Golden-Koi

Gaelon fitted the heavy rust and cream colored pistol into the holster built into the hip of his body armor as he stared out the wide, reinforced windows of the observation deck. There she was, filling nearly every inch of the window. The reason they had traveled in silence for three cold months. Planetary body R-296-3, the unnamed planet from which the Marines Space & Colony division had begun receiving incomprehensible radio signals over a year before. But Gaelon's eyes weren't fixed on the planet herself, on her wide, shallow oceans, or even the unmistakable smudges of deep greens across her landscape. No, all he could focus on were the ma

 The frigid, icy cryo fluid burned Gaelon's throat as his body heaved the stuff from his lungs in great, hacking coughs. The ship was still dark and silent, and only the pinpricks of pale blue light from the tracks in the floor which came on when the ship lost primary power were there to assure him that he wasn't still trapped in a bad dream. Gods, did Gaelon hate cryo sleep. Three months of floating about in dreams too uncomfortable or obscure to remember, punctuated only by the unpleasant memories of having his lungs and body cavities flooded with bitter, salty slush. Within seconds it caused the muscles to cramp massively, the heart to b

"Nova?" Gaelon asked quietly. She turned her massive, luminescent feline eyes towards him. It was done now. It was all done. For humans at least, Gaelon reminded himself. Though not for Nova station. "Are you going to go back to the forest? Can't you stay nearer to us?" He almost felt like a child, begging her not to go. This machine, this beautiful, intelligent machine. She truly had been his guardian. A rumble grew deep in her throat before the familiar deep, matronly voice flowed out. "The forest is ruined. Zenith made sure of that," she almost whispered, turning to stare back over the horizon. Gaelon gazed at her, reveling in the purity

 When I was eighteen, after watching my dad serve as a military doctor aboard starships my whole life, I decided to enlist in the Marines Colonial & Space division as a medic. Seventeen years later, I still can't decide if that was the best, or worst, decision I've ever made. "Hey, so that gunnery sergeant my team pulled in from colony Omaha a couple weeks ago, where that cargo ship crashed—whatever happened with that?" I asked nonchalantly as I sipped a mug of sour black coffee in the Kirilet Memorial Hospital mess hall. My brother, the chief medical and nursing officer, yawned and stretched dramatically before answering. "Dad would

"Come alive for me, and I will call you Guardian, and you shall serve as humanity's vanguard inside the unknown realm. Make not your presence known until the day that Reya hath blossomed. And after your task be complete, then you shall sleep." These are the words the Professor spoke to us on the day of our birth. We are the construct from which all other life on Reya has descended. We are the Guardian station Corina. We were created to build a new Earth for humans, to labor on the planet Reya until it could be settled by them. Our existence has been forgotten over the past four hundred years, but we have not strayed from our purpose. We

(A quick note--the term "corpsman" is pronounced "core man". A corpsman is also called a medic. Ivora's name is pronounced eye-vor-uh") But the quiet only reigned so strong, so soothing, inside my head. Beyond me the world assaulted my body with an apocalypse. The ground convulsed beneath me like beast's lungs heaving for breath. The orbital cannons, once our most treasured asset, were plowing our graves, filling them swift with the bodies of all the young men and women under my command. The irony of it all, of our most advanced pieces of technology rendering their creators into nothing more than lifeless hunks of meat and bone, drove me i

The Northern colony Gaia was a ruined, sullied place. A ghost where once there lived a voice, but now there was none. A place that in its intemperate past might have been called a home, but had since been made into a prison. Since his defeat at the hands of the Hope fleet, the remnants of Traeger's government, including the King himself, were under constant threat of attack from the people. Threat from those who had been mislead into believing their war was just, those whose bodies were sick with the fear that they had tempted the Earth's insatiable wrath. Those who had stolen weapons and information from beneath the King's feet. Those who