Three stories made the "that doesn't suck" cut this week.  Here's the first one:

Air

By David Goodner

 

            When the end came, it wasn’t with a bang, but with a sigh.  The Knarv tried conventional warfare, but humanity has been fighting and scrapping for thousands of years.  Even with their better technology, we fought on.  We murdered them by the thousands as we died by the millions.  Then we stole their technology and murdered by the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands.  And we did what we have always done.  We out-bred them.  The Vorgull tried orbital bombardment, but by then we had mastered kinetic shields, stolen from the Knarv. 

            But the Jax destroyed us.  They killed us with the least of things, something more fecund than we were.  It was a virus, introduced to the planet on a rock too small to merit disintegrating.  The plague ripped across mankind, but we stopped it.  We came up with a vaccine.  It mutated to our livestock, and that was bad.  The myriad strains each required a different cure.  But by then we were growing yeast cultures for most of our food anyway.  Our ships hunted Jax ships, harried them from our space.

            But the virus mutated again, and again.  Then it mutated some more.  By the time we noticed the final form, it was too late.  Transmitted by air, it silently infected its host organisms for years before we understood.  It rewrote their DNA.  In a way, it made them stronger, more robust.

            But there was one crucial change.  Infected plants… all plants… no longer turned oxygen into carbon dioxide.  They started breathing out methane, just like the Jax breathed.  Millions of species, too many to cure.  Day by day, the earth poisons her children.  The plants die, too.  They still need oxygen, and every hour there’s less to breathe.

            We could try leaving.  We will try.  But only a fraction of us will make it.  Earth is dead, and with it dies the beating heart of the human empire. 

            But we’re not going to die alone.  Our scientists learned from the Jax metavirus.  They learned to make a virus that turns methane-breathers into cyanide-producers.  There are twelve major worlds in the Jax cluster.  We have twelve ships armed and ready to go.

            Humanity will fight to the last breath.