Welcome to the very first issue of TEVUN-KRUS Vol. 2! After ten years and 100 issues of Wattpad's #1 e-zine, we've entered a new era for science fiction.
Welcome to the New Frontier.
Ooorah!
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Tending his herd of mining-bots was Jeff's profession and passion, and it was the one thing he was good at. He loved the silence, the simplicity, and the beauty of this work. He enjoyed the solitary vigil in his shuttle and the hours spent observing his machines as they slowly but persistently chewed away at an asteroid.
But today, something was awry. Today, the herd was restless.
The semi-sentient, eight-legged bots were skittish, swiveling their delicate sensor arrays nervously this way and that, chattering status messages back and forth.
Jeff logged into the alpha bot, R2-D2, and checked its sensor readings. They told him of a whiff of metal ions strolling the hard vacuum, the kind of trace the bots were designed to pick up. Yet the composition of elements was untypical for an asteroid of this part of the belt.
He shrugged. Jeff wasn't a scientist. He was just a herder. A good herder, keeping his bots running smoothly and efficiently. He had learned this line of work from his father and had inherited the bots from the old man.
Thinking of his dad made him remember the last time he had seen him alive, deeply inhaling from his final smoke, the acrid, obnoxious smell of Ooorah's Specials hanging heavily in the air. "Them are the best, son," the old man had said, holding the fag between two gnarled fingers while coughing viciously. "Them makin' you awesome." His coughing had lasted for some more minutes; then he had died.
Which hadn't been awesome.
Since then, Jeff had herded the bots, dragging them after his shuttle from one asteroid to the next, wandering the belt, harvesting it for rare metals. Occasionally, he visited one of the outposts for selling the ingots the bots excreted. Apart from that, he kept to himself and to his herd.
A herd growing more and more restless now at the whiff of strange metal ions.
Jeff activated the long-range radar of his shuttle, probing the endless abyss around him, searching for the origin of the signal.
It took some moments for the scan to materialize into a coherent picture. Three dots—still thousands of klicks out, but approaching steadily.
The clump forming in Jeff's stomach—as heavy and black as a migrant iron meteorite.
A beep announced an incoming AV-signal. He acknowledged the communication. A flurry of pixels coalesced into a face.
The monitor showed only the man's head, and not even all of it. Only a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth were visible, the rest of the man was outside the camera's field of view.
The dark stare drilled straight into Jeff. The eyebrows above them were deeply black, two long and bristly brushes almost meeting at the center. The nose twitched briefly, its dark, porous skin unusually tanned for someone living in space.
