Nebula Awards Showcase 2019

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  “Mr Cai’s the one bankrolling it, so it’s a staging ground for the Cai family to show how much better they are than everyone else. You saw the announcement—he’s probably been bragging to all his guests about how they’ll be the first to taste beef from his vertical farm. Changing it now would be a real loss of face.”

  “Okay,” Lily says. “I have a bunch of ideas, but first of all, how much do you care about this guy’s face?”

  Helena thinks back to her inbox full of corpse pictures, the countless sleepless nights she’s endured, the sheer terror she felt when she saw Lily step through the door. “Not very much at all.”

  “All right.” Lily smacks her fist into her palm. “Let’s give him a nice surprise.”

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  The week before the deadline vanishes in a blur of printing, re-rendering, and darknet job requests. Helena’s been nothing but polite to Mr Cai ever since the hitter’s visit, and has even taken to video calls lately, turning on the camera on her end so that Mr Cai can witness her progress. It’s always good to build rapport with clients.

  “So, sir,” Helena moves the camera, slowly panning so it captures the piles and piles of cherry-red steaks, zooming in on the beautiful fat strata which took ages to render. “How does this look? We’ll be starting the dry-aging once you approve, and loading it into the podcars first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Fairly adequate. I didn’t expect much from the likes of you, but this seems satisfactory. Go ahead.”

  Helena tries her hardest to keep calm. “I’m glad you feel that way, sir. Rest assured you’ll be getting your delivery on schedule . . . by the way, I don’t suppose you could transfer the money on delivery? Printing the bone matter cost a lot more than I thought.”

  “Of course, of course, once it’s delivered and I inspect the marbling. Quality checks, you know?”

  Helena adjusts the camera, zooming in on the myoglobin dripping from the juicy steaks, and adopts her most sorrowful tone. “Well, I hate to rush you, but I haven’t had much money for food lately . . .”

  Mr Cai chortles. “Why, that’s got to be hard on you! You’ll receive the fund transfer sometime this month, and in the meantime why don’t you treat yourself and print up something nice to eat?”

  Lily gives Helena a thumbs-up, then resumes crouching under the table and messaging her darknet contacts, careful to stay out of Helena’s shot. The call disconnects.

  “Let’s assume we won’t get any further payment. Is everything ready?”

  “Yeah,” Lily says. “When do we need to drop it off?”

  “Let’s try for five am. Time to start batch-processing.”

  Helena sets the enzyme percentages, loads the fluid into the canister, and they both haul the steaks into the dry-ager unit. The machine hums away, spraying fine mists of enzymatic fluid onto the steaks and partially dehydrating them, while Helena and Lily work on assembling the refrigerated delivery boxes. Once everything’s neatly packed, they haul the boxes to the nearest podcar station. As Helena slams box after box into the cargo area of the podcars, Lily types the delivery codes into their front panels. The podcars boot up, sealing themselves shut, and zoom off on their circuitous route to the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.

  They head back to the industrial park. Most of their things have already been shoved into backpacks, and Helena begins breaking the remaining equipment down for transport.

  A Sculpere 9410S takes twenty minutes to disassemble if you’re doing it for the second time. If someone’s there to help you manually eject the cell cartridges, slide the external casing off, and detach the print heads so you can disassemble the power unit, you might be able to get that figure down to ten. They’ll buy a new printer once they figure out where to settle down, but this one will do for now.

  It’s not running away if we’re both going somewhere, Helena thinks to herself, and this time it doesn’t feel like a lie.

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  There aren’t many visitors to Mr Chan’s restaurant during breakfast hours, and he’s sitting in a corner, reading a book. Helena waves at him.

  “Helena!” he booms, surging up to greet her. “Long time no see, and who is this?”

  “Oh, we met recently. She’s helped me out a lot,” Helena says, judiciously avoiding any mention of Lily’s name. She holds a finger to her lips, and surprisingly, Mr Chan seems to catch on. Lily waves at Mr Chan, then proceeds to wander around the restaurant, examining their collection of porcelain plates.

  “Anyway, since you’re my very first client, I thought I’d let you know in person. I’m going travelling with my . . . friend, and I won’t be around for the next few months at least.”

  “Oh, that’s certainly a shame! I was planning a black pepper hotplate beef special next month, but I suppose black pepper hotplate extruded protein will do just fine. When do you think you’ll be coming back?”

  Helena looks at Mr Chan’s guileless face, and thinks, well, her first client deserves a bit more honesty. “Actually, I probably won’t be running the business any longer. I haven’t decided yet, but I think I’m going to study art. I’m really, really sorry for the inconvenience, Mr Chan.”

  “No, no, pursuing your dreams, well, that’s not something you should be apologising for! I’m just glad you finally found a friend!”

  Helena glances over at Lily, who’s currently stuffing a container of cellulose toothpicks into the side pocket of her bulging backpack.

  “Yeah, I’m glad too,” she says. “I’m sorry, Mr Chan, but we have a flight to catch in a couple of hours, and the bus is leaving soon . . .”

  “Nonsense! I’ll pay for your taxi fare, and I’ll give you something for the road. Airplane food is awful these days!”

  Despite repeatedly declining Mr Chan’s very generous offers, somehow Helena and Lily end up toting bags and bags of fresh steamed buns to their taxi.

  “Oh, did you see the news?” Mr Chan asks. “That vertical farmer’s daughter is getting married at some fancy hotel tonight. Quite a pretty girl, good thing she didn’t inherit those eyebrows—”

  Lily snorts and accidentally chokes on her steamed bun. Helena claps her on the back.

  “—and they’re serving steak at the banquet, straight from his farm! Now, don’t get me wrong, Helena, you’re talented at what you do—but a good old-fashioned slab of real meat, now, that’s the ticket!”

  “Yes,” Helena says. “It certainly is.”

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  All known forgeries are failures, but sometimes that’s on purpose. Sometimes a forger decides to get revenge by planting obvious flaws in their work, then waiting for them to be revealed, making a fool of everyone who initially claimed the work was authentic. These flaws can take many forms—deliberate anachronisms, misspelled signatures, rude messages hidden beneath thick coats of paint—or a picture of a happy cow, surrounded by little hearts, etched into the T-bone of two hundred perfectly-printed steaks.

  While the known forgers are the famous ones, the best forgers are the ones that don’t get caught—the old woman selling her deceased husband’s collection to an avaricious art collector, the harried-looking mother handing the cashier a battered 50-yuan note, or the two women at the airport, laughing as they collect their luggage, disappearing into the crowd.

  END

  Weaponized Math

  Jonathan P. Brazee

  Staff Sergeant Gracie Medicine Crow, United Federation Marine Corps, accepted the cup from Rabbit as she scanned the almost-deserted village below. She blew on the coffee, then took a sip, and nodded in appreciation. She thought she recognized the brew as Cushington Blue, and she wondered where her new spotter had scored it. Lance Corporal Christopher Irving—“Rabbit”—had only been assigned to her for a week now, so she hadn’t formed an opinion as to his skillset yet. He’d gotten good grades at Triple S, the United Federation Marine Cor
ps Scout-Sniper School, but school performance didn’t always reflect performance in the field.

  Still, if he can shoot as good as he can scrounge up a good cup of Joe, then he might have potential.

  “Take the west side,” she told him in dismissal. “Let me know if anyone takes an unusual interest in the library.”

  “Roger that, Staff Sergeant,” Rabbit said as he scurried—as well as a two-meter tall, 120 kg Marine could “scurry” —to the other side of the roof.

  Gracie could sense his eagerness. Like all snipers, he’d proven himself in combat as a grunt before being accepted into Triple S, so technically, he wasn’t a newbie. Despite that, he still had that new-sniper smell to him, straight out of the package. More than that, he was still only a PIG, a “Professionally Instructed Gunman.” This was their first live mission together and, for once, Gracie was fine with the fact that it should be a cold mission. As part of a routine security element, she would have the opportunity to observe him in a field setting while the stakes were relatively low. Scout-sniper teams had to depend on and trust each other, and that usually meant months of training before going in hot. However, after Saracen had been killed three weeks ago, Sergeant Halcik Sung, her previous spotter, had been pulled from her to fill Saracen’s slot. Forty-one confirmed kills made Gracie the most accomplished sniper in the platoon, so she’d had to take the newbie.

  She took another sip of coffee. Five floors below her, Sergeant Rafiq exited one of the shops surrounding the small square. He and his squad had been conducting a sweep before the rest of his platoon escorted the major to the meeting with the local commissioners. He looked up and caught her eye, then nodded. Gracie acknowledged him with a half-salute.

  She really hadn’t expected Second Squad to find anything. Tension Gorge—why “Gorge,” Gracie still hadn’t figured out since the area around the village was as flat as a rugby pitch—was not in a high-risk area. The last incident, an IE attack, had taken place thirteen days prior and eight klicks away. But with a field grade officer coming from division, all precautions had to be taken, and the village had to be swept. So, instead of pursuing the FLNT commandos in the Mist Mountains, she and Rabbit were here acting as glorified security guards.

  They hadn’t even set up a proper hide with overhead cover and concealment. They were meant to be seen. Gracie felt exposed to the world, which made her nerves crawl. Every instinct told her to get into a hide from where she could deal death unseen, but orders were orders. Not many fighters, even FLNT commandos, would choose to take on a Marine sniper. She was there as a “Warning: Attack Dogs on Premises” sign.

  The slightest bit of movement caught her eye. Gracie raised her Windmoeller and scoped the spot. About a klick away, at the western edge of the village, a woman shifted her weight behind a window, looking out. She stood there for a moment before stepping back out of sight. Gracie pulled the map of the village onto her helmet display, noting the two-story house, and then running a line-of-sight to the library. She didn’t think the women could see the library entrance, but she might have a sightline on several of the library’s upper-story windows. She ranged the building, getting 984 meters, then entered it as a C-level target in her data book, joining the 44 other potential target positions she’d identified since arriving early in the morning with Second Squad.

  She ran through the target positions again to see if she could remember the range for each one, starting with the A’s. She got 39 of the 45 correct.

  Come on, Crow. Get them down! she chided herself before going over the list yet one more time.

  It would only take a moment to pull up the range on a specific target, but even a split second could make the difference between taking out an aggressor or allowing the enemy to engage the Marines. Some of her fellow Marines thought her anal-retentive insistence on memorizing details was over-kill, but none of them had notched 41 kills, either. Gracie believed in leaving nothing to chance.

  This time, she got 42 out of 45 correct. Better, but not good enough. She’d wait twenty minutes, then try again. It wasn’t as if range was the only parameter that went into making a good shot. Her angle to the ground, the temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity, the planet’s rotation, gravity—those and more would affect her round’s trajectory. The constants were already entered into her scope’s firing computer, but the variables had to be measured or determined at the time of the shot. The more variables she could enter into her scope’s AI, the better her chances of success, and the faster she could do that, the quicker she could fire. If already knowing the range could slice off even a microsecond, it would be worth it.

  At Triple S, a wall plaque proclaimed: Snipers aren’t deadly because they carry the biggest rifles; they’re deadly because they’ve learned how to weaponize math. This hit the nail on the head. Some people, even fellow snipers, claimed that sniping was an art, but Gracie knew it was purely physics, purely math, and ever since she’d become a sniper, she’d dedicated herself to making her math skills the best possible.

  “Staff Sergeant Medicine Crow, your package has been delayed. He’s still at Hornsby. Call it 80 minutes late,” Lieutenant Diedre Kaster-Lyons passed over the platoon net.

  “Roger that,” Gracie passed back. “Any idea as to why?”

  “That’s a negative. We just got the word. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Gracie took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. She wasn’t surprised. Nothing ever seemed to go according to plan on this planet. Part of it was normal Marine Corps operating procedures, but more seemed to be because of the local government’s maneuvering factions. Everyone agreed that the Frente de Liberación de Nuevo Trujillo was the enemy to all that was good and just on the planet, but in practice, none of the various political factions seemed willing to cooperate lest they cede some sort of advantage to another. She should be used to it by now, but the thought of sitting up on the roof for an additional hour-plus made her want to scream. By the time she got back to camp, she’d have spent at least 14 hours doing absolutely nothing.

  “Did you hear that?” she passed to Rabbit on the P2P.

  “Roger that. Uh . . . is it always like this? I mean, the changes?”

  She suppressed a chuckle. As a junior grunt, he wouldn’t have been kept in the loop as much as he was now as a scout-sniper. This wasn’t even the first change: the meeting had originally been planned for yesterday. This was now the second delay for today.

  “Hurry up and wait, Lance Corporal Irving. You know how it is in the Suck.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. It’s just so . . . well, you know.”

  Yes, I do know, Rabbit. Boy, do I know.

  Gracie could bitch with the best of them—although usually not aloud—but she still wouldn’t change her profession for anything. She was meant to be a Marine. A member of the Apsaalooké Nation from Montana on Earth, she came from a long line of warriors, and her lifestyle was embedded in her DNA. She might chafe at the delay, but this was her life. Without conscious thought, she reached under her collar and rubbed the “hog’s tooth” hanging from her neck between her fingers, a recovered round from her first victim’s magazine, but more importantly, the symbol of being a HOG, or a “Hunter of Gunmen.”

  She continued to scan the area below, working quick firing solutions in her mind for various locations, almost on autopilot. Sitting in a hide for days on end waiting for that one shot, there wasn’t much else to do, and she’d done this tens of thousands of times over the ten-plus years she’d been a designated scout-sniper. Tens of thousands of calculations and more than a year of combined time in hides, all for 41 kills. Civilians used to the Hollybolly war flicks might think it a lot of effort per kill, but some snipers never even registered a single kill. Never became HOGs. Gracie’s total was now the fourth largest among active duty snipers.

  “Dingo-Three, Charlie-Two-One, we’ve got a cargo hover approaching your position from azimuth Two
-Zero-Five, range two-point-three klicks. Looks like it’s got agricultural products in the bed. There are a few anomalies in the scan, but within accepted parameters. Just keep an eye on them,” an unnamed voice passed over the command net.

  “Roger that,” Gracie and Sergeant Rafiq said in unison.

  “You got that?” Gracie asked Rabbit over the P2P, turning her head to look at him.

  Two-Zero-Five was to the south west of their position, and her spotter should have a straight line-of-site to what they had designated as Route Bluebird, the road leading into Tension Gorge from that direction.

  Rabbit swiveled his body to glass to the south-west before ignoring the P2P to shout “Got it!”

  They might not have been in a concealed hide, but Gracie winced. In the open or not, snipers didn’t shout like that, giving away their positions. It was a bad habit to start, and she’d have to remind him of that.

  “Looks like a typical hauler, one of those gas jobs.”

  Which was to be expected. Nuevo Trujillo relied heavily on methane for ground transportation, methane extracted from agricultural waste. She ran a scan through the available feeds before picking up a micro-drone that had the hovertruck in its sights. The truck, three-quarters loaded with cargo pods, was making its way north down the road, which was the secondary north-south thoroughfare in the sector. Salinas, another small farming town, was twelve klicks south along Bluebird from Tension Gorge.

  Gracie wasn’t overly concerned about the truck since Tension Gorge was not a restricted town. While it had been largely abandoned during the fighting of two months ago, some people still lived there, and there were still crops to be harvested and transported to the processing plants. Still, Second Squad would have to stop and search the truck when it reached the village.