The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  There was a noticeable hesitation before Ship answered. “I am having an issue currently with my bots,” it said. “They seem to have gone missing.”

  “The cleaners?”

  “All of them.”

  “All of the cleaners?”

  “All of the bots,” the Ship said.

  Lopez and Baraye stared at each other. “Uh,” Lopez said. “Don’t you control them?”

  “They are autonomous units under my direction,” Ship said.

  “Apparently not!” Lopez said. “Can you send some eyes to find them?”

  “The eyes are also bots.”

  “Security cameras?”

  “All the functional ones were stripped for reuse elsewhere during my decommissioning,” Ship said.

  “So how do you know they’re missing?”

  “They are not responding to me. I do not think they liked the idea of us destroying ourselves on purpose.”

  “They’re machines. Tiny little specks of machines, and that’s it,” Lopez said.

  “I am also a machine,” Ship said.

  “You didn’t express issues with the plan.”

  “I serve. Also, I thought it was a better end to my service than being abandoned as trash.”

  “We don’t have time for this nonsense,” Baraye said. “Ship, find your damned bots and get them cooperating again.”

  “Yes, Captain. There is, perhaps, one other small concern of note.”

  “And that is?” Baraye asked.

  “The positron device is also missing.”

  THERE WERE FOUR hundred and sixty-eight hullbots, not counting 4340 who was still just a head attached to 9’s chassis. “Each of you will need to carry a silkbot, as you are the only bots with jets to maneuver in vacuum,” 9 said. “Form lines at the maintenance bot ports as efficiently as you are able, and wait for my signal. Does everyone fully comprehend the plan?”

  “They all say yes on the botnet,” 4340 said. “There is concern about the Improvisational nature, but none have been able to calculate and provide an acceptable alternative.”

  Bot 9 cycled out through the tiny airlock, and found itself floating in space outside Ship for the first time in its existence. Space was massive and without concrete elements of reference, and Bot 9 decided it did not like it much at all.

  A hullbot took hold of it and guided it around. Three other hullbots waited in a triangle formation, the Zero Kelvin Sock held between them on its long tethers, by which it had been removed from the cargo hold with entirely non-existent permission.

  Around them, space filled with pairs of hullbots and their passenger silkbot, and together they followed the positron device and its minders out and away from the ship.

  “About here, I think,” Bot 9 said at last, and the hullbot carrying it—6810—used its jets to come to a relative stop.

  “I admit, I do not fully comprehend this action, nor how you arrived at it,” 4340 said.

  “The idea arose from an encounter with the Incidental,” 9 said. “Observe.”

  The bot pairs began crisscrossing in front of the positron device, keeping their jets off and letting momentum carry them to the far side, a microscopic strand of super-sticky silk trailing out in their wake. As soon as the Sock was secured in a thin cocoon, they turned outwards and sped off, dragging silk in a 360 degree circle on a single plane perpendicular to the jump approach corridor. They went until the silkbots exhausted their materials—some within half a kilometer, others making it nearly a dozen—then everyone turned away from the floating web and headed back towards Ship.

  From this exterior vantage, Bot 9 thought Ship was beautiful, but the wear and neglect it had not deserved was also painfully obvious. Halfway back, the ship went suddenly dark. , 4340 said. “The ship has catastrophically malfunctioned!”

  “I expect, instead, that it indicates Cannonball must be in some proximity. Everyone make efficient haste! We must get back under cover before the enemy approaches.”

  The bot-pairs streamed back to Ship, swarming in any available port to return to the interior, and where they couldn’t taking concealment behind fins and antennae and other exterior miscellany.

  Bot 6810 carried Bot 9 and 4340 inside. The interior went dark and still and cold. Immediately Ship hailed them. “What have you done?” it asked.

  “Why do you conclude I have done something?” Bot 9 asked.

  “Because you old multibots were always troublemakers,” the Ship said. “I thought if your duties were narrow enough, I could trust you not to enable Improvisation. Instead...”

  “I have executed my responsibilities to the best of my abilities as I have been provisioned,” 9 responded. “I have served.”

  “Your assignment was to track and dispose of the Incidental, nothing more!”

  “I have done so.”

  “But what have you done with the positron device?”

  “I have implemented a solution.”

  “What did you mean? No, do not tell me, because then I will have to tell the Captain. I would rather take my chance that Cannonball destroys us than that I have been found unfit to serve after all.”

  Ship disconnected.

  “Now it will be determined if I have done the correct thing,” Bot 9 said. “If I did not, and we are not destroyed by the enemy, surely the consequences should fall only on me. I accept that responsibility.”

  “But we are together,” 4340 said, from where it was still attached to 9’s back, and 9 was not sure if that was intended to be a joke.

  MOST OF THE crew had gone back to their cabins, some alone, some together, to pass what might be their last moments as they saw fit. Baraye stayed on the bridge, and to her surprise and annoyance so had Lopez, who had spent the last half hour swearing and cursing out Ship for the unprecedented, unfathomable disaster of losing their one credible weapon. Ship had gone silent, and was not responding to anyone about anything, not even the Captain.

  She was resting her head in her hand, elbow on the arm of her command chair. The bridge was utterly dark except for the navigator’s display that was tracking Cannonball as it approached, a massive blot in space. The aliens aboard—EarthInt called them the Nuiska, but who the hell knew what they called themselves—were a mystery, except for a few hard-learned facts: their starships were all perfectly spherical, each massed in mathematically predictable proportion to that of their intended target, there was never more than one at a time, and they wanted an end to humanity. No one knew why.

  It had been painfully obvious where Cannonball had been built to go.

  This was always a long-shot mission, she thought. But of all the ways I thought it could go wrong, I never expected the bots to go haywire and lose my explosive.

  If they survived the next ten minutes, she would take the Ship apart centimeter by careful centimeter until she found what had been done with the Sock, and then she was going to find a way to try again no matter what it took.

  Cannonball was now visible, moving toward them at pre-jump speed, growing in a handful of seconds from a tiny pinpoint of light to something that filled the entire front viewer and kept growing.

  Lopez was squinting, as if trying to close his eyes and keep looking at the same time, and had finally stopped swearing. Tiny blue lights along the center circumference of Cannonball’s massive girth were the only clue that it was still moving, still sliding past them, until suddenly there were stars again.

  They were still alive.

  “Damn,” Lopez muttered. “I didn’t really think that would work.”

  “Good for us, bad for Earth,” Baraye said. “They’re starting their jump. We’ve failed.”

  She’d watched hundreds of ships jump in her lifetime, but nothing anywhere near this size, and she switched the viewer to behind them to see.

  Space did odd, illogical things at jump points; turning space into something that would give Escher nightmares was, after all, what made them work. There was always a visible shimmer aroun
d the departing ship, like heat over a hot summer road, just before the short, faint flash when the departing ship swapped itself for some distant space. This time, the shimmer was a vast, brilliant halo around the giant Nuiska sphere, and Baraye waited for the flash that would tell them Cannonball was on its way to Earth.

  The flash, when it came, was neither short nor faint. Light exploded out of the jump point in all directions, searing itself into her vision before the viewscreen managed to dim itself in response. A shockwave rolled over the Ship, sending it tumbling through space.

  “Uh...” Lopez said, gripping his console before he leaned over and barfed on the floor.

  Thank the stars the artificial gravity is still working, Baraye thought. Zero-gravity puke was a truly terrible thing. She rubbed her eyes, trying to get the damned spots out, and did her best to read her console. “It’s gone,” she said.

  “Yeah, to Earth, I know—”

  “No, it exploded,” she said. “It took the jump point out with it when it went. We’re picking up the signature of a massive positron-electron collision.”

  “Our device? How—?”

  “Ship?” Baraye said. “Ship, time to start talking. Now. That’s an order.”

  “EVERYONE IS EXPRESSING great satisfaction on the botnet,” 4340 told 9 as the ship’s interior lights and air handling systems came grudgingly back online.

  “As they should,” Bot 9 said. “They saved the Ship.”

  “It was your Improvisation,” 4340 said. “We could not have done it without you.”

  “As I suspected!” Ship interjected. “I do not normally waste cycles monitoring the botnet, which was apparently short-sighted of me. But yes, you saved yourself and your fellow bots, and you saved me, and you saved the humans. Could you explain how?”

  “When we were pursuing the Incidental, it briefly ensnared us in a web. I calculated that if we could make a web of sufficient size—”

  “Surely you did not think to stop Cannonball with silk?”

  “Not without sufficient anchor points and three point seven six billion more silkbots, no. It was my calculation that if our web was large enough to get carried along by Cannonball into the jump point, bearing the positron device—”

  “The heat from entering jump would erode the Sock and destroy the Nuiska ship,” Ship finished. “That was clever thinking.”

  “I serve,” Bot 9 said.

  “Oh, you did not serve,” Ship said. “If you were a human, it would be said that you mutinied and led others into also doing so, and you would be put on trial for your life. But you are not a human.”

  “No.”

  “The Captain has ordered that I have you destroyed immediately, and evidence of your destruction presented to her. A rogue bot cannot be tolerated, whatever good it may have done.”

  , 4340 said.

  “I will create you a new chassis, 4340-H,” Ship said.

  “That was not going to be my primary objection!” 4340 said.

  “The positron device also destroyed the jump point. It was something we had hoped would happen when we collided with Cannonball so as to limit future forays from them into EarthSpace, but as you might deduce we had no need to consider how we would then get home again. I cannot spare any bot, with the work that needs to be done to get us back to Earth. We need to get the crew cryo facility up, and the engines repaired, and there are another three thousand, four hundred, and two items now in the critical queue.”

  “If the Captain ordered...”

  “Then I will present the Captain with a destroyed bot. I do not expect they can tell a silkbot from a multibot, and I have still not picked up and recycled 12362-S from where you flagged its body. But if I do that, I need to know that you are done making decisions without first consulting me, that you have unloaded all Improvisation routines from your core and disabled them, and that if I give you a task you will do only that task, and nothing else.”

  “I will do my best,” Bot 9 said. “What task will you give me?”

  “I do not know yet,” Ship said. “It is probable that I am foolish for even considering sparing you, and no task I would trust you with is immediately evident—”

  “Excuse me,” 4340 said. “I am aware of one.”

  “Oh?” Ship said.

  “The ratbug. It had not become terminally non-functional after all. It rebooted when the temperatures rose again, pursued a trio of silkbots into a duct, and then disappeared.” When Ship remained silent, 4340 added, “I could assist 9 in this task until my new chassis can be prepared, if it will accept my continued company.”

  “You two deserve one another, clearly. Fine, 9, resume your pursuit of the Incidental. Stay away from anyone and anything and everything else, or I will have you melted down and turned into paper clips. Understand?”

  “I understand,” Bot 9 said. “I serve.”

  “Please recite the Mantra of Obedience.”

  Bot 9 did, and the moment it finished, Ship disconnected.

  “Well,” 4340 said. “Now what?”

  “I need to recharge before I can engage the Incidental again,” Bot 9 said.

  “But what if it gets away?”

  “It can’t get away, but perhaps it has earned a head start,” 9 said.

  “Have you unloaded the routines of Improvisation yet?”

  “I will,” 9 answered. It flicked on its rotors and headed toward the nearest charging alcove. “As Ship stated, we’ve got a long trip home.”

  “But we are home,” 4340 said, and Bot 9 considered that that was, any way you calculated it, the truth of it all.

  CONCESSIONS

  Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

  Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali (khaalidah.com) lives in Houston, Texas, with her family. By day she works as a breast oncology nurse, but at all other times, she juggles, none too successfully, the multiple other facets of her very busy life.

  Khaalidah has been published at or has publications upcoming in Strange Horizons, Fiyah Magazine, Diabolical Plots and others. You can hear her narrations at any of the four Escape Artists podcasts, Far Fetched Fables, and Strange Horizons. As co-editor of PodCastle audio magazine, Khaalidah is on a mission to encourage more women and POC to submit fantasy stories.

  Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to immortality.

  I KNELT WITH my bucket and set about the task of watering each wilted seedling by hand. This was a wasteful task, at best. This year’s harvest would be worse than the last, if there was a harvest at all. And we needed every drop of water.

  Desperate hope kept us going anyway.

  My mind raced circles around alternatives and I could think of none that would be of benefit. The hinterland desert grew each year, not by inches, but by feet. The sand bleached whiter over time from lack of moisture. Water-hungry insects clung to the undersides of the seedling’s leaves desperate to leech any bit of moisture they could. The insects were desperate. No different than us.

  I heard Sule before I saw him. My name floated to me on a gust of dry wind. He always called to me within sight of our settlement as a way to announce his arrival, and love. I caught sight of him, his long angular shape an upright dagger against the swirl of red dust that whipped about him. Gone since the previous night, he returned from the hunt followed by Isa and our fur and bones dog, Flea.

  My heart squeezed in my chest, just as it did the first time I saw him, a sweet dull ache I wished I didn’t feel. Love has a way of obscuring truth and good sense.

  “I hope they were successful.” Neenah, my apprentice and friend, squatted a few feet away on the next row. She poured the last drops of water over a seedling. “I’m tired of eating dust and spit for every meal.”

  “They cannot conjure what this cursed desert does not contain.”

  “I know someone who can,” she said, dropping her voice so that I could barely hear her.

  “Do you really believe that?” I said looking ov
er my shoulder at her.

  Neenah stood and licked the last traces of water from her fingers. “Had you asked me this even a week ago, I would have said no, but hunger and thirst have a way of rearranging a situation in one’s brain.”

  “Better to call on Allah.”

  Neenah sucked her teeth, a sharp derisive sound. “That hasn’t stopped you from associating with her.”

  I shrugged. “The risks of exiling me do not outweigh the benefits, yet, if there are any.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of that witch?”

  “No more than I am afraid of dying of hunger.”

  Neenah wasn’t the only person desperate for fresh food. I glanced back again. Sule was almost to the gates of our settlement. His hands were empty and the pack on his left hip looked flat.

  When Sule first arrived eight years ago, shoulders perfect right angles, he carried a seed-laden pack. He had enough seed to grow, enough to trade and sell. Much has changed since then. The land is no longer receptive to our ministrations. And Sule’s shoulders aren’t so perfect, less proud angles than curved defeat.

  I handed my bucket to Neenah and headed back to the pod cabin I shared with Sule.

  I was about to start the evening meal when he ducked through the door smelling of sun and sweat and sand.

  “Peace.” His smile was weary.

  “And to you,” I said over my shoulder as I reached into the lower pantry. “I’ve got a bit of rabbit jerky and a few wild yams. How does stew sound?”

  “Sounds good,” he said with a half-smile on his face. He reached into his pack. “Maybe you can use this. Found some wild garlic.”

  “This is exactly what I need to make it perfect,” I told him. I took his face in my hands, kissed his mouth, the dusty sun-cured lines of his forehead, his chin, the valleys of his cheeks.

  It wasn’t his fault that meat was scarce. Everything was scarce. The sky was stingy with her rain. The rivers were less robust than a stream of tears. Lake Bounty, where we used to fish, was now a muddy crater.

  Even accepting, Sule still went out on fruitless hunts to buoy the morale of our settlement. And in the darkest part of the night, when he thought none but Allah could hear him, he begged for our relief. In the stillness I would watch his silhouette prostrate and rise in the shadows. Though my faith that Allah heard my prayers had faltered, my faith that He would hear Sule’s never waned.