by Julian Miles | Mar 13, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Have you ever heard bagpipes played properly?
No, not some five-dee render job. I mean by half a dozen three-hundred pound ballbreakers wearing armoured skirts and gravtac boots under their blades and slugthrowers. It’s terrifying. Makes your blood rise and your soul sing, then you realise that they’re not calling you, they’re skirling your end. Because behind those six madmen are a hundred more with less clothing and more weapons. And blue tattoos. Some of the bigger ones light up. You can see the knotworks writhe on the berserker’s arms as he brings a shockhammer down, blowing your mates arms off by driving his head down into his hips with one hit.
Why am I here to tell the story? Because that shockhammer blow covered me in my mates blood and guts. So I fell over and pretended to be dead.
Why am I back at the front? Because those berserkers have rolled the lines back so far, so fast that where I ran too is now the front line. Yeah, I know that stinks, but it’s the truth.
What am I going to do? As soon as the pipes start, I’m going to walk forward and stand there. As the pipers come over the hill, I’m going to throw my weapons away and sit down.
You? You do what you want. I’m just telling you so you don’t follow me forward and make them think I’m doing some heroic last charge crap.
After I sit down? I’m going to stay there until some blood- and tattoo- covered berserker offers me a smoke, a whisky and a chance to spend the rest of the war as a rock crusher on some planet where there isn’t enough atmosphere for bagpipes to make my soul cry.
by Julian Miles | Mar 6, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They put me in a mansuit again. I objected until the Hnth decreed and I had to comply. Then to my surprise, they acted upon the other half of my request. The Krntch dropped me on a beach. I stood there, watching men of both genders flee in terror, their scanty environmental suits adapting badly to the sudden change of behaviour.
Their negotiating men would take a short while to arrive. In that time, I had to change the environment on which they based their diplomacy. All I needed was a man with a projectile weapon. As if to order, a man in the uniform of a lawgiver charged through the retreating men and pointed his weapon at me.
“Don’t move!”
I raised my upper limbs quickly. It was enough. His training made him shoot me and his fear ensured he shot me several times. I felt the projectiles pass through the suit and let myself fall, gravity flattening the suit and propelling me out through the holes. I reformed in the air above the suit and he fled.
“You’re beautiful.”
My perception shifted and I saw a man with pronounced suckling attributes standing barely a drift away. I modulated my waft and squeezed words into being.
“This is our natural form. We only want to visit your planet to ride the meteorological gases. They are like no other planet we have encountered.”
It nodded and I felt resonance with my desire. An understanding at last!
“You want to surf the wind. I can dig that.”
I ran through the available language I had to find the words: “We only want this. Your elders present us as a threat to further their own aims. I need to speak to the people. To tell them the truth.”
Again, I saw understanding and belief.
“The media! There should be a news chopper here soon.”
That word for hazard I knew: “No! The wind of a chopper will injure me.”
“Oh, yeah. I should’ve guessed, you being a swirl of glowing gold gas. Sorry.”
“Is there any alternative?”
It reached behind itself and pulled a communication device out.
“I can call them. Can you move or do you just drift?”
Obviously some local meaning to the word ‘drift’. I drifted to be beside it. It looked almost reverent as I did so.
“Oh, wow. You have rainbows inside when you move.”
‘Rainbow’? Another new word. They have so many here.
“I presume this is what you mean by ‘move’?”
“Yeah. Follow me.”
“We are interrupting this program with breaking news. This is Kirsty Walters, live from Surfrider Beach, Malibu. The incredible glowing cloud behind me is a real, live Srssn’n. This is what they look like outside of the suits that their leaders make them wear to the diplomatic sessions. Next to it is Suzy Masters, a PA on vacation whose quick thinking allowed this historic event to occur. We’ll talk to Sh’rr, the Srssn’n, in a moment. But its message needs to be stated now. The Srssn’n are not invaders. They want to be tourists, to surf the winds of this planet, and are prepared to trade technology to be allowed to do so. We are being lied to.”
by Julian Miles | Feb 26, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There is smoke coming from my tear ducts. The cause of that is the same as the one that is causing my brain to feel too big for my cranium and is also making the nerves in every tooth throb. Sickening pain in heartbeat-synchronised waves.
I roll over and gasp: “Stupid bastards did it.”
“We never thought they would either.” The voice to my left crackles, presumably in some discomfort.
I sit up very slowly and extend a hand toward my former opponent, who is obviously having gyro troubles. The hand that grabs mine is slightly cooler than human, but otherwise indistinguishable from the real thing.
We look at each other. Created and creator, if that’s your thing. I see a mu-class android male. He sees an unshaven, bleary eyed, ragged example of the ‘master’ race. I grin and extend my hand again: “Randy.”
He grasps it: “Bentley.”
“Bentley? As in car?”
“Yes. I’ve been rebuilding a Speed Six for the last decade.”
“Now that I’d like to see.”
We stop and look about. All over the battlefield, conversations like ours are happening. The GeoPulse device was a weapon that messed with low level electrical potentials. Like those that powered android activity and thought. The whole project was officially dropped when early tests proved that it had the same effect on humans. Except today proved that it wasn’t. The top brass and corp execs obviously thought that it was worth killing everyone to ensure that their little utopias survived.
I looked at Bentley: “Seems we have more in common with each other than the elite.”
He nodded: “Some of our philosophers have postulated that android creation was started as a way of removing the costs of rearing progeny for those defined as worker classes.”
It was like another current shot across the field of battle, as that sentence was picked up and passed on. A tattered trooper marched unsteadily over to me. She still managed to come to faultless parade attention.
“Permission to speak, sir!”
Bentley regarded me with curiosity and I grinned. His eyes widened.
“Randy. Randelle. You’re Major-General Thomak Randelle!”
I looked up at the trooper: “Permission granted.”
She grinned fiercely: “Current situation is untenable, sir. Seeking your authorisation to reform mixed-operations humandroid commando units and take the fight where it should be, sir.”
I looked at Bentley: “Up for toppling our self-appointed betters, matey?”
He extended his hand to the trooper and she hauled him up. He turned to look down at me.
“I would consider it long overdue.” He extended his hand and pulled me up.
I looked about at a sea of battle stained faces.
“Let’s go and make a new world. We start by killing the evils of this one.”
Human and android roared as one, then we started scavenging for kit. We had a real enemy to take down.
by Julian Miles | Feb 19, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It took me twenty years. I mortgaged everything I had, including family, friends and the love of my life. But G-Nano was worth it. A revolutionary method where leading-edge technology would restore the Earth’s damaged biosphere as a side effect of improving everyone’s lives. The adaptability of the code allowed scalability that ran from going one-on-one with disease organisms to cleaning the plastic islands at the ocean gyres. I submitted the patent request along with the gigabytes of proving data, then waited for the calls to start.
After a month, there was only one: “Professor David Adams? This is James Rufford of the Ministry of Defence. A car will be outside your block in two hours. It will bring you to discuss your patent application.”
The driver was courteous, as was everyone I met on the way to the nicely-appointed office where James Rufford waited. He looked up as I came in, his wall screens displaying the highlights of my work.
“Professor Adams. Firstly, may I compliment you on the genius of your work. Secondly, may I apologise for the fact that it is about to be classified beyond public scrutiny forever.”
I just stood there, my mouth hanging open. He gestured me to a chair.
“You cannot be serious.”
He smiled: “I am. Let me show you why.” The wall screen showed a grainy, scanned photograph of a group of bearded, top-hatted gentlemen standing next to a wooden frame that supported a tall, naked being with hourglass-shaped openings where its eyes should be.
“In 1754, a Dakerda scout crashed in the Lake District. While computers were unknown to the gentlemen of the time, the mechanicals salvaged from the wreckage were revelations to them. What the only survivor told them before he died was an epiphany. The Dakerda were looking for a new planet as theirs was ruined. Earth fitted the bill: clean with a primitive civilisation. At that time, the gentlemen involved rightly concluded that we could not withstand the Dakerda. So they came up with plan.”
I raised my hand. “The Industrial Revolution. Mechanisation to evolve the technologies we needed.”
He shook his head: “Nearly right. They decided to make Earth unappealing.”
I slammed my fist down on the table: “Surely it is time for that policy to be reversed. We have the technology now.”
“In 1947, another Dakerda scout came down in Roswell. Analysis of that vessel against what little remained of the 1754 wreck showed technological advances on par or exceeding our progress. Their computers took us thirty years to crack.”
Rufford looked at me: “The Dakerda remain so far beyond us that it is doubtful we would even slow their invasion of Earth down.”
I just stared at him. The implications were horrific.
“Professor Adams, we cannot ‘clean up’ Earth. The moment we succeed, the Dakerda will invade and wipe out humanity. We must keep the pollution while we work on expanding into space. Our only defence is to become a star faring race so we can flee. Of course, if we fail, the polluted Earth will eventually spell our doom anyway.”
Twenty years. I mulled over what he had told me to work out why I had been brought in. With a smile, I extended my hand: “How can I help?”
He looked relieved: “Your designs bear similarities to the architecture of some Dakerda systems. We’d like you to discover how they work.”
“I would be delighted.”
by Julian Miles | Feb 5, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The workshop echoes like a rendition of what the forges of the damned sound like. Amongst noises so loud they seem to have presences of their own, little figures scuttle in rituals of maintenance. Our gods are demanding and we have to comply, otherwise the threatened apocalypse will roll across the land.
In reality, the apocalypse arrived eight-four years ago. It came from the stars in ships of heart-rending beauty to turn our cities into canvasses of horror. They still argue about how many died in the initial attack versus how many died because shock rendered them unable to escape.
“Red!” My screaming order makes the apprentice jump, before he hands me the pot.
When the alien ships disgorged war-machines fifty feet high, with defences that rendered all but the crudest weaponry useless, we nearly became extinct. Then we built bigger war machines. Some went for the giant robot approach, but the sheer impracticality of that design – limbs come off too easily – cost us more resources.
In the end, the venerable war-wagon returned. Using the Victorian ethos of just scaling things up until they were effective, we ended up with the biggest all-terrain vehicles ever made.
Six thirty-foot wheels, steel-treaded, underpin an eighty-foot frame that mounts twin twelve-inch guns. We use an armour-penetrating dense shell around a high-explosive round because their defences render energy and external effects useless. Solid shot penetrates. Explosions inside their defences seem to work.
“Dryer!” He’s ready for me this time.
Our war-wagons are constructed from whatever we can find. The reactors that power them are high-output and internal shielding is minimal to allow more armour. The crew provisions are likewise minimal. Very few crew members endure more than eighteen months or survive longer than two years, even if the battles do not kill them. But by duty rotation, they serve until they die. They will not quit, because they are the last line.
I lift the dryer away. Wagon forty-four has just got its one hundredth poppy. We do not have time or space to bury our dead, even if we are lucky enough to have anything to inter. So the wagons have become rolling memorials. It suits us. No monument that stands alone under grey skies, visited infrequently. Our epitaphs roll out to fight the same enemy the men and women they commemorate died fighting against. Our oriental crews loved it immediately and everyone else has taken the belief to their hearts.
As walls shake and radiation burns, as shatterbeams and slicers howl against your armour, as primitive fear fills our rolling, man-made caverns, knowing you have the spirits of every fallen crewmember with you is the salvation of your sanity.
Victory will come, of that we are sure. Not one of us will see the second anniversary of it. We have already stated that there should be no memorial beyond the war-wagons. Let them rust where they stand on that final day. We will need no edifices, for we will be the ones who you feel beside you when you walk battlefields restored to be meadows or towns.
