The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  Garin sidles up beside him. “Looks like a crab raped an octopus.”

  “Your boys seem twitchy,” the Sheriff says. (Asante clenches his fist to control the tremor.) “They hopped on something?”

  Metzinger ignores the question. “Have they made any demands?”

  “Usual. Stop the rationing or they blow it up.” The Sheriff shakes his head, moves to mop his brow, nearly punches himself in the face when his decrepit Bombardier exoskeleton fratzes and overcompensates. “Everything’s gone to shit since the Edwards dried up.”

  “They respond to a water shortage by blowing up a desalination facility?”

  The Sheriff snorts. “Folks always make sense where you come from, Lieutenant?”

  They reviewed the plant specs down to the rivets on the way here. Or at least their zombies did, utterly silent, borrowed eyes flickering across video feeds and backgrounders that Asante probably wouldn’t have grasped even if he had been able to see them. All Asante knows—by way of the impoverished briefings Metzinger doles out to those back in Tourist Class—is that the facility was bought from Qatar back when paint still peeled and metal still rusted, when digging viscous fossils from the ground left you rich enough to buy the planet. And that it’s falling into disrepair, now that none of those things are true anymore.

  Pretty much a microcosm of the whole TExit experience, he reflects.

  “They planned it out,” the Sheriff admits. “Packed a shitload of capacitors in there with ‘em, hooked ‘em to jennies, banked ‘em in all the right places. We send in quads, EMP just drops ‘em.” He glances back over his shoulder, to where—if you squint hard enough—a heat-shimmer rising from the asphalt might almost assume the outline of a resting Chinook transport. “Probably risky using exos, unless they’re hardened.”

  “We won’t be using exos.”

  “Far as we can tell some of ‘em are dug in by the condensers, others right next to the heat exchangers. We try to microwave ‘em out, all the pipes explode. Might as well blow the place ourselves.”

  “Firepower?”

  “You name it. Sig Saurs, Heckler-Kochs, Maesushis. I think one of ‘em has a Skorp. All kinetic, far as we know. Nothing you could fry.”

  “Got anything on legs?”

  “They’ve got a Wolfhound in there. 46-G.”

  “I meant you,” Metzinger says.

  The Sheriff winces. “Nearest’s three hours away. Gimped leg.” And at Metzinger’s look: “BoDyn pulled out a few years back. We’ve been having trouble getting replacement parts.”

  “What about local law enforcement? You can’t be the only—”

  “Half of them are law enforcement. How’d you think they got the Wolfhound?” The Sheriff lowers his voice, although there aren’t any other patriots within earshot. “Son, you don’t think we’d have invited you in if we’d had any other choice? I mean Jayzuz, we’ve got enough trouble maintaining lawnorder as it is. If word ever got out we had to bring in outside help over a goddamn domestic dispute …”

  “Don’t sweat it. We don’t wear name tags.” Metzinger turns to Silano. “Take it away, Sergeant-Major.”

  Silano addresses the troops as Metzinger disappears into the cloaked Chinook: “Say your goodbyes, everybody. Autopilots in thirty.”

  Asante sighs to himself. Those poor bastards don’t stand a chance. He can’t even bring himself to blame them: driven by desperation, hunger, the lack of any other options. Like the who murdered him, back at the end of another life: damned, ultimately, by the sin of being born into a wasteland that could no longer feed them.

  Silano raises one hand. “Mark”

  Asante calls forth his mandala. The world goes to gray. His bad hand calms and steadies on the forestalk of his weapon.

  This is going to be ugly.

  He’s glad he won’t be around to see it.

  Heroes

  He does afterward, of course. They all do, as soon as they get back to Côté. They’re still learning. The world is their classroom.

  “Back in the Cenozoic all anybody cared about was reflexes.” Second-Lieutenant Oliver Maddox—sorcerer’s apprentice to the rarely-seen Major Emma Rossiter, of the Holy Order of Neuroengineering—speaks with the excitement of a nine-year-old at his own birthday party. “Double-tap, dash, down, crawl, observe fire—all that stuff your body learns to do without thinking when someone yells Contact. The whole program was originally just about speeding up those macros. They never really appreciated that the subconscious mind thinks as well as reacts. It analyzes. I was telling them that years ago but they never really got it until now.”

  Asante has never met Them. They never write, They never call. They certainly never visit. Presumably They sign a lot of checks.

  “Here, though, we have a perfect example of the tactical genius of the zombie mind.”

  Their BUDs recorded everything. Maddox has put it all together post-mortem, a greatest-hits mix with remote thermal and PEA and a smattering of extraporential algorithms to fill in the gaps. Now he sets up the game board—walls, floors, industrial viscera all magically translucent—and initializes the people inside.

  “So you’ve got eighteen heavily-armed hostiles dug in at all the right choke points.” Homunculi glow red at critical junctures. “You’ve got a jamming field in effect, so you can’t share telemetry unless you’re line-of-sight. You’ve got an EMP-hardened robot programmed to attack anything so much as squeaks, deafened along the whole spectrum so even if we had the backdoor codes it wouldn’t hear them.” The Wolfhound icon is especially glossy: probably lifted from BoDyn’s promotional archive. “And you’ve got some crazy fucker with a deadman switch that’ll send the whole place sky-high the moment his heart stops—or even if he just thinks you’re getting too close to the flag. You don’t even know about that going in.

  “And yet.”

  Maddox starts the clock. Inside the labyrinth, icons begin to dance in fast-forward.

  “Garin’s first up, and he completely blows it. Not only does he barely graze the target—probably doesn’t even draw blood—but he leaves his silencer disengaged. Way to go, Garin. You failed to neutralize your target, and now the whole building knows where you are.”

  Asante remembers that gunshot echoing through the facility. He remembers his stomach dropping away.

  “Now here comes one of Bubba’s buddies around the corner and—Garin misses again! Nick to the shoulder this time. And here comes the real bad-ass of the bunch, that Wolfhound’s been homing in on Garin’s shots and that motherfucker is armed and hot and …”

  The 46-G rounds the corner. It does not target Garin; it lights up the insurgents. Bubba and his buddy collapse into little red piles of pixel dust.

  “They did not see that coming!” Maddox exults. “Fragged by their own robot! How do you suppose that happened?”

  Asante frowns.

  “So two baddies down, Garin’s already up the ladder and onto this catwalk before the robot gets a bead on him but Tiwana’s at the other end, way across the building, and they go LOS for about half a second” —a bright thread flickers between their respective icons—” before Tiwana drops back down to ground level and starts picking off Bubbas over by the countercurrent assembly. And she turns out to be just as shitty a shot as Garin, and just as sloppy with her silencer.”

  Gunfire everywhere, from everyone. Asante remembers being blind and shitting bricks, wondering what kind of aboa would make such an idiot mistake until the Rann-Seti came up in his own hands, until he felt the recoil and heard the sound of his own shot echoing like a 130-decibel bullseye on his back. He wondered, at the time, how and why someone had sabotaged everyone’s silencers like that.

  Maddox is still deep in the play. “The bad guys have heard the commotion and are starting to reposition. By now Asante and Silano have picked up the shitty-shot bug and the BoDyn’s still running around tearing up the guys on its own side. All this opens a hole that Kalmus breezes through—anyone want to guess the odds
she’d just happen to be so perfectly positioned?— which buys her a clean shot at the guy with the deadman switch. Who she drops with a perfect cervical shot. Completely paralyzes the poor bastard but leaves his heart beating strong and steady. Here we see Kalmus checking him over and disabling his now-useless doomsday machine.

  “This all took less than five minutes, people. I mean, it was eighteen from In to Out but you’re basically mopping up after five. And just before the credits roll, Kalmus strolls up to the wolfhound calm as you please and pets the fucker. Puts him right to sleep. Galveston PD gets their robot back without a scratch. Five minutes. Fucking magic.”

  “So, um.” Garin looks around. “How’d we do it?”

  “Show ‘em, Kally.”

  Kalmus holds up a cuff-link. “Apparently I took this off deadman guy.”

  “Dog whistles, Ars and Kays.” Maddox grins. “50KHz, inaudible to pilot or passenger. You don’t put your robot into rabid mode without some way of telling friend from foe, right? Wear one of these pins, Wolfie doesn’t look at you twice. Lose that pin and it rips your throat out in a fucking instant.

  “Your better halves could’ve gone for clean, quiet kills that would’ve left the remaining forces still dug-in, still fortified, and not going anywhere. But one of the things that fortified them was BoDyn’s baddest battlebot. So your better halves didn’t go for clean quiet kills. They went for noise and panic. They shot the dog whistles, drew in the dog, let it attack its own masters. Other side changes position in response. You herded the robot, and the robot herded the insurgents right into your crosshairs. It was precision out of chaos, and it’s even more impressive because you had no comms except for the occasional optical sync when you happened to be LOS. Gotta be the messiest, spottiest network you could imagine, and if I hadn’t seen it myself I’d say it was impossible. But somehow you zombies kept updated on each other’s sitreps. Each one knew what it had to do to achieve an optimal outcome assuming all the others did likewise, and the group strategy just kind of— emerged. Nobody giving orders. Nobody saying a goddamn word.”

  Asante sees it now, as the replay loops and restarts. There’s a kind of beauty to it; the movement of nodes, the intermittent web of laser light flickering between them, the smooth coalescence of signal from noise. It’s more than a dance, more than teamwork. It’s more like a … a distributed organism. Like the digits of a hand, moving together.

  “Mind you, this is not what we say if anyone asks,” Maddox adds. “What we say is that every scenario in which the Galveston plant went down predicted a tipping point across the whole Post-TExit landscape. We point to 95% odds of wide-spread rioting and social unrest on WestHem’s very doorstep—a fate which ZeroS has, nice and quietly, prevented. Not bad for your first field deployment.”

  Tiwana raises a hand. “Who would ask, exactly?”

  It’s a good question. In the thirteen months since Asante joined Zero Sum, no outsider has ever appeared on the grounds of CFB Côté. Which isn’t especially surprising, given that—according to the public records search he did a few weeks back, anyway—CFB Côté has been closed for over twenty years.

  Maddox smiles faintly. “Anyone with a vested interest in the traditional chain of command.”

  Where Are We Now

  Asante awakens in the Infirmary, standing at the foot of Carlos Acosta’s bed. To his right a half-open door spills dim light into the darkness beyond: a wedge of worn linoleum fading out from the doorway, a tiny red EXIT sign glowing in the void above a stairwell. To his left, a glass wall looks into Neurosurgery. Jointed teleops hang from the ceiling in there, like mantis limbs with impossibly fragile fingers. Lasers. Needles and nanotubes. Atomic-force manipulators delicate enough to coax individual atoms apart. ZeroS have gone under those knives more times than any of them can count. Surgery by software, mostly. Occasionally by human doctors phoning it in from undisclosed locations, old-school cutters who never visit in the flesh for all the times they’ve cut into Asante’s.

  Acosta’s on his back, eyes closed. He looks almost at peace. Even his facial tic has quieted. He’s been here three days now, ever since losing his right arm to a swarm of smart flechettes over in Heraklion. It’s no big deal. He’s growing it back with a little help from some imported salamander DNA and a steroid-infused aminoglucose drip. He’ll be good as new in three weeks—as good as he’s ever been since ZeroS got him, anyway—back in his rack in half that time. Meanwhile it’s a tricky balance: his metabolism may be boosted into the jet stream but it’s all for tissue growth. There’s barely enough left over to power a trip to the bathroom.

  Kodjo Asante wonders why he’s standing here at 0300.

  Maddox says the occasional bit of sleepwalking isn’t anything to get too worried about, especially if you’re already prone to it. Nobody’s suffered a major episode in months, not since well before Galveston; these days the tweaks seem mainly about fine-tuning. Rossiter’s long since called off the just-in-case bots that once dogged their every unscripted step. Even lets them leave the base now and then, when they’ve been good.

  You still have to expect the occasional lingering side-effect, though. Asante glances down at the telltale tremor in his own hand, seizes it gently with the other and holds firm until the nerves quiet. Looks back at his friend.

  Acosta’s eyes are open.

  They don’t look at him. They don’t settle long enough to look at anything, as far as Asante can tell. They jump and twitch in Acosta’s face, back forth back forth up down up.

  “Carl,” Asante says softly. “How’s it going, man?”

  The rest of that body doesn’t even twitch. Acosta’s breathing remains unchanged. He doesn’t speak.

  Zombies aren’t big on talking. They’re smart but nonverbal, like those split-brain patients who understand words but can’t utter them. Something about the integration of speech with consciousness. Written language is easier. The zombie brain doesn’t take well to conventional grammar and syntax but they’ve developed a kind of visual pidgin that Maddox claims is more efficient than English. Apparently they use it at all the briefings.

  Maddox also claims they’re working on a kind of time-sharing arrangement, some way to divvy up custody of Broca’s Area between the fronto-parietal and the retrosplenial. Someday soon, maybe, you’ll literally be able to talk to yourself, he says. But they haven’t got there yet.

  A tacpad on the bedside table glows with a dim matrix of Zidgin symbols. Asante places it under Acosta’s right hand.

  “Carl?”

  Nothing.

  “Just thought I’d … see how you were. You take care.”

  He tiptoes to the door, sets trembling fingers on the knob. Steps into the darkness of the hallway, navigates back to his rack by touch and memory. Those eyes.

  It’s not like he hasn’t seen it a million times before. But all those other times his squadmates’ eyes blurred and danced in upright bodies, powerful autonomous things that moved. Seeing that motion embedded in such stillness—watching eyes struggle as if trapped in muscle and bone, as if looking up from some shallow grave where they haven’t quite been buried alive—

  Terrified. That’s how they looked. Terrified.

  We Are the Dead

  Specialist Tarra Kalmus has disappeared. Rossiter was seen breaking the news to Maddox just this morning, a conversation during which Maddox morphed miraculously from He of the Perpetually Goofy Smile into Lieutenant Stoneface. He refuses to talk about it with any of the grunts. Silano managed to buttonhole Rossiter on her way back to the helipad, but could only extract the admission that Kalmus has been ‘reassigned’.

  Metzinger tells them to stop asking questions. He makes it an order.

  But as Tiwana points out—when Asante finds her that evening, sitting with her back propped against a pallet of machine parts in the loading bay— you can run all sorts of online queries without ever using a question mark.

  “Fellow corpse.”

  “Fellow corpse.”
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  It’s been their own private salutation since learning how much they have in common. (Tiwana died during a Realist attack in Havana. Worst vacation ever, she says.) They’re the only ZeroS, so far at least, to return from the dead. The others hold them a little in awe because of it.

  The others also keep a certain distance.

  “Garin was last to see her, over at the Memory Hole.” Tiwana’s wearing a pair of smart specs tuned to the public net. It won’t stop any higher-ups who decide to look over her shoulder, but at least her activity won’t be logged by default. “Chatting up some redhead with a Hanson Geothermal logo on her jacket.”

  Two nights ago. Metzinger let everyone off the leash as a reward for squashing a Realist attack on the G8G Constellation. They went down to Banff for some meatspace R&R. “So?”

  Speclight paints Tiwana’s cheeks with small flickering auroras. “So a BPD drone found a woman matching that description dead outside a public fuck-cubby two blocks south of there. Same night.”

  “Eiiii.” Asante squats down beside her as Tiwana pushes the specs onto her forehead. Her wonky eye jiggles at him.

  “Yeah.” She takes a breath, lets it out. “Nicci Steckman, according to the DNA.”

  “So how—”

  “They don’t say. Just asking witnesses to come forward.”

  “Have any?”

  “They left together. Deked into an alley. No further surveillance record, which is odd.”

  “Is it really,” Asante murmurs.

  “No. I guess not.”

  They sit in silence for a moment.

  “What do you think?” she asks at last.

  “Maybe Steckman didn’t like it rough and things got out of hand. You know Kally, she … doesn’t always take no for an answer.”

  “No to what? We’re all on antilibidinals. Why would she even be—”

  “She’d never kill someone over—”

  “Maybe she didn’t,” Tiwana says.

  He blinks. “You think she flipped?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t her fault. Maybe the augs kicked in on their own somehow, like a, a … reflex. Kally saw an imminent threat, or something her better half interpreted that way. Grabbed the keys, took care of it.”