The Great Beyond Read online

  THE

  GREAT BEYOND

  An Anthology of Classic Space Adventure Tales

  Mark Henwick | J.R. Handley | A.M. Scott | Raven Oak | Richard Fife | Marcus Alexander Hart | C.W. Lamb | P. Andrew Floyd | David Alan Jones | A.K. DuBoff

  THE GREAT BEYOND: ISSUE 1

  Copyright © 2020

  “The Long Way Home” Text Copyright © 2020 Mark Henwick

  “The Mixon Drive” Text Copyright © 2020 J.R. Handley

  “A Fair Trade” Text Copyright © 2018 A.M. Scott

  “Weightless” Copyright © 2020 Raven Oak

  “Improbable Meat” Text Copyright © 2020 Richard Fife

  “The Captain’s Yacht” Text Copyright © 2020 Marcus Alexander Hart

  “Star Cadets” Text Copyright © 2020 C.W. Lamb

  “The Day the Earth Was Graded” Text Copyright © 2020 P. Andrew Floyd

  “Reservation Earth” Text Copyright © 2020 David Alan Jones

  “Integration” Text Copyright © 2019 A.K. DuBoff

  Cover Design by A.K. DuBoff

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the authors, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews or promotions.

  The stories contained in this compilation are works of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. The ideas expressed in the individual stories are those of the contributing author alone and are in no way representative of the other authors or the series editor.

  First eBook Edition: June 19, 2020

  Like audiobooks?

  Get an exclusive FREE audiobook of “The Long Way Home” featured in this anthology, read by actress Jessica Henwick, star of The Matrix 4, Underwater, and Iron Fist!

  Get it here: bit.ly/exclusiveaudiobook

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THE LONG WAY HOME by Mark Henwick

  Betrayal! A pair of ex-soldiers, weary of a war that went on too long, and desperate to take essential technology back to their colony planet, have to overcome treachery, injustice, corruption, greed... and pirates... on The Long Way Home.

  THE MIXON DRIVE by J.R. Handley

  Every journey starts with the first step. Reaching our intergalactic destiny was no different.

  A FAIR TRADE: A FOLDING SPACE SERIES PREQUEL by A.M. Scott

  At the cross-roads of the galaxy, an impulsive offer changes the direction of two travelers’ lives.

  WEIGHTLESS by Raven Oak

  In the developing industry of space tourism, a disabled and neurodivergent traveler finds her first space vacation fraught with prejudicial attitudes. When a ship malfunction threatens the lives of all on board, will Tara survive, or will she perish as society expects?

  IMPROBABLE MEAT by Richard Fife

  Zedara Clement already had enough problems as the captain of the first, and possibly last, colony ship from Earth to find a new home for the species. So, when Brett goes and gets himself and all the livestock killed, leaving the crew nothing else to eat but “Improbable Meat” for the next two years, she knows things have just gone from bad to worse.

  THE CAPTAIN’S YACHT by Marcus Alexander Hart

  Lounge singer Rico Diamond reunites with an old flame. Unfortunately, it’s on a derelict deep-space cruise ship during an alien zombie apocalypse.

  STAR CADETS by C.W. Lamb

  Ken Hall had always dreamed of attending the Galactic Academy, where the best candidates in the solar system competed for the limited slots in Space Command. With roommates from Mars and Venus, he discovers there are far more difficult things to overcome than math and physics.

  THE DAY THE EARTH WAS GRADED by P. Andrew Floyd

  When aliens leave a cryptic message, Earth’s best linguists launch an investigation to find the meaning behind first contact. Only, they may not like what they find.

  RESERVATION EARTH by David Alan Jones

  When an alien civilization claims it bought the Earth from primitive humans over seventeen thousand years ago, ace spaceman, Clifton Ramsey, and his ex-girlfriend, Gabrielle McGovern, must discover a way to thwart the claim, or face losing humankind’s birthright forever.

  INTEGRATION: A CADICLE UNIVERSE SHORT STORY by A.K. DuBoff

  Jason Sietinen is tasked with negotiating a technology trade with the Lynaedans, the so-called ‘tech-head’ planet specializing in cybernetic enhancements. When reservations on both sides jeopardize the deal, Jason must find common ground for the sake of the Taran Empire’s future.

  INTRODUCTION

  A Note from A.K. DuBoff, Series Editor

  Science fiction has been an important genre since its inception, providing a means to examine the human experience while offering an escape from everyday life.

  All fiction writing begins with an idea, a concept based on an acute observation about the world that can be captured in a new and exciting way, asking: what is the story in this? However, some observations offer a different type of inspiration. Rather than questioning not only what the story is, sci-fi authors ask: what if?

  Uniting ‘what if?’ ideas with an engaging story has turned sci-fi into an enduring genre within popular culture. Through these tales, readers can travel to distant worlds, to future times, or even to alternate realities. But these aren’t just mindless diversions; sci-fi, at its core, provokes thought. From social to political commentary, sci-fi can offer a critical look at the world around us while still being fun and entertaining.

  Though some of the stories in this inaugural edition of The Great Beyond might be considered more ‘space fantasy’ than ‘proper’ science fiction, they all ask ‘what if?’ questions that take the reader beyond their day-to-day experiences. Some are silly, others thrilling, but each offers a hopeful look for finding the good parts of life.

  The stories in The Great Beyond anthology follow intrepid travelers as they try to find their way home, venture out into the unknown, encounter alien beings, and discover what unites us.

  Enjoy the journey!

  THE LONG WAY HOME

  by Mark Henwick

  “I have a plan.”

  Bjorn Thorsson snorted. “Course you do.”

  We were both down to a quarter of a magazine for our weapons and we were crouching in a muddy ditch, halfway up a supposedly extinct volcano that had become active again under heavy bombardment from space. The mother of all pyrocumulus thunderstorms was unloading a year’s worth of rain on us, and through the clouds of steam, my IR detectors were picking out the glow of lava creeping toward our ditch. The lava would reach the ditch in three minutes, and fill it in ten.

  Our armored combat suits laughed off small arms fire, and were designed to continue operating underwater or in a vacuum, but I suspected lava exceeded the specifications.

  Our objective this morning had been to destroy a vital part of the planetary defenses of Rhea 4. It was a fortified fire-control installation buried in the lip of the volcano, which, despite the eruption, was still operating. It was only a half-klick away, but it might as well have been on the moon, because an automated plasma cannon had been deployed on an embankment right above us just as we’d reached the base. It was spitting a constant stream of vivid blue-white bolts at anything it considered a threat. The cannon fire meant the rest of our platoon was pinned down a quarter-klick behind us. Trouble was, give that tiny electronic brain enough time and data, and it’d work out where the platoon was hiding. That cannon was capable of blasting through whatever they were sheltering behind. It’d catch them if they came forward or retreated.

  Same for us. The cannon couldn’t depress enough to fire at us in the ditch, but we couldn
’t climb the embankment, and we couldn’t get out of the ditch. I really didn’t even want to try standing up.

  The lava was going to reach us in two minutes now.

  “Skelling, Thorsson, sorry to disturb you on your rest break.” Gunny’s voice crackled through the lightning interference on the comm. “That cannon is starting to be inconvenient.”

  “Which cannon is that, Gunny?”

  Probably wasn’t my best acknowledgment. I was saved from Gunny’s reply by the cannon zeroing in on her comms signal and vaporizing the ruined building she was hiding beneath. Then, it pointed down as far as it could and blew several huge craters just meters downslope from us.

  We crouched lower, pressing ourselves hard against the soft, slippery mud.

  All our supporting bombardment had stopped. Ground attack had been blown out of the sky by the same planetary defenses that we were here to take out. The cannon pinning us down didn’t seem to be low on plasma charge. Our platoon was stuck. We were stuck.

  It looked like, one way or another, this was our day to die.

  Or not.

  “That plan...” Bjorn said.

  I hadn’t had one before, but I did now.

  “Dig,” I said, forcing one armored hand deeper into the mud.

  “Into the side of a volcano? An erupting volcano? Crazy much?”

  “In and then up. It’s an embankment. It’s compacted earthwork, not rock. It’s probably already unstable with all the rain. And if it’s not unstable enough, we set off one of the bombs.”

  “They’re supposed to be for destroying the installation.”

  “Yeah, well, we have two of them, and anyway, better than being cooked.”

  Bjorn grimaced at the red and black wall of lava clearly visible now, even through the rain and steam, inching along the ditch. “Good point.”

  It turned out that armored suits dug well.

  Lava filled the ditch behind us, but fortunately, the mud of the earthwork was so liquid it flowed around us, sealing us off. At which point, it became more like swimming blind than digging. We were inside the earthwork and we couldn’t see anything.

  “My inertial sensors say we’re moving downward,” Bjorn panted after a couple of minutes of lung-bursting work.

  He was right. The mud was moving by itself. It was making a noise like a growl, which grew and grew. And the faster we dug, the faster we seemed to be sliding down the slope.

  Really fast...

  “Hang on!”

  We linked arms and locked our servos just in time. It seemed we’d succeeded in undermining the cannon’s platform, and once it started sliding, nothing was going to stop it.

  My suit speakers maxed out with the noise so I couldn’t even hear myself scream.

  For the first time since training, I switched on my helmet lights, otherwise known as I’m here, shoot me lights. They didn’t help.

  We were rolled over and over, blind, helpless, battered by rocks and twisted every which way. Even with the armored suits, we were in trouble.

  Maybe this was our day to die, after all.

  Then, suddenly, the turbulence thrust us up onto the surface of the mudslide.

  I couldn’t clear my visor, but I felt Bjorn pull me up onto something. The world settled a bit; we were still moving, but we seemed to be on the mud instead of inside it.

  I let rain sluice the visor until I could make things out.

  We were clinging to the underneath of the overturned plasma cannon, surfing it down the side of a volcano on a roaring mudslide.

  “Was this in your plan?” Bjorn yelled, one gauntlet pounding the metal of the cannon as if to make it go faster.

  “Sometimes you gotta improvise,” I shouted back.

  Relief after terror. We were laughing so hard, the tears ran down our cheeks.

  The command channel in my helmet blared into life.

  It was Gunny yelling on the comms. “Skelling! Thorsson! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Stop messing around! All units! Stand down. Cease fire. All units, cease fire.”

  There was a long wash of static, then Gunny’s voice came back, weary but exultant: “It’s over, people.”

  —

  Now that they had decided that the war had finally ended, they started shipping whole brigades back to Earth as fast as they could board them. We lifted off Rhea 4 the next day.

  It made sense; there were military units you use for peacetime duties, and then there were frontline units like the ones on Rhea 4: the 1st Frontier Assault Brigade and the Terran Volunteer Mobile Infantry.

  But maybe the more important thing for them was that those units were signed up for the duration; we weren’t career military. The sooner Earth government got us off their payroll, the happier they’d be. There was no profit in this war.

  War... Officially, the ‘Dimitras Incursion’ wasn’t a war, whatever it felt like while we were fighting it.

  Me? Janice Skelling. From Calloway, in the Ensylas Sector, far out on the Parvi Arc. Private (for the third time—‘authority issues’ and ‘attitude’. Got a problem with that, bud?). Assigned to Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Mobile Regiment, 1st Frontier Assault Brigade.

  Shit. You could spend all day chewing through names like that, which is probably one of the reasons why we were usually called the Acid Penguins, even by General Thoomis.

  And make no mistake, we were all happy to stop fighting and just go somewhere that wasn’t beat down or blown up, but while everyone else celebrated, it was at that point I started to worry. That’s the way I’m wired.

  We had to go back to Earth first; that was just the way the bulk of space transport worked—inward and outward from the center. But the ship they used for us? The TSS Wingate, the Terran Marine Corps’ just-launched, state-of-the-art troop transport ship. So new it had never been shot at, and only had one layer of paint on the bulkheads down in marine country.

  And it all worked. Even the freaking showers.

  It was a vacation at the military’s expense, with more time to think than I’d had in years.

  Like: why a war, even one that wasn’t called a war, had ended, and yet planets that could barely afford to feed themselves were still paying Earth to build ships like the Wingate.

  —

  “Hey, come on, Jan! We’re finally going home,” Bjorn said as we stood at the viewport, watching the blue-green jewel of Earth spinning beneath us.

  “I know we’re not all here,” he went on, misunderstanding my silent mood. “You’re thinking of Hal, aren’t you?”

  He held up his hand, fingers and thumb spread. I couldn’t refuse the ritual. I put up my hand to touch his, finger to finger, thumb to thumb. The Five, we called it, because there had been five of us from Calloway originally. Feeling lost among the two thousand recruits of the Frontier Brigade, this had been our little group’s greeting to remind us we weren’t alone.

  There were only two of us left. Solveig had died first. Then Enoch. Then such a long gap when we’d begun to think we were invulnerable. But Hal had died in the first nightmare drop onto Rhea 4, just one month ago. Happy-go-lucky Hal. So close. He’d almost made it.

  I squeezed my eyes shut.

  We’d all known the risks when we’d signed up.

  Calloway was a system at the very limit of the Frontier, unless you counted complete dead-ends like Yorkham. We hadn’t expected to be visited by Frontier Brigade recruiters from Earth and we told them truthfully, ignoring that we were actually pacifists, we couldn’t afford for people to leave. But then they told us what the pay was, and that it was in Terran dollars. Not enough to make it worthwhile back on Earth, but out on the Frontier, Terran dollars were the only way to buy the Inner Worlds tech that hard-pressed colonies were so desperate for. And we were desperate; we’d discovered Calloway had a long-term atmospheric cycle which fed a chemical change in the soil, and we were heading for a huge die-back of crops unless we could buy the kind of terraforming tech that would reverse the changes i
n our fields.

  Everyone had met up or connected by comms to debate, because that was the way we did it on Calloway. We’d worked out that five of us signing up for a standard three-year tour would make enough for eight of the bio-processors we needed. It would be enough to stop starvation, no more, but it was a compromise between hard choices.

  The Church declared that anyone who volunteered would be deemed guiltless in their eyes.

  Everyone who’d met the military requirements had put their names forward, and the five had been chosen by drawing lots. The recruiters had allowed a couple of contract amendments. In the event of death, payment would be made to the end of tour. The survivors and our cargo ‘within reason’ would be shuttled down to the surface of Calloway at the military’s expense.

  And so, the five of us became soldiers in the 1st Frontier Assault Brigade.

  Our choice hadn’t been wanting to take Earth’s side in some dispute about whether they had the right to export their marginal citizens into the Dimitras Sector.

  No.

  It’d been a stone-cold assessment of the trade-off between the temporary or permanent loss of five people who couldn’t be spared, and the purchasing power of hard Terran currency for the three years they’d originally said we’d be signed up for.

  And we’d done six years. Double the original tour—yeah, always read the small print, folks.

  But still...

  “Something’s going wrong,” I said. It was the same gut feeling I’d learned to trust in combat.

  “Paranoid much?” Bjorn laughed. “Hey, it’s okay. We all have doubts and failures of confidence at the end of a long project. It’s natural. But we did it, Jan! Look, just picture their faces when we arrive. The whole colony will be there.”