Asimov's SF, July 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The commodore's cabin is clean, free of the sand that seems to have settled everywhere else. The surfaces are polished, the floor spotless. William guesses the cabin was once a bedroom, but now the only furniture is a huge desk and three chairs, one for the commodore and two for his guests. Bookshelves are built into the walls, crammed with as much literature as the colony has been able to collect in its travels.

  And it's been traveling for a long time.

  “You're sure, Lieutenant?”

  William has long since grown accustomed to the designation. “Yes, Commodore. I'm sure. All my computer models agree.”

  The commodore steeples his fingers and leans back in his chair, a wooden antique worn smooth with more than a century of use. William stands and waits; his computer models have been continuously refined over the past three decades, and only once in five years has he been wrong. After several seconds of consideration, the commodore nods. “Very well.” He writes on his tablet and presses the commit button; William knows that, up on the bridge, the commodore's orders will appear on a repeater screen for the crew to act upon. “You may go, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, Commodore.” William walks down the narrow corridor to the main cabin, still as well-appointed as it had been when the ship was built in the 1990s. He retrieves his sidearm from the lieutenant who runs the commodore's personal guard, then goes out onto the aft deck. He squints in the bright sunlight—no clouds in the sky to lessen its impact—before covering his eyes with sunglasses.

  “Lieutenant,” says the Officer of the Deck—a greeting and an acknowledgment of William's greater rank; the OOD wears an ensign's single black bar on his shoulders.

  William has never approved of the military fashion in which the commodore runs the colony, and long ago he chose to ride in the middle of the pack, holding his appointed rank of lieutenant but never actually ordering anyone around. “Can you bring my car in, please?”

  “Yes, sir.” The ensign blows a four-note melody on his whistle, then shouts to a couple of enlisted men riding on a skid off to port. “Lieutenant Portis, disembarking!”

  William watches as the two men work a complicated pulley system; his car, docked at the end of a long, narrow girder, begins moving closer. As he steps up onto the platform, he feels the ship's engines thrumming harder. A moment later, he's hanging on tightly as a loud horn sounds from the bridge deck. That sound is picked up by other ships, echoing outward across the broad, sand-swept plain. Behind William, more than fifty other ships feed power to their engines and, seconds later, the ground below the ship is moving at a much faster clip than the stately twenty-per-hour it was when William had docked his car and come aboard to see the commodore.

  Oh well. It's not as if he's never done this before.

  William nods to the enlisted men as he reaches the bottom of the port ladder, then takes two quick steps across the skid before climbing onto the car and lowering himself through the opening in the roof. He has to angle his body uncomfortably to drop into the driver's seat. The car is still in neutral, its wheels moving as fast as the ship to which it's docked; William starts the engine and calls the OOD. “I'm ready to go. Thanks for your help.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.” William sees the ensign's hand come close to the video pickup; the young man works his console and, with a clank and a lurch, the magnetic clamp disengages from the side of the car. William shifts into gear and steps down on the accelerator; the engine catches and he turns the wheel left, veering away from the commodore's ship. It's the only one, he notices, that still has a gleaming-white hull; the rest of the ships in the Demetrius Colony are rusted or discolored or battle-scarred, but somehow the Royal Admiral has stayed as clean on the outside as the inside.

  William drives past the colony before reversing course; it's easier to dock at his home ship if he's coming up from behind. The rear-guard gunners salute as they see his dusty beige car pass, but he doesn't acknowledge them. He's busy navigating the small sea of colony ships, which have accelerated to 110-per-hour, keeping one eye on what's in front of him and the other on the position display—wouldn't do to get in the way of another vehicle, but this time there's no one else out except for him and a couple of patrols, picked out in pale yellow on his screen.

  Up ahead, he sees the broad stern of the Mighty Mississippi, its huge turbines mounted to long-disused fiberglass paddle-wheels. He calls the supercargo, whose features fills his display. “Ready to board,” he says.

  The supercargo's dirty face is streaked with sweat. “You're cleared for Slot 12. Opening main door.”

  “Got it.” William shuts off the screen. In front of him, the huge panel at the aft of the Mighty Mississippi eases downward, clanging as it hits the dry, cracked ground. William lines up his car, then presses hard on the accelerator; the little vehicle zips up the ramp and into the hold. Through his open roof he hears the heavy ka-chunka-chunka of gears pulling the door closed behind him, but he's already hitting the brakes hard, seatbelt locking, preventing inertia from throwing him through the windshield. Once he's down to ten-per-hour, he flicks on his lights and drives to Slot 12; as soon as he's in, the slot lowers itself thirty centimeters, effectively locking the car in place. He engages the emergency brake anyway, then shuts down the engine and steps out.

  “Any problems?” asks the supercargo.

  “None.”

  “What about the commodore? I heard the horns, but . . .”

  William gives the man a nod. “We're going,” he says.

  The supercargo's face brightens as he smiles. “Finally! You know my youngest has never actually seen a true storm?”

  “Now he will.” William knows the supercargo has three sons. He knows everyone on the Mighty Mississippi; he's been living here for the past fifteen years. “I'm heading upstairs. Say hi to Dinah and the boys, will you?”

  “Sure thing.”

  William claps the supercargo on the shoulder, then heads for the door. Couldn't hurt to check his models one last time.

  * * * *

  William wakes in the middle of the night, jolted out of a dream by the sound of horns. This time, it's not the deep horns that warn of a course change; this time, it's the staccato bursts that signal an attack.

  “How did they find us?” Andie asks as she climbs out of bed. “The scouts said we were clear for fifty kilometers!”

  “I have no idea,” William says. He watches Andie pull off her nightgown and struggle into her uniform. Objectively, Andie's prettier than his wife was, though Rina's still his first love. He doesn't think Rina would mind, though, that he's sleeping with the first officer of the Mighty Mississippi.

  Andie adjusts her jacket, then pulls her gray-streaked brown hair back into a tail. “Are you up?”

  He's awake, but he knows what she means. “No. Not until next week.”

  “Then get to a saferoom and stay there,” she orders. “I don't want anything to happen to you.”

  “Why, Andie,” he says, sitting up in bed and grinning, “I didn't know you cared.”

  She gives him a frustrated look. “Don't be an ass. Of course I care.” The look turns wry. “Who'll find us water if you get killed?” She blows him a kiss, then leaves the cabin, boots loud on the old wooden floors.

  He shakes his head, then gets up and gets dressed. Under his feet, the deck shudders as the Mighty Mississippi increases speed; the turbine engines are at full bore now. It sounds like they're pushing the ship at the colony's maximum speed of 150; the Mighty Mississippi can reach 175 with a good tailwind, but 150 is still more than the engineers will like.

  Dressed, William locks his cabin—not that anyone would steal from him, but it's an old habit—and makes his way to Deck Four.

  * * * *

  The all-clear message arrives four hours later, and William sees the sun coming over the horizon as he and the hundreds in the saferoom rush out to see what's happened while they were locked away. William stands at the railing, next to one of his neighbors, looking out at the s
hips nearest to them. “Not too bad,” the man says. “We're still moving, anyway.”

  William nods. He and Don are next to the casing that holds the port-side paddlewheel. There's smoke coming from a large yacht thirty meters distant, but nothing else looks out of place. He goes back into the ship, to the ladder that goes between the decks.

  Up on Deck One, William finds Andie on the open platform aft of the bridge. Though he's not fond of being a lieutenant, having rank allows him to be present. He brushes her hand and she flashes him a quick smile. “Did we lose anyone?” he asks quietly.

  “One of the gunships was bombed,” she says. “The Brasilia. Sixteen dead, and we had to scuttle the ship. Two more died when their trucks were rammed. Don't know how many injured, but Royal Admiral estimates fewer than one hundred overall.”

  William wants to touch Andie, to reassure her—and himself—but the set of her shoulders and the lines around her mouth tell him not to. “How about our ship? Anything I can do?”

  “No.” Her comm chimes, and she reads something off the small screen, then presses a couple of buttons and clips it back onto her belt. “We took a couple of shells, but they missed the engines and the paddlewheels. She's a tough old bitch.”

  He smiles. Andie loves the Mighty Mississippi; she's passed up several chances to command newer or faster or stronger ships. He knows the commodore wants her on the Council, but only ship's captains can serve. It doesn't matter to either of them, though; they're together on the Mighty Mississippi, happy most of the time, and—unlike the smaller colonies they've absorbed or the bigger ones that have trouble keeping their citizens happy—they have William and his computer models to help them find water.

  “I'm going down below,” William says after a long moment. “The repair crews are going to need coffee.”

  Andie nods, but doesn't look at William. He goes down to the cargo bay, where the crews for this quadrant of the colony will come together and receive their assignments. William hears the supercargo complaining about the damage the main door will suffer from all the cars and trucks driving over it, but everyone—including the supercargo—knows that being attacked is a part of life, especially if they're searching for water. After all, William's not the only meteorologist on the continent, and if he can find a storm, so can others.

  * * * *

  The colony fights off a band of raiders in small, fast boats—and destroys half of them—but isn't bothered for the rest of the week. At night they go faster, but every other day the ships slow down, the solar collectors they plundered from a city in what used to be Arizona recharging as many batteries as possible. William still remembers when the colony laid siege to the city, forcing them to give up the collectors and threatening the families of the engineers: come with us and make the collectors work on our ships, or we'll kill the people you love.

  It hadn't been the colony's finest day, but even William had realized the necessity of alternate forms of fuel. Nomadic colonies were more likely to survive because they could go and find the resources they needed, but the unfortunate tradeoff was that they needed resources to be nomadic. The solar collectors solved many of their problems. Plus, William knows, with water as precious as it is now, being able to find it and get to it is safer for everyone; bringing the colony to the water means no one gets ambushed bringing it back.

  In thirty years with the colony, William has been part of more than one ambush party, stealing water to survive. He much prefers using his computer models to find water and bring the colony to it.

  “We'll be there in a couple of hours,” he tells Rina. She hasn't responded in seven years. “This will be a big one, the biggest since . . . well, probably since I lost you.” A photograph of her smiling face looks up at him from the desk in his cabin. “You'd have loved it, Rina. Lightning, torrential downpours, the works. Nothing's actually pointing in this direction—the apprentices all say it'll be near Lake Michigan.” Or what's left of it, he amends mentally; there hasn't been more than sludge and debris there since the Event, since the planet was blasted for two days by radiation and heat from a solar storm no scientist predicted. It had killed almost three-quarters of the population and left most surface water undrinkable. Climate change had done the rest.

  “The hydrology crews have the collectors ready to deploy, and the container ships have been scrubbed. Finally we'll have water that doesn't taste like metal. And we'll all get to bathe.”

  Rina's smiling face doesn't change, even when William strokes the surface of the photograph. He remembers the rain that came in their first year together, right after they were married; they'd joined hundreds of others, stripping off their clothes and exulting in the cool water misting down from the sky. He's found the colony bigger storms since, but that type of rain—there are maybe four storms like it each year, and William usually gets them in range of one, sometimes two—makes his heart grow warm.

  William is an expert at finding rain, but Rina had been something special; when Rina found a storm, it was always a monster, washing away months—sometimes years—of accumulated dust and sand and dirt, filling the container ships almost to capacity, and giving everyone hope that maybe this time things would be different, that maybe this time the weather had finally changed for the better.

  It never does. It never will. William knows that, and, deep down, so does everyone else.

  William's comm rings. He touches the photo again, puts it back in the little box in his top drawer before answering.

  “Come up to the bridge.” It's Andie. “The commodore needs to speak to you.”

  * * * *

  Andie uses her influence to be assigned to the contact team; she's driving the white van, William seated beside her. Two security guards are in the back row of seats, and in the middle, controlling the main gun, is a wiry young man, probably on his first mission.

  In the side-view mirror, William sees the ships of the colony grow smaller. Repeater screens show the approximate location of the other colony and, up ahead, the single vehicle the commodore negotiated for them to meet. It's a dirty red truck, bigger than their van but less aerodynamic; William's seen a few like it in Demetrius, mostly used for transporting groups or medium-sized cargo. It could probably hold a dozen soldiers, though the scanner reads only five heat signatures. “Looks like they're holding to the agreement,” he tells Andie. Then, to the gunner, “What do you see, Paolo?”

  “One cannon,” he says, his voice through the door-mounted speakers a little quavery—definitely his first mission. “And, I think, two submachine guns as well.”

  “Stay locked onto their gunner, Mr. Ruiz. If this turns bad, I don't want them shooting up our asses.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  William hears the gears of the gun moving as Paolo takes aim. “I think they just want to talk, Andie,” he says. He wants to reach for her hand, resting on the shifter, so invitingly close, but the two guards don't need to know they're more than shipmates, more than colleagues.

  She makes a derisive noise. “You're our best meteorologist. You found a storm that's not supposed to be here, that there aren't any signs of. But the Jairasu are here anyway.”

  The implications of that name are heavy in the air, especially for William. “I never told the commodore—or anyone else—that I was the only one who could find the storm,” he says. “And anyone who can program a computer can, with enough time, learn to read the data like I do.”

  “We need this storm, Lieutenant,” Andie snaps. There's nothing in her voice to indicate that she was ever more than his commanding officer. That hurts, but he has to let it go. She's in command mode now.

  The van coasts to a stop; Andie leaves the engine running. The guards open the side doors and jump out, weapons pointed at the ground. Two soldiers—one with a shotgun, the other holding two pistols—step out of the red truck. Andie nods to William and touches his shoulder; he turns to her and sees the worry in her face and he wants to hold her, to tell her it'll be all right. Instead
he follows her lead, disembarking from the van. It's been a long time since he's stood on ground that isn't moving; he forces himself not to sway, not to show weakness.

  The front doors of the truck swing open and two more people step out. The passenger has two pistols in his belt, grips forward for a cross-draw, but it's the driver who grabs William's attention.

  “Rina?”

  Rina's blue eyes are chips of stone in her dark face. Her hair is cut close to her head, bare arms more muscular, body leaner than before.

  William, for his part, can barely move. He's staring at Rina's smile, at bright-white teeth bared in an expression not even close to friendly. She takes in the rank stripes on his shoulders. “Still a lieutenant?” Her words lilt, voice musical. “And who is this?”

  “Commander Andie Shepherd,” she says. “You called this meeting. Why?”

  When Rina looks to Andie, William finds himself able to breathe again. He tries not to gasp in the dry, dirty air. She's not supposed to be here. She's not supposed to be alive: seven years ago, Rina was on patrol duty when the colony was attacked by the Jairasu, a converted luxury liner with eight overweaponed gunships zipping around it in formation. Demetrius turned and ran, pursued by three Jairasu ships; one of the colony's gunships was obliterated before they made their escape. No colony William knows of, including his own, has ever been strong enough to take on the Jairasu.

  But it still doesn't explain how Rina survived. Three days after the battle, William joined a convoy to go back and search for survivors. No bodies were found—just scorch marks, dried blood, and the occasional scrap of clothing or desiccated flesh—but given the size of the explosion, they hadn't expected more.

  And William certainly hadn't expected to see her alive again, working for the most-feared colony in all of North America.

  “Lieutenant!”

  Andie's command voice brings him back. “Y . . .” He swallows, wishing he had some water; it's back in the van, for all the good that'll do. “Yes, Commander?”