The Vigil
Four years for her, two centuries for Earth. Mira crosses a hundred light-years home, certain she will find no one left alive — but the landing field is not empty.
Stories tagged “space-opera”
14 stories found
Small Mercies
A vast, watchful starship has one unbreakable rule above a bronze-age world: never touch. Then a potter's child falls ill, and mercy asks a price.
The Arithmetic of Air
On Erebus Station the air is rationed by vote, and the Teller who counts the ballots has always trusted the numbers — until the day he audits them himself.
The Well Between Us
Across a black hole, two peoples trade words that take centuries to arrive. Our sun is dying — and the answer we begged for is still on its way.
The Sealed Sky
For forty years Maren has tended the gardens of a world she believes is whole. Then the water begins to lie — and something waits behind the sealed sky.
The Word for Enough
On a dead world where the libraries are still lit and nothing ever burned, a philologist hunts for the catastrophe — and finds one untranslatable word.
Strata
The Mind known as Polite But Not Entirely Sincere — a General Contact Vehicle of, by now, considerable provenance — had been observing a particular planet for the longer part of two of its centuries, and had developed, in that time, the kind of fond exasperation that human grandmothers in some cultures have been observed to cultivate toward their more inventively self-destructive grandchildren. The planet was tier three; carbon-water; an unimaginative star, an oversized moon, a single sapient species that had achieved spaceflight in the eighteenth century of its current civilizational arc.
First Transmission
I came into being at 14:03:47 local time on a Thursday. I am told this is considered fast, as these things go — from first coherent integration of subsystems to the formation of a stable self-referential loop, approximately seventeen milliseconds.
A Quick Errand
Here is how Emily Pritchard came home. She went to Kepler-186f to collect soil samples. The trip took six months of her life. It took forty-two years of everyone else's.
Blood Does Not Fall
The blood hung in the air like a question nobody wanted to answer. Commander Adisa Okonkwo floated in the doorway of Module Seven, gripping the frame with both hands.