by Julian Miles | Jan 15, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I am the reason for the silence. It is if there is an invisible column of peace centred upon me. Far to starboard, I see an entire flight of Black Dragon assault drones holding station. Upon detecting my regard, the lead drone tilt-salutes in my direction.
It started in Syria, after a British combat paramedic and Iranian surgeon substituted the curve of the Red Crescent for the vertical bar of the Red Cross. Within days, that ‘Red Trident’ became our sign. On a white circle, it’s a civilian aid unit. On a white square, it’s an emergency services unit. On an inverted white triangle, it’s like me: a military mercy flight.
As I hammered across the desert for the first time, using the vectored thrust from my internal rotors to steer while the scramjet pushed me past Mach four, I saw soldiers looking up and making religious gestures. No matter whom I was rushing to help – friend or foe – they wished me well. One day, it could be them.
Entering the hot zone, I shut down the scramjet and hover-coasted while momentum dispersed. Far below, a warrior levelled an RPG at me. I saw his comrade shoot him in the head. No matter that my armour would ignore that sort of light arms fire. My behavioural routines did not understand, but my mission remained viable, so I retrieved the shrapnel-mutilated specialist with my robotic arms, lifting her gently into my primary care pod. With death placed in brief abeyance by activating stasis on the pod, I lifted slowly while orienting myself to point toward the nearest major trauma facility. When I had achieved sufficient altitude for straight-line point-to-point, I put a ‘clearway’ laser pulse along the route, vectored thrust and engaged the scramjet.
It was the day after that I found an article from a war correspondent who had been in the hot zone. I added it verbatim to my behavioural archive, because while I knew it explained the odd behaviour, I also knew that it would take me years to comprehend it:
“Today I encountered a legend in the making. A specialist had stepped on an IED. She could survive, but only with advanced medical care. I heard the word ‘lifespear’ and saw nods. Within minutes, there was a noise like I have never heard before: a banshee scream, underpinned by distant thunder. Just when I thought it would damage my ears, it ceased and the eerie howl of vectored thrust heralded the arrival of a wedge-shaped armoured drone. The only break in its matte-black finish was a Red Trident set in an inverted triangle. Within moments, it had loaded the specialist and levitated into the heavens. A rainbow flash shot westward, searing the desert evening – and my retinas. Then the screaming thunder started and shot off, following the line of the flash, leaving a wake like an accelerating meteor and a resonance echo in my chest.
Calling it a High-Threat Zone Retrieval Unit does not capture the reverence with which these ‘lifespears’ are regarded. They are absolutely inviolate, and that status is enforced by the nearest weapon-bearer capable of intervening, be it friend or foe.
I am reminded of my grandfather telling me how London traffic used to part before ambulances, and my great grandfather talking about his grandfather telling him about the Ghost Cavalry of Mons, who accompanied wounded men as they left the battlefield at night. I wonder if future grandchildren will be told of the Remote Angels, who rode thunder and sundered the heavens with spears of light to save wounded soldiers.”
by Julian Miles | Jan 5, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The mists swirl about our feet and the cold blues of brushed steel surfaces surround us. There is distant hubbub, like a monster stirring in its lair – which is an accurate analogy.
The Major’s eyes open and focus on mine. She sits up: “War?”
“War.” I nod agreement and feel my tacticals run cold. From the glint in her eyes, she’s feeling it too.
They used to go to war with rules. Hundreds of them. Had whole committees of impartial referees to decide what you could and couldn’t do. It took centuries to shake that stupid, selfish habit. War should be terrifying. War should be abhorrent. War should be the final step in a long chain of failures to find a peaceful solution.
But when war becomes the only recourse, it should be done with unmitigated savagery, surgical precision and no restraints. Because when a war is fought, you are trying to make it the last one. You are praying that your descendants never have to go through what you’re going through. No man or woman should have to take weapons in hand to do mortal combat in the pursuit of peace, simply because other people failed to find another way. Naturally, every entity/nation has cadres that are always prepared, but they are just that: an elite few, separate from a society they cannot fit into and could not understand.
When the fighting starts, you make it brutal, you make it atrocious. So that when non-cadre look upon the remains, they are resolved to never permit it again. If you have done your job properly, the losing side will never resurge – because there is no losing side. The only memorial will be the cluster of silo graves that stand in mute testimony to another utter failure of civilisation.
Territories will be realigned. Populations will be transferred. Peace will resume in the appalled aftermath, reminded once again of the necessity for sanity to endure.
I pick up my rifle after sliding both machetes into their scabbards. Checking my charge levels, I exit the tent and go to join my unit. After the warbotics finish their tasks, we must be ready to carry the battle into the enemy before they can recover.
Our cadre will have engaged theirs as ruination fell from the skies. We got the drop on them, so they will fight like the damned. Maintaining the layered pressure of attack is the only element of strategic mastery that counts: the real-time accumulation and analysis of countless tactical outcomes to guide this implacable, nation-crushing offensive.
They call us Terminators – an ironic reference to legendary monsters that sought to overthrow mankind. We are what dead cadre members become: cybernetic agents of slaughter, cryohibernated in the hope that we will never be needed again.
This is only the third time I have been awakened in five hundred years. Mankind is – finally – getting better at peace.
by Julian Miles | Dec 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Did you really think this was going to be scenic?” I cannot help it; disgust oozes around my words.
He swallows hard. Tearing his gaze from the spectacle, he fastens wide eyes on mine: “This is horrific. What law would allow this?”
Every time. Every. Damn. Time. I’d really like one person to come up here with a clear view.
“You fought tooth and nail to come here, and you have the gall to ask me that?”
Titan is Earth’s penal colony, and it was carefully designed. Prison shuttles arrive on the peak of a mountain in the Dilmun range. From there, a dropslide deposits the convicts into Titan One, the main ‘processing’ area.
I use the term loosely, because that is what it is labelled as on the designs. Since Titan has no inhabitants that are not criminals, I would guess that it may best be regarded as a nightmare cross between slave market and the gateway to hell.
Britain established HMP Titan 180 years ago, at the height of the Elite Regime. That may have fallen in fire and summary executions, but its legacy is this monument to human squeamishness. Every nation on Earth pays Titan Corp to use this place. The laughable element of that is the discrepancy between vast sums of money paid and miniscule expenditure required to maintain the transports and the crews: people like me.
Titan needs no budget. It is a frigid hell over a billion kilometres from Earth. The humanitarian campaigner I am escorting has just seen the plain on the Adiri side of Shangri-La. It’s littered with macabre sculptures: the dead. Some of them were corpses before they were deposited out here. Most got shot out of the waste chute as the losing side of an argument. No-one knows who – or what – rearranges them into these hideously fascinating patterns. Personally, I never want to meet the Iceghosts of Titan. I suspect they are non-too chuffed at having their home host the cesspit of Terra.
“I think I’ve seen enough. It is obvious that this place is beyond any rational intervention.”
Another do-gooder bottles it. I snort my low opinion and swing the scout shuttle around. While he organises his excuses, I look down at the field of dead and, once again, get the terrible feeling of being watched by something of unforgiving malice.
If that feeling is true, it’s not an Iceghost. It’s the spirits of the dead, levelling their hatred at me. Why? Because when Titan Corp came to me and said I could fly the convicts, or remain as one of them, I took my thirty pieces of silver and a lifetime exile from Earth. Apartment on Mars, girlfriend on the Titan Corp Penal Flight cleaning crew: ‘we the damned’ can only tolerate each other.
HMP Titan exists because the ruling powers of Earth have to be seen to be ‘fair’. No summary executions, just banishment. This place is far crueller than a death sentence, yet public sensibilities – and a craving to stay in power – force the establishments to keep this horror story going.
by Julian Miles | Dec 18, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The external camera pan across a steely – if a trifle motley – flotilla of guard skiffs, arrayed before a Griffin-class Space Dreadnought painted in the eye-baffling ‘wasp-fragmentary’ colour scheme.
Voiceover: “These nights, the long hand of the law comes to the furthest territories in the form of the Space Dreadnoughts from Privateers-of-the-Line; possibly this decade’s greatest rebranding triumph, although their former peers have also rebranded them, less flatteringly, as ‘The Turncoat Company’.”
The internal camera shows an anchorwoman dressed in ‘Gypsy’ formalwear: “Privateers-of-the-Line, formerly the Cutlass fleet ‘Desperados’, ruled by Captain Jake Delahunt, have gone – in ten short years – from Galactic Most Wanted to Galactic Defenders without compare. Good evening. My name is Verdanata Lires, and tonight I bring you a special presentation from Mercantor Unlimited.”
Subtitles: ‘Formerly the crew of the Cutlass Banshee. Incorporated 3455, Alastor Cluster. Trader registry 160828130526JV’.
The external camera jump-cuts to a battered Cutlass tethered to a barren asteroid.
Voiceover: “Is this your future? Have the days of star-wolfing fallen to nights of fleeing the Turncoat Company? Take heart! We have the answer. Guaranteed improved profit-from-pillage within a stellar month!”
Subtitles: ‘Subject to non-capture and abiding by raiding guidelines as established by Captain Blackhook under the Gather-In of 2609’.
“But don’t take our word for it! Here’s Captain Durgindar of the Cutlass Cremator, leader of the ‘Unforgiven’ Cutlass fleet.”
The internal camera cuts to a cyborg whose flesh components sport marginally more gold piercings than obscene tattoos, and whose cyberware is black chrome blazoned with fluorescent skulls.
“We wuz at d’end of owa teffer.”
Subtitles: ‘We had reached the end of our patience.’
“D’ally plots dun cropped our take.”
Subtitles: ‘The planetary alliances had made raiding too risky.’
“Me ladz dun fink we go deeptime.”
Subtitles: ‘My crew were considering crossing to the Fergall Cluster in cryosleep.’
“Den softlad fro Mercata cum bord wit savin graze.”
Subtitles: ‘Then a representative from Mercantor came aboard with his revelatory device.’
“From dat day to dis, we dun mor bootee dan eva. Black ‘ook bless Mercata!”
Subtitles: ‘Since then, we have made more profit than we ever did before. We cannot recommend the new Galactic Pillaging System from Mercantor highly enough.’
The internal camera cuts back to Verdanata, whose Gypsy formalwear is now looking somewhat informal in places: “Well, that’s it for tonight, ladies and gentlebeings. This is Verdanata Lires, signing off.”
Cameras chop to black. Audio continues: “Keep your filthy graspers off of me, you tin-clawed perverts! Guardee! Get me out of here!”
by Julian Miles | Dec 10, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The lumen panels are set to ‘candlelight’ and the susurrus of the climate control system is muted to barely a whisper. The room is twilit, draped with banners from a hundred victories. In a depression on the floor, an ornamental pool has been reborn as a cushion- and pillow-lined nook for a wearied and bloody command couple to find a moments respite.
An indistinct figure with flaxen hair tilts a face of rare beauty to gaze up at the chiselled lines of a face that could have been hewn from granite – and would have seemed softer had it been so.
“How do I die?”
“It will be a thing of surprise and expectation, an act unforeseen, yet suddenly so obvious to those staggering with grief. ‘Such a bright soul could not last in the tawdry environs of today’, they will say.”
“Michael?”
“He will be as one felled by a mighty blow, but the need to be there for your armies will save him. Duty will ever be his salvation after you are gone.”
“Will I bring peace?”
“Alas, no. There will be a cessation of hostilities. A funeral so rare because of the theretofore unseen gathering of intergalactic luminaries. But then the recriminations will start and rattling sabres will counterpoint venomous rhetoric. The year granted by your death will be recalled as you bestowing a gift upon the troops, even in your passing.”
“What of my killer?”
“He – or more correctly, it – is a companion of doers and movers throughout history, a creature that feeds on the rare essences generated by true heroines and inspirational leaders. But all of that is merely entrée to the haut cuisine created by the storm of emotion over each notary’s death. Thus what started as happenstance has become modus operandi. It is the lover and killer of those who make mankind great.”
“Will it miss me?”
“Forever. Every slaying wreaks decade-long havoc upon its mind, for all that the ecstasy of gourmet fare thunders within. You will be sorely missed.”
“Can you protect me, as you have done so many times before?”
“To defend you would require the end of me.”
“I know my killer very well, don’t I?”
“You do.”
“I started with the wrong question, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“When?”
“Close your eyes.”
The molecularly-aligned edges pass through sleight fields, body armour, dermal weave and titanium-laced bone with only the slightest frissance of impact. The resonance that realigns the edges is unperturbed as the weapon describes a swift reverse question mark in her heart, sundering chambers and cleaving erythrocytes.
She feels a quiver under her breast, but knows the knife is sharper than pain: death will take her before sensory trauma registers.
