by Julian Miles | Jun 9, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The era of warp drive started badly. Ships went in. Nothing came out. Then they found that ships did come out, just a gazillion miles from where they should have.
It took some very clever people to realise that there was only one ‘computer’ with the capabilities to navigate warp space: the human brain. From there, the Navigator Guilds were born and humanity was off to the stars.
The stars were unimpressed. The various races out there had been at peace, or stagnating, for a very long time. The kids from Earth were loud, pugnacious and insisted on asking embarrassing questions and demanding honest answers. We were not popular. But we had the numbers, and warp navigators who were second to none. Or more truthfully, second to one: people like me.
I had all the mental aptitudes to be a navigator. The only problem was that there were too many of me in my mind. Multiple personality disorder and warp space navigational traits were an unwelcome combination; my parents despaired.
Then a man from a ministry that doesn’t exist came and made me a job offer. At double the pay of a Grade One Navigator. Mummy and Daddy rejoiced. Me? I wasn’t so sure, but I signed up anyway.
I became a Zen Gunner.
We’re like snipers. But we shoot things a long, long way off. A lot of those things think they’re safe from anything except planet busters or assassins amongst their staff.
A mind that can navigate warp has certain unique qualities: an unshakeable knowledge of real space co-ordinates, an understanding of how to ride the tides that sweep warp space, and a warp-fold eye view of the destination at all times. That last one is the key: you can see a long way through warp space. See things unseeable by anything in real space.
If you have a lot of you in your head, one can handle the weapon that resembles a church organ (if it had been designed by Picasso), one can see the trajectory of the projectile (calling it a bullet is over-simplifying to the point of insult), one can see the target, and one can dynamically adjust the trajectory so that projectile and target meet.
I was the fifth Zen Gunner. My tutors burst out laughing when they saw that my surname was Bailey and I still don’t know why. But I do know that my ministry makes more money for Britain from one shot than the rest of Britain makes in a year.
Our latest (seventh) Zen Gunner is a girl named Zoe. We get on really well and are not unaware of the hopeful looks being exchanged amongst our managers. She and I have already decided that a family is what we want to become. We’re delaying any announcement until we work out just how much to charge them for it.
by Julian Miles | Jun 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
We were getting pasted in a dogfight off Agnos IV when Team Havoc dropped out of subspace and chewed up the Havna interceptors that had been giving us grief. The thirty-two of us left were damn happy to see the cavalry.
“Marduk Leader to Havoc Leader. Cheers for the assist.”
“No problemo, Marduk. Happy to help.”
At that moment, the jaws of the Havna trap closed and seventy-two Crusis Class interceptors appeared in four ‘eighteen wheels’ formations.
“Marduk Leader to all Marduk units. Looks like we get to celebrate on the run. Havoc, you got flank?”
“Hell no. I got the latest version of Combat Assessor online. Predicts over eighty percent losses. Havoc Flight, reset to start of zone in three,-”
“Reset what?”
“Oh man, you’re realtime? That sucks. Havoc out in two, one… Seeya.”
Team Havoc vanished into subspace and the dying began.
The merging of flight simulators, multiplayer combat games and drone technology started back in the mid twenty-first century. When man went into space via the discovery that subspace could carry more than communications, ‘simdrones’ became the new frontier. Billions of young gamers could reconnoitre actual new planets, all from the comfort of their recliners and gameshelms.
When negotiations broke down with the Havna, we nearly won. A million simdrones piloted by teenagers from across the world had the Havna outnumbered and out-insanitied – there are no limits to what you’ll attempt when you can’t die.
Havna technology advanced and subspace feedback missiles gave the simdrone community their first casualties: 196,547 in two days, to be precise. Cocky became cowardly. So much so that ‘training missions’, supposedly in virtual environments on Earth, were actually live missions, pulled off without the knowledge of the all-too-aware-of-their-mortality little darlings safe at home.
Occasionally, clusterfucks like the one that killed all bar three of Team Marduk happened. Apparently, Team Havoc received a ‘stern’ reprimand.
We hear the chime within the house. It’s a fine day and people are sunning themselves by their pools. Stacey and I, we look summer-ish. Get too close and you’ll see angular outlines under our jellabiya.
The door opens and a woman who could be anything between fifty and ninety smiles at us, revealing teeth to match her million-credit bodywork.
“Can I help you?” Her tone indicates mild curiosity.
“We’re from SD Monitoring, Madam. Can we speak to the resident SD Warrior?”
She sighs: “Warrior? Pain the neck is what he is. CECIL! People from the base to see you!” With that, she leaves us standing there and saunters off, calling for the maid.
A few moments later, a well-built teenager in a silk dishdasha ambles out: “You two my new handlers?” He focuses on Stacey: “Oh man, they sent a babe.”
I rest the foot-long suppressor that fronts my Morgan .60 cal on the tip of his nose: “Marduk Leader to Havoc Leader. Karma time.”
The kick shocks my wrist, elbow and shoulder. Cecil’s head sprays across four metres of parquet and stucco. I look at Marduk Seven – Stacey. She nods.
“Next?”
She checks the datapad on her wrist: “Two houses down on the other side.”
“Law enforcement window?”
“Nine minutes.”
Three minute walk, one minute knock and wait, one minute kill.
“Send subspace co-ordinates for the road outside the next house to Marduk Twenty-Three. Evac in seven.”
Jimi’s that good. Put him in a captured Crusis Class and we become oni: unstoppable demons of vengeance. By the time questions are asked about surveillance suppression and the like, we’ll be back in our quarters on ISS Twelve having left no traces of our little field trip.
by Julian Miles | May 22, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“There’s a lot to be said for old technology. Mainly: ‘ooh looky, spares’. Me and the old bus are both getting long in the tooth. But as she’s got six hundred years and I’m only approaching fifty, we’ll not embarrass the lady with ageist stuff.
She’s still got her original heraldry: a grey shield, with sable bar low and silver cross sinister. She’s called the ‘Last Lancer’ and damn me if she ain’t. The only surviving Rockwell B1, packing four Tetragrammaton XIV near-space drives, a twenty-hour rating for free space thanks to the Lenkormian Permaseal some foresighted owner had put on five centuries ago, and a suite of no-see-me and I-see-you that has yet to let her down.
This month we’re gracing the jungle planet of Durkedhil, where the locals are fighting a vicious civil war, supplied by some offworld profiteers. If it wasn’t for the imported arms, they would be throwing spears and cussin’ each other out, like they did before man and company came along with their ‘Uplift the Primitives’ spiel.
The Durkedhil have assault rifles, mustard gas and napalm to go with their loincloths and proto-heraldry. You would not believe just how happy a tribesman whose entire existence is surrounded by, and dependent on, trees can be to burn them down if he thinks that will stop his brother-in-law from getting them.
They have about a year before they doom themselves. The GalPol cannot touch the weapons merchants, because the population of the planet is willingly engaged in active trade. No matter that it’s a dying market in dying.
This is where people like me come in. We’re ex-GalPol, ex-military, or both. We share a belief that places are better without big guns. We like old technology – I admit mine is older than most – and we hate weapons peddlers. One of us will get the call. One of the others will get the payment. Then pretty soon, United Antiques will stage another display in the name of peace. Antiques aren’t weapons of war by intergalactic statute. They’re curiosities that people can view at travelling shows – or watch hurtling through their skies.
Free space is a dangerous place, but messing around in atmosphere carries different penalties and most shuttle pilots are nth-generation space monkeys. To use an old phrase we like: ‘They can’t fly for shit’.
Interdicting a planet is almost impossible. Stopping the deliveries in atmosphere is easy. The Last Lancer and I are the most recent piece of the puzzle, because the weapons companies have started to put hard bases down to host protection for their deliveries. They call them ‘caravanserai’ but in reality, they are nothing but heavily-fortified warehouses. A Rockwell B1 can carry enough destruction for twenty of ‘em. So while the lads and lassies are mopping the skies, I clean up the ground.
We should be done here in a month or two. On average it takes two months of no profits and big repair bills to get a planet declared ‘commercially non-viable’. Then they’ll be off supplying the next armaggedon down the way, and we’ll be waiting for another call from like-minded people who care about people rather than profits.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Last Lancer and I have warmongers to flatten.”
by Julian Miles | May 13, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
In a room devoid of décor, two chairs face each other across a table barely wide enough to be called a bench. Everything shows the khaki swirls of extruded Replast. In the left hand seat, a young man in filthy rags sits in a pose of tired resignation. Opposite, in many ways, sits a young woman in the uniform of a Major in the Ministry of Defence.
“Please speak clearly. This interview is being recorded and witnessed.” She smiles after she speaks; an encouragement.
“I must have given my statement a dozen times over the last week.” The tramp seems unimpressed, but his shoulders straighten.
“This will be the last time. Full and formal record.”
“Okay. How would you like it presented?”
“Tell the version you gave to the Draft Evasion Board.”
He leans back and stares at the ceiling. His voice betrays an education at odds with his appearance.
“It was ten years ago, just after the first conscription draft intake. We were in the same barracks. As you know, that draft was split into units after the first three months. I ended up in the scutwork battalion. He got into the new army cadre. I never figured it out, just got on with it. UNE profiling gave us the jobs we could do best, so I did my bit.”
She leaned forward: “Then came the Advent City Incident.”
“We all watched the news. The firestorm, the ship coming down, the recruits getting massacred trying to protect the townsfolk. Then the camera picked up a lone figure at extreme range, hanging off the old mine workings on a firing sling with a Trapenor Missile Launcher. Firing that monster was suicide; he’d bring the hillside down on himself for sure. But at that range, the missile would penetrate the Khomin’s shields and hull. We cheered like everyone else when he gave his life to save so many. We were so damn proud. A conscript had become the first hero of the Human-Khomin War. Everyone was fired up.”
“Until the hero was named.” She sat back and crossed her legs.
He grimaced: “It took them a week to recover his body. I was just out of the showers when someone slapped me on the back and told me I was a hero. When I heard the news, I went to our battalion office and made some enquiries. They told me my name was Gustav and that I should stop messing about. I got really angry. So they sedated me. I woke up in an ‘Unsuitable for Service’ workhouse.”
“Which you escaped from and disappeared. Until eight days ago.”
His grin was infectious: “Wouldn’t you? All of a sudden, I was a lunatic and my mum had a dead hero for a son.”
“So why did you come back?”
“Mum died two weeks ago. She’d had the support of a grateful Earth in her waning years, something far better than I could have given her. But now she’s gone, and the war is two years past. It’s time for the truth to be revealed. There is no way that a five-month recruit could have rigged an ad-hoc sniper harness on those mine ruins, let alone overcome the safety limiters and proximity locks on a Trapenor.”
“Say it clearly, please.”
There is a silence as he gathers himself. It reminds her of an animal shaking off the concealment it has risen from.
“My name is Leon Sprake. The man you have named streets, warships and memorials after was an identity thief, and I think we all need to know who he really was.”
by Julian Miles | May 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Bloody hell but it’s a long way down.
It always gets to me at least once each shift. Burlaria has a vast atmosphere envelope. The result of it becoming the capital of the Nineteen Worlds was a huge increase in population. As the planet prided itself on the beauty of its natural countryside, something had to be done.
An architect called Gingky came up with the idea of ‘Skyspires’. Vast tower blocks, supported by the latest in deep space technology and each independently powered by the gravitic core housed at the apex of the tower. Which allowed the core to be jettisoned into orbit with ease in the event of an emergency.
The idea swept all before it and within the constraints imposed by the physics involved, each Skyspire was permitted to be individual in appearance and style. Kilnrock looks like a classic evil wizard’s tower from old fantasy tales. Orbitville is the preferred habitat for spacers. There are six hundred Skyspires and they themselves have become a tourist destination: airships full of sightseers take tours around them, snapping movies and stills of the light shows, inlaid designs and, my personal favourites: the gargoyles.
The gargoyle had been a mountain dwelling winged predator in danger of extinction. Burlaria had tried so many times to halt the decline of these long-lived, magnificently ugly, stony-skinned pre-sentients. They were unique in the experience of the NWFPC – Nineteen Worlds Fauna Protection Council – but that uniqueness doomed them. There were no applicable behavioural or environmental models to adapt.
Then the Skyspire I’m on today, Lifespear, was completed. Within a month, there were sightings of gargoyles in the uppermost zones. Investigation showed gargeries in numbers never before seen.
The height was the thing. When Burlaria had been discovered, it had gigantic polyps drifting in the high sky. They were part edible, part refinable and part weavable. The rest was top-grade fertiliser. Extinction occurred before controls could be introduced.
It seems that the gargoyles needed the polyps to lair and reproduce, high above the highest-flying competing raptor species.
Skyspires gave them back their havens and their population has recovered, with divergent species and variants still being catalogued, eight decades later.
Something small, fluorescent and purple hurtles past me, a vicious rattle emanating from its throat sacs.
“Leave me be, you ugly son of a gull!”
I patch my video feed directly to ‘Gargoyle Central’, as we call the NWFPC watch station here.
“Gail, darling. What’s glowing purple and wants to eat my eyes?”
“Casey, that’s a broodmother of the Lesser Mauve Tyrant subspecies. Very, very rare. If she’s threatening you, you must be near a newly-established gargery. So stop what you’re doing.”
A gargery? Made from excreted resin and scavenged rubbish in whatever aperture appealed.
“Gail. Is this species a hot laying or cold laying one?”
“Hot. Why?”
“I’ll come back in, but you have to call Lifespear Maintenance and tell them exactly why their expensive contracted external works engineer will not be clearing the heat exchanger on level seventeen-hundred, but will still be charging them his premium callout rate.”
She’s laughing as she replies: “Done.”
