I watched the people on the bridge very carefully for some time, wishing I could read their moods properly. A lot of them were definitely afraid of me, but some of the drakes especially seemed… well, they glanced at me a lot, but when they did, they seemed to calm down slightly. They probably liked having me where they could see me. Maybe that was why nobody had sent Glath to get rid of me. 2024-07-20 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post
“Retrieval pod to ascent pod. Come in, ascent pod.”
Captain Klees pulls himself out of his half-doze and reaches for the controls. “This is ascent pod, we hear you. Over.”
“This is Gavi Sloap, piloting the retrieval pod. It’s an honour to be speaking with you, Captain Klees. I’ve got a crew of two with me and we’re nearing your location. You should be able to see us ...
2024-07-16 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostI listened carefully to Glath’s story, stopping him several times to clarify key points. I wrote the whole thing down, then read over it, then asked more questions to fill in some of the more obvious holes and address any conflicts. Then, confident that I had all the key details straight, I calmly closed my laptop and put it away.
“What the fuck,” I said calmly, “is wrong with you...
2024-07-13 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe shuttle has a weight limit. It’s designed to carry the five of use back to the ship, and not much else. We lied to Antarctica about how heavy we all were, and the removal of the docking clamps will give us a bit more weight to work with, but we want to get as many modern manufacturing machines up onto the ship as possible, so the logical thing to do would be to send up the pilot and copil...
2024-07-09 23:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostIt’s hard to get a full story out of someone who’s acting cagey and scared of you. It’s even harder when you don’t properly share a complete language, or even the same cultural criteria for story structure. But this is, to the best of my approximation, the story told to me by Glath, Space Spider Colony and Champion Underestimator of Basic Social Skills.
---------------------------...
2024-07-06 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe crew aboard the ship are a lot more cautious about the AI idea than we are, but do have to concede that they didn’t have a better solution. Eventually everyone agrees that if we can’t get a reliable AI from Antarctica or come up with a better solution, they’ll use my brain. Asteria starts going through the AI to confirm that the plan is viable on the computing end of things, and every...
2024-07-02 23:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostThere weren’t even any lasers.
I suppose there was excitement, in its way. For instance, as the airlock opened into space it suddenly occurred to me that if the ship jolted again before my safety line was attached, it could simply jerk me out into space and leave me flailing just out of reach of the ship to slowly run out of air. That certainly got my heart racing while I quickly tied m...
2024-06-29 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe Hypati launcher grows. New shuttle parts are constructed. I spend far more time than I want to loading and unloading tiny battery-operated trucks with huge chunks of metal and plastic to be bolted to other parts of metal and plastic up at the base of the launcher. A construction building – well, more of a giant construction tent – is built at the base of the launcher so that we can asse...
2024-06-25 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostYou’d be amazed how hard it is to find information about human nutrition that some random imbecile like me could understand.
Thing is, food isn’t really a problem for humans on Earth. Oh, sure, there were societies where poor people starved, and there were issues when natural disasters happened, and malnutrition was a thing, but all in all it’s actually really, really hard to starve...
2024-06-22 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe letters are written, read and discussed by the crew, read and discussed by the Leadership, rewritten, checked carefully for inconsistencies, rewritten again, and eventually sent. Captain Klees receives a stern letter back informing him that all orders related to major colony decisions should be confirmed by Antarctica before implementation, and an emphatic and several-times-repeated command...
2024-06-18 23:37:47 +0000 UTC View Post“Okay,” I explained to Glath, “so I need 240 volts, 10 amps to connect to these bits of metal on this plug here, as AC – uh, with the electrons zigzagging back and forth.”
“What are volts and amps?” he asked, crossing his front legs in what I was beginning to recognise as an inquiring gesture. Once I’d realised that Glath was way more comfortable imitating a giant mantis t...
2024-06-15 23:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post“We need to convince Antarctica to give us an AI,” Tal says one day at breakfast, not looking away from the computer as ke talks. “We’ve tried everything else and it’s impossible. Mama can’t do it. Amy’s dregs won’t work without brains, and I think we can all agree that hooking up another chronostasis ring to the ship to feed it dream logic is about the worst idea ever. No one h...
2024-06-11 23:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostFrom the outside, the Stardancer was ugly.
I guess I’d grown up looking at spaceships in fiction, with the occasional video of a shuttle launched from Earth for good measure. But what space needed, apparently, was neither style nor aerodynamics. The Stardancer was a big fat cylinder with rounded ends, and out of those ends stuck long poles, perpendicular to the rest of the ship. There w...
2024-06-08 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostGatekeeper Rault to Capt. Klees
Hylara has been ordered to continue to refuse supply drops due to possible infections. Be informed that this population may have undetected weaknesses in their immune systems. Provide further information on what health issues your ground crew have and we will send medical supplies via the Vault. Do not have medical supplies dropped ...
2024-06-04 23:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostIt was her first day of practical field training, and Sienna had to admit, she was nervous. She balled her hands, willed herself not to fidget, and looked up at the flight instructor.
Elat Den Hol, the tallest natural-born Lunari that Sienna had ever seen, scowled down at her. “You’re the new one, huh?”
“Yessir! Sienna Kae Jin Tep Kel Tan Hol Ap Sik, sir!”
“Hol, hu...
2024-06-02 00:58:25 +0000 UTC View PostSometimes I look back on my life and try to figure out exactly how I ended up on the edge of charted space with the Princess, outrunning the authorities. It is not, I suppose, a difficult question; every step in the sequence makes sense. I chose my Template because he caught my interest. I followed the Princess because my Template did. I was here, on a poorly maintained biohauler that was dange...
2024-06-02 00:23:00 +0000 UTC View Post“I don’t like it,” Celti tells me later. “Trading that tech gives her actions legitimacy. We could have a civil war on our hands.”
“Over a couple of unsanctioned unethical science experiments?” I’ve been an unwilling test subject enough times that I barely remember feeling the level of outrage in Celti’s voice. “Everyone who’s heard of what she did to me so far has r...
2024-05-28 23:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostChoose a story to run concurrently with Charlie MacNamara, once Time to Orbit: Unknown is finished.
I've removed a few of the options because they're either not something I want to run concurrently with CM or they're not ready/I'm not able to get excited about them right now. Sample chapters for all these options are available on patreon.
The poll is multiple choice, so vote for as ...
2024-05-28 04:35:27 +0000 UTC View PostYou’re not supposed to do it, of course, but it’s not unheard of for parents to try to ensure good destinies for their daughters by timing their conception carefully. Most hatchings take place under somewhat clear skies, so the gods that bear witness to the young larvae and claim them for their paths are stars. And stars are notoriously regular in their habits, for the most part; if you wan...
2024-05-28 04:28:53 +0000 UTC View PostJessica wasn’t sure that she liked her niece’s new boyfriend. It wasn’t necessarily the way he spent the whole party lurking in the corner on his phone – he didn’t know anybody except Steph very well, and frankly it was kind of bizarre for Steph to have invited a guy she’d been seeing for a month to her aunt’s 40th birthday, of course he was going to be shy and hide behind his pho...
2024-05-26 23:19:06 +0000 UTC View PostThe interpreter led the way down the tube. I followed closely, taking the opportunity to study them. They must have been watching me, too, because even though I was kind of drifting between hatches rather than actually walking, the interpreter’s faux-arms and legs moved in a noticeably more humanlike manner over our journey. The spiders, despite their wings, didn’t seem to be able to fly ve...
2024-05-25 23:31:01 +0000 UTC View PostAs any decent stargazer will tell you, you can’t do it in the city. You can’t do it in a town either, really, not properly. Too much light pollution. No; to properly see the stars, you have to wait for a moonless night and head out far from any electric light source and wait for your eyes to adjust and then, then you can see the majesty of the heavens.
I’m a stubborn person, so I ha...
2024-05-25 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post“Okay, that’s the end of our session. See you next month, Jane.” The old woman turned and walked out of the room without a second glance.
“Jade,” Jade muttered under he breath, but the trust was, she preferred this woman to the previous guy who’d run these jobseeker meetings. He’d been so enthusiastic about trying to get everyone into a job, pushing people to apply for every...
2024-05-24 05:48:23 +0000 UTC View PostOf the wizard tower’s fourteen floors, Owen’s favourite was the library. He couldn’t read the grand tomes stacked in their towering shelves, couldn’t make out a single word of the letters that the wizard spent long hours reading and writing at his heavy desk, but that didn’t matter. It was far from the richest-looking room in the tower, unless you counted the immense value of the book...
2024-05-22 10:01:54 +0000 UTC View Post“Okay, look,” I say. “There’s something you should probably know.”
I explain the synnerve experiment. The Leadership stare at me with uniformly horrified expressions.
“We’re so, so sorry that that happened to you,” Tana says. “We should have picked up on what was happening. That should never have happened to you.”
“Is that why you were so upset about your...
2024-05-21 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe first thing I learn upon coming into existence is that I have no idea what sort of a creature I am. I have lineage memories of being dozens of different types of organisms, and none of them are anything like this.
There are a couple of possible reasons for that. Maybe the memories of this biochemistry, this nerve type, this body structure were simply not deemed worth passing on somewh...
2024-05-21 12:38:40 +0000 UTC View PostThe Rapture occurred in 2030, when God called His chosen up to heaven and seven years of Tribulation started. Of course, no one noticed.
Seven years of war and famine and disease is not, when you think about it, all that different to how life was beforehand. These things come in waves, and humanity absorbed it in waves. As for the Rapture itself, we’ve found very little record. We suspe...
2024-05-20 18:28:19 +0000 UTC View PostSample chapters for each option will be provided shortly, then a poll will go up so that patrons can vote on what web serial I should write next.
Inner Life
Nobody knows who they really are when they’re first born. But most people get time to figure it out, and when you’re a body-snatching alien parasite, you don’t get that luxury. The parasites that fi...
2024-05-20 16:46:36 +0000 UTC View PostSo, the draft for Time to Orbit: Unknown is complete. The story is 183 chapters long and will continue to release on the website until completion.
At this stage, the plan is to have a Patreon vote, where all patrons get to decide which story I write and release next. However, there is a slight complication to this -- a popular option in these votes is the Charlie MacNamara series, an almo...
2024-05-19 09:36:03 +0000 UTC View Post