by Julian Miles | Jul 14, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They call me Wrench. It’s not particularly imaginative, but it does the job. Just like Socket, who still has a case to keep all the fiddly bits together. I like the adaptability and extra weight of a wrench, though. Socket has to be sneaky, coz if he hits anyone hard he might bend the case, so he has to use the long-handled socket drive as a little club. Still, it’s better than the spannermen. You get a poxy little quarter-inch or seven-mil to start. You can’t kill anybody with that easily. You have to get really personal about it, almost like knifework.
Knives. Yeah, I remember knives. I’m old. Seen one once, but the guardsman put it away before anyone could make a grab for it. It was just after Ma and Pa got downgraded. Good thing Pa dabbled with mechanicals as a hobby. Down here among the piles, if you can’t fix anything, you’re just fodder. Nobody wants to be fodder.
How did it get this bad? You’re asking at the wrong end of this society, chum. You want to go upside to get the lowdown on that. All we know is that our uncles and aunts made a bit of a stink about being chosen to be the underclass. They kept on making a stink until the upsiders had just about banned everything we could use against ‘em. The Bandroids were the trick. Couldn’t fool one of them. We just got our sharps taken away, then they took our blunt gear too. Left us with not a whole lot to do anything with, truth be told. But the treadmills at the powerplants don’t need tools, they just need legs.
Spanners? No, I don’t know how that came about either. Somebody screwed up, is my guess. Bandroids don’t consider spanners and similar to have weapons potential, so they leave us with ‘em. My adjustable wrench came from me pa. Biggest one not confiscated, so he said.
Blades? Yeah, we have a few. Problem is, Bandroids come in a lot of sizes and the small ones will call big ones and so it goes. A man can’t even get a decent shave no more. Got to use that cream instead. It’s just not manly, I tell you. A man should be able to shave with a razor. But at least we can mix that cream with solvent, freeze it and get Dust crystals. Makes a man forget his troubles for a few hours, does Dust.
Rebellion? You’ve been listening to those resistance stories, haven’t you? Well, come with me. That much I can give you a clear steer on. You see that place up there? That’s Socket’s girl’s place. Yeah, it’s proper clean. She can do that because she is the resistance. Well, she writes a good resistance. Your bosses pay her a good-damn fortune for articles about a rebellion that only exists on paper.
Illegal? Not a bit. Socket’s girl is smart. She got it all cleared with the Department of Bans. Seems she can write about rebellion as much as she likes. Makes the folk upside all nervy and obedient, she got told. That’s a good thing, apparently.
Why would I want to fight a battle where most of us would die to get to a place where I don’t know how to live? We’ve about got it sorted right here. Spanners and Dust. It’s all a man needs, these days.
by Julian Miles | Jul 6, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There is an unacknowledged transcript of the end of Twentieth Fleet. It surfaced a few years after the event that removed a small star system at the far edge of the Milky Way from existence in a flash of glorious colours and strange radiation.
We suspect that the lost system contained the origin planet of Homo sapiens, our predecessors, but as data transfer is notorious for inherent corruption, we cannot state with certainty from the records we have left.
Why exactly this transcript remains unacknowledged is a puzzling thing, because it hints at a starfaring race of immense antiquity and divergent technologies.
But I am not here to draw conclusions. I am here to disseminate the transcript so greater minds than mine can do that.
The last transmission of the Assault Cruiser Hyperdyne, as transcribed by the deadfall recording array in the quadrant monitoring station at Upervant:
“It looked like a short-handled sledgehammer!”
“Did it go through the Hyperdyne’s stellar drive before or after the enormous lupine entity appeared and ate your escorts?”
“After. The being named Azbragh who appeared did apologise – he had been aiming at the lupine entity, which he named a ‘Fenreer’. He set off after it when I told him our ship was doomed anyway.”
“That was when you long range sensors detected the silver missile with prismatic drive emissions?”
“No, that was when we saw a giant metallic serpent wrapping itself around a rainbow-hued freespace edifice of some kind.”
“Really? Very well. You moved to investigate, I presume?”
“No sir, we did not. There were too many freespace entities of types similar and dissimilar to Azbragh appearing and engaging in pitched battle with unknown energy technologies and primitive melee weapons.”
“In your opinion, were they similar to any previously encountered group, or even historical reports like those about the Olympus Theocracy?”
“I would agree a similarity between accounts of the Theocracy’s Guardforms and the Fenreer, sir. Apart from that, these beings seemed to be completely novel alien forms.”
“And this Azbragh being returned to warn you?”
“Yes. He looked to be badly wounded on his second visit.”
“And as you completed the withdrawal, the entire planetary system collapsed in upon itself?”
“Yes. There were some odd visual effects, like a great tree of lightning connecting the planets and such, but there were no adverse gravitational effects, which we expected from proximity to what we assumed to be a nascent black hole.”
“Your current status?”
“We appear to have suffered some unquantifiable irradiation, sir. Hallucinations and deliria are getting worse. I regretfully recommend that you write the Twentieth off and place this sector under ban.”
It is recorded that the Hyperdyne was lost to a ‘catastrophic stellar drive malfunction’; the aberrant drive field emitted by that moment inducing a detrimental resonance effect with the rest of Fleet Twenty’s stellar drives, causing them to detonate in a freakish chain reaction. No record of the Twentieth Fleet’s actual co-ordinates when this catastrophe occurred is available.
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.
