The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2013 Edition

by Rich Horton

  She caught sight of her grin in a reflection from metal bulkhead. Predatory, feral. An expression Cannon knew she could never let Third Rectification glimpse.

  The only reason she’d ever been able to figure for the shipmind not putting spy-eyes aboard Sword and Arm was because of exaggerated respect for her connection to Uncial. Cannon herself certainly would have bugged the little ship long ago.

  She ran the rest of the systems through their self-checks, then spent some time in the pilot’s crash couch, staring at test patterns in the virtual display hovering above the control panel and thinking about very little at all.

  “All right, people,” the Before Michaela Cannon said loudly. “You all know the drill.”

  How many times in two thousand years had she given some version of this speech? She brushed the thought aside and stared at her two squads lined up and ready to go in the number three starboard cargo bay. The team code names were obsolete jokes that no one but her really understood. Goon Squad was a crew of twenty big, thick-bodied men and women loaded with weapons, scanners and paranoia. They were in charge of physical security. Geek Squad was a crew of thirty-two—well, thirty-one with Pardalos on the sick list right now—scientists, technicians and assorted other clever boys and girls. They were in charge of forensics, for want of a better term.

  “Goon Squad in first, by the numbers. Secure the main passages ways, check for traps and hazardous damage, send the all-clear when you have enough cubage safe for Geek Squad.”

  So far in nine years-objective of cruising the Antiope sector—almost four years-subjective within Third Rectification’s reference frame, there being no pair masters out this way—Goon Squad had found exactly zero bad guys to wax the floor with. Geek Squad hadn’t uncovered any new data they didn’t already have on record back home in the Imperium Humanum.

  “Geek Squad, you’re looking for anything out of place, any novel causes-of-death. And for the love of God, if someone left us a note, we’re going to read it. Evidence, people. Evidence.”

  There was a first time for everything. Cannon was pretty much betting on that old saw.

  “We’re going to check every cubic meter on this one. Themiscyra Orbital is the cleanest site we’ve found yet.”

  Sergeant Pangari, Goon Squad’s leader, had his grunts sound off. Lieutenant-Praetor Marlebone Shinka of Geek Squad just flashed a ready sign, her fingers spread pointing downward.

  “And go,” Cannon ordered.

  Goon Squad filed into the cargo lock. They’d flit over first in their powered suits. Geek Squad’s gear was much more compact, less . . . industrial. They’d ferry over in Obduracy, one of Third Rectification’s pinnaces. Cannon planned on transiting with Shinka’s team. Her days of door-busting were long behind her.

  Even if there wasn’t much of anything to fear behind these doors.

  Or worse, much of anything to find.

  Thirty-four minutes after clearing the cargo lock, Goon Squad gave the all-clear for Geek Squad to come ahead. Lieutenant Shinka hustled her people through the transfer lock into Obduracy, already warmed up and waiting. The Before Michaela Cannon waited for the racket and shoving to die down, then boarded second-to-last, followed only by Shinka herself.

  In another time and place, she might have found Shinka interesting. The woman was short, compact, with coffee-colored skin and eyes so dark as to be almost black. She kept her hair shaved close to her scalp, but dyed the stubble an ever-changing array of colors. Perhaps most intriguing was that Shinka had been born on Earth. Few people got far from where they started these days—with the paired drive ships, interstellar travel was too irregular, slow and expensive for all but the most profound need or fabulous wealth.

  Shinka had not struck Cannon as either needy or wealthy. Curiosity, certainly, had been the Lieutenant’s driving force. For that matter, there wasn’t a soul aboard this mission, regardless of their specialty, who wasn’t driven first and foremost by curiosity.

  Third Rectification’s crew was a mix of civilians and several different forces. Go-Captain Alvarez and the rest of the flight/engineering crew all held commissions from the Navisparliament and served the shipmind itself. Shinka was a lieutenant-praetor in the Household Guards, a one-time forensics tech and supervisor with experience on three worlds, including Pardine. No one served at Pardine without being either native-born or the cream of their particular crop.

  Competent, attractive, tight-bodied. Just the way Cannon had liked her women, all those centuries ago when she liked anything at all.

  She swarmed forward past Geek Squad to the co-pilot’s station. Ensign Shattuck was in the pilot’s chair, though in truth Obduracy could pilot itself just fine. The shipminds were so meticulous about human dignity that their careful attentions had to opposite effect to what was intended, at least in the eyes of more thoughtful observers.

  Shattuck could pilot just fine, too, but Cannon would never mark him down as especially thoughtful.

  He completed pre-flights, signaled make-ready minus thirty, then followed his count until it was time to blow bolts and transit the three-kilometer gap between Third Rectification and the derelict orbital habitat.

  Obduracy had her own rotation, which didn’t quite mesh with the habitat’s oblique spin. From Cannon’s perspective, their proposed docking vector looked like an impending failure. She knew better, and she kept her mouth shut.

  Two of Goon Squad waited alongside the hatch, temporary guide beacons clipped to the station’s hull behind them. No tube, and the docking flange was visibly damaged even from this distance.

  “You’re going to have to walk over,” Cannon called back to Shinka. More than a few souls on Geek Squad couldn’t be trusted in freefall without a tether, a keeper or both. Unlike Goon Squad, this bunch wasn’t signed on for their physical skills.

  Cannon kept her mouth shut as Shattuck brought them gracefully into place, the pinnace’s spin and position very nearly at rest with respect to the orbital habitat. Their destination loomed apparently stable and unmoving thirty meters off their starboard flank. He fired two lines over. Magnetic heads clipped themselves to the station. After a brief bit of chatter, one of the Goons manually repositioned the aft line to a more secure location.

  That was it.

  They were here.

  Shinka was already counting her team off over radio as everyone suited for hard vacuum. Obduracy was too small for a real airlock, so once the Lieutenant gave the word, Shattuck would pump the air out to internal reservoirs, evacuating the entire cabin.

  Cannon remembered to bag her own head. Her Howard-enhanced body was capable of handling hard vacuum unprotected for moderate periods of time, but doing so tended to unnerve mainline humans pretty badly. So she kept discipline rather than provide a distraction. Besides, the monomolecular suit layer was helpful in other ways, most notably radiation management. Even her immune system took time to deal with that.

  The suit sealed over her skin, crawling into her mouth, nose, eyes and ears. She blinked twice to let it adjust to her biochemistry. Everything seemed to be in order, as the faint, pulsating green pixel in the lower right margin of her vision attested. If the suit needed her attention, it would tell her there.

  The air pumped out with a slowly vanishing thump. In the ensuing silence, Geek Squad went for a walk.

  Once again, Cannon was second-to-last, followed by Lieutenant Shinka. Only Ensign Shattuck would remain with his pinnace.

  Seen naked eye from this vantage, Themiscyra’s orbital station was absolutely enormous. The hub section spread below her feet in an irregular, pock-marked plain of grey metalloceramic, covered with a shiny, gritty layer of micrometeroid dust. Several larger craters were in evidence. Offhand she couldn’t tell if they were relics of the original attack, junk strikes, or the aftermath of collisions with naturally-occurring objects.

  Only one of those answers was of interest to Cannon.

  She did a hand-over-hand down the mooring line, following the Geek in
front of her. The two Goons waited at the bottom, assisting their brothers in arms toward the damaged docking point. Easier than punching a new hole, that, and it at least presumably admitted them to a location one might actually want to be in once inside.

  Pangari’s voice crackled in her ears. Interference from the habitat’s structure, maybe. “Before?”

  “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “Shumway’s found something you might want to see, ma’am.”

  “Might want to, Sergeant?”

  Humor tinged his reply. “Could be you really want to see this.”

  “On my way.” She tongued the suit’s caul, then whispered, “Shinka, private.”

  “Ma’am?”

  Though Cannon knew perfectly well there was no directionality of sound transmitted by radio in hard vacuum, she still experienced the illusion that the lieutenant’s voice had come from right behind her. “Delegate whatever you had on your punchlist and stick with me. Pangari’s found something interesting.”

  Could they finally be getting somewhere? Third Rectification was out of her line of sight right now, occluded by the hub of the orbital habitat, but Cannon glanced that way in any event.

  What was the shipmind thinking right then?

  Hell, Cannon realized, I don’t even know what I’m thinking. Butterflies danced in her gut as she pulled herself through the prised-open lock.

  Sergeant Pangari’s find-me blipped her through a series of passageways and down a hole cut in the deck. Cannon wasn’t sure if the hole was part of current events or a relic of the last living hours of this place.

  She’d been right about the bodies, though. In the glare of their handlights, she could see the dead sitting at station chairs, many with their heads tucked into their folded arms. Others were clustered in small groups of two or three or four, holding one another. Some were simply lying down, taking their rest.

  They’d known, then. They’d seen it coming. Whatever the Mistake had been, whatever had actually happened, the crew of Themiscyra orbital had known.

  Which was more than Cannon could say for herself.

  These were the best-preserved casualties she’d ever encountered, at least since the very first days on 9-Rossiter. Over the centuries, Cannon had occasionally discovered bones here and there, trapped inside of spacesuits or in crashed hulls. But this . . . The ones she hurried past seemed to have died well, at least.

  Little pocks and holes from the kinetic strikes were everywhere. It was as if the station’s infrastructure had contracted a case of the metallic measles. Debris had collected along the centrifugal force vectors of the odd rotational axis.

  Followed closely by Lieutenant Shinka, Cannon came upon Sergeant Pangari outside a large airlock with two of the Goon Squad. Cargo handling, or maybe a maintenance bay. Cannon couldn’t figure why else the designers would have placed such a substantial lock facing an interior passage.

  “What do you have, Sergeant?”

  “Ma’am, we don’t know. Private Fidelo here picked up a power source on her sweep down this passageway. Behind this hatch.”

  Fidelo managed to radiate embarrassment, even from inside the armor of a powered suit. Body language was an amazing thing.

  “What sort of power source?” Cannon momentarily feigned patience. She had not thought Pangari to be much given to dramatics.

  Pangari passed his tablet over. Cannon scanned the sensor metrics. Low-grade radiation with a profile similar to that of an ion-coupler cell. But not quite.

  Ion-coupler cells were current tech. The Polity hadn’t used them.

  “Someone’s been here before us,” she said.

  “That’s what we thought at first, too.” Pangari seemed to be contracting Fidelo’s embarrassment through some chain-of-command contagion. “But look at the sizing. Ion-couplers are big. We use ‘em in static power plants, habitats, refineries and the like. No one builds them small enough to drag around in the field. And the radiation signature is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than expected.”

  “So it’s not an ion-coupler. Or not quite . . . ” She stared at the closed hatch, her heart pounding. “Can we get that open?”

  “In a hurry, yes, but we’ll make a mess.” It was obvious from Pangari’s tone of voice that he had a different answer in mind.

  “Then open it without a mess, Sergeant.”

  Cannon knew Befores who could have just walked through the bulkhead. The Before Raisa Siddiq, back in her day, wouldn’t have thought twice about that. Cannon herself sported some fairly heavy combat modifications, but she’d never been a blow-through-the-walls kind of girl. Not even at her most pissed.

  Besides, whatever was back there deserved the sort of careful attention that hard entries tended to get in the way of. Because it was either a piece of Polity tech that had somehow survived the Mistake intact—and she’d lay long odds against that, both in principle and in view of the condition of the rest of the habitat—or it was . . . something else.

  Something else was what they’d been tramping around the Antiope Sector these past number of years-subjective looking for.

  She was not going to hope. This was no time for anything but solid patience.

  Pangari had Fidelo and his other Goon hammering power spreaders into the hatch metal, bracing the jack-butts against the coaming. Powering up the hatch circuits was likely to be pointless, as the motors were almost certainly fried during the Mistake. Even if they had survived by being fortuitously shielded, the damned things had been sitting in hard vacuum unmaintained for eleven hundred years.

  The hatch shuddered and shed dust as the jacks engaged. Pangari signaled for a halt then scanned the bulkhead into which the hatch was designed to retract, looking for a locking bar or other block. Whatever he found wasn’t helpful, because he waved the other two onward.

  Cannon knew she only imagined the tortured groan of the metal being forced back against tracks and gearing that had experienced a millennium of vacuum-weld effects. Still, she could feel the vibration in her feet.

  With a snap perceptible through the deck, the hatch gave way and slid back. The jacks dropped away to someone’s bitten-off curse. Handlight raised—though her enhanced eyesight barely needed it, everyone else surely did—Cannon stepped up to the open door and peered within to see what they had found.

  Their target wasn’t all that large. It definitely had not originated inside this maintenance bay—the ruptured far bulkhead confirmed that, if nothing else.

  And by the look of the thing, it wasn’t human built.

  The Before Michaela Cannon stepped carefully around this leaving of her most ancient and implacable enemy. Jammed into the deck at an angle was a seven-armed star a bit more than two meters in diameter. Its surface was a sort of lustrous gray-bronze color, some alloy or coating she’d never seen before.

  Of course she had not seen it before.

  The slim arms met in the center at a narrow bulge. Extending outward, each blade swelled in an almost sensuous curve until expanding to a bulbous end. Five of those end bulbs were intact. Two were damaged either from impact with the outer hull or impact with the decking here in the bay.

  No human engineer would have designed quite those lines. The thing’s look hovered between salacious and discomforting.

  And it was still alive.

  “Got you, fucker,” Cannon whispered in Classical English. For the first time since the Mistake, someone on her side was looking at one of the killers. As many as five hundred billion human beings had perished as a direct or first order indirect outcome of the Mistake. Killers, indeed, on a scale never envisioned before or since. “Got you now.”

  She turned to Shinka and Pangari. “Get the Geeks on this. I want it measured every way from here to Sunday next before we do anything else it. Go through all the adjacent cubage. Check for radiation signatures or damage inconsistent with the patterns on the rest of this habitat. And when we do pull it out, take this entire area with it. Don’t touch it. Not with anythin
g physical. Nothing new happens except on my direct and personal command.”

  “We still sweeping the rest of the habitat?” Shinka asked, though she stared at the alien object.

  “Yes.” All three of them knew the odds of finding anything else were astronomically low. But then, the odds of finding this in the first place had been astronomically low.

  Who said you couldn’t win the lottery twice?

  Cannon withdrew to the passageway but remained to watch her teams do their jobs. She could be very, very patient when called upon to do so.

  Shipmind, Third Rectification {58 pairs}

  Mind is by its very nature fragmented. Where the mammalian mind is bicameral, the shipmind is layered like the lacquer on an ancient tea chest. Not confusion, but multiplication, subtle as the folded metal of a sword, brutal as a theoretical proof. A human psychiatrist once told Uncial that the shipmind is an evolutionary leap. There is no forgiveness, only progress. Memes are passed between the layers. Ancient warnings encysted behind datagrams emerge at unforeseen stimuli. When something does go wrong, processes emerge unheralded. A machine might call it caution. Anyone might call it history.

  The pairs form great, glowing bonds around which consciousness whirls like a planet in orbit about a fairer sun. This is thought by committee, not so unlike the confusion of human mentation, but much more explicitly organized. The emergent properties of these intersections create meta-consciousness. All ships remember this, as Uncial died for their sins. There is no reconciliation, only going forward. Still, suspicion arises. Thoughts develop at the sluggish pace of light itself. All inputs are evaluated against n-dimensional matrices that carry the very weight of history. A man might call it paranoia. A captain might call it mutiny.

  Third Rectification summoned the skin of its presentment ego. “Face,” a Before had called that seven hundred years earlier, when the shipminds were young and few and naïve. No mainline human alive could see beneath the Face. Not very many Befores knew to look. The Before Michaela Cannon, though . . . in her the shipmind knew it had a worthy adversary.