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

by Ian Whates

  “We’re good, man! We need to go!” the team leader screamed at him as he dragged the machine gunner back towards the chopper. Cain threw the AK-47 into the helo. The other two Lurps were manning the door guns, providing covering fire. The team leader took a round in the arm, dropped the machine gunner as he sat down hard in the mud. The helicopter was full of holes, Cain had no idea if it would fly. Another round hit him like a hammer blow. Cain stumbled forward and fell against the chopper. The team leader was up, dragging the machine gunner. One of the door guns had gone silent as its operator helped the machine gunner into the chopper. Cain couldn’t breathe as he climbed back into the cockpit.

  He wasn’t sure about the rest of it. He remembered the Huey wasn’t responding well. He remembered firing the miniguns, and the remaining rockets as the Lurps fired the two door guns. He remembered the return fire as beautiful, glowing, inverted rain rising from the jungle and the moonlike surface of the crater-pitted land. He remembered the screaming of the team leader as he fought to keep the machine gunner alive. He remembered his disappointment when it ended, when he started to breathe again, the come down as he flew into the rising sun. And he remembered glancing at ‘John’. No John hadn’t ‘got’ South East Asia. He hadn’t understood war. Here they could do what they wanted. Here they lived as gods did.

  After the Loss, Ubaste System

  The glow of the of the Rakshasa’s mech’s missiles launching backlit the enemy war machine, throwing it into shadow. The stabbing light of the fusion lance turned new growth armour into liquid. His vision was filled with red, scrolling, warning sigils but he paid them no heed as he closed. The missiles plasma contrails drew lines of light from the enemy mech towards his own war machine. Red light connected his point defence lasers to the incoming missiles, detonating them and then he was caught in a storm of silent force and light that further battered the already heavily damaged mech. Then the storm broke and he was flying straight at the other war machine. He could see the puffs of powdered armour all over the cat-like machine from the impacts of hypersonic rounds fired from his arm mounted rotary assault cannon. Closer and closer, ignoring every impact, every warning sigil, the transfer heat in the mech’s cramped cockpit. Then came the bone jarring impact as he hit the other war machine low on the torso. The impact was hard enough to rattle his teeth despite the gyroscope in the pilot’s cradle. He felt the Rakshasa mech elbow him in the back. All he had to do was hold on just a little longer. Lock his arms around the other mech and then detonate the warhead on every missile in his back-mounted launchers.

  The Loss, Just Outside San Francisco

  9. The sky was red now. It had happened as he slept. On a nearby rock someone had sprayed the words: ‘The Empire never ended.’ Cain could feel the magic in the air, the demon parasites that would consume or transform. Except he knew they weren’t demons now. He guessed they were alien life forms of some sort, or perhaps just their tech, a weapon that infected everything. From his position on the hill he looked down at the warped, twisted mockery of the bayside city. Even from here he could tell that the things moving in the streets weren’t human any more. So far his ‘curse’ had managed to fight off the alien spores.

  Cain checked his surroundings and brought his AK-47 up. The stock that he had carved himself fitted snugly against his shoulder. He was heading down into the city. Food had become an issue and he was hoping to be able to avoid having to eat warped human flesh, though it wouldn’t be the first time, sieges are hard. He heard the distant echoing crack of gunfire from the city’s steel and glass canyons. Food was at a premium but somehow there were always enough weapons and ammunition.

  If the spores were tech then it went some way towards validating Cain’s theory that technology was the single biggest enemy of the warrior spirit. It should be hard to kill someone, take effort. You should be close enough to smell their evacuated bowels as you violated flesh with metal, close enough to see the death in their eyes, to understand the sacrifice your enemy had made. The more removed you are from that the less the deaths seem to matter. He’d listened to recordings of attack helicopter pilots laughing as they hit civilians with cannon fire. Cain wagered that wouldn’t have happened if they had to look each and every person they killed in the eye.

  Cain had done his best to embrace technology. With a new identity he had become a drone operator. He wasn’t sure why. He suspected that he had always felt himself inextricably connected to war, perhaps because of the nature of his original sin. Drones were merely the latest iteration of the tools of his trade. He had sat in an air conditioned bunker more then ten thousand kilometres away as the drone fed back footage of the target, a walled property in a suburb of Baghdad close to the banks of the Euphrates river. Once again it seemed that the West had come to prize the secrets of Babylon out of the East. Something had been bothering him all night. The area was familiar. Then he realised that he was looking down on Cunaxa, where he had stood with Clearchus and the rest of the Ten Thousand. He remembered what he had felt that day in the heat and the dust. The feel of pushing iron into flesh. The look on his enemy’s face. Then he had launched the missile from the drone and watched on a monitor as, half a world away, an explosion replaced the house. There was no immediacy here. The drone wasn’t a weapon, it was a game; you couldn’t connect with the destruction of something precious through a screen. There was no rush. That was when Cain had walked out.

  As he moved though the scrub on the side of the hill, the familiar heft of the AK-47 felt comfortable. He understood the allure of the gun. Vietnam had peeled back the layers of lies he had clothed himself in, the lies he’d used to justify what he did. Vietnam had taught him to be honest with himself. There was no wrong or right, just wants and needs. Weapons were fetish items in both senses of the word. People needed to be honest about their desire for them, about why children had to die in schools, about the arousal felt in unguarded moments by those who used weapons. The drone missed the point. To some extent the AK-47 missed the point. A conservative estimate of the amount of deaths caused by the weapon since it’s invention put the number at about ten million. Until the current on-going extinction event, the AK-47 had been the single most deadly weapon of mass destruction ever invented, and that was Cain’s point: it was all too easy. Just like the spores. This wasn’t a battle, humanity wasn’t fighting a war; it was being exterminated as an afterthought.

  Cain stopped as he felt the change in the air. He watched the mushroom cloud grow over the city. A last ditch attempt by humans to pretend that they had some level of control over the situation. It reminded him of a scorpion stinging at a parasite in its own flesh. He smiled and wondered if this would be enough. Then the firestorm turned him to ash.

  It wasn’t enough. Not for the tall obsidian-skinned man whose face Cain could never remember. This was the man who had danced with the witches when the legions came. He had whispered in Nero’s ear, in Hitler’s, and he had been waiting for Cain when they’ pulled him from the cloning tanks on one of the few seed ships that had escaped Earth. The man with the obsidian skin wanted him to play the part of Mars again.

  After the Loss, Ubaste System

  10. Cain had ejected from his mech even as the plasma fire from the detonated warheads consumed both machines. The explosion had superheated parts of the cavern, turning some of the closest pressure ridges into fountains of molten rock. The plasma fire reduced much of his space suit’s armour to slag, and despite the augmentations his body was battered so badly by the explosion that he lost consciousness.

  Cain came to being pelted with lumps of molten rock. The Rakshasa hit him low in the torso. It was almost exactly the same place Cain’s mech had tackled the feline’s war machine. The wind was knocked out of him for just a moment as he slammed into the cavern wall. Cain’s internal systems compensated and he could breathe again as he spun and bounced. The suit’s barely functioning scanners fed back what information it could about the Rakshasa. The feline’s suit had also been damag
ed in the explosion but a number of its weapons were still functioning. The feline had eschewed them all in favour of the powerknife in his right hand, the monomolecular blade oscillating at a frequency high enough to slip straight through the remaining armour on Cain’s suit. The Rakshasa had left his visor clear. Cain could see his enemy’s contorted, growling face. Warrior or not, this was one of the violent new breed Cain had heard about. He could read the madness of a tailored designer psychosis in his enemy’s face. His body would be full of soft and hard augments, more machine than uplifted feline. It took every last little bit of strength that Cain had to maintain his grip on the feline’s wrist, to hold the blurred blade away from his face. Now more than ever technology was narrowing the edge that experience had once provided.

  Cain had left fear behind a long time ago. As he watched his latest death inch towards him, he wondered if this would be enough. Would the obsidian devil just regrow him and uplift his consciousness into the next copy? Detached, he wondered how many he had killed. He had lived for so long, fought in so many wars, he’d bombed entire worlds. Had he killed ten million, as many as the AK-47? As the blade touched his suit’s helmet and he felt the vibration through his head, as he watched the tip protrude through his visor, he wondered what had made him think of that.

  “No,” he said quietly as he heard the air escaping from his helmet. “You’ve got to earn this.”

  It had been a mistake to fight the young warrior high on madness and his own augmentations strength to strength. He changed the direction of the force he was exerting on the feline’s wrist. At the same time he jerked his head to one side. The blade skidded across the visor, making a deep score. Only one of Cain’s weapon systems was still working, a last ditch close-in weapon only used during moments of desperation. He let go of the Rakshasa’s wrist with both hands. The feline warrior immediately started bringing the power blade to bear again. Acid squirted out of the tube on the suit’s left forearm, hitting the Rakshasa’s visor. The powerful acid immediately began unravelling the molecular bonds of the visor’s material. It was still too slow. Cain reached out with his right hand, still blood red beneath the gauntlet despite the cloning, and grabbed one of the still partially molten micro-asteroids and slammed it into the Rakshasa’s visor, shattering it. Then he hit him again and again in the face. Exultation. Teeth bared, hissing, Cain felt the impact of the cooling rock striking the feline’s face run up his arm. There was no warm splash of blood this time. The red droplets froze on contact with the vacuum.

  Cain was still straddling the Rakshasa’s now dead body as they floated amongst the cooling rock. His suit’s self-repair systems had already fixed the breach in his helmet. He had never understood God’s curse. He had always done what he had wanted to, lived as he pleased, fought, no, killed as he chose. He looked down at the frozen corpse. It was the same each and every time, regardless of gender, race, or species, in the end they all had his brother’s face. He was bored of killing his brother.

  Author’s Note: Thanks to Yvonne Cunningham and Anthony Jones for advice on Roman Legionnaires and 16th Century Japan, respectively. The mistakes and downright fabrications remain my own.

  About the Authors

  Nik Abnett writes short stories, novels, computer games and comic books, often in collaboration with her partner Dan Abnett. When she’s not writing, she spends her time messing about with old cameras and baking bread. Nik was runner-up for the inaugural Mslexia novel writing prize, and her first solo original novel Savant will be published by Solaris in 2016. She lives and works in the UK, with Dan and a small menagerie.

  Amy DuBoff is the author of the Cadicle space opera series. She has always loved science fiction in all forms, including books, movies, shows and games. She first studied creative writing at the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, and then received a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Portland State University. Amy currently lives in Portland, Oregon, USA, with her husband. When she's not writing, she enjoys travel, wine tasting, binge-watching TV series, and playing epic strategy board games. Find her online at: www.amyduboff.com

  Michael Brookes’ passion for science fiction extends back to his youth with the discovery of Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov. That love continues to the current day and into his day job as the Executive Producer for the Elite: Dangerous video game. As well as writing and guiding the game’s fiction, he has his own range of science fiction books, including Sun Dragon and the Mitchell & Morton series.

  Janet Edwards is the author of the Earth Girl trilogy. As a child, she read a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy. She studied Maths at Oxford, and went on to suffer years of writing unbearably complicated technical documents before deciding to write something that was fun for a change. She has a husband, a son, a lot of books, and an aversion to housework. Find out more at Janet’s website: www.janetedwards.com

  Una McCormack is a New York Times bestselling author of TV tie-in novels based on franchises such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. She also writes short fiction and audio dramas, and is a university lecturer in creative writing.

  Christopher Nuttall was born in Edinburgh. He writes science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction and more. He wrote his first manuscript in 2005, since when he has been responsible for some forty published titles, including the best-selling Ark Royal and its sequels and the popular Empire’s Corps series.

  Mercurio D. Rivera’s fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and has appeared in markets such as Asimov’s, Interzone, Lightspeed, Nature, and Black Static. His collection Across the Event Horizon (NewCon Press, 2013) was called “weird and wonderful” with “dizzying switchbacks” by Tor.com. His stories have been published in China, Poland and the Czech Republic and taught in writing courses at university level in the USA and Venezuela. Find out more at: www.mercuriorivera.com

  Adam Roberts is the BSFA Award-winning author of several score science fiction short stories and sixteen science fiction novels, most recently The Thing Itself (Gollancz 2015). He teaches literature and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

  Robert Sharp’s debut novella The Good Shabti (Jurassic London, 2014) was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award. During the day he works for English PEN, promoting free speech and defending an author’s right to break taboos, transgress cultural boundaries and speak truth to power.

  Gavin Smith is the Dundee-born author of the hard-edged, action-packed SF novels Veteran, War in Heaven, Age of Scorpio, A Quantum Mythology and The Beauty of Destruction, as well as the short story collection Crysis Escalation. He has collaborated with Stephen Deas as the composite personality Gavin Deas and co-written Elite: Wanted, and the shared world series Empires: Infiltration and Empires: Extraction.

  Allen Stroud is a writer and lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University in High Wycombe, England. He runs the BA (Hons) Creative Writing for Publication course and is studying for his Ph. D. in Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. Allen is also the editor of the British Fantasy Society Journal (www.britishfantasysociety.co.uk). He can be found online at: www.allenstroud.com

  Tim C. Taylor lives with his family in an old village in England called Bromham. When he was a young and impressionable lad, between 1977 and 1978, many important things happened to him all at once: 2000AD, Star Wars, Blake’s 7, Traveller, and Dungeons & Dragons. Consequently, he now writes science fiction novels for a living. You can chat with him and discover more about the worlds of the Human Legion at www.humanlegion.com.

  Tade Thompson lives and works in the United Kingdom. Along with numerous short stories, he is the author of the novel Making Wolf which won the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award in 2016, and the upcoming sci-fi novel Rosewater.

  Ian Whates is the author of eight novels (two co-written), most recently the Firefly-esque space opera jaunt Pelquin’s Comet. Sixty-odd of his short stories have appeared in various venues, and he has edited some thirty anthologies. His most recent collection is Dark Travelling
s (Fox Spirit 2016). His work has twice been shortlisted for the BSFA Award and once for the Philip K. Dick Award. In his spare time he runs independent publisher NewCon Press, which he founded by accident in 2006.

  Jo Zebedee writes science fiction and fantasy, either on the streets of her native Northern Ireland or in her space opera world of Abendau. She has three novels released to date with another two in the pipeline. She blogs regularly on writing, reading, and things to rant about in general, at jozebwrites.blogspot.uk. She also runs a consultancy, and runs after kids and pets.

  Now We Are Ten

  The sister volume to

  Crises and Conflicts

  Celebrating the first ten years of NewCon Press

  With sixteen original stories written especially for this book

  Contents:

  Introduction by Ian Whates

  The Final Path – Genevieve Cogman

  Women’s Christmas – Ian McDonald

  Pyramid – Nancy Kress

  Liberty Bird – Jaine Fenn

  Zanzara Island – Rachel Armstrong

  Ten Sisters – Eric Brown

  Licorice – Jack Skillingstead

  The Time Travellers’ Ball (A Story in Ten Words) – Rose Biggin

  Dress Rehearsal – Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The Tenth Man – Bryony Pearce

  Rare as a Harpy’s Tear – Neil Williamson

  How to Grow Silence from Seed – Tricia Sullivan

  Utopia +10 – JA Christy

  Ten Love Songs to Change the World – Peter F Hamilton

  Ten Days – Nina Allan

  Front Row Seat to the End of the World – EJ Swift

  Available as a signed limited edition hardback,

  paperback, and eBook

  www.newconpress.co.uk