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

by Gardner Dozois

  Mai points to a signpost near the gates.

  CAMP NIKE

  UNITED NATIONS–SPONSORED

  ALTERNATIVE SETTLEMENT ZONE

  NO WEAPONS ALLOWED

  PLACE ALL WEAPONS IN THE

  MARKED BINS FOR DESTRUCTION

  The sign’s in Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and English, and also emblazoned with the internationally-recognizable logos of all the camp’s primary private sector sponsors.

  There’ll be more of that when people got inside. Shoes and clothing by Nike. Dinners by ConAgra. TV by Samsung. Computers by Dell.

  The men read the sign, and start shaking their heads.

  This, Mai thinks, is a moment of balance, where the world around her could swing one way or another.

  Duc takes initiative, to her surprise, and waves at the men cheerily. He flips his faceplate open, so they can see his expression, while Mai curses him silently and fights the urge to grab him and yank him to safety.

  All it’ll take is one well-aimed shot from a sniper somewhere out there to kill him, now. Or for one of these men with an AKS-74 to spook.

  He might as well not even wear the armor, she thinks, absently reaching for her hip again.

  There is no gun, though. There never will be.

  Mai’s not close enough for her translation software to help her understand what the group of men is arguing over. But Duc has gotten close enough to be surrounded.

  “They want to see the food,” he reports.

  “What?”

  “They want to make sure they’re not being tricked into a prison camp. They won’t disarm until they see that what they were told about the camps was true.”

  One of the men holds up a cheap, black smartphone and points at it.

  Six months ago these things were dumped into North Korea by the millions. Each phone disguises its texting and data traffic as background static, and otherwise functions as a basic, jamming-hardened satphone. Between the satellite routing and peer-to-peer whisper comms, they created a “darknet” outside of Pyongyang’s official control.

  The Beloved Leader decreed death for anyone caught with one, but the experiment succeeded. Well enough to spirit out video and pictures of starving children, of brutal crackdowns on attempts to protest Pyongyang by desperate, starving peasants, and all the other atrocities that had built the case for international intervention.

  It has been through these phones that messages explaining the camps and invasion had been sent twenty-four hours ago.

  Promising food and safety.

  These soldiers are defecting, and can see the walls. Now they want to see the food.

  It’s all about the food.

  “Three of you, leave your weapons in the bin,” Duc says, “go in and come back out to report what you see.”

  It is a reasonable compromise. Duc and Mai let the three unarmed men pass through, and five minutes later they’re back, excited and shouting at their comrades.

  One of the men whistles back toward the crest of the hill. As if melting out of the countryside, a river of people carrying what possessions they had came trickling down the hillside, and out of the distant scrub where they’d been hiding.

  The first two hundred new citizens of Camp Nike stream in through the gates, and once they’re through, all that is left are the full bins of AKS-74s waiting to be destroyed.

  “Were you worried?” Duc asks as they watch the North Koreans line up at refugee registration booths.

  “Yes,” she replies. “I think we’d be foolish not to worry when people with guns walk up to us.”

  Duc thumps his chest. “With these on? We’re invincible here.”

  Maybe, Mai thinks. She looks back at the small city inside the walls. But we aren’t the only ones here, now, are we?

  * * *

  For forty-eight hours the stream of humanity continues. A thousand. Five thousand. Ten thousand. The Korean People’s Army is too busy chasing ghosts to notice right now: false reports about touchdowns. Jammed communications. Domination of their airspace.

  Satellite telescopes, early warning systems, and spyware pinpoints the point of origin of several missile launches. They die while still boosting up into the air, struck from above by high-powered lasers.

  Electromagnetic pulses rain down from heavy stealth aircraft drones, leaving any unshielded North Korean advanced military tech, which is far more than anyone realized, useless metal junk.

  By the time the North Koreans managed to haul out their ancient, analog Cold War-era artillery, Mai is on her way to the barracks to bunk down for her first real night of sleep.

  The shelling begins in earnest. A distant crumping sound, but without the accompanying whistle of the rounds falling.

  The Point Defense Array pops up. Green light flickers and sparks from the top of the almost floral-looking tower in the center of Camp Nike. Lines shimmer into the night sky as they track incoming artillery rounds.

  They’d been told during training that the green lasers were doing nothing more than “painting” the individual targets before the x-ray lasers slagged the incoming shells into nothing more than a slight metal mist.

  Mai watches the light show build in intensity for a few moments, just as awed by its beauty as she had been when she’d first seen it demonstrated.

  The bursts light up the undersides of the clouds. And not a single shell gets through.

  She wonders if she would still have the reflexes to get to cover if she ever hears the telltale whistle of an incoming round again, after living like this.

  * * *

  There might be thousands of Captain Nguyens in the Vietnamese military, Mai knows. But here at Camp Nike, there is only one. She is the sort of woman who straightens spines at a glance. They call her the Warrior of Binh Phuoc, and it’s rumored that she single-handedly kept that border region safe for years during the Cambodian Unrest.

  Nguyen’s been hopping in and out of helmet cameras all week long, moving them around like pawns on a chessboard.

  Now it’s time for Mai to face the chess master.

  Mai joins Trong Min Hoai, a member of her team, as they hop over a row of Japanese-donated grooming ’bots, rolling up the main street of Camp Nike sweeping up litter. They’re both in full Peacekeeping armor, servos whining as they work around her limbs to amplify her tiniest motions.

  In an already carefully-cultivated and manicured gaming park over to their right, a group of South Korean volunteers are combining literacy lessons with one of the role-playing games popular in the South.

  All it would take, Mai thinks, glancing up at the snap and crack of green Point Defense activity in the distance, is one artillery shell to sneak through and hit that park.

  But no one’s looking up. After a week, even the civilians are taking it for granted.

  Inside the ground floor of the temporary headquarters building, a nondescript ten-story instant skyscraper, Captain Nguyen stands in front of a podium and surveys the twenty fully power-armored members she’s called in.

  “LOCKDOWN,” declares an electronic system, and the doors thud shut. A soft blue glow indicates that the room is nominally clean of electronic surveillance.

  Everyone’s links to the outside die. Soldiers remove their helmets and let them hang from dummy straps on the back of their armor.

  It’s strange to see all these faces.

  Most relax in place, Mai’s one of the few who grits her teeth at that. She comes from Vietnam’s elite Marine Police, suffused with discipline and duty. Other soldiers have traveled in from less formal corners of Vietnam.

  Mai’s tempted to say it’s Western influence, but she comes from a family that has quietly welcomed the easing of the Party’s influence over the long years.

  Her grandfather served in the Republic of Vietnam Army in 1975. He melted back into civilian life when Saigon fell. Unlike various Hmong or other American allies he had not been lucky enough to secure a trip to the United States. Instead he endured, raised a family
, and placidly waited for the wheel to turn. As it had in Europe or Russia.

  That came almost without their noticing. Now Vietnam jostles with South Korea and Japan for economic strength.

  Which is what got her here.

  South Korea is playing down its role in this humanitarian incursion of sovereign national borders. Japan knows better than to stick any of its troops on foreign soil anywhere the Pacific Ocean touches land, even if it’s a peacekeeping mission.

  No one wants American soldiers involved in this.

  The UN has pushed hard to get Vietnamese forces to lead this. They believe they’re in the best position, historically and culturally.

  Behind the scenes promises and paybacks in the form of infrastructure, debt forgiveness from creditor nations, and military upgrades have been fairly epic.

  And if all goes well, Vietnam becomes a real world player, able to use this as a bargaining chip to leverage itself up onto the table with the world’s most powerful nations.

  If all goes well.

  The hopes of many Vietnamese politicians ride with the twenty armored soldiers in the room.

  “There’s been a change of plans,” Nguyen announces.

  * * *

  Nguyen casts full three-dimensional images of the camp from an overhead position up on the wall for them to see.

  “Due to the initial success of the disinformation campaign and disabling of North Korean military machinery, we grew this camp faster than anyone could have anticipated. We are bringing in more power: one of those airships that’s been helping blanket the area with wireless networks will soon be relaying a microwave laser from an Indian power satellite, which will let us expand the Point Defense Array’s zone of coverage and move our walls outward.

  “We need more living space, and more farmland. The UN is calling our mission a success, and the other camps are moving timetables forward as a result as well.”

  Mai glances around. Everyone looks excited, a bit anticipatory.

  This has been the goal, hasn’t it? Establish a secure base. Bring in refugees. Feed and educate, build a different civil and economic society on the fly, and with success, expand the borders of these safe zones.

  Within a decade, the camps could become cities in their own right: self-sustaining and continuing to grow. Tiny petri dishes of democracy, trade and world capitalism, their walls expanding outwards further and further until they were all of the country they’d been set up in.

  It beat decades-long war.

  Online massively multiplayer simulations indicated that it was also far, far cheaper. After just a few years, the citizens of the camps plug into global trade and currency, paying their own way. Becoming customers for large defense manufacturers. Full citizens of the peaceful, trading world at large.

  That’s the plan.

  And now they’re accelerating the timetable. Which will mean what? Mai swallows her worries and pays attention.

  Captain Nguyen continues with the briefing. “We’ve been coming under more frequent artillery attack from the North Korean Army over the last seventy-two hours. The shells have yet to penetrate the laser array, but we can’t afford to rely on that working one hundred percent of the time.

  “Thanks to our American friends in charge of the array we’ve identified the location of the artillery battery firing on us. We intend to end these bombardments during wall extension operations. You are the team that will do this.”

  Nguyen looks at them all, then seems to pause for a beat as she looks at Mai.

  Did that really happen? Is she being singled out? Or does everyone else in the room feel that Nguyen is talking to just them?

  “There will be no North Korean deaths,” Nguyen states flatly, “or any bodily harm as a direct result of your actions. You are there to disable the weaponry, not engage. Remember: I will be watching. So will the rest of the world.”

  And that is all.

  * * *

  Captain Nguyen physically leads the “attack.”

  Forty armored figures in UN pale blue trot out of the camp, double file, following her. Half of them are a mish-mash of other units from Eastern Europe and Africa, the other half are Nguyen’s warriors. They plunge into the tree line to the west of the camp, cutting new paths through the undergrowth.

  They cover the six miles to the North Korean firebase in about half an hour, and spread out into a skirmish line as they approach the elevated artillery base.

  The moment they begin to walk up the slope the North Koreans open fire on them from a sandbagged bunker at the crest of the low hill.

  Mai flinches at the chatter and fury. Her instinct to seek cover screams from somewhere deep in her. A round thuds into her midsection, but the armor does its job, sloughing off energy and dissipating mass.

  Her stride isn’t even affected.

  “Keep the line straight, hold out your arms,” Nguyen mutters to them all via helmet communications. “Show them we’re not armed.”

  They’ve been shot at in training. But these rounds are meant to kill them, not get them used to the impact.

  This is the real thing. Those people out there are trying to kill Mai.

  And all she’s going to do is hold out her hands and walk forward.

  The implacable pale blue line keeps moving up the hill.

  Mai feels round after round, entire bursts, carom off her armor like birdshot before she’s halfway up the hill. And then, finally, the North Korean gunners break and make a run for it.

  “Duc, Mai, disable the bunker,” Nguyen orders.

  Mai leaps free of the line with an exultant grunt, clearing fifteen feet of ground in a half restrained hop that has her slamming down in front of the bunker’s still-steaming gun in a second.

  Duc’s right by her.

  “No one’s inside. No heat signatures,” Duc reports. He rips the bunker apart, pulling the sandbags out and kicking the walls in.

  Mai yanks the roof’s timbers free, dropping the sandbags they’d supported down into a warren of cots and radio equipment. The crunching sounds from all this are distant and suppressed to her, like she’s turned the volume down on a Hollywood action movie.

  In three full breaths, they’ve reduced the fortified position to sandy rubble.

  Mai strips the machine gun down to its individual components, then grabs both ends of the barrel and twists it into uselessness. She repeats that with the spare barrel, then looks over at the ammunition.

  “The Ploughshares team can take care of the ammo,” Duc says. “They’ll catch up soon enough.”

  Something kicks her in the back, jostling her. Mai spins around and knocks away the gun of a scared soldier that has managed to sneak up on her.

  He stands there, stupefied, holding his hand, waiting for whatever comes next.

  “Mai!” Duc shouts.

  She has her fist in the air, ready to bring it down and crack his skull, but freezes in place. Her heart is hammering, her mouth dry. She can’t escape the adrenaline-pounding certainty that she almost died.

  But of course, she hasn’t. The man is no threat.

  “Leave,” she shouts into her helmet, and the translation booms out at the soldier.

  He rabbits away.

  “Mai?” Duc asks.

  “I am fine,” she tells him.

  Mai glances back. There’s activity in the air: ten heavy lift airships ponderously moving more wall segments in, to be dropped in place to secure the territory they are clearing.

  Soon the huge, articulated Ploughshares trucks will be along to gather up everything here for recycling.

  Duc tosses down seven mangled AKS-74s. “Then let’s go,” he says, and they’re on the move again, loping in long, impossible strides to catch up to the advancing line.

  As they catch up, Mai notices that Nguyen’s entire right side is blackened. She must have absorbed a large explosion of some kind while Mai’d been destroying the bunker. Other soldiers show signs of absorbing more fire, but the rate of it is fadi
ng. The North Koreans are mostly retreating into the woods on the west side of the hill.

  Mostly.

  One enterprising gun crew is trying to bring their huge 152mm cannon to bear on the advancing line.

  For the first time Mai sees Nguyen’s calm crack, and she hastily orders another pair of Peacekeepers to disable the cannon.

  The two armored soldiers snap into motion, and then calmly shepherd the North Koreans away from the weapon with shooing motions, ignoring the small arms fire. Once the North Koreans are clear, they smash the aiming mechanism, then get to work on the tube itself.

  A North Korean officer runs up to the two blue armored soldiers, pistol high, screaming at them. His face is red, and he looks almost ready to cry with frustration and rage.

  The distant pop of his pistol as he empties his entire clip into the backplate of the nearest Peacekeeper’s armor is accentuated by Mai’s translation software.

  “Stand and fight, cowards! Face me like real soldiers,” the artificial voice keeps murmuring.

  Mai feels sympathy for him.

  This isn’t a proper war.

  None of them have trained for this.

  It makes little sense, to either that officer or her, on some deep level.

  Part of her craves a fight. A real fight. A test of skill, courage, and arms.

  “Here’s the artillery,” Nguyen murmurs to them all. “On me. Destroy it all.”

  Mai and Duc move through the firebase with the rest of the team, dismantling the twelve big artillery guns and countless small arms and machine guns.

  Most of the machinery is in ill repair. Only five of the twelve look like they are actually firing, and a small bunker off to one side has been stacked with dud rounds. Which Mai figured Ploughshares could deal with. Suit or not, she didn’t want to be playing with those.

  * * *

  There’s been one casualty, and Nguyen is not pleased with this. The wounded Korean is on a pod-like stretcher, hooked up to emergency life-saving equipment while a medic they brought along treats him.

  “This could be a public relations disaster,” Nguyen tells Mai.

  “What happened?” Mai asks.

  “He threw a grenade, but it bounced back at him,” Nguyen says, shaking her head. She’s removed her helmet and holds it tucked under an arm. “We were too aggressive. I fought against the new timetable, but was overruled. UN headquarters are emboldened by all this success. Now look at this, all people are going to see is this idiot on their late-night television, wounded.”