The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley (3 page)
Read The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley Online
Authors: Assorted Baen authors,Barflies
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? Actually, 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?”
“Detonation,” answered a very junior aide, a mere stripling of a major.
“Right,” said the captain. “Well, the mine works like a charm, except for some minor little secondary effects . . .”
“Another three meters and I would have been steak tartare!” the general shouted, holding his arms in the air.
“With all due respect: Quit interrupting, General, sir. Anyway it packs about the wallop of a Class Three Space Mine and it causes some nasty secondaries, most of which are, fortunately, directed away from the MLR and certain unnamed ungrateful Frenchmen . . .” commented Captain O’Neal, rolling his eyes.
“Did I say I was ungrateful? General Taylor, General Horner, I call you to witness, I never have said I was ungrateful. Nervous? A touch. Frightened?
Merde
, yes! But not ungrateful, you dwarf poltroon!”
“Hah, stork! Anyway, it tears the living shit out of the command ship, but about a third of the ship hangs together. It apparently was really spectacularly visible from some of the positions on the MLR. This big piece of space cruiser describes a beautiful ballistic arc almost straight up, looking like it’s moving in slow motion,” expounded Captain O’Neal, gesturing with both hands. “You have to remember, this is to the background of a relatively small but quite noticeable nuclear blast . . .”
“About four kilotons,” interjected Géneral Crenaus, taking a hard pull on his cognac, “and less than a kilometer away!”
“More like three kilometers. Anyway, it rides up on the mushroom cloud, describes this tremendous vertical arc and comes gracefully back down . . .”
“Right on Buckley,” hooted Géneral Crenaus and cracked up.
“. . . right smack dab on Private Second Class Buckley. He was one of the guys who was on the roofs, in the blast radius . . .”
“
Sacré Bleu!
I was in the blast radius!”
“You guys should have hardly felt it in the blast shadow from the buildings!”
“Blast shadow he calls it!
Oui!
They were around our ears!” shouted the general, hands waving on either side of his head. “I know, I know . . .” he continued, holding up a hand.
“Bitch, bitch . . . anyway, here’s Buckley, grav-boots clamped to some nice powerful structure, miraculously alive, survives looking right into the shockwave, survives looking right into the neutron pulse, survives looking right into the thermal pulse . . .” Mike paused dramatically.
“It didn’t kill him, did it?” asked one of the aides, right on cue.
“In a suit? Nah, but it did knock him clean out. And this time he waited for somebody to come dig him up. He kinda had to since he was about fifty stories down in the building with a quarter kilometer of space cruiser on top of him,” ended Captain O’Neal, chuckling.
“To Private Buckley!” roared Géneral Crenaus, raising his brandy on high.
“To Private Buckley!” roared Captain O’Neal. “And all the other poor sods who wear the Mask of Hell!” he ended, a touch bitterly.