So I got the go-ahead and bug-splatted the two of them in a hot second. Because I killed two baddies in one strike I even got a multi-kill bonus. I watched the smoke flower on my screen and practically floated out of my chair with it. Who knows how many people they would have killed if they'd successfully set up and started firing?
I kept my surveillance up hoping to double tap, but no luck. The only people who came by were kids and then some old people, the men in fedoras and suits, the women wearing hats and dresses whose bright colours scanned weird on my screen. After circling the scene for an hour I realised that no insurgents would be coming, so I circled around back to the base by Ambato and kept an eye on the screen for anything else that might pop up. Nothing did, except for those white words, sprawled across the roof, greeting me and my drone.
After I noticed the message I started seeing more, all written on the roofs around Ambato. One said "Wat (their spelling, not mine) is your model?" Another also asked "What kind of drones do you have?" Others just said things like "you are in the USA" or "I think UAVs are very cool."
The first message was a funny little thing. It matched my joyous mood after my first kill. But now it was different. There were too many of them to take for granted. It wasn't an amusing random thing anymore. It was a mystery. The questions began to ride along with me over the city. Every time I cruised over Ambato I would start looking for messages. And I'd find them. Who was doing this? Why? I had to know the point of these things left all over the city for me. I had to know who was behind them. I didn't find any clues until my third kill.
The strike was against a PAA operative who'd been tagged but disappeared from view for a few weeks after that. I was doing routine surveillance when my auto sensors picked up someone matching his stats. He got into an old white Honda retrofitted to be electric and I tailed him for long enough to confirm and then blasted him.
As always, I circled the area after I bug-splatted him, hoping to score a nice double tap bonus on top of it, but no luck. Just your standard neighbourhood gawkers. And then I saw this kid, a little younger than me. He came out right after the explosion and started staring up into the sky and waving, jumping up and down like he was trying to get my attention. Of course I was at an altitude too high to see, but he still kept acting like he knew I was hovering right above him. I found it weird enough that I tagged him for further surveillance and uploaded his general stats.
The next couple of weeks I didn't follow up on him, though. There was a surge of infighting between the PAA and an Indigenous Autonomy group, and it spilled over into the Central Highlands. It was great for the clan because both groups were on our kill list. Any struggles between them pull them out into the open, where we can strike easily.
One day I was running standard surveillance after school when some indigenous terrorists tried to bomb a secret PAA convoy headed up towards Quito. They failed to pull off the bombing but in doing so gave away the convoy as smugglers. Two missiles, both cars down. I circled overhead for half an hour and caught a known Indigenous Autonomy agent checking out the aftermath. I bug-splatted him, and thus clinched my first successful double tap for extra points and a special merit badge.
This made me man of the hour with the crew. The whole spat kept us busy for a bit, but things calmed down again soon after. Once I was back doing routine surveillance over Ambato I began to notice even more new missives written across the city, facing up to the sky for my benefit. I had a flash of arbitrary intuition and decided to pull up any footage with the general descrip tags of the kid I'd seen earlier.
It turned out I was right on the money. After cycling through footage of the kid going to school or Internet cafes by himself I started pulling up videos of him writing messages on the rooftops around Ambato. Multiple occasions of him clambering onto old buildings with a big brush and a bucket of white paint.
I started watching for him, keeping an eye out when I was actively piloting and pulling up tagged footage when I wasn't. One day I saw a message saying that he thought my strike on the white Honda was very well done. A message specifically for and about me. I had to remind myself that it wasn't completely about me, he didn't know my actual identity. I was just another anonymous drone pilot in his eyes. That strike could have been carried out by anyone.
I think he started to stick in my head because he reminded me of a younger version of myself. I remember how fascinated I was when I was a kid, waving at the low-flying police drones overhead, staring up at the sky and wondering who might be looking down from a higher altitude. I would watch him acting all enthusiastic in the same way and wonder if he could be in this kind of situation, then why not me?
I brought him up at one of TORC's weekly recap meetings, but no one else cared. They just shrugged it off. Not like he was ever going to make the kill list. Just some weird kid with a weird hobby. So I was the only one who was interested, faithfully following every new message like a serialised update. He told me that his name was Ignacio, and he wished he could have his own home drone set up like me.
I pestered piss_em_gbye, the clan founder, about it a couple weeks later, asking him if he'd ever seen anything like this kid before. He hadn't, but he didn't really care about him either. I asked how he wasn't confused by this kid. Didn't he think the whole thing was odd? Maybe he was a spy, I suggested. I found it weird that this kid in Ecuador could speak English. But piss_em_gbye dismissed my concerns and explained to me that Ecuador used to be a pretty stable country. It wasn't too crazy for people there to know English, even now, years after we sponsored the coup and they got drawn into the whole region's military struggles. He told me to just forget about the kid.
I kept flying missions and tried not to bother about it, but I couldn't stop thinking about Ignacio, watching for his messages. I'd never considered any of the people on my screens as anything more than targets before him.
I realised I had to break myself of my obsession with him. I'd even started neglecting standard surveillance so I could track new messages and watch his movements. I convinced Lloyd to recalibrate my meds, but it didn't help any.
Making matters worse was the fact that it felt like Ignacio was actively reaching out to me. He left a message asking me to email him, writing his address on a dark grey rooftop. His missives got more personal, telling me how he wished he could be in the American league, how we get way better drones than the Ecuadorian army or the PAA. He asked me if I had a Predator MQ-88. It was his favourite model.
It was like he knew all about me, knew I was watching. It was so tempting to just pull up my browser and email him, simple as that. I started dwelling on it and realised that something wasn't right. There couldn't be some kid down there who was as obsessed as I was. Who just happened to know English and was almost my age yet also lived in a neighbourhood officially marked as borderline hostile. As if he were another me living in another country, in the middle of a combat zone. It didn't make any sense. I told myself that he was trying to get me to email him so he could infiltrate the league or hack my address or something. It didn't seem right otherwise.
This element of suspicion didn't make things any easier for me, though. Instead I grew more interested in his motives, wondering if he really was a kid just like me or if he was the pretence for a hacking team or a spy. I watched my collected footage of him and would gaze at his email address in my contacts bar, never pressing enter, just typing and staring.
Then some PAA operatives managed to detonate a car bomb outside a police station while I was on surveillance duty. Six dead, eight wounded. I missed it.
Everyone in the clan was really good about it. They keep telling me that none of the operatives had been tagged, that their behaviour didn't set off any alarms on the auto-sensors. But they didn't know why it really happened. I wasn't paying attention when I was supposed to. I was watching Ignacio.
I'd become familiar with his schedule. He'd go to school every day and spend a lot of time afterward on the Internet. He'd go outside and
stare up into the sky, climb around on buildings, or write messages to me. I never really saw him interacting with other kids. I'm pretty sure his parents worked somewhere else. They seemed to be out of town for weeks at a time. I was watching him at the exact moment the bomb went off.
Six dead, eight wounded. And it was his fault. The way he distracted me, the way he wormed his way into my head. Six people are dead, eight of them were sent to the hospital because of him. Because of what he did to me. He was ruining everything. I realised I couldn't let it continue. I had to do something.
Eventually, I found a way to take care of it, fitting my solution into a great multi-kill I had on three indigenous insurgents who tried to set up an IED in Ambato. Instead of bug-splatting them right away I tracked them as they got into their car and left. They were already close to Ignacio's neighbourhood, and I kept waiting until they were right in the thick of it.
The second missile hit their car. The first one went straight into a modest little brick building nestled among the ugly concrete boxes and tin shacks. It only took one missile to turn the house into rubble. Ignacio was inside. He'd just gotten back from school.
Now obviously killing a non-com meant minus points on the rankings, but I'm hardly the only person with an accidental death on my record. It's par for the course when you're part of the UAV leagues. They happen to everyone eventually. And the multi-kill bonus I got practically negated the lost points on the leader board anyway. I would have liked to move onto the Class B leagues with a clean record, but like I said, no one pilots UAVs seriously without occasionally bug-splatting a non-com. It just happens.
I mention the B leagues because The Order of the Red Condor is doing so well that we're likely to move up a league at the end of this year. If everything goes well then TORC could be back in the A leagues by some point next year, and at AAA level they actually start paying you semipro rates for your kills.
My parents met with Lloyd recently and they all agreed that joining the UAV leagues has really helped me raise my self-esteem and engage with the world. Mom and Dad are still sceptical that I'll ever be able to surpass the level of a sporadically paid hobbyist (if that) and go pro, but I aim to prove them wrong. They talked with my school counsellor and agreed that it's a laudable goal as long as I've got a backup plan. I'm doing well in school, and I even started hanging out with a couple of guys in the grade below me who are doing their own certification courses. I feel at peace with myself again, like I'm truly becoming who I'm meant to be. Everyone agrees that this has been really good for me. [GdM]
Aaron Fox-Lerner was born in Los Angeles and currently lives in Beijing, where he works as a nonfiction writer and editor. His short fiction has appeared in The Puritan, Thuglit, Newfound, Bound Off, and other publications.
Review: The Falcon Throne by Karen Miller
JEREMY SZAL
Book One of The Tarnished Crown takes place in a medieval-esque landscape, where numerous duchies hold an uneasy truce, their rivalries rooted deep in memory. Slowly the façade of peace starts to unravel as brother turns against brother, tyrants are overthrown, and disgraced bastard Vidar rises from the shadows to try to save a dying land.
Say one thing about The Falcone Throne: it’s massive. It’s grand in scale, it’s got a wealth of complex characters, it’s ambitious, it’s dark, and it has the potential to be a standout series in the world of grimdark. If anything, The Tarnished Crown series bares more resemblance to A Song of Ice and Fire than most grimdark epic fantasies on the shelves today. And that’s not praise thrown around lightly.
But in saying that, it does occasionally buckle under its own ambition. Where Martin is capable of introducing us to a gigantic universe, deftly weaving in layers and layers of intricate lore, characters, and kingdoms, Miller bluntly thrusts us, quite literally, straight into the action. The first major scene is a jousting event where we meet dozens of people and have their backgrounds and family legacies introduced to us. Thankfully these characters are complex and have a sense of individuality—each is unique in personality, attitude and voice. Miller’s ability to juggle several dozen characters in the air is impressive, and she is able to keep the show going for those with the capacity to keep up.
Of course, not everyone can do so. I frequently had to check out the long list of character names, their family ties and kingdoms that are listed at the start of the book. And just when I was starting to come to terms with these characters, the book threw half a dozen more at me. It was quite bewildering at times. Many characters also have names that sound similar. There’s the kingdom of Harcia, then there’s Harald and his councillor Humbert. There’s Balfre of Harald, then the Duchy of Clemen and Cassinia, the latter of which contains duchess Berardine, her late husband Baldwin and their daughter Brielle. Throw in Aimery, his armsman Ambrose and Argante, the duchess of Clemen and you start to get a little muddled. So much world building is crammed into the initial 75 pages or so that it can be a struggle to keep up.
Nevertheless, when you start putting all the pieces together, it becomes quite a satisfying read. Miller’s prose is smooth and she writes with gusto. She’s not afraid to combine chunky dialogue, long words, and visceral language when the story demands it. Nor does she shy away from brutal violence or dark undertones that run the course of the novel. She resembles a blood-thirstier Rothfuss with an abundance of grit and grime tucked away between beautiful and poetic prose that bubbles to the surface once in a while to remind us that this is a harsh world where a smile is as often as not laced with steel.
Dukes and duchies and kingdoms battle it out in the shadows, clash with words hastily scrabbled on parchment paper, and exchange blows from opposing sides of the kingdom. There are a variety of characters, many of which will slowly grow you on despite their dark intentions. Others you’ll admire simply because they’re trying their best. Others you’ll sympathize with because of the circumstances that led to their harsh plight. And when these characters come eyeball to eyeball you won’t know who to root for. Both sides have their good and bad, their moments of tragedy and their moments of heroism. The waters become so muddied and grey that it can be impossible to predict the outcome, impossible to say who truly deserves to live, impossible to decide if a character’s actions can redeem their past sins. This is a quintessential element of grimdark, and it’s marvellous that Miller is capable of creating such complex and interesting characters. She’s fearless and not afraid to pull the rug from under our feet just when we’re getting comfortable.
The biggest problem I had with the book, though, is that it can barely be classified as fantasy. While many grimdark authors keep their magic mysterious and in the background, magic is almost non-existent here. There are occasional whiffs of it, but it plays such a minor role that it’s not until almost halfway through the book before you see anything resembling magic or the fantastical. I’d go so far as to say that while the book is undeniably a fantasy novel, much of it reads like historical fiction. There are endless discussions of hierarchies, family heirs, marriages, legacies, rulership, treaties and wars, and so forth. But magic and the fantastic are rarely ever brought into focus and never in depth. This doesn’t make the book any weaker, and in some ways it allows for more ingenuity, but it does restrict the world from having a truly three-dimensional backdrop.
The Falcone Throne is definitely not a book for the faint-hearted, nor is it a quick read for a lazy morning. It requires your patience, your attention and your focus, but it’ll reward you with well-crafted characters, vicious battle sequences, and deep political intrigue. At the same time, the absence of almost anything resembling speculative fantasy is troubling at first, but the flavour does become noticeable after a while. However, if you like fantasy that focuses on magic and the fantastic, you might be disappointed. The Tarnished Crown is perhaps best described as a diluted Song of Ice and Fire, weakened by the sheer ambition and scope of the world. It’s an acquired taste, but it’s also a rewarding one. If you like your fantasy dark
, your characters complex, and your world building grand, then this might be up your alley. [GdM]
An Interview With Richard K. Morgan
ADRIAN COLLINS
[GdM]: Thank you for taking the time to speak to us, Richard. Your works and blog have provided an excellent source of grimdark characters and opinions for us to sink our teeth in to. The sub-genre has benefitted from one such as yourself; unafraid to take on “grimdark” in a positive light, draw a line in the blood-soaked dirt opposite the purist keyboard warriors and say, ‘come at me, mate’.
No worries - it’s a pleasure. Great to see a publication like this taking the same bull-by-the-horns positive approach, to be honest.
[GdM]: What does “Grimdark” mean to you and where do you see your place in the sub-genre?
[RKM]: More than being a sub-genre, Grimdark is, I think, a tension. Its origins, after all, are owed mostly to commentary and complaint from those who don’t like it! It was initially defined, by those same people, as some sort of failing in the fabric of epic fantasy. Later, those of us who chose to embrace the term and run with it have tended to see it as a series of exasperated questions posed to that existing fabric, eg - do you have any fucking idea how brutal and savage pre-modern human existence was? what ridiculous illusions about war with sharp metal are you hawking here? how on Earth could you imagine that contexts such as these would give rise to excesses of nobility and romantic heroism? So forth. Anyone working in Grimdark territory, myself included, is by definition working in engaged contrast to that pre-existing epic fantasy framework. We’re the Praetorian guard, to borrow briefly from Shakespeare and Ray Bradbury, whispering in epic fantasy’s ear Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal! And more importantly, human, with all the messy failings and flaws that implies! We’re the modernist rats, chewing away at the antique wooden bombast of an altar to distant, impossible gods.
Grimdark Magazine Issue #2 Page 4