Fiction
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By: Christopher Maffei The Bridge of the Silent Wind The heighliner’s navigation bridge was a cathedral. Three hundred meters of crystalline circuitry, suspension fluids, and the organic architecture that only the Guild could manufacture. At its center, suspended in a tank of orange spice-gas, floated Navigator Kaelen—his body elongated, his eyes milky orbs that saw…
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The trouble started when they stopped saying “Aloha” to each other. Not the tourists—they’d been gone for years, their resorts shuttered and their beaches empty, replaced by Chinese-manufactured surveillance towers that blinked red across the ridgelines like malevolent stars. The trouble started when the kūpuna—the elders who remembered the overthrow, who remembered when their grandparents’…
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Sarah Mancini, twenty-nine, had spent four years steaming oat milk at the Starbucks off I-71 in Columbus, Ohio. She could make a Butterbeer Frappuccino with her eyes closed, which was good, because her eyes were usually open on her phone, scrolling for a way out of Ohio. One rainy Tuesday, while wiping caramel drizzle off…
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The Annihilation of the NATO Surface Fleet 18:00 ZULU – THE INCURSION The order came from Norfolk, Virginia, via satellite relay. Admiral Henk Brinkman of the Royal Netherlands Navy, commanding NATO’s Standing Maritime Group 1, read the flash traffic on his secure tablet. Execute Operation Northern Safeguard. Effective immediately// The plan was simple in concept,…
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Subtitle: The Obsolescence of the MIM-104 Patriot and the PAC-3 MSE interceptors 13 FEBRUARY 2029 — SWISS PLATEAU, CANTON OF FRIBOURG The AN/MPQ-65 radar at Mount Vully had tracked the launch precisely. Three thousand kilometers east-northeast, a road-mobile Transporter Erector Launcher had risen from the tree line near Krichev-6 Aerodrome at 06:13:03. Nineteen seconds later,…