The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  “That won’t keep them for long,” Hester panted. “But we can stop for a second.”

  Cynthia tried to slow her breathing, to get more use out of her canned air. “Where in the nine names of Hell did they come from?”

  “Charlie opened a door,” Hester said.

  Cynthia squinted, but that didn’t make what Hester was saying make any more sense. “I’m missing some context—”

  Hester tapped Charlie’s connector, plugged into her opposite forearm jack. “I’ve got access to his logs, and I think . . . I think he didn’t like Fiorenzo killing his crew, because it’s pretty clear from the logs that she was. I think that’s why she electrocuted him. But the reanimated crew was killing the living crew, and she doesn’t seem to be able to control what she makes. So she lured them into a vacuum bay and sealed the door—”

  But vacuum can’t kill things that are already dead.

  “Charlie let his crew out,” Cynthia said.

  Hester nodded, the boojum’s crawling green and violet necroluminescence rippling across her corneas and the bubble of her suit. “He can open any door I override. And they’re probably not very . . . safe. Anymore.”

  “No,” Cynthia agreed. “Not safe.” Her throat hurt. She made herself stop swallowing and worked enough spit into her mouth to say, “We’d better keep moving. We have to find Fiorenzo’s device. Before her mistakes find us.”

  Part Four

  “She said she was in the morgue,” Cynthia muttered.

  “What?” Hester said, distracted by shooting the rotting hand off their lead pursuer.

  “Dr. Fiorenzo. She said when it happened, she was in the morgue. And she was the pathologist. If she was going to hide something anywhere, she’d hide it there.”

  “I imagine you didn’t get too many people dropping in for a friendly chat,” Hester said. “So where’s the morgue from here?”

  By the time Cynthia had enough breath to reply — running in a pressure suit was no picnic, and although Fiorenzo’s reanimated corpses weren’t very fast, they were undistractable and relentless — Hester had found the answer herself. “One up and two over. Okay then.”

  Cynthia had spent time on a handful of boojums — as passenger, as crew, that last nasty week on the Richard Trevithick as a prisoner — and there was no standard system of orientation. Some boojums had no internal signposts at all; unless the captain gave you the schematic, you were dependent on a crew member to guide you around. The Charles Dexter Ward was probably the best and most thoughtfully labeled boojum Cynthia had ever seen, and even so it was essentially markers to help you plot your position on a gigantic imaginary three-dimensional graph, onto which Charlie only problematically mapped.

  But it was better than nothing.

  And it was better than being torn apart by these mindless, malevolent things that Fiorenzo had created out of what had once been men and women. And surely, Cynthia thought, remembering the row of symbols on Major Ngao’s uniform, the men and women who deserved it least. She had been appalled by Fiorenzo and afraid of her and a little (admit it, Cynthia) envious, but now she began to be truly angry. Not at the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, but at the wanton destructiveness.

  “Up is good,” Hester panted beside her. “The ladder’ll take them longer.”

  “I just wish it would stop them,” Cynthia said. “Or that anything would.” Thus far, though they’d kept ahead of the reanimated, they hadn’t managed to lose them — certainly not to stop them.

  “Here,” Hester said. The ladder was stainless steel dulled with Charlie’s slow decomposition; Hester had to override the hatch at the top with Cynthia crammed against her lower legs to avoid the frustrated grabs of the reanimated beneath them.

  Hester helped Cynthia through the hatch and they slammed it closed again. Then they took off running — two shambling scientists pursued by more shambling corpses than they could stop to count.

  The morgue, when they found it, was long and low and cold — and all too obviously the right place. It crawled with the same decayed-looking light as the rest of the Charles Dexter Ward, but here that light limned empty body bags and open lockers. Cynthia was careful to close and dog the door behind them before they proceeded down the length. Her skin crawled at the idea of locking herself in here, blocking her own route of escape . . . but what waited outside was worse. They’d managed to leave the reanimated behind, but Cynthia had no confidence that that would last.

  They came around a corner to find Doctor Fiorenzo crouched behind an autopsy table, huddling with Professor Wandrei over a gaping hole in the decking. The ragged, ichorous edges framed something that looked like an exposed boojum neural cluster. The former Major Ngao was silently handing Fiorenzo tools. Fiorenzo had a veterinary syringe in her hand, a medieval-looking device with a needle easily four inches long. It was filled with some colorless fluid. Cynthia could make out two more empties on the floor.

  Meredith . . . Cynthia didn’t have to get close to see the lines of black stitchery holding the crushed edges of her neck together. Her head lolled to one side, tongue drooping from her slack mouth, and her eyes were halflidded and beginning to glaze.

  Cynthia wondered how Fiorenzo had arranged to have one of the pressure doors catch Meredith, and how long it would be before she got around to Wandrei. And how he could be so blind as not to see that he would be Fiorenzo’s next experiment.

  Hester raised and aimed her pistol. Wandrei must have glanced up just then, because he made a warning sound.

  Fiorenzo rose to her feet and turned. Light shivered along the needle of the syringe as she lowered it to a non-threatening position beside her thigh.

  The thing that had been Meredith took a shuffling step closer and Cynthia hid her cringe. For a moment, Cynthia waited, searching for words. Wondering why Hester hadn’t pulled the trigger.

  “Doctor Feuerwerker—” Wandrei began.

  Somehow, Cynthia silenced him with a glance. It must have been scathing; even her eyes felt scorched by it.

  Fiorenzo’s eyes met Cynthia’s. “You’re a doctor. A researcher. You should understand!”

  “I understand that you’re a mass-murderer, and you’re putting everyone in this sector of space at risk. Your monsters — your victims — aren’t far behind us. What are you going to do when Charlie lets them in here?”

  “I’m getting close!”

  “No, you’re not.” Cynthia waved a little wildly at Major Ngao. “Maybe you’ve made him not-dead, but you haven’t made him alive. You can’t. You can’t make Meredith alive and you can’t make that poor bastard off the Calico alive. You can animate the meat, but that’s not the same thing and you know it. This boojum isn’t alive. What it is, is wrong.”

  The Charles Dexter Ward shuddered beneath their feet, as if in agreement. Cynthia lurched into Hester, Wandrei and the two dead people went down, and even Fiorenzo had to grab at a safety-bar to keep her feet. Cynthia was reaching for Hester’s arm, to lift her sidearm back on target—

  Fiorenzo slammed the syringe with which she had been about to inject the Charles Dexter Ward through lab coat and trousers and into her own thigh.

  Cynthia stared, disbelieving. Fiorenzo straightened, smiling, and was starting to say something when she seized, crashing to the deck as stiff and solid as a bar of iron. Cynthia said over her to Wandrei, “We have to stop this.”

  “Science, Dr. Feuerwerker,” Wandrei began, and Cynthia shouted, “Science schmience!” which startled him into shutting up.

  Cynthia was a little startled herself, but she plunged on while she had the initiative, “Fiorenzo’s leavings out there aren’t science. They’re walking nuclear waste. And what she did to Meredith is murder.”

  “That was an accident,” Wandrei said.

  Hester made a bitter noise that wasn’t a laugh. “Do you really believe that?”

  Wandrei didn’t answer her. He said, “Dr. Fiorenzo has achieved a remarkable —“ and that was when he made the mistake of letti
ng Meredith get too close.

  Cynthia and Hester had not stopped to ponder the intentions of their reanimated pursuers, not with Charlie’s stuttering necroluminescence all around them and the carnage everywhere they looked. But if they had wondered, any last niggling doubt would have been unequivocally dispelled.

  Meredith tore Wandrei to pieces, starting with his mandible.

  Hester screamed; so did Wandrei, for a while. By the Queen of Hearts, is that his endocardium? Cynthia dragged Hester back, both of them sprayed with Wandrei’s blood like stationer graffiti, and said, her voice low and frantic, “We have to find the machine. Now. While the door’s still closed and Meredith is . . . distracted.”

  Hester’s gulp might have been a sob or a hysterical laugh, but she nodded.

  They looked around, trying to ignore the gory welter in the center of the room. There wasn’t much there beyond dissection tables and refrigeration units. A microscope locked down on a stand, a centrifuge . . .

  “Why would you have so many refrigeration units when the universe’s biggest refrigerator is right outside your door?” Cynthia muttered. “One, sure, for samples and emergencies, but . . .”

  They skirted the edges of the room, both keeping an uneasy eye on their roommate, but Meredith seemed to have forgotten about them, which was all to the good. The first refrigerator unit was just that, a nice Tohiro-Nikkonen that now needed very badly to be cleaned out. The second was a jury-rigged something — from the look on Hester’s face, she had no more idea than Cynthia did. But next to that, back in the corner where it was awkward to reach, lower and bulkier — “That’s it,” Hester said. “Has to be.”

  “Can you figure out how to turn it on?” Cynthia said. She stole a glance at Fiorenzo — still seizing — and Meredith. Still . . . busy.

  “Watch me,” Hester said confidently and wiggled into the cramped space. “Or rather, don’t watch me. Watch for company.” And she passed Cynthia her pistol.

  “You got it,” Cynthia said, although it wasn’t clear that the pistol would be any more use than a wedding bouquet if the reanimated found them and Charlie decided to open the doors.

  Pursuant to that thought, she asked, “Can you communicate with him at all? Charlie, I mean?”

  “I’ve tried,” Hester said. “I don’t know if it’s just that I can’t or that he doesn’t recognize me as crew.”

  “Rats,” Cynthia said. “Because it occurred to me that the best way to get rid of the reanimated would be for Charlie to eat them.”

  “Oh,” said Hester. “Well. That would certainly be tidy. Although I’m not entirely sure that he could. It doesn’t look to me as if Fiorenzo’s reanimated can actually digest anything.”

  “Well, there goes that idea,” Cynthia said. “But he could still chew on them, couldn’t he?”

  “If they went to his mouth. But he probably can’t just . . . reabsorb them.”

  The Charles Dexter Ward shuddered again; Hester was knocked against the wall, and Cynthia ended up in a drunken sprawl against the galvanic motor.

  “I think,” Hester said dryly, “that something isn’t quite right.”

  “Do you think that’s what the second dose of serum was for?”

  “Probably.”

  “Do you think without it, he’ll die again?” Horrible, to sound so hopeful. Horrible, to be in a situation where that was the optimum outcome.

  “Ngao hasn’t,” Hester said.

  Cynthia was trying to think of an answer that was neither obscene nor dangerously blasphemous when motion caught her eye. She jerked around, but it wasn’t Meredith or Ngao; it was a tove.

  “There weren’t any toves in here, were there?” They’d encountered a tove colony several corridors away from the morgue, thick on the ceiling and walls, and starting to creep across the floor. The smell cut through even the stench in Cynthia’s nostrils, and she and Hester both had to fight not to gag at the crunch and lingering squish of toves under their boots.

  “No,” Hester said. “Why?”

  Cynthia aimed carefully and shot the tove. “Just hurry up, okay?” All by themselves, toves weren’t much more than a nuisance — at least, not to a healthy adult. But where toves went, raths were sure to follow, and raths were dangerous. And where raths went, would surely come bandersnatches, and while a bandersnatch could probably deal with Fiorenzo’s mistakes, it would happily annihilate the rest of them as well.

  “Fiorenzo’s got it backwards, you know,” Hester said in a would-be-casual voice, instead of calling Cynthia on the evasion.

  “Oh?” Cynthia said warily. Hester was under tremendous pressure and had just watched one member of her family murder another at extremely close range. Cynthia wouldn’t blame her in the slightest for falling apart, but they desperately needed it not to be right now.

  “The fresher the body, the worse the results,” Hester said. “Meredith being Exhibit A. She must have reanimated Meredith within minutes.”

  Only as long as it takes to sew a head back on, Cynthia thought. Aloud, she said, “I see what you mean.”

  “So she’s wrong,” Hester said fiercely. “I had to say it to someone. The odds of having the opportunity to refute her theories in print . . .”

  Cynthia wanted to close her eyes, but she had to keep watch on Meredith, Fiorenzo, Ngao . . . and everything else. She said, “I understand.”

  “Okay,” Hester said, scrambling back to Cynthia’s side. “The machine is drawing power, and I’ve started it cycling. Now we just have to attach the leads to Charlie’s nervous system.” She brandished a thick double-handful of cables, and Cynthia followed her gaze to the hole Fiorenzo had dug in the deck of the morgue, with Wandrei’s remains on one side and Fiorenzo’s rigor-stiff figure on the other. Ngao was standing patiently where Fiorenzo had left him. Meredith had moved to the door, which she was pawing at with obvious confusion. But she wasn’t Charlie’s crew; he wasn’t opening it for her.

  “Can’t we just, I don’t know, rip him open ourselves?”

  “It would take too long,” Hester said with a crispness that betrayed her own reluctance. “Besides, I don’t have the specialized diagnostic equipment we’d need to find a node, and Fiorenzo must have cannibalized hers — or maybe left it somewhere.”

  Cynthia swallowed her arguments. “Okay. Will the cables reach?”

  “I suspect that node is where she attached them the first time,” Hester said. “But let’s find out.”

  Hester paid the cables out carefully; Cynthia kept pace, trying to keep her attention on far too many threats at once. A cheshire’s sixteen eyes had never sounded so good. Cynthia and Hester’s movement attracted Meredith’s attention, and she started in their direction, not in the all-out berserker charge of the other reanimated, but in that slow-seeming sidle that had lethally fooled Wandrei.

  Cynthia shot her, aiming as best she could for the knee. They had learned, by the good old scientific method of try-it-and-find-out, that the pistol could not damage a reanimated corpse enough to unanimate it. But it could cripple one. The trick was to make sure any bits you knocked off were too small to do any damage when they kept coming after you.

  At this range, even Cynthia couldn’t miss. Meredith didn’t make a sound — she couldn’t, with severed vocal cords — but the silent rictus of shock (pain? Cynthia wondered bleakly, betrayal?) was almost worse. She went down, and continued dragging herself forward — but her hands couldn’t get much purchase on the deck plates protecting the Charles Dexter Ward’s tissue, especially slick as they were with Wandrei’s fluids.

  Hester had reached the dark and wetly shining hole. She knelt clumsily, then looked up, a brave if not very convincing effort at a smile on her face. “You’d better,” she started; then voice and smile failed together, her face going slack with an emotion Cynthia couldn’t identify — until a voice behind her, a grating, hollow snarl said, “Stop.”

  And then she knew, because she could feel her own face mirroring Hester’s: it was horro
r.

  Cynthia turned. Dr. Fiorenzo was struggling to her feet. She stretched. She examined her hands. She took a carotid pulse.

  She smiled. “All it took,” she said calmly, “was a fresh enough specimen. Really, Dr. Feuerwerker, you of all people should appreciate my success.”

  Cynthia stepped backward. Once, twice. She worried about stepping into the pit, about tripping over Hester. About edging too close to Meredith and her undead strength. But she couldn’t take her eyes away from Fiorenzo. And she couldn’t — viscerally couldn’t — let Fiorenzo close the gap between them. No matter how sweet and reasonable she sounded.

  Something brushed Cynthia’s ankle. She almost squeezed off a shot— the last in the pistol — before realizing that it was Hester, mutely offering up the power cables. They were too thick to manage one-handed. Cynthia would have to let go of the gun.

  “Not live,” she said.

  Hester said, “I’ll worry about that.”

  Carefully, watching Fiorenzo the whole time, Cynthia handed Hester the gun and took the cables. They were heavy. How had Hester handled them so easily?

  “Dr. Fiorenzo,” she said. “Stop.”

  Fiorenzo took another step, but she was eyeing the cables cautiously. Cynthia was at the limit of their length, and the pit was behind her. She could retreat no farther.

  “I assure you, I’m no threat,” Fiorenzo said. “This process will save lives.”

  Cynthia heard Hester scrambling. Did she intend to get past Fiorenzo somehow? No, she was edging to the side, still keeping Cynthia as her buffer. Thanks a lot. But if their positions were reversed, would Cynthia be doing any differently?

  “It will save your life,” Fiorenzo said.

  And lunged.

  Her strength was incredible. Cynthia swung the cables against her head, again and again, until Fiorenzo pinioned her arms. They rolled to the floor. Fiorenzo landed on top. Fiorenzo’s teeth worried at the seam of Cynthia’s pressure suit; Cynthia got a foot up and kicked, but couldn’t knock her off.