My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January: Strong Women.80 short stories and novels, available at no cost.When we encounter alien life among the stars, will they have made the same mistakes we have? Worse? Will we even be able to understand them? And what will they understand about us?My new novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” the sequel to “Nasty, Brutish, and Short," appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.Here’s an excerpt:“Fire From Heaven”by Brian Scott Pauls“Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.”—Genesis 19:24-25I can’t say exactly what happened. I didn’t have a good view when the trouble started.Delvalle took point when we went into the mountain, followed by Kuna and de Cries, then Pagnol and Laing with their instrument pack. I came next, while Keahi and Ashishishe brought up the rear—eyes, ears, and nose peeled for threats.Not that we expected trouble. We all “knew” the desolate half of Janus was unoccupied. The wildly chaotic menagerie of organisms Lieutenant Keahi, Ash, and I had discovered on the other side of the planet gave way to an entire hemisphere devoid of life.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.Of course, by the time you read this, you’ll probably know what we found—or, to be more accurate, what found us. I’m sure our report will make quite a stir when it reaches Earth. The implications of what we encountered still keep me up at night. Of course, it's a lot more recent to me than it will be to you, relatively speaking.Beacon is an artificial black hole accompanying Janus in geostationary orbit. You’d think it would have evaporated by now, but ice balls arriving from the outer system continually feed it mass. Apparently, the Janusians used it as a power generator before they destroyed themselves—and Beacon played a major role in that.To function as a generator, the black hole must have once been contained. But that containment is gone. Now it just revolves about Janus, eating ice and belching gamma rays. Nothing unshielded can live on the side of the planet facing it. Even viruses are absent—if not because of the radiation itself, then because there’s nothing to serve as a host.Meanwhile, an increased mutation rate in organisms living close to the irradiated hemisphere has resulted in a greatly accelerated evolutionary pace.At least one intelligent species inhabited Janus. Diamond buildings remain in hundreds of cities spread around the world. Some appear to be fully intact, while the ruins of others surround giant blast craters. Whoever lived on Janus had fun tossing fusion bombs around before something wrecked Beacon’s containment, wiping out civilization. The cities in the verdant hemisphere are overgrown with life. Those on the ravaged side are as dead as everything around them.Abbadon appears to have been the receiving station for power beamed from Beacon. The Janusians scooped off the mountain’s peak, then set the dish of a large microwave antenna into the rock.We dropped to the surface in one of the Zheng He's aeros, each of us except Ash strapped into a seat modified to fit the extra bulk of our armored suits. The synth wore the lynx body it had developed especially for Janus, and made do with a cargo net.The standard Zheng He pressure suits wouldn’t protect against gamma radiation. Our excursion into the dead zone required the Physics and Engineering sections to fabricate tungsten carbide exoskeletons, so heavy they included powered augmentation to allow us to move. Instead of transparent faceplates, the fully enclosed helmets used cameras and other sensors to transmit details of the external environment directly into the sensoriums maintained by our cerebral implants.Each suit could reduce gamma exposure enough to allow 36 hours on the surface. We estimated twelve hours to get from the Zheng He, in geostationary orbit on the opposite side of the planet, to the surface, and then to the entrance. Getting back to the ship would require an equal amount of time. Technically that left a mere twelve hours in the mountain, but the rock would provide additional shielding against the radiation. We wouldn’t know how much extra time we’d gain until we were inside.Pagnol and Laing, a ...
