Resurrection View

© 1996 Stephen Hunt (UK)

Print this one out? Approx 5 pages of A4 text

McKinley watched the submarine sink beneath the obsidian skin of the Atlantic, the line of her closed helicopter bays the last part of the carrier to swirl out of sight. Drake was already ahead of him on the beach, but curiously inattentive, as if he had inhabited this landscape for so long in his imagination that confirming the fact of its existence was a sudden inconvenience to his obsessions. A barrier risen from the sand.

 "How do you like it, McKinley?" asked Drake. "Better than the Rhur, eh? Imagine what it will look like when the sun comes up."

 McKinley nodded, unsure if sunlight could ever really brighten this dark shoreline, but certain that most things were better than ending up in the hell of Spandau, marching alongside the twin banners of their unhappy island home: destiny and duty. He thought of the woad-coloured savages in the Black Forest and shivered, imagining a flint-tipped spear sinking into his flesh, confronting what he knew had to be his own cowardice.

 "We've been outside the Royal Oak's atmosphere for the five minutes now, doctor. We need to take our shots."

 Drake reluctantly pulled out two self-injecting vials from a cigarette case-sized slab of ceramic, unhappy to confirm their undeclared presence as invaders even by such a small act as a spectrum shot.

 "I've never heard of half of these diseases," McKinley said, attempting to fill the uncomfortable silence while rolling up both his sleeves, "Stab, CRAIN, Poliomyelitis-six. Besides, they need human contact for infection, don't they? You said that's unlikely."

 "Unlikely," Drake agreed. "But we've had no contact with this part of the world since the Change. It has never been very high on the palace's priority list. No, if it wasn't for my insistence the captain might never have diverted from the Falklands."

<

Download this story (and get a fab free digital book reader if you haven't already)

Read the rest of this short story? Well, you can download the complete story here for free.

And if you haven't already got it, you'll first need to download the fantastic & free E-Rocket Reader software (as shown in the picture above) to read our digital story. We have all fallen in love with the free E-Rocket Reader here at the Crownest, and strongly suggest you download it too.
more about E-book software

Back to the Short Story Listing

The latest Science Fiction Books