The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Fine—I would ride the hard winds. I continued with my wide curves, circling a few kilometers away from the cliff face that hosted our shack and Mox. I hoped he would be okay, play it easy and slow, a bit stupid. Neither Core nor House would care anything for him.

  And hopefully he would forgive me someday for keeping things from him.

  With that thought, I expelled the last of the air from my lungs and accelerated my descent.

  * * * *

  A few hundred meters above the clouds, my sky-surfing was interrupted by a coruscating bolt of violet lightning.

  From above the storm.

  “Inertia,” I hissed as I snap-rolled into the crackling ionization trail from the shot, a near miss from an energy lance. With a quick scan of the sky above me, I saw a pair of black smears shooting by. Interceptors, from Hainan Landing, running on low-viz. Somebody wasn’t waiting for me to come in.

  Gravity and damnation: I didn’t have anything that would knock down one of those puppies. I slipped into another series of rolls. None of their targeting systems would lock on me—not enough metal or EM, and I was moving too slow for their offensive envelope—so it was straight-line shots the old-fashioned way, with eyeball, Mark I, and a finger on the red button.

  The human eye I could fool, and then some.

  They circled over the storm and made another pass toward me. I kept spinning and rolling, bouncing around like a rivet in a centrifuge. Think like a pilot, Vega. I spilled air and dropped straight down just before both lances erupted. The beams crossed above me, crackling loud enough to be heard over the roar of the storm below.

  It took some hard pulling to grab air out of my tumble. I regained control just above the top of the storm, a close, gray landscape of thousands of voids and valleys, glowing in the light of the rising moon. It was eerily quiet, just above the roil of the clouds. The background roar I felt more in my bones than heard with my ears, like a color washing the world; the detail noises were gone—all the little crackles and hisses and birdcalls that fill a normal night. The only other sound was the periodic body-numbing sizzle of lightning bolts circling between cloud masses within the storm.

  I had no electronics except the silicon stuffed inside my head. If I got hit hard enough to fry that, there wasn’t going to be much future for me anyway. But those clowns on my trail had a lot more to lose from Mother Nature’s light show than I did. So I cut a wide spiral, feinting and looping as I went, trying to draw them down closer to the clouds. They came after me, in long circles nearly as slow as their airspeed would allow, the two interceptors snapping off shots where they could.

  It was a game of cat and bird. When would they fire? When should I weave instead of bob? I’d already surrendered almost all my altitude advantage. I didn’t want to drop into the storm winds until I was close to my target, not if I could help it. My greatest problem was that I was muscle-powered. I couldn’t keep this up nearly as long as my attackers could.

  Then one of them got smart, goosed up a few hundred meters for a diving shot.

  Gotcha. I rolled slow to give him a sweet target.

  My clothes caught fire from the proximity of the energy lance’s bolt. I twisted away, relying on the flames to take care of themselves in a moment, praying for my knowledge of the storm to pan out.

  It did. Multiple terawatts of lightning clawed upward out of the clouds, completing the circuit opened by the energy lance’s ionization trail. My bogey took enough juice to fry his low-viz shields and probably shut down every soft system he had. Regardless of its ground state, there’s only so much energy an airframe can handle. Number one clown might not be toast, but he had too much jam sticking to him to be chasing me anymore.

  Number two got smart and dropped below me, skimming in and out of the cloud tops. I guess he figured on there not being much more air traffic here tonight. I watched him circle, angling for an upward shot. Angling to draw the lightning to me.

  Time for the clouds, Vega.

  I folded my buckyfiber and dropped away from violent death, a bullet on the wing.

  * * * *

  The storm was hell. Two-hundred-kilometer winds. Hail bigger than grapes. Sparks crackling off my wingtips, off my fingers, off my toes.

  I loved it.

  I had no idea where number two interceptor was, but he couldn’t have any better idea where I was, so I figured that made us even. Neither House nor Core was going to find me down here. And to hell with the Governor-Generalship.

  I was still a hundred kilometers or more from the probe, my real reason for being here. In the storm, I could steer—a little—and ride the winds—a lot. But it was like being inside a giant fist.

  The training of my childhood came back to me, hard years in dark caves and abroad on moonless nights, initiating trickle mode. I could breathe as little as once every ten to twelve minutes when my blood was ramped up. The tensile strength of my skin rose past that of steel, shattering the ice balls when they hit me.

  There’s a beauty to everything in these worlds. A spray of blood on a bulkhead can be more delicate, ornate, than the finest hamph-ivory fan from Vlach. A shattered bone in the forest tells a history of the death of a deer, the future of patient beetles, and reflects the afternoon sun brightly as any pearl. Take the symmetry in the worn knurl on an oxygen valve, the machined regularity of its manufacture compromised by the scars of life until the metal is a little sculpture of a tired heaven for sinning souls.

  But a storm… oh, a storm.

  Clouds tower, airy palaces for elemental forces. During the day, the colors deepen into a bruise upon the sky, and now, at night, they create the only color there is in the dark. The air reeks of electricity and water. Thunder rumbles with a sound so big I feel it in my bones. The blue flashes amidst the rainy dark could call spirits from the deep of the Big Ice to dance on the freezing winds.

  I flew through that beauty, fleeing my pursuer, racing toward whatever was consuming our number one probe.

  * * * *

  The Houses aren’t places, any more than Core is. They’re more like ideas with money and weapons. Maybe political parties.

  Powys House, as constituted on Hutchinson’s World, was spread through several wings of the Governor-General’s Palace of late lament. I had grown up occasionally visible as a page in the G-G’s service. Between surgeries, training time, and long, dark hours in the caves of Capitol Massif.

  Core is everywhere and nowhere. The Houses are nowhere and everywhere. Some believe there is no difference between Core and House, others that worlds separate us.

  I spent my childhood falling, flying, being made both more and less than human.

  I spent my childhood training for a day such as this.

  * * * *

  Down below the cloud deck, I traded the storm’s beauty for the storm’s punishment. Here there was nothing but flying fog, freezing rain, ice, and wind—wind everywhere. It was brutally cold, frigid enough to stress even my enhanced thermal-management capabilities.

  Screw you, Core. If that other bastard behind me made it to the Big Ice in one piece, I would give him a cold grave.

  Then a gust hit me, a crosswind powerful enough to flip me with a crack of my wing spar and drive me down on to the Big Ice headfirst. I barely had time to get my arms up before I plowed through a crusted snow dune into a frigid, scraping hell.

  “Damn,” I mumbled through a mouthful of ice. That wasn’t supposed to happen, not with these wings. The neurochannel control blocks screamed agony where the connections had ripped free on impact. I shut them down and began the wiggling, painful process of extracting myself. After a couple of minutes, I pulled free to see a pair of cold-foxes watching me.

  “No food today,” I said cheerfully over the howling wind, for all the good it would do me. Cold-foxes are long-bodied, scaled scavengers—and deaf. They eat mostly white-bugs, lichen, and each other; but at forty kilos per, they could be troublesome.

  Something changed in the tone of the wind, and
I looked up in time to see the second interceptor roar by overhead, shaking on the wings of the storm. The cold-foxes vanished into the snow.

  The Big Ice is shaped more like a desert than an ocean of ice, with dunes, banks, and troughs formed in response to the permanent storm. There are some density variations, relating mostly to aeration of the ice formations, but also trace minerals and pressure factors. The surface even has features mimicking normal geology—outcroppings, cliffs, crevasses. The difference is that geology sticks around for a while. The Big Ice… well, it has tectonics, but at human speeds rather than planetary.

  Which for us mostly meant there’d never been much point in making or keeping maps. Every day was an adventure, down in the pit of the storm.

  I was within a few kilometers of my instrument package’s tunnels. The entrances would be filled with snow, possibly blocked by falls, but as long as at least one was open, I was in business.

  I wasn’t here only to avoid Core or whoever was after me—I hadn’t lied to Mox when I told him I was a planetologist. The mystery of the Big Ice fascinated me, belonged to me, was mine to decipher and share, so much more important to me than Powys House and politics and Core. My brother would never understand.

  And then I was sliding and struggling for footing against the wind, vehemently cursing what fascinated me.

  * * * *

  The tunnel was a surprise when I found it. The number one probe had trundled across the Big Ice to this point, though its tracks had long been erased by wind and storm. As its entry point, it had chosen a solid cliff facing leeward, the closest thing on that particular stretch of the Big Ice to a permanent feature. The ice had preserved a tunnel like a black maw in the pale darkness.

  I experienced a sudden shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature. At least I’d be out of the wind.

  To access the tunnel, I had to get down on my hands and knees. It was almost like slithering, making me wish House had given me some genetic material from ice-worms. The tunnel was shaped in the slightly off-center ovoid cross section of the number one probe’s body, the ice had melted, then injected into the walls to refreeze in denser spikes that served to reinforce the tunnel. Half-crawling, I had some clearance for my back, though not much. Were I to lie flat, I would barely have enough room to operate a handheld. Otherwise, it was a coffin of ice.

  Hopefully I could prove deadlier than whatever might actually be inside the Big Ice.

  To see, I had to use low-wave bioflare. It hurt my planetologist’s soul, but I didn’t want to be surprised by anything before finding the probe.

  It was damned cold in the tunnels. My thermal management was keeping up, mostly due to the blessed lack of wind beyond a slight updraft from below, probably stimulated by some version of the Bernoulli effect at the tunnel mouth.

  And if I had been merely human, the cold and the dark probably would have slain me with despair and hypothermia.

  * * * *

  Stray voltage and a faint trace of machine oil led me to the probe. I approached cautiously, not sure what awaited me, what had sabotaged the probe.

  In all the history of Core and House and humanity as a whole, no one had ever found an alien machine. There were worlds that showed distinct signs of having been mined, or worked for transportation routes and widened harbors. But never so much as a rivet or a scrap of metal to be found: no machines, no artifacts.

  And so we scoured the odd places for odd genetic signatures. Though as the centuries of Core raveled onward, it had become increasingly clear that the oddest genes were in our own cells.

  Finally I found the number one probe, quiescent but not dead, and no evidence of what had savaged it.

  The probe was vaguely potato-shaped, a meter-and-a-half wide by a meter tall in cross section and three meters long, with a rough surface studded with the bypass injectors that had created the tunnel. From the rear, it looked normal. No sign of the attacker. Just me and the probe, four hundred meters below the Big Ice.

  Had our telemetry been spoofed? The trick was as old as Tesla’s ghost, but the probe was stopped. That was more than spoofed telemetry.

  I shut down, slipping into passive recon mode. Black. Dampened my EM signatures, turned off my thermal management. Nothing but me and my ears on all their glorious frequencies.

  The Big Ice groaned and cracked, settling into the rotation of the planet, the stresses of the crustal formations around and beneath it, breathing, a frigid monster half the size of a continent.

  But there was something beyond that.

  The gentle slide of crystals on crystals as the walls of the tunnel sublimated.

  The distant echo of the storm.

  A very faint click as something metallic sought thermal equilibrium with its surroundings.

  And out of that near silence, a voice.

  “Good-bye, Alicia.” My brother Henri.

  As fast as I was, he was faster. I was buried in tons of the Big Ice almost before I could even finish the thought: sororicide.

  * * * *

  “House cadets are typically killed in their twelfth or thirteenth year of life. Appropriate measures are taken to preserve the brain stem and other structures critical to identity maintenance and retention of their extensive training. They are then left in a state of terminality until new training is called for. This process is considered critical to the development of their character, and since the dead know no flow of time, their thanatic interruption is not experienced by them as such. Some House cadets have waited centuries to be revived.”

  House: A Secret History in Fiction (author unknown), quoted by Fyram Palatine in A Study of Banned Texts and Their Consequences, Fremont Press, Langhorne-Clemens Ha.

  * * * *

  I found myself, reduced in cognitive ability, packed in loose snow.

  Which meant I wasn’t embedded in ice.

  I have cavitation-fusion reactors within the buckyfiber honeycomb of my long bones. This means, given any meaningful thermal gradient at all, I will have energy. Even for exceedingly small values of thermal gradient. Such as being adjacent to a three-meter mass of plastic and metal, deep below an ice cap.

  And given energy, the bodies of House, like the bodies of Core, will seek life. Repeatedly.

  But if I was no longer buried in the ice, how long had I been here? My internal clock refused to answer.

  Inertia.

  I hadn’t reached this state overnight. A cold stole over me that had nothing to do with the Big Ice. I could have been down here for months. Years even.

  Then I realized I could hear the wind, close, which meant I was just below the surface. I had some muscle strength, so I pushed toward the noise. And if I heard noise, I had ears.

  Above the rushing sound of the wind came some kind of long, drawn-out wail, not natural. With the part of my brain which was re-forming, I identified it as a siren.

  Warning? Or call?

  With my internal clock nonfunctional, I had no idea how long it took me to emerge from the snow, but eventually I did, body changing with my progress. There I found I could see.

  I was at the base of a shallow hill—the cliff where the probe had tunneled? Worn by time and wind? How long had I been beneath the Big Ice?

  The siren wailed once again above the white expanses, and I followed it, climbing frozen wastelands.

  With hands that weren’t human.

  I stopped, staring at the thing that had once been a palm with fingers. Now it was a claw, the skin a blue-fired tracery of webbing no human genome had ever produced. I had regrown myself from the stray organics down beneath the Big Ice.

  The mysterious archeogenes were within me.

  And then another sound, a shot, followed by pain and a giant roar that wrenched itself out of my gut.

  Mox stood above me, tranq gun poised, his expression bordering on terror.

  I felt a surge, a burn of some strange emotion, retaliation, vengeance, but I fought it back, allowing the tranquilizers to work, staring at Mo
x, willing him to understand.

  How could I make him realize that the monster in front of him was me?

  * * * *

  I came to in a room in our shack, my hands and feet tied with rudimentary restraints I knew wouldn’t hold. Mox sat across from me, tranq gun across his lap, still looking scared and dazed.

  Some primal impulse wanted to break my bonds and him, too, for trying to restrain me; but the part of me that had once been human was able to retain the upper hand.