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Damarr stared in stupefied awe at the spot in mid-air where his stone had apparently struck some invisible force and then fallen to the ground. He turned about and quickly scoured the slope for his companion.

“Did you see that?” he exclaimed and then snatched up another rock from the ground beside his feet, his attention turned once more to the view that stretched out before him. It was the wild lands. One of the places forbade by the elders.

“See what? A load more rocks? Oh, come on Dee, haven’t we had enough for today? I thought we were only going a little beyond the pathway…”

He turned a little to watch as Bella made the last ascent to the top of the ridge where he was stood, her face flushed slightly as she fought a little to catch her breath. She spent too long in that lab of hers, trying to figure out the wonders of nature. He smiled a little.

“Over there,” he said in a slightly hushed tone, almost as if were trying not to scare the invisible thing away. He turned and pointed as Bella looked on and then outward to the flora and fauna which populated the wild lands, interspersed with a few trees and many, many rocks.

He launched the rock and it sailed through the air with apparent ease until… it didn’t.
It seemed to strike something and then fall. He turned and saw the deep frown of intense curiosity flare up on Bella’s face as she watched the whole scene distort and bend as if watched through the ripples in a pool of water when someone casts a stone into the pond. The trees, rocks and scenery all seemed to ripple and flow as the distortion expanded and then dissipated into thin air.

“What… was that?” She said on a deep exhalation of air.

He shrugged and turned to scour the floor for another rock as she moved forward, taking a few steps toward the spot where the rock now lay, her arm extended out before her and her hand outstretched as if trying to feel her way in the dark.

He snatched a quick glance at her, his brow furrowed as he turned back to his search.
“Hey, go steady now. We’ve no idea what that is out there…”
He heard her snort and then laugh, his attention drawn as she turned about and stared at him, her hands now placed on her hips as she stared back at him from her position slightly further down the ridge.

“Oh really? Says the one who urged me to try breaking the rules for once and got me to come out here, just so you didn’t have to be out here all on your own when they come to get you…”
She was right. He snorted and turned back to his rock hunt.
“I just think we should be careful…”

That was when the air seemed to ripple all around him as a blinding flash caused him to flinch, and he flung up his arms to try and cover his eyes.
He fell, and the ground rushed up to meet him, hard.
There was a crackle, a fizz and a bang. One after the other. Almost on top of one another.
He swore and tried to blink a few times as his face twisted into a scowl, his vision slow to recover as he tried to which way he’d been facing when it all happened, and pushed himself up from the floor.
“Bella…?” He called out, voice voice seemingly strained. He tried to swallow. “Bella?” He called out again, but with no reply.

He turned to his left, and then to his right.
His movements came in short, sharp bursts as he looked all around, his gaze sweeping the floor in the direction he thought he’d last seen her stand. He thought that he might see her body, lying there on the floor. Unconscious. Dear stars, he hoped she was just unconscious. Somewhere.

Then something. A sound. A low, droning hum from somewhere behind. Somewhere down near the bottom of the ridge. He whirled about and stood in sudden fear as the glider moved into sight, not too far below here he now stood on the ridge.
It was coming to a halt.

For a fleeting moment he was filled with panic. They’d found him in the restricted zone. He was done for, but then… then an almost euphoric sensation swept over him as he realised they could help him find Bella. Give aid if she was hurt, or help move her to safety. He turned to face them and waved.

“Stand fast and hold out for ident.” The voice instructed and Damarr turned to see an agent stood nearby, on the other side of the ridge from where the glider now waited, down below.
It was obviously a ploy to catch him unawares, the agent having deployed in advance to make is ascent while the glider caught his attention, probably just in case he chose to run or put up some fight against being captured. He had no such intention. He held out his arm so that the agent could wave the short, stubby wand over the back of his wrist to check his registered status.

He moved and gestured down to where Bella had been, his eyes fixed on the agent before him.
“My friend was over there,” he said and quickly swallowed down as he flicked a glance over to the spot he’d last seen her, but still no Bella. “She was stood there and talking, and then there was this flash and a bang, and now she’s gone…”

“Then your friend was… unlucky,” the agent responded in a voice that was level and devoid of all empathy. “There’s a good reason we tell folks to not venture out here, and that is because of what lies beyond.”

“Beyond…?” Damarr replied, and his frown deepened. “Beyond what?”
“The barrier, of course,” the agent replied. “The only thing that stops us all from being like them, and now your friend has gone to join them in the great beyond.”
“I don’t understand,” Damarr said as he turned around to stare at the spot where the rocks had fallen to the ground. “We need to help her… we need to find her…”

The agent whispered in his ear.
“There is no coming back from what lies beyond…”
Damarr tried to turn but the agent held him fast, his arm brought up behind his back to twist him around in any direction the agent so desired. The man had moved quickly. Quietly.
“…As you will now learn,” the agent concluded.
“What are you…?” Damarr snarled out at he felt himself propelled down the ridge, the grip on his arm tightened and twisted as he tried to turn and squirm away but to no avail. “You are meant to protect and serve!”

There was a final shove and the grip released as Damarr felt something hard impact the small of his back. A fist, or a boot maybe? He had little time to think before he felt himself submerge as the barrier swallowed his body, the sensation being not unlike going under the water in a warm lake until you were enveloped. Completely. Words followed him into the blackness, in those few precious moments before his conscious mind was swallowed whole.

“It’s what I have to do, time and time again. I’m protecting them from people like you…”

***

The agent stood in seemingly silent contemplation as the ripples died away and he was left along on the ridge. He glanced down and shoved one of two rocks to the side with the toe of his boot before he turned to make his way back to the glider, and to all those people he’d sworn to protect.
His job here was done, for now.

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Mary stepped slightly forward of Jacob’s chair and turned about to face him, resting against the edge of the main navigational panel. He looked up at her and reciprocated her smile but then fell back into the confines of his chair with a faint frown on his brow. He knew that look.

“What?” he asked with resignation, in full expectation of the latest batch of friendly advice which she so often lavished upon him.

“All work and no play, Jacob. You know what they say about that, don’t you?”

He chuckled briefly as his gaze returned to the panel before him.

“Yes, I do, and you’ve made sure to remind me of it repeatedly over the past few days.”

“Then maybe you should try listening so I don’t have to repeat myself so often.”

He smiled as his gaze lingered on the radar scope for a moment before he glanced back up to her face to witness her wry smile.

“The Sunderland’s an old ship, and her systems…”

“Are absolutely fine!” she quickly remarked to interrupt his attempt at an excuse. “She’d completed well over a hundred round trips from Venus to Earth before they were forced to decommission her due to some bureaucratic nonsense.”

She quickly leant closer as he made a move to speak and placed her thin, delicate forefinger upon his lips to stall his protest.

“…and the only reason we’re on board her right now is to make sure no one hops on board while she takes her last trip to the salvage yard and then goes on a joyride across the inner worlds. Hell, of all the salvage jobs we’ve ever taken on, this has to be the sweetest of all. All her systems are running under computer control, and we’re just the caretakers along for the ride.”

“I know that,” he replied with slight hesitation as she withdrew her finger from his lips, then shook his head slightly in mild disapproval of her suggestion that they were no more than passengers on the final journey of the inter-colony freighter. “Doesn’t hurt to have a hand on the tiller anyway, just in case.”

She sighed and pushed against the control panel with the palm of her left hand to stand up straight and regarded him with a look of disdain.

“You know full well that Toran has rigged numerous monitors to the critical systems and piped them belowdecks so we would be alerted at the first sign of anything vaguely untoward.”

Jacob made a move to answer but seemed to think much better of it, resigning his reply to a dismissive shrug.

He knew that she was right and that everything he could monitor from the control deck could easily be watched in the company of his four crewmates belowdecks.

“This isn’t the Fenchurch,” her voice whispered as she leant slightly closer to him.

He snapped back from her in an instant as if she’d physically stung him, his glare hard and fierce as it fixed upon her finely sculpted, delicate features.

“I know why you’re doing this,” she quickly added in an attempt to soothe the anguish she saw upon his face at her words. “You told me about your old ship, remember?”

“I was drunk,” he muttered angrily, sore at himself for allowing his guard to drop and to reveal the most devastating moment of his entire life to date.

Not that she couldn’t have scoured SOLnet for the gory details and put together quite a damning picture of her own, but his own rather slurred and emotional recollection had been rather vivid and most certainly surpassed any of the cold, stark, unfeeling words that would recount the fate of the Fenchurch in the official reports.

“Maybe so, but you still blame yourself for what happened on your old ship, and you mustn’t. You said you were trapped below decks and, by all accounts, even if you had made it up to the control deck, there would’ve been precious little you could’ve done to prevent the disaster anyway. You would’ve died along with your Captain and the senior crew on duty that day.”

“Maybe I should’ve,” he muttered darkly in reply, “and then at least I’d not have to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that I let them all down. Yes, I was below decks when the Fenchurch died, but I should have been up there on the bridge at my station doing my duty and making sure the ship never hit the damned mine, let alone wandered that close to the bloody thing. No, I was down below because everything was boringly routine, and I’d made some cockeyed excuse to leave a kid in charge of the helm while I goofed off. Hell, the poor sod probably didn’t even see the relic until it hit the damned hull!”

Jacob let his head droop so that his chin rested on his chest.

“Stray mines are a constant hazard out here. You know that as well as I do. Old decrepit relics that go uncharted until some unlucky ship happens across one. Those things were designed to be hard to see with the ship’s sensor systems until it was too late and the device locked on and impacted to cause the most damage it could.”

Jacob raised his head slightly and gazed up at her.

“You know I’m right,” she insisted and delivered a coy smile which he found almost impossible to ignore.

He shrugged and turned his attention back to the controls before him.

“Maybe. I just feel much better being up here instead of down there so if something unexpected does rear its ugly head, I’m on hand to take over from the automated systems and try to bring us to safety.”

He frowned slightly and made a few adjustments to the control panel, his words trailing off as his attention became locked upon the sensor scope.

“Okay, I understand what you’re saying, so maybe we should bring everyone up here and… Hey, are you even listening to me anymore?” Mary asked and playfully pushed his right shoulder to regain his attention, but his frown only deepened at her effort as he shrugged her away and sat forward in his seat and made more refinements to the controls to try and focus the scans more acutely.

“We’ve got a bogey in our path,” he muttered grimly.

“What? Another ship?” she replied and spun about to look at the display he was so intent upon.

“Not sure yet,” he replied tensely, “but the initial bounce back suggests there’s an object of reasonable size and mass drifting on a heading that will intersect our present course. By the time we’re close enough to see it out of the window, it’ll have passed across and be off our port side a few hundred clicks. No determinable power readings at the moment, but we are at full stretch on the resolution.”

“I’d better call the others up here,” she muttered as her gaze remained upon the small grey blob at the furthest edge of the scope.

“This is exactly why I stay up here,” Jacob remarked off-handedly as she made her way over to the Captain’s chair to open the shipwide broadcast channel.

He knew it was a cheap shot, but she’d brought up the whole Fenchurch incident in the first place.

She had no idea. She’d not been there.

She hadn’t suffered the accusations of those who publicly claimed to do everything in their power to help the survivors in the aftermath, yet strived behind the scenes to discredit and humiliate each one so that promising careers were extinguished. It was all about money and power at the end of the day and the whole Fenchurch incident had damaged reputations high up in the chain, cost many credits in compensation to the company after many more had been spent levelling blame against the governing bodies of Mars and Earth for the war relic being allowed to float about with no apparent attempt to clear it and other mines like it from the vast blackness of space, and generally left a dirty taste in everyone’s mouths once the affair was over but the memory and stench of blame remained.

Jacob stared intently at the sensor display, only vaguely aware that Mary was speaking over the shipwide intercom to bring the rest of the crew in to join them on the bridge.

Maybe this was as it had been on his old ship, with an unknown object floating in their path and drifting innocently closer until it was much too late for them to evade as the mine awoke, locked on and propelled itself directly into them.

Slowly, the unidentified blob moved closer to them as they ploughed onward through the vast expanse of space.

“Ghost Ship” © 2024 Paul J. Fleming

Image credit:  Shredder on ShareCG

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Elijah Kane had enjoyed such a resounding success that his name would undoubtedly be in all the journals, his achievements lauded by those who once scorned him and his legacy to live on through the ages.

The problem was that none of it would happen.

Not now.

He paused at the doorway to his research laboratory and leaned up against the door pillar to suck down a few deep breaths, his legs aching with the sudden burst of activity and his mind awash with the difficulty that now faced him.

He had to flee the doomed underwater research station.

They were loose.

Not just one or two which could be neutralised quite easily, but the whole lot of them, and they’d begun to swarm through the station with relish as their base instincts took over.

Crewmembers had fallen but he did not care, for none had seen fit to treat him with kindness or respect. In turn, he did not mourn their passing but saw them as useful diversions to delay his creations and give him time to flee.

Kane turned a little to stare up the long corridor he’d just run through and felt the heavy thud of his heart in his chest as the lighting began to flicker, then die in sequence from the furthest fitting to the next, each time moving that little bit closer.

He was trapped.

It seemed he’d overestimated the usefulness of those he once served alongside.

He stepped inside the lab and stabbed at the panel to seal the door, enabling the forcefield to buy him a little more time. It was a basic containment field, but good enough to keep small marauders out for the time being.

Fear gripped his mind as he darted across to the workbench and swept unfinished items onto the floor, his hands scrabbling to find the project he’d been working on that would save the most precious thing he coveted most of all, which was his intellect.

His private lab upon the surface was all prepared with an artificial body in situ, but he had yet to test his work. He silently wished he had more time.

The forcefield flickered and sparked.

He snatched up the headset and checked its design, making a few final adjustments with hands that trembled with a mix of dread and anticipation before placing the device on his scalp and flicking the switch to begin.

The vast cabinet to his left hummed with power and light flickered over its surface as the mind of Elijah Kane was scanned and recorded, his genius digitised and on its way to the surface in a tight-beam transmission to his waiting equipment.

Then the forcefield failed.

Sparks erupted as he swept around to see the walls around the doorway darken as his creations made their way into his laboratory, the thousands of bodies moving swiftly toward his position.

Soon he would be reborn. He would survive.

Kane laughed as they swept over him.

He. Would. Survive.

“From the Depths” © 2024 Paul J. Fleming

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I watched him depart as my chest deflated with the lost hope of saving another poor condemned soul.

His back was so arched that his gaze fell upon the floor just before each shuffling foot as he went about his own little routine, leaving me free of my intended burden and with a sense of hollowness inside.

He would die later today. I knew that for a fact, yet my premonition and well-meaning offer of assistance to try and save him from that void which lies beyond could not dissuade him from the path he progressed along.

My heart beat heavily in my chest as I tried to turn my thoughts to the next endeavour I’d set myself for this day, trying to forget about the poor old seafarer and his fate.

No, some days you just couldn’t make a difference but it should not deter you from at least making the attempt, for along the line of failures there may be the one soul you do manage to pull from the jaws of death.

To cheat the reaper of his prize.

I glanced after the departing figure, only for a moment, then turned away to regard the vibrant city teaming with life, amongst which there were other souls in dire need of my services.

The student, the banker, the homeless man with the dog…

I set one foot before the other and moved back within their number, my goal defined and my mind resolved.

Before this day was out I would save at least one of them, if not all.

“The Crooked Seafarer” © 2024 Paul J. Fleming

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“I have a secret to tell,” she whispered as her eyes glistened with tears that threatened to cascade down her rosy cheeks.

I’d asked her to be part of my life and continue the joy we experienced together over those long, summer months, but instead, she became so sad and led me down to the clearing in the woods where we met.

My heart seemed hollow as I waited to hear her reason, for I feared there was another. I might lose her.

I watched with stunned awe as her wings unfurled, and she cast me a nervous, thin smile…

100-word #weekendchallenge by Write Academy
The Fairy Queen © 2024 Paul J. Fleming

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I stared down at the floor and all the pieces of glass littered thereon.
Some compulsion overtook me and I began to fit them back within the frame. It wasn’t long before I had but one piece left to place.

The door behind me burst open and the old man raced into the room, his face a twisted grimace of fear.
“You must not!” he cried, but the deed was done.

The piece fell into place, and the surface seemed to ripple, my reflection casting a malevolent sneer as it took a step closer and then through into our world…

100-word #weekendchallenge by Write Academy
The Broken Mirror © 2024 Paul J. Fleming

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At first, I only saw the sheet draped over the table and the ungainly shape which was covered beneath but then, as I moved a little closer, I saw the hand which escaped from out of one side.
It was large, seemingly more that of a beast than a man.

I felt the heavy beat of my heart inside my chest as if to break free and take flight from this dreadful place, but my mind burned with insatiable curiosity. What was the strange-looking man up to in this dank cellar?

Slowly, I reached out and pulled back the sheet…

100-word #weekendchallenge by Write Academy
The Madness of Professor Schmidt – A Mad Scientist’s Laboratory © 2024 Paul J. Fleming

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The excitement rippled through our little group as we breached the inner wall and crawled through the opening, our torches fighting back the gloom as we surveyed the riches which lay within.

I moved closer to the centrepiece, a large sarcophagus mounted on a pedestal.
The carvings were ornate and I felt compelled to reach out to trace the shapes cast in gold.
I wish I had not.

We were warned about the soul whose tomb we’d just defiled, the trickster who sought to cheat death, but I could not help it. My fingers moved ever closer to the sceptre…

100-word #weekendchallenge by Write Academy
The Sceptre © 2024 Paul J. Fleming

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The cold night air nibbled at my ears and nose as I stared out across the flickering lights far below and watched as people went about their lives with no knowledge of what lurked in the shadows.

I was like them once, not too long ago.

The heavy footfalls sounded out from behind me, and I spun around, my eyes narrowed as I focused against the gloom to watch my new companion advance. He joined me at the edge of the roof and peered down.

“Look at all that fast food,” he muttered and I knew to what he referred.

100-word #weekendchallenge by Write Academy
A Town Made of Food © 2024 Paul J. Fleming

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It took a good few hours for the conversation to percolate through my subconscious in order to distil the true, chilling undertone of her words. Only then did I find myself in the grip of fear for what she would do next, as her secret lingered in my conscious mind and forbade any attempt to be framed in an innocent light.
I fumbled with the brass lock on the door as I thought to plunge out into the bitter, snow-laden winds to find her before another innocent life would be taken.
Little did I know, it was already too late.

100 Word #weekendchallenge by @WriteStoryBooks
Enchanted Journal – © 2022 Paul J. Fleming

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