The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  Asante awakens standing in the meadow up the mountain. The sky is cloudless and full of stars. His fatigues are damp with sweat or dew. There is no moon. Black conifers loom on all sides. To the east, a hint of pre-dawn orange seeps through the branches.

  He has read that this was once the time of the dawn chorus, when songbirds would call out in ragged symphony to start the day. He has never heard it. He doesn’t hear it now. There’s no sound in this forest but his own breathing—

  —and the snap of a twig under someone’s foot.

  He turns. A gray shape detaches itself from the darkness.

  “Fellow corpse,” Tiwana says.

  “Fellow corpse,” he responds.

  “You wandered off. Thought I’d tag along. Make sure you didn’t go AWOL.”

  “I think ET’s acting up again.”

  “Maybe you’re just sleepwalking. People sleepwalk sometimes.” She shrugs. “Probably the same wiring anyway.” “Sleepwalkers don’t kill people.” “Actually, that’s been known to happen.” He clears his throat. “Did, um …” “No one else knows you’re up here.” “Did ET disable the pickups?”

  “I did.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Any time.”

  Asante looks around. “I remember the first time I saw this place. It was … magical.”

  “I was thinking more ironic.” Adding, at Asante’s look: “You know. That one of the last pristine spots in this whole shit-show owes its existence to the fact that WestHem needs someplace private to teach us how to blow shit up.”

  “Count on you,” Asante says.

  The stars are fading. Venus is hanging in there, though.

  “You’ve been weird,” she observes. “Ever since the thing with Caçador.”

  “It was a weird thing.”

  “So I hear.” Shrug. “I guess you had to be there.”

  He musters a smile. “So you don’t remember …”

  “Legs running down. Legs running back up. My zombie never targeted anything so I don’t know what she saw.”

  “Metzinger does. Rossiter does.” He leans his ass against a convenient boulder. “Does it ever bother you? That you don’t know what your own eyes are seeing, and they do?”

  “Not really. Just the way it works.”

  “We don’t know what we’re doing out there. When was the last time Maddox even showed us a highlight reel?” He feels the muscles clenching in his jaw. “We could be war criminals.”

  “There is no we. Not when it matters.” She sits beside him. “Besides. Our zombies may be nonconscious but they’re not stupid; they know we’re obligated to disobey unlawful commands.”

  “Maybe they know. Not sure Maddox’s compliance circuit would let them do anything about it.”

  Somewhere nearby a songbird clears its throat.

  Tiwana takes a breath. “Suppose you’re right—not saying you are, but suppose they sent us out to gun down a gyland full of harmless refugees. Forget that Caçador was packing enough explosives to blow up a hamlet, forget that it killed Silano … hell, nearly killed us all. If Metzinger decides to bash in someone’s innocent skull, you still don’t blame the hammer he used.”

  “And yet. Someone’s skull is still bashed in.”

  Across the clearing, another bird answers. The dawn duet.

  “There must be reasons,” she says, as if trying it on for size.

  He remembers reasons from another life, on another continent: retribution. The making of examples. Poor impulse control. Just … fun, sometimes.

  “Such as.”

  “I don’t know, okay? Big Picture’s way above our pay grade. But that doesn’t mean you toss out the chain of command every time someone gives you an order without a twenty-gig backgrounder to go with it. If you want me to believe we’re in thrall to a bunch of fascist baby killers, you’re gonna need more than a few glimpses of something you may have seen on a gyland.”

  “How about, I don’t know. All of human history?” Venus is gone at last. The rising sun streaks the clearing with gold. “It’s the deal we made. Sure, it’s a shitty one. Only shittier one is being dead. But would you choose differently, even now? Go back to being fish food?”

  He honestly doesn’t know.

  “We should be dead, Jo. Every one of these moments is a gift.”

  He regards her with a kind of wonder. “I never know how you do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Channel Schopenhauer and Pollyanna at the same time without your head exploding.”

  She takes his hand for a moment, squeezes briefly. Rises. “We’re gonna make it. Just so long as we don’t rock the boat. All the way to that honorable fucking discharge.” She turns to the light; sunrise glows across her face.

  “Until then, in case you were wondering, I’ve got your back.”

  “There is no you,” he reminds her. “Not when it matters.”

  “I’ve got your back,” she says.

  Watch That Man

  They’ve outsourced Silano’s position, brought in someone none of them have ever seen before. Technically he’s one of them, though the scars that tag him ZeroS have barely had time to heal. Something about him is wrong. Something about the way he moves; his insignia. Not Specialist or Corporal or Sergeant.

  “I want you to meet Lieutenant Jim Moore,” Rossiter tells them.

  ZeroS finally have a commissioned secco. He’s easily the youngest person in the room.

  He gets right to it. “This is the Nanisivik mine.” The satcam wall zooms down onto the roof of the world. “Baffin Island, seven hundred fifty klicks north of the Arctic Circle, heart of the Slush Belt.” A barren fractured landscape of red and ocher. Drumlins and hillocks and bifurcating stream beds.

  “Tapped out at the turn of the century.” A brown road, undulating along some scoured valley floor. A cluster of buildings. A gaping mouth in the Earth. “These days people generally stay away, on account of its remote location. Also on account of the eight thousand metric tons of high-level nuclear waste the Canadian government brought over from India for deep-time storage. Part of an initiative to diversify the northern economy, apparently.” Tactical schematics, now: Processing and Intake. Train tracks corkscrewing into the Canadian Shield. Storage tunnels branching like the streets of an underground subdivision. “Project was abandoned after the Greens lost power in ‘38.

  “You could poison a lot of cities with this stuff. Which may be why someone’s messing around there now.”

  Garin’s hand is up. “Someone, sir?”

  “So far all we have are signs of unauthorized activity and a JTFN drone that went in and never came out. Our first priority is to identify the actors. Depending on what we find, we might take care of it ourselves. Or we might call in the bombers. Won’t know until we get there.”

  And we won’t know even then, Asante muses—and realizes, in that moment, what it is about Moore that strikes him as so strange.

  “We’ll be prepping your better halves with the operational details en route.”

  It’s not what is, it’s what isn’t: no tic at the corner of the eye, no tremor in the hand. His speech is smooth and perfect, his eyes make contact with steady calm. Lieutenant Moore doesn’t glitch.

  “For now, we anticipate a boots-down window of no more than seven hours—”

  Asante looks at Tiwana. Tiwana looks back.

  ZeroS are out of beta.

  Subterraneans

  The Lockhead drops them at the foot of a crumbling pier. Derelict shops and listing trailers, long abandoned, huddle against the sleeting rain. This used to be a seaport; then a WestHem refueling station back before WestHem was even a word, before the apocalyptic Arctic weather made it easier to just stick everything underwater. It lived its short life as a company town, an appendage of the mine, in the days before Nanisivik was emptied of its valuables and filled up again.

  BUD says 1505: less than an hour if they want to be on target by sundown. Moore leads them overland acro
ss weathered stone and alluvial washouts and glistening acned Martian terrain. They’re fifteen hundred meters from the mouth of the repository when he orders them all into the back seat.

  Asante’s legs, under new management, pick up the pace. His vision blurs. At least up here, in the wind and blinding sleet, it doesn’t make much difference.

  A sound drifts past: the roar of some distant animal, perhaps. Nearer, the unmistakable discharge of an ε-40. Not ET’s. Asante’s eyes remain virtuously clouded.

  The wind dies in the space of a dozen steps. Half as many again and the torrent of icy needles on his face slows to a patter, a drizzle. Asante hears great bolts unlatching, a soft screech of heavy metal. They pass through some portal and the bright overcast in his eyes dims by half. Buckles and bootsteps echo faintly against rock walls.

  Downhill. A gentle curve to the left. Gravel, patches of broken asphalt. His feet step over unseen obstacles.

  And stop.

  The whole squad must have frozen; he can’t hear so much as a breath. The supersaccadic tickertape flickering across the fog seems faster. Could be his imagination. Off in some subterranean distance, water drip-drip-drips onto a still surface.

  Quiet movement as ZeroS spreads out. Asante’s just a passenger but he reads the footsteps, feels his legs taking him sideways, kneeling. The padding on his elbows doesn’t leave much room for fine-grained tactile feedback but the surface he’s bracing against is flat and rough, like a table sheathed in sandpaper.

  There’s a musky animal smell in the air. From somewhere in the middle distance, a soft whuffle. The stirring of something huge in slow, sleepy motion.

  Maybe someone left the door open, and something got in …

  Pizzly bears are the only animals that come to mind: monstrous hybrids, birthed along the boundaries of stressed ecosystems crashing into each other. He’s never seen one in the flesh.

  A grunt. A low growl.

  The sound of building speed.

  Gunshots. A roar, deafeningly close, and a crash of metal against metal. The flickering tactical halo dims abruptly: network traffic just dropped by a node.

  Now the whole network crashes: pawn exchange, ZeroS sacrificing their own LAN as the price of jamming the enemy’s. Moore’s MAD gun snaps to the right. An instant of scorching heat as the beam sweeps across Asante’s arm; Moore shooting wide, Moore missing. ET breaks cover, leaps and locks. For one crystalline millisecond Asante sees a wall of coarse ivory-brown fur close enough to touch, every follicle in perfect focus.

  The clouds close in. ET pulls the trigger.

  A bellow. The scrape of great claws against stone. The reek is overpowering but ET’s already pirouetting after fresh game and click the freeze-frame glimpse of monstrous ursine jaws in a face wide as a doorway and click small brown hands raised against an onrushing foe and click a young boy with freckles and strawberry blond hair and Asante’s blind again but he feels ET pulling on the trigger, pop pop pop—

  Whatthefuck children whatthefuck whatthefuck

  —and ET’s changed course again and click: a small back a fur coat black hair flying in the light of the muzzle flash.

  Not again. Not again.

  Child soldiers. Suicide bombers. For centuries.

  But no one’s shooting back.

  He knows the sound of every weapon the squad might use, down to the smallest pop and click: the sizzle of the MAD gun, the bark of the Epsilon, Acosta’s favorite Olympic. He hears them now; those, and no others. Whatever they’re shooting at isn’t returning fire.

  Whatever we’re shooting at. You blind murderous twaaaaase. You’re shooting eight-year-olds.

  Again.

  More gunfire. Still no voices but for a final animal roar that gives way to a wet gurgle and the heavy slap of meat on stone.

  It’s a nuclear waste repository at the north pole. What are children even doing here?

  What am I?

  What am I?

  And suddenly he sees the words, All tautologies are tautologies and ET’s back downstairs and the basement door locks and Kodjo Asante grabs frantically for the reins, and takes back his life, and opens his eyes:

  In time to see the little freckled boy, dressed in ragged furs, sitting on Riley Garin’s shoulders and dragging a jagged piece of glass across his throat. In time to see him leap free of the body and snatch Garin’s gun, toss it effortlessly across this dimly-lit cave to an Asian girl clad only in a filthy loincloth, who’s sailing through the air toward a bloodied Jim Moore. In time to see that girl reach behind her and catch the gun in midair without so much as a backward glance.

  More than a dance, more than teamwork. Like digits on the same hand, moving together.

  The pizzly’s piled up against a derelict forklift, a giant tawny thing raking the air with massive claws even as it bleeds out through the hole in its flank. A SAsian child with his left hand blown off at the wrist (maybe that was me) dips and weaves around the fallen behemoth. He’s—using it, exploiting the sweep of its claws and teeth as a kind of exclusion zone guaranteed to maul anyone within three meters. Somehow those teeth and claws never seem to connect with him.

  They’ve connected with Acosta, though. Carlos Acosta, lover of sunlight and the great outdoors lies there broken at the middle, staring at nothing.

  Garin finally crashes to the ground, blood gushing from his throat.

  They’re just children. In rags. Unarmed.

  The girl rebounds between rough-hewn tunnel walls and calcified machinery, lines up the shot with Garin’s weapon. Her bare feet never seem to touch the ground.

  They’re children they’re just—

  Tiwana slams him out of the way as the beam sizzles past. The air shimmers and steams. Asante’s head cracks against gears and conduits and ribbed metal, bounces off steel onto rock. Tiwana lands on top of him, eyes twitching in frantic little arcs.

  And stopping.

  It’s a moment of pure panic, seeing those eyes freeze and focus—she doesn’t know me she’s locking on she’s locking on—but something shines through from behind and Asante can see that her eyes aren’t target-locked at all. They’re just looking.

  “… Sofiyko?”

  Whatever happens, I’ve got your back.

  But Sofiyko’s gone, if she was ever even there.

  Blackout

  Moore hands him off to Metzinger. Metzinger regards him without a word, with a look that speaks volumes: flips a switch and drops him into Passenger mode. He doesn’t tell Asante to stay there. He doesn’t have to.

  Asante feels the glassy pane of a tacpad under ET’s hand. That hand rests deathly still for seconds at a time; erupts into a flurry of inhumanly-fast taps and swipes; pauses again. Out past the bright blur in Asante’s eyes, the occasional cough or murmur is all that punctuates the muted roar of the Lockheed’s engines.

  ET is under interrogation. A part of Asante wonders what it’s saying about him, but he can’t really bring himself to care.

  He can’t believe they’re gone.

  No Control

  “Sergeant Asante” Major Rossiter shakes her head. “We had such hopes for you.”

  Acosta. Garin. Tiwana.

  “Nothing to say?”

  So very much. But all that comes out is the same old lie: “They were just … children …”

  “Perhaps we can carve that on the gravestones of your squadmates.”

  “But who—”

  “We don’t know. We’d suspect Realists, if the tech itself wasn’t completely antithetical to everything they stand for. If it wasn’t way past their abilities.”

  “They were barely even clothed. It was like a nest…” “More like a hive, Sergeant.”

  Digits on the same hand …

  “Not like you,” she says, as if reading his mind. “ZeroS networking is quite—inefficient, when you think about it. Multiple minds in multiple heads, independently acting on the same information and coming to the same conclusion. Needless duplication of effort.”r />
  “And these …”

  “Multiple heads. One mind.”

  “We jammed the freqs. Even if they were networked—”

  “We don’t think they work like that. Best guess is—bioradio, you could call it. Like a quantum-entangled corpus callosum.” She snorts. “Of course, at this point they could say it was elves and I’d have to take their word for it.”

  Caçador, Asante remembers. They’ve learned a lot from one small stolen corpse.

  “Why use children?” he whispers.

  “Oh, Kodjo.” Asante blinks at the lapse; Rossiter doesn’t seem to notice. “Using children is the last thing they want to do. Why do you think they’ve been stashed in the middle of the ocean, or down some Arctic mineshaft? We’re not talking about implants. This is genetic, they were born. They have to be protected, hidden away until they grow up and … ripen.”

  “Protected? By abandoning them in a nuclear waste site?”

  “Abandoning them, yes. Completely defenseless. As you saw.” When he says nothing, she continues: “It’s actually a perfect spot. No neighbors. Lots of waste heat to keep you warm, run your greenhouses, mask your heatprint. No supply lines for some nosy satellite to notice. No telltale EM. From what we can tell there weren’t even any adults on the premises, they just … lived off the land, so to speak. Not even any weapons of their own, or at least they didn’t use any. Used bears, of all things. Used your own guns against you. Maybe they’re minimalists, value improvisation.” She sacc’s something onto her pad. “Maybe they just want to keep us guessing.”

  “Children.” He can’t seem to stop saying it.

  “For now. Wait ‘til they hit puberty.” Rossiter sighs. “We bombed the site, of course. Slagged the entrance. If any of ours were trapped down there, they wouldn’t be getting out. Then again we’re not talking about us, are we? We’re talking about a single distributed organism with God-knows-how-many times the computational mass of a normal human brain. I’d be very surprised if it couldn’t anticipate and counter anything we planned. Still. We do what we can.”

  Neither speaks for a few moments.

  “And I’m sorry, Sergeant,” she says finally. “I’m so sorry it’s come to this. We do what we’ve always done. Feed you stories so you won’t be compromised, so you won’t compromise us when someone catches you and starts poking your amygdala. But the switch was for your protection. We don’t know who we’re up against. We don’t know how many hives are out there, what stage of gestation any of them have reached, how many may have already … matured. All we know is that a handful of unarmed children can slaughter our most elite forces at will, and we are so very unready for the world to know that.