Tag: ytterbium fires

a series of science fiction stories from the original collection.

Hellscape

Posted on by Bill Kandiliotis in Short Story

First appeared on Wattpad

The sandstorm above had been raging for three days with no end in sight. So intense, the winds toppled vehicles, trucks and all. They eroded away the road leading in and out of the mine, destroying the ramp, even the supertrucks couldn’t scale the man-made canyon.

Workers have become sick. They had fallen weak; their skin had become yellow, not like jaundice, but splotchy yellow pigmentation. According to the doctor, whatever this pestilence was, it wasn’t infectious.

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Chthonic Punk

Posted on by Bill Kandiliotis in Short Story

Aris Forcer sensed it in every cell in his human body.

Another dimension.

Another universe.

Ever since their ordeal with the tesseract, having survived the gatekeeper, nothing had been the same. Not physics. Not biology. Not logic. Everything was upside down, inside out. But he felt alive, and as much as things were different, many aspects of this world were the same.

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The Forever Slave

Posted on by Bill Kandiliotis in Short Story

“A slave?” asked Aris.

“Yes, a slave,” answered Owis, bemused why the Earthman’s facial features had suddenly shrivelled up.

“Why in Gaia’s name did you do that?” asked the renegade cop from the human-infested Milky Way.

Owis thought it obvious, but explained, “This is the slave capital of the Dark Galaxy.”

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Relic Hunters

Posted on by Bill Kandiliotis in Short Story

“It’s a square.”

Silv heard correctly but wanted clarification. “What do you mean a square?”

“Probe One has just completed a second sweep over your location,” said The Captain, sitting comfortably in the Vitalis Express orbiting KIC10905746 C.  “We’ve now got a clearer picture of what’s down there. The anomaly’s actually a large geometric shape, fifty metres wide, just north of your location. In fact, there is a grid of quadrilateral structures underneath a kilometre of nitrogen ice.”

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Cruel Sky

Posted on by Bill Kandiliotis in Short Story

Mez watched the Windslipper 4 disappear from the Command screens. The data streams ended abruptly with millions of zeros trailing each other homogeneously. The humans and mimicrons gasped but their horror didn’t last long. The Jovian Commission’s Fusionjet Program had already gobbled up hundreds of mimicron pilots and eighty-two human explorers. Mez guessed they had grown accustomed to the fatalities. What they weren’t used to was the price tag for this particular launch. Tacacorp, a quasi-government outfit that operated Callisto, was seeking to gain the commission’s contract and had sunk a lot of development into their Windslipper Project.

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Draconis Prime

Posted on by Bill Kandiliotis in Short Story

Of the thousand eyes, one nodalex caught Gnomon’s attention. Idle and unproductive, it sat on the dry sand stacking pebbles into piles.

N-0x7G3BDdE44fe8, thought Gnomon, deciding it pertinent to name the appendage.

Pebblex, Gnomon flagged the wayward nodalex via the ship’s Metatron. Considering how far away from Gnomon-Prime they were, Gnomon considered prudent it personally monitors all anomalies no matter how trivial.

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The Tesseract

Posted on by Bill Kandiliotis in Short Story

The featureless salt desert spread out to infinity. The horizon; is nothing but a smooth chrome landscape under a dark taupe sky. The type-2 moon’s gravity helped her along, but the cold surface seemed to sap the warmth out of her suit with every step.

Ashley Isuuza couldn’t complain. She’d craved adventure ever since birth, and no adventure was worth taking without the prospect of death associated with it. So in theory, her little stroll across Obirus b III exemplified the very essence of a perfect, eventful life. Yet Ashley suspected she wasn’t going to live to tell her story.

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Nagasaki

Posted on by Bill Kandiliotis in Short Story

Jekka felt cold, the rain and the southerly breeze blowing from the bay not helping her situation. Had she time to plan she would have worn her florincoat. Instead, her impromptu escape into the Free Zone had left her running through backstreets wearing only a matching Vesper Morales bra and panties set, a pair of silicon geta and a RaiBox in her hand.

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Permian Spring

Posted on by Bill Kandiliotis in Short Story

First published on Wattpad, and part of the Ytterbium Fires collection of short stories

Apparently, they aren’t even reptiles.

With skin covered in scutes, boasting a vertebral sail and powerful jaws, this thing looks like a fat, bear-sized lizard, but Russell Hansard seems to think the wildlife around here predates the dinosaurs by fifty million years. Out of the two thousand surviving passengers on board the Cruise Ship Eudora, Mr Hansard is the only one who claims to be schooled in palaeobiology.

Too bad he isn’t here to see this monster. Somehow it managed to get into the ship and feast on an elderly couple lodging in one of the balcony cabins.

“It’s the biggest one yet,” I gasp, having abandoned living in fear; embracing this impossible, marvellous world.

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