The curved edge of the asteroid didn’t cover the toolbox panel, so they wouldn’t need to unload it. Still, some temptations couldn’t be resisted.
“I’m not as young as I used to be,” he said to Angela. “Perhaps you could have your driver get the toolbox out?”
Angela nodded. “Gehng.”
The look on Gehng’s face gave Narong a memory to treasure.
He turned back to Angela. “Your company sent you to recover it?”
For a moment, her face showed the need to avoid the question battling the need to ingratiate herself with a possible rescuer. He waited until she nodded uneasily. “It was supposed to go into the Gobi Desert. That’s…”
She waved a hand, wondering how to explain the geography.
“In Mongolia,” he said.
“Yes. Um. Well, something went wrong and it ended up in Thailand, so they sent us to get it.”
“And take it to Cambodia,” said Narong.
“Uh, no, I mean…”
“You’re going the wrong way for Bangkok.” Narong was enjoying himself a little too much. “No airport ahead of you till you get to Phnomh Penh.”
The sound of a tearing shirt and a very Anglophone expletive drew Narong’s attention to Gehng falling out of the truck with the toolbox.
“Thank you, Neung Gehng.” Narong deliberately addressed him as a younger man.
He opened the toolbox. The shine of stainless steel assailed him. For the first time since he’d seen the truck, he wanted something. Rows of screwdrivers and spanners cried out to him, pleading their supremacy over his own rusty toolkit that he kept wrapped in an old shirt.
He called himself a foolish old man. Tools like these belonged to his past. Narong’s knees cracked as he eased himself on his back. He pulled himself under the truck. There wasn’t a speck of rust on the chassis or the suspension, which was reinforced to take the load. It was a youthful vehicle compared to the doddering old wrecks he was so often called to resurrect, but he doubted it was treated with a fraction of the care people lavished on their vehicles in Ubon Ratchathani. This truck was owned by people who could afford to hand it off to a driver who didn’t realise he was invested in it until it broke down. It was painful to look at.
“You should be careful on these roads,” said Narong. “The dirt tracks aren’t too bad, but a lot of the roads round here are just tarmac that broke up for want of maintenance. They’ll rip your truck to pieces with this load.”
The answering silence told him Angela was glaring at Gehng and Gehng was looking anywhere but at Angela. Gehng must have bored her because her feet moved behind the front wheel until they were level with Narong’s head. Her face appeared as she squatted down to watch him.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
She wanted him to say he’d have it fixed in five minutes, no problem.
“I’ll know in a minute.”
She was leaning forward to see under the truck, giving him an interesting view down the front of her top. He hauled his eyes back to the gearbox. He was too old for such things, he told himself sternly. But he couldn’t resist snatching another look.
“What company do you work for?” he asked.
“One of the small ones.” Her eyes shifted away. “You probably haven’t heard of it.”
He’d heard enough to know there were no small companies able to afford the investment needed to mine asteroids. He also knew that while the UN Outer Space Treaty said nothing about exploitation, it didn’t allow for staking ownership of asteroids. If a chunk of asteroid happened to fall on Thailand, it became the property of the Thai government. Angela and Gehng couldn’t have made it more obvious that removing the asteroid was illegal if they had shouted it at him. No wonder Gehng was nervous.
It occurred to Narong that he was helping Angela steal from his country. Still, if the government cared whether people in Ubon Ratchathani followed its rules, it wouldn’t have left them to desiccate.
“You seem to know a lot about mechanics,” said Angela. “And you speak very good English.”
Narong managed to restrict himself to studying her face. She didn’t see what she was doing as stealing. She was going where her company had sent her, doing an unpleasant job that involved heat, dust and keeping the company’s business a little more confidential than usual. Gehng looked like a junior employee of a local subcontractor, who would be in Thailand long after Angela had left for good. No wonder he didn’t want anyone seeing the asteroid.
“I used to be a professor of engineering at Chulalongkhorn University,” he said.
“Chula … I’m sorry, I haven’t heard of that.”
“It closed five years ago. When the Chinese built their dams upstream of us, well, a country lives on water as much as a man or a woman does. We shrivelled up. We couldn’t afford all our universities.”
Angela sat down in the dusty road. Farang could never squat for very long.
“So you came here?”
The incredulity in her voice drew another look from him. Her head was tilted to one side and her brow was furrowed. She really didn’t understand.
“I grew up here. Of course it was greener then.”
“But it’s…” She waved her arm. “It’s so dry. It must be so hard. Is there nowhere else you could go?”
As if companies like hers were always taking on unemployed academics past retirement age. He’d applied all over the world when the department closed. He’d still had ambition then.
“It’s better than the slums in Bangkok,” he said.
Her expression didn’t change. For her, Bangkok meant air-conditioned hotels and restaurants on Sukhumvit Road. The new slums sprawling outside Bangkok’s dykes were as alien to her as the people of Ubon Ratchathani had been until the gearbox screamed. There was no point in trying to explain how the slums flooded every time it rained on a high tide, and how they would need to be abandoned altogether if the sea level kept rising over the next decade or two.
He changed spanners.
“I used to work on monofilament dew collectors. When I came here, I set them up on every hillock we can get a barrow to,” he said. “They give us enough water to grow GM cassava, and a few other things.”
He felt the cadence of his voice slip into the turns of the spanner. “We’ll do what we can with what we have for as long as we can.”
It was a beautiful spanner.
“The longer we can keep our children away from the slums, the better. Do you have children, Khun Angela?”
“Two girls.” Perhaps her voice had known laughter after all. “It’s hard being away from them. Sometimes you have to do what the company says, you know?”
“I’m sure.”
“Their names are Jasmine and Rebecca. I haven’t even been able to call them for the last couple of days.”
Narong saw the anecdote he would become, the old peasant pushing a barrow who turned out to be a professor and rescued mother in the wilderness. Her eyes sparkled as she spoke of her girls, looking forward to telling them about him. He concentrated on the gearbox, giving the odd grunt when Angela paused for breath. It was as though Angela had been keeping all her talk behind a dam he’d breached when he mentioned her favourite subject. Narong smiled. Any thought that involved breaching dams was worth smiling at.
“I never married,” he said.
Neither of them had much to say after that. He worked in silence for the next half hour. When he pulled himself from under the truck, Gehng was in the driver’s seat with his feet dangling outside the cab. His disconsolate expression made him look very young. Angela paced up and down, her exposed skin already tinted pink.
She turned to him with a pleading look. “Could you fix it?”
“Partly,” said Narong. “It will run in first and second gear, but no higher. It should get you to Phnomh Penh. You’ll be able to get a proper repair there.”
Angela bit her lip. “It’ll take, what? Ten, twelve hours to get to Phnomh Penh in second gear?�
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“At least. You are welcome to stay here if you wish. Gehng could send another vehicle when he gets there.”
Angela’s hair was lank with sweat. She wouldn’t know how to wash without using water as though it came from an unlimited reservoir. He would have regretted the offer if there was any chance she would accept it.
“That’s very kind of you,” she said, “but I need to stay with the load.”
She was determined to annihilate every kilometre between her and an air-conditioned room with a phone she could call her children on.
“Of course.”
Narong handed the toolbox to Gehng. He felt a morsel of pity as Gehng scrambled under the asteroid fragment. He wasn’t looking forward to the next ten to twelve hours.
He stood with Angela, watching Gehng replace the tarpaulin.
“You should keep the revs low,” he said in English. “I did what I could, but too much strain will drop it again.”
Gehng didn’t react, but Angela nodded. Her eyes wouldn’t leave the rev counter all the way to Phnomh Penh.
“We’ll be careful,” she said. “I really appreciate your help, sir.” She hadn’t caught his name. “How much do I owe you?”
“There is no charge. It cost me nothing.”
She had made his day more interesting. It would cheapen the memory if it became a transaction.
“There must be something I can do. You saved our lives.”
Narong managed not to laugh at the dramatic statement. He watched her watching him, wanting to pay off her sense of obligation. Her body was already poised as if to run for the cab. From some dark corner of his mind, the idea of asking for another look down her top jumped into his consciousness.
“Next time you lose a rock, could you drop it on one of the dams blocking the Mekong?”
She laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He’d given her the punch line to the story she’d tell her daughters.
Gehng finished his idea of tying down the tarpaulin. He made a wai in Narong’s direction. Angela was oblivious to the disrespect in the minimal dip of his shoulders. Narong sent them on their way with a straight back and a smile that would be a friendly parting for Angela and an insult to Gehng.
The note of the truck’s engine rose, fell as Gehng engaged second gear, rose again and fell abruptly. Narong laughed aloud, imagining Angela ordering Gehng to keep the revs down and Gehng’s stifled sigh.
He picked up the socket set and spanner he’d left under the truck. An old man should not be a slave to temptation, but it could be years before anyone even looked in the toolbox again. He put the tools on top of the water barrow and pushed it toward the dew collectors on the hillock.
The Colonel
PETER WATTS
Self-described as “a reformed marine biologist,” Peter Watts has quickly established himself as one of the most respected hard-science writers of the twenty-first century. His short work has appeared in The New Space Opera 2, Tor.com, Tesseracts, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Upgraded, On Spec, Divine Realms, Prairie Fire, and elsewhere. He is the author of the well-received Rifters sequence, including the novels Starfish, Maelstrom, Behemoth: B-Max, and Behemoth: Seppuku. His short work has been collected in Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes, and his novelette “The Island” won the Hugo Award in 2010. His novel Blindsight was widely hailed as one of the best hard-SF books of the decade. His most recent novel, Echopraxia, is a sequel to Blindsight. He lives in Toronto, Canada.
The story that follows deals with a military man trying to evaluate and contain the threat to ordinary humans from conjoined hive mentalities who might drive them into obsolescence and extinction, and who may not turn out to be even the worst threat to human civilization—a struggle deepened and complicated by his troubled relationship with his own family, and with his own conflicted heart.
The insurgents are already vectoring in from the east when the flag goes up. By the time the Colonel’s back in the game—processed the intel, found a vantage point, grabbed the nearest network specialist out of bed and plunked her down at the board—they’ve got the compound surrounded. Rain forest hides them from baseline vision but the Colonel’s borrowed eyes see well into the infrared. From half a world away, he tracks each fuzzy heatprint filtering up through the impoverished canopy.
One of the few good things about the decimation of Ecuador’s wildlife: not much chance, these days, of mistaking a guerrilla for a jaguar.
“I make thirteen,” the Lieutenant says, tallying blobs of false color on the display.
A welter of tanks and towers in the middle of a clear-cut. A massive umbilical, studded with paired lifting surfaces along its length, sags gently into the sky from the pump station at its heart. Eight kilometers farther west—and twenty more, straight up—an aerostat wallows at the end of the line like a great bloated tick, vomiting sulfates into the stratosphere.
There’s a fence around the compound of course, old-fashioned chain link with razor-wire frosting, not so much a barrier as a nostalgic reminder of simpler times. There’s a ring of scorched earth ten meters wide between fence and forest, another eighty from fence to factory. There are defenses guarding the perimeter.
“Can we access the on-site security?” He tried—unsuccessfully—before the Lieutenant arrived, but she’s the specialist.
She shakes her head. “It’s self-contained. No fiber in, no phone to answer. Doesn’t even transmit unless it’s already under attack. Only way to access the code is to actually go out there. Pretty much hack-proof.”
So they’re stuck looking down from geostat. “Can you show me the ranges at least? Ground measures only.”
“Sure. That’s just blueprint stuff.” A schematic blooms across the Lieutenant’s board, scaled and overlayed onto the real time. Translucent lemon pie–slices fan out from various points around the edge of the facility, an overlapping hot zone extending to the fence and a little beyond. The guns are all pointed out, though. Anybody who makes it to the hole in the donut is home free.
The heatprints enter the clearing; the Lieutenant collapses the palette down to visible light.
“Huh,” the Colonel says.
The insurgents have not stepped into view. They didn’t walk or run. They’re—scuttling, for want of a better word. Crawling. Squirming arrhythmically. They remind the Colonel of crabs afflicted with some kind of neurological disorder, flipped onto their backs and trying to right themselves. Each pushes a small bedroll along the ground.
“What the fuck,” the Lieutenant murmurs.
The insurgents are slathered head-to-toe in some kind of brownish paste. Mud idols in cargo shorts. Two pairs have linked up like wrestling sloths, like conjoined twins fused gut-to-back. They lurch and roll to the foot of the fence.
The station’s defenses are not firing.
Not bedrolls: mats, roughly woven, natural fiber from the look of it. The insurgents unroll them at the fence, throw them up over the razorwire to ensure safe passage during the climb.
The Lieutenant glances up. “They networked yet?”
“Can’t be. It’d trip the alarms.”
“Why haven’t they tripped the alarms already? They’re right there.” She frowns. “Maybe they disabled security somehow.”
The insurgents are inside the perimeter.
“Your hack-proof security?” The Colonel shakes his head. “No, if they’d taken out the guns they’d just—shit.”
“What?”
Insulative mud, judiciously applied to reshape the thermal profile. No hardware, no alloys or synthetics to give the game away. Interlocked bodies, contortionist poses: how would those shapes profile at ground level? What would the security cameras see, looking out across—
“Wildlife. They’re impersonating wildlife.” Jaguars and guerillas, my ass …
“What?”
“It’s a legacy loophole, don’t you—” But of course she doesn’t. Too young to remember Ecuador’s once-proud tradition of protect
ing its charismatic megafauna. Not even born when that herd of peccaries and Greenpeacers got mowed down by an overeager pillbox programmed to defend the local airstrip. Wouldn’t know about the safeguards since legislated into every automated targeting system in the country, long-since forgotten for want of any wildlife left to protect.
So much for on-site security. The insurgents will be smart enough to hold off on coalescing until they’re beyond any local firing solution. “How long before the drones arrive?”
The Lieutenant dips into her own head, checks a feed. “Seventeen minutes.”
“We have to assume they’ll have completed their mission before then.”
“Yes sir, but—what mission? What are they gonna do, scratch the paint with their fingernails?”
He doesn’t know. His source didn’t know. The insurgents themselves probably don’t know, won’t know until they network; you could snatch one off the ground this very instant, read the voxels right off her brain, get no joy at all.
That’s the scary thing about hive minds. Their plans are too big to fit into any one piece.
He shakes his head. “So we can’t access the guns. What about normal station operations?”
“Sure. Stations have to talk to each other to keep the injection rates balanced.”
The insurgents are halfway to the scrubbers. It’s astonishing that such quick headway could emerge from such graceless convulsion.
“Get us in.”
A wave of stars ignites across the schematic, right to left: switches, valves, a myriad interfaces coming online. The Colonel points to a cluster of sparks in the southwest quadrant. “Can we vent those tanks?”
“Not happily.” She frowns. “A free dump would be catastrophic. Only way the system would go along with that is if it thought it was preventing something even worse.”
“Such as?”
“Tank explosion, I guess.”
“Set it up.”
She starts whispering sweet nothings to distant gatekeepers, but she doesn’t look pleased. “Sir, isn’t this technically—I mean, use of poison gas—”
“Sulfate precursor. Geoengineering stockpile. Not a weapon of war.” Technically.
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection Page 41