Beyond the Wall

by Justin Stanchfield

• Word count: 8443

• Page count: 23

Beyond the Wall is a science fiction short story about a UN security team that chases a pirate ship to a forbidden area on one of Saturn's moons. At the base of a controversial alien wall the team experiences several mysterious events as they first search for the pirates and then deal with the strange effects of the colossal artifact.

From two hundred kilometers out the Wall seemed an impossibility, the scale too large to comprehend. Jenine Toole checked her descent rate against the radar, her own senses unreliable as she guided the lander downward. Outcrops of pitted stone vied with undulating lines of drifted, tarry snow until the surface seemed zebra-striped in the wan light. As the craft dropped lower she saw its shadows racing beneath them. Twin shadows, one diffuse, cast by Saturn’s milky glow, the other sharper but faint, the sun a mere point in the carbon haze. She had landed on Titan before, and each time the oddness of the landscape threatened to overwhelm her. Small wonder, she thought, that whoever had built the Wall had chosen this moon to build it on.

Beyond the Wall originally appeared in Ruins Extraterrestrial ^† - an anthology of science fiction short stories.

You can read a nice pdf version of Beyond the Wall for free at the Hadley Rille Books website.

If you enjoyed this story, you can learn more about the author, Justin Stanchfield on sff.net.

† - This is an affiliate link.  Learn more on my Privacy & Disclosure page.

(This is a revised version of a post which was originally published on BestScienceFictionStories.com on Jan 12th, 2008.)