“I have full authority . . .”
“Major.”
“What?”
“Major. What you want to say is: Major, I have full authority. You will address me by my military rank. I’ve earned it, and you are not coming in my house without a warrant. This isn’t the United States. Are you a Yankee?”
The reverend-inspector’s face darkened at the insult. “Major, your story to my associates was unconvincing. There were no squatters in the woods. And I found these.” He held up silver dog tags that flashed in the sun. “When I come back it will be with a warrant.”
He stepped onto his porch, and the reverend-inspector stumbled backwards down the two steps.
“If you come back, we will duel over any further insult. Do you accept? I’ll register our intent with the county.”
The inspector flushed red, unprepared for the personal challenge. Duels were rare, but permitted between CSA landowners and military officers.
“I, I . . .”
“I thought not. Get off my property.”
The reverend-inspector turned, stalked to his county car, and drove away.
M’ling emerged from the other room and pressed her body against his back. She wrapped her arms around him, and leaned her head on his shoulder.
“He will come back.”
He locked his desk drawer and stepped into the hangar. The helicopters inherited from the USA were slotted in their spaces but immobile for a lack of spare parts. All the mechanics he supervised had already left for Friday services, a euphemism for drinking moonshine in the back room of the local roadhouse.
He drove past a chain gang of un-saved and un-white conscripts supervised by mirror-shaded, shotgun-toting deputy-deacons. He stopped at the toll bridge and honked his horn for the attendant to lift the reflector-bedazzled log gate that blocked his way. The attendant came out of the booth and walked away from him.
“Hey, I need to get home,” he yelled to the attendant, but the man entered the tollhouse and closed the door.
“Under new management, Major,” said a voice from behind the driver’s window. His door was wrenched open and a gun pressed against his temple.
He reached for his own gun in the glove box.
“No you don’t, Major. No you don’t. Please step out.”
The pressure from the pistol barrel eased and he unfastened his seatbelt. He stepped out and recognized the highwaymen, a former military unit that did the unchristian work it took to enforce a Christian state. The man with the gun to his head pistol-whipped him, and he dropped to his knees. Two more heavy blows pounded on his head. Stars exploded, but he held to consciousness.
Rough hands grabbed him and dragged him into the surrounding woods. Twisted hemp rope secured him face-down over the hood of a car. They were strong and fast and, like him, ex-military.
“Major, what is good?”
He spit blood out of his mouth. Some of his teeth felt loose.
“I said, what is good?”
A fist punched him in the back of his head, bouncing his face against the hood of the car. ’19 Mustang, he thought. The last year they made them.
“I’ll tell you. Good is that which pleases God, and what pleases God is what I have to do. To the matter at hand: There is an abomination in our midst, and it needs to be purged. Fire has to be fought with fire, an abominable act for an abominable act.”
A knife sliced open the back of his pants and eager hands jerked his trousers down. He breathed in fast, fearful pants.
“Where is the abomination?”
He remained silent.
“When we are done you know what you must do.”
When they finished taking turns, they cut him free, and he fell to the ground. They left him alone and walked back to their camp behind the tollhouse. Darkness fell, and he pulled himself up and limped to his truck. Warm blood dressed his legs and back.
He drove home naked and broken.
He did not need to explain.
She knew.
He radiated humiliation and pain.
She reached for him, but he kept walking through the house to the backyard. He stepped into the small pool converted into a fishpond and sat in the water up to his neck. Carp and brim nibbled at him. In time, he went to bed, and she lay next to him, her hand on his chest. Between them, in the still of the night, thought and feeling ebbed and flowed in a gentle tide.
He awoke alone, his throat raw, his insides dirty. In the bathroom, he looked in the mirror and saw a small snowflake tracery of white on his cheek. He drank tepid water until he gagged. She was not in bed and he went in search. The backdoor to the living room lay open to the night. Dark clouds scudded across the full moon. M’ling stood on the steps in the pool that he sat in earlier. She glowed ghostly in the pre-dawn light, a specter worthy of darkest fear. The water lapped at her ankles. Naked and alien, she washed shadowed blood from her forearms and chest and mouth.
The highwaymen did not know what they had unleashed.
Predatory eyeshine regarded him with love. She stepped from the pool and embraced him. Retractable-clawed hands caressed the fibrous cluster at his cheek. Her dew claw rested across his throat. She would do it if he asked.
“No,” he said. “I want every minute.”
He made arrangements. The doctor visited him and injected him with an expensive antifungal that slowed the progression but could not stop it.
Long ago, the doctor, then a medic, paralyzed with fear over the onslaught of incoming artillery rounds, had curled into an exposed fetal ball in the open battlefield. The major, then a captain, had dragged the doctor into the shelter of the root ball crater of a fallen tree. Anti-personnel shells burst overhead, filling the air with white-hot blades of Yankee metal. They outlasted the fierce barrage and survived the night and spoke no more of it.
The doctor owed him.
“Do this for me and our debt is settled.”
“I will.”
The thirty-foot-long speedboat rolled under the topside weight of three big outboard engines and six fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel on the aft deck. Big men dressed in night camouflage unloaded alcohol, pornography, medicine, and other hard-to-find necessities. The run back to Cuba would take twenty hours, but in less than two they would be beyond the decrepit CSA Coast Guard.
By the light of the half moon, the fungal rhizomes luminesced. The fibers spread across his face and neck and reached for the thoughts in his head. The smuggler crew kept their distance. As she embraced him, his hand drifted to the swell of her belly. He pressed, feeling for a kick, but felt none. Maybe it was too soon.
“Our daughter.”
She kissed him one last time and boarded the boat.
As the boat receded into the night, sadness attenuated. His connection grew weaker and weaker until he could no longer feel her. He dropped to the wet ground, empty and hollow.
By unthinking instinct, he selected a dead pine that offered unobstructed access to the wind. Compulsion drove him to the topmost reaches, and he swayed in the amber morning light, rocking to-and-fro in the breeze. He thought his last thoughts of love and war before bizarre biological processes bundled his memories into microscopic spores that erupted from him in a pink haze to be scattered on the winds.
CONTRIBUTORS
Charlie Jane Anders writes about science fiction for io9.com, and she’s hard at work on a fantasy novel. You can find her work in the McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, Best Science Fiction Of The Year 2009, Sex for America, and other anthologies. Anders has also contributed to Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, ZYZZYVA, Pindeldyboz, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Lightspeed, and many other publications. She organizes the Writers With Drinks reading series and with Annalee Newitz, she co-edited the anthology She’s Such a Geek and published an indy magazine called other (a
“magazine of pop culture and politcs for the new outcasts”). She wrote a novel called Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award. As a contestant on To Tell the Truth, she wom $1,000. She has recently sold two novels to Tor, the first, All the Birds in the Sky, is scheduled for early 2016 publication, and has also completed a fantasy novel, and the only question I have is, how did she find time to write them?
Michael Barretta is a retired U.S. Navy Helicopter pilot with deployments around the world. He works for a major defense contractor. He holds a Master’s degree in Strategic Planning and International Negotiation from the Naval Post-Graduate School and is nearing a completion of a Master’s Degree in English from the University of West Florida. He has been published in Jim Baen’s Universe, New Scientist, Redstone, and various anthologies. He resides in Gulf Breeze, Florida with his wife, Mary Jane, and five children.
Holly Black is the author of bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids and teens. Some of her titles include The Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), The Modern Faerie Tale series, The Good Neighbors graphic novel trilogy (with Ted Naifeh), and her new Curse Workers series, which includes White Cat and Red Glove. She has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, a finalist for an Eisner Award, and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award. She currently lives in New England with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret door.
Robert R. Chase is Chief Counsel at an Army research laboratory. He has published more than two dozen stories in Analog and Asimov’s as well as three novels, most notably The Game of Fox and Lion. The Army wants you to know that his opinions are his own and do not reflect those of the Army or the Federal Government. Really.
Eric Leif Davin, a science fiction historian, is the author of two books about science fiction—Pioneers of Wonder: Conversations with the Founders of Science Fiction and Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction: 1926-1965. In 2014 Damnation Books published his debut novel, The Desperate and the Dead, a work of historical horror. Its sequel, The Scarlet Queen, will appear in 2015.
Seth Dickinson is a lapsed doctoral student at NYU, where he studied social neuroscience, and both an alumnus of and an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. Since his 2012 debut, his fiction has appeared—or will soon appear—in Lightspeed, Analog, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
David Drake was attending Duke University Law School when he was drafted. He served the next two years in the Army, spending 1970 as an enlisted interrogator with the 11th armored Cavalry in Viet Nam and Cambodia. Upon return he completed his law degree at Duke and was for eight years Assistant Town Attorney for Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has been a full-time freelance writer since 1981. His books include the genre-defining and bestselling Hammer’s Slammers series, the RCN series including What Distant Deeps, In the Stormy Red Sky, The Road of Danger, and many more.
Stephen Gaskell is an author, games writer, and champion of science. His work has been published in numerous venues including Writers of the Future, Interzone, and Clarkesworld. He has imagined worlds for Ubisoft and Amplitude Studios, written treatments for Hollywood, and consulted for disruption technology think-tanks. Currently Lead Writer at Spiral Arm Studios, he is preparing the world for the coruscating vision of Maelstrom’s Edge. In addition, he is currently seeking representation for his first novel, The Unborn World, a post-apocalyptic thriller set in Lagos, Nigeria. For news and freebies sign up for his newsletter at stephengaskell.com.
Matthew Johnson lives in Ottawa, Ontario with his wife Megan and their two sons. His novel Fall From Earth, a feminist Confucianist space opera, was published by Bundoran Press in 2009; a collection of his short fiction, Irregular Verbs and Other Stories, was published in 2014 by ChiZine Publications. In his other life he is Director of Education for MediaSmarts, a nonprofit media literacy organization, for which he writes blogs, lesson plans, articles, creates educational computer games and occasionally does pirate voices.
Derek Künsken writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror in Gatineau, Québec. His fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, On Spec, Black Gate, and multiple times in Asimov’s. “Persephone Descending” was his first appearance in both Analog and StarShipSofa. Derek has been short-listed for the Aurora and won the Asimov’s Readers’ Award, while his work has been podcast in all three Escape Artists podcasts, translated for several foreign sf magazines, and has appeared in the Best Horror of the Year. Derek blogs at www.blackgate.com and tweets at @DerekKunsken. “Persephone Descending” is part of a larger space opera universe he’s been building recently.
William Ledbetter lives near Dallas with his family and too many animals. A Writers of the Future award winner, Bill is also a consulting editor at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. Bill is the administrator of the annual Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest for Baen Books. He can be found on the web at http://www.williamledbetter.com/.
David D. Levine is the author of Arabella of Mars (Tor 2016) and over fifty SF and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo Award, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell. Stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, five Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection Space Magic from Wheatland Press. David is a contributor to George R. R. Martin’s bestselling shared-world series Wild Cards. He is also a member of publishing cooperative Book View Cafe and nonprofit Oregon Science Fiction Conventions Inc. He has narrated podcasts for Escape Pod, PodCastle, and StarShipSofa, and his video “Dr. Talon’s Letter to the Editor” was a finalist for the Parsec Award. In 2010 he spent two weeks at a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. David lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Kate Yule. His web site is www.daviddlevine.com.
Linda Nagata is a Nebula and Locus-award-winning author. Her more recent work includes short fiction “Nahiku West,” runner up for the 2013 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the novel The Red: First Light, a near-future military thriller that was a finalist for both the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Though best known for science fiction, she also writes fantasy, exemplified by her “scoundrel lit” series Stories of the Puzzle Lands. Linda has spent most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, and a programmer of database-driven websites. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.
Brad R. Torgersen is the author of numerous stories, novelettes, and novellas which have appeared in the pages of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show webzine, Mike Resnick’s Galaxy’s Edge magazine, and beyond. He’s a two-time winner of the Analog AnLab readers’ choice award, a three-time Hugo award nominee, and a winner in the 26th annual Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contest. A full-time healthcare computer geek, Torgersen is a Chief Warrant Officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. He lives in Utah with his wife and daughter. His first novel, The Chaplain’s War was released by Baen Books in 2014, preceded by his short fiction collections Lights in the Deep and Racers of the Night.
Michael Z. Williamson is retired military, having served twenty-five years in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force. He was deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Desert Fox. Williamson is a state-ranked competitive shooter in combat rifle and combat pistol. He has consulted on military matters, weapons and disaster preparedness for Discovery Channel and Outdoor Channel productions and is Editor-at-Large for Survivalblog, with 300,000 weekly readers. In addition, Williamson tests and reviews firearms and gear for manufacturers. Williamson’s books set in his Freehold Universe include Freehold, Better to Beg Forgiveness . . . , Do Unto Others . . ., and When Diplomacy Fails . . . He is also the author of The Hero—written in collaboration with New York Times bestselling author John Ringo. Williamson was born in England, raised in Liverpool and Toronto, Canada, and now lives in Indianapolis with his family.
ear’s Best Military SF & Space Opera
The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Page 39