Kismet City Limits - Fiction Page

Title: Battening Down
Characters: Linton’s family
Word Count: 1900
Timeline: Late 230s
About This Story: This was written especially for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. It will also be an extra in the forthcoming Hunter’s Moon graphic novel.

Two meters or so beneath the surface, Reber darted through the sun-dappled water as if she’d been born to it — as, in many ways, she had. The filmy breathing mask across her mouth and nose filtered oxygen out of the water, as seamlessly as if she were on dry land. In the water’s embrace, her whole body was a sensory organ, the ebb and flow of the ocean alerting her to obstacles before she encountered them. Slim fingers, their sensitivity dulled only slightly by the gloves she wore to protect herself from sharp edges of coral and stings of sea creatures, danced over the shallow coral bed beneath her. With all of her short lifetime’s skill, she quickly sorted economically viable shells from the worthless, but beautiful, sea flora and fauna around them, dropping her catch into the carrybag around her neck. Read the rest of this entry »

This post will be revised frequently as new stories are added.

Some of the Kismet stories are comics; others are prose fiction. Each is identified by type in the timeline below. Read the rest of this entry »

In a galaxy where abundant resources and ample living space have rendered many of the old reasons for war obsolete, Tertia and Secuba—a harsh, inhospitable planet and its water-world neighbor—have been the site of a bitterly protracted war that’s gone on for over a hundred years.

The fundamental problem is that Secuba never was a good candidate for large-scale settlement. It’s entirely covered with water, except for a handful of volcanic or formerly volcanic archipelagos, and floating islands formed by dense mats of a kelplike plant. Secuba’s warm climate and oxygen atmosphere made it attractive to the early settlers, but they quickly ran into the problem of mineral resources—most of Secuba’s minerals can be recovered only through expensive sea-floor mining or even more expensive reclamation from seawater. Read the rest of this entry »

Title: untitled Signy vignette
Character: Signy
Word Count: 549
Timeline: immediately post-Hunter’s Moon
Warning: Spoilers for Hunter’s Moon

Read the rest of this entry »

Title: The Seaweed Pool
Characters: Seymour, Guido
Word Count: ~1700
Timeline: Probably the early 270’s

“Seymour, you gotta come see this! There’s a mermaid in the bathtub!”

Most of the time, my brother Guido is a dependable kinda guy. For a professional henchman, I mean. He’s ideally suited to this kind of work — he just ain’t got the imagination to get sidetracked or distracted. Confused, maybe, from time to time.

This, however, goes beyond simple confusion. Read the rest of this entry »

Title: Souvenirs
Characters: Jackie
Word Count: 926
Timeline: About 30 years before the present day

Under a sky so pale it was nearly white, the desert of East Patagonia baked in the vicious Hadean sun. The planet was a failed terraforming experiment, one of many … but still inhabited, as many of them were. The thin atmosphere could support life, barely. The planet boiled during the day and froze at night. Its people eked out a rough living as miners or by herding small, shaggy goats that were genetically adapted to survive in the harsh climate.

Nothing moved in the scorching afternoon sun — until a brown lump that had hitherto appeared to be part of the rocks suddenly stood up and proved to be a skinny kid in a battered, wide-brimmed hat. Next to her, a long-legged scrub dog stretched and slowly uncurled itself from the shade. Read the rest of this entry »

Title: Aubergine
Characters: David Aubergine
Word Count: 1100
Timeline: Somewhere in the 250’s

Six days before the next House Conclave, Arthur Ling Mordant, Scion of Aubergine House, died on his homeworld Anubis.

Like a flock of bright birds in their house colors, fifteen of the sixteen Anubian Scions — or their duly appointed representatives — met at the Truce Table to discuss Arthur’s succession. The empty chair was Aubergine’s. The representative of that house sat by himself in a corner. He disdained the chair that had been offered him, and instead sat on the floor, reclining against the wall in an immobile mockery of relaxation. For this man sat in an absolute, stonelike stillness, a stillness that very few people can achieve, and then only through intense mental effort.

He could do it naturally.

He had been doing it for an hour and a half. Read the rest of this entry »

Title: Tradition
Characters: Gil, Ru, Zack
Word Count: 2200
Timeline: 275 GST

“You going home today?”

Zack Boundary glanced up, surprised not just by the question, but by who was asking it. It was nearing the end of his night shift in the Kismet Port Authority, and he was finishing up typing up the week’s situation reports before heading back to home, to his wife Ru, and to bed. He’d let his new partner (Colette, a novice who’d only been in Customs for a few days) take the night off so that she could get a good night’s sleep before the day’s festivities. At the moment, the only thing on his mind was making it through the half-hour until his relief showed up, eating dinner with Ru — who also worked nights — and then getting some rest.

He looked up at his brother Gil, standing in the doorway of the Customs control room with folded arms and wearing his characteristic scowl, and all he could do was wonder why in Kismet Gil would be asking if he was going home when he got off shift. Of course he was going home; where else? Read the rest of this entry »

Title: Wizard of Aaargh!
Characters: Frank and nearly everyone else in town
Word Count: about 6300
Timeline: Probably the early 270’s, but it doesn’t really matter

Sometimes he hated this moon.

Frank Bernetti gritted his teeth as he hiked up his slit-sided skirt (Guido hastily averted his eyes) in order to snap his pressure suit around his legs. Vacuum protection gear was simply not designed with 1940s fashions in mind.

“Guido, quite gawking at the ceiling and open the damn airlock.” Read the rest of this entry »

Title: Henchmen
Characters: Frank, his bodyguards, little bit of Fleetwood
Word Count: 7400
Timeline: The early 270’s (prior to Father’s Day)

High above Kismet, there’s a bar with the fancy name of Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, but everybody calls it Godiva’s. It dangles from a long rail out from the Towers and it’s shaped like a big wheel, and it spins, so the dancin’ folks can see the stars under their feet and the city over their heads. I don’t get the whole appeal myself. Some chick whose name I don’t remember explained it to me once, usin’ words like “sacred energy” and “flow of chi”, right before I broke her husband’s kneecaps not ten feet from where I was standing on the day Frankie said goodbye.

We were standing on the ceiling with the stars under our feet, with couples and threesomes dancing beside us and above us. Frank always liked Godiva’s, as it’s the sort of place where folks don’t ask questions, but it still creeps me out. Call me old-fashioned if you like. I was born in a planetary gravity well and I got some pretty conservative ideas about which way gravity’s supposed to point and which way it don’t. Read the rest of this entry »