Infinity Wars
Page 1
Edited by
Jonathan Strahan
Also Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Best Short Novels (2004 through 2007)
Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005
Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volumes 1-11
Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Vols 1-4)
The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows
Life on Mars: Tales of New Frontiers
Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron
Godlike Machines
The Infinity Project
Engineering Infinity
Edge of Infinity
Reach for Infinity
Meeting Infinity
Bridging Infinity
Infinity Wars
Infinity’s End (forthcoming)
Fearsome Journeys
Fearsome Magics
Drowned Worlds
With Lou Anders
Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery
With Charles N. Brown
The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction
With Jeremy G. Byrne
The Year’s Best Australian Science
Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1
The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 2
Eidolon 1
With Jack Dann
Legends of Australian Fantasy
With Gardner Dozois
The New Space Opera
The New Space Opera 2
With Karen Haber
Science Fiction: Best of 2003
Science Fiction: Best of 2004
Fantasy: Best of 2004
EDITED BY JONATHAN STRAHAN
Including stories by
Carrie Vaughn
An Owomoyela
Caroline M. Yoachim
Nancy Kress
Indrapramit Das
Elizabeth Bear
Dominica PhettEplace
Aliette de Bodard
David D. Levine
Garth Nix
Genevieve Valentine
Rich Larson
E.J. Swift
Eleanor Arnason
Peter Watts
First published 2017 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
Cover by Adam Tredowski
Selection and “Introduction” by Jonathan Strahan.
Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Strahan.
“Mines” by Eleanor Arnason. © 2017 by Eleanor Arnason.
“Perfect Gun” by Elizabeth Bear. © 2017 by Elizabeth Bear.
“The Moon is Not a Battlefield” by Indrapramit Das. © 2017 by Indrapramit Das.
“In Everlasting Wisdom” by Aliette de Bodard. © 2017 by Aliette de Bodard.
“Dear Sarah” by Nancy Kress. © 2017 by Nancy Kress.
“Heavies” by Rich Larson. © 2017 by Rich Larson.
“Command and Control” by David D. Levine. © 2017 by David D. Levine.
“Conversations with an Armory” by Garth Nix. © 2017 by Garth Nix.
“The Last Broadcasts” by An Owomoyela. © 2017 by An Owomoyela.
“Oracle” by Dominica Phetteplace. © 2017 by Dominica Phetteplace.
“Weather Girl” by E. J. Swift. © 2017 by E. J. Swift.
“Overburden” by Genevieve Valentine. © 2017 by Genevieve Valentine.
“The Evening of Their Span of Days” by Carrie Vaughn. © 2017 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC.
“ZeroS” by Peter Watts. © 2017 by Peter Watts.
“Faceless Soldiers, Patchwork Ship” by Caroline M. Yoachim.
© 2017 by Caroline M. Yoachim.
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
ISBN: 978-1-78618-085-8
For the mancationers – Garth, James, Sean, and Simon – who persevered through illness and adversity and triumphed in the end (well, saw snow and drank whisky).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE INFINITY PROJECT and Infinity Wars only exist because of the faith shown in them by editor-extraordinaire Jonathan Oliver and the whole Solaris team. My sincere thanks to Jon, David Moore, and Ben Smith for their support and for their hard work on the book you now hold, and for everything else. My thanks also to Adam Tredowski, who has delivered another knock-out cover for the series. My sincere thanks, too, to all of the writers who sent me stories for the book, whether I used them or not, and to everyone who wanted to be part of Infinity Wars. As always, my thanks to my agent Howard Morhaim who has stood with me for all of these years, and extra special thanks to Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie, who really are the reason why I keep doing this.
CONTENTS
Introduction, Jonathan Strahan
The Evening of Their Span of Days, Carrie Vaughn
The Last Broadcasts, An Owomoyela
Faceless Soldiers, Patchwork Ship, Caroline M. Yoachim
Dear Sarah, Nancy Kress
The Moon is Not a Battlefield, Indrapramit Das
Perfect Gun, Elizabeth Bear
The Oracle, Dominica Phetteplace
In Everlasting Wisdom, Aliette de Bodard
Command and Control, David D. Levine
Conversations with an Armory, Garth Nix
Heavies, Rich Larson
Overburden, Genevieve Valentine
Weather Girl, E. J. Swift
Mines, Eleanor Arnason
ZeroS, Peter Watts
About the Authors
Also in this series
INTRODUCTION
Jonathan Strahan
WELCOME TO INFINITY Wars, the sixth book in the Infinity Project. The Infinity Project started in 2011 with the simple idea of asking some of the best writers working in science fiction and fantasy today to revisit some of its core ideas and themes in refreshing new ways. As the title Infinity Wars might suggest, this time we’re looking at the future of war itself, something that has been a part of science fiction since its earliest days.
The way Western society looks at war and warfare has changed so significantly over the past century or so that in some ways it has rendered how people felt about war at the beginning of the 20th century alien to a modern reader. I remember reading accounts of the Great War of 1914-1918 when I was at university and being struck by the eagerness, the need, to enlist and to serve Queen and Country, to be a part of the war, where young men (mostly) lied about their age so they wouldn’t ‘miss out’. It was a reflection of the time, when war and conflict still had an aura of excitement and opportunity, and that excitement was combined with a deep sense of commitment to the institutions of society. While new military technology had led to a terrible number of deaths during the US Civil War, it was only during the Great War that fact was really brought home on a personal and visceral level outside the US as troops died in staggering numbers in the trenches of Europe.
Projections of war in science fiction of the time had focused on airships and submarines and the like, with books such as George Griffiths The Angel of the Revolution (1893) and Olga Romanoff (1894) telling rather fanciful stories of new military adventure without any real substantive change to the view of how wars were fought (Michael Moorcock would go on to parody this type of adventure in his 1970s novels The Warlord of the Air and The Land Leviathan).
This changed during the period between the Great War and World War II, with new military science fiction taking a distinctly apocalyptic stance, seeing war as more likely to end civilization than anything else.
This doomsday vision of warfare in fiction deepened after the Second World War. The technology developed and deployed during that War—large-scale air forces, nuclear weapons, rocketry, and so on—made it clear that doomsday was not only possible, but likely. The belief that war was justifiable or survivable was strongly tested, and post-World War II science fiction shared those doubts. The Pulp Era was in full swing, space opera was the fiction of the day, and conflict was intergalactic in scale and devastation was theatrical and overblown. You need only look back to A.E. van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer” and The War Against the Rull, the work of E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, the work of Eric Frank Russell, and even Pohl and Kornbluth’s Gunner Cade (as by Cyril Judd) to see that. But even in amongst the overblown theatre of space opera, there were doubts.
Robert A. Heinlein (we were always going to get to him) spent most of the 1950s writing a series of popular juvenile SF novels, many of which dealt with life and work in our Solar System. He capped the decade with one of his most enduring works, Starship Troopers. The Korean War had filled the early part of the decade, stumbling to its never-ending pause in 1953, and it affected how writers saw the future of war. The intervention of troops from the United Nations was a new type of military action, bringing the idea of a world government to the fore. Starship Troopers sat in this world, with its philosophical discussions of the morality of war and the cost soldiers paid for taking part. The issues raised in Starship Troopers would be debated elsewhere in science fiction, in books like Gordon Dickson’s Dorsai novels and the work of Poul Anderson.
If the Korean War, the development of atomic weapons and the rise of the Cold War impacted on science fiction and forced writers everywhere to grapple with the moral justifiability of war, it would be a book by a returning Vietnam soldier, Joe Haldeman, that would be the next major step forward in military science fiction. The Forever War (1974) put the boots-on-the-ground grunt at the forefront of science fiction, and gave SF a glimpse of the price soldiers paid on a personal level when put in harm’s way. It was a book that questioned the value of war itself, and the Vietnam War in particular. Vietnam would continue to influence SF and the discussion of war for the remainder of the century, as can be seen in Jack Dann and Jeanne Van Buren Dann’s landmark anthology In the Field of Fire and novels like Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s The Healer’s War, Bruce McAllister’s Dream Baby, Lucius Shepard’s Life During Wartime (a fix-up which includes the hallucinatory novella “R&R”), and David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers stories.
The discussion of war and the military continued through the last years of the 20th century and into the new century in less militaristic and often mercenary-driven stories from writers like Lois McMaster Bujold, Elizabeth Moon, Larry Niven, and Elizabeth Bear. This anthology, which sits in a tradition of military science fiction/war anthologies dating back to Michael Moorcock’s Before Armageddon and England Invaded, Dann’s In the Fields of Fire, Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War series, Reginald Bretnor’s The Future at War, and Martin H. Greenberg’s Ace/Tor Military Science Fiction and 3000 Military Science Fiction sequences, and The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century, aims to look at what comes next.
With the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC in 2001 and the subsequent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya; and the rise of terrorism generally, and ISIL in particular, our view of war is changing again. War seems to have evolved from an easy-to-spot state-vs.-state conflict to something muddier and harder to understand, where individual acts of terrorism contrast with hi-tech conflict conducted at arm’s-length by soldier-bureaucrats with devastating affect for those on the ground.
And so Infinity Wars takes up the challenge: some of today’s best writers take on the question of what war as we now know it might look like in fifty years, in a hundred, here on Earth, and in the distant corners of the galaxy. You’ll find glimpses of the smoldering remains of space opera in some of the stories, most notably in stories from Caroline M. Yoachim and Elizabeth Bear, alongside slick, dark glimpses into Fifth-Generation warfare from Peter Watts, Eleanor Arnason, E.J. Swift, and others. You’ll see how future war, and our approach to it, continues to change, since it seems we may always be involved in some kind of war or another.
Above all, I hope you’ll enjoy the stories here as much as I have. The Infinity Project continues—I’m already hard at work on book seven—and more than anything else, it’s about delivering great science fiction to you. See you next time!
Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Western Australia
THE EVENING OF THEIR SPAN OF DAYS
Carrie Vaughn
OPAL’S KINGDOM LOOKED out at stars, facing away from a dim home sun to the black frontier and the spaceways that stretched to forever; to colonies and shipping lanes; to survey missions and scout satellites; and great huge swathes of unknown everything. Tennant Station was the last Trade Guild outpost along this vector, the farthest-reaching tendril of exploration and settlement that seemed immense—hundreds of planets, thousands of ships, billions of people—until it stood up against what still lay beyond.
Her realm: ten maintenance docks, a hundred twilight-shift personnel, a supervisor she preferred not to deal with, and pervasive supply problems. Tennant Station could repair anything, its mission statement said. Manufacture anything, supply anything. But they still needed raw materials, and had to wait for delivery. And wait.
“Laser welders wear out,” said Henry, Bay Four crew chief, standing at an empty gear rack. Even the cap shoved crookedly on top of his curly black hair looked frustrated. “The lenses fog up, crack. We’re down to three. If we had six, we’d finish in half the time.”
This was mechanic math, and Opal wasn’t sure it would hold up to scrutiny. Behind the gear rack, a dozen fixer stations lined up before the docking tube. Half threw sparks and rattled with the noise of grinding metal and hissing welders as they repaired components and refurbished modules. The other half were quiet, robotic arms tucked away, welders and riveters still. Needing repairs, needing parts they didn’t have and attention from already overworked crew.
She’d been staring out the small viewport in the bay, half listening to Henry and half lost in thought. Beyond the docking tube and maintenance airlocks, ISV Marigold sat parked for refit. It was an older freighter, scarred, painted, repainted. Still very much serviceable, if she was taken care of. The floodlights of the repair dock washed over her, erasing shadows, bringing out details. Lumps, compartmentalized; engines attached to cargo holds attached to living spaces—Opal could pick out the parts of the ship, guess some of its history in the way additions had been made, sensor dishes and antennae connected.
The lights washed out the field of black and points of stars beyond the station, but Opal knew the rest of space was there, beyond this island of light and life.
Drones worked around the ship, thrusting across its metal skin, examining every crack and seam, removing components for repair, tagging areas for human inspection. Two of Henry’s crew were outside in exo-suits. Opal could just see them through the square viewport, working, herding drones. A flash of movement, one arm raised to show an all-clear sign to the other.
All as it should be, working as it always had, even the complaints.
“I’ll make a note, but I can’t promise miracles,” she said.
Henry made fists and pleaded with the ceiling. “Yeah? Well you’ll be the one who has to tell the captains why their refits are behind schedule.”
They had this conversation nearly every day. Opal gave him a cheerful smile and walked on to the next bay. Her kingdom, a well-lit stretch of corridor that curved enough to notice, so that the floor met the ceiling far ahead. Steel archways marked each repair bay, and most of them echoed with industrial noise. She breathed in the sm
ell of old grease and burning plastic. Some days she felt she was a small thing moving through it all, the plain gray corridor reaching above her, the station’s spin pinning her to the floor in a way that was odd to think about.
“Opal!” At the next arch, the next repair bay, Zare dashed out to block her path. The woman was young and prone to panic – this was her first placement as crew chief. Her eyes always seemed too big for her head, and their implanted optical enhancements, repairing a childhood injury, glinted green and metallic. “Thank goodness you’re here. We’re falling so far behind. We keep blowing fuses, we really need a power rationing exemption for this job. Tell them that if they want this done on time we’ve got to get an exemption, right?”
Opal listened patiently and answered, “You can’t possibly be using that much power.”
“Oh, but we are!”
“Let’s check the logs.” Opal tapped the pad on her wrist, and her headset, mashed over her pale braided hair, displayed the data, columns of numbers, labelled and color coded, highlighted to show trends—and yes, they needed that much power, the workload had gone up, but none of their supply rations had. “Everybody’s stretched a bit thin right now.”
“Have you seen what’s on our schedule?”
Opal winked. “I made the schedule.”
Zare groaned, head tipped back, much like Henry had, and Opal moved on. Start of the shift, she talked to everyone. And still reached Supervisor Creedy’s office too soon. Maybe she should have lingered to argue with everyone a little longer.