Archive for the ‘Daniel Braum’ Category
Pirates of the Caribbean
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
The skull and crossbones flag wasn’t flying high with impunity like it used to but James considering himself lucky that at least the Red Cassandra wasn’t full of cannon balls in Davy Jones’ locker. The Royal Navies had put so many at the end of a rope. He didn’t like being out manned or out gunned.
The crew had finished repairing and caulking their hull after their last close call. Wind rustled through the palms on shore. The moon hung over its lonely reflection. One more quiet night in the hidden bay and then it was back to the shipping lanes to hunt. Easy prey was in such short supply.
Something whisked overhead, whistling like the mother of all cannon balls. Had the British found them, even here? No other cannonballs followed. James looked up in time to see a huge shooting star with fiery red tail streak across the sky and disappear over the trees. Fireworks? A thunderous crash came from beyond the trees followed by column of water.
“I seen it, Captain,” Billy cried from the crows nest. “A ship fell from the sky. And it was on fire!”
James ordered the Red Cassandra to the inlet on the other side of the island. In the shallows lodged between the sandbar and the reef was the wreck of the strangest ship he had ever seen. A sleek oval schooner with no sails. It was made of a glistening metal that looked like silver and gold.
James and Billy and some of the crew approached in the dingy.
“There’s no crew in here,” Billy said from inside the torn belly of the strange ship. “They must have abandoned. But wait, I think I found guns, Captain.”
James had an idea. He fired his rifle. The ball dinged harmlessly off the metal hull.
Then he ordered the crew to fire the Red Cassandra’s cannons. The cannonballs were easily repelled.
They spent the next weeks living on fresh fruit and fish and plating the Red Cassandra’s hull with the salvaged metal. They mounted the new guns in the cannon ports and the on the deck.
James mounted a strange device from the other ship’s bridge in front of the steering wheel. He wasn’t sure what it did but it seemed to be a map of the stars and that could prove useful. It cast the ship in a glow like artificial moonlight. He liked how ominous it made them look.
To the shipping lanes, Captain James ordered.
He raised the Jolly Roger. The men cheered. James smiled.
Let the Navy come, he thought. Looks the skull and cross bones will be flying high on these seas a while longer.
Death is Not the Answer
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
by David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Daniel Braum, and Luc Reid
This is an exquisite corpse. Each of us wrote 1/3 of the story.
Joe wanted to blink. His eyes were shriekingly dry. He tried to focus. Bundles of dried wass reeds, a wall of them. Hung on the wall: stone-tipped spear, leather sack, dried Tolin head. He was in a native hut, but somehow things seemed to be too low. If he was standing on something, he couldn’t feel it. Holy crap! He couldn’t feel anything below his neck! Was he paralyzed? His mind ran panicked circles in his head.
A Tolin stood in front of him. It was a short one. They stood eye to eye, but most of the aliens were at least 7 feet tall.
The creature spoke.
“Death is not the answer,” it said.
Joe’s mind filled with a mechanical buzz. Sensation began to return to his limbs. Cold and stiff.
“Contact with you and your kind was too important to just let you die,” the Tolin continued.
Joe looked down and realized why he was able to understand its speech. His body had been replaced with artificial mechanisms. Parts of his new body looked like wreckage from his ship mixed together with the rudimentary Tolin technology.
But they couldn’t be that primitive, could they? Not half as primitive as he and his superiors back on Earth had thought … Joe dug into his memory, trying to recall. One of the top-heavy Tolin trees had crushed his chest. Had they really brought him back to life? Or had they just done some kind of radical surgery to save him?
“We want to understand your species,” the Tolin said, his voice a low hum that Joe could feel in his bones. “We know more than you imagine, and your computer video records are very easy for us to view, but we don’t speak your language yet. We thought perhaps if we took apart your brain, we would find your language in the pieces, but it was not there.”
Joe began to remember a little more now, disturbingly more. Yes, the tree had fallen on him: but now he remembered a group of Tolin standing in the shadows behind the tree as it fell.
“No, death is not the answer,” the Tolin said, “but that’s all right. We’ll just try something else.”
— end —