The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

“I don’t know.” The woman with the seashell ear pendants shrugged. “Well over a hundred, the last I heard.”

  “And so far not a single one where it didn’t happen. One way or another, a huge and bloody world war always breaks out, invariably over something utterly stupid, sometime within the same twenty-year bracket. Talk about inevitability.”

  “I know all that,” the woman with the red ribbons said. “But this is the first time I’ve had to watch it happening. With someone I cared about getting destroyed by it.”

  She put an arm around the woman beside her and laid her head on her shoulder, making the seashell ear pendants clack softly. “How much longer?” she said.

  “Not long. Any time now.”

  They sat looking out into the darkness, watching for the tall flame that would mark the end of yet another world.

  LEVIATHAN WEPT

  Daniel Abraham

  New writer Daniel Abraham lives with his wife in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is director of technical support at a local Internet service provider. He’s made sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, The Infinite Matrix, Vanishing Acts, The Silver Web, Bones of the World, The Dark, Wild Cards, and elsewhere. Not one to do things by halves, he’s just sold his first three novels, a fantasy trilogy, which will be appearing over the next couple of years.

  In the unsettling story that follows, he shows us that it’s really true that all of us are connected on some level – and that that might not be a good thing.

  “GOOD CROWD,” Pauel said, from Paris.

  “Things are weird,” Renz said, passing his gaze over that auditorium so that Pauel could see it better. “People are scared.”

  When Renz had first trained with the link – when he began what Anna called his split-screen life – he had wanted the display windows to show the other people in his cell instead of what they were seeing; to make him feel they were speaking face to face. It had taken months for him to become comfortable with the voices of people he couldn’t see and the small screens in his own visual field that showed what they were seeing. Now it lent their conversations a kind of intimacy; it was as if they were a part of him. Pauel and Marquez, Paasikivi and Thorn.

  The auditorium was full, agents of CATC – Coordinated Antiterrorist Command – in almost every seat and so many others linked in that the feed was choppy from bandwidth saturation. The air was thick with the heat and scent of living bodies.

  Of the other members of his cell, only Marquez was physically present, sitting beside him and tapping the armrest impatiently. Pauel, Paasikivi, and Thorn were linked in from elsewhere. Pauel was in his apartment, lying back on his old couch so that the rest of them were looking up at his dirty skylight and the white-blue Parisian sky. Paasikivi and Thorn were sharing a booth at a Denver coffee shop so that Renz could see each of them from the other’s perspective – Thorn small and dark as an Arab, Paasikivi with her barely graying hair cut short. Renz wondered how long they would all be able to pretend those two weren’t lovers, then placed all the window in his peripheral vision so he wouldn’t be distracted from the man on the stage.

  “Renz. I heard Anna was back in the hospital,” Paasikivi said. Her tone of voice made it a question.

  “It’s just follow-up,” Renz said. “She’s fine.”

  The man at the front tilted his head, said something into a private link, and stepped up to the edge of the stage. In Denver, Thorn stirred his coffee too hard, rattling the spoon against the cup the way he did when he was uncomfortable. Renz lowered the volume from the link.

  “Good afternoon,” the man said. “I’d like to welcome you all here. And I have to say I wish we had this kind of turnout for the budget meetings.”

  A wave of nervous laughter swept over the crowd. Without meaning to, Renz found himself chuckling along with the rest. He stopped.

  “For those of you who don’t know me, my name’s Alan Andrews. I’m a tactical liaison for the Global Security Council’s theoretical branch. Think of me as the translator for the folks in the ivory tower.”

  “Condescending little pigfuck, isn’t he?” Pauel said.

  “By now I’m sure you’ve all heard about the anomalies,” the speaker said. “OG 47’s experience with the girls in New York, OG 80 and the old woman in Bali, the disruptions at the CATC root databases. I’m here to give you an idea what the theoretical branch has made of them.”

  “Yes, Pauli,” Marquez muttered. “But are you sure about the pig? He looks more a chimp man to me.”

  “Would you two shut up,” Renz said. “I want to hear this.”

  “The first thing I want to make clear,” the man said, holding his hands out to the crowd, palms out, placating, “is that there are no direct ties between these incidents and any known terrorist network. Something’s going on, and we all know that, but it’s not a conspiracy. It’s something else.”

  The man dropped his hands.

  “That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s probably something worse.”

  Looking back, the first anomaly had been so small, Renz had hardly noticed it. It had presented as a series of small sounds at a moment when his attention had been a thousand other places. He had heard it and forgotten until later.

  The town they had been in at the time was nothing remarkable; the Persian Interest Zone was peppered with places like it. Concrete apartment buildings and ruined mosques mixed with sad, prefab Western strip malls. The asphalt roads had been chewed by tank treads sometime a decade before and never repaired. But intelligence said that an office building in the run-down central district was still running network servers for the al-Nakba.

  Organizational Group 47 – Renz, Marquez, Pauel, Thorn, Paasikivi – were in an old van parked on a side street, waiting. Thorn and Pauel – the only two who could pass for local – sat in the front playing the radio and smoking cigarettes. Paasikivi and Marquez squatted in the belly of the machine, using the three-foot-tall degaussed steel case of the EMP coil as a table for Marquez’s chess set. Renz kept watch out the tiny tinted windows in the back. Waiting was the hardest part.

  The operation was organized in a small-world network, the cells like theirs connected loosely with fifty or a hundred like it around the world and designed to behave organically, adjusting to contingency without need for a central authority.

  It gave them, Renz supposed, the kind of flexibility that a war between networks required. But it cost them a solid timetable. They might be called up in the next thirty seconds; they might be waiting for an hour. It might be that allowing the target to survive would be a viable strategy, and they’d all pull quietly out without anyone knowing they’d been there.

  Paasikivi sighed, tipped her king with a wooden click, and moved forward in the van, leaving Marquez to chuckle and put the pieces away.

  “You’re thinking about Anna,” Marquez said.

  Renz glanced back, shook his head, and turned to the windows again.

  “No, I’m winding myself up about the mission.”

  “Should be thinking about Anna, then. Nothing we can do about the mission right now.”

  “Nothing I can do about Anna either.”

  “You going to spend some time with her when this is over?”

  “Yeah,” Renz said.

  “Really, this time?”

  It wasn’t the sort of question Renz would have taken from anyone but Marquez. He shifted forward, staring out at the sun-drenched street.

  “Really, this time,” he said.

  An out-cell window flashed open. The blond man appearing in it looked harried as an air-traffic controller. Renz supposed the jobs weren’t so different.

  “OG 47, this is CG 60. Please begin approach to subject. Your target is fifteen minutes.”

  “Acknowledged,” Paasikivi said for them all. Pauel flicked his still-burning cigarette onto the sidewalk and started the van. Renz didn’t shift his position at the rear, but as he watche
d the street flow away behind them, the old electric feeling of adrenaline and anticipation grew in his belly.

  There were four stages to the operation: penetration, reconnaissance, delivery, and withdrawal. Or, more plainly, get in, look around, do the thing, and leave. They had all rehearsed it together, and everyone knew what to do.

  The van turned the corner two minutes later, angled into a ramp down to underground parking. A security guard at the entrance frowned at Pauel and barked something that wasn’t Arabic but might have been Armenian. Pauel replied in Farsi, managing to sound bored and put upon. The guard waved them through. Renz watched the guard turn his back to them.

  “Twelve minutes to target,” Paasikivi said.

  Pauel drove past the stairway leading up to the building proper, around a cinderblock corner, and parked across three parking spaces. The first stage was over; they were in. Without a word, Pauel and Marquez got out and started walking. Renz increased the size of their windows. Marquez, whistling, moved around a corner and deeper into the parking structure. Pauel went up the way they had come, toward the guard and the stairs.

  “Pauel, you have something at your ten o’clock.”

  The window with Pauel’s viewpoint shifted. Beside an old white Toyota, a woman in a birka was chiding a wiry man. The man, ignoring her, began walking toward the stairway.

  “Civilians,” Pauel murmured, hardly loud enough for the link to pick it up.

  “Are you sure?” Paasikivi asked.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “Nine minutes,” Thorn said. Hearing the words through the link and in the van simultaneously made them seem to reverberate, carrying a sense of doom and threat they didn’t deserve. He felt Thorn tap his shoulder, and, still watching Pauel and Marquez, Renz shifted back, his hands resting on the cool metal carrying handles of the EMP coil, but not gripping them yet.

  Marquez’s window showed Arabic graffiti, oil-stained concrete, a few cars. More than half the lights were out.

  “Looks good here,” Marquez said.

  In Pauel’s window, the guard glanced back, frowning. Renz watched Pauel’s hand rise in greeting.

  “I’m going to go chat this bastard up, keep him busy,” Pauel said. “Apart from him, I think we’re clear.”

  The second stage was complete. Paasikivi slid to the front, into the driver’s seat. Renz looked across the steel case to Thorn. Thorn nodded, and Renz leaned forward and pushed the rear door open.

  “All right,” Thorn said. “Renz and I are coming out. If you see anyone about to kill us, speak up.” Renz thought his voice sounded bored. It was only a few steps to the wall, but the coil was heavy. His wrists strained as they snugged the metal against the cinderblock wall.

  Renz stepped back as Thorn slid adhesive packs around the base of the coil, and then between the side of the metal case and the wall. He checked the time. Six minutes to target.

  There were five small, very similar sounds, quickly but evenly spaced. The guard with Pauel scraped open a pack of cigarettes, the radio in the van beside Paasikivi popped as she put the key in the ignition, Thorn’s adhesive packs went off with a hiss, a bit of gravel scraped under Renz’s heel, and something like a cough came from deeper in the garage behind Marquez. Each sound seemed to pick up the next. A little musical coincidence that sounded like nothing so much as a man clearing his throat. Renz noticed it, and then was immediately distracted.

  “Someone’s back here,” Marquez said. Renz caught a movement in Marquez’s window. Someone ducking behind a car. “I think we may have a problem.”

  Everything happened at once, improvised and contingent but with the perfect harmony of a team acting together, so practiced it was like a single mind. Renz drew his sidearm and moved forward, prepared to lay down suppressing fire. Pauel, at the front, shot the security guard twice in the chest, once in the head. Paasikivi started the van. Marquez, seeing that Renz was coming, moved quickly backward, still scanning the darkness for movement.

  Within seconds, Renz was around the corner, Marquez fifteen or twenty feet ahead of him, a pistol in his hand. Behind them and around the corner, where they couldn’t have seen without the link, Thorn had the rear doors of the van opened and waiting, and Paasikivi was turning it around to face the exit. Pauel, at the base of the ramp, was dragging the guard out of the roadway.

  Something moved to Marquez’s left. Renz shifted and fired while Marquez pulled back past him to the corner. When Renz saw his own back in Marquez’s window and Marquez braced to fire in Thorn’s, he broke off, turned, and ran as Marquez opened up on the darkness. From listening, it would have been impossible to say when one had stopped shooting and the other started.

  On the out-cell link, the blond man from OC 60 was saying that OG 47 had been compromised and Paasikivi was shouting at him that they had not. The coil was in place. They were withdrawing.

  Marquez broke off as Renz reached the van, turned, and sprinted toward them, white tombstone teeth bared in what might have been effort or glee. Renz and Thorn both knelt inside the van, guns trained on the corner, ready to kill anyone who came around it.

  “Okay,” Pauel said from the ramp as Marquez reached the relative safety of the group. “Can you come get me now?”

  The van surged forward, tires squealing as they rounded the corner – the van coming into view in Pauel’s window, Pauel silhouetted against the blaring light of the street in Paasikivi’s.

  “Pauel! The stairs!” Renz said almost before he realized he’d seen something. There in Paasikivi’s window, coming down from the building. He watched as Pauel shot the girl – five years old? six?

  Time slowed. If they had been compromised, Renz thought, the girl could be wired – a walking bomb. There wasn’t enough room in the parking structure to avoid her. If she went off, they were all going to die. Fear flushed his mouth with the taste of metal.

  He heard Thorn exhale sharply, and the van sped past the stairway. The dead girl failed to explode. A dud.

  “Jesus,” Marquez said, relief in the sound of the word. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

  Paasikivi stopped for less than a second, and Pauel was in the passenger’s seat. Renz pulled the rear doors closed and latched them as they went up the ramp and out to the brightness of the street.

  They were half a mile from the building when the trigger signal attenuated and the coil sparked out. With a shock like a headache, Renz’s link dropped for a half second, leaving the disorienting sensation of only being inside his own head again. It felt like waking from a dream. And then the display windows were back, each showing slightly different views out the front while he alone looked back at a plume of white smoke rising from the town behind them.

  By the time they reached the base in Hamburg, the news was on all the major sites. CATC under the orders of the Global Security Council had launched simultaneous attacks on the al-Nakba network, including three opium processing plants, two armories, and a training camp. Also the al-Nakba communications grid and network had suffered heavy damage.

  The opposition sites added that a preschool near one of the armories had also been firebombed and that the training camp was a humanitarian medical endeavor. Eighteen innocent bystanders had died, including ten children from the preschool and two teachers.

  There was also a girl shot in a minor raid in the Persian Interest Zone. Her name was Samara Hamze. Renz looked at the picture of her on the newsnets – shoulder-length black hair that rounded in at her neck, dark, unseeing eyes, skin fair enough she could have passed in the most racist quarters of Europe if she’d been given the chance. If she’d wanted to.

  By the time they’d dropped Pauel off in Paris and found seats in a transatlantic carrier, the news cycle had moved on, and the girl – the dud – was forgotten.

  Renz had never expected to see her again.

  “That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s probably something worse,” said the man on the stage. “Now, this is going to seem a little off-topic, but we m
ay be in some strange territory before we’re done here, so I hope you’ll all indulge me. Ask yourselves this: Why aren’t we all brilliant neurochemists? I don’t mean why didn’t we choose to go to med school – there are lots of reasons for that. I mean doesn’t it seem like if you’re able to do something, you must know about it? Aaron Ka can play great football because he knows a lot about football.

  “But here we are, all juggling incredibly complex neurochemical exchanges all the time, and we’re all absolutely unaware of it. I mean, no one says ‘Oops, better watch those calcium channels or I might start getting my amygdala all fired up.’ We just take ten deep breaths and try to calm down. The cellular layer just isn’t something we’re conscious of.

  “And you can turn that around. Our neurons aren’t any more aware of us than we are of them. If you ask a neuron why it fired or muscle tissue why it flexed, it wouldn’t say ‘Because it was my turn to run’ or ‘The bitch had it coming.’ Those are the sorts of answers we’d give. If our cells could say anything, they’d say something about ion channels and charges across lipid membranes. And on that level – on the cellular level – that would be a fine explanation.

  “The levels don’t talk to each other. Your neurons don’t know you, and you aren’t aware of them. And, to torture a phrase, as above, so presumably below.”

  Renz felt Marquez shift in his seat. It wasn’t impatience. Marquez was frowning, his gaze intent on the stage. Renz touched his arm and nodded a question.

  “I don’t like where this is going,” Marquez said.

  When Renz got back from the mission, Anna was sitting at the kitchen table – cheap laminate on peeling-chrome legs – scrolling through another Web page on her disease. Outside the dirty windows, the streetlights of Franklin Base glowed bright enough to block out the stars. Renz closed the door behind him, went over, and kissed his wife on the crown of her head. She smelled of the same cheap shampoo that she’d used since he met her. The sudden memory of her body when it was young and powerful and not quite his yet sent a rush of lust through him. It was embarrassing. He turned away, to the refrigerator, for some soda.