The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Silence is a form of complicity,” Somerset said. Its eyes crossed as it tried to focus on the hypo. “I do not need another shot. I can bear pain.”

  “This is for us,” Maris said, and pressed the hypo against Somerset’s neck. The neuter started to protest, but then the blast of painkiller hit and its eyes rolled up.

  “We could fly it right out of the airlock,” Ty said. “It wouldn’t feel a thing.”

  “You know we aren’t going to do any such thing,” Maris said. “Listen up. Any minute now, the ship’s crew are going to notice that their boss is missing. What we have to do is work out what we’re going to tell them.”

  Ty said, “I’m not giving her up.”

  “We know Alice must have killed Barrett in self-defense,” Maris said. “We can testify—”

  Bruno said, “Ty is right, boss. We know that Alice isn’t a murderer, but our testimony won’t mean much in court.”

  Alice waved her hands to get their attention, then pointed to the workshop’s camera.

  “It’s recording,” Ty said. He laughed, and turned a full somersault in midair. “Alice knows machines! She had the internal com record everything!”

  Maris shook out a screen, plugged it into the camera, and started the playback. Ty and Bruno crowded around her, watched Barrett struggle through the airlock in his p-suit, watched him question Alice, his p-suit still sealed, his voice coming cold and metallic through its speaker. He loomed over her like a fully armed medieval knight menacing a helpless maiden. Her stubborn intervals of silence, his amplified voice getting louder, his gestures angrier. Alice shrank back. He showed her his weapon. And Alice flew at him, whipping a tether around his arms and body, the tether contracting in a tight embrace as her momentum drove him backward; she wrapped her legs around his chest, smashed his visor with a jack-hammer, and emptied a canister of foam into his helmet.

  The camera saw everything; it even picked up the glint of the weapon when it flew from Barrett’s gloved hand. He flung his helmeted head from side to side, trying to shake off the foam’s suffocating mask; Alice pressed against a wall, unobtrusively out of focus, as his struggles quietened.

  Maris said, “It looks good, but will it look good to the court?”

  “We can’t turn her over to Symbiosis or the TPA police,” Bruno said. “At best, they’ll turn her into a lab specimen. At worst—”

  “Where is she?” Ty said.

  Alice was gone; the hatch to the airlock was closed. Neither the automatic nor manual system would budge it. As Bruno prized off the cover of the servomotor, Maris joined Ty at the door’s little port, saw Alice wave bye-bye and shoot through the hatch into Barrett’s sled. A moment later, there was a solid thump as the sled decoupled.

  Maris and Bruno and Ty rushed to the viewports.

  “Look at her go!” Maris said.

  “Where is she going?” Ty said.

  “It looks like she is heading straight to the Symbiosis ship,” Bruno said. “She sure can fly that sled.”

  “Of course she can,” Ty said. “What do you think she’s going to do?”

  “We’ll see soon enough,” Maris said. “Meanwhile, let’s get busy, gentlemen.”

  Bruno glanced at her. “I do believe you have a plan,” he said.

  “It’s not much of one, but hear me out.”

  By the time Ty and Maris had hauled Barrett’s body to the shuttle, his sled had docked with the motor section of the Symbiosis ship. They tethered the body to the tank where Alice had slept out three hundred days, and tethered the weapon to the utility belt of its p-suit. Maris dragged some of the plastic insulation out of the tank’s hatch for dramatic effect, fired a couple of shots into the tangle of bags and tubes inside, then scooted back to look at her work. The tank looked like something had hatched from it in a hurry; Barrett’s body, with its mask of lumpy foam, hung half-folded like a grotesque unstrung puppet, its yellow p-suit vivid against the black film of the vacuum organism.

  “It looks kind of cheesy,” Ty said doubtfully, over their patch cord link.

  “If you have a better idea,” Maris said, “let me know.”

  “Maybe it’s because I don’t think he would have had the sense to tether his weapon.”

  “He found where Alice was hiding,” Maris said, “and opened up the tank. There was a struggle. She killed him and took his sled. The weapon is necessary. It shows he meant her harm. If we don’t tether it to him, it’ll drift off somewhere and no one will find it. So let’s pretend that in his last moments he was overcome with common sense.”

  “Yeah, well, none of that will matter if the crew knew where he was going in the first place.”

  “We’ve been over that already. Barrett wouldn’t have told them where he was going because he wanted what Alice had for himself. Otherwise, you can bet that he would have come with plenty of back-up, or sat tight in the safety of his ship and let the Symbiosis cops take care of it.”

  Ty looked as though he was ready to argue the point, but before he could say anything, Bruno broke in on the common channel. “Heads up,” he said. “The Symbiosis ship just broke apart. It would seem that the cable linking the two halves has been severed.”

  Maris called up her suit’s navigation menu, and after a couple of moments, it confirmed Bruno’s guess. With the cable cut, the lifesystem and motor section of the ship had shot away in opposite directions. The lifesystem, tumbling badly, was heading into a slightly higher orbit; the motor section was accelerating toward Saturn, its exhaust a steady, brilliant star beyond the ragged sphere of wrecked ships. Maris’s com system lit up: the distress signal of the Symbiosis ship’s lifesystem; messages from the other two wrecking gangs; Dione’s traffic control.

  “A perfect burn,” Bruno said, with professional admiration. “It is too early to judge exactly, but if I had to make a guess, I would say that it is heading toward the rings.”

  “Let’s get packed up,” Maris told Ty, over the patch cord. “The cops will be here pretty soon.”

  “She’ll be all right, won’t she?”

  “I think she knew what she was doing all along.”

  Back at the hab-module, Maris and Ty stripped off their suits and grabbed tubes of coffee while Bruno flipped through a babble of voices on the radio channels. Two tugs were chasing the Symbiosis ship’s lifesystem, but as yet no one was pursuing the motor section. Bruno had worked up a trajectory, and showed Maris and Ty that it would graze the outer edge of the B ring.

  “One hears many wild stories of rebels and refugees hiding inside the minor bodies of the rings,” he remarked. “Perhaps some of them are true.”

  Maris said, “She’s going home.”

  A small, happy thought to cling to, in the cold certainty of days of inquiries, investigations, accusations. Wherever Alice was going, Wrecking Gang #3 was headed rockside, their contracts terminated.

  “We’ll have to let Somerset go,” she said.

  “I still think we should make it take the big step,” Ty said. “Anyone seen my TV? Maybe the news channels will tell us what’s going down.”

  “Somerset is a fool,” Bruno said, “but it is also one of us.”

  Maris said, “I can’t help wondering if Somerset was right. That we were manipulated by Alice. She killed Barrett and ran off, and left us to deal with the consequences.”

  “She could have taken Barrett’s shuttle as soon as she killed him,” Bruno said. “Instead, she took a very big risk, alerting us with that radio squeal, waiting for us to get back. She wanted us to know she was innocent. And she wanted to give us a chance to get our story straight.”

  Maris nodded. “It’s a pretty thought, but we’ll never know for sure.”

  Ty suddenly kicked back from his locker, waving something as he tumbled backward down the long axis of the living quarters. It was his TV, rolled up in a neat scroll. “Will you look at this,” he said.

  The scroll was tied with a length of blue wire. The wire Alice had regurgitated. The
cargo she had guarded all this time.

  The consequences of Barrett’s murder and the sabotage of the Symbiosis ship took a couple of dozen days to settle. Maris and the rest of Wrecking Gang #3 spent some of that time in jail, but were eventually released without trial.

  Before the cops came for them, they agreed to take equal shares of Alice’s gift. At first, Ty didn’t want to give Somerset anything, and Somerset refused to take its share of the wire.

  “I have agreed to lie about what happened. I have agreed to tell the police that my injury was caused by an accident. I do not need payment for this; I do it to make amends to you all.”

  “It isn’t payment,” Maris said. “It’s a gift. You take it, Somerset. What you do with it is up to you.”

  Maris hid the wire by splicing it into the control cable of her p-suit’s thruster pack. It turned out to be an unnecessary precaution; Symbiosis believed that the passenger had taken the missing vacuum organism spores with her, after she had killed Barrett and hijacked the engine section of his ship, and the police’s search of the hab-module was cursory. After they were released, the members of Wrecking Gang #3 met just once, to divide the spore-laden spool of wire into four equal lengths. They never saw each other again.

  Somerset and Bruno sold their portions on the grey market. Somerset donated the money to his temple’s refugee center; Bruno bought a ticket on a Pacific Community liner to the Jupiter System. Maris became a farmer. With an advance on the license fees for the two novel varieties of vacuum organism that her length of wire yielded, she and her family set up an agribusiness on Iapetus, ten thousand square kilometers of the black, carbonaceous-rich plains of Cassini Regio. The farm prospered: the population of the Outer System was expanding rapidly as the economy recovered and migrants poured in from Earth. Maris married the technician who had helped type her vacuum organisms. He was ten years younger than her, and eager to start a family. The dangerous idea of exploring the ruins of the domed crater where Alice’s family had lived was an itch that soon dissolved in the ordinary clamor of everyday life.

  A few years later, on a business trip to Tethys, Maris paid a spur-of-the-moment visit to the hearth-home of Ty’s clan. She learned that he’d given them his length of wire and set off on a Wanderjahr. His last message had been sent from a hotel in Camelot, the only city on Mimas, the small, icy moon whose orbit lay between Saturn’s G and E rings. It seemed that Ty had taken a sled on a trip to the central peak of Hershel, the huge crater smashed into the leading edge of Mimas, and had not returned. The sled had been found, but his body had never been recovered.

  Maris believed that she knew what grail Ty might have been searching for under the geometric glory of Saturn’s rings, but she kept her thoughts to herself. Tales of feral communities, fiddler’s greens, pirate cities, rebel hideouts, edens, posthuman clades, and other wonders hidden in the millions of moonlets of Saturn’s rings were by now the mundane stuff of sagas, psychodramas, and the generic fictions broadcast on illicit TV. Maris knew better than most that a few of these stories had been grown from grains of truth, but by now there were so many that it was impossible even for her to tell fact from fable.

  The Political Officer

  CHARLES COLEMAN FINLAY

  New writer Charles Coleman Finlay made his first sale last year to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and has since followed it up with three more sales to that magazine, including the taut and suspenseful story that follows, which takes us on a deeply hazardous top secret mission into deep space, with a hard-pressed crew who soon discover that for all the dangers outside, the biggest dangers may be the ones that lurk within ...

  Finlay lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio.

  Laxim Nikomedes saw the other man rush toward him but there was no room to dodge in the crate-packed corridor. He braced for the impact. The other man pulled up short, his face blanching in the pallid half-light of the “night” rotation. It was Kulakov, the chief petty officer. He went rigid and snapped a salute.

  “Sir! Sorry, sir!” His voice trembled.

  “At ease, Kulakov,” Max said. “Not your fault. It’s a tight fit inside this metal sausage.”

  Standard ship joke. The small craft was stuffed with supplies, mostly food, for the eighteen-month voyage ahead. Max waited for the standard response, but Kulakov stared through the hull into deep space. He was near sixty, old for the space service, old for his position, and the only man aboard who made Max, in his mid-forties, feel young.

  Max smiled, an expression so faint it could be mistaken for a twitch. “But it’s better than being stuck in a capped-off sewer pipe, no?”

  Which is what the ship would be on the voyage home. “You’ve got that right, sir!” said Kulakov.

  “Carry on.”

  Kulakov shrank aside like an old church deacon, afraid to touch a sinner lest he catch the sin. Max expected that reaction from the crew, and not just because they’d nicknamed him the Corpse for his cadaverous and dead expression. As the political officer, he held the threat of death over every career aboard: the death of some careers would entail a corporeal equivalent. For the first six weeks of their mission, after spongediving the new wormhole, Max had cultivated invisibility and waited for the crew to fall into the false complacency of routine. Now it was time to shake them up again to see if he could find the traitor he suspected. He brushed against Kulakov on purpose as he passed by him.

  He twisted his way through the last passage and paused outside the visiting officers’ cabin. He lifted his knuckles to knock, then changed his mind, turned the latch and swung open the door. The three officers sitting inside jumped at the sight of him. Guilty consciences, Max hoped.

  Captain Ernst Petoskey recovered first. “Looking for someone, Lieutenant?”

  Max let the silence become uncomfortable while he studied Petoskey. The captain stood six and a half feet tall, his broad shoulders permanently hunched from spending too much time in ships built for smaller men. The crew loved him and would eagerly die—or kill—for him. Called him Papa behind his back. He wouldn’t shave again until they returned safely to spaceport, and his beard was juice-stained at the corner by proscripted chewing tobacco. Max glanced past Lukinov, the paunchy, balding “radio lieutenant,” and stared at Ensign Pen Reedy, the only woman on the ship.

  She was lean, with prominent cheekbones, but the thing Max always noticed first were her hands. She had large, red-knuckled hands. She remained impeccably dressed and groomed, even six weeks into the voyage. Every hair on her head appeared to be individually placed as if they were all soldiers under her command.

  Petoskey and Lukinov sat on opposite ends of the bunk. Reedy sat on a crate across from them. Another crate between them held a bottle, tumblers, and some cards.

  Petoskey, finally uncomfortable with the silence, opened his mouth again.

  “Just looking,” Max pre-empted him. “And what do I find but the captain himself in bed with Drozhin’s boys?”

  Petoskey glanced at the bunk. “I see only one, and he’s hardly a boy.”

  Lukinov, a few years younger than Max, smirked and tugged at the lightning-bolt patch on his shirtsleeve. “And what’s with calling us Drozhin’s boys? We’re just simple radiomen. If I have to read otherwise, I’ll have you up for falsifying reports when we get back to Jesusalem.”

  He pronounced their home Hey-zoo-salaam, like the popular video stars did, instead of the older way, Jeez-us-ail-em.

  “Things are not always what they appear to be, are they?” said Max.

  Lukinov, Reedy, and a third man, Burdick, were the intelligence listening team assigned to intercept and decode Adarean messages—the newly opened wormhole passage would let the ship dive undetected into the Adarean system to spy. The three had been personally selected and prepped for this mission by Dmitri Drozhin, the legendary Director of Jesusalem’s Department of Intelligence. Drozhin had been the Minister too, back when it had still been the Ministry of the Wisdom of Prophets Reborn. He
was the only high government official to survive the Revolution in situ, but these days younger men like Mallove in the Department of Political Education challenged his influence.

  “Next time, knock first, Lieutenant,” Petoskey said.

  “Why should I, Captain?” Max returned congenially. “An honest man has noth ing to fear from his conscience, and what am I if not the conscience of every man aboard this ship?”

  “We don’t need a conscience when we have orders,” Petoskey said with a straight face.

  Lukinov tilted his head back dramatically and sneered. “Come off it, Max. I invited the captain up here to celebrate, if that’s all right with you. Reedy earned her comet today.”

  Indeed, she had. The young ensign wore a gold comet pinned to her left breast pocket, similar to the ones embroidered on the shirts of the other two officers. Crewmen earned their comets by demonstrating competence on every ship system—Engineering, Ops and Nav, Weapons, Vacuum and Radiation. Reedy must have qualified in record time. This was her first space assignment. “Congratulations,” Max said.

  Reedy suppressed a genuine smile. “Thank you, sir.”

  “That makes her the last one aboard,” Petoskey said. “Except for you.”

  “What do I need to know about ship systems? If I understand the minds and motivations of the men who operate them, it is enough.”

  “It isn’t. Not with this,” his mouth twisted distastefully, “miscegenated, patched-together, scrapyard ship. I need to be able to count on every man in an emergency.”

  “Is it that bad? What kind of emergency do you expect?”

  Lukinov sighed loudly. “You’re becoming a bore, Max. You checked on us, now go make notes in your little spy log and leave us alone.”

  “Either that or pull up a crate and close the damn hatch,” said Petoskey. “We could use a fourth.”

  The light flashed off Lukinov’s gold signet ring as he waved his hand in clear negation. “You don’t want to do that, Ernst. This is the man who won his true love in a card game.”