In the new book Space Story, a pair of teens named Kay and Bobby manage to escape from a dying Earth… But that’s just the beginning of their story, which finds the two on the intergalactic run from “highly evolved, highly arrogant automatons.”
Written by W.W. Marplot, Space Story promises a Monty Python meets Hitchhiker’s Guide comedic adventure as, according to the book’s logline, “Kay becomes an important prophetess, and Bobby an accidental, mythical deity, within the eyes of both their oddly constructed new friends and some very ambitious enemies.”
Read on for a free sample from Space Story, which comes from Waxing Gibbous Books. The book is available for order now
Professor Lully and the Arrival of Enemies, Aliens, and a Bloody Nose “Uh oh,” the ship’s computer said, an annoying, idiotic, idiomatic humanism that someone else had programmed into him.
“What?” Lully demanded, but he already expected the worst. His spaceship shook violently, spilling his lukewarm coffee and staining the white of his shirtsleeves and of his Captain’s Chair. On the trembling screens and through the viewports played a hectic scene—the robots were hurrying back to the ship in panicked, halting zigzags.
Over the moon’s horizon roamed, silhouetted by Jupiter itself, a growing shape. It rose like a ghost of vaguely human shape but of terrible, gigantic size. Then another. And another—each shape now roving and rampaging across Europa’s surface.
“What!” Lully repeated to the ship’s computer.
“Hold please.”
“Don’t tell me to hold, you brainless beeping byte-box!” the Professor shouted. “Tell me what is happening!”
But there was too much data coming into the main computer to produce an answer for Captain Lully—all the robots were transmitting at once, and their pandemonial output and screeching audio only added to the readings from all the sensors that scanned both ground and sky. The processing needed a few extra seconds.
The scene continued to change, the enemy shapes came nearer, soon joined by roaring machines in the atmosphere whose gases fumed and choked the sky. The ship’s robots all reported different views simultaneously, and Lully turned down the audio volume so he could think.
And helplessly watch. The great professor did not know where to look, but everywhere he did it seemed familiar. The shapes on the ground, closing in, resembled his pursuer on Earth, that zoo-illogically formed, wildly roaming ogre. And all the time coming closer to the robots—and the ship.
“Take off!” he barked to the controls and to the computer. Perhaps there was an empty stable in the sky he could hide in.
But all engineering and guidance systems were temporarily paralyzed with calculations and throughput.
The ships of the air were also familiar, but that memory was lost in the massive vaults of Lully’s massive brain. He strained eye and limb to get a steady, stationary look at the things as they bellowed and burst with sounds that crushed the very air and rattled their—puny by comparison—ship’s walls.
The larger shapes looked like the smaller ones, just stuck together. And still, the pattern and form teasingly tickled the professor’s memory.
“Computer! Halt all processing!” Lully commanded while taking over the manual controls himself.
“OK, I am back. Enemies are coming,” the computer said at last.
“Really?” Lully’s sarcasm dripped onto the console and into the circuit boards, and he pointed out the larger window as a beastly flying thing went by. It looked to be part rocket, part airplane, part robot, and part radio station. And it, and a few others, were lowering to land.
“Not those. They aren’t doing much. They could impede all our systems, electromagnetically and physically, but haven’t, and the incoming communications are babbling and incoherent.”
Lully wanted an example, but something more pressing occurred to him: instead of talking, he needed instead to stand up and grab his face. The ship had been knocked sideways, loose items struck walls and ceilings, and Professor Lully crashed face-first into the console edge before skidding along the floor to a corner where a thick, bound book fell on his head and a flattened, destemmed red rose dropped out of it. With a cry of mathematically-advanced fear, he crawled around in a circle. His nose was bleeding, and his suit jacket torn, his white undershirt showing through like a badge of irretrievable cowardice.
“Uh oh.”
“Wud was dat?” Lully held his bunched sportscoat to his nose and spoke nasally though with dignity from under a bolted-down desk he had ducked under.
“The enemies. Those…things…on the ground,” the computer relayed.
Lully—scientist extraordinaire—could not help but pause at the use of the word “things.” Computers are precise. There are no things; there are knowns and unknowns, and for the knowns, there is an answer. The choice of that word was curious, given the ship’s computer’s design limits with regards to artificial intelligence. Then Lully—fleshy and bloody man—could not help but swallow his own heart at the mention of enemies that could move so fast and shake a five-million-pound spacecraft until the potted marigolds inside it were uprooted.
Who on Earth—or orbiting it—had the firepower, engineering skill, and political agility to not only create tanks and rockets with this sophistication, to reach this point in space and be able to attack with such force, while also keeping it from the world-backed GAB-BA-THREE, Lully thought, though not in so many words.
And outsmart ME? Who?
“Aliens,” said the ship computer.
“Doe. Impotdible!” Lully kept pressure on his nose. “Eddyway, get uts—”
“Out of here. I am working on it,” the computer reassured the master, also mentioning that taking the manual controls would not help.
According to Waxing Gibbous Books, Welkin Westicotter Marplot, of Coillemuir, Scotland, “is a curator and collector of ancient manuscripts, stories, and sources of hidden wisdom. Among his piles of esoteric and mysterious works are modern stories about normal kids in terrifying situations — or unique kids in worse ones.”
by Dojo! April 9, 2022 · Automatic
