Tehanu woke on a lumpy bed with lights shining on her as bright as midday, though she knew it to be evening. The air smelled old and stale ( Read more... )

((I have decided to elide the inevitable "I'm on a space station? What's that? Why is T-Pain here, and why am I wearing this nautical-themed pashmina afghan?" sequence.

Scenario I/II is a set piece. Scenarios III and IV invite response, if anyone feels so moved!))

I. A pod begins to shake ( Read more... )

Odd things happened all the time on the station, by now that was a given, but for the last few days things had taken a turn for the worse. A distraught Lain's ability to manipulate the collective unconscious had spun out of control after fusing with the stations holodeck. With the consciousness, memories, thoughts, and emotions of every living on ( Read more... )

The station hasn't had so many dead all at once in a long time. There have been equipment failures, scuffles, incidents-but not on this scale. Trying to handle it all through the station's democratic systems has been a mess-committees and subcommittees deciding conflicting thing, and all of it having to happen quick, while the recovered bodies are ( Read more... )

Katriel didn't want to think about the quantity of energy credits this station had to be burning through each day. More than her entire village. Maybe more than all Sehalda itself, on an off day. It seemed utterly, obscenely wasteful to a person raised on a world where scarcity made of it a second currency.

And yet she couldn't call this a rich ( Read more... )

Sah'ot had racked his brain for a fun activity for the children during Sandoval's little shindig. The station, it seemed, wasn't set up for children to play in, though enough of them had been born on board. They tended to be dropped off with whoever would take them on "safe" planets once they became too much to handle ( Read more... )

Another night comes to the station. Or night cycle, anyway. And with it come the usual phantasmagorias of sleep... though tonight, there's something special. Here and there might be a shape out the corner of an eye, or a figure glimpsed dimly in the distance. Closer-up it's a thing like an adult, womanly shape, carved out of shadow and specks of ( Read more... )

Antivesuvio was a true garden world. It was as if an army of landscapers had systematically combed the planet, levelling, steppeing, hillocking and in general artfully arranging things. Flowerbeds were arranged in patterns large enough to only be seen from orbit. Gently babbling rivers were pre-provided with shellike boats ( Read more... )

( The sound of the ring transporter activating caught the God's ear and he looked over from his place in his throne. )

Having finally bullied her way into having access to the alchemical circle used to generate the station's food supply, Roxie builds up her work over the course of a few hours. Intricate diagrams, nets of pseudowiring, arrays of scrap-metal antennas that look more like abstract art than any kind of machinery... by the time she's done, what was a ( Read more... )