The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 3

by Allan Kaster

  Wen ignored that, saying, “I’m very disappointed in you, child. I hoped that overseeing the scale-harvesting operation would teach you something about duty, responsibility and common sense. I can see that it has done nothing of the kind. I’ll be waiting for you when you get back to the camp, to make sure that this woman gets the best treatment we can provide until the peacers arrive.”

  Sure enough, a freshly printed avatar was standing at the edge of the landing pad when the hopper touched down. A hollow plastic shell in roughly human form, with feet like suction cups and claws for hands, it stepped forward and lifted Xtina Groza from the cargo rack and set off toward the trailer before Bai had finished powering down the hopper.

  The trailer’s little revolving airlock could only take one person at a time. Bai went through first, and there was a moment, while she was hauling Xtina Groza’s rigid pressure suit out of the lock, when she thought of shutting the avatar outside—the thing was running semi-autonomously because of the time lag, she’d be able to do it before it could react. But she was already in more than enough trouble, so she dutifully spun the lock around and waited for the avatar to cycle through so her mother could tell her what to do next.

  Wen ordered the doctor thing to extrude itself from the trailer’s wall, told Bai she had found instructions for manually opening the antique hardshell suit. The avatar stood at Bai’s back while she warmed the suit to room temperature and worked through the checklist of latches, snap fasteners and ring and plug connectors. At last, she lifted the helmet from the neck ring, removed the bulky life support pack, gloves and chestpiece, and tugged down the long zip of the inner lining.

  Xtina Groza was swaddled in a yellow, close-woven, elasticated undergarment that clung to the blades and ridges of her long-limbed, painfully thin body. A hank of black hair, coarse and glossy with grease, was pulled back from her face and lay across her left shoulder; a small black disc lay between her flattened breasts. The machine that had been regulating her metabolism during cold sleep, Bai’s mother said. Old tech.

  Bai unclipped the lines that had been feeding the woman drugs and nutrients, her catheter and breathing tube. Her skin was clammy but not chilled, and a faint pulse was visible under the angle of her jaw. She was no longer in true cold sleep; her suit had been trying to wake her.

  The avatar carried her to the doctor thing, which immediately wrapped her from head to toe in its shroud and got to work, and Wen told Bai that she needed to take the pressure suit outside.

  “It’s powered down. And in pieces.”

  “It’s an old combat model,” Wen said, her voice coming from the avatar’s unmoving transparent face. “I don’t know what it’s capable of and neither do you. Go on, now.”

  No point arguing, and besides, Bai had an idea. After her own suit had assembled itself around her, she piled the helmet, gloves and other loose pieces inside the shell of Xtina Groza’s suit and hauled it through the lock and whistled up a sled and rode across to the refinery, where she stuffed the suit inside an unused storage tank. Out of sight, and so on. If the peace police forgot to ask about it, and her mother forgot to remind them, Bai could try to hack into its mind, find out everything it knew about its owner. It was only a token rebellion and probably wouldn’t come to anything, but it put a little bounce in her gait as she trekked back to the trailer.

  The doctor thing was still ticking away to itself as it assessed and stabilized the comatose woman. It took a while. Bai munched a sprouted bean wrap and sipped a bulb of tea, tried her best to ignore the impassive avatar. The adrenalin high of the search and rescue had drained away. She was tired and cross-grained, felt that she was being punished for doing the right thing. At least the results of the doctor thing’s analyses and diagnostic tests were worth the wait.

  Xtina Groza was somatically and genetically female, apparent age around twenty-five, chronological age unknown. Trace analysis suggested that she had been in cold sleep a long time. A minimum of seventy years, maybe more. Which would have been interesting in itself, but there were also the gene mods. As well as the usual adaptations to life in low gravity, with minor variations in their genetic code that suggested Xtina Groza had been born in the Saturn system, there were mods that weren’t in any catalogue, implants in the visual cortex of her brain and her brainstem, and a mesh of fine threads woven through her musculature.

  Bai and her mother agreed that the combat suit, the mods and implants, and the length of time she’d been in cold sleep strongly suggested that Xtina Groza had been involved in the Quiet War. Most Outers had taken the high road of passive resistance, but some cities and settlements had fought back against Earth’s Three Powers Alliance in the brief fierce clash, and a few pockets of rebels had actively resisted the subsequent occupation of the Jupiter and Saturn systems. Xtina Groza might be one such, a soldier enhanced for speed and strength and survival, and Bai had an idea, she thought a good one, which could explain how this woman had ended up in a lifepod which had only just now crash-landed on Oberon.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Quiet War, a group of self-styled Free Outers had fled from the Saturn system and briefly settled on Titania (the gala where Bai had met Lindy Garten had been part of the celebrations on the hundredth anniversary of their arrival) before moving even further out. One of them, Macy Minnot, Bai’s great-grandmother, had been a defector from Greater Brazil; another had been Macy’s husband, Newton Jones, scion of an influential clan from Saturn’s moon Dione—Bai and Wen’s clan. It was possible, Bai told her mother, that Xtina Groza had been a member of the resistance, sent to recruit the Free Outers to her cause. But her ship had run into trouble, or perhaps it had been involved in a fire fight with the Three Powers expeditionary force that had come looking for the Free Outers, and she’d escaped in her lifepod and somehow it had not been picked up. Orbiting Uranus for decades in a highly eccentric path that took it far from the planet most of the time, before at last it had come close enough to Oberon to attempt a landing.

  “The pod took a last chance at saving its passenger,” Bai said. “And because it didn’t realize that the war was long over, it wiped all its records in case it was captured by the enemy.”

  “It’s a nice story,” Wen said. “But at the moment we don’t know enough to know if it’s anything more than that.”

  “When she wakes up, we can ask her directly.”

  “She isn’t going to wake up for a while,” Wen said, the time delay giving it the weight of a carefully considered reply rather than something that had already been decided without consulting Bai. “The doctor thing will keep her in an induced coma until the peacers arrive.”

  Bai started to say something, forgetting in her anger about that damn delay, but her mother hadn’t finished, anticipating her objections, telling her that the woman possessed military mods, she was an unknown quantity, it wouldn’t be safe to wake her until she was in a secure place.

  “She isn’t my prisoner,” Bai said, unable to help herself.

  “I know you want to know everything there is to know about her. It’s only natural that you do. And you will, soon enough. Meanwhile, you’ll have to learn how to be patient. And you should get some rest. You’ve had quite the day, and you’ll need to be at your best when the peacers arrive.”

  So that was that. As usual, her mother was treating her like a child, taking charge, making decisions without bothering to consult her. All she could say, in token protest, was that when the peacers came she wanted to go back with them. “You said that I needed to learn about responsibility. Well, I feel responsible for Xtina Groza because I saved her life. Making sure that she’s transported safely to Titania is the least I can do for her.”

  If she turned out to be a genuine hero of the resistance, the peacers wouldn’t be able to hold the woman long. And she would need a place to stay when they let her go. Bai could invite her to stay in one of the clan’s guest apartments, help her, listen to her stories. They’d become friends, and maybe Bai could le
ave with her, when the time came.

  She elaborated this fantasy while she drifted to sleep in the curtained niche. It was an echo of the stories she’d told herself as a child, stories about the places she’d visit and the wonders she’d see when she was old enough to travel the solar system. She hadn’t thought then that she’d end up on Oberon, where hardly anyone lived and nothing ever happened. But something had happened now, all right, and it would change everything . . .

  When she woke, just a few hours later, the doctor thing was still humming and clicking at the other end of the trailer’s living space, Xtina Groza was still motionless under the doctor thing’s shroud, and the avatar’s soap-bubble statue was still standing guard. Except that now it was controlled by Ye, the oldest of Bai’s fathers.

  “Why don’t you have some breakfast,” he said, “and tell me all about your adventure.”

  Big, cuddly, endlessly patient Ye was Bai’s favorite parent. He’d always taken her plans for travelling the system seriously; he’d done plenty of travelling himself before he’d married Wen and Egil, Bai’s biological father, and settled down in Fairyland. He possessed the serene calm of someone who had seen so much of worlds that nothing could surprise him anymore, and Bai loved his stories of exotic corners of the outer system and the two years he’d spent working for the Martian Terraforming Authority. They gave her hope that one day she’d be able to see those same places and more besides. Still, she faintly resented that he was babysitting her. No doubt it was Wen’s idea. Even though telling him the story of how she’d found Xtina Groza rekindled something of the excitement and wonder of it, she felt that she was being pandered to.

  “It’s definitely one for the scrolls,” Ye said, which was what he called the clan’s records. “You’re a hero, Bai. I can’t tell how proud I am.”

  “It isn’t over yet,” Bai said. “And I want to see it through to the end. Find out who she is, and the whole story of how she ended up here. And help her deal with the peacers, and help after they let her go.”

  She sipped from her bulb of tea while waiting for his reply, a lot longer than the time delay.

  “Mmm-hmm. We’ll have to think about that. And see what the peacers have to say about it too. Meantime, you should check the board. One of the harvesters has got itself in a pickle.”

  “As if it matters now.”

  “Of course it matters. You know the Gartens don’t want us here. Any violation of our lease, no matter how small, would give them an excuse to make a complaint to the Commonhold Council. You go on now, and don’t worry about your sleeping beauty. I’ll keep watch. If there’s anything to report, I’ll let you know at once.”

  Bai knew it was busy work got up to distract her, but she was also sort of glad to get out for a few hours. It would give her time to think. To plan. To work out exactly how she could persuade the peacers to let her ride along with Xtina Groza to Titania.

  So without any argument she suited up and headed out on one of the rackety old sleds toward the spot where the harvester had gotten itself into a jam. Mostly, the machines could be left to work by themselves. Several hundred man-sized, squid-shaped harvesters crawling in long transects across the forest floor, collecting scales shed by the umbrella trees and dumping their loads in the hoppers of runners that transported them to the refinery, where metals and rare earths were extracted for export and the residue was used as a substrate for starter cultures of nanomachines, which the forester rig force-injected into the rock-hard ice to quicken new colonies. Bai monitored every aspect of this activity, fixed machines that damaged themselves beyond the limits of their repair mites, organized movement of the camp to a new area of the forest when a patch had been completely harvested, and supervised the cannon that shot loaded cargo drones into low-energy transfer orbits which eventually intersected with Titania.

  When she wasn’t overseeing all this, carrying out routine maintenance in the camp, or studying for her engineering certificates, she liked to hike through the umbrella-tree forest and climb to the top of the crater’s rimwall and look out at the moonscape. Her favorite route followed the narrow crest of a buttress that rose steeply to the edge of a cirque bitten into the rimwall, with a view across a smashed plain to the curved horizon, notched in the west by one of the long deep canyons that dissected the moon’s surface. Craters everywhere. So many that new craters overlapped or were inside older craters, and everything was dusted with dark red CHON tars that had spiraled in after being knocked off irregular outer moons by meteorite and micrometeorite impacts.

  All around, absolute silence and stillness. No sound but the faint hiss of air in Bai’s helmet, the hum of her suit’s pumps, the flutter of her pulse in her ears. Looking out at the moonscape with her comms turned off, no boot prints on the dusty ground but her own and nothing moving under the black sky, where Uranus’s big beautiful blue globe swam like an exotic jellyfish, and at this latitude and in this season, the cold spark of the sun hung close to the horizon, and Bai felt like the queen of the little world, or the last person in the solar system. A lovely lonely feeling.

  Although she’d been packed off to Oberon because her mother hoped that it would quench her restlessness, it had instead fed her hunger for travel and adventure. The Uranus system was a dull, sparsely settled backwater, and everywhere else the solar system was abloom with what people were beginning to call the Second Renaissance. Established cities and settlements in the Jupiter and Saturn systems had all been rebuilt and expanded, and hundreds of new settlements and gardens had been constructed on minor planets, moons, asteroids—even on kobolds out beyond the orbit of Neptune. The great terraforming projects on Mars still had centuries to run, but more than a million people lived there in tented cities and gardens, and forests were being planted out in the lowest parts of the Hellas Basin, where the atmospheric pressure was high enough, now, for liquid water to persist on the surface. There were half a dozen different plans to terraform Venus too, and colony ships and seedships were halfway to some of the near stars and more were being constructed to sustain the outward urge.

  Bai wanted to see some of that with her own eyes. She wanted to visit the clan’s Firsthome on Dione, sample life in the cities of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and the garden colonies of the asteroid belt, sail the polar lakes of Titan, take the scenic railroad down the length of Valles Marineris on Mars, maybe even visit ancient, teeming Earth. Rescuing Xtina Groza was confirmation that she wasn’t meant for an ordinary life. It was the beginning of a wonderful and strange adventure whose ending was excitingly unclear.

  But first, she had to sort out the damn harvester. It had wandered into a narrow steep-sided fracture that zigzagged from a secondary crater and couldn’t work out how to retrace its steps, bumping with futile persistence against the sheer wall where the fracture terminated. A minor fault in its nav system, probably. Bai towed the machine out of the fracture and aimed it at the nearest patch of forest. She watched as it stepped away on its springy tentacles, disappeared into ink-black shadows under the umbrella trees. If it got stuck again, she’d have to bring it in and figure out what had gone wrong, but hopefully it was just a one-off glitch.

  She was halfway back to the camp when an alert overflashed her comms. It was her mother, asking Bai where she was, telling her that there was a serious problem at the camp.

  “We think the woman may have woken up. The avatar went offline and the feed from the doctor thing cut out. We can’t access the camp’s comms, either. Which means we can’t see what’s going on, and we can’t print new avatars. We’re trying to get back up inside the comms, but it’s going to take a while. I’ve alerted the peacers. They know what to expect. They’ll go in, do what needs to be done. Meanwhile, I want you to hunker down in place. The woman has already attacked you once. She could take you hostage, or worse.”

  “It was her suit that attacked me, and it was a mistake.” Bai had slowed the sled, was trying to process what she’d been told. It didn’t seem likely that
Xtina Groza had woken from her induced coma. Maybe the Gartens had kidnapped her, although that would be a risky and provocative move. Or maybe one of the half hundred hermits and aesthetes scattered across Oberon had heard the chatter about her, decided she was dangerous, or that she was a messenger sent by one of their gods . . .

  She told her mother this, said that she had to check out the camp. “If someone took her, I’ll find out who it was and where they went.”

  “There was no sign of any intruder before the comms went out,” Wen said. “The peacers will be there soon. Promise me you won’t do anything silly before they arrive.”

  Silly. That stung. As if she was still a little girl. As if she didn’t know what she was doing.

  “I’m cutting my comms,” Bai said. “In case someone is listening in. I’ll be back shortly.”

  She knew that she was being reckless, but she also knew that she had to find out what had happened, and drove the rest of the way at full speed, banging over rough ground, swerving around trees, concentrating on steering the sled so she wouldn’t have to think about everything that could go wrong.

  The camp was set up on top of a bare apron of ejecta that had been thrown out from a secondary crater. Bai halted in the shadows at the edge of the forest and used the suit’s optics to scope out the lie of the land. Several runners were frozen in place around the refinery, presumably shut down when the comms had fallen over. Nothing was moving around the white cylinder of the trailer either. The spare sled was parked nearby, and the pair of hoppers stood side by side in the green glow of the lights that circled the landing apron. No sign of any intruders, but they could have come and gone, taking Xtina Groza with them . . .

  A couple of years ago, on her sixteenth birthday, when she’d officially become an adult, Bai’s clan had given her a round trip to Miranda. One of the moon’s sightseeing attractions was a long ribbon of sheer cliffs more than five kilometers high, Verona Rupes, a big fault scarp created by upwellings of partially melted ices, and like any other tourist Bai had jumped off the end of a platform cantilevered out from one of the highest points. The gravity of Miranda was even lower than the gravity of Oberon or Titania; it took almost six minutes to reach the big target painted at the bottom. But in vacuum free fall, with no air resistance to slow acceleration, the final velocity of that long swooning fall was enough to kill a person, so jumpers were equipped with backpacks that stabilized their fall and fired braking jets during the last ten seconds. A big slam of deceleration that was part of the fun.