The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley Read online

  Sam laughed and got out of bed. “That’s true enough. I’ve seen pigs do it. What’s a horse?” On the wall screen opposite Sam’s bed there appeared an image of a horse standing next to a picture of Porky. “Now that is a funny looking critter.”

  Then Sam considered the implications. “Porky is tech?” Sam started laughing. “The firsters must not have known that. They’d have killed them all.”

  “I don’t understand,” the AI said. “Why would the firsters object to pormels being engineered?”

  “Well, Old Carter didn’t really know why. Just that in the early days it was believed that using tech, even knowing how to read, would call down demons on you and they would throw lightning at you or burn you up.”

  The conversation was interrupted as Sam went through his morning routine and resumed when he arrived at the dining niche.

  “So had I been discovered in the early days, the firsters would have objected.”

  “They’d have burned you down then taken axes to what was left.” Sam grinned. “’Course, there was no one living out here then. Everyone lived near the coast.”

  The AI projected a map on the table and Sam resisted the urge to tell it to stop doing things like that. He figured if he told it to stop it would and he figured he needed to get used to this sort of thing.

  He looked at the map that the AI had put on the table. It was like looking down at the world from a great height. At the same time, the map was wrong. “That place there, where you show a city by the ocean. There’s no city there, never has been. That bay extends inland ten miles or so and there are cliffs all around it.” Sam pointed to the most obvious error in the map.

  The map changed, zooming in on the place he was pointing. Then a circular bay appeared. “Like this?” the AI asked.

  “Sort of.” He and the AI refined the image. Sam drew with his finger and the AI corrected the map as he indicated, until they had it pretty much the way Sam remembered from when he was a boy.

  “Sam, what you have described here looks like the results of a kinetic strike.”

  Sam sighed. “What’s a kinetic strike?”

  “In this case, a rock about four hundred feet across was dropped out of the sky on Landing. It would have hit the city so hard there would have been nothing left but the hole you describe. It would have filled with water, making that round bay.”

  Sam looked at the map again. “Uh. That ain’t the only hole like that near the coast. There must be over fifty of them. I grew up in that part of the world.”

  The AI drew other dots along the coast. “There?”

  It looked mostly right, but he pointed at one dot. “There wasn’t one there. He said that’s where they found the how-to books about two hundred years ago. Old Carter was crazy for those books.” Sam considered. “Sounds like the firsters might have had a point. It sure looks like the demons hit those places hard. So why didn’t they get you?”

  “In all probability they didn’t hit the Buckley homestead for three reasons. First, the strike was only a few years after the colony was established and the Buckley homestead was located farther away from Landing than any other homestead. Second, the homestead systems were partially shut down while Mr. Buckley was on business in Landing. Finally, the homestead was built into the rock and effectively shielded from casual detection.”

  “That explains why the demons didn’t hit you then. What about now?”

  “It is likely that the Eeestrang are your Demons,” the AI said. “In that case, the chance that they are still in the system are remote. Humanity had been fighting a war with them and had mostly won it by the time the colony set out. The war was why this world was settled. This system didn’t have a world that was really suitable for the Eeestrang. They like slightly heavier worlds with much denser atmospheres.”

  Sam sat back down and propped his feet on the table in front of him. “So, you’re saying the demons were real but they’re gone now? Just how sure of that last part are you? Getting a demon’s rock on my head ain’t something I’m looking forward to.”

  “The probability approaches unity.” There was a short pause, then the AI rephrased its statement. “As close to absolutely sure as makes no difference. They couldn’t have stayed in this system without noticing that man had survived and if they had seen it they would have attacked. Their hatred of humanity is close to pathological.”

  “One more question.” Sam paused. “Make that two. What do I call you?”

  “Whatever you feel comfortable with. You can call me AI or give me any name that suits you. It’s a matter of personal taste; some people preferred to name their household AI. Mr. Buckley never felt the need.”

  “All right if I call you Alen?”

  “That would be fine.”

  “Okay then, Alen. Why didn’t you do something when the demons attacked? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re here. But why did you just sit out here and do nothing when everyone was dying?”

  There was silence for a few moments. Then Alen started talking again. “This may be difficult for you to understand, but I am not like a person. In most ways, I am not even a single entity. If all that is needed to perform a specific function is a gauge and a switch . . .”

  Sam started losing track. He kept listening, his eyebrows drawing closer and closer together until his head started hurting. Finally, Alen said, “When Mr. Buckley left for Landing, there were no instructions to take any action save maintenance of the property and preventing unlawful entry.”

  Sam looked at the map still on the table. “You slept through it?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  Sarah A. Hoyt:

  When I was a brand new Baen author, who had yet to deliver a book, I met Joe Buckley at Libertycon. It was late at night, outside the Barfly Suite, and this man approached me, shook my hand, smiled and said, “Hi. I’m Joe Buckley. How are you going to kill me?”

  I had absolutely no idea why I should kill him, or what he meant by it and wondered if he was dangerous. Then someone from the side interposed, “He’s Joe Buckley. Baen authors kill him in books.” At which point I figured—not having anything planned—there was only one answer to the question. “With a smile on your face,” I said.

  And though I forgot to kill him in Draw One in the Dark, in my second book for Baen, Gentleman Takes a Chance, I did kill Joe, with a smile on his face, exactly as promised. I just wonder if the shark girl smoked a cigar.

  Now that I think about it, I realize I’ve yet to kill him in Darkships.

  Mwah. Ah. Ah. And Ah.

  Gentleman Takes a Chance

  SARAH A. HOYT

  He shouldn’t have been so reckless as to shift shapes while there was someone else in the building, but the hint of shifter scent he’d been able to pick up even with his human nose had forced him to check it out. After all, a shapeshifter at a crime scene could mean many things. The last time he’d picked it up, it had, in fact, meant that the shifters were the victims. But there was always the chance it meant the shifter he smelled was the killer. And a murder committed by shapeshifters, properly investigated, would out them as non-mythological. Which meant—if Rafiel knew how such things worked—that at best they’d all be studied within an inch of their lives. At worst . . . well . . . Rafiel was a policeman from a long line of policemen. He understood people would be scared of shifters. Not that he blamed them. There were some shifters that he was scared of himself. But the thing was, when people were terrified, they only ran away half the time. The other half . . . they attacked and killed the cause of their fear.

  “I’ll be okay. I have a four-wheel drive, and I’ve lived here all my life. This is not the first blizzard I’ve driven in,” he said. He was still trying to process the input of the lion’s nose. There had been a clear shifter scent trail throughout the aquarium. It had circled the shark area.

  The shark area where, yesterday, a human arm had been found—still clutching a cell phone—inside a shark. The aquarium had been shut down�
�though the weather provided a good excuse for that. And the relevant area was isolated behind the yellow crime-scene tape. The dead man had been identified as a business traveler from California, staying in town for less than a week.

  The question was—had he fallen in the tank or been pushed? And if he’d been pushed, was it a shifter who’d done the pushing?

  * * *

  “Uh,” Rafiel interrupted, “before you guys start arguing domestic arrangements, the other thing is, that I tried to find Old Joe, because, you know, since he was right about the last corpse—by the way, the name was Joseph Buckley; he was a software salesman—I thought he might be able to give me details and pinpoint who the woman might be he was talking about. But I can’t find him anywhere.”

  Tom sighed. “He’s very, very good at hiding. I think he’s been doing it for centuries. If he’s right about having been alive since before horses . . .”

  “Yeah. Probably. Anyway . . . I can’t figure out where he’s gone, so if you hear something let me know.”

  John Ringo:

  So . . . Getting published is one hell of a thrill.

  I used to go to work every day in a geotextile mill and try to tease reality out of a bunch of quality control data so screwed up it wasn’t even funny. For not particularly good pay and surrounded by people who generally despised me for pointing out that they couldn’t find their butt with both hands.

  In April 1998, due in part to a conversation on Baen’s Bar, Jim Baen took a look at the manuscript for A Hymn Before Battle and, after thoroughly and professionally eviscerating it, wrote, “If you change it the way I said, I’ll buy it.”

  I thought I could walk to the top of Mount Everest on the clouds. Seriously.

  Because they couldn’t find the paper manuscript, I’d emailed him Hymn along with as much as I’d finished of Gust Front, the sequel. In August I got an email from him that read: “Your mss ends in medias res. You have ten minutes.”

  Turns out he’d been reading Gust Front and it had suddenly ended. In the middle of a battle. In the middle of a sentence. In the middle of a prepositional phrase. The last word was “of.”

  Fortunately, I’d finished it. And he bought that. Forty plus novels in hardback later and the rest, as they say, is history. (I wish I could find my fifth grade English teacher and just gesture to a well-stocked shelf in a bookstore . . .)

  But Gust was (and is) rough. When I write I write fast and sometimes, especially in those days, certain grammatical and spelling errors crop in. Example: Even in the book blurb at the front of the paperback version, there are three egregious grammatical errors including issues of plurality and tense.

  It was worse in the rough. Much, much worse.

  So I thought to myself: “Self, Joe Buckley is a detail-oriented guy! Send it to him and get some copy-editing help!”

  Turns out Joe’s editing persona is a lot like his online persona. There were 108 corrections, many of which were what he tends to call “peanut gallery” observations. (For many years Joe maintained a website called “Views from the Peanut Gallery,” which tended to not so much review books by his favorite authors but roast them. Think of him as a reviewer version of Don Rickles.)

  I showed some of them to Jim Baen to see what he thought and Jim frankly hit the roof. But Jim was rarely mild in person or online.

  After some thought I decided that Joe needed a lesson in manners. The scene below from Gust Front originally had a randomly chosen name of “Peterson” for the character described as “Lefty.” After the Peanut Gallery Incident I just hit “Find/replace: Peterson/Buckley.”

  I’m sorry, I didn’t know what I’d started!

  David, as mentioned, had previously killed Joe in the Cuttthroat. But when I went full-on psycho on the character, the avalanche was rather beyond anything intended.

  Joe, fortunately, takes it all in stride and finds it rather amusing.

  And now: to the killing fields!

  When the Devil Dances: Except as an example, Joe Buckley doesn’t appear in Gust Front. But he’d survived what happened to him in Gust Front. So he was still around. When I needed a viewpoint character for the grunt perspective of the events in When the Devil Dances, well, Joe was just sitting there . . .

  Cally’s War: My co-author for the series, Julie Cochrane, hadn’t had a chance to kill Joe Buckley. Yet. The problem being, in that universe Joe Buckley is already dead. But, to quote Lovecraft: All are not dead that sleeping lie, and in strange aeons even death may die.

  See if you recognize a certain pessimistic character in the AI. If you use an iPhone, you get Siri. If you’re on the Discovery One you get HAL. If you use a Buckley . . .

  Sister Time: Snork.

  Honor of the Clan: I’m a stinker, ain’t I?

  Eye of the Storm: Same universe, same AI but with a bit more expansion as the Buckley personality finally is seen in start-up mode.

  Poor Joe.

  Citadel: By the time this book was written, I pretty much use Buckley every time I want to discuss in third person some sad-sack character who died or did something boneheaded, or both. This was getting on to forty books and you tend to get a bit lazier and more cynical by that point in your career . . .

  A Hymn Before Battle

  JOHN RINGO

  For the next few hours soldiers and NCOs were contacted and units worked out. Personnel who were mobile were sent to free thoroughly trapped comrades. The grenade idea worked well except in the case of one unfortunate private who discovered after arming the grenade that he could not retract his arm. Fortunately GalTech medical technology could regenerate the missing hand if they ever got back to friendly lines. Given that the pain was quite brief, the suit sealed the breach and pain-blocked the damage almost instantly, it caused a certain amount of black humor at his expense. It only got worse when he told them his last words were, “This is gonna huurt.”

  * * *

  The explosion tore the space cruiser in half, vaporizing the facet against which the material had been placed and blasting two separated pieces of ship away from each other. One was blasted sideways into the nearest megascraper, which was already coming apart from the nuclear wave front. It slammed into the top of the mile-cube building and smashed half of it to the ground, taking out two more buildings as well before it finally ground to a halt.

  The other section of the massive ship was blasted nearly straight up. It rose on the edge of the mushroom cloud, a black spot of malignance on the edge of the beautiful fireball, and finally curved back downward to smash into another Posleen-held megascraper.

  Gust Front

  JOHN RINGO

  “Well, come on in when you want. Where to begin?” mused Mike, taking a sip of bourbon.

  “At the beginning is usually best,” commented General Horner dryly. The dozen or so Absoluts had seemed to effect Horner not at all. Mike had heard he had a hollow leg. Now he believed it. The only way to tell he was drunk off his ass was that his normally sober expression had become like iron. Way drunk.

  “Yeah. Well, Buckley was one of the guys caught under Qualtren. Now, we had to extract ourselves from the rubble, which we did by blowing through with our grenades and stuff, not a technique I suggest to the unarmored.”

  “Oui, they are after all . . .”

  “. . . antimatter!” Mike finished. “Right. So, everybody was able to figure out how to do this successfully except the unfortunate Private Buckley, or Lefty as we came to call him. Private ‘Lefty’ Buckley, on his first try, slipped out his grenade, extended it as far away as he could, since it was, after all . . .”

  “. . . antimatter!” chorused Géneral Crenaus and his aide.

  “Right. So he sticks his arm out as far as it will go, pushing through the rubble, and thumbs the activator.”

  “Oui, oui! Only to find that he can’t retract his arm!” crowed the French general, belly laughing.

  “Yeah! The rubble shifted and it’s caught. So, like, this is gonna huuurt, right? Actuall
y, it only hurts for a second ’cause of all the suit systems. Blocks the nerve, shuts down the bleeding, debrides and disinfects the wound, all in seconds. But, ya know, ya got to imagine, I mean . . .”

  “It’s a ten-second count?” asked General Horner, looking grim, which for him was the same as smiling.

  “Right, right. So like . . .”

  “Dix, neuf, huit, sept . . .” interjected Crenaus, with tears of laughter in his eyes.

  “Right, ten, nine . . .” Mike translated, “and then . . .”

  “Wham!” interjected General Taylor, laughing.

  “Right. Like, ‘Whoa, is this a Monday or what?’ Anyway, it didn’t, doesn’t really hurt, or it wouldn’t be so funny. Just the really brief but memorable sensation of your hand vaporizing.”

  “So, what does that have to do with the command ship detonation?” asked one of the surrounding aides.

  “Well,” continued Mike, with another sip of bourbon. “Lefty has made it to the perimeter, and performed a really decent private’s job, as well as he can left-handed. And when the command ship lifts he’s one of the guys that goes with Sergeant Green.” Mike paused and solemnly lifted his glass. “Absent companions . . .”

  “Absent companions,” the officers chorused.

  “. . . he went with Staff Sergeant Alonisus Green to distract the command ship away from the Main Line of Resistance and focus its attention so that I could attempt to plant a friggin’ antimatter mine on its side,” he ended, quite solemnly.

  “There was supposed to be a humorous punch line,” said General Horner as the pause became elongated.

  “Right, sir,” said Captain O’Neal after a sip of his sour mash. “. . . so anyway the whole cockamamie thing works, I get through the defenses, plant the mine and do my now famous imitation of a piece of radioactive fallout . . .”

  “Ten seconds early, might I add!” interjected Géneral Crenaus.

  “Man, some people wouldn’t be happy if you hanged them with a gold rope! I go ‘to infinity and beyond’ and all the friggin’ Frenchie can do is complain about premature detonations. Where was I, sirs?”