by Ken Liu
“Already done,” said Number-One. “Everything we proposed, they said, ‘Not a problem’.”
“I like these birds,” Bunky said. “Get the PR and media people in here. We gotta plan the announcement.”
The world took Bunky Sansom to its bosom like never before. He had more honorary citizenships, keys to cities and propositions from hot celebrity babes than he knew what to do with. Not only did Not a problem become his signature phrase, but three countries and seven states adopted it as their official mottoes. Privately, he was already negotiating the protocols that would see him become de facto ruler of the world.
Three weeks after he made the big announcement, the first of the expected spaceships were detected decelerating out beyond the orbits of the gas giants. Two days later, the lead ship eased itself into orbit and then, after circling Earth a few times, descended gently into the atmosphere and came to hover over the coordinates Bunky’s people had sent. For his convenience, the contact site was the roof of the Sansom Enterprises’ head office, a vast, truncated pyramid overlooking the sea-girt island that was all that now remained of Vancouver.
The roof was huge, but even so the ship was too large to land on it. It was too large to land on the shrunken city. Instead it hovered a few yards above where Bunky waited with the Secretary-General, a flock of Presidents and Prime Ministers, a few kings and queens, and one ayatollah.
From the ship’s flat base, a long, wide ramp uncurled itself. There was a pregnant pause, then the first of the arrivals came down the sloping gangway.
“That’s some bird,” Bunky said to Number-One. “Twenty-feet, nothin’—that thing goes thirty.”
“I don’t think it’s a bird,” Number-One said. “It’s got feathers, all right, but those are arms, not wings. And those teeth—”
The Secretary-General was speaking. She offered a welcome from all the people of the Earth, and thanked the newcomers for their kindness in coming to help with the problem of global warming. Bunky stepped up proudly beside her, carefully prepared speech in his hand.
The huge feathered being opened its mouth in a kind of smile, revealing dozens of teeth shaped like curved daggers. Its voice was a series of hisses and squawks, but Bunky heard a translation from an earpiece that connected to a device that was also the result of the communicator schematic the slugs had sent through. He had already made a fresh billion from manufacturing it.
“We keep telling you,” the creature said, “it’s not a problem—it’s a solution.” It cast its plate-sized, yellow-irised eyes across the crowd of dignitaries then focused on the King of Tonga. A clawed hand as wide as an armchair scooped up the portly monarch. Then, almost before the king could scream, the foot-long teeth bit off his top half.
The jaws crunched. A spray of blood, bone flakes and meat scraps speckled the heads and shoulders of the dignitaries as they turned and fought each other to reach the roof’s single exit. Bunky heard the voice in his ear say, “Hey, didn’t I tell you they’d taste just like sheeshrak? Come on, try one!”
Then the claws closed around Bunky’s torso—he was the plumpest specimen still uncaught—and he was carried to the edge of the roof. He saw the big three-toed feet sink deep into the tar-and-gravel surface with each step. From behind his captor he heard a cacophony of screams and feeding sounds, while the translator conveyed the squabbles over the choicer morsels.
Soon it grew quiet. He twisted in the thing’s scaly grip and saw it looking out over the warm sea, its nostrils distending as it breathed in the thick and sultry air. Above it, the sky was now full of immense ships.
The great voice hissed and clacked, the translation duly fed into the billionaire’s ear: “It’s so good to be back. It’ll be like we never left.”
“Listen,” Bunky gasped, as he was lifted, and the blood-stained jaws opened wide.
A moment later, the translator said, sliding down the dinosaur’s gullet, “Or maybe not sheeshrak. Maybe chikkichuk.”
The Pattern Box
Christina Klarenbeek
Christina Klarenbeek lives on a remote Canadian farm where (though she cannot prove it) she once encountered an actual, no-kidding, bottom-of-the-garden-style fairy. Like Conan Doyle, she genuinely believes it. Unlike Conan Doyle, the magic of that experience has directly influenced her writing ever since. We're proud to present her first sale here, and she has another imminent: “15:32”, which will be published in the anthology Theatre B in the new year.
In this story—one small part of a currently unpublished epic space opera—we join an interstellar exodus in progress, in which the crew of one deep space vessel slumber, oblivious to their peril, as their path crosses into the domain of life forms both new, and old, and utterly different from anything they’ve known before.
The siren roused him with such a start that Avery almost opened his eyes. He squeezed them shut as the pump kicked on and the out-take shaft slurped up goo. Edwards had been so sure the trip would be uneventful. He swallowed a wry chuckle as he fidgeted, envying her optimism.
The fans kicked on as the level dropped and he coughed and pulled at the feeding tube, desperate to get it out. Too slowly it scraped across his throat. He took a hurried breath through his nose. Still thick with artificial amniotic fluid, it ran down his throat as thick as snot. He gagged before he spat it into the surrounding slurry, cleared his nose and took another breath. Panic was pointless.
To his left Rodriquez pounded on his pod. At only five foot three, he wouldn’t be able to breath for another three minutes. Avery thumped back, slow and steady while, to his right, Edwards maintained her trademark smug, stoic silence.
Something, a hundred somethings, hit the ship in an endless succession that threatened his composure. Rodriguez stopped pounding as a computerised voice announced they were on auxiliary power, with life support at ninety-eight percent. That, in itself, didn’t sound too bad but he needed to get to the bridge to determine what has hitting the hull and if it the fleet was still intact. The computer continued to drone warnings as Avery’s shoulders rose and tensed. His hands clenched and unclenched in time with the siren and he knew he was in trouble.
“Wait for it,” he whispered as he rolled his shoulders.
He raised his hands above the surface and scraped them across one another in an effort to clean them before he moved on to his face. The crap was stuck in a beard he shouldn’t have and Avery’s heart began to race. He could think of only two explanations and neither had them in orbit around Gliese. Either a malfunction had lengthened his wake cycles, using extra power and threatening his mental acuity, or they’d bypassed their destination by countless light years and were now stranded in unknown space with failing support. Neither was good.
A strong light bathed him in warmth as the amnio level fell below the interior utility hatch, giving him access to the only pod towel that had survived cost cutting. Like diluted Vaseline, it seeped between his lashes to cloud his vision. Through the pod’s clear polymide walls, Rodriquez seemed to waver before him like a grumpy fun house reject.
Rodriguez’s raspy voice was like hearing a favourite song. “With all the fucking money they threw into this crap mission you’d think they could afford to give us more than a fucking face wipe.”
Avery smiled at the welcome distraction. “You ok?”
“Yeah, I’m fi… fuck.” Rodriguez nodded his head towards Edwards’ tank.
Avery turned and instantly wished he hadn’t. Through the murk inside he could discern a collection of bones congregated at the bottom. Edwards was soup. After fifteen years, she deserved better than to go out like that.
As a boy he’d dreamed about flying through space in his own rocket ship, rescuing pretty girls. The Tamara wasn’t his, and the prettiest girl was beyond saving.
Avery blew out a couple of deep breaths and struggled to get back on task. He removed his waste tubes with care and watched as their contents flowed back into the tank. He stood, up to his ass, in shit of his own making while
the slurry continued its lazy swirl down the drain. When they were finally clear to climb out, there was still enough goo on their feet that they slid across the room, grabbing at pod handles to stay upright.
Avery hit the opposite wall and thumbed the button that silenced the alarm, leaned over the one working computer and held a bleary eye to a retinal scanner that failed to identify him. He stepped back and let Rodriquez have a go while he struggled into a set of coveralls that twisted and clung to his still wet legs despite his best efforts to get them straightened out.
He was fighting with the zipper when Rodriquez gave his assessment. “We’re fucked.”
It was the inflection that told the tale. “What about the rest of the fleet?”
Rodriquez just shrugged. The computer showed they’d been travelling normally, but for way too long, when their power had simply vanished. If they didn’t get it back up soon the pods would start shutting down by reverse priority order.
The problem was that the fuel cells weren’t disconnected—they were drained, and auxiliary power was dropping.
A panicked voice came over the com. “They’re alive.”
Rodriquez rolled his eyes. “Was that Callaghan? What the fuck’s he doing on the bridge?”
Avery shook his head. “Best find out.”
They ran through the ship, flattening themselves against the wall to make way for techs in too much of a hurry to observe protocol. Rodriquez clapped him on the shoulder. “Glad to see someone useful is awake, but Callaghan’s an idiot. How many people gotta die before they leave him in charge?”
Avery stopped just outside the bridge but the answers on the other side of the door didn’t care if he was ready to hear them. “He’s the last of the civilian command.”
Rodriguez held open the door. “Want me to shoot him?”
He laughed as he walked through. “Not yet.”
Still naked from his pod, Callaghan leaned heavily against the helm. His entire left side was a withered mess of atrophied muscle; the clear result of cheap electrodes. Avery resisted the urge to run his hands over limbs he’d already assessed. “Sit rep?” he asked.
Callaghan turned. He looked frightened but hopeful as he slammed his palm down on a control panel initiating an emergency landing procedure. “I’ve saved us,” he announced.
The ship bucked and groaned as hundreds of magnetic clamps let go and ejectors launched the satellites that would stay behind. Without manual guidance, all these vital systems were locked into predetermined paths meant for a different planet.
Avery hurried across the deck. “What have you done? Where’s the captain?”
Callaghan staggered over to the captain’s chair. As he sat down, his voice shook with false bravado. “I’m the captain. Buckle up boys. We’re going in.”
Avery ignored him to study the screen. There were gaps in the fleet and hordes of tiny adversaries attacked every ship that remained, sipping energy and initiating widespread panic—the airwaves were a garbled mess of terse voices issuing contradictory orders. However, with no evidence of debris from the missing ships he was hesitant to correlate disappearance with destruction.
“Well, ain’t that convenient.” Rodriquez leaned over Avery’s shoulder, pointing to a second data stream. Beckoning from below was a planet the computer deemed habitable. The visible portion showed a vast ocean surrounding a large continental landmass and a few islands. There were no signs of advanced civilization, past or present.
“Very.”
Rodriquez snorted as he pointed to another screen. “Callaghan’s not the only civie to have panicked.”
More blips on the screen broke formation, forcing the rest of the fleet to follow suit. Avery looked back at the planetary data. He felt like he stood at the mouth of a cattle chute, but there was nowhere else to go and no time to worry about anything beyond the degree of their entry.
Avery buckled into the helmsman’s seat and disengaged the computer guidance system. He attempted to make course corrections as Rodriquez read from a manual. The monitors showed other ships doing the same, but not all. A couple skipped off the atmosphere and careened back into space, others over-corrected to plummet towards the planet too steeply. They broke apart, creating obstacles for those who followed.
As they neared the planet, the magnitude of error in Avery’s course corrections increased exponentially. He’d come in too hot and missed the main continent.
The screen revealed a swarm of tiny points funnelling towards the planet in their wake—whatever had brought all this down on them hadn’t lost interest yet. Rodriquez’s voice was flat and fatalistic. “You think they’ll follow us in?”
Avery rotated the ship, using sideways displacement to steer them towards a small island. The planet’s gravity grabbed hold of him like a vice, forcing him deeper into the chair and making speech difficult as the Tamara’s pre-programmed landing sequence released its six landing craft.
“I hope so, it’s the only way we’ll get any payback for being trapped here. Now find a seat and buckle in. This is gonna be rough.”
Ekki stood on the hillside, pretending she wasn’t alone.
Before her an assortment of divergent patterns grew in a clump. So greatly had they changed during her last sleep cycle that she couldn’t predict what they would look like by the time she checked on them next. While most of her terrestrial creations still fanned out low, hugging the ground, these few had grown tall. They had branched as they climbed, sprouting flattened spheres at each of their terminal ends. They reached for the duplicitous sun, unknowingly threatening their unchanged brethren.
Ekki leaned to examine them more closely, despairing at the constancy of their change when her own existence was most terribly fixed. She brushed up against the plants with a melancholy affection that dislodged a puff of fine particles. It was the beginning of a cycle she had been forced to end many times. Some of the pollen clung to her outer layer, others drifted on the breeze towards distant relations with no understanding of the danger.
In time the flowers would evolve until they required the assistance of other creatures to propagate, which would likewise evolve until the ground was covered with myriad forms of life. It was always so beautiful… until the Aloika started to hunt, and corrupted everything.
She had shielded the planet to the best of her ability, cut herself off from all of the others the Conductor had trapped in this system, even Hetchi—yet still the Aloika got through to menace her children. Ekki had covered most of the planet with water both cold and deep. It quenched the Aloika’s fire almost instantly, protecting those that dwelled below. On land, all she could do was initiate a freeze and start again.
Ekki despaired as she cradled a first flower. How long could she postpone the inevitable?
Before she could answer the question she was distracted by a violent disruption of the shield around the planet. Vast beings of various size and shape burst through the upper atmosphere. The mammoth creatures cleared a path for tens of thousands of Aloika who swarmed through the breach in pursuit. Without grace, they pitched themselves against the descending bulks in a frenzied and futile attack that belied them ever having been star dancers.
Revulsion mingled with hope as she watched the Aloika suicide against hulls that refused to admit them. It was impossible to tell if they attacked out of fear or hunger. What in the stars had found her? Allies? Prey? Had a new enemy come to threaten her garden?
The beings kept a steady trajectory, either unconcerned with the Aloika or incapable of evading them. Any hope for companionship was crushed as Ekki watched them fail to slow their descent. They were a disparate group, and they were in trouble. She wasn’t strong enough to save them all, but she called the winds to catch those closest to her, rocking them gently to disperse their momentum while she buffeted the Aloika away. Even from this distance she could hear their collective hiss, but it was of no consequence.
Thunderous crashes rocked the ground as the hulks impacted with the pla
net, crushing untold thousands of her emerging patterns. She mourned their losses as she descended the foothills, swatting away the few Aloika who challenged her directly. They were visionless cowards who threatened the vulnerable from the safety of a mob. Their punishment had taught them nothing.
She reached the nearest impact site and paused, uncertain. She gazed upward towards the distant moon that imprisoned Hetchi and wondered if the perforations in her shield were large enough to let her speak to him. “Can you hear me Hetchi?”
Ekki pushed down her disappointment at the silence. Perhaps he was too far away. Perigree was still days away, she would keep trying. For now, she was still on her own.
Avery placed his hands to either side of his head in an attempt to silence the noise that surrounded him. He hadn’t expected to make it. Their landing had been hard enough to knock out all of their electronics but he didn’t need sensors to tell them they still had company. Outside, the aliens hammered against the hull like giant hail. His head pounded in syncopation. Through it all were moans, curses and pleas for help that prodded him. He took two slow breaths and he opened his eyes. The emergency lights flickered.
“Rodriquez, you breathing?” he asked as he hauled himself up.
“Over here.”
Avery made his way across the bridge, checking on other crew members who’d made it out of stasis and assessing the damage. The landers were meant to be taken apart and repurposed, but there was enough buckling of the supports that he didn’t imagine the envisioned city would ever be more than an artist’s sketch. Across the room, Rodriquez guided an uncooperative Callaghan back into his captain’s chair. “We need to find some steady light,” Rodriguez called, “and secure our position.”
A shout from across the room cut off Callaghan’s reply. “Heads up.”