She pushed the buggy briskly, half listening to the twins yakking away about whatever, and half making a shopping list in her head. That double concentration must have been why she didn’t hear the footsteps behind her. She certainly never felt the stunning blow to the back of her head. She dropped like a stone, but it can only have been moments before she found herself looking into a pair of concerned eyes. She tried to sit up, but the world began spinning and she felt very sick.
“The children,” she managed to whisper, “are the twins okay?”
“What children? There are no children here.”
She managed to push the nausea back far enough to scramble into a seated position and grab her saviour by the arm.
“The twins. Eli and Ahab.” She could hear her own voice skirling up towards hysteria. “They are in their buggy. I was taking them to the supermarket. They love the supermarket.”
The man who knelt beside her turned his attention to the rapidly growing crowd.
“Anybody seen any children?”
“The place is lousy with ‘em,” a coarse voice replied. “What children?”
“Twins,” the man said, “twins in a buggy.”
“What. Them weird kids? I seen them just now, with a bloke in running gear pushing the buggy. I just fort they ‘ad a new nanny. They gets a new one about every month.”
The man looked down at the obviously concussed girl and smiled reassuringly.
“The police are on their way. We called them when it became obvious you had been attacked.”
As if the very words had summoned her, a young policewoman pushed through the knot of onlookers to crouch at the injured girl’s side.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“The children. Somebody took the children…”
“Your children?”
“No. I’m their nanny. But what does it matter who… You need to find them.”

On the other side of the park, a Lycra-clad figure pushed a double buggy out through the ornate wrought iron gates onto the street. He turned left and crossed the road via a blinking and bleeping pedestrian crossing. Five minutes later, man and buggy were in a multi-storey car park riding the lift towards the top floor.

When the lift doors opened a man’s body flopped onto the floor, half in and half out of the cabin. The doors attempted to close, but finding an obstruction remained half open. The two women awaiting the lift reacted in very different ways. One screamed and fainted, the other called nine-nine-nine.

Although the police arrived with commendable quickness, a knot of onlookers had gathered by the time two constables jumped out of their car. One went to the side of the woman who had fainted, while the other shouldered his way to the lift doors.
“Oh, shit” he said. “Oh very, very shit.”
His companion looked at his suddenly pale face.
“If you are going to throw up can you move away from the crime scene” she recommended serenely before uncurling from her crouch and going to look for herself. She was made of sterner stuff than her companion, but even so she didn’t look for long.
“Victor, bravo, delta to control. We seem to have an unexplained death here. One body, and a lift awash with blood and various internal organs. Also in the lift one upended buggy fitting the description from the incident in the park.”
She listened for a moment.
“Have I been inside the lift? No. And you couldn’t pay me enough to go in there.”
She listened again.
“Yes. We can secure the area and wait.”

Under the upturned buggy the twins eyed each other in silent congratulation. They could wait for rescue now….

© jane jago 2017

Ping looked at the strange creature that had dropped into his plot. It was not, he was almost sure, alive but he sat back and studied it all the same. For a long time it did nothing, until it grew bold and began emitting creaks and whistles as strange appendages slipped out of slots and holes in its skin. 

Ping growled softly in his throat and the thing grew still.

Many clicks later it began to squeak and grow again.

Ping fetched Elmo, who sniffed the intruder and shrugged.

“Space junk.”

They both pissed on the thing before wandering off.

©️jj 2019

They had taped her mouth for the trial.
“The woman may not speak. Let a man speak for her,” the judge decreed. “What is the charge in full?”
“The woman committed the crime of questioning something a man said as being offensive.”
“Was it offensive?” The judge asked, determined to be fair and just.
“Exhibit A.” The prosecutor showed all the men of the jury and they knitted their brows in puzzlement. “As you see,” the prosecutor went on, “it was something no man would see as offensive, but this, this woman, said she found it so.”
A rumble of contempt and anger was heard through the jury.
“How dare she?”
“Who is she to say?”
“What difference does it make what she thinks anyway?”
“No one cares what she thinks. She’s only a woman after all.”
The judge banged his gavel to bring order to the courtroom.
“So, who speaks for this woman?”
A man stood up looking a little nervous and cleared his throat.
“Your honour, this woman wanted to say that she found this offensive and degrading to women.”
The judge frowned and the man sat down quickly.
“Degrading?” The judge gave a snort. “Who else wants to speak for the woman?”
Around the courtroom, here and there a woman tried to rise to speak, but each was pulled down and her mouth taped shut by the men – and women – around her.
“So how does the jury find this woman?”
“Guilty!”
“Guilty!”
“Guilty!”
The word echoed around like a chanted orison.
The judge brought the gavel down again.
“Let all her words be struck forever from the record so none may see. They might offend the men or encourage other women to speak out.”
Around the courtroom, most of the men nodded at the wise judgement and some of the women did too. Those who did not were left too afraid to speak up, too afraid to say, in case their taking offense at the fate of the woman was seen as an offensive thing.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Kai was normally careful, but with a pint in her system the fighting Celt tended to slip the leash.

Which was why she waited to be interviewed for a job below her capabilities and pay grade.

The bored-looking receptionist’s phone bleeped.

She listened then beckoned Kai.

“Room fifteen.”

She pointed. Not the way the other applicants had been sent. Kai was intrigued.

The man in room fifteen waved her to a seat.

“Did you call Smethwick a ‘gutless asshat’?”

“Yes. He is one…”

“Will you promise not to call me an asshat?”

“No.”

He extended a hand. “You’re hired.”

©️jj 2019

An extracr from 'No More Valor', a Fortune's Fools story that has yet to be published. Names of people in the story are purely coincidental...

The small storage area he found empty,  built into the bulkhead between two of the cabins. It was a snug fit to squeeze himself in and he was grateful that the door was not airtight. This would be used to carry personal luggage for any passenger but he had seen the freetrader and she was travelling alone. He was fairly certain the vessel was not sophisticated enough to have weight sensors for the human occupancy area, so Durban was not too concerned that the storage might be investigated before take off.
It was uncomfortable, but he was exhausted. He had little rest the night before and then been up before dawn to travel to Keran from the port town of Vinbrith. Closing his eyes meaning to let himself relax a moment, Durban woke to the light of the open compartment hatch shining on him. His first thought was that he had made it off Temsevar but the voice he heard shattered that illusion immediately.
“Man, I could have done without this today. Alright, whoever you are, come out and keep your hands in clear view.”
The voice was male and Durban placed it as belonging to the individual in charge of the spaceport, Agernilio Tavi. Blinking a little he eased himself out of the cramped storage locker.
The freetrader with Tavi, a woman in her middle years, was wearing a slightly exasperated expression as if faced with a naughty schoolboy. The spaceport supervisor had a much less friendly expression, but it seemed ill-fitting on his round face, not something he was used to adopting. He spoke again, a hardness in his voice.
“Your stowaway, Ducky, what do you want to do with him?”
The energy snub the man held was aimed unwaveringly at Durban’s midriff. He would be fully within his right to use it. There was no ambiguity in the laws of space – a stowaway was classed as a potential hijacker or pirate and as such could be executed out of hand. For a moment Durban wondered if he had made the biggest miscalculation of his teenage life.
The freetrader shook her head. “I can’t say I blame anyone from here wanting to get off this planet. I would if I were born here. But this is not the way. What’s your name, kid?”
She didn’t sound as if she planned to order him shot, so he instinctively dropped into a bow, and spoke quickly.
“Durban Chola, Honoured One. And I had no intention of bringing any harm to you or your ship. And you are correct, I just wanted to get off world.”
The woman nodded, her gaze holding his own for a few long moments. Durban looked up at her from his kneeling pose and thought he could see some trace of amusement in her eyes.
“You can put the snub away, Gernie, I don’t think our stowaway is that dangerous.” She touched the man’s arm as she spoke. “And you can get up, youngster, it’s a bad look. You need to stop doing that grovelling if you really plan to get yourself off world. Good thing I spotted you as I’m not leaving for a couple of days yet and you would have got hungry fast in there.”
Hoping that meant he was out of the fire, Durban got to his feet, a smile of relief already creeping onto his face.
The man called Gernie still held the snub, but no longer looked quite so inclined to use it.
“So what do you want to do with him, Ducky?”
The freetrader smiled.
“I think we should go and get him a good meal in Micah’s and find out a bit more about him, what do you think?”
Gernie studied Durban for a few moments more then gave a slight shrug and put the snub away under his jacket.
“I think that could be a good call.”

A short time later Durban found himself sitting in the corner of one of the more luxurious taverns he had seen. Pinned, politely, in his seat by the two people sitting at the table opposite him. The food, when it came was good and having not eaten a full meal since before he boarded a ship in Harkera on the Western Continent to cross the Lesser Ocean, two moons before, Durban had to restrain himself from over-indulging. It was only as he cleaned his plate with a piece of bread and was eating that, he became aware that his two companions were watching him with amusement.
“Man you were hungry,” Gernie said shaking his head and grinning. Durban, hand half-lifted to his mouth with the last morsel of his meal managed to make himself look a little guilty.
“So where are you from?” Ducky, the freetrader, wanted to know.
Durban took a drink wondering how to answer. He put the goblet back down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before replying.
“I came in by sea, from the Western Continent. Rode up from Vinbrith with a trader.”
“Big place the Western Continent,” Gernie observed. “Which bit of it did you come from?”
“I took ship from Harkera.”
Ducky nodded.
“What were you running away from?”
Durban decided the freetrader was much more perceptive and intelligent than he had first believed. He favoured her with his sunniest smile.
“If you are asking if I am a fugitive then the answer is no, not in any legal sense of the word at least. I am not running ‘from’ anyone – I am trying very hard to run ‘to’ somewhere.”
“To somewhere?” Ducky echoed.
“I want to go to the worlds beyond the stars,” Durban said without any hesitation. “I’ve heard there is a planet where there is high technology and not too much interest in who you are or where you came from.”
The other two exchanged looks and Gernie shook his head.
“Man, that is just talking crazy. You could never – I mean, ” he laughed briefly. “No. Just no. You would not survive ten seconds in that kind of place.”
Ducky had sat back in her chair and was looking at Durban with a very different expression.
“I agree with you there, Gernie, but what interests me a bit more is how this youngster even know that such places exist?”
Durban let his smile widen, keeping his tone benign whilst silently cursing her sharp mind.
“Temsevar is not completely without knowledge of what goes on beyond our atmosphere. There are tales in the taverns of the amazing wonders out there, the traders bring us news. News of places like Starcity.”
“The ‘City? Shit, kid you are out of your mind.”
Gernie and Ducky looked at each other, two grown-ups in a room with a child. Durban
worked hard to keep his expression ingenuous and open. Ducky shook her head.
“I give up my claim on this one,” she said. “He’s your problem, Gernie. And good luck with that.”

E.M. Swift-Hook

Durban Chola's portrait from a book cover by Ian Bristow of Bristow Designs

Her dinner companion was both genial and dryly amusing, but unlike so many of her ‘set’ his comments were never barbed or cruel. She sat back and enjoyed good food and undemanding company without so much as thinking about what she was doing there.

It wasn’t until they reached the coffee and liqueur stage that she was jerked back to reality.

He reached into his pocket and took out a small, red box. She sighed inwardly. He smiled his understanding.

“I know. I’m not asking you to pretend to love me…”

They celebrated their golden wedding in the same restaurant…

©️jj 2019

This is the tense opening of The Legacy of Pandora, the first book in the Shan Takhu Legacy an exciting new series of hard sci-fi novels from Eric Michael Craig.

Hector: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster: Date: 2232.094:

Thirty seconds. The timer scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Relentless. Certain.
Unavoidable.
He sat staring at the display, his eyes unable to focus on the numbers.
He was afraid.
And alone.
Beyond the edges of civilization, with only a clock to watch over his last fleeting seconds.
Weeks ago he’d run out of options, and hope had died soon after. So he made peace with himself and pointed his ship toward the inevitable.
Twenty seconds. The stars ahead blinked out as he dove forward. He could see it, almost visible in the dim light of the distant sun. Dark, ominous, and unforgiving.
The engines behind him coughed once. Then again. The roaring fell away as his fuel supply failed. The last of the reaction mass exhausted, gravity would finish the task, hauling him to his destiny.
He tapped the control to jettison the marker buoy, listening to its thrusters hissing against the outer skin of the ship as it shot off into the darkness. He knew it would remain trapped in orbit as certainly as he had found himself ensnared, but it gave him some solace that his last thoughts and actions might live past his own mortality. If anyone ever came looking for him.
Ten seconds.
He floated free from the seat and closed his eyes.
Counting down the numbers in his mind …

CHAPTER ONE

Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:

“Commander, report to ConDeck immediately.”
Jephora Cochrane was not the type to take his duty lightly, but his engineer’s tone made every word an order as she ripped him from sleep an hour early.
Petra “Rocky” Rocovicz always sat third watch alone. No one on the crew wanted to spend time working with her, except as absolutely necessary. She didn’t mean to be offensive, but she had a way of expressing herself that was brutally forceful.
Machinery didn’t care if she spoke her mind. People on the other hand, were less fault-tolerant.
“What’s the problem?” he asked, pulling the seal-edge of his coverlet loose and rolling slowly toward the open air. He tried to keep his frustration from showing in his tone.
“Payload Four is lost,” the chief engineer said.
“How the frag do you lose 500 billion tons of ice?” he asked.
“Is good question,” she said.
“I’ll suit up and be on deck in five,” he said pushing off his bed and over to the autovalet.
Being a native to Juno, his light-world ectomorph physiology would never function well at anything above a tenth-g, and working with a mixed-physio crew meant that he had to be ready at any time for hard acceleration. His Pressure Support Exosuit let him work on an even footing with any of the heavy-grav mesomorphs on the crew by boosting his strength and compressing his extremities and torso with enough force to keep the blood flowing to vital body parts. Like his lungs and brain.
As the suit’s polymorphic liner wrapped around him, he flashed through the familiar sensation of suffocating under tons of water before the actuators kicked in and began carrying his breathing. It was a moment of terror that anyone who’d ever wrapped into a PSE knew.
The autovalet’s arms finished the rest of the dressing process. Contact pads first, then legs, arms, torso shell, and finally neck-support struts all slipped into place. He resented having to wear his suit because every time he put it on, it reminded him why he’d never been given a real command after twenty years in FleetCom.
A nearly inaudible beep told him the process was complete and his augmented body sprang to life. He shoved himself forward, a slug encased in an armor shell. He hated it, but it didn’t matter because without it, he’d be dead at an acceleration level most of his crew could take naked.
He thought about grabbing himself something to eat on the way by the galley, but instead he swung himself feet first up the chute toward the ConDeck. After four years working with her, he could tell that Rocky sounded worried, even through her gruff.
Flipping out onto the deck he stopped abruptly, snapping his maglock boots down with a firm click.

To keep reading you can find the book here.

A Bite of... Eric Michael Craig

Q1: What is the greatest challenge in writing realistic sci-fi?

Staying fresh enough and educated in enough disciplines to stay ahead of the world we live in. The truth is the world around us is SciFi. Every single aspect of it is impacted by things that were science fiction when I was in school.
In order to stay up on the trends, an author needs to read not just other novels, but technical stuff. Journals and trade publications. And those things have to be broad spectrum. You cannot write relevant sci fi if you only know one thing about science.
A person who was on the cutting edge of biochemistry ten years ago could have written any number of stories that by today would be out of date, and missing something hugely important in electronics (the smart phone). On the other side of that an Electrical Engineer that saw the coming portable communications explosion, might have missed something like CRISPR and the idea of biohacking.
It is almost impossible to stay relevant in a world that will have changed by the time you get from chapter one, to chapter twenty, let alone two years after the book is published.
I chose to move my latest series 220 years into the future and I am praying that they endure a few years before someone invents the warp drive and makes local space colonization irrelevant.

Q2: If you didn’t write science fiction is there any other genre you would like to write?

This answer fits in with the one above. Other than historical romance, most anything set in the real world is now science fiction. The stories I have been writing are a bit across the lines of science fiction sub-genre. Stormhaven Rising is a political thriller/action as much as it is mainstream Science Fiction. My new series has elements of mystery/crime drama, as well as political drama buried inside a harder edged space opera.
Anything I’d write would have to include those elements. Even if I wrote Epic Fantasy, I’d be explaining the magic in terms that made it just technology beyond our human understanding. I think it has to be that way or the reader won’t see and feel the relevance of the story. If you can’t make your world relatable in a real way, it’s pointless to tell the story.
So, having said that, I don’t feel like there’s much of anything around that I could write that isn’t in some way inherently science fiction.

Q3: Which author do you most admire and why?

This question is a real challenge for me. I grew up reading the “masters” like Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, and although I could say they have influenced me and how I think, I have been forced to turn away from that.
The issue is that we live in the Marvel/Disney era of storytelling.
Authors like RAH and Clarke could spend 300 pages developing an epic premise story, and people read them because they were fascinating studies in possibility.
Unfortunately now, authors cannot do that. We do not get to write “epic premise stories,” we have to write “major crisis management adventures.” If the first paragraphs of a novel don’t drive the story into an emergency situation, nobody will read past the first page.
Because of that, I’ve had to turn loose of my heroes and look to the world around me … unfortunately, very few modern writers are more than a “flash in the pan” or formula hacks. I know that sounds harsh, but at the speed the world moves, there is a sad truth to the notion that most readers attention spans vary inversely with the velocity of life.

About Eric Michael Craig

Eric Michael Craig is a Hard Science Fiction writer living in the Manzano Mountains of New Mexico. He is the former Director of Research for a private consulting laboratory in Phoenix, where he experimented with inertial propulsion and power generation technologies.
Fascinated with the “cacophony of humanity,” he dedicated much of his life to observing society and how people relate to each other and the world around them. Ultimately this drove him to write full time.
When not writing, Eric is active in Intentional Community Design, plays guitar and bass, occasionally dabbles in art of various forms, and designs websites. He also owns way too many dogs.
Eric is a founding member of the SciFi Roundtable. The SFRT is an active online group dedicated to supporting indie and traditional authors by networking them with other writers and professional resources.

You can follow him on Twitter, find him on his website and sign up for his newsletter there.

Chinwart studied his brown, stubby toes as he attempted to avoid Mother’s gimlet eye.

“I’m waiting…”

“Well. Y’see ma’am, it were a bet.”

“A bet?”

“Yes’m. Walleye bet me I couldn’t come by a pair of Beetroot’s underdrawers.”

Mother made a choking noise. “Why didn’t you liberate them from the laundry line? It would have been safer.”

Chinwart wrinkled his grubby brow.

“But Walleye said…”

“I bet he did.” Mother sighed and sent Chinwart on his way.

She left Walleye to Beetroot.

That miscreant found himself spreadeagled on the village green. Naked. Save for a pair of pink, frilly bloomers.

©️jj 2019

Sam got up to man the coffee machine, while Anna loaded the dishwasher. Jim moved his chair away from the table and stretched his long legs in front of him.
“It’s amazing,” he said reflectively “even though Patsy and Anna are all grown up now, and their personal styles have diverged, you can still feel Patsy’s mum’s hand in their food.”
“You can indeed,” Patsy agreed. “It ain’t so much what we cook, or even how we cook it, as the joy we take in feeding people. That’s what Mum gave us, joy and confidence.”
“It is indeed,” Anna agreed. “Joy, confidence and love. My own mother despised me. If it hadn’t been for aunty Pat my life would have been bleak indeed. But she took me under her wing and loved me like one of her own. I owe her a lot.”
“Not according to her,” Patsy said with a laugh in her voice. “She reckons you repaid her with love, laughter, and an enormous son-in-law.”
Sam must have looked puzzled, because Jim laughed.
“I was a sort of protégée of Anna’s and she taught me a great deal of what I know about computers. It was through her I met Pats. I was fourteen and she was sixteen. I fell like a ton of bricks. Fortunately she felt the same – although we had to wait until I was eighteen before our parents would countenance the marriage.”
“We did. But waiting did us no harm. And we’ve been married twenty years now. He was worth waiting for…”
“You too, toots, you were certainly worth waiting for. Though you are right about the wait, it taught us patience and gave us the chance to be sure.”
Then he leaned over and gave her a smacking kiss.
Sam bought coffee and a big box of after dinner mints. “Would a brandy round this off?”
“Oh yes,” Anna said, as she wiped away a sentimental tear. “Wouldn’t it just.”

And so they finished their evening with snifters of Sam’s best brandy.
“Look behind you,” Patsy said to Anna. “Gandalf and Bonnie are sharing a basket, and they are both snoring.”
Anna looked around and grinned.
“Look at the soft buggers. I reckon they are in love. But it’s just as well Bonnie has been done, I don’t fancy a Groenendael/lurcher cross.”
“No. I don’t reckon it’d be a pretty dog. Though I bet it’d be intelligent and trainable.”
Sam finished his brandy.
“Come on Bon Bon. Bedtime pees. And you Gandalf.”
The dogs followed him into the garden, and Jim went with them. Anna and Patsy quickly cleared up the kitchen.
“Blimey, Anna,” I just looked at the time. “It’s nearly two o’clock. S’no wonder I’m pooped.”
“Me too. But it’s been nice since we got our Glaswegian friend sorted.”
“Has. But it was bloody before that.”
“It was. And I didn’t help by having a wobbler.”
“You couldn’t help that. You never had anybody before Sam, and the idea he was in danger just messed up your head. That’s what happens. The first time I thought somebody had it in for Jim, I was so scared I was physically sick. I’ve had to learn that he is big enough to look after himself. Mind you, somebody going after the boys was a hard pill to swallow – though I had to put the fear away. It helps nobody. But I reckon you figured that one out for yourself today.”
“I did. It wasn’t easy. And I guess it won’t ever be easy. But you are so right about fear helping nobody.”
Patsy put a meaty arm around Anna’s slim shoulders. “Doesn’t. But noisy sex does…”

And so it was when the men came in from the garden, they found their womenfolk in each other’s arms almost weeping with laughter.
“It won’t be any good asking them,” Jim said, “even if they do manage to explain, we mere men won’t be able to understand. Best to just lock up and haul them off to bed.”
Sam grinned and locked the front door, before coming back into the kitchen. He threw Anna over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes.
“Come on giggleswick. Bed time.”
Jim grabbed Patsy around the waist and steered her up the stairs in the wake of Sam and Bonnie, and the still giggling Anna. Gandalf settled himself in Bonnie’s bed by the Aga. He wasn’t a dog who was fond of climbing stairs, or of witnessing noisy sex.

As a consequence of a very fraught day, a pretty late night, and some extremely noisy sex, nobody got out of bed very early on Saturday morning. First to emerge was Sam, who had a brisk shower before letting the dogs out and putting the coffee machine on. As soon as the beverage was ready, he took Anna a jumbo-sized cappuccino and a couple of digestive biscuits. She was just opening her eyes when he walked into the room, and her nose twitched like a rabbit’s at the aroma of fresh coffee.
“It’s no wonder I love you,” she remarked, “not only are you handsome and sexy, you also make excellent cappuccino.”
He laughed, then cocked his head.
“I think I hear stirrings down the hallway. I shall go and do hostly things while you wake up.”
He strode off, leaving Anna smiling and sipping frothy coffee. Jim was in the corridor looking rumpled.
“Sam. Thank  fuck you are up. Pats needs coffee and my life won’t be worth living until she gets it.”
“Cappuccino?”
“Even better.”
“Come with me, and I’ll provide you with a jumbo cup so you’ll get many brownie points.”
Jim patted him with a heavy hand.
“Thanks mate.”

They went to the kitchen where the dogs were sitting inside the French door surveying a very rainy garden with obvious canine disgust. Sam filled his metal jug with milk and put it under the steam nozzle.
“Here Jim, hold this while I organise cups, and breakfast for the dogs.”
Jim obliged blearily, and Sam shoved a chocolate digestive biscuit in his free hand. He grinned and ate it in one bite. Sam pushed the packet towards him before heading to the boot room where he filled two dishes with kibble.
“Bonnie, Gandalf, breakfast.”
The dogs left their contemplation of the sodden garden and came to eat.

Jane Jago

Rat’s whiskers itched.

“We have to move,” he said.

His mate hissed. “This my home.”

“Who’s Rat around here?”

She subsided reluctantly, and even when his instinct led him to a dry cave high up in the cliff wall she was unhappy and wouldn’t look at him.

But Rat insisted. The males carried the nestlings one by one, while the young females made beds of straw for the infants and the old.

Rat and his brothers caught a fat rabbit and everybody ate that night. 

Then the heavens opened.

In the morning Rat’s mate was gone. 

He thinks she drowned…

©️jj 2019