The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  Where magnets yanked it into the bowels of the machine. Where it went unnoticed by the engineers.

  “By the time the engineers realized there was a problem and cut the flow of diesel fuel, it was too late. Without speed control, the rotor accelerated beyond its tolerances. The voltage regulators couldn’t keep up.”

  “The power surge,” said Pabst. “The blown fuses.”

  Gottlieb said, “This happened just as Klaus carried his battery to the test site. The batteries contain delicate circuitry. It’s susceptible to—“ He opened his bird-watching notebook, read the phrase Osterhagen had provided. “—electromagnetic pulse.”

  As for why Gretel had done this, Gottlieb explained how the close call played on Klaus’s phobia. No mere warning could have carried the same visceral impact. “I predict Klaus will make rapid progress in his training. His sister orchestrated this experience to hone him. Temper him.”

  Von Westarp sunk into a brooding silence. It lasted several minutes. The only sound was a faint click when Pabst turned on a lamp.

  “Do you know what this means?” von Westarp whispered.

  Yes, thought Gottlieb. She’s too dangerous, too subtle to be let loose. Please see that.

  “If there were a God,” said von Westarp, “she would know His mind, and thwart Him. He has been replaced.”

  Like a sweater caught on a burr, Gottlieb’s breath hitched in his chest. Von Westarp was making a grievous error, thinking he could use Gretel. But Gottlieb had narrowly avoided one execution this week, and couldn’t bear to start over again. Perhaps it was weakness, perhaps it was cowardice, but he kept his thoughts to himself.

  “Excellent work, Gottlieb. If you hadn’t persevered, the full scope of my success might have gone unrecognized a great deal longer.”

  Gottlieb knew when he was dismissed. He should have melted with relief, but he couldn’t. Not while one loose end remained.

  As he departed, he heard von Westarp address the colonel: “I’m troubled, Pabst. This flaw in the batteries is unacceptable. Go down to the laboratory….”

  * * *

  Von Westarp called off the search for Oskar’s body the next morning. The excavation had grown so deep and wide it threatened to disrupt training operations. It did make a convenient grave, however. They tossed Osterhagen’s body in the crater before filling it.

  Gottlieb said a silent prayer for his friend, then took a walk to the meadow.

  Gretel was there. But she had company today. Von Westarp had assigned a soldier to attend her. Right now the private carried an armload of buttercups and lavender. Another soldier had been sent to the mess hall, to collect empty milk bottles that Gretel could use as vases.

  And just like that, the last loose thread unraveled before Gottlieb’s eyes. Gottlieb had worked at it well into the night, as he drank to Osterhagen’s memory. But he’d made no headway.

  With a minimum of effort, Gretel had managed to save her brother’s life while simultaneously ensuring the near miss would become a scar he carried for the rest of his life. And along the way she managed to demonstrate—vividly—a major flaw in the battery design.

  All this in the course of hanging wildflowers in her room. Which, doubtless, she would have done even if she’d had no need to rescue Klaus. She liked flowers.

  Gretel was nothing if not efficient. And yet she’d gone so far out of her way to change her routine on the day Oskar died. She hadn’t done it before or since. Why hunt mushrooms on that one day?

  Because Gretel had wanted Gottlieb to see her.

  When they’d first met, Osterhagen had said Gottlieb was Pabst’s dogsbody. But that was wrong. Not a dogsbody—a cat’s-paw. He’d been Gretel’s cat’s-paw.

  She’d arranged everything so that Gottlieb would dissect her plan and lay it out for von Westarp. Just to instill von Westarp with a sense of awe. From now on, Gretel could do anything she wanted.

  Who controlled the farm now? Gottlieb couldn’t say for certain. But he did know that from now on he lived by Gretel’s indulgence as much as von Westarp’s.

  She had murdered God. Nature had lost its grip on her.

  Copyright © Ian Tregillis 2010

  Cover art © copyright Gary Kelley 2010

  Books by Ian Tregillis

  Bitter Seeds (Tor Books, 2010)

  The Coldest War (forthcoming from Tor Books)

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  Washington, D.C., remained the de jure capital of the United States. Harris Moffatt III had never been there. Neither had his father, President Harris Moffatt II. His grandfather, President Harris Moffatt I, got out of Washington one jump ahead of the Krolp. That the USA was still any kind of going concern came from his ever-so-narrow escape.

  Harris Moffatt III was also Prime Minister of Canada, or of that small and mountainous chunk of Canada the Krolp didn’t control. The two countries had amalgamated early on, the better to resist the invading aliens. That, of course, was before they realized how far out of their weight they were fighting.

  When the enormous ships were first detected, between Mars’ orbit and Earth’s, every nation radioed messages of welcome and greeting. The Krolp ignored them all. The enormous ships landed. There were still videos—Harris Moffatt III had them on his computer—of human delegations greeting the aliens with bouquets and bands playing joyful music. At last! Contact with another intelligent race! Proof we weren’t alone in the universe!

  “Better if we were,” the President muttered. When the Krolp came out, they came out shooting. Some of those fifty-year-old videos broke off quite abruptly. And “shooting” was the understatement of the millennium. Their weapons made ours seem like kids’ slingshots against machine guns.

  Seeing how the Krolp wanted things to go, half a dozen militaries launched H-bomb-tipped missiles at the great ships. They couldn’t live through that, could they? As a matter of fact, they could. Most of the missiles got shot down. Most of the ones that did land on target didn’t go off. And the handful that did harmed the Krolpish ships not a bit and the rampaging, plundering aliens running around loose very little.

  They weren’t invulnerable. Humans could kill them. Unless somebody got amazingly lucky, the usual cost was about two armored divisions and all their matériel for one Krolp. Back in the old days, the United States was the richest country in the world. All the pre-Krolp books said so. Not even it could spend men and equipment on that scale.

  Back before the Krolp came, a fellow named Clarke had written, Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Harris Moffatt III didn’t know about that. What the Krolp did wasn’t magic. The best scientists in the USA—the best ones left alive, anyhow—had been studying captured or stolen Krolpish gadgets for half a century now. Their conclusion was that the aliens manipulated gravity and the strong and weak forces as thoroughly as humans exploited electromagnetism.

  Humans could use Krolpish devices and weapons. They could even use them against the invaders, for as long as they kept working. What humans couldn’t do was make more such devices themselves. The machines weren’t there. Neither was the theory. And neither was the engineering to turn theory into practice.

  And so Harris Moffatt III ruled an attenuated state between the Rockies and the Wasatch Range. He understood too well that he ruled here not least because the Krolp hadn’t yet taken the trouble to overrun this rump USA (and Canada).

  From everything he’d heard, the United State
s still was the richest country in the world. The richest human-ruled country, anyhow. And if that wasn’t a telling measure of mankind’s futility in the face of the aliens, Harris Moffatt III was damned if he could figure out what would be.

  * * *

  His appointments secretary stuck his head into the Oval Office. “Excuse me, Mr. President, but Grelch wants to see you.”

  “Tell him I’ll be with him in a few minutes, Jack,” Moffatt said. “I really do need to study this appropriations bill.” Calling the economy in the independent USA rotten would have praised it too much. So would calling it hand-to-mouth. Robbing Peter to pay Paul came closest, except Paul mostly got an IOU instead.

  Jack Pagliarone turned to pass the news on to Grelch—but Grelch didn’t wait to hear it. The Krolp shoved past the appointments secretary and into the office. “I see you, Moffatt,” he said—loudly—in his own language.

  “I see you, Grelch,” Harris Moffatt III answered—resignedly—also in Krolpish. There was a lot of Grelch to see. He was big as a horse: bigger, because he was a tiger-striped centauroid with a head like a vampire jack-o’-lantern. He had sharp, jagged jaw edges—they weren’t exactly teeth, but they might as well have been—and enormous eyes that glowed like a cat’s. He smelled more like Limburger cheese than anything else.

  “I have some things to tell you, Moffatt,” he declared. No titles of respect: the Krolp had them for one another, but rarely wasted them on humans.

  “I listen,” the President said, more resignedly yet, wondering what Grelch would want this time. He was bound to want something, and he’d make trouble if he didn’t get whatever it was.

  Not for the first time, Harris Moffatt III wondered what Grelch had done to be forced to flee to Grand Junction. A dozen or so alien renegades lived here. Humans had learned a lot from them, and from their predecessors. But they were deadly dangerous. They were Krolp, and had Krolpish defenses and Krolpish weapons. And they were almost all of them sons of bitches even by Krolpish standards. No alien who hadn’t done something awful to his own kind would have to stoop so low as to live with humans.

  “I need snarfar, Moffatt. You’ve got to get me snarfar,” Grelch said.

  “I can do that, Grelch.” The President tried to hide his relief. Some Krolp chewed snarfar. It gave them a buzz, the way nicotine or maybe cocaine did for humans. Harris Moffatt III didn’t know the details; snarfar poisoned people. He did know the aliens turned mean—well, meaner—when they couldn’t get the stuff.

  But he could get it. They grew it in the flatlands of the Midwest—what had formerly been wheat and corn country. He still had connections in the lands his grandfather once governed. People and things informally slid over the border all the time. He’d arranged to bring in snarfar before. He’d known he would have to do it again, for one Krolp or another, before too long.

  “You better do that, Moffatt. By the stars, you better,” Grelch snarled. He turned—which, with that four-legged carcass, needed some room—and stomped out of the Oval Office. The ripe reek that came off his hide lingered in the air.

  The President sighed. “That’s always so much fun.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jack Pagliarone said sympathetically. Even a renegade Krolp, an alien who’d put himself beyond the pale of his own kind, was convinced down to the bottom of whatever he used for a soul that he was better than any mere human ever born. All the evidence of fifty years of conquest and occupation said he had a point, too.

  “If we didn’t need to pick their brains…” Harris Moffatt III sighed again. Humanity needed nothing more.

  “By the stars, Mr. President, if the first big uprising had worked—” Jack sadly shook his head.

  Back when Harris Moffatt III was a boy, Americans, Russians, and Chinese all rebelled against the centauroids at once. They rocked the Krolp, no doubt about it. They killed forty or fifty of them, some with stolen arms, others with poison. But close didn’t count. The Krolp crushed mankind again, more thoroughly this time.

  Jack had spoken English with the President. Humans in the free USA mostly did. Even humans in Krolp-occupied America did when they talked among themselves. But the appointments secretary said By the stars anyhow.

  Well, Harris Moffatt III sometimes said By the stars himself. More and more humans these days believed what the Krolp believed and tried to imitate the conquerors any way they could. Weren’t the Krolp stronger? Didn’t that prove they were wiser, too? Plenty of people thought so.

  The President had when he was younger. Like his father before him, like Harris Moffatt IV now, he’d spent several years in St. Louis, the center from which the Krolp ruled most of the USA. He’d gone to what was called, with unusual politeness, a finishing school. In point of fact, he’d been a hostage for his father’s good behavior, as his older son was hostage now for his.

  He’d learned Krolpish—learned it more thoroughly, that is, because he’d already started lessons in Grand Junction. He’d learned the Krolp creed, too. He’d kept company with the pampered sons and daughters of the men and women who helped the centauroids run the occupied USA. Some of them were descendants of people who’d served in the American government with Harris Moffatt I. They were all much more Krolpified than he was. They thought him a hick from the sticks, and weren’t shy about telling him so.

  By the time he finished finishing school, he was much more Krolpified himself than he had been when he got there. He was so much more Krolpified, in fact, that he didn’t want to go back to the independent United States. His own people had come to look like hicks to him.

  He hoped he’d got over that. He hoped Harris Moffatt IV would get over it when the kid came home. You had to hope. If you didn’t hope, you’d give up. And where would free humans be then?

  Come to that, where were free humans now? In places like Grand Junction, Colorado, that was where. Happy day!

  * * *

  One of the men with whom the President had gone to finishing school was the grandson of an important official in the DEA. No one in the United States these days, free or occupied, worried about enforcing human drug laws. No one had time for that kind of nonsense. But Ommat—he even had a Krolpish name—knew how to get his hands on snarfar, and how to slip it discreetly over the border. Grelch got his chew. He didn’t bother Harris Moffatt III for a while.

  As far as Moffatt was concerned, that was all to the good. He had other things to worry about. The Krolp in St. Louis announced that they were going to send an embassy to Grand Junction. Not that they wanted to send one, but that they were going to. Asking permission of humans wasn’t a Krolpish habit.

  The U.S. Army still had a few tanks that ran. It had plenty of machine guns. And it had several dozen Krolpish weapons, which cut through a tank’s armor as if it weren’t there. As soon as one of those weapons hit it, it wasn’t.

  Several suits of Krolpish body armor had fallen into American hands, too. The only trouble was, humans had no way to adapt those to their own shape. Nothing people knew how to do would cut or weld the transparent stuff. The tools… The science… The engineering…

  Harris Moffatt III received the envoy and his retinue with a mixture of human and Krolpish ceremonial. The Stars and Stripes and the Maple Leaf flew behind him. He wore a polyester suit and tie and shirt from the days before the invaders came. Bugs and moths ignored polyester. They sure didn’t ignore wool or linen, the independent USA’s usual fabrics.

  A star shone over the President’s left shoulder. That sort of display was standard among the Krolp. With them, as far as human observers and savants could tell, it was a real star, even if a tiny one. And it hung in the air with no means of support at all, visible or otherwise. The Krolp routinely did things that drove human physicists to drink.

  Humans…imitated and improvised. This star was made from LEDs surrounding a battery pack. It hung from invisibly fine wires. It wasn’t as good as one of the originals, but it showed Harris Moffatt III claimed sovereign status. (Its weakness might say he
didn’t deserve it, but he refused to dwell on that.)

  A star followed the Krolp envoy, too. His name, Moffatt had been given to understand, was Prilk. His star was brighter than the human-made simulacrum, but did not float so high. He was a representative, not a sovereign.

  Prilk’s overlord wasn’t the Krolpish governor of North America. He was the ruler of the Krolp, back on their home planet. He wasn’t exactly a king or a president or an ayatollah. Not being a Krolp, Harris Moffatt III didn’t understand exactly what he was. He was the boss: Moffatt understood that much. Krolp here could petition him. So could humans. Letters took months to reach the homeworld. Decisions took…as long as they took. Answers took more months to come back. Once in a blue moon, those answers made things better for people, not worse. It wasn’t likely, but it did happen.

  Prilk’s guards kept a wary eye on the American soldiers carrying Krolpish hand weapons. Those were dangerous to them and to the envoy, unlike almost any merely human arms. Reading Krolpish body language and expressions was a guessing game for people. Harris Moffatt III’s guess was that the centauroids thought humans had no business getting their hands on real weapons. Well, too bad.

  The envoy surprised Moffatt: he said, “I see you, Mr. President,” in slow, labored English.

  “And I see you, Ambassador Prilk,” the President replied, also in English. He hadn’t expected to use his own language at all in this confab. He smiled broadly.

  Then the envoy went back to his own harsh tongue: “I see you, Moffatt.” In Krolpish, he didn’t waste time with any polite titles. That he’d done it in English was remarkable enough.