The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I’m not feeling real inspired.”

  He’s going to torture himself over the chauffeur, Ruthless thought; he’ll need close watching. And Elva’s curiosity—there was that to consider too. She’d have to keep a watchful eye.

  “What else isn’t Earthtown talking about?” she said.

  He looked at her blankly.

  “You were doing this to get people talking, right? Rip off the scabs, heal some wounds, something along those lines?”

  “You don’t have to make it sound naive.”

  “Look, you said nobody talks about the feelers. What else do you think we should be talking about?”

  “There’s the war,” he grunted. “What it was like to lose. What it was like to leave.”

  To lose. She nodded, thinking it through. “A lot of my playmates, the ones who survived the Setback and made it out, they’re here.”

  “They won’t talk to me. You saw that Cope guy. He thought I was kelpheaded.”

  “Well. I’m very persuasive.”

  He squinted at her in the morning light. “You’d do that?”

  I’d do anything for you, kid, she thought, but it wasn’t tactically sound to let him know that, was it? What she said was “Like you said, you’re in the club now. People will sense it; it’ll open doors. And I’ll help.”

  “Okay.” Rav gave her a faint, tired smile—his father’s smile, Ruthless thought. Then he stopped walking. They had reached the rear entrance of Elva’s movie theater. “That’d be . . . I could do that.”

  “It’s a deal then—I’ll call you tomorrow,” Ruthless said. “Get some sleep, okay?”

  “Thanks, Auntie.” Ducking his head like a little boy, Rav tiptoed into the darkened theater and was gone.

  “Last kid standing wins the game,” Ruthless mumbled, turning east. Already considering ways to unlock the long-shut mouths of her playmates, she headed toward the fog-shrouded dawn, taking the beachward route home.

  * * * *

  NIGHTINGALE

  Alastair Reynolds

  Here’s another brilliant story by Alastair Reynolds, whose “Signal to Noise” appears elsewhere in this anthology. In the hair-raising adventure that follows, he sweeps us along with a determined and heavily armed boarding party off to storm a lost ghost ship as big as a moon—and crewed with a full complement of bizarre and deadly ghosts of its own.

  * * * *

  I checked the address Tomas Martinez had given me, shielding the paper against the rain while I squinted at my scrawl. The number I’d written down didn’t correspond with any of the high-and-dry offices, but it was a dead ringer for one of the low-rent premises at street level. Here the walls of Threadfall Canyon had been cut and buttressed to the height of six or seven storeys, widening the available space at the bottom of the trench. Buildings covered most of the walls, piled on top of each other, supported by a haphazard arrangement of stilts and rickety, semi-permanent bamboo scaffolding. Aerial walkways had been strung from one side of the street to the other, with stairs and ladders snaking their way through the dark fissures between the buildings. Now and then a wheeler sped through the water, sending a filthy wave of brown water in its wake. Very rarely, a sleek, claw-like volantor slid overhead. But volantors were off-world tech and not many people on Sky’s Edge could afford that kind of thing anymore.

  It didn’t look right to me, but all the evidence said that this had to be the place.

  I stepped out of the water, onto the wooden platform in front of the office, and knocked on the glass-fronted door while rain curtained down through holes in the striped awning above me. I was pushing hair out of my eyes when the door opened.

  I’d seen enough photographs of Martinez to know this wasn’t him. This was a big bull of a man, nearly as wide as the door. He stood there with his arms crossed in front of his chest, over which he wore only a sleeveless black vest that was zipped down to the midriff. His muscles were so tight it looked like he was wearing some kind of body-hugging amplification suit. His head was very large and very bald, rooted to his body by a neck like a small mountain range. The skin around his right eye was paler than the rest of his face, in a neatly circular patch.

  He looked down at me as if I was something that the rain had washed in.

  “What?” he said, in a voice like the distant rumble of artillery.

  “I’m here to see Martinez.”

  “Mr. Martinez to you,” he said.

  “Whatever. But I’m still here to see him, and he should be expecting me. I’m…”

  “Dexia Scarrow,” called another voice—fractionally more welcoming, this time—and a smaller, older man bustled into view from behind the pillar of muscle blocking the door, snatching delicate pince-nez glasses from his nose. “Let her in, Norbert. She’s expected. Just a little late.”

  “I got held up around Armesto—my hired wheeler hit a pothole and tipped over. Couldn’t get the thing started again, so had to…”

  The smaller man waved aside my excuse. “You’re here now, which is all that matters. I’ll have Norbert dry your clothes, if you wish.”

  I peeled off my coat. “Maybe this.”

  “Norbert will attend to your galoshes as well. Would you care for something to drink? I have tea already prepared, but if you would rather something else…”

  “Tea will be fine, Mr. Martinez,” I said.

  “Please. Call me Tomas. It’s my sincere wish that we will work together as friends.”

  I stood out of my galoshes and handed my dripping wet coat to the big man. Martinez nodded once, the gesture precise and birdlike, and then ushered me to follow him farther into his rooms. He was slighter and older than I’d been expecting, although still recognizable as the man in the photographs. His hair was grey turning to white, thinning on his scalp and shaved close to the skin elsewhere on his head. He wore a grey waistcoat over a grey shirt, the ensemble lending him a drab, clerkish air.

  We navigated a twisting labyrinth formed from four layers of brown boxes, piled to head height. “Excuse the mess,” Martinez said, looking back at me over his shoulder. “I really should find a better solution to my filing problems, but there’s always something more pressing that needs doing instead.”

  “I’m surprised you have time to eat, let alone worry about filing problems.”

  “Well, things haven’t been as hectic lately, I must confess. If you’ve been following the news you’ll know that I’ve already caught most of my big fish. There’s been some mopping up to do, but I’ve been nowhere near as busy as in…” Martinez stopped suddenly next to one of the piles of boxes, placed his glasses back on the ridge of his nose, and scuffed dust from the paper label on the side of the box nearest his face. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Wrong place. Wrong damned place! Norbert!”

  Norbert trudged along behind us, my sodden coat still draped over one of his enormous, trunklike arms. “Mr. Martinez?”

  “This one is in the wrong place.” The smaller man turned around and indicated a spot between two other boxes, on the other side of the corridor. “It goes here. It needs to be moved. Kessler’s case is moving into court next month, and we don’t want any trouble with missing documentation.”

  “Attend to it,” Norbert said, which sounded like an order but which I assumed was his way of saying he’d remember to move the box when he was done with my laundry.

  “Kessler?” I asked, when Norbert had left. “As in Tillman Kessler, the NC interrogator?”

  “One and the same, yes. Did you have experience with him?”

  “I wouldn’t be standing here if I did.”

  “True enough. But a small number of people were fortunate enough to survive their encounters with Kessler. It’s their testimonies that will help bring him to justice.”

  “By which you mean crucified.”

  “I detect faint disapproval, Dexia,” Martinez said.

  “You’re right. It’s barbaric.”

  “It’s how we’ve always done thin
gs. The Haussmann way, if you like.”

  Sky Haussmann: the man who gave this world its name, and who sparked off the 250-year war we’ve only just learned to stop fighting. When they crucified Sky they thought they were putting an early end to the violence. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Ever since then, crucifixion is the way executions happen.

  “Is Kessler the reason you asked me here, sir? Were you expecting me to add to the case file against him?”

  Martinez paused at a heavy wooden door.

  “Not Kessler, no. I’ve every expectation to see him nailed to Bridgetop by the end of the year. But it does concern the man for whom Kessler was an instrument.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Kessler worked for Colonel Jax, didn’t he?”

  Martinez opened the door and ushered me through, into the windowless room beyond. By now we must have been back into the canyon wall. The air had the inert stillness of a crypt. “Yes, Kessler was Jax’s man,” Martinez said. “I’m glad you made the connection: it saves me explaining why Jax ought to be brought to justice.”

  “I agree completely. Half the population would agree with you. But I’m afraid you’re a bit late: Jax died years ago.”

  Two other people were already waiting in the room, sitting on settees either side of a low black table set with tea, coffee and pisco sours.

  “Jax didn’t die,” Martinez said. “He just disappeared, and now I know where he is. Have a seat, please.”

  He knew I was interested; knew I wouldn’t be able to walk out of that room until I’d heard the rest of the story about Colonel Brandon Jax. But there was more to it than that: there was something effortlessly commanding about his voice that made it very hard not to obey. In my time in the Southland Militia I’d learned that some people have that authority and some people don’t. It can’t be taught; can’t be learned; can’t be faked. You’re either born with it or you’re not.

  “Dexia Scarrow, allow me to introduce you to my other two guests,” Martinez said, when I’d taken my place at the table. “The gentleman opposite you is Salvatore Nicolosi, a veteran of one of the Northern Coalition’s freeze/thaw units. The woman on your right is Ingrid Sollis, a personal security expert with a particular interest in counter-intrusion systems. Ingrid saw early combat experience with the Southland, but she soon left the military to pursue private interests.”

  I bit my tongue, then turned my attention away from the woman before I said something I might regret. The man—Nicolosi—looked more like an actor than a soldier. He didn’t have a scar on him. His beard was so neatly groomed, so sharp-edged, that it looked sprayed on through a stencil. Freeze/thaw operatives rubbed me up the wrong way, no matter which side they’d been on. They’d always seen themselves as superior to the common soldier, which is why they didn’t feel the need for the kind of excessive musculature Norbert carried around.

  “Let me introduce Dexia Scarrow,” Martinez continued, nodding at me. “Dexia was a distinguished soldier in the Southland Militia for fifteen years, until the armistice. Her service record is excellent. I believe she will be a valuable addition to the team.”

  “Maybe we should back up a step,” I said. “I haven’t agreed to be part of anyone’s team.”

  “We’re going after Jax,” Nicolosi said placidly. “Doesn’t that excite you?”

  “He was on your side,” I said. “What makes you so keen to see him hang?”

  Nicolosi looked momentarily pained. “He was a war criminal, Dexia. I’m as anxious to see monsters like Jax brought to justice as I am to see the same fate visited on their scum-ridden Southland counterparts.”

  “Nicolosi’s right,” said Ingrid Sollis. “If we’re going to learn to live together on this planet, we have to put the law above all else, regardless of former allegiances.”

  “Easy coming from a deserter,” I said. “Allegiance clearly didn’t mean very much to you back then, so I’m not surprised it doesn’t mean much to you now.”

  Martinez, still standing at the head of the table, smiled tolerantly, as if he’d expected nothing less.

  “You’re under an understandable misapprehension, Dexia. Ingrid was no deserter. She was wounded in the line of duty: severely, I might add. After her recuperation she was commended for bravery under fire and given the choice of an honorable discharge or a return to the frontline. You cannot blame her for choosing the former, especially given all that she had been through.”

  “OK, my mistake,” I said. “It’s just that I never heard of many people making it out alive, before the war was over.”

  Sollis looked at me icily. “Some of us did.”

  “No one here has anything but an impeccable service record,” Martinez said. “I should know: I’ve been through your individual biographies with a fine tooth-comb. You’re just the people for the job.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, moving to stand up. “I’m just a retired soldier with a grudge against deserters. I wasn’t in some shit-hot freeze/thaw unit, and I didn’t do anything that resulted in any commendations for bravery. Sorry, folks, but I think…”

  “Stay seated.”

  I did what the man said.

  Martinez continued speaking, his voice as measured and patient as ever. “You participated in at least three high-risk extraction operations, Dexia: three dangerous forays into enemy lines, to retrieve two deep-penetration Southland spies and one trump card NC defector. Or do you deny this?”

  I shook my head, the reality of what he was proposing still not sinking in. “I can’t help. I don’t know anything about Jax…”

  “You don’t need to. That’s my problem.”

  “How are you so sure he’s still alive, anyway?”

  “I’d like to know, too,” Nicolosi said, stroking an elegant finger along the border of his beard.

  Martinez sat down, employing his own stool at the head of the table, so that he was higher than the three of us. He removed his glasses and fiddled with them in his lap. “It is necessary that you take a certain amount of what I am about to tell you on faith. I’ve been gathering intelligence on men like Jax for years, and in doing so I’ve come to rely on a web of contacts, many of whom have conveyed information to me at great personal risk. If I were to tell you the whole story, and if some of that story were to leak beyond this office, lives might well be endangered. And that is to say nothing of how my chances of bringing other fugitives to justice might be undermined.”

  “We understand,” Sollis said, and I bridled at the way she presumed to speak for all of us. Perhaps she felt she owed Martinez for the way he’d just stood up for her.

  Again I bit my lip and said nothing.

  “For a long time, I’ve received titbits of intelligence concerning Colonel Jax: rumours that he did not, in fact, die at all, but is still at large.”

  “Where?” Sollis asked. “On Sky’s Edge?”

  “It would seem not. There were, of course, many rumours and false trails that suggested Jax had gone to ground somewhere on this planet. But one by one I discounted them all. Slowly the truth became apparent. Jax is still alive; still within this system.”

  I felt it was about time I made a positive contribution. “Wouldn’t a piece of dirt like Jax try and get out of the system at the first opportunity?”

  Martinez favoured my observation by pointing his glasses at me. “I had my fears that he might have, but as the evidence came in, a different truth presented itself.”

  He set about pouring himself some tea. The pisco sours were going unwanted. I doubted that any of us had the stomach for drink at this time of the day.

  “Where is he, then?” asked Nicolosi. “Plenty of criminal elements might have the means to shelter a man like Jax, but given the price on his head, the temptation to turn him in…”

  “He is not being sheltered,” Martinez said, sipping delicately at his tea before continuing. “He is alone, aboard a ship. The ship was believed lost, destroyed in the final stages of the war, when things e
scalated into space—but I have evidence that the ship is still essentially intact, with a functioning life-support system. There is every reason to believe Jax is still being kept alive, aboard this vehicle, in this system.”

  “What’s he waiting for?” I asked.

  “For memories to grow dim,” Martinez answered. “Like many powerful men, Jax may have obtained longevity drugs—or at least undergone longevity treatment—during the latter stages of the war. Time is not a concern for him.”

  I leaned forward. “This ship… you think it’ll just be a matter of boarding it and taking him alive?”

  Martinez seemed surprised at the directness of my question. He blinked once before answering.