snippet – Page 24

01/05/2022 Snippet, ROCCA JACK AND THE LIQUID GOLD JOB.

Characters!

The four of them met in Jack’s rooms. Someone of his rank rated the sort of hotel suite that came with a planning room, complete with decent maps of the East and Gulf coasts. Besides, you couldn’t hear the shouting and hammering from here.

“The ship we’re looking for is called the August Emancipation. Second Republic registry,” Jack drawled, “if you hadn’t already guessed from the blessed name. She’s a Chesapeake Ram schooner, one hundred thirty feet long, three-masted, gaff-rigged. The Emancipation was on the Providence-Baltimore run when she disappeared, somewhere around here.” His finger tapped the map, in the general area of the Barnegat lighthouse ruins.

His navigator peered at the map, still slightly owlishly. Sober or drunk, though, Arwen Gonzales knew her charts. “That’d be off course for the Yankees,” she noted. “They hate getting too close to Cursed Jersey. We sure about where they ended up?”

“The client said they were able to get a half-assed scrying off,” Jack replied, “although they didn’t use those exact words. You know how bad that area gets.”

The weathermage snorted. “No, you don’t,” said Half-Elf Charlie. “I know how bad that area gets. You can taste the Dominion curses up there, if the wind’s right.”

01/04/2022 Snippet, ROCCA JACK AND THE LIQUID GOLD JOB.

I am so making things up as I go on this.

“She figured you out right good, didn’t she, skipper?” His first mate Joey the Tourist grinned at him, later. “Knew just how to turn your gears, she did.”

“If you think I’m distractible by a prim-and-proper lass, all smelling of business and enterprise,” Jack grinned back, “well, I am. At least, while we’re in port. It’s good money, though. Hershey credits may not clink, but there’s nothing wrong with how they spend.” He turned and leaned on the low wall overlooking the drydocks. “Besides, it’ll light a fire under these lazy shipworkers’ arses. The Firepot should’ve been out to sea a week ago.” His grumbling was low, because that was nonsense: the work on the Firepot had actually been running on schedule, or close enough to it not to matter. Now the workers swarming on and over it were hopping, fueled by the promise of some Hershey bonus money for a job done quickly, and well.

He certainly thought she deserved it. The Firepot would have been instantly recognizable to any of the shadowy, titanic figures from the Great Age of Buccaneering, who would have called it a fifth-rate true frigate, square-rigged and sleek. Fast enough to run, tough enough to fight: just the sort of vessel to scout out an enemy fleet or hostile shore. Rocca Jack Hwinda would command a lot of ships, in his time, but he always had a soft spot in his heart for this one. It wouldn’t stop him from putting her into harm’s way, though. The ballistae onboard were there for a reason.

“You pull the crew out of the stewpots and opera halls yet?” Jack asked Joey. “The dockmaster says we’ll be ready in three tides.”

01/02/2023 Snippet, ROCCA JACK AND THE LIQUID GOLD JOB.

The title needs a little tweaking.

Ladezel, The Elf-Lands

(Savannah, Georgia)

2610 AD

You went to the Opéle Wafflëro for two things; the food, and the fighting. Rocca Jack Hwinda found both particularly fine, tonight. His ham and cheese omelet was exactly as he liked it, the coffee had the kick of a Gulf Coast hurricane, and the inn had gotten hold of some of the good ketchup that Big Mát had liberated from the Panamanians last month. As for the fighting? The brawling had started while everybody was half-sober, which was the best kind of brawl to observe. Sober people fought too grimly and drunk ones were too sloppy about the whole thing.

It’d even spread to the inn’s workers… briefly. The Opéle Wafflëro liked to hire folk who would greet a thrown punch with a lazy grin, and they were all good at encouraging even the drunkest privateer to swing a fist somewhere else. There’d been one human lass manning the grill who had deflected a thrown chair with such easy efficiency and cool fury, that rat bastard Skinny Hermano hired her for his Hyalma before Jack could even put down his fork. He only half-regretted it — this omelet was well worth his full attention — until he realized that Hermano’s new hire had also been the one who had cooked Jack’s dinner. He shook a fist amiably in Hermano’s direction, grinned at the upraised finger offered in reply, and took another swig of coffee.

The brawl (by now cordoned off, over to one side, so as not to disturb the people actually eating) made the inn look fuller than it was, but that was normal for a Tuesday when most of the Fleets were off reminding the Panamanians to pay their damn transit taxes. Jack’s own Firepot would be out there herself, but even privateer flagships need the occasional overhaul. But that was fine; the shipwrights would be done with their hammers and spells, soon enough.

Snippet the Last, NO GODS BUT OURS.

I absolutely have to stop writing short stories that turn out to actually be Chapter Ones of novels. On the bright side: I now know what my 2023 NaNoWriMo project is going to be.

The scream was wild and horrible, sounding precisely like a woman being burned alive, and it wouldn’t stop. Bernice had clearly never heard such a cacophony before, live and in person, and she took a half-step forward before Greg’s right arm was suddenly an obstacle irresistibly blocking her path. “Don’t look,” he warned her as he stabbed at more buttons, his eyes determinedly lowered. “That’s what it wants you to do! Remember your training!”

That calmed her down. “Right. It’s not human, it’s not human. What is it?”

“Well, it didn’t react when I shoved iron and silver through the flesh, so we know it’s not a blob,” Greg said conversationally as he spun a dial all the way to eleven. “And it’s not vibrating through the corners, so we can rule out an angle-hound. I’m going to guess it’s a gold-witch. And what do those get, Bernice?”

“They get more fire,” Bernice said, more or less automatically.

Greg beamed as he opened up the spouts. “Exactly.”

From inside the box the screaming increased — rivaling the alarm sirens now going off all around them — as magnesium dust was sprayed into the flames. The temperature increased noticeably in the room, but not evenly. Puffs of coldness stirred the air, but not welcome ones. It wasn’t the cool relief of spring rain, or the honest chill of the polar wastes; it was more like the corpse of heat, as if something had eaten up energy and left nothing behind but scraps and waste.

12/26/2022 Snippet, ANALOG.

I had better get a move on on this one.

“Didn’t Oswald Feeney show up for work on Friday?” Bernice asked Greg as they went back to their car.

“That’s what the timesheets said,” agreed Greg. “Whether or not they’re accurate is another story. Nobody actually saw Feeney that day, and he didn’t have any group meetings. Guy never ate lunch with anybody, either, so that angle’s out.”

“Right, and he commuted in, so good luck finding somebody on his train who’d remember, either way.” Bernice sighed. “The poor guy was a target, wasn’t he?”

“With a big, flashing light over him saying, ABDUCT ME.” Greg started the engine. “Which makes me wonder if he was a trap.”

“A trap? You mean, one we were setting?” Bernice scowled. “That can’t be true! They’d never deliberately let a bunch of gold-witches sprout. Somebody could have gotten infected. Besides: even if this is one of our operations, why would they have us investigate it blind?”

“The easy answer to both questions is, they wouldn’t,” replied Greg, his eyes checking the rear-view mirrors regularly. “If you assume that ‘they’ means ‘the head Inquisitors.’ We may be dealing with some people who are a little more informal. You buckled in?”

Bernice’s response heartened him; she automatically checked her belt and her gun. “Yes, sir.”

“Greg’s fine. And hang on.”

12/24/2022 Snippet, ANALOG.

Disappearances!

There was nothing immediately wrong with Charles Feeney; and Greg had been an Inquisitor for long enough to stop thinking how that could be suspicious. These days, most people really weren’t tainted, even a little — and they also voted. The FI couldn’t come rolling in hot, anymore. Not unless they had a damned good excuse for it. Greg didn’t know Oswald, but Charles looked like him, only younger: thin brown hair, a face saved from roundness by a surprisingly strong chin, and green eyes in a pale face.

He obviously wasn’t overjoyed to be talking to Inquisitors, but he wasn’t terrified, either. “I hope I can help you, sir, ma’am,” he told them both as he settled into a chair opposite theirs in the sitting room. “Is this about my father’s disappearance? I have to admit, I was expecting to be interviewed later in the week.”

“Oh?” Bernice gave him a look that mixed interest, and general suspicion. “Any reason why, Mr. Feeney?”

He blinked at her. “The last I heard from him was last Thursday, and I only started worrying about him yesterday. The police officer at the local precinct told me to wait another day before filing a missing persons report, just in case he had gone fishing or something. I only got back an hour ago from doing just that, and they said that it could take a few days for a case to be generated.”
The two Inquisitors traded looks; even for a place this quiet, that sounded risky.

12/192/2022 Snippet, THE THING IN THE AIRLOCK.

Making myself finish this up!

Back in the dim days of a year ago, hand-to-hand combat on the moon was something you did for fun. Everybody in the military learned the principles, but nobody actually used them. Well, nobody used them in order to injure people. Sometimes security personnel might have to use an arm lock or quick grapple on a sloppy drunk, but real combat? What was there to fight about?

I thought we were done with this! Tobias snarled to himself — or maybe complained to Asenath — as he kneed a cultist in the crotch. Everybody who was going to go kill-crazy already had!

It started out at sixteen to ten, and his side were the ones who had started behind. It was now ten to seven, because while what had turned out to be a nest of Silver Dawn cultists had plenty of knives, his security squad had helmets, and armor that wasn’t completely useless. They also knew something about how to fight as a group.

Tobias was still getting angrier and angrier at every successful slash and strike. We need to shut this down now, Asenath! he snarled again, as he flung a cultist into the wall. Any luck getting control of the HVAC system?

12/19/2022 Snippet, ANALOG.

Campus!

“Classy place,” Bernice murmured as they parked their car. “How did Oswald afford this on a government salary?”

“Fair question.” Inquisitors didn’t starve, to put it mildly, but something like Mantuxet College was a bit beyond a government employee’s wallet. The campus had an antique, but well-scrubbed look: weathered stone buildings and plenty of greenery everywhere. Most of all, it felt pristine. The FI’s records hadn’t shown an outbreak at Mantuxet in over sixty years; it had even managed to get through the bad old days without being burned down once.

“This looks like just the sort of place you’d want to stash your kid, isn’t it?” Greg went on, as the two walked down a sidewalk that had never even seen concrete. “Supposedly our Charlie is a scholarship boy, though. Got a full ride, and all the trimmings.”

“Nice for him.”

“Yes and no,” Greg said, knocking on the door of the dormitory. “That kind of ride comes with some obligations.

“Hi, ma’am!” he said to the old woman opening the door. “I’m Inquisitor Gimbal with the FI, and this is my partner, Inquisitor Jones. We need to speak to Charles Feeney. It’s rather urgent, I’m afraid.” That got him — a generic scowl, he decided. FI men (and women) were rarely warmly welcomed on college campuses. It wasn’t a ‘I’m going to enjoy ritually backstabbing you’ scowl, though, and that was the important thing.

12/17/2022 Snippet, ANALOG.

Exposition!

“So what was their angle?” Greg said, stubbing out his smoke; he had gotten what he needed from it. “How did they get through the line?”

“Not what. Who.” Ibrahim slid a smart folder over to him. Greg raised an eyebrow at the actual use of digitech, and flicked it on. A holographic image of a balding, middle-aged man appeared. “That there is Regional Processing Coordinator Oswald Feeney. He’s a twenty-year man, clean jacket, no disciplinary record and no signs of corruption. Boring family life, no money troubles, and his biggest vice was a weakness for ice cream. His subordinates said he was nice, but dull. Just the sort of fellow you would want looking over everybody’s shoulder to make sure that magically infected corpses don’t have gold-witch eggs in them.”

“No kidding,” Greg replied. “It’s also just the kind of cover you want for a deep-cover agent. Who looks at the boring ones? He’s our guy, then?”

“Either that, or our fall guy. It’s his signature on the clearance forms for all the corpses that turned out to be gold-witches, and nobody’s seen our good Mr. Feeney since yesterday. Either way, they got to him.”

12/15/2022 Snippet, ANALOG.

After-report!

Gabe looked Ibrahim over. He was sporting bandages on his arms and neck, and his fingers were trembling from one too many buzzkills. “Looks like you were in the scrum yourself, Chief. When were you planning to get some sleep?”

“I dunno. When are you?” Ibrahim shot back as he lit a cigarette. “We got a lid on the situation now, but the pot’s still bubbling and the handle’s damned hot. I can keep track of what still needs doing; I’ll hand things off to my relief when I can’t. Kimiko’s better off soaking up what happened while she’s still got fresh eyes for it, anyway.”

“Fair enough, Chief.” Greg lit his own cigarette. “What did happen, anyway? I know we got swarmed, sure — but who released the wasps? We haven’t had this many gold-witches at once since the last days of the War. An incursion point didn’t show up when I wasn’t looking, did it?”

“I almost wish, Greg. That’d be easy-peasy to solve. A couple of H-bombs through the point to let the Others know we ain’t happy, and a firecracker on our end to seal the hole; if we could do that, it’d already be done. There’s been no breakthroughs, though. Besides, we’d know if one had popped up. It’s for sure we’d have done better triage!”