Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  But it’s no traveling rec room hidden amid the braces and padding of his cargo hold. Fighting Luke’s hands, Tipper climbs in, scanning the jumble of wires and consoles.

  “What the hell? What is all this?”

  “Tip.” He grabs her under the arms. Tipper’s been in too many sibling fights to let him get away with that. “Listen,” he pleads as she kicks him back, “don’t . . . don’t touch anything, okay? It’s too late, anyway.”

  She hops down from the truck and spins to face him, gravel spitting from her toes. “You planned this.” Luke’s face is miserable but resigned. “You had me fix your car so it would be registered to me. So you could get it back here in the staff areas. You only did this so you could . . . ”

  He doesn’t object. That’s the worst part of it. Hanging his head, staring at the ground, he can’t even bother to tell her it’s all more complicated than she understands.

  Sabotage. Everything, every event of the week, begins and ends in that word. Sabotage.

  “You shit.” Tipper begins to pant. “You piece of shit.”

  She lurches away from the car, remembering Carter’s words. Radio hacks, sophisticated methods, like the military uses on enemy drones. She can see now it’s not only rides that are affected. The local repair drones are sputtering into walls, dropping like addled moths from the sky. Tipper’s own brain feels fuzzy, scrambled. She finds Carter seated in the dirt, vomiting into a tuft of grass.

  The apocalypse is winding down. A wall of the Haunted House collapses, bricks and fake armchairs tumbling out. Snake is a twitching hulk, the joints of the skeleton snapped or fused, fabric flesh hanging in ragged swags. The image of death couldn’t be more complete if it were a real dragon here, vanquished and moribund.

  Tipper approaches. A flame spits from the ride’s battered head. Sparks begin to jump and catch. The gel-pack padding burns with an awful stench.

  “Tipper, stop.”

  A hand grabs her wrist. Tipper wheels around.

  Suzie stands behind her, not crying, only watching as Baby Snake melts into a greasy mass. Up the fairway, a siren yowls. The main emergency station is proofed against attacks, and the fire-dousing drones are already in formation, descending with jets and extinguishers and warnings.

  “Keep Back. Danger. Keep Back. Danger.”

  “Suzie.” Tipper is surprised to see that the older woman’s face is unmarked by grief, as if Suzie can’t even quite comprehend what has happened. “Suzie, I’m so sorry.”

  Tipper tries to say more, but she can’t go on without sobbing or choking. Smoke spreads in a thin haze. As Suzie’s eyes track over the ride, the plumpness seems to leach from her features, cheeks clinging to her bones.

  Tipper turns, looking for Luke. Bad move. Suzie turns also, seeing the truck. As for Luke himself, there’s no sign.

  “Oh.” Suzie releases Tipper’s hand. “Okay, I see. Yes, I see, now.”

  “Wait.” Tipper clutches at her hand. “Suzie, I didn’t know, I swear. He took me out, we drove around, I didn’t think he was—”

  Suzie nods dully. “All right, Tip. Just . . . just give me a second, here, okay.”

  The Haunted House is a crumbling wreck. Carter stumbles around it, wiping her mouth. The area is thick with drones and bots, most of them gathering around Luke’s truck. As for Luke himself, he seems to have completely disappeared.

  “Suzie, you have to believe me, I trusted him, he never said he would—”

  “All right, Tip.” Suzie’s tone is like the grating of a key. “I see what happened, here, okay? I get it.”

  It’s somehow more awful than being yelled at, this calm detachment, this sudden withdrawal. Because Suzie has been through everything, down here in the metal demimonde. She knows what’s what. And when Suzie makes up her mind, there’s no one who can unmake it.

  Tipper backs away, stumbling on stalled drones. “Please, Suzie. Please, believe me.”

  But the old operator drifts away, standing over the corpse of her ride.

  Tipper finds that she’s crying like a child, snot and tears flowing together. She wipes her face clumsily, vision blurred. Without thinking, she turns and runs.

  A group of teens trip by her on the fairway, one draped over two supporting friends. The crowds, already thin, are dwindling fast. “I’ll find you,” Tipper hears herself panting. “I’ll find you, you son of a bitch.”

  A ripped-off arm, part of the Dementor, lies like a fallen tree across the midway, repair bots swarming around it. Fairgoers circle like leaves in a stream, some fleeing, some gawking, some apparently aimless. Tipper remembers how Luke first appeared, one boy among many, a member of the crowd.

  She’ll get him. If security hasn’t done it yet, she’ll bring him in.

  Her stomping boots take her past the game stalls, through hordes of staring attendees. At the security tent, she searches the area. On to the repair station, the prize displays, the main gate.

  Nothing.

  She circles back through the wreckage to the road, under the fence and out of the fair, to where squatters have set up ersatz attractions.

  Nothing.

  Finally, Tipper takes her hunt to the limits, the public parking lots where it all began. And that’s when she has to admit that he’s gone, vanished the same way he appeared, another lost soul drifting through the Fringe and the idle decades and empty towns. And she finds a fallen trashcan and kicks it to death and sits on it and lets herself cry.

  When the sobbing ends, Tipper lifts her head. The fair is strangely quiet, now. She checks for messages from Suzie, Luke, the security team, but the whole world seems to have fallen silent. An eerie air of solitude hands over the empty parking lot, and she realizes that out here, she is entirely alone—except for a host of watching machines.

  Yes, they’re all around her. Rabbit Run, Wheelie-Dealie, The Speedy Demon. And the true relics, the old classics: Tyger-Tyger, Tentaculus, The Great Jim-Jamboree. The Orphans bow over her with solemn stares. With surprise and delight, Tipper realizes that they must have been out of range, spared the effects of Luke’s scrambling radiation. Rabbit Run sends out a bouncing bunny; it cocks at her a velveteen ear. Tyger-Tyger burns with a welcoming light. A tap on her shoulder makes Tipper jump. She sees Tentaculus grinning down at her, giving a slow wink of its huge eye.

  She stands and walks through this forest of the forgotten, this cohort of the estranged. The rides all vie for her attention. Come take a run with the racing rabbits! Are you hunting the tiger, or is he hunting you? It’s more than a monster: it’s Tentaculus!Without operators, these machines have to fend for themselves, begging for riders, attention, trust.

  Tipper works her way deep into the crowd, wondering, hoping. She hasn’t memorized every ride in the fair, which sometimes switches units between stops. An old ride, a small ride, an obscure ride, might just have escaped her noticed. It’s possible . . . .

  And as she rounds a corner and sees what’s ahead, the thrill of discovery thunderbolts through her heart.

  Approaching the gate, Tipper hears a ding of greeting.

  “Don’t be afraid! Step right up and meet the Gentle Giant!”

  It’s smaller than expected, a mere runt compared to the mighty Scream-o-Saurus. It’s also the cheapest ride Tipper’s ever seen, no more than the cost of a soda deducted from her account. Everything looks as Suzie described: the plastic ball, the gorilla-like arms. The seat smells musty and old. A click of a buckle, a tightening of straps. No protocols, now, no humans at all. When the ride confirms that she’s secure, up she goes.

  The Giant’s hands hold the sphere without a tremor. Like a flea in a soap bubble, Tipper slowly rises, though it seems as if the world is dropping away. A twist of the Giant’s hands, and she’s facing the fairgrounds, held aloft over the robot’s head, looking down on this strange little kingdom of wandering monsters and carnies and kids. From up here, the rides look like the toys they really are, the corpse of the Snake a frail black curl, the Haunted M
ansion a crumbled doll’s house. Away beyond the dirt and brush, far down the highway, are the scattered Fringe towns, the strange blue shapes of the moonlit desert. And farther off, in some smattering of lights too remote to see, the home that Tipper has left behind.

  The great hands move. The ball slowly spins. Tipper looks down into the face of the Giant, who gazes up, solemn and intent, as if trying to decide what kind of fairy he’s captured. Does this little creature sting? Will it bite? Is it dangerous? His eyes, as Suzie said, are a somber green, and Tipper holds their gaze as she undoes her harness. Her feet move silently on the padded floor. When she presses her hands to the plastic shell, a trickle of air runs past her palms, and she realizes the whole plastic sphere is pierced with tiny holes.

  The metal face looms below, larger than Tipper’s entire body. It’s proudly masculine in appearance—big square jaw, a prominent brow—and oddly reassuring. Here it is, what Suzie fell in love with, a great gentleness born of great strength.

  Spreading her arms, Tipper rests her weight on the plastic, looking down into eyes that will never look away. And she feels almost joyful, now, almost loved, as she reflects that, for this unbearably brief moment, she is undoubtedly in good hands.

  Alastair Reynolds is the bestselling author of over a dozen novels. He has received the British Science Fiction Award for his novel Chasm City, as well as the Seiun and Sidewise Awards, and was shortlisted for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. He has a PhD in astronomy and worked for the European Space Agency before he left to write full time. His short fiction has been appearing in Interzone, Asimov’s, and elsewhere since 1990. Alastair’s latest novel is The Medusa Chronicles, co-written with Stephen Baxter.

  THE IRON TACTICIAN

  Alastair Reynolds

  Merlin felt the old tension returning. As he approached the wreck his mouth turned dry, his stomach coiled with apprehension, and he dug nails into his palms until they hurt.

  He sweated and his heart raced.

  “If this was a trap,” he said, “it would definitely have sprung by now. Wouldn’t it?”

  “What would you like me to say?” his ship asked, reasonably.

  “You could try setting my mind at ease. That would be a start. It’s one of ours, isn’t it? You can agree with me on that?”

  “It’s a swallowship, yes. Seven or eight kiloyears old, at a minimum estimate. The trouble is, I can’t get a clean read of the hull registry from this angle. We could send out the proctors, or I could just sweep around to the other side and take a better look. I know which would be quicker.”

  “Sometimes I think I should just let you make all the decisions.”

  “I already make quite a lot of them, Merlin—you just haven’t noticed.”

  “Do whatever you need to do,” he said, bad-temperedly.

  As Tyrant swooped around the wreck, searchlights brushed across the hull like delicate, questing fingertips, illuminating areas of the ship that would have been in shadow or bathed only in the weak red light of this system’s dwarf star. The huge wreck was an elaborate flared cylinder, bristling with navigation systems and armaments. The cylinder’s wide mouth was where it sucked in interstellar gas, compressing and processing it for fuel, before blasting it out the back in a vicious, high-energy exhaust stream. Swallowships were ungainly, and they took forever to get up to the speed where that scoop mechanism was effective, but there was nowhere in the galaxy they couldn’t reach, given time. Robust, reliable, and relatively easy to manufacture, there had been only minor changes in design and armaments across many kilo-years. Each of these ships would have been home to thousands of people, many of whom would live and die without ever setting foot on a world.

  There was damage, too. Holes and craters in the hull. Half the cladding missing along one great flank. Buckling to the intake petals, beyond anything a local crew could repair.

  Something had found this ship and murdered it.

  “There,” Tyrant said. “Swallowship Shrike, commissioned at the High Monarch halo factory, twelve twelve four, Cohort base time, assigned to deterrent patrol out of motherbase Ascending Raptor, most recently under command of Pardalote . . . there’s more, if you want it.”

  “No, that’ll do. I’ve never been near any of those places, and I haven’t heard of Pardalote or this ship. It’s a long way from home, isn’t it?”

  “And not going anywhere soon.”

  Beyond doubt the attacking force had been Husker. Whereas a human foe might have finished this ship off completely, the Huskers were mathematically sparing in their use of force. They did precisely enough to achieve an end, and then left. They must have known that there were survivors still on the ship, but the Huskers seldom took prisoners and the continued fate of those survivors would not have concerned them.

  Merlin could guess, though. There would have been no chance of rescue this far from the rest of the Cohort. And the damaged ship could only have kept survivors alive for a limited time. A choice of deaths, in other words: some slow, some fast, some easier than others.

  He wondered which he might have chosen.

  “Dig me out a blueprint for that mark of swallowship, the best you can, and find a docking port that places me as close as possible to the command deck.” He touched a hand to his sternum, as if reminding himself of his own vulnerability. “Force and widsom, but I hate ghost ships.”

  “Then why are you going in?”

  “Because the one thing I hate more than ghost ships is not knowing where I am.”

  The suit felt tight in places it had never done before. His breath fogged the faceplate, his lungs already working double-time. It had been weeks since he had worn the suit, maybe months, and it was telling him that he was out of shape, needing the pull of a planet’s gravity to give his muscles something to work against.

  “All right,” he said. “Open the lock. If I’m not back in an hour, find a big moon and scratch my name on it.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want the proctors to accompany you?”

  “Thanks, but I’ll get this done quicker on my own.”

  He went inside, his suit lit up with neon patches, a moving blob of light that made his surroundings both familiar and estranged at the same time. The swallowship was huge but he only meant to travel a short distance through its innards. Up a level, down a level, each turn or bend taking him further from the lock and the debatable sanctuary of his own ship. He had been steeling himself for corpses, but so far there were none. That meant that there had been survivors. Not many, perhaps, but enough to gather up the dead and do something with their bodies.

  Slowly Merlin accepted that the ship was all that it seemed, rather than a trap. The suit was beginning to seem less of a burden, and his breathing had settled down. He was nearly at the command deck now, and once there it would not take him long to decide if the ship held useful information.

  He needed better charts. Recently there had been a few close scrapes. A couple of turbulent stretches had damaged Tyrant’s syrinx, and now each transition in and out of the Waynet had Merlin praying for his last shred of good luck. Swallowships could not use the Waynet, but any decent captain would still value accurate maps of the old network. Its twinkling corridors of accelerated spacetime provided cover, masking the signature of a ship if it moved on a close parallel course. The location of the Waynet’s major hubs and junctions was also a clue as to the presence of age-old relics and technological treasure.

  Merlin paused. He was passing the doorway to one of the frostwatch vaults, where the surviving crew might have retreated as the last of their life-support systems gave out. After a moment’s hesitation he pushed through into the vault. In vacuum, it was no colder or more silent than any other space he had passed through. But he seemed to feel an additional chill as he entered the chamber.

  The cabinets were stacked six high on opposite walls of the vault, and the vault went on much further than his lights could penetrate. Easily a hundred or more sleepers in just this vault,
he decided, but there would be others, spread around the ship for redundancy. Thousands in total, if the swallowship was anything like his own. The status panels next to each cabinet were dead, and when Merlin swept the room with a thermal overlay, everything was at the same low temperature. He drifted along the cabinets, tracing the names engraved into the status panels with his fingertips. Sora . . . Pauraque . . . they were common Cohort names, in some cases identical to people he had known. Some had been colleagues or friends; others had been much more than that. He knew that if he searched these vaults long enough he was bound to find a Merlin.

  It had not been such a rare name.

  One kindness: when these people went into frostwatch, they must have been clinging to some thought of rescue. It would have been a slim hope, but better than none at all. He wanted to think that their last thoughts had been gentle ones.

  “I’m sorry no one came sooner,” Merlin whispered, although he could have shouted the words for all the difference they made. “I’m too late for you. But I’m here to witness what happened to you, and I promise you’ll have your justice.”

  Filled with disquiet, he left the vault and made his way to the command deck. The control consoles were as dead and dark as he had been expecting, but at least there were no bodies. Merlin studied the consoles for a few minutes, satisfying himself that there were no obvious booby-traps, and then spooled out a cable from his suit sleeve. The cable’s end was a standard Cohort fixture and it interfaced with the nearest console without difficulty.

  At first all was still dead, but the suit was sending power and data pulses into the console, and after a few minutes the console’s upper surface began to glow with faint-but-brightening readouts. Merlin settled into a chair with his elbow on the console and his fist jammed under his helmet ring. He expected a long wait before anything useful could be mined from the frozen architecture. Branching diagrams played across his faceplate, showing active memory registers and their supposed contents. Merlin skimmed, determined not to be distracted by anything but the charts he had come for. The lives of the crew, the cultural records they carried with them, the systems and worlds this ship had known, the battles it had fought, might have been of interest to him under other circumstances. Now was the time for a ruthless focus.