The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories!

by Lake, Jay

  His brow wrinkled as he thought about that.

  I looked at the board and noticed that our terminal trip-velocity read fifteen miles a second. My, my.

  Finally Jeff said, “That’s right, you have.” And then, just a shade unhappily, “I might have known. You always tell the truth, Joe—you’re perfect.”

  TO THIS THEIR LATE ESCAPE, by Jay Lake

  Originally published in The Sky That Wraps (2010).

  A Tale of the Sunspin Universe

  Year 240 post-Mistake

  Port Brooks, Novy Gorosk

  The Before Skanderia Knaak

  The Martian sunrises of her youth were eleven hundred years in the past, but the second-oldest woman in the world could still see that pale orange wash reflected in the peach-and-salmon riot of this broken world’s eastern horizon. Her steward Velikov—seventh of his name and line in Skanderia’s service—bustled nearby on the shattered balcony. The man warmed water for her tea on the little hand-primed alcohol stove that was literally the highest piece of technology anyone on Novy Gorosk could make in these years. Overhead the stars fled one by one, taking their hollow promises of salvation with them.

  “They’re never coming back,” she muttered, as she had every day of her exile.

  “I expect not, Great Queen.”

  She’d been having this conversation every morning for the lives of seven generations of Velikov’s family, and in the years before that. It was one of the few things keeping Skanderia Knaak alive.

  Routine, routine, routine. All Howard Immortals had been heavily counseled about the value of strong routines. Back when there been a Howard Institute. Or counselors.

  Velikov handed Skanderia her morning tea, and the most of urgent of the day’s reports. “Starost Pilchen sends word that the Siddiqi are massing small boats at the Brownmouth.”

  “Of course they are.”

  Besides routine, the other thing keeping Skanderia Knaak alive was a titanium-willed determination to outlast the oldest woman in the world. Raisa Siddiq, the only other Howard Immortal remaining on Novy Gorosk. None of the children who lived and died here now even knew the name of the Polity, let alone what it might mean.

  None but her enemy could understand.

  Skanderia stepped to the cracked rail and looked down across Port Brooks. The old Portmaster’s Residence had been built on a crag west of the city, and commanded a fantastic view. It had escaped the high-energy burn that swept most of Port Brooks on the day everything had ended. She could remember the fat-bellied lighters growling out of the sky with their cargos and passengers as clearly as if they had just cleared the airspace. The old landing field was a forest now, trees grown almost a hundred meters tall since the crumbling, heat-blurred blast pits had last heard the thunder of engines. Port Brooks’ great boulevards, famously laid three point seven degrees out of true because of an error in the original survey, still stretched open, though they were meadowed now, and dotted with rows of crops so dark-leaved as to be black in the dawn light. Leathery frill-birds circled the curling skeletal towers of the financial district, their slagged and melted ruins still being salvaged for refined materials almost two and half centuries after the collapse of, well, everything.

  A few miles past the entrance to the bay, just beyond Skanderia’s line of sight, the Brownmouth would be cluttered with boats. Bronze swords, sharpened steel taken from the old buildings, horn-and-hide bows. Raisa Siddiq was coming to try once more to wrest Skanderia’s city from her grasp.

  “Great Queen.”

  Something in Velikov’s voice brought Skanderia out of her reverie with a rapid twist of alarm. “What is it?”

  He pointed up into the western sky, where the rearguard of night struggled its last against the encroaching day. “The Siddiqi have launched a new devilment.”

  Skanderia looked toward the unmistakable blue-white of a fusion drive flame. That color had not been seen on Novy Gorosk for a very long time. Such a noisy, dirty drive would have been illegal in the later days of the Polity. Now it was a miracle.

  “Velikov,” she said, her words stretching with deliberation. A hope long since mummified stirred somewhere deep in her dusty soul. “That is no new devilment of Raisa Siddiq’s. That, my friend, is a very old devilment indeed.” To hell with routine. “Go, now. Alert the Starost. The world ends again today. If we are lucky, we will have a say in the birth of the next world.”

  He stood, caught for a moment between the eye-piercing glare descending in the west and her own soul-sharp glare, honed over centuries of absolute despotism.

  “Go,” Skanderia whispered.

  The steward fled, already shouting for the couriers who lurked in the stables at the foot of the cliff.

  * * * *

  Starost Pilchen

  Starost Kolodny Pilchen stared at the last of night along the western horizon. Something spat light there such as he’d never seen. Something that moved too slowly to be a shooting star, and too deliberately to be anything but manmade.

  Skanderia had always been right. Not that he’d ever thought the Great Queen to be a liar. Immortal or not, it was just that so many of her stories were so... improbable.

  Pilchen felt the landslide of history like a migraine’s bloom. Everything he’d ever known was at least partially wrong. That world was finished now. The improbability was here.

  Around the beachfront camp men began to shout and point. The Starost jumped up from his camp chair. “I want every man in formation in three minutes,” he shouted at his adjutant. He needed to stop the rumors before they took hold.

  Whoever was falling out of the sky right now was coming for either Skanderia or Siddiq. Or both. In any case, this was the end of the world.

  He was damn well going meet the end in formation, at sword’s point.

  * * * *

  The sergeants-major got the men lined up in less than six minutes. The Starost let the NCOs twist on their own worries about the timing. The light was cutting angles across the brightening sky. A dozen men had been injured staring at it, partially or fully blinded.

  He stepped up onto a weathered block. Over four hundred men stared at him. Private soldiers, sergeants, sergeants-major, lieutenants and four captains. Only the injured and Dr. Zvibi were absent.

  “The Great Queen’s brothers and sisters are come from beyond the sky,” the Starost bellowed. Not ten men in the formation knew a damned thing about the true history of Novy Gorosk. That would do for an explanation, for now. “The Siddiqi will seek to deceive and entrap them. We will meet them as they land, and we will escort them to Her Majesty’s presence. Captains, have your men to the landing field triple time.” He paused for three beats. “Now!”

  Within two minutes, the entire formation had moved out, except for the perimeter guards, the cooks and his own immediate staff. Even the coast watch had marched away.

  “Now what?” asked Sergeant-Major Kandinsky.

  “We follow,” the Starost replied. “And hope like hell I guessed right.”

  * * * *

  Even after two centuries of salvage and renewed habitation, the city still looked like fresh ruins so far as he was concerned. Not that Pilchen had any real idea how Port Brooks had appeared in its prime. Just not...this.

  He rode toward the formation already deploying around the field. The old pits that had once cradled starships were filled with little bowls of forest, but the wider paved expanse had been kept clear over the years for military exercises and, the Starost suspected, some lingering sense of optimism on the part of the Great Queen.

  Skanderia Knaak had no predecessors and no successors. She had always been the Great Queen, ever since there had been a Great Queen. As unitary and undying as the sun, taking no lovers, producing no heirs, outliving generations of generals and counselors and everyone exce
pt Raisa Siddiq.

  At that thought he glanced up toward the palace on the cliffs to the west. Whatever unholy fire had sent the stones of the central city flowing like mud had spared that high house. The Great Queen used the place as her retreat, as her headquarters, her sanctum. Even he, highest in the Great Queen’s councils, had made the climb up there less than half a dozen times. Only Velikov came and went freely from the palace. No one else lived there except for a handful of mute servants, tied to their mistress by loyalty and crippled tongues.

  His horse followed Kandinsky onto the wide, decaying expanse. The troops knew the landing drill well enough. Every man learned it with his first weaponscraft. Every man practiced landing drill as thoroughly as they rehearsed any attack formation.

  The troops had fallen into four formations. Each was shaped like the head of an arrow, pointing inward to bound a box three hundred paces on a side. The Starost had never been certain what the basis of that measurement was—surely nothing sacred was at play here—but the Great Queen had insisted on it.

  When he was a raw recruit, an old sergeant had shown him a manual of arms from the days before printing presses and even forges. Crudely copied in squid ink on a rough paper mashed from leaves, it contained drills for fighting with sticks and rocks. Even then, the manual of arms had also contained the landing drill.

  That Skanderia Knaak thought ahead was news to absolutely no one in the Great Queen’s domain. Still, her prescience sometimes chilled the Starost’s marrow.

  His command party pulled up next to the eastmost arrow. The eye-ripping glare was close enough now to be accompanied by a low rumble. And yes, it was slowly turning. Banking toward them.

  “Make ready,” the Starost called. His words echoed down the chain of command as if each man was deaf to all but his nearest master. Swords to hand, the army of the Great Queen made ready.

  * * * *

  Skanderia Knaak

  She permitted herself a smile. Over two centuries of careful training had borne fruit in a moment that by definition was unexpected. Back when she and Siddiq had still met from time to time under a flag of truce, for the sake of the conversations only the two of them could have, the Earth-born woman had laughed at Skanderia’s expectation of an eventual return.

  “They’re never coming back,” she’d said. “We don’t even know what happened to them, but nothing works any more.”

  “They will come back,” Knaak had replied. She’d spoken from a deep, stubborn faith rooted in nothing more than sheer human restlessness and the apparently inescapable expansionist impulse. “This is an easy world. Those future people won’t even know you and I ever existed, but they’ll want the biosphere for themselves. And we’ll be here.”

  “You’re going to die here, Skanderia.”

  “Not at my hands.”

  Those were the days when their chess game had been played on a hand-carved board with the sacrifice of ivory pieces rather than along the fens of the River Brown and the seaside sedges of this miserable bay with the sacrifice of doe-eyed boys trembling in their fear.

  Now a lander came, almost two and half centuries too late. How many deaths? She ignored that question, it had ceased to matter to her long before this world had fallen to whoever had destroyed their future. Skanderia had always figured if the invaders came back, she’d never know. She would just die unawares in another burst of fire and radiation.

  This was a human approach.

  It rode downward on a bright sword of nuclear fire. She wondered if the pilot planned to touch down on top of that flaming column. It would be ironically Biblical, but utterly beside the point on a world where only two people had heard of the Bible, and only one had read it.

  The pilot cut off her fusion drive at about six hundred meters and deployed a set of ducted fan jets. With the actinic glare eliminated, Skanderia could see the lander as a fairly crude lifting body. It was a tail-stander, not big enough for half a dozen passengers in that hull unless they had fantastically efficient and tiny life support systems.

  Again, human.

  When it landed, she would descend. Protocol was meant to be observed, even and especially by Great Queens. The Starost Pilchen could handle whomever came out of the hatch. He had his landing drill, too, as had every adjutant of hers since the beginning of her queendom.

  * * * *

  Velikov bustled onto the balcony as Skanderia was buckling her armor back into place. “The Starost has ordered his troops into the landing drill, Great Queen,” he announced unnecessarily.

  “I can see that,” said Skanderia gently. “Our visitor has arrived, as well.”

  The steward’s eyes darted toward the marble rail. An unusual breach of his protocols, to look away from her, but Skanderia was prepared to forgive a great deal on this extraordinary morning.

  “We will go down now and meet our visitor.”

  “Yes, Great Queen.”

  He backed into the house, bowing, leading her as if his entrance were being replayed.

  She followed, alternately bemused and depressed. What purpose had her years here served, in truth? Little more purpose than any of her years as a Howard Immortal.

  Sighing, she took up her sword—the last functioning wireblade on the entire planet, and another reason why Raisa Siddiq hesitated so strongly to take passage of arms against Skanderia Knaak in person.

  It hummed comfortingly in her hand, carrier wave of a vanished civilization. The weapon seemed attuned to the presence of a still-cooling fusion drive on the landing field below.

  * * * *

  Starost Pilchen

  He watched the metal wedge as his orders told him he must. Pilchen knew perfectly well that he himself was the key to this little charade. The troops served their purpose, but just like a battle, this meeting would be won or lost in the fields of the mind before metal ever touched flesh.

  The thing—ship, the Starost reminded himself dubiously—the ship had an elegant shape, like the wedge-shaped snout of a battering ram. Its skin was rough and pitted. Nothing like the gleaming white ships of the Great Queen’s late-night campfire tales. More like the sort of ship a man might build and fly, if a man had the gifts of shipbuilding and flight.

  Her memories perfect what never was so, the Starost realized.

  Ten minutes crept by. The heat pouring from the ship like a campfire faded to warmth.

  Twenty minutes crept by. Someone in the ranks was seized with a coughing fit. The men had a different view of the world from their stance in formation. The Starost was content to remain at attention and stare at the key to the future.

  Thirty minutes crept by. With a sudden, unexpected hiss, steam vented from beneath the ship’s legs. A surprised murmur rippled through the ranks. The Starost waited for the next thing to happen—a door to open, a weapon to discharge. None of those things occurred. Not then, at any rate.

  When an hour passed, his moment would come.

  At forty minutes, the Great Queen arrived atop her tall gray mare, followed close behind by Velikov. Skanderia’s horse was white as any fish belly, but he knew that the Great Queen would never call it white.

  What he didn’t know was why.

  “Your highness,” he said, dismounting to take her reins.

  Skanderia Knaak waved the Starost Pilchen away. He paused at her stirrup, looking up at her right hand crossed loosely across the saddle, the wireblade in her grip humming like a disturbed porch wasp. Behind her, Velikov appeared vaguely ill.

  “You plan to cut your way through the metal of this ship?” he finally asked.

  “No, you idiot.” Her voice was absent, her attention focused on the ship. “By this blade he will know me for who I am.”

  You look like old saddle leather, and are stronger than re-rolled steel, the Starost thought. No one can possibl
y mistake you for anyone other than who you are.

  Except for Raisa Siddiq, he corrected himself. Surviving the deeps of time had lacquered both women with an armor of experience at sheer survival.

  The Starost realized he’d finally once and for all accepted the truth of the Great Queen’s stories about herself. She was stranger than her own myths. The proof had arrived on a sword of fire.

  * * * *

  Skanderia Knaak

  When the hour had passed, she flipped the wireblade sword to attention and nudged her mount into a slow walk toward the lander. The ship made the horse nervous—it smelled of ash and complex hydrocarbons and burnt metal. Not smells familiar on Novy Gorosk anymore.

  “Easy, Gansevoort,” she whispered, her free hand stroking the horse’s neck. The mare’s fear-sweat threatened to overwhelm even the reek of the lander. Eschewing the advantage of height, Skanderia slipped from her saddle, tossed the reins over the pommel, and the horse back toward Velikov. Gansevoort trotted away, her hooves echoing on the ancient concrete.

  She wondered if any of the Howard Immortals had survived. Did the women inside the lander even know who and what she was?

  A hatch seal broke free with a hiss on her approach. Her landing drill hadn’t been made up out of whole cloth, it had been drawn from old contact protocols. Clearly these people had read the same books that still lurked in Knaak’s memory.

  A thousand years as a mercenary-attorney had given her a preternatural ability at negotiation. She would be ready for whoever stepped out of the lander.

  She wasn’t ready for the clash of arms that erupted behind her.

  The Great Queen whirled, her sword out already. Its tip moved with the speed of her boosted metabolism. Self-maintaining combat mods to muscle twitch and strength ratings had survived even these last two centuries of maintenance neglect well enough to take any natural-born human on the planet.