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.
by Julian Miles | Sep 2, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
My dad was a spy. A really good one, according to mum. I couldn’t get her to understand. How could he have been any good if he got caught? It meant there was a better spy, or spycatcher, out there. That was who I wanted to be.
Twelve years later, I’m sitting in a featureless meeting room with eight other people I don’t know. Footsteps echo down the corridor outside. Their cause stops short of the door. His words make my breath catch.
“If you’re going to kill a family, do make sure you get them all. No leftover grudgebearers, please.”
I sense, rather than see, nervous glances being exchanged. My eyes remain fixed on the doorway. He strides in: hands behind his back, black suit, no tie, magenta hair, slight stubble, eyes like pools of night. A Mandlerian halfbreed!
“If what I just said causes you discomfort, leave now.”
Three people go.
He looks us over: “Those with the courage of their convictions have just left. So what are you?”
Someone on my left replies: “Dangerous.”
Someone on my right chuckles.
I don’t see the halfbreed’s hands move. Something fast goes past my ear, the whine of gravtac making me wince. I whip my head about: the comedian and his audience are dead, the stubby tails of Zein darts projecting from their foreheads.
A tall man to my left blanches and throws up.
Halfbreed gestures to the door. Whey-face departs.
“And then there were three.”
Death and lesser decisions do not faze him. There is a practiced ease to his movements. Which makes this a test, not a meeting.
Mandlerians had been our first intergalactic enemy and are now our only ally. The rest of the humanoid strains are primitives, and the favoured cheap labour source of every other race. And there you have it. ‘Dumb apes’ are everywhere. So ‘smart apes’ can go anywhere we want to be, ensuring our survival by having the secrets everyone else needs. It’s a special kind of smart, coupled with the capacity to endure abuse, and the ability to go from ‘apparently stupid’ to ‘merciless’ without warning.
The sort of smart that makes me rotate my hands so I can touch my third fingers to the base of my thumbs unobserved. I know what I’d do next, in his position. The Mandlerian smiles. I suspect my moves weren’t entirely unseen.
He whispers: “Last hominid standing.”
As he says “last”, I tuck my legs into my chest and roll forward, pivot over a shoulder, land on my knees and stay low, flicking my arms toward the last two. The Zein darts, released from their sheaths by my moves, cross the short distances before their targets can respond. Two bodies fall.
“You will surpass your father.”
I look up at the halfbreed.
He smiles: “In this career, a problem with killing will eventually get you killed.”
Coming to my feet, I smile back: “Did you kill him?”
“No. I killed what killed him.”
I raise an eyebrow in surprise.
He laughs: “It was in my way. Vengeance and similar romanticism will also get you killed.”
I’m a spy. But not like my dad.
by Julian Miles | Aug 24, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The metallic grey blob shot across the cavern and landed with a wet ‘splat’ in the circular tub of turquoise gel. The conical lid had an aperture the exact size to admit the blob, and a length of cone precisely calculated to prevent any gel splashing out.
“What the hell is that?” Walt pointed at the assembly through the glass.
“That is the first 9-Cronin Adsee in the Kuiper Belt, Mister Thrumyn.”
Walt turned to face the willow-thin, native born woman who had spoken: “In plain terms, Miss-” he paused to pointedly read her name tag, “Hayvers. Preferably non-technical English.”
She smiled: “It is the most advanced Autonomous Digital Synthesis Engine – ADSE – ‘Adsee’ – outside of the laboratories of Mars. A ‘Cronin’ is an abstract unit of capability and performance, allowing the many different styles and types of chemputer – chemical synthesis computers – to be compared easily.”
“Thank you. Now why is it occupying an entire Class-One processing cavern in my headquarters asteroid?”
“That is better demonstrated that explained, Mister Thrumyn.”
Walt turned his attention to the tub. Inside, the blob seemed to spinning, or maybe see-sawing incredibly fast, he couldn’t be sure. But it wasn’t a blob. He saw shining flakes spurt into the gel from one side, a glittering stream that disappeared into the blob that now seemed to have a blurry shape visible within its frenetic movement.
Three more streams of material were shot into the mass, then the sides of the tub turned opaque and a hatch snapped shut over the top of the cone. From within the tub, flashes of intense light showed up every fine gap in the closures. Then the hatch over the cone aperture opened and bright beam of energy shot into the tub.
“Intense heat. That and a near-weightless environment allows the Adsee to do, in minutes, a growth assembly that would take a week on a planet.” She nodded toward the cone, which was lifting.
Walt gasped as a silver-grey drone lifted from the tub, oriented itself to the local ‘up’, then exited through the slot opposite.
“Belt mining has always been fraught with danger. Drones have lowered the fatalities, but replacing lost drones was difficult to keep pace with. Switching to modular assemblies with common Power and Control units allows us to keep up with that. In the event of an incident, the P&C unit will, if possible, rotate the drone so it takes the impact. Usually, the function module survives and we can just mate another P&C unit with it. As you can see, P&C units are something we can make in under half an hour. The cavern size is necessary because those drones are eight metres across.”
Walt drifted slowly across the viewing chamber, face pale, eyes wide: “Oh.”
Miss Hayvers tilted her head: “Anything else?”
Eyes fixed upon the device in the chamber, as another blob landed in it, his reply was barely louder than a whisper: “No, that’s fine, Miss. I’ll just wait and watch, if that’s okay.”
She shook her head and exited the room, while Walt watched the machine that ‘grew’ spaceships do its thing, experiencing a wonder he hadn’t felt since childhood.
