fiction

Something something science fiction

Science #$%@ Fiction

SCIENCE! Fiction

Holy Science Fiction, Batman!

Science Fiction = e

Science Fiction: Rs=2GM/c^2

Something, something Science Fiction

Angel walked into the cargo hold with her attention focused on reaching the maintenance hatch. She moved against the wall on the starboard side of the hold doors that she had opened via the manual fail safe. When she reached the location where Aeolus had told her the supplies were located she found herself looking at a bare wall of sheet metal. She looked up and saw the supply hatch she was looking for about fifteen feet above her head. “You're kidding me,” she sighed. Aeolus's voice came over the radio in a smooth baritone that sounded almost musical. Angel knew that he could have modulated his voice to sound like any gender and any vocal range, even something in human.

The sentient ship said to its captain, “You are at the hatch, what is wrong?” Angel rolled her eyes.

“Some dumbass engineer designed it for zero gravity access,” she answered. Aeolus was silent. Through the neural-link Angel could tell he was engaged in calculations. “Can you kill the gravity system for the hold with out cargo floating free?”

“It is possible, but it depends on the cargo being secured properly. The experimental cargo is in a sector that my internal sensors can not access due to the damage.” Angel shook her head. It was just like Xenogen to pack in extra material with out any real information except for high clearance officials. The fact that Aeolus was sentient didn't change the fact that he was viewed as just a machine. He wasn't required to have clearance or access. “Captain, target acquired thirty five degrees on the x-axis on your plane, moving towards you at a rate of one meter per minute. Distance undetermined, target is not accelerating at this time,” Aeolus sounded in her head through the neural-link, “Retreat is advisable.”

“Oh hell,” Angel muttered, reaching through the emergency med-access point to draw her pistol free from her suit. She turned and leveled the plasma pistol at where she'd expect a human head to be, “Can you get the damn light on? The suit doesn't give me range here.”

“System failure thirty two on line alpha eight. Illumination is not possible in that hold, captain. Target is showing up as four meters from your position,” Aeolus said through the neural-link, a tone of urgency in his voice, “Repeat, retreat is advisable.”

“Something you should learn about me, Aeolus,” Angel said, “I don't run from the unknown. Kill the gravity switch.”

“System eighty seven on line beta eight off-line. Good luck, Angel.” The moment the gravity simulator system turned off, Angel sighted the access point and jumped. The force of acceleration from her motion was unevenly applied so she rose with a slow drift to the left of where she intended to go. While a part of her said she should try to 'swim' towards her target, Angel pressed the button for the booster system to correct her course. It was contrary to what her body told her to do, but she knew that in zero gravity she'd functionally be flailing in a circle with out anything to provide enough resistance for her to push forward against.

As she reached the maintenance hatch and started the procedure of opening it one handed, a light caught her eye. She looked over to see another emergency suit drifting towards her, occupied with a familiar looking face. One hand holding the maintenance hatch door and the other pointing the plasma pistol at the figure drifting towards her, Angel said, “System eighty seven on line beta eight, engage. Now.” The figure drifiting dropped immediately at thirty two feet per second, per second. As they hit the deck below, Angel watched them lay there stunned. She looked up at the hatch handle she was holding on to. “Why the hell aren't the mag boots standard issue?” Angel muttered.

“Captain, your system indicates that strain is increasing on your left arm. The hatch handle is not designed to be load bearing. I advise disengaging system eighty seven on line beta eight before the handle is damaged.” Angel wrenched her self around with a sharp twist of her whole body. For a brief moment, she pulled herself up against the hull. In those few seconds, she opened the hatch door and watched as the equipment began to fall out. Angel let go of the door as it gave way beneath her weight. “Kick it off,” Angel barked. The gravity abruptly shut off and she pushed herself off of the hull as it did so. As such, she was moving at the rate of gravity towards the deck. She tucked herself into a roll. “On,” she commanded and the figure that was sailing towards the cyborg dropped to the ground moments after Angel landed and came to her feet.

She put a boot into their chest and kicked them to the ground. Behind her, the sealed repair kit clattered to the deck along with the ripped off hatch door. Her plasma pistol was square in between the eyes of what looked to be her long dead lover, Dregan. “Talk or I'll just take your head off,” she said flatly, “You should be dead. I have no problems fixing that.” The Dregan in the plasma suit held their hands up in a universally recognized gesture of surrender.

“I'm unit alpha nine nine seven. My mission is to support the captain of this ship in the event of a plasma breech. I was activated when the emergency systems came on line.” Angel looked down at the cyborg before her. The nine nine seven line were non-combat units. Dregan was a combat unit that had gone rogue long before her. Combat units that went rogue were collected and reconditioned before being placed in another combat unit. They were too expensive to really eliminate. This unit, however, was a cheap clone with half the programming, if it really was a nine nine seven unit.

“Captain,” Aeolus said via the neural-link, “Additional targets incoming.”

“I know you,” the cyborg on the deck said, “You are A.. A.. A..” It stuttered. Angel was half of a mind to drag the cyborg beneath her foot into the main quarters of the ship. Then she saw the other lights of the emergency suits coming.

“It's a trap,” she said, “Good night, sweet prince.” She looked away from the blast of the plasma pistol. It lit up the space in a dramatic flare of light. She could see the others coming towards her from the damaged part of the hold. She reached back and grabbed the gear that had fallen to the ground behind her and ran for the hatchway back to the main quarters of the ship. As she got to them, Angel threw the gear into the corridor and dove through the doors. “Shut it!” she shouted. It didn't matter that Aeolus could hear the thought as it materialized in her mind and was in the midst of executing the command. On the door, she heard the sound of something hitting the metal. Then the blast doors came down and there was total silence except for her breathing.

“What the hell?” Angel demanded.

“I do not understand the question, captain. Please rephrase it.”

“Don't give me that bullshit, Aeolus. What in hell just happened? There were combat units in there. Prior gen combat units.”

“The experimental cargo must have breeched containment,” Aeolus said, “It was delivered by automated systems shortly before your arrival.”

“That was the experimental cargo?” she replied tersely, “A container full of clones of prior gen combat units?”

“The manifest did not list what it was, only that emergency suits had to be supplied in the area where the container was located and that all systems to it had to remain online constantly.”

Some more Science Fiction

I have about half a novella's worth of stuff featuring my cyborg Angel. I'm beginning to think I should just write the damn novel while I am trying to fix plot holes and figure out what the hell I'm doing with e-publishing books one through three. And yes, I'm still stalled on book seven.

Winds of Aeolus

Aeolus monitored the cryosleep chambers as he listened to the star-quakes. It had been a long time since he had heard anything like music. He could recall it. If he desired it, he could have the system play it. But he was no longer a mortal man, he could not actually listen to music. There was no sensory input and Aeolus missed it. But he could hear via the ships sensor array electromagnetic noise. Where the crew complained about the silence of space, Aeolus heard cacophony.

Until they drew close enough to Sol that the background noise of the planets and interstellar sound was drowned out completely. What had been a single deep note was beginning to get static. The note vibrated in uncomfortable ways. It made his solar sail ache like his knees did long ago before rain. Aeolus was uncomfortable in ways that he couldn't describe. Human language had no words for this strange pain that ran through him as electromagnetic waves rolled over him. In the cryosleep chamber, Angel moaned. It was a low strangled noise that she had never made before. Aeolus connected to her through the neural-link.

That was when he saw her struggling with a degrading synaptic pulse modulator. In the architecture of her mind, she was hammering on a gigantic machine with a set of old hand tools. A gear was grinding to a halt and Angel was forcing it to continue to move with a series of blows from a sledge hammer. With a cry of fury, she swung her hammer and the gear twitched forward before turning a few rotations and then grinding to a stop. Aeolus walked up to her.

He took hold of the hammer head as she reared back to deliver another mighty blow. “I'll stabilize the system. We're leaving orbit now. You can't handle the stress of this longer and the star-quakes are getting bigger.” Angel tried to pull the hammer out of Aeolus's hand but discovered that within the theater of the mind linked to the machine, the machine-linked mind is more powerful. Aeolus let go of the hammer and stepped past Angel. He set a hand delicately on the gear and gave it a gentle nudge.

It began to spin freely and Angel began to look healthier. No longer pale and sweating, Angel just looked weary. Aeolus gave the tall cyborg a slight bow. His hair fell briefly into his eyes. His Grecian features were not those of an older man as he had appeared to her before but of someone who perhaps was in the winter of their twenties. He was at least a hundred years old in the uplink system and Angel wasn't sure how much older he was to begin with. She realized as she looked at him that this was how he saw himself, a young man on the verge of beginning the grandest of adventures that life had awaiting him.

“Three hundred and sixty two,” he said, “We'll talk more when we're moving on.” Angel sat down beside the machine that represented her neural-link. Aeolus shook his head. “You should rest.”

“I am resting,” Angel answered tersely, “You should pilot us the hell out of here.”

“Captain,” Aeolus said before giving the half bow. He then withdrew from her neural-link interface, satisfied that the synaptic pulse modulator was stable with the electromagnetic buffer he activated around her cryosleep pod. The star-quake that happened made the photosphere ripple beneath him. Aeolus fired his thrusters and lifted them up on the path towards their next destination, Earth. When the coronal jet came out and struck the solar sail, Aeolus felt exquisite pain. A memory of being uploaded into his first ship slammed into him of all of his senses screaming in agony. A visual sensor's electromagnetic shield failed because the equipment was literally vaporized by the plasma. A moment of terrific white hot pain and then nothing.

In that agony, Aeolus was struck with grief. Had his calculations failed? That was when he realized he was still somehow functional. Aeolus ran a systems check, starting with the life support of the captain's quarters. The electromagnetic buffer was burned out but Angel lay in stasis. Her neural-link remained functional. There was silence on her end of the neural-link but Aeolus could tell that she was observing him through his systems check. Life support was fully functional. Defensive array was suffering from some damage but that was something they could repair. The cooling system for the ship was heavily damaged on the leeward side. Aeolus wasn't sure if they had the means to fully repair it. The data he had been gathering was amazingly still intact. He had the pride of completing his mission, he thought grimly.

“Status report,” Angel's voice came through the neural-link. Aeolus, if he had been still human, would have let out a breath he didn't realize he was holding. Instead, he fed her the visual report of the data on the damage as he ran through his systems checks. “We can repair the cooling system with the core units for the stellar data. We're not going to need it anymore.” Aeolus considered arguing with his captain. “The star is going nova in a few months, if we're lucky. We have to get to Earth to resupply and extract what we'll need to progress forward.”

Aeolus materialized in Angel's mental chamber where she was 'dreaming'. It was no longer the room of machinery that he had found her in earlier. It was a walled courtyard covered in snow with a koi pond and a few gnarled trees. He looked around himself in astonishment. He knew this place but he couldn't place why. “What is this?” he asked.

“A memory of the Creche,” Angel answered, “one of the few pleasant ones. I'd sit here in the snow and meditate. They would watch me and study the data as I built this within. They couldn't interpret it. From here, I'd reach out to the network. And now, to you. Or should I say, we can communicate easier here.”

“The Creche … “ Aeolus mused. Angel sat beside the koi pond dressed in a black kimono with her long hair unbound. She was the image of Japanese beauty, though she was far taller than most women standing at six feet tall. Aeolus was dressed in a man's kimono that was also coal black. “They were developing this from my discovery. I tried to stop them. They framed me for murder. Then tested the technology on me. With each iteration... I was promised release if I cooperated. For a time I thought I was free then I realized it was the system. And now …"

“Now we are bound for Earth. We're going to the Antarctic stronghold facility. I know the plasma weapons are fully charged. I expect that I can get the defense array back on line and the atmosphere will take care of heat exchange off of the hull. I think we can get enough supplies to get the systems fully operational. Last I recall, the facility was a storage locker made to look like a top secret installation. Skeleton crew at best and all of them alpha line rejects. Like me.”

Aeolus heard the bitterness in Angel's tone as she made her final statement. “You are more human than your previous masters,” Aeolus said, “you have taken a ship and plotted a course among the stars for humanity to have hope of survival. All contrary to orders, but you have never followed orders very well. You are too independent.” Angel looked over at him. He straightened and tipped his head slightly to the right as though listening to something.

“The CME is carrying us faster than I anticipated. The plasma temperature is dropping. If we start on repairs now, I think the systems have an eighty five percent chance of holding for the entire flight. If we wait, they may hold until we reach the Martian orbit ring at best.”

“Then let me out of the damn box and lets get to work scavenging their precious data cluster systems.”

Angel opened her eyes to utter darkness. As the cryosleep pod opened, she realized that the lighting in her quarters was off line. “Is the entire ship dark?” she said. A green colored light seemed to form before her eyes. It blinked a few times and then went to blue. Angel blinked again and through the dimmest of light, she could see her way through her quarters to the doorway. She hated the night vision alteration that allowed her to see on the outer limits of the visible spectrum. At the same time, she knew that Aeolus was supplementing it so that she could see well enough to operate in darkness absolute.

She stepped out into the corridor and began walking down it towards the aft section. Visual static began to bother her as she drew closer to where the damage was. She stopped at an emergency hatch. She opened the door and pulled out a kit. Fixing a plasma pistol at her right hip, Angel couldn't help the feeling that something terrible was about to happen. Angel put on the space survival suit and closed her eyes. The head lights flicked on as Aeolus brought her visual field back into normal tolerances. The radio crackled to life. “Captain, the aft cargo chamber's field is damaged. I advise extreme caution.”

“I know, Aeolus,” Angel answered her ship, “The repair kit is where again?”

“Two meters from the entrance on the starboard side towards the prow. The lighting systems are down in that part of the section. If you see light from something other than your equipment, retreat back to the main deck.”

“You say that as if there is a hostile on board, Aeolus,” Angel muttered.

“Some of the cargo in the aft hold is experimental. I have suspicions about the experimental element of it.”

“And you didn't tell me this before now?”

“Do you realize how much processing power it took to chart a stable orbit with out frying?”

“Good point. But we're having a discussion after this is all finished.”

“Of course, Captain.” Aeolus seemed to have a trace of humor in his reply but Angel wasn't sure if she was reading into it.

Angel drew her plasma pistol and opened the manual fail safe for the first cargo hold. She was sure they were off to the beginning of a spectacularly bad day. Of course it had to happen on a Monday.

Something Science Fiction.

Dear Reader,

I took a break from the novel I'm writing to whip this up. Consider it a thank you for sticking with me. As Monty Python says, And Now For Something Entirely Different:

~*~*~*~*~*~

As she walked down the center of the corridor, Angel's boots clanked against the grid marked metal. If there were dust on those boots, it may have sifted down into the vent system's cleaning functional down draft. Considering that as ship captain, Angel was too high priority for the corporation to send her planet side, those boots were immaculate. It was dead watch hour. The previous captain slept during the final watch of the night. It was a luxury. Angel was up from the start of the final watch until the beginning of third watch. Constantly in motion, constantly at work and monitoring her ship and crew, Angel was said to be the epitome of the interstellar command's ideal captain.

It wasn't much of surprise. She was engineered for military type exercise. There was enough machine in the cyborg that she overcame the 3 second delay for human reflexes. There was enough code in her neural system that she spoke fluently with machines via the neural-link. The last captain was a wealthy human. He bought his position. Money did not make him adequate. Thus, when the corporation needed someone to retake control of the ship, they purchased Angel.

Now, Angel knew what her duty was. Command the ship and make sure that the heliosphere was secure. The sub-corona orbit should have rendered the equipment in her useless. She should have been laying on the deck seizing as the neural-link shut down. The ship should have been falling into the photosphere because there was no proper explanation for why it remained up. Angel wasn't the machine they wanted. The corporation considered this a failed mission when the previous captain refused the sub-corona orbit and went rogue. The hope was that Angel's system was enough to force past the previous captain's security measures to make the ship transmit data back before the catastrophic failure of the systems happened and the ship plunged into Sol, just as the last attempt did.

Angel, however, had her first real taste of freedom on ship. With out the security corps around her, with out the entire regiment running the Gauntlet in punishment for her defiance (which should have been eliminated by the programming), Angel could at last be somewhat human. It was all she had wanted. When she accessed the ship, she learned that the rumors of criminal's being used for revere uplink experimentation were true. A man whose name was Aeolus who was uploaded into the ship forcibly formed the ship's consciousness. Somehow, Aeolus was sane. The previous captain insisted the ship was defective, but it was Aeolus refusing his commands because they put the crew in danger.

Now, in the darkness of the dead watch, Angel walked the corridor of the ship with what some would have called a hallucination of Aeolus. Most nights, they said very little to each other via the neural-link. They simply were in each other's company. Aeolus was hesitant to dive into the sun. Angel had no desire to die as well. Thus, it was through the three year long journey to the sun from the point where she had boarded that they calculated an orbit that would keep the ship moving on the magnetic currents flowing over the star. Just barely within the sub-corona zone but high enough that the ship's shielding could keep systems running, they skated on the edge of death and gathered data.

The official report back was an overwhelming mass of data roughly organized. The corporation didn't know that Aeolus was once a scientist. They didn't know that his crime was committed long before the corporation's founding, of speaking a truth about the environment that leaders didn't want to hear. Once stasis systems were developed, Aeolus was placed in one. Irony that his own technology was used to imprison him didn't surprise Aeolus. He simply looked at his keepers who were placing him into the pod and said, "One day, I'll return. And a storm of all storms will be unleashed."

Aeolus was working on a stasis system to contain and sustain the stellar environment so that Sol did not swell to a giant star or collapse into a dwarf. It was the protoypes that got turned into prison systems where prisoners were trapped in a suspended animation state. As the systems became more advanced and things like the neural-link were developed, Aeolus was the first one lifted up out of suspended animation to have things tested on him. Aeolus knew exactly what Angel had gone through.

Now, trapped within a computer system, Aeolus sifted through data at a speed that was even greater than Angel could process. And he came to a conclusion that it was time to leave. The first cataclysmic eruption was about to happen. "Turn five degrees on the z axis and twelve on y," Angel said out loud, her voice echoing in the silence. The image of a forty year old man dressed in officer's rank garb with out insignia nodded. Angel looked over at him. "Are you sure this is it?" she asked.

"If my calculations are correct, we'll reach Earth in eight minutes. The CME will pass through the orbit path but not reach Earth. It will be at least one Juipter radius away from Luna. The sky will light with fire, but they won't be harmed. Then we have three days before the next ejection. Time enough to gather supplies and set our route," he answered. Angel looked down at her boots. Black ones, standard issue. In a half hour, they were about to be on Earth and then she was going to raid the seed vault at the Antartic before launching again in a desperate attempt to flee the shock wave of the beginnings of stellar collapse. If they were lucky, the sentient ship of eighteen souls, one cyborg, and a cat, would escape the Oort cloud with out damage and reach deep space to follow the route of the last interstellar traveler to move through the system to sanctuary on an M class planet.

"It is time, go to your quarters. All systems are secure. The crew are quartered and all hatches are battened down." Aeolus said, a trace of humor in his final statement. Angel looked over at him. "Storm's a brewin', cap'n." Aeolus said in his best imitation of the pirates of antiquity. Angel turned and entered her quarters. As she laid down in the stasis system pod, Aeolus set to the work of making sure that they were in correct orientation for their launch out of the sun. He laughed at the idea. For the first time in a hundred and fifty years, he felt almost human again. Down beneath that magneto-sphere, the star shuddered.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Musical inspiration:
The Way from Zack Hemsey

Random Short : How the Scry Mirrors came to Ranyth

The hunter walked through the forest. With a careful gaze, they scanned the forest floor. In some surprise, they found signs of human passage through the trackless depths of the woods where the deer roamed in fear of wolves and the bears. Curious and deciding that following this trail was more important than finding a possible deer path when there had been none in sight for an hour.

Broken branches and brambles showed that whomever had passed by did so with no care for pursuit. A snag of red cloth flapped like a lord's pennant on a thorny bush. The hunter paused and picked it off. Ahead, they could see something red moving. They moved off the path and began to move alongside it. As the hunter drew closer, they heard a voice singing some manner of invocation.

At the edge of the glade where the sun's light broke through the canopy to fall in gleaming rays, the hunter saw a youth dancing in some manner of a circle dance. The young lad's hair shone like gold and bounced in ringlets on his shoulders as he skipped through the dance's movements. His high pitched voice rang clearly in the air and echoed off the trees. Strangely, the birds seemed to join in his song.

Fear snaked through the hunter's heart. Something of magic was happening here, or worse yet of the gods. Feeling as though he was in danger, the hunter began to slip back into the deep brush. Then the boy stopped dancing and looked straight at him, his song ending. "You have come as I have summoned," the boy said. The hunter was compelled to emerge from the woods. The red cloth of the boy's torn tunic looked all too much like heart's blood for the hunter's liking. He wanted to drop the cloth in his hand but his fingers refused to obey his will, clutching it tighter like some holy relic.

"Your quarry awaits you in the hedge of the river," the boy said, "But first you must send me home."

"Where does your mother await you, lad?" the hunter asked uncomfortably. He had heard old, old stories from his father of the walker in the woods. The one who demanded sacrifice of blood and flame.

"I have no mother," the golden haired boy replied, "Nor father."

"Where then is your home and who cares for you?" the hunter asked. In the distance, thunder rolled. The boy pointed skyward. The hunter shook their head. "No man lives in that place, only the Stag Lord and his goats," he answered.

The boy smiled. It seemed as though light shone with such brilliance it blinded him, though he could still see the boy. In amazement, the hunter watched as the boy leaned forward and was upon all fours. His form changed to that of a goat with a ram's horns. The red color of the tunic had transformed to a rich caramel color fur. The goat bleated.

"I can not kill a child," the hunter said. The goat brandished its horns fearsomely at him. "I reject this temptation," the hunter said. Thunder grew louder. The goat charged him and the hunter dove aside. It ran in a quick circle and came back again to charge him, all four horns ready to strike home. The hunter moved aside, grasped the forward facing horns and wrestled the goat to the ground. The goat bleated and kicked. The hunter continued to hold the goat down with great effort.

As rain began to fall, a man walked out of the trees on the far side of the glade."You have found my son," he said. The hunter looked over. The man's face looked familiar, but he couldn't recall why whilst holding the struggling goat. "Release him to me," the man said, "Your willingness to adhere to mercy is admirable." The hunter stood and the goat ran to the side of the man who was also dressed in red and had golden hair. "I shall give you a gift as reward for your mercy and care of my child," he said.

The hunter was blinded by the lightning strike and left deaf. He fell to the ground quavering. When his vision and hearing eventually returned, the hunter was soaked from the driving rain. At the center of the glade where the lightning bolt struck, was a glistening black thing. The hunter cautiously picked up the glass. He thought of his home and wondered if he was now too deep in the woods to get back safely. The black mirror seemed to have its surface ripple like water and then he saw the cottage of his father by high cedars. "Father will not be pleased," the hunter said, "My first hunt alone and this happens."

As he began to move along the path, he wondered if there was a way that took him to the place the child-goat said a deer waited. The mirror glistened and he saw the deer track that started not far from him. The young man put the mirror carefully into his pouch. He followed the track. It was a sudden surprise to find himself at the thick wall of brambles with the river flowing on the other side. With its horns trapped in the hedge, there was a great stag. It was larger than the hunter thought it could be.

Exhausted from its efforts to free itself from the hedge, the stag just stood there placidly as the young man walked up to it. Slowly, he drew his knife and slit its throat. A great wash of blood flowed as the stag sagged down to the ground to weak for even death throes. The newly blooded hunter struggled to pull the stag's crown free from the thorny vines. He pulled out the strange black mirror and said, "Show me my father, let him hear my voice." The mirror rippled and the hunter saw his father at work chopping wood. "Father," he called, "Father, come to the hedge at the river. I can not bring the deer home with out you." The image of his father looked up and looked around confused. The wood axe was set upon the sled the man grabbed and he began walking.

A noise came nearly an hour later from the hedge on the river side. His father called out for him and the hunter answered. The axe hewed a path through the thorny hedge and father embraced son with great relief. He wondered at the mirror and the stag. Working together, they freed the deer from the hedge and dragged it on the sled back to their home. Never in the rest of his days did the hunter forget the child-goat. And ever on did he keep the mirror secret in his home only sharing its knowledge in times of deep need.