Matt Dovey

You will just have woken in your bed. Time is short. You are groggy, I'm sure, but it is important you pay attention and do not leave--do not move--until this recording is finished.

Listen: marketing is everything.

I keep my head low as I sprint towards the floating Kakardemon, dodging left-and-right across the dusty ground of Io. A ball of lightning crackles overhead, a near-miss, and the Kakardemon's single green eye twists in fury, its red leather skin sparking in the twilight as it builds another attack. But I'm Energy Power, Queen of New Hell, I'm too damn fast and I get what I want: I leap forward with the Knife of Taertus held high and stab it into the Kakardemon's brow. I'm nearly thrown off as the floating ball of hate starts bucking beneath me, but I grab one of its curved horns and hold on tight.

The Kakardemon sinks to the rocky canyon floor with a hiss.

Michelle smiled, exhausted, as her baby's cry filled the hospital room. The lights above her were harsh and cold, and the sheets beneath her were tangled and scratchy, soaked in her sweat and stinking of iodine, but none of that mattered against such a beautiful sound. She heard it so rarely--just once a year.

Aidan stretches forward on old knees and lifts a rock from the nursery pool. There's a juvenile starfish on its underside, grown enough, so he drops it in his bucket with the others.

It's been a decent bucket. Never would have guessed it'd outlast him on the farm.

Vikram watches with growing uncertainty as Isaac turns round and around, searching for a landmark in the heavy fog. Neon signs glow through it like stars, tinted green by the algae; it's like a rainbow galaxy surrounds them, dotted with light. They may as well be floating in a nebula cloud for all they can see of San Francisco, anyway.

Vik signs a question. Their face-masks muffle whispers, and they daren't raise their voices and alert any drones, of course. They're not stupid. Every SF kid knows sign language for fog running, and Vik has picked it up fast since moving here from Sacramento.

Do you know where you're going? Vik exaggerates the signs so they're obvious even through plastic goggles. Every inch of skin is covered for them both.

Camila glanced over at the elevators, and her heart lurched when the shining doors opened. But it still wasn't Hailey. Perhaps she wouldn't come after all. Perhaps something had come up. Perhaps she'd put the phone down on Camila and immediately forgotten her, moving on as smoothly as she always had.

"Hey," said the barman, shouting over the music and putting a Coors down on the glossy-black bar. "This is on the house."

It was a cheap bottle, sure, but shit--free is free, yeah? "What for?" Camila shouted back.

I'm sure they're not a threat. Their ships probably need to be that big to travel so far across the stars and the spaces between. They don't mean them to look so dangerous.

They must be friendly. You wouldn't be able to build such things if you couldn't work together as a society.

--then scooted her chair over to the microscope. Amira only needed a glance at the holographic zoom floating over the scope. The viral cells were replicating rapidly, budding and splitting at a phenomenal rate.

"Hey, Mariana, look at this." Amira indicated the hologram, then was struck, at once, with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu: something beyond the familiarity of her lab and its clean white surfaces, or the flat icy plains of Europa beyond the carbonglass windows. And more than the déjà vu, there was a feeling of instantaneousness, that this moment had arisen out of nothing, that nothing was all that had been there before, that everything had just--appeared.

Maybe I should kill her, thought Michael, and a thrill ran through him at the idea.

He looked up from his untouched cold toast as Cathy walked back in from the garden, the winter sun picking out the stray silver hairs that had escaped from her ponytail.

"Not hungry, love?" She put a box of fresh eggs on the side.

Michael smiled weakly and pushed his plate away. "Apparently not."

"Fretting about your writing again?"

And just like that, his decision was made.

Silence is the great divider. Perhaps that is why Melinda wields it so effectively against me.

In the silence of space, solar winds flash green, pink and yellow across the gas giant before me, the aurorae twisting like sea worms. Folded nebulae of colour and gravity stretch across the darkness behind it, unimaginable arms of light like grasping gods. Dust twinkles all around me as it vaporises in the antimatter field of our ships.

My own daughter. Alien to me now.

This is the sound of the end of the world: a billion voices raised in song, a harmony twisting and ululating around the colossal vibrating bass of the core immolators, twelve shining lances of light from the Yattari ships that pierce the now-dying planet of Korthia at equidistant points and pin it in space like a dissected animal on a metal tray.

Captain Jann Yo watches from her bridge. Doubt gnaws at her, and so she connects to the colonial beacons. She needs to hear the hate and violence of the insurrection. She needs to remember her reasons.

The beacons transmit everything. They fulfil their function blindly and faithfully, unable to question their purpose, only to follow it.

They make Captain Jann Yo uncomfortable. She wonders if she is only a beacon to the Empire.