Story Excerpts

XMas in Derbtown
by M.T. Reiten

Joey pressed against the clear side of his “hamster ball,” a repurposed rescue bubble scrounged from the Conglom’s luxury resort on the far side of the crater. The fine lunar regolith creaked beneath the tread as he moved. His dad steadied the squishy bubble with a strong hand so Joey wouldn’t accidentally roll away down the slope into the debris field below.

With his own eyes, Joey saw blurry plasma colors pinched in magnetic fields shifting against a permanent night sky. Joey recognized what the Weber fields made a kilometer away. A huge, jittery cone-shaped Christmas tree—neon red ornaments and argon green branches and a sodium yellow star on top—pulsated over the resort dome. Seeing it in person made better sense than the round, glowy blob on the satellite feeds on the display at home. “Wow.”READ MORE

Derailed
by Hûw Steer

She limped a few meters from the rails to get a good look at the crash site, already covered in a thickening layer of red dust.

“Well,” said Lowell, looking at the distinctly sideways nuclear steam train, “shit.”

Nobody heard the words but her. That was one of the many items jockeying for the hallowed status of “biggest problem” on her mental list. The dust storm that would be sweeping over this area for at least two days had filled the air with lovely scattering particles that rendered even the powerful radio aboard the train useless at any significant range. She could try to find a local transponder, but even those would be iffy in this weather. READ MORE