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.
by Julian Miles | Sep 19, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Papa Six, touchdown.”
Inside the wall, the grounds are laid out formally, in concentric rings. Each ring of growth is separated from the next by a ring of lawn. Big trees, then little trees with flowers on, then brambles and blackthorn, then shrubs and roses, and so on down to the neat plots of daisies growing around the various ponds and swimming pools that ring the house.
“Team Papa, strike clockwise.”
That includes me. Team Baby will be going the other way. Much as we don’t want it to, the densely planted foliage restricts us to the paths if we want to remain quiet. The only good thing is that attack fauna, even xenoforms, would also be hindered by having to thrash their way through the plant life.
“Movement. West balcony. Baby Three, put ‘em to sleep.”
The house is a sprawling affair, like someone wanted a mansion but refused to go higher than a bungalow. Its owner is a collector of rare gems. While the centrepieces of the collection are secured by methods only a fool would challenge, the ‘lesser’ items are scattered about the place as ornaments. We’re after a selection from for the guest quarters, as they lie nearest the wall.
“Baby Three. Respond.”
That call freezes us. I see my fellow shadowy figures crouch low, so I slip up onto the plinth of a big gargoyle statue, then lie along its back, peering over its misshapen head.
“Baby Four? Damn. Team Baby, sound off.”
Something has gone badly wrong. Team Baby are the true veterans in our little foray. That something took them out without a sound gives me chills.
I’m contemplating what could have gone wrong when I see Papa Four slump sideways. As he does so, something skitters out of the way of his body. I run the magnification up on my goggles and a perfectly grass-patterned dinosaur looms into view. Suppressing a squeak of surprise, I zoom out and engage the fauna identifier on my tactical ‘puter.
It’s a Hashichura. Or Hashichuras, as they never come in pack sizes of less than a dozen. Natives of Corbellyon, they resemble the monitor lizards of Earth, but are the reason why their planet is a tropical paradise where humans still sleep under domes. Nocturnal, semi-sentient and possessing a bite that is poisonous, in varying degrees, to pretty much everything. Even Hashichuras are not immune to their own venom, reserving it for when they think lethal force is needed: mating duels, defending territories, etcetera. These gardens are obviously their territory. Which means I’m the sole survivor of the nastiest security system I’ve ever encountered.
They lair at dawn. My escape depends on the time between their leaving the ground behind me and the last of them making it home, allowing the daytime guard systems to activate.
I spend a bitter night on a cold statue, watching for signs of camouflaged predators in the long grass. As predawn lightens the sky, I see several ripples of movement, all heading away.
No time to calculate. I slide off the statue and sprint for the wall. I manage to leap two rings of flora, but have to use the path through the rings of trees. The last lawn I sprint across, using the speed to help my depleted jump rig get me over the wall.
Clearing the wall with millimetres to spare, I drop onto the roof of the fake security van. Moments later, I’m heading for a trip offworld. There are too many bodies back there with links to me.
by Julian Miles | Sep 13, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I hear the mugger running off as the echoes of the gunshot fade.
Opening my eyes, I’m still standing. There’s a bleeding body at my feet that hadn’t been there when I closed my eyes. He rolls over.
“Michael!”
He looks up, tears streaming back into his hair.
A career in trauma care tells me his wound is mortal. I drop to my knees and rest his head on my lap. Fighting back icy shock, my words come out in a rush: “How? Where did you come from? Where did you go?”
The last time I saw him was during our final semester. We were planning a life together, then the science centre blew up and took him with it. In the intervening twenty years, there hasn’t been a day when I didn’t think of him.
His voice is a whisper: “The temporal flow experiment. It worked. But only for things I had a personal connection to. Saw us. You. Two decades ahead, alone. One night, you left your friends and walked down a side road. The mugger attacked, you fought back. He shot you.”
I know what he did, the beautiful, brilliant, stupid man.
He wheezed on: “That moment. This road. Worked out I could save you, but only by removing myself from causality’s reach. Adapted the experimental gear and sent myself here. Now. For you.”
I stroke his forehead and tears fall onto his face: “You idiot. If you hadn’t left, I wouldn’t be here.”
His bloody hand rises to touch my cheek: “Yes, you would. No matter the decision path, you ended up here, dead. If I’d stayed, best option was that we were childless and divorced after I became a drunk. Saw that my life went nowhere, no matter what I did. Decided then and there I would do right by you. I did the thing the flow didn’t show. To make good for once.”
My lost-and-found sweetheart coughs and just like that, he’s dead and gone.
I’m trying to make sense of it all when the shock overwhelms me. I tumble into a darkness that, thanks to a mad love, and with a little luck, I should wake from.
