A Planet Too Far: Beyond the Stars, #1

by Nick Webb

  Tango looked out at the new city being constructed, the green land around them, the many soldiers who carried out tasks to complete this no-two-stones operation. The old cities‌—‌the so-called palaces‌—‌were gone into dust. The green band around the equator would be the new home for these people. It was battle, only a different kind.

  “Just think of it this way. We’ll have a story no other division can match,” Tango said. Then she swatted at another mosquito and sighed.

  Q&A with Ann Christy

  The concept of dedicating a human to be either a “Voice” or a “Hand” is horrible and fascinating. And I love the way the reality of those terms creeps up on the reader. How did you come up with such a chilling planetary society?

  In truth, it just sort of crept up on me. In this case, a small subset of the population believes they are the chosen ones and this is how they manifest that belief in their physical world. And because those who are not the chosen ones know of nothing that would contradict this insanity, they simply accept it as truth. We see this mirrored in our world, though not with that level of mutilation. It’s really about how we can become blinded by belief and how disastrous that can be for anyone caught in such a web.

  Has SF always been your favorite genre to read and write?

  I love the mind-expanding nature of SF and it has always been my favorite genre to read. I’m still only a few years into this life as a writer, but I find that I can express myself so much better through the SF genre. And really, that’s what it is for me. I express all that’s in my head, only in creative ways.

  What’s up next for you in terms of new stories?

  Lots of stuff! I’m always cooking up more stories. Right now I’m working on the Perfect Partners, Incorporated series, which is generally focused on sentient androids. I rather like looking at humanity from the lens of an outsider as I’m doing in these books. Also, the next book in the Strikers series is slated for an early summer release, which is exciting!

  Where should readers find out about you and your other books?

  My website is http://www.annchristy.com, but I’m also on social media (mostly Facebook) and I love interacting with people there. Just ignore all my crazy photos and dog memes.

  The Immortals: Anchorage

  by David Adams

  Monsters don’t sleep

  under your bed.

  They scream forever

  inside your head.

  ‌—‌ Extract from ‘A Dance of Dreams and Nightmares’, an Uynovian poem

  Ever since the Founding, Colonial settlers whispered of ghost ships; silent, empty vessels drifting between the stars, steel tombs for their crew. Ships that set out from Earth and, for whatever reason, never made it to the stars.

  The causes were innumerable. A leaking reactor. A pathogen. An unstable passenger who took a knife and obeyed the voices in her head.

  Or worse.

  Recruited into the mysterious Synapse Foundation, Nicholas Caddy‌—‌still bearing the scars of an interstellar war‌—‌is dispatched on his first mission with the Immortals. A passenger liner, the Anchorage, has gone silent. Their task is simple: find the ship, salvage what they can, report what happened. Simple.

  Simple.

  This is Part two of The Immortals series set in the Universe of War, thirteen years before the events of Symphony of War: The Polema Campaign.

  Anchorage

  DT-Y 44 Transport Lahore

  Deep space

  0025

  January 1st

  2231 AD

  Three years after The Immortals: Kronis Valley; thirteen years before the events of Symphony of War: The Polema Campaign

  “HAPPY NEW YEAR, Caddy,” said Golovanov as he threw a dossier on my chest, the feeling jolting me awake. “Here’s your present.”

  It took me a second to process all of this. I sat up in my bunk, shielding my eyes with my prosthetic hand, squinting in the harsh glare of the Lahore’s overhead lights. I sent my implants a mental command to dim the lights and the ship mercifully complied, dropping the illumination down to a manageable level.

  “Wait,” I said, swinging my legs over the side of the bunk and opening the steel-grey dossier. “We got a job?” The screen lit up, showing a bunch of writing and ship schematics.

  “Yup,” said Golovanov. “The Synapse Foundation is putting us in the field. You’ll like this one: it’s gas.”

  I brought the lights back up as my eyes adjusted. Seemed like all we did every day was train. Adjust to the Immortal Armour. Working in a team with the other Immortals. Fire drills.

  I skimmed over the documents, absorbing as much as I could as we spoke. Something about a ship in distress. “What’s the deal?”

  “The Anchorage,” Golovanov said. “A DT-Y 44 just like this one. Passenger liner. It went silent about three days ago and has been drifting through Polema’s space since. Not responding to hails. Long range scans show low power and thermal signatures, but spectrographic analysis suggests there’s at least some atmosphere left. So we get to take a look-see.”

  Any excitement I had at the potential for action slowly faded. “A bunch of civilians bought it out in the black? This is a job for the Coast Guard.”

  “It is, and they’re contracting it out to us.”

  “What a beating,” I said, and considered a moment. That was very odd. The Polema Coast Guard‌—‌named for their nautical forbearers‌—‌were tasked with sorting out this kind of garbage. “Wait, why the hell would they do that? The Coast Guard is one of the best funded agencies in the colonies. Why do they need us?”

  Golovanov sat at the edge of my bed. “Maybe you should save your questions until you finish reading,” he said.

  “Reading is for nerds,” I said. I switched off the dossier with a mental command. “So. Are we mercenaries now?”

  “Eh.” He shrugged. “I prefer to use the term Private Third-Party Offshore Conflict Resolution Engineers. You can tell how fancy it is by how many words it has.”

  “So, mercenaries.”

  “There’s no money in integrity. You got a problem with that?”

  “Naw,” I said. “Like they say on Eris, money doesn’t buy happiness, but poverty doesn’t buy anything. If we’re here to do dodgy stuff, and we’re going to make a buck doing it, that’s fine by me.” I stretched out my arms. “But I thought we were supposed to be tracking down and recovering Earthborn technology. Who cares about some civvie freighter?”

  “The Coast Guard suspects,” said Golovanov, “that the Anchorage was attacked by Earthborn raiders.”

  Well. That would explain a lot of things. “Why not call in the Colonial fleet?” I asked. “If the Earthborn are pushing up into our space, we should hit them hard. Another Reclamation would be… “ I didn’t even want to think about it.

  “Money talks, but wealth whispers.” Golovanov’s eyes met mine. “Polema wants to avoid making waves‌—‌their economy is only just beginning to recover from the Reclamation. If the Earthborn really did hit the Anchorage, this might be just an isolated incident. You know, some renegades blowing off steam, or maybe a bunch of clones went rogue. Not an organised attack.”

  My thoughts went to the same place. “And if that’s true, and Polema raises the alarm, and it all turns out to be nothing, they’ll lose tens of trillions of creds. They want this whole mess to be taken care of quietly.”

  “Right,” he said. “A few hundred civvies die, but the rich get richer and that’s the important thing.”

  It was as it always was. “The Prophets Wept.”

  “It’s not all bad,” said Golovanov. “This is a gas opportunity for us, too. If the Earthborn really did hit the Anchorage, they probably left stuff behind. Stuff we could use.”

  “Right,” I said, standing and stretching out my cramping legs. “Whatever. It’s gotta be better than more drills.”

  * * *

  I splashed some water on my face and adjusted my chrono implant. It began feeding
my body chemicals to suppress drowsiness. By the time I left my quarters, I felt like I’d slept for a year then chugged ten cups of coffee.

  Almost. Synthetic sleep was never the same; it was too perfect, too fake, as though some part of my brain were silently screaming in protest. They said it was bad for you.

  But so was falling asleep during a firefight.

  My suit of Immortal Armour was waiting in the cargo hold, an empty space at the rear of the ship. The Synapse Foundation had converted the area to a hangar. My armour, like the others, hung suspended from the ceiling by thick cables, a ten foot tall ape-like monster, boxy and metal. A caged hunter begging to be unleashed.

  “Caddy,” said Angel, from behind her suit, one of the seven others. She seemed to be in a particularly bad mood. “You’re late.”

  “Came as fast as I could,” I said. “How far out are we?”

  “Six hours,” said Angel, stepping into view‌—‌shaved hair, muscled frame and all‌—‌and reached into the suit’s cockpit. She pulled something out that sparked before it went silent. “The Anchorage should be coming up on external sensors momentarily. Golovanov said he’d pipe the feed down here. AI, let me know when we have eyes on it.”

  “Of course,” said the voice from her machine. Genderless. Empty.

  I didn’t know how I felt about Angel. We’d been training together for months now. Things had been very professional. We hadn’t bonded properly yet; the Immortals and I. Angel least of all.

  She was from a world called Uynov. They called themselves The First to Suffer. Uynov had been trashed by the Earthborn during the Reclamation; their bio-weapons turned it from a watery paradise to a shit-hole full of toxins and quarantined areas. Most Uynovians lived in space these days and they tended to be broody and aloof.

  There didn’t seem to be anything Angel loved more than weapons drills, or practising endlessly with her armour. Angel might as well be a robot, an observation compounded by her heavy cybernetic augmentation. Prosthetics jutted from almost all parts of her flesh, blunt chrome slivers. Her face was hard, hair shaved, skin rough as cracked desert earth. She couldn’t have been older than twenty five but looked in her forties.

  She was the first Uynovian I’d ever met. I wasn’t sure what I expected. But, you know, a smile occasionally wouldn’t go amiss.

  “Hey Caddy,” said Stanco, clapping me on the shoulder from behind. “You ready to do this?”

  I also didn’t know how I felt about Maddisynne Stanco. He was built like a bull with biceps like fire hydrants. Fun fact: he was also born a she. A trans-man. Not that there was anything wrong with that.

  Although we were all supposed to be enlightened these days, and we’d been taught to accept trans people for what they wanted to be, I couldn’t. I tried. I knew it wasn’t right‌—‌if someone wanted to identify as an eggplant or something, why couldn’t they?‌—‌but, sometimes, I couldn’t look past the parts of Stanco’s facial structure that were effeminate. The way he sometimes looked at me or others.

  Eris, my home, was very traditional. Osmeon, Stanco’s world, was viewed by most Erisians as decadent and hedonistic. Of course, they saw us as uptight, bigoted prudes.

  But now, at the end of the day, we were all in this together. They had to accept us, and we had to accept them.

  I was trying.

  “Yeah buddy,” I said, trying to smile my best. “Our first real mission, huh?”

  Stanco leaned up against Angel’s suit, folding his big hands behind his head. “Fuck yeah. It’s going to be gas, my friend.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, and I took a few steps to my suit.

  Tall and strong, a mirror of the others, a hunchback made of steel.

  “Morning Caddy,” said the suit’s AI, smooth and feminine. I had named her Sandy, after Sandhya, a woman I’d fought alongside during the Reclamation.

  I probably shouldn’t have done that. Sandhya hadn’t come home. We’d been close: we shared ammo magazines, tactical info, and far too often, a bedroll.

  I probably shouldn’t have done that either. I had been married to Valérie at the time. Valérie, who had stood by me after I’d been wounded. Valérie, who’d been endlessly understanding, endlessly loving, endlessly patient.

  Almost endlessly. We were divorced now. I hadn’t seen her in years.

  “Morning Sandy,” I said. “How’s your diagnostic coming?”

  “Coming along nicely,” she said. “I think I’ve narrowed down the stability issue; the gyros weren’t aligned correctly. It shouldn’t happen again.”

  That was gas. The suits were new technology‌—‌not only were they inherently unstable, to give us better maneuverability, they required an AI to operate. We were the guinea pigs, working out the kinks.

  I wanted to ask Sandy more about exactly how she was fixing this complex problem in software, but Golovanov stepped into the hangar and everyone fell silent.

  “Immortals,” he said, casually folding his hands behind his back. Just like the old days.

  “Ho,” we said in chorus. Only Angel, Stanco and I were here. We had eight suits. Where was everyone else? Nobody seemed concerned. Maybe I should actually read the mission briefings in future.

  Golovanov’s eyes flicked to me, then he addressed the group. “We’re coming up on the Anchorage,” he said. “Should have eyes in a few minutes. Based on the large amount of debris, it’s starting to look like someone did, in fact, attack the ship.”

  “Cunts,” spat Angel. “Of course the Earthborn would prey on civilians.”

  “Any information from the distress beacon?” I asked. “Maybe they mentioned who was attacking them.”

  “It’s just an automated beacon.” Golovanov narrowed his eyes. “So if it was the Earthborn, they struck fast.”

  That was their MO.

  “Deployment is three suits,” said Golovanov. “That’s you guys. The rest of the Immortals will cover you. Float over from the Lahore, get inside the ship, find what you can. Take some emergency bulkheads in case you need to secure an area and dismount, but have someone maintain overwatch. Deployment is with standard layouts for Angel and Caddy, Stanco as fire support with the assault gun.”

  Standard layout was an autocannon, grenade launcher, and flamethrower. “Fire support on a boarding mission, sir? Don’t you think that assault guns are kind of overkill?”

  “Hell no,” said Stanco. “Automatic weapons are the most casualty producing weapon in the fire team. It’s more than simply fire support and suppression.” His face lit up in a wide, cheesy grin. “Plus they’re fucking rad. I feel like a god when I spin that thing up.”

  “Deific posturing aside,” said Golovanov, “we have no idea what’s going on aboard that ship, and if the Earthborn are aboard, we want a firepower advantage. Even if it’s in close quarters.”

  “Sounds gas,” I said. “I’d rather have it and not use it than need it and not have it.”

  “Exactly,” said Golovanov. “Any questions?”

  Angel raised a hand. “Who’s lead suit?”

  All eyes fell upon her. She was the obvious choice.

  “Angel is leading this op,” said Golovanov, as we expected she would. “Don’t get me wrong‌—‌you’ll all get your turn. Next time is Stanco. Caddy, you’re next.”

  “Sounds gas,” I said. “Gives me time enough for everyone else to make the mistakes.”

  Stanco laughed. “Gee, thanks.”

  “Never forget that your eyes are connected to your brain.” Golovanov pointed to my suit. “Go suit up. Make sure you’re comfortable. I’ll put through any more info as it becomes available. Learn what you can, and get back here ASAP.”

  “Right,” I said. Six hours locked in a metal box. No worries.

  Come on, I sent to Sandy via my implants. It’s time to go to work.

  Sandy’s chest opened up, peeling back like a blooming flower. I turned around and stepped backwards into the suit, the metal petals closing in around me. Thin cables snak
ed out from the suit and latched into my exposed implants, magnetically attaching to the metal. Three, two, one…

  My vision went dark and a numbness enveloped my whole body. The quiet hum of the hangar disappeared; I felt as though I’d been thrown into a bucket of ice water, silent, black as night.

  Then I was standing in the hangar, eight feet tall and strapped to the ceiling, as the suit’s body became mine. My eyes could see so much now: the heat of the booting up suits, green boxes around the other suits, and text floating in air giving me ammunition counts, power levels, and whatever Sandy wanted to highlight for me. My world was fish-eyed. I could feel one of the cables brushing against the EVA pack on my back.

  I was ready for the activation but it was always disconcerting.

  “Looking gas,” said Golovanov. He looked so small now, like a child who only came up to my waist. He gave me a thumbs up.

  I returned it. “Connection is solid,” I said, my voice synthetic, an approximation of my natural voice, just deeper. “Ready to go.”

  Angel’s portrait appeared on the left side of my vision. “Immortal Armour active,” she said.

  Stanco’s face appeared below her. “Ready to chew arse and kick bubble gum,” he said. “And I’m all out of arse.”

  “Right.” I chuckled, trying to sound natural. Why did he have to sexualize everything? Not every guy was like that. It reeked of over overcompensation.

  Not that there was anything wrong with that. I kept telling myself that.

  Golovanov left, leaving the three of us hanging from the ceiling. I couldn’t feel my real body; I knew it was hanging there, limp and immobile, inside my chest cavity, weak as a baby.