Aurealis #130

By Dirk Strasser (Editor)

Aurealis #130 is just what you’re looking for. There’s Anya Ow’s ‘Last Light’, an action-packed space marines’ adventure, with a Vandermeer-esque touch of body horror and morality. A story that explores desperation in its many forms, both human and nonhuman. Our second story is Stephen Dedman’s post-apocalyptic ‘Bid Time Return’ world which asks just how far the urge to return to an imagined golden age might be taken. Our third is R B Kelly’s ‘Pineapples are Not the Only Bromeliad’ which looks at what identity means to humanity when faced with the reality of sentient AIs. Then join the conquistador quest for Incan gold in a strange New World in Dirk Strasser’s CONQUIST Part 4 ‘By the Throne of the King’. Lachlan Walter discusses ‘Science Fiction, Politics and the Evolving Nature of Remakes’. Gillian Polack gives us some true gothic from Australian history in ‘The Case of the Demon Bushranger’ and B P Marshall allows us all to take ‘How to Create Advanced Humans (and Aliens) 101’. And to finish off we have 20 reviews including The City - A Cyberfunk Anthology edited by by Milton J Davis, Dark Angels Rising by Ian Whates, Arcamira by Hannah Sandoval, and Londonia by by Kate A Hardy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chimaera Publications
• Release date: May 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781922031945

Dirk Strasser (Editor)

Dirk Strasser has written over 30 books for major publishers in Australia and has been editing magazines and anthologies since 1990. He won a Ditmar for Best Professional Achievement and has been short-listed for the Aurealis and Ditmar Awards a number of times. His fantasy novels – including Zenith and Equinox – were originally published by Pan Macmillan in Australia and Heyne Verlag in Germany. His children’s horror/fantasy novel, Graffiti, was published by Scholastic. His short fiction has been translated into a number of languages, and his most recent publications are “The Jesus Particle” in Cosmos magazine, “Stories of the Sand” in Realms of Fantasy and “The Vigilant” in Fantasy magazine. He founded the Aurealis Awards and has co-published Aurealis magazine for over 20 years.

Book preview

AUREALIS #130

Edited by Dirk Strasser

Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2020

Copyright on each story remains with the contributor

EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922031-94-5

ISSN 2200-307X (electronic)

CHIMAERA PUBLICATIONS

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors, editors and artists.

Hard copy back issues of Aurealis can be obtained from the Aurealis website: www.aurealis.com.au

Contents

From the Cloud—Dirk Strasser

Last Light—Anya Ow

Bid Time Return—Stephen Dedman

Pineapples are Not the Only Bromeliad—R B Kelly

CONQUIST Part 4: By the Throne of the King—Dirk Strasser

True Gothic: The Case of the Demon Bushranger—Gillian Polack

How to Create Advanced Humans (and Aliens) 101—B P Marshall

Science Fiction, Politics and the Evolving Nature of Remakes—Lachlan Walter

Reviews

Next Issue

Credits

From the Cloud

Dirk Strasser

Am I the only one who feels like we’re all inside a science fiction story? An alien invasion by an invisible enemy that strives for existence at our expense? An adversary we don’t understand that is suddenly everywhere at once. An exponential force dominating our world. Who would have thought, outside our fictional speculations, that our way of life was really so fragile? How could our societies be turned upside down so easily? Our natural inclinations so rapidly forced into hibernation?

Of course, it’s not actually like a science fiction story, is it? Not when it really comes down to it. Isolation is too mundane, too mind-numbingly monotonous. The days run together. As we wait for the COVID-19 curve to flatten, it’s our own biological rhythms that are flatlining. If we were in a story, we would have already met our hero, the one who is going to save the world. In real life we don’t know who will find the vaccine. In fact, we don’t even know if one is possible. A vaccine for the common cold has, after all, proved to be elusive. So, what do we do while the world’s best scientists grapple with the problem?

We wait. We self-isolate. We engage in social distancing. We protect the elderly and the vulnerable. And we wait. Waiting isn’t a story. It’s passive. Its heroes are unsung. It has no narrative drive. No palpable antagonist. No climax. No denouement.

So, what does a magazine like Aurealis do in these times? We continue to send out true stories. You know, the fictional kind. The ones that you can experience in every way, the highest and lowest of emotional curves, but then walk from and head through a portal into yet another story. One of my favourite quotes is by George R R Martin: ‘A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one.’

Here are some more lives for you.

All the best from the cloud.

Dirk Strasser

Back to Contents

Last Light

Anya Ow

On her birthday, Laura killed herself eight times. It was a good omen, she told Pinn later. Eight was a lucky number.

Pinn laughed. He’d only had to kill two of his own bodyshops today by himself. Turrets had taken care of the rest. The one he was hauling up into the meat cart was more centipede than Pinn, its segmented body impervious to bullets, with sharp-tipped feet that punched easily through body armour. Pinn had stabbed the ‘shop through the face to kill it. ‘Just eight? You’re slowing down, gunny.’

‘Says the man who only got two,’ Laura said.

‘What can I say? Auto-turrets stole my kills. Not my fault that ‘shops only go for their donors and I happened to be standing next to the Bessie Sisters. ‘Shops are funny bastards.’

Laura said nothing. Kryn shipboard defence systems had always made sense to her. Upgrading or replicating the DNA from each invading organism and sending copies of them against the original was logical to a species whose entire technology was somehow organic based. Kryn ships didn’t understand inanimate tools. That gave humans an edge.

She finished piling the glaive-like limbs of the last of her kills on the meat cart and helped Pinn haul his second kill up to the platform with a grunt. The ichor from its wounds hissed as it made contact with the bare skin of one of Laura’s ‘shops. Within her helmet, Laura wrinkled her nose at the stench. The bodies were already starting to dissolve as the automated meat cart trundled toward the incineration chamber.

‘Not good,’ Pinn said as he watched. Accelerated decay meant that the next wave of ‘shops was already getting reconstituted by the Kryn starship, part of the supermassive alien organism’s immune system.

‘Get some rack time while you can, Corporal. I’ll finish up here.’ Laura made a show of studying her hand terminal. Pinn wished her good night and shuffled off. Only when Laura was alone did she sit down on a rock and lean her arms over her knees. Thirteen days and she was bone tired. Her eyes stung. Laura squeezed the tears away and logged in.

‘Welcome, UNSX Sergeant Lau,’ said the terminal. Laura had long grown to hate its peppy voice as much as she’d grown to like its impenetrable case. She’d be less one arm by now if it hadn’t been for the blocky gauntlet that ran from her left wrist to the elbow. The screen that fed along her inner arm brought up a dashboard of densely packed numbers and charts.

Laura was too tired to read it. ‘Extraction status,’ she said.

‘ETA two days, five hours, eight minutes.’ The terminal helpfully pinged Laura with a shot of the Core, where liquid solarium was being slowly siphoned out of a purple-grey prime node. Enough solarium to power the generation ship her family lived on for a century. The node shuddered and flinched every so often, an insectile moan echoing through the ship whenever it did.

‘Jesus.’ Too slow. They were low on energy cells, low on food. The last wave damaged two out of their six remaining pulsar turrets. Mosa and Indira had suffered injuries critical enough that they’d had to be packed into medevac pods. Their ride out of here was via an autoship that’d chance a general evac only when the system reported at least 80 percent extraction and a medical emergency. They had the emergency but not the extraction.

Laura stared blankly at the terminal. Mosa had been the Captain in charge of this mess. She was in a medically induced coma now. No help there. As Laura scrolled through the list of their supplies, Pinn pinged her. ‘Shoot,’ Laura said.

He looked grim on the visfeed. ‘We found something in Sector 4-B. You better get down here.’

‘Was this here before?’ Laura asked. The bulbous, ivory-coloured formations were embedded into the fleshy hull of the chamber like lesions.

‘Not on the first sweep,’ Pinn said, ‘but I don’t know if Indira was looking very hard.’ ‘Sector 4’ was their squad nickname for corridors that led to nothing interesting. There were a lot of those in Kryn ships this big and could usually be ignored. Bodyshops swarmed out of the Breweries, the large chemical vat rooms that cribbed trace foreign DNA out of the atmosphere and warped it into weaponised horrors. They weren’t much for advanced tactics beyond a linear zerg.

Laura held up her terminal for a surface scan. Light flicked over the formations. ‘Terminal thinks it’s part of the wall.’

‘Gonna call BS on that. Watch.’ Pinn palmed a rolled wrapper from his pocket. Before Laura could stop him, he tossed it at one of the formations. Part of the wall beside it formed itself into a sharp spike, impaling the wrapper in mid-air. Laura yelped. The spike froze, then tenderly fed the wrapper into the formation. The ribbed surface shuddered as it swallowed the wrapper whole with a faint gloop.

‘We can’t spare any of the auto turrets,’ Laura said.

‘We could blow it up.’

‘Not without knowing what it is. I don’t want to kill the ship by accident before we finish extraction.’ Kryn starships were the most important find humanity had made in this sector of space; relics of some ancient, fully organic civilisation that archaeologists were still trying to decipher. The ships sat among the planets of the Setesa System, orbiting their red sun, quiescent and non-hostile until boarded. Laura would’ve felt sorry for the gigantic, bioengineered beasts if they weren’t such great natural sources of pure solarium. People were centuries-deep into humanity’s search for another liveable planet and the generation ships were starting to run out of fuel, to the point where even medical services were now limited by resource allocation. To Laura, it was between her species’ extinction or the Kryn’s. Making a mistake on this ship and wasting its still untapped potential would be criminal.

‘It’s doing a fine job of trying to kill us,’ Pinn pointed out. ‘I’ve been on five extraction missions. They’re not usually like this.’

Laura nodded. Kryn starships always fought back by mutating bodyshops out of their Breweries, but all the ‘shops she’d fought had always been little more than reanimated human corpses. Easy to down. ‘Maybe they’re learning.’

Pinn grimaced. ‘Not funny, Sarge.’

‘Set a perimeter alarm and volunteer someone to do a second sweep of the Sector 4s. That’s all we can do with what we’ve got.’ Laura started to back away from the chamber and went very still as the lesions started to pulse. Pinn retreated to her side. They both drew their pulse rifles from their back brackets.

‘Terminal scan’s still drawing a blank.’ Laura pressed her lips into a thin line as the coarse surface of each lesion started to ripple rapidly, a reverberation that echoed through