The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  The next day your uncle buys you a pair of black pants and a shirt like his, made from a self-cleaning material that’s both hydrophobic and insulating, plus a shiny chromium steel clip for your hair. You can’t stop smiling. And although you don’t say it out loud to him, in that moment you’re sure that the two of you are going to be the greatest smuggling duo of all time.

  3. When someone says they’ll pay double your normal rate, they’re offering to pay at least half what you’d charge them if you knew the whole story.

  THE CELERIS stays docked in the spaceport for a couple of weeks while your uncle buys some used parts to repair the worst of wear and tear to her systems and looks for the right official job – and then an unofficial job to make the most of that InterPlanetary transport license.

  You try to keep out of your uncle’s way so he doesn’t start thinking of you as some kid who’s always underfoot. You don’t want to get sent back home. Instead, you hang around the spaceport, trying to make yourself less ignorant. You go into the store that sells navigational charts and stare at the shifting patterns of stars. You go into the pawnshop and look at the fancy laser pistols and the odd alien gadgets, until the guy behind the counter gets tired of your face and orders you to buy something or get out.

  After a while the spaceport seems less scary. Some of your uncle’s friends pay you pocket money to run errands, money that you use to buy caff bars and extra batteries for your mother’s gun and holographic hoop earrings that you think make you look like a pirate. Just when you start to feel a little bit cocky and comfortable, your uncle informs you that it’s time to leave.

  He’s lined up the jobs. He’s found a client.

  A little man with a red face and red hair sits in their eating area on the ship, sipping archer ethanol, booze culled from the Sagittarius B2 cloud, out of a coffee can. The man tells your uncle that he supplies alien tissue to a scientist who has his laboratory on one of the outer worlds, where the rules about gene splicing and cloning are more lax. The little man has come across a particularly valuable shipment of frozen alien corpses and needs for it to get where it’s going fast, with few questions asked.

  The assignment creeps you out, but you can tell that your uncle has been distracted by the ludicrously high offer the man is waving around. It’s more money than you’ve ever imagined being paid for anything, and even with the cost of fuel and bribing Centurions, you’re pretty sure there would be enough to refit the Celeris in style. No more used parts, no more stopgap repairs. He could have all new everything.

  “Half now,” the man says. “Half when the cargo arrives intact. And it better get there inside a month, or I will take the extra time out of your hide. I am paying for speed – and silence.”

  “Oh, it’ll be there,” your uncle says, and pours a little archer ethanol into a plastic cup for himself. Even the smell of it singes your nose hair. “This little ship has got hidden depths – literally.” He grins while he’s speaking, like the offer of so much money has made him drunker than all the booze in the sky. “Hidden depths. Like me.”

  The red-haired man doesn’t seem all that impressed.

  You have lots of questions about where the alien bodies came from and what exactly the scientist is going to do with them, but a quick glance from your uncle confirms that you’re supposed to swallow those and keep pouring drinks. You have your guesses, though – you’ve heard stories about space pirates with alien parts grafted on instead of their own. New ears and eyes, new second stomachs tough enough to digest acid, second livers and new teeth and organs humans don’t even have – like poison glands or hidden quills. And then there were worse stories: ones about cloned hybrids, pitiless and monstrous enough to fight the surviving Charkazak and win.

  But you’re a stupid kid from a backworld planet and you know it, so you quash your curiosity. After the client leaves, you clean up some and fold your stuff so it tucks away in the netting over your bunk back in your room. You go down to the cargo hold and move around boxes, so the way to the secret storage compartment is clear for when the redhead comes back with his alien parts in the morning. That night you look out through the transparent alumina windows at ships docking on Zvezda-9, and you get excited about leaving for your first mission in the morning.

  But in the morning, the Celeris doesn’t depart.

  It turns out that it takes time to get ready for a run like this – it takes supplies and paperwork; it takes charting a course and new fuel and lots of batteries and a ton of water. The whole while you careen between sadness over leaving Zvezda-9 now that you’ve become familiar with it and wishing you were in space already. You visit your favorite spots mournfully, unsure if you’ll ever see them again, and you pace the halls of the Celeris at night until your uncle orders you to your bunk. His temper is a short-sparking fuse. He sends you to buy supplies and then complains loudly about what you get, even though you’re the one who’ll be doing the reheating and reconstituting.

  The client arrives in the middle of the night. You sit in the shadows above the cargo bay and watch what he loads – a long cylindrical casket, big enough for several human-size bodies. Smoke curls off of it when it’s jostled, as though it is very, very cold inside.

  An hour later you’re back among the stars. There, your uncle starts to relax, as though space is his real home and being on a planet for too long was what was making him tense. Over the next week, he teaches you a few simple repairs he has to do regularly for the Celeris, shows you a few of his favorite smuggling hidey-holes, teaches you a card game and then how to cheat at that card game, and even lets you fly the ship for an hour with him hanging over your shoulder, nagging you about everything you’re doing wrong.

  Considering that he turns on autopilot while he sleeps, letting you put your hands on the controls while he watches isn’t that big of a vote of confidence, but sitting in the cockpit, gazing out at the spray of stars, makes you feel important and wholly yourself, as though all your time laboring in that red dirt was worth something, because it brought you to this.

  Mostly the trip is uneventful, except for an evening when your uncle comes up from the cargo hold and won’t look at you. He downs a whole bottle of archer ethanol and then gets noisily sick while you watch the computer navigate and fiddle with your earrings. He never says what set him off, but the next day he’s himself again and you both try to pretend that it never happened.

  Then you wake up because the whole ship is shaking. At first you think you’re passing through an asteroid field, but then you realize something bad is happening. There’s the faint smell of fire and the sound of the ship venting it. Then the gravity starts going crazy – lurching on and off, bouncing you against the floor and the walls.

  Once it stabilizes, you manage to crawl out into the corridor. Your heart is pounding like crazy, fear making you light-headed. You clutch your mother’s gun to you like it’s some kind of teddy bear. There’s shouting – more voices than there should be on board. You think you hear your uncle calling your name and then something else. Something loud and anguished and final.

  You head automatically for the cockpit when a man runs into the corridor, skidding to a stop at the sight of you. Based on the mismatched array of weapons and armor, you figure he’s got to be a pirate – if he was a Centurion, he’d be in uniform. He reaches for his weapon, like he’s just shaking off the shock of seeing a kid in her nightgown aboard a smuggling ship, but you’ve already swung your mother’s gun up. You blast him in the head before you allow yourself to consider what you’re doing.

  When he drops, you start trembling all over. You think you’re going to throw up, but you can hear more of them coming, so you try to concentrate on moving through the ship, on remembering all the hidey-holes your uncle pointed out to you.

  The lights go out all of a sudden, so you have to feel your way in the dark, but soon you’ve found one big enough for you to fit yourself into and you’re shut up inside.

  Snug as a bug in a rug, y
our mom would say.

  You start crying, thinking about her. You know your uncle is probably dead, but you don’t want to admit that to yourself yet, so you pretend you’re not thinking of him when you wipe away your tears.

  4. If your ship gets raided by space pirates, don’t hide in the cargo hold, because everybody wants what’s in the cargo hold.

  THE CELERIS IS a small enough ship that you can hear the pirates walking through it, talking to one another. You try to count different voices, but all you can figure out is that there’s more than five and probably less than ten. Which doesn’t mean that much, since they boarded from another ship and there could be any number of them back there.

  Did you find it? you hear them say, over and over again. We’ve got to find it before it finds us.

  Which doesn’t mean anything to you. You wonder if they attacked the wrong ship. You wonder if your uncle got murdered for nothing, for less than nothing, since the credits he got paid are in his bank account and not anywhere aboard the ship.

  You hear the acceleration of the engines and feel the odd sensation of forward momentum. Which means they’re probably taking the whole ship, not just gutting it for parts and leaving it to spin endlessly in the void – which would have meant no life support for you. Maybe you’ll survive this, you think. Maybe no one even knew you were aboard, maybe they thought the guy you shot was shot by your uncle. If they docked on a planet, even a terrible planet, maybe you could sneak off the ship and hide in the station.

  To do that, you need to make sure you stay hydrated. You’ll need food too, but not right away. A bathroom, ideally. You and your uncle usually ate in the little kitchen area – he called it the galley – off the main cockpit, where there’s a small burner, lots of packages of freeze-dried food, tubes of paste, and a jar of nutrient powder. You’re sure that some of the pirates have raided it by now, drinking through your uncle’s supply of archer ethanol – you’ve heard them, rowdy and full of good cheer, like they’d done something heroic instead of something awful.

  If they catch you, they’ll most likely kill you. You’re using up oxygen, just breathing. But you know all the other things pirates might do instead – sell you, use you, cook you, eat you. Your parents loved to tell you how bad things could get when you talked about wanting to have adventures in space.

  There’s food in the cargo hold, you know – those were the supplies that went on the official roster as his official shipment. Your uncle had the papers to sell that stuff to a homesteader planet. He’d been planning on sending you down to haggle with them – and had loaded you down with plenty of pieces of dubious bargaining wisdom in preparation.

  Don’t be afraid of silence, he’d told you. Silence shows your strength. Have a bottom line, he’d told you. Sometimes to make a deal, you’ve got to walk away from a deal.

  But it turned out that pirates didn’t care about negotiating. Just like your uncle had told you in the beginning, there aren’t any rules.

  You doze impatiently waiting for your chance to slip down to the cargo hold. Your leg cramps from the position you’ve folded yourself into, and finally you decide that even though you can still hear voices, they’re faint, and you’re going to have to go for it.

  You unfold yourself and step into the hallway. The floor is cold against your feet, and you feel light-headed from being in one position so long, but you begin to pad your way toward the cargo bay. There’s a steel ladder to a crow’s nest above the cargo bay, and as you climb down it, you know that if there’s a pirate patrolling beneath you, he’s going to see you before you see him, your pale nightgown fluttering around you like a white flag of surrender. There’s nothing you can do about it, though, so you just try to keep on going and stay quiet.

  You’re in luck. There’s no one there. You climb all the way down and start to open up the shipping crates. You find luxuries that settlers love – caff bars, tins of coffee, jars of spicy peppers, fermented soy, and plenty of both salt and sugar. Ripping into one of the caff bars, you realize the stuff won’t keep you fed until the pirates dock, unless they dock very soon. Worse, there’s nothing to drink.

  Despairing, you grab another caff bar and begin to look over the few remaining crates. You find some machinery – farming stuff – and what appears to be an array of tents suitable for a desert environment.

  You’re freaking out, sure that you’re about to be caught, when you remember the secret hold, where the alien bodies are being stored. There might not be anything particularly useful there, but it’s at least a little more spacious than your last hiding place, and if you keep to the corners, you’ll have a great shot at picking off any pirates who discover the compartment before they can spot you.

  It takes you a few tries to get the hatch open, but you manage it and slide down into the darkness. The only lights are the dim blinking green and blue and red buttons on the side of the cylindrical casket. You crawl over to it and look at the buttons. Maybe, you think, maybe it has life support built into it. Maybe you could dump out the contents and put yourself inside if things got really bad.

  You squint at the control panel. There’s a large button, clearly labeled: VIEW SCREEN.

  You press it.

  5. If your ship gets raided by space pirates and you wind up hiding in the cargo hold, even though you know it’s a bad idea, don’t go poking through the secret cargo.

  ASQUARE OF the shiny white case turns clear and the inside glows. The whole thing hums a little, as though expecting more instructions, a thin mechanical whine. You lean down, looking at what’s inside, and then it’s all you can do not to scream.

  There’s a Charkazak, its eight terrible black legs drawn up against the shiny black carapace of its chest. Its humanoid face, with black lips and red tattoos along its cheekbones. A chest that rises and falls with breath.

  That thing is alive.

  You stumble back, falling against the steel, more scared than you were when you faced down the pirate in the hallway, more scared than when you felt the blast hit the side of the ship and realized the Celeris was being raided.

  You’ve heard horror stories about the Charkazaks all your life, on the news, whispered about at slumber parties of kids on the farm, and even on Zvezda-9. They were a race of warriors who worshipped death, becoming bodyguards for the most corrupt merchants and glorying in being soldiers on the front lines of the most awful wars just so they’d have more opportunities for bloodshed. They were so awful that they wouldn’t follow InterPlanetary laws regarding who it was okay to kill and who it wasn’t, nor did they believe in things like surrender or mercy. They invaded planets, brought down ships, and generally behaved like the monsters they appeared to be. When Centurions were dispatched to discipline the Charkazaks, they fought back with such viciousness that the only way to keep them from overrunning the galaxy was the obliteration of their planet and all the Charkazaks on it. Those that were off-planet when the Charkazaks’ homeworld was destroyed became even more vicious than before. And as you look at the living one cocooned in metal, you feel like a child hearing those stories for the first time – more like a child than you’ve felt since you stowed away after that last stupid fight with your parents.

  This – this must have been what the pirates meant when they worried about it finding them before they found it. You wonder how the redheaded dirtbag who hired your uncle acquired such a thing and where you’d really been transporting it. That Charkazak is the reason your uncle is dead.

  The whine gets a little louder, and one of the red buttons on the side of the case begins to blink, like a throbbing pulse. Between that and the dim light from the screen, the secret cargo area feels too bright, but you wait and wait and finally all the lights switch themselves off.

  You wouldn’t think you could sleep with that thing near you, but you’re so relieved to be able to stretch out your limbs that you sleep after all. You dream of someone calling your name from very far away. When you wake, your body is stiff with cold and ever
ything is still dark. You realize that you’re freezing and that if you don’t get warmed up fast, you might be in serious trouble.

  Tents, you remember. There are tents up in the regular cargo hold. But as you feel around in the dark, you can’t quite make out how to open up the hatch. Then you remember that the casket lit up – surely that would be enough for you to find the latch by – so you go over and press the green button again.

  It lights up the case and you try not to look inside. You scuttle up instead and grab a couple of tents. You’re dragging them back down when you hear the tramping of heavy footfalls. They speed up, like maybe they heard the thud of the material hitting the floor, and you swear under your breath. You move as quickly and quietly as you can, back under the floor, yanking the cover of the hidden compartment into place.

  The light is still shining from the casket, and you’re afraid that the glow will show through the seams and reveal your hiding spot. You press the green button again, hoping that will turn off the view screen, but it doesn’t. The other light – the red one – starts blinking again, and you’re panicking, because it’s brighter and more obvious than the glow from the casket.

  Push to open, the red button says. And as the footfalls come closer, as you hear the pirate feel around for the latch, a sudden strange calm comes over you. Since you’re going to die – or worse – you figure, screw everything. Screw the pirates, screw yourself, screw every goddamn thing. You owe your uncle some final revenge. You’re not going out like some dumb farmer kid. You’re going to give those pirates exactly what they were looking for.

  So you press the button. Twice. There is a horrible loud sound, like a giant exhalation of breath. The top of the casket slides open.

  6. And if you do go ahead and poke through the secret cargo, then for the love of all that is holy, watch out which buttons you push.