Friday’s Flash—About Face

-
Last week we had a short joined-worlds fantasy. This week, it’s a very short piece of military science fiction that forms the February 8th entry in 366 Days of Flash Fiction.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
About Face

“Do you want to live forever?”
If I never heard that phrase again, I would be a very happy girl. For now? For now, I shouted ‘Sir, no sir!’ with all the rest, and ran right out into the ambush. When I went down, it was under the Sarge, the machine-gunner and the comms carrier. It was a good thing the tiktaks left the dead where they lay. A good thing, and almost the end of me.
By the time the rescue team arrived I was having trouble breathing; the smell of carrion surrounded me, and the weight of the dead bore down on more than my soul. They all thought I was crazy when they dug me out and I picked up the nearest rifle, sedated me before I got fully to my feet.
Dayum—I wasn’t crazy; I was mad. Some dumb sonuva had dropped us right into the middle of a bunch of hostiles, who’d shot us all to shit. And I wanted to know who, and why. Fortunately, Odyssey take people like me, and then they use our interests to their best advantage. It wasn’t the tiktaks I was itching to kill, but the traitors upstairs.
It was just my good luck that Odyssey needed an assassin for the very same thing.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
You can find the first two flash fiction collections at the links below, until the covers are updated. The third collection will be released later this year.


books2read.com/u/bap506
books2read.com/u/3J21B3


Location: Canberra ACT 2601, Australia

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Australian Insects: An Unknown Caterpillar eating Grevillea flower buds

-
Image
So, this little guy nearly bought it when I caught it eating the still-forming buds on my Robyn grevillea, but then I thought I might like to see which particular butterfly was responsible, so I took some pictures and decided to keep an eye on it, so I knew when it pupated. The first shot - caterpillar happily nibbling on flower buds:  Yup - definitely nibbling: And here's another view. Note the little yellow lumps near its back end. Same day, but it was one of those cloudy days with variegated light. And it kept nibbling for quite some time: Stretching out to get the more tasty tidbits, and using its hind feet to keep a firm grip on the branch. Eventually it looped back on itself... ...and headed into denser foliage. It didn't always move in a straight line... How come caterpillars have more feet than butterflies? Eventually, it got into some much thicker growth (well, for a young grevillea, anyway), meaning it was somewhat prot
Read more

PokemonGo Tips - Earning the Berry Master Medal

-
Image
Another relatively easy one to earn, but it takes time. Main tip? Feed Them All. Well, okay, it's a bit more like this: Only the berries you feed to a pokemon in a gym count. You can only feed berries to pokemon in a gym that belongs to your team. You can feed up to a maximum of 10 berries to each pokemon. You can feed any pokemon that belongs to a team member, as well as your own. You can feed your team's pokemon from home, as long as you have a pokemon in the same gym - as last week's post showed. It's interesting, but really annoying if you accidentally feed a golden razzberry to a pokemon in a gym... just sayin'. Sometimes, not having a berry on hand to help catch a pokemon is also annoying - especially when you've just fed all yours to your team's pokemon - so think about that before you go all out stuffing their faces; the medal is pretty, but catching stuff is cool, too. Also, pokemon are little piggies when it comes to berries. And that&
Read more

NEW RELEASE: AUTUMNAL THREAT

-
Image
An alien autumn. An unseen predator. Deadly burrowers and an oncoming winter. And bugs big enough to ride. Joaquin only wants to warn his daughter of a new danger. To keep her safe. To make her understand her mother isn’t coming back, while keeping her alive. But what if he’s wrong? What if Mariam really did survive? What if, when everything looks like it’s going wrong, it’s really going right? Autumnal Threat is Joaquin's story. It is a father's story...and the story of a husband who misses his wife, and wants to keep his daughter safe from a new threat on their frontier world. It's a story of hope, and not giving up, and of family, as well as an exploration of what an alien eco-system might look like. It was a lot of fun to write. You can find links to this newly released, stand-alone, science-fiction short story on this Books2Read page: https://books2read.com/u/mgyopK or read an earlier version in A Collection of Lost Ships and Colonies .  
Read more