Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  “Through the cemetery,” I said.

  I only just remembered to remove the revolver from Davey’s jacket pocket. My mother suddenly appeared, gave me a tearful but silent hug, and started mopping the floor.

  We straightened out a story on the way down, and I disappeared out of the car while my father went inside and got a couple of orderlies out with a stretcher. Ambulances came and went, sirens blaring, lights flashing. A lot of uniforms about. By this time we were fighting the Brits as well as the Yanks. After a few minutes Malcolm returned, and I stepped out of the shadows and slid into the car.

  “They bought it,” he said. He lit a cigarette and coughed horribly. “Back to the house for a minute? Talk to your mother?”

  “Dangerous for us all,” I said. “If you could drop me off up at Barr’s Cottage, I’d appreciate it. Otherwise, I’ll hop out now.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  Past the station again, at a more sedate pace.

  “Thank you,” I said, belatedly. “For everything.”

  He grinned, keeping his eye on the road. “‘First, do no harm,’” he said. “Sort of thing.”

  He drove in silence for a minute, around the roundabout and out along Inverkip Road. The walls and high trees of the cemetery passed on the right. Gordon was probably picking his way through the middle of it by now.

  “I’ll give her your love,” he said. “Yes?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Won’t be seeing you again for another couple of years?”

  “If that,” I answered, bleakly if honestly.

  He turned off short of Barr’s Cottage, into a council estate, and pulled in under a broken streetlamp. The glow from another cigarette lit his face.

  “All right,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”

  Another sigh, another bout of coughing.

  “You may not see me again. Your mother doesn’t know this yet, but I’ve got six months. If that.”

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  “Cancer of the lung,” he said. “Lot of it about. Filthy air around here.” He crushed out the cigarette. “Stick to rural guerrilla warfare in the future, old chap. It’s healthier than the urban variety.”

  “I’ll fight where I’m —”

  His face blurred. I sobbed on his shoulder.

  “Enough,” he said. He held me away, gently.

  “There’s no pain,” he assured me. “Whisky, tobacco, and heroin, three great blessings. And as the Greek said, nothing is terrible when you know that being nothing is not terrible. I’ll know when to ease myself out.”

  “Oh, God,” I said again, very inaptly.

  His yellow teeth glinted. “I have no worries about meeting my maker. But, ah, I do have something on my conscience. A monkey on my back, which I want to offload on yours.”

  “All right,” I said.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes.

  “Another time I treated a leg with a very similar injury…” he said. “You were there then, too. You were much smaller, and so was the patient. You do remember?”

  “Of course,” I said. My knees were shaking.

  His eyes opened and he stared out through the windscreen.

  “The last time we discussed this,” he said, “I suggested that you look into the origin of the bomber. No doubt you have read some books, given the matter, thought, and drawn your own conclusions.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I certainly have, it’s a —”

  He held up one hand. “Keep it,” he said. “I’ve had a lot longer to think about the origin of the pilot. My first thought was the same as yours, that it was a child. Then, when I got, ah, a closer look, I must confess that my second thought was that I was seeing the work of…another Mengele. The grey skin, the four digits on hands and feet, the huge eyes, the coppery color of the blood…I thought for years that this was the result of some perverted Nazi science, you know. But, like you, I’ve read a great deal since. And as a medical man, I know what can and can’t be done. No rare syndrome, no surgery, no mutation, no foul tinkering with the germ-plasm could have made that body. It was not a deformed human body. It was a perfectly healthy, normal body, but it was not human.”

  He turned to me, shaking his head. “The memory plays tricks, of course. But in retrospect, and even taking that into account, I believe that the pilot was not only not human, but not mammalian. I’m not even sure that he was a vertebrate. The bones in the leg were —”

  His cheek twitched. “Like broken plastic, and hollow. Thin-walled and filled with rigid tubes and struts rather than spongy bone and marrow.”

  I felt like giggling.

  “You’re saying the pilot was from another planet?”

  “No,” he said, sharply. “I’m not. I’m telling you what I saw.” He waved a hand, his cigarette tip tracing a jiggly red line. “For all I know, the pilot may be a specimen of some race of intelligent beings that evolved on Earth and lurks unseen in the depths of the fucking Congo or the Himalayas, like the Abominable Snowman!”

  He laughed, setting off another wheezing cough.

  “So there it is, John. A secret I won’t be taking to the grave.”

  We talked a bit more, and then I got out of the car and watched the taillights disappear around a corner.

  Scotland is not a good country for rural guerrilla warfare, having been long since stripped of trees and peasants. Without physical or social shelter, any guerrilla band in the hills and glens would be easily spotted and picked off, if they hadn’t starved first. The great spaces of the Highlands were militarily irrelevant anyway.

  So everybody believed, until the guerrilla war. Night, clouds and rain, gullies, boulders, bracken, isolated clumps of trees, the few real forests, burns and bridges and bothies all provided cover. The relatively sparse population could do little to betray us and — voluntarily or otherwise — much to help, and supplied few targets for enemy reprisals against civilians. Deer, sheep, and rabbits abounded, edible wild plants and berries grew everywhere, and vegetables were easily enough bought or stolen. The strategic importance of the coastline and the offshore oilfields, and the vulnerability and propaganda value of the larger towns — Fort William, Inverness, Aberdeen, Thurso — compelled the state’s armed forces to hold the entire enormous area: to move troops and armor along the long, narrow moorland roads, through glens ideal for ambush, and to fly low over often-clouded hills; to guard hydroelectric power stations, railways, microwave relay masts, the military’s own installations and training-grounds; to patrol hundreds of miles of pipelines and cables.

  That was just the Highlands: the area where I was sent for obvious reasons. Those who fought in the Borders, the Pentlands, the Southwest, and even the rich farmland of Perthshire all discovered other options, other opportunities. And that is to say nothing of what the English and Welsh comrades were doing. By 1981 the Front was making the country burn. The line had changed — Deng Hsiao-Ping was making cautious advances in the Versailles negotiations — but the fighting continued and we felt proud that we had fulfilled the late Chairman’s directive. We had brought home the war.

  The Bren was heavy and the pack was heavier. I was almost grateful that I had to move slowly. Moving under cloud cover was frustrating and dangerous. Visibility that October morning was a couple of meters; the clouds were down to about a hundred, and there was a storm on the way. Behind me nine men followed in line, down from the ridge. I found the bed of a burn, just a trickle at that moment, its boulders and pebbles slick and slippery from the rain of a week earlier. We made our way down this treacherous stairway from the invisible skyline we’d crossed. The first glomach I slipped into soaked me to the thighs.

  I waded out and moved on. My ankle would have hurt if it hadn’t been so cold. The light brightened and quite suddenly I was below the cloud layer, looking down at the road and the railway line at the bottom of the glen, and off to my right and to the west, a patch of meadow on the edge of a small loch with a crannog in the middl
e. Three houses, all widely separated, were visible up and down the glen. We knew who lived there, and they knew we knew. There would be no trouble from them. Just ahead of us was a ruined barn, a rectangle of collapsed drystone walling within that rowans grew out of, and rusty sheets of fallen corrugated iron roofing sheltered nettles and brambles.

  We’d come down at the right place. A couple of hundred meters to the left, a railway bridge crossed the road at an awkward zigzag bend. The bridge had been mined the previous night; the detonation cable should be snaking back to the ruined barn. A train was due in an hour and ten minutes. Our job was to bring down the bridge, giving the train just enough time to stop — civilian casualties weren’t necessary for this operation. We intended to levy a revolutionary tax on the passengers and any valuable goods in transit before turning them out on the road and sending the empty train over where the bridge had been, thus blocking the road and railway and creating an ambush chokepoint for any soldiers or cops who were sent to the scene. Booby-trapping the wreckage would be gravy, if we had the time.

  I waved forward next man behind me, and he did likewise, and one by one we all emerged from the fog and hunkered down behind the lip of a shallow gully. Andy and Gordon were there, they’d been with me since the street-fighting days in Greenock. Of the others, three — Sandy and Mike and Neil — were also from Clydeside and four were local (from our point of view — in their own eyes Ian from Strome and Murdo from Torridon and Donald from Ullapool and Norman from Inverness were almost as distinct from each other in their backgounds as they were from ours.

  “Tormod,” I said to Norman, “you go and check out the bothy there, give us a wave if the electrician has done his job right. Two if he hasn’t. Lie low and wait for the signal.”

  “There’s no signal.”

  “The fucking whistle. My whistle.”

  “Oh, right you are.”

  Crouching, he ran to the ruin, and waved once after a minute. I sent Andy half a mile up the line to the nearest cutting with a walkie-talkie ready to confirm that the train had passed, and deployed the others on both sides of the bridge and both sides of the road. Apart from watching for any premature trouble, and being ready to raid the train when it had stopped, they were to stop any civilian vehicles that might chance to go under the bridge at the wrong moment. A light drizzle began to fall, and a front of heavier rain was marching up the glen from the west. Still about five miles distant, but with a good blow behind it, the opening breezes were already chilling my wet legs.

  I had just settled myself and the Bren and the walkie-talkie behind a boulder on the hillside overlooking the bridge, with half an hour to spare before the train was due to pass at 12:11, when I heard the sound of a train far up the glen to the east. I couldn’t see it, none of us could, except maybe Andy. I called him up.

  “Passenger train,” he said. “Wait a minute, it’s got a couple of goods wagons at the back — shit, no! It’s low-loaders! They’re carrying two tanks!”

  “Troop train,” I guessed. “Maybe. Confirm when it passes.”

  “I can check it frae here wi the glasses.”

  He did, but still couldn’t be certain.

  Two minutes crawled by. The sound of the train filled the glen, or seemed to, until a sheep bleated nearby, startlingly loud. The radio crackled.

  “Confirmed brown job,” said Andy, just as the train emerged from the cutting and into view. It wasn’t traveling very fast, maybe just over twenty miles per hour.

  I had a choice. I could let this one pass and continue with the operation, or I could seize this immensely dangerous chance to wreak far more havoc than we’d planned.

  I watched the train pass below me, waited until the engine had crossed the bridge, and blew the whistle. Norman didn’t hesitate. The blast came when the third carriage of the train was on the bridge. It utterly failed to bring the bridge down, but it threw that carriage upwards and sideways, off the rails. It ploughed through the bridge parapet and its front-end crashed on to the road. The remaining four carriages concertina’d into its rear-end. One of them rolled on to the embankment, the one behind that was derailed, and the two tank-transporting flatbeds remained on the track.

  The engine and the two front carriages had by this time traveled a quarter of a mile farther down the track, and were accelerating rapidly away. There was nothing that could be done about that. I opened fire at once on the wreck, raking the bursts along the carriage windows. The rest of the squad followed up, then, like myself, they must have ducked down to await return fire.

  In the silence that followed the crash and the firing, other noises gradually became audible. Among the screams and yells from the wreckage were the shouts of command. Within seconds a spatter of rifle and pistol fire started up. I raised my head cautiously, watched for the flashes, and directed single shots from the Bren in their direction.

  Silence again. Neil and Murdo reported in on the walkie-talkie from the other side of the track and up ahead a bit. They’d each hit one or two attempts at rescue work or flight. We seemed to have the soldiers on the train pinned down. At the same time it was difficult for us to break cover ourselves. In any sustained exchange of fire we were likely to be the first to run out of ammunition and then to be picked off as we ran.

  This impasse was brought to an end after half an hour by a torrential downpour and a further descent of the clouds. The scheduled train, either cancelled or forewarned, hadn’t arrived. Any cars arriving at the scene had backed off and turned away, unmolested by us. We regrouped by the roadside, west of the bridge, well within earshot of the carriage that had crashed on the road.

  “This is murder,” said Norman.

  I was well aware of the many lives my decision had just ended or wrecked. I had no compunction about that, being even more aware of how many lives we had saved at the troops’ destination.

  “Seen any white flags, have you?” I snarled. “Until you do, we’re still fighting.”

  “Only question is,” said Andy, “do we pull back now while we’re ahead?”

  “There’ll be rescue and reinforcements coming for sure,” said Murdo. “The engine could come steaming back any minute, for one thing.”

  “They’re probably overestimating us,” I said, thinking aloud in the approved democratic manner. “I mean, who’d be mad enough to attack a troop train with ten men?”

  We laughed, huddled in the pouring rain. The windspeed was increasing by the minute.

  “There’ll be no air support in this muck,” said Sandy.

  “All the same,” I said, “our best bet is to pull out now, we have the chance and there’s nothing more to — wait a minute. What about the tanks?”

  “Can’t do much damage to them,” said Mike.

  “Aye,” I said, “but think of the damage we can do with them.”

  It was easy. It was ridiculously, pathetically, trivially easy. Four of us had National Service experience with tanks, so we split into two groups and after firing a few shots to keep the enemy’s heads down we knocked the shackles off the chains and commandeered both tanks. They were fuelled and armed, ready for action. We crashed them off the sides of the flatbeds and drove them perilously down the steep slope to the road, shelled the train, drove under the bridge, shelled the train again, then shelled the bridge. Then we drove over the tracks and around the back of the now-collapsed bridge and a couple of miles up the road, and off to one side, and when the relief column arrived — a dozen troop trucks and four armoured cars — we started shelling that.

  By mid-afternoon we’d inflicted hundreds of casualties and had the remaining troops and vehicles completely pinned down. Reinforcements from our side began to arrive, pouring fire from the ridges into the glen, raiding more weapons and ammunition from the train and the relief column; and then attacking its relief column. The battle of Glen Carron was turning into the biggest engagement of the war in the British Isles. The increasingly appalling weather was entirely to our advantage, although my squad,
at least, was on the point of pneumonia from the soaking we’d got earlier.

  The first we knew of the bomber’s arrival was when we lost contact with the men on the ridge. A minute later, I saw, through the periscope, the other tank — a few hundred meters away at the time — take a direct hit. That erupting flash of earth and metal told me without a doubt that Gordon was dead, along with Ian, Mike, Sandy, and Norman.

  “Reverse, reverse, reverse!” I shouted.

  Murdo slammed us into reverse gear and hit the accelerator, throwing me painfully forward as we shot up a slope and into a birch-screened gully. The tank lurched upward as the bomb missed us by about twenty meters, then crashed back down on its tracks.

  Blood poured from my brow and lip.

  “Everybody all right?” I yelled.

  No reply. Silence. I looked down and saw Andy tugging my leg, mouthing and nodding. He pointed to his ears. I grimaced acknowledgment and looked again through the periscope and saw the bomber descend towards the road just across the glen from us, by one of the trapped columns. Five hundred meters away and exactly level with us.

  There was a shell in the chamber. I swiveled the turret and racked the gun as hearing returned through a raging ringing in my ears, just in time to be deafened again as I fired. My aim was by intuition, with no use of the sights, pure Zenlike, a perfect throw of a stone. I knew it was going to hit, and it did.

  The bomber shot upwards, skimmed towards us, then fluttered down to settle athwart the river at the bottom of the glen, just fifty meters away and ten meters below us, lying there like a fucking enormous landmine in our path.

  I poked Murdo’s shoulder with my foot and he engaged the forward gear. Andy set up a bit of suppressing fire with the machine-gun. We slewed to a halt beside the bomber. I grabbed a Bren, threw open the hatch and clambered through and jumped down. My ears were still ringing. The wind was fierce, the rain an instant skin-soaking, the wind-chill terrible. Water poured off the bomber like sea off a surfacing submarine. There was a smell of peat-bog and metal and crushed myrtle. Smoke drifted from a ragged notch in its edge, similar to the one on the crippled bomber I’d seen all those years ago.