The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  It was better, though, that she stayed eating berries and broiling moles on the Isle of the Dead. In any other part of Ghezirah, or any of the other Ten Thousand and One Worlds, life for her would be not so much difficult as impossible, and would most likely be brought to a rapid end.

  “How long have things been like this?”

  Elli now looked awkward. “I don’t know. I…” She looked up at the hissing, dancing roof. “… Can we leave this place?”

  It was good to be back out in the warm afternoon, even if all the falling memorials were now a constant reminder to Bess that this was a place of the dead. But as for Elli, she thought, as she gazed at her friend sitting on a pile of rocks with her arms wrapped around her grubby knees, she’s right in what she says. She isn’t some ghoul or monster. She’s truly alive. Then Bess’s eyes trailed down to that lightgun. The reason it looked like a toy, she realized, was that it had probably once been one. But she didn’t doubt that it was now deadly, or that Elli knew how to use it. In her own way, this little grave-runt was as much a warrior as Bess was.

  It seemed a time for confidences, so Bess explained what little there was to explain about her own life. The long days of endless practice. The even longer dormitory nights. The laughing chants. That sense of not properly belonging even in a community of outcasts. And now—the way her entire church and all its intelligences seemed to have withdrawn from her, when she’d been expecting to face some kind of ultimate challenge through which she could prove her worth.

  “You mean, like a dragon or something? A monster that needs killing?”

  She nodded. A dragon, or even a quasi-dragon, would certainly have done. Anything, no matter how terrible, would have been better than this. It was as if she’d been thrown back into the empty nowhere from which she had come, but pointlessly trained in swordplay and changed into the thing she now was …

  Something patted down Bess’s scales, leaving blurry silver trails that her camouflage struggled to mimic. After a long moment’s puzzlement, she realized it was tears.

  “Don’t you have any idea of your earlier life?” Elli asked. “I mean, some hint or memory?”

  Bess gave an armor-plated shrug, and rumbled about the piece of jewelry that she happened to possess. A thing on a chain, oval-shaped.

  “You mean a locket?”

  “I think it’s called a locket, yes. You’ve heard of them?”

  “Of course I have. I’ve got one myself. So—what’s inside yours?”

  “What do you mean, inside?”

  Elli laughed and leapt down from her perch.

  “You really don’t know much about anything other than killing things, do you, Bess?”

  Then she explained how lockets came in two hinged halves—there were, after all, plenty of examples of this and every other kind of trinket to be found on this isle—although the main thing that Bess was conscious of as they talked was her friend’s close presence, and the strange and peculiarly delicious sensation of a hand touching her own strange flesh.

  It was getting late. The dawn-singers had already made their first preparatory cries, stirring up an evensong of birds. Contrary to the once-popular saying, it proved far easier to depart the Isle of the Dead than to get there, and Elli soon led Bess back toward the same marble steps through which they had entered, and down into the depths of the forest that lay below. Moving through the pillared near-dark, Bess was conscious again of the danger of this place. Far more than the island above them, this was a landscape wherein monsters and wonders might abide. Yet Elli led on.

  The clearing lay ahead.

  “You’ll be here tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” Elli smiled. “I will.”

  Bess shambled across the meadowgrass, which, amid darker patches of bloodflower, already shone with dew. The caleche hissed open its door. She climbed in and laid down her sword. The keyhole eye at the center of the cabin’s altar, which would surely soon bear her a fresh instruction, and perhaps even apologies for this pointless waste of her time, remained unseeingly dark. The food tray hissed out for her, and she ate. Then, as she prepared to lie down, she remembered what Elli had said about lockets. Vaguely curious, but somehow still feeling no great sense of destiny, she opened her small chest and lifted the thing out. After a moment of struggle, the two sides broke apart.

  Another morning, and, although it was still too early for dawn, Bess was standing in the dim clearing outside her caleche with her sword. She, too, was a thing of dimness; her armor saw to that. But already the dawn-singers were calling. Light would soon be spilling from tower to tower. And there was Elli, standing out from the shadow trees, pale as stripped twig.

  “Bess! You’ve come!” She was almost running. Almost laughing. Then she was doing both.

  “I said I would, didn’t I?” Bess’s voice was as soft as it was capable of being. And as sad. It made Elli stop.

  “What’s happened?” They stood a few paces apart beside the rusty beetle of the caleche in the ungreying light. “You seem different.”

  “I haven’t changed,” Bess rumbled. “But I’ve brought you this. I want you to take it…” She held out the locket, glinting and swinging on its silver chain, from her hand’s heavy claw.

  “It’s that thing you described…” Elli looked puzzled, hesitant. “The locket. But this is…” She took it in her own small fingers. Here, in the spot in which they were standing, the gaining light had a rosy flush. “… mine.”

  “Open it.”

  Elli nodded. Red flowers lay all around them. The silver of the locket was taking up their color, and Bess now seemed a thing entirely made of blood. Swiftly, with fingers far more practiced and easeful than Bess’s, Elli broke open the locket’s two sides. From out of which gleamed a projection, small but exquisite, of the faces of three women. They were the same faces that hung in the hologlass pillar of Dallah’s mausoleum. But in this image they looked as happy as in the other they had been sad.

  “Dallah’s mothers.” Elli breathed. “This thing is yours, Bess. But it’s also mine…”

  “That’s right.”

  Elli snapped it shut. Dawn light was flowing around them now, and the bloodflowers made Elli beautiful, and yet they also made her pale and dangerous and sharp. “This doesn’t really have to happen, does it?” she whispered.

  “I think it does.”

  “Don’t tell me, Bess.” She almost smiled. “You remember it already…?”

  “I didn’t—not at all. But I’m beginning to now. I’m sorry, Elli.”

  “And I’m sorry as well. Isn’t there some way we can both just go our separate ways and live our own lives—you as a warrior and me just as me? Do I really have to do this to you?”

  “We both do. Nothing is possible otherwise. We’re joined together, Elli. We’re a monstrosity, a twist in spacetime. Our togetherness is an affront to reality. It must be destroyed, otherwise even worse things will break through. There are no separate ways.”

  The killing moment was close. Bess could already hear the lightgun’s poisonous hum. She knew Elli was quick, but she also knew that the use of any weapon, be it blade or laser, was the last part of a process that any trained warrior should be able to detect long before the final instant came. But how by all the intelligences was she supposed to do such a thing, when Elli was her own younger self?

  Then it happened. All those hours of practice and training, all the imam’s praises and curses, seemed to collide in a moment beyond time, and emerged into something deadly, precise, and perfect. For the first time in her fractured life, Bess executed The Cold Step Beyond with absolute perfection, and she and her blade were nowhere and in several places at once. Elli was almost as quick. And could easily have been quicker.

  Yet she wasn’t.

  Or almost.

  And that was enough.

  Bess swung back, a blur of metal and vengeance, into the ordinary dimensions of the spreading dawn. Around her, still spraying and toppling, spewed the remains of E
lli of the Isle of the Dead. Nothing but hunks of raw meat now, nothing you could call alive, even before the bits had thunked across the ground.

  Bess stood there for a moment, her breathing unquickening. Then she wiped and sheathed her sword. She knew now why the bloodflowers bloomed so well across this meadow. Without them, the strew of flesh that surrounded her would have been too horrible to bear. But something glinted there, perfect and unsullied. She picked it up.

  Her blade had cut through everything else—time, life, probability, perhaps even love—but not the chain and locket. It was the one strand that held together everything else.

  She remembered it all now. Remembered as if it had never been gone. Playing with Dallah—who had called her Elizabeth, or sometimes Elli, or occasionally Bess—all those aeons ago when she’d been little more than a hopeful ghost. Then pain and emptiness for the longest time until some kind of residual persistence took hold. It was, Bess supposed, the same kind of persistence that drives all life to strive to become, even if the body of someone once loved must be stolen in the process. Long seasons followed. There was little sense of growth or change. The once-sacred island around her slid further toward decay and neglect. But now she was Elli, and she had Dallah’s discarded body and she was alive, and she learned that living meant knowing how to feed, which in turn meant knowing how to kill.

  Elli had always been alone apart from a few of the other mausoleums’ residual intelligences.

  But it wasn’t until one warm summer’s morning when the light seemed to hang especially pure that she looked down across at the other great islands, and saw something moving in a clearing with jagged yet elegant unpredictability, and realized that she felt lonely. So she found a way down through the twisty forests that lay below the catacombs, and came at last to a space of open grass, and watched admiringly until she was finally noticed, and the monstrous thing came over to her in blurring flashes, and turned out to be not quite so monstrous at all.

  But that locket. Which had once been Dallah’s. Even as the Bess-thing held it out, Elli had understood that there was only one way that Bess could own it as well. That time, like the locket’s chain, had looped around itself and joined them together in a terrible bond. And Elli then knew that only one of them could survive, because she was the monstrosity that this creature had been sent to kill.

  The killing moment, when grace, power, and relentlessness are everything. But in the memory Bess now had of holding Elli’s lightgun, the warrior-thing had hesitated, and her own laser had fired a jagged spray. Even as Bess gazed down at the remains of Elli’s butchered body lain amid the bloodflowers, the memory of the burning stench of her own wrecked chitin and armor came back to her. She had died not once this dawn, but twice. And yet she was still living.

  It was fully day now. The clearing dazzled with dew. Looking back toward her caleche, Bess saw that its door had opened, and that, even in this morning blaze, the light of her altar shone out. More questing, perhaps. More things to kill. Or an instruction for her to return and recuperate within her church’s iron walls.

  The intelligences of the Warrior Church were harsh and brutal, but they also welcomed the sorts of creature that no other church would ever think to accept. And now they had given Bess back her memory, and made her whole. She realized now why her earlier quests had seemed so pointless, and why she hadn’t yet felt like a true warrior at all. But she was truly a warrior, for she had taken that final step into the cold beyond, and been found not to be wanting.

  Bess gazed at the open door of her caleche, and its eerie, beckoning glow. She had climbed in there once clutching that locket, been borne away in a long moment of forgetting to begin the life that had eventually brought her back here. But now her gaze turned toward the encircling forest, and she remembered that sense she had had of different dangers and mysteries lurking there. Wonders, perhaps, too.

  The caleche awaited.

  The light from its doorway blared.

  Its engine began to hum.

  Bess of the Warrior Church stood bloodied and head-bowed in a clearing in a nameless forest, wondering which way she should go.

  A Militant Peace

  DAVID KLECHA AND TOBIAS S. BUCKELL

  Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born science fiction author. His work has been translated into sixteen different languages. He has published some fifty short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and Campbell Awards. He’s the author of the Xenowealth trilogy, consisting of Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose. His short fiction has been collected in Nascence and Tides from the New Worlds. His most recent novel is Arctic Rising. Much of his short work has recently been made available as Kindle editions. He maintains a Web site at tobiasbuckell.com.

  David Klecha is a writer and Marine combat veteran currently living in West Michigan with his family and assorted computer junk. He works in IT to pay the bills, like so many other beginning writers and artists.

  Here they combine talents for a compelling look at an unusual, high-tech, nonviolent invasion of North Korea.

  I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace.

  —Albert Einstein

  For Nong Mai Thuy, a Vietnamese Sergeant in the Marine Police, the invasion of North Korea starts with the parachute-snapping violence of a High Altitude, Low Opening jump deep in the middle of the inky black North Korean airspace at night. Here the air is the stillest, bleakest black. The bleakness of a world where electricity trickles only to the few in Pyongyang.

  This is good for Mai. The synthetic ballistic faceshield displaying heads-up information has a host of visual add-ons, including night vision. She flicks it on, and the familiar gray-green of a landscape below rushes up to smack into her.

  When she thuds into the ground the specialized, carefully fitted, motorized armor hisses slightly as it adjusts to the impact.

  “Duc?”

  “I am safe,” her partner responds in her ear over the faint distortion of high-end crypto. In the upper right of her HUD a beacon glows softly, and she turns around. Duc’s smashed his way through several hefty tree limbs before hitting ground. But he’s already packing his chute.

  They are officially on the ground.

  Beyond the darkness are some nine and a half million North Korean forces that aren’t going to respond well to what has just happened.

  And Mai wonders: how many of them are already on the way to try and kill her right now?

  Three minutes before Mai and Duc hit the ground, heavy machinery in stealth-wrapped containers had parachuted in, invisible to prying electronic eyes, and touched down.

  Mai and Duc fan out to establish a perimeter and protect it, even as hundreds more hit the ground, roll, and come up ready to follow orders beamed at them from commanders still up in the sky, watching from live satellite feeds.

  A portable airstrip gets rolled out across the grassy meadow. Within the hour the thorium nuclear power plant airdrops in and gets buried into the ground, then shielded with an artillery-proof cap.

  Once power is on, Camp Nike takes shape. The ballistic-vest wearing civilian Chinese contractors have built whole skyscrapers within forty-eight hours. Here they only need to get four or five stories high for the main downtown area. They get a bonus for each extra geodesic dome fully prepped by the morning. The outer wall of the camp is airlifted in. It’s been constructed in pieces in Australia ahead of time, and the pieces slam down into the ground via guided parachutes. No one glances up, this part of the invasion has been practiced over and over again in Western Australia so much that it’s old news.

  Twenty minutes before sunrise two large transports land and the civilians rush them. The field is cleared of non-combatants soon after, leaving the ghost city behind it.

  It is dawn when what looks like a hastily organized contingent of the North Korean Army crests the hills. Thirty soldiers here to scout out what the hell just happened, Mai
imagines.

  Mai ends up outside the perimeter, guardian to the north gate.

  “Welcome to Camp Nike,” Duc mutters.

  Someone is riding shotgun through their helmet cameras and jumps into the conversation. It sounds like Captain Nguyen, Mai thinks. “Make a slight bow to the commanding officer, wave encouragingly at the group.”

  Mai’s hand rests on her hip, where a sidearm would usually be.

  “No threatening gestures, keep your arms out and forward,” her helmet whispers to her. Aggressive body-posture detected and reported by her own suit. It feels slightly like betrayal. Old habits die hard: Mai can’t help but reach for her hip.

  She is, after all, still a soldier.

  The small group of men all have AKS-74s—which the North Koreans call a Type 88—but they’re slung over their shoulders, even though they can see Mai and Duc in full armor.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Mai mutters.

  “Hold your positions,” command whispers to them.

  It isn’t right. Standing here, unarmed, holding her hands up in the air as if she’s the one surrendering, placating an enemy. When there are men standing just thirty feet away with rifles.

  One of them steps forward, his hands in the air, and she realizes he’s nervous.

  Mai points to a signpost near the gates.

  CAMP NIKE

  UNITED NATIONS–SPONSORED

  ALTERNATIVE SETTLEMENT ZONE

  NO WEAPONS ALLOWED

  PLACE ALL WEAPONS IN THE

  MARKED BINS FOR DESTRUCTION

  The sign’s in Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and English, and also emblazoned with the internationally-recognizable logos of all the camp’s primary private sector sponsors.

  There’ll be more of that when people got inside. Shoes and clothing by Nike. Dinners by ConAgra. TV by Samsung. Computers by Dell.

  The men read the sign, and start shaking their heads.