‘Then we need help,’ I said. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing else out there? The last time we saw it, the Mandate of Heaven was still in one piece. If she could rendezvous with us, she might be able to carry us all to the portal.’
After a moment, he said: ‘There is something, an object in my vicinity, about one hundred and twenty li out, but I only sense it intermittently. I would have mentioned it sooner, but I did not wish to raise your hopes.’
Whatever he intended, my hopes were rising now. ‘Could it be the Mandate?’
‘It is something like the right size, and in something like the right position.’
‘We need to find a way to signal it, to get it to come in closer. At the moment, they have no reason to assume any of us are alive.’
‘If I signal it, then the enemy will also know that some of us are still alive,’ Muhunnad answered. ‘I am afraid I do not have enough directional control to establish a tight-beam lock. I am not even certain I can broadcast an omnidirectional transmission.’
‘Broadcast what?’ Qilian asked, drifting into the bridge.
I wheeled around to face him; I had not been expecting him to return so quickly. ‘Muhunnad says there’s a good chance the Mandate of Heaven is nearby. Since we don’t seem to able to move, she’s our only chance of getting out of here.’
‘Is she intact?’
‘No way to tell. There’s definitely something out there that matches her signature. Problem is, Muhunnad isn’t confident that we can signal her without letting the enemy know we’re still around.’
‘It won’t make any difference to the enemy. They’ll be coming in to finish us off no matter what we do. Send the signal.’
After a moment, Muhunnad said: ‘It’s done. But I do not know if any actual transmission has taken place. The only thing I can do is monitor the Mandate and see if she responds. If she has picked up our signal, then we should not have long to wait. A minute, maybe two. If we have seen nothing after that time, I believe we may safely assume the worst.’
We waited a minute, easily the longest in my life, then another. After a third, there was still no change in the faint presence Muhunnad was seeing. ‘I am more certain than ever that it is the Mandate,’ he informed us. ‘The signature has improved; it matches very well, with no sign of damage. She is holding at one hundred and twenty li. But she is not hearing us.’
‘Then we need another way of signalling her,’ I said. ‘Maybe if we ejected some air into space . . .’
‘Too ambiguous,’ Qilian countered. ‘Air might vent simply because the ship was breaking up, long after we were all dead. It could easily encourage them to abandon us completely. What do we need this ship for in any case? We may as well eject the lifeboats. The Mandate of Heaven can collect them individually.’
After a instant of reflection, Muhunnad said: ‘I think the commander is correct. There is nothing to be gained by staying aboard now. At the very least, the lifeboats will require the enemy to pursue multiple targets.’
There were six lifeboats, one for each of us.
‘Let’s go,’ Qilian replied.
‘I’ll see you at the lifeboats,’ I said. ‘I have to help Muhunnad out of the harness first.’
Qilian looked at me for a moment, some dark calculation working itself out behind his eyes. He nodded once. ‘Be quick about it, Yellow Dog. But we don’t want to lose him. He’s still a valued asset.’
With renewed strength, I hauled the both of us through the echoing labyrinth of the ship, to the section that contained the lifeboats. It was clear that the attack had wrought considerable damage on this part of the ship, buckling wall and floor plates, constricting passageways and jamming bulkhead doors tight into their frames. We had to detour half way to the rear before we found a clear route back to the boats. Yet although we were ready to don suits if necessary, we never encountered any loss of pressure. Sandwiched between layers of the River Volga’s outer hull was a kind of foam that was designed to expand and harden upon exposure to vacuum, quickly sealing any leaks before they presented a threat to the crew. From the outside, that bulging and hardening foam would have resembled a mass of swollen dough erupting through cracks in the hull.
There were six lifeboats, accessed through six armoured doorways, each of which was surmounted with a panel engraved both with operating instructions and stern warnings concerning the penalties for improper use. Qilian was floating at the far end, next to the open doorway of the sixth boat. I had to look at him for a long, bewildered moment before I quite realised what I was seeing. I wondered if it was a trick of my eyes, occasioned by the gloomy lighting. But I had made no mistake. Next to Qilian, floating in states of deceptive repose, were the bodies of Jura and Batbayar. A little further away, as if he had been surprised and killed on his own, was Uugan. They had all been stabbed and gashed: knife wounds to the chest and throat, in all three instances. Blood was still oozing out of them.
In his good hand, Qilian held a bloody knife, wet and slick to the hilt.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, as if all that situation needed was a reasonable explanation. ‘But only one of these six boats is functional.’
I stared in numb disbelief. ‘How can only one be working?’
‘The other five are obstructed; they can’t leave because there is damage to their launch hatches. This is the only one with a clear shaft all the way to space.’ Qilian wiped the flat of the blade against his forearm. ‘Of course, I wish you the best of luck in proving me wrong. But I am afraid I will not be around to witness your efforts.’
‘You fucking . . .’ I began, before trailing off. I knew if I called him a coward he would simply laugh at me, and I had no intention of giving him even the tiniest of moral victories. ‘Just go,’ I said.
He drew himself into the lifeboat. I expected some last word from him, some mocking reproach or grandiloquent burst of self-justifying rhetoric. But there was nothing. The door clunked shut with a gasp of compressed air. There was a moment of silence and stillness and then the boat launched itself away from the ship on a rapid stutter of electromagnetic pulses.
I felt the entire hull budge sideways in recoil. He was gone. For several seconds, all I could do was breathe; I could think of nothing useful or constructive to say to Muhunnad, nothing beyond stating the obvious hopelessness of our predicament.
But instead, Muhunnad said quietly: ‘We are not going to die.’
At first, I did not quite understand his words. ‘I’m sorry?’
He spoke with greater emphasis this time. ‘We are going to live, but only if you listen to me very, very carefully. You must return me to the couch with all haste.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s no good, Muhunnad. It’s all over.’
‘No, it is not. The River Volga is not dead. I only made it seem this way.’
I frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘There isn’t time to explain here. Get me back to the bridge, get me connected back to the harness, then I will tell you. But make haste! We really do not have very much time. The enemy are much nearer than you think.’
‘The enemy?’
‘There is no Mandate of Heaven. Either she scuttled back to the portal, or she was destroyed during the same attack that damaged us.’
‘But you said . . .’
‘I lied. Now help me move!’
Not for the first time that day, I did precisely as I was told.
Having already plotted a route around the obstructions, it did not take anywhere near as long to return to the bridge as it had taken to reach the lifeboats. Once there, I buckled him into the couch—he was beginning to retain some limb control, but not enough to help me with the task—and set about reconnecting the harness systems, trusting myself not to make a mistake. My fingers fumbled on the ends of my hands, as if they were a thousand li away.
‘Start talking to me, Muhunnad,’ I said. ‘Tell me what’s going on. Why did you lie about the Mandate?’
‘Because I knew t
he effect that lie would have on Qilian. I wished to give him a reason to leave the ship. I had seen the kind of man he was. I knew that he would save himself, even if it meant the rest of dying.’
‘I still don’t understand. What good has it done us? The damage to the ship . . .’ I completed the final connection. Muhunnad stiffened as the harness took hold of his nervous system, but did not appear to be in any obvious discomfort. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked warily.
‘This will take a moment. I had to put the ship into a deep shutdown, to convince Qilian. I must bring her back system by system, so as not to risk an overload.’
The evidence of his work was already apparent. The bridge lights returned to normal illumination, while those readouts and displays that had remained active were joined by others that had fallen into darkness. I held my breath, expecting the whole ensemble to shut back down again at any moment. But I should have known better than to doubt Muhunnad’s ability. The systems remained stable, even as they cycled through start-up and crash recovery routines. The air circulators resumed their dull but reassuring chug.
‘I shall dispense with artificial gravity until we are safely underway, if that is satisfactory with you.’
‘Whatever it takes,’ I said.
His eyes, still wide open, quivered in their sockets. ‘I am sweeping local space,’ he reported. ‘There was some real damage to the sensors, but nowhere as bad as I made out. I can see Qilian’s lifeboat. He made an excellent departure.’ Then he swallowed. ‘I can also see the enemy. Three of their ships will shortly be within attack range. I must risk restarting the engines without a proper initialisation test.’
‘Again, whatever it takes.’
‘Perhaps you would like to brace yourself. There may be a degree of undamped acceleration.’
Muhunnad had been right to warn me, and even then it came harder and sooner than I had been expecting. Although I had managed to secure myself to a handhold, I was nearly wrenched away with the abruptness of our departure. I felt acceleration rising smoothly, until it was suppressed by the dampeners. My arm was sore from the jolt, as if it had been almost pulled from its socket.
‘That is all I can do for us now,’ Muhunnad said. ‘Running is our only effective strategy, unfortunately. Our weapons would prove totally ineffective against the enemy, even if we could get close enough to fire before they turned their own guns on us. But running will suffice. At least we have the mass of one less lifeboat to consider.’
‘I still don’t quite get what happened. How did you know there’d still be one lifeboat that was still working? From what I saw, we came very close to losing all of them.’
‘We did,’ he said, with something like pride in his voice. ‘But not quite, you see. That was my doing, Ariunaa. Before the instant of the attack, I adjusted the angle of orientation of our hull. I made sure that the energy beam took out five of the six lifeboat launch hatches, and no more. Think of a knife fighter, twisting to allow part of his body to be cut rather than another.’
I stared at him in amazement, forgetting the pain in my arm from the sudden onset of acceleration. I recalled what Qilian had said, his puzzlement about the ship twisting at the onset of the attack. ‘You mean you had all this planned, before they even attacked us?’
‘I evaluated strategies for disposing of our mutual friend, while retaining the ship. This seemed the one most likely to succeed.’
‘I am . . . impressed.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Of course, it would have been easier if I had remained in the harness, so that we could move immediately once the pod had departed. But I think Qilian would have grown suspicious if I had not shown every intention of wanting to escape with him.’
‘You’re right. It was the only way to convince him.’
‘And now there is only one more matter that needs to be brought to your attention. It is still possible to speak to him. It can be arranged with trivial ease: despite what I said earlier, I am perfectly capable of locking on a tight-beam.’
‘He’ll have no idea what’s happened, will he? He’ll still think he’s got away with it. He’s expecting to be rescued by the Mandate of Heaven at any moment.’
‘Eventually, the nature of his predicament will become apparent. But by then, he is likely to have come to the attention of the Smiling Ones.’
I thought of the few things Muhunnad had told us about our adversaries. ‘What will they do to him? Shoot him out of the sky?’
‘Not if they sense a chance to take him captive with minimal losses on their own side. I would suggest that an unpowered lifeboat would present exactly such an opportunity.’
‘And then?’
‘He will die. But not immediately. Like the Shining Caliphate, and the Mongol Expansion, the Smiling Ones have an insatiable appetite for information. They will have found others of his kind before, just as they have found others of mine. But I am sure Qilian will still provide them with much amusement.’
‘And then?’ I repeated.
‘An appetite of another kind will come into play. The Smiling Ones are coldblooded creatures. Reptiles. They consider the likes of us—the warm, the mammalian–to be a kind of affront. As well they might, I suppose. All those millions of years ago, we ate their eggs.’
I absorbed what he said, thinking of Qilian falling to his destiny, unaware for now of the grave mistake he had made. Part of me was inclined to show clemency: not by rescuing him, which would place us dangerously close to the enemy, but by firing on him, so that he might be spared an encounter with the Smiling Ones.
But it was not a large part.
‘Time to portal, Muhunnad?’
‘Six minutes, on our present heading. Do you wish to review my intentions?’
‘No,’ I said, after a moment. ‘I trust you to do the best possible job. You think we’ll make it into the Infrastructure, without falling to pieces?’
‘If Allah is willing. But you understand that our chances of returning to home are now very slim, Yellow Dog? Despite my subterfuge, this ship is damaged. It will not survive many more transitions.’
‘Then we’ll just have to make the best of wherever we end up,’ I said.
‘It will not feel like home to either of us,’ he replied, his tone gently warning, as if I needed reminding of that.
‘But if there are people out there . . . I mean, instead of egg-laying monsters, or sweet-looking devils with tails, then it’ll be better than nothing, won’t it? People are people. If the Infrastructure is truly breaking down, allowing all these timelines to bleed into one another, than we are all going to have to get along with each other sooner or later. No matter what we all did to each other in our various histories. We’re all going to have to put the past behind us.’
‘It will not be easy,’ he acknowledged. ‘But if two people as unalike as you and I can become friends, then perhaps there is hope. Perhaps we could even become an example to others. We shall have to see, shan’t we?’
‘We shall have to see,’ I echoed.
I held Muhunnad’s hand as we raced towards the portal, and whatever Heaven had in store for us on the other side.
N-Words
TED KOSMATKA
As the autumnal story that follows demonstrates, some forms of prejudice go very far back indeed.
New writer Ted Kosmatka has been a zookeeper, a chem tech, and a steel-worker, and is now a self-described lab rat who gets to play with electron microscopes all day. He made his first sale, to Asimov’s, in 2005, and has since made several subsequent sales there, as well as to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Seeds of Change, Ideomancer, City Slab, Kindred Voices, Cemetery Dance, and elsewhere. His story “The Prophet of Flores” was picked up by several Best of the Year series last year, including this one, and he’s placed several stories with several such series this year as well. He lives in Portage, Indiana, and has a Web site at tedkosmatka.com.
They came from test tubes. They came pale as ghosts with eyes as blu
e-white as glacier ice. They came first out of Korea.
I try to picture David’s face in my head, but I can’t. They’ve told me this is temporary—a kind of shock that happens sometimes when you’ve seen a person die that way. Although I try to picture David’s face, it’s only his pale eyes I can see.
My sister squeezes my hand in the back of the limo. “It’s almost over,” she says.
Up the road, against the long, wrought iron railing, the protestors huddle against the cold wind. They grow excited as our procession approaches. They are many, standing in the snow on both sides of the cemetery gates, men and women wearing hats and gloves and looks of righteous indignation, carrying signs I refuse to read.
My sister squeezes my hand again. Before today I had not seen her in almost four years. But today she helped me pick out my black dress. She helped me with my stockings and my shoes. She helped me dress my son, who is not yet three, and who doesn’t like ties—and who is now sleeping on the seat across from us without any understanding of what he’s lost.
“Are you going to be okay?” My sister asks. She is watching the protestors.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think I am.”
The limo slows as it turns onto cemetery property, and the mob rushes in, shouting obscenities. Protestors push against the sides of the vehicle.
“You aren’t wanted here!” someone shouts, and then an old man’s face is against the glass, his eyes wild. “God’s will be done!” he shrieks. “For the wages of sin is death.”
The limo rocks under the press of the crowd, and the driver accelerates until we are past them, moving up the slope toward the other cars.
“What’s wrong with them?” my sister whispers. “What kind of people would do that on a day like today?”
You’d be surprised, I think. Maybe your neighbors. Maybe mine. But I look out the window and say nothing. I’ve gotten used to saying nothing.
She’d shown up at my house this morning a little after 6:00. I’d opened the door, and she stood there in the cold, and neither of us spoke, neither of us sure what to say after so long.
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