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

by Jonathan Strahan

  Oudeman was a repair base for Third Skyfleet. We walked in the shadow of hovering skymasters. Engineers in repair rigs swarmed over hulls, lowered engines on hoists, opened hull sections, deflated gas cells. It was clear to me that the fleet had suffered grievously in recent and grim battle. Skins were gashed open to the very bones; holes stabbed through the rounded hulls from side to side. Engine pylons terminated in melted drips. Entire crew gondolas and gun turrets had been torn away. Some had been so terribly mauled they were air-going skeletons; a few lift cells wrapped around naked ship spine.

  Of the crews who had fought through such ruin, there was no sign.

  The base commander, Yuzbashi Osman, greeted us personally. He was a great fan, a great fan. A dedicated life-long fan. He had seen the Maestro in his every Istanbul concert. He always sat in the same seat. He had all the Maestro's recordings. He played them daily and had tried to educate his junior officers over mess dinners but the rising generation were ignorant, low men; technically competent but little better than the Devshirmey conscripts. A clap of his hands summoned batmen to carry our luggage. I understood only rudiments of his language but from his reaction to the engineers who had dropped my piano, I understood that further disrespect would not be tolerated. He cleared the camp steambath for our exclusive use. Sweated, steamed and scraped clean, a glowing Count Jack bowled into the mess tent as if he were striding on to the stage of La Scala. He was funny, he was witty, he was charming, he was glorious. Most of the junior Onbashis and Mulazims at the dinner in his honour could not speak English but his charisma transcended all language. They smiled and laughed readily.

  "Would you look at that?" Count Jack said in the backstage tent that was our dressing room. He held up a bottle of champagne, dripping from the ice bucket. "Krug. They got me my Krug. Oh the dear, lovely boys."

  At the dinner I had noted the paucity of some of the offerings and marvelled at the effort it must have taken, what personal dedication by the Yuzbashi, to fulfil a rider that was only there to check the contract had been read. Count Jack slid the bottle back into the melting ice. "I shall return to you later, beautiful thing, with my heart full of song and my feet light on the applause of my audience. I am a star, Faisal. I am a true star. Leave me, dear boy."

  Count Jack required time and space alone to prepare his entrance. This was the time he changed from Count James Fitzgerald to the Country Count from Kildare. It was a deeply private transformation and one I knew I would never be permitted to watch. The stage was a temporary rig bolted together from Skymaster spares. The hovering ships lit the stage with their search-lights. A follow-spot tracked me to the piano. I bowed, acknowledged the applause of the audience, flicked out the tails of my evening coat and sat down. That is all an accompanist need do.

  I played a few glissandi to check the piano was still functioning after its disrespectful handling by the dock crew. Passable, to the tin ears of Sky Fleet engineers. Then I played the short overture to create that allimportant sense of expectation in the audience and went straight into the music for Count Jack's entrance. The spotlight picked him up as he swept on to the stage, I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen bursting from his broad chest. He was radiant. He commanded every eye. The silence in the deep Martian night was the most profound I think I have ever heard. He strode to the front of the stage. The spotlight adored him. He luxuriated in the applause as if it were the end of the concert, not the first number. He was a shameless showman. I lifted my hands to the keyboard to introduce Turna a Surriento.

  And the night exploded into towering blossoms of flame. For an instant the audience sat transfixed, as if Count Jack stood had somehow summoned the most astonishing of operatic effects. Then the alarms blared out all across the camp. Count Jack and I both saw clearly the spider-shapes of War Tripods, tall as trees, wading through the flames. Heat rays flashed out, white swords, as the audience scattered to take up posts and weapons. Still Count Jack held the spotlight, until an Onbashi leaped up, tackled him and knocked him out of the firing-line just as a heat ray cut a ten thousand degree arc across the stage. He had no English, he needed no English. We ran. I glanced back once. I knew what I would see, but I had to see it: my piano, that same cheap, sturdy hire upright piano that I had shipped across one hundred million miles of space, through the concert halls and grand opera houses, on dusty roads and railways, down calm green canals: my piano explode in a fountain of blazing hammers and whipping, melting wires. A War Tripod strode over us, its heat rays arms swivelling, seeking new targets. I looked up into the weaving thicket of tentacles beneath the hull, then the raised steel hoof passed over me and came down squarely and finally on our dressing room tent.

  "My Krug!" Count Jack cried out.

  A heat ray cut a glowing arc of lava across the ground before me. I was lucky – you cannot dodge these things or see them coming, hear their ricochets or guess their approach. They are light itself. All you can be is moving in the right direction, have the right momentum: be lucky. Our Onbashi was not lucky. He ran into the heat ray and vanished into a puff of ash. A death so fast, so total it became something more than death. It was annihilation.

  "Maestro! With me!"

  Count Jack had been standing, staring, transfixed. I took his hand, his palm still damp with concert sweat, and skirted around the end of the still-smoking scar. We ducked, we ran at a crouch, we zigzagged in our tails and dickie bows. There was no good reason for it. We had seen it in war movies. The Uliri war machines strode across the camp, slashing glowing lava tracks across it with their heat rays, their weapon-arms seeking out fresh targets. But our soldiers had reached their defensive positions, and were fighting back, turning the Uliri's own weapon against them, and bolstering it with a veritable hail of ordnance. The troopers who had manned our spotlights now turned to the heat-rays. Skymasters were casting off, their turret gunners seeking out the many-eyed heads of the Uliri tripods. The war machine that had so hideously killed the brave Onbashi stood in the river, eye-blisters turning this way, that way, seeking targets. A weapon-arm fixed on us. The aperture of the heat ray opened. Hesitated. Pulled away. Grasping cables uncoiled from between the legs. We scuttled for cover behind a stack of barrels – not that they would have saved us. Then a missile cut a streak of red across the night. The war machine's front left knee-joint exploded. The machine wavered for balance on two, then a skymaster cut low across the canal bank and severed the front right off at the thigh with a searing slash of a heat ray. The monster wavered, toppled, came down in a blast and crash and wave of spray, right on top of the boat that would have carried us to safety. Smashed to flinders. Escape hatches opened; pale shapes wriggled free, squirmed down the hull towards land. I pushed Count Jack to the ground as the skymaster opened up. Bullets screamed around us. Count Jack's eyes were wide with fear, and something else, something I had not imagined in the man: excitement. War might be brutal and ghastly and ugly, as he had declaimed on the Empress of Mars, but there was a terrible, primal power in it. I saw the same thrill, the same joy, the same power that had commanded audiences from Tipperary to Timbuktoo. I saw it and I knew that, if we ever returned to Earth and England, I would ever be the accompanist, the amanuensis, the dear boy; and that even if he sang to an empty hall, Count James Fitzgerald would always be the Maestro, Sopratutto. All there was in me was fear; solid fear. Perhaps that is why I was brave. The guns fell silent. I looked over the top of the barrels. Silvery Uliri bodies were strewn across the dock. I saw the canal run with purple blood like paint in water.

  The skymaster turned and came in over the canal to a low hover. A boarding ramp lowered and touched the ground. A skyman crouched at the top of the ramp, beckoning urgently.

  "Run Maestro, run!" I shouted and dragged Count Jack to his feet. We ran. Around us heat rays danced and stabbed like some dark tango. A blazing war machine stumbled blindly, crushing tents, bivouacs, repair sheds beneath its feet, shedding sheets of flame. Ten steps from the foot of the ramp, I heard a noise that turned
me to ice: a great ululating cry from the hills behind the camp, ringing from horizon to horizon, back and forth, wash and backwash, a breaking wave of sound. I had never heard it but I had heard of it, the war-song of the Uliri padva infantry. A hand seized mine: the skyman dragged me and Count Jack like a human chain into the troop hold. As the ramp closed, I saw the skyline bubble and flow, like a silver sheen of oil, down the hillside towards us. Padvas. Thousands of them. As the skymaster lifted and the hull sealed the last, the very last sight I had was Yuzbashi Osman looking up at us. He raised a hand in salute. Then he turned, drew his sword and with a cry that pierced even the engine drone of the skymaster, every janissary of Oudeman Camp drew his blade. Swordpoints glittered, then they charged. The skymaster spun in the air, I saw no more.

  "Did you see that?" Count Jack said to me. He gripped my shoulders. His face was pale with shock but there was a mad strength in his fingers. "Did you? How horrible, how horrible. And yet, how wonderful! Oh, the mystery, Faisal, the mystery!" Tears ran down his ash-smudged face.

  We fled through the labyrinth of the night. We had no doubt that we were being pursued through those narrow, twining canyons. The skycaptain's pinger picked up fleeting, suggestive contacts of what we had all heard: terrible cries, echoes of echoes in the stone redoubts of Noctis, far away but always, always keeping pace with us. The main hold of the skymaster was windowless and though the skycaptain spoke no English, he had made it most clear to us that we were to keep away from his crew, whether they were in engineering, the gun blisters or the bridge and navigation pods. So we sat on the hard steel mesh of the dimly lit cargo hold, ostensibly telling old musician stories we had told many times before, pausing every time our indiscriminate ears brought us some report of the war outside. Hearing is a much more primal sense than vision. To see is to understand. To hear is to apprehend. Eyes can be closed. Ears are ever open. Maestro broke off the oft-told story of singing for the Pope, and how thin the towels were, and what cheap bastards the Holy See had turned out to be. His ears, as I have said, were almost supernaturally keen. His eyes went wide. The Twav battledores on their perches in the skymarine roosts riffled their scales, shining like oil on water, and shifted their grips on their weaponry. A split second later, I heard the cries. Stuttering and rhythmic, they rose over three octaves from a bass drone to a soprano, nerve shredding yammer. Two behind us, striking chords and harmonics from each other like some experimental piece of serialist music. Another answered, ahead of us. And another, far away, muted by the wind-sculpted rock labyrinth. A fifth, close, to our right. Back and forth, call and response. I clapped my hands over my ears, not from the pain of the shrill upper registers, but at the hideous musicality of these unseen voices. They sang scales and harmonies alien to me, but their music called the musician in me.

  And they were gone. Every nerve on the skymaster, human and Twav, was afire. The silence was immense. My Turkic is functional but necessary – enough to know what Ferid Bey is actually saying – and I recalled the few words of the skycaptain I had overheard as he relayed communications to the crew. The assault on Camp Oudeman had been part of a surprise offensive by the Tharsian Warqueens. Massive assaults had broken out along a five hundred mile front from Arsai to Urania. War machines, shock troops – there had even been an assault on Spacefleet: squadron after squadron of rockets launched to draw the staggering firepower of our orbital battleships from the assault below. And up from out of the soil, things like no one had seen before. Things that put whole battalions to flight, that smashed apart trench lines and crumbled redoubts to sand. As I tried to imagine the red earth parting and something from beyond nightmares rising up, I could not elude the dark thought: might there not be similar terrible novelties in the sky? This part of my eavesdropping I kept to myself. It was most simple: I had been routinely lying to Count Jack since the first day I set up my music on the piano.

  "I could murder a drink," Count Jack said. "If there were such a thing on this barquadero. Even a waft of a Jameson's cork under my nose."

  The wine on the deck of the Empress of Mars must have corrupted me, because at that moment I would gladly have joined the Maestro. More than joined, I would have beaten him by a furlong to the bottom of the bottle of Jameson's.

  Up on the bridge, a glass finger projecting from the skymaster's lifting body, the skycaptain called orders from his post at the steering yoke. Crew moved around us. The battledores shifted the hue of their plumage from blue to violent yellow. I felt the decking shift beneath me – how disorienting, how unpleasant, this sense of everything sound and trustworthy moving, nothing to hold on to. The engines were loud; the captain must be putting on speed, navigating between the wind-polished stone. We were flying through a monstrous stone pipe organ. I glanced up along the companionway to the bridge. Pink suffused the world beyond the glass. We had run all night through the Labyrinth of Night; that chartless maze of canyons and ravines and rock arches that humans suspected was not entirely natural. I saw rock walls above me. We were low, hugging the silted channels and canals. The rising sun sent planes of light down the sheer fluted stone walls. There is nothing on Earth to compare with the loveliness of dawn on Mars, but how I wish I were there and not in this dreadful place.

  "Faisal."

  "Maestro."

  "When we get back, remind me to fire that greased turd Ferid."

  I smiled, and Count Jack Fitzgerald began to sing. Galway Bay, the most hackneyed and sentimental of faux-Irish paddywhackery ('Have you ever been to Galway Bay? Incest and Gaelic games. All they know, all the like') but I had never heard him sing it like this. Had he not been seated on the deck before me, leaning up against a bulkhead, I would have doubted that it was his voice. It was small but resonant, perfect like porcelain, sweet as a rose and filled with a high, light innocence. This was the voice of childhood; the boy singing back the tunes his grandmother taught him. This was the Country Count from Kildare. Every soul on the skymaster, Terrene and Martian, listened, but he did not sing for them. He needed no audience, no accompanist: this was a command performance for one.

  The skymaster shook to a sustained impact. The spell was broken. Voices called out in Turkic and Twav flute-speech. The skymaster rocked, as if shaken in a god-like grip. Then with a shriek of rending metal and ship-skin, the gun-blister directly above us was torn away; gunner, gun and a two metre shard of hull. A face looked in at us. A face that more than filled the gash in the hull; a nightmare of six eyes arranged around a trifurcate beak. The beak opened. Rows of grinding teeth moved within. A cry blasted us with alien stench: ululating over three octaves, ending in a shriek. It drove the breath from our lungs and the will from our hearts. Another answered it, from all around us. Then the face was gone. A moment of shock – a moment, that was all – and the skycaptain shouted orders. The Twav rose from their perches, wings clattering, and streamed through the hole in the hull. I heard the whine of ray-rifles warming up, and then the louder crackle and sizzle of our own defensive heat rays.

  I thought I would never hear a worse thing than the cry through the violated hull. The shriek, out there, unseen, was like the cry I might make if my spine were torn from my living body. I could only guess: one of those things had met a heat ray.

  We never saw any of the battledores again.

  Again, the skymaster shook to an impact. Count Jack lunged forward as claws stabbed through the hull and tore three rips the entire length of the bulkhead. The skymaster lurched to one side; we slid across the decking in our tail-coats and smoke-smudged dickie shirts. An impact jolted the rear of the air ship, I glimpsed blackness and then the entire tail turret was gone and the rear of the skymaster was open to the air. Through the open space I saw a four-winged flying thing stroke away from us, up through the pink stone arches of this endless labyrinth. It was enormous. I am no judge of comparative dimensions – I am an auditory man, not a visual one – but it was on a par with our own limping skymaster. The creature part-furled its wings to clear the arch, then tur
ned high against the red sky and I saw glitters of silver at the nape of its neck and between its legs. Mechanisms, devices, Uliri crew.

  While I gaped at the sheer impossible horror of what I beheld, the skymaster was struck again, an impact so hard it flung us from one side of the hold to the other. I saw steel-shod claws the size of scimitars pierce the glass finger of the bridge like the skin of a ripe orange. The winged Martian horror ripped bridge from hull and with a flick of its foot – it held the bridge as lightly and easily as a pencil – hurled it spinning through the air. I saw one figure fall from it and closed my eyes. I did hear Count Jack mumble the incantations of his faith.

  Robbed of control, the skymaster yawed wildly. Engineering crew rushed around us, shouting tersely to each other, fighting to regain control, to bring us down in some survivable landing. There was no hope of escape now. What were those things? Those nightmare hunters of the Labyrinth of Night? Skin shredded, struts shrieked and buckled as the skymaster grazed a rock chimney. We listed and started to spin.

  "We've lost port-side engines!" I shouted, translating the engineers' increasingly cold and desperate exchanges. We were going down but it was too fast... too fast. The chief engineer yelled an order that translated as brace for impact in any language. I wrapped cargo strapping around my arms, and gripped for all my worth. Pianists have strong fingers.

  "Patrick and Mary!" Count Jack cried and then we hit. The impact was so huge, so hard it drove all breath and intelligence and thought from me, everything except that death was certain and that the last, the very last thing I would ever see would be a drop of fear-drool on the plump bottom lip of Count Jack Fitzgerald, and that I had never noticed how full, how kissable, those lips were. Death is such a sweet surrender.