ParSec snapped to attention. “Welcome aboard, Captain!”

“Thanks,” the man said. “Sign here, please.” He thrust a small pad at her and stood waiting. ParSec looked at Chavez, who shrugged. She signed the pad.

“Great, hang on.” He folded himself back through the hatch, in stages, and then backed out again while dragging a large box. The box had a frosted front and blinking lights. Blinking lights on a coffin-sized box, in Hy’s personal experience, were never good. “There you go,” the man said, slapping his hands together. The box had tiny wheels on it; it continued to roll a few more inches after he set it down. “You have a good day, now.” And he swung the hatch closed behind himself. Within seconds an engine fired up and the floor shook as the delivery ship disengaged and fell away.

Chavez was already bent over the box. “It must be cheaper to order frozen captains,” he said. “Maybe they buy them in bulk.” (more…)

Traditionally, a “town” is either a small city or a really big village, or even a settlement with delusions of grandeur. Streets mark where the cow paths to the water used to be, or where people did most of their walking in the areas left to them after the richer citizens marked off the bits they wanted. Towns often have a central location where residents gather to picnic or to celebrate or to pass out the torches and the hastily painted signs that say, more or less, “Down with the Richer Citizens.”  Businesses radiate outward from there, leading to urban areas filled with determinately industrial industry and violent crime and to suburban areas filled with peaceful neighbors and friendly, domestic crime. Farther out you get small fiefdoms, often ending in “Hills” or “Estates” despite the absence of either, with strong identities and clearly designated perimeters where everyone knows everyone and, more importantly, knows who doesn’t belong. And at the outer ring of the town will be the rural spots where crops are grown, livestock is stocked, and folks can find a place to call home where the hustle and bustle of the town can’t be bothered to visit.

Venture was both a ship and a town, and like most combo devices it wasn’t a very good either. As a ship it lacked maneuverability and possessed what attacking forces, were they any, might call a “target surplus.” And as a town… as a town it made a great ship. (more…)

“Right, right. Thanks, Katy,” Hy said, sitting up and coincidentally dumping her bedclothes from over her head over on top of the other pile, which squeaked in protest. “This isn’t over,” she warned the pile. It giggled. Hy lurched to her feet and shook her head. C’mon, Alistair, what you gonna do when emergencies hit and worried townsfolk wake you in the middle of the night, hats in hand? Get used to getting up at oh-christ-hundred, you signed up for this.

She grabbed a tunic at random, thought about possible media coverage of the experiment, and put it back to select another with a careful eye towards fit, style, and recent cleansing. Hy dressed quickly, trying not to look at the empty spot on the bed where Arcus was now rolling about to create a giant Arcus-filled blanket tortilla. Her husband Ambrose was already hard at work somewhere. Sewage management waited for no man or mayor, apparently. Hy sighed, trying not to feel hurt that he was paying more attention to human effluvia than he was to her. Everyone in the town was hustling to get the bugs out of their systems while diasters were still easily contained, and making their byproducts swiftly and smoothly wend through the mysterious processes that turned crap into vegetables was, at the moment, much more important than spending time with her. Dammit.

Besides, soon she’d be leaving him behind to deal with slightly different human byproducts. She thought about Ambrose crawling through the sewer mains and smiled to herself. Their jobs weren’t that dissimilar, actually. She just turned crap into government. (more…)

The crowd stood there, smiling softly, watching. She was down to her hands and knees now, hands bloody from pulling, and they just watched. Lovingly, they just watched. Some of them even started to join hands and sing, swaying back and forth and beaming at each other over the wonderfulness of it all. She screamed as she felt herself slipping into the cold, dark ground with a wave of grass sweeping up to close over her head, and the last thing she saw was her husband kissing the top of their daughter’s head as they both calmly watched her die–

“Eeeeyaaaaooouugh!” she yelled, sitting up hard enough to wrench her back. Hy Alistair, mayor of the newly-formed and completely airborne town of Venture, waited a full minute to compose herself and let her heart rate drop back down until it was merely tachycardia. She was in her dark, stark bedroom, full of metal and plastic and shiny fake wood, with no window anywhere and only a single small picture frame displaying a sunny sky on an otherwise featureless wall. The bed itself, with a small table to either side, was the only thing suggesting “bedroom” in the first place; otherwise a casual observer might have guessed “storeroom” or “shipping container” or “closed-off end of an abandoned corridor.” Not what you would expect to see in a picturesque town that had heretofore only appeared in her dreams. She closed her eyes and let herself dwell on that fantasy town. Damn appealing, even with the scary grass monster which probably represented her deeply suppressed fears of leadership or failure or…

At the end of the bed her daughter Arcus was still pulling at her foot and giggling.

—Or her fear of being convicted of a capital crime. Venture had laws against murdering eight-year-olds, right? She was certain she had seen that in the bylaws somewhere. (more…)

The greenest, most picture perfect meadow imaginable stretched out before her beneath an endless blue sky. She ached to just run through the layers of sweetgrass and clover and wildflowers, rolling on them and breathing in the sweet fragrance, but that would have to wait. Her people were coming.

Instead, she eased off her shoes without looking down and let the ground caress her bare feet as a promissory note for later. Maybe she could come back and roll naked on the clover, would that be too scandalous? More to the point, did she care? Thousands of tiny leaves tickling her skin… Maybe later, in the moonlight, when the grass was even cooler and no one would see her. Mayors have an image to uphold, after all.

They began arriving then, individually and in family groups. She stepped reluctantly back into her shoes; the first few people noticed and grinned at her for it. She touched their hands as they approached. More people gathered, walking up the hill from the picturesque town below, laughing and holding hands. Children ran and played as they came. Songbirds flew around them to nestle in the trees. Lovers held each other. The meadow quickly filled with people and still they came until finally she looked out over a sea of smiling faces. For one crazy second she thought about jumping up into their arms and rolling over and over on top of their heads, and she chuckled when it occurred to her that they’d probably let her do it. (more…)

Tuckby then began expounding the mathematics behind his discovery of Interim Space, a non-place which exists between the smallest possible division of time. It took more than forty years and thousands of ferrets, but he finally made the breakthrough of firing two concentrated bursts of tachyons to… do something or other, Parvo had no clue, he had zoned out as soon as the Fudd guy started jabbering.

Had there been signs, with Kelly? Some subtle indicators he might have noticed had he not been blinded by love and six-inch-long skirts? She had seemed to favor pony tails a lot, but that could have been a Japanese thing. And she did disappear between 6:30 and 3:30 each day but she had assured him that was the early shift at the pesticide taste-testing facility where she worked but would never let him visit.

Tuckby was now waving his arms like a pissed-off windmill and raving something about time-space and induced causality-suppression and yadda yadda yadda. Her skin was awfully clear. And she did have that habit of waiting outside when he bought booze… No, this was insane, it was one of Buchanon’s tricks. Parvo’s job was fine, Kelly was waiting for him, he wasn’t going to get railroaded into volunteering for some idiotic science project with Dr. Wabbit Season, here. Parvo took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and started listening again.

“–which is why doing so would be the most dangerous thing imaginable, with consequences for our entire solar system, so don’t ever, ever do that,” Tuckby finished, wild-eyed and breathing heavily. (more…)