AndrewJP

She heard the guttural grunts and the thumping impacts as it careened down the hill after her. Erina’s breathing degenerated into random, panicked gasps.
“Uh… uh…”

Play the film.
I find you in the kitchen, with the light from the window crisping your hair to gold. “What’s for tea?” I ask.
“Lasagne,” you answer.
My stomach rumbles. I slip my hands arou…

Have you ever thought
that a wedge-tailed eagle
may have composed
the perfect sonnet
in his head,
but had no means
of writing it down?

He reached into her consciousness, and was startled by the enormity of the void he found there. The tide of her pulse was dim and dry, her heart was shrunken. She was barely alive.

I have seen things you will never see. I have experienced sounds, tastes and sensations that you will never experience. I trace my ancestry back four hundred million years, and rule of this ear…

Vlasich froze beside her. He heard it too. “What the hell is that?” he gasped.
Gable moved over to them, still clutching the handgun.

Maurice Gable moved over to them, clutching a black service pistol. It was the only weapon left at the ship. It looked small and useless in the vast shadow-draped cavern.

Atheist.
Conservationist.
Tasmanian.
Do not resuscitate.

Right in the centre of the ravine floor, draped in shadow, loomed Schiffer’s mining container. None of the interior lights were on.

The infirmary of the Hayden Van Frost was beginning to look a little crowded. Despite protesting that he was fine, Trace had been ordered by Jessica Treylan to take some time away from his comm…

Passenger 12 slid quietly out of his seat. The human-like outer shell peeled away, revealing a thing of black anodized metal, skeletally thin but exuding awesome strength and grace. By projec…

“Fire in the hole!” Austin screamed. He leaned out and laid down a storm of covering fire, then tumbled down the ice slope onto the cavern floor.

Part Four: Through struggle to the stars

There was a darker side to Alan’s journey. It had been included as a safety measure, but in the frantic seconds before his launch he had totally forg…

Part Three: Degrees of Freedom

“What went wrong?”
Cowra made a pained noise. “I had bugs crawling all over my hatch, and I thought they were about to burn through. Maybe they got into the e…

Part Two: Gulf Two Piñata

Alan had never understood people who devoted their lives to science. Especially weird, abstract areas of science like quantum theory. After all, how did that knowle…

Part One: Hercules Falls

It was hard to say goodbye to her, with the air force men trying to push an oxygen mask into his face. She kept repeating the same checks over and over, cramming him…

"I had to kill for it," he said, affecting a look of understated malevolence. The middle-man’s heavy head swung around like an old piece of machinery. The jewel had already disappeared down one…

I see them dance, these ships of steel.
Two alone, they duel, filling the expanse with their sound, twin sparks of exotic metal high in the blue. They flash and thunder, rolling, swaying over …

The eyes flicked open. Apparently dry and dead a moment ago, it seemed to have been wrenched back to life by the rain.

Corporal Austin listened to the soft hiss of his pressure suit’s breathing mechanism as he stepped down onto the cavern floor. The camera really hadn’t done the place justice, he thought