First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (33 page)
Read First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga Online
Authors: Stephen Case
N
othing
in the universe is ever created, and nothing is ever destroyed. Patterns are simply rearranged.
The twisted metal pinions that linked Jens Grale’s arm to the bulk of the heavy-suit were collected fragments from the death of a high mass star; the sinews and organs of her body were built up of patterned elements stitched together in a lower-mass star. None of it was new, however; they were constructs of matter and energy that had been arranged and re-arranged since the universe began.
Only thought was new. Only the things no one could touch.
There were no stars visible. The twisted wreckage of the First Fleet was only apparent through its residual heat signatures, seen through the still-functioning heads-up display of her heavy-suit.
She was running out of fuel. Several of her suit’s servos were unresponsive. If she could get to one of the hulks, she might be able to make repairs. It was impossible to say where they were, impossible to tell how far the creature had deposited them, but she would find a way.
She had to.
Space was a tomb. It was a grave.
And Jens Grale wasn’t dead.
She was going home.
The End
THE REWIND FILES
Washington DC, 2112
When a bookish junior agent at the U.S. Time Travel Bureau stumbles across a massive conspiracy with roots in 1972’s Watergate, she is forced into her first-ever field assignment - to expose the conspirators and avert World War III.
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S
tephen Case gets paid
for teaching people about space, which is pretty much the coolest thing ever.
He also occasionally gets paid for writing stories about space (and other things), which have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show and several other publications. His first anthology, Trees and Other Wonders, is available on Kindle.
Stephen holds a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Notre Dame and will talk for inordinate amounts of time about nineteenth-century British astronomy. He lives with his wife, four children, and three chickens in an undisclosed suburb of Chicago that has not yet legalized backyard chickens.
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