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

by Rich Horton

  He can picture an EVA-suited form taking it by the handle and initiating a burn, to carry it to a waiting airlock.

  So it’s to be capture, then. Which had always been the greatest likelihood. Even had the pilots of the Dart not been after him specifically, they cannot know who or what has been left in this surprise package for them to find; they must open and examine.

  All right, then.

  More tugging, repositioning.

  Followed by the sudden return of weight, as the potato sack enters the Dart’s generated local gravity. Draiken happens to be floating at the center of the sack at the moment, and as the sack lands hard on a metal surface, he does too, protected both by it and his EVA suit. He emits an involuntary grunt, one that fortunately cannot carry all the way to his captor while the airlock around them remains in vacuum. Then he hears the incoming whoosh of pressurization, the familiar sound of an inner door sliding open, and multiple sets of footsteps as the potato sack is dragged into the Dart proper.

  Nobody talks. It would be helpful to derive information from whatever words his captors exchanged as they performed immediate tasks; even that minimal but critical intelligence, the very number of them, as they aligned their efforts with one another with the assistance of sentence fragments like, “Get that,” and “Careful,” and “Over here.” He might even be able to gauge just how hostile they were. But they say nothing: they work, if not as a well-oiled machine, then certainly as a silent one. They are either practiced at retrieving potato sacks from interplanetary space, or so used to working from each other, that they need no chatter between them as they carry it to a central location where they can work on it together.

  By the time they lower him back to the floor, where he gets the sense of them surrounding him, he thinks that he might be facing three people, but he cannot be sure.

  They cluster at the base of the sack, where the immediate plan must be to keep an eye on him as they undo the seal.

  But he has no intention of leaving via that exit.

  What he’s carried with him all this time in the sack, what he now takes from its magnetic clamp at his hip, is an item from his transport’s tool kit, one of several he requisitioned for use during his capture. It’s a hypersaw, a handheld tool used for something he’s never been any good at—repairs in space. The blade, already sharp, can be set to piston at a thousand times per second, slicing almost all surfaces like butter; among them, EVA suits, which is why the two-hundred-page manual is rich with fervent warnings to exercise caution and only use it when the blade is pressed against the specific surface you wish to cut. You don’t want to hold it at your side, when it’s on, the manual warns. Allowing it to brush against your EVA suit in vacuum would be a bad thing. You could get killed that way

  He turns it on and, in one steady slash, opens a slit a meter and a half long, that he launches himself out in the same moment. As it happens, they’d put him down near a bulkhead and so there is not much room to roll away before rising, not with grace, but he eschews grace, uses that wall as a launching pad, and rises facing them.

  He sees at once that his estimate is wrong.

  There are five of them.

  Draiken performs an instant assessment of their likely threat level, in the process indulging an intermittent old habit of giving them provisional names as he goes.

  There are two men, one slightly built but possessing the edited-down look of a man whose speed will make him dangerous in a fight. Call him Alpha. The one next to him is larger, bulkier, meaner-looking, already forming fists that resemble blunt objects. Beta Their expressions are dull portraits of malice, and so Draiken makes the simple guess that they’re muscle, not leaders.

  The one still in an EVA suit, sans helmet, is a slightly-built woman with jet-black hair and features obscured by a tattoo-scape of jagged lines, possibly intended as lightning-bolts. Shock The fourth, behind her, is another woman, whose almond-shade skinsuit matches her complexion and appears an odd attempt to simulate nudity: the bristly halo around her head is not hair, but a prosthetic wireset, that constantly waves back and forth as if driven by an unseen breeze. Awe The fifth, behind all of them, is not human at all, but a Riirgaan, whose fixed features and reptilian cast fail to hide the posture of a being who had not expected their prisoner to rebel in quite this manner, quite this soon. He backs away as far as the limited space inside the Dart will permit him, content to use the human beings as shield. No reason to name him right away, not when the Riirgaan will be more than sufficient.

  Draiken can only wish he’d doffed the suit. It will offer some protection, but in a fight against five, he would much prefer to be light on his feet and have all his martial skillset available to him.

  He is just beginning to consider ways to talk his way out of this when the two men he’s mentally dubbed Alpha and Beta march toward him, not caring about his brandished hypersaw at all.

  God damn it.

  Against his better judgment he flicks off the hypersaw and returns it to its magnetic sheath, because he would rather not slice bloody gobbets from human beings if there’s any way to avoid it.

  He puts Alpha down with a jab to the throat, takes the tackle that drives him against a wall to his back, rams an elbow into the side of Beta’s head, breaks Beta’s toes with his heel, puts him down and breathless with a punch to the belly.

  A kick to the face and Beta’s down, though not necessarily out.

  Alpha’s clutching his throat but trying to rise.

  No time to be fancy about this.

  Draiken breaks his kneecap.

  Alpha falls to the deck screaming.

  • • •

  Shock and Awe speak in unison, their shared voice seeming to emanate from the empty space between them. “Those two,” they say, “never were big on strategy. They’re always the first two down, against anybody at all formidable.”

  And Draiken thinks, Oh, Hell.

  They’re the recipients of cylinking, an enhancement he’s only encountered once before, on New London. Their minds have been wired together, forming one personality out of two. Essentially one person, they enjoy shared greyware with ridiculous advantages when it comes to strategic cooperation, reaction time, and the capacity to run rings around any unenhanced person trying to take them out in a fight. He knows this. He is supernaturally fast by most human standards, but his last fight with a linked pair ended with him in custody after twenty seconds.

  They say, “Are you Draiken?”

  He is, of course, still wearing his helmet, which obscures his face. But he sees no practical benefit in denying his identity. “It’s one of the names I use. Who are you?”

  They don’t answer. They just come after him, one on each side of the deflated potato sack, their movements effortlessly coordinated even though one is in a bulky EVA suit and the other is not.

  Draiken does what makes the most sense and goes after the unsuited one, Awe, going for a strike in mid-chest to deprive her of breath.

  There is absolutely nothing wrong with his strike, but it fails utterly. She is not where she should be, but somehow just outside his range, and even as he tries to correct for a backswing, Shock is driving a kick into his hip.

  The impact of this blow does not get past all the armor and the padding beneath it to vulnerable flesh and bone, but it accomplishes what it is meant to in driving him back a step and forcing his attention to just staying on his feet. He stumbles against the bulkhead to his right, corrects, lashes out at Awe again, and again somehow misses, not by a mile as the ancient saying goes (whatever a “mile” is), but by a margin so narrow that anyone without her shared condition would have likely flinched; she does not. Instead, she drops out of sight, and he would normally devote time right now to wondering just why she’d do that, but he does not have that time; not when the next unexpected input is his helmet’s face-plate, crumbling.

  EVA suit faceplates are not supposed to fragment. They can be broken, and they can be penetrated, but they are buil
t to withstand impacts that would reduce the human face behind them to a soup of bone and liquefied flesh. If they don’t survive anything that’s been thrown at them, it’s a near certainty that the person behind them won’t either.

  Draiken therefore finds it a shock to feel multiple micro-fragments of the transparent material peppering his cheeks and forehead, stinging one eye in what amounts to agony, and yet to still be alive at the end of it, his eyes watering at a suddenly unobstructed view.

  Shock withdraws her gloved hand. He had not seen her strike coming at all. She is wearing something on the tip of that hand, something that makes that entire hand look fuzzy and out of focus. Whatever it is gives off a high-pitched whine; high-speed vibration of some kind, though it escapes him how it can pulse fast enough to shatter his faceplate and not do the same favor for all the bones in her fingers.

  The one positive is that this development simplifies things. If they’re using deadly weaponry, so can he.

  The negative is that when he clutches for the hypersaw on his hip, he finds Awe’s hand already on the handle. His gloved hand has landed on her bare one, and for no more than a heartbeat, the outcome remains in doubt. Her grip is sure even if part of it is on the blade, his is not so much on the hilt as on her fist.

  Were they fighting for a knife, or for any other weapon in a holster, she would win or at the very least hold him at bay long enough for Shock to strike again.

  The one variable in his favor is that the on-off switch for the hypersaw is not in the hilt, but in his suit.

  He experiences what happens next as a jolt of pure agony, as their struggles slice through the material of his suit and beyond it to take out a slice of the skin at his hip—but he is prepared for the pain and willing to take it in order to bestow what Awe gets; an equal shock that forces her to instinctively shift her grip away and gives him time to seize his own hold. He yanks the hypersaw away, and she screams, clutching that hand with the other. It no longer looks quite like a hand, the fingers and half the palm now dangling by a mere strip of skin and sinew.

  It’s more damage than he planned on or wanted, and had he the luxury of fretting over the morality of his actions, he would likely feel bad about it. But he has taken some serious damage himself, and so it’s remarkable enough that he refrains from bringing the saw to bear and instead elbows her as hard as he can in the face, slamming the back of her skull against the bulkhead and giving her the excuse she probably needs to pass out.

  Shock looks green. She would. Draiken’s past encounter with the linked pair known as the Porrinyards has given him the impetus to research just how the enhancement works. She would have felt everything her other half Awe just felt, the same way she would have felt a direct attack on herself.

  More to the point, more critical where tactics are concerned, is something he’s learned about linked pairs, in general.

  The forced unconsciousness of one of her bodies reduces the useful intelligence, and the reaction speed, of the other by about half.

  He advances.

  She jabs with the glove. He blocks it with his hypersaw. The impact gives off a burst of heat and light that stuns both of them. They fall back and join again. This time he gives her a deliberate opening. She jabs, not going for his exposed face, but for his chest, her blurred fingers cutting through the reinforced material of his EVA suit like wet paper. For an instant he feels a tremendous heat even through the inner layer of padding, and is aware that if his chestplate offers no protection then neither will his flesh, or his ribs.

  He does something she surely would have foreseen, had her other half and sibling still been awake.

  He brings the hypersaw down like a guillotine and amputates her hand at the wrist.

  Even as it tumbles to the deck, she stumbles back, features contorting in disbelief.

  He puts her down, as humanely as he knows how, as much of an eleventh-hour mercy as it might be.

  He tells the Riirgaan, “If you have something to address their wounds, this is the time to get it. As long as you don’t make any sudden moves against me, I won’t stop you.”

  The Riirgaan advances, first hesitantly and then with haste, eager to get the job done so he can scurry back out of range as soon as possible. He takes a canister from its slot on the bulkhead, sprays the mangled hand of one linked woman with fast-congealing crystal, then does the same for the other’s pulsing wrist-stump. He doesn’t bother with the two men, whose injuries are less serious and not as urgent to him as putting distance between himself and this man who took out his team in less than minute. “Thank you,” he says. “You did not have to give me that opportunity. I consider it a kindness.”

  The Riirgaan’s apparent surrender strikes Draiken as a relief. He has had to fight more martially inclined members of the species from time to time, and the sons of bitches can kick. He says, “Who sent you?”

  “I like that,” the Riirgaan says. “You don’t waste any time on asking who I am. You know that my name would mean nothing to you, and that neither would the names of my colleagues. You get straight to the heart of the matter, with your very first question. Most efficient of you, sir.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be saving me any time,” Draiken says.

  “You already know who sent me. It’s been many years, and so most of the parties who once harassed you have either scattered or retired or died. But some of their heirs remain, and though the position they reported to you on Greeve was that they’d written you off as yesterday’s problem, they have been apprised of some of your recent exploits and feel that you’ve established the potential to become a renewed nuisance today. My associates and I are among several independent agencies who have been tasked to return you to their custody, for debriefing.”

  “You know that I would rather die than once again subject myself to their version of debriefing.”

  Riirgaans are incapable of smiling, but in dealing with humans they sometimes employ a wry bow, and so this Riirgaan employs one now. “That was discussed, yes. You may take comfort in the knowledge that alive is still preferred, though only just in some quarters.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “Your movements are not easy to predict, sir, but once we establish the first few map points, the rest is relatively easy to narrow down to a few possibilities. One nearly needs to list the places that align with your specific interests, and narrow them down according to your most recent confirmed movements. The use of certain mind-manipulation technology on Piithkarath certainly made it a locale likely to attract your interest, and though we didn’t know what you look like now, it was a simple matter to take up residence there and wait for you to identify yourself by making some noise. This you did.”

  “They’ve never employed nonhumans before.”

  “I assure you,” the Riirgaan says, “they’ve made all sorts of allies in recent times. A necessary adaptation, given what’s coming for humanity.”

  “Which is?”

  “War, sir.”

  “Among who?”

  The Riirgaan appears to take pleasure in enlightening him. “Between everybody and humanity, of course.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Do you ever pay attention to anything but your own petty obsessions? Surely you’ve noticed how much grumbling there’s been, of late, among the nonhuman powers? It has been significant, and most intelligent analysts suspect that your race’s years of being permitted to exist unmolested, in all its perverse rapaciousness, have entered their twilight. Soon, many powers will cooperate in a reckoning of genocidal scale, and until then, what centers of power you have are scrambling for allies and sponsors. Your old antagonists are among those trying to find . . . a place.”

  This is too much for Draiken to take in, right now. He might have time to dwell on it, later, but he has learned that the best possible way to deal with a problem well beyond his ken is to break it down into smaller ones, and worry only about those. So he says, “Where were you to take m
e?”

  “If you were willing to go there, then you just maimed a number of my people for no reason.”

  “Where?”

  The Riirgaan gives him the name of a star system. The name of a planet, in that star system. The name of a city, on that planet. He gives each with what seems like pleasure. And then, as has always been inevitable, as has been visible to Draiken since the beginning of this conversation, he makes the move he has always intended to, a sudden grab for the hidden projectile weapon Draiken spotted as far back as the beginning of this conversation.

  It has never been a major concern.

  Nor is it now.

  The Riirgaan is easy.

  • • •

  It is now five days later. This together with the period already traveled constitutes more than twice the length of time he originally promised Jathyx it would take to reach their destination, but between the irritating delay with the Riirgaan’s crew, the principled care they took in disabling that vessel and stashing it somewhere where it may be retrieved and its occupants rescued before their life support fails, certain subsequent difficulties in rendezvousing with Stang, and a few other problems involving navigation past system security forces—who because of the problems have now had time to fan out through the entire system looking for the vessels that left Piithkarath after the explosion—it has not been the easiest of journeys.

  It would be nice to have the easiest of journeys, just once; but Draiken is aware that in this business he might have to wait for his passage into the land of the dead.

  They land in a pockmarked debris field on that part of Henry now swathed in night, one kilometer away from another vessel that sits atop a lumpy ridge, waiting for them. A brief exchange of signals with that other vessel, just to confirm that all is well, and Draiken opens the door to the brig, inviting Jathyx out.

  Jathyx emerges warily, blade in hand, the look of a man who knows that this must be some kind of trick. “I’m surprised, dead man. No paralysis?”

  “No,” Draiken says. “And you can keep your weapon, if you prefer. This is the time for trust.”