Crises and Conflicts: Celebrating the First 10 Years of NewCon Press

by Ian Whates

  Stories started to slip out of the dome when the first colonists fell ill. The doctors mapped the sickness and confirmed it was a slow illness, and painful, and new. Alien was the term they avoided, but we all understood – this was not of Earth. It wasn’t something the colonists could defend themselves from, not once they realised it had spread through the colony and was in every person’s cells, waiting to take them.

  Pierra was the first to die. News screens across Earth showed her last message, still dressed in her Cosmonaut suit, face white beneath the pustules, scalp pink where her hair had come out. Her voice was hoarse and low, not the confident space commander we were used to.

  “The dream must live,” she said. “Our people must live.”

  We agreed with her, but there could be no return to Earth for the people on Pierra. To doom the colony was one thing, but to risk our single globe, that couldn’t be contemplated. Whatever resided in the colonists’ bodies had to stay deep in space.

  I stumble over that section of the story, as I always do, not sure of the script I should really follow. Jay believes we’re going to a safe planet where the sickness has abated. I can’t tell him that if we do get taken to Pierra, it’ll be because our mission has failed, and we’ll die too.

  “And she died,” he says, breaking my silence, and his is the voice of someone who’s heard the story so many times it’s a fairy tale, not quite real. He doesn’t remember the shock of her death, the moment when our untouchable space commander was destroyed, and the dream of Earth colonies shattered.

  “She did.” My voice croaks, almost giving me away, but I manage a quick, tight hug and I don’t think he notices.

  “Did she look like she did in the books?” He hasn’t noticed, he’s too engrossed in Pierra. “Did she wear a silver spacesuit?”

  “Yes.” A silver spacesuit with black boots, snug against her legs. A space helmet that hid her face but not her grace, even in heavy gravity. That was the Pierra I want to remember, a woman of the stars brave enough to build a colony. But that woman’s hidden behind the news-announcers declaring her death, and my dull realisation that it could have been me, shivering and pustulating on a rock somewhere years from home.

  Barely a month later the call came from ISEB, collecting on the allegiance I’d sworn years before and reminding me that my contract with them had never been terminated.

  They must have known I would never agree to what they wanted. Perhaps I wasn’t the first of the ten to be called, or they just knew that no one would agree. Either way, they told me they had Gabriel. Nothing would happen to him, they promised, as long as I did the duty I’d signed up for so long ago. I listened, and I argued, but they came back with statutes and emergency measures, and the demand that I be ready and I knew the cold voice could not be argued with, that everything had changed.

  The clock was loud in the kitchen and I stood, letting it tick off the moments before I went into Father in his bedroom. His double bed was slept in on one side only. The bedside table that had once held my mother’s ring-tree and books held only a picture of her. I wondered how to tell him I’d be leaving, and he’d be alone, but he knew.

  “When?” was all he asked, and I touched my belly and wondered how it would feel, swelling, without Gabe beside me to feel it too. And I cried. I cried, right up to the knock on the door, and the first faceless soldiers in ISEB uniforms.

  “You were brave to go,” says Jay, and I hate the lies that are his truth. One day, when he’s an adult, I’ll tell him. I push away the little voice that reminds me he might not become an adult, that we might both be as dead as Pierra herself in a decade. That little voice leads to fear, and paralysis, and a half-life.

  “And then you had me on the ship. I was the first Space-birth.” Jay grins in pride. This was the bit of the story he most loves. “I was the first of the babies.”

  “You were.” I’d never have done it, if they hadn’t forced me. Got onto the ship, heavily pregnant, with nine other women in the same position, the unlucky ones to have signed up and be pregnant at the wrong time. It didn’t matter that we had a medical crew, or that the bay was as well-equipped as any hospital – better, given our mission – our situation was still daunting.

  I’d climbed the gangway in a daze, my father’s last kiss on my cheek still lingering. His skin had been papery-thin and I knew I wouldn’t see him again. It’s hard to believe that he’s dead, but the prognosis wasn’t good before I left. At least with Mother, we buried her. At least I was with her and held her hand when she passed.

  I find my hand going to my belly. If I’d gone in the first run any baby of mine would have been born on Pierra... It’s a good thing, what happened to us. Certainly ISEB think so.

  “There’s something in the colony that, if it gets out, will destroy you and any children you have,” a man in ISEB uniform told me. By then, I was on Venturer-II, and forced to silence – no communications with Earth, or anyone on the ship. Only with the Bureau.

  “I understand,” I’d said, and I did, but that didn’t make things any easier.

  “We don’t want to force you.” He had three stripes on his uniform, which made him important, I guessed. I didn’t answer him, not then, or since – they had forced me onto the ship so they could use my baby.

  He leaned forwards. “It had to be babies – the gene code had to be put in at the same time as the virus. It’s the only way to activate the immunity, the doctors say – to transplant at the same time. They’ve tried every other way on Terra Pierra.”

  His eyes had met mine and, briefly, they looked softer, more human. “The colony is doomed. But we can protect the next generation. If this works.”

  “But it’s not on Earth,” I told him. “We’re not in danger.”

  He shook his head, and it was as if I was a child and him an all-knowing teacher. “You know how stupid humans can be. We can’t put this disease away now it’s here. There’s no guarantee someone won’t decide to use it: some politician thinking it will help his cause, for instance, or a bleeding-heart taking pity on the colony. Or the scientists. God knows they’d do anything to get their hands on something like this and win the Nobel cracking how the virus works. No; we can only learn how to stop it.”

  “Then trial it on Earth,” I pleaded. “Lock us in a lab somewhere and do what you need to.”

  “No.” The hardness was back. “The virus doesn’t get onto Earth. It stays where it started. In Space.” He stood, and paused, and gave a sorry smile. “But if we get the cure, everything changes. You go back to Earth. Your son does, too. All it takes is the gene strand to be right in one of the infants. That’s all. Just one.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  He didn’t answer, and he didn’t need to. We’ll never bring this ship back to Earth. Not as long as something of the virus, uncured and deadly, remains in the testing labs. Either we’ll find the cure or we’ll join the colonists and die on Pierra, letting the doctors there test our children, seeking for something hidden within them that could be used.

  Seven years have passed since they brought me on board. Nothing’s changed since the day of the long launch, when Earth fell away from us. The ship is the same – long corridors of white leading from our quarters to an empty living quarter, to the medicine labs, and back. The same air goes round and round, the same lungs breathe in and spit it out.

  Still, the guards are with us, watching through the monitors, listening to my words, making sure I’m still holding up their lies. Perhaps they don’t even know they’re lies. Perhaps they believe this really is the right thing, that in signing myself up I signed up a baby I carried.

  For now, I hug Jay to me, feel the hard bones of his spine, his soft breaths slowing as he moves towards sleep. Today, he’s well. I close my eyes and pray that tomorrow will be the same, and the next, and the next.

  A deep shudder from somewhere in the ship wakes me. The distant roar of engines can be heard. The door to our compartment has opened. Figur
es pass outside, one tall, the other a child, and neither is a soldier.

  Jay sits up beside me, blinking. “What is it?” he asks, voice sleepy.

  Another pair of figures pass, and another, and I realise what’s happened.

  “It’s okay,” I say, and my voice is choked. Somewhere, Gabe is being freed. I’ll be able to go back and see him. He’ll meet Jay. “They’ve done it.”

  “Done what?”

  Relief floods through me. I can barely speak, but he deserves me to, needs me to. “Found the cure,” I whisper.

  One of the children – perhaps Jay, perhaps another – has beaten the illness. No, more than beaten it: has removed the virus from their gene strand. “One of the ten has become The One.”

  I find myself crying and the fear slips away. I’ve been given my life back. More than that. I crouch in front of Jay.

  “You can be anything you want to be.” I nod, fierce and determined to take back what’s his. “Anything at all, anywhere at all.”

  The Beauty of Our Weapons

  Gavin Smith

  ...a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the Earth.

  (Genesis 4:10–12)

  1. Exultation. Teeth bared, hissing, Cain felt the impact of the rock hitting his brother’s face run up his arm, the warm splash of blood.

  Samael, the angel who delivered the greedy god’s curse, did not have wings, nor was he beautiful or terrible to behold. He had the face of a serpent and had been Cain’s mother’s lover.

  Cain didn’t think he understood the curse. It made him burn from the inside and his hand had turned red but beyond that it didn’t seem to be a punishment at all.

  After the Loss, Ubaste System

  He had barely paid attention to what the fight was about. All that mattered was that this was a Conflict Resolution world and the enemy were Rakshasa. It would be over resources, it was always over resources. They were rimward in the system in a recently formed asteroid belt made when a significantly sized planetoid had been destroyed during the early stages of the conflict. From his perspective the more distant stones in the field looked like smoke in the light of the faraway sun.

  The Rakshasa parasite ships had been buried deep in the asteroids, harvesting rock and minerals for raw materials to feed their military assemblers. He had told the young exec in charge of the Consortium contractors not to take the ship into the field without a screening force of mechs. He/she hadn’t listened and a nuclear mine had broken the back of the carrier ship. The worst of the blast hit on the opposite side of the ship from his squad’s mech cradles and they had made it out into the field.

  The mine detonation seemed to have caught the Rakshasa as much by surprise as it had the military contractors. He and the rest of the squadron had managed to fall on the insectile parasite ships. Fusion lances and missiles ruptured the ships before they had been able to do much more than utilise their point defence systems.

  The fight only really began when the Rakshasa’s sentry mechs had found his squad. They came out of the weak actinic light, using the asteroids as cover, electronic warfare signals confusing or spoofing the drones they had deployed. It proved a brutal fight because of the close range. The rest of the mechs in his squad were now little more than cooling, expanding debris fields but there was still one more Rakshasa mech left.

  401 BCE, Cunaxa, Persia

  2. The age of champions was over. There were no more heroes even though his red right hand marked him out as a favoured son of Ares to the rest of the Greek mercenaries. All knew Cain, and even though he would stand in the front line of the phalanx, where the press would be at its greatest, men fought to stand next to him. He had been a king, he had been a champion but now he was just another man in the phalanx.

  Two days’ march north of Babylon, the mercenaries baked under the blazing sun. The hoplite’s bronze armour was hot enough to cook meat on, hot enough to burn the flesh wearing it. The breeze coming off of the Euphrates, the river that protected their left flank, did little to mask the stink of ten thousand sweating men.

  Cain could just about make out the Persians through the heat haze and the dust of the trampled field. He had heard that there were at least four times as many Persians as there were Greeks. He was starting to worry if they were going to fight at all, though they had come a long way for nothing if they did not. He had been close enough to hear Cyrus the Younger, the prince that had employed the mercenaries, order Clearachus, the Spartan general who led them, to move the right hand phalanx into the centre. Cyrus wanted Clearachus’ men to face off directly against Artaxerxes the Second, the brother that Cyrus was trying to oust from the Persian throne. Clearachus had of course refused, as it would leave the right flank, the weakest part of any phalanx, exposed. They had reached an impasse. A Persian prince was as used to having his orders ignored as a Spartan general was to having his ability to wage war questioned.

  Finally, however, they were given the order to advance. They did so in huge clouds of dust. The wind blowing from the north carried the dust cloud before the hoplites, stinging their eyes, choking them, further obscuring the site of the enemy. They could hear the Persian horns, however, the beat of the drums, the cries of their commanders urging them on.

  The first arrows started to fall. There were a few startled cries from the men either side of him, behind him, then laughter. The Persian arrows could not penetrate the bronze. Their impact was little more than a hard rain.

  At a shout from Clearachus they picked up the pace and ran out of the dust cloud. All Cain could see stretching from the river were lines of men. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen so many in one place, let alone in a battle. He ran into the oncoming Persian arrows, his armour and his aspis, the long concave shield of the hoplite, keeping him safe. He felt invulnerable, the superior numbers of the Persians were irrelevant.

  They charged the Persian lines. Cain thrust his doru, underhand, into one of the Persian soldiers. The long spear split the Persian’s wicker shield, and went straight through his armour of stiffened layers of linen. Cain lost the doru, torn from his hand by the momentum of the charge. He put his head down behind the shield as they hit the line and the charge broke against the shear amount of men that opposed them.

  Cain found himself peering over his shield at a terrified-looking Persian, both of them trapped in the press of the men behind them. Cain’s helm and breastplate turned the enemy blades. He drew the kopis, the wickedly curved shortsword sheathed on the inside of his aspis, and looked into the Persian’s eyes as he forced the blade under his shield. His opponent could see what he was doing and started to beg even before the iron point of the kopis touched him. Cain slowly pushed the weapon upwards. The stink of ruptured bowel filled the air, as intestines uncoiled and the Persian’s guts splattered to the dusty ground but the press of men held him upright still. The hoplites behind Cain thrust their spears overhand and the Persian line bowed. It was enough. Cain pushed forward, hacking. He was worried that war had become too easy.

  After the Loss, Ubaste System

  The first thing he knew of the remaining enemy mech had been when a lance of plasma hit the small asteroid he had been sheltering in. The resultant jet of molten rock and iron struck his mech, sending red warning signs cascading down his vision as the mech fed his neunonics damage reports.

  He hit the mech’s thrusters, the thirty-foot tall, humanoid shaped war machine shot away from the asteroid, flying blind, as electro-magnetically propelled rounds fired from a rotary cannon arced away in front of him.

  The mech’s damage control systems worked to repair the war machine as he searched for another place to hide.

  69 CE, Germania Inferior

  3. Cain hadn’t run because he feared death, though having died once he knew enough to fear the pain. He ran because the legion had broken and his death would have served no purpose. It hadn’t been the Batavian auxiliaries that his fellow legionaries had feared. The auxiliaries were to be respected, no doubt. Before the revol
t they had served Rome honourably and well for more than twenty-five years until Nero’s fit of pique. Dangerous as they were, the Batavian auxiliaries were a known quantity. Instead it was the tribes from the other side of the Rhenus in Magna Germania who had joined in with the revolt that they feared. It was the tribespeople that legionaires told stories about. Around the campfire and in nightmares the Germanic warrior were elevated to the staus of demons. Cain knew that the barbarians from the other side of the river were just men and women, but even as a decanus there was little he could do about such beliefs. In the eyes of the other legionaires his red right hand was enough to mark him as favoured child of Mars, the god of war. How could he then explain that the huge, demonic creature tearing into one of Rome’s invincible legions was just a large man wearing animal furs and covered in mud.

  The rebellious Batavian auxiliaries had caught them in an area of woodland some ten leagues north of the camp at Oppidum Batavorum. The woodland was on a hill that ran down to the Rhenus and a number of streams ran through the area. It was difficult ground for the legionaries to manoeuvre in. Gaius Julius Civilis, the Batavian prince who led the rebellion, had chosen the site of his ambush well.

  The tribal warriors had exploded out of the undergrowth on each side of the narrow track the centuria had been patrolling. Even to Cain’s eyes they had seemed to burst from the ground. He’d only just had the presence of mind to throw his pilum at the first tribeswoman who had charged him. The soft iron tip of the javelin had penetrated her shield, and bent. The woman’s shield was dragged down by the weight of the pilum’s haft. Digging into the ground, the bent javelin had broken her momentum. Cain stepped forward, standing on the wooden haft, forcing the shield further down, exposing her side and stabbing his gladius through the layers of fur and dirt, into her. The tribesman behind her vaulted the dead woman’s body and all but leapt onto Cain’s tall scutum. He could smell sweat, the musk of old furs, rancid breath but mostly the smell of the earth from where the tribesman had hidden, half buried. Cain let him have the shield and it toppled to the ground, the surprised tribesman underneath. To the Spartans that he had once fought with, losing his shield, to become ripsaspis, would have been enough to disgrace him