The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009
Page 44
At 2.350 seconds in, it got a forearm around my left elbow and gave it a good hard pull, dislocating my arm at the shoulder. I knew then it really was ancient, and had retained the programming needed to fight me. My joints have always been a weak point.
It hurt. A lot, and it kept on hurting through several microseconds as the Vamp tried to actually pull my arm off and at the same time twist itself around to start chewing on my leg.
The Tau field was discouraging the Vamp, making it dump some of its internal nanoware, so that blood started geysering out of pinholes all over its body, but this was more of a nuisance for me than any major hindrance to it.
In mid-somersault, somewhere near the ceiling, with the thing trying to wrap itself around me, I dropped the silver knife. It wasn’t a real weapon, not like the splinter. I kept it for sentimental reasons, as much as anything, though silver did have a deleterious effect on younger Vamps. Since it was pure sentiment, I suppose I could have left it in coin form, but then I’d probably be forever dropping some in combat and having to waste time later picking them up. Besides, when silver was still the usual currency and they were still coins I’d got drunk a few times and spent them, and it was way too big a hassle getting them back.
The Vamp took the knife-dropping as more significant than it was, which was one of the reasons I’d let it go. In the old days I would have held something serious in my left hand, like a de-weaving wand, which the vampire probably thought the knife was—and it wanted to get it and use it on me. It partially let go of my arm as it tried to catch the weapon and at that precise moment, second 2.355, I feinted with the splinter, slid it along the thing’s attempted forearm block, and reversing my elbow joint, stuck it right in the forehead.
With the smart matter already at work from its previous scratch, internal explosion occurred immediately. I had shut my eyes in preparation, so I was only blown against the wall and not temporarily blinded as well.
I assessed the damage as I wearily got back up. My left arm was fully dislocated with the tendons ripped away, so I couldn’t put it back. It was going to have to hang for a day or two, hurting like crazy till it self-healed. Besides that, I had severe bruising to my lower back and ribs, which would also deliver some serious pain for a day or so.
I hadn’t been hurt by a Vamp as seriously for a long, long time, so I spent a few minutes searching through the scraps of mostly-disintegrated vampire to find a piece big enough to meaningfully scan. Once I got it back to the jumper I’d be able to pick it apart on the atomic level to find the serial number on some of its defunct nanoware.
I put the scrap of what was probably skeleton in my flight bag, with the splinter and the silver knife, and wandered downstairs. I left it unzipped, because I hadn’t heard any firing for a while, which meant either Susan and Karl had cleaned up, or the Vamps had cleaned up Susan and Karl. But I put my T-shirt back on. No need to scare the locals. It was surprisingly clean, considering. My skin and hair sheds vampire blood, so the rest of me looked quite respectable as well. Apart from the arm hanging down like an orangutang’s that is.
I’d calculated the odds at about 5:2 that Susan and Karl would win, so I was pleased to see them in the entrance lobby. They both jumped when I came down the stairs, and I was ready to move if they shot at me, but they managed to control themselves.
“Did you get them all?” I asked. I didn’t move any closer.
“Nine,” said Karl. “Like you said. Nine holes in the ground, nine burned vampires.”
“You didn’t get bitten?”
“Does it look like we did?” asked Susan, with a shudder. She was clearly thinking about Mike.
“Vampires can infect with a small, tidy bite,” I said. “Or even about half a cup of their saliva, via a kiss.”
Susan did throw up then, which is what I wanted. She wouldn’t have if she’d been bitten. I was also telling the truth. While they were designed to be soldiers, the Vampires were also made to be guerilla fighters, working amongst the human population, infecting as many as possible in small, subtle ways. They only went for the big chow-down in full combat.
“What about you?” asked Karl. “You OK?”
“You mean this?” I asked, threshing my arm about like a tentacle, wincing as it made the pain ten times worse. “Dislocated. But I didn’t get bitten.”
Neither had Karl, I was now sure. Even newly-infected humans have something about them that gives their condition away, and I can always pick it.
“Which means we can go and sit by the fence and wait till morning,” I said cheerily. “You’ve done well.”
Karl nodded wearily and got his hand under Susan’s elbow, lifting her up. She wiped her mouth and the two of them walked slowly to the door.
I let them go first, which was kind of mean, because the VET have been known to harbour trigger-happy snipers. But there was no sudden death from above, so we walked over to the fence and then the two of them flopped down on the ground and Karl began to laugh hysterically.
I left them to it and wandered over to the gate.
“You can let me out now,” I called to the Sergeant. “My work here is almost done.”
“No one comes out till after dawn,” replied the guardian of the city.
“Except me,” I agreed. “Check with Lieutenant Harman.”
Which goes to show that I can read ID labels, even little ones on metal-mesh skinsuits.
The sergeant didn’t need to check. Lieutenant Harman was already looming up behind him. They had a short but spirited conversation, the sergeant told Karl and Susan to stay where they were, which was still lying on the ground essentially in severe shock, and they powered down the gate for about thirty seconds and I came out.
Two medics came over to help me. Fortunately they were VET, not locals, so we didn’t waste time arguing about me going to hospital, getting lots of drugs injected, having scans etc. They fixed me up with a collar and cuff sling so my arm wasn’t dragging about the place, I said thank you and they retired to their unmarked ambulance.
Then I wandered over to where Jenny was sitting on the far side of the silver truck, her back against the rear wheel. She’d taken off her helmet and balaclava, letting her bobbed brown hair spring back out into shape. She looked about eighteen, maybe even younger, maybe a little older. A pretty young woman, her face made no worse by evidence of tears, though she was very pale.
She jumped as I tapped a little rhythm on the side of the truck.
“Oh . . . I thought . . . aren’t you meant to stay inside the . . . the cordon?”
I hunkered down next to her.
“Yeah, most of the time they enforce that, but it depends,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“Me? I’m . . . I’m OK. So you got them?”
“We did,” I confirmed. I didn’t mention Mike. She didn’t need to know that, not now.
“Good,” she said. “I’m sorry . . . I thought I would be braver. Only when the time came . . .”
“I understand,” I said.
“I don’t see how you can,” she said. “I mean, you went in, and you said you fight vampires all the time. You must be incredibly brave.”
“No,” I replied. “Bravery is about overcoming fear, not about not having it. There’s plenty I’m afraid of. Just not vampires.”
“We fear the unknown,” she said. “You must know a lot about vampires.”
I nodded and moved my flight bag around to get more comfortable. It was still unzipped, but the sides were pushed together at the top.
“How to fight them, I mean,” she added. “Since no one really knows anything else. That’s the worst thing. When my sister was in . . . infected and then later, when she was . . . was killed, I really wanted to know, and there was no one to tell me anything.”
“What did you want to know?” I asked. I’ve always been prone to show-off to pretty girls. If it isn’t surfing, it’s secret knowledge. Though sharing the secret knowledge only occurred in special cases, when I
knew it would go no farther.
“Everything we don’t know,” sighed Jenny. “What are they, really? Why have they suddenly appeared all over the place in the last ten years, when we all thought they were just . . . just made-up.”
“They’re killing machines,” I explained. “Bioengineered self-replicating guerilla soldiers, dropped here kind of by mistake a long time ago. They’ve been in hiding mostly, waiting for a signal or other stimuli to activate. Certain frequencies of radiowaves will do it, and the growth of cellphone use . . . ”
“So what, vampires get irritated by cellphones?”
A smile started to curl up one side of her mouth. I smiled too, and kept talking.
“You see, way back when, there were these good aliens and these bad aliens, and there was a gigantic space battle—”
Jenny started laughing.
“Do you want me to do a personality test before I can hear the rest of the story?”
“I think you’d pass,” I said. I had tried to make her laugh, even though it was kind of true about the aliens and the space battle. Only there were just bad aliens and even worse aliens, and the vampires had been dropped on earth by mistake. They had been meant for a world where the nights were very long.
Jenny kept laughing and looked down, just for an instant. I moved at my highest speed—and she died laughing, the splinter working instantly on both human nervous system and the twenty-four hours-old infestation of vampire nanoware.
We had lost the war, which was why I was there, cleaning up one of our mistakes. Why I would be on earth for countless years to come.
I felt glad to have my straightforward purpose, my assigned task. It is too easy to become involved with humans, to want more for them, to interfere with their lives. I didn’t want to make the boss’s mistake. I’m not human and I don’t want to become human or make them better people. I was just going to follow orders, keep cleaning out the infestation, and that was that.
The bite was low on Jenny’s neck, almost at the shoulder. I showed it to the VET people and asked them to do the rest.
I didn’t stay to watch. My arm hurt, and I could hear a girl laughing, somewhere deep within my head.
A WATER MATTER
JAY LAKE
The Duke of Copper Downs had stayed dead.
So far.
That thought prompted the Dancing Mistress to glance around her at the deserted street. Something in the corner of her eye or the lantern of her dreams was crying out a message. Just as with any of her kind, it was difficult to take her by surprise. Her sense of the world around her was very strong. Even in sleep, her folk did not become so inert and vulnerable as humans or most animals did. And her people had lived among men for generations, after all. Some instincts never passed out of worth.
His Grace is not going to come clawing up through the stones at my feet, she told herself firmly. Her tail remained stiff and prickly, trailing gracelessly behind her in a parody of alarm.
The city continued to be restive. A pall of smoke hung low in the sky, and the reek of burning buildings dogged every breath. The harbor had virtually emptied, its shipping steering away from the riots and the uncontrolled militias that were all that remained of the Ducal Guard after the recent assassination. The streets were an odd alternation of deserted and crowded. Folk seemed unwilling to come out except in packs. If chance emptied a square or a cobbled city block, it stayed empty for hours. The hot, heavy damp did nothing to ease tempers.
At the moment, she strode alone across the purple-and-black flagstones of the Greenmarket area. The smell of rotting vegetables was strong. The little warehouses were all shuttered. Even the everpresent cats had found business elsewhere.
She hurried onward. The message which had drawn her onto the open streets had been quite specific as to time and place. Her sense of purpose was so strong that she could feel the blurring tug of the hunt in her mind. A trap, that; the hunt was always a trap for her people, especially when they walked among men.
Wings whirred overhead in a beat far too fast for any bird save the bright tiny hummers that haunted the flowering vines of the temple district. She did not even look up.
The Dancing Mistress found a little gateway set in the middle of a long stucco wall that bordered close on Dropnail Lane in the Ivory Quarter. It was the boundary of some decaying manse, a perimeter wall marking out a compound that had long been cut up into a maze of tiny gardens and hovels. A village of sorts flourished under the silent oaks, amid which the great house rotted, resplendent and abandoned. She’d been here a few times to see a woman of her people whose soul path was the knowledge of herbs and simples. But she’d always come through the servants’ gate, a little humped arch next to the main entrance that faced onto Whitetop Street.
This gateway was different. It clearly did not fit the wall in which it was set. Black marble pilasters were embedded in the fading ochre plaster of the estate’s wall. The darkness within tried to pull her onward.
She shook away the sense of compulsion. In firm control of her own intentions, the Dancing Mistress slowly reached out to touch the metal grate. Though the air was warm, the black iron was cold enough to sting her fingers down to the claw sheaths.
The way was barred, but it was not locked. The Dancing Mistress pushed on through.
The dark gate opened into a tangle of heavy vines. Ivy and wisteria strangled a stand of trees which had been reduced to pale, denuded corpses. Fungus grew in mottled shelves along the lower reaches of the bare trunks, and glistened in the mat of leaves and rot that floored the little grove. There was a small altar of black stone amid the pallid trunks, where only shadows touched the ground. An irregular block of ice gleamed atop the altar. It shed questing coils of vapor into the spring-warm air.
Her folk had no name for themselves—they were just people, after all. And it was one of her people who had written the note she’d found strung by spider webs against the lintel of her rented room. She had been able to tell by the hand of the writing, the scent on the page, the faint trail of a soul flavored with meadow flowers.
No one she knew, though, not by hand nor scent nor soul. While the Dancing Mistress could not readily count the full number of her folk in Copper Downs, it was still a matter of dozens amid the teeming humans in their hundreds and thousands.
This altar freezing amid the bones of trees was nothing of her people’s.
A man emerged from the shadows without moving, as if the light had found him between one moment and the next. He was human—squat, unhandsome, with greasy, pale hair that twisted in hanks down his shoulder. His face had been tattooed with fingerprints, as though some god or spirit had reached out and grasped him too hard with a grip of fire. His broad body was wrapped in leather and black silk as greasy as his hair. Dozens of small blades slipped into gaps in his leather, each crusted in old blood.
A shaman, then, who sought the secrets of the world in the frantic pounding hearts of prey small and large. Only the space around his eyes was clean, pale skin framing a watery gaze that pierced her like a diamond knife.
“You walk as water on rock.” He spoke the tongue of her people with only the smallest hint of an accent. That was strange in its own right. Far stranger, that she, come of a people who had once hunted dreams on moonless nights, could have walked within two spans of him without noticing.
Both those things worried her deeply.
“I walk like a woman in the city,” she said in the tongue of the Stone Coast people. The Dancing Mistress knew as a matter of quiet pride that she had no accent herself.
“In truth,” he answered, matching her speech. His Petraean held the same faint hint of somewhere else. He was no more a native here than she.
“Your power is not meant to overmatch such as me,” she told him quietly. At the same time, she wondered if that were true. Very, very few humans knew the tongue of the people.
He laughed at that, then broke his gaze. “I would offer you wine and bread, but I know your cust
oms in that regard. Still, your coming to meet me is a thing well done.”
She ignored the courtesy. “That note did not come from your hand.”
“No.” His voice was level. “Yet I sent it.”
The Dancing Mistress shivered. He implied power over someone from the high meadows of her home. “Your note merely said to meet, concerning a water matter.” That was one of the greatest obligations one of her people could lay upon another.
“The Duke remains dead,” he said. She shivered at the echo of her earlier thought. “The power of his passing has left a blazing trail for those who can see it.”
“You aver that he will not return.”
The man shrugged away the implicit challenge. She had not asked his name, for her people did not give theirs, but that did nothing to keep her from wondering who he was. “Soon it will not matter if he tries to return or not,” he said. “His power leaches away, to be grasped or lost in the present moment. Much could be done now. Good, ill, or indifferent, this is the time for boldness.”
She leaned close, allowing her claws to flex. He would know what that signified. “And where do I fit into your plans, man?”
“You have the glow of him upon you,” he told her. “His passing marked you. I would know from you who claimed him, who broke him open. That one—mage, warrior or witch—holds the first and greatest claim on his power.”
Green!
The girl-assassin was now fled now across the water, insofar as the Dancing Mistress knew. She was suddenly grateful for that small mercy. “It does not matter who brought low the Duke of Copper Downs,” she whispered. “He is gone. The world moves on. New power will rise in his place, new evil will follow.”
Another laugh, a slow rumble from his black-clad belly. “Power will always rise. The right hand grasping it in the right moment can avoid much strife for so many. I thought to make some things easier and more swift with your aid—for the sake of everyone’s trouble.”