The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera

by David Afsharirad

  “Uh, pretty much,” Laporte mumbles, hoping to avoid this conversation: she was at Hellas for Martin Mandho’s speech ten years ago, but she was a snotty teenager, Earthsick, and single-handedly ruined Mom’s plan to see more of the world. “Never with a native guide, though.”

  “Tourist girl.” Simms tries skipping again. “Fuck!”

  “Boss, you’re killing me.” Laporte finds a flat stone chip, barely weathered, and throws it—but Mars gravity, hey, Mars gravity is a good excuse for that. “Mars gravity!” she pleads, while Simms laughs, while Laporte thinks about what a bad idea this is, to let herself listen to that laugh and get drunk. Fleet says: no fraternization.

  They walk a while.

  “You really hate them?” Laporte asks, forgetting whatever wit she had planned the instant it hits her tongue.

  “The colonists? The Alliance?” Simms squints up Olympus-ways, one boot up on a rock. The archetypical laconic pioneer, minus only that awful Mongolian chew everyone here adores. “What’s the alternative?”

  “Didn’t you go to school?” Ubuntu never found so many ears on hardscrabble Mars. “They gave it to us every day on Solaris: love them, understand them, regret the killing.”

  “Ah, right. ‘He has a husband,’ I remember, shooting him. ‘May you find peace,’ I pray, uncaging the seekers.” Simms rolls the rock with her boot, flipping it, spinning it on its axis. “And you had this in your head, the first time you made a kill? You cut into the merge and lined up the shot thinking about your shared humanity?”

  “I guess so,” Laporte says. A good person would have thought about that, so she’d thought about it. “But it didn’t stop me.”

  Simms lets the rock fall. It makes a flinty clap. She eyes Laporte. “No? You weren’t angry? You didn’t hate?”

  “No.” She thinks of Kassim. “It was so easy for me. I thought I was sick.”

  “Huh,” Simms says, chewing on that. “Well, can’t speak for you, then. But it helps me to hate them.”

  “Hate’s inhumane, though.” Words from a conscience she’s kept buried all these months. “It perpetuates the cycle.”

  “I wish the universe gave power to the decent. Protection to the humane.” Simms shrugs, in her shoulders, in her lips. “But I’ve only seen one power stop the violent, and it’s a closer friend to hate.”

  She’s less coltish down here, like she’s got more time for every motion, like she’s set aside her haste. “Hey,” Laporte says, pressing her luck. “When I transferred in. You were—in a tough place.”

  Simms holds up a hand to ward her off. “You can see the ships,” she says.

  Mars is a little world with a close horizon and when she looks up Laporte feels like she’s going to lose her balance and fall right off, out past Phobos, into a waiting wolfpack, into the Eos dawnbringers from over the horizon. She takes a step closer to Simms, towards the stanchion that keeps her down.

  High up there some warship’s drive flickers.

  “I was pretty sure,” Simms says, “that everyone I knew was going to die, and that I couldn’t stop it. That’s where I was, when you transferred in.”

  “And now?” Laporte asks, still watching the star. It’s a lot farther away, a lot safer.

  “Jury’s out,” Simms says. Laporte’s too skittish to check whether she’s joking. “Look. Moonsrise. You’ve got to tell me a secret.”

  “Are you fucking with me?”

  “Native guide,” Simms says, rather smugly.

  “When I was a kid,” Laporte says, “I had an invisible friend named Ken. He told me I had to watch the ants in the yard go to war, the red ants and the black ones, and that I had to choose one side to win. He said it was the way of things. I got a garden hose and I—I took him really seriously—”

  Simms starts cracking up. “You’re a loon,” she chokes. “I’m glad you’re on my side.”

  “I wonder what we’ll do after this,” Laporte says.

  Simms sobers up. “Don’t think about that. It’ll kill you.”

  Laporte listens to the flight data record of that training sortie, the tangle with the Nyx wolfpack, just to warm her hands on that fire, to tremble at the inarticulate beauty of the fight:

  “—am spiked, am spiked, music up. Bandit my seven high, fifteen hundred, aspect attack.”

  “Lead supporting.” The record is full of warbling alarms, the voices of a ship trying to articulate every kind of danger. “Anchor your turn at, uh—fuck it, just break low, break low. Padlocking—”

  “Kill him, boss—”

  “Guns.” A low, smooth exhalation, Simms breathing out on the trigger.“Guns.”

  “Nice. Good kill. Bandit your nine low—break left—”

  Everything’s so clear. So true. Flying with Simms, there’s no confusion.

  They respond to a distress call from a civilian vessel suffering catastrophic reactor failure. Indus jumps on-scene to find an Alliance corvette, Arethusa, already providing aid to the civilian. Both sides launch fighters, slam down curtains of jamming over long-range communications, and prepare to attack.

  But neither of them has enough gear to save the civilian ship—the colonists don’t have the medical suite for all her casualties; Indus can’t provide enough gear to stabilize her reactor. Captain Sorensen negotiates a truce with the Arethusa’s commander.

  Laporte circles Indus, flying wary patrol, her fingers on the master arm switch. Some of the other pilots talk to the colonists on GUARD. They talk back, their accents skewed by fifty years of linguistic drift, their humanity still plain. One of the enemy pilots, callsign Anansi, asks for her by name: there’s a bounty on her head, an Enemy Ace Incentive, and smartass Anansi wants to talk to her and live to tell. She mutes the channel.

  When she stops and thinks about it, she doesn’t really believe this war is necessary. So it’s quit, or—don’t think about it. That’s what Simms taught her: you go in light. You throw away everything about yourself that doesn’t help you kill. Strip down, sharpen up. Weaponize your soul.

  Another Federation frigate, Hesperia, picks up the distress signal, picks up the jamming, assumes the worst. She has no way to know about the truce. When she jumps in she opens Arethusa’s belly with her first salvo and everything goes back to being simple.

  Laporte gets Anansi, she’s pretty sure.

  Fresh off the Agincourt coup, they make a play for the Carthage—Indus, Yangtze, Altan Orde, Katana, and Simms riding herd on three full squadrons. It’s a trap. Steele’s been keeping his favorite piece, the hunter-killer Imperieuse, in the back row. She makes a shock jump, spinal guns hungry.

  Everyone dies.

  The last thing Laporte hears before she makes a crash-landing on Indus’ deck is Captain Simms, calling out to Karen Ng, begging her to abandon Yangtze, begging her to live. But Karen won’t leave her ship.

  Indus jumps blind, destination unplotted, exit vector unknown. The crash transition wrecks her hangar deck, shatters her escape pods in their mounts.

  She falls into light.

  So Laporte was wrong, in the end. The death of everyone Simms knew was inevitable.

  Monsters win.

  Laporte stacks her bottlecaps and waits for Simms to offer her a word.

  The game is just a way to pass the time. Not real speech, not like the chatter, like the brevity code. Out there they could talk. And is that why they’re alive, just the two of them? Even Levi, old hand Levi, came apart at the end, first in his head when he saw the bodies spilling out of Altan Orde and then in his cockpit when the guns found him. But Simms and Laporte, they flew each other home. Home to die in this empty searing room with the bolted-down frame chairs and the bottle caps and their cells rotting inside them.

  Or maybe it’s just that Simms hated harder than anyone else, hesitated the least. And Laporte, well—she’s never hesitated at all.

  “It’s my fault we’re here,” Laporte says, even though it’s not her turn.

  “Yeah?” Simms, she’s got re
d in her eyes, a tremor in her frame.

  “If I hadn’t listened to Karen’s note, if I hadn’t done whatever I did to wake you up.” If they’d never met. “Netreba never would’ve picked Indus for the task force. We wouldn’t have been at the ambush. Wouldn’t have watched Imperieuse kill our friends.”

  “All you did was fly my wing,” Simms says. “It’s not your fault.” But she knows exactly what Laporte’s talking about.

  Simms picks up a bottle cap and puts it between them. “I’m transferring you to Eris,” she says. “Netreba’s flagship. On track for a squadron command.”

  “Bullshit.” Because they’re not going to live long enough to transfer anywhere.

  Simms wraps the cap up in her shaking hand and draws it back. “I already put the order in,” she says. “Just in case.”

  A dosage alarm shrieks and stops: someone from damage control, silencing the obvious. Beams of ionizing radiation piercing the torn armor, arcing through the crew spaces as Indus tumbles and falls.

  Is this the time to just give up on protocol? To get her boss by the wrists and beg: wait, stop, please, let me explain, let me stay? We’ll make it, rescue will come, we’ll fly again? But she gets it. She’s got that Ubuntu empathy bug. She can feel it in Simms, the old break splintering again: I can’t watch these people die.

  Laporte’s the only people she’s got left. So Simms has to send her away.

  “Boss,” she says. “You taught me—without you I wouldn’t—”

  Killing, it’s like falling into the sun: you’ve got all this compassion, all this goodwill, keeping you in the human orbit. All that civilization that everyone before you worked to build. And somehow you’ve got to lose it all.

  Only Laporte never—

  “Without me,” Simms says, and she’s got no mercy left in her tongue, “you’d be fine. You’ll be fine. You’re a killer. That’s all you need—no reasons, no hate. It’s just you.”

  She lets her head loll back and exhales hard. The lines of her arched throat kink and smooth.

  “Fuck,” she says. “It’s hot.”

  Laporte opens her hand. Asking for the cap. She doesn’t have the spit to say: true.

  Captain Simms makes herself comfortable, flat on her back across three chairs. “Your turn,” she says.

  “Boss,” Laporte rasps. “Fuck. Excuse me.” She clears her throat. Might as well go for it: it begs to be said. “Boss, I . . . ”

  But Simms has gone. She’s asleep, breathing hard. It’s lethargy, the radiation pulling her down. Giving her some peace.

  Laporte calls a medical team. While she waits she tries to find a blanket, but Simms seems to prefer an uneasy rest. She breathes a little easier when Laporte touches her shoulder, though, and Laporte thinks about clasping her hand.

  But, no, that’s too much.

  Federation ships find them. A black-ops frigate, running signals intelligence in deep orbit, picks Indus’ distress cries from the solar background. Salvage teams scramble to make her ready for one last jump to salvation.

  Laporte’s waiting by her captain’s side when they come for her. The medical team, and the woman with the steel eyes.

  “Laporte,” the new woman says. “The Indus ace. Came looking for you.”

  By instinct and inclination Laporte stands to shield her captain from the gray-clad woman, from her absent insignia and hidden rank. She can’t figure out a graceful way to drop the bottle cap, so she just holds it like a switch for some hidden explosive, for the grief that wants to get out any way it can. “I need to stay with my squadron leader,” she says.

  “If I’m reading this order right,” Steel Eyes says, though she’s got no paper or tablet and the light on her iris makes little crawling signs, “she’s shipping you out.” She opens a glove in invitation. “I’m with Federation wetwork. Elite of the elite. I’m recruiting pilots for ugly jobs.”

  Laporte hesitates. She wants to stay, wants it like nothing she knows how to tell. But Steel Eyes stares her down and her gaze cuts deep. “I know you like you wouldn’t begin to believe,” she says. “I watched you learn what you are. We don’t have many of your kind left here in Sol. We made ourselves too good. And it’s killing us.”

  “Please,” Laporte croaks. “I can’t leave her.”

  The woman from the eclipse depths of Federation intelligence extends her open hand. A gesture of compassion, though she’s wearing tactical gloves. “What do you think happens if you stay? You’re not going to stop changing, Noemi. You’re never going back to humanity.”

  She sighs a little, not a hesitation, maybe an apology. “This woman, here, this loyalty you have. You’re going to be an alien to her.”

  Laporte doesn’t know how to argue with that. Doesn’t know how to speak her defiance. Maybe because Steel Eyes is right.

  “Ubuntu,” the woman says, “is a philosophy of human development. We have a use for everyone. Even, in times like these, for us monsters.”

  What’s she got left? What the fuck else is there? She gave it all up to become a better killer. Humanity’s just dead weight on her trigger.

  Nothing but Simms and wreckage in the poison sunlight.

  “You know we’re losing,” Steel Eyes says. “You know we need you.”

  Ah. That’s it. The thing she’s been trying to say:

  Monsters kill because they like it, and that’s all Laporte had. Until this new thing, this fragile human thing, until Simms.

  Something worth fighting for. A small, stupid, precious reason.

  Laporte gets down on her knees. Puts herself as close to the salt sand cap of Simms’ hair as she’s ever been. Says it, the best way she knows, promising her, promising herself:

  “Boss,” she whispers. “Hey. I’ll see you when we win.”

  For Darius and the Blue Planet crew.

  LIGHT AND SHADOW

  by Linda Nagata

  The skullcaps kept emotion at bay—anger, fear, hate. They kept the mind cold and calculating. A boon on the battlefield, a way to stay sane.

  LIEUTENANT DANI REID was serving her turn on watch inside Fort Zana’s Tactical Operations Center. She scanned the TOC’s monitors and their rotating displays of real-time surveillance data. All was quiet. Even the goats that usually grazed outside the walls had retreated, taking refuge from the noon sun in a grove of spindly thorn trees.

  The temperature outside was a steamy 39°C, but within the fort’s prefabricated, insulated walls, the air was cool enough that Reid kept the jacket of her brown-camo combat uniform buttoned up per regulation. The skullcap she wore was part of the uniform. Made like an athletic skullcap, it covered her forehead and clung skin-tight against her hairless scalp. Fine wires woven through its silky brown fabric were in constant dialog with the workings of her mind.

  On watch, the skullcap kept her alert, just slightly on edge, immune to the mesmerizing hum of electronics and the soothing whisper of air circulating through the vents—white noise that retreated into subliminal volumes when confronted by a louder sound: a rustle of movement in the hallway.

  Private First Class Landon Phan leaned in the doorway of the TOC.

  Phan was just twenty-one, slender and wiry. Beneath the brim of his skullcap, his eyebrows angled in an annoyed scowl. “LT? You should go check on Sakai.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “Ma’am, you need to see it yourself.”

  Phan had been part of Reid’s linked combat squad for nine months. He’d done well in the LCS; he’d earned Reid’s trust. She didn’t feel the same about Sakai.

  “Okay. You take the watch.”

  Light spilling from the TOC was the only illumination in the hallway. The bunkroom was even darker. Reid couldn’t see anything inside, but she could hear the fast, shallow, ragged breathing of a soldier in trouble, skirting the edge of panic. She slapped on the hall light.

  Specialist Caroline Sakai was revealed, coiled in a bottom bunk, her trembling fists clenched against her chin, her eyes squeezed
shut. She wore a T-shirt, shorts, and socks, but she wasn’t wearing a skullcap. The pale skin of her hairless scalp gleamed in the refracted light.

  “What the hell?” Reid whispered, crossing the room to crouch beside the bunk. “Sakai? What happened?”

  Sakai’s eyes popped open. She jerked back against the wall, glaring as if she’d never seen Reid before.

  “What the hell?” Reid repeated.

  Sakai’s gaze cut sideways. She bit her lip. Then, in an uncharacter-istically husky voice, she confessed, “I think . . . I was having a nightmare.”

  “No shit! What did you expect?”

  She seemed honestly confused. “Ma’am?”

  “Where the hell is your skullcap?”

  Sakai caught on; her expression hardened. “In my locker, ma’am.”

  The microwire net in Reid’s skullcap detected her consternation and responded to it by signaling the tiny beads strewn throughout her brain tissue to stimulate a counteracting cerebral cocktail that helped her think calmly, logically, as this conversation veered into dangerous territory.

  The skullcap was standard equipment in a linked combat squad. It guarded and guided a soldier’s emotional state, keeping moods balanced and minds honed. It was so essential to the job that, on deployment, LCS soldiers were allowed to wear it at all times, waking or sleeping. And they did wear it. All of them did. Always.

  But they were not required to wear it, not during off-duty hours.

  The hallway light picked out a few pale freckles on Sakai’s cheeks and the multiple, empty piercings in her earlobes. It tangled in her black, unkempt eyebrows and glinted in her glassy brown eyes. “You want the nightmares?” Reid asked, revolted by Sakai’s choice.

  “Of course not, ma’am.”

  Use of the skullcap was tangled up in issues of mental health and self-determination, so regulations existed to protect a soldier’s right of choice. Reid could not order Sakai to wear it when she was off-duty; she could not even ask Sakai why she chose to go without it. So she approached the issue sideways. “Something you need to talk about, soldier?”