Doc Sherwood
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The Trojan Horse, Chapter Three
On Mars, warning-klaxons were adding their blare to the noise in the beaming-station and the lurid light from the Feeder Ray’s furnace was leaping and guttering like fire under a gale. “What in the two moons are they hitting us with?” Iskira exclaimed. “Nothing should be able to disrupt field coherency so fast!”
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Mars Rising, Chapter One
The crimson whiplashes of Dimension Borg’s eyebeams tore into the world. Neetra threw herself aside, teleporting as she rolled to finish up a clear six feet from the deadly path of the rays. Dimension Borg, his great cuboid body still motionless but his computer-brain working and compensating at terrifying speed, swivelled his head. More flashes and sparks followed suit, scarlet from him and golden from her, such that for minutes on end a frenetic dance of light played across the viewing-gallery’s sandy floor while the ranks of unheeding time-portals continued to file in sedate sequence overhead. The girl was all reflexes and speed, the robot all merciless exacting precision. She scampered and skipped from spot to spot, refusing to let herself be targeted, and he was an entrenched battalion to which she could not draw near. Such a standoff had to end, and it did when Neetra, flitting unhurt out of the latest fusillade’s trajectory, was tagged through the flapping pleats of her short brown tunic. Skirt smoking from three round holes she skidded to a halt amid a small dust-cloud and threw both hands above her head.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Mars Rising, Chapter Three
Hand by hand, aching all over, Neetra made her weary way back up the tow-chain. The pilot’s chair awaited her at the end of her painful clamber and she started the Ultimate Cycle’s engines again, though they sounded in worse shape than she was and overexerting the forcefields for such a desperate gambit had sapped the batteries almost to deadness. Nevertheless our heroine set course to return to the citadel, with nothing to go on but hope she had power enough to make it there.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
When Flashes Clash, Chapter One
Once upon a time, two boys had sat together on the shores of reality and looked out at what lay beyond. This was the Seegs, an endless flat ocean of searing glaring rawness whose terrible white stretched far past the dark horizon where bolts of lightning played. No-one in this galaxy or any other could say for certain whether there was truth in the folk-song that described the Seegs as the place where the universe ended. All that was known was that those who stepped into it never came back.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Love in the Underground, Chapter Two
Phoenix Prime’s wings were the only source of illumination in a compact cave, where the tunnel through which the girls and Kral-it-Gor had entered branched off ahead into two. For some minutes the party had held still, until they were certain from the surrounding hush that they had not been followed.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Love in the Underground, Chapter One
From the steep-sided canyons between towering skyscrapers to the rubble-mounds strewn across the battlefield below, Nottingham City Centre reverberated as if in the aftermath of an electrical storm. Office-block exteriors seemed to ring with it, giving back upon the charged and tingling atmospherics all that the shockwave had laid upon them, while ongoing battle-noise gradually warped and echoed its way back from eerie distortions to the proper register and key. Even the air was swimming with residual frissons crackling out their last. Through this static-bath a single small figure moved on a determined course, like the first animal to venture from its hollow once the tempest was over.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
When Flashes Clash, Chapter Three
Figures were moving, hastening along the tunnel towards the shaft. Most of their faces were those of friends, but this did not stop Phoenix and Phoenix Prime immediately training an energy-weapon and a blazing hand on the one exception.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Love in the Underground, Chapter Three
Lightning for his part had been only too aware of the Henry Martin overhead, and immediately prior to entering the alleyway between warehouses had glimpsed her tacking off in obvious search of a landing-place. “Company’s coming, Flashtease,” he muttered grimly to his companion and prop. “Every second’s going to be crucial now.”
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Shapeshifters, Chapter Three
Professor Iskira Neetkins looked down at the face of Dr. Mendelssohn and thought exactly what her daughter was thinking. Then she eased the control lever back into its housings and brought the all-terrain vehicle to a grateful juddering halt. They had arrived at a long-abandoned mineral processing mill, a solitary pillar of old pitted stone perched high atop a desert ridge. Ancient conveyor-belts, their gears and pulleys corroded together into single metal masses that would never move again, slanted from the precipice into deep empty quarries through which the wind sang an endless lonely song. An edifice of such apparent age could only date back to before the Venusian exodus. Iskira could imagine it out here in this remote place, weathering the day when destruction came to the first Martian civilization. Though the past was crumbled and gone, fragments of it were standing yet.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Shapeshifters, Chapter Four
Joe and Gala, having broken out of the cell, were proceeding through the dark tubes of the fungus-ship’s innards on their way back to the bridge. A smooth jolt ran through the organic walls and floor, followed by an unmistakable feeling of increased inertia.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
