The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (Best SF & Fantasy of the Year)

by Jonathan Strahan

  We were here first, they said without speaking, without uttering a sound.

  It wasn't only desperation in their eyes; it was anger, spite, and a promise of stillborn retribution that the wolves knew would never come.

  Ten times a million years before you, we feasted on your foremothers.

  And, in that moment, I was as frightened as any small and defenseless beast, cowering in shadows, as still as still can be in hope it would go unnoticed as amber eyes and hungry jaws prowled the woods.

  I have wondered if my eyes replied, I know. I know, but have mercy.

  That day, I do not believe there was any mercy in the eyes of the wolves.

  You cannot even survive yourselves, said the glittering amber eyes. Ask yourself for charity.

  And I have wondered if a mother can pass on dread to her child.

  4.

  Nix Severn reaches the ladder leading up to the crawlspace, only to find it engulfed in a tangle of thick vines that have begun to pull the lockbolts free of the wall. She stands in waist-high philodendrons and bracken, glaring up at the damaged ladder. Briefly, she considers attempting the climb anyway, but is fairly sure her weight would only finish what the vines have begun, and the resulting fall could leave her with injuries severe enough that she'd be rendered incapable of reaching Oma's core in time. Or at all.

  She curses and wraps her right hand around a bundle of the vines, tugging at them forcefully; the ladder groans ominously, creaks, and leans a few more centimeters out from the wall. Nix lets go and turns towards the round hatchway leading to Three and the next vegetationclogged segment of the Blackbird. The status report she received when she awoke inside the home-away, what little there was of it, left no room for doubt that all the terraforming engines had switched on simultaneously and that every one of the containment sys banks had failed in a rapid cascade, rolling backwards, stem to stern. She steps over a log so rotten and encrusted with mushrooms and moss that it could have lain there for years, not hours. A few steps farther and she reaches the hatch's keypad, but her hands are shaking, and it takes three tries to get the security code right; a fourth failure would have triggered lockdown. The diaphragm whirs, clicks, and the rusty steel iris spirals open in a hiss of steam. Nix mutters a thankful, silent prayer to no god in whom she actually believes because, so far, none of the wiring permitting access to the short connecting corridors has been affected.

  Nix steps through the aperture, and the hatch promptly spirals shut behind her, which means the proximity sensors are also still functional. The corridor is free of any trace of plant or animal life, and she lingers there several seconds before taking the three, four, five more steps to the next keypad and punching in the next access code. The entrance to Isotainer Three obeys the command, and forest swallows her again.

  If anything, the situation in Three is worse than that in Four. As if the jungle weren't slowing her down enough, she comes upon a small pond, maybe five meters across, stretching from one side of the hull to the other. The water is tannin stained, murky, and half obscured beneath an emerald algal scum, so there's no telling how deep it might be. The forest floor is quite a bit higher than that of the 'tainer, so the pool could be deep enough she'd have to swim. And Nix Severn never learned to swim.

  She's sweating. The readout on her visor informs her that the ambient temperature has risen to 30.55˚C, and she pushes back the hood. For now, there's no rain falling in Three, so there's only her own sweat to wipe from her eyes and forehead. She kneels and brushes a hand across the pond, sending ripples rolling towards the opposite shore.

  Behind her, a twig snaps, and there's a woman's voice. Nix doesn't stand, or even turn her head. Between the shock of so abruptly popping from the home-away sleep, her subsequent exertion and fear, and the effects of whatever toxic pollen and spores might be wafting through the air, she's been expecting delirium.

  "The water is wide, and I can't cross over," the voice sings sweetly. "Neither have I wings to fly."

  "That isn't you, is it, Oma?"

  "No, dear," the voice replies, and it's not so sweet anymore; it's taken on a gruff edge. "It isn't Oma. The night presses in all about us, and your grandmother is sleeping."

  There's nothing sapient aboard but me and Oma, which means I'm hallucinating.

  "Good day, Little Red Riding Hood," says the voice, and never mind her racing heart, Nix has to laugh.

  "Fuck you," she says, only cursing her subconscious self, and stands, wiping wet fingers on her jumpsuit.

  "Where are you going so early, Little Red Riding Hood?"

  "Is that really the best I could come up with?" Nix asks, turning now, because how could she not look behind her, sooner or later. She discovers that there is someone standing there; someone or something. Which word applies could be debated. Or rather, she thinks, there is my delusion of another presence here with me. It's nothing more than that. It's nothing that can actually speak or snap a twig underfoot, excepting in my mind.

  In my terror, I have made a monster.

  "I know you," Nix whispers. The figure standing between her and the hatchway back to Four has Shiloh's kindly hazel-brown eyes, and even though the similarity ends there, about the whole being there is a nagging familiarity.

  "Do you?" it asks. It or she. "Yes, I believe that you do. I believe that you have known me a very, very long while. "Whither so early, Little Red Riding Hood?"

  "I've never seen you."

  "Haven't you? As a child, didn't you once catch me peering in your bedroom window? Didn't you glimpse me lurking in an alley? Didn't you visit me at the bio that day? Don't I live beneath your daughter's bed and in your dreams?"

  Nix reaches into her left hip pouch for the antipsychotics there. She takes a single step backwards, and her boot comes down in the warm, stagnant pool, sinking in up to the ankle. The splash seems very loud, louder even than the atonal symphony of dragonflies buzzing in her ears. She wants to look away from the someone or something she only imagines there before her, a creature more canine than human, an abomination that might have been created in an illicit sub rosa recombinant-outcross lab back on Earth. A commission for a wealthy collector, for a private menagerie of designer freaks. Were the creature real. Which it isn't.

  Nix tries to open the Mylar med packet, but it slips through her fingers and vanishes in the underbrush. The thing licks its muzzle with a mottled blue-black tongue, and Shiloh's eyes sparkle from its face.

  "Are you going across the stones or the thorns?" it asks.

  "Excuse me?" Nix croaks, her throat parched, her mouth gone cottony. Why did I answer it. Why am I speaking with it at all?

  It scowls.

  "Don't play dumb, Nix."

  It knows my name.

  It only knows my name because I know my name.

  "Which path are you taking? The one of needles or the one of pins?"

  "I couldn't reach the crawls," she hears herself say, as though the words are reaching her ears from a great distance. "I tried, but the ladder was broken."

  "Then you are on the Road of Needles," the creature replies, curling back its dark lips in a parody of a smile and revealing far too many sharp yellow teeth. "You surprise me, Petit Chaperon Rouge. I am so rarely ever surprised."

  Enough…

  My ship is dying all around me, and that's enough, I will not fucking see this. I will not waste my time conversing with my id.

  Nix Severn turns away, turning much too quickly and much too carelessly, almost falling face first into the pool. It no longer matters to her how deep the water might be or what might be lurking below the surface. She stumbles ahead, sending out sprays of the tea-colored water with every step she takes. They sparkle like gems beneath the artificial sun. The mud sucks at her feet, and soon she's in up to her chest. But even drowning would be better, she assures herself. Even drowning would be better.

  5.

  Nix has been at Shackleton Relay for almost a week, and it will be almost another week before a
shuttle ferries her to the CTV Blackbird, waiting in dockside orbit. The cafeteria lights are too bright, like almost everything else in the station, but at least the food is decent. That's a popular myth among the techs and co-op officers who never actually spend time at Shackleton, that the food is all but inedible. Truthfully, it's better than most of what she got growing up. She listens while another EOT sitter talks, and she pokes at her bowl of udon, snow peas, and tofu with a pair of blue plastic chopsticks.

  "I prefer straight up freight runs," Marshall Choudhury says around a mouthful of noodles. "But terras, they're not as hinky as some of the caps make them out to be. You get redundant safeguards out the anus."

  "Far as I'm concerned," she replies, "cargo is cargo. Jaunts are jaunts."

  Marshall sets down his own bowl, lays his chopsticks on the counter beside it.

  "Right," he says. "You'll get no kinda donnybrook here. None at all. Just my pref, that's it. Less hassle hauling hardware and whatnot, less coddling the payload. More free for home-away."

  Nix shrugs and chews a pea pod, swallows, and tells him, "Fella, here on my end, the chips are chips, however I may earn them. I'm just happy to have the work. Those with families can be choosers."

  "Speaking of which…" Marshall says, then trails off.

  "That your concern now, Choudhury, my personal life?"

  "Just one fella's consideration for a comrade's, all."

  "Well, as you've asked, Shiloh is still nagging me about hooking something in the yards." She sets her bowl down and stares at the broth in the bottom. "Like she didn't know when I married her, like she didn't know before Maia, that I was EOT and had no intent or interest in ever working anything other than offworld."

  "Lost a wife over it," he says, as if Nix doesn't know already. "She gave me the final notice and all, right, but fuck it. Fuck it. She doesn't know the void, does she? Couldn't know what she was asking a runner to give up. Gets wiggled into a fella's blood, don't ever get out again."

  Marshall has an ugly scar across the left side of his face, courtesy a coolant blowout a few years back and the ensuing frostbite. Nix tries to look at him without letting her eyes linger on the scar, but that's always a challenge. A wonder he didn't lose that eye. He would have, if his goggles had cracked.

  "Don't know if that's the why with me," she says. "Can't say. Obviously, I do miss them when I'm out. Sometimes, miss 'em like hell."

  "But that doesn't stop you flying, doesn't turn you to the yards."

  "Sometimes, fuck, I wish it would."

  "She gonna walk?" he asks.

  "I try not to think about that, and I especially try not to think about that just before outbound. Jesus, fella."

  Marshall picks up his bowl and chopsticks, then fishes for a morsel of tofu.

  "One day not too far, the cooperatives gonna replace us with autos," he sighs, and pops the white cube into his mouth. "So, gotta judge our sacrifices against the raw inevitabilities."

  "Union scare talk," Nix scoffs, though she knows he's probably right. Too many ways to save expenses by completely, finally, eliminating a human crew. A wonder it hasn't happened before now, she thinks.

  "Maybe you ought consider cutting your losses, that's all."

  "Choudhury, you only just now told me how much choice we don't have, once the life digs in and it's all we know. Make up your damn mind."

  "You gonna finish that?" he asks and points at her bowl.

  She shakes her head and slides it across the counter to him. Thinking about Maia and Shiloh, her appetite has evaporated.

  "Anyway, point is, no need to fret on a terra run, no more than anything else."

  "Never said I was fretting. It's not even my first."

  "No, but that was not my point, fella," Marshall slurps at the broth left in the bottom of her white bowl, which is the same unrelenting white as the counter, their seats, the ceiling and walls, the lighting. When he's done, he wipes his mouth on a sleeve and says, "Maybe it's best EOTs stay lone. Avoid the entire mess, start to finish."

  She frowns and jabs a chopstick at him. "Isn't it rough enough already without coming back from the black and lonely without anyone waiting to greet us?"

  "There are other comforts," he says.

  "No wonder she left you, you indifferent fuck."

  Marshall massages his temples, then changes the subject. For all his faults, he's pretty good at sensing thin ice beneath his feet. "It's your first time to the Kasei though, that's true, yeah?"

  "That's true, yeah."

  "You can and will and no doubt already have done worse than the Kasei 'tats."

  "I hear good things," she says, but her mind's elsewhere, and she's hoping Marshall grows tired of talking soon so she can get back to her quarters and pop a few pinks for six or seven hour's worth of sleep.

  "Down on the north end of Cattarinetta Boulevard – in Scarlet Quad – there's a brothel. Probably the best on the whole rock. I happen to know the proprietress."

  Nix isn't so much an angel she's above the consolation of whores when away from Shiloh. All those months pile up. The months between docks, the interminable Phobos reroutes, the weeks of red dust and colonist hardscrabble.

  "Her name's Paddy," he continues, "and you just tell her you're a high fella to Marshall Mason Choudhury, and she'll see you're treated extra right. Not those half-starved farm girls. She'll set you up with the pinnacle merch."

  "That's kind of you," and she stands. "I'll do that."

  "Not a trouble," he says and waves a hand dismissively. "And look, as I said, don't you fret over the cargo. Terra's no different than aluminum and pharmaceuticals."

  "It's not my first goddamn terra run. How many times I have to –"

  But she's thinking, Then why the extra seven-percent hazard commission, if terras are the same as all the rest? Nix would never ask such a question aloud, anymore than she can avoid asking it of herself.

  "Your Oma, she'll –"

  "Fella, I'll see you later," she says, and walks quickly towards the cafeteria door before he can get another word or ten out. Sometimes, she'd lay good money that the solitudes are beginning to gnaw at the man's sanity. That sort of shit happens all too often. The glare in the corridor leading back to the housing module isn't quite as bright as the lights in the cafeteria, so at least she has that much to be grateful for.

  6.

  Muddy, sweatsoaked, insect-bitten and insect-stung, eyes and lungs and nostrils smarting from the hundreds of millions of gametophytes she breathed during her arduous passage through each infested isotainer, arms and legs weak, stomach rolling, breathless, Nix Severn has finally arrived at the bottom of the deep shaft leading down to Oma's dormant CPU. The bzou has kept up with her the entire, torturous way. Though she didn't realize that it was a bzou until halfway through the second 'tainer. Sentient viruses are so rare that the odds of Oma's crash having triggered the creation of (or been triggered by) a bzou has a probability risk approaching zero, at most a negligent threat to any transport. But here it is, and the hallucination isn't an hallucination.

  An hour ago, she finally had the presence of mind to scan the thing, and it bears the distinctive signatures, the unmistakable byte sequence of a cavity-stealth strategy.

  "A good quarter of an hour's walk further in the forest, under yon three large oaks. There stands her house. Further beneath are the nut trees, which you will see there," it said when the scan was done. "Red Hood! Just look! There are such pretty flowers here! Why don't you look round at them all? Methinks you don't even hear how delightfully the birds are singing! You are as dull as if you were going to school, and yet it is so cheerful in the forest!"

  Oma knows Nix's psych profile, which means the bzou knows Nix's psyche.

  Nix pushes back the jumpsuit's quilted hood and visor again – she'd had to lower it to help protect against a minor helium leak near the shaft's rim – and tries to concentrate and figure out precisely what's gone wrong. Oma is quiet, dark, dead. The holo is off, so she
'll have to rely on her knowledge of the manual interface, the toggles and pressure pads, horizontal and vertical sliders, spinners, dials, knife switches… all without access to Oma's guidance. She's been trained for this, yes, but AI diagnostics and repair has never been her strong suit.

  The bzou is crouched near her, Shiloh's stolen eyes tracking her every move.

  "Who's there?" it asks.

  "I'm done with you," Nix mutters, and begins tripping the instruments that ought to initiate a hard reboot. "Fifteen more minutes, you'll be wiped. For all I know, this was sabotage."

  "Who's there, skycap?" the bzou says again.

  Nix pulls down on one of the knife switches, and nothing happens.

  "Push on the door," advises the bzou. "It's blocked by a pail of water."

  Nix pulls the next switch, a multi-boot resort – she's being stupid, so tired and rattled that she's skipping stages – which should rouse the unresponsive Oma when almost all else fails. The core doesn't reply. Here are her worst fears beginning to play themselves out. Maybe it was a full-on panic, a crash that will require triple-caste post-mortem debugging to reverse, which means dry dock, which would mean she is utterly fucking fucked. No way in hell she can hand pilot the Blackbird back onto the rails, and this far off course an eject would only mean slow suffocation or hypothermia or starvation.

  Nix takes a tiny turnscrew from the kit strapped to her rebreather (which she hasn't needed to use, and it's been nothing but dead weight she hasn't dared abandon, just in case). She takes a deep breath, winds the driver to a 2.4 mm. mortorq bit, and keeps her eyes on the panel.

  "Alright," she says. "Let's assume you have a retract sequence, that you're a benign propagation."

  "Only press the latch," it says. "I am so weak, I can't get out of bed."

  "Fine. Grandmother, I've come such a very long way to visit you." Nix imagines herself reading aloud to Maia, imagines Maia's rapt attention and Shiloh in the doorway.

  "Shut the door well, my little lamb. Put your basket on the table, and then take off your frock and come and lie down by me. You shall rest a little."