by Julian Miles | Feb 3, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Jardine dragged himself over the log, gasping in agony as the belt that formed the tourniquet on his leg caught. His jodhpurs were stained and the lower sections were covered in bloody handprints where he’d had to kick Harvey loose.
It had been the first Pembrokeshire hunt in over a century, set in the recently restored forests and part of the carefully designed fauna management plan. After all, if one were going to restore a nineteenth century estate, why not have authentic methods of vermin control?
Those last two words came back to haunt them. They had all laughed at the antics of the anti-hunting lobbies of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but really, in the hierarchically-enlightened twenty-third century, what could the great unwashed do?
It turned out that some of the ‘unwashed’ had kin who had fought in the Tarantilla and Shoren Gar campaigns. Descendents who excelled in the comparatively new discipline of cyborg handling.
The Pembroke Hunt had used genegineered hawks for spotting and all the hounds were networked – it made it easier for the packmaster. Things had been going swimmingly until the fox turned at bay, and the hawks had all gone dark in rapid succession. The packmaster had shouted something unintelligible before going into a Grand-Mal seizure and thrashing himself to death. Far away, they heard the baying of hounds in full rout. It became a fascination, listening to the number of crying animals drop off one by one. By the time the last hound limped into view, those remaining realised they had left it far too late to run. To reinforce that, the one flying thing that remained unloaded an unholy number of dart-missile things into their horses. Some horses blew up while the others keeled over, either shutdown or dead. Riders were crushed, limbs were broken.
Into this scene of chaos came the Fox.
A red-eyed hunting cyborg – the Rorschach stain of white question marks visible on its head identifying it as one of the deadly Critsune marque – set itself to slaughtering the downed huntsmen.
This encouraged the ambulatory survivors to flee, and the macabrely reversed hunt began in earnest. All afternoon they fled, manners and artifice banished by terror and desperation. Naked brutality surfaced, where people crippled former friends to give themselves more time.
As evening drew in, Jardine had kicked Harvey until his nose broke and he fell backwards into the cutting. Jardine knew that cutting, it was the one that ran across the foot of the wooded backdrop to the formal lawns. Lawns that replaced the lakes about Pembroke Castle. He was nearing safety!
He curled himself with his back to the log while the pain in his leg eased. When his vision was no longer grey at the edges, he gathered himself for the last stretch.
Red eyes opened in the shadows between him and the castle towers.
There was a crackle. A voice came from the Fox: “The birthplace of Henry Tudor silhouetted against the last light in a way that he himself could have admired on his way to Bosworth. Fitting, don’t you think? A nod to heritage as we have this out.”
Jardine choked, his throat dry: “What do you want? Money? Fame? Have you recorded this?”
There was a chuckle: “I want you to die, Foxhunter. I want the abhorrent practice to remain a thing of the past. Thus you will be a statistic of a massacre unclaimed. Fear is better for keeping this sort of thing under control.”
The Critsune leapt for the kill.
by Julian Miles | Jan 21, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
She’s screaming like her life is being dragged from her using blunt instruments. Occasionally she’ll stop, but after a series of ominous ‘thuds’, she’ll start again.
“We ‘ave control of zis street.” This from the blue-uniformed Avantacop.
“Rubbiz. The rezonink places this addrez within oor control perimeter.” Response from the black-and-orange uniformed Fourgeecop.
“City statutes give prioridee response t’us.” A riposte from a grey-uniformed Spartacop.
“How about we co-operate to cover the premises from all sides, achieve entry with precision and numbers, then use superior force to area-neutralise whatever threat is inside?” The suggestion comes from my partner, in Carabinieri black – just like me.
We’re one of the six official police forces that could be here, were it not for the mandated EU ‘open-market’ rulings on civil policing. Now, in addition to the five ‘resident’ national police forces and regional police forces, there are twenty-eight ‘guardian’ (corporate) police forces and countless franchise mobs. It used to be a nightmare with just five or six of us versus the Cosa Nostra and friends. This? This is a new ring of Dante’s hell in the guise of policing, and criminals rarely enter the equation – or get caught, for that matter.
The screams escalate again and Armand looks at me, his brows creasing. We both think back to the meeting we attended four days ago. This is it. The moment that was discussed and everyone agreed to.
He nods at me and we both cross-draw paired Webley & Scott Suppressors. Armand takes both of the Avantacops and I drop the standing Fourgee and Sparta. Their companions show their uselessness by trying to exit their cars and join the firefight, instead of securing their positions and calling for assistance.
Ignoring the downed pseudocops for a while, we retool with compressor-pulse shotguns and storm the building where screams continue. It seems that sudden, decisive action involving the direct application of violence was something that our little gang of drug-crazed torturers were not expecting. They were waiting for hostage negotiators and news crews. They continue waiting until their bodies hit the ground from three floors up. Some people are a waste of the judicial system’s time.
By the time the ambulances pull away and the coroner’s van is loading, the pseudocops are reclining in their neatly parked vehicles, in the car park of a local convenience store four blocks away.
Four days ago we agreed that we would be police, and any jurisdictional arguments from competing forces would be treated as interference with the execution of our duties, if co-operation was refused or ignored. The people deserve to be protected when the threat is nigh, not to wait until the bureaucracy is done.
by Julian Miles | Jan 15, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I am the reason for the silence. It is if there is an invisible column of peace centred upon me. Far to starboard, I see an entire flight of Black Dragon assault drones holding station. Upon detecting my regard, the lead drone tilt-salutes in my direction.
It started in Syria, after a British combat paramedic and Iranian surgeon substituted the curve of the Red Crescent for the vertical bar of the Red Cross. Within days, that ‘Red Trident’ became our sign. On a white circle, it’s a civilian aid unit. On a white square, it’s an emergency services unit. On an inverted white triangle, it’s like me: a military mercy flight.
As I hammered across the desert for the first time, using the vectored thrust from my internal rotors to steer while the scramjet pushed me past Mach four, I saw soldiers looking up and making religious gestures. No matter whom I was rushing to help – friend or foe – they wished me well. One day, it could be them.
Entering the hot zone, I shut down the scramjet and hover-coasted while momentum dispersed. Far below, a warrior levelled an RPG at me. I saw his comrade shoot him in the head. No matter that my armour would ignore that sort of light arms fire. My behavioural routines did not understand, but my mission remained viable, so I retrieved the shrapnel-mutilated specialist with my robotic arms, lifting her gently into my primary care pod. With death placed in brief abeyance by activating stasis on the pod, I lifted slowly while orienting myself to point toward the nearest major trauma facility. When I had achieved sufficient altitude for straight-line point-to-point, I put a ‘clearway’ laser pulse along the route, vectored thrust and engaged the scramjet.
It was the day after that I found an article from a war correspondent who had been in the hot zone. I added it verbatim to my behavioural archive, because while I knew it explained the odd behaviour, I also knew that it would take me years to comprehend it:
“Today I encountered a legend in the making. A specialist had stepped on an IED. She could survive, but only with advanced medical care. I heard the word ‘lifespear’ and saw nods. Within minutes, there was a noise like I have never heard before: a banshee scream, underpinned by distant thunder. Just when I thought it would damage my ears, it ceased and the eerie howl of vectored thrust heralded the arrival of a wedge-shaped armoured drone. The only break in its matte-black finish was a Red Trident set in an inverted triangle. Within moments, it had loaded the specialist and levitated into the heavens. A rainbow flash shot westward, searing the desert evening – and my retinas. Then the screaming thunder started and shot off, following the line of the flash, leaving a wake like an accelerating meteor and a resonance echo in my chest.
Calling it a High-Threat Zone Retrieval Unit does not capture the reverence with which these ‘lifespears’ are regarded. They are absolutely inviolate, and that status is enforced by the nearest weapon-bearer capable of intervening, be it friend or foe.
I am reminded of my grandfather telling me how London traffic used to part before ambulances, and my great grandfather talking about his grandfather telling him about the Ghost Cavalry of Mons, who accompanied wounded men as they left the battlefield at night. I wonder if future grandchildren will be told of the Remote Angels, who rode thunder and sundered the heavens with spears of light to save wounded soldiers.”
by Julian Miles | Jan 5, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The mists swirl about our feet and the cold blues of brushed steel surfaces surround us. There is distant hubbub, like a monster stirring in its lair – which is an accurate analogy.
The Major’s eyes open and focus on mine. She sits up: “War?”
“War.” I nod agreement and feel my tacticals run cold. From the glint in her eyes, she’s feeling it too.
They used to go to war with rules. Hundreds of them. Had whole committees of impartial referees to decide what you could and couldn’t do. It took centuries to shake that stupid, selfish habit. War should be terrifying. War should be abhorrent. War should be the final step in a long chain of failures to find a peaceful solution.
But when war becomes the only recourse, it should be done with unmitigated savagery, surgical precision and no restraints. Because when a war is fought, you are trying to make it the last one. You are praying that your descendants never have to go through what you’re going through. No man or woman should have to take weapons in hand to do mortal combat in the pursuit of peace, simply because other people failed to find another way. Naturally, every entity/nation has cadres that are always prepared, but they are just that: an elite few, separate from a society they cannot fit into and could not understand.
When the fighting starts, you make it brutal, you make it atrocious. So that when non-cadre look upon the remains, they are resolved to never permit it again. If you have done your job properly, the losing side will never resurge – because there is no losing side. The only memorial will be the cluster of silo graves that stand in mute testimony to another utter failure of civilisation.
Territories will be realigned. Populations will be transferred. Peace will resume in the appalled aftermath, reminded once again of the necessity for sanity to endure.
I pick up my rifle after sliding both machetes into their scabbards. Checking my charge levels, I exit the tent and go to join my unit. After the warbotics finish their tasks, we must be ready to carry the battle into the enemy before they can recover.
Our cadre will have engaged theirs as ruination fell from the skies. We got the drop on them, so they will fight like the damned. Maintaining the layered pressure of attack is the only element of strategic mastery that counts: the real-time accumulation and analysis of countless tactical outcomes to guide this implacable, nation-crushing offensive.
They call us Terminators – an ironic reference to legendary monsters that sought to overthrow mankind. We are what dead cadre members become: cybernetic agents of slaughter, cryohibernated in the hope that we will never be needed again.
This is only the third time I have been awakened in five hundred years. Mankind is – finally – getting better at peace.
by Julian Miles | Dec 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Did you really think this was going to be scenic?” I cannot help it; disgust oozes around my words.
He swallows hard. Tearing his gaze from the spectacle, he fastens wide eyes on mine: “This is horrific. What law would allow this?”
Every time. Every. Damn. Time. I’d really like one person to come up here with a clear view.
“You fought tooth and nail to come here, and you have the gall to ask me that?”
Titan is Earth’s penal colony, and it was carefully designed. Prison shuttles arrive on the peak of a mountain in the Dilmun range. From there, a dropslide deposits the convicts into Titan One, the main ‘processing’ area.
I use the term loosely, because that is what it is labelled as on the designs. Since Titan has no inhabitants that are not criminals, I would guess that it may best be regarded as a nightmare cross between slave market and the gateway to hell.
Britain established HMP Titan 180 years ago, at the height of the Elite Regime. That may have fallen in fire and summary executions, but its legacy is this monument to human squeamishness. Every nation on Earth pays Titan Corp to use this place. The laughable element of that is the discrepancy between vast sums of money paid and miniscule expenditure required to maintain the transports and the crews: people like me.
Titan needs no budget. It is a frigid hell over a billion kilometres from Earth. The humanitarian campaigner I am escorting has just seen the plain on the Adiri side of Shangri-La. It’s littered with macabre sculptures: the dead. Some of them were corpses before they were deposited out here. Most got shot out of the waste chute as the losing side of an argument. No-one knows who – or what – rearranges them into these hideously fascinating patterns. Personally, I never want to meet the Iceghosts of Titan. I suspect they are non-too chuffed at having their home host the cesspit of Terra.
“I think I’ve seen enough. It is obvious that this place is beyond any rational intervention.”
Another do-gooder bottles it. I snort my low opinion and swing the scout shuttle around. While he organises his excuses, I look down at the field of dead and, once again, get the terrible feeling of being watched by something of unforgiving malice.
If that feeling is true, it’s not an Iceghost. It’s the spirits of the dead, levelling their hatred at me. Why? Because when Titan Corp came to me and said I could fly the convicts, or remain as one of them, I took my thirty pieces of silver and a lifetime exile from Earth. Apartment on Mars, girlfriend on the Titan Corp Penal Flight cleaning crew: ‘we the damned’ can only tolerate each other.
HMP Titan exists because the ruling powers of Earth have to be seen to be ‘fair’. No summary executions, just banishment. This place is far crueller than a death sentence, yet public sensibilities – and a craving to stay in power – force the establishments to keep this horror story going.
