Red-Blue
By Marco Etheridge
Forty-four seconds. Forty-three.
The digital counter drops. Gregor wipes his sweating forehead.
Clever bastards. An analog bomb, ancient technology, immune to sensors. Blocks of Semtex, enough to fragment the ship. Bodies drifting in space. A dead crew and dead alien diplomats. An interstellar war sparked by fanatics and triggered by the device under his fingers. And no one to stop it but him.
Twenty-one seconds.
Two wires. One choice. Red or blue. No guidance from the handheld. A pair of wire cutters. Fifty-fifty odds. Gregor thinks of his wife, his little boy.
Now, choose. Cutters ready.
Eight seconds. Seven.
Snip.
Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in over one hundred reviews and journals across Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. His story “Power Tools” has been nominated for Best of the Web for 2023. “Power Tools” is Marco’s latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor for a new ‘Zine called Hotch Potch. In his other life, Marco travels the world with his lovely wife Sabine.
