Space Opera by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: science fiction, space opera, anthology
ISBN: 9781607014232
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2014-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

Lehr, Rex

Jay Lake

Captain Lehr’s face had been ravaged by decades under the coruscating emanations of this forgotten world’s overbright sun. The angry star, a rare purple giant, dominated the daysky with visible prominences that sleeted hard radiation through every human bone and cell that walked beneath its glare. Still, one could see the spirit of command which had once infused him, present even now in the lines and planes of his face as rough and striated as the great, crystalline cliffs which marched toward the horizon sparkling azure and lavender under the hard light. His eyes were marbled with a blindness which had come upon him in the long years, victim perhaps of some alien virus, until with his blank visage appeared to be chiseled from the planet’s sinews as much the very rocks themselves.

How he and whoever yet lived among his crew had survived this hellish gravity well for close to half a human lifetime was a mystery to me, which yet remained to be truckled, but survive they had. The old man was king of all he surveyed with his blind eyes, soul shuttered behind milky shields, ruling from his seat in a shattered palace comprised of the main hull frame series of INS Broken Spear. The baroque pillars which had once bounded the great rays of energy required to leap between the stars now served to do little more than support a roof to keep off the rare rains, and cast a penumbra against the pitiless glare. The place had a gentle reek of aging plastic laying over the dank dance of stone on shadowed stone, but otherwise was little different from a cavern fitted out for the habitation of men.

We did not yet know where the rest of his benighted vessel had come to her grave, but she had certainly fulfilled her ill-starred name. Finding the balance of her remains was critical, of course, in the niggardly time allotted our expedition by Sector Control and the unsympathetic laws of physics. That mankind had bent our way around the speed of light was miracle enough, but we had not yet broken past the photons cast so wide in nature’s bright net, and so must live with the twinned constraints of relativity and simultaneity.

“Golly, skipper, he’s a real mess,” whispered Deckard behind me. “Just like his ship.”

I waved my idiot engineer to silence.

Allison Cordel, a woman still beautiful amid age and hard use, stood yet beside her commanding officer, loyal as any starman’s wife though it was the two of them together lost so far from home. Our own records, copies of dusty personnel files laboriously thermaxed from ancient microfilm, had shown that despite the natural disadvantages of her sex Cordel had risen to Executive Officer of Broken Spear before that late ship’s collapse from heaven. Most of the girl officers who came into the service under the Navy’s occasional outbreaks of gender-rebalancing soon enough yielded to destiny and their biological imperatives and found more suitable work as

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