by Julian Miles | Dec 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
He’s petrified. I can tell from the white-knuckle grip he has on his rifle, the way his eyes cannot fix on a given point for more than a few seconds. My threat scan classifies him as ‘low to negligible’. Which is a bit of a bugger as he’s one of my best.
“Johnny… Trooper Blumenthal!”
That gets his attention. He slams upright so hard I have to backhand him in the knees to stop him coming to attention – which would leave a metre of the bits he’d really regret losing sticking up into the open.
“Johnny, I know this is scary, but you have to get your fear to work with your training. Don’t worry about bravery, charging in, even shooting your weapon at an enemy. Leave that to me. I have a special op for you.”
His gaze fixes on my visor. I can see the four-metre creature I am reflected in his eyes. In fairness, I can also see the veins at the back of his eye that tell me he needs a diabetes check if he survives this. How did the medics miss that? But, more importantly, let’s concentrate on getting him to that medical.
“Johnny. You with us?”
He swallows hard. I see him consciously gather himself into the now. Good lad.
“Yes sir. I’m back.”
“Right. You see how the back of this sorry excuse for a foxhole gives you a clear field toward our rear?”
“Yes sir.”
“Scan that field. If you see one of ours pulling back, you use that heater of yours to melt a death-for-desertion clean through them. Can you do that?”
He goes white. Then his smile thins out, and he nods.
“That’s the spirit. I’ll tell you a secret, Johnny. You’re not here to fight the Bodan. You’re here to stop the others running away. I’m going to fight the Bodan. Between the two of us, we’ll have a victory, and a unit one step nearer to being veterans by nightfall.”
He looks at me quizzically.
“Each of these combat bodies costs more than the GDP of two colonies, Johnny. We can’t waste them on trainees. Every one is operated by the mortal remains of an old soldier. As one of these is equivalent to a thousand-man battlegroup with full mechanical support, we are holding the Bodan. What we need are more hardcore soldiers to pilot the next generation, and fill the occasional gaps in the ranks.”
Johnny grins: “You reckon I’ll last long enough to get me one of what you’re wearing?”
I smile, although nothing shows where Johnny can see it: “Yes. Now cover your sector, Trooper Blumenthal. I’ll be back in a while.”
by Julian Miles | Nov 21, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The seasonal rains have set in; bringing the battle for the planet we call Tango to a bogged-down halt. High above, the grey clouds flash blue-veined white as miniature suns blossom in orbit. The war continues across known space, committed men and women laying down their lives for a cause that became tenuous months ago.
I’m not here to contemplate the vagaries of politics. Like all hierarchies, we have our share of champions, villains, and those who simply do the best they can for the people they represent. They couldn’t do my job. I couldn’t do theirs. Neither of us would want to trade places.
“Hangman Seven, this is Gallows. What’s feeding the crows?”
I smile. Someone has a darkly appropriate sense of humour back at headquarters.
“Eight this morning. Awaiting this afternoon’s first customer. H-7 out.”
A long time ago, men in trenches never lit a third cigarette – an early form of chemical inhaler – from the same match. This was because enemy snipers would have ranged them from the first two ignitions, and the third recipient would die.
These days, all the battlefield drugs arrive by patch or spray. Nothing to betray a position. The beams from combat lasers are invisible to an unaided human eye, which is all I have. My people joined the war when the enemy decided that our homeworld was more valuable as a vast open-cast mine than a place of ancient forests and sky-piercing peaks.
For centuries uncounted, we hunted fairly. Man versus beast, intelligence our only advantage. When command found out about our far-sighted hunters, they tried – and failed – to fit us into the armoured warrior ethos they had fostered. Then a smart man asked us what we needed to kill our foe. We took body paint that hid our heat and did not run in any liquid, then learned about rifles. What they made for us are short, very accurate – and place us within range of enemy rifles. That is only fair. When we told them to let the enemy know, many regarded us as lunatics. A few nodded and smiled coldly.
Our prey is hyperaware that we are nearby. They know we have to be within range of their guns. They cannot use area devastation because of that caveat. Their initial contempt has turned to fear, because they cannot stop us. We are far better unseen hunters than their technology, or skills, can neutralise.
Forty feet away, a bored enemy watch-sniper idly vapourises a raindrop. The little puff of steam is not detectable, as far as he knows, but I see it. To honour tradition – something that has always separated us from the beasts we hunt – I wait until he does it a third time before putting a silent projectile into his nasal cavity, which explosively removes the back of his skull as it fragments.
My first for the crows of the afternoon.
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.
