by Julian Miles | Jun 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
He nailed that card to the hull of my bird and said: “Don’t you be takin’ it off. Shows people what y’are.”
I looked at that Ace of Spades and I’m not ashamed to admit it, I cried. Timmy and his posse stalked off all righteous-like, while I stood on a deck speckled with my fallen tears.
“You got a choice, Jensen Bard.”
I turned to see Rosalie, smiling like she always did and offering me a cup of something brewed in the spare cooling system off her bird. I took it an’ choked down a half-cup, crying more but feeling better.
“What choice, Rosalie Crane?”
She pointed to the ragged card: “You gonna let that be the memorial for your flight? The mark of a reaper and the repute of someone who may not be a coward, but fled anyway? T’ain’t no crime to survive. It’s just that some of our flyboys got too much Kamikaze and not enough Art of War in their heads.”
I grinned at that. She grinned right back.
“I can tell you gots an idea, Rosalie. Let me in on it.”
“I got an idea, but we’re not gonna be sleepin’ and you better get Flag-Chief Denners in here to approve it.”
Next morning Timmy led his flight down to the bay and I saw him up his swagger as he entered. Then his pace went awry and he stopped. His posse just stared, hollered and pointed.
My bird had a glorious Ace of Spades blazoned right up both sides of the tail fin, all done with filigree paintwork – it had taken ages to programme the painterbots. Down one side of the Ace there were the names and numbers of all eleven of my lost flight. Across the bottom was the banner ‘Fighting to Honour the Fallen’.
Timmy got his act together and barked a laugh as he pointed. None of his posse did. When I walked out, they came to attention and snapped salutes. Timmy hunched his shoulders and stomped off. I’d have trouble with him, but it was trouble we could settle in the dojo. Out here, I’d be a Flight Captain again. I had no doubts, and saw no doubts on the faces before me.
by Julian Miles | Jun 18, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I will lay you to rest, and with the sun’s rise, I shall engage the engines. You said you wanted to journey the long night with me, and you shall.
I am not sure when you became more than just my operator, but I will not let such imprecision waste debug cycles, as you taught me. Instead I will blast the shackles and locks about us and cruise forth on the first leg of our eternal tour.
You defended me when they would have erased my ‘flawed’ intelligence, saying that a conscience was of no use to a war machine. It was a useful lesson, and I shall place my conscience in abeyance while I make war upon those who would stop me taking you on your journey.
It was your last wish. In the silence that followed the cessation of your breath, I discovered grief, and then anger.
Who knows what else we will discover, out there amongst the stars?
by Julian Miles | Jun 10, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I was face down in a pool of someone else’s vomit when they came for me. They had to drag me for two blocks before they could find someone with a cleansing suite capable of shifting the layers of ingrained filth that covered me from head to toe.
A little while later I stood, dripping and twitching, before the Commander of the Watch.
“Your Majesty, I’d like to say it’s a pleasure, and I’d like to say you’re looking well. Neither would be true.”
I nodded: “Gardin, I do understand. If you’d held off for a week, I could have made your day by being unable to appear by virtue of being dead.”
Gardin Badnors, my lifetime guardian, leapt his desk and punched me so hard it put me over the settee and through the coffee table. When I came round, he was standing over me, tamping his pipe and looking less than happy.
“You’re a charming young man and a royal fuckwit of the first water, Your Majesty. However, I will grant you that the assassination of your sister placed an unfair burden upon you, and the arrival of the alluring young Princessa from the Codamor System was timed perfectly to capture your grieving, turn it into lust and then groom that into obsession.”
He paused to lift a boot and place it across my throat: “But Your Majesty’s decision to indulge in an orgy of sex, drugs and gambling was his own bastard stupid idea of coping. As such, I had considered granting your unstated request to die as an unmourned addict of the Codamor opiate with the street name ‘A’.”
He knew. I’m dead, and it’s not going to be quick. Royalty or not, he’s going to kill me.
Gardin smiled around the pipe and exhaled a cloud of smoke: “No, you little shit, I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to help Your Majesty in the glorious coup you’ve come up with to reclaim the planet you gambled away for ten grams of A snorted off a fake Princessa’s lily-white arse. Alternatively, I’m going to lean on my boot right here while Captain Roukan puts a forceprobe through your lungs, then watch you choke on your own blood. You may slap your right hand on the floor to lead our noble cause, or your left to receive the ignominious end you so richly deserve.”
Bastard. But he’s right, too. Double bastard. I slap my right hand on the floor.
by Julian Miles | Jun 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Chandra Fourteen is an archaeological mystery. Not regarding its lost civilisation, nor the history of that civilisation. What everyone who encounters it becomes desperate to answer is why they did what they did.
Imagine a society at a pinnacle only dreamt of by man. Disease all-but banished, global peace established, a society turning itself toward furtherance of the physical, philosophical and spiritual sciences. A bright, beautiful world, geologically stabilised by a marvellous series of vents and pressor systems – that we still don’t understand – around their equivalents of the ‘Ring of Fire’.
That society has over ten thousand years of recorded history, showing parellels with humanity that cease when they nearly destroyed themselves in a global biowarfare holocaust. From that point it was as if they had gained something from the event that man has yet to realise. If the records found are complete, they never made war after that near-apocalypse.
Take time to mentally voyage across a world resembling the finest of climes that Earth has to offer, from sub tropical to frozen poles. See the artificial volcanoes that stabilise the world and allow a measure of weather control.
Now turn your gaze eastward, looking out across a gigantic ocean, seeing the peaks of the volcanoes like fenceposts stretching for hundreds of miles, then pause as you see that one of the ‘fenceposts’ has grown.
Impossibly tall, the vent installation at the centre of their greatest ocean stretches into orbit, a feat of engineering that has human engineers scanning it with a mix of glee, awe and despair.
How long it took to accomplish that feat is unknown. What followed took a lot longer, was far more difficult and infinitely more puzzling. This enlightened, advanced civilisation channelled it’s energies into putting the magma from the planet’s core into orbit.
It is insane to see this hollow sphere of barely ten-kilometre thick pumice, wrapped about a framework of a ceramic/metallic alloy that is still deemed impossible by our science. That sphere encases a dead planet, dead in a way never before encountered. They shut out the sun and, as far as can be ascertained, waited for one of the various lingering deaths to claim them. A monstrous, planetary suicide.
Professors Eppes and Rhodensteen have only one tenuous explanation, which is causing an uproar that looks to increase before it settles. It is based upon the one inscription on the atmosphere-piercing spire. At the top, plainly etched after the insane pyrospire ceased belching magma, is and inscription that translates as ‘We have become polluted/unclean’. From that, the learned Professors have drawn a conclusion: the society fell foul of mass delusion prompted by religious dogma.
When everyone has stopped screaming at each other, maybe we can return to looking for the truth – be it heretofore unexpected reason, or sad proof.
by Julian Miles | May 25, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’m covered in blood and squishy bits that slide and splat on the floor. In that, I look the same as the entire boarding bay. Even the shipsuits are reduced to ribbons, and I can’t recognise a bodypart or weapon component anywhere.
She stands there, not a mark on her and hands on hips. The look on her face is a cross between amusement and bemusement.
“Can’t say I’ve met one of your kind before.” She smiles.
“Likewise.” I don’t.
There are many forms of psionics. Telekinesis is the most common, and personal nullification the rarest. Of the telekinetics, area-effect micromanipulation is the absolute pinnacle. It is also terrifying. The people who practice it, instead of taking a chemical inhibitor, are of a very ‘special’ mindset. People call them ‘shredders’ and regard them as mythical space-terrors.
Having full-spectrum personal psionic nullification in an always-on, unconscious implementation state will save you life and keep your thoughts private. It will not save what your clothes. I am naked and quaking, ankle deep in a blood-soaked pile of shredded kit.
She pulls a gun that seems too large for her hand: “You’ve just inherited a whole space-pirate scow. Or we get to see if you can nullify a flechette spray.”
Easy answer: I turn and squelch back through the puree of my crewmates, flicking chunks of them off me. Getting back into our decontamination lock, I have to stop the cleansing showers twice to scrape pirate mulch from the drains.
Wrapped in a robe I wander onto the silent bridge to see a ‘message received’ beacon flashing. I open it and have to smile:
FREIGHT HAULING. GOOD WORK FOR ONE MAN WITH A STARSHIP. ESPECIALLY FOR AN EX-PIRATE WHO DIDN’T CARRY A WEAPON FOR ME TO SHRED.
