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

by Lake, Jay

  The Siddiqi were attacking, a flying wedge straight between two of the landing drill formations. Which were, damn it, not the least bit suitable for defense. Starost Pilchen already bellowed orders, while his officers and sergeants scrambled to form, reform, defend.

  But Raisa Siddiq wasn’t aiming for a set battle. She was aiming for the lander. The bitch must have put those boats in the water the moment she saw the drive flare, and counted on Skanderia to strip her men from the pickets. She knew what the landing drill was, for all that she’d mocked it down the decades.

  The Great Queen cursed her own carelessness, then sprinted directly toward the heart of the fight. Only one of those approaching held any fear for her at all. Striking down Siddiq would be a privilege as well as a workout.

  * * * *

  Starost Pilchen

  He pulled his mount hard, riding to intercept Skanderia before she could run bodily into the armored front of the Siddiqi attack. This was a flying squad, not an attack in force. It was obvious enough what Raisa Siddiq was about. Taking down the Great Queen in the bargain would only be a bonus.

  A thought struck him with that strange timeless quality of the mind in battle: Had she been planning this move down all the years?

  A much harder thought followed it: Had the Great Queen been planning this move down all the years?

  Then he was upon Skanderia Knaak and reaching for her with one great arm. Her uncanny senses did not desert her—she grasped his wrist without even looking back, and leapt in time to the horse’s stride to slip behind him.

  “Siddiq,” she growled in his ear, and the Starost cast aside his darker speculation as his horse bore down on the first of the invaders.

  They were already losing their advantage of speed. Too many of his own men swarmed forward. Out of formation, endangering themselves, but robbing the enemy of her precious time.

  The Great Queen’s sword hummed so loudly now that Pilchen’s skin itched. She sliced through armor and leather and skin without even the drag of blade on bone. Two men fell away, three more scrambled for safety, preferring the steel edges wielded by the Starost’s soldiers to the terrible power of that wireblade.

  Another pair in the lacquered breastplates of Siddiq’s personal guard turned to block her. They parried with strange weapons, like padded practice swords, that made Skanderia hiss under her breath. The Starost solved that problem by riding one of them down and breaking the other’s skull with the flat of his very normal sword while the man tried to meet the wireblade with his device.

  Then Raisa Siddiq was before them. Still surrounded by her men, not close enough to kill, she stood in her stirrups like a leather target dummy and stared at the ship. The worst of it was, he realized, she smiled as the men around her died.

  He understood why when a voice thundered as loud as any sound he’d ever heard in his life.

  LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS.

  Pilchen felt a rush of warmth as his ears began to bleed. He kept his seat as his horse swayed beneath him. Many of the men on both sides collapsed with their hands clutched to their heads. Others staggered aimlessly. A few still swung at their opponents, but with the wild errors of the drunken.

  Siddiq’s smile turned into a laugh, though the Starost could not hear her voice for the worth of his life.

  “Bitch,” said the Great Queen behind him. Her he only understood because she was almost biting his shoulder as she spoke.

  Her arm snaked around and tugged his reins to the left. The ship. She wanted to reach the ship. His thoughts were not coming in the right order. He had to protect the Great Queen, fight Raisa Siddiq, do something other than surrender to the echoing pain inside his skull.

  What he did instead was ride toward the lander, and short, dark-skinned spaceman who stood in the opened doorway wearing a silver suit, with a rifle in his hand. Raisa Siddiq strode through the groaning, bleeding soldiers, walking faster than the stumbling pace of Pilchen’s horse. She caught up to them and looked toward Skanderia Knaak with an expression so complex, so intense, upon her face that the Starost knew he would never understand it.

  What did it mean to be enemies so long?

  * * * *

  Skanderia Knaak

  She knew what it meant to be enemies so long. They might as well have been married, she and Siddiq. The horse was foundering, so for a second time she slipped down, though careful to keep the wireblade in hand. Behind her Skanderia heard the Starost collapse with his mount, both of them going down onto the hardstand in an avalanche of flesh and leather and metal.

  Her attention was split between Siddiq and the man in the lander. His rifle was at port arms. Needle gun, supersonic muzzle velocity judging by the dampers on the barrel. Even a couple of combat-hardened Howard Immortals could be shredded by a weapon like that.

  What had he been expecting?

  Me, maybe.

  The Great Queen began to laugh. Siddiq laughed with her. In that moment she knew what they had been fighting over all along.

  Freedom. Space. The past they shared with no one else on this world. But out there...? It could all begin again. Home. Anywhere but this miserable mousetrap of a world.

  After more than a thousand years of acquaintance, words weren’t necessary so very often. Together, almost free, they walked toward the open hatch and the frowning man and the weapon capable of ending their long, twilight struggle, and the ship behind him that could lift them both away.

  “Cross over,” Siddiq muttered as she paused for breath. “I’ll draw his aim, you take his weapon from the offside.”

  Visions of stars dancing in her head, Skanderia Knaak snapped her sword to the ready by way of answer.

  The two immortals would carry their fight home.

  * * * *

  Starost Pilchen

  He dragged himself to hands and knees by main force. Two small puddles of blood spread just below him. The Starost tilted his head back to see the Great Queen and Raisa Siddiq move so quickly they blurred his vision. Like he’d never seen before.

  Except they weren’t fighting one another.

  The spaceman tumbled out of the lander’s little door, his arms at angles that would make for a sickening memory later. The Great Queen stepped into the shadows within, her head turning as she looked back at him with glittering eyes and a feral smile. Raisa Siddiq turned with the captured weapon—for surely it was a weapon—and made as if to sweep the field of the fallen with it. Then she followed her enemy into darkness.

  A moment later the door shut. It must have hissed or banged, but Pilchen could not tell. He was unsure if he would ever hear again. The lander began raising a terrible, stinging cloud of dust with a noise he felt in his bone and joints, even if his ears were little more than stones. The Starost dropped flat and buried his face in his forearms to protect himself.

  After about a minute, the vibrations eased. He looked up again. The lander had already climbed substantially heavenward. Something sparked at its base, and once again the Starost shielded himself. The heat of that eye-searing flame pounded him even here down on the ground.

  He finally stood and stumbled toward the body of the spaceman. Body it was—the poor bastard had been cut to ribbons by the scattered debris of his own lander’s departure. The Great Queen’s wireblade sword lay discarded next to the dead man.

  He remembered the smile. Discarded? Or given?

  The Starost grasped the wireblade, flicked it in his wrist as he had seen the Great Queen do a hundred times. It hummed, taking on whatever power or spell that drove it.

  Science, he thought. The rest of humanity has come back to us. We must rediscover their science.

  He stumbled back toward the center of mass of the aborted battle. Two of the Siddiqi elite bodyguards were already pulling themselves to their feet. The Starost glanced at the
sword in his hand and wondered whether to slice them to pieces or offer it to them.

  The past had just left, flown off into the future. Which way would they face?

  Hand firmly on the hilt, the Starost Pilchen began to talk, shouting loudly enough that they could at least see that he meant to speak instead of slay them.

  STEAK TARTARE AND THE CATS OF GARI BABAKIN STATION, by Mary A. Turzillo

  Originally published in Analog, April 2009.

  Earthlings were coming to attack the cats this very afternoon. And where was Benoît?

  Had she really considered licking his earlobe while he was reporting on the new cheese flavonoids? As if he were a surly tomcat, like this handsome fur ball now rubbing her legs?

  Ah, Lucile, she thought, so impulsive we are! The boy’s not all that sexy; he never combs his hair or gets it cut, or even washes it often.

  He had a certain something, though. Think how he lashed out at the Earth inspectors who came through a year ago trying to murder the feral cats in tunnel M. The inspectors wanted to vent that corridor and let the cats die of decompression. Benoît put them in their place.

  Those Earth people! They needed cats. Cats to sleep with, to feed, to pet, to tease with bits of string, to get a little rough with and wind up with a bitten finger or a scratched cheek. That would rearrange their psychic furniture.

  Benoît used to say, “They have cats on earth, too, so what the hell’s their problem?”

  But not cats like those of Gari Babakin Station.

  Where was Benoît? As Supervisor of Flavor Engineering and the mayor’s third in command, he was supposed to greet them so she could make a late, more impressive entrance.

  A message came in that a rocketplane had arrived from Borealopolis carrying Terran supervisors.

  Providentially, Benoît slunk in just then, running fingers through his greasy hair. He had been trying to grow a beard, and looked endearingly like an adolescent ferret.

  “They’re here,” Lucile said levelly. “And me in this nasty old jumpsuit! At least I put on perfume this morning.” She swung around to Benoît. “You were supposed to greet them.”

  “I didn’t think they’d follow through on their threat,” Benoît said. He picked up the cat that had been pestering Lucile and scratched between its ears. At least she thought it was the same cat. All the cats all looked the same, small polydactyl tabbies in varying shades of dark gray, with pink noses, all descended from the same pregnant queen that somebody smuggled into Gari Babakin Station twenty Mars years before.

  “It’s about the cats.”

  “Oh, yeah. That. They said some dumb thing about a parasite or virus. I thought they were talking about crabs.”

  “Benoît!” she hissed. “They are not sending a delegation from Earth or even from Borealopolis to stop an epidemic of crab lice.” She clawed through her desk drawer for her makeup kit, but found only a purple lace garter belt she has misplaced.

  “So? Why do they always have to pick on us?”

  Benoît exasperated her. He got more adolescent every day. He had a Ph.D. in xenonutrition, for heaven’s sake!

  No, it wouldn’t be worth seducing him, even if he was one of the few non-disgusting men on the station she hadn’t bedded. “Listen, Benoît, they’re coming through the front airlock. Could you entertain them? I have to go back to my apartment and change.” What was in her closet? The red frock with the keyhole above the derriere. Perfect.

  * * * *

  When she got back, nicely turned out in the black faux tux since the red frock had a bigarade sauce stain near the plunge of the neckline, she found Benoît and three strangers in the reception room off the main airlock. Benoît’s hands were jammed in his pockets, his eyes narrowed with paranoid hostility. The three strangers—two dowdy-looking women, and a slender youngish man with chopped-off hair and depilatory burns on his cheeks—were still in environment suits, shrinking away from the clowder of cats weaving in and around their legs.

  The man pulled off his glove, strode forward to shake hands with Lucile, faltered as if he had changed his mind about touching her, then finally seemed to conquer his squeamishness and held his hand out like a Ping-Pong paddle. “I’m Godfrey Worcester,” he said. “You’re the head of the station? Martialle Lafayette?” He used the feminine of the Martian formal title for citizen.

  Lucile took his hand and held it in both of hers. “No, no, Jean-Marie took a personal day. ‘m in charge in his absence.” What a shame Jean-Marie liked his wine so much, especially before lunch.

  “Jean-Marie? A man? We really need to talk to Martial Lafayette.” He switched to the masculine form. “You would be?”

  “I would be Lucile Raoul. I’ll send for Jean-Marie.” She gazed into Godfrey’s hazel eyes. He was a handsome, trim fellow despite the fact that his barber apparently hated him. She liked these naive types.

  She turned to the two women. “May I take your suits? Your suitliners? We have some chic little dusters you can change into while you’re in the station.” She tried not to roll her eyes. Both women apparently had been victimized by the same barber as Godfrey, and she shuddered to think what they wore under their suitliners. Neither of them seemed to have the imagination to go naked underneath, although you never could tell.

  Benoît sprang to attention. “I know what you’re after, and we will resist to the death.”

  Lucile let go of Godfrey’s hand and went to Benoît. “Benoît, dear, let these nice people have their say. But first, may I offer coffee and a pastry?”

  “Where do you get real coffee?” asked the frumpier of the two women suspiciously.

  “But my dear, we didn’t get it. We manufacture it. Alain, our head molecular gastronomist, is just a genius with esters.”

  “He’s the one that concocted the wine you sent us?” the tall woman asked. She was wriggling out of her suit, revealing a suitliner in a ghastly shade of pink that she apparently thought she could pass off as station day-wear. Lucile tried not to look.

  “No, no, we have a special vintinière. But—“

  Benoît interrupted. “We won’t reveal his name. Your goons will kidnap him and lock him up in some forced labor laboratory.”

  Lucile looked daggers at Benoît. His eyes flashed, but he shut up.

  * * * *

  Lucile escorted the trio (their clumsy gait in Mars gravity betrayed their recent arrival from Earth) to a patisserie on the upper level. The proprietor had coaxed a container of violets into bloom in the center of the room, under the mirror-maze skylight. The air smelled of cinnamon, coffee, and butter.

  “Where’s this Jean-Marie Lafayette?” the taller woman asked. Dr. Kermilda Wrothe was her name, Lucile had managed to find out. The shorter woman, who resembled a starved gerbil, was Dr. Hilda Wriothesley. “We can’t be wasting time. This is a matter of public health.”

  Just then, two of the station cats—both wore purple bows around their necks, so Lucile concluded they belonged to the proprietor—started fighting, snarling, hissing, shrieking. The larger cat was apparently trying to mount the smaller, or maybe it was the other way around.

  “I sent a message to his apartment. He’ll be here as soon as he wakes up. Monsieur, may we have coffee all round, and a tray of your pastries?”

  The coffee and pastries arrived and the three strangers eyed them with suspicion and desire.

  Benoît said, “You can just forget it. You can’t make us kill the cats. They are our soul.”

  Godfrey sat up straighter and said, “Oh, come now. Not only are you overrun with cats, but you are all infected with Toxoplasma gondii, and it’s destroying your personalities as well as probably causing birth defects.”

  Benoît jumped up and leaned over the table, nose to nose with Godfrey. “That’s slander, punk. First of all, impugning our persona
lities is tantamount to admitting that you want to enslave everybody on this station, take our proprietary secrets for wine and cheese making, and then wipe us out. Second, no child has born on this station for over fifteen Mars years.”

  It was the longest speech Benoît had made in the entire time Lucile had known him. She stirred her coffee and sipped daintily. Under the table, she drove her spike heel into Benoît’s instep.

  He turned to her, bewildered.

  “What Benoît is saying,” she purred, “is that we are well aware of the issues involved in Toxoplasma gondii infection, but we feel that you are, shall we say, trying to impose your cultural values on us. I mean, as non-toxoplasmotic people.”

  Hilda spoke up for the first time. “Surely you can’t mean that you enjoy the cultural values, as you call them, of being infected by a parasite?”

  “That’s exactly what she means, you constipated hag!” Benoît half rose and yelled in her face.

  Lucile kicked him again, harder, and he sat down, deflated. She continued, “We prefer to think of Toxoplasma gondii as a kind of beneficial symbiont.”

  “That is just outrageous!” said Dr. Hilda Wriothesley. “We’ve monitored your communications. Analysis shows that your men are paranoid, poorly organized, and brain-damaged, while your women are—well, they’re—”

  “Stylish and attractive to the opposite sex?” Lucile purred. Her gaze traveled over the gaudy, shapeless coveralls the two women wore.

  Godfrey stared at her, openmouthed.

  She flicked a smile at him, as if they shared a delicious secret.

  Godfrey cleared his throat, then started up a presentation from his finger computer, flashing the slides on the table top. “Top scientists at Utopia University have developed a virus which kills Toxoplasma gondii while leaving the host unharmed. It works very well with humans, and while there have been minor side effects in feline subjects, we feel that it is a viable solution to a public health problem that could otherwise spread beyond Gari Babakin Station and infect all of Mars.”