A Collection of Lost Ships and Colonies: C.M.'s Collections, #10

By C.M. Simpson

From ships lost to accidents in warp, space pirates and plague, to colonies facing unexpected rivals, and new lifeforms on the ground, this collection draws on some of the what-ifs and maybes surrounding humanity's future among the stars. From flash fiction to novelette-length short stories to verse, the speculation runs from the idea of corporate takeovers of colony worlds, to unusual critter incursions, to the simplicity of plague, and how our future selves might cope when facing the gamut of human emotion on an extra-terrestrial stage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.M. Simpson
• Release date: Sep 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215166949

C.M. Simpson

I spent the first twenty years of my life living in different parts of Queensland and the Northern Territory. My father was a teacher who liked to travel, so he took teaching appointments in all kinds of places. I don’t think I stayed in one place for more than four years at a stretch. I wrote stories for most of that time, drawing on the different landscapes we encountered and giving a hyper-active imagination somewhere to run. Seeing so many different places gave me a lot of food for thought as I stepped into the world of adulthood and took my first full-time job, and I never stopped writing and exploring the worlds in my head. So far, I have written four collections of short stories and poetry, and a number of novels, with many more to come. I hope you have enjoyed this part of my journey.

Book preview

A Collection of Lost Ships and Colonies

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C.M.’s Collections #10

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C.M. Simpson

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From ships lost to accidents in warp, space pirates and plague, to colonies facing unexpected rivals, and new lifeforms on the ground, this collection draws on some of the what-ifs and maybes surrounding humanity’s future among the stars. From flash fiction to novelette-length short stories to verse, the speculation runs from the idea of corporate takeovers of colony worlds, to unusual critter incursions, to the simplicity of plague, and how our future selves might cope when facing the gamut of human emotion on an extra-terrestrial stage.

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NOTE: This collection draws together short pieces from the flash fiction and poetry collections in this series, but includes a number of short stories that can only be found within its covers.

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License Notes

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This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase a copy for yourself, and Thank You for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright Page

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A Collection of Lost Ships and Colonies

1st Edition

Copyright © September 14, 2022, C.M. Simpson

Cover Art & Design © April 02, 2022, Jake at JCaleb Design

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION

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To everyone who believed in me until I finally had to believe in myself.

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Thank you.

Author Forward

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Welcome to A Collection of Lost Ships and Colonies, a collection of short work themed around the mishaps and challenges of humanity’s future in space. It’s a theme that rose in many of the pieces I wrote in my flash fiction and poetry, but which also came about when I started writing short stories, and as I gathered those tales into this single volume, I noticed several recurring ideas among them.

It seems I couldn’t write a colony story without some kind of disaster happening, whether it was because something went drastically wrong with the colony transport causing the colony to end up a long way from where it was aiming for, to the idea that plague would be more of a problem than the native wildlife, or that first contact might include settlers of another species being rivals for a livable world. I don’t think I wrote about a single colony that didn’t have some kind of disaster to deal with.

The same situation occurred when I looked at my starship stories. I don’t know how many of them suffered mishaps during a warp and ended up someplace else, or how many wrecks I sent drifting until another ship discovered them and told their tales...or how many of them ended up as misplaced colonies. There were more than a few. It’s amazing the troubles a human can get themselves into when they’re not really trying.

What was surprising, given the majority of these stories were written over the last ten years, and not just the last three, was the number of the stories that revolved around the idea of illness and plague. Sometimes it was sickness causing havoc on ships, but there was also the story of a colony’s descendants dealing with a legacy of plague, and a lost pilot falling back on his training to deal with the bacteria of a new world.

Most of those stories were written before the covid outbreak, with the most recently written, and longest, story, having nothing to do with illness, at all. That one deals with an AI coming of age, so to speak, and was a lot of fun to write.

Throughout all of the stories, there have been elements of discovery, heroism, and the idea that family and human connection is important, whether it’s a father and daughter searching for something indicating the fate of a loved one, second-generation colonists discovering the secrets of, and their connections to the first generation, a father and daughter connecting over a song, or a crew member on child-minding duty making sure one of her charges gets to ride his pony.

I’ve enjoyed meeting these people. They’ve made me smile, and reminded me that we’re all connected, and they’ve also given me some hope that there is good yet to be found in our species, and that maybe this will remain true of it as it reaches for the stars.

Above all, I’ve enjoyed discovering these people and worlds as the words created them, and I hope you enjoy them, too.

CONTENTS

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Author Forward

Nothing

The Apocalypse Bride

Shelter from the Swarm

Space Hulk Rescue

The Death of the Nissam Baru

Lillie and the Colonists

Space-Faring Bungle

The Holevnek Evacuation

New Colony, Old Threat

The Spur-Winged Traders of Calemkaspia

Murder in the Colony Medilo

Star Light Reflections

Out Amongst the Stars

Uncharted Colony

Meet the Medilo Range

The Dance of Life

Skies Full of Dreams

The Montoya Evacuation

The Death of Cartenha’s Calliope

The Shenzi’s Stain

Leaf-Stalker Alarm

The Eviction Notice

Pranksters

Tears in the Night

Slavery’s End

To the Stars I Will Return

Eliminating the Elite

The Lions of Melicia Came from the Sky

Ice Shards and Fire Flowers

The Wreck of the Daun Sur Angin

Last Stop—Bryony’s Tether

Makty’s Return

The Colonist’s Wish

Space Pirate Attack

The Starships of Avanil

Starships and Colonists

Splash Woman

Storm Peace

Starships to the Sky

The Vanguard’s Regret

Colonial Error

Flip-Side Farewell

Autumnal Threat

The Starman’s Arrival

Rough Landing

The Medusa’s Starman

Affirmation

Shanra and the Iskevar

The Prides of Kadesti

The Years of Voyage

Lord of the Vortex

Colonial Exiles

The Curse of Foresight

The Sevarine Sidestep

A Hazard of the Job

The Flowers of Rudel

Holly and the Monsters

The Perfumed Planet

Forbidden

The Wolves of Lunar 10

Harrum Scarum

The Crash of the Chelsea Blue

The Long Way Home

A Spring Infestation

Launched and Lost

Of Dreams and Dread

Misplaced Colony

Drifting in the Black

The Beetle Folk Revealed

Secret Protector

Sing a Song of Colony

River’s Edge

Prospector Denied

The Colonist’s Choice

Newcomers to Dun-Le-Vie

Calliope’s Challenge

Author’s Notes

Other Work by C.M. Simpson

About C.M. Simpson

Nothing

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Written in late 1995 or very early 1996, Nothing is a science fiction short story at a time when I first started trying the short form. Until that time, most of my writing had been in novels, but the popular theory of publishing at the time was that one had to break into the short-story market to have any chance at breaking into the ‘real’ world of publishing. This piece first appeared in the now out-of-print collection They Walk Among Us.

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It was dawn on the prairie. The sun rose, red-gold, in a sea of pale blue sky, and was reflected in apricots and peaches on a sea of ice-green grass. The soft morning wind did nothing to ease the winter cold from the air.

Jerome watched the sun, and the prairie waking slowly beneath it. The colors of the land softened the brown in his eyes, tainting it first with emerald, then with gold. He would have been horrified had he known. He had been a technician in the starship’s engine room, but now he was a soldier.

He stood on a rise in the rolling prairie, the grass lapping around his knees and steaming gently as it warmed with the sun. He stood above the town of Nothing, shivering as the breeze wound chilly fingers through his hair, and the dew on the grass soaked its way through the legs of his cotton fatigues. His breath formed small misty clouds as he gazed across the plains.

Beyond the town a river wound or rather, a riverbed, for its bottom was sand and rocks and islands of earth crowned with grass and trees that water rarely touched. Jerome looked it over carefully, just in case. The uneven ground and clumped vegetation provided a perfect place for concealment.

His gaze wandered to where another sentry stood, on another rise, overlooking the town. The man had shifted so his back was to the town, reminding Jerome that the river wasn't the only place his enemy could hide. He turned to survey the ground behind the rise. Nothing broke the wavelike ripple of the grass.

The sun climbed higher in the sky, turning the grass from an ocean of softly rippling green ice to a never-ending land of waving green-tinged gold. It reminded Jerome of the wheat fields that, on another world, had surrounded his home. Small, birdlike creatures whistled and flitted just above the grass-tops. They signaled the coming of full day but, more importantly, their presence meant nothing lurked below them. Jerome began to relax. The sun, climbing towards midmorning, meant it was too late for Them to come. At least, They'd never come this late before.

Jerome scanned the surrounding prairie once more then, shouldering the rifle propped at his side, he strode towards Nothing. From the shelter of another rise, green eyes watched.

Their green matched the color of the pale green grass. They reflected the sun in striations of gold radiating from a dark-blue splotch pooled at their center. They reflected the sun in the shifting amber that disturbed the green.

The eyes watched the man’s lone figure walking toward the stone huts clustered in a bowl-shaped valley in the prairie. They saw the shimmering curtain of the force field surrounding the buildings part to allow the soldier entry, and watched him disappear into the largest hut. When he was gone from their sight, they blinked once in slow satisfaction.

It had been only a handful of years since the first starship had landed, five since the first human had emerged from the wreckage of its belly to walk across the blackened scar of its crash site, not quite enough time for man to have claimed the plains as his own.

Man had been dazed then, shell-shocked by the sudden end to his journey across the stars. He had also been stunned by the unscheduled landing on an uncharted planet, and numbed by the realization he was cut off from the rest of his kind. He and They had arrived together.

At first, they hadn't known what to call the world they'd found. It had plains, rolling grasslands and dry rivers like their home. They'd called the area Channel Country.

They hadn't cared about their new town. When asked what he could think of to name it, the captain's shell-shocked first mate had shrugged and muttered, 'Nothing'. As a name, Nothing had stuck.

The green eyes stared down at the town. Man had never known what struck him, had never been aware. When Nothing subsided into nothing, the last man would still be unaware.

Abruptly, the observer looked away, sliding back down the hill, before moving swiftly away. There were plans to set in motion.

In the barracks below, Jerome shook his head at the soldier who tried to take his rifle. He didn't want to return it. He didn't feel safe, even with the stone beneath his feet and the force field surrounding the town.

The soldier reached for it again, and Jerome leant towards her and looked deeply into her eyes. Her eyes met his gaze, blue not green. He relaxed but refused to give her his rifle, all the same.

The soldier shrugged. There were rumors in the barracks. Now she knew they were true. She watched Jerome take the rifle to his sleeping quarters and shrugged again. It didn't matter.

Jerome knew about the rumors. He knew and didn't care. As he felt the tiredness creeping through him, he loosened his boots on his feet and slid beneath the blankets. Even if he hadn't wanted to sleep alone, the rifle would still have shared the bed, and his lover would have worn handcuffs. It was the only way to be sure.

The sun rose higher above the town of Nothing. Its invisible rays scorched the prairie around the settlement. The heat rose to meet those rays in a wavering veil, and the ice green grass shivered beneath it.

The green-eyed watcher had returned, and was no longer alone. Its kindred had gathered beside it on the rise. They peered through the heat at the shimmering collection of stone buildings below and watched the men move between them.

The sun had never bothered the watchers. It had merely been convenient to let the men believe it, just as it had been convenient to let the men believe that all their eyes were green touched with gold like the plains of their homeland.

The observer smiled at the memory. The Channel Country, so like the world they had found. The eyes hardened, save that the Channel Country was still bound by humankind.

The sun reached its zenith, and the observer sent a swift spark of silent command to her waiting kin. Confusion erupted in the buildings below. Those waiting on the rise swept down the slope, concealed by the waving grass, and hidden from the settlement’s guards by dangers more immediate.

Jerome felt that danger approaching and woke. He was still swinging the rifle from beneath the blankets when the soldier struck. He died to the sound of the rifle blast passing harmlessly by her as her claws passed through his throat. He was the last.

The soldier reverted enough to shrug her way out of her uniform and the constrictive boots that bound her feet, then dropped to all fours. Outside, the sounds of battle stilled and she knew they'd won.

With a last sneering look at the body on the bed, she padded out of the room.

Since man had first come to their original homeland, her kind had been in danger of extinction. They had hidden amongst mankind until the building of the starship, then they had hidden themselves, as many as qualified for the trip, amongst the first humans to take to the stars.

The ship had been called 'Going Nowhere'. It had been built to explore. The creature that had been the soldier lifted its lips in a snarl.

From Nowhere to Nothing, she thought with scorn. My, haven't we come a long way?

With a derogatory flick of her tail, the creature disappeared through the door of Jerome's sleeping quarters and into the compound outside.

They would build the compound as a real town. They would prepare for the men who would follow. Every starship that came across them would stop here and every man in it would come to Nothing.

The Apocalypse Bride

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Written in response to another terribleminds flash-fiction challenge, ‘The Apocalypse Bride’ came into being on a beautiful Canberra afternoon. The title is a result of two rolls. The first gave me the result of ‘apocalypse’, the second ‘bride’. I combined the two and immediately rebelled against the idea of writing a zombie story. Rolling the combo around in my head, I thought ‘Apocalypse Bride’ would be an awesome name for a starship—a really big starship—and went from there. Completed on October 7, 2013, ‘The Apocalypse Bride’ was posted to my blog as a free read on October 8, 2013, and first published in 365 Days of Flash Fiction.

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The Apocalypse Bride came down in a shower of star dust and meteor debris. She took the hit that would have set the world askew, and her fleet sisters did the rest. Her entire crew were snagged from orbit after sending her on her way. Most of the rescue ships even made it planet-side, avoiding the aftermath through luck and sheer pilot bravado. No AI could fly like that.

We watched Apocalypse Bride fall, saw her sink from the ocean of stars in pieces not much larger than housing blocks. Damn, she’d been a big girl—the only one who could’ve done it, although nothing could have done it and survived. I mourned her loss. The others just stood with mouths agape and hoped nothing would land on their heads.

There was one thing that hadn’t made it off the ship. I hoped to hell it had made it through the crash and then the fall. Why no-one had thought of the research stored in her data files, I don’t know. Maybe it was too much panic and too little time. Heaven knows, the scientists hadn’t been given the time to pack. Getting them off and away in an orderly fashion had been hard enough to swing while we maneuvered her into place.

The meteor had very nearly blind-sided us, and we’d been reeling as it was. A mega-storm, an earthquake and a pending volcanic eruption hadn’t been enough to worry about? Apparently not. If Karma is a bitch, then Mother Nature is the biggest Mother out there, and she’d obviously had enough of the way we’d been treating her—enough to throw a meteor at us, while we were repairing the only space station able to look in that direction.

What can I say? That station had been broke a long time, and the government had been just as broke—broke enough that looking into space hadn’t been a high budget priority. Well, it was now.

We’d lucked out when the guys in Orbit One decided to take a peek out the window pointed away from Earth. Granted, it had been a wild and stormy day, and there’d been nothing to see dirtside, but they’d known about the broken satellite station, and they’d been joking about being able to see what the rest of us were missing. The meteor had been an entertaining shadow blotting out the starscape, until the radar started to beep. They phoned home right away.

So, I watch, dividing my time between the sky, the radar, and the machine-that-goes-beep, which I’m holding in one hand. That beep is going to go a long way to re-stabilizing the population—if it survives impact. If we can get to the Bride’s research centre. If it misses the nuclear power plant, and anything else that goes boom on landing.

I swing the detector, aiming carefully at each falling chunk. The Apocalypse Bride is coming in hard. The old girl is taking this marriage of fate a bit too seriously for my liking. I’m pretty sure that whole joining-together-as-one thing did not mean being embedded into each other so tight it’ll take a seismic survey to tell the two apart. Still, it ain’t my wedding, so what do I know?

The detector tells me the chunk we need is coming in as predicted. It sucks we couldn’t predict who’d need to evacuate. Pretty early on, we’d been thinking the Bride would come to roost in a remoter part of the country. Well, she didn’t and she ain’t, and...

I shake myself together. Grieving will come later, and that’s only if we can stop the plague that arrived in the meteor’s aftermath. Whole world was busy tracking the ash cloud from the resulting earthquakes and volcano, and trying to pull itself out of the morass left by the storm, while the aftershocks rolled through more densely populated lands than ours. I vaguely remember someone saying they’d lost sight of at least one island. Apparently, there were houses floating on the same currents carrying plastic bags to that garbage island in the South Sea.

No one had time for an itty-bitty flu. Not when it was only us.

I’d thank God for international travel and humanity’s tendency to selfishness, which means they fly when they know they’ve got a fever and darn well shouldn’t. If so many hadn’t, we’d be fighting this particular devil on our own. The world’s like that.

But people did travel sick, all hoping to get home before the ash cloud grounded them for God-knows-how-many months, and now enough of the world is trying to get a vaccine or a cure that I have a machine to detect the bit of Apocalypse Bride that we’re all gonna need, because that particular bit—if it survives—holds the key to this particular fever. Because some medical organisation found an interesting bug, and some unnamed conglomerate wanted to see how it fared in space—for reasons it won’t name—and the world united and said the results were ours.

The chunk is just a smoldering ruin of metal and plastech, where before it was a descending candelabra of flame. Re-entry is over and that budgie is comin’ home to roost—along with a whole flock of its friends. Satisfied it ain’t gonna land on the bunker, I signal the team inside. Three need a quick tap on the shoulder to get them moving, and I can’t say as I blame them. One of them needs a sharp slap upside the head.

The bunker seals and holds, but we know when our bit of the Bride sets down. It’s like a small earthquake all on its own. We’re just lucky it’s not going to set off a real earth shake, not here. There are other parts of the planet not so lucky. When everything settles, and I can get feeds from the cameras outside, I take look around. It’s an hour before we can shoulder our packs and head out to the vehicles.

Now, it’s time for retrieval.

Shelter from the Swarm

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What challenges will colonists face on distant worlds? What hardships? What joys? What answers will be left for those who follow the first wave of settlement? There are days when I don’t think we know nearly enough about the universe. This tale came about on one of them. It was written on October 27, 2013, and first published in 365 Days of Flash Fiction.

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Summer died in a maelstrom of slashing claws and teeth. Oh, the sun still shone, and the skies stayed blue, but daylight no longer offered any protection.

They came from everywhere, covering the plain like a living carpet of sharp-mouthed many-legged cushions. And they were fast—too fast to outrun.

What should have been our good days filled with easy plenty, became a fear-filled tragedy. If the Shenandoah hadn’t come early, the settlement would have been lost.

What did the first colony do to deal with this?

You don’t see any evidence it survived, do you?

No....

Then, get aboard.

Space-Hulk Rescue

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Written on November 3, 2013, and first appeared in 365 Days of Flash Fiction.

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I had lived a thousand years in limbo—a thousand years—but the capsule reached its limit and, sensing the impending catastrophic failure of its circuits, brought me out of stasis. It was a rough trip, proving even AIs make mistakes. I heard its electronics fry even as the lid popped open.

The starship was a ruin, but one where shadows moved, some scuttling over the ceiling and walls, and some striding through the lowest gravity, shining lights ahead of their armor-suited bodies. A row of projectiles stitched a line in the lid. I watched it shatter. Silence followed, then Permission to come aboard, ma’am rang matter-of-factly across the deck.

Silence.

I coughed, sat up slow, saw the leading suit watching me, observed the others turned outward, guarding their perimeters against encroaching shadows, a second invading force.

Permission granted, I croaked, from a throat too dry, and remembered to add, I will share the salvage.

With that, the rescue began.

The Death of the Nissam Baru

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Written on November 30, 2013, and first appeared in 365 Days of Flash Fiction, I cannot say what inspired this bitter-sweet tale.

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The Nissam Baru erupted into Novadel space in a rainbow swirl. It slowly coalesced into a point of light. Lost though she had been, no one rejoiced at her arrival, least of all me.

She had visited five worlds before ours. She had left the people of five worlds dead in her wake. Whatever the Nissam carried, it was deadly—and as contagious as hell. We did not want it here.

When the Nissam sent a request for resupply and repair, as it had to those before, we hid our fears—and plans—behind tears and smiles.

They thought we shed tears of joy, until we blasted them from the sky. We mourned them all, but I mostly mourned my wife.

Lillie and the Colonists

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Written on November 30, 2013, this piece first appeared in 365 Days of Flash Fiction, and is a little about colonizing and a little about parenting and the surprises a new world can bring.

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Horsey... Horsey... Horsey... The little girl’s voice called softly, using a sing-song tone of voice to call her pet. At least, I hoped it was her pet... and I hoped it was a horse. You never could tell with children.

I kept out of sight, as I followed her, scanning the country for danger. I might be letting her think she was doing something by herself, but it was nearing dusk, and my beautiful, articulate four-year-old was going nowhere without protection—not on this world; it wasn’t safe. I ducked down just as she turned around, still calling, still looking hopefully for her horsey.

I wondered which one it was this time: her horse from the plastic building-block set, or the sheep from the same—those toys were classics—or some kind of critter, although I sure as shit hoped it wasn’t some piece of the native fauna. I mean those things were cute, but ‘horseys’ they weren’t. They were more like deer—with six legs, soft blue fur and wings. I sighed. Knowing my daughter, it probably was one of the fieren.

You ate my horsey! Her outraged shriek brought me abruptly back to the present, and I forgot all about giving her illusions of independence. I’d been stupid to even think it.

I burst out of the bushes and skidded to a stop.

There she was, standing as tall as her three-and-a-half feet in height would allow, shouting up at six-feet-plus of something looking like a cross between a dragon and a wolf—three somethings, and they looked