Posts Tagged ‘Cy De Gerch’

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Cast of Wonders 103: The View from Stickney Crater

Cast of Wonders 103: The View from Stickney Crater is a Cast of Wonders original.

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The View from Stickney Crater

by Rick Kennett

Five minutes later they were in the airlock, ready to jump. Dr Ben Norsk at a hundred and three was the oldest member of Utopia Plain’s crew, while Lieutenant Cy De Gerch at seventeen was the youngest.

“How’s the headache now, Miss De Gerch?” asked Norsk, trying to sound calm over his vacsuit’s intercom.

“Gone,” she said. “Should stay that way as long as fire control remains off-target.”

Captain Brown loud in her helmet earpiece said, “Cy, do you still hear Wiltchie’s voice?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. Go.”

They went, the doctor first, De Gerch following, swept out of the lock on a beam of gravity. At its focus up ahead lay the dead hulk of the troop transport Mariner Valley, drifting as a gigantic, jagged shadow against the sunlit side of Cue Ball. Opposing starships had swarmed around the small white moon a day before, leaving behind such wreckage. Both Norsk and De Gerch knew, as they arrowed between ships, that the battle might soon return.

De Gerch did a half somersault to watch Utopia Plain shrink into the darkness. Too late. Black on black, the frigate was already impossible to make out, save where eclipsed stars betrayed her outline.

The voice in her head said, **Cy, are you here yet?** As always it spoke with no pain, no urgency, no fear.
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Cast of Wonders 89: The Carmel B Crazies

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The Carmel B Crazies

by Rick Kennet

On the day she turned seventeen Cy De Gerch peered through a window into rusty red desert and saw her future squatting darkly in its launch cradle.

She’d been discharged from hospital an hour before and had made her quick way to Styx City Starport. Standing now at the window into Launch Cradle 3, her bag slung over the shoulder of her new Martian Star Corps tunic, she gazed through the glass like a kid outside a toy store. Utopia Plain, her new toy, smooth, black, ellipsoid, seemed to squat in its cradle amid a patch of the red desert of Mars. Recently repaired after a battle with Xenoid warships at Rigel, the starship’s liquid lines were unbroken but for the pressure tunnel extruded from her forward hatch. A thing of space, it seemed to sit impatient to lift into the pink-brown sky and the void beyond.

All her fears and excitements came flooding back – a feeling of elation at this new beginning aboard her first ship; a scary feeling too of coming adrift, separated from her family on Phobos and the surrogate family of her space cadet section, training days ended.

Inspecting herself in the window’s reflection, Cy adjusted her tunic sporting its new lieutenant’s bars and ran a hand through her short dark hair, wondering if she’d surprise her new captain with her age. She thought that she might. She was the first of her breed – a product of the Gartino genetics experiment – to qualify for active service. It all depended on what Captain Ralph Brown was like. Would he understand and appreciate her as a purpose-built person, trained and schooled seventeen years for this purpose? Or would there be suspicion and mistrust?
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Cast of Wonders 71: Now Cydonia

Originally published in Orb Speculative Fiction Volume 7 (2007)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:00 — 28.5MB)

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Now Cydonia

by Rick Kennett

Cadet Cy De Gerch bounced forward into the desert darkness, raised her arms in a defensive posture and, as best as a fourteen year could, barked, “Halt! Who goes there!”

There was no one there. There never was.

Cy jumped back, a slow leap in the low gravity, to her original position on the perimeter, her vacsuit moving easy like a second skin, to watch and wait and break the boredom as best she could until relieved. Out there was the desert she had trekked the past two years with her section of Martian Star Corps cadets. Out there was the countryside of Mars – cold and red and a billion years dead, littered with rocks, pocked with craters, filled with myths and ghost stories, most of which Cy didn’t really believe. Sergeant Kreeng – Old Get-It-Right – had known what he was doing when he’d set them perimeter guard duty consisting mostly of doing nothing. It was, she knew, a discipline of the mind.
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