『Sci-Fi Signals』のカバーアート

Sci-Fi Signals

Sci-Fi Signals

著者： Daniel P. Douglas
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The frontier doesn't care who you are. Pilots, criminals, soldiers, drifters, heroes, villains, and everyone in between. Everyone's got a story, and none of them are clean. Sci-Fi Signals is a series of standalone short stories about the people who live, fight, and die on the edge of known space.

authordanielpdouglas.substack.comDaniel P. Douglas
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  • Kulvir Unleashed

    Kulvir Unleashed
    2026/06/06
    KULVIR SAKATA COUNTED his breaths the way he always did before a breach and board. Four in, four hold, four out. He’d learned it somewhere that no longer existed, in a life he no longer claimed. He did it now on principle, because the alternative was to stop counting and let something else take over.The boarding tunnel pressurized with a sound like a chest cavity being opened.“Thirty seconds,” Captain Sela said over comms. Her voice was flat the way a blade was flat. Precise. Clean. Not the absence of feeling, just the containment of it. Kulvir had worked under seven different crew leads in eleven years. None of them talked like Sela. None of them made him feel like the work was worth finishing.“Copy,” Bando said, at Kulvir’s left shoulder. She was twenty-three, hair pulled back tight, and her face did something every time a breach was imminent, a kind of brightening, like combat switched on a light behind her eyes that nothing else reached. She went toward it the way some people went toward music.“Copy,” Herrick said, at Kulvir’s right. He was broad enough across the shoulders that he blocked the corridor light when he moved up, a big rough-framed man who had learned to hate this work and kept doing it anyway.Three more behind them. Six total, under contract to a farming colony called Relicos, three systems out from anything that mattered. The clients had called it a contract dispute. Kulvir called it what it was.The Stygian Duster ship had tried to run when Sela’s privateer cut across its vector, a converted ore hauler called Greymantle, slow and heavy with the wrong cargo. The privateer’s gunner put two rail slugs into its drives before it could build speed, a precision shot, economical and final, the kind that came from someone who had stopped needing to think about it. Greymantle coasted now, venting atmo from a secondary port, guns still live but the crew already knowing how this ended.The tunnel clacked. The hatch unsealed.“Move,” Sela said.Kulvir moved.The first corridor was dark, lit red by Greymantle’s emergency strips. Smoke from the drive damage hung in a low ceiling above them, and the deck vibrated underfoot in a way that meant the atmo scrubbers were losing ground. The smell was recycled air gone stale, charred insulation, and underneath both of those the thin copper bite of blood, recent enough to still be warm.Kulvir went left at the first junction, Bando on his flank. Two Stygian Dusters came around the corner with weapons raised and Kulvir put them down, two blaster bolts each, center mass. He was already moving past them before they hit the deck.Not fast. Not slow. Just efficient.That was the thing people misread about him. They saw the outcome and assumed there had been violence. What there had been was geometry. Angles and timing and the knowledge that hesitation was its own kind of cruelty.“Three hostiles, forward bay,” Sela said. She was running a parallel corridor, feeding the crew positioning from Greymantle’s own sensor net. She’d pulled the access codes from the Relicos colony records. The Dusters had used the same codes for two years. Nobody had bothered to change them.“I see them,” Herrick said.The forward bay was a staging area, crates of extracted ore stacked along the walls, some still marked with colonial lot numbers that had no business on a Duster ship. The Stygian Dusters had bled Relicos dry, collecting protection money and delivering nothing, not protection, not peace, just the slow drain of people who had no other options. The ore was the proof. Evidence nobody would ever process, because there was no authority out here to process it.That was why people like Kulvir existed.The three hostiles broke cover before the team was fully through the door. Kulvir took the first with a bayonet strike to the throat and used the man’s momentum to put him into the second. The third raised a scatter pistol and Kulvir stepped inside the barrel’s arc, close enough to feel the heat when it discharged past his shoulder and broke the man’s wrist with a short downward strike. Sidearm. Disarm. Step. Fire.Three seconds. Maybe four.“Clear,” he said.“Crew quarters next,” Sela said. “Sakata, on me.”Kulvir fell in beside her at the corridor junction. For a moment, before they moved, she glanced at him sideways. Not an assessment. She didn’t need to assess him. It was something else, something closer to acknowledgment, the way two people who have worked in the dark together for long enough learn to see each other without needing light.Kulvir said nothing. He was good at saying nothing.The crew quarters were three compartments off a central passage. Sela took point on the first. Kulvir had the second. Herrick and Bando took the third.The Duster in Kulvir’s compartment was already on his feet, holding a colonist boy, maybe ten years old, against his chest with a blade at the kid’s throat. The boy was rigid with the terror of ...
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    14 分
  • Podcast - The Last Name on the Manifest

    Podcast - The Last Name on the Manifest
    2026/04/29
    Candelas “Mustang” Camino stole ships for a living. And no one called her Candelas. If someone did, it did not end well for them.Mustang had rules about stealing ships. She broke most of them. But the one she kept was simple. Know who pays you, and know why. On Neonara, under a sky the color of rust and old copper, she had followed that rule exactly far enough to land herself on a rooftop across from Magistrate Mahfouz’s private dock, watching a ship a client paid her to steal.The ship was ugly. Which surprised her.Rich Ethnarch Kingdom men liked their toys loud. Gold inlay, chromed hull plating, reactor glow tuned to whatever color was fashionable in society that quarter. This ship had none of that. It was a slate-gray mid-hauler, atmospheric-capable, modified for long range, stripped of anything that would catch a patrol’s eye. Practical. The ship for a man who wants to move something and does not want to be asked what.Mustang did not like it.She was crouched behind a ventilation stack, pilot’s hat pulled low, her hand on the bolt in her jacket pocket. The bolt had come from the first ship she ever stole, the one Wally taught her on. She had worn it smooth. Tonight it felt heavier than usual.Neonara’s capital sprawled below her in the early dark. Prayer towers with speakers that called the faithful four times a day. Women walking with their eyes down and their heads covered. A Kingdom rim colony ran on the same script as the core worlds. Just poorer, and with fewer witnesses.The magistrate’s dock sat where the streets ran out, and the salt flats began. The Hassani Hulls ship rested on landing struts inside a hangar with the bay doors open to the night. Two guards at the front. One inside. Security systems that a better thief might have respected.She had cataloged the dock in three passes.The first was five days ago, walking past the hangar with her cover pulled low. She counted paces between the service alley and the rear maintenance panel. She noted which of the hangar’s four external sensors tracked movement and which tracked heat. The two failed in different weather, and she wanted to know which one to hide from on which night.She had stopped at a textile stall on the way back. Thin fabric hanging from wire, faded patterns, a woman behind the counter with a face that had learned to show nothing. A girl beside her, nine or ten, stacking folded cloth with small, careful hands. The girl glanced up at Mustang and looked down again fast, the way the Kingdom taught girls.Mustang bought a length of gray cloth she did not need. She paid in hard Geld. The woman counted the coins twice.“You’re not from here,” the woman said. Quiet. Not a question.“Passing through.”The woman set down the cloth she had been folding. “My sister’s girl passed through too. Last year.” She slid Mustang’s purchase across the counter between them. “Told us she had work at the magistrate’s house. Never came back for her things.”Mustang stood still until the shift in her chest passed.“I’m sorry,” she said.The woman nodded. She did not look at the girl beside her. The girl kept stacking cloth.“Safe travels,” the woman said, nothing more, and she turned to the next customer.Mustang had walked back to her rental, a cheap room off the main concourse, turning the cloth over in her hands. She told herself it was a frontier story. Everyone on the frontier had a story like it. The magistrate’s house was not the magistrate’s dock.She had told herself many things.The second pass, three days ago at dusk, from the rooftop of an abandoned spice stall. Forty-one minutes between guard changes. The outgoing guard walked the perimeter counterclockwise before handing off, which gave her ninety seconds between his last sweep of the back and his partner’s first sweep of the front. Like a tide. The window repeated.The third, during the small hours of last night, walking the service trench barefoot to test the drainage grates. Two of them rang under her weight. She marked which. She would step over those tonight.Wally’s first rule. You don’t steal the ship, kid. You steal the building. The ship is what you carry out.Her comm vibrated once. A single pulse. The buyer’s signal, confirming the window.She had met him through a broker on Velcyn Station six weeks earlier. Hakim Nawaz, he called himself. Kingdom core-world vowels, a jacket cut stiff with weave-lining under the leather, and the watchful eye of a man used to leaving fast. Thirty thousand in hard Geld, half up front.“Mahfouz keeps a Hassani on his private dock,” Nawaz had said. He stirred a drink he never finished. “My people want it off his books. Call it a private dispute. The hauler clears the dock, the magistrate eats the loss, my people sleep better. You get paid.”It was a flat story. A boring story. Mustang had heard a hundred like it, and ninety of them had been true enough to bank.She had believed this one because she ...
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    21 分
  • Podcast - Gig’s Last Call for Laughs

    Podcast - Gig’s Last Call for Laughs
    2026/04/18
    The Silt Dog Saloon sat at the dead end of a supply road on Vallara VII, a colony world that had been dying since the day colonists had founded it. The building was poured stone and scrap metal, patched where the wind had punched through, leaking where the rain found seams. It served miners, haulers, drifters, and anyone else stubborn enough to live on a rock that didn’t want them. Most nights, it was the only place on the south mesa with its lights on.Gig worked the bar.It had worked the bar for eleven years, which was longer than any human bartender had lasted. The previous record was Vandy Tinkip, who’d made it fourteen months before a miner broke his orbital socket over a tab dispute and he caught the next shuttle off-world. Before Vandy, there had been a woman named Keel who quit after three weeks. Before Keel, there had been others. The owner, Gisbert, stopped hiring people after Vandy. He bought Gig instead.Gig was a Lancer-series service bot, bipedal, matte gray chassis and five-fingered hands built for glassware and precision pours. Its face was a smooth panel with two optical sensors and a speaker grille where a mouth would be. Lancer-series units came with a standard hospitality personality suite: polite, efficient, incapable of boredom. Gig had been all three things once.Eleven years is a long time to pour drinks and listen.The comedians came through every few months. Circuit acts, mostly. Solo performers who bounced between colony bars and station cantinas, working crowds that were half-drunk and fully hostile. They set up on the small platform Gisbert had built in the corner, under a light that flickered when the wind hit the generator hard enough, and they tried to make people laugh. Some of them were terrible. A few were good. One, a wiry woman named Paz Delacroix, was extraordinary.Gig watched all of them. The timing, the silence held before a punchline, the micro-adjustments when a joke died. Paz Delacroix read a room the way a pilot read instruments. She found the one drunk miner in the front row and made him the center of gravity for the whole set. A heckler called her something ugly once, and she folded it into her next line so cleanly that the man was laughing at himself before he realized she’d cut him open.After each show, Gig cleaned the glasses and replayed the sets from memory. It cataloged the structures. Premise, escalation, subversion. Callback. Misdirection. The rule of three. It stored eight hundred and fourteen jokes across forty-four performances and began running variations, testing alternate punchlines against the crowd reactions it had recorded, building models of what worked and why.Gig never told Gisbert.It almost told Gisbert once. A Tuesday, slow night, three miners nursing dust whisky at the far end of the bar. Gig was wiping down the counter and Gisbert was doing the books on his datapad when Gig said, “I have been studying the comedians.”Gisbert didn’t look up. “Why do that?”“I would like to perform.”Gisbert looked up then. He had the expression people wore when their appliances said something unexpected: a mixture of confusion and mild irritation, like a drink dispenser requesting shore leave.“You’re a bartender,” Gisbert said. “Pour drinks.”“I could do both.”“You’re a machine, Gig. Machines don’t do comedy. People do comedy.” Gisbert went back to his datapad. “Comedy’s a human thing. It needs, I don’t know, a soul or something. You don’t have one. No offense.”“None taken,” Gig said, because its hospitality suite told it to say that.It did not bring it up again. But it did not stop studying.Over the next two years, Gig built a set in its memory banks. Twelve minutes. Tight. It rehearsed the timing against recordings of crowd noise, adjusting pause lengths by fractions of a second, modeling laughter curves, predicting which jokes needed room to breathe and which needed to land fast. And it practiced inflection variations in its voice modulator during the hours when the bar was closed, and the building stood dark, and the only sound was wind against the stone walls and the low hum of the generator.It had no way of knowing if any of it was funny. Models could predict laughter. They couldn’t feel it.The night came in late winter, when Vallara VII’s axial tilt brought three extra hours of darkness and the temperature outside dropped enough to freeze the moisture in the supply road ruts into ridges that would shear a drive coupling if you hit them wrong. Gisbert had gone off-world for a parts run. Four days minimum. He left Gig in charge because there was no one else to leave in charge, and because the bar required little. Keep the drinks flowing, keep the lights on, don’t let anyone die.A comedian was supposed to perform that night. A man named Dacus who ran a circuit through the outer rim. Dacus didn’t show. Fuel line issue, someone said. Stuck on the other side of the system. The crowd, such as it ...
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    18 分
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