“And hard freakin glass,” Gawyn says with a smile.
I smile back. Kid’s making me all warm and freakin fuzzy. Maybe I’ll retire.
After twenty minutes of floating through the sky, we land back in the city, on the top of one of the few remaining ten thousand foot buildings. Popping the hatch proves a challenge for my weary and burning muscles, but my synth-arm is still up to the task. We’re greeted by the cool night air, kept clean and breathable by air scrubbers running up the sides of every building in town. I suck the air in like a siphon.
The girls climb down the side of the satellite one at a time, both refusing my help. I’m just shocked that I offered to begin with. As I roll my neck back, letting the bones crack back into place, I notice how bright the stars are. Stars… I laugh as I realize that when the weapon was fired it cleared a clean hole over the city. Probably killed a bunch of civies in the process, but you know what they say about breaking a few eggs.
My vision follows the stars to a bright object floating in space that I’ve only seen in books. The moon. With all the crap orbiting the planet, no one on the surface has seen the moon for a thousand years. Probably just the way they liked it, being able to move in concealment, like sneaking up on a scared kid hiding under the blankets. Too bad for them, this scared kid got hold of a big gun.
A perfectly round hole, the size of Maine, stares back from the Moon’s surface—evidence that any threat from the moon has been wiped out. Any Mooner forces remaining are probably scattering in a confused daze, unsure where to run. Rehna and Gawyn stand next to me, staring up in silence.
“Hard to believe we did that.” Rehna says.
I look her in the eyes. “Think they’ll let me go back up there and turn it into a smiley face?”
She just smiles back and takes my hand. Feels funny, but I let it linger. A pressure on my finger brings my eyes back down, and I see Gawyn holding onto my index finger. My muscles tense and I fight the urge to shrug them both off, but after wiping out an entire civilization, I’ve destroyed enough lives for one day. I pick the kid up and throw her over my shoulders. With my arm around Rehna, I head for the roof stairwell, thinking about starting a new life. Maybe I’ll get a dog too.
Heh, I’m all freakin heart.
AFTERWORD
My editor recently described this story as noir. My immediate internal reaction was, “What?! No! I hate noir!” Having reread the story, I see that he’s right. While sci-fi noir is not something I would consciously write, it seems a part of me appreciates the genre. My only memory of actually writing this story is being in between novels, having a few hours to spare and sitting down in front of laptop.
As an artist, I often sit down with a blank piece of paper and just start drawing. I don’t know what I’m going to draw. I just start putting lines on the page and something emerges. It’s not some kind of metaphysical experience, I just see something in the shape and expand upon it. I play the same game with my family while waiting for food in the restaurant. Someone scribbles some quick lines and I turn it into a drawing. The creation of FROM ABOVE was similar. I sat down and started dreaming up good first lines. After a few minutes I typed, “When my arm came off, I knew something wasn’t right.”
I built the rest of the story around that line, first explaining how it had happened and then asking and answering the follow-up questions that explanation created. The story emerged on its own, and I suspect the noir feeling of it comes from it being written that way. I was asking and answering questions like a detective and that voice crept into my writing.
The end result is an experimental story that turned into my first magazine published piece and made me a whopping fifty bucks.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JEREMY ROBINSON is the author of eleven thrillers including Pulse and Instinct, the first two books in his exciting Jack Sigler series. His novels have been translated into ten languages. He is also the director of New Hampshire AuthorFest, a non-profit organization promoting literacy in New Hampshire, where he lives with his wife and three children.
Copyright
© 2011 Jeremy Robinson. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For more information e-mail all inquiries to: info@jeremyrobinsononline.com
Visit Jeremy Robinson on the World Wide Web at: www.jeremyrobinsononline.com
—SAMPLE—
CALLSIGN: KING
by JEREMY ROBINSON
and SEAN ELLIS
Available for $2.99 via the E-Book Store
DESCRIPTION:
The fabled Elephant Graveyard has been discovered. It contains enough ivory to make Ethiopia a wealthy nation. But the cave contains more than physical riches—it also holds the means to control the world. Fifteen scientists enter the cave. Only one leaves.
Jack Sigler, Callsign: King (field leader of the covert, black ops Chess Team) receives a cryptic text from Sara Fogg, his girlfriend and CDC "disease detective". A catastrophic disease has been reported in Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley, but Fogg suspects something more is going on. Her suspicion is confirmed when King’s arrival in Africa is met by a high speed assassination attempt.
As King fights against two competing, high-tech mercenary forces, each struggling for control of the deadly discovery, Fogg disappears. Working with the surviving member of the science team that made the discovery, King begins a search for Fogg and the source of the potential plague that takes him back to the Great Rift Valley, back to the Elephant Graveyard, and brings him face-to-face with modern man’s origins.
1.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Four men were sent to kill King.
Of course they didn’t think of him as “King.” They knew his name was Jack Sigler, but even that meant nothing to them. He was just the target. If they had known about his callsign, identifying him as part of the ultra-secret and ultra-lethal black ops group called Chess Team, they probably would have sent forty.
King settled into the cracked vinyl seat in the taxi’s rear passenger area, and just for a moment, closed his eyes. He was tired, but strangely his fatigue was not the product of sustained physical or even mental effort. In fact, he thrived on exertion.
This capacity had served him particularly well in his military service, enabling him to surmount whatever challenges training or combat placed before him, whether it was negotiating a twelve-mile nighttime land nav course, or taking down the deadliest terrorists in the world. His ability to turn the tables on exhaustion had been instrumental in his success as the leader of Chess Team, a small but very elite group of operators drawn from the ranks of the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command, and now recently given special autonomy to defend the nation—indeed, the entire world—from threats that were beyond the comprehension of traditional military forces. They took their operational callsigns from the chessboard. As leader, he was naturally “King.” Zelda Baker, the first woman to battle her way up through the male-dominated world of Spec-Ops, was “Queen.” Erik Somers, Iranian by birth, but 110% an American patriot—the extra ten percent owed to a physique that would have been the envy of Schwarzenegger in his prime—was “Bishop.” The Korean, Shin Dae-jung was “Knight,” and “Rook” was reserved for Stan Tremblay….