Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 111

by Neil Clarke

  “That’s not what I bloody meant,” says Laura, “what do we do?”

  Franckton’s already paid for the foetal care team and all the licensing. They won’t notice the damage to the wives, will they? Probably not. They only look munted if you get up close, check them out carefully. Nothing a bath won’t fix, either. They’ve paid for everything. There’s the harvest to think about. The Ministry’s more trouble than it’s worth to talk to. This whole thing’s been a muck-up from start to finish.

  “They’ve killed Simeon,” says Laura.

  The Mayor has an expression like rock ice. She meets Laura’s terrified eyes, and Laura sees the fear reflected in hers, the fishlike darting of the pupil. There’s a shuffling outside. A lot of the wives have gathered by the door. The whole croft turns to look at them: twenty dull, dispassionate expressions, mud streaks on flexing fingers. Some of the wives have put on new aprons, but the ones who haven’t have big blooming brownish stains on each breadth. They look expectant. They look supremely calm. They look healthy and green and moist.

  One of them is at the door and they didn’t even see her move.

  “Do we look after the goats, Aunty?”

  The Mayor stares at her—stares right through her. After a moment she says, “No. There’s clearing up today, after the rain. Tell—tell the other girls to go home.”

  “Yes, Aunty,” she says, and she’s gone with the rest.

  There’s silence in the pub. An empty, wavering silence, like a heat shimmer. Anticipatory. Laura says faintly, “We need to tell someone . . . ”

  “We’ve got our bloody pride,” says the Mayor.

  The crofters are all picking up their slippers and their mugs and are smoothing back their hair, drifting homewards to re-start the morning. Numbly, Laura does the same, retracing her steps, sliding open the mossie screen on her front door. The eggs on her breakfast plate are cold. Her wife is back and running plates under the dry-cleaner, laboriously picking off bits of dried food, singing tunelessly. Laura notices the bloody splotches on the hem of her dress.

  “Welcome home,” says her wife.

  Sweat beads at the middles of Laura’s palms.

  The rest of the croft settles down and plans the pohiri they’ll have to welcome the conception-care team, and a picnic. The Ministry announces that they’ll be given five percent off foetal mitochondrial therapy, on account of it being Christmas. Everyone contributing to a baby washes their shirt.

  About the Author

  Tamsyn Muir is a writer from Auckland, New Zealand, currently teaching in the United Kingdom. Her short-form horror fiction has appeared in such publications as Nightmare Magazine, Weird Tales, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  Morrigan in Shadow

  Seth Dickinson

  capella 1/8

  She’s falling into the singularity.

  Straight off her nose, shrouded in the warp of its mass, is the black hole that ate a hundred million colonists and the hope of all mankind.

  So Laporte throttles up. Her fighter rattles with the fury of its final burn.

  Spaceflight is about orbits. That’s how one thing relates to another, up here: I whirl around you. I try to pull away. You try to pull me in. If we don’t smash each other apart, or skip away into the void, maybe we can negotiate something stable.

  But Laporte has learned that sometimes you just need to fall.

  Her instruments don’t understand what’s happening. They’re military avionics, built to hunt and kill other warships (other people) in cold flat space. Thus Laporte flies her final mission in a screaming constellation of errors, cautions, icy out-of-range warnings. An array of winter-colored protests from a machine that doesn’t know where it is or why it’s about to die.

  She wants to pat the ship (a lovely, lethal, hard-worn Uriel gunship, built under Martian skies, the skies of her lover’s childhood) on its nose and say: there, there, I know exactly how you feel. I’m with you, man. This shit is beyond me.

  But it’s not beyond her. She knows why she’s here.

  Laporte never thought she’d be a good soldier. Certainly she’d never planned to be an exceptional killer. Or a mutineer leading a revanchist fleet up out of Earth’s surrender and into a crusade across the length of human space. Or, in her final act as a human being (if she dares make claim to that title any more), the avatar of an omnicidal alien power with no intelligence, no awareness, and a billion-year-old cosmic imperative to destroy all higher thought.

  But she is all those things now. Born from the tragedy of a war as unnecessary as it was inevitable. Shaped by combat and command and (between it all, pulling in the opposite direction) the love of the finest woman she’s ever met.

  After all that, after Simms and NAGARI and That Revelation Ken, she knows why she’s here. She knows what force plucked her out of paradise and fired her down the trajectory of her short, violent life. To this distant terminus where the universe folds up behind her into a ring of light, everything she loves, everyone she’s hurt, receding.

  She knows what she’s come to kill. The object of her last assassination.

  “Boss, this is Morrigan,” she tells her flight recorder. “I am descending towards the target.”

  That’s what she calls Simms, even now. Not ‘love’. Boss.

  There are three stories here, although they are all one:

  What happened in Capella, at the end.

  What happened with NAGARI, at the beginning.

  What happened between Noemi Laporte and Lorna Simms, which is the most important story, and the one that binds the others.

  It begins with the war, and with Lorna Simms—

  simms 1/9

  For a long time, long enough to murder tens of thousands of people, Laporte thought Simms was dead.

  They fought for the United Earth Federation in the war against the colonist Alliance. Laporte and Simms were Federation combat pilots (SQUADRON VFX-01 2FM/FG2101 INDUS—The Wargods, Captain Lorna Simms Commanding) and they were good, so good, they fought like two fists on a drunken boxer, moved by instinct and kill-joy. Of course, a boxer has a body as well as a pair of fists—but they tried not to consider the shape of what connected them.

  It wasn’t love or lust alone (they were soldiers and their discipline held), nor was it only respect, or fear, or sly admiration. Something of all of this. Whatever connected them, it helped them fight. Simms the Captain, leader of killers, and Laporte her faithful wingman, who was the finest killer.

  And they fought to save their Federation, their happy humanist utopia, Earth and Mars and the Jupiter moons—a community of people making each other better. They fought hard.

  The war is a civil war. As intimate and violent and hard to name as the bond between Laporte and Simms. An apocalyptic exchange of fratricides between the Federation and its own far-flung interstellar colonists: the Alliance.

  For a little while, long enough to give them hope, Laporte and Simms and their Wargods almost won the war.

  Then the Alliance clockmaker-admiral, the cryogenic bastard Steele, set a trap. It caught Simms, Laporte, and their whole squadron. Everyone died. It was like a lesson: no band of heroes will save you. No soldiers bound by law and decency.

  Out of that ambush Simms and Laporte flew each other to refuge, but it was not refuge enough, the war was in their bones and flesh now: Simms was dying, poisoned by radiation. So they sat together on a crippled warship and they talked about anything but each other.

  Remember that? After the ambush at Saturn? Remember adjusting Simms’ blankets and pressing your cheek to her throat? Hoping she’d live long enough for both of you to die together, as you’d always dreamed?

  (Laporte’s dreams are not, it turns out, wholly her own.)

  The Alliance was winning, they agreed. Neither of them could see a way to avoid defeat. Neither of them would admit that to the other—not defeat, nor the other thing between them.

  Simms passed out. Laporte stayed by her side.

/>   And then a rescue ship came, and with it came al-Alimah, the woman with the gunmetal eyes and the shark-sleek uniform of a Federation black ops officer. She came to tempt Laporte away from Simms with the promise of her other love—

  Victory. Al-Alimah came to offer Laporte a chance at victory. And she named the agents of that victory NAGARI.

  nagari 1/10

  What is victory? Only a fool goes to war without an answer.

  The Alliance is winning (has won). What is their victory condition? Their grievance? The fatal casus belli that sparked it all?

  The Federation is a gentle state, built on Ubuntu, a philosophy of human connection. So they say: the war began because the Alliance couldn’t stand to be alone. They spent two decades rebuilding the severed wormhole to Earth, so they could demand reunification, so they could mobilize our thriving economy to build their warships. So they could galvanize our culture for war.

  What the Alliance asked the Federation is what the woman named al-Alimah asked Laporte, as they stood together over the radiation-cooked body of Lorna Simms: give up your gentle ties. Come with me, towards victory. Become a necessary monster.

  When the Federation refused to militarize, the Alliance invaded. It was their only hope.

  Either they gained the Federation’s riches, or they faced the Nemesis alone.

  Laporte, she made the other choice, the one her beautiful home could not. She went with al-Alimah. She joined the phantom atrocity-makers called NAGARI and she discovered her own final hope, her endgame for Federation victory.

  It’ll require the extermination of the entire Alliance population. So be it. She is an exceptional killer. She proved that after she left Simms.

  That’s how she ended up here, at this raging dead star on the edge of Alliance space, this monument to the power of the alien Nemesis. The tomb of Capella—

  capella 2/8

  Back in the now: and someone’s chasing her.

  She sniffs him out by the light of his engines. Something’s come through the wormhole behind her and started its own plunge towards the (terrible, empty, fire-crowned) black hole.

  Laporte grins and knocks her helmet twice against her ejection seat, crash crash, polymer applause for the mad gentleman on her trail. She knows who it is. She’s glad he’s come.

  She tumbles the Uriel end-for-end so that she’s falling ass-first into oblivion and her nose is aimed back, up, towards the universe. There’s a ring of night and bent starlight all around her, where the black hole’s gravity bends space, but up above, as if at the top of a well, are the receding stars.

  And there he is. A fierce blue light which resolves into the molybdenum greatsword-shape of an Alliance strike carrier. Atreus. Steele’s flagship. Two and a half kilometers of tactical divinity.

  Admiral Onyekachi Tuwile Steele prosecuted the war in the Sol theater. A game of remorseless speed chess with fifteen billion pawns in play. In the end, after the Federation exhausted all its gambits and defenses (save one, the one called NAGARI), he won the war.

  He’s a perfectionist, Steele. A man of etiquette and fine dress, a man who moves like a viper or a Kinshasa runway model. He makes intricate, clockwork plans, predicated on perfect understanding of his opponent’s behavior. He cannot abide error.

  He made only one.

  Nowhere in the final hours of the war, the Mars gambit, the desperate defense and ultimate failure of SHAMBHALA, did he send enough hunter-killers to eradicate Laporte.

  And now he has come a-howling after her, propelled by portents and terrors, operating on a desperate, improvised logic. That logic might be: if she wants it, I cannot permit it. If Laporte reaches for a thing, I must deny it to her. She is too dangerous to ever have a victory.

  It might be something else. It’s dangerous to let your enemy understand your war logic.

  simms 2/9

  There are three stories here. They all matter.

  One is the story of Laporte at Capella, trying to kill billions. That’s the ending.

  One is the story of Laporte leaving Simms for NAGARI, in the name of victory. That’s the beginning.

  But in between them is another story, because the road from victory to genocide passes through love. In this middle part, the Federation’s civilian government surrendered to the Alliance. And here in the ashes Laporte found Simms alive, Simms found Laporte still (barely) human, they each found the other in the cold scorched wolfpack of the Federation Navy, lurking on the edge of the solar system and contemplating mutiny.

  This story is the most important, because it was Laporte’s last chance to be a person again.

  So: Laporte reaches for Simms. She wants to be close again. She wants to come back.

  They’re lying side by side in the avionics bay of Laporte’s fighter: an alloy coffin as cold as treason. Mostly empty. The terms of the cease-fire have stripped all military electronics from the Federation Navy.

  Like their uniforms—taken too. They work in gym clothes and mechanic’s overalls. Whenever they breathe the vapor spills out white like a suitbreach. Every ten minutes a dehumidifier clicks on.

  Simms shivers. Her hands rattle and she breaks the test pin she’s using against the teeth of a server stack. “Shit,” she says, closing her eyes. “Fuck.”

  She survived radiation poisoning. But surviving a wound doesn’t erase it. You only rebuild yourself around the scar.

  Laporte knifes the RESET switch up, down, up, down. They’ll start over. “Slowing me down, boss,” she says, trying to take Simms’ fear and judo it around, make it funny, disarm its violence. “Slowing me down.”

  “Fuck you too.” Simms clenches and unclenches her fists, one finger at a time. She’s longer than Laporte, and stronger. Before she soaked up fifteen grays of ionizing radiation, she could always keep up. “You try fingerbanging a combat spacecraft after a lethal dose.”

  Laporte makes a wah-wah baby noise. Simms laughs. They work for a few more minutes and soon they’ve made the fighter ready to hold combat software in the spare memory of its navigational systems.

  If they’re going to mutiny, the mutiny needs its fighters. And Laporte is planning a mutiny.

  Simms puts down the test pin and shivers from her scalp to her toes. She looks silver-gold, arid. She is the child of Mongolian steppe and American range and the desert of Mars. She’s used to cold. Laporte’s afraid that it’s not the cold making her shiver. Simms has been listening, the last few days, as Laporte lifts up her scabs and talks about NAGARI, and about her plan for victory.

  “They took out all my bone marrow,” Simms says. “I’m full of fake bone shit. Medical goo.”

  Laporte rolls into her (the old words, in a pilot’s brevity code: Boss, Morrigan, tally, visual, press, It’s you, I’m me, I see you, I will protect you) and Simms puts an arm around her. Laporte kisses her under the jaw, very softly, and rests her ear against Simms’ collarbone. There’s a plastic button rubbing into her cheek but she doesn’t mind.

  “Seems to work okay,” she says. She looked up radiation therapies: desperate transplant of reprogrammed skin cells and collagen glue. She imagined them peeling the skin off Simms’ thighs to fill up her bones.

  “Yeah.” Simms’ heart is slowing down, soothing out. It can’t find the fight it’s looking for. Or it’s disciplining itself for what’s to come. “I still work.”

  Laporte looks up from her collarbone to look her in the eye. “Are you going to fly with me?”

  Will she fly in the mutiny. Laporte’s grand plan, NAGARI’s final hope? The Federation has surrendered, but its soldiers, its guardian monsters, do not consent to Alliance rule. They were made to win.

  “I don’t know yet,” Simms says, looking at her hands. Whatever she says next will be an evasion. “I need to know more about your operational plan.”

  I need to know more about what you’ve become. What you got up to without me, while I was in the tank with my skin peeling off and glue in my blood.

  “I need you out t
here,” Laporte says. She means it to be business, pilot chatter, a tactical requirement. But she’s thinking about how she left Simms. How it might have seemed, to Simms, that she had been expended. Cast off as spent ordnance.

  Simms makes a soft sound, like she’s too tough or too happy to cry.

  The dehumidifier wakes up to dry out their words.

  capella 3/8

  The mutiny is what carried Laporte from the middle to the end.

  The Alliance killed the Federation’s best soldiers. It battered the Federation into political surrender. But it never beat NAGARI. It never beat Laporte.

  When the peace negotiations began, Laporte flew her re-armed Uriel from post to distant post, rallying the Federation’s dying strength for the death ride to Capella. Dozens of ships. Hundreds of pilots. Answering to Noemi ‘Morrigan’ Laporte, the last ace, the one who wouldn’t let the fire go out.

  Laporte airbrushed the suggestion of a raven on her fighter. Its claws are bloody. There is armor in its jaw.

  She asked Simms to ride in her back seat as she went to raise mutiny. “A couple undead soldiers, flying the mutiny flag,” she joked. “Like a buddy cop thing.” But Simms looked away and Laporte thought, what am I doing, how can I ask her to light this war back up, to be the spark that escalates it from atrocity to apocalypse? The war took her skin and melted the inside of her bones. It ripped out the lining of her guts. She can’t even shit without fighting the war.

  “I’m not mission capable yet,” Simms said, and she looked at Laporte as if the war had taken one more vital thing from her. “I hope the avionics work. I broke a lot of test pins in there.”

  So Laporte flew with al-Alimah instead. Al-Alimah from NAGARI.

  The Federation government surrendered but its fleet did not. They struck during treaty negotiations. Laporte’s rebel armada fought its way out of Sol by shock and treachery. Breached the blockades in Serpentis. Menaced the Alliance capital in Beta Aquilae.

  And as they did, Laporte’s NAGARI elite slipped into Vega. One wormhole away from their true goal.