Writers of the Future, Volume 27

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” he said. “People in this city know to stay out of the tunnels.”

  I narrowly avoided snorting at him. Anybody with even a passing understanding of human nature knows that people will cheerfully go exactly where they’re least safe.

  Two steps farther.

  He grabbed my shoulder, twisted and slammed me up against the wall. It was too quick. I’d let myself be too lulled into complacency, and so I didn’t react. Just slammed into the wall and felt the air whistle out of me, hands snapping up to show they were empty, eyes wide, adrenaline making the dim tunnel clearer than it should have been. Empty but for us.

  Cold metal dug into the soft underside of my jaw so hard that I thought I might gag. A click.

  “Cocky, stupid, bastard Canadian,” he said.

  I was afraid to swallow. Afraid to talk. Breathe.

  He dug the gun in harder, shoving my head up. “What, you thought Trexell would hand himself to you? On a platter, maybe? With a little note that says, ‘Dear Christina, please turn me in. I’m tired of living. Oh, and while you’re at it, enjoy your reward.’”

  “That’s not my name,” I snarled, surprised at what I clung to in the seconds before I died.

  “You hunt bones,” he said, his voice so reasonable. One arm across my chest, keeping me pressed against that earth-cold concrete wall, his face so close we could have kissed. “Bones don’t move. They don’t run. They’re usually so wrapped up that they don’t even try to hide themselves. Easy pickings for a hypocrite.”

  I kept my chin up, instinct pushing away from the gun. Looked up at him. “Either shoot me or let me go,” I said.

  “Who knows you’re here?”

  David. I thought about him clambering around on the lahar, cataloguing new plant growth, tsk-tsking at plants that should only grow at warmer climates. What would they do to him, uninvolved David, if I told them he knew I was in Seattle? “Nobody,” I said.

  He pulled back, like he meant to hit me over the head, but I moved too quickly for him. I slammed my forehead into his nose, using the few seconds of disorientation to disarm him, send the gun skittering across the concrete floor.

  He didn’t waste time going after it and pulled a knife instead, dim light shining along the edge of the blade. I blocked his first mad slash with my forearm, the angle such that he didn’t cut through my thick canvas coat. My knee connected with his stomach.

  He shoved me back again, and I hit the wall. Before I could twist away, hot pain lanced down my side. I cussed, put my foot against the wall and used it to launch myself at him.

  Dust and dirt puffed into the air, and his head hit the floor with a sharp crack. Good luck on my part. I beat his hand against the floor until his fingers loosened, and then I sent the knife skittering across to where the gun was.

  Pain lanced up and down my left side, my shirt gone sticky from the blood. I told myself I’d had worse and flipped him onto his stomach. I planted my right knee in the small of his back, pinned him while I caught my breath.

  “How many of you are there?” I asked when I could, having trouble keeping him pinned.

  Nothing.

  I leaned so close I was practically yelling in his ear. “How many of you are there? You got an army? Just a couple of you? Just you and Trexell?”

  “Enough of us.”

  “Enough of you for what?”

  He shook his head, laughing down at the concrete. I let him laugh, dug in my pocket for a tranquilizer, pulled it out of the box with one hand and uncapped it with my teeth. I gave him a full dose, listening to the laughter turn to curses when the needle went in.

  When he went limp, I picked up the gun and left him there.

  I took the stairs into the mall. The broken escalator wasn’t even safe for climbing. Pieces of it had been pulled off and sold for scrap. Every piece of glass in the entire place had been shattered, everything from doors to store windows. Spray-paint graffiti blanketed every surface, turning walls into scenes of dueling tags. The air held the thick smell of stale urine.

  Volcanic ash lay on the floor a good three inches deep. The place was never cleaned up after Rainier blew. The mall had already been closed, so when the ash filtered in through the broken windows, covering all four stories, there was no point.

  I had to stop too often, breathing in little gasps, alternately trying to encourage myself to walk on and cursing myself for not going back.

  The ash saved me some time, showing me a path up and down the broken escalators—these ones treacherous but still climbable—that was much more traveled than the side paths.

  My ragged breath was the only sound in the mall. I left a trail behind me, drops of blood on ash, like breadcrumbs to safety.

  At the top, more shattered glass. The remains of a food court to my right, the decommissioned remains of a monorail station to the left.

  And a man dressed all in gray. Behind him were skyscrapers in front of a sapphire-blue sky, half of the windows broken out, gaping holes in their shining surfaces. “Flesh is overrated, isn’t it?” he asked.

  I gripped the rubber escalator rail so hard that I felt my fingernails dig in. It’d been years since I’d even held a simulated handgun, but some muscle memories don’t go away. I took aim, resting my finger on the side of the trigger guard. Willing to let him talk. Glanced around, too late to save me if he’d had an ambush, but the floor was empty.

  I stayed on my feet but I was losing too much blood.

  “Not sure about that,” I said, “but your security is. Should have beefed it up when you moved out here.”

  A smile. “You weren’t expecting me to be on my feet.”

  “Might be for the best,” I said. “Since I can’t carry you out like this.”

  He laughed. “Chris, Chris, Chris,” he said. “If I were willing to let you take me alive, would you really be happy?”

  “Sure I would,” I said. “I’m sick of being poor.” I shuddered, cold suddenly, my head swimming.

  I pulled myself the last step to the top of the escalator, my legs feeling like large cooked noodles. If he’d been just like the other bones, dead to the world in a hospital bed, I could have made it. But now that I finally saw Cameron Trexell in the flesh, I could see that he never plugged in permanently. Never had. Never would. His devotees had. I had.

  I lowered the gun, put the safety on.

  “Have things been fixed, in your wild attempt to wake people up? To make them see the world as you do? How many of them turned around and plugged back in, escaped their flesh-and-blood bodies?”

  I leaned on the escalator rail, leaving a bloody smudge on the stainless-steel surface. “Some of them stayed out.”

  He took a step toward me and I forced myself to level the gun at him again, even if the safety was still on. My arm felt like it was made out of iron, too heavy to hold up. “How many of them, even if they stayed out of the ’net, fixed what you wanted fixed? How many of them got worthless jobs just to survive like you did?”

  All of them.

  Somewhere far off, I caught the scent of oranges, that bonehouse smell. Trexell himself might not be plugged in permanently, but somebody was around here.

  He took another step. “Put down the gun, Chris. You’re dying, and you gain nothing if either of us bites it.”

  I remembered waking up in the bonehouse dark, disconnected back into the flesh of my body, feeling it again. Bones aching. Atrophied muscles useless. Sobbing from the pain of badly used nerve endings while I waited for the ’net connection to come back. Wanting nothing but to go back in, to feel the pain melt away, to have the body sense of myself as male jacked back into my brain. The bonehouse cat, a skinny black slip of a kitten, curled up by my shoulder, purring insistently, as though it could make me stop hurting through sheer force o
f will.

  I still craved it, stronger than any drug. It was a million times worse now than the simple pang I felt performing an eviction. Even remembering the moments of intense pain, I wanted it. Needed it.

  “Anyone I save from you is worth it for that alone,” I said.

  Another step toward me, his feet scuffing in the ash. The gun was only pointed at his feet. I couldn’t sustain holding it any higher than that. “You don’t want to stop us,” he said. “We’re showing the world that the Northern Coalition is no different from any other set of rulers in the past. Convincing them they must put aside their complacency and rise up.”

  I thought about the riots.

  How many people did he have in his makeshift bonehouse? How many did he hold in other bone-houses across the country? “You never were Sammy Gauge, were you?”

  “Of course not, although he was one of my best,” he said. “He and I had too much in common, if you found us.”

  He took another step. He asked, “Do you remember when you used to have an effect on the world, instead of simply taking money to rearrange other people’s lives? I don’t think you’d be here if you didn’t want to come back. This world isn’t getting any better, is it?”

  Every year, another disaster.

  “You’d take me back just like that,” I said. Twenty minutes and I’d be in. This time, there’d be no David to pay for my eviction.

  “Just like that,” he said.

  I brought the gun up again, leaning on the escalator rail with my hip and using both hands to aim. I hit him twice, once in each leg. I hadn’t aimed to kill, though at that moment I’m not sure I would have minded if I did.

  He went down, screaming, cursing. I dropped the gun, afraid he’d get it from me if I brought it nearer to him.

  “There’s more at stake here,” he yelled at me, clutching one shin in both hands, even though it was bleeding just the same as the other, his gray pants gone a dark, bloody red.

  “I know,” I said, and then I got the tranquilizer into him.

  The mall was silent again, except for the sound of my breathing and a cat mewling somewhere far off. I crawled over to where I’d left the gun and cradled it, watching for anyone coming out of the hallways or up the escalator.

  The screen of my phone was cracked, but it still worked. I sent out my SOS call with my GPS location. Told them to bring first-aid resources and enough people to take care of Trexell’s illegal bonehouse.

  Jealous congratulations started pouring in, but I ignored the messages.

  I watched the reflections of dark clouds in the mirrored surfaces of skyscrapers. I wondered if I’d won.

  This Peaceful State of War

  written by

  Patty Jansen

  illustrated by

  SCOTT FREDERICK HARGRAVE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  As Patty Jansen grew up, her father read lots of science fiction and her mother told her stories of her youth in South Africa. As consequence, Patty dreamed of faraway lands and faraway planets. She started writing planetary romances in primary school, but in high school, teachers insisted that science fiction was not proper literature, and compulsory reading lists instilled in her a hatred for fiction reading that lasted twenty years. A full-time job as an agricultural scientist and young children put a stop to her writing. She always intended to go back to writing.

  It was the too-early death of her father, in 2003, that finally jolted her into action. (Hint: if you want to do something, do it now or never.) Within a year, she had joined Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction and had her first nonpaying story published in a small magazine. Her first pro sale, to the Universe Annex of the Grantville Gazette, came two weeks before winning the second quarter of the contest, and her intended-but-withdrawn third quarter story has just been sold to the pro magazine Redstone SF. She accredits the success of her winning story to a pair of titanium scissors.

  Patty lives in Sydney, Australia. These days, she subscribes to Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog and reads about fifty SF and fantasy books a year.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Scott Frederick Hargrave attributes his lifelong love of storytelling and creative flights of fantasy to being born the son of two fliers. His mother, a private pilot, set his imagination soaring with childhood tales of 1930s adventuress Amelia Earhart; Scott’s father was a WWII B-25 bomber pilot whose stories of exotic Egypt, both of ancient Pharaohs’ ghost-haunted tombs and his own adventures during wartime, sparked and shaped the dreams of all three of their sons.

  One became an archeologist, another a writer and a painter.

  Scott’s own imagination and love of art was nourished too growing up in 1970s Puerto Rico, a Caribbean alternate-reality, where 400-year-old Spanish cathedrals, radiant with religious art and spiritual yearning, coexisted with the Arecibo radio telescope’s Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project. His young imagination overflowed with mountain rainforests and underground caverns, soulful Latin-African salsa rhythms pouring from sunny park plazas and shady San Juan bars, and exotic island landscapes where the sun kissed the beautiful surfer girls on the white beaches of El Rincon by day—and by night mysterious chupacabra monsters were still believed to prowl the hills or mermaids surfaced to seduce swimmers out to drown beneath the stars.

  Such inspirations sow dreams and cry out from the soul to be made into art.

  Scott’s career endeavors and dreams include screenwriting, directing low-budget films and creating The Dust of All Our Dreams: A Graphic Novel that he says not only explores the Apocalypse, but—once completed—will most probably cause it.

  This Peaceful State of War

  Ash,” Brother Copernicus says.

  I rub the substance between the thumb and fingers of my gloves. It’s fine and powdery, and white, unbelievably white.

  A thick layer of it covers the field of tree stumps and broken branches, all the way to the wall of rain forest in the distance. Heat shimmers above the brilliant surface.

  Yesterday, when arriving from Solaris Station, I saw these tracks from space. They looked like scars, as if a deranged soul has taken a knife to the planet, cutting scores in the cover of forest.

  “The Hern burnt these tracks wherever they destroyed the Pari villages.” There is raw hatred in Brother Copernicus’ voice, even when filtered through his rebreather mask. “They stacked up the debris from the houses and the bodies and burnt the lot. Always at night, so we wouldn’t notice.”

  I let the powder trickle from my glove, fighting the impulse to rub my hand on my protective robe. I can’t. The action of rubbing might trigger a spark that will lead to all sorts of trouble in this high-oxygen atmosphere. Those warnings played in the cabin of the landing craft have etched themselves in my mind.

  “Why is it so white? Has anyone analyzed this?” The color intrigues me, and I wonder why the ground underneath the patch where I’ve picked up the powder is moist and cool.

  “I’m sure someone has. Is that important? It’s ash, Envoy, human ash.” Brother Copernicus brandishes the word human like a sword, challenging anyone who dares to disagree. “You’re standing on the biggest murder site in all of humanity.”

  The camp looks like a prison with two perimeter fences, one about five meters inside the other, the top bar of each armed with spikes as long as my hand. Through two lots of metal security mesh, I can make out tents of the infantry variety lined up in perfect rows. There is no sign of movement, human or alien.

  I follow Brother Copernicus along the walkway of rubbery mats. My crutches keep sinking into the little crevices in the mats that allow rain to filter through.

  Sweat rolls between my breasts and over my back. At the moment, I hate every gram of my uncooperative body and my body has a lot of grams, let’s leave it at that.

&n
bsp; You’ve spent too much time in space, Miranda, the doctor at Solaris would say in his self-righteous voice.

  I agree. I love low-G environments, I thrive in crisp recycled air. I hate planets. I’m a whale on a beach.

  Three guards stand at the camp entrance, missionaries in ankle-length brown habits with sleeves tucked into their gloves. The religious garb contrasts oddly with the plasma guns on their belts and crossbows in their arms. I stare at the weapon in the closest guard’s hands as he busies himself opening the gate. Why the heck would they use crossbows?

  Brother Copernicus has already gone through the open gate. “Envoy Tonkin, if you please.”

  I’m still waiting for the first signs that he’s getting annoyed with my slow walking pace. There are none. He’s the model religious brother: patient, friendly, selflessly taking up the cause of the downtrodden—convinced that I represent the enemy.

  We walk through into a metal cage and wait for the guards to shut the gate behind us.

  “Pretty crazy security,” I say, hating the way the mask reflects my voice back at me.

  “It works, though. The fighting stopped the moment we locked up the local band of Hern. There have been no more attacks on Pari villages, at least not in this area.”

  He lets the obvious go unspoken: the slaughter continues unabated in all the places where the Universal Church doesn’t have a mission, which is pretty much all of the planet. He and his mission want to stop the war. The Solaris Agency wants me to assess if that’s even feasible. I feel in my bones, the way my contract was phrased, that they want humans off Bianca, that it’s too risky, too expensive. To him, I am the enemy.

  We walk into the murderers’ camp. The second gate shuts behind us with a definitive clang.

  “This way,” Brother Copernicus says.

  The Hern are all in the mess tent. When my eyes adjust to the drop in light, I cannot help but feel awed. Oh, my, the sight of these alien people: their sheer size, their athletic build, their hair-covered backs, their green skin and black, animal-like eyes.