Asimov's SF, December 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Got it. Thanks,” Bari said. She watched as the Auroran fighters split just as predicted, and moments later saw a small shift in the herd nearby: Turquoise's handiwork. “I'm glad I brought you along.”

  [He's laughing,] Omi said.

  She edged her stolen craft toward the growing gap, and emerged just after one of the three Aurorans passed. A quick check showed another moving along the underside of the herd where it had cover from the decoy, but in her own clear sights.

  Do it, she told herself, and powered up the weapons systems. She fell in behind the first fighter, and then, carefully sighting on it—she wouldn't get any extra chances here—fired. The ship flared and died.

  She sighted on the fighter below, which was just beginning an evasive maneuver away from her, and took it down too.

  “Tonker! What the fuck?!” This from the remaining ship.

  “Omi, jam him!”

  [Doing what I can.]

  She banked up and around, resisting the urge to use the Rooan as shielding. The fighter broke off and fled. They raced away from the herd, Bari on his tail as he wove a pattern through space, staying always one tic and jump just out of her sights. “Oh, Hell,” she swore. Her hands flew over the console, overriding the safeties and dumping energy from life support, gravity-gen, and radiation shielding into the engines. She was suddenly light in her seat, held in place only by inertia, seat straps, and her safety tether. The burst of extra speed was less than she'd expected, but she began to close.

  [Bari . . . ]

  “I know,” she said. She could already feel it, the cabin growing colder. She closed her eyes for a second, let long practice at mind-body control kick in, and slowed her heart rate and her breathing. Then she opened calm eyes on the enemy, closer now, and brought him down with a fast double-hit. She hadn't even reached the debris halo before she was already diverting the ship's systems back to normal.

  [That was dangerous.]

  “So would be letting him get away.”

  Outpost One lay dead ahead. It sat in space like some giant's toy, the sunlight of Beserai's distant star gleaming off it only adding to the impression of a scaled-up, metal wasp's nest. Around it floated smaller objects: waste processors, chemical weapons storage, trash. As she watched, four more ships appeared, heading her way at full burn.

  She got out of her seat, careful to keep the safety tether clipped, and pulled another small device out of her pack. It took her a long minute to wire it into the console, while the ship closed the distance to the outpost's remaining defenders. “Omi, did you get a good look at that last fighter's evasion patterns?”

  [I did.]

  “Then I'm putting you in charge of the helm,” she said, clicking the device on. “You should have remote now.”

  A pause. [Got it. Any change in plans?]

  “No, we're going in the hard way. Get as close as you can. If you can, blow the escape pod just before they take us out.”

  Bari pulled her face shield back down, checked her suit seals by reflexive gesture, then disengaged the safety tether and cycled herself back out the airlock. Pulling herself along the ship's hull, she reached one of the purely aesthetic wings and clambered out until she was perched comfortably about halfway down its length. Here, she was well out of the way of the furiously burning engines slung on the underside. She traced her fingers along the thin ribbon of silver laid into the black wing, the very familiar starburst pattern, and let an old anticipation, and a newfound guilt, wash over her.

  [The herd front is nearing closest proximity to the outpost.]

  “You should be safe. I think Aurora is going to be too busy dealing with me to think about anything else for a while.” At the moment, the stolen fighter beneath her feet was heading straight for the outpost. “Omi, course change in five,” she said. “Four, three, two, one . . .”

  She let go of the ship even as it banked away underneath her, now on a collision course for the chemical weapons bunker. In her suit she was invisible to the intercepting ships; by eye they might spot her, but now they all changed course as well, pursuing the visible threat. She put her arms out from her sides in a parody of a swan dive as she fell/flew toward the outpost. Sailing through space in nothing but the Dzenni suit gave her a sense of being both infinitely powerful and infinitely insignificant at the same time. Which is exactly as it should be, her teachers would have told her.

  Far away from her now, the Auroran fighters drew close enough to her stolen ship to obliterate it; she caught the small flash of the escape pod ejecting, but the fighters closed in on that, too, and turned it into just so much more space debris. “Sorry, Tonker,” she murmured.

  From there the fighters spread out, cautiously edging forward away from the base and each other, looking for the next threat. She was already well inside their slowly expanding perimeter, the outpost looming large dead ahead. She smiled; she was on target, no need to risk a burst from her pack to change course.

  She curled herself up and around until she was foot-first, trying not to think about how long she'd had to practice the maneuver to keep from sending herself into a hopeless spin, and hit the side of the station near the pinnacle well above the central mass. It was a hard landing, but she'd prepared for that as well, and turned it into a short tumble up the sloped surface before she managed to catch a grip and stop. Then she activated the light mag fields in her boots, stood up in what felt, even absent any meaningful input from her inner ear, like a cartoonishly horizontal direction, and ran down and across the surface of the station.

  The maintenance hatch was exactly where she expected it to be.

  Bari spun the outer wheel, pulled the hatch open, and tucked herself into the small crawlspace backward so she could close it again. Once the hatch was sealed, she tried to turn around and discovered that, with the pack on her back, she couldn't. “Oh, great,” she muttered.

  [Everything okay?]

  “It's just smaller than I expected.”

  [Or you're bigger than it expected.]

  “Thanks,” she said, then under her breath, “you bit-fried hunk of space flotsam.”

  [I heard that.]

  She scooted backward through the tight space until she came up hard against the inner lock. Now what? she thought. As best as she could, she laid down flat, her pack an uncomfortable wedge under her back, and studied the upside-down lock controls. Then she pried open the security panel, pulled out two leads, and shorted them. The hatch slid open with a whoosh as air filled the small crawlspace, and she scrambled out and into the maintenance space on the far side.

  This area was only marginally bigger, but it was enough that she could turn around and, squatting, pull herself upright. Also, it had atmosphere. Her suit's supply was down to 52 percent so she set it to recharge automatically from the surrounding air.

  It took her a minute to get her bearings, and then she moved through the tunnels as quickly as a need for quiet could afford. Several turns and intersections later, she found herself at another small hatch, with what appeared to be a small butter knife wedged into the control panel. She touched it gingerly, as if it could shock, but it was inert, a dead relic of another's past.

  At least I know I'm in the right place, she thought. “I'm going in.”

  She emerged into a cramped and dusty storeroom filled with boxes, crates, and stacks of miscellaneous junk, the lighting dim. She took several deep, calming breaths as she unloaded from her vest pockets the next set of items she'd anticipated needing. As soon as she felt back under control she reached out an arm and slipped it past the chip reader. The doorlight turned green and admitted her into the main corridors of Aurora's Outpost One.

  The senior staff would be in the situation room, monitoring the fighters as they looked for signs of their enemy, while security spread out throughout the decks, watching the airlocks and the docking rings, watching their own population for any sign of internal insurrection. The Auroran warlord would be doing much the same from his seat back in the cen
tral enclave, watching everyone, trusting no one. Out of Bari's grasp, but not beyond her touch.

  A stunner took out the door guard. She shorted out the lock into the situation room the same way she had the hatch's internal airlock, and stepped inside. The room was dark, wood-paneled at ridiculous expense, displays overheard showing the still-expanding search party in vivid red tracery. Heads turned, hands reached for weapons, but before anyone could draw she was at the chair of the outpost's commander, her gloved hand lightly laid under his chin, across his neck, above the silver embroidery of a jacket nearly the same as her own. There were three other men in the room, all frozen where they stood, assessing, waiting.

  “Who are you?” the commander barked.

  “You don't remember me, Karilene?” she said.

  He stared at her face, then at the jacket she wore. “I don't know you.”

  She hesitated, then reached up and peeled off the biomask she'd worn for nearly half a year, nearly coming to accept that face, the face of “Ms. Park,” as her own.

  The commander stared, and his gaze lost none of its sharpness, but after a moment the single “Ah” that passed his lips was like the last, faint breath from a dying man. He straightened, his arms folded carefully, fingers entwined, on the console board in front of him. “Bariele. You've grown into that jacket at long last, I see. You've come for revenge.” It was statement, not question.

  “No,” she said. “Business.”

  “You're an assassin, then?”

  “A facilitator. In this case, the difference is minor.”

  “Who sent you? Not Glaszerstrom, surely?”

  “No, not them.”

  “Then who?”

  “You were in someone's way, and presented them with a difficulty they wanted resolved.”

  He laughed. “My brother and I built Aurora out here in the Sfazili Barrens so that we would not be in anyone's way, and no one would be in ours. You know that.”

  “And yet.”

  “The ambush was cleverly done. I hope you got a good price.”

  “I did.”

  “He'll rebuild Outpost One, even if it takes years and years. It's not like him to let anything go. And he'll hunt you across the entire Multiworlds if he has to.”

  “And I expect he'll find me, sooner and closer than that.”

  As if sensing that something was about to happen, the others in the room began to shift and move, but before anyone could act she'd grabbed the short handle protruding from her pack, drawn out the thin, sharp blade that lived there, and moved it down in one swift, graceful motion. The old man jerked twice in his seat and then was still.

  A young man toward the back of the room let out a cry, fumbling for his pistol, and abandoning her blade where it was she drew a small, cruel knife from the sleeve of her suit and skewered him through the neck from across the room. “Anyone else?” she asked, unholstering at last her own pistol. The remaining men stared at her angrily but relinquished their weapons. “Neither of you are half the man Karilene was. If you want to live, leave this room now and get off this station.”

  She stood, blade in one hand, pistol in the other, as the two men walked carefully around her and out. “When you report what happened here,” she told the second man, “be sure to tell my father I send my regards.” Then she closed and sealed the door.

  Removing her jacket, she laid it over the old man's body like a shroud, or a calling card, or perhaps both. Where she was going she could not take it, and she knew—and he would know—that she left it only because she'd be back for it.

  “It's done,” she said into her suit mic.

  [The fighters have turned and are heading back to the outpost at top burn, and there's activity at the Enclave itself,] Omi said. [Not to rush you, but you need to get out of there.]

  “I'm on it.” She sat at Karilene's console and slid in the small chip. Immediately systems began shutting down and scrapping themselves as the Outpost's general evacuation alarm sounded. She positioned her last three EMP mines beside the console and set the failsafe to detonate if they were interfered with. In a short while, the entire base would be defenseless, uninhabitable, scrap. It would be abandoned until it could be secured and rebuilt, which wouldn't happen until Aurora's warlord had made some determination of who had sent her. And that was something he would never resolve.

  The same paranoia that would keep him away from this border until he understood what had happened here was now her own way out. She went to one wooden panel, felt around the trim until her fingers found the tiny catch, and the panel swung open. From there, metal rungs set into the narrow tube led her up and into the very top of the station where a small ship lay cocooned as insurance against the worst.

  The escape craft had dust on the console but was fully charged, waiting. She left the outpost in a roar of speed only seconds ahead of the EMP explosion that crippled the station.

  Setting the tiny ship on a wide arching course for the far side of Beserai, she engaged the auto-pilot. By the time the Auroran pursuers caught up and blasted the ship to pieces she'd long since abandoned it as well, floating curled in a ball in space, invisible.

  Finally, far behind and away from the furious activity, the Rooan herd caught up to her, enveloped her, carried her along.

  The Space Turd felt cramped and foreign when she climbed back into it. Cardin was still banging on the hatch at random intervals with little enthusiasm. After checking on the soundly asleep Ceen and Vikka—utterly ambivalent now to them—she sat herself down at the helm, slid the life support controls back up to full, and turned back on the gravity generators. She slowed the ship and changed its course; in a few seconds it would begin to fall behind and away from the herd. Last, she reactivated Cardin's intercom and sensors, a gesture she could only think of as recompense for the use and misuse of his ship. And because it didn't matter anymore.

  She flipped the hatch bolt with one foot, toed it open; it was still dark in the cabin, dark enough to hide her, but she could see the professor's face in the dim light of his computer, the lines of fear etched in it rendering him a stranger.

  “Ms. Park?”

  “Your handheld,” she said, and dropped the unit down to him. “Ceen should wake up and let you out in a few hours, and then you can go home. In the meantime, collect what data you can.”

  “But . . . Aurora . . .”

  “You don't need to worry about Aurora, Professor.” And she closed and locked the hatch again.

  She peeled off Ceen's patch, throwing it in the ship's flash-recycler. Vikka she left as she was; it was up to Ceen to decide if he wanted to listen to her the entire trip back or leave her asleep.

  Her suit was fully re-charged. Time to leave the Turd, pick up Omi, and collect payment. She left the airlock one last time; the Turd was still on auto-pilot, but would soon diverge from the herd as the Rooan changed trajectories again for the slingshot pass around Beserai. Her pickup rendezvous was arranged for the far side.

  She moved through the herd, jumping from one giant, rough body to another as if she was a stone skipping across a lake, until she found one with a small silver sphere taped to the underside, just under the nose.

  [I still itch.] Turquoise said.

  “Yeah, yeah. Omi, tell him to hang on.”

  She peeled off the tape, held the sphere up beside her, and let it go in space. Its single blue lens blinked at her.

  [About time.]

  Large rippling shades of blue moved up and down the body of the Rooan. [The big guy is happy, too.]

  The Rooan flashed another sequence of blue. “I didn't catch that,” Bari said.

  [Oh, sorry, I was looking the wrong way,] Omi said. The sphere turned, flashed a sequence of lights at the Rooan, who flashed back.

  [Thank you,] Turquoise said through Omi's translator. [The herd has given you Rooan names, in thanks for your assistance. Bari, it will honor us to be allowed to call you ####. Omicron, if #### does not suit you, I don't know what will.]

/>   “Uh . . . I didn't catch that.”

  [Light-based names. If it helps, you're 23-17-83RGB Fading Reverse whereas I am 61-40-240RGB Brightening Center.]

  “I'm honored,” Bari said, hoping she was.

  [Your price. We near Beserai. You wish to surf with us?]

  “Oh, I do.”

  [It is, we would expect, lethal for non-Rooan.]

  “My suit will hold.”

  [As you wish. We draw close.] Turquoise's massive body shuddered, and long vents opened in his sides along his entire length. [We will not be able to talk again until the far side, so please fasten yourself to a vent gill with something heat- and stress-resistant, but also preferably not itchy.]

  Bari pulled a harness out of her pack, then let the pack float away into space. It would not survive the trip, and she would not need it on the far side, where she had a small ship of her own waiting and ready. It took several long minutes to attach and seal the links across her torso and legs, until she felt almost a prisoner in the tight bindings. Then she looped the remainder around the vent gill. “I'm ready,” she said. “Omi?”

  The silver ball drew near, and she plucked it out of space and tucked it down inside a pocket along the front of her suit. [The indignity!] Omi said, his signal weak.

  “Oh, shut up,” Bari said. Looking ahead, the bright crescent edge of a blue-white planet loomed near.

  The vent gill closed again, holding her fast. She put her hands to her sides and ran through a precise sequence of control gestures with both hands. The straps shrunk, tightening. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs and expanding her chest, then completed the last gesture. The Dzenni suit, technology far beyond human, hardened into an immoveable shell. She could no longer feel the straps, only the unyielding foam that the suit extruded around her. Her faceplate was clear, bright in the light of the planet.

  The Rooan herd hit the edges of Beserai's thermosphere, riding the curve of the planet like surfers riding a wave, seeking the mesopause. She caught her breath as noctilucent clouds spread out in wisps below her, then held it as Turquoise's entire back half split asunder and a million thin, iridescent threads tumbled and waved behind, tasting and collecting the rare bounty of elements and ice crystals they passed through, saving and storing them for the long cold ahead.