The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Once she finishes the patch job—it’s ugly, but it will hold, and it looks industrial enough that almost everybody who takes the corridor from now on will just blame the station’s regular maintenance crew, whose work isn’t much prettier—the three of them occupy a space where they can go undetected indefinitely. That’s of course longer than they need. They plan to escape with their prisoner within a very few minutes. But they can take their time.

  It took days of examining the station plans to find this place, the one useful access point near their quarry’s habitual travels; days more of vigils in silence and darkness to confirm that they would not be disturbed while they had Jathyx in hand.

  That is the least-celebrated aspect of the work that has deformed Draiken’s life. Most of the time, the brief intervals of action are just hiccups in the painstaking drudgery one must endure to ready for it. That’s how you get to live.

  This may be the only place on the entire station that fits the joint requirements of being close to Jathyx’s regular movements, and of presenting opportunities for moving him without running afoul of station security. It’s not like they could have just stuffed him into a box, and blithely taken him through customs. Station custom agents tend to catch that sort of thing. It makes them cranky.

  And then there’s Jathyx’s current employer, a powerful local drug syndicate employing him as enforcer. They’d be even crankier. They like having him around to cut throats. They have connections at the custom gates, as they’d just about have to. And this kind of thing makes them even crankier.

  Better to avoid all such forms of crankiness.

  Hence this forgotten space.

  Which has everything they need, including potential access to space, just a few centimeters across the bulkhead. Just no airlock.

  Right now, it’s a space occupied by several items that Draiken and Stang have gone to ridiculous pains to smuggle in over the past few weeks.

  One is a great padded object that, now inflated, is about the size and shape of a comfortable two-person mattress, propped up against the far wall of this forgotten place and completely covering it (not to mention the crawlspace the two of them had needed to use to drag its uninflated form where they needed it). There are four smaller packages at its base, all still sealed in plasgel and also vivid reminders of the headaches they were to obtain and put in place.

  Draiken unseals two of these, winces each time at the hissing tang of stale air, and pulls out two flexible EVA suits, one in his size and one in Stang’s. He dons his, glancing over at Jathyx, who’s doing quite an impressive job hiding any dismay he might be feeling over the appearance of materials for navigation in vacuum.

  “Don’t worry. We have something for you, too. I didn’t leave you to die in there, and I won’t let you die in vacuum either.”

  The paralyzed man displays no relief, nor appreciation, of this intelligence.

  Stang dons hers. It’s a somewhat older model than Draiken’s, another function of the difficulty involved in finding one that fits her. The helmet adds several inches of height to her already towering frame, and makes further demands on her ability to fit within this forgotten space; she stoops.

  “Here’s yours,” Draiken says. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about this next part, too.”

  For reasons now lost to history, it’s called a potato sack. It is not an EVA suit capable of powered navigation. There is no reason Draiken and Stang would have gotten one for a prisoner whose opportunities for rebellion need to be kept limited. Besides, it’s hell to get an actual spacesuit on a man whose limbs are not capable. The potato sack is a flexible escape pod, of a model meant to be shelved and stored in large number whenever not in use. It’s basically a flexible bag, open at one end for insertion of that hypothetical John the Disabled Casualty. The procedure is to pull it over John’s head, burn-seal the open end, and attach an air supply that will keep the passenger alive during transfer. John will enjoy radiation shielding, temperature control, and a breathable atmosphere. He does not have his own means of propulsion, any ability to navigate, light, a window to ascertain his predicament, openings for his limbs, or any degree of dignity. He’s just a body in a bag, utterly dependent on anyone lugging him from one airlock to another.

  This has got to be an additional irritation for their very dangerous prisoner, another reason for him to hate Draiken and Stang just on general principle, but.

  You know.

  Can’t be helped.

  Draiken and Stang stuff Jathyx into the potato sack, perform all the operations necessary to render it a viable habitat, and inflate the thing. At its full extension it becomes bean-shaped, a pudgy oval almost comical in light of its serious purpose. It is only recognizable as a habitat because of the air tank, also a less-than-optimal model, they’ve attached to the intake.

  With their work so close to finished, there is still a lot to do, and they labor in silence, not from stealth but from focus on procedure. They attach four cables between the corners of the big inflated mattress, and from there to a flexible loop at the base of the potato sack, near where their prisoner’s feet must be. Draiken uses a shorter cable to secure the belt of his own suit to the potato sack’s other end and another to secure himself to Stang.

  She turns to nod at him, and communicates via private channel.

  “If we get killed,” she says, “I’ll never talk to you again.”

  Draiken says, “What would you say, anyway?”

  He’s been making more jokes, in response to hers, in part because they’re the only possible response to hers. He supposes it might be love. He’s come close to the emotion a few times in his life, but is not the kind of man who recognizes it.

  It would be nice to be. Someday. But until then he has this unfinished business.

  • • •

  Both Draiken and Stang are trained in the use of explosives. Over the course of their partnership, which has not been an extraordinarily long one, they have established that despite his significantly longer career, she still possesses the edge when it comes to exacting work.

  He is not foolish. He defers.

  Nevertheless, he watches for an error as she sets the charges on the bulkhead opposite the parcel they have come to call the Mattress. There are many of them, a couple of hundred in fact, the size of coins, and she arranges them in a square almost the size of that entire wall, leaving only half a meter of metallic lip between the desired hole and the floors, ceiling, and wall that surround it. Once she is done she produces a tube of explosive paste and draws a line over connecting the dull gray dots, turning the dotted line into a solid one.

  She then opens the last of the packages, removes a set of magnetized weights with handgrips, and affixes them to what will be the center of the popped-out section of bulkhead. There are two of the cables left, each about twenty feet long, and she strings each length from the handles on those weights to a vest-shaped harness she slips on over her EVA suit.

  What they have constructed is a train of objects, linking the sabotaged bulkhead to the mattress-shaped object at the far end of the forgotten space. They are: the bulkhead, the magnetic weights, two flexible cables connecting the weights to Stang’s harness, the harness, Stang, another flexible cable, Draiken, another flexible cable, the potato sack containing Jathyx, and finally, the four flexible cables leading from the sack to the Mattress.

  Secured the way Stang is, it would be difficult for her to turn around, but she speaks to Draiken on their encrypted channel. “Want a countdown?”

  “I’ve never liked them,” he says. “Just tell me when you’re about to blow the wall.”

  “Sometime today, I expect.”

  She makes it happen.

  There is sound, a drumbeat of concussive pops, for what seems less than a second.

  The charges work. The square outline flares like white fire, each coin-shaped bomb an even brighter point of sheer destruction, rendering the bulkhead more a perforated line than a solid wall barrie
r between this forgotten space and vacuum.

  The entire wall goes, all in one piece, propelled by the pressurized atmosphere of the station.

  Explosive decompression sucks them out so fast that all Draiken and Stang experience is a painful jerk followed by a blur of movement. But this is what happens. The wall goes. The weights pull the cable, which pulls Stang who pulls the cable pulling Draiken who pulls the cable pulling the potato sack, which in turn pulls the Mattress, an object under pressure designed to inflate upon any sudden drop in air pressure. The flexible cables pull the two suited people and the sack containing their prisoner right through the center of the opening they have made and thus protect all three from the potentially catastrophic results of an unfortunate escape trajectory.

  Meanwhile, in the fraction of a second, too short for human perception to measure, that it takes the Mattress to be pulled along behind them, it does what it was designed to do and reacts to the sudden alarming drop in air pressure by expanding to four times its previous size. By the time it gets to the breach, where it is arrested by the metallic lip defining the borders of the escape route Draiken and Stang have arranged for themselves, it completely fills the available space and becomes as secure a plug as any of the tens of thousands of people aboard Piithkarath could possibly hope for. It will certainly last long enough for emergency systems to close off this entire section of the station, and alert station maintenance crews of the blowout.

  The evidence will certainly point to unknown, if remarkably considerate, saboteurs. But no one will die, not even from panic; a factor key to Draiken’s planning.

  He’s been a killer, many times. He’s not a murderer. Not for the most part.

  Some of the cables attaching the various segments of the chain Draiken and Stang have made of themselves are breakaways, designed to snap at specific moments of stress.

  The cables dragging Stang behind the blown-out section of bulkhead snap first, releasing that potentially dangerous object before it can be yanked back toward them with a force capable of flattening them.

  Bringing up the rear, the ones attaching the potato sack to the mattress, break only at their fullest extension, which means that they part only after they arrest the forward momentum of the remaining objects in the chain. For the three human beings, the result is a jolt at least as painful as the sudden acceleration immediately before it, but it controls their flight. They don’t go hurtling so far into nothingness that their propellants aren’t enough to get them back.

  Draiken’s helmet includes a rear-display confirming that the potato sack is still sealed to vacuum and that Piithkarath is too, something he’d worried about. Given its patchwork origins, the station wall is lumpy, unlovely in outline, clearly the product of several generations of engineering overlaid on top of one another; but there is no sign of any additional escaping air. A knot of tension dissipates. He hadn’t needed anything else on his conscience.

  Stang’s voice erupts from his helmet speaker. “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”

  Draiken glances at another of his internal helmet monitors. Jathyx, stuck inside an opaque sack and likely wondering what the hell just happened, shows elevated heart rate and blood pressure but is otherwise in perfect health. “Me too. And our cargo, too.”

  “I’m so pleased. Taking us in.”

  She executes a burn and begins their operation’s most delicate phase, navigating them the quarter kilometer, as the crow flies, toward the hatch where their vessel is docked. There are such points all over the station, but they have arranged one as close to their point of egress as possible.

  There are a number of places along the way where random eyes could be glancing out a porthole and see a large figure dragging along a smaller one and a sack; no doubt they’re seen by any number of people along the way. But EVAs for maintenance are fairly common on Piithkarath. Wholly unremarkable, in fact. Few people outside of station security would have any immediate reason to link this specific pair (and whoever happens to be in that sack, probably someone not suit-rated) to the brief alarm that sounded elsewhere, not when they’re chugging along with such nonchalance, such an utter lack of furtiveness. Station security itself might be hard-pressed to draw an instant connection.

  Of course, they’ll soon know that the blowout was sabotage and commence their furious manhunt.

  But not now.

  Keeping suit chatter to a minimum, they skirt the station exterior and in a matter of minutes get to the nearest docks, where a handful of other transports sit, untended and dark. Piithkarath is an out-of-the-way station in an out-of-the way system, but there are still Bursteeni shuttles, Riirgaan shuttles, even a single Tchi transport, resembling a terrestrial mushroom the way theirs do, and somehow—colored by the nature of the species that piloted it here—somehow conveying that it’s snotty and judgmental, even in its silence. Nobody pays them any special attention, especially not the small flurry of dart-shaped one-man skimmers who race by them at high speed, toward the scene of the blowout.

  Their own transport bears the markings of a small inner-system trader, though those markings are holographic and can be changed to any of several possible templates stored in their system. They enter through the cargo airlock, and once inside, with the still-paralyzed Jathyx safely locked away inside a set of quarters they’ve repurposed as a brig, they activate an inactive program they’ve already hidden within the station’s security system, one that retroactively declares them in compliance with all outgoing cargo inspections and clears them to leave, in this the few minutes before anybody can think of suspending all departures.

  As an extra safety measure, they have tinkered with the sensors of their docking station, which will now fail to update its own status; for the time being, it will continue to report to the station harbormaster systems that there is still a transport docked here. They will not receive any updates indicating that a vessel has left. It’s the kind of bullshit error clerical software makes all the time, and should cover their absence until somebody thinks of performing a manual ship-by-ship inspection. At which point, a forced update will reveal that they left two days ago.

  This tampering will be discovered, eventually. Probably too soon. But it will give them a head start.

  So they haul ass. Piithkarath is a lumpy, receding shape in the distance, less than twenty minutes after their manufactured blowout. It’s so far as daring an escape as any Draiken has ever been a part of, but he still doesn’t relax. He’s spent too much time confined to feel safe anywhere near any authorities that might want to jail him, and so he spends these precious minutes continuing to monitor activities at the station, for any sign that anybody might be coming after them. They’re far from safe, of course. Sooner or later station security will draw a connection to the one transport that left. Once that happens, they will be hunted for as long as they remain in this solar system.

  Status quo, more or less.

  Delia Stang reclines her chair and puts her giant legs up on the counter, all while enjoying a bottle of her latest favorite brew, a concoction he’s tried on her urging and found beyond vomitous. She has changed out of the generic maintenance uniform she wore on Piithkarath, to pants that must have taken a miracle to find, somewhere, that manage the impossible trick of being baggy on her. They are patterned with a hideous pink/orange camouflage pattern that fits no ecosystem he is aware of, though they must be surplus from some planetary conflict, somewhere.

  “You know,” she says, “there are people who have spent all their lives on that station.”

  “I know.”

  “No, think about it. Tens of thousands of people. They’re born in debt and can’t afford even a brief vacation to inner system. They don’t know what it’s like to feel dirt under their shoes. They have one employer: the station’s owners. They’ll never make the jump to any other system, not unless they sign up with the Dip Corps, or Bettelhine, or some other wretched master.”

  “So?”

  “So imagine it. Birth.
Childhood. The teen years. Adulthood. Never seeing a horizon, let alone ever traveling beyond it. Having kids who’ll spend their lives in the same cage, not finding that strange.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “This mission you’ve arranged for yourself, that I’ve been stupid enough to sign up for, mostly because I have nothing better to do, is all about opposing tyranny. And I’m down with that. But you ever stop to think that 90 percent of what humans call life under tyranny is . . . inertia? Being stuck in some local system, whether good or bad, and being unable to move beyond it?”

  “Every day.”

  She tips the bottle back for another chug. “I don’t think you’ll ever make a difference without accounting for human surrender to complacency.”

  “Well,” he says, after a moment, “that might just be one of those things we’ll have to grow to accept.”

  He does not acknowledge her delayed reaction to that.

  The two of them have been together for about a year, more or less, excluding the time they’ve spent between systems in bluegel suspension. They are partners, casual lovers, as close to friends as it’s possible for them to be. It’s an unlikely relationship given that she knocked him unconscious within two minutes of first meeting him. But what else are you going to do when the pair of you get put on a fast train out of Dodge, out to the edges of human space where it’s been judged you won’t be a nuisance for a while? You know no one else. You might as well make the best of it. And he has to admit they’ve done just that. They make a good team, indulging each other in their respective forms of madness: a far more congenial one than he had with his last traveling companion, Thorne, who would love him and try to murder him, on more-or-less alternating days. At bare minimum, with Stang, he never has to worry about waking with her knife to his throat.

  Piithkarath becomes a dot in the distance, one that blinks out as it becomes too far to see. He sets course for the nearest planetary body of any size, Henry, an airless outer-system world so worthless that it’s been generations since it was mined for any raw materials of any value. Unless anybody else has reason for a joyride there, which is unlikely, it has a current population of exactly four, all connected to the matter at hand. Draiken considers the approximately forty hours it will take this vessel to traverse the distance, for a few seconds indulges the aggravating impatience of the man with something to do who knows it will be several days before he can do it, and then, as he had with the snatch on Piithkarath, reminds himself that the job is, and always has been, waiting.