The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  Mercer picked himself up and climbed.

  At the top of the stairs, a single guardian remained at his post — a sturdy, mature Not armed with authority and habit as well as a sapphire-tipped spear. The creature barked the traditional warning at the intruder, and Mercer replied by declaring his identity and demanding help. But the building was being peppered with grenades and kinetic rounds. The Not heard nothing that convinced him to quit, and he must have believed that this was one of the invaders. He lifted his spear and drove the tip downward, aiming for a gap in the unbreakable armor. Mercer had no choice but shove the Not aside, and when the creature stubbornly tried to find his feet again, Mercer used a short sword to finish the useless fight.

  The nursery was built to never burn, which was helpful.

  And it was tall, which gave him a sniper’s power.

  But there were several doors and endless windows intended for ventilation, and that meant that no one fighter could keep the army at bay for long.

  The gunfire fell off, vanished.

  Mercer slipped into a long narrow room where the windows faced south, admitting the afternoon sun into a realm where unborn Nots lay inside their transparent cocoons — the first exoskins wrapped tight around half-defined bodies that were hung from the stone ceiling, each of those unfinished faces habitually following the sliding of the day’s light.

  A pair of the cocoons had been shot.

  Mercer measured the wounds and guessed the likely angles of fire, and he crawled between two windows and shucked off his pack and his rifle and pulled a dulled piece of mirror out of a pocket, using the dark reflection to study both of the facing buildings without letting the sunlight offer up his position.

  Someone launched one kinetic round.

  On the lane below, a single Not screamed and died.

  Mercer made himself do nothing. Nothing. He would let the monsters sit and wonder if he’d managed to get away from them somehow. Make them crazy, at least for a little while. The next few minutes were spent unfolding and then studying a piece of high-technology — the highly detailed map of the city, including not only what the Nots had built in the last ten generations, but also every chamber and abandoned sewer and paved-over cave that no living creature besides him was aware of.

  Nots were gathering in the lane below. Their long feet moved in a rough unison, a desperate muttering building. Dozens of them had crawled out of their hiding places. There could be a hundred of them, even more. Then he heard prayers to vanished gods, and thankfully, prayers intended for him. The Nots had learned about this fight at the nursery, and they were coming to rescue their children. Which wouldn’t have happened if the enemy had struck him in the open, in the Stonehenge. That would have been better for everybody, Mercer told himself.

  “But you can’t live forever,” he muttered to himself. “Not wasting your head thinking about what-ifs, you can’t . . .”

  The snipers opened up on the converging Nots.

  Prayers turned to wailing screams. Across the lane, two windows sprouted guns, and Mercer lowered his mirror and lifted his rifle and turned on the laser sight, and then he came around smoothly, kneeling low, waiting for the first human face to fill the eyepiece before punching three fast shots between the eyes.

  He pulled back, grabbed his gear and rolled and then ran hard.

  Grenades dove through three windows, spinning and then exploding, sticky gobs of napalm splashing across walls and the helpless cocoons.

  Mercer dropped beside another window and pulled out a single bomb. One of treasures that he stole from the original colony was the chemical knowledge of his species, and with the resources and ample time, he had managed to concoct some wonderfully potent species of pyrotechnics.

  A hundred Nots were dying below him.

  Again he wheeled and aimed, punishing the next human face with a single round of lead and gold and silver, and then he set the fuse and flung the bomb at the open window, his aim not quite perfect but the gray aluminum casing slipping across the sill and bouncing inside maybe two seconds before the blast incinerated flesh and bone, half of the apartment building shaken to pieces and collapsing onto the street below.

  A fresh handful of humans joined the fight, spraying explosives through the nursery windows.

  But Mercer had slipped away. He was charging down the back stairs, pack and rifle held high in one hand and maybe two dozen Nots coming up into the nursery from the flanking side of the building. They could smell burnt flesh, pure death. A peace that had lasted longer than their lives had been lost, and every old instinct forced them to act crazy and stupid, rushing up those same stairs even when they couldn’t do anything that would matter.

  The human monster shoved his way into them.

  His plan was find the latrine at the building’s low end and open the floor with a shaped charge and work his way up along the sewer line. In principle, he could reach the farmland without being seen again. But the smarter plan would be to pop up periodically, hitting his enemies with a few shot and blasts, making sure that their focus wouldn’t fade.

  He wanted to make a very specific retreat.

  That was the goal.

  But Mercer didn’t expect to round one corner in the narrow hallway and find a human monster ready for him.

  He threw his pack at the figure.

  She had a long rifle meant to fire little bombs, and she managed to avoid firing until the pack had fallen at her feet.

  Too late, he threw his rifle to his shoulder.

  Her first shot struck the hyperfiber plate over his belly, bouncing off and detonating at his feet.

  Mercer was flung back, his boots torn apart, feet burnt to the bone.

  But then he had his shot to take, and he even managed to fix the laser on that point on her neck where half a dozen solid rounds would probably break the spine and cut the head clean off.

  What made him pause was a mystery.

  Maybe it was the woman’s age, which seemed very young, or how terrified she looked to him just then. Or maybe he was startled, noticing the swollen belly that made her nanofiber armor next to useless. Or it was her gun, which was the same type that Dream had seen in his armory — the model carried by that young couple who had tried so hard to kill her just last winter.

  In an impoverished world, human bone could be a precious resource for any woman expecting to give birth.

  Was her pregnancy to blame?

  Unless there was no hesitation at all. Maybe the first blast hurt Mercer worse than he had realized, and he wouldn’t have gotten off any kind of return fire before she shot again, blindly but with extraordinary luck.

  The man was flat on his back, on the hard stone floor, and the bomb passed between his belly plate and chest plate.

  His hyperfiber contained the blast, making it worse.

  Guts were shredded and his heart quit and those scorched lungs opened up to the air, and he howled and dragged himself backward, and she fired one last time, aiming carefully and missing by quite a lot.

  Mercer shot her once in the forehead.

  The bullet knocked her off her feet, giving his body time to rouse several anaerobic metabolisms. Then he dragged himself close enough to use the diamond sword, hacking at that long limp neck until it was cut through, and he set two of his big bombs on long timers and left them under his pack, and he took only his rifle and sword and a pair of grenades, crawling to the latrine door, flinging in one grenade and then another, battering a wide hole in the floor before he pulled his near-corpse to the edge.

  He clung there, smelling the rancid chemistry of an alien sewer.

  Mercer asked himself if life could be worth this kind of misery.

  Then he rolled and fell into the gaping hole, his impact cushioned by water and the stinking gelatinous filth. And because the building above him was about to collapse, he forced his battered body to stand, and he convinced his exhausted legs to march upstream, his guts held in place under his hand while his thoughts, such as
they were, revolved around the woman that was still waiting for him.

  13

  She began to work even before her feet quit tingling. Following Mercer’s precise instructions, she slipped into the armory and found everything that she needed and filled the same huge pack that the man had used when he came to rescue her, all but dead on the shoreline. Then she stomped her toes a few times, just to make certain that her legs had recovered. Shouldering the pack took three attempts, and the hike proved far harder than she had imagined. But there was still daylight when she reached the hilltop, and she dropped the pack against the magna-wood tree with its camouflaged blind. The next few hundred breaths were spent studying the slope to the south. The big fires down by the sea were beginning to die back. She wasn’t certain about the timetable, which meant that she might already be late. But Mercer had been explicit: The trap would work or it wouldn’t work; they would never get a second chance.

  The incendiaries were not particularly large, but he had promised that they had a hard kick. And the fuses could have been any brown cord, which was why she invested a few moments cutting an extra length of fuse and wrapping it around the magna-wood trunk before setting one end on fire.

  In two hurried breaths, the entire fuse turned to sparks and ash.

  As she had hoped, the water-gorged bladders protected the old wood. No premature fire had been started. She fixed her first bomb to the trunk’s base, on the south side, and tied in the brown cord and laid it back to where she would sit unseen. Then she grabbed several bombs and all of the fuses and worked her way down the slope, selecting only in the largest and the weakest trees.

  Mercer had gone past the barricade to put up a good brief fight. He wanted to do just enough to get every human’s attention and rage, and then he would lead that army on a long, painful retreat, bringing them here during the night, hopefully leading them through this particular drainage.

  Her job was to mine this slope and then hide, waiting for that perfect moment when she would drop the entire forest on their heads.

  The little bombs would spray fire, and if enough of the trees’ watery bladders were punctured, and if enough deep wood was splintered and exposed to the atmosphere, then what would begin as an avalanche would turn into an enormous, cleansing bonfire.

  With each bomb set and each cord laid back up on top of the hill, she found herself more and more believing in Mercer’s plan.

  About when she expected to hear gunfire, the muted explosions began to drift from below. She paused occasionally, listening carefully, trying to piece together an accurate picture of the war. But then came a final big thud followed by silence, and she returned to her work as the sun set and night rose up from the dried streambed and then fell from a sky full of close bright and astonishingly colorful stars.

  Her hands knew what to do in the dark, and she soon discovered that every bomb was set and there was no more fuse to cut and splice and lay out.

  Satisfied, she returned to the hilltop and the hidden place where thirty cords lay together, waiting for any excuse to burn.

  She listened for another battle, preferably from some place nearer.

  None came.

  But she didn’t let herself worry. Not yet. Having fixed her future to Mercer, she found herself willing to accept his skills and experience, and his confidence, and what she considered to be his bottomless well of luck.

  The man was coming, she told herself.

  As time passed, the Gold Moon rose over the eastern sea, washing the hillside with its slippery wet light. Maybe in the next breath or two, Mercer’s armored body would appear. She pictured him shoving his way up along the drainage, defiant and unbowed, firing back a few times just to make his pursuers hold their pace, and then pausing at a predetermined point and signaling his survival to her with that bright red laser.

  She had to believe that he was coming, didn’t she?

  But then at some point, without warning, her mother interrupted her unheard-of devotion.

  “Run,” the dead woman advised.

  In the softest whisper, the daughter asked, “What?”

  “That man is lost,” declared the ghost. The phantom. The memory. “You know where you left your pack. So run to it now and push on, and don’t bother looking back.”

  She said, “No.”

  Then after a long listen to the silence, she admitted, “He should have been here by now.”

  “Lost,” the phantom repeated.

  Perhaps so.

  “And if those monsters find you, then you’re lost as well.”

  She told herself to remain in her hiding place. To give Mercer time, to give him every chance. But her body was suddenly possessed with energy, nervous but ready, and the best she could do was make herself stand slowly, stepping nowhere, watching the valley below and discovering a numbing despair that had been secretly brewing for a long while.

  From the opposite slope came the hard quick voice of an ollo-lol.

  To give her mind some job, she began to count her quick breaths.

  “Remember what I told you, daughter?” the phantom continued. “Before my death, you were kneeling over me, tending to me. But the dying have few needs, except to be heard.”

  “I listened,” she reported, interrupting her count.

  “What a beauty, life is. I told you. And I promised you that small moments in every day would contain some lovely good thing to soothe the eye or sweeten the nose or linger inside the happy ear.”

  “Quiet,” she begged.

  But the phantom refused to obey. Quietly but with force, it reminded the grown daughter, “I promised you one treasure for your day.”

  She realized that she was weeping, and she had been weeping for a long while now.

  “What was the treasure, daughter?”

  “No.”

  “I was dying—”

  “You weren’t dead yet,” she muttered, probably too loudly.

  “I was lost,” the phantom said.

  Starvation on top of endless malnutrition had shriveled her mother’s badly depleted body. The woman had insisted that her child eat everything available, which was very little, and that final deprivation meant that even cuts that should have healed in moments refused to knit. Organs, named and otherwise, were plunging into hibernation. Old wounds were resurfacing, and each labored breath could have been the last.

  “You did what you had to do, daughter.”

  The strength drained from her legs. Slowly, she dropped to the ground and wrapped her arms across her bare knees, sobbing peacefully.

  “I was lost—!”

  “I could have buried your body,” she interrupted. “Hidden you and come back again, with food. With nutrients.”

  “That wouldn’t have happened,” the phantom replied.

  “In my pack,” she said, looking south toward the sea. “I have enough treasures to make you over again. Bring you to life and back with me—”

  “Your child needs those gifts, darling.”

  “I didn’t have to,” the young woman muttered, mouth against one knee, the salty taste of her own flesh making her guilt even worse. “Your bones . . . they were just a few little sticks at the end . . .”

  “Mine became yours,” the phantom assured her.

  But that sorry truth just made her sicker, and sadder, and she pulled the palms of her hands across her wet eyes and choked back a deep sob and let little gasps leak out while the phantom said, “Sticks, yes. Spent, yes. But still with little nodules of minerals that you needed worse than any dead lost soul would need them . . . and that was the beautiful heart of your day, daughter . . . regardless what you pretend to think . . .”

  Another ollo-lol spoke in the darkness.

  She looked up, looked around. What would she do now?

  “Run,” the dead mother advised one last time.

  Then the young woman rose to her feet again, finding the strength to retrieve her rifle from the hiding place. What she would do next wasn’t decided.
She didn’t know her mind yet, and it might have taken another thousand breaths before she finally gave up the wait. But then came the sudden thunder of bombs exploding to the east and south, and she turned in time to see a flash rising from where the barricade divided the island into its two halves, both His.

  She ran.

  Then halfway down the rocky slope, she stopped. What good could she do in this fight? Her task — his hope — was for her to be where he expected her to be, waiting for the signal. Always, impulses seemed to rule over reason inside her. She chastised herself and managed to turn around, starting to climb again, when a voice she didn’t know screamed, “The forearm! The left forearm! And his damned gun too, I got it!”

  Mercer was injured.

  “Blood,” the voice said. A woman’s voice. “Look for blood trails.”

  Badly hurt, she realized.

  Some man asked, “Which way?”

  Another man said, “Here’s a track, here . . . !”

  Where the dry stream poured down onto the farmland, human shapes were moving. Brush was snapping; she heard overlapping orders. A single man stood in the moonlight for a long moment, presenting an easy shot. The enemy believed that the war was won. Whatever had happened before made them feel safe and powerful, and obviously they didn’t have any hint that she was standing nearby, eager to spray explosives down across their heads.

  Instead of firing, she crept silently along the slope, trying to guess where Mercer was.

  A kinetic pistol fired.

  Half a dozen larger weapons slashed at the trees, starting fires that sputtered and died as the ripped bladders bled over them.

  Then somebody yelled, “Quiet,” and then, “What do you see?”

  In the chill light of the moon and endless stars, she saw the familiar shape struggling to run. He was still some distance ahead of his pursuers. The hyperfiber armor still encased the powerful body, but it was obvious that nothing had worked as planned. Mercer was staggering. Two steps, and he dropped to his knees while the stump of one arm flailed senselessly, and then he rose again and did nothing after that, too spent to manage even one weak step.