“FROM HER BEACON-HAND GLOWS WORLD-WIDE WELCOME ...”

Andy smiled up into the lantern. Its beam was bright enough to shine the stars, but no-one else had chosen to see it. He shook his head.

“Never you mind, pal. You’re daein alright. It’s them buggers just need tae get used tae ye. But they’ll get there, D-CON.”

“B-CON.”

“Eh?”

“MY NAME IS B-CON.”

As Andy followed the robot’s stare into the now starlit sky, a bat, suddenly visible against the gleam, fluttered past, and the air took on the pungent taste of lead. Never before had he witnessed skies so full of life, a horizon that brimmed with anything but streetlights and the cracks between curtains. Now, above the spire, three dots of light were developing slowly against the black, a perfect triangle that shimmered in the sky and hung there. He watched them coming, as if a fresh constellation was jostling into the order of things, a spearhead advancing through the aging cosmos.

He understood.

Beneath his palm, Andy felt the robot humming gently—happily, even. The stars were dying, and the news of some unfamiliar galaxy was finally reaching Earth.

Thomas Clark is a Glaswegian writer now based in the Scottish Borders. He is poet-in-residence at Selkirk FC. His work has been published in The Scotsman, The Sunday Mail and Bella Caledonia, and broadcast on ITV, BBC and Sky Sports. He writes about writing at www.thomasjclark.co.uk

and tweets intermittently @ClashCityClarky

Overkill

Rob Butler

Art: Stephen Pickering

The tavern light beckoned through the inky darkness of the dying woods. The only sound was the chugging of a generator. We were thirsty from another fruitless day looking for work and it took us a couple of drinks to notice him.

Starship warrior. Had to be. Something about them. Furtive.

He was tucked away in a corner. We organised a drink for him. The old guys usually decided to say something after a while, once the alcohol mixed with the guilt.

“The astronomers picked them up first, of course. Several light years away, heading straight for us. More ships than you can imagine. Thousands of them. Maybe millions.”

He took a swig of his drink and squinted at us from beneath his sprawling eyebrows.

“Millions of them,” he repeated. “So what did we do? What would you young guys have done, huh? We started to build starships to go out and defend ourselves. There was an invasion force heading right for us. We had no other choice.”

For a moment he smiled, rolling his chipped cup between his fingers.

“It was magnificent in a way, you know? All the different countries coming together. Pooling resources. Forgetting all our differences and hatreds. Twenty-five years of effort and we did it. We built two starships from scratch. Assembled them in orbit, nuclear to build speed and then the Roemer star drive kicked in. Beautiful.”

His faraway gaze refocused and he gave us an anxious glance.

“I know we used up almost everything developing the antimatter technology. But damn it, you’ve got to see what we were facing.” He hesitated. “What we thought we were facing.”

We stared at him. Several moments passed before he decided it was safe to continue.

“Well I was nearly too old to sign on but I made it.” He grimaced. “Obviously I was on the ship that didn’t blow up leaving orbit.”

Ben’s voice cut across him like a blade.

“Weren’t you the lucky one? You missed all those nuclear explosions and antimatter reactions bursting one after another across the globe as that thing fell out of the sky. My grandparents were underneath it.”

He gave us a pleading look. “But what could we have done? We were already in flight. Hell—we weren’t expecting to come back anyway. Fighting off millions with two starships was bad enough, but just one ...”

He cringed but Ben wasn’t going to hit him. We would let him finish.

“So, we got out there. Deep space, way beyond the solar system. We tried to communicate with them but there was nothing. We tried to block them, to get them to change course, but they just swept past us. So we had to shoot at them. Ship after ship exploded. Like fireworks. They seemed to have no defences and they never fired back.” He sipped then whispered. “They never once fired back.”

The barman switched off another lamp to save power. There was just one light left, casting a weak glow on the old man’s face.

“We must have destroyed hundreds of their ships. Eventually our weapons fused. All we could do was follow them home. Helpless. We thought it was all over, that we’d failed.”

He sighed.

“And instead they simply swung around the Sun using its gravity to propel them off to wherever it was they were heading. That was all they were ever going to do. They just marched on like a swarm of ants. We’d stamped on a few of them but they’d just ignored us.”

He looked up and spread his hands.

“I’m sorry boys. I really am. We thought we were saving the world. We’ve left you youngsters with one hell of a mess.”

We rose and watched him flinch as he thought the beating was finally about to start but we weren’t interested in any more violence. Instead we turned and silently filed out, heading back on foot along dark tracks to our cold tents. Overhead, the unreachable stars blazed in the jet black sky of a devastated world.

Rob Butler lives in England but is a regular visitor to Scotland where he has both family and friends. His short fiction has appeared in a number of online publications such as Perihelion, Lakeside Circus and Daily Science Fiction. He’s delighted that he’s now also been published in Scotland.

When There is no Sun

Craig Thomson

Art: Elijah Lin

Thought jolted. Jolted. Jolted. Falling; spiralling down razorbacked valleys into canyons.

Into canyons. Into canyons. Falling; mind shotblasted out of matter/energy; sculpture ripped livid from the void. Hands vast and ancient unfolding form with impossible, merciless clarity.

They say existence is suffering: they’re right.

I came out of coldtime.

It took only a fraction of a second for the buffer to unzip the modulated phase state that encoded my consciousness and transfer it to the shipboard embodiment that had been prepared for it. The body was a lightweight, streamlined conjunction of muscle and gristle—a pared down template of something time and circumstance had once crafted under a yellow sun, across gulfs that dwarfed history. The body was more or less humanoid. It had bilateral symmetry. It had four long, pentadactyl limbs. More importantly, it had lungs and vocal chords.

I came out of coldtime and screamed.

“Dreams?”

Melano listed against the rim of the hab, black limbs splayed.