Sci-Friday – Excerpt from “A Long Way from Arach”

A 6th (and final) glimpse into my upcoming book of 6 eerie sci-fi stories

Check out the first glimpse, 2nd glimpse, 3rd glimpse, 4th glimpse, and 5th glimpse.

Here is the sixth excerpt from my book of short stories in the science fiction realm that now available on Kindle through Wordwooze Publishing. (Great editor there, very accommodating and easy to work with.) I’ve saved the best for last, unless you have arachnophobia, that is.

The Excerpt

Sethla’s eight eyes gazed out at the blackness dotted here and there with bits of light. “So cold and empty,” she thought, all eight of her limbs shuddering. “I need to check on them and get back into hibernation. We still have a long way to go.”

“Close cover,” she said.

The voice command control closed the cover over the window in the side of the ovoid spaceship as Sethla turned gradually around, feeling along the web guide threads that lined the interior, avoiding the sticky lining on the floor, walls, and ceiling of the passageway, and making her way slowly and carefully to the hatchery. She checked on the eggs. All was well. The thermostat showed the optimum temperature, and the hatch time tracker showed that the ship would reach that planet, rich with food the hatchlings needed, by the time they emerged.

Pleased, Sethla returned to her hibernation chamber, curled her limbs around her, and said, “Lights off.” The control dimmed the lights, and Sethla once more dreamed of those who had sent her and her precious cargo on this journey to a destination a long way from her home planet, Arach.

As the ship had left that planet, Sethla had sent back word that the nursery was full. A cheer had risen in the launch control room, and the High Council had spread the news around the globe. Their food supply may be depleting, but her destination offered hope for the continuance of their kind.

Once upon a time, Sethla’s planet had teemed with food—creatures that had exo- or endo-skeletons. Easier to catch than Endos, Exos often flew or crawled into the traps that Sethla’s ancestors spun for them. The two-legged Endos, as Sethla thought of them, with rational brains began killing off many of those Exos, though, since both competed for plant food and the Exos tended to spread diseases to those Endos. As a result, Sethla’s ancestors had decreased in numbers at an alarming rate—that is, until they found that Endos, both with four legs and with two, were a more substantial food source than Exos. After a few millennia, though, the Endos’ numbers had also declined alarmingly. They didn’t reproduce fast enough. Also, the two-legged ones tended to engage in violence against each other, succumbed to diseases, took months to gestate, and required years after that to grow large enough to make a good meal.

And the High Council had been getting desperate as pressure mounted on them to find another food source.

About a decade ago, fortune had smiled. An object from space had crash-landed on their planet. It had strange markings on the outside: HUBBLE. When they had succeeded in opening it, they had found star charts, one showing what looked like their solar system highlighted in a constellation of stars that resembled Sethla’s kind in basic shape: two body parts and eight limbs. The constellation in a galaxy labeled “The Milky Way” was named “Spider Constellation,” and her solar system was “Arach System 1.” Realizing that this was their same galaxy, the High Council had begun calling the planet “Arach” and referring to themselves and all like them as “Arachnians.”

Other items in the thing called “HUBBLE” included photos of beings that looked just like the two-legged Endos on Arach and labeled “human male” and “human female.” There were also space coordinates back to the origin planet.

The High Council had heard with great excitement the report from the team examining the object.

“A whole planet teeming with food for us!” the Council Head had exclaimed.

“How do we get there?” a Council Member had asked.

One of their Endo collaborators—too puny to be a slave and too intelligent to fatten up as food— had spoken up, “Build a spaceship.”

Several Council Members had laughed, but the Head had agreed.

“But they have to be much more advanced than Endos here,” a Council member had warned. “Who knows what other technology they have—advanced weapons, for example? How could we land?”

“Don’t worry about that,” the Council head had replied. “The ship will have defenses. This is too important to risk anything less. Our Endo collaborators will install those defenses first.”

The Council had immediately formed the Arachnian Space Team, consisting of Arachnian overseers, Endo collaborators, and Endo slaves, for project Destination Survival. They began work on the design and construction. Ten years later, using a lot of the information found in HUBBLE, they had the ship completed and tested. In fact, the Arachnians had managed to surpass and greatly advance the technology for the space flight propulsion system used in HUBBLE.

“We’re ready to launch,” the Team Lead had announced to the High Council.

A few months prior to that announcement, knowing that the ship was nearing completion, the Council had put out a call for a volunteer to travel in it. Hundreds of candidates had applied, but Sethla had been the final choice, coming from a long line of Arachnians, as they had now gotten used to calling themselves, who laid large egg batches—usually ninety to one hundred instead of the average fifty. She had mated with an intellectually and scientifically advanced male Arachnian to pass on both his and her total genetic knowledge just before launch and then had eaten him, something Arachnians saw as a sign of good luck. And she needed luck for the long journey through that cold, empty space.

Now, back in hibernation, a vision ran through Sethla’s dreams, something shooting at her as the ship approached that destiny planet. She had been briefed about this possibility before the launch. Her eight limbs twitched a little, and a faraway voice called out in her dream, “Have no fear.”

Now, Back to Earth...

Hope you’ve enjoyed these six excerpts. Your feedback is most welcome.

And best wishes with your writing!

See my article: Publisher Agent Fiction Genres Defined, with downloadable PDF.

Please check out my author website. And thanks for reading.

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Thanks for reading. Please check out my first book of recently published eerie short stories (ebook, paperback, audio), and my new book of eerie Sci-Fi stories (ebook only for now), both from Wordwooze Publishing. (I even designed the covers.)

Wind Down the Chimney and Other Eerie Tales: Ebook, paperback at Barnes & Noble, Amazon. Ebook on other platforms: Books2read. On Audible.

The Stardust Alliance and More: Ebook at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and elsewhere for now. Paperback and audiobook coming soon.