Far above, stars were framed by the edges of the cleft. One star was falling towards her: Opie Kindred. Margaret switched on the suit’s radar, and immediately it began to ping. The suit shouted a warning, but before Margaret could look around the pings dopplered together.
Proxies.
They shot up towards her, tentacles writhing from the black, streamlined helmets of their mantles. Most of them missed, jagging erratically as they squirted bursts of hydrogen to kill their velocity. Two collided in a slow flurry of tentacles.
Margaret laughed. None of her crew would fight against her, and Sho was relying upon inexperienced operators.
The biggest proxy, three metres long, swooped past. The crystalline gleam of its sensor array reflected the lights of the platform. It decelerated, spun on its axis, and dove back towards her.
Margaret barely had time to pull out the weapon she had brought with her.
It was a welding pistol, rigged on a long rod with a yoked wire around the trigger. She thrust it up like the torch of the Statue of Liberty just before the proxy struck her.
The suit’s gauntlet, elbow joint and shoulder piece stiffened under the heavy impact, saving Margaret from broken bones, but the collision knocked the transit platform sideways. It plunged through reef growths. Like glass, they had tremendous rigidity but very little lateral strength. Fans and lattices broke away, peppering Margaret and the proxy with shards. It was like falling through a series of chandeliers. Margaret couldn’t close her fingers in the stiffened gauntlet. She stood tethered to the platform with her arm and the rod raised straight up and the black proxy wrapped around them. The proxy’s tentacles lashed her visor with slow, purposeful slaps.
Margaret knew that it would take only a few moments before the tentacles’ carbon-fibre proteins could unlink; then it would be able to reach the life support pack on her back.
She shouted at the suit, ordering it to relax the gauntlet’s fingers. The proxy was contracting around her rigid arm as it stretched towards the life support pack. When the gauntlet went limp, pressure snapped her ringers closed. Her forefinger popped free of the knuckle. She yelled with pain. And the wire rigged to the welding pistol’s trigger pulled taut.
Inside the proxy’s mantle, a focused beam of electrons boiled off the pistol’s filament. The pistol, designed to work only in high vacuum, began to arc almost immediately, but the electron beam had already heated the integument and muscle of the proxy to more than 400°C. Vapour expanded explosively. The proxy shot away, propelled by the gases of its own dissolution.
Opie was still gaining on Margaret. Gritting her teeth against the pain of her dislocated finger, she dumped the broken welding gear. It only slowly floated away above her, for it still had the same velocity as she did.
A proxy swirled in beside her with shocking suddenness. For a moment, she gazed into its faceted sensor array, and then dots of luminescence skittered across its smooth black mantle, forming letters.
Much luck, boss. SK.
Srin Kerenyi. Margaret waved with her good hand. The proxy scooted away, rising at a shallow angle towards Opie’s descending star.
A few seconds later the cleft filled with the unmistakable flash of laser light.
The radar trace of Srin’s proxy disappeared.
Shit. Opie Kindred was armed. If he got close enough he could kill her.
Margaret risked a quick burn of the transit platform’s motor to increase her rate of fall. It roared at her back for twenty seconds; when it cut out her pressure suit warned her that she had insufficient fuel for full deceleration.
“I know what I’m doing,” Margaret told it.
The complex forms of the reef dwindled past. Then there were only huge patches of black staining the nitrogen ice walls. Margaret passed her previous record depth, and still she fell. It was like free fall; the negligible gravity of Enki did not cause any appreciable acceleration.
Opie Kindred gained on her by increments.
In vacuum, the lights of the transit platform threw abrupt pools of light onto the endlessly unravelling walls. Slowly, the pools of light elongated into glowing tunnels filled with sparkling motes. The exfoliations and gases and organic molecules were growing denser. And, impossibly, the temperature was rising, one degree with every five hundred metres. Far below, between the narrowing perspective of the walls, structures were beginning to resolve from the blackness.
The suit reminded her that she should begin the platform’s deceleration burn. Margaret checked Opie’s velocity and said she would wait.
“I have no desire to end as a crumpled tube filled with strawberry jam,” the suit said. It projected a countdown on her visor and refused to switch it off.
Margaret kept one eye on Opie’s velocity, the other on the blur of reducing numbers. The numbers passed zero. The suit screamed obscenities in her ears, but she waited a beat more before firing the platform’s motor.
The platform slammed into her boots. Sharp pain in her ankles and knees. The suit stiffened as the harness dug into her shoulders and waist.
Opie Kindred’s platform flashed past. He had waited until after she had decelerated before making his move. Margaret slapped the release buckle of the platform’s harness and fired the piton gun into the nitrogen ice wall. It was enough to slow her so that she could catch hold of a crevice and swing up into it. Her dislocated finger hurt like hell.
The temperature was a stifling eighty-seven degrees above absolute zero. The atmospheric pressure was just registering—a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulphide. Barely enough in the whole of the bottom of the cleft to pack into a small box at the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, but the rate of production must be tremendous to compensate for loss into the colder vacuum above.
Margaret leaned out of the crevice. Below, it widened into a chimney between humped pressure flows of nitrogen ice sloping down to the floor of the cleft. The slopes and the floor were packed with a wild proliferation of growths. Not only the familiar vases and sheets and laces, but great branching structures like crystal trees, lumpy plates raised on stout stalks, tangles of black wire hundreds of metres across, clusters of frothy globes, and much more.
There was no sign of Opie Kindred, but tethered above the growths were the balloons of his spraying mechanism. Each was a dozen metres across, crinkled, flaccid. They were fifty degrees hotter than their surroundings, would have to grow hotter still before the metabolic inhibitor was completely volatilized inside them. When that happened, small explosive devices would puncture them, and the metabolic inhibitor would be sucked into the vacuum of the cleft like smoke up a chimney.
Margaret consulted the schematics and started to climb down the crevice, light as a dream, steering herself with the fingers of her left hand. The switching relays that controlled the balloons’ heaters were manually controlled because of telemetry interference from the reef’s vacuum smog and the broadband electromagnetic resonance. The crash shelter where they were located was about two kilometres away, a slab of orange foamed plastic in the centre of a desolation of abandoned equipment and broken and half-melted vacuum organism colonies.
The crevice widened. Margaret landed between drifts of what looked like giant soap bubbles that grew at its bottom.
And Opie Kindred’s platform rose up between two of the half-inflated balloons.
Margaret dropped onto her belly behind a line of bubbles that grew along a smooth ridge of ice. She opened a radio channel. It was filled with a wash of static and a wailing modulation, but through the noise she heard Opie’s voice faintly calling her name.
He was a hundred metres away and more or less at her level, turning in a slow circle. He couldn’t locate her amidst the radio noise and the ambient temperature was higher than the skin of her pressure suit, so she had no infrared image.
She began to crawl along the smooth ridge. The walls of the bubbles were whitely opaque, but she should see shapes curled within them. Like embryos inside egg
s.
“Everything is ready, Margaret,” Opie Kindred’s voice said in her helmet. “I’m going to find you, and then I’m going to sterilize this place. There are things here you know nothing about. Horribly dangerous things. Who are you working for? Tell me that and I’ll let you live.”
A thread of red light waved out from the platform and a chunk of nitrogen ice cracked off explosively. Margaret felt it through the tips of her gloves.
“I can cut my way through to you,” Opie Kindred said, “wherever you are hiding.”
Margaret watched the platform slowly revolve. Tried to guess if she could reach the shelter while he was looking the other way. All she had to do was bound down the ridge and cross a kilometre of bare, crinkled nitrogen ice without being fried by Opie’s laser. Still crouching, she lifted onto the tips of her fingers and toes, like a sprinter on the block. He was turning, turning. She took three deep breaths to clear her head—and something crashed into the ice cliff high above! It spun out in a spray of shards, hit the slope below and spun through toppling clusters of tall black chimneys. For a moment, Margaret was paralyzed with astonishment. Then she remembered the welding gear. It had finally caught up with her.
Opie Kindred’s platform slewed around and a red thread waved across the face of the cliff. A slab of ice thundered outward. Margaret bounded away, taking giant leaps and trying to look behind her at the same time.
The slab spun on its axis, shedding huge shards, and smashed into the cluster of the bubbles where she had been crouching just moments before. The ice shook like a living thing under her feet and threw her head over heels.
She stopped herself by firing the piton gun into the ground. She was on her back, looking up at the top of the ridge, where bubbles vented a dense mix of gas and oily organics before bursting in an irregular cannonade. Hundreds of slim black shapes shot away. Some smashed into the walls of the cleft and stuck there, but many more vanished into its maw.
A chain reaction had started. Bubbles were bursting open up and down the length of the cleft.
A cluster popped under Opie Kindred’s platform and he vanished in a roil of vapour. The crevice shook. Nitrogen ice boiled into a dense fog. A wind got up for a few minutes. Margaret clung to the piton until it was over.
Opie Kindred had drifted down less than a hundred metres away. The thing which had smashed the visor of his helmet was still lodged there. It was slim and black, with a hard, shiny exoskeleton. The broken bodies of others settled among smashed vacuum organism colonies, glistening like beetles in the light of Margaret’s suit. They were like tiny, tentacle-less proxies, their swollen mantles cased in something like keratin. Some had split open, revealing ridged reaction chambers and complex matrices of black threads.
“Gametes,” Margaret said, seized by a sudden wild intuition. “Little rocketships full of DNA.”
The suit asked if she was all right.
She giggled. “The parasite turns everything into its own self. Even proxies!”
“I believe that I have located Dr Kindred’s platform,” the suit said. “I suggest that you refrain from vigorous exercise, Maggie. Your oxygen supply is limited. What are you doing?”
She was heading towards the crash shelter. “I’m going to switch off the balloon heaters. They won’t be needed.”
After she shut down the heaters, Margaret lashed one of the dead creatures to the transit platform. She shot up between the walls of the cleft, and at last rose into the range of the relay transmitters. Her radio came alive, a dozen channels blinking for attention. Arn was on one, and she told him what had happened.
“Sho wanted to light out of here,” Arn said, “but stronger heads prevailed. Come home, Margaret.”
“Did you see them? Did you, Arn?”
“Some hit the Ganapati.” He laughed. “Even the Star Chamber can’t deny what happened.”
Margaret rose up above the ice fields and continued to rise until the curve of the worldlet’s horizon became visible, and then the walls of Tigris Rift. The Ganapati was a faint star bracketed between them. She called up deep radar, and saw, beyond the Ganapatis strong signal, thousands of faint traces falling away into deep space.
A random scatter of genetic packages. How many would survive to strike new worldlets and give rise to new reefs?
Enough, she thought. The reef evolved in saltatory jumps. She had just witnessed its next revolution.
Given time, it would fill the Kuiper Belt.
GOING AFTER BOBO
Susan Palwick
Not nearly as prolific as she should be, Susan Palwick’s eloquent work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Sci Fiction, Starlight 1, Not of Women Born, Pulphouse, Xanadu 3, Walls of Fear, The Horns of Elfland, Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, and other markets. Her acclaimed first novel Flying in Place was one of the most talked-about books of 1992, and won the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel, which is presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
She’s currently at work on her second novel, Shelter. She lives in Reno, Nevada, where she’s an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, teaching writing and literature.
Here she gives us a moving portrait of a young boy growing up fast in a troubled near-future world, one who’s forced to face some choices that are hard to make at any age…
I was the only one home when the GPS satellites finally came back online. It was already dark out by then, and it had been snowing all afternoon. I’d been sitting at the kitchen table with my algebra book, trying to concentrate on quadratic equations, and then the handheld beeped and lit up and the transmitter signal started blipping on the screen, and I looked at it and cursed and ran upstairs to double-check the signal position against my topo map. And then I cursed some more, and started throwing on warm clothing.
I’d spent five days staring at my handheld, praying that the screen would light up again, please, please, so I’d be able to see where Bobo was. The only time he’d even stayed away from home overnight, and it was when the satellites were out. Just my luck.
Or maybe David had planned it that way. Bobo had been missing since Monday, the day the satellites went down, and David had probably opened the door for him when I wasn’t looking, like always, and then given him an extra kick, gloating because he knew I wouldn’t be able to follow Bobo’s signal.
I hadn’t been too worried yet, on Monday. Bobo was gone when I got back from school, but I thought he’d come home for dinner, the way he always did. When he didn’t, I went outside and called him and checked in neighbours’ yards. I started to get scared when I couldn’t find him, but Mom said not to worry, Bobo would come back later, and even if he didn’t, he’d probably be OK even if he stayed out overnight.
But he wasn’t back for breakfast on Tuesday, either, and by that night I was frantic, especially since the satellites were still down and I had no idea where Bobo was and I couldn’t find him in any of the places where he usually hung out. Wednesday and Thursday and Friday were hell. I carried the handheld with me every place, waiting for it to light up again, hunched over it every second, even at school, while Johnny Schuster and Leon Flanking carried on in the background the way they always did. “Hey, Mike! Hey, Michael—you know what we’re doing after school today? We’re driving down to Carson, Mike. Yeah, we’re going down to Carson City, and you know what we’re going to do down there?We’re going to—”
Usually I was pretty good at just ignoring them. I knew I couldn’t let them get to me, because that was what they wanted. They wanted me to fight them and get in trouble, and I couldn’t do that to Mom, not with so much trouble in the family already. I didn’t want her to know what Johnny and Leon were saying; I didn’t want her to have to think about Johnny and Leon at all, or why they were picking on me. Our families used to be friends, but that was a long time ago, before my father died and theirs went to jail. Johnny and Leon think it was all my f
ather’s fault, as if their own dads couldn’t have said no, even if my dad was the one who came up with the idea. So they’re mean to me, because my father isn’t around any more for them to blame.
It was harder to ignore them the week the satellites were down. Mom’s bosses were checking up on her a lot more, because their handhelds weren’t working either. We got calls at home every night to make sure she was really there, and when she was at work, somebody had to go with her if she even left the building. Just like the old days, before the handhelds. And God only knew what David was up to. I guess he was still going to his warehouse job, driving a forklift and moving boxes around, because his boss would have called the probation office if he hadn’t shown up. But he wasn’t coming home when he was supposed to, and every time he did come home, he and Mom had screaming fights, even worse than usual.
So I had five days of not knowing where Bobo was, while Johnny and Leon baited me at school and Mom and David yelled at each other at home. And then finally the satellites came back online on Friday. The GPS people had been talking about how they might have to knock the whole system out of orbit and put up another one—which would have been a mess—but finally some earthside keyboard jockey managed to fix whatever the hackers had done.
Which was great, except that down here in Reno it had been snowing for hours, and according to the GPS, I was going to have to climb 3,200 feet to reach Bobo. Mom came in just as I was stuffing some extra energy bars in my pack. I knew she wouldn’t want me going out, and I wasn’t up to fighting with her about it, so I’d been hoping the snow would delay her for a few hours, maybe even keep her down in Carson overnight. I should have known better. That’s what Mom’s new SUV was for: getting home, even in shitty weather.
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