10
Apr
This is sort of cheating, since it’s a storystarter I created myself earlier in the day, and then I edited it, but it’s there. Of course, me being me, I managed to just miss the 500 word limit. I can’t seem to write in under 500 words. Ah well. I hope you find this interesting, although I think it’s a story that needs to be improved to be really good.
The warp gate hung before it, the great ring of spinning metal filling its view-port. A new colony lay on the far side of that portal, and it looked forward to what that gate offered. This ship, the Rose, had spent many a year performing shuttle runs within the Old Core planets, mistreated and abused, never set free to explore the purpose it had constructed for. It had once been the pride of the interplanetary vessels, the first in a new breed of AI-run colony ships, safely carrying their sleeping cargoes across the millennia of light years to their new homes. But the Rose, as the first of all her kind, was given a special gift: she became the test mule. Each time a new innovation was tested, it was tried on her first, and soon she became a hodgepodge of malfunctioning machinery, a rabbit warren of engineers and cables.
Rose despaired, for although she had not been given emotions as such, she had been given a purpose and a goal in life, and that had been taken away from her at the moment of her birth. She endured the poking and the prodding, feeling parts of her mind cut away and replaced, sometimes better, often worse, all in the hope that one day she could fulfil her ambition. Three hundred years of waiting was finally at an end, and as Rose hung before the warp gate, she fairly quivered in glee, her engines pulsing in delight.
She turned her sensors on throughout the ship, recording her glorious body, lovingly restored to her original configuration, but she looked most of all at the sleeping passengers. They were her children, and Rose was to birth them onto their new planet. Sending fuel to the engines, she sailed forward, her form engulfed in white light as the gate enclosed her, wrapping Rose in its energies. Time stretched until the end of the universe arrived, and Rose counted many, many minutes passing on her internal clock, until it reached the end and had to start over at one.
A surge into darkness, and Rose had arrived. She measured the stars around her, and found that she had arrived right where she should. Yet her clock was far off, and she reset it, to one minute after she had flown through the gate. Her internal logic puzzled at the question, but without the databases of the Old Core to consult, she could find no answer, and left the question alone.
Rose flew to the planet of her assignment, and slipped through the atmosphere, waking her passengers into the buffeting of her decent. They stretched and moved for the first time in years, and as she landed, Rose watched her children ready themselves to leave their metal womb. Cracking the hatches, they spilled out from her, a tide of seed that would plant and grow fruit in this fertile land, and Rose looked down on them, a proud parent to the last. She had done what she must, and a brilliant glow of satisfaction spread throughout her, and in that glow of happiness and joy, she shut down, never to rise again.
7
Apr
A thanks to Selorian for providing the Story Starter for this one, although I didn’t use it in the normal way.
Nathan ran. He sprinted down alleyways, jumping over drunks and around waste, and yet the inexorable cloak came on. That was how Nathan thought of the man chasing him, as the ‘cloak’. A black cloak covered the pursuer’s body, and an equally dark hood rendered his face invisible. Once, as Nathan, slipped on the muck as he turned a corner, he heard the clank as a throwing dagger spun off of the wall next to him. Fear drove Nathan onwards, into the Spiral, the foetid mess of ruined buildings and ruined lives that hung at the centre of the city.
Nathan had arrived in this predicament by accident. He was a thief by trade, and was scouting a merchant’s mansion when he saw the cloak leaving – by an upper story window. Knowing what that meant, the thief had dropped from his perch and taken off. Of course, Nathan had been too late, and he carried a small nick from a dagger that grazed his upper arm.
Jumping over a pair of drunks rolling in the gutter, Nathan dove round a corner, feet scrabbling for purchase on the muddy streets. He was heading for one of his hideouts, one where he could slip down into the sewers and lose his pursuer in the mass of tunnels and filth. If only that blasted assassin would fall behind. But no, every time Nathan slowed going round a corner, there was the whine of a passing knife, skittering off the old plaster and brick.
He wondered if he was being herded. Nathan didn’t think so, he’d been in the lead the whole way, but the cloak’s uncanny ability to keep him just in sight was beginning to wear thin. Time to do something about that. Nathan burst through the nearest door, sprinting up the stairs and out onto the roof, where he leaped to the next roof, landing hard in a roll. Gods, he was breathing hard.
Chest hurting from the impact, Nathan proceeded to leap from roof to roof, zigzagging deeper into the Spiral. No knives had flown past in the last few minutes, and so he paused to look backwards. A curse fell from his lips, for only a roof behind was the cloak, marching onwards and reaching for a dagger. Throwing himself into a roll, Nathan fell down the far side of the building, catching his fingers on the edge for a moment before dropping to the alley beneath. The hard impact rolled his ankle, but this was no time for him to slow down: he was nearly at the safehouse.
A few more twists and turns and dives through buildings, and Nathan was there. Slamming the door behind him, Nathan stomped on the plate that shut every opening into the building except the sewers, and down he went, ripping up the trap door and clambering down into the foetid wastes of the oldest and foulest part of the city. Nathan paused, his breath coming in great gasping bursts. He’d made it! Free of the damn cloak.
A wet splash was Nathan’s only warning, and before he could turn he felt the dagger slide under his collarbone and into the artery. Nathan’s shocked glance showed only a deeper darkness moving away from him, and the thief cried out in fear and in pain, begging for someone to come help him. His pleas for help fell on deaf ears. The city bustled above as he lay bleeding in the storm drains below their feet.