The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  “All getting bubble ships now,” said Miha. “Poor bastards.”

  “Not official yet,” said Grott. “The general can still change her mind.”

  “Why would she? You got a better idea, with the Allegiance already at our doorstep? Should be thanking Mother you’re not among them. Someone’s gotta prep the fleet.”

  Imbra looked without looking at Paloma’s bench and thought he saw Paloma look without looking back at him, too. Ren, though—Ren stared straight at Imbra, hard as ice, then squeezed Paloma’s wrist. Grott, catching the chill of it, winked at Imbra.

  “Not to worry, kitten. They can’t come for you now. Not with all this going on.”

  Imbra shook his head. “Not what I’m worried about.” The last of the gears turned freely now, though his heart didn’t even have the decency to beat wildly at the risk he knew he was entertaining—for himself and one other. He pushed calmly from the table instead. “I’ll be in coolant, if you need me. We still keep copper wiring in third-wing storage?”

  Miha nodded and waved him off. Imbra hesitated, then took the long way out of the mess—across the room, past the youngsters, elbowing Paloma hard as he floated through. Paloma needed little provocation—arms and legs lashing out, one hand finding Imbra’s jumpsuit and the other, as a fist, Imbra’s jaw. The other youngsters fell back, making room for ensuing blows, while the older crew proved slow to step in. When two other mechanics eventually did, though, Miha could have sworn that Imbra had Paloma’s ear and was whispering something serious enough to give Paloma pause, fist upraised for another blow.

  “The hell in Mother’s name is he up to,” said Miha to Grott.

  Grott shrugged. “Kittens, man,” he said. “Can’t feel much, so you’d be surprised the lengths they go to, to feel anything at all.”

  Imbra might have agreed, if he’d overheard Grott’s comment. As far as lack of feeling went, even the shipyard shifts weighed hard on a body that had no ability to switch into a more vigorous working mode and kept trying to nod off while engaged in high-intensity tasks. That lack of feeling also went some way toward explaining why he kept flexing and clenching his hands on route to the assembly line; he knew his idea was sound, in theory, but he still struggled with why he’d picked the kid to make it a reality. Paloma could easily inform on him, or tell Ren, who’d do the same. And for what reasonable payoff? Imbra had been part of enough precarious ventures to know that chances were slim Paloma would actually show up after shift, let alone put him self in a bubble ship of Imbra’s choosing and special design when the fleet deployed.

  “Stupid,” Imbra muttered, but with the declaw firmly in place, he hadn’t even the anger to punch a bulkhead. He let his clenched fist rest at his thigh instead, nails digging into the fabric of his jumpsuit, while he studied the coolant systems and let the steps in his plan turn into mantra, joined only by the constant ringing in his head.

  General Asarus debarked from her flagship, the N.S.S. Ragnara, during the next day shift. That evening, the whole of the shipyards team received debrief about the Novuni’s plan of attack. Some in Imbra’s quarters grumbled about the intended scope of the battlefield, but the crankiest mechanics were those working remote weapons’ design, which only made sense, since the bulk of Asarus’s plan relied on letting the Allegiance fleet get close—very close— and attempting to outmaneuver on familiar ground, with plenty of asteroid debris to use for cover and collision courses. There were too many variables for a human to work out, but with AIs in control of the ships, programmed in the months since Fort Five with the trajectories of tens of thousands of known, minute astral bodies, it almost seemed feasible. Still, the numbers weren’t promising; even official holovids made no secret of the fact that the bubble ships, streakers, battle cruisers, and lancers stood outnumbered three to one by the waves of Allegiance ships gathered just past the gas giant Dreya.

  No wonder, then, that Grott soon joined the other spiritual objectors on the last shuttle bound for Hav, the planet’s largest moon and the Novuni territory best equipped for long-term underground shelter from any invading party.

  No wonder, too, that Miha and the others on the Path of the Vengeful Sun took renewed vigor in their work—eagerly priming the fleet as best they could, knowing full well in their aching hearts that the misery of unwanted existence would be at an end soon.

  And maybe, Imbra reasoned, why Paloma showed up outside his quarters the night before departure after all. Alone, and unarmed.

  “Did you tell anyone?” said Imbra. “Even …?” “She wouldn’t let me come, if I did. And she’d be right. Frigg, even leaving her with the others out there, while I go off and do this fool thing—it’s a death sentence, isn’t it.” The question landed as a statement, so Imbra didn’t reply at once. He glanced around the otherwise empty module, all his bunkmates busy drinking in the mess, but there was nothing to offer the kid, not even a squeeze-bottle of water. “Most ship’s officers are from the south,” he said instead. “Nice place. Rich. Automated.”

  “So, what, this is some sort of weird valley loyalty?”

  “No. I’m not even sure if I can do loyalty.” Imbra frowned, hands palm up. “No rush of oxytocin, no real bonding, right? At least, I think … I don’t know. It’s all …” He cradled his head in his hands, massaging his throbbing temples, hoping to lessen the ringing.

  Paloma looked at him with the revulsion that only youth, in all its decisiveness and propensity toward binary thinking, could dredge up. “I don’t care,” he said heavily.

  Imbra raised his gaze and sniffed. Moisture settled strangely, high in the sinuses, in zero-g. “Right, of course. I only meant that—” He took a long breath. “You can drive. Most of these others, especially from the south—they can’t. Too used to giving it all up to the AIs. More interested in weapons control than steering, in any case.”

  Paloma watched his mother’s killer steadily. “And that’ll save me?”

  Imbra had to fight back a desperate laugh, the closest to fear he’d come in weeks.

  “O Mother!” he said. “Kid, that might save us all.”

  Bubble Ship AV04’s forward camera caught it first—the sudden tumbling of another bubble ship out of formation, a spray from its port panels indicating some sort of leak. Catastrophic coolant loss to any outside eye, with the ship spinning dead, belly up over and over in the middle of the fray. Meanwhile, AV04 was locked into an engagement course with the Allegiance, its waves of AI ships rising high to the left field of the viewscreen. Other ships started to feel the heat of their enemy’s long-range weapons soon after—sides scored until decompression became imminent; comm lines riddled with panicked ship’s officers last prayers for themselves and their sun. One little busted bubble ship hurtling so far ahead wasn’t much, then, in the scheme of things, with AIs dodging so much debris on both sides.

  A streaker ship called the Jalfreda caught the best footage of what happened next—the little bubble ship’s tumbling suddenly becoming less predictable, more of an uneven wobble just below the plane of the leisurely advancing Allegiance fleet. To the invading AIs, the little ship surely registered no sign of active onboard processors—not with the coolant gone, and the engines superheating the rest—so it fell into background noise, along with all the other debris still being accounted for on their maps. Then all the Allegiance ships proximate to the little bubble ship went dark—like a ripple, extending outward from Bubble Ship XF32. An EM pulse, knocking out ion shields and disrupting processors in turn.

  Those still in the shipyards watched in stunned silence at first—but then that magnetic ripple hit the mechanics, too, in its own way, and with a cry of triumph bodies collided with bodies, detritus flung about the mess. The EM pulse lessened in intensity as it broadened, so ships at the fringe of the fleet still hurtled forward, unaffected—but with the Allegiance temporarily halved, Novuni fighters stood a better chance. And they took it. Not enough to win, but enough to drag the invaders into a standoff. Then a ceasefire
. A broadcast from General Asarus eventually reporting that the Allegiance had promised a rep from one of its time-dilated worlds: a figure of significant corporate authority, who would articulate their demands more clearly than any heard around Novun Prime to date.

  “Now,” said the general, over vidscreens system-wide three days after first strike. “We negotiate a lasting peace, or we die trying.”

  In those three days of combat, all aboard the shipyards had alternated between volatile bursts of celebration and anxiety—more drinking, more quarrelling, more breakneck labors over wounded ships back in port. All, that is, except one: Imbra, who slept and work and ate and drank amid the other mechanics’ frenzy like a man disembodied, wandering at a remove from creatures so wildly impassioned he almost couldn’t believe they were of the same species, let alone tribe. But once the battle was over, Miha clapped Imbra’s back just the same, and reassured the northerner that he hadn’t missed out on much, not being able to weep as openly for the protracted lease on life that one little ship had brought to all the rest.

  Imbra nodded at the gesture but couldn’t bring himself to reply, a lump lodged in his throat because the dread still lay within him—deep down, only lacking the right physical response to flourish. He kept replaying footage from the Jalfreda instead: the slow approach of Allegiance, the sudden strike of the EM wave, the darkness, and then, in the midst of it, the slightest movement: the ejection of a lifepod, barely noticeable, from XF32.

  Paloma’s lifepod resurfaced a week after the ceasefire—a whole week in which his ship’s maneuver had been chalked up to General Asarus’s craftiness, her unparalleled head for deep strategy beneath all her openness with the fleet about tactics. Only Ren—also alive, if shaken up from her time in the field—suspected otherwise. Within hours of her return to the shipyards, she found Imbra running diagnostics routines and stood at the edge of his work module, her lean frame as tense with anger as Paloma’s, on the surface, had been.

  “He’s alive,” said Imbra. “I know he is.”

  “He’d better be,” she said. “Easy enough to toss you out an airlock, if he’s not.” Imbra notched a brow. “Lot of hatred from a southerner. You must really love him.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” she said. “Declaws don’t vote in the south. They don’t get a say. They get to shut up and give back to society until their time in the sun is done.”

  “Does it really matter who contributes, so long as the war comes to an end?”

  “Yes,” she said and clearly meant it. Imbra’s lips twitched, but he held back a smile.

  “Credit’s all his,” he said. “I don’t want it. Once he gets back, he’ll be a hero. More than he already is. They’ll name schools after him, promote him two grades. Salary for life.”

  Ren didn’t look convinced, and Imbra didn’t blame her—not even when Paloma returned to the land of the living, haggard and haunted from his time in stasis. Certainly, the celebrations for the Novuni’s latest hero were wild enough. His name resounded through the system far and wide enough. And the accolades poured on him were lavish enough, too.

  But in the process, in private, Paloma had told someone in command the full story.

  Next thing Imbra knew, he was standing before General Asarus herself, on the bridge of the N.S.S. Ragnara.

  “I could have you thrown to the courts, or straight out an airlock, for what you did,” she said. “On your own, without oversight, without permission.”

  “Yes sir,” said Imbra.

  “But since it doesn’t really change anything in the long run, you might as well live.” With that, she pinned bridge crew insignia on his collar and assigned him a bunk on the ship.

  3.

  Even the planet runs in circles.

  Mother help the fool

  Who thinks in straight lines.

  —Novuni Proverb

  In person, General Asarus remained larger than life, an illusion aided in no small part by a uniform and unwavering gaze that commanded attention, despite the bun crowning her flat-twist hair coming no higher than the shoulders of some of her bridge crew.

  Imbra, his own coils a wild tangle more days than not, took with difficulty to the standards of dress and conduct aboard the N.S.S. Ragnara. The ways of the valley—Biggs’ ease with the law; Tripp and Hurley’s excesses on the right side of it—he’d been able to manipulate with only minor physical concessions, while even the shipyards had their share of play, from Grott’s teasing to Miha’s unhinged banter. But the stringency of life aboard a military vessel had yet to offer any easy evasions. Every day shift at six bells, Imbra stood for inspection—and failed, miserably—and after reprimands and first meal seated himself at eight bells at the back of the war room, reviewing schema after schema littered in the jargon of half a dozen subdisciplines he could barely identify, let alone parse.

  “I’m just a valley hick with a knack for machines,” he said on the first day, while posing a question about a recurring symbol to the shipmate beside him.

  Lieutenant Bastrus answered his question, but not before pinning him with a look that plainly read well, try harder.

  And Imbra did, though his head felt sluggish for reasons that neither the declaw nor the lingering hearing loss could fully explain. He ran simulations of ambush paths, decoys, and direct, full-frontal assaults across the asteroid field and gas giants, trying to beat an AI in scenarios where the Allegiance had prepped an invading force to overwhelm the system on what civilian news was already triumphantly calling Treaty Day. In every case, Imbra failed, and in every case, he ended the day reporting on his failure to General Asarus herself, her back turned to study the muddy sun through a slice of ship’s glass.

  “You could get an AI to run these same simulations,” he added at the end of his third shift. “Faster, more efficient, probably with better results—sir.”

  “We have,” said Asarus. She steepled her fingers and glanced at Imbra over a shoulder. “And, no, recruit. It’s a failure every time. But as I told you in our first conversation, it doesn’t matter—none of it—in the long run.”

  “Sir?”

  “They even anticipated you. Did you know that? Not you, specifically, but the trouble you caused. Just as they anticipated—and maybe even con-structed—me.”

  Imbra wore his confusion too plainly to answer.

  “The Allegiance,” the general explained. “There’s been talk that they’re shaping the whole contest. That the game was rigged before it began. The well-loved general, the underdog story, the hotshot hero pilot—all of it. Wild theories about their reasons, too, but then, that’s what you get when you deal with an ancient people, a people living in time-dilation like nothing we’ve ever known. Have you heard any of these wild reports?”

  Imbra thought of the look on Biggs’ face a lifetime ago—the hesitation of a man who knew crazy when he saw it, and who apparently had seen it in archives, but who had decided at the last against passing on the disease. “I’ve heard that the theories get wild, sure.”

  “But not the theories themselves.” Asarus nodded. “Good, I suppose. Some ideas are hard to let go of, once they take root. They eat at your sense of being, your sense of purpose, until there’s almost nothing left. You do have a creed, don’t you?”

  “Of a kind.” Imbra noted the general’s quick glance at his bare skin—no tattoos to indicate his side on the question of the sun. “Enough to get by.”

  At the emotion rising then on General Asarus’s face, Imbra surprised himself with a sudden tightness, a knot in the muscles below his ribs. He’d almost thought that sort of eagerness behind him, but hers was such a sad, unexpected smile. Another kind of try harder.

  So he did.

  At the beginning of his next shift, Imbra took a different tack, opting to review the ship’s onboard archives before taking another run at the simulator. After all, the main trouble with the simulations was temporal: The Allegiance simply had more time on their side. But why? Life on Nov’s northern co
ntinent hadn’t offered the greatest education in system-wide or interstellar history, but Imbra knew that the Allegiance and the Novuni had first met centuries ago, which seemed like plenty of time to stabilize tech trade with such a vast economic power. And sure enough, as the Ragnara’s records showed, since first contact the Allegiance had indeed offered all the Novuni all manner of trade packages, including one bundle of neurotech responsible for declaw procedures, in exchange for raw and semirefined resources system-wide. There had, however, always been one notable exception to the Allegiance’s side of the pot: In every trade brief Imbra came across, any advances related to interstellar travel remained strictly off the table.

  Certainly, the Novuni had developed significant EM technologies on their own over the centuries, but they hadn’t yet mastered the energy reserves needed for proper long-distance shielding—nor the systems needed to protect human beings through huge shifts in speed at the end of the ride, though the lifepods were getting close. Nor could the Novuni build to such speeds in the first place, although some on Hav were currently tinkering with possibilities involving laser tech. In short, hundreds of years of uneasy partnership on, the Allegiance still largely dictated terms by which anyone around Novun Prime could ever hope to leave the system. And eventually, someone in central gov had objected to this arrangement.

  When talks fell apart, though, the Allegiance sent for the fleet surprisingly fast. Imbra remembered hearing tell in the valley of what happened next— how only by dint of General Asarus’s quick thinking had a deal been struck at Fort Five to spare lives and return mining operations to their original trade framework—but the accelerated time frame of initial proceedings baffled him as he sifted through official records. General Asarus’s peace only held until the miners rebelled, too; after that, the Allegiance took even more exaggerated offense to the Novuni, and its representative left with a declaration of total war.