by Julian Miles | Aug 16, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Is all she asks. Four bloody words. I stand there like an idiot. Meanwhile, buildings burn and people run about screaming. Alarms, sirens and explosions blend into a constant din. The news said it was a ‘massive layered drone swarm attack’. Whatever that is, it’s turned my life into an apocalypse movie.
I stare blankly at Esther. Giorgio, on the other hand, is ready.
“We need to get to high ground so we can see what’s going on.”
Smooth-talking bastard. I hate him.
She looks at Giorgio.
“I know what’s going on. I’m trying to survive it.”
He looks confused.
“Okay, then. Supplies. What first?”
That kicks him into gear.
“Weapons! Tools or kitchen knives.”
That gives me an idea.
“We should head for Steve’s. His place is above the kitchen shop a couple of streets down.”
Giorgio waves his hands.
“No, my dude, no. Can’t rely on anyone except ourselves. Can’t guarantee what people are planning.”
‘My dude’? Really?
Esther slaps the back of his head.
“It’s a start. If this Steve’s in, we might get lucky. If not, it’s still a place where one of us is known. Less risk of confrontation if he comes home to find we broke in.”
She looks at me.
“We run to Steve’s. You lead.”
Sounds simple enough. I never really thought about running through a disaster. I mean, who does? I manage about a bus length before some woman slams into me, knocks me down, then punches a stiletto heel through my hand as she scrambles up and runs off.
I scream. Esther wads tissues either side of the wound, then uses her hair thingy to keep them in place.
“We need to get a better dressing on that. Let’s go.”
Giorgio gets to the next junction ahead of us. A wheel comes in at chest height. He turns to face it, arms up. By the time we get there, he’s down, face ripped apart where the trials bike went over him.
Esther spits in the direction of the departing rider.
“With spikes on? Cocksucker.”
I look down at my smooth-talking bastard dead best friend. Fuck this. Fuck this. Fuck th-
Esther slaps me.
“Tears later. Run now.”
Her stare could melt metal. I run.
Steve’s door is open. Sounds of a fight upstairs. She pushes me in, swings the door closed, then bolts it and puts the chains on. After that, she squeezes past and takes the stairs two at a time, dagger in hand. Where did that come from?
I’m halfway up the stairs when there’s a scream. I enter the lounge to find her helping Steve onto his settee. The room’s wrecked. I can see three sprawled bodies.
Steve waves to me.
“So this is the hottie you’ve been pining over, Andrei?”
Okay, floor. Swallow me now.
He grins.
“Always best to tell the hitter up front, so she can allow for it.”
She crouches by him.
“What happened?”
“Went out for more water. Got some, came back to find three tossers taking advantage. Was doing okay until one of them knifed me.”
“Bad?”
He nods.
“Past saving.”
Sticking his hand in a pocket, he pulls out a set of keys and gives them to her.
“Place is yours. You can shelter here. Dump the bodies, including mine, down the road. Got supplies for a week if you’re careful. Things should have settled by then. Be nice to Andrei. He’s a great guy when he’s not overthi-”
No dramatic pause.
Just gone.
She closes his eyes with a trembling hand.
“Now it’s time for tears.”
True.
by Julian Miles | Aug 9, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
He’s banging on my helm with some ornate looking rod. The noise is incredible. Echoes of echoes. Being found is usually welcome after so long doing math problems in my head, but this is a bit much.
“Hey! I can see you! Stop hitting this and talk to me!”
He backs off fast, screaming something in a strange language.
Another figure enters my narrow view. Okay, if the man-thing with the rod is some sort of functionary, I’m going to guess this is the authority. I recognise that innate confidence of movement from back when the project started. No mistaking it: lady-thing is a chieftess of some kind.
She examines the helm, then extends a hand with a whispered command. A spindly arm reaches in and deposits a cloth on her palm. She reaches forward and wipes the crud off my faceplate, recoils a little, then peers at me. I smile.
“Hello. My name is Damien, and I’d really like it if you could get me out of here.”
Her eyes narrow. She looks off to one side and beckons. A wizened old man-thing shuffles into view. He clambers up next to her, listens to her rapid commands, then leans close.
“Zumpel asks: are you a lebett waiting to tear us all to pieces upon your release?”
That’s a thick accent. Am I a what?
“I’d not admit it if I were. Therefore, saying I’m not is no guarantee.”
There’s another swift exchange of what I’d guess are conflicting opinions.
“Zumpel says she understands your problem. She thinks it best to reseal this edifice and leave you to your sacred watch.”
Again?
“Look, could you ask her Zumpelness if she wouldn’t mind just destroying this edifice, because I’m sick of leaders passing the problem to the next civilisation. I’ve been in here too long.”
“Zumpel asks: what did you do to be sealed away?”
“I volunteered.”
“I do not understand that word.”
“My leaders asked for someone brave enough to try out something new. I said I was. It did not do what they expected, so they hid their mistake. Eventually an earthquake revealed a part of it. Soon after that, the first encounter like this one happened. There have been ten since.”
The exchange of words is longer.
“What will happen if you are released?”
“I might be unharmed. I might turn to dust. I don’t know. Those who made this didn’t know. That’s why they hid it.”
The official reason given – along with a formal apology – was ‘due to the possibility of deleterious chronophasic energy interactions’. I’ve stopped mentioning that. It never translates well.
“What do the letters D-I-S-I-N-T-E-R form?”
“A word that means ‘to dig up or bring to light’. Why?”
“There is a handle set into the back of your strange armour. It has that word engraved into it.”
Nobody ever mentioned that!
“Then I beg you to pull that handle.”
An argument starts, and goes on for a long time. It moves out of my field of view.
There’s a flash. I find myself lying naked on a cavern floor, looking up at the fading glow about the unit. Completely self-contained experimental armoured stealth gear that never worked as intended. The side effects were partial immobility, and immunity to the passage of time. They were too scared to risk turning it off to free me, nor could they risk destroying it. So they buried me alive, forever.
I’m free!
The wizened face comes into view from one side, Zumpel from the other.
“Welcome.”
I take stock: weak, but mobile. Hungry, too.
“Thank you.”
by Julian Miles | Aug 2, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
She stands there in the street, head cocked to one side, hair in disarray. I pause to watch what happens next. These ‘no loitering’ walkways are still new to smaller towns.
A patrol drone rolls up next to her. It beeps in what’s supposed to be an authoritative manner, but still sounds like a cheap toy.
“I’m sorry, I was listening to Odin.”
It beeps again.
“Yes, yes. He said you’d be insistent. It’s your mother, isn’t it? She’ll be fine. You have to stop worrying, and you need to stop taking it out on people you find contravening the urban behaviour rules. That’s just bullying, you know?”
The drone spins about and careens away.
“That was amazing. How did you do that?”
Her eyes find mine. It’s like a voltage runs from my eyes to my toes and back through my heart. Blue like Antarctic ice, distant as the sky. Then she blinks, the blue turns to that of a tropical lagoon, and the shock runs through me again.
She raises a finger. Nods, whispers something, then lowers her hand.
“I didn’t. He did. He knows. But not everything. Says that would be cheating. He can only know everything about one thing at a time. That’s one of the staves he set upon himself.”
I see we’re near a coffee shop. I’ll call this as ‘unforeseen circumstances’ and work through my break to make up.
“Can I get us a coffee while you explain?”
She nods, pirouettes, and rushes off towards the coffee shop. I stroll after her, trying to look casual.
By the time I get there, she’s sitting at a table eating a sticky bun. There’s another sticky bun on a plate opposite.
“Your coffee will be here soon.”
“How do you know what I like?”
“He told me.”
This could get irritating.
“Really? So he knew all about me for a while?”
“Yes.”
Okay. You’re enchanting, and I could drown in your eyes. Let’s play.
“Did he keep it all to himself or did he tell you anything?”
“He warned me my eyes weren’t the right shade of blue. Told me which way you’d walk to work today.”
“Too easy. You got someone to run an online preference profile.”
She grins.
“Your father left the keys to the toolbox on the windowsill above the freezer. The cat knocked them down. They fell and got caught inside the crossbar at the back of the freezer. That’s why you can’t find them.”
I’ve searched everywhere since he died!
Deep breath. Pause. Now say something.
“So you… No, ‘he’ says. What’s with the Odin advising you act, anyway?”
She shrugs.
“He’s always been there, ever since mum introduced me to him. Said it was a boon those of our bloodline get.”
“Odin’s talking to a towheaded girl in a baggy white jumper, silver leggings, and army boots?”
“Why not?”
Fair question.
A huge smile crosses her face. I feel myself grinning in response.
“You should be more worried about why he’s talking to me about you.”
Actually, that is disturbing.
“Did he tell you?”
“A little.”
“Can you tell me?”
She leans forward conspiratorially.
“A power cable fell from the pylon outside your work. If you’d arrived on time, you’d have been electrocuted and crushed.”
“That’s insane!”
The smile returns.
“No, what’s insane is you’re sitting here on your own, this Valkyrie’s stolen your bun, and my boss has got plans for you. Good luck.”
She vanishes, leaving two empty plates.
A long, blue feather drifts down and alights on the back of my hand.
There’s that shock again.
by Julian Miles | Jul 26, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The third moon of Charius has an erratic orbit. The survey vessel noted that fact, but evaluated the deviation to be within acceptable margins. Nobody bothered to investigate any further because, by then, the planet was desolate: ruined by a catastrophe during automated terraforming.
Thirty years ago I got a merit badge for my school project. I made a family tree going all the way to Earth, back to Laurent of Guienne, a knight. I started it because I’d always been fascinated with the ancestor I was named after: Antoine Guerin. 942 years ago, he captained the Éternelle, the second cold-sleep colony ship. It was followed by eight more. Each set off in a different direction.
The inhabitants of Zufluchtsort are descended from third ship colonists. Those from the seventh settled on Kaladden and Nathfend. We’ve found five ships drifting, everybody dead, with sorrowful records of starvation and disease. The radioactive remains from a drive malfunction on the ninth are known navigational hazards in the Landulaz system, and a fifteen-kilometre-wide crater on New Hope is embedded with fragments of the fourth.
We’ve mapped everywhere the cold-sleep ships could have reached. Until yesterday, a rogue wormhole was thought to have claimed the Éternelle, one of the first casualties of the rare hazard we still barely understand.
Yesterday I swung the pinnace from the Hilary, our expeditionary ship, round to the dark side of the third moon. In the beams of the searchlights, I saw wreckage. We confirmed it from samples soon after, then we found a collapsed shelter. Inside were two bodies: Navigation Officer Lilian Glazer and Ruth Guerin, daughter of Antoine and Lilian.
They’d left their story etched into fragments of ship panelling.
Twenty years out, meteor strikes damaged the cold sleep banks on the port side. We started rotating people through five-year sleep/wake cycles. Eighteen years after that, a mutiny occurred. They killed my father over crazy rumours about a plot to kill half the colonists and get back on schedule!
Flight Officer Gary Thomas took over, a compromise candidate agreed by the various factions. Lilian recommended Charius. We voted, then sent terraforming units ahead. As we approached, the ‘Eternal Journey’ faction sabotaged our drives. They were determined to keep us in space. Ned Gillen, their leader, was overzealous: he crippled our manoeuvring thrusters as well.
Unable to change course, we were going to hit the third moon. Ned and his faction fought their way onto the bridge, refusing to believe he’d doomed us all. When confronted, they blamed the crew for ‘suicidally denying’ their wishes.
Gary ordered everyone to abandon ship, then led the attack against Ned’s faction. Mum and I tried to make it to a lifepod, but the stampede and running battles were too much. In the end, we suited up, set the timer on a stasis locker near the rear of the ship, and shut ourselves in it. Twenty hours later, we had to fight our way out of the badly deformed locker.
We’ve been using this shelter for a week. We’ve found no survivors. The moonquakes are easing, but some still throw rocks and wreckage about.
Tomorrow we’re going looking for communications equipment.
Looks like something crushed the shelter that night. Ruth and her mother lay side by side. The fragment with the sentence starting ‘Tomorrow’ was lying next to the hobbyists drill she’d been using as a pen.
I cried while I built a cairn over them, then returned to the Hilary.
I open a file I’ve maintained for thirty years. Time to put Lilian and Ruth back into my family.
by Julian Miles | Jul 19, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The sky is lit by colossal energy beams throughout an otherwise murky afternoon. Most of them originate from the monstrous shape that looms on the far horizon like a mountain cut from steel.
The outpost on the hill had been deserted since a war over a century before. Now it’s crammed with officers, staff, and equipment. All the people with weapons are on the outside, and are happier there, despite the foul weather. Even standing upwind, they can still hear the General shouting.
“What do you mean we’ve got no tanks left? We had over a thousand last month. I saw them from the Glory Day Overflight.”
Inside the outpost, the quieter reply comes from a bespectacled giant of a man.
“She destroyed the last of them yesterday.”
The General brandishes a cane at the giant’s chest.
“What do you mean, ‘she’? It’s a machine! A damn big one, I’ll grant you, but still a machine. Just because it’s as big as a bloody battleship there’s no need to get soppy about it.”
The giant removes his glasses and massages his temples. That done, he puts the glasses down and speaks with a hand over his eyes.
“Excuse me. Headache from the lights. Tell me, General, what do you know about the Oni-Class Fortresses?”
The General chews a stray bit of his moustache.
“Sodding great wastes of time from a few decades ago, weren’t they? Somebody got a bee in their bonnet and built a couple before it came to light the computers required didn’t exist?”
“Neat summation. Well, times change and computing power increases. I got tasked with seeing if the repulsor-lift fortress dreadnought called the Western Oni could be activated with current technology. Took me a few years, and the co-operation of the AI Research Unit, but we cobbled something together that addressed the shortfalls of the original project and added a few new ideas. We took a Therbithi cryobrain, flashed it into a vegetative state, then loaded seed mnemonics and the whole Oni suite. Like the Therbithi recommend: wake one up, then give it something complex to do. The intelligence will stabilise quicker that way.”
“You lazy bastards put alien technology in my hoverfortress?”
“No, General, us overworked bastards put alien tech in the repulsor-lift fortress because your people insisted we succeed at any cost.”
The General points as the looming threat ploughs through another city, explosions illuminating the angled slabs of its lower armour.
“Well, you certainly did that. Now, how do we call it to heel?”
“Her name is Tabitha. She’s in total rage because I made the mistake of using emotional attachment to reinforce her control routines.”
The General steps closer.
“I don’t understand.”
The giant grins.
“That was my second mistake. Things were going well. We were just preparing for you to be introduced as another authority figure when I cheerfully told Tabitha I was being sent to activate the Eastern Oni.”
“So what?”
The giant colours up.
“Embarrassing as it is to admit, for all intents and purposes, the hoverfortress with enough firepower to level a continent is in love with me. Finding out I was intending to go off and fire up what she perceives as a rival, and giving it all the improvements I’d got from working with her, Tabitha feels I am betraying and insulting her.”
“The hoverfortress is jealous?”
“More like a woman scorned. I might be able to talk her down after she’s levelled the Eastern Oni. Until then? Not a chance. Best stay out of her way.”
“Oh my God. You idiot.”
“Agreed.”
