The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “You are still the son of a whore,” Jathyx says, with considerably less heat.

  “If she taught me anything,” Draiken replies, “it’s that someone stuck with a dirty job should do it well.”

  It would be out of character for a man like Jathyx to laugh out loud. He might not even be capable of that physical function. But the edge of one lip curls up just the slightest bit, and the raging fire in those gray eyes cools a couple of degrees.

  This is not peace. Draiken’s life expectancy has not improved since that corridor on Piithkarath. It might still be measurable in seconds.

  But communication has been established.

  Jathyx says, “Speak.”

  • • •

  Draiken is aware that he now briefs a creature with compelling reason to want him dead, and so he edits his prepared explanation as he goes.

  Backstory is the first thing to be cut to the bone. “I call myself Draiken. It’s not my birth name, but the one I’ve been using for a while. If you need more details of my career to this point, I can fill them in later. But I’m skipping to the part that’s important.”

  “Continue.”

  “Some time back, I started trying to track down some old captors of mine. I’d been hiding out for a while and so didn’t know that the methods they once used for psychological torture have been refined to a frightening degree. They are now being used throughout human civilization. I’ve found out that there are techniques now that can control your perceptions, that can edit your beliefs and your senses at will; that they are being studied now, in part as preparation for controlling entire populations. It is my belief that if the people wielding these powers are not stopped, they won’t stop until they wipe out all free will.”

  Jathyx rolls his eyes. “This is a crazy belief, dead man. If anybody could do these things, we would all be slaves already.”

  “It is admittedly more pervasive in some places than others. And one of the reasons that’s so is that there are several groups, all possessing different forms of this knowledge, and all refining it in different ways. They may not all have the same agenda, but they’re all working on the same project. Often at cross-purposes. Sometimes as outright enemies. Sabotaging each other’s progress. Claiming one another’s territory.”

  “A turf war.”

  “At least in part, yes.”

  “And whose side are you on?”

  “No side,” Draiken says. “I want to smash them all, equally. I want the very capability taken out of the human equation. I have no idea how I’m going to accomplish this. The question’s too big. Until then I just fight delaying actions.”

  Jathyx weighs this information. “You expect me to believe that you’re an idealist.”

  “A pragmatist. But you can call me by whichever label you prefer.”

  More contemplation. “Either way, what you’re telling me is that you fight a war you can’t win, against too many enemies to count.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are not just an idealist. You are a fool.”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “I have a weak spot for fools,” Jathyx says. He falls silent for a few seconds, and then he resumes. “I’m going to give you more than I ever gave anybody whose throat I ever promised to cut. You can stop talking right now, turn this crate around, and bring me back to Piithkarath. I’ll forego killing you myself, go back to living my life, and take satisfaction in the knowledge that I don’t have to kill you, because someone else will. That’s a one-of-a-kind offer that won’t be made again.”

  “It’s generous,” Draiken admits. “But there’s more you need to know.”

  “If you insist. The offer’s expired.”

  This declaration comes complete with a sudden twitch, a faked reach for the knife.

  Draiken does not react. He can tell the difference between a feint and a genuine attempt. He knows that the gesture was a test.

  Jathyx grins at him, for the first time showing real pleasure in this negotiation. He gets up, goes to the sink, runs some of his allotment of water into a cup, then hesitates. “How do I know the water isn’t drugged?”

  “What would be the point of that? I already had you completely paralyzed. You can’t get more neutralized than that.”

  “I can think of any number of reasons you might want me mobile but drugged.”

  Draiken spread his hands, palms upward. “I could get you water from another source, but you’d have the same distrust of any I could provide, from anywhere aboard this vessel. Believe me: I’ve faced this kind of situation myself. Whatever you might think, you’ll get thirsty enough to surrender to trust me on this point.”

  Jathyx considers that, shows teeth, drinks, returns to the sink, gets more water, drinks that, and returns. “You were saying?”

  • • •

  For a few minutes, Draiken is able to speak without interruption.

  “The various factions use different methods, and they’re all experimenting with levels of control. Some reduce the people they dominate to what amount to robots, unable to make even the simplest decisions for themselves; but that’s very labor-intensive on the part of management. Another way is to set up various plants serving your agenda, steering the decisions of the locals in your favor. You don’t even need a majority. You just need people occupying the right positions of influence . . . in industry, in the media, in law enforcement, in the courts. Making this decision instead of that. That decision instead of this. Steering the society where you want it to go.

  “And it’s been known to work. But then you’re faced with the standard issue that faces so many conspiracies. They fall apart. People lie, suffer attacks of conscience, develop other agendas, get caught, and tell everything. Above a certain number of participants, it’s downright inevitable.

  “But not if you first make sure that your plants are incapable of betraying you.

  “Not if you make sure that they’re incapable of even considering ever going into business for themselves.

  “You let them do what they think comes naturally, enjoy what they think is free will, and if that isn’t enough, re-connect with them from time to time, to adjust their parameters. It’s no less slavery, of course, the reduction of human beings to machinery; but you can even say it’s somewhat more humane; they won’t know they’re machinery. They’ll just do everything you, their owner, wants them to do, and everybody they influence will just follow that agenda of their own accord. Men and women of free will, not aware that they’re following the dictates of robots.

  “This is happening on Piithkarath. I have a list of about three hundred names, all in positions of influence, all steering policy. Three hundred who are mentally incapable of being steered from that agenda, who make sure that the dominant vision for Piithkarath never improves too much, that the society as a whole is prevented from addressing the conditions that their hidden controllers find to their advantage. I assure you, it’s only a pilot program now, but in the next six months, they are headed for the implementation of stage two, and that’s when things on your little station will really turn to hell.”

  Jathyx pulls the knife from its sheath in the mattress and starts to manipulate it in his hand. It does not seem preparatory to another attack. It seems more like this fidgeting frees a part of his brain to focus on consideration of Draiken’s story. “Do you possess any proof of this nonsense?”

  “Yes.”

  “Share it.”

  “I intend to. I need you to be patient with me for two days, and then I can.”

  Another flip of the knife, and now Draiken knows for certain. Jathyx is weighing the consequences of breaking their enforced truce, regardless of consequences. It might go either way.

  Jathyx surprises him by gently inserting the knife back in the previous wound in the mattress. “Assuming you do provide proof, I do not know why I would care. I am already a murderer, in the employ of monsters engaged in selling addictive poison to the lost. I make my living because the
world around me is a corrupted hell. It’s never bothered me as long as it’s gotten me what I want.”

  “True,” Draiken admits. “I have no illusion of ever appealing to your better instincts. I don’t make the mistake of presuming you have them.”

  “Then why are we doing this, dead man?”

  “I think you still have an important part to play. One that is not inconsistent with your nature.”

  “Tell me.”

  “When I provide my proof.”

  Now Jathyx does laugh. It is not a happy sound. It reminds Draiken of something long petrified falling apart, the ground where it had stood being pelted by the debris. But when he speaks again, his tone is almost affectionate. “I believe you are mad.”

  Draiken replies with an equivalent lack of mirth. “That’s not at all inconsistent with being the son of a whore.”

  “No, dead man. It is not. But even mad sons of whores have been known to possess great secrets, from time to time. So I will wait two days for the delivery of your proof, and I will then decide for myself.” He shows teeth. “At that point, I will also require you to show me how I may profit from a new job as revolutionary. There would otherwise be no point in changing a life that has served me so well, up until now. I suppose that we will not endure these next two days in one another’s company, each waiting for the other to fall asleep?”

  “I am not that mad,” Draiken says.

  He taps the link at the throat, to reactivate Jathyx’s neural link. The assassin goes limp and falls flat on his back, his eyes now back to promising murder. As is, Draiken must admit to himself, only reasonable under the circumstances.

  He stands, pulls Jathyx’s knife from the mattress, and places it on the little table beside the bed. With another prisoner, he would confiscate it, in order to avoid tempting self-harm. But he has gotten enough of a sense of this man to know that what he does, he does because his are the only concerns that matter. Those concerns do not currently include any ambitions of ending it all. But with the knife, he might feel a little more secure, a little more inclined to wait for what’s coming. It’s a small show of good faith, one that might make a difference, in the days to come.

  Draiken sends another hytex signal and waits.

  After about two minutes, far too much time to be accounted for by distance, the food slot in the door slides open. It is at waist-height, the wrong altitude for eye contact, but Stang has knelt. Her relief upon seeing Draiken in control is palpable and warms him more than he would have guessed.

  She unlocks the door for him, saying, “Look at you. All alive and everything.”

  “It’s a habit of mine.”

  Only when the brig is safely behind him, the door once again sealed and an impassable barrier to Jathyx’s homicidal ambitions, does Draiken tap his throat and cancel the man’s paralysis. He doesn’t need to look at any monitors to imagine the assassin’s immediate reaction to the return of his capacity for movement. No doubt it involves much in the way of cursing, followed by immediate minute examination of his cell for any weak spots that can be exploited.

  Of course, this is not just what Jathyx would do, but also what Draiken himself has done, at his several prior tastes of incarceration. And so he has allowed the man much to occupy his time: a false air vent that will take almost a full day to loosen, likely using the knife as screwdriver, revealing nothing behind it but the brig’s second bulkhead. A means of retracting the bed, to provide floor space that will seem to promise another means of egress, through the machinery beyond. That will take a determined captive still further, through a narrow gap between bulkheads likely to remind him of the narrow corridors on Piithkarath. But in all meaningful ways, that is also sealed off.

  It’s always a good idea to keep animals occupied.

  • • •

  Nothing much happens for the next couple of hours. They are in a slow-moving transport, designed for interplanetary hops so short it doesn’t even have bluegel crypts for corpus storage at relativistic speeds. It seems to lumber. Of course, Draiken is well-used to the phenomenon, the psychological version of relativity, that turns all journeys ponderous when constructive action is a comfort reserved for destinations. He does the only thing he can do: he trains. He stands in the middle of the available space and constructs a mental battleground, in which opponents of great skill assail him from all sides. He partitions part of himself toward construction of their tactics, separates that from the part of himself that must counter-attack.

  Exercise of his physical resources is not the concern; those are fine, and he has already given them a life-or-death workout today. What matters is the capacity of his mind, to face incoming problems and devise instant strategies for response. He runs several hypotheticals, each time placing himself at a disadvantage. An enemy leaps in from behind; he spins, evades, strikes, fends off the counter-attack. Now two more come, from opposite sides. He assesses which one may be evaded, which one must be neutralized. A strike, a kick. An exercise in keeping an eye on one enemy while not losing the one who, like Jathyx given his preferred strategy, circles behind him. Can one be used against another? Can he force one to back off, while engaging the other? Add a third. Arm one with energy weapon. Give one a teemer, which can incapacitate an enemy with a single flash of light. Add more variables. And more after that. Assume that they will keep coming until you fall.

  He “dies” twice. Lives twice but is on one of those occasions too immobilized by injury to escape the arena. That might as well be another death.

  He once again admits to himself something that’s become increasingly obvious, after the last few years: he’s getting old. Not just in years—and in those he’s very old indeed, so old that he long ago would have withered and died, without access to various rejuvenating technologies; in terms of apparent age, a different thing, he’s currently about forty, Hom Sap Mercantile. And if all he cared about was vigor of body and mind, he could retain this level of health, indefinitely, simply by continuing to seek out those treatments. But they do not solve every possible problem. He has acquired too many memories, too many reflexes, too many learned responses. His experiences have made him about as dangerous as it’s possible for a human being to be, but they have begun to crowd one another, to conflict in elementary ways that make it more difficult to call on instinct. Now, increasingly, choices require conscious mediation. This has slowed him down significantly. He is still dangerous. But the inevitable decline has begun and cannot be slowed by any technology capable of providing him with more years. Sooner rather than later, he will still be able to walk about, interact with others in peaceful situations, even strategize campaigns for younger men, but he will not be able to face a creature like Jathyx and imagine that muscle memory can save him. That’s going away, and will not be coming back.

  And naturally, the race between that and the scale of the mission he has set for himself, increasingly argues that he will not live to see its end, a conclusion he’s been coming to of late, that is becoming impossible to deny. . . .

  Stang cannot know what he’s thinking, of course, but given the context, it’s unfortunate that when she finds cause to interrupt him, she doesn’t call him by name. “Old man! Stop boxing imaginary phantoms and come over here!”

  He banishes the mental hypotheticals, wishing that it were possible, in genuine tactical situations, to do the same with actual enemies. (This, too, is not quite as instantaneous a shift as once it would have been.) He shakes his head and joins her at the monitor console. “What?”

  “We’re being followed.”

  She calls up a holomap of the system, displaying the relative positions of Piithkarath, Henry, their own transport, and the one tracking them. Given that the human eye would not be able to see all four locations on any graphic preserving their relative distances, the four essential locations are larger on the map than they are in real life, a necessary fiction that makes them appear to be closer to each other than they actually are. The actual distances are irrel
evant to the basic knowledge: the object in pursuit is gaining.

  Draiken rubs his jaw. “Are they Piithkarath forces?”

  “I didn’t see them leave the station, but this far out it’s hard to imagine where else they could have come from. Their course certainly implies it.”

  “What does the station’s manifest say?”

  This is public knowledge, available system-wide to anybody with a hytex link.

  Stang says, “It says that nobody’s left. It hasn’t even detected us yet.”

  “What kind of vessel is it?”

  “I think it’s a Dart.”

  This is the popular term for a class of small craft with an official name not nearly as descriptive. It is built for maneuverability and speed. It’s slightly smaller than their own transport, which is made for a family-size cargo hauling business. It can run with a crew of two, carry a maximum comfortable crew of five, even support eight if you’re willing to risk fistfights over farting and body odor. It’s the kind of vessel built for trips where everything else comes in second to rapid acceleration and rapid deceleration, as well as instant maneuverability. This one’s exact offensive capabilities would depend on how it’s been customized.

  Their own transport is armed for only light engagements, the amount more or less required in a regularly patrolled system that’s not exactly a lawless frontier. It can’t outmaneuver or outrun a Dart.

  He says, “Is its heading at all ambiguous?”

  Stang shrugs. “We’re in a heavily traveled system; I can point you to any number of other small craft in range. But theirs is the only one that left Piithkarath after we did, heading in the direction we are. The implication is pretty damn obvious.”

  “You know what I find interesting?”

  “I’m not sure this is the right time for an exhaustive list of your hobbies.”

  “About this.”

  “No, old man. What?”

  “It’s not a fleet of interceptors; it’s one vessel. I doubt it’s anybody in authority, intent on arresting us for sabotage.”