“Oh, dear God,” Abe clasped his hands to his face as he looked at his emails.
“What’s up?” Shoshana asked poking her head around the door.
“We have been invited,” said Abe rolling his eyes, “to another bloody Zoom cocktail party.”
“Fuck,” Shoshana said, “who is it this time?”
“My boss,” Abe responded, he ran his hand through his thinning hair, “which means we can’t cry off, can’t leave early, and definitely can’t turn up in dressing gowns.”
“Hang on a moment, sis,” Shoshana pointed at the phone clamped to her ear. Then said to Abe, “Can we talk about this later, honey?”
Abe nodded, printed the email out and walked slowly to the fridge to stick it under one of the magnets covering its facia.
Snippets of conversation drifted from the living room.
“Absolutely nothing to wear…”
Shoshana was good at displacement, Abe was not. He liked the atmosphere in work; the watercooler chats about TV, the banter, the crap coffee, even his boss’s grumpiness. It defined him. Now he was lost in a world of Facebook and eking out Netflix series so they lasted the duration.
“Hey Belial,” Lilith shot the demon a furious glance, “will you quit your beatboxing, or I swear to Dog I’ll beatbox your ears.”
His single, vein-etched eye widened as she swept a taloned claw inches from his snout and he tumbled backwards in mid-beat into a vat of moral turpitude soup.
“Watch it, mam,” he coughed, picking lumps of jellied depravity out his hair, “you nearly had my eye out then.”
She skewered him with a look that would have frozen sunspots.
“What,” she snarled, “do you think I was TRYING to do?”
When Jack was a kid, about twice a year, his family would drive from their home in Dade County, in the north-west of Georgia, to his grandparents’ farm in Seminole County, in the very south-western corner of the state. This trip meant three small boys sitting in the back seat of a 55 Chevy for over three hundred miles, travelling on fifties roads through Georgia and bits of Alabama. It was before the government built the Interstates and the journey was often interrupted by roadworks and low-speed limits through numerous towns so small they didn’t appear on maps in those days. It was a long, miserable trip: seven or eight hours of brothers’ elbows, mother’s scolding and potholes testing the suspension of their dad’s car.
Colquitt was the last town they went through before reaching the farm, meaning it was only about ten miles to go and their father would often stop to get some refreshments and relieve themselves of other burdens. The town was always a welcome sight and they would sit for half an hour in the shade of the Colquitt Tower Hotel on North Main Street, mama sipping her peach tea, their daddy downing a root beer and the boys arguing over their ice-cream sodas.
“There’s lots of thrusting going on…” Jacquie said, letting the sentence hang in mid-air. My beta reader does not pull punches, even though her image is the archetype of diminutive, floral printed, butter-would-not-melt, she is actually a ball of literary savagery.
She was referring to the first love scene in my Work In Progress, which has reached the point where the hero is shacked up with his female interest, they are surrounded by antagonists and need to dig deep to find a route to their goal. This is the moment where the hero puts down his gun, bares his chest and goes for his secondary objective. Thrusting ensues.
“The thing is, white men can’t jump, dogs can’t sing, and middle-aged authors can’t write sex,” she said. Continue reading →
Lionel and Nathaniel were as alike as any two men aged twenty years apart. Both shared broad faces and prominent foreheads, topped by luxuriant dark brown hair. Nathaniel was the taller of the two, by a good three inches, a testimony to his father’s insistence on a healthy diet denied to the older man in the hard times of his youth. Otherwise, their heritage shone through in the way they carried themselves, their choices and actions; and the quirky speech mannerisms marking them out as different to the melange of Grangetown’s habitués.
They sat in the front room of a small terraced house facing the southern edge of Cardiff, with just a broad strip of green known locally as “The Mall” between them and the Bristol Channel. Continue reading →
For you to understand the god-damn enormity of my task means I have to explain it to you. I don’t want to because seconds count, but I will anyway.
It’s this: light travels very fast. In one second it will cross 186,282.40 miles. A photon leaving Earth will travel beyond the orbit of the moon in the time it takes to make two strides.
I’m Detective Inspector Andy Spence.
And I have to stop it.
It is twenty-four years, three months and sixteen days after First Contact Day and I’m drinking coffee while sitting behind my aged metal desk in London’s New Scotland Yard. I cleared some space by pushing one of several paper mountains to one side and put my mug down. An old plastic cup, its contents dried to a brown biscuit in its base, fell off the edge and skittered across my office floor. It joined several friends decorating the office landscape. This was because the domestic staff were on strike and I am always clear about demarcation. Civilians made me sick.
My partner, Detective Sergeant Kieran Mulrooney, strode towards me with that look on his face. He has a case and I am about to get involved. Again. I heaved a sigh and looked up.
“Boss”, he said as he waved a sheet of paper at me. “Look at this…”
“Let me see,” I said. I tried my best not to sound weary, but this time I may have failed. The memo was from Police Intelligence. They were monitoring a clutch of peacenik academics in Camden. Hard-wired bugs, you’ll understand, we don’t use radio any more. Not since Scrixn’s warning, anyway.
The memo was short and brutal. It said, “There is credible evidence Professor Dexter P. Arthur, a leading light in the Peace Costs Nothing group is discussing with fellow academics the possibility of pointing a comms laser at the Drar’ch fleet as they cross interstellar space in search of new civilisations to crush. They intend to broadcast a message of peace. The case requires termination.”
“Saddle up, Kee,” I said rising to my feet and taking a last gulp of coffee. I reached into my desk, pulled out my Glock 17, checked the clip and pocketed two more clips just in case. “We’ve got work to do.”
“Boss,” he acknowledged and patted his belt holster. He favoured the smaller Walther PPK/S. It was safer to carry, but that long pull of the trigger to cock the mechanism cost seconds. Survival often depended on seconds. I scowled but left my displeasure for a future discussion.
We left the building by the roof exit, crossing a darkened London with speed. The Professor’s home and laboratory were around the back of Camden Market, just four miles away. We made it in six minutes, landing on a second-floor balcony without any noise. I glanced up and saw light escaping from a misplaced blackout curtain and signalled Kieron to position himself in front of the window. He rose without hesitation, his A-grav-plate glowing a faint violet as he did so, and I entered the building via the balcony doors.
The room was cluttered with plush furniture, books in piles like sentries guarding a twin pedestal walnut desk, a single Anglepoise lamp and a heavy wooden pipe jutting up like craggy rocks in a sea of paper. It smelled of old tobacco and older body sweat, like an end of the line brothel in a cheap part of town. The incongruity of it set my OCD on edge, or maybe that was the stomach acid from swallowing my coffee too quickly.
Tiptoeing across the room, I found the door was ajar and I could hear voices coming from the floor above. They were dull and indistinct, but my cop’s instinct told me they would very soon get real clear, so I pulled the door further and looked around the hallway. There was no-one around, so I made my mind up to take the plunge right there and then.
Creeping out of the study, I activated my AGP and scaled the stairs without causing an alerting creak. The Glock was in my hand now and my breathing was low, even though my heart was beating faster than a trapped fly’s wings on a hot summer afternoon.
“Do we have enough battery yet?” said a low voice. I recognised it as the Professor from a lecture of his I attended some five years ago. The incongruity of his West Country burr castigating the authorities in a London academic setting stuck with me.
“Yesh,” came the reply. The second voice shocked me. It was Scrixn, the alien who came to warn us about the Drar’ch, a race of self-replicating machines, whose sole purpose was to find intelligent biological life and destroy it. “You may proscheed, Professher.”
I kicked the door open and opened fire. The alien flew backwards as three slugs hit him in his broad, scaly forehead and the Professor whirled around clutching a device that looked like a spring-loaded clamp, its jaws wide and two wires trailing from the handle.
“Inspector,” he said in a nonchalant voice. He raised his hands as I pointed my gun at him.
“Drop the device, Professor,” I commanded him. I shook the gun at him for emphasis. “Drop it now.”
He smiled and let go of the clamp, the jaws closed and sparked. A table-top laser hummed, the blackout curtains parted and he laughed.
I shot him in the face and as he fell to the floor, still smiling, I emptied my clip into the laser’s casing. Bullets ricocheted everywhere, but the hum continued to rise. In desperation, I dived for the clamp and prised its jaws apart as the laser fired a thin red beam through the open window. I was too late. Seconds too late. The laser beam only lasted a few seconds before it exhausted its batteries and cut off. But it was a few seconds too long for humanity.
I looked through the window to see if I could catch it streaking through the night sky, but saw instead the hulking figure of Sergeant Kieran Mulrooney hanging there, a blank expression on his lifeless face, his AGP still glowing, and a small smoking hole bored into his front armour. I reached out and pulled him close, swivelling his carcass around. There was no hole in the rear.
Epilogue: Ten Years Later
Optical telescopes all over the Earth watched as the billion-strong fleet of Drar’ch proceeded on its murderous procession away from Sol, ever deeper into space. Away from us. We had survived, but only by seconds.
We never found out why Scrixn acted so duplicitously. The current theory is he got us to cut back on technological development just to weaken us, but that’s just a guess. Embedded in his brain was a lot of circuitry, but it will be a long time before the brainboxes can work out what it does, especially as my handiwork had done a lot of rewiring. They will piece it together though. One day. Of that, I am pretty sure. Then maybe we can get some payback for all those races the Drar’ch have wiped out.
For now, I was content to do my shifts, break in my new partner and go home to nurse a bottle of Scotland’s finest. Today was a day of celebration though and I was stuck in the Yard, nicking terrorists, organised criminals, and shuffling paper.
Once again, I was sitting at my desk, a mug of java in my fist, watching cable-TV through the wide-open entrance to my office as scientists played videos of the armada retreating into the ether. They looked like a rash of white dots across the black – too small to get any clear definition even with the best telescopes we had. Maybe if the satellites were still operational, we could have gained a clearer picture, but the risk was too great. For now, the earth would remain in the dark, a lifeless blue marble to outside eyes.
I stood up and walked out of my office as the broadcast came to an end and the politicians took over. There wasn’t much to say, it was a relief more than a victory, but we came close to annihilation and but for the unfortunate positioning of Mulrooney, we would be preparing for an invasion instead of toasting our good fortune. I was going to toast it anyway, so I raised my mug and said, “To life.”
The shift was silent up to that point as they watched the retreating armada, but to a man, woman and robot they turned and raised their mugs to me and in a ragged chorus, echoed my words.
I raised my mug again in acknowledgement, but also in a toast to Sergeant Kieran Mulrooney. He came a magnificent second, but the rest of us won and the thing the aliens don’t realise is we don’t get mad, we get even and payback is coming. One day.
As Mack Trotter rode the elevator down to the lobby, he glanced at himself in the mirrored walls of the six by eight box and decided he was looking distinctly tubby. He sucked in his gut and chided himself for letting a few spare pounds settle on his midriff.
“Fewer steaks, more gym,” he muttered and smoothed down an errant lock of hair. It still felt damp from his shower, but he was anxious to get to the bar, so he had not bothered drying it. It had been a long day and he needed some R and R, preferably with extra Rrrrrrrrr.
I woke in a strange bed, which itself was in a large,
unfamiliar room. Long shadows were cast by sunlight streaming from the window
behind the head of the bed, so I assumed it was late in the day, perhaps early
morning. I dismissed the latter; there was something about the quality of the
light suggestive of evening, rather than the rosy glow of morning.
Around me were a collection of machines and tubes, one of
which was clamped to my face by elasticated straps, with an invasive tube
thrust into my throat via my mouth. Curious bi-pedal, chromium mannequins
dressed in medical scrubs roved to and fro along the tiled floor-space between
the foot of my bed and the adjacent wall, clicking and whirring as they made
their way from one arcane task to another. I recognised them as robotic nurses,
although I had never seen one before, at least not in the flesh, or metal, as
it were.
Daniel Frischmann was surprised to find he was dead. Not the fact of his death, because that was fairly sure given the certainties of gravity, and the distance between his starting point on the nineteenth floor of his apartment block and the concrete courtyard directly below his balcony. No, his surprise was more like, “Oh wow, continuity of existence”. Not those exact words you will understand: his actual expression contained far too many expletives for polite company, so we will skirt around it for now.
Once he got over this shock, he looked around. His
surroundings were grey. A bit like a faded black and white photograph, but
darker and extending into the distance rather than ending with a white edge.
I first met Jose Luis Vercas on the concrete apron jutting out into the mouth of the Targus where the splendour of the Manueline Port of Lisboa ends and a wide expanse of river divides the city from Alcântara. He was short, but well-muscled and possessed of that curiously Portuguese combination of a mane of swept-back, black and wavy hair; and a forehead so high it begged to be labelled, “domed”. He said he too was a teacher, but offered no hint of subject or at what level he taught and, to be frank, my interest did not extend that far.
