Doc Sherwood
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Overture, Chapter Two
The Solidity fleet’s Communications Hub was a miniature moon of black metal hanging at the heart of the massed battleships. From every point on its smooth mantle protruded towering antennae topped with smaller steel spheres, from which millions of megahertz in radiowaves were beamed every minute to coordinate fight-paths and prepare the vessels for their imminent departure. This strange pincushion even boasted its own artificially-generated gravity and atmosphere, to safeguard the non-robotic Solidity members who worked in its pods.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Triptych
Before the eyes of Dr. James Neetkins, Kumiko Rintari, D’Carthage and 4-H-N, absolute dark was dispelled by the soft flickering onset of light resembling that of a sunset. Each face among the foursome reappeared to the other three, daubed warmly by the golden glow which was steadily growing in brightness and magnitude even as it shaped itself into human form. This was no mere silhouette however, for the details of the figure’s features and clothing were picked out as if in a painter’s complex study of evening-sky hues. The highlights were that shining brilliance which would have showed where the sun itself touched the horizon’s edge, whereas the shades were like the ruddy heavenmost edges of cloud-formations furthest from daylight’s last blaze. All these variations in gold and flame disclosed the body and eyes and hair of a boy, standing some distance above the ground at the centre of the circle of four. It perhaps went without saying he was a boy they all recognized.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Broadside for Broadside, Chapter Four
High above the clouds the clear light of day was still set to reign for at least another hour, but over the Henry Martin there now fell a shadow that was not nature’s doing. The galactic cruiser had arrived, and was hulking abreast of the Next Four’s ship. On her bridge Amy switched manoeuvring jets to hold steady, and the discharge from their vents blew into the combatants like a north-wester. Bret and Gala locked blades in the squall, drawing face-to-face.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Overture, Chapter Three
“Greetings, weak fleshling fools!” Steelstreak declaimed. “Welcome to the site of your final conflict! Yes, this futile resistance to our grand design is herewith at an end, for great Space-Screamer wills it to be so, and where our illustrious creator commands, we his loyal underlings obey as if – ”
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Joe and Gala, Chapter Three
Every movement was pain, and the feeblest exertion of the muscles incurred wracking spasms that begged release from the cruel hold of consciousness, as Joe and Gala hauled themselves excruciatingly out of twin puckering orifices that marked the end of the line. They had fetched up in the bilges, where lubricant was deposited as a slack sludgy residue once everything of worth had been leeched from it. Ankle-deep in this, ragged and bloodstained and their hair matted solid with caked-up filth, the two combatants turned to one another for the last time.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Broadside for Broadside, Chapter Three
Dylan and Phoenix ploughed a perpendicular line through the cloud-cover, their descent growing ever more rapid as their spluttering jet-pack steadily failed to bear the extra body for which it had never been designed. Using his powers Dylan was doing everything he could to compensate.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Joe and Gala, Chapter One
Light-years distant from anywhere else, in the cold vacant gloom of a galactic backwater, a starcraft hung. It was not of metal but flesh, a giant fungus-cap listing somewhat to its anterior cusp, and the tempest it knew was not external but raging within its twisted guts. Had any observers been by in this dim starlit no-man’s-land, they would have witnessed a periodic trembling of this patch or that patch on the thing’s dull surface, and heard a muffled din of explosions and blows carrying across the silent void. Then all at once these spectators would have been astonished, as the saucer’s horny husk tore open in a brilliant jet of flame.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Joe and Gala, Chapter Two
With battle-wearied bodies nearing their last vestiges of strength, Gala and Joe were swinging and slugging at less than half the speed of before. There was something however keeping them going, something each had found within one of the darker and less-travelled recesses of themselves, as slowly parrying they stumbled into some boiler-room deep in the fungus-ship’s bowels. Here the environment more than suited the combatants’ mood. Shapes that did not bear close inspection hulked in the murk, and the walls and floor were awash with horrid slime secreted by these giant glands to lubricate the constant peristalsis of this living craft.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Broadside for Broadside, Chapter One
Pavements soaked with standing rain stretched beneath a hard grey-black sky seared through with red. The city drew in breath. Something was moving through the clouds, something huge, something fast. Doors and windows rattled in its unseen overhead wake, and lakes and canals parted into deltas as if cloven by an invisible prow. Those citizens who turned their eyes fearfully upward saw only an immense indistinct shape, darker than the heavens it was forging through, throwing even gloom into shadow for a moment then just as swiftly gone.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Overture, Chapter One
Stars and planets wheeled overhead for a vertiginous instant before the combatants crashed through the bulkhead wall together and plunged into the cavernous square vault of the battle-cruiser’s cargo hold. Bret Stevens proceeded along the quickest route into the dark, punctuating this vertical course with rebounds and springs from the walls while striking brilliant sparks and clashing notes between his samurai sword and an alien bladed weapon that flashed with equal speed. Its owner, a lean and lithe and man dressed in form-fitting white and a round black helmet, had so far matched Bret in his aerial acrobatics and countered thrust for thrust and parry for parry.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Please be Waiting, Chapter Two
Soon a pair of sisters were in each other’s arms. Carmilla had once decried Phoenix as a traitor to The Four Heroes’ cause, and although this was not wholly unreasonable since Phoenix engineered that deception herself, there had been prior harshness and accusation too for which reconciliation never came. Now however, as Carmilla and Phoenix held one another close, their peace was finally made.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
At the Drive-In, Chapter One
Two glaring eyes on a monstrous faceless visage burst upon the horizon without any warning at all, as heavy beats of warlike music began to pound. Flashthunder, beholding in the dark, trembled. He had dreaded this moment. The tiny comfort that usually accompanied it, which was in knowing that for once in a way he wasn’t the only one terrified, scarcely applied tonight. For this evening it was very important he somehow find it in himself to not to show his fear.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
