Writers of the Future Volume 28: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  Odyssey taught Corry a great deal about writing—including the value of community. She frequently attends science fiction conventions where she loves meeting other writers and talking to fans. When she’s not writing or thinking about science, you’re likely to find Corry hiking or rock climbing, enjoying a night at the opera, discovering new and delicious teas or reading a good book in the sun. That is, if she can find the sun. She lives with her husband in Redmond, Washington, and pines for the Colorado sunshine of her youth.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Greg began his artistic journey the way many others did. As a child growing up in Poland, he loved drawing, which contributed to many notebooks being filled with doodles and cartoons. In grade school his skills were quickly exploited by his classmates, who demanded drawings of their favorite characters from the television show DragonBall Z and others. Greg quickly realized that getting paid for drawing would be a great life. However, it wasn’t until he came to the United States and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City that he realized that there are people who actually do that. There he discovered old master painters, as well as contemporary illustrators who inspired him to take art seriously and commit to a life of creativity. His current plans are completing his undergraduate illustration study at SVA and transitioning to freelance work on books and advertising.

  Shutdown

  The alarm blared over the forest’s metallic rustling, and my HUD’s red warning light glazed the view through my faceplate. Ten seconds until the defense scan hit my position. Ten seconds until any motion, any electrical signature would whip vines down from the iron-cored trees, wrapping me as surely as steel cables, pinning me while cutter-bugs took me apart.

  My muscles clenched, and I froze. The training sims hadn’t prepared me for the terror twisting my gut, for the way my heart seemed to dance a pas-de-bourrée, its ballerina toes rapping against my ribs.

  I didn’t have time to panic. I chinned my skinsuit’s kill switch and dropped to the forest floor. In the silence after the klaxon died, my breather hissed out one final gasp of oxygen. The red glow faded from my faceplate and the forest closed in, dark without the HUD’s gain and unnaturally silent without the suit’s audio pickups. Weak sunlight filtered through the thick canopy, yellowed by sulfur gas, enough to make out shapes, but not details. In sims, they’d cut our visual enhancement, but they must have extrapolated badly because the shadows had never been this deep, the shafts of sunlight never so diseased.

  I crouched on a patch of dirt, crumpling fallen leaves, but avoiding the forest’s ragged undergrowth. I folded my legs beneath me, splaying my arms for balance. My hands slipped on the metal-rich berries that covered the ground as if someone had derailed a freight train of ball bearings. I swept some impatiently aside and rested my helmeted forehead on the dirt. How much time had passed? Eight seconds? No time to worry.

  Gritting my teeth, I stopped my heart.

  A vise seemed to close about my chest. Sweat beaded on my brow as I dragged in one last breath, my body panicking, automatic reflexes screaming at me to fight, to struggle, to escape. I fought them as Sergeant Miller and Captain Johnston trained me, fought them and stopped breathing. My vision narrowed. My lips tingled and went numb. Twelve minutes, I repeated to myself as the forest grew dark and disappeared.

  You’ll come back. The words echoed in Sergeant Miller’s clipped bark. Just a few minutes ago, he’d given me the thumbs-up after checking my suit’s seals. He’d rapped his knuckles against my helmet for luck, and I’d stridden toward this forested hell.

  So, Amaechi,” Private Yaradua said as I topped my glass off from her flask. “If we were back on Hope’s Landing, what would you do with your last night?”

  “I’d go whoring,” Obasanjo said. “Nice place in Makurdi where—”

  “Wouldn’t call it nice,” Tamunosaki said. “You mean cheap.”

  “No, not that place we went with Akpu-nku. There’s one uptown.” Obasanjo shrugged. “Might as well spend all my money, right?” He said it like a joke, but nobody laughed.

  Yaradua knocked her glass back, and Balogun focused on twirling her knife. We headed planetside at 0800 tomorrow, and MilComm gave slim odds that we’d make it back. The silence stretched, Obasanjo looking expectantly around for someone to agree with him.

  Yaradua clanged her empty glass down on the table. “I didn’t ask you, Obasanjo. I asked Amaechi.”

  “She’d probably go to the ballet,” he said with a snort.

  The corners of my glass dug into my palms; I wondered if I could squeeze it hard enough for it to shatter. The two missing fingers on my left hand itched. I twitched the stub of my middle finger and contemplated slamming my glass into Obasanjo’s forehead. If it weren’t for those fingers, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be about to land on a planet that would probably kill me.

  “Obasanjo’s an idiot,” Tamunosaki said softly. “Ignore him.”

  “He thinks he’s funny,” Balogun said, like we didn’t all know it.

  “What?” Obasanjo said. “What’d I say?”

  “Forget it,” I said. I didn’t want to think about the ballet. “I sure as hell wouldn’t spend my last night watching those princesses stick their noses so high . . .” My teeth were grinding. “You’d think they were giraffes,” I finished lamely.

  “Screw that,” Balogun said, jamming the point of her knife into the table and letting it waver there. “This isn’t my last night. I’m coming back.”

  “We all are,” Tamunosaki said, voice loud as he tried to sound convincing. We all glared at him, then tried to pretend that we hadn’t. MilComm had assigned him to penetrate only two shutdowns deep into the forest before returning to his lander. The rest of us were headed for the center and whatever might be hiding there. If anyone would make it back, Tamunosaki would.

  A rushing sound like a raging waterfall. Colors and faces flashing past. A jumble of words. Private Amaechi? Focus. Come back. It sounded like Sergeant Miller, screaming over a buzz like Hope’s Landing’s insects at dusk.

  My back arched. Shadows and shapes flitted behind my eyes: my squad members, mission briefings. Sergeant Miller was shaking me. No, I was shaking myself. Reboot convulsions. I gasped, and stale, humid air poured into my lungs. Nothing had ever tasted so sweet.

  Panting, I licked dry lips. My vision stuttered in, grayscale. Motion out of the corner of my eye made me flinch. A fist-sized gather-bug skittered over on eight legs, gunmetal gray and dragging a mesh sack filled with fallen berries. Its mottled exoskeleton glinted in the jaundiced sunlight, its forelimbs in constant motion, spearing berries with sharp stabs of steel-tipped limbs.

  My brain snapped out of the reboot haze. A green light winked in my periphery, and a knot in my throat loosened. My reboot seizures had started the suit and HUD reboot. I switched my attention to my environment. “Not a sim,” I whispered as I assessed my physical condition.

  I hadn’t fallen out of my crouch during the seizures, so I scanned my surroundings without lifting my head, eyes darting in threat assessment, not wasting time interpreting details. The gather-bug skittered over my hand and I stiffened. I held myself motionless, expecting a sharp stab, expecting the rotten-egg tang of sulfur dioxide to poison my air. But the bug apparently found my skinsuit’s carbon fiber uninteresting, and it marched on, spearing a berry next to my thumb.

  My pulse hammered loudly in the enclosed helmet, and each inhale grew more labored as I depleted the bubble of stagnant oxygen. Each exhale fogged my faceplate, and the green light kept blinking. Was the suit’s reboot taking too long? I could barely see through the fog.

  This would be one hell of a time for the suit to crash reboot.

  Sergeant Miller called me into his office after three grueling hours of weapons training. I’d joined MilComm a month ago and hated how Basic left me no time to practice my pirouettes and soubresauts. Hell,
I rarely had enough energy at the end of the day to lace on my slippers and get up on my toes. I hated MilComm for that, hated the way my form was slipping. But mostly I hated myself for being so stupid, so distracted that I burned off two and a half fingers with a damn cutting torch.

  To be a prima ballerina, you had to be perfect. And little Adanna Amaechi from Gwantu Village would never be able to afford finger prosthetics on a factory worker salary.

  When the MilComm fleet arrived in system and started recruiting, and rumors flew about them paying for high-tech implants, I figured them for my last chance. So far, though, they’d just driven me through grueling drills and stuffed my head with military propaganda.

  “Take a seat,” Sergeant Miller said.

  I dropped my salute. Maybe this would be quick and I’d have time to practice a few grand battements before lights out.

  “You used to be a dancer,” he said, voice gruff like when he walked us through psych control drills.

  I narrowed my eyes. He didn’t say it like a question and I was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear me say that, even though I wore damn combat fatigues, I still was.

  “You’ve got excellent control.”

  That took me aback. “Sir?”

  “Your regulation of breath, heart rate. You’re leagues ahead of the other recruits.” He fiddled with a stylus on his desk before deliberately placing it aside. “You’ve heard the latest reports from Helinski Five.”

  “The cutter-bugs?” They’d splashed the footage all over base: gleaming metal bugs hacking apart a recon probe that twitched helplessly beneath a tangle of vines. I wasn’t sure if it was meant to scare us or motivate us.

  “We’re losing a war we haven’t started fighting,” he said. “To be frank, Amaechi, we don’t even know if it is a war.”

  “So it’s true then? There haven’t been any survivors?” Five worlds had succumbed to the alien attacks, but the details were sparse and always distorted by speculation. I didn’t have the faintest idea why Miller was talking to me, but the chance to get the story straight seemed too good to pass up.

  “By the time our probes have arrived to investigate those worlds, they’ve already been terraformed past a human-breathable atmosphere. As far as we can tell, the aliens destroy all our electronics on their approach to the settled system. We’ve never received any transmissions about the attacks, and all colonial tech we’ve recovered has been slagged.”

  The reports I’d heard always painted MilComm in a more powerful light. They understood these aliens. They had a plan. Apparently, that was more propaganda.

  “MilComm needs something to go on,” he said, “and our best shot is that forest on Helinski Five.”

  “The one with the cutter-bugs?” My stomach twisted. Whatever point he was getting at, I wasn’t going to like it.

  He nodded. “It’s roughly a hundred kilometers in diameter and radio opaque. We’ve sent probes in, but they’ve never returned. What Lieutenant Aldren’s team found is that some sort of defense scan sweeps the area roughly every eight minutes. The scans short all active electronics and any motion attracts cutter-bugs.”

  The sinking in my gut worsened. He was going to send me into that hell.

  “Aldren’s team sent back detailed intel on the first ten meters of the forest, but—” His jaw muscles worked and he took a minute before saying anything else. “—but once they started deeper, something got them.”

  I swallowed hard. “Dead?”

  Miller nodded.

  My jaw tightened, and I struggled not to run from the room. That forest had murdered a career MilComm team, so now they’d send the new recruits. The ones that didn’t matter.

  Could I quit MilComm? I could still dance in the cheap traveling productions the aristocracy put on as a token effort to bring culture to the masses. Commoners wouldn’t care if a ballerina in the back was disfigured.

  Miller ran a hand over his shaved head. “Captain Johnston and I got approval for a mission, but we need local recruits—without implants—to pull it off. We can teach you to escape the scans, which, at least at the forest’s perimeter last a consistent twelve minutes each.”

  “You want someone who can hold her breath for twelve minutes?” Was this why he was talking to me? “I’m not an otter—sir.”

  A faint smile pulled at his stubbly cheeks. “We don’t want you to hold your breath, Amaechi. We want you to stop breathing.”

  “And die.”

  “Temporarily.”

  I tried to come up with something to say. I didn’t want to die. There still had to be a chance, somehow, that I could make it into the Abuja Ballet Academy.

  Sergeant Miller must have taken my silence for confusion. “Soldiers have mastered the art of self-stasis before. But no one has revived without external stimulus.”

  Self-stasis was an awfully pretty word for death. “Stimulus like a defibrillator?” We’d learned how to use AEDs in the factory.

  “Yeah.” Sergeant Miller actually looked sheepish. I didn’t know sergeants could. “But Johnston and I developed a new method. We’ll start training on base, and as soon as MilComm gets a dreadnought resupplied, we’ll depart for Helinski Five.”

  “I didn’t join up to die, sir.”

  “You’ll come back from these deaths, Private. And MilComm will pay big bonuses for solid intel on these aliens. We don’t even know what these creatures look like—you could make a big discovery.”

  A few temporary deaths would be worth it if they got me into the Academy. But the footage of cutter-bugs chopping apart that probe still haunted me.

  “Only a handful of the ten thousand grunts who lined up with you show any promise,” Miller said. “We need you for this mission.”

  I rubbed my thumb over the scarred skin where the cutting torch had burned through my fingers and my carefully planned future. Sergeant Miller caught the gesture.

  “That doesn’t matter here. You’ve got seven and a half perfectly good ones.”

  “If I make it back with intel on these aliens, will MilComm pay for lifelike prosthetics?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I took a deep breath and flexed the two and a half fingers on my left hand. I didn’t care about aliens. I wanted my life back. “Then teach me how to die, sir.”

  With a faint hiss, my faceplate cleared. A heartbeat later, the HUD came online, brightening the gather-bug’s outlines and transmitting the scritch and crumple of its steps across aluminum-plated leaves. Its sack of iron berries clacked like a child’s bag of marbles.

  “Alien defense scan has passed your position,” the HUD said, its accent flat like Captain Johnston’s.

  “Roger.” I leaped up and slipped through narrow gaps between hanging vines, keeping my steps as much on dirt and the uncertain footing of metal berries as I could. No one knew what foliage encompassed the defensive array. The other team had warned MilComm only of the vines, and I shuddered as I skirted some of the gray-green tendrils, imagining them pinning me while the cutter-bugs swarmed.

  Step after step, I stole forward in my armored carbon-fiber skinsuit, wondering if the next defensive scan would come in eight minutes, or if it would strobe more frequently as I approached whatever lay at the forest’s heart.

  Had Yaradua, Balogun, Obasanjo and Tamunosaki made it through their first shutdown already? Were they seeing the same critters as we converged from our five points around the perimeter?

  The HUD’s alarm blared, and I dropped to the forest floor, heart hammering in an adrenaline burst I didn’t clamp down on fast enough. My HUD shut down and the world went silent.

  As I stopped my heart, the shadows seemed to crawl with cutter-bugs poised to attack. Make sure you come back, Sarge had said as my feet hit the alien dirt and I glanced back at him silhouetted in the airlock.

  “Yes, sir,” I whispered before squeezing
my eyes closed and stilling my lungs.

  Kilometers bled past. My head grew fuzzy from too many shutdowns, and my chest ached each time I inhaled.

  I checked the time; it felt like twenty minutes had passed since my last shutdown. It had only been five.

  According to my HUD, I was coming up on my twentieth shutdown. Over six hours and fourteen kilometers had passed since I’d entered this hellhole. I slipped through some spiny shrubs and came out in a clearing. Exhausted, I sat cross-legged in the middle of it, sucking at my nutrient tube. My HUD counted down the minutes until the next anticipated defensive scan.

  The backup scanner strapped to my calf felt like a brick weighing down my every step. I pulled it off, contemplating leaving it behind. The defensive scans had been coming like clockwork every eight minutes, so I probably wouldn’t need it. I sipped water through another tube, beyond caring that it was recycled piss. Grimacing, I transferred the scanner to my other leg. Its crude circuits might survive if something took out my HUD, and I still didn’t know what lay at the heart of this forest.

  I hoped to hell that whatever it was, I’d find it soon.

  I envied Tamunosaki, who was probably back on the dreadnought already, kicking back with a pilfered glass of Yaradua’s whiskey. I bit my lip. Were the others even still alive?

  They had to be.

  A metal-shelled creature the size of a dog scuttled past, and I reminded myself that everything I was seeing, everything my HUD was recording and writing to archaic plastic storage devices, was new intel. I had to make it out. I would get my prosthetic and be able to dance again.

  But right now, that hardly seemed to matter.

  My HUD blared its warning, and I killed myself again.

  Up ahead, the vines thickened. I crouched low, sweeping foliage gently aside. Forward, ever forward.

  The vines grew denser. I backtracked, cursing the extra distance as I sought a way around the thicket. But the tangle of vines stretched on. After wasting two precious minutes trying to go around, I steeled myself to go through.