SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

I’d go to school on occasion to recruit. Other than that, school meant nothing to me, the show, everything. Our enclave of misfits grew, as did my bond with Lem.

And as I spent the next months skipping across the galaxy with our gang of outsiders, my yearning for Earth waned; the memories of grass underfoot and wind brushing skin, once vivid, now faded. But did any of that matter?

Mom didn’t have a chance at getting us back to Earth. And I was too busy seeing new worlds to care if she did. I was in a river, slow flowing but with a current too strong to fight. Sure, I could swim for the bank, but oblivion was beautiful. The shows began to blur into each other, sometimes a planet died— war the killer one show, nature the next—sometimes it was just a city, occasionally a malfunctioning skip station.

They mixed like a trillion wisps of smoke commingling, fornicating, trapped in a room of flickering light. It was intoxicating, addictive.

Tattoos crawled up my arms, piercings punched holes through my skin, flashing implants danced up my spine. Friends came and went, but Cox and Lem were always there, never missing a show. True friends, true cohorts.

Then came one show, one particular show, where I realized the dreams of my father’s death had stopped entirely, shoved aside by the preparation and intoxication of the lightshows.

It started like all other shows. Rodney’s band played as friends skipped in from across the galaxy to a cramped room just warm enough to make sweat bead above the brow. The preshow flickered—a junked satellite station spinning in and out of orbit only to be drawn by its planet’s gravity and eaten in fiery gulps by its atmosphere.

Lem bit my lip and whispered something in my ear. Timmet and Trager tinkered with the projector, finalizing calibrations. Boys almost old enough to be men rolled about kissing girls who were almost women.

Somewhere, someone was in a classroom learning something.

The screen skipped. I felt a sense of familiarity. Earth, and a station just above it, round with vast clear windows, greenery on the inside. My stomach knotted itself. When was this? Where were we? How many light years from Earth? One? Two? How long had I been in interstellar space? In the skip stations? How old was I? Fifteen? Couldn’t be older than sixteen, but what’s a year and a half when you’re in a thousand different stations, light years from the embrace of seasons?

In my mind’s eye I saw my father on his death bed, weeping sores covering his skin, just as he was after the rescue team had skipped him back to Earth. He babbled, the radiation sickness frying him from the inside out. On the screen an infrared filter spotted a solar flare lash the station like a whip. The telescope zoomed in. Masses of doomed men and women pounded at the domed windows.

It was a research center, the same one dad had worked at.

What was I doing here? Watching people die? I wanted to stand up, to skip off, just…leave.

Lem felt the muscles in my back tense. I looked down at her hand on my arm. Grey. And so was my arm, except for the tattoos, all up and down my arms. When had I gotten those? In that sobering moment, I couldn’t remember half of the scribbles. An Earthen landscape sprawled across my left bicep, horribly inked by someone who’d never stepped foot on a planet. Who had done that one? Surely, not me. Hopefully, not me.

In the waning light, my tan was a figment of the past, a figment of Earth spinning below the domed station on the screen. I was a corpse, just like the rest of them, not an outsider. And we were kids no longer.

I tried to stand. Lem pulled me to her, licked my ear, “Baby it’s just getting good.”

“I think I should leave.”

I could hear her smile. “You can’t leave.”

Originally published by Daily Science Fiction

“You lose,” Lieutenant Darrow said. “Again.”

He tipped over Erin’s game piece, the one they were calling the king. Ton-Gla-Ben wasn’t exactly like chess, but the mechanics were very similar, and the actual Quggano names were mostly unpronounceable by humans.

Erin hated chess. She also hated being stuck in this cargo bay, with the ship’s first officer running her through a crash course in alien game theory.

“How long have we been in here?” Erin asked.

Darrow checked his wristcom. “Not that long.” His atypical lack of precision meant it was longer than he wanted to say.

“This is useless,” Erin said.

“You just need more practice.” Darrow swept up the pieces. “Let’s try a different opening.”

“Tell me again why we can’t just cheat?” Erin asked. “I wear a hidden micro-cam, you coach me through an earpiece?”

Darrow shook his head. “The Quggano are honorable, and they enforce honor in others. The competition chamber is fully radiation-shielded. And you’ll be naked.”

“Right,” Erin said. “How could I forget the best part?” She was not looking forward to exposing her flabby, middle-aged body to a bunch of aliens. She wondered if there was still time to kill herself.

“Ready to go again?” Darrow reset the board to its starting position.

“Why are we even bothering?” Erin stood up. “I barely have time to learn this game, let alone get good at it. I might as well concede and save myself the humiliation.”

“If you forfeit, we all become prisoners of war.”

Erin groaned. She wanted to pace, but there was no room. The Myrmidon wasn’t designed to carry passengers. Most of this compartment was still taken up by supply crates.

It was pure dumb luck that Erin had ended up here. A piece of space debris had killed her stardrive, and she’d spent nearly a week adrift before the Myrmidon happened into range of her beacon. Unfortunately, a Quggano destroyer had also heard Erin’s distress call, and intercepted the Myrmidon right after they picked up Erin’s ship.

When Captain Yokota demanded a champion game—a variation on the ancient Quggano single-combat tradition—the aliens had named Erin as their opponent. That had surprised everyone on Myrmidon , but the Quggano’s rules did allow each side to select a specific enemy champion to challenge. It didn’t happen very often. Usually, neither side knew who was on the other ship, and the respective ship captains acted as champions by default. All of Myrmidon ’s senior officers had been trained to play Ton-Gla-Ben, and the XO, Lieutenant Darrow, was the best. So he was teaching Erin.

“You could get lucky,” Darrow said. “You never know.”

Erin sighed and sat down again. “Fine. Not like I have anything better to do with my last few hours of life.”

“Wait,” Darrow said as she reached for a light pawn. “Say the word. You have to say it when you start the game.”

“I can’t say the damn word.”

“Just try. Please?”

Erin grumbled. “ Gaalaann .”

“Close,” Darrow said. “But not quite. Gaalaann .”

“What the hell does it even mean?”

Darrow shrugged. “Who knows? It’s just part of the ritual. Come on, try again. More of an accent on the second syllable. Gaalaann .”

“I can’t hear the difference,” Erin said.

“Listen closely,” Darrow said.

The door chimed and slid open. Rayley, the ship’s science officer, burst into the room, looking very excited.

“We’ve got something,” Rayley said. “A way for you to win.”

“A kid?” Erin gaped. “They’ve got a child on board?”

The conference room display showed an interior scan of the enemy destroyer: an overlay of radar, thermal imaging, and other passive radiation scans. There was definitely some kind of smaller creature running back and forth between two adult Quggano, an indistinct blue-green blob flanked by large, eight-legged, insectoid forms. Erin felt like she was watching some kind of bizarre nature documentary.