Breach: Issue #10: NZ and Australian SF, Horror and Dark Fantasy

By Breach

We celebrate our 10th issue with a selection of 10 fantastic short stories and poems. Nikky Lee's "The Longest Hour" explores the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy in space, and Aurealis-nominated Arthur Robinson prepares for a very rainy day in "Big Girls Don't Cry".

Xander Stronach's "g = Gm/r2" is a gorgeous, heart-breaking ode to space elevators and the fathers who build them. Things get weird in "The Ethnographer's Gift" and "When Supermarkets Go Bad", while "Pilgrimage" and "The Glowing" look to Lemmy and HG Wells for their inspiration.

"The R Option" and "Blind Date" both concern sex of a strange sort, and Juleigh Howard-Hobson closes #10 with her Return Pain Spell, a working spell in sonnet form.

A great run of fiction from Australia and New Zealand. Enjoy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Breach
• Release date: Mar 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463892695

Breach

Breach is bi-monthly online zine showcasing Australian and NZ writers and artists, with a lean to sci-fi and horror. Our focus is on new and emerging Australian and New Zealand writers and artists, and helping them get their work out into the world. Publishers of Alfie Simpson's "Sub-Urban" (Breach #07), winner of the Best Horror Short Story at the 2018 Aurealis Awards. Our stories have been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Aurealis, Australian Shadows and the Sir Julius Vogel Awards. We only publish what we love and believe in and we champion our authors every way we can.

Book preview

Issue #010Science Fiction, Horror and Dark Fantasy from Australia and New Zealand

ISSN 2209-2196

Copyright © 2019 by each individual author as noted

All rights reserved.

Find us online at:

breachzine.com

facebook.com/breachzine

twitter.com/BartholemewFord

instagram.com/breach_magazine

Cover Art and Design by Oliver Hayes

Edited by Peter Kirk

Published by Breach

Thank you for supporting independent publishers, writers and artists.

Contents

Nikky Lee – The Longest Hour

Arthur Robinson – Big Girls Don’t Cry

Xander Stronach – g = Gm/r2

Christopher McMaster – The Ethnographer’s Gift

Melanie Harding-Shaw – When Supermarkets Go Bad

Matthew R. Davis – Pilgrimage

C. Heidmann – The Glowing

Peter Ninnes – The R Option

Anthony Ferguson – Blind Date

Juleigh Howard-Hobson – Return Pain Spell

The Longest Hour

Nikky Lee

Nikky is an Australian-born, New Zealand-based writer. With a background in content marketing and copywriting, she has had an advertorial published in Nature Journal, interviewed a NASA engineer about the Mars mission and written an array of articles from cyborgs and big data to real estate and health insurance. She currently works as a content writer for a marketing agency in New Zealand, servicing clients across New Zealand and Australia. You can find her here, on Facebook or Twitter.

There’s something I need to tell you, the message begins. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve replayed it. The words warble out of the speakers, weak and shaking. I press a clammy finger down on my data-pad. Send.

I teeter in the low-grav, moving to peer out my tiny porthole as I count down the minutes. Saturn dominates the window: a churning ball of yellow, brown and grey gas. A dark line – the famous rings – cleaves the view in half tonight.

One. My message has passed Pheobe and the outer moons, riding the radio waves, chasing the Artemis back to Earth. The ship would be in its breaking phase by now, solar sails folded, thrusters roaring to slow its momentum for its three-month approach into the mother-world’s orbit.

I clamber into my bunk, wriggling in my sleeping pouch, trying to get comfortable. Deep within the station, a periodic clunk, clunk chimes as the habitation arc of the Minerva completes another circuit of the core. She’s an old model, only capable of generating 3.5 newtons of gravity – less than Mars, more than the Moon.

"Everyone loses weight on Minerva, Dr Aisha had joked with me. But you’re the first I’ve seen to gain any."

That was before she ran the tests. Before her expression sobered and she’d stared at me from over the rims of her glasses. There’s a first for everything, I guess.

Ten. It’s approaching Jupiter now. Speeding past our sister station Athena as she probes the ice sheets of Europa. Like us, they are questing for proof, a glimmer, a sign – anything to know we’re not alone.

Titan’s glowing stratosphere sweeps into view outside. It is lighter than Saturn; a small moon crowning the bottom of the porthole. Its green-blue light diffuses through eighty centimetres of fused glass.

Of course, we’d taken precautions. Hormone implants; vasectomies. Minerva was no place for a child. We should have been barren, as inhospitable as the Moon. Yet, it seems, life gained a foothold.

Fifteen. My message is somewhere in the asteroid belt. I imagine it bouncing through the dark bodies, perhaps through the steel bulkhead of a mining ship. I hope, not for the first time, that they aren’t monitoring our channels.

I wish you’d come to me sooner, Aisha had sighed. You’re too far along. You’ll have to carry it to term. She’d muttered a curse in Arabic. My clinic is not equipped for this, but we’ll manage. She’d turned on me then. Have you told him?

No. What was the point? It probably wouldn’t survive the birth. That thought alone chills me.