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Escape Pod 585: We All Scream

Escape Pod 585: We All Scream is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:56 — 26.0MB)

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We All Scream

by Marie Vibbert

We weren’t, any of us, heroes. Aiden was a downright chicken. I’m allowed to say that; I love him. My husband doesn’t have to live up to your expectations of masculinity. I’ll beat the crap out of anyone who says otherwise. Me? I don’t stick my neck out. I mind my own business, which is selling ice cream and looking after the twins. That’s Aiden’s business, too. We take turns driving the truck and keeping the kids from falling out of it.

It was Aiden driving that particular day. I was counting the money and finding that we’d gotten short-changed about the price of a dream bar at the playground stop – always happens when there’s a large crowd. Little scammers.

“Count the dream bars, Stevie,” I said. He rolled his eyes as he got to his feet like I’d asked him to carry eight loads of bricks ten miles. Molly raised her head and with the air of a saint said, “I can do it, Momma.”

“Nothing doing, you keep on with your reading.”

I was being mean and forcing them to do the work the other one was better at. Builds character. Molly hid her annoyance well.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 559: Vegetablemen in Peanut Town

Escape Pod 559: Vegetablemen in Peanut Town is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:04 — 43.4MB)

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Vegetablemen in Peanut Town

By August Marion

Otto scanned the grassy countryside for any sign of marauding vegetables. The steeple he and Darby were in wasn’t quite thirty feet tall, but it was taller than any other building in Peanut Town, so it offered an unobstructed view of the surrounding farmland. There were acres and acres of genetically engineered, perambulatory peanut plants shuffling around in scattered groups, probing the rich soil for nutrients with their roots. Everything looked perfectly safe. Peaceful even.

“Hey, genius.” Darby said acidly. “North is that a way.”

“Oh.” Otto said, as he turned around. He refocused the binoculars he was using, and then he saw them: vegetablemen. The same strain that had so annihilated Manhattan that even the rats had given up on the place. There were about three dozen of them scattered over the gently rolling hills. They lumbered toward the town slow and heavy on their long, stout, green stalks. They were still far off, but he could tell from the coloring of the peels around their thoraxes that they were the same cultivar that the king had sown on Manhattan.

Otto lowered the binoculars. He swallowed hard.

“Well?” Darby asked. “Is them the ones from Manhattan?”

“Those are they, yes.” Otto confirmed, as he tugged at his collar. He hated hot weather. It didn’t fit his wardrobe.

“We’re going to have to fight them.” Darby grinned madly.
(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 554: Captain Drake Learns His Lines

Escape Pod 554: Captain Drake Learns His Lines is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:05 — 57.7MB)

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Captain Drake Learns His Lines

By Amy Sisson and Kate Suratt

So I was sitting there minding my own business and trying to choke down the rotgut Rick passes off as whiskey, when who should come sailing through the door but Jeanne Bixby –- yes, the Jeanne Bixby, the biggest telewave starlet this side of the galaxy. She’d covered that famous red-gold hair with a gauzy green scarf and wore sunglasses, but she had to take them off because the bar was so dim she nearly tripped over the Candalubian dozing on the floor just inside the doorway.

Candalubians can sleep anywhere.

Anyway, I knew it was her the minute she took the glasses off, but I couldn’t figure out what the hell she was doing in Rick’s Bar. She didn’t even have her contingent of red-carpet bodyguards with her, just a single H’Rak’tin wearing brass knuckles on all four hands.

On second thought, maybe that was enough. H’Raks are famous for what they can do with brass knuckles.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 420: The Shunned Trailer

Originally in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2000.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:14 — 35.3MB)

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The Shunned Trailer

by Esther Friesner

[EDITOR: We don’t have the rights to post the text of this story.]

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Escape Pod 321: Honor Killing

Escape Pod 321: Honor Killing is an Escape Pod original.

Rated 10 and up for blaster violence.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:33 — 13.5MB)

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Honor Killing

By Ray Tabler

You would think that after all the years I’ve spent schlepping cargoes around the galaxy I’d have learned not to get involved with the locals, especially when they’re not humans. You would think.

A Yanuleen sat down across the table from me in a bar at the edge of the landing field outside of Yanult’s largest city. Yanuleen are furry little folk, bipedal and about a meter tall with six multi-jointed arms poking out at odd intervals around their middles. This one blinked beady, black eyes at me, “Greetings Sentient Being.”

“Uh, greetings.”

“Isn’t it a glorious piece?” My new buddy pointed an arm at the artwork on display in the middle of the bar.

Yanuleen are a bit nuts for that type of thing. They have artwork, mainly sculpture, everywhere, even in a bar. To me it just looked like a three-meter tall bundle of twigs with pieces of broken pottery tossed in at random.

“Very nice.” Being in a foul mood, I took a drink and stared at the Yanuleen.

“Here is being Klonoon.” He pointed all six arms at himself, in the manner of his kind. “Might here also being Captain Anne Katya Shim, who is having a cargo of entertainment modules impounded by the Port Authority?”
(Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Escape Pod 241: Thargus and Brian

Escape Pod 241: Thargus and Brian is an Escape Pod original.

Rated F: for two f-bombs and some serious munchies.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:53 — 28.3MB)

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Show Notes

Show Notes:

Next week… we discover that food is, in fact, love.

Thargus and Brian

By Stephen Gaskell

Thargus thought the time right. He set the lights to full strength and flailed and gnashed and roared as he’d been practising. He felt rather silly, but the performance seemed to be working. The human, one hand steadying its spin, looked on intensely. It moved the white stick up to its mouth, breathed in, and then stabbed the stick out against the sac wall.

“Don’t be afraid,” Thargus said, meaning the opposite. He’d seen the trick on old films stored in the moss-brain when humans always said one thing and meant another like “We’re safer if we split up.”

The human exhaled a long stream of smoke. “I’m not,” it said.

That didn’t sound right. Thargus considered his response while staring at the human. It sure was ugly. A patchwork of dirty synthetics over the majority of its body, and on top of its pudgy, pink head, strand upon strand of greasy hair. Ugh! Thargus felt sick.

“Be afraid, then,” he said.

“Why, are you going to eat me?”

Thargus didn’t feel comfortable telling an outright lie, but that didn’t mean he needed to be too honest. “I might.”

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Escape Pod 42: Practical Villainy

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:05 — 18.6MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG. Fictional animals were harmed in the making of this podcast. Also knights, damsels, dragons, and medieval economies.

Referenced sites:
Dragon Page Wingin’ It

Musical guest: Jonathan Coulton.

Practical Villainy

By Janni Lee Simner

The first thing I want you to know is that I drowned those kittens for a reason. Villains rarely do anything without purpose, and I’m no exception, to that or any other rule. Irrational, passionate acts are for heroes, with their bright armor and their grand ideas, their conviction that with enough heart they can right any wrong, unravel any curse. My dragons were once well-fed on their kind, and their skulls still decorate the spikes above my gates.

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