Posts Tagged ‘crime’

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Escape Pod 955: Endymion

Escape Pod 955: Endymion is an Escape Pod original.

Contains transphobic slur, adult language, and brief but graphic violence

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:38 — 45.3MB)

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Endymion

by Sylvie Althoff

It’s green here—green and wet. The twittering of birds in the treetops pauses as one voice, as if the forest is holding its breath.

A lone eagle wheels silently overhead. Then the sun pierces the clouds, scattering drops of gold across the misty valley, and with a lusty yawp from the eagle, the forest begins its song anew.

I suck in a breath of the bright, sunny air. Dinosauric ferns waft their brown-speckled leaves in the gentle breeze. The rocks and tree trunks are covered with blankets of emerald lichens. The sound of rushing water fills my ears.

“What do you say, Mac? I told you it wasn’t so bad out here.”

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Escape Pod 954: Chandra’s Game (Flashback Friday)

“Chandra’s Game” originally appeared in Lone Star Stories (2009), and in Escape Pod 373.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:03 — 51.4MB)

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Chandra’s Game

by Samantha Henderson

Joey Straphos, Papa Joe, told me once that Chandra’s Game is a bitch of a city, fickle but generous when the mood strikes her.  But Papa Joe was a romantic.

Chandra’s Game roots in the side of a barren asteroid moon like a tick.  Over the years we’ve burrowed deeper into rock and ice until poor Chandra is mostly Game.  We loop the twin wormholes, Gehenna and Tartarus, roundabout in a figure eight, ready to catch the freighters as they escape from hell’s dark maw.  We strip them of goods and drink their heat, load them up and send them into another hell.  It’s a profitable game, Chandra’s.

My mother smuggled me into Chandra’s Game without patronage and compounded her error by dying without permission; I was Terra-born unless she was lying, which was likely enough.  I joined the other unregistereds down in the Warrens: ferals that lived off the Mayor’s Dole and by odd-jobs when that wasn’t enough.  Papa Joe fed us, and sometimes the tunnels were glorious with the smell of meat, and if you were smart or hungry enough you didn’t ask from what.  Where there’s humanity there are rats, and Joey wasn’t a rich man, not then.  But food is food, and he’d bunk you if he could, and if all he asked in return for the latest Warren scuttlebutt or a few sticks of ephedrine off a freighter’s load, what of it?  Saints are few and far between in Chandra’s Game.

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Escape Pod 932: The Walking Mirror of the Soul

This story was originally published at Apex Magazine #134 in December 2022.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:37 — 61.7MB)

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The Walking Mirror of the Soul

by Renan Bernardo

My desire was written all over Halcyon’s torso, a shimmering tattoo composed of my thoughts and the Vonkrai’s crusted skin.

{Tell Vitória you know.}

Luckily, we were alone in Teresa Station’s investigation room, so no one could read it. I was uneasy, palms sweating, tapping my feet on the floor. Normally, I met Vonkrai in restaurants, in the sightseeing deck or in the human-Vonkrai gatherings and conferences to restate our decade-long commercial and cultural partnership. In those places, their bodies were scrawled with everyone’s thoughts in a mess of unidentifiable and overlapping scribbles translated from human minds to Vonkrai bodies. Latin, Gujarati, Hangul, Cyrillic, Nsibidi, Arabic, and dozens of others from the Teresa Station human population. Mingled with our bulky and confusing thoughts, the Vonkrai’s own dot-like script were scattered all over their bodies, words and logograms hopping from body to body, untraceable even for those who knew how to read Vonkraish.

But now, my mind glared back at me from their body like a damn accusation. It was hard to even follow the Detective 101 tips, like maintaining eye contact and interpreting body language. On the other hand, those things wouldn’t really work with Vonkrai—or they would be hard enough even for me, Isabela Cardoso, Teresa Station’s only investigator.

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Escape Pod 865: Spider (Part 2 of 2)

The Way of the Laser (Vernacular Books, May 2020)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:50 — 51.0MB)

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Show Notes

Don’t miss Spider, Part One

Spider (Part 2)

by Patrice Sarath

Nguyen

“Attention. Attention. Stay in your quarters. Attention. Attention. Stay in your quarters.”

The bloody pink light of the station alarm washed over Shane and Ray as they pushed at top speed toward the residential arm. Despite the warning, most of the station population was watching from their doorways, in various stages of ragged middle of the night un-dress, hair floating around fluid-bloated faces.

They encountered the first drifting blood drops as they rounded the corner of the miners’ section. Adrift in the corridor was the body of one of the brothers, barely conscious. Shane reached him first, wrestling the body around so she could run a diagnostic. His face was battered, as if the other brother had tied him to a rail and then kept ramming an oxygen canister at his nose. She fished for his I.D. Rose.

“Where’s Carter, Rose?” She said. His eyes fluttered, but he made no response.

“Where’s medic?” Ray yelled into his mic. “What is taking you guys so long?”

“On our way,” came a voice over the radio.

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Escape Pod 864: Spider (Part 1 of 2)

The Way of the Laser (Vernacular Books, May 2020)

Some harsh language

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:35 — 57.6MB)

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Spider

by Patrice Sarath

Bifrost Mining Station, June 2063
The plan

I knew the two miners were trouble as soon as they pulled themselves into the bar. They looked around and one, I think it was Carter but you try telling the brothers apart, nudged Rose and nodded his chin at me. They came over and slid next to me, one on either side. We floated there, me pulling at my bulb of cheap station whiskey, trying not to show my unease.

“Hawkes,” said Carter. “Good to see you.” He was close enough now to see the scar under his eye, a reminder of when Rose had tried to gouge his eye out. Family.

“Hmmm,” I said.

Carter was unfazed and leaned closer. “We have a proposition.”

My heart sank lower.

Carter said, “It’s your share of five hundred million dollars and a way off Bifrost.”

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Escape Pod 828: City of Refuge

City of Refuge originally appeared in Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology, November 2020.

Contains harsh language, violence, and drug use

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:27 — 49.4MB)

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City of Refuge

By Maurice Broaddus

Hope was a fickle bitch. Mercurial and quixotic, the kind of woman you spent the whole week getting ready for only to have her cancel the date at the last minute.

The world was ending, but Royal Parker still had to go through the motions of a job interview. He knew as soon as he sat down across from the manager—in his ridiculous red and white striped shirt and paper hat—that he wasn’t getting the job.

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Escape Pod 795: Tiger Lawyer Gets It Right

Tiger Lawyer Gets It Right originally appeared in Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology in November 2020.

One scene of gore, violence and death. A few A-grade curses.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:40 — 55.0MB)

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Tiger Lawyer Gets It Right

By Sarah Gailey

Vladislav Argyle rested his head on the cool titanium surface of the plaintiff’s table. It dipped a little under the sudden weight of his skull, then hummed as the antigrav lifts adjusted their power to accommodate their new burden.

“Mr. Argyle? Are you alright?” The bandage-swathed tip of Argyle’s client’s primary tentacle crackled near his ear, and he knew that she was touching his temple in a gesture of inquiry. The people of Ursa Vibrania were very skull-oriented in their communications. It was sweet, really, how they wanted to know what was happening inside every other endoskeletal vertebrate creature’s head. How much they wanted to understand.

Argyle clenched his fists in his lap. The Vibranians were so kind, and they had trusted him to help them, and he was failing. As always.

“I’m fine,” he said through his teeth. “Just a little ritual I have after opening statements.” (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 766: The Unrepentant

Escape Pod 766: The Unrepentant is an Escape Pod original.

This story has content notifications for language and violence.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:45 — 60.5MB)

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The Unrepentant

by Derrick Boden

First time I saw her, she was bleeding from her left nostril with a nightstick jammed under her chin. Officer Vang was twisting her arm all kinds of unnatural behind her gene-hacked body, pressing her face to the exterior window with four thousand miles of freefall and filth and societal decay on the flip side. The lights in the cramped hallway–alpha quadrant, fourteenth floor of this godforsaken space elevator–painted her face a rusty orange. She was just another dirtside ghoul from the Rot, weaponized by another shadow corporation that had repurposed Earth’s battlegrounds into one big biotech testbed. Officer Vang–an over-muscled knot of a woman that never missed a chance to make example of one of us refugees–had the ghoul jammed against the hull so hard her boots were dangling like the guerrilla corpses in the town squares back home. She should’ve been howling in pain.

She was laughing.

I’m a shrewd woman, a survivor. Should’ve shuffled right past along with the seventy-some other scrag refugees, all beleaguered and shock-eyed with horror. We weren’t twenty hours from Processing–another week before we’d reach Distribution at the lift’s orbital counterweight–and the illusion of freedom had already bled dry. We’d won the lottery, escaped the Bloc, only to be stamped and sorted and packed into this long vertical handoff from one indenture to the next.

Maybe that’s why I stopped. Something in her laugh said nice try. Sure, we’d spent our respective lives on opposite sides of the war–ghoul against scrag, Rot versus Bloc. Sure, defiance is a cheap substitute for hope. But goddamn did that laugh sound just right, just then.

Besides, I had a plan. I’d been tracking Officer Vang since her immigration crew had subdermaled KUIPER INC down my forearm and tossed me onto this lift. I had a better shot at seeing my twenty-second birthday back in the dirtside scrabble than mining the Kuiper belt. Fucking sponsors.

Only hope now was to carve my own fate.

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Escape Pod 761: Jolene

This story originally appeared in Interzone 283, September 2019 (shortlisted for BSFA Award for Shorter Fiction)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:10 — 41.9MB)

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Jolene

by Fiona Moore

“I’ve got a case for you,” said Detective Inspector Wilhemine FitzJames. “It’s a country singer whose wife, dog and truck have all left him.”

“Seriously,” she said, after my unprintable reply. “The dog died and there’s nothing much you can do about the wife, but I thought you might be able to help with the truck.”

I leaned back in my reasonably-priced office chair so I could see the screen better. “So, you want me to try and patch things up between them? Bit outside my usual remit.”

The hand-lettered card under the buzzer downstairs read DOCTOR NOAH MOYO, CONSULTANT AUTOLOGIST, and I usually had to explain that to the uninitiated as “like a cross between a psychologist and a social worker, only for cars and other intelligent Things.” Wills, though, had been working for the London Metropolitan Police’s automotive crime unit for much longer than I’d been in practice, and was more likely to ask if you specialised in criminal, restorative, therapeutic or developmental autology, and if your clients were primarily cars, bots, or home appliances.

“Not sure you can.” On screen, Wills shook her mane of locs. “The truck has been ignoring all communications, and doesn’t seem likely to agree to mediation. I was brought into the case because the fellow turned up at the station reporting an automotive kidnap, but it didn’t take long to establish that the truck had left him and was working for a new user. Voluntarily.”

“As is his legal right,” I said, “Hers? Its?”

“Hers. Texcoco pickup. Name of Jolene.”

The name rang a bell, and, tediously, sparked an earworm. I told my inner Dolly Parton to get knotted. “If she didn’t violate the terms of her contract, she’s free to leave and work for someone else.”

“That’s what I told him,” Wills said. “But he’s having trouble coming to terms with it. Kept claiming she’d been kidnapped. Got upset when we repeatedly told him that the police can’t investigate a crime that isn’t a crime. I thought maybe you might be able to help. Either patch things up between the two of them, or help him understand and move on.”

“Okay,” I said. I hadn’t had many cases recently, and was also hoping to move on, to an office that wasn’t deep within an old industrial park and shared with a local construction and demolition company. Maybe print out some furniture that was more comfortable than it was reasonably priced. “Tell him my fees, give him my address and suggest he makes an appointment.

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Escape Pod 616: My Generations Shall Praise

First published in Interzone, November 2016, and reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction 34, edited by Gardner Dozois.

Contains frequent class-one cursing (f-bombs and the like), graphic description of murder, somewhat less graphic description of sexual assault, and bad parenting. Not for young ears.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:43 — 67.0MB)

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My Generations Shall Praise

By Samantha Henderson

The woman on the other side of the glass must be very rich and very sick. I study her face, looking for any kind of resemblance. If I’m a Jarndyce candidate, we must be related. It’s the only way she could ride my brain.

She’s a predator. I recognize my own kind.

Mrs. Helena McGraw is studying me too. The side of her mouth quirks up, twisting her face out of true. “Great-grandmother Toohey,” she says, a little too smug.

Never knew my great-grandmother, but I do a quick calculation. That makes us second cousins. Helena’s lucky, me ripe for picking on death row. Only this low-hanging peach has some say in what’s going to happen to her. Not much: a choice of deaths. But how I choose means everything to her.
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