He nods back and then moves off to steady our young Marines while I’m busy talking with company HQ.
Barakah’s past is vague – suspiciously so, as is the considerable time he spends away on special missions. He can’t reveal what they are, beyond a nebulous insistence that he is delivering a vital morale boost to millions of Marines like us, but I sense he would dearly love to explain if he could. He says he will one day, when I am ready. When I am strong enough.
But today is all about Hill 435. When the air above the fortified missile battery explodes with nuclear fire, revealing that its defensive shield is still intact, I know the final battle of my tenth tour will be cruel indeed, and that there is no one I would rather have by my side than my new companion, Barakah.
— About this story —
Right from the start, the Human Legion stories prominently featured AIs who grew up and learned their soldiering trade with the young Marine cadets, until they were such slick teams that the distinction between human and AI became first blurred and then unimportant. What went through the ‘minds’ of these AIs? What did they really want? What secrets did they know that they couldn’t let on? What would happen to the AIs if their human partner died? Even before I was far into writing Marine Cadet, I wanted to explore some of these questions, to tell tales from an AI’s point of view.
My chance came when Newcon Press invited selected authors for stories to go into an anthology to celebrate their 10th anniversary. All I had to do was write a story based on the theme of ‘10’.
Big names were waved beneath my nose. Peter F. Hamilton was one, Chris Nuttall another. I’m pretty sure Alistair Reynolds was too for a while but his idea turned into a standalone novella. Plus there was to be a launch party with cake. I agreed to write what became Hill 435 because I wanted to develop an idea about AIs I’d had waiting in the development queue, and not at all because I’m a vain author who wants to be seen hanging out with famous names while eating cake… and get paid for it. Honest.
The result was Crises & Conflicts which had a fabulous cast of authors and stories, and together with its sister anthology, Now we are Ten, a great launch party.
The book sunk without trace. Such is science fiction publishing.
Hill 435 takes the number of published Human Legion short stories to seven and I have sketched out ideas for another three plus a novella. I will definitely be producing a collection of them at some point, but my priority remains novels for now. I’d guess a collection is a couple of years off. Maybe three. So if you have characters, concepts, alien races, technologies or missing parts of the Human Legion story you want to see developed, now’s the time to leave a comment at humanlegion.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Tim C. Taylor – March 2017
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Hill 435: Tales from the Human Legion Page 3