The Only War

by Jason Wray Stevensson

  Miles’ mother and sister died in a cave-in when he was eleven; it took them two weeks to recover the bodies. He did his last couple of years at Foundling Hospital as a boarder. Originally an orphanage, Foundling was a frontier version of the vocational comprehensives back on Earth and provided lots of healthy character building work experience; about the only way you could tell you’d graduated was your shifts got shorter. His friends’ parents were always happy to have him stay over, but their families were large and chaotic, and the small dormitory he shared with eleven other children was a restful idyll in comparison.

  Workers housing went something like this; you lived in the racier parts of Port Alpha when you were young or fresh off the ship, but then you’d meet someone and maybe settle down. The company owned tied housing in the model town of New Sunlight, for the use of respectable employees with no convictions in the last two years. Rents were a quarter of their commercial equivalents for the duration of employment, and into retirement should you survive that long. You put your name on the list and waited; it could take a while. Many used time in these houses to build up big deposits and move to larger family homes in the commuter dome of Dresden Green, but others found it jollier somehow to attempt the record for the largest number of human beings ever raised in a two up two down shoe box.

  Foundling returned the contents of the Ravenscroft home to Miles when he left; among the housewares and keepsakes was an ancient empty record sleeve. The date on the back was 1975, nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, and from the condition Miles reckoned something flat and round had been contained within. It must have featured some distant ancestor but there was no way of telling the musicians’ names, and no way to hear the disc even if he found a copy. Miles loved music and had signed up straight away for the works band, picking up tenor trombone with startling speed. He also owned a guitar, abandoned beneath his sisters’ bedroom window one night when a suitor was surprised by Ma Ravenscroft; his mum was into opera and liked to play it loud, so there were arias he’d known since before he was born. The photograph on the sleeve was strange though; for one thing the musicians were elevated on a stage above a throng of people who were watching and cheering, as if the band were actors in a play. Nobody watches musicians; their job is to provide background sound for social interaction. The old photo was a surreal depiction of journeymen as matinee idols, yet the dressed down youths looked more like off duty workers hitting the town on a Saturday night than performers. He’d never seen guitars like theirs; almost flat with no soundbox. There was obviously some sort of microphone hidden inside – he could even see wires – but they didn’t look the sort to be strumming torch songs under girls’ windows; they looked more likely to ransack the house and burn it down on the way out. Percussion was piled up at the back, and a pianist was striking the keys so hard the instrument had noticeably rocked backwards as the shot was taken. Miles could make out a two finger chord on the heavy strings of one guitar and the other was being played right on the heel, a string bent through three semitones and an inexplicable grimace of pain on the players’ face. It really made you wonder what musicians who looked like that could possibly sound like.

  Throughout the colonies the British model of education had taken hold and you graduate at thirteen, which produces taxes and pension contributions far earlier than keeping students until their twenties. There is a modest yearly allowance before tax is extracted, and if your earnings rise above it you have a vote; there is no representation without taxation until you hit sixteen, which is considered the age of full citizenship. Children are allocated a vocational comprehensive school at the age of four and taught something useful so a new, young and highly educated labour force was soon working to safeguard speculations made before they were even born. These people are the Great Generation of the twenty third century; in every economic cycle of pass the parcel you have those who don’t get to unwrap any layers. It’s their job to lay foundations for a new utopia, which their ungrateful children will take for granted and their degenerate grandchildren will drive off a cliff.

  It is the works shutdown, an annual fortnight during which production is halted for maintenance, and Miles is with a skeleton crew riding the three storey lift down fifty two hundred feet; it takes an indecently quick ten minutes as he struggles to retain his breakfast. On reaching the bottom he offers a nod to an effigy of Santa Barbara, wired to the cage by a follower; Miles is not particularly religious but it costs nothing to be civil to the patron of those who, like him, work with an awful lot of explosives. He’s no plans for the fortnight off, so it’s all gravy and frankly a doss; his crew are to clear a worked out salt mine recently used as storage by the US Government.[†] Salt forms underground in huge domes, some higher than mountains, pushed upwards by the pressure of the surrounding rock. The thing about an old salt mine is the walls, floor and ceiling are still made of salt, as are the squat support pillars; the very fabric of the facility sucks moisture from the atmosphere. Underground heat circulated with cooler surface air, perfectly preserving hundreds of unwanted crates of obsolete equipment and forgotten paperwork.

  Among the spoils are twelve battlefield messenger motorcycles, built without wiring to remain operational after electromagnetic pulse attacks. There was no chrome or polished steel on these machines; everything was coated in the same dull matt blacking used on the air cooled pumps which dotted the pithead. No lifters or superfluids here; these things had wheels! Wheeled vehicles are not unheard of in the twenty third century, but there had to be a bloody good reason. Wheels mean brakes and bearings, suspension and differentials, transmission and fluids and about a million different moving parts operating at high speed under enormous pressures; wheels are unsafe, high maintenance and expensive. On decent roads cheap lifter/floater units were an obvious choice, but off road they shake themselves to pieces; where blacktop ended, wheels took over. The fuel tanks on the motorcycles are empty, but Jenny knows a guy on the deep cleaning crew in the canteen and kitchens; several gallons of used cooking oil is obtained and emptied into the bikes. The engines required pre-heating until they glowed and a hefty kick start was necessary, but once going they do not hang about; the only way of shutting them off seemed to be stuffing a rag down the intake. The unfamiliar physical contact gave a visceral sensation of road being eaten up beneath the rider, and the high compression Diesel engines burnt oil with a throaty roar very different to the electric whine of everyday hover bikes. Out in the colonies, you see, everything is new. When you pick up a fork it’s not going to be sterling silver, and the oldest houses have been there barely sixty years. These bikes aren’t so very old, but they look it, and this gave them personality; every one of the machines mysteriously disappears before the recyc truck arrives.

  The colonies of Alpha Centauri Bd don’t import food; agriculture was in place before the mines, and this led to a loophole in transport law once roads began to be built. Many farmers use lightweight trail bikes on their land, and occasionally their way is barred by a stretch of public highway; these machines are exempt from insurance and licensing, as farmers are unlikely to get off and push just to cross a road. The legal definition of a trail bike is hazy, so the knobbly tyres and high mudguards of the U.S. Diesels make them tricky for the police to impound; they’re lapping the Outer Circular before the last echoes of the knocking off siren have faded. Miles soon discovers he’s gotten the quickest of the bunch and paints Count Scion the Undefeated on the fuel tank, after an action flick from the Saturday morning cinema shows of his childhood.

  The rock of Bd was rich in resources; even if trade was down all over it still supported communities such as New Sunlight and Port Alpha, enclosed in domes against the bone melting acid atmosphere. These domes are fast growing self contained safe spaces, augmented by the Electric Sunshine Co. to provide both interior illumination and a night time view of the cosmos while remaining outwardly opaque to the large sensitive eyes of native Centaurians. A network of tunnels connects the domes and a mag
lev service surrounds the equator, taking full advantage of the planets’ rotation to connect human population centres at speeds of up to three thousand miles an hour. Not all celestial bodies revolved, and those which did had good reason; most were in an electromagnetic sweet spot, but Bd was hit at some stage in its existence and had been spinning like a top ever since. Touching down on a moving planet is like diving into a draining plughole, so goods and passengers are teleported via a hovering dock high in the thermosphere; the Piccards’ Rest expanded during the boom and once boasted a revolving restaurant, now sadly stationary and badly in need of a lick of paint. About the only ship to land directly on the planet below was the BMC Earth Freighter, a purpose built spinning cargo saucer designed to resemble an enormous silver coin.

  The road tunnels had no particular need of a speed limit but there was an offence on the books called Driving like a Prick, which would get you a fine. Offenders were also compelled to carry a large green letter P on their vehicle for a week but the newly formed Igniters Motorcycle Club, named for the business end of a detonation fuse, wore their P plates proudly as badges of honour. They’d play chicken in the early hours when the tunnels were almost deserted; one rider starting from Port Alpha, the other from New Sunlight, they’d accelerate all the way keeping their cap lamps on the broken white line which divides the carriageways. These torches are used for communication in the saddle as when working underground; you couldn’t hear the wiki above the noise of a fan cooled[‡] Diesel engine and most signs translated. Cameras are attached offside front and six inches from the Tarmac, and many are smashed as one or both of these latter day jousters swerves at the last imaginable second.

  Miles’ signature move was the Death Doughnut; the bikes had independent front and rear braking, and ahead of a drag race it was common for riders to give their rear tyres traction by spinning them until they warmed up. This produced thrilling amounts of noise and noxious smoke and Miles learned to angle his machine with one foot on the ground, the bike pivoting around him as he slipped the clutch; black rubber circles burnt into the road means you’re in Igniters country. They regularly take on the packed Port Alpha gyratory system the wrong way in a blur of blaring pod horns and understandably horrified faces and are often detained by the constabulary, only being let out for work after a sleepless night. The Desk Sergeant liked to pipe rousing military marches into the cells, which she would silence for a restful hour should you have anything juicy to tell her. If you find yourself in this unenviable position, you should resist the temptation to make up any old rubbish just to get some sleep; police officers have highly developed bullshit detectors, and Lying to the Desk Sergeant will earn you the special recording which skips in random places until it drives you mad.

  The Igniters did not go unchallenged for long; there were others thinking themselves equally badass in hot rodded hover pods. These enthusiasts had, until recently, confined themselves to cruising the leisure areas. You’d often see gaggles of youths posing in podparks with their hoods up, tricked out electric motors on show, but the very existence of the motorcycle club seemed to bring out the worst in them; the wiki crackled with taunts, war cries and occasional grudging admiration. Miles was secretly quite taken with a machine which advertised itself as the Ferrari Hunter; it was a stripped down Jaguar Gentleman Bandit straight off the showroom floor, the seats replaced by a single racing harness.

  The Bandit was this years’ executive MPV with limited off-world capability; built to be the last word in Pullman class refinement, they’d scare the willies out of the unwary as they swished silently by at an obscene rate of knots, and only thirty were ever made. Jaguar installed a unique and experimental thorium fuel cycle engine, which exploited a loophole in the blanket ban on individual ownership of nuclear reactors; only uranium fuelled variants were specified, as thorium had not even been considered when the legislation was drafted. The law was, predictably, amended three weeks after the launch date, ending a short but glorious production run forever. A reactor was necessary to move tons of radiation shielding and life support from zero to sixty in three point three seconds, vertically if required. With all that weight missing it was the fastest thing on the road in a straight line but way too light to take bends,[§] which is where Miles had the bastard. The Bandit would brake so hard it appeared to be reversing towards him at speed, the way parachutists seem to rocket skyward as they deploy. Every time Miles would scream through on the inside corner, flat on the fuel tank with the bike leant right over and one steel capped kneepad trailing sparks. The Jag would always catch up again on the straights, back end dipping almost to the road as the driver fought to keep the accelerating pod level before giving a grinning salute and blazing off into the distance; in this way they leapfrogged around the tunnels to neither advantage, until Miles felt the hesitant shake of a liquid fuel engine running low on juice. Hauling in the clutch and letting the engine die, momentum carried him to the exit where he pulled a sharp ninety degree turn and rolled down a steep embankment with gearbox in neutral and wheels spinning free; the machine was now essentially a seven hundred pound bicycle, off road and gathering speed. He didn’t touch the brakes; he was going to need all the inertia he could get to carry him along Proxima Road, which lay at the foot of the hill and involved another sharp turn. Bursting from a roadside hedge the bike hit Tarmac, and as it eventually slowed with his building in sight Miles attempted an optimistic jump on the kick starter; the engine ripped the silence and he blapped the final yards in triumph before it died again.

  Proxima Road stretches from the very centre of Port Alpha to the dome wall, and it was here ships would land back in frontier days when men were men and weren’t put off by a bit of planetary rotation. The farther out you get the cheaper the rents become until you arrive at the Solway Inn, a spit and sawdust sort of place a short stagger from Miles’ digs. The company own subsidised housing even here, and it’s a lot easier to fraudulently call in sick when your bedroom window isn’t visible from the pithead. The Solway received a steady trade in old miners and spacefarers, but the back room was built earlier and retained soundproofing from when detonations were nearer topside and it was here the Igniters congregated. The motorcycle club liked to wait for a particular tune to come on the piped BMC radio then ride out, the aim being to take the tunnel to New Sunlight and back again before it ended. Speeds in excess of a hundred miles an hour were necessary to achieve this, and it only calmed down after the clubhouse (which is how they were referring to the back bar by now) was paid a special visit by the boys in blue.

  “If you’d care to observe Constable Wilkins on the far side of the road” Sergeant Wesson indicates his junior, who waves cheerily to the sullen and suspicious group of teenage Diesel punks resentfully assembled outside. Officers had drawn lots for the privilege of demonstrating this game changer, and Wilkins’ body cam was broadcasting live to all those back at the station who would very much like to see the looks on the little scrotes’ faces.

  “Constable; do your duty!” A step is taken toward the kerb in the manner of an underarm bowler, and twenty foot of metal spikes scissors across the road. A tinny cheer emits from Wilkins’ cam and he clamps a hand guiltily over the speaker; the Igniters utter oaths and exchange looks as the Sergeant inspects the obstruction.

  “Oh my gosh look at all those razor sharp spikes! Shame if any ton-up boys or girls were to come roaring along like bloody idiots and catch their tyres on this bastard, eh?” Miles is appalled, and by dint of nothing other than having the fastest bike he feels duty bound to speak for the group.

  “Those things are designed to stop four wheelers; you can’t use a stinger on us, it’d be murder!” Sergeant Wesson brings his face very close to Miles’.

  “It’d be suicide son, which was still a crime last time I checked” stepping back, be addresses the group collectively “you little tossers are going to kill yourselves anyway the way you’re carrying on, but you’ve no right to take real people with you. Think of thi
s as an intervention. The tunnels are no longer your private race track; you’ll thank me for it if you live to be older.”

  Miles lived with Anna, and had done for some months now. Anna was a Garden Girl, named for the verdant ivy adorning the BMC administration block. Garden Girls were invariably posh if chronically underpaid office workers, either on gap years between the ubiquitous comps and some archaic finishing school or avoiding matches with distant relatives. The whole set-up was a semi official Foreign Legion for upper-class gels, where chapel attendance was non-negotiable and the youngsters were watched over by a senior staff of matronly lifers. It wasn’t a convent though, and the Garden Girls weren’t prisoners; you’d often see them in noisy laughing groups on nights out together, honking like drunken geese and equally as intimidating. Sometimes they could be observed on their demure setting at more formal events, arm in arm with young officers, elegant as swans and ephemeral as mist. The Garden Girls appeared to Miles as divorced from his peers as unicorns from donkeys yet inexplicably, Anna was his girlfriend. At least, Miles was fairly certain she was his girlfriend. They’d met at a reception for the renowned space adventurer Commander Gregory Pearson; she came outside for a cigarette and he had a light. She wore an asymmetrical fringe and a lopsided grin; in her ballgown she looked like Henry VIII’s stalker, and she was far from happy with her date.