Bud Sparhawk - Bright Red Star

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 22.87KB 9 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Bright Red Star

BUD SPARHAWK

From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

Bud Sparhawk (sff.net/people/bud_sparhawk) lives with his wife in Annapolis, Maryland "and is a

frequent sailor on the Chesapeake Bay." He is a writer of mostly "hard" science fiction. He

started writing in 1975, with sales to Analog. Thirteen years later he returned to writing, and his

stories have been appearing regularly in Analog and other magazines, and in anthologies. He has

been a Nebula finalist three times for his novellas.

"Bright Red Star" was published in Asimov's. It is a very tightly constructed military SF horror

story about the sacrifice of innocents, in the hard SF tradition of "The Cold Equations."

Sparhawk says "It was written as the events of 9-11 evolved. I tried, in this piece, to address the

motivations of those who could allow themselves to commit such heinous atrocities." But it is not

directly about current events at all, which makes it we think more effective.

Our boat floated silent as owls' wings and settled softly as an autumn snowflake. There was no doubt that

the enemy had spotted us—the stealth could only minimize signs of our presence. We'd done everything

we could to reduce de-tectability: hardened plastics, ceramics, charged ice, and hardly any metal. All that

did was create doubt, and, possibly, delay. Or so we hoped.

We tumbled quickly from the boat as grounding automatically discharged the ship charge, without which

the boat's ice frame would quickly melt. In a matter of minutes, the only remaining trace of our craft

would be a puddle of impure water and the gossamer-thin spider-web of the stealth shield—and that

would dissipate at the first hint of a breeze.

We deployed in pincer and arrowhead formation, sending two troops to the north to parallel our

advance, two likewise to the south, and two to the point. Hunter and I followed in column.

We moved quickly, carefully, ever wary. That the Shardies would eventually find us was not in doubt,

neither was the certainty of our death when they did so. They did not use humans well; however, I

doubted they'd find much use for us.

Tactical estimates gave us an hour to save the recalcitrant settlers' souls. They were some sort of

colony—religious or otherwise, it made no difference—only that they had foolishly chosen to remain

where others fled.

There was a slight probability we'd have less than an hour and an even smaller possibility of having more,

so we moved quickly. I'd estimated twenty minutes to reach their position and ten to twenty to ensure

we'd located everyone. That left us five minutes for action and ten as margin for contingencies.

I knew we'd fail if we used more than fifty-five minutes.

"… shards," one of the last observers managed to croak out before Jeaux II fell silent. That word was the

only description of the aliens we'd ever heard, so it stuck.

The Shardies had hit hard when we first made contact with their kind, which could hardly be called

contact at all since they attacked first and without provocation. When our ships backed off, their ship

followed, attacking again and again with unbelievable ferocity. When its missiles ran out, they tried to ram

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Bud Sparhawk - Bright Red Star.pdf

共9页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Bud Sparhawk - Bright Red Star

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: