Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  I concentrate everything I have on the dark space within the tear. Through the swarming smoke, I can see the other tanks slipping away like ghosts. I have to get to them. There is a short cut.

  I turn to the nearest building and kick down the door. It buckles under my weight and I charge through it. Truth is, I’m not interested in what’s inside, except to find an exit and cut off the tanks. I have my mission, and all I care about is occupying the enemy’s machines. It doesn’t matter what they are doing in here. That’s someone else’s priority.

  Only, it does matter. It matters a great deal.

  Inside the building, there are rows and rows of computerised terminals that I do not recognise or understand. Huge mechanical arms hang from the ceiling, interwoven with pistons and hoses. They end in a variety of claws and pincers. There are walls lined with what I think must be tools, although they are unknown to me. Against one wall are a series of chambers with wires and hoses leading away and disappearing into the ceiling.

  Inside each is a Widow.

  My sensors scream an alert and I don’t have time to consider the ramifications of what I have seen. On the other side of that wall is a tank. If I’ve located it, I have to assume the sensors in that dome on top of the turret have picked me up too. The wall between us won’t protect me.

  The door in the other side will come out in front of the tank. I sprint towards it, drop my shoulder. Momentum carries me up to the door and through it, almost as if it weren’t even there. I drop into a roll and pivot. Both railguns are aimed at the tank and firing before I even realise it. Spears of plasma scorch the air and buildings around me as I slide. But I have a new plan—a weakness I’ve seen in the armour. Not much of one, because to exploit it, I need to get underneath. To get to the vents, I need to be right up close.

  I hammer through the door of the building next to the tank. The walls explode with shards of concrete and brick as heavy rounds punch through. I’m kicked back by the chaos and I duck down low as it surges over the top of me. This is the only cover I have, but I don’t need to be in here for long. I know what the tank is trying to do; in fact I am banking on it. Banking on the fact it has been watching the way I fight and is trying to predict what I will do next. The human part of me that is left—what I might once have called guile—is my best weapon now.

  There’s a door at the other end, about the right distance. I pop a grenade and aim it just next to the door. It explodes, tearing the steel frame apart and kicking the door, contorted, into the street. Heavy rounds blister the air around it and surge through the broken doorway. But I’m not there to be hit. Instead, I’m sprinting through the first door, behind the tank, dropping low, sliding beneath it in the mud and rain. I launch grenade after grenade at those vents and some of them even go in. But it’s too late to stop the slide. I look away as the tank explodes.

  The armoured beast sinks to the ground and I try to roll away, but can’t get my left arm out before it collapses onto it. The pain nearly overwhelms me. I engage the Terminal Emergency Mode and dampen every nuance of it I can. The effect is almost instant: artificial and inhuman. Another reminder of what I really am. I try to get the arm out, but the weight of this armoured titan is too much and I cannot lift it.

  As I struggle, through a small gap between the hull and the ground, and amidst the billowing plumes of smoke, I see the boy.

  He is on his back, scrambling backwards, trying to bring his railgun up. His face is contorted into a rictus of fear and fury, all focused on something out of my field of vision.

  On my sensors, there is a single tank headed towards him.

  My interrogator lied to me. Of course, what did I expect? I should be furious, but all I can think about is preventing a conclusion to this mission which involves the boy’s broken, bloodied body lying in the mud alongside others.

  I scream inside my head, channelling everything I have into my efforts to move the tank’s vast bulk even a little, but it’s too heavy. I jerk my body away hard, again and again, but cannot free myself. I consider digging but the ground is too hard. There is only one way.

  I allow myself to access the image of the small girl on the swing, his sister. I take comfort in her beaming smile. Then I bring my right arm over and level the railgun against my left. I turn away—ricochets might conceivably damage my retinal systems, or maybe I can’t watch as I know even the terminal emergency mode won’t dampen this—and I open fire.

  The pain is beyond me, made worse by the knowledge there is no coming back from this amputation—no fresh Widow to take away the loss. Sensory data explodes across my vision, angry warnings I can do nothing about. I pull myself away, sick and reeling; I am unsteady, as if I am skating on slick ice.

  There is no time for self-pity. You deserve this. The boy does not.

  I turn and run hard, pumping round after round into the tank surging towards him. I want to hit it with grenades, anything that might kick through the hull, but I know it will be a waste; that the armour will turn them away without something more.

  The boy sees me coming. He keeps firing.

  There is no way I can stop the tank firing on him. No way to disable or destroy it before the plasma tears his fragile body into two. I launch into a dive.

  I hit him hard, but there’s nothing I can do about that.

  I curl him up in my one good arm and allow the momentum of my run, and the weight of the Widow, to do the rest.

  We roll for maybe thirty metres, but I keep my arm rigid around him like a cage. There’s no doubt it will hurt him, but it might be enough to save his life.

  A cluster of sensors tell me the plasma has struck about the area where the kidneys might be in the human body. They also tell me that dozens of systems in that area have shut down and that my right leg is receiving intermittent signals from the main neural pathways. I can hardly walk, let alone run.

  I stumble, half-carrying, half-dragging the boy and head for the cover of one the compound’s low buildings. I know the tank will reach us in seconds.

  I throw him down and lean against the wall, trying to formulate a plan.

  The clock reads four minutes, eight seconds. Less than a minute and they’re out.

  There is only one play left.

  I glance down at the boy and wish, in that moment, he could see my face, instead of the demon from his nightmares. But he can’t. “Go now,” I say. “I’ll get you the window you need to escape.”

  He knows they can’t make it out without this; he knows I am not coming. I allow myself to believe I can see something approaching forgiveness in his eyes.

  I lift the bandolier of grenades from his shoulder, and turn away from him. I slam a reload into my remaining railgun as I turn the corner and open fire.

  It was never my intention to escape. As I listened to my interrogator, I could not help but analyse what he was saying and what that meant for the war. When They had finished their bombardment, they occupied what was left of our colonies because we were easily subjugated. Most colonies have been annexed and are now governed by Them, and what is left of humanity exists at Their whim and within Their prison of night.

  But the resistance has been able to attack heavily guarded compounds and surgically remove precisely what it needs to control Widows. They were able to disable and attack my Battle Group in the drop zone. They knew we were coming. Their weaponry, even though it is a scarce resource to them, is military in origin. Now, this last raid might begin to turn the tide in the war.

  There is only one way the resistance could have obtained all that information and materiel: they have informants in positions of considerable responsibility. If I know this, and if I am captured, then so will They.

  There is only one way to protect that information.

  I was once an immortal weapon of war, but now I can finally find peace in death. A permanent sleep from which I will never wake—and no more will die by my hand. I have found my retribution. I have given humanity the tools to free itself.
<
br />   In my mind, I can see an orange flower, moving gently in the breeze as the darkness comes.

  I am death.

  Yet finally, I am gone.

  Nicolette Barischoff

  https://twitter.com/NBarischoff

  Pirate Songs(Novelette)

  by Nicolette Barischoff

  Originally published by The Future Fire in the anthology Accessing the Future

  The floater turned out to be one of those shiny, sky island multi-deck passenger deals that would occasionally completely lose its shit in the middle of a jump.

  This one would have been alright—various backup systems humming away, fifty or sixty first-colony licensed pilots determined to discover just what went wrong—had it not jumped straight into something else. Probably a garbage scow; there were a lot of garbage scows this far out. Now, the ship just drifted, listing and rolling like a fat, pretty corpse.

  The Dustpan’s crew all had their faces flat against the port windows, eyeing it like a bunch of dogs with tongues out. That was the only reason Rumer had let them go salvage. You pass up a big, beautiful floater like that, you never get your men to do anything useful ever again.

  We don’t got the time or space to pull her apart, he’d told them. No scrapping. Get yourselves something small and shiny and get back.

  For the most part, they’d listened, filling up their suit-packs with the sorts of little things you always find on a floating hotel like that; alcohol in expensive-looking bottles, VR games with an obscene number of attachments, the palm and wrist PCs that were only considered valuable out here where nobody could afford them. Bottles and needles from a well-stocked sick bay, cards, cash, the turtles out of an elaborate terrarium…Kell, the mutinous asshole, had tried to haul back two of those sultry-voiced concierge kiosks, and a broken servitor droid.

  Rumer wasn’t sure which of them had brought back the girl.

  She looked to be about fifteen, but to Rumer Pilgrim, anybody not born and raised out of New Pelican looked young.

  She didn’t have to be conscious to tell you she was far from home, either Earth or first colonies…German, Canadian, American, some single-nation settlement; she was that same kind of glass-house pretty. Well fed, with pale, untouched, swany skin, and a long, long waterfall of hair that somebody brushed out for her every morning, and a pale pink mouth that looked like it was used to pouting. When her eyes did flicker open for a split-second at a time, he could see they were a pale and brittle green.

  The crew crowded around that narrow infirmary bunk for a full day and a half. Diallo, a skinny kid from the pan-Africas with half a field medic’s education and a permanent shit-eating grin, actually left the pilot’s chair to bandage her head wound. And Kell, his lecherous one-eyed bulldog of a first mate, seemed to think he was going to wake her by flicking her nipples.

  “Haven’t even seen one like her in a while,” he said, rubbing his scrap glass eye, a sort of endearing nervous tick once you got to know him. “Kind of forgot they made ‘em like this.”

  “With two eyes and two whole titties?” said Diallo. “Not every woman’s like your New Pelican dock-workers, Kell. Back up, man, an’ stop gettin’ in the light. This one’s never seen anything ugly as you.”

  Kell grinned. “I’m sure she’ll just love that child-fucker smile you got.”

  Rumer ignored their dick-swinging. “Who brought her?” he asked.

  Diallo shrugged. “She was the only thing alive on that boat, Captain, her and that mess o’ turtles.”

  Rumer frowned. “Bad time to have a hitchhiker, you forget that already? What’re you thinking we’re gonna do with her when we have to make our drop?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Kell, “you ask me, we shouldn’t have the stuff in the first place.”

  “Right. But I didn’t ask you, and we do have the stuff, and we’re going to have to make a drop before much else happens.”

  “You mean before the shit’s no damn good to anybody, or before big Papa Kang figures out who took it and sends a team after us? Because I can guarantee you that second thing’s already happened.”

  “I’m thinking, Captain,” said Diallo, making the sort of diplomatic silencing gesture that made Rumer like him, “she is very far from home. She might help. With carrying, with distribution. In exchange for passage, you know.”

  Rumer cocked his head. Nodded.

  “It’s useful to have someone who looks like her, where we are going, what we are doing. People trust someone who looks like that. Nice pretty white face. They’ll take it from her. No need to tell her where it comes from.”

  “So she plays little White Mother for us, we put her down wherever she wants, she goes on home having gratefully agreed to tell nobody, and everybody’s happy and still alive, is that it?”

  Diallo grinned wide and white. “She won’t even have a ship’s name to tell her mother.”

  “It might work,” said Rumer. “If we don’t run into any transit police or any Peacekeeping Officers she feels like chatting to.”

  “Why would she talk to any Blueberries?” asked Diallo, “why leave the ship at all? We are just some nice men of varying degrees of handsomeness taking her to port.”

  Kell laughed at that, his loud bulldog bark. “I’ll agree with that! Why leave the ship at all? Hell, I’ll teach her to have fun sittin’ in one spot.”

  “You’ll wait ‘til she’s awake, you ugly fuck,” said Rumer. “If she don’t immediately bite your balls off and run screaming from your very presence.”

  Kell laughed again, louder and longer. Rumer turned to Diallo.

  “She’ll get her ride, but she’ll have to work. You think you can get her to work?”

  Diallo paused. The girl’s green eyes flickered open. And she sat up.

  Or rather, she tried to sit up, squirming strangely for several minutes before going limp, and saying, in a slightly strained voice: “Could one of you please help me up?”

  Nobody moved for a second. Diallo took her by the arm, and when that proved insufficient, grabbed her by the armpits, and propped her against the corner. Her feet were bare, and her legs dangled off the edge of the bunk, limp and pale. “Thank you,” she said.

  Diallo answered with a nod.

  The girl looked around her, not exactly frightened. Not exactly. But looking a little like she’d been thrown into an icy gray lake, and was just now bringing her head up out of the water to discover which of them had done it to her. “Who…What…happened? Where is this?”

  Rumer thought it best to let her have it all at once. “I am the more-or-less captain, Rumer Pilgrim, and you are currently a passenger aboard my ship, this streamlined and classically engineered cargo vessel you see before you.”

  “Why…?”

  “Well, young lady, because your own is presently floating through deep space like a chunk of particularly metal-rich frozen shit. Now, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t really care to. But you’ve got to know that we’ve gone pretty well out of our way to pick you up. Now, I didn’t mind doing it, and you’re welcome. We’ll drop you off soon as we’re able, anyplace you want to be, so long as it’s not a place where people are likely to get up in our business. But before that happens…what?”

  The girl was shaking her head, green eyes dry. “The ship, I was just…how did…?” She blinked, touched her head bandage, and suddenly settled on a question. “Your name’s Rumer Pilgrim?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s your real name?”

  Rumer frowned. “Never had another.”

  There was the smallest flick of a smile on that pink mouth. “So your name is actually ‘Pilgrim, Pilgrim’.”

  “No.” Rumer Pilgrim looked at her with narrower eyes than he intended. “No, and I can’t say I know what you’re playing at.”

  The girl’s smile widened the littlest bit. “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “Young lady, if you’d rather not ride with us…”

  “No, no. It’s fi
ne. Thank you…Thank you.”

  Rumer nodded.

  She let out a somewhat shuddering breath of air. She looked around. “Sorry…can I have my chair, please? Where did you put my chair?”

  Rumer blinked. Blinked again. “What chair?”

  ***

  Margo had been busy hiding when the crash occurred.

  She was trying to find a way to get lost and freeze to death inside the “Antarctic Exploration” levels of the ship’s educational Ages of Earth VR. You never could get really lost, of course. Margo knew that. Even the game’s wrong turns and avalanches and blinding snowstorms were all part of a network of programmed paths with beginnings, middles and ends.

  But on the outgoing flight, a kid who’d been angling to get a ride in her chair had tried to convince her that if you wandered far away enough from all the computer-generated explorers and the Prince Charles Mountains and the penguins, ignoring the game’s copious temperature warnings and the automatic chattering of your teeth, the VR would give you a slow and dramatic “death” on the spectacularly shimmering ice.

  She’d read everything interesting on the ship’s library terminal, and at least half-watched all the films available in the tiny holo-theater, and the VR terminals were the only other place the servitors couldn’t follow her.

  It had been a full two weeks of dodging the servitors. Everywhere, the servitors.

  Margo had brought one droid for the return journey from Polis. Her mother had supplied the ship with the other ten. One to three of them were always hovering nearby, chirpy little orbs of plastic and metal that went into fits of attentiveness every time their sensors detected movement: “Hello. Do you need assistance? What would you like to do? Please repeat what you would like to do. If you don’t know what you would like to do, I can make suggestions. The time is now 12:30. Are you hungry? If you’d like, I can access the network to tell you what is currently available in the kitchen…”