Tales from the Transit System

Two stories set in a future universe where planets are connected through a wormhole-powered Transit System, and a third unrelated story about the destructive powers of magic. 


"One Term"

Park Ji-Sung is a quiet, orderly man, who leads a quiet, orderly life on the colony world of Ionius Minor. An engineer who loves solving problems, he feels his only daughter should understand and love order just as much as he. 


Decades ago she defied him, leaving their home to start a new life on Earth. Bitter and angry, he had not spoken to her since. 


Their long silence is broken when he receives a troubling message from her asking him to visit. 


She says she is dying. Reluctantly, he undertakes the journey to Earth to learn why she’s made this incomprehensible decision. Because death, in the future, is not inevitable. It is a choice. 


"Spindles"

Keisha Omondi was once a captain in the Commonwealth Defense Force’s Viper Brigade, the most elite fighting unit in human space. But after a rescue mission she commanded went horribly wrong, she was drummed out of the brigade and sent into exile, forced to live on the planet Harmony, a blistering furnace of a world crawling with religious viruses and ruled by aloof, indifferent Families who keep all the high technology for themselves. 


She goes about rebuilding her life and lands a job as the security chief at a remote archaeological dig. But this isn’t just any dig: it might be the most illegal location in human space. She gets a perverse thrill keeping it secret from the Commonwealth. It’s her way if sticking it to the people who ripped her out of the only home she’d ever known. 


When the archaeologists make a breathtaking discovery, everything Keisha knows suddenly comes into question. Who is she, really? Where do her loyalties lie? And more importantly, does she even have a choice? 


"The Merlin Plague"

What if, overnight, a third of the world’s population was granted the ability to work magic? 


What if your father, a bitter, abusive alcoholic, could start fires with his mind? 


What if terrorists could make air solid, or levitate skyscrapers? Turn water into rock?


What would the world look like? 


Would we have a chance to survive?