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The Border, a continuation of “Itty Bitty Package” and “Courier Duty”

Dec14

After Itty Bitty Package ane Courier Duty. To [personal profile] thnidu‘s commissioned continuation.

Want to bring a specific more, please to my attention? Go here.

Pregnant? Pretza was unsure if she was more surprised at that or at his correct assessment of her as female. It must be the way she was carrying her package, against her stomach and chest and under her clothes.

It was a gift, and she should not kick the tires on a gift rover too much. “Sir.” It was no trouble at all to make her voice sound tired or stressed. “I need to get -“

He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Where everyone with any sense needs to get, of course. Orion Free Territory is just over that hill. But there’s a Corbetian contingent between here and there, girl. And you may not be my daughter, but I won’t hand you over either way.”

He took her hand. “This way.”

Tip Package 😉

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/865297.html. You can comment here or there.

Courier Duty, a continuation of “Itty Bitty Package” for Morepls (@clarekrmiller)

Dec11

After Itty Bitty Package.

Want to bring a specific more, please to my attention? Go here.

The road wasn’t really a road anymore, not in this section of the country. It was three-quarters pot-hole and one-quarter bomb crater, with the occasional multi-terrain vehicle left abandoned half in one sort of hole or another. There were corpses, too – livestock and buildings left burnt out and falling down where they stood, people who had fought until they couldn’t fight anymore.

The front had moved forward; technically, Pretza had already gotten them through the worst of it. They had moved past the soldiers, past the tanks, past the first line of rear guards. They had crossed three minefields and one inferno. And they were almost to the border.

The road wasn’t actually safe, but moving near the road had served Pretza well. Too far off the beaten track, and they were likely to find bandits, deserters, and land mines. On the road, they were a target. She moved through the remains of the trees, instead, murmuring as quietly as she could to the tiny bundle pressed up against her chest. “It’s all right, just stay quiet a little longer. Just a little longer, kidlet.”

She avoided three soldiers and one deserter, and then ran smack dab into the fifth man. He grabbed her by both arms, shaking her and her tiny package.

Pretza took a deep breath and assessed the situation. At this range, arterial blood would splatter all over her and her package, which would not only attract flies but make them very obvious. His face was pockmarked and scarred, his nose broken so many times it was impossible to guess if he was Thalassan, Corbetian, or Orion. His hair was grey and nearly gone, and he wore no helm, no uniform, and no insignia.

“You’re not her,” he muttered. “You’re not her. Never really thought she’d still be here, but I had to look.” His eyes raked over Pretza. “But at the moment, you’ll do. Come on, girlie. The front is no place for a pregnant girl.”

Tip Package 😉

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/865297.html “The Border”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/864159.html. You can comment here or there.

Discoveries on the Colony, a ficlet of Space/Colonies (@Inventrix)

Dec6

Written to [personal profile] inventrix‘s prompt as a warm-up for that other thing I’m working on for Ix.

“Mom! Uncle Toma! Aunt Jea! Come quick! The spear plants! They’re peeling!”

Bobeh and his sister came tearing across the central commons, skidding into the workshop where Branga and her family cooperative worked. She looked up, not particularly concerned; the kids were always finding something, and it was always a crisis. As long as it involved plants and not the local or imported fauna – or, all heavens forfend, the Renegades – there was probably not anything to be worried about.

In this case, her partner-wife Jea seemed to think differently. “The spear plants? The ones down by the clearwater pond?”

“Those! Seffie and I were going for water, we were being careful,but the plants, they’re all -” The six-year-old flailed his hands in some sort of dance. “Come on, come on, they were going one at a time but they’re probably doing more now!”

“Sorry, Branga.” Jea made a face. “I know we have to get this order out, but this could be important. The spear plants are on the list of Confusing Shit the Grandparents left us.”

Jea’s great-grandparents – as well as Branga’s, Toma’s, and every other adult’s on the planet, including the thrice-cursed Renegades – had been the survey-and-colonize team on this planet nearly a century ago. They had left detailed notes on everything – everything except the Renegades, who had systematically destroyed all references to themselves. And, for the most part, their notes were followed like job orders, or like the Word from On High.

Not that it made it any less sour to put down an order in the middle of the work, but it least it gave them a viable excuse. Branga followed her partner-spouses, who in turn were following their children, out to the clearwater pond.

The spear plants – 10-meter-tall spikes poking straight into the sky, which surrounded the north side of the pond and the north side of every other body of water they’d found – were, indeed, peeling.

“No.” Branga shook her head. The way the pieces were curling downwards, that wasn’t like bark peeling. It was more like a bud opening. “No. They’re flowering.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/861559.html. You can comment here or there.

A Game, a story for the Giraffe Call

Jun9

I asked for prompts regarding Variants here for The MicroPrompt Giraffe Call. This is written to Kelkyag’s Prompt here.

Whenever Asata traveled to a new place, she included in her weight allowance a proper set of Chatha pieces. The board was woven cloth, the tokens polymer scrimshaw, and the cards tissue-thin, but she had yet to find a place where it did not pass muster as a Chatha set.

It lived nestled in her always-on bag, next to the first-aid kit, the wrinkle-free change of clothing, the emergency rations, and the treesilk towel-slash-sarong-slash-hijab. And she’d found that, of every item in the little bag, she’d gotten the most use out of the Chatha set.

The game in its core was simple, but nobody – except people like Asata, interstellar anthropological diplomats – played it in its core format. Every town, every colony, every station had their own variation, and every variation told you something about the people playing the game.

In Hosier and Calbranta, none of the pieces were female, and the female cards were replaced – with trees on Hosier and with animals on Calbranta. Landri and Tolmecha did the opposite, replacing male cards with minerals in one case and more females in the other case. Asata’s deck had new cards for every variation she encountered, and her notes on the culture began, each time, with at least four games of Chatha.

And now she was landing on a new colony, a Lost Colony that the Federated Empire was only now re-contacting with. They were not first down, but her team would be the second contact the colony had with the greater space-faring humanity.

And it would begin with a game of Chatha. Asata studied the first-down team’s notes, and got ready to play.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/730159.html. You can comment here or there.

Itty Bitty Package, a story for the Giraffe Call

Jun4

I asked for prompts regarding Packages here for The MicroPrompt Giraffe Call. This is written to Kunama_Wolf’s Prompt here.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

Pretza had carried easier things. She had, for one, carried the entire team’s gear up the side of a mountain. She had carried an injured teammate down the side of a mountain. She had once carried a carriage, albeit only for five feet.

She had carried a Edenian tiger “cub” back to its mother – without getting mauled. She had carried Westerosi killer flesh-eating viruses across a lava field. Once, she had carried a bomb through enemy lines, on Narnia, near the Terebinthian front.

All of these things had been easier than this. She was a trained courier; courrying things was what she did. “Easy, easy. You are bouncy, I thought that was just a thing people said.” She adjusted the three layers of Kevlar and wished that the job had been, just this once, not somewhere tropical.

Or that it had come with a bulletproof car. She had never, ever, wanted so badly for her package to not get jostled, and she had carried things that could destroy a planet – if not a solar system – if they were jostled. “Shh, shh. Oh, please, shh. We’re not in safe territory yet.”

She had, once, led three schoolchildren to safety through a mountain range that had no name except Death in any language. That had been nerve-wracking. This, this was harder. “Come on, little one, how about a finger for now? Here, I know it’s not green, but it’ll have to do.”

The Thalassan royalty had paid Pretza very well. They would pay her three times as well if she got her little package across the border and into the Orion Free Territory – well enough that she could, if she chose to, easily retire. If she failed… and Pretza had never failed… they would not need to punish her, because she would already be dead.

“There you go. There you go. Shh, now, that’s a girl. Just a few more miles.”

Next: Courier Duty

Tip Package 😉

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/725609.html. You can comment here or there.

And on the next day… a short story of beginnings

Apr18

I asked for prompts to the theme of genesis. This is [personal profile] alexseanchai‘s result.

“In the beginning of the gods’ creation of the heavens and the earth…” Heressa’s voice was quiet as she read, dropping lower with every word. The children fell quiet, too, until the soft slip of her voice and the crackling of the fire were the only sounds. “The world was ice and steel, empty of life.”

She made the globe with her hands, the shape of the ribs of the world. “And onto the ice and the steel, the gods brought earth, and from the earth, they brought plants, and from the plants, they brought animals.”

“And when the animals and plants had run all over the globe, the gods brought down humans made from the gods’ bone and the gods’ spit, and then they left. And here we have lived, humans on the world of steel, ever since.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/706123.html. You can comment here or there.

Carry On Tuesday Short Story: “Children’s Hour” #weblit

Feb1

Children’s Hour

It wasn’t universally recognized, of course. On a colony like Roan Oak, you were lucky to get people to generally acknowledge the direction the sun rose from every morning; you couldn’t normally get more than twenty-five out of any hundred people to agree on what year it was, and often a marriage group couldn’t settle on a last name so they all used something different. But the Children’s Hour was more regularly recognized than most “actual” holidays were, and, possibly, more enjoyed.

It was certainly louder than anything but the Spring-has-come festivals, a cacophonous clatter that echoed from one end of the settlements to the other. For, in that time when the sun had begun to set but there was still light out, across all the scattered villages, miners and carters, teachers and shopkeepers, farmers and craftspeople all put down their work and went outside.

And all of them, the gruffest miner, the sternest teacher, the most curmudgeonly shopkeeper, every single one of them, (of those who took part, of course, because there would always be some who did not participate), they all played. The brought out the balls, big and small, the bats and the nets, the mittens in winter and the sprinklers in summer, the toy trucks and the dolls, and, for an hour as the sun sank below the horizon of their new world, grown men and women acted like children for just a little while.

The children, too, played, of course, most of them enjoying seeing their parents and mentors acting silly, “acting like children,” (the children would say they were acting nothing of the sort, but they’d mostly learned not to disillusion their elders, and, by the time they, themselves, were grown-ups, almost all of them forgot that particular complaint).

Some said a teacher had started the trend, wanting to connect her students and their parents; some, a doctor, who wanted people to be more healthy, to be more active outside of repetitive work. A few, who were the closest to right and the least often listened to, murmured that it had been a miner, who just wanted an excuse to kick the ball around after work.

The miner’s wives, both of them grey with age by now, smiled to themselves, and kicked the bases into place for a Children’s Hour game of baseball.

For Carry On Tuesday; today’s prompt was:

    the first verse of Longfellow’s poem The Children’s Hour
    Between the dark and the daylight
    When the night is beginning to lower
    Comes a pause in the day’s occupations
    That is known as the Children’s Hour

This story takes place in the same place as my flash fiction The Colony, sponsor for $15

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