by submission | Aug 20, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jackson Fitzjames
Anonymous trespassing isn’t very easy in a surveillance state. Or, at least, that’s what they want you to think.
The rocketbike is juddering along between my legs in a way that’s going to chafe soon. If I get any more growth spurts, I’m not going to fit on it any more, and then we’ll have to build some new transport.
You see, the Powers That Be aren’t very good at thinking up new things. This is part of their appeal- they’ve already figured out how people are liable to rebel, and they have countertactics for everything. If someone tries to infiltrate them, they’ll know even if all of the passwords have been figured out. They can turn on a dime in a thousand critical ways, and restructure themselves even if there are only a few cells of them left, like a horrible disease.
However, this is also their undoing. Some of us, the older ones, just roll dice and use self-made random number generators to pick their actions, which starts producing glitches in the system. Some of us, however, are a bit more direct.
The rocketbike is a bike with a lot of propulsion systems attached to it. Nothing fancy, not like the jetpacks that a few people have come up with. They’re clunky and work with roughly the same physics as our weapons of the week, modified potato guns. The guns aren’t altered, because that would be too obvious- the potatos are just stuffed with explosives.
The Powers That Be can see all rooftop activity using sensors built into their surfaces, they can track all road movement with basic cameras stuck to the building and the odd checkpoint, and they can track rogue helicopters with long-distance radar. They don’t bother to look for teenagers reckless enough to stick propulsion technology (and occasionally, hoses) to a bunch of scrapped bikes and start flying through windows. Add some construction paper masks and you’re set.
Speaking of that, here’s the building we’re breaking into tonight. Straight ahead, it’s nothing but glass, wood, and juicy, juicy insides.
I put the pedal to the metal, and let come what may.
by Julian Miles | Aug 19, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“What the hell is he riding – or is that piloting?”
“Riding. Even though the round bits front and rear aren’t wheels: they’re gravtac repulsor loops.”
Blake turned to stare at Neville: “Nice. So what the frack is it?”
Neville smiled: “Vincent Black Banshee.”
“Aren’t they illegal?”
“Not yet.”
The ten-foot long vehicle they pursued – seemingly made only of flowing lines and reflections of the objects it passed – accelerated away from them without difficulty, then pulled an impossibly sharp left-turn and shot up the side of a tall building.
Blake punched the roof lining of their unmarked pursuit car.
“Bloody marvellous. How are we supposed to catch something that can do that?”
Neville grinned: “Vincent’s Black Ghost was the first gravtac motorbike. As the gravtac was like you get on the boots, it behaved like a motorbike. The Black Banshee added a gravitic field generator and Lenkormian Forever Drive. That means as far as it’s concerned, ‘down’ is whichever way the underside points.”
Blake clamped a hand on Neville’s shoulder: “He’s been causing chaos for months. Given the state of the streets inside the London Orbital, his antics were tolerated – until he started tagging secure vehicles.”
“He only showed the inadequacies of our security versus new technology. He saved lives: we revised our procedures and stopped two hi-tech assassination attempts cold.”
Blake nodded: “I’ll give him that, but the feeling is that he’s with the activists.”
Neville slammed the car to a stop: “They what?”
“They think he’s setting himself set up as a popular icon to heighten the impact when he pulls something grievous. It’s not like we could stop him.”
Neville chuckled.
Blake stared at him: “What’s so funny?”
Neville pointed out the window on Blake’s side. Barely twenty feet away, he could see his reflection in the gleaming black panels of a thoroughbred hybrid of drag bike and cruise missile. It hung inches from the pavement, the rider sitting relaxed with hands in lap and helmeted head turned toward them. The gloss black bodysuit, bulky from chest inserts, matched the gloss black finish of the machine. Just forward of a shapely thigh, Blake could see the word ‘Vincent’ in white block capitals on a curved gold banner.
He paused; shapely thigh?
“That’s no man!”
Neville applauded: “Well done, detective. That’s Metropolitan Armed Response Sergeant Suzy Mandrill. It was the only way we could think of to get urgent security improvements past the bureaucracy.”
Blake’s head came round so fast he winced: “’We’?”
Neville smiled: “You must have misheard me.”
Blake clenched his fists and pointed out of his window: “You just told me that two elite officers conspired to subvert security protocols.”
Neville peered over Blake’s hand: “Me and who?”
Blake looked back. Between his window and a shop entrance, only a solitary fox trotted by.
Neville drove while Blake swore himself out. After the silence had stretched for an hour, he stopped the car and turned to look at Blake.
Blake glared and snapped: “What?”
“I was wondering if you’d like to come round for dinner one evening. Bring Heather; I’m sure she and Suzy will get along.”
Blake’s face turned a colour normally reserved for beetroot: “Your girlfriend is the Black Rider?”
Neville smiled and shook his head: “You do have the strangest ideas, detective. We just thought you’d like a relaxing evening. Maybe even go for a ride. You know, see how pillion suits you?”
Blake rested his head in his hands: “We’re all going to jail.”
Neville patted his shoulder: “Only if you tell, detective, only if you tell.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 18, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The flickering neon promise was the same as always, ‘Rooms by the Hour’ and underneath ‘Vacancy’. I knew what I would find inside. The locks on the double front doors were burned away completely leaving a metre wide hole in the surrounding glass, soft bubbled edges that were very recently molten.
I pushed one door open with the barrel of my pistol and stepped into the lobby. The small room reeked of antiseptic cleansers layered with floral air conditioners. Neither masked the smell of roasted hair and flesh.
Behind the front desk a thin figure in a grey suit lay in an androgynous heap, head burned completely off. It wouldn’t matter how fast the meat wagons got here, they could grow back an arm or a leg, scrape the latent personality and experience from the brain and reprint a clone if the kill turned out to be unrighteous, but without a head this life was lost for good. Working the front desk at a whore house, it was unlikely whoever it was could afford backup.
Up the stairs to the second floor, I passed door after door where the scene played out the same; wood kicked off hinges, hookers and clients alike in various states of undress lay in torched heaps, some in their beds, some near the doorway no doubt investigating the noise, some half way to the bathroom or bedroom window, their desperate attempt to escape cut short by the merciless cone of death fired at apparent close range.
He was in the last room, standing staring at her body where it lay motionless on the bed. He turned slightly as I entered, the weapon hanging limply at his side. The virus had turned more than half of his skin black, polished and shiny, the far side of his face infected top to bottom giving him the eerie appearance of a man half in shadow, even in this light.
She was dead. Skin turned completely black, joints shattered where her death throes had broken the crystalline flesh in the last few moments of life.
“They must have made her a carrier, kept her isolated until she infected me.” He waved absently at her. “I was her only client in the last three weeks, she was saving herself for me.” I remembered the body at the front desk, his opening salvo of questions. “They must have let it off its leash once they were done with her.” One side of his face creased into a smile, the dark side frozen, the resulting expression appropriately grotesque. “No loose ends.” He fished in his pocket and produced my badge. “You’ll be needing this”, he said as he tossed it to me. I caught it left handed without looking, brailled its surface reflexively and slipped it in my hip pocket. “We’re not done here.”
I knew what he’d started I would have to finish. We stared at each other, like figures on either side of a funhouse mirror, he regarding what he’d looked like before the infection effectively ended his life, I was looking back at what I had become in the days while I was being reconstituted. The carnage between then and now making us two very different people.
“Not different,” he read my mind, “we’re the same.” He weighed the blaster carefully, studying the purpose built simplicity of the weapon as though seeing it for the first time. “And if they came for us once, they’ll be coming again.”
I knew he was right. Knew I was right. He met my gaze and held it. I wondered if the sadness in his eyes was echoed in mine.
“Thank god for backup.” He raised the barrel and pushed it under his jaw, once more the grotesque smile in the instant before the particle blast erased it for good.
“Thank god for backup.” I repeated.
by submission | Aug 17, 2014 | Story |
Author : RM Dooley
The rogue tampons rolling across the trunk floor and abandoned high heel tell me it’s a girl’s car. Probably this girl’s car.
I can’t move much. Duct tape binds her hands, feet, and stretches over her mouth. The taillight is kicked out and the flashlight next to her flickers in and out of life. She must have tried to get attention before I took control. I doubt she woke up in time for it to do any good. No glow from street lamp or car light slips in through the break, already too far down an empty back road.
Whatever drug he used still pumps through her, giving me a secondary disconnected dizziness. The throbbing head, a physical blow rather than chemical, registers to me more like radio static than actual pain.
The car stops gliding and begins a jolting trundle down an unpaved road.
Dammit. I bang her head against the trunk’s floor. I’d scream if I could. How far away can the driver be? Four, five feet difference in where my consciousness landed? If I’d taken him, she would make it.
I could’ve turned the car back around. Straight to a police station. I could’ve saved her.
I can’t cry. My body is at least twenty miles away, safely slumped across my couch. So she cries for me, hot angry tears over the five feet that killed her.
Not like I can aim. The mind wanders where it will. I should consider myself lucky I found her, working off a name and face until I latched on to one. Desperation more than anything let me find her, mine drawn to hers.
The crunching gravel goes quiet. Her heart thuds as the car door opens and shuts. She’s not aware and I keep my hold. Neuroimaging shows that while I’m in control the host’s brain functions as if in a very deep sleep, near comatose. She won’t know, won’t feel. And I can at least get a look at his face.
He opens the trunk and smiles down at her. At me. Clean shaven, early thirties. Even in the dark I know he’s handsome. Dark cropped hair, straight nose, hungry blue eyes. I carve his face into memory to bring back to my body.
I glare up at him. You’re dead asshole
I won’t report him to the police. No facial composite, no falsifying witness reports so the courts will believe how he was tracked down. Not this one. This is going to be personal. I have his face and I’ll share a memory. That’s enough for a wandering mind like mine to eventually track him down with.
He picks her up, almost lovingly until I start to fight. To me, the breaking nose feels like buzzing discomfort.
Whatever he does, I’m not letting go. And he’s not done with the ritual. One he carries out with disturbing efficiency.
But I won’t let go. She doesn’t have to know this. Let her last memory be whatever final prayer she clung to; another driver would notice bound hands waving out from the trunk. Someone would find her. Save her. She doesn’t have to know the climax to his gentle kiss, the pretty practiced lies he whispered to lure her away.
I’ll leave when she does. The last cut that bleeds us from her body. I can’t save her, but I can spare her. No one should have to experience this.
I would know.
by submission | Aug 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Peter R Jennings
“It’s not going to work, is it”? Gentry gasped out between huge, sucking breaths. He was right next to me so I was getting his panic in stereo through my earphones. The bright, tight lines of lasers and crumping explosions flashed and strobed the night sky above the crater. This was taking too long. Sweat was making my enhancement goggles and my fingers inside the slim gloves slippery so I snarled up at him.
“No, it may not and then we die, OK? Now, shut up”! Even though he towered above me he shrunk back as though more frightened of me than the Skarenji, his young face pushed into cherubic folds by the confines of his power armour. The Tandem masters tended to be a little chubby like the wheel-chair bound. I would have thought the adrenalin shots that were being thumped into them by the field controllers would burn it off. Hell, I could use a pick me up right about now.
“BOOMERANG”! shrieked Gentry a second before he bull-rushed me to the ground. The sizzling ‘wop-wop’ noise dopplered and bang! The white flash was followed by a hail of shrapnel and half the crater collapsing a few feet from us. Gentry’s arms were braced above me so that the weight of his armour, (augmented as it was with weapon pods, jump pack, ammunition and shield/stealth generators), would not crush me beneath him,
“Sir! Sargent Janus, you one hundred”? Gentry was yelling into my face. Damn it, I think the tandem harness on his chest had cracked my jaw. I threw a thumbs up between us and into his face. Grinning, he leapt to his feet. Scrambling back to the pillar of steel I plunged my hands back into the circuitry. The boomerang’s ordnance was anti-personnel so little damage was done to the metal structure. Alright, I just need to bypass the B-line and we are back in business. Forty five seconds maybe a minute.
“I’m getting the Fifty up” Gentry panted as a he palmed the command into his wrist pad. A cylinder rose, whirring, from his back and reaching back he unclipped it with practiced ease. He was battle calm now and that was good. Weird how he got steadier as things got worse. I think I was the opposite.
“They’ll know we are here” I said, looking at him whilst I reached for the impact welder on my belt.
“Uh sir, I think they may know already” Sliding the bolt on the side of the cylinder he braced to lob it over the trench.
“Gentry” I called to get him to glance at me and I gestured with my head back towards where he had covered me with his armoured body.
“Thanks, man” I said simply.
“No problem, Sir. Hurry up” He tossed the Fifty over the crater wall and all hell erupted over our heads as the staccato blasting of the fifty was matched with red flashes lighting up the drifting smoke above. Gentry’s face plate snapped shut and he levitated upwards until he was level with the rim. His repeater thumped against his shoulder as he kept up a steady rate of fire.
“100 metres…closing” his voice was in my ear as the B-line finally thrummed into life. I crashed the hard-plate shut. The War-bot rose smoothly to his feet, raised his fist and fired rapidly towards the horizon.
“Thank-you, sir” boomed the mechanical monster in his demonic voice as he exited the crater, blasting the advancing Skarenji.
“TECH-SUPPORT”! Bellowed another War-bots rasping, dying, voice from a different sector of the field.
Sigh…
