The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I couldn’t figure out how I felt about that.

  Jeru was watching me. “Tar—do you think we should all be frightened for ourselves, like the Academician?” Her accent was strong, unidentifiable.

  “No, sir.”

  “No.” Jeru studied Pael with contempt. “We are in a yacht, Academician. Something has happened to the Brightly. The ’dome was designed to break up into yachts like this.” She sniffed. “We have air, and it isn’t foul yet.” She winked at me. “Maybe we can do a little damage to the Ghosts before we die, tar. What do you think?”

  I grinned. “Yes, sir.”

  Pael lifted his head and stared at me with salt water eyes. “Lethe. You people are monsters.” His accent was gentle, a lilt. “Even such a child as this. You embrace death—”

  Jeru grabbed Pael’s jaw in a massive hand, and pinched the joint until he squealed. “Captain Teid grabbed you, Academician; she threw you here, into the yacht, before the bulkhead came down. I saw it. If she hadn’t taken the time to do that, she would have made it herself. Was she a monster? Did she embrace death?” And she pushed Pael’s face away.

  For some reason I hadn’t thought about the rest of the crew until that moment. I guess I have a limited imagination. Now, I felt adrift. The captain—dead?

  I said, “Excuse me, Commissary. How many other yachts got out?”

  “None,” she said steadily, making sure I had no illusions. “Just this one. They died doing their duty, tar. Like the captain.”

  Of course she was right, and I felt a little better. Whatever his character, Pael was too valuable not to save. As for me, I had survived through sheer blind chance, through being in the right place when the walls came down: if the captain had been close, her duty would have been to pull me out of the way and take my place. It isn’t a question of human values but of economics: a lot more is invested in the training and experience of a Captain Teid—or a Pael—than in me.

  But Pael seemed more confused than I was.

  First Officer Till came bustling back with a heap of equipment. “Put these on.” He handed out pressure suits. They were what we called slime suits in training: lightweight skinsuits, running off a backpack of gen-enged algae. “Move it,” said Till. “Impact with the Ghost cruiser in four minutes. We don’t have any power; there’s nothing we can do but ride it out.”

  I crammed my legs into my suit.

  Jeru complied, stripping off her robe to reveal a hard, scarred body. But she was frowning. “Why not heavier armor?”

  For answer, Till picked out a gravity-wave handgun from the gear he had retrieved. Without pausing he held it to Pael’s head and pushed the fire button.

  Pael twitched.

  Till said, “See? Nothing is working. Nothing but bio systems, it seems.” He threw the gun aside.

  Pael closed his eyes, breathing hard.

  Till said to me, “Test your comms.”

  I closed up my hood and faceplate and began intoning, “One, two, three …” I could hear nothing.

  Till began tapping at our backpacks, resetting the systems. His hood started to glow with transient, pale blue symbols. And then, scratchily, his voice started to come through. “ … Five, six, seven—can you hear me, tar?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The symbols were bioluminescent. There were receptors on all our suits—photoreceptors, simple eyes—which could “read” the messages scrawled on our companions’ suits. It was a backup system meant for use in environments where anything higher-tech would be a liability. But obviously it would only work as long as we were in line of sight.

  “That will make life harder,” Jeru said. Oddly, mediated by software, she was easier to understand.

  Till shrugged. “You take it as it comes.” Briskly, he began to hand out more gear. “These are basic field belt kits. There’s some medical stuff: a suture kit, scalpel blades, blood-giving sets. You wear these syrettes around your neck, Academician. They contain painkillers, various gen-enged med-viruses … no, you wear it outside your suit, Pael, so you can reach it. You’ll find valve inlets here, on your sleeve, and here, on the leg.” Now came weapons. “We should carry handguns, just in case they start working, but be ready with these.” He handed out combat knives.

  Pael shrank back.

  “Take the knife, Academician. You can shave off that ugly beard, if nothing else.”

  I laughed out loud, and was rewarded with a wink from Till.

  I took a knife. It was a heavy chunk of steel, solid and reassuring. I tucked it in my belt. I was starting to feel a whole lot better.

  “Two minutes to impact,” Jeru said. I didn’t have a working chronometer; she must have been counting the seconds.

  “Seal up.” Till began to check the integrity of Pael’s suit; Jeru and I helped each other. Face seal, glove seal, boot seal, pressure check. Water check, oh-two flow, cee-oh-two scrub …

  When we were sealed I risked poking my head above Till’s chair.

  The Ghost ship filled space. The craft was kilometers across, big enough to have dwarfed the poor, doomed Brief Life Burns Brightly. It was a tangle of silvery rope of depthless complexity, occluding the stars and the warring fleets. Bulky equipment pods were suspended in the tangle.

  And everywhere there were Silver Ghosts, sliding like beads of mercury. I could see how the yacht’s emergency lights were returning crimson highlights from the featureless hides of Ghosts, so they looked like sprays of blood droplets across that shining perfection.

  “Ten seconds,” Till called. “Brace.”

  Suddenly silver ropes thick as tree trunks were all around us, looming out of the sky.

  And we were thrown into chaos again.

  I heard a grind of twisted metal, a scream of air. The hull popped open like an eggshell. The last of our air fled in a gush of ice crystals, and the only sound I could hear was my own breathing.

  The crumpling hull soaked up some of our momentum.

  But then the base of the yacht hit, and it hit hard.

  The chair was wrenched out of my grasp, and I was hurled upward. There was a sudden pain in my left arm. I couldn’t help but cry out.

  I reached the limit of my tether and rebounded. The jolt sent further waves of pain through my arm. From up there, I could see the others were clustered around the base of the First Officer’s chair, which had collapsed.

  I looked up. We had stuck like a dart in the outer layers of the Ghost ship. There were shining threads arcing all around us, as if a huge net had scooped us up.

  Jeru grabbed me and pulled me down. She jarred my bad arm, and I winced. But she ignored me, and went back to working on Till. He was under the fallen chair.

  Pael started to take a syrette of dope from the sachet around his neck.

  Jeru knocked his hand away. “You always use the casualty’s,” she hissed. “Never your own.”

  Pael looked hurt, rebuffed. “Why?”

  I could answer that. “Because the chances are you’ll need your own in a minute.”

  Jeru stabbed a syrette into Till’s arm.

  Pael was staring at me through his faceplate with wide, frightened eyes. “You’ve broken your arm.”

  Looking closely at the arm for the first time, I saw that it was bent back at an impossible angle. I couldn’t believe it, even through the pain. I’d never bust so much as a finger, all the way through training.

  Now Till jerked, a kind of miniature convulsion, and a big bubble of spit and blood blew out of his lips. Then the bubble popped, and his limbs went loose.

  Jeru sat back, breathing hard. She said, “Okay. Okay. How did he put it?—You take it as it comes.” She looked around, at me, Pael. I could see she was trembling, which scared me. She said, “Now we move. We have to find an LUP. A lying-up point, Academician. A place to hole up.”

  I said, “The First Officer—”

  “Is dead.” She glanced at Pael. “Now it’s just the three of us. We won’t be able to avoid each other anymore, Pael.�
�

  Pael stared back, eyes empty.

  Jeru looked at me, and for a second her expression softened. “A broken neck. Till broke his neck, tar.”

  Another death, just like that: just for a heartbeat that was too much for me.

  Jeru said briskly, “Do your duty, tar. Help the worm.”

  I snapped back. “Yes, sir.” I grabbed Pael’s unresisting arm.

  Led by Jeru, we began to move, the three of us, away from the crumpled wreck of our yacht, deep into the alien tangle of a Silver Ghost cruiser.

  We found our LUP.

  It was just a hollow in a somewhat denser tangle of silvery ropes, but it afforded us some cover, and it seemed to be away from the main concentration of Ghosts. We were still open to the vacuum—as the whole cruiser seemed to be—and I realized then that I wouldn’t be getting out of this suit for a while.

  As soon as we picked the LUP, Jeru made us take up positions in an all-around defense, covering a 360-degree arc.

  Then we did nothing, absolutely nothing, for ten minutes.

  It was SOP, standard operating procedure, and I was impressed. You’ve just come out of all the chaos of the destruction of the Brightly and the crash of the yacht, a frenzy of activity. Now you have to give your body a chance to adjust to the new environment, to the sounds and smells and sights.

  Only here, there was nothing to smell but my own sweat and piss, nothing to hear but my ragged breathing. And my arm was hurting like hell.

  To occupy my mind I concentrated on getting my night vision working. Your eyes take a while to adjust to the darkness—forty-five minutes before they are fully effective—but you are already seeing better after five. I could see stars through the chinks in the wiry metallic brush around me, the flares of distant novae, and the reassuring lights of our fleet. But a Ghost ship is a dark place, a mess of shadows and smeared-out reflections. It was going to be easy to get spooked here.

  When the ten minutes were done, Academician Pael started bleating, but Jeru ignored him and came straight over to me. She got hold of my busted arm and started to feel the bone. “So,” she said briskly. “What’s your name, tar?”

  “Case, sir.”

  “What do you think of your new quarters?”

  “Where do I eat?”

  She grinned. “Turn off your comms,” she said.

  I complied.

  Without warning she pulled my arm, hard. I was glad she couldn’t hear how I howled.

  She pulled a canister out of her belt and squirted gunk over my arm; it was semi-sentient and snuggled into place, setting as a hard cast around my injury. When I was healed the cast would fall away of its own accord.

  She motioned me to turn on my comms again, and held up a syrette.

  “I don’t need that.”

  “Don’t be brave, tar. It will help your bones knit.”

  “Sir, there’s a rumor that stuff makes you impotent.” I felt stupid even as I said it.

  Jeru laughed out loud, and just grabbed my arm. “Anyhow it’s the First Officer’s, and he doesn’t need it anymore, does he?”

  I couldn’t argue with that; I accepted the injection. The pain started ebbing almost immediately.

  Jeru pulled a tactical beacon out of her belt kit. It was a thumb-sized orange cylinder. “I’m going to try to signal the fleet. I’ll work my way out of this tangle; even if the beacon is working we might be shielded in here.” Pael started to protest, but she shut him up. I sensed I had been thrown into the middle of an ongoing conflict between them. “Case, you’re on stag. And show this worm what’s in his kit. I’ll come back the same way I go. All right?”

  “Yes.” More SOP.

  She slid away through silvery threads.

  I lodged myself in the tangle and started to go through the stuff in the belt kits Till had fetched for us. There was water, rehydration salts, and compressed food, all to be delivered to spigots inside our sealed hoods. We had power packs the size of my thumbnail, but they were as dead as the rest of the kit. There was a lot of low-tech gear meant to prolong survival in a variety of situations, such as a magnetic compass, a heliograph, a thumb saw, a magnifying glass, pitons, and spindles of rope, even fishing line.

  I had to show Pael how his suit functioned as a lavatory. The trick is just to let go; a slime suit recycles most of what you give it, and compresses the rest. That’s not to say it’s comfortable. I’ve never yet worn a suit that was good at absorbing odors. I bet no suit designer spent more than an hour in one of her own creations.

  I felt fine.

  The wreck, the hammer-blow deaths one after the other—none of it was far beneath the surface of my mind. But that’s where it stayed, for now; as long as I had the next task to focus on, and the next after that, I could keep moving forward. The time to let it all hit you is after the show.

  I guess Pael had never been trained like that.

  He was a thin, spindly man, his eyes sunk in black shadow, and his ridiculous red beard was crammed up inside his faceplate. Now that the great crises were over, his energy seemed to have drained away, and his functioning was slowing to a crawl. He looked almost comical as he pawed at his useless bits of kit.

  After a time he said, “Case, is it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you from Earth, child?”

  “No. I—”

  He ignored me. “The Academies are based on Earth. Did you know that, child? But they do admit a few off-worlders.”

  I glimpsed a lifetime of outsider resentment. But I couldn’t care less. Also I wasn’t a child. I asked cautiously, “Where are you from, sir?”

  He sighed. “It’s 51 Pegasi. I-B.”

  I’d never heard of it. “What kind of place is that? Is it near Earth?”

  “Is everything measured relative to Earth … ? Not very far. My home world was one of the first extra-solar planets to be discovered—or at least, the primary is. I grew up on a moon. The primary is a hot Jupiter.”

  I knew what that meant: a giant planet huddled close to its parent star.

  He looked up at me. “Where you grew up, could you see the sky?”

  “No—”

  “I could. And the sky was full of sails. That close to the sun, solar sails work efficiently, you see. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, tacking this way and that in the light. But you can’t see the sky from Earth—not from the Academy bunkers anyhow.”

  “Then why did you go there?”

  “I didn’t have a choice.” He laughed, hollowly. “I was doomed by being smart. That is why your precious commissary despises me so much, you see. I have been taught to think—and we can’t have that, can we … ?”

  I turned away from him and shut up. Jeru wasn’t “my” commissary, and this sure wasn’t my argument. Besides, Pael gave me the creeps. I’ve always been wary of people who knew too much about science and technology. With a weapon, all you want to know is how it works, what kind of energy or ammunition it needs, and what to do when it goes wrong. People who know all the technical background and the statistics are usually covering up their own failings; it is experience of use that counts.

  But this was no loudmouth weapons tech. This was an Academician: one of humanity’s elite scientists. I felt I had no point of contact with him at all.

  I looked out through the tangle, trying to see the fleet’s sliding, glimmering lanes of light.

  There was motion in the tangle. I turned that way, motioning Pael to keep still and silent, and got hold of my knife in my good hand.

  Jeru came bustling back, exactly the way she had left. She nodded approvingly at my alertness. “Not a peep out of the beacon.”

  Pael said, “You realize our time here is limited.”

  I asked, “The suits?”

  “He means the star,” Jeru said heavily. “Case, fortress stars seem to be unstable. When the Ghosts throw up their cordon, the stars don’t last long before going pop.”

  Pael s
hrugged. “We have hours, a few days at most.”

  Jeru said, “Well, we’re going to have to get out, beyond the fortress cordon, so we can signal the fleet. That or find a way to collapse the cordon altogether.”

  Pael laughed hollowly. “And how do you propose we do that?”

  Jeru glared. “Isn’t it your role to tell me, Academician?”

  Pael leaned back and closed his eyes. “Not for the first time, you’re being ridiculous.”

  Jeru growled. She turned to me. “You. What do you know about the Ghosts?”

  I said, “They come from someplace cold. That’s why they are wrapped up in silvery shells. You can’t bring a Ghost down with laser fire because of those shells. They’re perfectly reflective.”

  Pael said, “Not perfectly. They are based on a Planck-zero effect … . About one part in a billion of incident energy is absorbed.”

  I hesitated. “They say the Ghosts experiment on people.”

  Pael sneered. “Lies put about by your Commission for Historical Truth, Commissary. To demonize an opponent is a tactic as old as mankind.”

  Jeru wasn’t perturbed. “Then why don’t you put young Case right? How do the Ghosts go about their business?”

  Pael said, “The Silver Ghosts tinker with the laws of physics.”

  I looked to Jeru; she shrugged.

  Pael tried to explain. It was all to do with quagma.

  Quagma is the state of matter that emerged from the Big bang. Matter; when raised to sufficiently high temperatures, melts into a magma of quarks—a quagma. And at such temperatures the four fundamental forces of physics unify into a single superforce. When quagma is allowed to cool and expand its binding superforce decomposes into four sub-forces.

  To my surprise, I understood some of this. The principle of the GUTdrive, which powers intrasystem ships like Brief Life Burns Brightly, is related.