The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  If anyone in Command ever bothered to check the ship’s heading and acceleration, they would have had a surprise. But the staff had an emergency on its hands, and much to occupy them; their sensor displays were tuned to the awesome might of the x-ray beam spinning ever closer, and a distant ship that did not call attention to itself was something that floated only on the margins of their attention, like a lily floating in the distant reaches of a pond.

  No queries regarding Titan came to Martinez’s attention. One shelter after another was certified, and the population put to rehearsing their evacuation schemes. At the last moment the Lady Mayor of Port Gareth came up with another plan: she wanted to put much of the population of her town into several of the large containers that had brought goods from orbit, and sink them below the surface of the bay for the duration of the emergency. Martinez, torn between irritation and hilarity, told her that it was too late to change the plans, and she should complete all conventional shelters in her town.

  Lord Pa and Allodorm were on the ground, coordinating last-minute emergency and evacuation work. Personnel on Chee Station were sent to the surface, leaving a skeleton crew behind. The two huge rotating wheels were braked to a stop, and the antimatter reactor powered down. Even the emergency lighting was turned off in most of the station to keep surges from following power lines. Kayenta was readied at the airlock, with Marcella and select Meridian Company personnel aboard, a team that would return to the station with Martinez for a survey before anyone else was allowed to return to the station. One by one the displays and work spaces at Ring Command were shut down, leaving live only the boards that would be needed to begin the restart.

  Martinez, Lord Ehl, and the other crew left the darkened, eerily silent Command room and floated along guide cables to the entrance to the great elevator car. Martinez accepted their salute, wished Ehl luck, and watched them file aboard. The car began its descent, diving smoothly along the cable to its vanishing point in the green land mass below, and then Martinez turned for Kayenta’s berth.

  When Kayenta departed from the station, it would go into a polar orbit calculated to place the mass of the planet between itself and the pulsar for the critical few seconds, just as the shuttles were doing. Martinez would be able to return to the station after less than an hour’s absence.

  With all the ventilators shut down the air was perfumed by the scent of decaying polymers. Empty and without lights the docks were a monumental, indistinct darkness, vast as space itself. The beam of Martinez’s hand flash vanished in the blackness. At a great distance Martinez saw the glow that marked Kayenta’s docking port, lit not by station power but by the yacht’s own power supply. Martinez placed his feet carefully against a wall and kicked off, and was pleased to find that he was straight on course for the airlock.

  Two figures bulked large by the door, their feet tucked into handles on the wall, their arms reaching for Martinez. As he drifted closer, he saw they were both Torminel. They wore only shorts and vests over their thick gray and black fur, and their huge eyes, adapted for hunting at night, glittered as they tracked Martinez.

  Two of Marcella’s survey team, apparently.

  Martinez flew into their arms, and they caught him and absorbed his momentum with ease. A furry hand closed on each of his, and placed his hands on handholds by the airlock.

  “Thank you,” Martinez said. He tried to shift his left hand, but the Torminel on his left kept it pinned.

  The other Torminel, he saw, had a med injector in his free hand.

  He barely had time to register alarm before he felt the cool touch of the injector against his neck.

  And then he had all the time in the world.

  There was silence in the control room, broken only by the sound of his breath, by the pulse that beat a quick march in his chest.

  Severin watched from his acceleration cage as Titan flew toward its objective, its engines firing a last series of powerful burns that would inject it into the pulsar’s accretion disk at exactly the right angle.

  The colossal gravity of the pulsar would tear the ship to atoms, hurling its cargo of antihydrogen into the spinning disk. A great swath of the disk’s hydrogen would be annihilated in a ferocious burst of gamma rays, energetic neutrons, and pi-mesons. A percentage of these particles would fall into the neutron star and pump up its x-ray emissions. Another percentage would fly outward into the accretion disk, heating the hydrogen there to blazing temperatures so that when it fell into the pulsar another fierce megaburst of x-rays would blaze forth.

  But in between the two ferocious blasts would come eighteen minutes of silence. The mechanism that produced the life-destroying double lance of the pulsar would be shut down.

  Or at least it would if Severin’s calculations were correct.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Chamcha reported unnecessarily. The seconds were ticking down in a corner of Severin’s display.

  Titan was standing on a vast, blazing tail of annihilated matter. Severin was using the cargo ship as a giant torpedo, aimed straight for a deadly enemy.

  “Ten seconds,” Chamcha said.

  “Oh, shut up,” Severin murmured. Chamcha must have had more acute ears than Severin thought, because the sensor tech maintained a resolute silence right up till Titan vanished into the larger blip that was the pulsar and its brown companion.

  Severin’s attention immediately turned to the pulsar’s rotating x-ray beam, which his display had colored a lurid green. The reaction was immediate: the beam, rotating twelve times per second, blazed into an emerald fury. If the beam hit Chee now, it would strip the planet down to its mantle.

  Severin could only hope that the pulsar would switch off when it was supposed to.

  And suddenly he thought: the statue!

  That’s how he’d work it. Frenella, the gamine, would send Eggfont the little statue of Lord Mince, and that would tip Eggfont to Mince’s relationship with Lady Belledrawers.

  He felt a little shiver of delight as he contemplated the perfection of the device. And, as he waited to see whether his plan for Titan would work, he thought about what Eggfont would do next.

  There was a faint gray mist that swirled through the air, an insistent electric humming in his ears. His fingers and toes tingled as if he’d rubbed them with sandpaper. A furry animal seemed to have got lodged partway down his throat.

  With a convulsive heave of his chest he tried to expel the object in his throat. He made several attempts before he realized that the animal was in fact his tongue. His mouth was absolutely dry and his tongue scraped painfully against the roof of his mouth.

  He closed his mouth and tried to summon saliva. He worked his jaw and throat muscles for several long moments before he managed to produce a little moisture.

  Having relieved some of his discomfort he then he tried to work out where he was. The gray mist had darkened, and the humming sound had largely faded. He could feel nothing, not even air moving against his skin. It was as if he’d been packed in cotton up to his neck.

  He touched himself just to assure himself that he was still there. He felt the familiar uniform tunic, the medal of the Golden Orb at his neck, and he bent – knelt? – to feel his legs in their trousers, with the shoes still on his feet. There was something that bobbed and interfered with his right hand, and he took hold of it and realized it was his hand flash, attached to his wrist with an elastic lanyard.

  At this point he came to the realization that he was in free fall. He was in darkness and in free fall and probably he had never left Chee Station: he was floating somewhere in one of its huge overdesigned open spaces.

  A jolt of adrenaline hit Martinez then, a sudden hot burning along his nerves as he remembered the pulsar. If he’d never left the station, then he was still vulnerable to the burning x-rays.

  He raised his left forearm before his face and whispered, past his painfully dry tongue and through dry lips.

  “Display: show time.”

  Yellow numerals flashed onto Mar
tinez’s sleeve, pulsing in time to the speeding of the seconds. Through the gray fog Martinez tried to fit to the numbers to the chronology of the last days, and with a chill of horror he realized that the pulsar’s beam should have struck nearly five minutes before.

  Without willing it he began patting himself again, as if in search of a wound. Partway through the action he realized its absurdity, but he couldn’t make himself stop until he had assured himself, again, that his parts were all where they were supposed to be.

  He didn’t feel as if he’d been blasted through with x-rays. He felt strange, with the gray fog drifting past his eyes and the deep electric hum a distant presence in his ears, but he didn’t feel ill.

  He tried to remember what might have happened to put him in this situation. He recalled leaving Command with Lord Ehl and the last of the station crew. He couldn’t remember anything that happened after that.

  Then, with a song of relief that chorused in his bones, he remembered Severin. Severin must have succeeded in his effort to switch off the pulsar.

  Good old Severin! he thought wildly. Severin had come through! It made Martinez want to sing the “Congratulations” round from Lord Fizz Takes a Holiday.

  Instead he wiped his mouth and tried to summon saliva into his mouth. The yellow seconds ticked by in his sleeve display. He still couldn’t remember how he got here.

  He wondered if there had been an accident, but he thought not. An accident would have resulted in more damage, not least to him.

  Martinez remembered the hand flash hanging off his wrist, and he reached for it and switched it on, pointing it above his head. The beam vanished into the darkness without encountering anything. He panned the beam down, and at a downward angle the beam found a wall painted a dark gray. Martinez tracked the beam along the wall until he encountered a large sliding cargo door, on which were painted in white the numerals 7-03. Which meant Warehouse Three, Docking Bay Seven.

  Bay Seven was where Kayenta had been docked. Apparently he’d got as far as Kayenta’s berth before . . . before what?

  Perhaps the yacht had left early and stranded him on the station. But in that case, it seemed odd that Martinez had no memory of it.

  The cargo door, Martinez saw, had handholds by it. There wasn’t a lot of point in hanging in midair and waiting for something to happen. Perhaps he ought to get to somewhere where he could make something happen.

  He swam awkwardly in midair until he had his back to the cargo door, then he took off his shoe and hurled it as hard as he could in the opposite direction.

  Equal and opposite reaction, though unfortunately the masses were unequal. Martinez began drifting very slowly toward the cargo door while pitching backwards in long, slow circles.

  Several seconds later, he heard a clang as the shoe hit something on the other side of the cargo bay.

  The act of throwing his shoe left him panting and out of breath. Something was clearly wrong with him physically. It was going to take him a while to reach the cargo door, and while he slowly drifted and tumbled he thought about how he had got here, and why he couldn’t remember.

  He had been drugged, he thought. He had been drugged and only the fact of his veins being full of narcotics had prevented him from realizing it earlier.

  He probably hadn’t been shot with an amnesia drug: some drugs could cause amnesia as a side effect. It was one of those odd reactions that couldn’t be predicted.

  As he tumbled, his hair flying in front of his eyes, he felt a sudden chill as he realized what had happened.

  He’d been drugged and left to be killed by the pulsar, but the person who had left him to die hadn’t known that Titan was going to shut off the pulsar, and Martinez had survived.

  Which meant that as soon as the person who had left him to die worked out that the x-ray beam hadn’t hit the station, he was going to have to come back and finish the job.

  Martinez almost wrenched his neck as his head darted around, staring into the darkness for his attacker. Who could be lurking on the station, and loading his gun or his med injector even now.

  The wall rotated closer and Martinez reached out to grab one of the handholds by door 7-03. The drug almost made him miss, but he touched it with his fingertips and that slowed his rotation slightly, so that when he hit the wall and bounced he was able to make another grab for a different handhold and brought himself to a stop.

  It occurred to him that his hand flash was very possibly making a target of him, so he turned it off and tried to think where he needed to go next.

  The person who had tried to kill him could have hidden easily on the nearly deserted station, and then from hiding to strike as Martinez moved from the elevator to Kayenta. Wherever the assassin had hidden, though, there was only one place the assassin would be now, and that was in shielded Ring Command, where he’d be safe from the pulsar. Martinez should definitely avoid Ring Command.

  The problem was that Ring Command had all he’d need to establish contact with the outside world: control of all communications systems, the antennae, and the power supply to start everything up.

  Martinez tried to think where else he might find communication gear, and then sudden light dazzled his eyes.

  Across the docking bay, the floodlights at one of the ports had just lit. A ship had docked, and was powering up the airlock through its electrical connection.

  Kayenta! Martinez felt his heart give a leap. Kayenta had come to rescue him!

  He gathered his legs under him, feet pressed against the wall, ready to spring to the airlock and greet his rescuers the second they came through the door.

  And then he hesitated. There was something about the sight of the distant airlock, surrounded by its glowing lights, that caused him unease.

  Why? Why was someone trying to kill him?

  He hadn’t stopped to think about that before.

  He had found out that the Meridian Company had been committing massive fraud. That might be worth killing over, he supposed, though assassination seemed an immoderate response.

  It was so uncivilized. They might at least have tried to bribe him first.

  Kayenta, in any case, wasn’t a Meridian Company ship; it belonged to the Chee Company, owned principally by the Martinez family. Lady Marcella Zykov, a Chee company executive and a near relation of the Martinez clan, was on board and in charge.

  But there were Meridian Company personnel on board, to inspect and help restart the station. Some of them might have been given orders concerning Martinez and his health.

  Perhaps, Martinez thought, he shouldn’t jump straight to Kayenta. Perhaps he should first hide, and then see who left the airlock, and if they had large firearms.

  He glanced around the huge space and found no place to hide. To his left was a corridor, rather distant, that led to Ring Command – and he didn’t want to go that way, in case an assassin was heading in the other direction. To the right was a huge bulkhead door that led to another cargo bay, but that had been closed and it would require station power to open it.

  That left one or another of the warehouse spaces. 7-03 was as good as any.

  The cargo door would require a power assist, but each warehouse space also had a personnel hatch, and the hatches were extremely well balanced so that weightless people could use them. Martinez pushed toward it and snagged a handhold. The hatch opened in complete silence. Martinez slipped in feet-first, then drew the hatch partly shut, so that he still had a view of Kayenta’s airlock.

  The air in the warehouse was close and had an aromatic scent, something like cardamom. Martinez looked over the interior with his hand flash and saw it was packed with standardized shipping containers, all in bright primary colors, stacked atop one another and strapped down to keep them from drifting. Because the weightless conditions permitted it, the containers were strapped to all six surfaces, including those he might arbitrarily designate as walls and ceiling. There was very little open space in the room, only a straight square tunnel that stretched to
the back and would permit containers to be maneuvered in and out.

  No real place to hide, he realized. He should have chosen another storage room.

  Martinez was considering a jump to the next warehouse when he heard the airlock doors open and knew it was too late. He peered over the sill of the hatch and strained to see past the glare of the floodlights. There were at least three figures in the airlock, and from their barrel torsos and squat, powerful legs, Martinez knew the first two for Torminel.

  An alarm rang in Martinez’s mind. He didn’t like the sight of those Torminel, and even though he couldn’t remember why, he knew very well that he didn’t want to show himself now.

  “Lord Inspector?” one of the Torminel called, lisping the words past her fangs. “Lord Inspector, are you there?”

  The sound echoed and died away in the vast empty dockyard.

  The Torminel turned on bright flashlights and began shining them across the big room. Martinez remembered how well their huge eyes could see in the darkness and shrank from the hatch sill.

  “Look!” the other Torminel called. “It’s his shoe!”

  While the Torminel were inspecting the mystery of the shoe that was floating by itself in the vast room, Martinez drew the hatch shut and locked it down. Unfortunately the manual lock mechanism could be worked from the outside, but at least when it began to move it would provide a bit of warning.

  What Martinez really needed was a weapon.

  He panned along the wall with his hand flash and saw a small locker on the wall. He drifted toward it and opened it.

  In the locker were spare light globes, a pad of stick-on labels for shipping containers, a pair of fire extinguishers, pairs of work gloves, large reels of strapping for holding down crates and containers, and tough plastic clamps for tying down the strapping. But what chiefly attracted Martinez’s attention were the two shiny aluminum pry bars, each as long as his leg, that were used to wedge the containers into their proper places. They were octagonal in shape until the business end, where they narrowed into flat, slightly curved blades.