Sci-Fi Signals Titelbild

Sci-Fi Signals

Sci-Fi Signals

Von: Daniel P. Douglas
Jetzt kostenlos hören, ohne Abo

The frontier doesn't care who you are. Pilots, criminals, soldiers, drifters, heroes, villains, and everyone in between. Everyone's got a story, and none of them are clean. Sci-Fi Signals is a series of standalone short stories about the people who live, fight, and die on the edge of known space.

authordanielpdouglas.substack.comDaniel P. Douglas
Folgen
  • Podcast - Thirty-One Percent

    Podcast - Thirty-One Percent
    Jul 11 2026

    Podcast Episode Summary

    How much is a human life worth when the ledger says zero? Agent Quist is a reclamation specialist for Ardent Holdings, a company that doesn't accept excuses, only assets. Her latest assignment: repossess a Series 9 water reclaimer from a dying colony on the edge of known space. Without it, the nine residents of Sennet’s Reach won’t last a week. Quist soon discovers the 'delinquency' isn't an accident; it's a manufactured theft designed by the company to liquidate a desperate world. When a corporate enforcer arrives to ensure the job gets done, Quist faces a choice that will cost her everything. In the lawless frontier, justice isn't found in a courtroom. It's found in the remaining 31 percent of a water tank. A gritty, high-stakes sci-fi space western thriller about the price of a conscience in a galaxy owned by corporations.

    My special thanks to Midsummerr - AI Audio Production Platform for providing the voices, music, and sound effects for this episode.

    Thanks for listening to Sci-Fi Signals. Be sure to check out The Intelligence Bulletin from Author Daniel P. Douglas on Substack for more podcasts, written articles, and links to all my books. And remember, fly smart and stay sharp. The frontier doesn’t give second chances.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit authordanielpdouglas.substack.com
    Mehr anzeigen Weniger anzeigen
    14 Min.
  • Kulvir Unleashed

    Kulvir Unleashed
    Jun 6 2026
    KULVIR SAKATA COUNTED his breaths the way he always did before a breach and board. Four in, four hold, four out. He’d learned it somewhere that no longer existed, in a life he no longer claimed. He did it now on principle, because the alternative was to stop counting and let something else take over.The boarding tunnel pressurized with a sound like a chest cavity being opened.“Thirty seconds,” Captain Sela said over comms. Her voice was flat the way a blade was flat. Precise. Clean. Not the absence of feeling, just the containment of it. Kulvir had worked under seven different crew leads in eleven years. None of them talked like Sela. None of them made him feel like the work was worth finishing.“Copy,” Bando said, at Kulvir’s left shoulder. She was twenty-three, hair pulled back tight, and her face did something every time a breach was imminent, a kind of brightening, like combat switched on a light behind her eyes that nothing else reached. She went toward it the way some people went toward music.“Copy,” Herrick said, at Kulvir’s right. He was broad enough across the shoulders that he blocked the corridor light when he moved up, a big rough-framed man who had learned to hate this work and kept doing it anyway.Three more behind them. Six total, under contract to a farming colony called Relicos, three systems out from anything that mattered. The clients had called it a contract dispute. Kulvir called it what it was.The Stygian Duster ship had tried to run when Sela’s privateer cut across its vector, a converted ore hauler called Greymantle, slow and heavy with the wrong cargo. The privateer’s gunner put two rail slugs into its drives before it could build speed, a precision shot, economical and final, the kind that came from someone who had stopped needing to think about it. Greymantle coasted now, venting atmo from a secondary port, guns still live but the crew already knowing how this ended.The tunnel clacked. The hatch unsealed.“Move,” Sela said.Kulvir moved.The first corridor was dark, lit red by Greymantle’s emergency strips. Smoke from the drive damage hung in a low ceiling above them, and the deck vibrated underfoot in a way that meant the atmo scrubbers were losing ground. The smell was recycled air gone stale, charred insulation, and underneath both of those the thin copper bite of blood, recent enough to still be warm.Kulvir went left at the first junction, Bando on his flank. Two Stygian Dusters came around the corner with weapons raised and Kulvir put them down, two blaster bolts each, center mass. He was already moving past them before they hit the deck.Not fast. Not slow. Just efficient.That was the thing people misread about him. They saw the outcome and assumed there had been violence. What there had been was geometry. Angles and timing and the knowledge that hesitation was its own kind of cruelty.“Three hostiles, forward bay,” Sela said. She was running a parallel corridor, feeding the crew positioning from Greymantle’s own sensor net. She’d pulled the access codes from the Relicos colony records. The Dusters had used the same codes for two years. Nobody had bothered to change them.“I see them,” Herrick said.The forward bay was a staging area, crates of extracted ore stacked along the walls, some still marked with colonial lot numbers that had no business on a Duster ship. The Stygian Dusters had bled Relicos dry, collecting protection money and delivering nothing, not protection, not peace, just the slow drain of people who had no other options. The ore was the proof. Evidence nobody would ever process, because there was no authority out here to process it.That was why people like Kulvir existed.The three hostiles broke cover before the team was fully through the door. Kulvir took the first with a bayonet strike to the throat and used the man’s momentum to put him into the second. The third raised a scatter pistol and Kulvir stepped inside the barrel’s arc, close enough to feel the heat when it discharged past his shoulder and broke the man’s wrist with a short downward strike. Sidearm. Disarm. Step. Fire.Three seconds. Maybe four.“Clear,” he said.“Crew quarters next,” Sela said. “Sakata, on me.”Kulvir fell in beside her at the corridor junction. For a moment, before they moved, she glanced at him sideways. Not an assessment. She didn’t need to assess him. It was something else, something closer to acknowledgment, the way two people who have worked in the dark together for long enough learn to see each other without needing light.Kulvir said nothing. He was good at saying nothing.The crew quarters were three compartments off a central passage. Sela took point on the first. Kulvir had the second. Herrick and Bando took the third.The Duster in Kulvir’s compartment was already on his feet, holding a colonist boy, maybe ten years old, against his chest with a blade at the kid’s throat. The boy was rigid with the terror of ...
    Mehr anzeigen Weniger anzeigen
    14 Min.
  • Podcast - The Last Name on the Manifest

    Podcast - The Last Name on the Manifest
    Apr 29 2026
    Candelas “Mustang” Camino stole ships for a living. And no one called her Candelas. If someone did, it did not end well for them.Mustang had rules about stealing ships. She broke most of them. But the one she kept was simple. Know who pays you, and know why. On Neonara, under a sky the color of rust and old copper, she had followed that rule exactly far enough to land herself on a rooftop across from Magistrate Mahfouz’s private dock, watching a ship a client paid her to steal.The ship was ugly. Which surprised her.Rich Ethnarch Kingdom men liked their toys loud. Gold inlay, chromed hull plating, reactor glow tuned to whatever color was fashionable in society that quarter. This ship had none of that. It was a slate-gray mid-hauler, atmospheric-capable, modified for long range, stripped of anything that would catch a patrol’s eye. Practical. The ship for a man who wants to move something and does not want to be asked what.Mustang did not like it.She was crouched behind a ventilation stack, pilot’s hat pulled low, her hand on the bolt in her jacket pocket. The bolt had come from the first ship she ever stole, the one Wally taught her on. She had worn it smooth. Tonight it felt heavier than usual.Neonara’s capital sprawled below her in the early dark. Prayer towers with speakers that called the faithful four times a day. Women walking with their eyes down and their heads covered. A Kingdom rim colony ran on the same script as the core worlds. Just poorer, and with fewer witnesses.The magistrate’s dock sat where the streets ran out, and the salt flats began. The Hassani Hulls ship rested on landing struts inside a hangar with the bay doors open to the night. Two guards at the front. One inside. Security systems that a better thief might have respected.She had cataloged the dock in three passes.The first was five days ago, walking past the hangar with her cover pulled low. She counted paces between the service alley and the rear maintenance panel. She noted which of the hangar’s four external sensors tracked movement and which tracked heat. The two failed in different weather, and she wanted to know which one to hide from on which night.She had stopped at a textile stall on the way back. Thin fabric hanging from wire, faded patterns, a woman behind the counter with a face that had learned to show nothing. A girl beside her, nine or ten, stacking folded cloth with small, careful hands. The girl glanced up at Mustang and looked down again fast, the way the Kingdom taught girls.Mustang bought a length of gray cloth she did not need. She paid in hard Geld. The woman counted the coins twice.“You’re not from here,” the woman said. Quiet. Not a question.“Passing through.”The woman set down the cloth she had been folding. “My sister’s girl passed through too. Last year.” She slid Mustang’s purchase across the counter between them. “Told us she had work at the magistrate’s house. Never came back for her things.”Mustang stood still until the shift in her chest passed.“I’m sorry,” she said.The woman nodded. She did not look at the girl beside her. The girl kept stacking cloth.“Safe travels,” the woman said, nothing more, and she turned to the next customer.Mustang had walked back to her rental, a cheap room off the main concourse, turning the cloth over in her hands. She told herself it was a frontier story. Everyone on the frontier had a story like it. The magistrate’s house was not the magistrate’s dock.She had told herself many things.The second pass, three days ago at dusk, from the rooftop of an abandoned spice stall. Forty-one minutes between guard changes. The outgoing guard walked the perimeter counterclockwise before handing off, which gave her ninety seconds between his last sweep of the back and his partner’s first sweep of the front. Like a tide. The window repeated.The third, during the small hours of last night, walking the service trench barefoot to test the drainage grates. Two of them rang under her weight. She marked which. She would step over those tonight.Wally’s first rule. You don’t steal the ship, kid. You steal the building. The ship is what you carry out.Her comm vibrated once. A single pulse. The buyer’s signal, confirming the window.She had met him through a broker on Velcyn Station six weeks earlier. Hakim Nawaz, he called himself. Kingdom core-world vowels, a jacket cut stiff with weave-lining under the leather, and the watchful eye of a man used to leaving fast. Thirty thousand in hard Geld, half up front.“Mahfouz keeps a Hassani on his private dock,” Nawaz had said. He stirred a drink he never finished. “My people want it off his books. Call it a private dispute. The hauler clears the dock, the magistrate eats the loss, my people sleep better. You get paid.”It was a flat story. A boring story. Mustang had heard a hundred like it, and ninety of them had been true enough to bank.She had believed this one because she ...
    Mehr anzeigen Weniger anzeigen
    21 Min.
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
Noch keine Rezensionen vorhanden