Expatriates

Expatriates

A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

By James Wesley, Rawles

Wyndhamites

“Never forget, even for an instant, that the one and only reason anybody has for taking your gun away is to make you weaker than he is, so he can do something to you that you wouldn't let him do if you were equipped to prevent it. This goes for burglars, muggers, and rapists, and even mor so for policemen, bureaucrats, and politicians.”

(Aaron Zelman and L.Neil Smith, Hope, 2001.

Wyndham, Western Australia – Late November, Western Australia – Late November, the Second Year

Peter and Joseph snugged up the mooring lines at the pier while Tatang shut down the engine. They began unloading the suitcases from Tiburon, carrying them up a ribbed aluminum gangway ramp, which had rollers at the end to adjust for the tide. A woman from the crowd stepped up the Rhiannon and  said, “My name is Vivian and you're all welcome to stay at our house in Wyndham East while you get things sorted out.”

“God bless you, ma'am,” Rhiannon replied.

They were told that the pier was primarily used for exports of live cattle, cattle hides, lead, and zinc. The barge nearby was laden with zinc ingots nominally bound for South Korea, but the shipment was delayed by the international financial turmoil. The pier operator offered them three nights of free anchorage at the pier or indefinite free anchorage amid the larger group of yachts farther out, where a skiff would be required to reach them. Tatang opted for the latter.

After they had unloaded the baggage and their two GPS receivers, they borrowed skiff from the harbormaster and anchored Tiburon using a permanent buoy at the fore and and a concrete anchor at the aft.

With the engine still hot, Tatang gingerly removed the Mitsubishi engine's fuel pump and wrapped it in rags and then a pair of bread bags. The pump went into his duffel bag. He told Jeffords, “Nobody is starting her motor without this.”

Expatriates. Photo by Elena.

Vivian soon had them and their bags loaded in her Toyota Estima minivan. Rhiannon was impressed with how quickly and with such wordless economy of motion the woman attached the baggage to the car's roof rack with bungee cords. She looked like she had a lot of experience doing it. Her full name, Alvis Edwards, was a broker in both salt and exotic hardwoods.

In just a few minutes, they were at Vivian's home in Wyndham East. It was a large house and one of the few in town that had a swimming pool. The great room was lined with taxidermied trophy heads from three continents – mostly from Africa. A childless couple, the Edwards' passion was big game hunting. Vivian told them that they had taken many hunting trips to Africa, Canada, the United States, and even Argentina. The floor was mostly covered with tanned hides of everything from bears to zebras. The backs of the couches were draped with gazelle hides. Joseph spent a long a long time examining the trophy mount collection of such magnitude before and they were fascinated. Tatang observed that it was like walking into a museum. To Rhiannon, it was reminiscent of living room of the house near Bella Coola where she had grown up, though her old house had a much smaller number of deer, elk, and caribou mounts.

(About the author: Former U.S. Army Intelligence officer and survivalist James Wesley, Rawles, is a well-known survival lecturer and author Rawles is the editor of SurvivalBlog.com – the nation's most popular blog on family preparedness. He lives in an undisclosed location west of the Rockies and is the author of the bestselling Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse; Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse; Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse; and a nonfiction survival guide, How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It).

Phasma

Star Wars: Phasma

By Delilah Dawson

Scanning the sands before them, Siv saw two things. The first was a stranger fence made of meta; wore stretching forever in either direction. The second was a figure glittering so bright that it burned her eyes to look at it.

Without a word, the lead GAV changed its direction, aiming for the figure. Siv couldn't tell from so far back whether it was a structure, a droid, a machine, or something different. Another mystery seen only from far off involved white placards placed at equal distances along the fence, flapping against the metal and making an eerie, toneless song as they were buffered by the wind. Any writing that had been there had long ago been scoured away. The fence went on and on, rising stark against the bright-blue sky, and they didn't slow as they approached.

When they were almost within blaster-rifle range of the bright thing, the first GAV skidded to a halt. Brendol and Phasma's vehicle drew even with it and stopped, as did Siv's. All in a row, engines growling, they stared at the puzzling figure. Phasma pulled out her quadnocs, considered the scene, and handed them down to Brendol. He, too, looked a long time, and when the 'nocs dropped, he was frowning, his whole face bright red and dripping with sweat.

“What is it?” he asked Phasma.

She took her dead. “Nothing I've ever seen before”.

“The way the sun reflects off it,” Torben said. “It burns my eyes.”

An extraterrestrial member of the Enterprise starship. Photo by Elena.

The two leaders hopped down from their vehicle, and Phasma gestured to her warriors to join her while Brendol consulted his troopers. Even with the quadnocs, Siv couldn't tell what the bright thing might be, and she had the sharpest sight among the Scyre folk.

Gosta sidled up to Siv and tried the quandoncs herself. 

“Stranger,” she muttered. “It's too lumpy for a machine, but too shiny for a living thing.”

Brendol put a hand on Gosta's shoulder. “You're still injured. You stay here and guard the GAVs. Everyone else, have your weapons ready.” He pulled his own blaster and fiddled with the switches on the side. “This is not normal.”

“Well, what is, these days?” Torben said, hefting his club and ax.

The troopers went first, blaster rifles up and ready, their boots slipping through the sand. Phasma came next, Siv and Torben flanking her. Brendol came last, his blaster shaking in his hand as sweat dripped down his forehead in a way that Siv found nearly blasphemous when she glanced back. Gosta clearly hated staying behind, but she held her blaster and took her place in the back of her behicle as the others crept up the hill. Defying Brendol had somehow become as ridiculous a thought as defying Phasma.

The whole thing seemed silly to Siv. If the mysterious object was a machine, it either was deactivated or had been tracking them all along. If it was an animal, it was stupid or slow, as it hadn't budged. She couldn't think of anything else that could pose a real threat, and yet Brendol commanded them to sneak up on it? Still, her leader was following his orders, and so she would follow Phasma.

Closer and closer they crept in plain sight, every blaster aimed, every bit of metal reflecting in the sun, and still the glittering thing didn't make and move whatsoever. Soon Siv could make out the true shape of it, and it reminded her of a statue she'd seen in Arratu, a piece of claywork vaguely in human form, apparently representing some much-loved Arratu of time past. The shape was lumpy like that, and yet the material wasn't anything she'd seen before.

Ultima

Ultima

By Stepĥen Baxter

Soon they had their fields laid out and plowed. It was hard work. The lack of draft animals, and a paucity of machines away from the richest ayllus, meant there was a reliance on human muscle. But for all they grumbled, Romans were used to hard work.

There seemed to be no seasons here, as far as Mardina could tell from interrogating baffled locals, though, she supposed a cycle of shorter and longer days, a “winter” created by selectively closing some of the light pools, could have easily been designed in. But then, much of the Incas' original empire on Terra had been tropical, where seasonal differences were small. This did mean that growing cycles, and the labor of farming, continued around the year; you didn't have to wait for spring.

Yet life wasn't all work. They might have to pay the mit'a, bu the legionaries soon learned they didn't  have to go hungry. If you fancied a supplement to your vegetable based diet, you could always go hunting in the rain forest, where there seemed to be no restrictions on what you took as long as you were reasonable frugal about it. There were big rodents, which the ColU called guinea pigs, that provided some satisfying meat, even if they were an easy kill. Smaller versions ran around some of the villages.

The lack of alcohol was one enduring problem. It seemed to Mardina that the local people didn't drink, in favor of taking potions of different kinds. Chicha, the local maize beer, was officially used only in religious ceremonies. After a time Quintus turned a blind eye to the illicit brewing of beer.

It grew wild in the forest... Photo by Elena.

The production of coca was part of the mit'a obligation. But you could grow it anywhere – it grew wild in the forest – and everybody seemed to chew it, from quite young children up to toothless grandmothers. Some of the legionaries tried it, taking it in bundles of pressed leaves with lime, and a few took to it; they said it made them feel stronger, sharper, more alert, and even immune to pain. Medicus Michael officially disapproved, saying that the coca was making your brain lie to you about the state of your body.

With time, the villagers started to invite the Romans to join in feasts to celebrate their various baffling divinities. The adults passed around the coca, smoked or drank various other exotic substances, played their noisy pan pipes, and danced what Mardina, who did not partake, was assured were expressions of expanded inner sensation, but looked like a drunken shambles to her. The children would hang lanterns in the trees, and everybody would sing through the nigh, and other communities would join in until it seemed as if the whole habitat was echoing to the sound of human voices.

The local people would always look strange to a Roman or Brikanti eye, Mardina supposed. The men wore brilliantly colored blanket-like tunics, and the women skirts and striped shawls and much treasured silver medallions. But they grew tall and healthy. Sickness was rare here. The medicus opined that most diseases had been deliberately excluded when the habitat was built, and it was kept that way by quarantine procedures of the kind legionaries had had to submit to  on arrival. And, if you ignored the forest-bird feathers that habitually adorned the black hair of the men, and the peculiar black felt hats with wide brims that the women sported, the people could be very attractive with almost a Roman look to their strong features.

Universe

Universe

Need a gateway plan? We've got a club for that!

 … still quite young when I realized that there was something wrong with Einstein’s Theory of Gravitation. In particular, there seemed to be a fallacy underlying the Principle of Equivalence. According to this, there is no way of distinguishing between the effects produced by gravitation and those of acceleration.

But this is clearly false. One can create a uniform acceleration; but a uniform gravitational field is impossible, since it obeys an inverse square law, and therefore must vary even over quite short distances. So tests can easily be devised to distinguish between the two cases, and this made me wonder if…

How often we have all heard arguments about the size of the universe, and whether it has any boundaries! We can imagine no ending to space, yet our minds rebel at the idea of infinity. Some philosophers have imagined that space is limited by curvature in a higher dimension – I suppose you know the theory. It may be true of other universes, if they exist, but for ours the answer is more subtle. (Unknown author)

All the pictures have been taken by Elena.

Earth's Landscape.

High Park, landscape.

A Cat and his man, a sculpture in Yorkville.

Dynamic Girls, ambassadors of Earth in the Universe.

Orion Nebula.

A Faberge duchess.

Flowers in spring, Rosedale.

Pusha, just Pusha.

Red Galaxy.

Rain forest.

Red Bird.

Our World.

The Dragon in the Sea

The Dragon in the Sea

By Frank Herbert

The Ram bore southwest toward home waters, and the timelog reeled off the days. A monotonous succession of watches amidst the cold pipes, dials, wheels, levers, blinking lights, and telltale buzzers. The same faces and the same danger.

Even peril can grow boring.

A distant sound of propellers in an area where all such sounds mean hunter.

Wait and listen. Creep ahead a few knots. Wait and listen. The distant sound is gone, The Ram picks up speed while red-rimmed eyes watch the ranging and sonar gear.

Garcia was up and about on the fourth day – a man grown strangely morose and sullen when Ramsey was present. Still the subtug moved steadily nearer to safety, towing the turgid slug: a prize wrested from death itself.

And a special tension – a new pressure – crept into the actions of the Ram's crew. It was a tension that said: “We're going to make it... We're going to make it... we're going to make it...

“Aren't we?”

Ramsey, asleep in his bunk, wrestled with a silent night-mare in which Sparrow, Garcia and Bonnett suddenly turned to face him – all with the features of mad Heppner.

Slowly, the nightmare lifted and left him peaceful in the womb-like stillness of the boat.

Dragon in the sea. Photo by Elena.

Stillness!

Ramsey sat bolt upright in his bunk, wide awake, every sense crying out against the strange new element: quite. He reached behind him and snapped on his bunk light. It was dim – showing that they were on emergency batteries.

“Johnny!” It was Sparrow's voice over the wall speaker.

“Here, Skipper.”

“Get up to your shack on the double. We're having pile trouble.”

“I'm on my way!”

His feet hit the deck, fumbled into shoes. He snapped off his bunk light, ran out the door, up the ladder two steps at a time, down the companionway and into his shack station, talk switch open. “On station, Skipper. It is serious?”

Bonnett's voice came back. “Full-scale flare-up.”

“Where's the skipper?”

“Forward with Joe.”

“Joe shouldn't be anywhere near that! He's still on the hot lost!”

“It was Joe's watch. You know how - “

“Johnny!” Sparrow's voice over the intercom.

“Here.”

“Secure the shack for minimum power drain and come forward.”

“Right.” Ramsey found that his hands knew automatically which switches to hit. He blessed the long hours of patience with the mock-up board. This was what Reed had meant: “There is no such thing as a minor emergency aboard a submarine.” He made the conventional glance-around double check: standby light glowing amber, jacks out, main switch up, relay circuit to control room plugged in and green. He thumbed his chest mike: “Les, she's all yours.”

“On your way.”

He ran out the door, turned right up the companionway, through the control room without glancing at Bonnett, and out onto the central catwalk. The laboring hum of one engine turning slowly on battery power to give them headway permeated the engine room.

Garcia stood beside the tunnel hatch down forward to the left, his hands fumbling with the zipper of an ABG suit.

The Dragon hidden deep in the sea. Illustration by Elena.