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

by Gardner Dozois

  He crouched to face her, his sword held above him like a scorpion’s sting. She crept sidewise before him on the tips of her fingers and toes—he concluded that yes, her fingers were surely strong enough to break him if she should lay a hand on him.

  A rock struck her head from behind, bounced away. Close behind the lilith he saw Floribunda, recovering her balance; the rock she had heaved had been the size of a loaf of bread. But the lilith’s head twitched, no more than that, no more than a flinch at the annoyance of being struck by a rock that would have crushed a natural’s skull.

  Mendel knew then that he was likely to die. The two girls would, too, if the lilith had it in her head to bring harm to them. The lilith reared onto her legs a moment, her mouth widened in the now-familiar grave contraction.

  Mendel took his fatal chance and did not dodge. A stream of the venom splashed his chest and runnelled down his breastbone as he leapt at her. But, as he had hoped, aiming her venom took some concentration: one thing she had not expected was that an enemy might leap to embrace her just as she vomited her poison. He too was stronger than he looked: she fell back in his arms, just as the spike of his finger slid into her side, under the ribs.

  He felt himself weakening, his body straining to respond to the acid devouring his skin, the systems going into shock, his heart chattering, his thoughts scrambling in the fog. Yet he retained the presence of mind to know that the lilith had gone weaker still: he could see the tip of his fingerblade sprouting from the other side of her body, the blood draining from her in great sheens down her legs. Her face showed neither panic nor suffering but rather an impregnable calm.

  And then, he could hold her up no longer and she fell back, and he also, a moment later. The sky was purple above him. He heard a rushing sound which might have been the wind, or perhaps a sound coming from within him. The pain hammered.

  A minute later, or perhaps five, perhaps after he was already dead, he heard the two girls breathing above him. He heard the zipper of the little green girl’s pack. Then a trickle of water into his mouth, ambrosia.

  “Pour the water over my skin,” he said. He was overcome with gratitude that Lupe Hansen had sent her daughter with a three liter bottle in her backpack. The water ran cold and excruciating over his pulsing, blistered flesh.

  The two girls crouched in front of him as he lay on his back. They watched silently like two creatures inured to suffering, or so acquainted with it that they did not consider his agony worthy of comment.

  He lay there through the night, his skin howling in the cool of the breeze. When the sky had brightened enough that he could make out their features, the girls still watched him, sleeplessly, the way old women had tended fires for a million years. He could feel the flood of macrophages and growth hormones already released into his tissues; by dawn he was able to hoist the three liter bottle himself, to drain the last milliliters of water into his mouth.

  If he could run unburdened, Handy’s redoubt lay six hours to the west. As it was, he might walk there with the girls in three days if water could be found. He had no compunction now about linking with the satellite—the girls watched him and noticed nothing more than that he closed his eyes for a time. If the maps were accurate, a creek ran sixteen kilometers to the west, near the foothills of the Sierra Madre.

  He logged off, opened his eyes as though he had been sleeping for a few minutes, smiled at the two girls who looked at him like two inscrutable frogs. He pushed himself to his feet and observed the pounding of his head as his humors balanced. Behind the girls the lilith’s corpse lay staring at the Sierra Madre.

  He crouched over her body and drank what blood he could from the wound. There was not much left. If her blood carried radio tags, perhaps no one would catch up with him until he was safe at Handy’s.

  “Now you have to walk with me a long way,” Mendel told the girls, extending a hand to each of them. Floribunda took his right hand, caked with the lilith’s blood. The three of them walked in the direction of the pass, and water.

  Silence Like Diamonds

  JOHN BARNES

  John Barnes has commercially published twenty-eight volumes of fiction, probably twenty-nine by the time you read this, including science fiction, men’s action adventure, two collaborations with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, a collection of short stories and essays, one fantasy, and one mainstream novel. He has done a rather large number of occasionally peculiar things for money, mainly in business consulting, academic teaching, and show business, fields which overlap more than you’d think. Since 2001, he has lived in Denver, Colorado, where he has a wonderful girlfriend, an average income, and a bad attitude, which he feels is actually the best permutation.

  In the fast-paced tale that follows, a high-tech troubleshooter in an intensively wired and hooked-up future learns that it can be dangerous when the troubles start shooting back.…

  The override siren made me spill a lovely, just-drinking-temperature cup of chamomile-peppermint. Amaryllis, Daisy and Mrs. Greypaws all bolted from the balcony and under the bed, wailing.

  My sister Yazzy paid me extra to have that super-powered, never-off phone bell always hanging over my silence. It was worth it except when it went off. I rubbed the tea splashes on my old yoga pants, kicked my slippers off at the French doors and padded inside barefoot. “House, main parlor.”

  The siren doused into muffled plaintive mewing. Paintings, bulletin boards and windows vanished from the interior wall. I dragged my chair over to face it, about a meter away.

  The wall became apparently transparent, seeming to join my morning parlor to my sister’s late afternoon office. She had that smirk, having caught me before I dressed for the day. “Hi, Yip. How’s Arcata?”

  “Same as always. How’s Prague?”

  “Different from Arcata. I talked to the folks on Thursday. They’re still okay?”

  “You know, the usual. Mama robbed a bank; Táta drove the getaway car.”

  She stuck her tongue out at me, just like when we were kids. “All right, and how’re things on the Markus front?”

  “I’m sorry I ever told you about that. I don’t know if I should even try to get his interest. What if he finds out there’s hereditary yenta-ism in my family?”

  Yazzy sighed. “I guess you just want to get right to business, huh?”

  “Well, I do have my itsy-bitsy pottering pleasures to bury myself in.”

  “I’m sorry I ever said that. Does that make us even?”

  “What’s the gig, sis? Who’s the client and what’s the matter?”

  “It’s NameItCorp. I guess you know who they are.”

  I held a thumb high. “Hey, good going.” I was so impressed I didn’t care if she saw. NameItCorp was as ubiquitous nowadays as Google had once been. Type or speak “NItCO” or “NameItCorp” while connected to the Net, add the name of any problem and AI and human operators would rush you a price and a time estimate, or SORRY, NOT POSSIBLE WITH PRESENT TECH, or SORRY, ILLEGAL. “What do they need us for?”

  Yazzy shrugged. “They need you. And they’re smart enough to know it. There are maybe 200 scheme architecture analysts worldwide, and last time Dusan ran 1,000 iterations of an open-ended self-defining search, 1,000 out of 1,000 times, you turned up in the top three.”

  “He’s biased. He’s your husband—”

  “He’s the Zalodny in Zalodny Integrated Security, Yip. When he’s analyzing on the marketing and business side, his feelings get into it about as much as yours do when you’re tracing the money or mine do reading code. You’re our single most salable asset, which is why we do pretty much any ridiculous thing you ask so that we can be the only 4D security firm that has ‘Yi Ingrid Palacek, Yip to her friends, a legend in scheme architecture analysis…’”

  “Ugh. I hate that stupid bio.” It was good that we were talking through the screen-wall; it kept me from throwing vases at her.

  “I love that stupid bio. It’s some of Dusan’s best work. When prospects read it, they want yo
u so bad that they’ll take us to get you.” She was grinning. “Don’t even try to pretend you’re not flattered.”

  “All right, I won’t try to pretend that. For the 10 millionth time, Yazzy, I don’t get off on being told how good I am at scheme architecture analysis. I just need them to know that I’m the best so they won’t be joggling my elbow all the time. You wouldn’t get any value out of a grandmaster who had to take half an hour after each move to explain everything to a high school chess club. Selling me as the best is just the best way to sell the clients on staying out of my way.”

  Mrs. Greypaws leapt into my lap.

  Yazzy smiled. “Lot of tuna in this case, anyway. All right, Yip, I thought you’d like to hear how much we need you. Wrong as always, I guess. But whether you want to hear it or not, we can’t do it without you.”

  “Suit yourself.” I’d spent enough time in my life already trying to tell Yazzy that I didn’t feel what she expected me to feel. “Now, who’s the opposition this time? And what are they doing to NItCo?”

  “The not-yet-identified opposition is like an imitation of the best security company ever, suddenly volunteering to work for NItCo. They’re blocking almost every attempt to penetrate NItCo’s security in all the physical channels: drone hacks, cubesat hacks, smart environment hacks, public crypto, even old-fashioned human voice and video penetration. As soon as anyone taps into NItCo’s communications, the opposition covers it up, blurs out the analyzable part—”

  Joy Sobretu, the familiar NItCo company avatar, appeared, seemingly standing with a foot on each side of the boundary between Arcata and Prague. “You mentioned NItCo and a problem. Do you need help blurring the analyzable—”

  A thunderclap shook my roof. Pressure pulsed through the French doors. Glare flooded through every window.

  “What the hell was that?” Yazzy asked.

  “Identification available: $1,” the NItCO avatar said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Where Sobretu had stood, a 3D animation showed a high-altitude public communications drone over Arcata folding its wings and plunging toward my house, colliding with a local booster drone two meters above my roof ridge. Sobretu’s voice explained, “General Electric Griffon III stratospheric hybrid drone intercepted by ATRizon Roverino pocket drone. Noise and light primarily hydrogen explosion.”

  The graphic vanished into Sobretu. “Offer: send firefighters? Several roof shakes are currently smoldering. Offer: summon your preferred physical protection? Combined fee: $110—”

  “Do it.” I scooped up Mrs. Greypaws, whistled for Daisy and Amaryllis, and moved. “Yazzy, we’ll be back in touch once my roof isn’t on fire.”

  I walked swiftly down the steep, rocky garden that tumbled like a green and flowered waterfall behind the house. Daisy and Amaryllis padded after me; as far as they knew, we only went down here for treats. I carried Mrs. Greypaws, that distractible dawdler, under my arm.

  At the windowless concrete-block tool shed, the solid-core steel door slid silently open, then closed behind us. I set Mrs. Greypaws down on a bag of composted sheep manure.

  “House, activate emergency shelter.” A pallet of potting supplies moved aside. The cats squeezed through the opening trap door, calling back to me the one word that is in every cat’s vocabulary: now. Down the steep stairs, I closed the inner steel door behind me, and opened a can of mackerel, split it into three bowls, and set it down. Instant silence except for soft slurps and grunts of pleasure.

  “House, report.”

  The house system had pushed 30,000 liters of recycled wastewater and captured rain through spouts in the ridge, extinguishing the burning shakes and clearing burning debris.

  “Lightning Fast Fire Company estimated to—”

  A different voice broke in. “Yip, this is Markus Adexa. I just got here. Lightning Fast Fire Company should be here any second; I’ll try to keep them out of your flowerbeds. Please stay in the shelter till I tell you we’re secured.”

  “Thanks, Markus. That was fast.”

  “Yeah. I was coming back from a routine alarm check real close to here.”

  Markus Adexa was the local physical ops specialist, i.e. muscle, we used most often. He was violence-proficient but not violence-prone, and he was nice to everyone, especially clients. Also, I’d been dumb enough to admit to my sister that I kind of liked him, so Yazzy was always looking for a way to throw us together.

  While I read NItCo’s report about the drone collision, the firefighters from Lightning Fast arrived. As soon as Markus was satisfied with their perimeter security, and that they knew enough to stay out of flowerbeds, he came down.

  “Some burning debris landed in the yellowwood and the burr oak on the south side of the house, and some smoke was rising from that bed of soaproot. The house was flooding it with the drip irrigator, but whatever was burning was probably off the ground. I had the firefighters spray all up and down those trees, and a lot of junk fell out. I used your garden hose to spritz that soaproot bed myself, since it wouldn’t be good if they watered it with a fire hose.”

  “My garden thanks you.”

  “It’s gorgeous; I’d hate to see a place like that messed up.” Markus loved gardening like I did. “So what happened?”

  “The opposition dove the Griffon that carried most of Arcata’s traffic toward my roof and collided a Roverino with it.”

  “Explain the Griffon. Little bitty words. I’m just a big lug that beats people up.”

  “Oh, right, fish for compliments.”

  “Roverinos are common as crows around a tech town. I’ve never seen a Griffon.”

  “Normally you wouldn’t. It’s a hydrogen-inflated drone, shaped like an airplane, transparent plastic on top, solar-powered plastic underneath. Maybe five meters long with a twelve-meter wingspan. The Griffon circles around over town, 35,000 meters up. It’s a wireless broadband relay. Normally during the day it stores up power and rises a few kilometers as the sun warms the hydrogen; at night it slowly circles downward. To ascend fast, like when they first go up, they inflate auxiliary bladders. To descend fast, like for a solar flare or a government shutdown, they pack hydrogen back into their tanks and collapse to the size of a desk chair.”

  “Which is what this one did, about ten minutes before it went bang over my house—it sucked its wings and stabilizers back into its body, reformed into a raindrop shape, and was diving at 700 km/hr by the time it arrived. If it had hit the roof, it would have penetrated, its hydrogen tanks would have burst and there’d have been enough explosion and fire to gut the house.

  “But in the last thirty meters, it inflated all its bladders to the max. Air resistance had ripped it into sheets of loose plastic when that little Roverino’s red-hot microjet came blasting through that cloud of hydrogen. So instead of taking the roof off and the walls down, it was just loud enough to give me the mother of all headaches and scare the hell out of me. So not only did they penetrate through what’s supposed to be a high-security backdoor, they did it almost instantly, just to give me a warning shot.”

  “That’s quite a warning. Do we know who’s trying to scare you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How long before it blew up did it start down?”

  I stared at Markus. “No more jokes about being a big dumb lug. That question was brilliant.” I tapped the wall with my finger. “Report on Griffon hijacking here, US letter size.” A rectangle of light appeared. I tapped next to it. “15 cm, Yazzy live.” A smaller squareshowed Yazzy’s face.

  “Yip, I’m so glad you’re OK. Markus, what have—”

  I asked, “What was the exact time when you accepted the deal with NItCO?”

  My sister likes to socialize but she recognizes urgency; she glanced down at her display and looked for a moment. “‘K, contract was finalized 15:54:12 universal—”

  “Well, at 15:54:18, six seconds later, something took over that Griffon and sent it into an emergency-protocol drop at my roof. Six seconds after you
signed that contract. We’re hacked. We are so hacked. Bet on it, whoever the opposition is, they’re listening to us this second.”

  Yazzy was nodding slowly. “You’re right, or at least we’re probably hacked and NItCo is definitely hacked. Six seconds after they sign us as a contractor, our main subcontractor asset gets a massive, scary warning shot.”

  “Speaking as your main subcontractor asset, this concerns me,” I said, sounding a lot braver than I felt.

  “So what do we do about it? Do we drop the contract?”

  “Never. Principle One, you know?”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “So shut down, purge and clear everything. I mean everything. I’m doing the same here. I’ll figure out how we’re getting back in touch sooner or later, or I’ll watch for anything from you. Till then, love you, sis.”

  “I love you too, Yip. You can always go by Mama and Táta’s on Thursday mornings and just hang out when I call; at least that way we’ll get to see each other before all this is wrapped up.”

  “That’s a good idea. I’ll do that.” We broke the connection simultaneously. I said, “House, assume whole system penetration, assume buried bugs in both executable and data, assume negatives are false. Download, clean and reupload everything, internal and all cloud, going back to the last clear and clean; spot-check in case they had some way to slip something in the archives. Overall, maximum sterilize everything, assume damage worst case, assume source and paths unknown. How long till you can report?”

  “Estimated time to complete that is 24 minutes.”

  “Good.” I turned back to Markus.

  “Principle One?” he asked.

  “Dusan came up with a list of principles when he and Yazzy started the company. Principle One is that if we ever let anyone scare us off a job, everyone will know we can be scared off a job, which would be the end of ZIS.”