Alien being and other attractions

  Jackson’s hologram imagine flickers to life on my screen, a welcome sight after too many hours staring at a field screen and the icy horizon of this tiny planet upon which we are stationed. We are far from the front lines, part of the second line of defense should the enemy break through. We spend eight hour shifts staring out from these concrete cubes on the surface waiting for something that would certainly doom us if it ever came. The frosted landscape is so foreboding only Santa Claus would find it cheerful. Each of the thousands of cubes houses one blaster cannon and three men like me to operate it, two men off duty while the third one watches. My two companions hate me because I am not consumed with the booze, dames and music of the R&R world one light year away the way they are. I like to talk about home and the little things I miss about civilian life. Jackson is an outcast in his cube, too, consumed with more terrible memories of home when on that desert planet of hi...

  God only knows what men see in spit and ice planets like this one. I crawl along the surface keeping my feet flat so as not to slip. I am alone, days out from any settlement, my air supply suffice only because I learned to breathe carefully. Three earth days ago, pirates raided one of the fringe settlements and made off with the Governor’s daughter. No one has yet asked for a ransom. No demand has come via transmission. She may well be dead or worse. Still, I travel in search of her, feeling pangs of regret for taking on the chore. This is the fault of the Empire, that greedy mechanism that travels from planet to planet, taking what it wants in resources, paying the least in wages or property rights to the natives. The natives don’t know how to fight fair. They can’t. They have weapons so primitive that we of the Empire’s military laugh, stopping only when we find even primitive weapons can kill. Our shields fail. Our vehicles explode. And the rebels, pirates, terrorist or whatev...

  I fire my primitive laser thinking I know where the red-eyed alien is. But he’s not there. His race is so far above us in technology, they know when I will fire before I do. Such great weapons have stripped our world of all we have. A few plants remain. No buildings. We live in holes in the ground as if tossed back into caves. I have never felt so much like an animal as I do now. We were once a proud and accomplished race, inventors of languages and machines. I tell myself when peace comes again, we shall restore the earth to what it once was. Since human brain is our greatest tool,  I am convinced that we will find a way to over come these beasts from space. And in my mind, I need to start with this one red-eyed monster I have found. So I set my traps and wait. I sense his hesitation when he nears my bunker. His machines whir as they read the area for my trap. This is so open, so pathetically simple, I think even a child can see it from miles away. My heart beats faster wit...

    The face is a green mass of bubbles, some of which serve the damned thing as eyes. I can only see the mouth when it speaks, when the green color fades slightly to a more yellow green. I can’t make out all the words the creature says. It is like listening to a sponge, each word thick with a bubbling sound. Yet I’m too scared to ask for it to repeat anything. He and his green companions are pirates after all, cooperating with us – not because they believe in our mission to overthrow the tyrant régime on this planet, but because of the plunder they will receive in credits. My captain warned me not to trust them. He said nothing about my inability to understand their watery words, even though we are supposed to be speaking the same universal tongue. We have so little time. We need to transport the weapons we get here to the underground farther inland before the PNAC wipes them out. Their resistance here is our last hope, our last foothold on this work and in this system, and i...

  Pa asks me where my uniform is the minute he sees me on the walk to the house on Delta Seven. The old man looks older than I remembered and I’ve only been away a year. I tell him I dumped it in the trash after I got off the base. I’m huffing a little from the thin air. A year living on a planet with thicker air, I feel like an off-worlder now, one of those foolish tourist I used to mock as they gasped all the time. Pa tells me I’ll get shot as a deserter for taking the uniform off. But had a left it on, I wouldn’t have gotten this far, and tell him as much. He says I ought to get shock, and that he didn’t raise me to be no coward, and when they come to get me, he’s going to turn me in. I tell him I’m no coward, I just don’t see a point in dying for something I don’t believe in. Pa gets mad and tells me the bugs attacked us, we didn’t ask for it. But I’m not so sure and I want to know the truth before I got blasting them out of existence, and Pa says I ought to find some place els...

  I’m doomed The big goon eyes me like I got two green heads Just like he does. Since he’s been pounding rocks here on Territ Seven’s third moon as part of a life sentence for god knows what, anything, even a human like me looks good to him. They say the way to survive in any jail is to pick a fight with the toughest prisoner right off. But I’m scared once the goon gets his four arms and four legs around me, I’m doomed. So I just keep my distance, hoping that with an only six month stretch, I might just get out of this alive. The guards, who are neither goons nor human, lay odds I won’t, and decide to hedge their bets by bunking me in with the goon where it’s easier to get its mitts on me. So as I said before, I’m doomed.   Main Menu email to Al Sullivan

  When my master died, I wanted to cry. But plants don’t cry. We don’t have tear ducts. We can’t run away either with our roots locked into whatever soil humans plant us. We change location only when some human decides to put us somewhere else. We do have feelings. Maybe we always had feelings. Maybe humans merely brought them out more when they fiddled with our genes over the years, splicing us up, combining us with other plants, their pets, even themselves. Most humans haven’t got a clue about our feelings. As superior as they think they are with their complex arrangement of genes, humans are pretty stupid. They think they matter many than any other living thing in the world. Some humans even think they are better than other humans. This explains why humans can kill other humans and not think twice about it. Humans hardly think at all when they kill animals. And us plants? We don’t count in the least. Maybe plants like me didn’t know how little we counted before humans started “t...

It looks like a bubble of water in space, though if I squint I can just make out the shape of something inside it. Sensors say it contains a life form; so I order it brought aboard and call for a squad of Royal Marines to meet me on the deck where it gets dumped. How this object got into Royal Space remains one of the universe’s continuing mysteries. But the bubble popped once I got the cargo hold, leaving a deep chill in the air that life support systems seemed unable to modify, and a larger red sleigh still dripping. Two small creatures with red cloth caps and green pointed shoes grin at me as I approach. Each has silver glittering off his beard. “Hello,” one says, then repeated by the other. They tell me they have appointments to keep and only halted to see what sort of beings we were and whether we deserved candy or coals in our stockings this year. When I tell them to stop talking nonsense, they giggle and tell me they have to go. I tell them to halt. The bubble pops back up aroun...

  She stands in the chamber like an oiled statue. After all this time and many planet systems later, I can’t believe I am seeing her here, a slave to the Aterian trader I have come to kill. She slithers through the doorway and goes to give him a kiss. I want to puke. No human should ever kiss anything so putrid as something like him, all horns and scabs. No wonder his race refuses photographs. No world would deal with them knowing what they look like in advance. How did she get here? The last time I saw her on one of the French worlds prior to the federation invasion, She wanted to marry me, but wouldn’t wait for me to finish my assignment. She assumed I would get killed trying to assassinate the federation leader. I nearly was. I survived on the rage of her leaving me, killing everyone and anyone as if each one was her. Now, I find her a slave on a planet 100 light years away, and a slave to one more target I am assigned to kill. The Aterian thinks I’ve come to trade for raw mater...

  I see the blood when I pause to admire the setting of this planet’s two suns. At first, I mistake the red liquid for melting snow reflecting the rich colors in the sky. But this high up on the tundra, the snow does not melt with anything short of a blaster blast. And I can smell the stench of human blood as sharply as if it is my own. The humans in the village resented my coming, claiming the beasts of the north are harmless, even though from time to time they carry off some of the women. I know better. I have been beasts on every planet turn mean after extended contact with the human race. I cannot fault them. Human’s have a way of spreading hatred with every planet they touch, carrying with them disease and pollution that drives out those who lived in these places first. Perhaps I would ban humans from colonization, but they have the vote on the council, so we all must live with their bad habits and their bad attitudes. Still, their arrogance stings as I look north for the sign...

It’s the space station’s fault. Even as a young girl in bordering school, I was never pushed so close to other people as we are up here. Maybe men and women have no business being in space together, where some fool like me will fall in love, and some bitch like Linda will want to steal my man. At first, I denied it all, telling myself that I’m not in love. Women like me do not go through all the trouble to become an astronaut to fall for the first good looking guy who comes along. And me and Linda went thought the academy together, suffering the same doubts all girls do when we try to play in the same ball park as the boys do. On earth -- with other choices – I wouldn’t even look at a guy like Jeff. He’s so puffed up on his own ego; he doesn’t have room in his head for thoughts about me. So I tried to get away from everybody and concentrate on work, figuring I could do here what I did in high school to make up for the fact that I was not popular with the boys. But where do you go on a ...

A million ways to kill Bob cross my mind as I cross the lunar surface from the pump house to the silver bubble he and I call home. Unofficially we call it a pimple because we both fear it might someday pop. Neither of us ever figured we would run out of air first. Terrorists’ attacks on earth delaying four shipments until each of the dozen pimples like ours has only enough air for one, when two live in each. With each step I dismiss another way of killing Bob. Not because I am a moral being, but because I know I cannot reasonably explain to Central Command how my partner died so conveniently as to keep me alive. I volunteered to check the pump house for a few more possible hours of air we both know does not exist only to keep myself from my murderous temptation, and in the isolation of my space suit, crossing the unmoving dusty lunar plain, I ponder other possibilities, such as each of us going to sleep to reduce our intake of air or perhaps holding our breath for as long as possible w...

  Sunset just wasn’t sunset in LA after the do-gooder whole earthers got to fiddle with it for half a century. Which was why I sit here on this hill side waiting for my chance to grab it. Dusk settles into the valley as I adjust my lens, a creeping dark that fills each crevice like a fog with occasional street lamps glittering and the shimmer of the last gleams of sunlight off the bulk of a building just above. Such moments are rare, even in a city like LA that once boasted a reputation for smog, people suffering while above them glorious sunsets reined. I have seen old photographs from the time and still envy those whose fingers snapped the shot, those distant strangers unaware of just how extinct those moments would become to generations like mine. Only when natural weather patterns cooperate, when a storm surges towards the coast, or away from it, can we even see a shadow of what once was. I am locked into a drudgery of news photography, of grand openings, close elections and no...

They told me I was the last man on earth when they set me free. The aliens had not bothered to invade earth. They just waited for us to destroy ourselves, then moved in when we had used our last bombs to kill our own kind. By that time, all they needed to do was round up those of us they could find and let our abused environment kill off the rest, knowing a man on his own could not drink any of the water running openly or eat any of the plants growing out of our poisoned soil. I was still a young child during the round up, although I kept hearing my father ask if the ovens were next. I never expected to live so long or for them to think it safe enough to set me free. Perhaps they expected me to die. Although I knew from my years in captivity that the aliens did much to set right what we did wrong, making polluted water clean again and bad soil good. I even learned how to fish and farm, and hunt – magnificent feats for anyone born in a city like I was. The aliens did not remove everythi...

The first time I see her at the old tavern, I’m repulsed.             She acts as if she just landed on earth from another planet, laughing too hard, saying thing to me and other no woman in her right mind would say.             Then she looks at me and asks if I ever fucked an animal.             Everybody I know wants her to go away.             I refuse to talk to her, though she draws enough of a crowd at the bar to keep Tommy from tossing her out.             Even then, I can’t stop looking at her.             She looks back and knows exactly how attracted to her I really am.             I guess that’s w...