Scroll down to check out excerpts and links to Kevin Stadt’s full stories.
Ledger rose, bent close to the tied man, regarding him with the expression of someone inspecting a rotten corpse. Then he grabbed the chair, lifting the man and blocks and all, and tossed it an astounding distance. The mind-boggling feat of strength seemed to cost Ledger little effort.
They watched him sink. Eddie wondered how long it would take the guy to fall all the way to the bottom. He held his own breath.
The boss sat again and lit a cigarette. “I would like you to work for me. You come highly recommended. Our organization has need of a man with expertise in custom implants. Working for us has benefits few in Night Water enjoy. Wealth. Women. Respect. But you must not take this offer lightly. That man,” Ledger gestured vaguely toward the water, “took our relationship lightly. Do you understand?”
“Eddie’s Upgrade”
The underwater half of Night Water resembled airside except in mirror image, buildings stretching down toward the deep rather than up to the stars. Subpods instead of quads, fish instead of pigeons and far more illicit activity. If any activities could really be considered illicit in Night Water. Neon signs boasting gambling, sex, modifications and virtual worlds lit up the neath in Korean, Chinese and English. Marco descended past blooms of jellyfish, lines of sub traffic, three men in propeller-driven dive gear pulling a body-sized bag and spider-like aquabots doing maintenance on the outside of his building. A great white swam past, close, and for an instant Marco’s eyes met the blank gaze of the predator. Then it moved on, compelled to swim and hunt and never stop.
“Stealing the City’s Dark Dream”
“They’re coming and coming and coming, no question, no escape and if you hadn’t made me you would have gotten tenure at Heidelberg University in ten years and Cillian would have pioneered a new style of painting that would have influenced two generations and you would have adopted three more climate refugee orphans, two girls and another boy. They’re all racing here, neogelical covert ops teams and Samsung syndicate assault squads and the Sovereign’s genomod guard, all wrenched gravitywise, careening and crashing matter and energy…but the local Night Water bosses are closest. Bennett, Ledger, Price. Price will get to us first. They cauterized his soul out of him in the wars and he’s collecting the tech puzzle pieces he needs to take over Night Water and it’s a new stage of evolution with exponential snowballing monsters gathering Godpowers—”
Stephen broke in, hands up. “Stop! Just—”
“You’re bloated and rotting and floating down crushed in the black pressure and stuck in the pull of planetary mass and fish are picking at your cold, open eyes.”
“Demon’s Orbit”
Kace came closer to the captain. “Listen. I just want the package. That’s all. I’m gone after that. But my wife...she has more of a, what should I call it? Itch. To murder your type. Know what I mean?”
Valen struggled against the boa, which tightened around him. “Do you think I’m going to hand over an illegal device with that kind of power to you and your psychotic wife?”
Kace let out a long sigh and leaned on some railing. “Let’s just be straight, man to man. My wife bought that device for me as an anniversary present. You can understand. She put a lot of thought into it, and paid a frankly ridiculous amount of money for it.” He surveyed the men laying all over the bridge. “I’m trying to save your life. If you don’t tell me where it is, then she’s going to feel compelled to ask you herself. That will not be good times on your end.”
“Us vs. Them”
“You don’t get it. The Chaku didn’t just invade one or two planets, and they didn’t come to steal technology or resources. They feed on people, Dad. And their favorite way to eat us is while we’re alive and screaming. How can you just go about your day like that’s not happening?”
“It’s terrible. Absolutely. But they won’t come here.”
“You’re kidding yourself. They’ve already attacked dozens of human worlds. The Chaku are ravenous. They’ll never stop unless we stop them. Better to fight them out there, away from our home. Better to fight alongside the other humans. If the Chaku beat the humans out there, and then come here, we’ll be fighting alone.”
“We Hunt Together”
The reticle in his vision continuously scanned and locked onto anything moving, infobubbles appearing to offer analysis. A Homo Sapien man ran between apartment buildings, shrieking with a millipede-like creature scuttling up his back. A Homo Apparatus woman with augmented arms thrashed a snake-like animal that groped frantically toward her with bizarre fanged mandibles. A Homo Simius teenager covered in skittering insectoids jumped out of a thirtieth-story window only to spread his fleshy wings and crash headlong into Grieger's building and fall to the pavement below. He spotted a dozen other alien species implanted with Chaku symbiotes, each more horrifying than the last.
Grieger held the rifle tightly, gripping the cold metal. Twice while watching the battle outside he found himself at the door, about to rush into the fray. But the boy. The woman. If he left now, he wouldn't be there to get them out. Trying to save everybody would just mean getting killed and saving nobody.
”Defective”
Ro set the dog down in her chair and pulled a plasma pistol from God knows where. Kace held up a hand and barely managed to open his mouth in protest before Ro leveled it at the elderly lady’s head and fired.
The woman’s skull exploded. Red, wet bits of sloppy mess sprayed into the air and rained onto the floor of the bridge. Ro giggled and stepped closer to the headless body, peering at the smoking neck stump. A six-inch grey slug wriggled out of the esophagus and flopped onto the floor, then tried to inch away. Ro picked it up and held it in her hand. With a squeal of joy, she squeezed and popped it. Her face lit up with a how-great-was-that expression.
“Rescue on Marianus Prime”
He got into the shower, noting dispassionately that the bumps had spread over his entire body. Many had developed scabby, greenish crusts. And despite how he'd been eating and sleeping, his dad bod was transforming. The old-man potbelly had given way to abs, and his normally flabby arms had hardened with muscle. He picked up the bar of soap and regarded it in his fingers, which he had to admit looked fully alien now. They were markedly shorter and hook-like, the skin grayish and tough. At some point he couldn't remember, the fingernails had fallen off, and the tip of each thick digit had narrowed to a sharp point. He observed these things as if he were merely noticing dandelions growing in the yard or rain clouds blowing in.
“Vector of Infection”
The flower's tendrils reached out to him. They caressed his skin, each glancing touch setting off fireworks in the pleasure center of his brain. Alex saw the flower doing the same to Megan, and for an instant a thought passed through his mind that this was weird, that flowers didn't normally do this, but the notion broke apart before it even fully formed.
One of the tendrils found Megan's ear, then another her nose, her mouth, and her eyes. The threads snaked into these openings, and she shuddered as if in climax. Alex sucked in a breath as the wisps penetrated him, too, every opening on his skull. He pushed his face even closer, nearly losing his balance and wishing only that the flower had more threads and he more eyes and ears and noses.
Psychedelic fireworks of color exploded in Alex's brain and he heard himself groan. He was dimly aware that he'd fallen to the ground. His vision smeared and slid as dizziness overwhelmed him, and his consciousness ebbed away by degrees into the sweet relief of blackness.
“First Urges”
She shook her head and reached into her mind. While her memories on many subjects seemed quite full, none of the knowledge revealed anything about her. She knew about Equilarion, about its people, places, and even history, but when she tried to bring forth even so simple a detail about herself as a name, she found nothing.
She turned back to the room and noticed a tall mirror near the bed. She hesitated for a moment and then stepped before it. A gasp escaped her mouth and her hands flew to her face.
Her heart hammering in her ears, she stared into the dark eyes of a stranger. Long scars lined her face, some of them less stark, some of them a fresh and angry red. Her hair was shorn nearly to the skin. She pulled back the sleeves of her robe and found scars there, too. Farther up on the insides of her inner arm she discovered scars of an entirely different sort, words clumsily carved in her flesh. The left arm screamed “YOU WILL PAY,” and the right shouted “KILL YOURSELF BEFORE.”
“Scars and Solace”
Rico rode for months before he picked up the Tinker’s trail. He rode through woods in the South populated by ancient giants, cybernetic dwarves, and trees that grew higher than the clouds. He searched through the metal midlands of the robot nation to the East, where his alloy limbs and half-mechanical face allowed him to pass. Finally, he combed the deadlands of the North, where the sun never rises and no right men live but mutants and vampires. None of those places scared him so much as the town he’d finally tracked the Tinker to. Jagged Steel Creek.
He had sworn he’d never let Mona see his face there again.
“Outmatched”