Daikaijuzine

January 1828 Finnegan never imagined winters in the south could be so wicked. He paced the perimeter of the Fort on cold-stiff legs, his rifle slung across his back. Apart from training, he had not fired the thing but once since joining the Army and that was to shoo away a wild dog. He brought [...]

Niko doesn’t believe I can’t dance. Get up, he demands, and show me what you can do. He pulls my arm. Not only am I known as the emperor of invention, he says, the genius who lit the world, the patron saint of modern physics, but I am a very talented dancer. Not many people [...]

“We’re not freezing our baby!” “Margaret, you’re being old-fashioned.” Chad guided his wife away from the Hologram TVs. She glanced back over her shoulder at the looped video display of a baby grabbing and stuffing a toy in its mouth. “Cryonic technology,” he continued, “has been approved by the FDA. There’s no danger.” “No?” She [...]

Halfway through the morning briefing, all Matt Ryan had been able to process was that there was a tiny, almost-invisible fly circling the donut box at the center of the table, and Matt could’ve caught it with her fingers, if only she was a ninja. The fly landed on the edge of the donut box, [...]

“Get your arses back here, ya mongrels!” Carl’s dogs looked back at him, tongues lolling, then plunged on through the bush. Carl hefted the pig’s carcass over his back and started up the slope after them. His jaw throbbed with the effort. The last time he’d been hunting, he’d stumbled across a couple of blokes [...]

“Can you make them larger?” Dr. Sdravko Nieczuja looked up from his lab table at the pair of slobbering mastiffs General Fitzsimmons had in tow. “You’re the big specialist in making things grow, aren’t you?” Fitzsimmons said. “Yes, I get it, there’s lots of technical mumbo-jumbo behind the growth serum. I’m interested in results, not [...]

Via Vespasianus, Central Atlantis, 5:20pm, Wednesday 12th October, 2360 The low hum of the rope through the wet air warned them, and they scattered. Andreas ran, feet slapping against wet concrete, not looking back. Ves slipped sideways, into the shadowed alley between two soaring buildings. By the flickering light of a broken streetlamp, Andreas caught [...]

The drunk in the Stetson thumped his fist on the table, proving that he wasn’t dead.  I heard him mutter "…  an’ nex’ thing you know, they’ll be wanting the vote, jes’ like the goddamn…"  as I faded out the muzak and cued ‘Rawhide’ for Melanie.  The drunk was trying to simultaneously outstare three deiks [...]

Honored Silvertip: With due reverence for the deserved reputation of the honored Professor Upenlock, I nevertheless feel required to post a protest about the uncritical and noncognitive acceptance of his analysis (Vol 36, #5) of the linguistic properties of residual artifact tracings found exterior to artificial hive structures of a commercial (?) nature at his [...]

"What’s the problem? Did you cut the wrong wire?" "If I had cut the wrong wire, we’d all be dead." I force myself to add: "Sir." The squad leader — my superior — has little patience for me, especially in situations like this one. "But it stopped," he says. "Why is it counting down again? [...]

(Continued from Part One) The storm raged. Snow pounded in unbounded avarice, skirling across the frozen crust of the winter’s buildup. One-Eyed Kate held a pair of lanterns over the fighting pit. At the north end, a bear cage could be lowered into the pit by means of a winch. At the south end, a [...]

There were no enemy ships on the horizon, so I watched as Pierre swept into Hidden Lodge on Titchen Creek late on a moonless night. His two sled dogs huffed and bunched their shoulders, then dug their back legs in with angry growls, hating the trail, as they crossed that last stubborn rise. The runners [...]

I was fixing a weeder in the cornfield and trying not to think about Ariela when the jumper alert sounded. I hated that field. Its hot mugginess and swarms of gnats made me sick. Normally, I worked in an air-conditioned computer room, but I was the brownhorn up from Earth just two years ago. I [...]