She tried not to think of the unspoken conditional: If he’s still alive.
They left her with the rest of the stolen larvae and pupae in a cavernous storage chamber. When she could only hear the background hum of the nest, she heaved herself out of her cocoon. She stripped off her sodden undergarments, lodged the clothes in the pod, and swiftly applied the new colony’s pheromone.
A worker at the chamber entrance rushed over. It seemed confused to find her there, but after probing her it turned its attention to a pupa that was nearing maturity. Lena rapped out a pattern on its head. Ana had taught her the action—a command to retrieve fungal pap for the queen. The worker set off. Lena grabbed her pack and jogged after it, grateful that it paused at the chamber entrance to pick up the right trail. She kept her harpoon gun in hand, ready to fire.
Unlike the original colony, the tunnels teemed with activity. She encountered several castes she hadn’t seen before: a small, frenetic beast that ferried debris away from tunneling sites; a type with a proboscis-like extrusion sensitive to mineral deposits; and a lumbering insect with a long balloon-like sac on its underbelly. The last was one of the fabled kamikaze caste. An insect loaded up with more toxic acids than Genotech’s entire biochemical division. The other nestmates gave it a wide berth. Lena did likewise.
After the worker collected some pap in a nearby garden, it led her off to an almighty chamber. The chatter of several hundred insects and a thousand myriad rumblings filled the cavern, while the smell of moist organics prickled Lena’s nose. In contrast to the dying queen, this gargantuan matriarch positively glowed with vitality. The great curving bulk of its abdomen shone, while its flesh beat with powerful pulses. Lena wondered if it had any inkling its colony had won the battle for Vesta.
“Lena!”
Artem. Thank God.
Lena tracked the sound of his voice to one of the side vestibules, where she found him gesturing her over. She went to embrace him, but he grabbed her hard and pulled her down amongst the giant fungi. “What the hell are you doing here?” he spat, keeping his voice low.
Only trying to save your ungrateful ass.
“How did you find me?” His face lit up. “It’s Ana, right? She’s alive.”
His mind worked fast. Too fast, sometimes. Lena nodded, glad to be the bearer of good news.
Artem’s smile was short-lived, though. “If you’ve come to talk me out of this, forget it. And if you’ve come to give me help, I don’t need it.”
“Like you didn’t need help when the corps came knocking?” It felt good to stand up to him for once. “Look where that got you.”
He blinked, shocked.
“I’m not blaming you.” She took a deep breath. “You don’t have to fix everything on your own, Art.”
He bobbed his head up, looked across the chamber towards the entrance. “Were you followed?”
“Shit, Artem, are you listening to me?” Lena punched a saucer-shaped fungus head. “No, I wasn’t followed.”
“Good, we’ve still got time then.”
“Artem, stop! You got a death wish? For what? Revenge?”
“Revenge? You think this is about revenge?” He gritted his teeth, stared hard at Lena. “Okay, I admit it. I won’t be sorry to put this animal down, but that’s not it. I’m doing this for all those miners who live short, shitty lives, for those guys who if they don’t cop it out in the belt, die of the raddies when they get back home. If she dies,”—he nodded at the monstrous queen—“belt mining stays in the dark ages.”
“No, stupid. If she dies, we lose six months’ work. If you die,”—and here, suddenly, a knot of emotion choked her—“we lose everything.”
He examined her face, which she held up, proud. Then he picked up a loose rock, rolled it in his hands, while he stared across the chamber. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
Lena didn’t say anything, just listened to the rhythms of the nest, inhaled the pungent smells of life and death. There was a harsh beauty to this world.
After a while, Artem got to his feet.
They left together.
She thought he was leading her to safety.
She thought their fleetness of foot, their silence, their persistence in keeping to minor passages, were tactics to avoid the slicer. Any moment she thought they’d emerge from the riddled, evolutionary-honed chaos of the nest and come across the clean engineered lines of the space-rafts.
She thought wrong.
Artem wasn’t avoiding the slicer, he was tracking it. The realization came too late to argue the toss—came when they almost ploughed straight into the back of the monster. It was trudging away from them, crossing a large pit-shaped chamber, the space churning with insects. She imagined they would’ve met a swift death if it hadn’t been for the noise and motion of their nestmates.
Artem ducked down, pulling Lena with him so they were hidden by the monstrous bodies. A din of clicks and burrs and taps echoed off the hard igneous walls, but Lena could still hear the whirring, metronomic stride of the slicer. Zzzt-klank. Zzzt-klank. Zzzt—
It stopped.
She would’ve been furious if she wasn’t so shit scared. She slowed her breathing, held herself still. Her legs trembled, muscles exhausted. Artem motioned for the harpoon gun. Wait, she wanted to say, but his face was hard and unyielding. She leaned over to pass him the gun, the reflex to obey as natural as blinking. Still the compliant sister, a small part of her whispered, taunting. Only as a last resort, she tried to tell him with her own face set stern. It was almost in his hands, when she had an idea. She drew it back from him, delicately twisted the pack off her back, and retrieved the aerosol from inside.
Artem’s eyes lit up, understanding. The aerosol held the original colony’s scent. If he were forced to fire, dousing the slicer in the scent would give them a fighting chance of escape. She passed him both the gun and the aerosol.
The slicer began moving again—began moving away from them. Lena let her head slump, felt her tension draining. Then she turned to Artem, and watched in horror as he stood up, jammed the aerosol can into the harpoon tip, and took aim—
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
The slicer turned full about, unleashing some type of explosive pulse.
Artem fired.
A tunneler took the full brunt of the pulse—its heavy abdomen flying apart with a terrific crack—but they were still thrown like rag dolls by the blast. The spiked harpoon must’ve hit the slicer because around it a storm of fighting broke out. The shot didn’t have the consequences Artem had intended though. The slicer was like the calm eye of a hurricane, impervious to the carnage that whipped about it, blade fields cutting its opponents to pieces in a carnival of false color. This thing—this cold-hearted killer, this inhuman machine of flesh and blood and metal, this monster of rhymes and nightmares—would kill them.
She couldn’t move, could barely breathe for the thought. “Artem,” she screamed.
No reply.
Artem wasn’t going to save the day. Artem was still down, keeping a low profile, licking his wounds—or worse.
Dazed, she watched the strange caste of insect with the pendulous, bulbous sac amble past. Before she lost her nerve, she clambered onto the bloated insect, gripped its antennae like reins. She wheeled it about to face the slicer, struck a simple pattern on the side of its head. As the insect charged, its enormous sac inflated. Ten yards from the target, she leapt off, landed painfully on a rocky outcrop. She got up just in time to see the immense gland burst, throwing searing, toxic fluids all over the slicer and the pit floor and a few of the fleeing insects and, to her horror, her brother.
“Artem, oh Jesus, Artem.”
He hadn’t been cowering. He’d been crawling closer, still fighting whatever the odds.
She stumbled to his side, glanced at the wound that slashed across his torso, neck, and around the side of his face. He was alive, but in so much agony that it was a curse as much as a blessing. Nearby, an acidic whorl rose of
f the seared tissue and corroded metal of what remained of the slicer. The gurgled scream that had greeted the monster’s demise still echoed in her mind.
“You did good,” Artem croaked, spittle flecking his lips. “You make sure that newsman knows you’re a hero.”
“Shh, shh.”
She used all the elements of her limited med-kit: painkillers, salve strips, gauze pads. Still he cried in pain. She lifted him to lean on her shoulder, felt a sticky warmth against her arm. His pain hurt her deep.
What hurt her more though was his betrayal of her trust.
Their space-raft looped in a high eccentricity—five hundred klicks at furthest, two at closest—orbit around Vesta. Nik had switched on the emergency distress beacon as soon as his and Ana’s space-raft had launched, and help was on its way from Pallas. He’d also had the smarts to inform the United Interplanetary Space Authority that he’d sighted outer system pirates—another remnant of the Fringe Wars—in the vicinity. Military vessels, bound by standard protocol, would be vectoring in to secure the local volume. There’d be no more slicers.
The colony was safe.
They were safe.
Lena set Artem up in a loose mesh-cradle, pumped him full of meds. The weightlessness helped him deal with his blistered skin and corroded flesh, but he still moaned in pain. He’d make it though.
“What will you write?” she asked Nik when their space-rafts had line-of-sight comm as they shot close over Vesta’s plains.
“What I always do.”
Below, Lena spied movement. A flinger stood on its hind legs, antennae twitching at the stars. It circled about, drew back its muscular tail. A whiplike blur later, a glittering speck raced into the heavens. “What’s that?”
“The truth.”
The truth meant revealing the unlicensed second colony. The truth meant Genotech prosecuted, Artem incarcerated. Even though ore was leaving Vesta again, even though the experiment was a success, with the truth, the corps would sink the technology in a legal mire as dangerous as quicksand. Nobody would touch it. Belt mining would remain trapped in the dark ages.
“What about the bigger picture?”
“The bigger picture? Not my concern. I just write what happened.”
“What happened? What happened?” she stuttered. Everything was slipping away. Was it all going to be for nothing? She had to try. “What happened is that my brother saved your fucking life. If he hadn’t tracked that monster, if he hadn’t killed it, where’d you think you’d be now? I’ll tell you where: blasted to slag. All of us would be.”
Artem moaned softly.
“He killed it?” Nik asked.
Lena gripped her brother’s hand. “Rode one of those suicide bugs straight into its ugly cybernetic side,” she lied. “Nearly killed himself for his efforts.” Artem’s eyes opened wide. Lena pressed her index finger over his lips. “My brother’s a hero and you want to write a story that’ll see him locked up, see his work abandoned, and see the corps carry on, business as usual, all because you have some misplaced allegiance to a code. Tell me, how many miners’ deaths could you live with? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?”
“Not my concern,” Nik said again, although this time there was less conviction in his words.
“Ten thousand?”
“Not my concern.” Barely a whisper.
“A hundred thousand?”
Vesta receded, plains and prominences merging into a grainy wash. “I’ll think about it,” he said eventually, but the subtext was clear.
Lena severed the connection. He’d write the story they wanted. There’d be no mention of the second colony. Only his pride stopped him saying as much now. She should’ve felt happy, but where the feeling should’ve been there was only hollowness.
“You lied for me,” Artem whispered.
“Not for you.” Lena peeled off a dressing-salve from her brother’s shoulder, inspected the salmon-pink tissue.
The space-raft carried on into the darkness, silent as the vacuum.
STEALING ARTURO
by William Ledbetter
In the no man’s land of the asteroid belt, free from the laws governing both Earth and Mars, workers on board the space station Arturo are little more than slave labor. Kept docile with a drug called Canker, generations are born and die without hope of escape. But ice miner Clarke Kooper has a plan—and the engineering know-how to make a break for it.
I TRIED TO STAY AWAKE and upright as the elevator bucked and jerked its way down the spoke into the Earth-normal gravity of Ring One’s sleeping level. The lights flickered as the weight settled over me, pushing my exhaustion deep into every cell. I didn’t know how much longer I could take it. If the power failed and left me stuck in the elevator again, I might turn into a raving madman. Would I really ever escape this station? Were the months of covert effort wasted?
Felicia spoke, but her voice was there and not there, a feathery touch that revived memories of her fingers brushing back my hair. “You can do this. I believe in you, but you need sleep. And a shower.”
I snorted and hugged her canister to my chest with one hand and scratched my two-day-old beard with the other. She was right. It had been nearly as long since I’d showered or slept. Extended periods working in the hub’s microgravity always did this to me, but I had little choice, time was running out.
A hand appeared before the lift door had even opened halfway, grabbed the front of my shirt and yanked me out into the corridor. Since I didn’t have my gravity legs yet, I fell directly to my knees. The two Security “officers” laughed, and the one with red hair—whom I had long ago assigned the name Meathead—gave me a little shove with a highly polished boot and I further lost my balance. I had enough warning to at least tuck Felicia’s canister against my chest before I toppled over like a crippled old grandpa.
A foot pressed on the back of my head, trying to shove my face into the thick grime that had accumulated in the corner over the decades. Dust and debris were sucked into the air filtration system on low gravity levels, but down here, where the poor people lived, filth collected like it had throughout human history. Bits of plastic and a rusted screw decorated the black gunk only inches from my mouth, but I pushed back and rolled over quickly, causing Meathead to lose his balance and stumble backward.
I fought the centrifugal gravity and struggled to my feet, ready to kill the crisply uniformed bastard. As I braced to head-butt him, before he regained his balance, I heard Felicia’s voice in my head.
“Don’t be stupid, Clarke. You’re only weeks away from your escape. You can’t to be arrested now.”
She was right, but I had to at least put up a token fight or they’d get suspicious. I gave the two goons a withering glare, tucked Felicia under my arm and tried to push past them. They grabbed my arms and shoved me against a bulkhead.
“Lieutenant Eisenhower sent us to ask about your ice production quota. He thinks you’re holding out.”
“I don’t give a shit what Eisenhower thinks. I don’t answer to him. I was hired by the station management.”
The goon shoved me again, making my head bang against the wall.
“That’s Lieutenant Eisenhower. You need to show some respect.”
“Lieutenant is a rank that implies either training or experience, and he has neither. He’s just the head guard dog and that doesn’t demand respect in my book.”
The second goon—the one with dark hair and beady eyes—took a swing at me, intending to pin my face between his fist and the bulkhead. I dodged, but not quite fast enough, and his punch glanced hard off of my cheekbone, then scraped my cheek with his wrist comm as it continued into the wall.
He cursed, and punches from both assailants rained down on me in a flurry. I bent low, intending to take a few hits and then try to dart between them, when someone yelled.
“Stop hitting him, you big turds!”
Everyone stopped and turned to see a scruffy young girl in patched clothes standing just behind Meathead. She lo
oked to be around eight or nine, and I recognized her as the girl who lived with her mother two doors down from my cabin.
“Get lost, kid!” the dark-haired guy said and made a half-hearted swipe at her.
She didn’t budge, just glared back at the man.
Both officers laughed, but threw no more punches. Instead, in an unexpected snatch, Meathead grabbed Felicia’s canister from my grasp.
I straightened abruptly, shoved them both backward and grabbed for her can, but missed.
Meathead hefted it like a school yard bully playing keep away. “I think we’ll have to confiscate this.”
“No, you won’t,” I said.
They glanced at each other and grinned. “We already have, Kooper.”
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think you understand. If you decide to keep my property, then you’ll have to kill me or imprison me. And in either of those cases, you and everyone on this station will die within a couple of weeks after the water runs out. As your boss already mentioned, my production level is way down. We have about a week’s worth of water in reserve. My predecessor already picked the local area clean of icy rocks and they’re getting tough to find. Without me, you won’t find any ice. Nor will you be able to bring a new ice miner in from Mars or Earth quick enough to stave off that rather ugly death. Of course the managers and your boss will probably hoard plenty for themselves, but do you think you’ll get any?”
Meathead shifted his stance and glanced at his partner.
“And if you let me go, but still keep my property, then I have at my disposal forty-nine mining robots, each with a laser capable of burning right through the hull of this station. I wouldn’t have a bit of trouble finding your cabin and I don’t even have to hit you with the beam. I’d just wait until you were asleep and open a hole in the hull. Then pfffftttt, you’d squirt into vacuum like a long string of goober paste.”
The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Page 29
