The sunset was greeted with another aftershock. This one was milder than most, barely causing the piles that used to be buildings to shift and rattle. The shelter was rigged from blankets and tarps, far too small for the dozens of injured that lay around it.
A couple of firefighters, a nurse and an EMT staffed [...]

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My generation lived in a fantasy world. We had all suffered through one day, The DAY, and had worked very hard to see that there would never be another day like it. September 11, 2001. We went on our merry way after the DAY, making war, finding peace, tearing down and rebuilding. All the while [...]

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Since the odds were long that a bad thing would happen, I was not worried. Well, no more than usual. I snuck a couple of additional air bottles and some combat rats onboard, finding places behind the wall plates that were empty enough to hold them. I also added some computing power, borrowing an officer’s [...]

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There are gradients of bad things. Some make you say “Oh, shit!” Some cause you to exclaim “Oh, fuck!” And, then there are those times when the shit is rolling down hill so fast you don’t have time to speak.
The sole official duty of a Space Academy cadet was to be the “buoy boy”. That’s [...]

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Whenever I did something unbelievably stupid, as young men often do, my dad would ask me “Did you take a stupid pill this morning, son?”
When I was discharged, after eighteen years in the Terran Marines, to accept an appointment to the Space Academy, I heard his voice. Two years from retirement and I bailed.
I was [...]

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Hey, there, fellas. How about buying a vet a drink?
Tell ya what. I’ll trade you a story for that drink.
Well, how about one about the Battle of the Grape Arbor?
Laugh all ya want, boys. Some of us did make it out. That’s why I’m in this chair, ya know.
Thank ya kindly. Let me wet my [...]

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My father liked rituals. He said that it kept up morale and preserved the rightness of our cause. I’ve always felt like one of those Balkan royals that bumped around the globe after World War I. Bowing and scraping to each other in the slums of Shanghai.
I was about four when we escaped. I don’t [...]

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Another piece of orginal fiction

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There I floated, rotating ever so slowing from left to right. Our instructors had warned us not to make any sudden moves in the suits. I rolled my shoulders, that’s all. Now I get to watch the stars parade by.
They don’t twinkle in space, you know. Just little points of light. Some President used that [...]

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The atrium was filled with noise, and bodies moving, seemingly at random. I paced my little island of anxiety, a circle defined by those who avoid me like I had the plague. Some glance my way. Others purposely look away. Occasionally a passerby offers a friendly sound, or a rude epithet.
The doors of the hall [...]

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I fiddled with my tie. I paced. And paced, and paced some more.
The dress uniform chafed in places I can’t mention. It hung on me because I still hadn’t regained the weight I lost.
The room where I had been placed was beautiful. Antique everything. All those chairs that you don’t dare sit on because they [...]

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Fortitude McBride was the archtypical gunnery sergeant. A Marine’s Marine. If you cut him, he’d bleed green.
He’d joined the Space Marines to escape the backwater colonial planet he’d been raised on. His parents were members of a tiny Christian sect that named their sons after virtues. Not even his friends called him Fortitude. Fort, for [...]

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