Would you humour me for a minute or two? This is an experiment. I'm playing with two things at the moment and could go either way. I keep changing my mind. They are both in a very early stage, still forming it, writing with a million typos. But both characters feel very natural and like they will be fun to write. I can hear their voices which is good at an early stage.
But what would you read more of?
Fractured-
Detective Constable
Ajinder Kaur always felt the same way when she walked into the Chief
Constable's office; a frisson in her belly. Almost like she was a
naughty schoolgirl again, about to get a good telling off from the
headmaster. She knew she hadn't done anything wrong. Knew her record
was as spotless as her black trouser suit, every I in her work
dotted, every T on the forms crossed. The trepidation was still
there, the unspoken question; 'have I missed something he's going to
pick me up on?
He didn't get up
from his desk when she entered. Chief Constable Arnie 'Rimmer' Felton
wasn't that well mannered. He didn't invite her to take a seat either
but that wasn't unusual, she stood at ease in front of his desk.
'How can I help,
Chief Constable?'
He gave her a
smile, lacking in warmth, and ran a hand through thinning grey hair,
turning it into greasy tramlines on his sunburnt scalp. Everything
about him was pristine, making the smell of him, stale fags and beer
all the more surprising. If she thought he was brave enough she'd
have suspected it as a metaphor, an underlying scent that hinted at
corruption but she knew that was pop-psych bollocks. Felton was a
paper policeman, rumours abounded that he'd been on a shout once and
pissed himself, she suppressed a smile. Aj could imagine that.
Imagine his face.
'Constable Kaur,'
she hated him a little bit more for that, for dropping the
'detective' part when he spoke to her. 'I understand you went for the
H-Met interviews on the last round?'
'Yes sir,' fuck
him, 'I've always been quite open about my wish to work on the
Homicide and Murder Enquiry Team'
'Really,' he gave
her a dishwater smile, 'well. I had a visit from Tim Franklin.'
'The MP?' she said
and her mind started to race. Had she tangled with him recently? She
didn't think so.
'Yes,' he picked
up an expensive fountain pen and stared at it for a moment, 'the MP.
It seems, Ms Kaur,' oh she hated the way he emphasised the 'Ms',
'that one of the councillors, Sarpreet Singh, has been explaining to
Mr Franklin how Asian women are under-represented in our murder
squad.'
A hole seemed to
open in her stomach, taking her insides with it, hollowing her out.
'Not like this,' she thought.
Felton blew on the
end of the pen and shined the gleaming gold band around the centre,
'Sarpreet Singh is your cousin, I believe?'
Aj wanted to kick
something. Instead she tried to turn it into a joke.
'Been checking up
on me, Sir?' she gave him a smile, tried to hide the fury growing
within her.
'It's good to know
who knows who, politically speaking,' he took the top off his pen.
'Then you should
know, sir' she smiled again and felt an almost overwhelming desire to
touch up her lipstick, her words came out in a rush, memories of a
childhood in Bradford sneaking into her carefully accentless voice.
'Sarpreet is my dad's elder brother's kid, but we don't have anything
to do with them. My Dad and Sarpreet's Dad fell out ages...'
Felton held up a
hand.
'Nonetheless, Mr
Singh is correct and we are below the national average in the area
of,' he examined the nib of the pen before saying slowly, 'Asian
women.'
There were four
words in her mouth, desperate to get out: 'don't you fucking dare.'
She fought them back, blinked her eyes. Gave him a smile.
The Escalator.
I've spent the
last one thousand years or so hunting myself. Not literally, you
understand, because literally would be easy. I could web into the
Unity central truth core and just ask: 'address for Lonal Haraljiit,
please >DNA embedded<.' Then drop in with a gun. Life is never
that simple.
Neither is death.
And I know, I die
a lot.
'You should be
more careful.'
As Mr Jiggs, my
crystal intelligence companion says, I probably should be more
careful but after so many long years and cheap bodies it's easy to
become a bit gauche about survival. Now pain, pain is an entirely
different thing. You never get over pain. It never gets easier to
bear and if you block it your efficiency is cut down by fifty, maybe
sixty per cent. I could do without the pain coursing through me. The
spider web of red agony that radiates from the wound in my stomach.
Gut shots are always the worst. It's like they know where to hit me.
Of course they
know. I'll have told them. Or a facet of me will. A once was.
'Where are they,
Jiggs?' every whisperthink word I don't speak into the link is an age
of ache.
'I don't know.
They seem to have backed off but these linker places are hell on my
sensorium and your pain is causing feed back.' Jiggs sounds amused.
He always sounds amused. 'I'm glad I'm not a biologic, it seems a bit
shit.'
'Thanks Jiggs. How
long have I got left?'
'Oh, you've got
hours of agony yet.'
Linker stations
are drab, miserable, places to die.
Beghella station
was like them all, grey, the populace walking like dead people,
unaware of the world around them. To be fair, every one of those
people probably lived an exciting life in a riot of colour to them,
no need to decorate the outside when the inner life covers it all. I
wondered why they moved about at all, why not just become loaders and
ditch the physical? Something about walking among these silent,
somnolent people made them feel as alien as any of the other species
that called Unity space home.
Or maybe it was
the drizzle.
Baghera station
was a perfect storm for drizzle. Somewhere a designer was burning in
hell for creating this place. A steel sphere with a 1500 kilometre
diameter, a mass gatherer placed in the centre created a smaller
sphere where gravity was just not quite near enough to human normal
to be annoying. It had been beautiful once, full of fountains, but
gradually it had fallen into disrepair and the mean temperature had
increased. Now water evaporated off the pools and the sweating
populace and drifted up to the outer edges where it condensed in the
cold that radiated in from the outer skin to fall as drizzle.
It rained, people
were trying to kill me and the predominant smell was of rust and
failing sewage recyclers. I fucking hated this place.
I was here
tracking a load of dilium a chemical harmless to humans but that had
a dramatic effect on a non-unity species called the Vina; it either
gave them a massive high or caused them to explode. As the Vina were
nine-meter tall flowers covered in six centimetre spines this was
causing trouble throughout the Unity sphere of influence. The Vina
government refused to admit a problem, 'Vina have no need for drugs'
was the official line but the whole dilium trail was being set up
specifically to look like a Unity plan to destabilise their
government. Fair enough, it is the sort of thing we do, but not this
time.
Unity central
couldn't ban the Vina from our space as they were a relatively
powerful force on the lower right segment and given to petty
belligerence, border raids and such. And here I was, Unity Central
Investigator Lonal Harajit tracking the drug and hoping to stop a
war.
'Oh-oh,' said Mr
Jiggs, 'Lon, I'm picking up, wait. Wow, this is going to be
impressive. Someone's overloading the central station reactor.'
'What? There's
fifty thousand people on this station, what do I need to do to stop
it?'
'Do? Fight your
way into the control room that's eighty KM away and shut it down. Or
you could just relax and wait for death.'
'How long do I
have?'
'About eight
seconds.'
Sliding down the
wall to curl around my aching guts I wondered, for a moment, what I
had to done deserve this. Then I remembered: genocide.
Maybe they
wouldn't wake me up this time.
A sudden, fierce,
warmth against my face.
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