The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  “As I’ve said, our hygiene standards are impeccable, and our stock is purebred Hereford!” Cai slaps the flank of a cow through the cage bars, and it moos irritatedly in response. “There is absolutely no way it could happen here!”

  Helena does some mental calculations. Aired last year, when the farm recently opened, and that cow looks around six months old … and now a request for steaks from cows that are sixteen to eighteen months old …

  “So,” Lily says, leaning on the back of Helena’s chair. “Bovine parasitic cancer?”

  “Judging by the timing, it probably hit them last month. It’s usually the older cows that get infected first. He’d have killed them to stop the spread … but if it’s the internal strain, the tumors would have made their meat unusable after excision. His first batch of cows was probably meant to be for the wedding dinner. What we’re printing is the cover-up.”

  “But it’s not like steak’s a standard course in wedding dinners or anything, right? Can’t they just change it to roast duck or abalone or something?” Lily looks fairly puzzled, probably because she hasn’t been subjected to as many weddings as Helena has.

  “Mr. Cai’s the one bankrolling it, so it’s a staging ground for the Cai family to show how much better they are than everyone else. You saw the announcement—he’s probably been bragging to all his guests about how they’ll be the first to taste beef from his vertical farm. Changing it now would be a real loss of face.”

  “Okay,” Lily says. “I have a bunch of ideas, but first of all, how much do you care about this guy’s face?”

  Helena thinks back to her inbox full of corpse pictures, the countless sleepless nights she’s endured, the sheer terror she felt when she saw Lily step through the door. “Not very much at all.”

  “All right.” Lily smacks her fist into her palm. “Let’s give him a nice surprise.”

  The week before the deadline vanishes in a blur of printing, re-rendering, and darknet job requests. Helena’s been nothing but polite to Mr. Cai ever since the hitter’s visit, and has even taken to video calls lately, turning on the camera on her end so that Mr. Cai can witness her progress. It’s always good to build rapport with clients.

  “So, sir,” Helena moves the camera, slowly panning so it captures the piles and piles of cherry-red steaks, zooming in on the beautiful fat strata which took ages to render. “How does this look? I’ll be starting the dry-aging once you approve, and loading it into the podcars first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Fairly adequate. I didn’t expect much from the likes of you, but this seems satisfactory. Go ahead.”

  Helena tries her hardest to keep calm. “I’m glad you feel that way, sir. Rest assured you’ll be getting your delivery on schedule … by the way, I don’t suppose you could transfer the money on delivery? Printing the bone matter costs a lot more than I thought.”

  “Of course, of course, once it’s delivered and I inspect the marbling. Quality checks, you know?”

  Helena adjusts the camera, zooming in on the myoglobin dripping from the juicy steaks, and adopts her most sorrowful tone. “Well, I hate to rush you, but I haven’t had much money for food lately …”

  Mr. Cai chortles. “Why, that’s got to be hard on you! You’ll receive the fund transfer sometime this month, and in the meantime why don’t you treat yourself and print up something nice to eat?”

  Lily gives Helena a thumbs-up, then resumes crouching under the table and messaging her darknet contacts, careful to stay out of Helena’s shot. The call disconnects.

  “Let’s assume we won’t get any further payment. Is everything ready?”

  “Yeah,” Lily says. “When do we need to drop it off?”

  “Let’s try for five AM. Time to start batch-processing.”

  Helena sets the enzyme percentages, loads the fluid into the canister, and they both haul the steaks into the dry-ager unit. The machine hums away, spraying fine mists of enzymatic fluid onto the steaks and partially dehydrating them, while Helena and Lily work on assembling the refrigerated delivery boxes. Once everything’s neatly packed, they haul the boxes to the nearest podcar station. As Helena slams box after box into the cargo area of the podcars, Lily types the delivery codes into their front panels. The podcars boot up, sealing themselves shut, and zoom off on their circuitous route to the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.

  They head back to the industrial park. Most of their things have already been shoved into backpacks, and Helena begins breaking the remaining equipment down for transport.

  A Sculpere 9410S takes twenty minutes to disassemble if you’re doing it for the second time. If someone’s there to help you manually eject the cell cartridges, slide the external casing off, and detach the print heads so you can disassemble the power unit, you might be able to get that figure down to ten. They’ll buy a new printer once they figure out where to settle down, but this one will do for now.

  It’s not running away if we’re both going somewhere, Helena thinks to herself, and this time it doesn’t feel like a lie.

  There aren’t many visitors to Mr. Chan’s restaurant during breakfast hours, and he’s sitting in a corner, reading a book. Helena waves at him.

  “Helena!” he booms, surging up to greet her. “Long time no see, and who is this?”

  “Oh, we met recently. She’s helped me out a lot,” Helena says, judiciously avoiding any mention of Lily’s name. She holds a finger to her lips, and surprisingly, Mr. Chan seems to catch on. Lily waves at Mr. Chan, then proceeds to wander around the restaurant, examining their collection of porcelain plates.

  “Anyway, since you’re my very first client, I thought I’d let you know in person. I’m going traveling with my … friend, and I won’t be around for the next few months at least.”

  “Oh, that’s certainly a shame! I was planning a black pepper hotplate beef special next month, but I suppose black pepper hotplate extruded protein will do just fine. When do you think you’ll be coming back?”

  Helena looks at Mr. Chan’s guileless face, and thinks, well, her first client deserves a bit more honesty. “Actually, I probably won’t be running the business any longer. I haven’t decided yet, but I think I’m going to study art. I’m really, really sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Chan.”

  “No, no, pursuing your dreams, well, that’s not something you should be apologizing for! I’m just glad you finally found a friend!”

  Helena glances over at Lily, who’s currently stuffing a container of cellulose toothpicks into the side pocket of her bulging backpack.

  “Yeah, I’m glad too,” she says. “I’m sorry, Mr. Chan, but we have a flight to catch in a couple of hours, and the bus is leaving soon …”

  “Nonsense! I’ll pay for your taxi fare, and I’ll give you something for the road. Airplane food is awful these days!”

  Despite repeatedly declining Mr. Chan’s very generous offers, somehow Helena and Lily end up toting bags and bags of fresh steamed buns to their taxi.

  “Oh, did you see the news?” Mr. Chan asks. “That vertical farmer’s daughter is getting married at some fancy hotel tonight. Quite a pretty girl, good thing she didn’t inherit those eyebrows—”

  Lily snorts and accidentally chokes on her steamed bun. Helena claps her on the back.

  “—and they’re serving steak at the banquet, straight from his farm! Now, don’t get me wrong, Helena, you’re talented at what you do—but a good old-fashioned slab of real meat, now, that’s the ticket!”

  “Yes,” Helena says. “It certainly is.”

  All known forgeries are failures, but sometimes that’s on purpose. Sometimes a forger decides to get revenge by planting obvious flaws in their work, then waiting for them to be revealed, making a fool of everyone who initially claimed the work was authentic. These flaws can take many forms—deliberate anachronisms, misspelled signatures, rude messages hidden beneath thick coats of paint—or a picture of a happy cow, surrounded by little hearts, etched into the T-bone of two hundred perfectl
y-printed steaks.

  While the known forgers are the famous ones, the best forgers are the ones that don’t get caught—the old woman selling her deceased husband’s collection to an avaricious art collector, the harried-looking mother handing the cashier a battered 50-yuan note, or the two women at the airport, laughing as they collect their luggage, disappearing into the crowd.

  Alastair Reynolds is the bestselling author of over a dozen novels. He has received the British Science Fiction Award for his novel Chasm City, as well as the Seiun and Sidewise awards, and was shortlisted for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards. He has a PhD in astronomy and worked for the European Space Agency before he left to write full time. His short fiction has been appearing in Interzone, Asimov’s, and elsewhere since 1990. Alastair’s latest novel is Elysium Fire.

  HOLDFAST

  Alastair Reynolds

  1.

  We were in trouble before we hit their screens. What was left of our squadron had been decelerating hard, braking down from interstellar cruise. Three hundred gravities was a stiff test for any ship, but my vessels already bore grave scars from the maggot engagement around Howling Mouth. A small skirmish, against the larger picture of our war—it would be lucky if my squadron warranted a mention in the Great Dispatches.

  But nonetheless it had bloodied us well. Weapons were exhausted, engines overloaded, hulls fatigued. We felt the cost of it now. Every once in a while one of my ships would vanish from the formation, ripped apart, or snatched ahead of the main pack.

  I mourned my offspring for a few bitter instants. It was all I could give them.

  “Hold the formation,” I said, speaking from the fluid-filled cocoon of my immersion tank. “All will be well, my children. Your Battle-Mother will guide you to safety, provided you do not falter.”

  An age-old invocation from the dawn of war. Hold the line.

  But I doubted myself.

  From deep space this nameless system had looked like the wisest target. Our strategic files showed no trace of maggot infestation. Better, the system harboured a rich clutch of worlds, from fat giants to rocky terrestrials. A juicy superjovian, ripe with moons. Gases and metals in abundance, and plenty of cover. We could establish a temporary holdfast: hide here and lick our wounds.

  That was my plan. But there is an old saying about plans and war. I would have done well to heed it.

  2.

  The last wave of decoys erupted from my armour. An umbrella of scalding blue light above. Pressure shock jamming down like a vice. My knees buckled. The ground under me seemed to dip, like a boat in a swell. My faceplate blacked over, then cleared itself.

  “Count.”

  “Sixth deployment,” my suit answered. “Assuming an Eight-Warrior configuration, the adversary will have used its last suit-launched missile.”

  “I hope.”

  But if there had been more missiles, the maggot would have fired them soon after. Minutes passed, an iron stillness returning to the atmosphere, the ground under my feet once more feeling as secure as bedrock.

  Then another bracket flashed onto my faceplate.

  Optical fix. Visual acquisition of enemy.

  The maggot leapt into blurry view, magnified and enhanced.

  It was an odd, unsettling moment. We were still twenty kilometres apart, but for adversaries that had engaged each other across battlefronts spanning light-years, in campaigns that lasted centuries, it might as well have been spitting distance. Very few of us were gifted with close sight of a maggot, and our weapons tended not to leave much in the way of corpses.

  Neither did theirs.

  We stood on two rugged summits, with a series of smaller peaks between us. Black mountains, rising from a black fog, under a searing black ceiling. So deep into the atmosphere of the superjovian that no light now reached us, beyond a few struggling photons.

  The maggot was quite brazen about presenting itself.

  It must have known that I had used up my stock of missiles as well. The enemy knew our armaments, our capabilities.

  I wondered if the maggot felt the same sting of loss and shame that I did. From a fully intact squadron, to a few ships, to just my command vessel, and finally just me in a suit, with the buckled, imploded remains of my ship–along with my children, still in their immersion tanks–falling into the deeper atmosphere.

  Loss and shame? I doubted it.

  The alien was a silver-grey for mcrouching on too many legs. It had come to the edge of its rock, poised above a sheer cliff. I counted the legs carefully, not wanting to make a mistake. From this angle a Ten-Carrier or a Six-Strategist looked almost alike. The difference could be critical. A Ten-Carrier would be rugged and determined, but also ponderous and lightly armed. They were shaped for moving logistics, munitions and artillery. A Six-Strategist, or a Four-Planner, could be viciously armed and clever. But they were averse to close-combat, all too aware of their high tactical value.

  In my heart, though, I’d already known what I was dealing with. Only an Eight-Warrior would have pursued me so relentlessly, so mechanically.

  And an Eight-Warrior was going to be very hard to kill.

  The alien squatted lower, compressing its legs like springs, hugging its segmented body close to the rock. Then leapt off from the summit, a squirt of thrust from its suit aiding its flight, sailing out over the cliff, beginning to fall along a gentle parabola. I watched it wordlessly. Terminal velocity was very low in seven hundred atmospheres, so the alien seemed to float downwards more than fall, descending until it had passed out of view behind the furthest intervening summit.

  I stood my ground, certain of the maggot’s plan, but needing confirmation before I acted. A minute passed, then five. After ten a metallic glint appeared over the crest of the summit, a mere seventeen kilometres away. The maggot had leapt off one rock, touched down on some ledge or outcropping of the next, climbed all the way to the top.

  With my suit-missiles depleted I only had one effective asset at my disposal. I unshipped the mine from its stowage point under my chestplate. It was a self-burrowing cylinder, angled to a point at one end so that it could be driven into the ground. Multimode selector dials: variable yield, fuse delay timer, remote trigger.

  Being ahead of the maggot was my one advantage. I hefted the mine, wondering if this was the place to embed it, setting a trap for the alien. At full yield it would shatter the top of this mountain, so the maggot wouldn’t need to be following in my exact footsteps. But we were only at seven hundred atmospheres now. Such a pressure was well within the tolerance factor for my suit, and doubtless the same was true for the maggot. If it caught the edge of the blast, it might survive.

  But if I led the maggot deeper, pushed both our suits to the limit of crush depth …

  Well, it was another plan.

  I reached the next mountain and climbed to its summit, then made my way over the crest and down a gentle slope. Nine hundred and fifty atmospheres– well into the danger margin.

  Good.

  I paused and for the second time unshipped the mine. This time I entered its settings, armed it, knelt to the ground–my suit lights created a circle of illumination around me—and pushed its burrowing end into the terrain. The mine jerked from my glove, almost as if it were eager to get on with destroying itself. In a few seconds it had buried itself completely, invisible save for a faint red pulse which soon faded into darkness. I checked my suit trace, confirming that it was still reading the mine, ready to send a detonation signal as soon as I gave the order. I had locked the yield at its maximum setting, deciding to take no chances.

  Having done all I could, I rose to my feet and set off. The maggot could not be far behind now, and I imagined its quick metal scuttling, the hateful single-mindedness of its thoughts as it closed in on its quarry. I had timed things so that the alien would be ascending the far face of the nearest mountain as I laid the mine, screened from a direct line of sight, but that meant cutting my advantage to a very narrow margin. Everything d
epended on the next few minutes.

  I scrambled my way down to my next jump-off point. Beyond the void was another, smaller mountain, and I was confident I could reach its upper flanks with the remaining propellant in my tank. It was lower than this one, though, and the increase in pressure would push my suit close to its limits. Once there, I would feign slowness, encouraging the maggot to cross ground more hastily.

  Perhaps I would not need to feign it.

  My suit was already beginning to warn of low power thresholds. Locomotion and life-support would be the last to go, but in the meantime I could help matters by shutting down as many non-essential systems as I dared. I blanked down my faceplate readouts, then dimmed my suit lights, the darkness rushing in from all sides. My suit already knew where I wanted to jump; being able to see where I was going would serve no purpose until I was nearly at the other mountain.

  I had known many kinds of darkness in my military career. There is the darkness of deep space, between systems. But even then there are stars, cold and distant as they may be. There is the darkness of the immersion tank, as the lid clamps down and the surge gel floods in. But even then there are faint glows from the inspection ports and medical monitors. There is the darkness of the birthing vats, before we are assigned our living roles. But since we have known nothing but darkness until that instant of awakening, it is light that sparks our first understanding of fear.

  This was not the same kind of darkness. When the last of my lights had faded the blackness that surrounded me was as total and unremitting as if I had been encased in ebony. Worse, I knew that this darkness was indeed a solid, crushing thing. It was the unthinkable pressure of all the layers of atmosphere above me, still more below. Air becoming liquid, then a kind of metal, denser and hotter than anything in my experience.

  Slowly my eyes adapted–or tried to adapt. I did not expect them to see anything.

  I was wrong.

  There was a glow coming out of the ground. It was so faint that I had stood no chance of seeing it until this moment, and even now it was much harder to make out by looking directly at it, than by catching it in my peripheral vision. Nor was it continuous. The source of the glow was a loose tracery of yellow-green threads, branching and rejoining in a kind of ragged net. It was either growing on the surface, or shining through from a layer just a little below it.