Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

  More thudding, pounding and booming from the door. More sharp, jagged points of metal jutting inwards. It no longer looked like a door, but more like the model of an extensive mountain range turned on its end.

  The attack stopped as suddenly as it had begun, echoes bouncing through the Lightship’s corridors. For a moment there was silence, and Aldo and the Fris looked at each other. Aldo did not believe the creature had given up, and he doubted the Fris believed it either. They waited.

  A creak from the bulkhead to the right of the door. Had it buckled slightly? Aldo peered at it, reluctant to move closer and check. He thought he saw a slight buckling. He felt the tightening in his chest again, a twist in his stomach.

  Another creak. A groan. Raised lines began to radiate from the bulkhead edge by the door, like veins on the back of an old man’s hand. The bulkhead on the other side of the door now creaked. More veins began to creep from its edge.

  Aldo felt sick, his chest tight, his stomach churning. He raised the Browning, his fingers white with clenching. It was a useless gesture. There was nothing to fire at. It was little consolation that the Fris had raised his weapon also.

  “It’s getting in,” said Aldo. It was a needless remark, but he felt the need to say something, to show he was aware of the situation. Aware that his own death was approaching.

  “How long can you survive in a vacuum?” said the Fris, his weapon raised, his eyes flashing from one bulkhead to the other, watching the slow creep of the metal veins.

  “What?” Aldo was confused by the question. He was finding it hard to concentrate on anything but the groaning bulkheads.

  “How long?” repeated the Fris, an edge of irritability creeping into its growling voice.

  “I don’t know... less than two minutes?” said Aldo, trying to remember his basic training. “But I’d be unconscious in seconds.”

  Without a further word, the Fris put down his weapon and, after releasing several clasps, shrugged out of his spacesuit.

  Aldo stared at the first Fris he had seen without a suit. Its skin looked like smooth armour, with none of the cragginess of the face. It wore a one-piece overall-type garment, close fitting but not skin tight. It was all surprisingly human, until the tail swished or the beast-like head turned and growled.

  “What are you doing?” said Aldo, uncomfortably aware of how the creaking and groaning of the bulkheads was getting louder. It would not be long before the creature was able to completely infiltrate the Rec Room. The veins were already pulsing with life, growing wider and longer with each second.

  “I can survive for almost three of your hours, and will retain consciousness for at least thirty of your minutes,” said the Fris. As he spoke he adjusted something at the back of the suit and the tail section detached, falling to the deck and rolling to one side. It reminded Aldo, bizarrely, of an out-of-place draft excluder.

  “Not all of us have tails,” explained the Fris. “The suits are made to adapt.”

  “But why...?”

  The Fris held the suit out to Aldo.

  “Put this on. It will not be perfect, but once sealed it will keep you alive.”

  “It won’t stop that thing from killing me,” said Aldo, still puzzled by the Fris’s actions. “I don’t understand what your plan is?”

  “Put the suit on,” said the Fris. “If there is still time to explain after that, I will try.”

  The bulkhead to the right began to visibly buckle, a few sharp peaks poking outwards. The metal began to scream under stress.

  Aldo, beyond the point of arguing, stepped into the suit, with help from the Fris. It was too big for him, his hands barely reaching the gloves, the feet clown-like in their length, but as the helmet rose from the back, curving over his head, and sealed at the front, he could not deny he felt strangely safer. Intellectually he knew the suit would not protect him from the creature, but emotionally he felt more secure than he had in only t-shirt and trousers. He felt properly dressed.

  He looked at the Fris, still an impressive sight even without the bulk of the suit. It was built to be a warrior, every muscle honed to perfection. Humans must look so weak to a Fris.

  A prolonged screech of metal turned his attention to the bulkhead. It was blistering. The veins looked ready to pop. At any moment, it seemed the creature would gain complete control and either crush them or gather them in as it had others, somehow digesting the flesh, the bone and muscle, in seconds.

  “Given its long residence on this Lightship, I am hoping it needs oxygen as we do,” said the Fris.

  Aldo thought that, once again, he saw that mostly immobile mouth twitch into something resembling a smile.

  The Fris was bent over the control pad of its energy weapon. Then, with hurried steps, it placed the weapon on the deck, at the junction of the left bulkhead and the damaged door.

  “Tell me the plan,” said Aldo, as the Fris retreated to the back of the Rec Room. It waved at Aldo to join it, which he managed with awkward, stumbling steps.

  “I have overridden the safety systems on the weapon,” said the Fris. “I have also dialled it to full power. Without the safety, it should overload.”

  It took a moment for Aldo to catch on. When he did, he was not sure whether to feel hopeful or even more frightened.

  “You think it’ll explode,” he said. It was not a question.

  The bulkheads around them screamed as tentacles of metal reached for them. Aldo saw the Fris grabbed and, struggling, dragged back towards the bulkhead. He moved to help, but was, himself, caught around the right leg. He tried to pry the metal free, but it wrapped tighter. Pain shot through him as his leg was crushed. He felt the bone snap and screamed his agony into the helmet of the Fris spacesuit. He could not resist as he was pulled backwards.

  The energy weapon exploded with a blinding flash of light and a percussive wave that slammed into Aldo, hurting him almost as much as the creature was. There was a hole in the bulkhead that spread across to the door. The screaming of the metal was joined by the screaming of air as it was sucked into the vacuum of space.

  The tentacles around Aldo and the Fris retracted, snapping back into the bulkheads either side. He could not be sure, but Aldo thought he heard another scream, a totally alien gurgle of a scream, joining those of the metal and the air.

  He could feel the tug of the vacuum, trying to pull him towards the hole in the bulkhead. He struggled not to go, holding on to a chair that was bolted to the deck. A hand on his arm startled him, and he let out a small yelp of fear before he heard the growl of the Fris clearly through the helmet.

  “Let it take you. We need to be outside.”

  The Fris let go of his arm and Aldo watched in stunned silence as the alien allowed itself to be lifted and pulled through the Rec Room and out of the hole into space.

  The bulkheads were writhing. Undulations of metal that were almost liquid in their motion. An occasional angry peak would be punched out, but the overwhelming impression to Aldo was of fear, of panic. The creature was thrashing about within the bulkhead, unsure what to do in this new situation. The deck beneath his feet was buckling too. Around him, stalactites and stalagmites of metal were appearing with sudden ferocity, and he wondered how long before one would tear through the suit and kill him.

  “What the hell,” he said quietly. “I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  He let go of the chair.

  The outrush of air picked him up with ease and he felt himself flying, out of control, through the deadly maze of sharp metal jutting up and out all around him. The foot of the suit caught the edge of one and he began to spin. He felt nauseous but relieved that the suit was not punctured. He was still spinning as he was sucked out into the blackness of space.

  A hand steadied him, and he saw the Fris was holding on to an antenna. The Fris pointed away to its right. As Aldo looked, understanding made him smile. The Fris ship still hung in space, docked with Neophyte, but sealed.

  The Human and the Fris pushed off tog
ether, an untethered space walk in the direction of the Fris ship.

  Aldo managed to look back once. More holes were being punched in the Rec Room and, at times, he thought he saw, not metal, but rose-coloured flesh writhing and pulsing through the distorted bulkheads and decks. Then it was gone. The Rec Room became suddenly lifeless and Aldo knew the creature had returned to the main body of the Lightship.

  8.

  They boarded the Fris ship with ease, entering through an airlock that was so similar to the ones on Neophyte that Aldo was disoriented for a moment. The more he learnt about the Fris, the more human they seemed.

  Aldo had half expected there to be crew aboard, but the ship’s corridors and cabins were eerily empty.

  “Small ship on an unpopular mission,” explained the Fris as they hurried towards the Control Room. “Everyone was needed for the boarding. Automatic systems were left in control.”

  “What kind of weaponry does it have?” asked Aldo, his breathing becoming laboured as he struggled to keep up, still inside the outsized Fris spacesuit. He dragged his broken leg, hissing and wincing at the pain.

  “Enough.” It was all the answer the Fris would give.

  Aldo tried to look around him as they went, looking for any crucial pieces of information he could take back to Space Command, if he survived. It had long been the Holy Grail to gain access to a Fris ship. In two-hundred years of warfare, they had never captured one as anything less than a twisted wreck. Now, here he was, inside the enemy’s ship, and it all looked disappointingly familiar. Other than extra wide doors, presumably to allow the Fris tail through without hindrance, there was little, if any, difference from a standard Human ship. Apparently, if you were a bipedal race of a certain build, there was a basic, functional design that objects would follow. Including a military ship. Perhaps the decor changed, or the language of signs, but where the function was the same, the design became the same also.

  They entered the Control Room. The positioning of desks and chairs was slightly unusual, but Aldo knew he could control this ship with ease, should the need arise.

  “I guess this all looks a little familiar,” said the Fris as he took a position at the weapons console.

  Aldo, the helmet now retracted as the air inside the ship was perfectly acceptable, if a little heavy in an unusual animal-like odour, nodded.

  “I was just thinking how amazing it is, the way basic functional design can evolve in such a similar way in two different species,” he said.

  The Fris snorted, the first time Aldo had heard that particular, and fairly unpleasant, sound.

  “We captured several of your ships almost a century ago, by your time, and copied the design,” said the Fris. “Until then, our ships were impractical and inefficient.”

  Aldo was stunned by the admission. He felt deflated, even slightly embarrassed at his well-meaning but inaccurate reasoning. He quickly recovered. There were still enough human-like mannerisms and behaviours in the Fris to maintain his belief that they were not all that different from humans, despite what the official propaganda might say.

  “Look,” said the Fris, directing the weapon system’s outside view onto a large screen built into the front bulkhead.

  The Fris ship had disengaged and now stood some way off. Aldo could see Neophyte directly ahead, but the shape seemed blurred, subtly wrong in some way. It took a moment for him to realise all the outer bulkheads were buckled, distorted. Tentacles writhed near the engine room, most of them metal, but some a pulsing rose-coloured flesh.

  “Any final words?” said the Fris, its finger poised above the Fire button.

  Aldo thought of all the people who had died, Eliot, Sergeant O’Connor and the others, including the Fris soldiers. He thought of how, for two centuries, this creature had hidden in the bulkheads and the decks, striking out when it felt threatened. It had killed hundreds, and it had tainted the memory of the longest serving Lightship in the Human Navy.

  “Good riddance,” he said.

  The energy beam struck again and again, each time tearing great holes in Neophyte, debris spinning off into space, some clattering against the hull of the Fris ship. The explosions flared in silence, the ripping of metal unheard in the vacuum of space. Nevertheless, Aldo imagined he could hear the creature screaming, as he had heard it just before he escaped from the Rec Room. It made it all, somehow, more satisfying.

  At one point, late on in the destruction, he thought he saw a rose-coloured, amorphous mass drift away from the Lightship. It was the briefest of glimpses and could have been the after-effect of one of the explosions. But it made him wonder.

  He was not so surprised to find the Fris had been having similar thoughts.

  “Do you think it is dead? Or did it escape?” said the Fris, as he continued to fire the ship’s weapon, one eye watching the temperature needle crawling closer to the danger position.

  “I hope it’s dead,” said Aldo. “But I fear otherwise.”

  “We need to warn others,” said the Fris. “It is unlikely this creature was unique. Whether this one is dead or not, there is still the possibility of more out there.”

  “How safe do you think we are here?”

  The Fris did not answer, and Aldo was not surprised. No answer was preferable to the probable truth.

  The energy weapon ceased fire, and the Fris turned almost apologetically to Aldo. “It was about to overheat. I had to stop.”

  Aldo looked at the screen and the blackened, crumpled wreckage that had been the Lightship Neophyte.

  “I think it’s enough,” he said. “I came here to decommission her. I guess you could say the job’s done.”

  “We should remember those we lost,” said the Fris, and Aldo nodded.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever forget them,” he said.

  A thought struck him and he almost laughed. “Your President, or whatever, is going to be pissed. You’ve destroyed his museum piece.”

  The Fris shrugged in its peculiarly Human fashion. “The Lgoblol will need to look elsewhere. Sometimes I feel this whole war is being run by our rulers for their personal profit.”

  Aldo silently agreed, and wondered again at the similarity in his and the Fris’s thinking.

  It seemed the danger was over. The creature had been either killed, or at least expelled from Neophyte. A lot of men had lost their lives, but he and this one Fris survived, aboard a Fris spaceship.

  “I guess I’m your prisoner,” he said with quiet resignation.

  The Fris nodded slowly and then, in a quiet, low growl, said, “Yes. But much can happen between here and home. For example, after I have treated your leg in our medical facilities, you might steal one of our lifeboats which I have carelessly left unsealed and which are a short walk down the corridor from the medical room.”

  Aldo grinned. “You know, I feel I should introduce myself. My name is Aldo.”

  “I am Wrancda,” said the Fris.

  They shook hands.

  Ana

  Liam Hogan

  It’s weird, the things that can mess up a kid’s head. Take Ana, for example. She was convinced that every time she looked under her bed, the Universe split in two. In a parallel world in which a mirror Ana also looked under her bed before going to sleep and after saying her prayers and where, up until then, she’d never found anything bad, this time there would be a ghastly demon with wicked teeth and blood-stained claws, whose only desire was to catch and tear apart Ana, aged six and three quarter years.

  Little wonder she said her prayers before she looked. Little wonder she had nightmares.

  I told her that wasn’t the way the multiverse theory worked. That for every Ana that found a slavering beast, there was one that found a toy she’d lost, or one that forgot to look under the bed.

  She skewered me with her most outraged look. This Ana never forgot.

  But it’s hard arguing theoretical physics with a child yet to turn seven and, as I wasn’t prepared to deny the theory outright, it was cl
ear this notion was not going to be an easy one to shift. It wasn’t simply that she had a binary, yes versus no, either-or view of the coin toss that happened in her imagination every time she lifted the skirt that kept under-the-bed out-of-sight. It was because what terrified her, wasn’t the finding a monster under her bed, it was the not finding a monster under her bed. In her head, every time she survived, she doomed the parallel Universe Ana to a grisly death. It was the guilt that was crushing her.

  “Why don’t you not look?” I reasoned.

  “I have to,” she replied with an air of ancient sorrow. “There might be a monster under the bed. I have to check. And even if I don’t, the other Ana will.”

  This had me scratching my head, figuratively speaking. I’m a psychologist by trade, not a physicist. Wouldn’t that require the Universe to have already split? And, once the other Ana looked, it would be her Universe that split again, not this Ana’s. Maybe this was something I could use.

  I thought of her parents. Reading between the lines, not a tricky task with those two, they wanted me to crush Ana’s creativity. To make her as easy to handle as she had been twelve months earlier. To make her ‘normal’. But normal wasn’t an option; it was clear this precocious child had the potential to far exceed the pretensions of her middle class parents.

  “Ana,” I said, “Who looks first? You, or the other Ana?”

  She suspected a trick and trod carefully. “We both...” then she corrected herself. “There is no other Ana, not until I look. Or there is, but it’s me and we haven’t split yet.”