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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 898: A Gentlemen’s Agreement

A Gentlemen’s Agreement was originally published in Kaleidotrope in January 2022.

Violence and peril.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:50 — 45.6MB)

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A Gentlemen’s Agreement

By Aimee Ogden

Heroes are such fragile things.

Sphinx takes in the scene from a distance, first, as is his custom. He makes a wide orbit around the pillars of smoke and the pathetic caution-tape bandages. The first responders are looking in the wrong place. The cones of searchlights angle away from the response team, leaving the darkness and smoke to swallow up the navy-blue uniforms. Yellow letters reading LAKESIDE EMS float, disembodied, in the air. Steel girders cut oblique angles through the top of the fog.

They’re searching in the foundations of the ruined RadioGenInc Labs building.

Moving slowly, too: either out of consideration for the structure’s instability, or the hazardous chemicals that may have been released by the bomb, or because they are (reasonably) concerned that Doc Diablo has left traps against the unwary would-be rescuer.

It may also be that the rescue team has access to information that Sphinx does not. This is a slender possibility, though, and it will not bear the weight of action.

The Cavalier will not be found here. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 895: Man on the Moon

“Man on the Moon” was the winner of the 2022 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award and was published on the Baen Books web site on June 16, 2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:06 — 66.5MB)

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Man on the Moon

by Elaine Midcoh

Sasha Venditti hopped-skipped in her spacesuit just like the guide taught the group that morning. Two people on the tour, a teenage boy and an old woman, had already fallen at least once, but Sasha took to moon hopping like a newborn calf takes to its mother’s teat, all natural, knowing what to do. She had saved nine years for this vacation, deciding that owning a home by age 35 was less important than getting to the moon by age 35. And this excursion, the Alan Shepard’s Golf Ball Scavenger Hunt, had cost her at least five month’s salary, but, God, it was worth it.

“Don’t forget to look up,” the guide’s voice sounded in her ear. A full earth hung in the lunar sky. If my smile gets bigger I’ll crack my helmet, she thought. At home right now she’d probably be reviewing a business merger deal or advising some self-important client on a hostile takeover. But instead I’m one of the .003 percenters who’ve walked on the moon.

(Continue Reading…)

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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.

(Continue Reading…)

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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.”

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 844: The Vaulting Vandals of Termina Celeste (Part 2)

This story appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of The Colored Lens (October 15, 2020)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:54 — 70.4MB)

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The Vaulting Vandals of Termina Celeste (Part 2)

by Jordan Chase-Young

Our boots echoed through the fuselage as we hurried to the bridge. Nerva lagged behind us, grunting whenever Jacob smacked him with the chrome vaulter he’d taken from the cache.
I ordered Nerva to unlock the bridge door.

When he hesitated, I made the squid tap its poison bone against his nape.

Nerva swore in some Delphine patois and punched a number on the keypad. The latch clicked. I forced the squid to ball up behind Nerva’s head, then sprayed Jacob and myself a couple of light, round shields. Since the spray couldn’t make energy weapons, apparently, I also fashioned us each an arqueblaster and loaded them with armor-piercing bullets.

We hid in the shadows of the antechamber while Nerva made his way onto the bridge, moving carefully, as I’d commanded, to keep the squid out of Hadrian’s view.

“Done already?” crooned the merchant prince from his padded throne at the controls.

“Yes,” mumbled Nerva.

“Had a feeling the spray would take to that one. You can always tell a natural by that flame in their eye.” The throne, which slid on a railgrid in the floor, squeaked and rumbled as Hadrian kicked his way like a child in an office chair from one task to another. “As for Jacob, well, let’s hope his vaulting’s as good as they say.”

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Escape Pod 843: The Vaulting Vandals of Termina Celeste (Part 1)

This story appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of The Colored Lens (October 15 2020).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:47 — 78.5MB)

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The Vaulting Vandals of Termina Celeste (Part 1)

by Jordan Chase-Young

Back then, we liked to scour the docks of Termina Celeste for starships to tag: sleek crafts with hulls like vast canvases and cabins that were mostly unattended because the space-lagged passengers were off in the city somewhere, getting drunk or on business or both.

Blaise Landry was the leader of the crew, being the oldest out of the five of us. I was his lieutenant. That meant whenever Blaise was out, decommissioned–because sick or in deep trouble with his dad or whatever–I got to be in charge that day, which meant I got to choose which ship to tag.

Our evening began like every other: calm and lubricated with a little beer. No hint of the chaos you may’ve read about or seen on holotrope feeds. That all came later.

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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.

(Continue Reading…)

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