by Julian Miles | Oct 24, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
You had to fall into mine. Lord, but you are a sight for jaded eyes. Hair like liquid night, eyes a man could drown in, lips that form a bow Robin Hood would kill for. We’re a long way from Sherwood, milady, and the Sheriff’s ‘men’ are darned strange, but won’t you quit your guardian’s space castle and come live in the asteroid woods with me?
“You’re staring again, Slim Jorn Banton.”
Every time I see Shreelanie Botarlion Cree, those thoughts echo through my mind. We met after I literally scooped her up from a dying drift after her cruiser got blast-looted by Drundim bandits. Not sure who came up with the idea of blast-looting, but it’s a cruel living. Why do the whole piracy thing when it’s easier to decompress the target and strip it bare at leisure? There are mean beings involved in that trade, and they can be hired to ensure specific vessel never reach their destination.
“I know. Can’t help myself.”
Like hers. A “tragic waste of a young noblewoman’s life”. They never even mentioned the two-dozen other souls sent into the long night with her ship. She wasn’t meant to survive. Officially, she didn’t.
But you’ll find Slim Jorn Banton and his beautiful partner, Dark Lanie Banton, listed as ‘freelance privateers’ on the Cree Company rosters. Our retainers are paid in gems to trusted intermediaries scattered across the Outer Reaches.
They don’t care if she’s dead or alive, just as long as she stays gone. Lanie never wanted to be the bird in a gilded cage. She had no intention of going back if she survived the blast-looters. Then she got rescued up by a wandering hopeless romantic who happened to have the same birthday.
“Then, sir, you’d better lean over here and kiss me by way of apology. After that, we can decide where we’re going.”
As I lean in, I whisper: “Who cares? As long as it’s with you.”
by Julian Miles | Oct 17, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The man coming round the corner blinks as I punch a killrod under his ribs and through his heart. By the time his body completes its slide down the wall, I’m over the barrier and extracting the other killrod from the receptionist’s eye socket.
My killrods are embedded where the smallest two fingers of each hand used to be. At rest, they protrude thirty millimetres and are concealed by prosthetic fingers. Extended, they are eight centimetres long.
The media insists on calling them ‘covert weaponry’. I fail to see how a man unable to make a fist can fit even the most basic requirements of covert operations. The false fingers are so the public won’t raise the alarm before I reach my destination and start killing. I’m not covert. I’m what gets sent in when covert has failed and the killing still needs to be done.
“Gloves, sitrep.”
They call me Gloves. A play on ‘gloves coming off’, I presume.
“Entry and reception areas quelled. Moving to laboratories.”
Someone has set off an alarm. Time to increase my pace.
The guards are good, but expecting someone who obeys rules and cedes to threats. By the time they are dead, I have been shot twice.
The next guards are ex-military. It makes no difference. I get shot five times, they die. I have to pause while my internal mechanisms expel a bullet that is jamming my shoulder. As it clatters to the floor, I hear someone swear.
“You’re a Teelow!”
I had not expected to be recognised, but hobbyists abound. I break from course of action to kill the geek, then return to plan.
Three floors and eighteen kills later, Professor Wilson Rodriguez looks up at me from where he cradles his wife’s body in his arms.
“Why can’t they let this technology out? It could help so many.”
“You’re asking the wrong end of the spear, Professor.”
His eyes go wide as my killrods punch through his throat.
“Target quelled. Exit path required.”
“Response was too quick, Gloves. Bin yourself.”
I run to the nearest waste processing chute and dive in head first. The trip down to the basement only inflicts superficial injuries. The trash shredder at the base of the chute is another matter. By the time I exit its smoking remains, I’m carrying my left arm in my right hand, with clothes and flesh hanging from me. Given the way my pickup driver turns pale and vomits, this must be a new level of ruin for me.
“Oh, God Almighty on a bloody harvester, you’re a mess. Turn about so we can snap a rear view.”
I catch an incredulous whisper: “Fucking hell, Tim. You can see right through him in places.”
We were created from a concept engendered by a film, of all things. Consciousness was an accident, they tell me. My name’s Cameron. I enjoy poker, am fascinated by photographs, and know over a hundred discrete ways to kill a human.
by Julian Miles | Oct 10, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The room is a stock F-Class residential dwelling. With three people and a forensics robot within, it’s one small child short of standing room only.
A young man in a lurid red suit, cut in the fashionable retro-zoot style, turns to his bearded boss with a look of mystification: “What’s a ‘buk’?”
Detective Dru looks up: “It’s an intermediary form of collated hardcopy, printed on sheets of pressed wood pulp.”
“It’s made of wood? No wonder they called it pay-per!”
“You’re not wrong. Now, back to the matter at hand: why does Miss Priscilla Townsend, a twenty-year-old student, living on the poverty line, have a shelf full of them?”
The third member of the team, a woman possessing eyes seemingly too large for her narrow face, waves a hand toward the shelf: “Initial assessment has their value at mid or high six figures, depending on content.”
Dru nods: “Tomas, get someone from Antiquities to catalogue and bag everything on that shelf, then get me the last five years of our victim’s life. Loanna, find me something on the family. We’ll meet at the office in two hours.” With that, he turns and carefully makes his way out of the cramped domicile.
Their office was a converted B-Class residence, salvaged from the last flood before the Thames Levee went up. On the flat roof, where Dru was, you could see the broken line of low islands that marked where the Thames Barrier had been.
“She was the great-granddaughter of Elliot Parson, boss.”
Dru knew that name, but the details eluded him. He sighed: “Go on, then. Remind me.”
Tomas grinned: “Headmem, boss. You really should get some before your mental archives of London criminality and how to catch them are lost to us.”
“I meant remind me about Mister Parsons.”
Loanna joined them: “He knows that, but couldn’t resist it.”
Dru pointed at Tomas: “Tell.”
“Elliot Parson, last curator of the British Library, disappeared fifty-three years ago, just after the library system was abandoned. During the transfer of assets to the British Museum, it was found that he had stolen a huge selection of collectables from the deposit archives in Bolton over the preceding decade. Most of those items are still missing, and all of the items on the young lady’s shelf are part of that haul. She died of malaria because she wouldn’t sell stolen goods to pay for treatment.”
Loanna nodded: “We’ve actioned a death mandate for her data presence, and her private blog details exactly that. It also seems that Elliot may not be as dead as everyone thinks. He, or someone purporting to be him, sent those books to her three years ago when she started university.”
Dru stared out across the Thames Delta: “Send the actionable data to Interpol, arrange for her ecofuneral, and hand the books over to the British Museum.”
As Tomas and Loanna reached the door to the stairs, Dru’s raised voice reached them: “Don’t forget to get an itemised physical receipt as well as an electronic one. There are far too many academics in that place for there not to be an indebted hacker or two.”
by Julian Miles | Oct 3, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“I’ll bring your drinks over in a moment, but the steak sandwich will be about ten minutes.” With a flick of her auburn hair, Teria moves away, navigating the tables, chairs and customers with an unconscious grace.
She works fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and volunteers at a shelter for abused women on the seventh. As she relays my order, Leo, her supervisor, looks up and waves a greeting toward me. I smile and nod. He splits his time between working here and caring for his terminally ill son, doing nothing else except eating and sleeping.
Compassion. I had never encountered a race like you, nor had I heard of anything like it. In a universe of predator-eat-predator, the concept of being strong enough to survive was thought to be the antithesis of caring about the weak.
I arrived by supralit, stepping from its crackling portal with eighty-four others. We were the infiltration teams, spreading across the continents of Earth. Our job was to start the rot that would ruin your societies, weakening you for the moment when our governance would be welcomed as a saving grace rather than an invasion.
Since then, I’ve seen war zones, refugee camps, rural towns and packed cities. I’ve broken break with Amish, shared MREs with survivalists and greeted the dawn on Anglesey. I’ve sung in churches and thrashed like a lunatic at heavy metal gigs.
And, more importantly, I’ve intervened in situations where the strong prey upon the weak. The first time that happened, the rapist was dead on the ground before I realised what I was doing. As the intended victim fled, I stood there with blood on my hands and cried like a lost child.
You did this to me. With your savage battles and glorious last stands, by giving your last pound to a homeless man, the completely impossible ability to go from killer to healer in the blink of an eye. Nowhere else in this universe will a fighter stoop to aid a fallen opponent after the bout is done. Respecting your adversary is a concept alien to the very aliens you postulate about. Valuing every life – is ridiculous.
Until I saw you do it. I came to wreak havoc in the name of an empire so distant you cannot see the light from the sun above its nearest outpost with your greatest telescopes. In the ten years since I have killed seventy-three of my former comrades. I would be agonising over that, were it not that the remaining eleven have suffered similar epiphanies to my own.
We send back reports of a race torn by factions of varying depth, of fighting a long war with deadly opponents, of a long-term strategy that may take generations to accomplish. The empire we serve notes our reports and commends us, as it pursues a thousand strategies on ten thousand worlds. We have a couple of centuries before suspicions arise.
A chromed tray sliding onto my table breaks my reverie.
“One latte, one red wine, and a Danish from Leo’s mama. He says she demands that you visit again.”
I smile up at Teria: “Which evening will you be free next week?”
She grins: “Tuesday. I meet this lovely bloke after work, but you’ll do if he doesn’t show up.”
It’s our little joke. She spent ages stalling me, just to see if I was deadly serious about her. This ‘lovely bloke’ was born thousands of light years away. My children will be born here, and we will start the defences. Deadly serious is all I have left.
by Julian Miles | Sep 26, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’m reading his thermo-image through the door before he knocks: average human temperature distribution, no suspicious cool patches. Something chilly in his hand.
Tucking the Sternig pulse pistol into the back of my trousers, I open the door with a smile.
“Mister Vance? Your Real-Earth Cola.”
He’s the picture of five-star service, but his eyes hold an element of curiosity. I’m supposed to be a top exec, and what they sometimes do tends to breed rumours. I zip a tip to his ID-pad and he grins at the numbers. It’s real credit, too. I never short the staff.
With him gone and the privacy engaged, I pour myself a tall glass of non-alcoholic fizz that has travelled over a hundred million miles. The bottle slips as I set it down and spills its remaining contents across the table. In my haste to grab a towel, I knock my whiskey and water over.
Working from the edge of the table, swearing loudly, I carefully mop the mixed drink spill up. As far as my watchers know, I’m a clumsy exec with very expensive taste in carbonated beverages.
The headache generated by my implant intensifies as it interprets the code picked up by the scanner in my left cybereye. It’s coming from the light emitted by the whiskey-agitated fluorescent molecules in the very unique cola sent by my agency. A method that no-one out here knows of, and even if they did, they would need the exact mix of whiskey and water to generate light in the same wavelengths.
I have a clear head by the time I leave my room, the Sternig conspicuously left on the bedside table. My watchers are scrambling to be ready to follow me from the lobby, but their timing is off.
Lucia Dedarist got a call from her contact a few minutes ago. She’s a veteran, but the message gave me her reaction and pace times. As I step into the chute, she’s floating to one side of the entrance, heading for the lobby, thinking she’s going to meet her contact. He was killed last week, but no-one will ever find his remains.
My shoe catches the corner of the doorway and I swing into her.
There’s an immediate, angry response: “Get your paws off!”
I clumsily backpedal: “Sorry, miss. Not used to these drop thingys.”
She shakes her head as she straightens her jumpsuit: “Clumsy Earther. You need a handler.”
We drop the rest of the way in silence. I exit at the lobby; she continues on down to the vehicle bays. Picking up my usual tail, I take the expressway to the spaceport. Neither of my followers have time to get a hold placed on me when I switch queues from domestic to offworld. They are still making frantic calls when I catch a fast shuttle to meet a passing freighter that’s headed for Proxima B.
Far behind me, someone will be asking Miz Dedarist why she’s sleeping at the bottom of the dropchute. There will be concern, then consternation. The eventual autopsy scan will reveal that she’s been poisoned: an anaesthetic-coated hollow needle delivered a dose of very unique cola. Which contained a nasty little something tailored to her DNA.
That being said, I didn’t drink any of it. I have a personal aversion to stuff with too many things going on at a level I can’t see.
Settling back, sipping a whiskey and water, there’s time to enjoy the trip for a while. Not that I’m actually going to Proxima B. They just need to think I am.
