Lightburst: Displacement

By Mike Sheriff

Awake . . . Aware . . . Adrift.

After spending the last century off-planet in the Kuiper Belt, exo-miner Quatrain Dyer awakens from stasis to an agonizing toothache and an unnerving sense of displacement.

Why is he in his hive's old recspace? Why is all his gear still here? And why hasn't the reintegration team from CAGE Dynamics met him?

The answers Quatrain discovers will turn his reality inside out . . .

Lightburst: Displacement is tailor-made for on-the-go readers who need a quick sci-fi fix! The short story also includes bonus chapters from Survival Aptitude Test: Sound and Survival Aptitude Test: Hope's Graveyard, two books in Mike Sheriff's new post-apocalyptic sci-fi series, The Extinction Odyssey.

Scroll up and grab this scintillating sci-fi short today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Appended Press
• Release date: Nov 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9780995276611

Book preview

LIGHTBURST

LIGHTBURST

DISPLACEMENT

MIKE SHERIFF

A SCINTILLATING SCI-FI SHORT

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Awake

2. Aware

3. Adrift

Afterword

Bonus Chapter

About the Author

Also by Mike Sheriff

Copyright

Lightburst: Displacement

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Awake . . . Aware . . . Adrift

After spending a century off-planet in the Kuiper Belt, exo-miner Quatrain Dyer awakens from stasis to an agonizing toothache and an unnerving sense of displacement.

Why is he in his hive’s old recspace? Why is all his gear still here? And why hasn’t the reintegration team from CAGE Dynamics met him?

The answers Quatrain discovers will turn his reality inside-out. . . .

1

AWAKE

THE ABSCESS PUMMELED Quatrain’s trigeminal nerve with the ferocity of an impulse-hammer. Each incendiary pulsation seared his cheekbone and torched his eye socket.

He mashed his face into Cleeleese’s coffee-stained throw pillow. Her milky scent diluted the Kona Roast’s dusky notes, but it didn’t stop him from screaming his throat raw.

For five minutes of consciousness, an agonizing throb had accompanied every beat of his heart. More than five hundred already, he reckoned. The pain said little about why he’d awoken on the couch in his hive’s recspace. It said even less about why the ten-by-ten enclosure looked the same as he’d left it a century earlier.

He rocked forward and screamed into the pillow again. The primal yawp converted acoustic energy into a minuscule amount of heat. More importantly, it snapped his focus back onto the last stanza of his work-in-progress.

I crossed the rift whilst bearing gifts

To wind up in my hive

My tooth it aches—that’s all it takes

To prove that I’m alive

But am I so? I do not know

To feel is not to be

My dross did last the cent’ry past

To mock and screw with me

Quatrain lowered the pillow. He grunted, mindful to avoid grinding his teeth. The poem fell short of his best work, but that missed the point. He needed the distraction, and any port in a raging nociceptor-storm would do. Pain, however, was the least of his problems.

Something was wrong—as in wrong with a capital Fuck.

The return voyage from KBO 2169 should have taken twenty-two years. He should have awoken from stasis at CAGE Dynamics’s reintegration facility. He should have been met by the company’s medical staff and reorientation team.

The tidy stack of should haves collapsed under the weight of the implausible reality surrounding him. He set the pillow aside and scanned the recspace for the tenth time.

The armless couch retained the double-dip depression that once