With prompts of 'it all went sideways' from Framing Device and 'they aren't guidelines; they're doctrine' from Pethrai D'arkos, we have a new addition to the Star-crossed setting, as well as a new prompt thread for my patrons, so check out the story and get your ideas in!
Tag: Science Fiction
Children of Heaven, Chapter 18
Abigail leaned forward in her chair as the mass of Lefu HAVOCs opened like an unfurling flower. Some of them were braking hard, still on approach to the planet. The rest were shifting ranks as they came about on a course that would take them right to her pilots. What in hell are you playing at? Humanity’s experience with the Lefu was not what one might call vast, but they had the range to slag Hyperion Secundus from thousands, if not millions of kilometers away. Why did they need to decelerate in order to…. Oh. “They’re preparing to break atmo,” the wing-captain realized.
To the Victor, the Spoils, Chapter 6
Capricorn City was, by pre-War standards, not a terribly large place. Its population was less than a tenth of Minneapolis... had anyone still lived in its crumbling wreckage. Many major population centers were dead and had been for decades. Only places that the Hegemony had prioritized in rebuilding like Garamond gave some semblance of human civilization returning to Earth. Five billion people died. Some starved as crops were poisoned and stores ran out. Others fell to disease; many through the filth of war but others from the Hegemony’s bioweapons. Riots, civil wars, radiation sickness – the ways that humanity had used to tear itself apart were both many and varied. After Johannesburg, when the Coalition’s last, desperate chance for victory had failed, the killing had truly begun in earnest. No... not killing. It had been too sterile, too clinical for that. Culling. The eradication of defiant populations and anyone who could pose a threat to the Hegemony and their damned High Human Culture. And that bitch upstairs was the one who had made it all possible. Why couldn’t she have just died? It wasn’t an angry thought. If he’d seen Savoy revelling in this new world, it would be easier to find that hatred. Instead, it was almost despondent.
Proximal Flame's Fiction 