by Julian Miles | Nov 12, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Ravella is a blighted world, riven and sundered before man ventured into space. The race or races responsible are hopefully dust as well, because the fury they vented upon this planet was breathtaking in its totality. But whoever – or whatever – held Ravella dear was not to be deterred by the apocalypse visited upon them. They adapted.
It was sheer luck that put an imaging satellite over the Gorge that day. It was a coincidence of timing and position that made everyone involved shake their heads and glance about nervously. They were puzzled by chill pangs of a supposedly long-dead thing that used to be called superstition.
On a world ravaged by winds that howled across glassy tundra that spanned whole continents, a single rift sheltered a planet’s ecosystem. Aligned so perfectly that it was illuminated right down to its depths regularly enough by sunlight, yet concealed from discovery by anything except a lone viewer high above, at a precise time and place, for only a few minutes each day. Outside of that, the Gorge was shrouded in shadow and easily discounted as another barren, mile-deep crack amongst the many.
In the Gorge, the craggy, precipitous walls were festooned with flora that hung, sprawled or clung to surfaces you would have thought impossible for anything to thrive upon. Down in the depths, a floor was swept by a swift river that whirled past dozens of islands. Each cluster of islands exhibited differing habitats. Within those habitats, creatures that could not thrive in another environment lived alongside the visitors and predators from the walls. Some species had evolved to use the walls as their hunting grounds, but they were few. The sheer scale of the place was baffling. The scope of the ecological planning involved to balance this entirely artificial, two-hundred-mile long preserve has driven experienced ecodesigners to tears of joy and frustration.
Amidst this abundance of flora and fauna, there is only one trace of those who created it. On a single island, set at the westernmost end of the Gorge, a great boulder had been sliced in two – without trace of method. On one smooth face, graven eight inches deep, is a lexicon of stunning complexity. Once translated, it gave meaning to the paragraph graven upon the opposite face.
“Let the cause and participants of the conflict be unknown. Let that which we forgot be the thing that is remembered.”
by Julian Miles | Nov 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Bald Eagle, this is Leopard, are you receiving?”
“Leopard, good to have you back. Confirm reinforcements. ETA three minutes.”
“Bald Eagle, this is Leopard: abort, abort, abort. Total loss inevitable.”
“Leopard, intel disagrees. Target is viable. Enemy has no backup.”
“Bald Eagle, when will you people listen? The enemy needs no backup because he has got the stolen unit online. I repeat: enemy has one of our Command Servers!”
“Leopard, we show no interference – boards are green.”
“Bald Eagle, our position is in basement of building flagged as East Nine.”
“Leopard, are you assaulting the enemy position?”
“Bald Eagle: no, you moron. We are the poor bastards in East Nine.”
“Say again, Leopard.”
“Bald Eagle, we are the sole inhabitants of building East Nine.”
“Leopard, where is target?”
“Bald Eagle, you’re supposed to be telling me that.”
“Leopard, what is your twenty?”
“Bald Eagle, corner of west and south walls in basement of building East Nine.”
“Leopard, do you have eyes on target?”
“Bald Eagle, do not have eyes on target, because he is nowhere near building East Nine.”
“Leopard, we show target at your twenty.”
“Bald Eagle, we know that! Six flights of our drones are trying to kill us!”
“Say again, Leopard.”
“Bald Eagle, the only target in building East Nine is a friendly. Your command protocols are compromised.”
“Leopard, ID on friendly.”
“Bald Eagle, oh, for pity’s sake. ID on friendly is Team Leopard!”
“Leopard, that is you. Need ID on friendly with you.”
“Bald Eagle, are you not listening? We are the friendly! You are targeting the wrong people!”
“Say again, Leopard.”
“Bald Eagle, how many times… Oh, you bastard. You’re not Bald Eagle!”
“Leopard, this is Wolfhound. Kiss your sorry butts goodbye.”
by Julian Miles | Oct 21, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The night is slashed with beams of white light and the sky is spotted with technicolour detonations.
“Who does that? I ask you. Who does that?”
I don’t know how Mitchell can talk and run at this speed. I shrug in reply and keep going.
We pulled up in the panel van at the designated staging point: under a bridge a klick from the target. From there we moved to the edge of their secondary perimeter and commenced insertion. It was textbook, fully planned out, tactically vetted to hell and gone.
Except for one thing: nobody bothered to check if they had a tertiary perimeter. Where it starts, I don’t know. I suspect it’s a couple of klicks out. Which means Mitchell and I are around three-quarters of the way through it and far from safe.
“We’re nearly two klicks out, man. Let’s find some transport.”
He’s the boss. I wait as he scopes out the driveways of the neighbourhood we’re running through. All modern grid saloons; easy to track and useless off gridded roads. Punching the air, Mitchell points toward a vintage Merc. Ideal.
I’m just about to run after him when my suspicions regarding the tertiary zone stop me in my tracks. Which is the thing that saves me as Mitchell dives into the Merc, slams the door and the killing vapours hide him from view. A flytrap – dummy vehicle, wood and cloth interior, organo-molecular acid sprays – this far out is a new level of vicious.
Some very old training surfaces and I run back toward the target. Without pausing to give them time to triangulate, I dive into the culvert we crossed, letting all my gear pull me down to the bottom of the murky flow.
Taking the oxygen bottle from the medical kit, I ditch the rest of my gear, slow my breathing and let the water take me. Just another chunk of waste on the way to the Solent.
Six hours later I’m lying on the sun-warmed sands of the Isle of Wight. Stripped to my trunks, there is nothing to betray me when I present myself to the local police just after sundown. I tell them a sorry tale about having my car stolen while I spent a day on the beach. They will find it where I left it two days ago, when I was picked up for the job. I’ll get assisted transit to it, after they’ve checked it and found it clean. It’s a hire car, after all.
Then back to bonny Scotia and enough of this sorry Police State infested with paranoid private military companies. Whatever they were protecting, they can keep it. I’ve just retired.
by Julian Miles | Oct 14, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Ten o’clock. Eight o’ clock. Nine. Left. Four. Tang dynasty.”
The wavelength goes to static and I roll off the bed, lean back to kiss Tamara, then carry my clothes out of the bedroom and dress in the lounge. My daughter, Sarah, is a light sleeper and if she wakes, Samson will too. My son may be only three, but I would back him in a noise-making contest against an F18 on takeoff.
Fifteen minutes later I’m on the road. The Landie may not be comfortable, but it can get to any place I need to go.
As ten o’clock arrives, I’m four miles down the first left turn that’s nine miles from my house in a vaguely south-westerly direction. I say vaguely because clock direction does not correspond exactly to compass points, and that’s the whole idea. Tonight, I am parked in a ploughed field, wet mud sucking so I am driving in slow circles to stop the Landie sinking beyond its own power to escape.
With a searing flash, the field has another occupant. It strolls over to the Landie and I wind down the passenger window.
“How old is the vase?” The check-in question.
“Tang dynasty.” I give the response that was given to me and it nods before opening the door and getting in. Something squeaks against the leather seats.
“Destination?”
It pauses, as if consulting an unseen guide.
“Taunton. Before dawn.”
Twenty minutes later I park at a service station and we transfer to a Maserati Quattroporte. All terrain capability is essential, but fast point to point is beyond the Landie.
As we accelerate, it looks about at the interior.
“The artisans of this are to be cherished.”
I nod. Every time I use this car, my passengers pass impressed comment.
Taunton at the cusp of dawn is ghostly in the fog that enshrouded us about five miles out.
“Stop by the next crossroads.”
I do so. The passenger door opens and closes. It is gone. Looking down, I see a teardrop cut star sapphire just under an inch long on the seat. Payment in excess, but that is why I do this. One day, I will have to leave. One day, the skies will fill with invaders. One day, I will have to tell my wife the truth and see if she loves me enough to take our half-breed children to another planet.
by Julian Miles | Oct 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The terrain is ideal for them, and they will take every advantage of the variegated cover: tiered platforms that scatter this little roomscape. Plus they have the advantage of looking like the indigenes. It is a good thing that I was tasked to interdict this zone. No other unit could handle this without resorting to terrain-ruining ordnance.
From the lampshade I spot movement. This gives the assembly nearest the target a bearing. No movement yet. Nothing to betray my presence. I have a potential target. Now for the thing I share with every soldier throughout history – the wait for the battle to commence.
My deployment of an overlook assembly is a strategic advantage that few of our kind have mastered. They cannot yet understand; I cannot understand why they do not. I can see the whole zone. Three distributed layers allow me to go from initial spotting to tactical view without movement. Nothing to warn hyperaware opponents.
The concept of dynamic assemblies is also foreign to my kind. Restructuring myself according to the dictates of terrain, opponent and opportunity. It is simple for me. I presume that is why I am moved so often, being assign to zones where my unique skillset bestows an insurmountable advantage.
The movement resolves itself into a scatter of arachnid hatchlings. I focus down to individual units, devolving the assembly that holds the contact zone into pairs assigned to each hatchling. Not long now.
Far to the left rear flank, an atypical movement: A hatchling flicks its rearmost right leg up and over to scratch behind its rightmost eye. That is not an arachnid move. It is a telltale of a covert drone. In a synaesthesic conflict, operators of drones that have more than two visual inputs experience a phantom ear-itch. So far it is incurable, cannot be trained out, and the movement to ‘scratch’ it is unconscious.
I flag that false arachnid and resume my waiting. There is never only one drone. They are suspicious and fear my kind, so they come in numbers. Within three minutes, I have acquired seven further targets.
A surprise sighting on the coving: eight arachnids moving in a single column along the ridges made by the decorative scrollwork. I am impressed. Apart from the giveaway formation, using the ceiling is something they had been remiss in adopting. It seems that their technology has finally proven artificial gecko traction pads, something I have had since awakening.
Another minute to confirm that every other moving thing in this zone is natural, then I assign kill flights to the portions of assemblies behind each target. With a flex of my will, the hammer falls: inanimate fixtures spread sixty-four pairs of wings and stoop down upon them where they struggle. The nanopolymer sprayed from the miniscule tangle rounds shot by tiny underarm grenade launchers, using the slack space in the forearm exoskeleton. The muzzles are still emitting ephemeral wisps of smoke as they swing up to support the claws in the classic poise.
This lounge is mine. I am Mantid Swarm 35, and I will be the standard for the next generation of my kind. Over a thousand bodies allow me to include specialisations such as grenade-launching and functional wings without degrading my tactical effectiveness. From formicid drones to human troops, I have never met a problem that I could not kill.
