by Julian Miles | Jun 26, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The sensation of having no legs is new, and I’m not liking it. Being unable to connect to the in-ship stream is worrying. At least I was able to reach the emergency button. Right on cue, the door panel slides back to admit-
A ghost in black.
“You’re dead!”
She smiles. Another one that doesn’t warm her eyes.
“Nearly, Miles. I called it a good effort.”
My mind flashes back to that day on the Eventide. We stood at either ends of the shuddering evacuation room, atmosphere venting about us, she in the ballgown I gave her, me in the environment suit I’d changed into before the bomb I planted killed her along with the ship. Her eyes went wide, I pulled the trigger. She went over back-
No.
She rose up before she went backwards when the beam hit.
“You tip-toed! Took it through the face instead of the brain.”
Callisto smiles. This one reaches her eyes.
“Your recall is good as ever, but still needs prompting to work properly. That arrogant surety versus actual attention to detail never changes. I’ve watched you, on and off, ever since I got out of rebod.”
She always loved to have every angle covered. Which is why a lover’s betrayal was the only thing that – judging from the evidence before me – only nearly caught her out.
“How’s the new bod?”
There’s a grimace in reply.
“This is the second. Emergency relief was pushed, trying to save all the worthy from the Eventide after you cracked it open. The go-bod I ended up with wasn’t optimal. I had to live with seizures for a year until I could get a me-bod printed and have myself cut across to it.” She smiles. This one makes her eyes flash. “I kept going by knowing we’d meet this way: you paralysed, and me standing over you.”
I wave my arms.
“Partially paralysed. You’re slipping, Callisto. Getting sloppy.”
Her quickdraw is flawless. The dart gets me centre-mass. Got to admit, had our situations been reversed, I’d have waited before taking the shot. Gloating has always been a weakness of mine.
I slump back. Fast-acting, major muscle groups only. I can still roll my eyes.
“Better, sweetie?”
When I flick my eyes from side to side, doing the closest thing to a nod I can manage, she laughs properly. I’ve missed that… Surprisingly true, and a realisation too late – again.
Callisto holsters the weapon as she steps closer to stare me in the eyes.
“The crew are sleeping in the lifeboat they’re headed away on. They didn’t know their wealthy client is a double-crossing interstellar thug.”
She straightens up.
“The other lifeboat is mine, because I’m not leaving here in the fresh produce container I arrived in.”
So that’s how she got on board.
With a move I don’t quite follow, she stabs me low in the side. The drug cocktail she used is very good: pain receptors aren’t affected at all.
Crouching next to me, cerametal dagger cradled idly in her offhand, she gives me a smile like she used to when we were in love. Well, she was. I was in lust while getting paid a fortune for revelling in it.
“I’m not sure if the overloaded drive core exploding, the decompression it causes, or the blood loss will kill you, but a little variety never hurt anyone, did it?” She chuckles, quoting one of my favourite pre-kill phrases.
“Bye.”
She gets up and leaves. Just like that. I’d definitely have gloated. Such a beautiful set-piece. Shame it’s me in it.
by Julian Miles | Jun 19, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It was a lovely evening. We’d seen a band, gone for a meal, had a fine THC vape, and were wandering home, giant mocha lattes in hand.
“Hey, isn’t that a Spot?”
I look where Tam’s pointing. There’s a robodog coming down the sidewalk towards us. Bright yellow carapace, quick stepping, cheery rainbow flag bobbing at the end of its antenna.
It stops. A little turret where the head should be turns our way.
“Tamzyn Coombs?”
A female voice, probably artificial.
Tam raises her eyebrows, then steps forward.
“Yes.”
I see her drop, then hear the shot. My first urge is still to spin round while drawing a gun. Instead I feign tripping up on some raised paving and go down hard. I kick a bit, twitch onto my side – so I have some view of the street – before relaxing and going still. Ignore me, robot assassins, I’m unconscious.
After a short wait, robodog deploys a pair of manipulator arms. That isn’t a Spot. It’s a Zeke. Based on the same chassis, but created for urban infiltration. In the silence, I can hear the rotors of a drone come closer. Probably keeping a lookout. The Zeke takes Tam’s bag, then slides or cuts off her jewellery and places them inside.
A bulkier manipulator rises with a gripless pistol mounted on it. The robodog moves round, positioning the weapon carefully, then shoots Tams lifeless body again, this time point blank. Bits splatter. A dum-dum round to conceal the real cause of death. That done, the Zeke trots away, stolen bag swinging. The drone sound fades.
This is a new level of savage. I’ve been stood next to comrades who got shot: she was dead before she hit the ground. On a side street in a city an ocean away from the nearest war!
Without fighting my reaction, I make myself scarce, using every trick available to avoid being followed by anything. Bad times fleeing through foreign cities where every watcher could be hostile come to mind, bringing all the old freight that’s not helping me now. Finding myself down by the railway tracks, I sprint, letting the hard exercise help me process the chaos in my head.
Tam I’ll grieve for later. Something’s changed in the people versus those who rule, and I need to get some place where I can confirm my suspicion: this wasn’t a one-off.
Her social media supports ordinary people, providing links to resources and stuff like that. She never failed to call out corporations, and recently caused a case to be brought against our local Senator for his dealings with certain pharmaceutical lobbies.
Algy runs an all-night cybercafe. He looks up as I slip in through the rear door to the kitchen.
“Whose blood are you wearing, brother?”
“Tam. Killed by a sniper drone after a Zeke got us to stop. I faked a trip and knockout, then legged it soon as.”
He crosses himself.
“Lord above, may she rest in peace. Who targeted her?”
“Some three-letter mob. Get me to a secure browser.”
The nets are alive with reports of a spate of murders linked to muggings and suchlike. Officially unrelated, but in less than six hours we’ve hit a critical shortage of high-profile activists. Nearby drones are a common theme.
I turn to Algy.
“My guess is they’ve got mass production of combat robots up and running. They’ve decided they have the numbers to be immune to mass protests.”
“Are they right?” He snarls.
I scowl.
“No. It’ll take time and martyrs, but we will overcome.”
by Julian Miles | Jun 12, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I watch Nona and Paul walk away, then drop back down. Nothing to do for a while. My next workday is Thursday, so I’m free for the next five days. I wonder if Wanda… No, she’s off with Eber doing resistance stuff. I couldn’t do that. Wearing one of those heavy respirators and sleeping in pressurised tents? No. To be honest, I don’t see what they’re resisting. I mean, there hasn’t been a war in ten years. Can’t remember the last time I witnessed a fight. Haven’t heard of any, either.
Eber and the die-hards say we’ve been conquered and our proud heritage demands we should strive for our freedom from the aliens with every breath, every drop of blood. That whole ‘never surrender’ thing.
Which is where he and I parted ways. I asked one question: “Why should we fight to get back to a situation far worse?”
He hit me. Called me a defeatist. He called me a lot of other things, too. But it doesn’t matter – another thing he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand.
The alien race have a name that sounds like ‘Bangarstom’. Somebody called them Bangers, and that was the end of the naming discussion.
Technically, they didn’t invade. Fifteen years ago, an unexpected meteor shower lit the skies for a week. Unusually, many of them survived the burn and landed. By the time the authorities realised the scale of the problem, it was already out of hand. Vena advena is what the scientists called it – a majority decision after weeks of wrangling gave way before the effects of what the rest of the world had come to call Peace Weed.
It spread fast. Where meteorites landed in urban areas, the response was able to contain the effects with only a few accidents. Those only occurred after the authorities realised burning the alien plant released a smoke that acted like a concentrated dose of the chemicals given off by the living plants. So they experimented sloppily, killing an unknown number of people and animals, then settled on a couple of forms of hard radiation. Which also killed things, but not immediately, and nowhere near as quickly as it killed Peace Weed.
When it became clear that huge tracts of wilderness had become infested with Peace Weed, several governments proposed the use of methods that ranged from nuclear weapons down to radioactive crop spraying. None of the options were adopted. The amount of land that would be sterilised would spell the end of civilisation. Scientists noted Peace Weed was a non-competing species, and that it had become effectively established worldwide in record time.
The results of the chemicals given off by the weed were never properly categorised, because nobody cared. Science, like everything else, moved to providing solutions for the ills and deficiencies that had plagued humanity for decades. Nobody wanted to compete anymore. Many wanted to co-operate. The rest wanted to just live their lives without hunger or pain.
Then the Bangers arrived, asking politely if they could set up a few towns on the understanding they would share non-military technology without reserve. Everybody agreed it would be a good idea, as we hadn’t quite sorted out the transition from capitalism to where we’d arrived without warning.
That was twelve years ago. Between us all we sorted the final details of becoming a ‘quiet planet’, and have been that for ten years.
We are, at last, at peace.
Wanda flops down next to me.
“Why is Eber determined to return to a dystopia?”
“Fear, probably. You done with them?”
She kisses me.
“Yup.”
by Julian Miles | Jun 5, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Standryl looks down from the walkway. It’s like peering into one of those curio shops on a winter evening – corridors of angular junk filled with mysterious shadows and twinkling lights – except here, every constellation of lights is an old spaceship. The perspective is deceptive, too. The ‘corridor’ he’s looking down is many kilometres long, running parallel to the north-south axis of this satellite.
He turns to his guide, a cyborg so old all its biological components have mummified. It sounds like old dresses crinkling when it moves.
“Tell me how he did it.”
The voice is dry as well. Completely toneless. But the eyes brighten as it tells the tale.
“The Jessop family operated a salvage operation back on Old Earth. When humans went into space, Horace Jessop figured they’d make the same messes they had on their home planet, just spread over a bigger area. He started operating a salvage service, where one of the Jessop Wrecking ships would go anywhere – for a fee – and take away space junk.”
Standryl watches a robo-tracer drift by, locator beeping softly as it seeks the particular make and model of ship a spacer tasked it to find.
“I recall he was famous for the volume of stuff he cleared up. Wasn’t there something shady about that? Accusations of fraud?”
“Yes. The base claim was that the recycled material he returned to market was only a fraction of what he took in. Tenuous theories of unsafe practices used in the disposal of gravitic cores and similar perilous scrap were built on suspicion and guesswork. But, apart from the raw numbers being largely correct, nothing criminal or dangerous was ever found. Jessop Wrecking returned thirty percent of its salvaged material to market. What happened to the rest became the topic of media speculation and fictional accounts for decades.”
“Then the wars rolled in.”
“Yes. All Jessop Wrecking ships were destroyed during the defence of Shargyn in the First Conflict. By the time the Third Conflict collapsed into the Great Retreats, there was nothing left of the company. Other wreckers catered to the demand. A demand that had changed. After the depletions of war, resources were scarce. Recommissioning and repair became the thing. Scarcity of old ship parts made it a lucrative business. Spacers started scouring former battle zones and debris fields.”
“Soon after that started, Alison Bant found this, and you.”
“Yes. She was unique. Spent days talking with me, then disappeared for a few months while she changed her name, found two investors, and bought the Jessop Wrecking name back from GalactaBank. The launch of this facility was spectacularly successful.”
“This is the place Horace stored all the ships he didn’t recycle?”
“Yes. In addition to predicting a need for salvaging, he was also sure a need for spare parts would develop, made all the more keen by the long serviceable lifespans of spaceships. He was right. This facility was used to store every vessel in eighty percent or better completion, but impractical or too costly to return to service at the time. He knew he’d never see this place open its docks, but he also knew it would.”
Amazing long-term vision.
“What was he like?”
The cyborg turns to face him.
“A fat man with a love of brandy trifle and fried vat-grown herring. He never drank hot drinks, and was a cheerful player of ancient boardgames who’d quite literally play for days if uninterrupted.”
The venerable companion droid turns to gaze downwards.
“He called this view ‘fascinating’.”
It pauses.
“I wish I could have salvaged him, too.”
by Julian Miles | May 22, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’m wondering about that human. It seems to be contemplating something. Probably violence. It’s the only reason why we allowed them membership, after all. Come to think of it, what is it doing sat in a cafe on the Aslencade anyway? I though civil zones were off limits to combat aspected beings.
At least that’s easily remedied. I tap my callcuff, and indicate a suspected zone violation.
Moments later, a Constable descends to attend at my side. My response to its polite query is delayed by the human giving me a little grin. There’s no mistake. It knows why the constable is here! How? They’re not telepathic except by genetic happenstance, and none of those are let out of Earth Empire space.
“To repeat: please indicate the suspected offender, Exalted.”
I use the cuff to direct it. No need to make things obvious.
“Thank you for reporting your suspicion, but the indicated being is an enfleshed Constable.”
A what?
Before I can work out who to route a pointed query to, the human rises and crosses to attend me.
“To answer your inevitable question, we found on Earth that criminals and police often share identifiable traits. Being ignored out here – where we are always assumed to be inferior brutes on the verge of criminality – turns our key talent into an advantage: the ability to spot a crook by the way they behave is something you lost when you switched to automated enforcement. While it is remarkably effective at intervention, it is noted that prevention is greatly reduced. In practice, if criminality is covert, and beings do not become suspicious enough to report it, your Constables are ineffective.”
The hovering Constable flashes a trio of green confirmation panels in agreement.
“Are you intimating that you can spot potential criminals by the way they behave, Constable?”
“Nothing potential about it. I know a crook when I see one, and you have a lot of crooks about. The only problem is in determining which are guilty of crimes of relevance, to use your terminology. To do that, I have to watch the suspect while colleagues investigate their data. Today, you have witnessed me doing that.”
Just a minim.
“Do you suspect me of criminality, Constable?”
An upward curve of their mouthparts indicates amusement, I believe.
“That would be something I cannot divulge, and for you to know the truth of anyway, would it not?”
How very irritating. Now I’m contemplating violence.
