j mark miller | a writer's fantasy

A Verdant and Capricious Moon—Part 8

This is the 8th post of 10 in the series, A Verdant and Capricious Moon

verdantmoonpost

When the shuttle was loaded to Caygill’s satisfaction, Chidlow directed everyone to the cafeteria. Two of the Lunar Base crew, Glenville Bach and Amila Manger, had been preparing a final meal, digging deep into the base’s supplies to produce as lavish a feast as could be had on the surface of the moon.

The Lunar Base crew seemed to relax more and more throughout the dinner. Being cut off from the entire human race had affected them profoundly, and Anthea wondered if they would ever fully recover. She kept an eye on Jin as he sat across from her, looking for signs of emotional or mental distress, but he seemed like the same Jin she’d fell in love with. He was still slow to speak and quick to laugh, with eyes full of compassion and intelligence.

The meal wound through several courses, including two desserts. There were jokes about needing to take some equipment back off the shuttle in the morning to make sure they could gain escape velocity. People seemed reluctant to leave the table, to cut themselves off from human company. Then Anthea noticed a few couples seemed to be developing. She took it as her cue to take Jin’s hand in her own and make the next eight hours of scheduled rest their own.

He squeezed her hand and looked at her across the table. She loved it when Jin looked at her like that, like there was nothing else in the universe that could steal his attention. Anthea traced the contours of his face with her eyes. His wiry hair, his deep brown eyes, the split in his lip from a childhood scuffle. He wasn’t a big man, but he was sinewy, in top physical condition.

And his touch was as soft as the finest silk.

Jin let go of her hand and pushed away from the table. Anthea thought to stand up too, but Jin shook his head and motioned for her to sit back down.

“Give me twenty minutes,” he said, “then come. My berth is C-34.”

Anthea knew better than to argue or question. Jin loved his little games, and she loved letting him play them. She watched him move away, more gliding than bouncing in the low gravity.

Most of the others had cleared out of the cafeteria. She looked down at the far end of the table to see Chidlow, Caygill, and Khan sitting together. Khan caught her eye and raised his tube of energy drink in a kind of salute. She nodded back with a bit of a smile.

She rose from the table with a glance at her watch. There were nineteen minutes left, which meant she needed something to do instead of sitting idle. She remembered the seeing an observation deck while they traipsed back and forth to the shuttle.

Anthea found her way and stood in the midst of a wide semicircle of glass. The stars twinkled overhead, and she took the time to relax, catching her breath for the first time since the moon disappeared. She loved looking up at the stars, remembering long hours she’d spent on the grassy hill behind the house looking through the telescope with her dad.

She had trouble recognizing the constellations, figuring they looked different from the moon. Maybe because she could see stars that normally  would have been visible from only one hemisphere or the other. If only she could find Orion, or the Big Dipper…

The stars were wrong.

She couldn’t find familiar constellations because they weren’t there. That planet down below, the surrogate for Earth, wasn’t an alternate version of Earth at all. When Barzelay had gone on and on about multiple dimensions, she assumed he was postulating parallel dimensions. She was wrong. They were as far away from home as anyone could possibly be. Farther away than any human had ever been before.

A shudder ran through her body from the tip of her head all the way down her back. It was all too much. Too far beyond her.

She glanced at her watch. Two minutes left, just enough time to get to Jin’s room and not be early. Two minutes left before she could forget about their circumstances for a while.

The base was quiet. Everyone had gone to their beds or other private matters. She walked through the C wing, finding number thirty-four near the end of the long corridor. She didn’t bother knocking, knowing Jin would be waiting inside.

She found him standing within, a smile on his face and his hands held out towards her. A small package rested in his hands, an envelope of some sort. She knew instinctively he’d made it with his own hands, his need for twenty minutes of privacy revealed.

“Take this and keep it close,” Jin said. “Be sure to have it on you when we make the crossing tomorrow.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“An omamori,” he said, “a sort of talisman for protection.”

“A good luck charm?” Anthea asked. “I never knew you were the superstitious sort.”

“Well,” his face turned serious, “when you see your home world turn into a barren rock, you begin to reconsider things.”

She looked down at the omamori in her hands. It was simple piece of paper folded into a rectangular pouch and tied shut with a bit of string. He’d written a bit of kanji on each side, but she had no idea what they said.

“Anthea,” Jin said.

“What?” she looked up.

“You left the door open,” Jin said.

She turned and looked to find the door wide open. Her foot swung out and pushed it closed.

“Not anymore.”

Leave a Comment »

Filed Under: A Verdant and Capricious Moon, Science Fiction

Rise of the Sun King—Chapter 2.1

This is the 8th post of 12 in the series, Rise of the Sun King

rise-banner

Tinker suffered a short-lived downturn in customers over the course of the next week. Scuttlebutt around the neighborhood hinted that patronage of the gadgeteer might be frowned upon by the authorities. He thought nothing of the slump until Jobe, his building’s know-it-all, told him the rumor. After putting out a few feelers, Tinker was able to trace the story to Cyril’s front door.

A few dropped hints of his own later and Cyril was found dead in his flat, lying in a pool of his own vomit. Cyril was a known drunkard, so no one thought much about it, figuring the man drank one too many whiskeys. Life on the block was back to normal before the end of the day.

Such was life in the city.

Tinker himself had no idea who had done the deed, but he suspected a lightspinner. Those with healing abilities were equally adept at sickening someone, even to death. There was a time when he might have felt guilty about possibly instigating a murder, but in a world where innocents were afforded no protection, in an empire where someone born as a fluke of nature lived under a mandatory death sentence, pangs of self-reproach were easily done away with.

By the end of the next day, a fresh, new block Warden named Dec had moved into the building’s sloven penthouse. Full of energy and enthusiasm, he spent the entirety of the next day knocking on every door in every building on the block, introducing himself to all those who would open their door, promising to watch out for the public welfare and deal with citizens in a fair and just manner. His second full day found his smile fading as the neighbors went out of their way to avoid him. On the third, his good humor was broken as he awoke to find his penthouse door defaced with several obscenities.

Before the week was done, the once bright-eyed Dec, rising star of civil service, was a jaded young man who had taken his first bribe, cheated his first prostitute, and turned his first blind eye. The neighborhood nodded in collective approval as he settled into his proper place within the community.

Glance had suffered a downturn of her own. Her failure to bring some food home from Tinker’s pantry had been the final straw with her boyfriend. He’d tried to beat her, but was so drunk he was easily confused by her illusions. She escaped with her life, but none of her possessions, ending up back at Tinker’s flat on the very same evening she’d delivered the sunstone for Cyril’s watch. She begged for a place to stay. Two weeks later, she was still taking up his bed while he slept on makeshift pallet on the floor.

If that weren’t enough, Tinker’s wayward brother, another of Glance’s old boyfriends, showed back up for the first time in months. He’d managed to get himself kicked out of wherever he’d been staying.

Again.

“Whew,” whistled Sultry as he stood looking out Tinker’s window, “would you look at that. There goes another one.”

Sultry, a confessed firebug, watched with glee as an entire city block in the slums went up in flames. Given the city’s fuel oil system, such occurrences were fairly common, happening at least once a month. If a fire began in a flat, the entire building was nearly always lost because of the grid of oil-filled pipes inside the walls.

One of the duties of a block Warden was to prevent such catastrophes. If a fire did somehow break out, he was charged with shutting the valve that connected his block to the city’s main supply. Cheapside tenements didn’t have plumbed water, making the fire brigade’s job a futile struggle.

“Those are human beings dying or losing their homes,” Tinker scolded. “You shouldn’t be so happy about it.”

“I’m sorry,” Sultry blushed, “but a fire that big is exciting. I can’t help myself.”

Tinker grunted in grudging acceptance. He had a hard time understanding his little brother. When Sultry’s lightspinner powers manifested, he transformed into a different person. He became prone to fits of passion, giving in to him impulses rather than thinking things through. Most Torches, those able to master their power before burning themselves out, were notorious pyros. So far, Sultry had kept himself from becoming a firebug, but the flames still called to him.

Leave a Comment »

Filed Under: Fantasy, Rise of the Sun King

A Verdant and Capricious Moon—Part 7

This is the 7th post of 10 in the series, A Verdant and Capricious Moon

verdantmoonpost

Running system checks on the Clarke proved to be slowest hour of Anthea’s life. They found the ship just where she should be, and in the condition expected of any new craft who’d been given a shakedown cruise—near mint.

Khan seemed determined to check the status of every system, sub-system, and all their redundancies twice over. At first she thought he was doing it out of some sort of playful revenge, keeping her from seeing Jin as long as he was plausibly able.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized she was being unfair. The Clarke was his ship, and the Mars mission his mission, likely his final one. If he led the first successful manned mission to Mars and back, he could retire in glory.

She had to give Khan credit, he acted like the incident back on the shuttle had never happened. Jin seemed to know what he was talking about. As long as she gave Khan due deference, he was businesslike and professional, if somewhat overfastidious.

When he was finally satisfied the ship was sound, they winged their way back down to the moon. Once the shuttle was docked and the hanger was pressurizing again Khan confronted her one last time.

“I hope we understand one another now,” Khan said.

“We do, sir,” Anthea answered, trying not to grind her teeth.

“Act like a professional when you’re on the clock and I’ll treat you like one,” he said. “What you do in your free time, and who you do it with doesn’t make a blip on my radar. But, I have to know I can count on you in a crisis.”

“Yes, sir,” Anthea answered again.

“Now,” he went on, “Chidlow’s ordered everyone to have dinner and try to get a few hours sleep before we make the attempt to cross back over to home. She feels we should be well rested before we subject ourselves to another shaky transition. I suggest you help load the shuttle, then make the most of that time.”

Anthea rocked back, surprised at Khan’s innuendo, and his unspoken approval. He grinned at her just a little wickedly and said, “Dismissed.”

Anthea turned and bolted for the airlock, but caught herself before skipping out of the cockpit. She turned and said, “Khan.”

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Thank you,” Anthea said with more than a little sincerity.

Khan waved his hand in the air in dismissal and turned back to the shuttle’s control board.

Anthea bounded out of the shuttle and made her way into the station proper. It was a sprawling structure, resembling a single story hospital more than anything else. Relatively new, it was still spartan in nature and mostly unoccupied. So far the personnel had been kept to a skeleton crew by the Agency. They were waiting until the new shuttle fleet was operational.

She followed the sound of voices, and found a mixture of the two crews loading experiments onto a cart. She recognized Farold Lementov from astronaut training, but the rest of the lunar personnel were strangers. Chidlow was on hand to introduce her, and Lementov took his own turn acquainting her with his own colleagues.

Jin wasn’t there.

She shrugged off her disappointment as best she could and threw herself into the work. There were dozens of carts filled with delicate experiments that were too expensive or sensitive to be abandoned. The crews wheeled the carts from various wings of the base, and Anthea passed Jin several times over the intermediate hour. He smiled at her each time but never said a word, knowing reports would worm their way back to Khan’s ears.

It made the time she’d spent on the Clarke seem short in comparison.

Leave a Comment »

Filed Under: A Verdant and Capricious Moon, Science Fiction

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • …
  • 8
  • Next Page »

Book Progress

Flaming_Sun_Medallion
Rise of the Sun King
Phase:Serializing
4%
il_570xN.330327510
Bitter Water
Phase:First Draft
90.1%
story-seeds-03
250 Story Seeds
Phase:First Draft
56%

Available Series

Categories

  • Fantasy (13)
  • Flash Fiction (1)
  • Non-Fiction (1)
  • Science Fiction (10)
  • Serials (22)
    • A Verdant and Capricious Moon (10)
    • Rise of the Sun King (12)
  • The Writing Life (7)

My Books

The Foundlings

The Foundlings
The world’s only hope is in a prophecy hardly anyone believes in. The Foundlings is the beginning chapter in the epic Swords of Xigara trilogy—a coming-of-age story full of peril, intrigue, and discovery. Follow these adventurers as they strive against impossible odds to save their world—a world that may not want to be saved. More info →
Buy from Amazon

Behind the Hidden Places

Behind the Hidden Places
Behind the Hidden Places is an anthology of science fiction and fantasy short stories interspersed with free verse and true-to-life stories. Travel to the universe found just next door or found across the vast reaches of the multiverse. Discover, cherish, lose, and regain true love. Find a cure for cancer. Honor the fallen. Delve into the genesis of artificial intelligence. All within the pages of Behind the Hidden Places. More info →
Buy from Amazon

The Road to Awesome

The Road to Awesome
Upgrade your finances, work, home, community, and faith! Get passionate, work hard, sacrifice, be faithful, and get the results you want out of life. Get on The Road to Awesome. More info →
Buy from Amazon

J. Mark Miller on Twitter

My Tweets

© 2018 j mark miller | a writer's fantasy. All rights reserved. Design by Five J's Design.