Category: Short Stories

Short Story: Chameleon

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The pale glow of moonlight threw streaks of white across a puddle of warm, crimson blood. It formed a wet trail along hardwood flooring, slivered between strands of dry floor that shined of freshly-dried lacquer. The trail grew toward the wretch at its source as he drug himself forward. Light steps tamped a rhythm behind him, their gait paced to miss the blood entirely. The effeminate figure’s thin legs stepped forward with an almost reptilian sway toward the soon-to-be corpse.

A hand grabbed the old wretch by the shoulder, began to morph as it turned him over. The five-fingered hand turned to a four-clawed, reptilian fore-foot. The face of the sultry woman above it transformed to the swept-back, armor-plated features so common to her Chameleon race. The old man’s face was whiter than his hair, a difficult task even for a man of nearly two-hundred. The reptilian assassin leaned in with a sniff. Its head turned curiously to allow its panoramic sight to engulf the old man’s dying breaths.

He shook with a death rattle that jostled him in the lizard’s grip. His last thoughts centered on the knowledge that there’d be no corpse left to discover. Indeed, even after his body was wholly consumed, what little bits of his blood formed the trail would be lapped up. Any particulate remnants therein would be bleached away by the creature’s volatile saliva. There would be no evidence he was attacked, killed, or even– due to the wretch’s appetites– that anyone had been in the apartment.

That was what made them such efficient assassins, allowed them to charge the most exorbitant prices on the black market. They were nigh-on undetectable, impossible to suss out or catch even if spotted. Like humans, and a half-dozen other species, they’d evolved from Earth, aided by biochemical toxins dispersed into its atmosphere during the First Contact War. The virulent, gene-altering poisons were meant to distract Humanity during the war, bring chaos to Earth in order to weaken its hold on Mars and Sol’s colonies. It did that and so much more.

But none of that mattered now. Not to the old man. He felt his knurled innards rend, harden, then numb as the creature’s paralytic took effect. The Chameleons– MeLons– had won the evolutionary arms race. Their adaptations blew Canines and Felines out of the water, their minds even more cunning than the Corvian Crows and Raptors that now ruled most scientific institutions.

What had once been simple, color-changing camouflage to hide among their habitats for became the ability to shape-shift. They could copy, then hide among, any creature’s species as spies, refugees, or any other purpose they saw fit. While most MeLons had used the ability to blend, make themselves more humanoid, others used it for profit. It was mostly rumors, but the old man knew them to be true. He’d hired more than a few to do his dirty work over the years.

The assassin knelt over the wretch as the life faded from his eyes. His last breath left his lungs with a rattle. She inhaled the fresh stench of death pervading the room from the human’s lacerated torso– the ambrosia of a fresh kill ready to be savored piece-by-piece. Before she could begin though, she reached for his neck, jerked a pendant off it. It rose in the scaled palm of her hand, its faceted ruby twinkling in the light.

That was it; what her client had paid so handsomely for. In addition to his murder, and the stipulation that she clean up her mess, he added one other caveat. She slipped the jewel into a pocket of now ill-fitting clothing, leaned down to begin her meal. What her client wanted the data-jewel for, she couldn’t say. Nor was she certain of why the corpse needed to become a corpse, but she wasn’t paid to think or question, only to do the job, and do it well.

The balance of the galaxy had pivoted wildly. The powers were out of control. The Human Federation’s expansion was too rapid, their colonies too far apart and too numerous to be properly supported or defended. The HAA was no different, kowtowing to the Federation’s demands as if its plaything. Their subversive, inner-elements were gaining ground, the shift felt everywhere.

The assassin understood the chaos more than most, had suffered her share during the genetic alterations. Everyone’s life-span increased near tenfold over normal, her own included. Where humans had only minor birth anomalies of psycho and telekinetic power– her entire species had been changed.

Most MeLons that had survived the transformation had died off to poverty, in-fighting, or racist agendas. At that, most deaths were largely due to their own egos or carelessness. Like her, they saw their place in the galaxy as above others, but not one steeped in shadow. Most MeLons now lacked the subtle finesse and patience that had once been their biggest asset as lower-beings.

Inevitably, patience ran thin for the new-gen “MeLons” due to lacking any memory of their former station. For a species that used to do little but remain still, lying in wait to hunt or blending subtly with their environments to hide, it was ironic to say the least. Still, the new age of MeLons were letting themselves go extinct, refusing to adapt to the reality thrust upon them. She was different though, and nothing would keep her from living this strange, new life to the fullest.

It was nearly a full-hour before she’d lapped up the last of the blood puddle, dried her saliva with a hand towel from her pocket. She took great care not to overflex the Lycra bodysuit requested by the old wretch and now pulled taught over her scaly body.

She rose to her feet, ambrosial blood still fresh in her mouth, then began a slow walk toward the apartment door. Each step saw her morph more into the black-haired, pale-skinned nubian she’d been when she’d first entered. She stepped out fully shape-shifted, rode the elevator down. On the ground floor she made for the doors, the data-jewel hidden between her thighs. With a crooked smile at the door man, she disappeared out into the metropolis– just one more creature in the billions, but perfectly suited to her profession.

Short Story: Apex

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 2 Comments

The night air was frozen with inaction, the wind petrified by its own icy gale. When it did see fit to blow, it did so begrudgingly and with a fury that froze everything to its very core. Even the stars saw no reason to appear despite the cloudless sky. It was as if some phantom force had turned them off until it felt they were needed again.

Beneath that vast emptiness was nothing but glacial fields and sprawling ice. That is, unless directed southeast, nearest the pole. There a few, hilly rises would break the monotonous flatness until they were over-passed and the land became flat again. The nearer one approached however, the more their shapes would redefine.

From their distant, mound-like forms, they would turn first to dome half-spheres. Then, upon even closer inspection, the domes would reveal a pattern. The largest would be seen to tower above the rest and encircle it like particles to an atomic nucleus. Upon being beside or beneath these semi-spheres it would then become obvious that each was composed of individual panes of glass, each one slightly conical in the center to keep off snow and ice, and otherwise were curved to varying degrees.

One by one, the rows of panes curved to form the dome shapes. Beneath them though, the truly wondrous marvel was a creation of neither man’s ingenuity nor his daring. Rather, it was a creation of nature, fused into a block of ice roughly ten feet wide, six feet deep, and eight feet long.

Located with a 3-D Resonance Imager– a device that sent sound-waves through objects then recorded their vibrations. The interpreting computer then read the reverberations, and arranged them into a picture of various contrasts of light and dark, that by degrees, formed an accurate render of the site examined. All of this was carried out via antarctic rovers, computer-guided across barren tundra, from one room beneath the largest dome.

The other twelve domes housed full-sized living spaces for the scientists, researchers, and various others staffing the facility. The entity in charge of this great place, known as the International Collective of Scientists, had footed the project’s five billion dollar costs with grants from just about every country in the world. From each of them too, it drew its employees; every individual required, and to the best of abilities, accommodated, to live in the Antarctic glacial lands for an indeterminate amount of time. The structures they occupied were surrounded by ice, that for millenia-untold, had been undisturbed by anything beyond the gales of ice and snow.

The Antarctic Research Treaty, created by men and women infinitely smarter than those that passed it, was a piece of UN legislation meant to help collaborative scientific efforts. Thus, the ICS was born and the domes built. If asked though, the people there would have simply called it “The Dome.” Though they lived spread across the other domes, it was in the largest of them that their lives were carried out. Whether in research, work, eating, or even recreation, life was lived largely in “the Dome.” That was the level of commitment the ICS had built it with.

Still, the wonder in the laboratory of one, particular team of scientists rivaled everything else in the Dome. Arguably, it might even rival anything thus far discovered by humanity. It would, if all suspicions were true, confirm an eon of speculation. Moreover, it would rewrite the history of the planet– if not the universe.

Presently, heat lamps were stationed around the block of ice that was half-melted. Streams of cold water leaked down into the floor. The team responsible for its discovery were clustered around it in white, level-1 containment suits to protect themselves from the discovery and vice-versa. A few held clipboards, but all of their faces were fixed in consternation, staring at the ice and the thing half-protruding from it.

For nearly two days the team went without sleep. Most fell into varying stupors, near collapse, awaiting the moment they could, with the utmost care, gather round to liberate the find from the ice. The twisted, humanoid creature, was perfectly preserved down to its blue, leathery hide. Once removed and laid upon a table, the remaining ice-block was combed for any particulate matter left behind. After thorough analysis, it was concluded that not so much as a skin cell had been misplaced. The creature was intact down to its cellular level, preserved as if in a time-capsule at the moment of its freezing.

A few people took pictures for the record. Flash-bulbs strobed from cameras that homed in on the strangely embryonic features of the subject. It appeared as human fetus might, early in its development; at least as far as the head, eyes, and face were concerned. They had oblong, grotesque proportions. The arms and legs were distended, over-long with hands whose five fingers were similarly longer than normal. Nail-like claws a few centimeters in length adorned the grisly hands with points so sharp it hurt to look at them too long.

Clearly, this creature had evolved for combat, adapted to either extreme defense or hunting. The mouth was merely a slit in the otherwise overly large head, suggesting the creature had little to no use for vocalization. Most fascinating of all however, were the thick, bone-like plates plateauing the broader area of the limbs and torso. The protective adaptations broke only for the neck, head, and joint areas that were marred by deep gouges, scars leftover from its life.

Clearly, this creature had come from violence.

Someone made careful measurements of the claws and the wounds, concluding they must have come from the another of the creature’s species. The debate it sparked, however academic, seemed to conclude in one way; this species was a violent predator. More importantly, it possessed strength that easily rivaled humans. Despite its distended, yet muscled form, someone theorized that with its brain size its intelligence would rival humanity’s. Were this creature alive today, it could topple Humanity with enough numbers.

The extraction of a skin sample immediately confirmed Earthen DNA. This was no visitor. Rather, it was a distant relative who’d appeared first on the evolutionary chain. The team would have to keep it quiet for now, but there was no doubt this species would have supplanted humans if living.

It was then that someone took another skin sample. The man leaned over to begin a small incision. The bulbous eyes flitted. The room froze. The person with the scalpel keeled over. Blood streamed from his eyes, nose, and mouth. His body stilled.

The creature sat up. All at once the team crumpled. They tried to scream, found their airways closed by invisible hands. The pressure in their heads built. Blood leaked from orifices. They fought to cry out. One by one, they realized what they’d done before dying from it: they’d awakened an apex predator– one capable of reason, intelligence, and very angry.

They knew their mistake when its words entered their minds. As if harsh whispers on a surf of disharmony, everything they’d only theorized was confirmed. With a lone sentiment, its hidden properties were revealed; “My kind will reclaim this world from you.”

The last to die was merely one of the first.

Short Story: Vanguard

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 3 Comments

A bright flash. A concussive boom. She stumbled in her run, blind and deaf. Her HUD had been knocked out. It flickered in her vision, spurting lines of colors. That meant her her optics had gone too. An EMP-flashbang. Bastards. EMPs, meant to disorient the cybernetically augmented and their tech, her. Getting out was important, but seeing was even more important.

She felt, rather than heard, the thump of boots. They flooded the narrow corridor behind her. She knew the place’s floor-plan from memory, but in her stumbling run, wasn’t sure she’d make the right turns. She booked it, both oblivious and fiercely aware of the platoon aimed to fire on her.

They told her this would happen; her friends, family. Not the blood kind of course. Shitty parents and siblings had long been an epidemic in this brave new world. Her family particularly, were corp through and through, Aries SC, Guardian LLC, Arc Systems, or one the other big ones, it didn’t matter who belonged to which. Wage-slaves and tin-soldiers were all there was room for these days, and she knew her family was a conglomerate of half of them.

She had meant her real family. Not her blood, but the people down at The Green Fairy, one of the slum-bar-hotel combos where she lived, worked, survived and thrived. Even running blindly from corp-sec down a hallway, optics half-fried, she remembered the first time she’d walked into the place.

She was still a teenaged hell-raiser in those days. Short, spiked, platinum blonde hair accented ever-present facial piercings, and self-satisfied smugness. That was before her eyes had the neon glow of optic augs, but even then she couldn’t have been called innocent, however definite an air of naivete hung about her.

She stumbled again, pictures ebbing back into her eyes. She slid around a corner, felt the thunder of a hand-cannon split the air. It barked after her. Metal on metal grated her teeth.

How the hell’d she get here? She’d showed up at the Fairy to stay the night. With no creds, or even corp-cash, she was forced to slave away mopping floors. They’d lost their only janitor a few weeks before in a gang-raid. It wasn’t the first, and she’d seen her fair-share since. It was how she got the name Cutter; she’d been attacked like everyone else, but by a guy that wanted more than a piece of her ass. She gutted him like a fish with his own knife. The sheer atavism made the other gangers freak. The Fairy’s people took advantage of it. A few more gangers went down in gunfire. The rest bolted.

She still remembered feeling the guy hard against her. He’d grabbed her from behind in a room she’d been cleaning. He stank like month-old ashtrays smothered in grease and piled with stale butts. She managed to wriggle from his grip, slip out and behind him. As he turned to grab her again, she gave his testes a full, hard kick. The force staggered them both. He toppled onto her, screaming. She fought to get out from under him, somehow grasped a knife he had hanging from his belt.

She remembered everything clearly, like it had only just happened, but not the murder. Her first blood. She only remembered standing just outside the room, covered in blood, bile, and stinking of the guy’s bowels. The knife trembled under her white-knuckles as Den Mother found her. The Old lady was a whore, running the place as a brothel– among other things. That Cutter’d drawn blood, nearly been killed defending the place, made her one of the Fairy’s Vanguard from then on.

That’s why she was here now, in this damned corp building. She’d actually been fooled into believing the place was home. Hell, maybe it was by now.

She hurled herself around another corner. Her vision had almost fully returned. Her optics were still going haywire, but she saw the double-doors leading to the loading bay. Its internal storage room stretched out behind a wall beside her. She could feel the van waiting, already running. Too bad her augs were scrambled, or she might’ve called for suppressing fire.

Den Mother had sent her here– all of them actually– but the rest weren’t forced to come inside. Den Mother had long been paying-off corps to keep the Fairy in business. One owned the deed, another the land. As much as they wanted to, they couldn’t take it from her, no matter the amount of illegality going on. Sure, they could send in corp-sec, but Den Mother had made it well-known that she’d blow the place apart with her in it before she’d let them take it. Cutter’d seen the C4 stacked in the basement. It wasn’t a bluff.

Until now, corp-sec had stayed away from the Fairy and its people. In fact, aside from a few skirmishes and narrow escapes after petty theft, Cutter’d never had any trouble with them. But sure enough, after someone in a suit showed up in the Fairy– a weasel-looking guy too sharply dressed for usual, Fairy business– Den Mother pulled the Vanguard in to a pow-wow. Cutter’d never been sure what that really meant, but she knew, when it it was over, that she was about to infiltrate a corp. With the aid of a remote receiver and the Fairy’s resident tech-genius, Dan “The Man”, she’d been tasked to locate and delete all deed information relating to the Fairy and Den Mother.

Cutter watched one of the doors open. Jack the Ripper appeared. Ripper was lethal at any range, and the aimed baby-eagles in his hands said he was all business. The door beside him divoted from rifle fire. Cutter pumped her legs. Ripper stood stock still, damn near invincible with his Kevlar-woven skeleton and armor-plated torso augs. The baby eagles barked and spit lead at corp-sec that dodged for cover at the far end of the hall.

Cutter dove past Ripper into the van’s rear, landed half-in. The Man yanked her the rest of the way. Ripper’s eagles barked. He back-stepped confidently, unrushed and unswayed. He fell in backwards, rolled to come upright, still firing. The baby eagles clicked empty. The Man hit a key on his laptop. The auto-van growled, tires spinning, and tore off into the night.

“You alright?” Ripper asked reloading his eagles.

The Man was too busy hacking the autopilot, spoofing its travel information. A sign on the side of the van said “Aries Security Corp,” so the corp they’d just hacked would have no idea who’d really done the job.

Cutter’s chest heaved for air. Her hands ran along herself to check for holes. Other than a splitting migraine and some wonked-out optics, she was fine. Fine? Alive, more like. She’d probably never been fine, never would be really. At the very least though, her home was safe, secure. The Vanguard had prevailed again.

She swallowed hard, “Yeah. Five-by-Five.” He handed over a canteen and she drank deep. Then with a breath, “Vanguard always wins, right?”

Short Story: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

By day, they were no more than a group of nerds– social outcasts banded together from their mutual trait of having been exiled from the other cliques of the standard, American high-school. By night however, they were two psionics, a tank-built soldier, a sniper, and a combat medic whom specialized in healing their wounds. Their goal was not to gripe about the bully of the day, or become enveloped in social commentary on their less-enlightened peers. Instead, they came together for one reason; to game.

When they entered the basement where the walnut-wooded table with its soft, velvet top, resided, they were instantly transported to a universe both similar and so unlike their own. Each night their surroundings were different. At times they might be slogging through a scot-like bog, ascending great nordic-dwarfing mountains engulfed in blizzards, or even delving deep into a labyrinthine bunker of blood and danger.

To the casual observer their D20s were just curiously-shaped number cubes, but to them they were their Gods. Its rolls were the Gods’ words, commandments they were bound by honor to follow whether through great success or unimaginable misery. With each toss, they might find themselves in mortal peril that even the most clever of schemes could not correct. With one mistake, they might doomed, slain before they could react, or else they might defeat their enemy, scour its corpse for loot.

To them, the game was life, the automated die-tracker built-in to the table the oracle of all things good and evil. The randomized, procedurally-generated scenarios eternally crawled from the table’s speakers and the Game Master’s, synthesized, female voice to give narration to the landscapes that rose and fell before them in their Augmented Reality glasses. Each step, breath, and move was tracked in real-time before them as though they were there.

When the tank’s roll came up positive, combat began with him in the lead. His avatar so curiously resembled him sans the full-body armor it wore. Like it, he was enormous; a giant, fleshy redwood that lumbered through space-stations, across foreign planets, and along hidden trails to combat encounters. Like him, his primary weapon– a shotgun– was big, loud, and intimidating. In reality, the soldier was little more than a giant with more heart than flesh– but this wasn’t real-life, that was the point.

Invariably, behind him the Psionics would be scanning the horizon with their sub-machine guns. Whether it was a jungle, ice-field, or even open desert, they’d both be in single-file behind their leader. There was only the smallest hint of a ever-present field of super-opaque blue around them, an effect of their psionic barriers interacting with their armor’s shields. The shimmer told of powerful psychics ready to manipulate sub-atomic matter at a moment’s notice, unleash hell on any would-be attackers.

To that end, the combat medic would be second to last, always with her assault rifle shouldered to suppress any enemies and head for cover. When the others’ shields failed, or the tank-like solider drew too much aggro, she would lay down fire, rush to aid with medical tools, and keep death’s scythe at bay.

Meanwhile, the sniper at their rear-guard would never falter. Her long-rifle was steady, attached bi-pod waiting to be deployed or her light-bending cloak activated to make her invisible to the naked eye. Then could she duck down, bob, or weave through the enemy advance to gain the high-ground, out flank them. Even outside of combat she was ready to sneak ahead of the others, leave the rear-guard to the medic to take up over-watch on a ridge. There she could observe and mark enemy positions and patrol-routes on the over-head, A-R map accessed in real-life by a simple button press on the side of their A-R glasses.

When things finally kicked off, be it from crude, synthetic life-forms; their more-advanced, less obvious android counterparts, or any of the other multitudes of human or alien pirates, mercenaries, or rogue soldiers, they were prepared. The tank’s job, his duty, was to keep the others safe, lead them to victory. With a howling war-cry he’d boost their various stats to increase their resolve, initiative, and stamina, then sprint headlong into the furthest cover forward to take aim with his shotgun and blast their adversaries apart.

Behind him the Psionics would further buff the groups’ stats, spray SMG bursts at the enemies, or manifest elements in their hands to hurl at clustered or individual enemies. Beside them, the medic kept her aim true, ready to bolt and heal at a moment’s notice while her rifle barked with muzzle flashes, spit fire at already-doomed enemies. The few that crossed the sniper’s sights stood no chance, especially when her cloak was still engaged to increase her damage. Even at full health, a single-round from her rifle might strike them down, eliminate the threat altogether.

On the inside, they were more than “nerds,” more than any, singular moniker could apply to them, really. They were a well-oiled military machine, a five-man army with all the fire-power, cunning and honor of even the most fabled war combatants. To see them outside, one would never believe that they had mastered the virtual arts of infiltration, matter manipulation, weaponry or medicine. But such is the deceptive nature of the world. The five needed no approval from those outside the universe they inhabited outside their own. They needed only to rely on each other, both in and out of game, were all the stronger for it.

It is in the nature of the man, like the gamer, to band with those that best compliment their qualities and short-comings. In true gamer fashion, they settled disputes in-game and out with honor-bound duels– either of words or weapons. Even with the latter, no-one was so stupid as to cut the throat, go for the kill, lest they wish the game to end for everyone. Their almost civilized-brutality might have frightened those outside the circle, but the five were well-aware of that.

They were better for it, always respectful for fear of incurring wrath and having their honor-challenged by one whose skills were less advanced. Otherwise, like the game, attacking one meant bringing the full-force of the team against them. Outcast or not, the solider especially was not one to take such attacks lightly. Then again, there were few who would dare to face them at all. At that, they emanated an air of confidence, because– as the adage goes– appearances can be deceiving, and that most certainly applied to them.