The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Okay, here come the lions from the sea.

  Okay, here come the bearpigs from the jungle. There’s more birdsong, this time from the line of trees, so Arkies are in the jungle as well, leading the troops.

  The Cousins are closing in. If we make every single shot count, they’ll still win. If panicking was any use, I’d panic.

  Since it isn’t, I’ll have to try something else.

  I cross over to Jamal and hand him my notebook. “Take care of this.”

  He raises black arched eyebrows.

  “I have something to do. You’re in command till I get back. If we live through today, you can sock me good and hard on the jaw.”

  That’s sort of a good-bye.

  ITEM (21)

  From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  (continued by Jamal al-Sba’a)

  Kohn leaves the field of battle. Much as I dislike him, I don’t think he is running away. He is a brave Jew.

  May the Ever-Living One preserve him, for I hope to collect on his offer at the end of this day.

  It’s strange, I’ve never seen him talk into this notebook, yet he always has it with him. The idiot light goes on when I speak, so I suppose it’s picking my voice up. I have no notebook of my own – all my stuff except my weapon was lost in the flight from Main Base.

  All right, we have only eight weapons. We will soon be assailed from two sides. Do we fight out here in the open, or withdraw to the dome and try to defend it? This is the kind of decision a commander must make, and if he’s wrong, everyone is lost. I’ve always longed for power, now I feel its crushing weight.

  I decide that we’ll retreat, for two reasons: first, Captain Mack and her goddamn missiles. She can kill many of us and we can’t afford losses. Second, the Cousins can afford losses, so the damage we do to them is beside the point. The only strategy is to resist as long as possible and then accept our fate. I call Doctor Li and instruct her to move the aid station inside the dome. Eloise gathers up the medical kit and heads back, while Li waits to see if we take any casualties on the retreat. The Chinese woman appears perfectly calm.

  Mack is coming round again in her flyer. The noise of the engine is lost in the volume of sound rising on all sides – the roaring, the warbling, the barking of the creatures from the sea.

  And – Inshallah! – another flyer is rising to meet her! So this is why Kohn left us!

  ITEM (22)

  From Doctor Li’s Report

  All my life I had struggled to attain the Buddhist ideal of nonattachment – maybe out of cowardice, because I feared the pain of loss.

  Maybe this is why I fled from life into the laboratory – from the knowledge of passion to a passion for knowledge. Why, until Robert came to Bela, I was so much alone.

  When I saw our one fully functional flyer take off, I felt as if I’d been stabbed in the heart with an icicle. Then I told myself that if Robert intended to crash into the other flyer, he would have said good-bye to me first.

  So I comforted myself, thinking that, yes, he intended a dangerous game – to distract and alarm Mack, make her fire and waste her remaining missiles. He went, I decided, to court danger, not to seek death. Yet the flyer shot straight at her, moving far too fast for safety, and she must have been startled, for her craft yawed and for a wonderful moment I thought it would spin out of control and crash. But then she mastered the controls and the two aircraft began a twisting, turning ballet that I can only compare to the mating dance of mayflies.

  Then our craft turned and fled, with Mack in pursuit.

  I found myself again atop the Black Hill without any sense of how I got there. Looking down for a moment, I saw an incredible sight, the creatures of two worlds paralyzed by shared amazement and staring upward.

  A sea lion had crashed through a barrier of stunted trees, and it rested propped on immense flippers with its tusked face in the air. Without the support of the sea its own weight oppressed it, and its great scarred sides heaved with the effort of breathing.

  On the landward side, bearpigs standing on their hind legs moved their heads from side to side, following the action above like entranced listeners following the music at a concert. Arkies were pointing with their bronze weapons and exchanging wild and strangely sweet snatches of song.

  I saw the launcher emerge from the pilot’s port of Mack’s ship, and an instant later came the blinding backflash. The missile burned a long twisting trail, and my heart stopped because I realized that it was homing in, that it was too swift for its target to escape, and then it struck our flyer, which exploded in a great orb of flame like an opening peony. Dark fragments floated downward like gull’s feathers into the sea. From our enemies came a crescendo of sound that I can never describe – one world triumphant over another, howling its victory.

  Next I felt a grip on my arm; it was Jamal and he said, “Come on, we’re retreating to the dome. Save yourself.”

  I answered, “Why?” wishing only for my life to be over.

  ITEM (23)

  From a Letter of Eloise Alcerra to Her Mother

  We’re all inside the dome together. There was one real shocker when it turned out the door to the hangar had been left open.

  Something forced its way in, I didn’t see what, but I heard an impact weapon cough and then a couple of guys slammed the door, I think pushing a body out. End of Crisis One.

  I was looking for Doctor Li. I’d brought in the medical kit, but to be any good it had to be married to the one person who knew how to use it.

  I found her looking awful and I said in alarm, “Are you wounded?” She said, “No, only dead,” which I took to be some kind of weird joke – meaning, like, aren’t we all?

  Jamal was yelling orders, and I said to him, “Colonel Kohn won’t like you taking his job away from him.”

  To my amazement, Jamal said, “Kohn’s dead.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  He ran off, saying he had to check the rest of the doors, especially the loading doors onto the pad, because they were big enough to let in an army if they’d been left open too.

  Paying, of course, no attention to me whatever.

  I went back to Anna Li, and she was preparing our hospital for new casualties. Her movements were strange, jerky like a marionette, and she hardly seemed to see what she was doing.

  I said, “Anna, what’s wrong? I mean, aside from the fact that we’re all going to be killed, what’s the matter?”

  She said, “Robert’s dead.”

  Second one in five minutes. Patiently I told her, “No, he’s not, he’s up on one of the catwalks under the dome, checking the air intakes.”

  She stopped and looked at me steadily. “I saw him die,” she said.

  “Well, he must’ve died very recently, because I saw him climbing a ladder when I was bringing in the medical kit.”

  “Inside the dome?”

  “Of course inside the dome. He’d have to be nuts to be climbing an exterior ladder.”

  At that her face turned to parchment and she fainted. I caught her going down and laid her on an empty cot. The blind woman, Mbasa, was demanding to know what was going on, so I led her over and sat her down and gave her Anna’s hand to hold.

  Then I went looking for Colonel Kohn. As I pushed through the people milling around in the main lobby area, most of them were talking about his death. Apparently everybody had seen him die, and only I had seen him alive.

  I suppose I should say I doubted my own sanity, but I didn’t. What I doubted was everybody else’s.

  I found a metal ladder with its supports embedded in the duroplast and started climbing. I really don’t like heights, but pretty soon I was twenty meters in the air and running along a metal catwalk, wondering where the damp warm air was coming from until I realized it was everybody’s breath, rising and collecting up there.

  I spotted him standing at the main air intake. He’d pulled off the housing and shoved back the big flexible duct and he was aiming his pistol between the m
etal louvers. He fired the way real marksmen do, touching the stud so gently that I could hardly see his fingertip move. The pistol coughed and something outside roared.

  “One less,” he muttered, and I didn’t know whether he meant one less round or one less enemy, or both. “What are you doing here, Eloise?”

  I told him that everybody had seen him die, including Anna, and he’d better show himself alive before she died of grief and before Jamal had time to make everybody hate him.

  “You underestimate them both,” he said. “Oh, oh. Step back and open your mouth and cover your ears.”

  I did and the catwalk jumped and I felt like I’d had an iron bell over my head and somebody had hit it with a sledgehammer.

  “Oh my God,” I was muttering. “Oh my God.” He yelled something at me but I was almost deaf.

  He walked me away from the spot. My ears were still ringing, but after a little while I could understand him. He talked like a lecturer.

  “If that last missile had hit the grille we’d have a big hole in the dome. And it’s accessible to an exterior ladder. But it just occurred to me that we ought to let them come in this way, because they’ll be squeezed together on this goddamn catwalk and we can shoot them like rabbits. Or maybe just pry the catwalk loose and let them fall.”

  He told me to go see Jamal and have him order two people with guns up here. “And tell Anna not to wet her pants. I’m alive as I ever was. As soon as my two shooters get here, I’ll be down.”

  Before going I asked, “Why does everybody think you’re dead?”

  “It’s the flyer. I was going to take it up and harass Mack and see if I could get her to waste her last missiles. But somebody else got there first.”

  “Who?”

  “Vizbee and Smelt, of course. I guess they figured they were on the menu and the battle gave them a good chance to escape. Though where they hoped to escape to, I don’t know. Idiots. Now, scram.”

  ITEM (24)

  From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  (Kohn speaking)

  Jamal tells me he’s deferred the punch on the jaw until either the Cousins break in, or else we get away. That way if he knocks out a few teeth I can either have dental care or else not need it.

  I’ve had some of the guys loosen the retaining bolts on the upper catwalk. A bearpig tore out the grille and louvers but nothing’s tried to get through yet. I suppose they’ve figured out that it’s like climbing into a bull’s eye.

  I wish I knew if Mack’s got any missiles left. Let’s see, there were six in the armory to start with. One fired into Krebs’ quarters. One to blast the power station. One to open up the mess hall. Three fired here. Does that mean she’s out?

  I bet not. I bet she had a couple stored away in some secret place, maybe underground. This lady is daring but also careful. If she has more, they’ll soon be hitting a door. Preferably two doors, one on each side. Then the big beasts will break down what’s left, and they’ll be inside.

  We’ll kill a lot of them but it won’t make any difference, because, as Anna said, you can’t fight a whole world.

  WHAM!

  Hear that? Just in case anybody gets to listen to this record. I wish I wasn’t so goddamn right all the time. I wish I was dumber, so I couldn’t see things coming. I wish Anna and I were anyplace but here.

  It’s the door into the hangar again. It’s bent and bulging inward but still standing.

  Lots of pressure against the outside. Nerve-shattering squeals of metal grinding on metal. It moves slowly, but it does move. E pur si muove – what Galileo told the Inquisition – but it does move. Meaning the Earth, which probably we’ll never see again.

  That noise like a very loud shot was a hinge breaking. If only these things were nuclear steel, but they’re not; they’re strong, but we need something indestructible.

  I order four shooters to the threatened door. Order one guy to stand behind each shooter and grab his weapon if he’s killed or wounded. Yell for the shooters on the catwalk to come down. Order one to join Jamal, the other to blow off the loosened retaining bolts if something comes through the intake, as of course something will. Order everybody to stay away from the area underneath. Order Jamal to watch the double doors that open onto the shuttlepad. If the Cousins break in there, we’re seriously screwed.

  Finally stop giving orders. I’ve done the best I can, now we’ll fight it out and they’ll win, as possibly they deserve to do. As Eloise said, it is their world.

  On the way to her hospital, Anna gives me a blissful smile. She’s actually happy to be dying with me – compared to living without me. In all my long life, nobody ever looked at me that way before.

  ITEM (25)

  From the Letter of Eloise Alcerra to Her Mother

  I feel like such an idiot, talking, talking to you across the light years at a time like this. But what else can I do?

  It’ll hurt you to know exactly how I died, but not as much as not knowing. And I want you to know my last thoughts are with you.

  The expected blast just hit the double doors to the pad right in the middle and the metal snapped and bent. Then steady, unrelenting pressure.

  All the usual sounds from outside. Warbling, roaring, barking. I hardly hear them, I’m listening to the outcry of the metal as it bends. A lot of muscle out there. An arm reaches through, one of the bearpigs, long claws scratching at the metal. Jamal yells Hold your fire!

  And of course he’s right, that would’ve been a waste of ammo. There’s scrabbling around outside, more singing, more roaring, and then the pressure suddenly gets much, much worse. You can see the strong metal bulge, something snaps, something else snaps. Whatever’s pushing is breathing in huge gasps.

  We have to wait until the doors collapse, then shoot whatever’s on the other side. Its body will block the opening, but not for long.

  Mama, when I close my eyes for an instant I see your face.

  ITEM (26)

  From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  The double doors to the pad burst open. One of the sea lions that’s been leaning against them takes two shots and screams, screams like a wounded animal anywhere, only thirty times as loud.

  Then with a huge metallic crash the catwalk comes down, carrying half a dozen bearpigs with it. I step up and shoot the one that’s still moving.

  Turn back and see that the body of the sea lion is blocking the double doors. It’s like the hull of a boat, black and slick except for many white scars of past battles for mates and the two small entry holes left by the impact weapons.

  Bearpigs are trying to pull him out of the way, and an Arkie scrambles over him, takes one look at what’s waiting for him and scrambles back. But the body’s moving now, and it’s last-stand time in the old Beladome.

  ITEM (27)

  From Dr. Li’s Report

  And then came a thunderous roar and such a collective scream as I never thought to hear even in hell.

  ITEM (28)

  From the Letter of Eloise Alcerra

  (as dictated to Dr. Li)

  Jamal spun on his heel and picked me up and threw me out of the way before jumping himself.

  I landed against the curved wall of the dome just as a long plume of fire licked into the doorway and the body of the sea lion burst into flame, all the layers of fat under its hide igniting like wax, melting, spattering here and there, burning gobbets flying. A guy who was caught in the blast was turning black and falling apart like a doll hit by a blowtorch.

  If the Cousins hadn’t been there to block the opening partly, we’d all have been fried. As it was, Jamal’s clothes caught on fire and I threw myself on him and rolled, feeling the flame and not feeling it, until it was out.

  And then people were grabbing me by the wrists and pulling me into the hospital, and somebody had Jamal too, and about the same moment the roaring stopped and I realized that the supply ship’s shuttle was down and the retros had finally been turned off.

  ITEM (29)

  From t
he Report of Doctor Li

  I have never been busier than during the loading of the shuttle.

  The surviving Cousins had fled for the moment, but of course they would be back. So time was of the essence, and we had serious burn cases. Robert had suffered compound fractures of the radius and ulna of his left arm. He had either been blown down or had fallen hard trying to escape the blast.

  Fortunately, the shuttle was bringing in medical supplies among many other things, and we tore the boxes apart to find what we needed.

  Jamal had severe second-degree burns on the torso and some charring on the hands. Eloise had painful but superficial burns on her hands, belly, and right breast. A young man serving with Jamal had been burned beyond recognition, and died as we were loading him.

  The shuttle pilot, a Lieutenant Mannheim, talked to me as I worked. He was still amazed by what he had found. He said the overcast had been unusually dense, even for Bela, and he was almost on top of the port before he saw that it was under attack.

  Since the shuttle is unarmed, he did the only thing he could by landing in the usual way, using the retros as weapons. Robert praised and commended him, as indeed was only just, for this young officer – though suddenly confronted with an unimaginable situation – had saved all our lives.

  At the earliest possible moment, we lifted off. I did not feel entirely safe until we rose above the clouds, into eternal sunlight blazing against the blackness of space.

  ITEM (30)

  From Colonel Kohn’s Second Notebook

  Naturally, Anna wants to knock me out and put me in sickbay for the next six months. I tell her to give me a nerve block and splint the broken wing.

  I also get a rest, which I need. Anna bathes me. I’m fed and allowed to sleep under sedation for twelve standard hours. When I wake up, I visit Jamal and find him encased in a kind of body suit that protects his burns from infection and promotes healing. Anna says he’ll need a lot of grafting when we get home.

  His hands are in no condition for punching me, but I renew my offer for whenever they are. He’s wearing a blissfully silly smile, and I think is still too far under the M2 to hear me or care much, one way or the other. He’s alive and loved and floating on a morphine cushion, and that’s as close to paradise as any of us are likely to get.