Doc Sherwood
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Stories (497/0)
Undercurrent
“Grindostater units recommissioned for service on Nereynis,” were the words Psiona finally heaved out. “That’s the one.” As holographic newspaper-clippings went it was a perfunctory two-paragraph job at best, but of all Psiona’s numerous team-mates clustered round her control-desk in the asteroidal headquarters’s monitoring-cave, no humanoid or mini-jeep felt in much of a position to start second-guessing. Ever since their empty-handed return from the Rings of Xandreth, Psiona had applied herself to nothing short of unstinting toil over the galaxy’s media-streams. Carmilla, though she knew from experience how stubborn and determined girls that age could be, had more than once been on the brink of treating Psiona like one of her own little sisters and insisting she stopped taxing herself thus.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
Engagement
Three interplanetary hot-rods, crimson, cobalt and black, were parked together at a rocky corner of the island’s coast. Flashtease, standing in his shoes, thrust arms and head into his short-sleeved tunic and finished with a purposeful two-handed tug on its hem, then turning to the first of his team-mates made a masterful gesture of leadership which immediately put his bright yellow underwear on display again.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
Issues, Chapter Three
There was no beam, no line of colour nor electrical crackle bridging the short interplanetary gulf between Drenthis and her twin. Scientooth’s aesthetic had always tended more towards the Biblical. Sunshine and a lazy blue ocean fumed and plunged to purple-black sky-mountains illumining red, as torrential deluges drove down on the turbid waves and lashed Grindopolis’s skyscraper walls. In the promenades of the island city, colonials making purchases or sightseeing or merely talking to each other were drenched between breaths, and seaside recreation was supplanted by mass scrambles to seek shelter from the instantaneous tempest. Then out of the depths beneath Big Grin’s bullseye a body of mind-boggling broadness broke the roiling roof, distance and climatic conditions obscuring from shore any details besides its awesome span. Three more heartbeats of monsoon however and the thing surfaced again, leagues nearer, showing itself for some sort of armour-plated manta ray built like a good-sized sandbar. Atop harbour battlements or flood-defence banks those few Grindo observers who had not yet retreated from the heavens’ inundation stayed just long enough register as much, then fled hopping and wobbling the way of their frenzied fellows.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
Issues, Chapter Two
High-stepping it over Big Grin's abandoned exo-frame Carmilla plunged through the doorway and hit the spiral stair, Blaster-Track and his Commander skimming doggedly at her heels. For the latter duo even the uppermost level of this ancient Toothfire outpost had felt like it belonged far back in their quadrant’s bleak antiquity, and now each each corkscrew twist they traversed round the gloomy brick pillar seemed to be burying them ever deeper in that bygone age of interstellar violence. The ad-hoc munitions laboratories crowding every dungeon arch were straight out of Grindotron cinema’s most shocking historical blockbusters, or at least that was what some Mini-Flash of today would have had the luxury of thinking. Both man and jeep remembered when such weaponry was real, as here it apparently still was. Those glistering spectral exhalations which moaned from the machines’ gaping valves had their place in the olden days too, if spacefarers’ tavern-tales of The Back Garden were to be believed. Nothing but a nightmare along these lines could have come of conspiracy between Scientooth and Prince Agaric. Within the bounds of this pit from the past it was as if the present peaceful epoch had never occurred, and two of the galaxy’s most infamous expansionist empires revelled forever in a microcosm of their horrific heyday.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction
Buyer's Market
It had been a supermarket car-park, and in the early weeks they queued there while there was still stock on the shelves to buy. Today the long lines were back, but they were made up only of young women and girls. The few men moving among them were big and armoured and armed, each shaven head a pale dome. At one end of the concourse vans were parked, their doors open.
By Doc Sherwood3 years ago in Fiction