Doc Sherwood
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Geological Thinking, Chapter Two
A purple twilight greeted The Chancellor as he opened his eyes. It was a stranger and more lurid illumination even than that of the catacomb, and the many faces peering down at him with looks of mingled sympathy and fear were just as strange. He sat up. All around were rock-people, but of a very different race to any our heroes had previously encountered. These stood only two feet tall, with slight bodies that were pale and translucent like marble. Their huge globose eyes sparkled in their heads like precious gems.
By Doc Sherwood4 years ago in Fiction
Please be Waiting, Chapter One
The numerous conquests and invasions of Nottingham had impressed upon its people the importance of a good Treaty Day. Indeed, citizens often cheerfully remarked that ceasefire celebrations were worth looking forward to the whole year round. Faith in the safe-haven city for all mankind could never be shaken, only reaffirmed, as long as there were such days. For it had been learned before now that hostilities, in both their outbreak and cessation, were necessary parts of the process whereby Nottingham survived, its children grew, its adults became wiser, and friendship and love endured. This particular Treaty Day was one of brilliant sun in early autumn, when the leaves on the trees were just starting to turn. Without the swelter or the hazes of summer, shadows stood out sharp and black while a cloudless blue sky deepened into afternoon. The day The Four Heroes created Nottingham had been much like this, and now as then, a palpable feeling hung in the air of something new beginning.
By Doc Sherwood4 years ago in Fiction
Geological Thinking, Chapter Three
After hiking for many miles along the soaring cavern’s dusty floor, Joe, Dylan, Gala and D’Carthage came upon their first sign of life since the battle with the barbarians. It was not geological life, for the herdsmen who built the corral and small homestead had not survived the war and lay shattered on the plain, looking like their own funereal cairns. However, the creatures they had once tended, perhaps because they were organic in nature, seemed to have weathered far better the environmental changes and were roaming healthy and wild in the acres of rocky farmland beyond the boundary fence. They were like huge lizards, each as tall as a carthorse and as long as a bus from its snout to the tip of its tail, and jets of fire snorted from their nostrils as they lurched, shambled and charged each other at surprising speed in a baggy, flat-footed way.
By Doc Sherwood4 years ago in Fiction
Geological Thinking, Chapter One
A million brilliant specks of mica began to gleam from the desert sands as the first rays of sun touched the Earth. Golden daylight stretched along the single road that ran through the town of Silence, brightening the facades of its six ramshackle wooden buildings and throwing their gable-ends and side-alleys into black shadow. A hundred miles from Nottingham and surrounded on every side by parched and dusty emptiness, Silence did not see many visitors. On this particular dawn the town barber and the owner of the general store were sitting together on the shop porch to smoke and watch the sun come up, in keeping with a custom they observed each and every morning.
By Doc Sherwood4 years ago in Fiction
Broadside for Broadside, Chapter Two
The Henry Martin came about, beams and missiles zinging around her, while Steam took off in a fiery torrent to confront Neetra above the masthead. “Steam, you wouldn’t lie to me!” the girl cried. “Tell me Joe hasn’t really turned against us!”
By Doc Sherwood4 years ago in Fiction
Overture, Chapter Two
The Solidity fleet’s Communications Hub was a miniature moon of black metal hanging at the heart of the massed battleships. From every point on its smooth mantle protruded towering antennae topped with smaller steel spheres, from which millions of megahertz in radiowaves were beamed every minute to coordinate fight-paths and prepare the vessels for their imminent departure. This strange pincushion even boasted its own artificially-generated gravity and atmosphere, to safeguard the non-robotic Solidity members who worked in its pods.
By Doc Sherwood4 years ago in Fiction
Triptych
Before the eyes of Dr. James Neetkins, Kumiko Rintari, D’Carthage and 4-H-N, absolute dark was dispelled by the soft flickering onset of light resembling that of a sunset. Each face among the foursome reappeared to the other three, daubed warmly by the golden glow which was steadily growing in brightness and magnitude even as it shaped itself into human form. This was no mere silhouette however, for the details of the figure’s features and clothing were picked out as if in a painter’s complex study of evening-sky hues. The highlights were that shining brilliance which would have showed where the sun itself touched the horizon’s edge, whereas the shades were like the ruddy heavenmost edges of cloud-formations furthest from daylight’s last blaze. All these variations in gold and flame disclosed the body and eyes and hair of a boy, standing some distance above the ground at the centre of the circle of four. It perhaps went without saying he was a boy they all recognized.
By Doc Sherwood4 years ago in Fiction
Broadside for Broadside, Chapter Four
High above the clouds the clear light of day was still set to reign for at least another hour, but over the Henry Martin there now fell a shadow that was not nature’s doing. The galactic cruiser had arrived, and was hulking abreast of the Next Four’s ship. On her bridge Amy switched manoeuvring jets to hold steady, and the discharge from their vents blew into the combatants like a north-wester. Bret and Gala locked blades in the squall, drawing face-to-face.
By Doc Sherwood4 years ago in Fiction
Overture, Chapter Three
“Greetings, weak fleshling fools!” Steelstreak declaimed. “Welcome to the site of your final conflict! Yes, this futile resistance to our grand design is herewith at an end, for great Space-Screamer wills it to be so, and where our illustrious creator commands, we his loyal underlings obey as if – ”
By Doc Sherwood4 years ago in Fiction
Joe and Gala, Chapter Three
Every movement was pain, and the feeblest exertion of the muscles incurred wracking spasms that begged release from the cruel hold of consciousness, as Joe and Gala hauled themselves excruciatingly out of twin puckering orifices that marked the end of the line. They had fetched up in the bilges, where lubricant was deposited as a slack sludgy residue once everything of worth had been leeched from it. Ankle-deep in this, ragged and bloodstained and their hair matted solid with caked-up filth, the two combatants turned to one another for the last time.
By Doc Sherwood4 years ago in Fiction
Broadside for Broadside, Chapter Three
Dylan and Phoenix ploughed a perpendicular line through the cloud-cover, their descent growing ever more rapid as their spluttering jet-pack steadily failed to bear the extra body for which it had never been designed. Using his powers Dylan was doing everything he could to compensate.
By Doc Sherwood4 years ago in Fiction
