“Speedeth All” by Meriah Crawford has a small, outnumbered squad of soldiers desperately fighting for their lives on a distant moon, unsure what they’re really fighting for, and why, left in the dark by their military leaders, questioning if their lives even matter. Will they make it out of battle, or will their rescue ship come too late?

To find out, here’s an early look:

Speedeth All

by Meriah Crawford

KEPLER-443b
27 March 2318, UTC 14:27

It was shortly after dawn on their thirteenth day on the Bee, as they’d all started calling it. Not just as an abbreviation of the planet’s designation, but because it was annoying—and painful, if you didn’t watch what you were doing. Long days, vicious heat, nasty bugs, and hidden tunnel systems where the lizards hid. Add to that the lack of water or food, and almost complete absence of cover, and, for a “simple recon mission,” it was about as bad as it could get. About the only positive aspect of the place was that the atmosphere was breathable, though no one quite knew why.

Squad Leader Vetter leaned against a red boulder in a small impact crater watching Trine cleaning and repairing their comms unit. The box had taken a hit from a pulsed laser weapon, and

it was dead.

Trine had assured Vetter there was nothing that could be done to fix it, short of replacing “almost every single bishtup part,” including a lot of parts he didn’t have spares for. He’d been removing, cleaning, and repairing parts for the last two hours of his watch, anyway. Vetter didn’t need to ask why. She’d have killed for a task, however pointless—but there was little she could do but wait.

Macksin was snoring. Bastard could sleep through anything— was probably the best-rested biped on the dirt—but he seemed to have the mental capacity of a rutabaga. He’d follow orders if you explained them slow enough, but in a firefight, he was next to useless. And most of the time when he was awake, he just sat and read through technical specs and manuals, like he’d never set sight on the insides of the machines he’d been trained to maintain.

Damn shame, too, because he was an exceptionally wellconstructed soldier, and command didn’t much mind fraternizing if they didn’t see it happening—not during off-world missions.

They’d gotten along well, too, at first—until things started to go wrong, and Macksin proved himself to be the least competent mechanic she’d ever seen.

Vetter shook her head. How she’d found herself left with these two—alone in their sector, as far as she could tell—was a mystery. Macksin, at least, should have been the first to go. Some of the squad started calling him a good luck charm after the third time he narrowly missed being killed or maimed. They were dead now. Every last one.

When the war with the lizards started just nine months ago, Vetter’s squad and almost two thousand other soldiers—a rough mix of lifers and draftees—were sent to the Bee. The planet supposedly had some very useful minerals but minimal tactical value, though the orders to constantly scan the surface and relay the data to orbit each watch suggested it was far more important than they’d been told. Beyond that, she had little idea what was going on. None of them even knew what had started the war—they only knew it was happening. The better their tech got, the less information command shared. Smart, she supposed, but annoying. Frustrating. And this time, maybe lethal.

To read the rest of “Speedeth All” click here https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0998364118/associatizer-20/

By Meriah Crawford

Brace yourself for some shocking news: life is unfair. You may have noticed that it’s the people who have life the easiest who tend to focus the most on life’s injustices. This is probably because those people are used to either being treated fairly as a matter of course, or being given unfair advantages. After a while, people like that come to accept injustice in their favor as their natural due.

The bad news is, those people can be ridiculously annoying whiners. The good news is, sometimes they post to social media about it, and we get to laugh at them:

Today, though, I don’t want to talk about that sort of dire injustice. Instead, I want to focus on the ways in which life is unjust and unfair to me, personally. For example:

1. It is extremely unlikely that we will accomplish manned interstellar travel in my lifetime.
2. It is essentially impossible, therefore, that I will ever serve on an interstellar starship.
3. Though the technological challenges are fall smaller and more surmountable, and with a much shorter time frame, it’s still incredibly unlikely that I will travel to the moon or Mars, whether as a tourist or a colonist. (Though I feel I should note for any NASA officials reading this post that I am a fine gardener, and have a strong multi-year record of success at growing potatoes in the honestly rather sketchy soil in my backyard.)
4. The chances of my participation in first contact with aliens is either less unlikely or vastly more unlikely than numbers 1 through 3 above, depending on unknown data. To wit: the proximity of aliens who have the capability of interstellar travel along with a fascination for backward, somewhat vicious societies. But regardless, it’s still quite unlikely. And this is a tragedy, because I would be awesome at first contact. I know, because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. And it would be so damn cool.
5. I also find it both deeply unjust and ironic (for reasons that will be obvious if you read my story) that reptilian aliens are so often the villains in sci-fi, because I like reptiles. I find it significantly less likely than most authors, it would seem, that lizardy aliens would aim to kill and, potentially, eat us. And yet…well, I suppose some of them would. And that would be unfair, if it happened to me. (Or you, really. Depending on your understanding of what is and isn’t fair.)

Anyway, I hope you’ll read my story, “Speedeth All”, which appears in the Love, Murder & Mayhem anthology from Crazy 8 Press, and is on sale now. If you think about it, it would be totally unfair to me if you didn’t.

Love, Murder & Mayhem is now available for sale both in print and ebook formats.

Meriah Lysistrata Crawford is an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as a private investigator, writer, and editor. She has published short stories in several genres, a novella, essays, a variety of scholarly work, two poems, and co-edited the anthology Trust and Treachery: Tales of Power and Intrigue. Meriah has an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program, and a PhD from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Literature and Criticism program. Her work as a PI, spanning over fourteen years, has included investigations of shootings, murders, burglary, insurance fraud, backgrounds, counterfeit merchandise, patent infringement, and missing persons.