The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  On the central screen, the two sunfish slowly revolved on the blood-black swell. On the screens to the left and right, a wider view showed other sunfish pairs ponderously locking together, and surviving soldiers spending their fury on each other or on ripping apart smaller, unsuccessful sunfish.

  Katya asked Arkadi Sarantsev to take his machine higher, was watching intently as it circled the entire area, trying to make sure she captured a good image of every pairing, when the ekranoplan’s turbofans started up with a shuddering roar. A few moments later a seaman leaned into the hatch of the little room and told Arkadi to bring in his drone.

  “Captain Chernov’s orders,” he said when Katya protested, and couldn’t or wouldn’t answer her questions.

  She pushed past, hauled herself along the pitching companionway, and climbed to the teardrop cockpit that, with its pale wood and polished brass trim, the diffuse overcast of the cloudroof gleaming through its canopy, always reminded her of the luncheon room of the Engineers’ Union where her mother, the architect I.V. Ignatova, took her every birthday for a ritual meal of beefsteak and cultivated wild mushrooms. The pilot and navigator were hunched in their horseshoe of switches and dials and computer screens; Captain Vladimir Chernov was enthroned behind them, sipping from a glass of black tea; all three wore bulky headsets. The ekranoplan had made a cumbersome turn away from the sargasso, and now the pilot gripped the throttle levers by his thigh and eased them forward. The roar of the big turbofans, mounted on canards behind the cockpit, ramped up as the ekranoplan began to accelerate.

  Katya grabbed a spare headset to muffle the incredible noise and braced herself in the hatchway during the shuddering lurch of takeoff. She had learned the hard way that she could not speak to the captain in the cockpit until he acknowledged her, and he didn’t acknowledge her until the ekranoplan was under way.

  An adaptation of the famous curable-maket, the Caspian Sea Monster, it resembled a gigantic aeroplane but was really a wing-in-ground-effect machine that rode on the cushion of air generated by its turbofans and square, stubby wings: a long-range, lightly armed beast capable of speeds of up to three hundred knots. It was making top speed now, skimming some five metres above long rolling waves, skimming over breakers frothing across sea-lily reefs. On its way to investigate an emergency at the People’s Republic’s most northerly outpost, Makarov Mining Station, according to Captain Chernov.

  “I am sorry about the abbreviation of your studies,” he told Katya, “but the station sent a disturbing message two days ago and has not responded since. Although we are not the nearest vessel, we can reach it before anyone else.”

  He did not look at all sorry: he appeared to be enjoying himself. A burly, broad-shouldered, bullet-headed man dressed in the Navy’s tropical uniform—blue shorts and a blue short-sleeved jacket over a striped telnyashka shirt—whose cool condescension reminded Katya of the sadistic anatomy lecturer who liked to pluck a student from the ranks and hand her a random bone and demand that she name it and identify the animal it came from.

  Captain Chernov was scrupulously polite to Katya, but did not bother to hide his scorn for her work, and the collaboration with the Americans and their British allies. He was a war hero who, during the campaign against American libertarian pirates ten years ago, had devised and carried out a daring, spur-of-the-moment raid that had ended with the capture of a particularly bloodthirsty warlord. Popular acclaim meant that the Navy couldn’t cashier him for disregarding the chain of command, so he had been given a medal and promoted sideways to the Survey Corps, where he’d been chafing ever since.

  When Katya asked him what kind of problem he was responding to, he studied her with remote amusement, then said, “It is something you might find interesting, if true. The miners claimed that they were being attacked by monsters.”

  “Monsters? What kind of monsters?”

  “Most likely the American kind,” Captain Chernov said. As usual, he was speaking to a spot somewhere behind her left shoulder, as if addressing the ghost of an authority she herself did not possess. “If there really are monsters, if this is not some Yankee trick, you may be of some help. Until then, do your best to stay out of the way. My men must prepare for trouble.”

  * * *

  The ekranoplan made the two thousand kilometre trip in just under five hours. Katya studied the images captured by the drone, sorted them into categories, and made a few preliminary measurements. She ate a sparse lunch alone in the long tube of the mess room (which could double as a field hospital if the need arose), composing a bitter complaint to the IBY committee, the Marine Biology Institute, and the Ministry of Defence which she knew she would never send. Pick your battles carefully and fight them only in your head, her mother liked to say. No one remembers the righteous who go to war and lose.

  The vibration of the turbofans created standing rings in her tumbler of water.

  She wondered about the monsters which had supposedly attacked the miners at Makarov Station. The shallow seas of Venus teemed with an extravagance of macrofauna—sunfish, cornet squid, mock turtles, and so on—but only a few large animal species had been discovered on the northern continent settled by the Americans, and the thousands of islands and sea mounts and atolls of the southern hemisphere. So finding a species of carnivore capable of killing a man would be a considerable coup. A swarm of pack-hunting reptiloids. Some kind of super crocodilian. Or perhaps, just perhaps, something as rare and strange as a tiger or a wolf.

  She went back to work, counting sunfish, measuring them, tracking the paths of individuals … Trying to squeeze as much data as possible from the truncated observations. At some point, she noticed that the deep drone of the turbofans had diminished to a gentle throbbing. The ekranoplan was afloat again, driven by its auxiliary engine as it nosed through dense billows of fog. Captain Chernov was outside, on the little railed observation deck behind the cockpit, with the chief petty officer. The two men wore pistols on their hips, and were watching the long shadow of a shoreline resolve out of the fog: the shore of the mysterious equatorial continent.

  Two billion years ago, the last great resurfacing era, vast quantities of molten rock from Venus’s mantle had risen to the surface through long vertical cracks in the crust. Injections of lava and differential crystallisation of minerals had formed an enormous geological basin with distinct layered strata, including reefs of titaniferous magnetite gabbro, and vast quantities of tin and iron. The basin had tilted and eroded and half-drowned, leaving only one edge exposed, a long, narrow continent that wrapped around half of Venus’s equator. Most of its volcanic ranges and salt flats and deserts were scorching, waterless, and utterly uninhabitable, but a cold sea current rose at its southern coast, feeding banks of fog that grew during the long day and sustained an ecosystem found nowhere else on Venus. The People’s Republic had established several mining stations there, to exploit deposits of titanium and tin ore, copper and silver, platinum and bismuth, and to lay claim to the deserts to the north.

  This was the coast that the ekranoplan was approaching, drowned in fog and mystery.

  An even pearlescent light, streaming with particles and tiny transient rainbows in whichever direction Katya happened to look. The close, clammy heat of a Turkish bath wrapping around her like a wet towel. The puttering of the auxiliary motor and the slap of waves unnaturally loud in the muffled hush. And something echoing in the distance: faint, staccato, persistent.

  “I see no monsters,” Captain Vladimir Chernov said, turning to Katya. “But I definitely hear something. Do you hear it too, Doctor? Could you give your professional opinion?”

  “It sounds like dogs,” Katya said. “Dogs, barking. Do they have dogs?”

  “I don’t believe so. Pigs, yes. To eat their kitchen waste and supply them with fresh pork. They are Ukrainian, the miners here. And all Ukrainians love pork. But if the records are correct there are no dogs.”

  “Well, it sounds more like dogs than pigs. Someone smuggled in their pets, per
haps. Or watchdogs were assigned to this place, and the paperwork was lost or mislaid.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps it is monsters that kill and eat men, and bark like dogs,” Captain Chernov said. A fat pair of binoculars hung from his neck, a symbol of his status, perhaps: they were of no practical use in the fog.

  “It would be something new to science,” Katya said, refusing to rise to his bait.

  “Science does not yet know everything,” Captain Chernov said. “Isn’t that why you were studying the sunfish, Doctor? Not just to be friends with the Americans, but because you wished to learn something. We are at the edge of an unexplored continent. Perhaps you will learn something here.”

  “Or perhaps they really are dogs. American running dogs,” the chief petty officer said.

  He was a stocky, grizzled fellow with a scornful gaze who had even less time for Katya than Captain Chernov. But at least they were direct about their dislike, unlike the chauvinist fossils at the Marine Biology Institute, and it had nothing to do with her being a woman—a woman who asserted her own opinions, and refused to recognise her inferiority. No, they resented her presence because the IBY had many enemies in the government, and if its unstable mixture of science and peacenik appeasement blew up, the fallout would contaminate everyone associated with it. Which was why, of course, Katya had been assigned to the sunfish project by her bosses, and why she wanted to make a success of it.

  “Dogs, pigs, monsters: we will find out. And we must do it soon,” Captain Chernov told Katya, for once addressing her directly. The ice-age of his contempt had somewhat thawed. He was relaxed, almost cheerful. This was Navy work: he was no longer answerable to Katya and the IBY. “If the Americans are not already here, hiding from us or lying in wait, they will be here soon. They claim to have intercepted the distress call. They claim to want to help. There is no airstrip here. The terrain is rough. Too many steep hills and ridges. So everything comes in and goes out by sea. One of our frigates will be here in three days, but one of the American so-called research ships will be here tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Makarov Station, strung along the edge of a natural harbour sheltered by a sandbar, was entirely obscured by the fog: it wasn’t possible to survey it and the surrounding area with drones or lidar. Infrared imaging showed that the buildings, usually air-conditioned, were at ambient temperature. Apart from a man-sized trace perched on a dockside crane there was no sign of the twenty-six people who lived and worked there, or of the monsters which supposedly had attacked them.

  The ekranoplan dropped anchor, sounded its siren, sent up a flare that burst in a dim red star high in the fog. There was no answer from the shore, no response on the radio, no reply when the chief petty officer called to the miners through a loudhailer, and no one was waiting at the edge of the long quayside as the landing party motored towards a floating stage in a big inflatable.

  Captain Chernov sprang onto the stage and galloped up the steps, pistol drawn, followed by the chief petty officer, the drone pilot Arkadi Sarantsev, and seven seamen—most of the ekranoplan’s crew. Katya followed, her heart hammering in anticipation. When she reached the top of the stairs, sweating in the damp heat, the men had already spread out in a semicircle, menacing fog with their pistols and carbines. The skeletal outline of a crane, heaps of dark ore, the outlines of a string of small, flat-roofed buildings and a tall radio mast faintly visible beyond. The persistent barking in the distance, tireless as a machine.

  Captain Chernov paid no attention to it. He was standing with his hands on his hips, looking up at the crane’s scaffold stem. The jut of its long jib was veiled in misty streamers, but it was just possible to make out the shadow of a man at its end. He did not respond when Captain Chernov ordered him to come down and he did not respond when the chief petty officer put a bullet into the steel plating a metre behind his feet. The sound of the shot whanged off across the muffled, fog-bound quay.

  Captain Chernov cupped his hands to his mouth. “Next one he puts in your damn leg!”

  No response. They all stood looking up at the man. The monotonous barking had not let up, hack-hack-hacking away deep in the fog.

  “Take another shot,” Captain Chernov told the chief petty officer.

  “I’ll go up there,” Katya said.

  “I distinctly remember telling you to keep out of the way,” Captain Chernov said mildly.

  “I am medically qualified,” Katya said. It was technically true: she had been given basic first-aid training at Young Pioneer camp. “The poor fellow may be hurt or wounded. He may not be able to climb down without help.”

  “He may be an American for all we know,” the chief petty officer said.

  “You can bring him down?” Captain Chernov said.

  “I can assess him, talk to him. Whether he comes down, that will be up to him,” Katya said, with that airy feeling just before a dive, before she toppled over backwards into unknown water. As her mother so often observed, she had a knack of talking herself into trouble.

  “No, whether he comes down will be up to you, Doctor,” Captain Chernov said, turning now, favouring her with his thin cool smile. “Don’t disappoint me.”

  The steel rungs of the ladder, dripping with condensed moisture, slipped under Katya’s fingers as she climbed, slipped under the tread of her boots. When she reached the little glass and metal box of the operator’s cabin, she clung to the handrail and called out, asking the man if he needed help, trying to sound encouraging, friendly. The man did not respond. He lay prone at the far end of the jib, arms wrapped around a steel beam as if around a long-lost lover. There was only ten metres between them, but he did not even turn his head to look at her.

  She swore, and swung up the steel framework to the top of the jib, trying to ignore the dizzying plunge to the ant-like cluster of people below. She called to the man again, asked him to tell her his name, and now he moved, rolling awkwardly to look at her without letting go of the beam. His eyes, sunk deep in dark hollows, seemed to be all pupil.

  “You’re safe now,” Katya said, trying to project a confidence she did not feel. “Come towards me. I’ll help you down.”

  The man’s mouth worked, but no words emerged. He was young, younger than Katya, and wore blue coveralls and heavy workboots.

  “I’ll come to you, then,” Katya said.

  But soon as she started to crab towards him, the jib shivering uneasily beneath her, the man humped backwards, like a demented caterpillar. She stopped, told him that everything was all right, that he was safe, and he closed his eyes and shook his head from side to side. He was crouched at the very end of the jib now, beside the cable wheel.

  Captain Chernov called out, asking why this was taking so long. The man looked down and then looked back at Katya, and slowly rose to his feet, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker, balancing at the edge of the foggy void.

  “Wait!” she said. “Don’t!”

  He did.

  Katya closed her eyes. A moment later there was a hard wet sound and a shout of dismay below.

  When she reached the ground, Captain Chernov said, “Your treatment worked, Doctor, but unfortunately it killed the patient.”

  The son of a bitch must have been working on that quip while he watched her climb down. She said, “He was scared to death.”

  “Of you?”

  “Of his worst nightmare, I think.”

  She was staring at the captain because she did not want to look at the splayed body.

  “The crane is twenty metres high,” the chief petty officer said. “Whatever he was scared of, it must have been very big.”

  “And it’s still here,” Katya said, pointing in the direction of the distant barking that had not, in all this time, let up.

  “You are eager to make a famous discovery. But first we must secure the station,” Captain Chernov said, and detailed two seamen to stay by the boat, told the rest to stick together.

  “Look after the doctor, lads,” the chief petty
officer said. “She isn’t armed, she can’t run as fast as we can, and she’s probably a lot tastier than your salty hides.”

  “There were twenty-six people here,” Katya said. “All men?”

  “Of course,” the chief petty officer said. “They were here to work. They didn’t need distraction.”

  “All men,” Katya said. “And they didn’t do too well, did they?”

  * * *

  They swept through the buildings. Dormitories. A mess hall. Offices. Stores. Two generators purring in a shack constructed from concrete blocks and corrugated iron. An assay lab and a small clinic. A cold store with three bodies wrapped in black plastic sheeting. One had been badly mangled in some accident; the other two looked like suicides—a ligature of electrical cable around the neck, slashed wrists. Five more dead men were sprawled behind one of the dormitory huts, hands bound, chests torn by what appeared to be gunshot wounds, bullet holes in the hut’s plank wall. Another body sprawled at the foot of the radio mast. His neck was broken, and Katya suggested that he had fallen while climbing.

  “Climbing to escape from monsters, like your patient on the crane?” Captain Chernov said. “Or perhaps trying to escape from Americans who shot his friends.”

  “Perhaps they all went stir crazy in this damn fog,” the chief petty officer said. “There was a quarrel. It got out of hand…”

  “Something drove them mad, perhaps,” Captain Chernov said thoughtfully.

  The prefab buildings were empty, although there were signs that people had left with some haste. Plates of food rotting on tables in the mess, papers scattered on the floor of office, a record rotating on a gramophone in one of the dormitory huts, making an eerie scratching click until Captain Chernov lifted the needle. The gun locker was open and empty, but apart from the five men who had been lined up and shot there was no sign of any struggle, no blood spray, no bullet holes anywhere else. And no sign of the sixteen men still unaccounted for.