She heard another boom behind her. The Slaybot Prime was headless now. The southern gantry peeled away, and then the body itself began to lean. Elena had been inside the thing; the chest assembly alone was as big as a cathedral.
The Slaybot Prime slowly bowed, deeper, deeper, until it tumbled off the pillars of its legs. Dust leaped into the sky where it fell. The tremor moved under Elena, sending cracks snaking across the glass.
The collapse of the Prime seemed to signal the end of the fighting. The sounds of the energy blasts ceased. Figures flew in from all points of the city and coalesced above the industrial sector. In less than a minute there were dozens and dozens of them, small and dark as blackcap geese. Then she realized that the flock of übermenschen was flying toward her.
Elena glanced to her left, then right. She was as exposed as a pea on a plate. The glass plain ended fifty or sixty meters away at a line of rubble. She turned and ran.
She listened to the hiss of breath in her throat and the smack of her heavy boots against the crystalline surface. At every moment she expected to crash through.
Elongated shadows shuddered onto the mirrored ground ahead of her. She ran faster, arms swinging. The glass abruptly ended in a jagged lip. She leaped, landed on broken ground, and stumbled onto hands and knees. Finally she looked up.
Racing toward her with the sun behind them, the U-Men were nothing but silhouettes—shapes that suggested capes and helmets; swords, hammers, and staffs; bows and shields. Even the energy beings, clothed in shimmering auras, seemed strangely desaturated by the morning light.
Without looking away from the sky she found a chunk of masonry on the ground in front of her. Then she stood and climbed onto a tilting slab of concrete.
When the mass of U-Men was directly above her she heaved with all her might.
Useless. At its peak the gray chunk fell laughably short of the nearest figure. It clattered to the ground somewhere out of sight.
Elena screamed, tensed for—longing for—a searing blast of light, a thunderbolt. Nothing came. The U-Men vanished over the roof of the next apartment building, heading out to sea.
Weeks after the invasion, the factory remained closed. Workers began to congregate there anyway. Some mornings they pushed around brooms or cleared debris, but mostly they played cards, exchanged stories of the invasion, and speculated on rumors. Lord Grimm had not been seen since the attack. Everyone agreed that the Savior of Trovenia had been dead too many times to doubt his eventual resurrection.
When Elena finally returned, eighteen days after the invasion, she found Verner and Guntis playing chess beside the left boot of the Slaybot Prime. The other huge components of the robot’s body were scattered across two miles of the industrial sector like the buildings of a new city.
The men greeted her warmly. Verner, the ancient mechaneer, frankly noted the still-red cuts that cross-hatched the side of her face, but didn’t ask how she’d acquired them. If Trovenians told the story of every scar there’d be no end to the talking.
Elena asked about Jürgo and both men frowned. Guntis said that the birdman had taken to the air during the fight. As for the other two members of the heavy plate welding unit, no news.
“I was sorry to hear about your brother,” Verner said.
“Yes,” Elena said. “Well.”
She walked back to the women’s changing rooms, and when she didn’t find what she was looking for, visited the men’s. One cinderblock wall had caved in, but the lockers still stood in orderly rows. She found the locker bearing Jürgo’s name on a duct tape label. The door was padlocked shut. It took her a half hour to find a cutting rig with oxygen and acetylene cylinders that weren’t empty, but only minutes to wheel the rig to the changing rooms and burn off the lock.
She pulled open the door. Jürgo’s old-fashioned, rectangle-eyed welding helmet hung from a hook, staring at her. She thought of Grandmother Zita. What possesses a person to put a bucket on their head?
The inside of the locker door was decorated with a column of faded photographs. In one of them a young Jürgo, naked from the waist up, stared into the camera with a concerned squint His new wings were unfurled behind him. Elena’s mother and father, dressed in their red Gene Corps jackets, stood on either side of him. Elena unpeeled the yellowed tape and put the picture in her breast pocket, then unhooked the helmet and closed the door.
She walked back to the old men, pulling the cart behind her. “Are we working today or what?” she asked.
Guntis looked up from the chess board with amusement in his huge wet eyes. “So you are the boss now, eh, Elena?”
Verner, however, said nothing. He seemed to recognize that she was not quite the person she had been. Damaged components had been stripped away, replaced by cruder, yet sturdier approximations. He was old enough to have seen the process repeated many times.
Elena reached into the pockets of her coat and pulled on her leather work gloves. Then she wheeled the cart over to the toe of the boot and straightened the hoses with a flick of her arm.
“Tell us your orders, Your Highness,” Guntis said.
“First we tear apart the weapons,” she said. She thumbed the blast trigger and blue flame roared from the nozzle of the cutting torch. “Then we build better ones.”
She slid the helmet onto her head, flipped down the mask, and bent to work.
G-Men
KRISTINE KATHYRN RUSCH
Here’s a look at an alternate world not really all that different from our own—but my, what a difference that difference makes!
Kristine Kathryn Rusch started out the decade of the nineties as one of the fastest rising and most prolific young authors on the scene, took a few years out middecade for a very successful turn as editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and, since stepping down from that position, has returned to her old standards of production here in the twenty-first century, publishing a slew of novels in four genres, writing fantasy, mystery, and romance novels under various pseudonyms as well as science fiction. She has published more than twenty novels under her own name, including The White Mists of Power, The Disappeared, Extremes, and Fantasy Life, the four-volume Fey series, the Black Throne series, Alien Influences, and several Star Wars, Star Trek, and other media tie-in books, both solo and written with husband Dean Wesley Smith and others. Her most recent books (as Rusch, anyway) are the SF novels of the popular Retrieval Artist series, which include The Disappeared; Extreme, Consequences; Buried Deep; Paloma; Recovery Man; and a collection of Retrieval Artist stories, The Retrieval Artist and Other Stories. Her copious short fiction has been collected in Stained Black: Horror Stories, Stories for an Enchanted Afternoon, Little Miracles: And Other Tales of Murder, and Millennium Babies. In 1999, she won readers award polls from the readerships of both Asimov’s Science Fiction and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, an unprecedented double honor! As an editor, she was honored with the Hugo Award for her work on The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and shared the World Fantasy Award with Dean Wesley Smith for her work as editor of the original hard-cover anthology version of Pulphouse. As a writer, she has won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery (for A Dangerous Road, written as Kris Nelscott) and the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award (for Utterly Charming, written as Kristine Grayson); as Kristine Kathryn Rusch, she won the John W. Campbell Award, has been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and took home a Hugo Award in 2000 for her story “Millennium Babies,” making her one of the few people in genre history to win Hugos for both editing and writing. Her most recent book is the novel Duplicate Effort.
“There’s something addicting about a secret.”
—J. Edgar Hoover
The squalid little alley smelled of piss. Detective Seamus O’Reilly tugged his overcoat closed and wished he’d worn boots. He could feel the chill of his metal flashlight through the worn glove on his right hand.
Two beat cops stood in front of the bodies, and the coroner crouched over them. His
assistant was already setting up the gurneys, body bags draped over his arm. The coroner’s van had blocked the alley’s entrance, only a few yards away.
O’Reilly’s partner, Joseph McKinnon, followed him. McKinnon had trained his own flashlight on the fire escapes above, unintentionally alerting any residents to the police presence.
But they probably already knew. Shootings in this part of the city were common. The neighborhood teetered between swank and corrupt. Far enough from Central Park for degenerates and muggers to use the alleys as corridors, and, conversely, close enough for new money to want to live with a peek of the city’s most famous expanse of green.
The coroner, Thomas Brunner, had set up two expensive, battery-operated lights on garbage can lids placed on top of the dirty ice, one at the top of the bodies, the other near the feet. O’Reilly crouched so he wouldn’t create any more shadows.
“What’ve we got?” he asked.
“Dunno yet.” Brunner was using his gloved hands to part the hair on the back of the nearest corpse’s skull. “It could be one of those nights.”
O’Reilly had worked with Brunner for eighteen years now, since they both got back from the war, and he hated it when Brunner said it could be one of those nights. That meant the corpses would stack up, which was usually a summer thing, but almost never happened in the middle of winter.
“Why?” O’Reilly asked. “What else we got?”
“Some colored limo driver shot two blocks from here.” Brunner was still parting the hair. It took O’Reilly a minute to realize it was matted with blood. “And two white guys pulled out of their cars and shot about four blocks from that.”
O’Reilly felt a shiver run through him that had nothing to do with the cold. “You think the shootings are related?”
“Dunno,” Brunner said. “But I think it’s odd, don’t you? Five dead in the space of an hour, all in a six-block radius.”
O’Reilly closed his eyes for a moment. Two white guys pulled out of their cars, one Negro driver of a limo, and now two white guys in an alley. Maybe they were related, maybe they weren’t.
He opened his eyes, then wished he hadn’t. Brunner had his finger inside a bullet hole, a quick way to judge caliber.
“Same type of bullet,” Brunner said.
“You handled the other shootings?”
“I was on scene with the driver when some fag called this one in.”
O’Reilly looked at Brunner. Eighteen years, and he still wasn’t used to the man’s casual bigotry.
“How did you know the guy was queer?” O’Reilly asked. “You talk to him?”
“Didn’t have to.” Brunner nodded toward the building in front of them. “Weekly party for degenerates in the pent house apartment every Thursday night. Thought you knew.”
O’Reilly looked up. Now he understood why McKinnon had been shining his flashlight at the upper story windows. McKinnon had worked vice before he got promoted to homicide.
“Why would I know?” O’Reilly said.
McKinnon was the one who answered. “Because of the standing orders.”
“I’m not playing twenty questions,” O’Reilly said. “I don’t know about a party in this building and I don’t know about standing orders.”
“The standing orders are,” McKinnon said as if he were an elementary school teacher, “not to bust it, no matter what kind of lead you got. You see someone go in, you forget about it. You see someone come out, you avert your eyes. You complain, you get moved to a different shift, maybe a different precinct.”
“Jesus.” O’Reilly was too far below to see if there was any movement against the glass in the pent house suite. But whoever lived there—whoever partied there—had learned to shut off the lights before the cops arrived.
“Shot in the back of the head,” Brunner said before O’Reilly could process all of the information. “That’s just damn strange.”
O’Reilly looked at the corpses—really looked at them—for the first time. Two men, both rather heavyset. Their faces were gone, probably splattered all over the walls. Gloved hands, nice shoes, one of them wearing a white scarf that caught the light.
Brunner had to search for the wound in the back of the head, which made that the entry point. The exit wounds had destroyed the faces.
O’Reilly looked behind him. No door on that building, but there was one on the building where the party was held. If they’d been exiting the building and were surprised by a queer basher or a mugger, they’d’ve been shot in the front, not the back.
“How many times were they shot?” O’Reilly asked.
“Looks like just the once. Large caliber, close range. I’d say it was a purposeful head shot, designed to do maximum damage.” Brunner felt the back of the closest corpse. “There doesn’t seem to be anything on the torso.”
“They still got their wallets?” McKinnon asked.
“Haven’t checked yet.” Brunner reached into the back pants pocket of the corpse he’d been searching and clearly found nothing. So he grabbed the front of the overcoat and reached inside.
He removed a long thin wallet—old-fashioned, the kind made for the larger bills of forty years before. Hand-tailored, beautifully made.
These men weren’t hurting for money.
Brunner handed the wallet to O’Reilly, who opened it. And stopped when he saw the badge inside. His mouth went dry.
“We got a feebee,” he said, his voice sounding strangled.
“What?” McKinnon asked.
“FBI,” Brunner said dryly. McKinnon had only moved to homicide the year before. Vice rarely had to deal with FBI. Homicide did only on sensational cases. O’Reilly could count on one hand the number of times he’d spoken to agents in the New York bureau.
“Not just any feebee either,” O’Reilly said. “The Associate Director. Clyde A. Tolson.”
McKinnon whistled. “Who’s the other guy?”
This time, O’Reilly did the search. The other corpse, the heavier of the two, also smelled faintly of perfume. This man had kept his wallet in the inner pocket of his suit coat, just like his companion had.
O’Reilly opened the wallet. Another badge, just like he expected. But he didn’t expect the bulldog face glaring at him from the wallet’s interior.
Nor had he expected the name.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said.
“What’ve we got?” McKinnon asked.
O’Reilly handed him the wallet, opened to the slim paper identification.
“The Director of the FBI,” he said, his voice shaking. “Public Hero Number One. J. Edgar Hoover.”
Francis Xavier Bryce—Frank to his friends, what few of them he still had left—had just dropped off to sleep when the phone rang. He cursed, caught himself, apologized to Mary, and then remembered she wasn’t there.
The phone rang again and he fumbled for the light, knocking over the highball glass he’d used to mix his mom’s recipe for sleepless nights, hot milk, butter and honey. It turned out that, at the tender age of 36, hot milk and butter laced with honey wasn’t a recipe for sleep; it was a recipe for heartburn.
And for a smelly carpet if he didn’t clean the mess up.
He found the phone before he found the light.
“What?” he snapped.
“You live near Central Park, right?” A voice he didn’t recognize, but one that was clearly official, asked the question without a hello or an introduction.
“More or less.” Bryce rarely talked about his apartment. His parents had left it to him and, as his wife was fond of sniping, it was too fancy for a junior G-Man.
The voice rattled off an address. “How far is that from you?”
“About five minutes.” If he didn’t clean up the mess on the floor. If he spent thirty seconds pulling on the clothes he’d piled onto the chair beside the bed.
“Get there. Now. We got a situation.”
“What about my partner?” Bryce’s partner lived in Queens.
“You�
�ll have back-up. You just have to get to the scene. The moment you get there, you shut it down.”
“Um.” Bryce hated sounding uncertain, but he had no choice. “First, sir, I need to know who I’m talking to. Then I need to know what I’ll find.”
“You’ll find a double Homicide. And you’re talking to Eugene Hart, the Special Agent in Charge. I shouldn’t have to identify myself to you.”
Now that he had, Bryce recognized Hart’s voice. “Sorry, sir. It’s just procedure.”
“Fuck procedure. Take over that scene. Now.”
“Yes, sir,” Bryce said, but he was talking into an empty phone line. He hung up, hands shaking, wishing he had some Bromo-Seltzer.
He’d just come off a long, messy investigation of another agent. Walter Cain had been about to get married when he remembered he had to inform the Bureau of that fact and, as per regulation, get his bride vetted before walking down the aisle.
Bryce had been the one to investigate the future Mrs. Cain, and had been the one to find out about her rather seamy past—two Vice convictions under a different name, and one hospitalization after a rather messy backstreet abortion. Turned out Cain knew about his future wife’s past, but the Bureau hadn’t liked it.
And two nights ago, Bryce had to be the one to tell Cain that he couldn’t marry his now-reformed, somewhat religious, beloved. The soon-to-be Mrs. Cain had taken the news hard. She had gone to Bellevue this afternoon after slashing her wrists.
And Bryce had been the one to tell Cain what his former fiancée had done. Just a few hours ago.
Sometimes Bryce hated this job.
Despite his orders, he went into the bathroom, soaked one of Mary’s precious company towels in water, and dropped the thing on the spilled milk. Then he pulled on his clothes, and finger-combed his hair.
He was a mess—certainly not the perfect representative of the Bureau. His white shirt was stained with marinara from that night’s take-out, and his tie wouldn’t keep a crisp knot. The crease had long since left his trousers and his shoes hadn’t been shined in weeks. Still, he grabbed his black overcoat, hoping it would hide everything.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual Page 83