by Neil Clarke
Watching this action, Jael was not entirely sure which side she wanted to win. If the Prador took out the two remaining golem they would go after the Atheter in the chamber behind her. Maybe they would just ignore her, maybe they would kill her out of hand. If the golem finished off the Prador they might turn their attention on her. And she really did not know what to expect from whatever now controlled them. Retreating and finding some other way out was not an option—she had already scanned Penny Royal’s network of tunnels and knew that any other route back to Kobashi would require a diversion of some miles, and she rather suspected that thing back there would not give her the time.
The decoy second-child lucked out with the next golem, or rather it lucked out with its elder kin. Firing its rail-gun into the gap between a spherical electric furnace and the wall, where one of the golem was crouching, the second-child advanced. The golem shot out underneath the furnace toward the Prador child. A turquoise bar stabbed out, nailing the golem, but it passed through the second-child on the way. An oily explosion centered on a mass of legs collapsed out of sight. The first-child used its other claw to nudge out its final sibling into play. The remaining golem, however, which Jael had earlier seen on the far side of the room, dropped down from above to land between them.
It happened almost too fast to follow. The golem spun, and in a spray of green the second-child slid in half along a diagonal cut straight through its body. The first-child’s claw and half its armored visual turret and enclosing visor fell away. Its fluids fountained out as it fell forward, swung in its remaining claw, and bore down. The golem collapsed, pinned to the floor under the claw containing the particle weapon. A turquoise explosion followed underneath the collapsing Prador, then oily flames belched out.
Jael remained where she was, watching carefully. She scanned around the chamber, but there seemed no sign of any more of those horrible golem. The Prador just lay there, its legs sprawled, its weaponized claw trapped underneath it, its now exposed mandibles grinding, ichor still flowing from the huge incision from its visual turret. Jael realized she couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome. After a moment she stepped out, her weapon trained on the Prador.
“Jael Feogril,” its translator intoned, and it began scrabbling to try and get some purchase on the slick floor.
“That’s me,” said Jael, and fired two explosive rounds straight into its mouth. The two detonations weren’t enough to break open the Prador’s enclosing artificial armor, but their force escaped. Torn flesh, organs, ichor, and shattered carapace gushed from the hole the golem had cut. Jael stood there for a moment, hardly able to see through the green sludge on her visor. She peered down at something like a chunk of liver hanging over her arm, and pulled it away. Yes, a satisfactory outcome, apart from the mess.
“Jael Feogril,” said a different voice. “Drop the gun, or I cut off your legs.”
I was telling myself at the time that I needed detail on the location of the memstore. Rubbish, of course. The energy readings had located it in the chamber beyond—somewhere near to the gabbleduck. I should have just fried her on the spot then gone on to search. Twenty years earlier I would have, but now I was less tuned-in to the exigencies of surviving this sort of game. Okay, I was rusty. She froze, seemed about to turn, then thought better of it and dropped the weapon she’d just used to splash that Prador.
With Gene walking out to my left, I moved forward, crosshairs centered on Jael’s torso. What did I want? Some grandstanding, some satisfaction in seeing her shock at meeting someone she’d left for dead, a moment or two to gloat before I did to her what she had done to the first-child? Yeah, sure I did.
With her hands held out from her body, she turned. It annoyed me that I couldn’t see her face. Glancing up I saw that the beetlebots had about closed off the hole, because the earlier wind had now diminished to a breeze.
“Take off your helmet,” I ordered.
She reached up and undogged the manual outer clips, lifted the helmet carefully, then lowered it to clip it to her belt. Pointless move—she wouldn’t be needing it again. Glancing aside I saw that Gene had moved in closer to me. No need to cover me now, I guessed.
“Well, hello, Rho,” said Jael, showing absolutely no surprise on seeing me at all. She smiled. It was that smile, the same smile I had seen from her while she had peeled strips of skin from my torso.
“Goodbye, Jael,” I said.
The flicker of a high-intensity laser punched smoke, something slapped my multigun, and molten metal sprayed, leaving white trails written across the air.
“Total malfunction. Safe mode—power down,” my helmet display informed me. I pulled the trigger anyway, then gazed down in bewilderment at the slagged hole through the weapon.
“Mine, I think,” said Jael, stooping in one to pick up her weapon and fire. Same explosive shell she’d used against the Prador. It thumped into my chest, hurling me back, then detonated as it ricocheted away. The blast flung me up, trailing flame and smoke, then I crashed down feeling as if I’d been stepped on by some irate giant. My chainglass visor was gone and something was sizzling ominously inside my suit. Armored plates were peeled up from my arm, which I could see stretched out ahead of me, and my gauntlet was missing.
“What the fuck are you doing here with him?” Jael inquired angrily.
“He turned up on Arena before I left,” Gene replied. “Just to be on the safe side I was keeping to the Pens until Penny Royal’s golem left.”
“And you consider that an adequate explanation?”
“I put Arena Security onto him, but he somehow escaped them and ambushed me outside.” Gene sounded somewhat chagrined. “I let him persuade me to give him the U-signal code from the gabbleduck.”
I turned my head slightly but only got a view of tangled metal and a few silver golem bones. “Ulriss,” I whispered, but received only a slight buzzing in response.
“So much for your wonderful ECS training.”
“It was enough to convince him that I still worked for them.”
So, no ECS action here, no Polity dreadnought on the way. I thought about that encounter I’d seen between the Prador cruiser and the dreadnought. I’d told Gene about it and she’d used the information against me, convincing me that the Polity was involved. Of course, what I’d seen was the kind of saber-rattling confrontation between Prador and Polity that had been going on in the Graveyard for years.
“What’s the situation here?” Gene asked.
“Fucked,” Jael replied. “Something’s intervened. We have to get out of here now.”
I heard the sounds of movement. They were going away, so I might survive this. Then the sounds ceased too abruptly.
“You used an explosive shell,” Gene noted from close by.
“What?”
“He’s still alive.”
“Well,” said Jael, “that’s a problem soon solved.”
Her boots crunched on the floor as she approached, and gave me her location. I reached out with my bare hand and slid it into slick silvery metal. Finger controls there. I clamped down on them and saw something shimmering deep into twisted metal.
“Collar!” I said, more in hope than expectation, before heaving myself upright. Jael stood over me, and beyond her I saw Gene reach up toward her neck, then abruptly drop to the floor. I swung my arm across as Jael began to bring her multigun up to her shoulder. A slight tug—that was all. She stood there a moment longer, still aiming at me, then her head lifted and fell back, attached still at the back of her neck by skin only, and a red stream shot upward. Air hissing from her severed trachea, she toppled.
I carefully lifted my fingers from the controls of the golem weapon, then caught my breath, only now feeling as if someone had worked me over from head to foot with a baseball bat. Slowly climbing to my feet I expected to feel the pain of a broken bone somewhere, but there was nothing like that. No need to check on Jael’s condition, so I walked over to Gene. She was unconscious and would be for some time
. I stooped over her and unplugged the power cable and control optics of her weapon from her suit, then plugged them into mine. No response and of course no visor readout. I set the weapon to manual and turned away. I decided that once I’d retrieved the memstore—if that was possible—I would come back in here and take her suit, because mine certainly would not get me to Ulriss Fire.
The hum of power and the feeling of distorted perception associated with U-jumping greeted me. I don’t know what that thing was poised over the gabbleduck, nor did I know what kind of force-field surrounded it and that other entity that seemed the bastard offspring of a sea urchin and an octopus. But the poised thing was fading, and as it finally disappeared, the field winked out and numerous objects crashed to the floor.
I moved forward, used the snout of my weapon to lift one tentacle, and then watched it flop back. Penny Royal, I guessed. It was slumped across the floor beams and other machinery here. The gabbleduck turned its head as if noticing me for the first time, but it showed no particular signs of hostility, nor did it seem to show any signs of it containing some formidable alien intelligence. I felt sure the experiment here had failed, or rather, had been curtailed in some way. Something’s intervened, Jael had said. Nevertheless, I kept my attention focused on the creature as I searched for and finally found the memstore. It was fried but I pocketed it anyway, for it was my find, not something ECS had put in the path of my sifting machine.
Returning to the other chamber, I there stripped Gene of her space-suit and donned it myself.
“Ulriss, we can talk now.”
“Ah, you are still alive,” the AI replied. “I was already composing your obituary.”
“You’re just a bundle of laughs. You know that?”
“I am bursting with curiosity and try to hide that in levity.”
I explained the situation to which Ulriss replied, “I have put out a call to the Polity dreadnought we sighted and given it this location.”
“Should we hang around?”
“There will be questions ECS will want to ask, but I don’t see why we should put ourselves at their disposal. Let their agents find us.”
“Quite right,” I replied.
I bagged up a few items, like that golem weapon, and was about to head back to my ship when I glanced back and saw the gabbleduck crouching in the tunnel behind.
“Sherber grodge,” it informed me.
Heading back the way I’d come into this hellhole, I kept checking back on the thing. Gabbleducks don’t eat people apparently—they just chew them up and spit them out. This one followed me like a lost puppy and every time I stopped it stopped too and sat on its hindquarters, occasionally issuing some nonsensical statement. I got the real weird feeling, which went against all my training and experience, that this creature was harmless to me. I shook my head. Ridiculous. Anyway, I’d lose it at the airlock.
When I did finally reach the airlock and began closing that inner door, one big black claw closed around the edge and pulled it open again. I raised my gun, crosshairs targeting that array of eyes, but I just could not pull the trigger. The gabbleduck entered the airlock and sat there, close enough to touch and close enough for me to fry if it went for me. What now? If I opened the outer airlock door the creature would die. Before I could think of what to do, a multijointed arm reached back and heaved the inner door closed, while the other arm hauled up the manual handle of the outer door, and the lock air pressure blew us staggering into the pipe beyond.
I discovered that gabbleducks can survive in vacuum . . . or at least this one can.
Later, when I ordered Ulriss to open the door to the small hold of my ship, the gabbleduck waddled meekly inside. I thought then that perhaps something from the memstore had stuck. I wasn’t sure—certainly this gabbleduck was not behaving like its kind on Masada.
I also discovered that gabbleducks will eat raw recon bacon.
I hold the fried memstore and think about what it might have contained, and what the fact of its existence means. A memstore for an Atheter mind goes contrary to the supposed nihilism of that race. A race so nihilistic could never have created a space-faring civilization, so that darkness must have spread amid them in their last days. The Atheter recorded in the memstore could not have been one of the kind that wanted to destroy itself, surely?
I’m taking the gabbleduck back to Masada—I feel utterly certain now that it wants me to do this. I also feel certain that to do otherwise might not be a good idea.
Paul M. Berger has been a Japanese bureaucrat, an M.I.T. program manager, an Internet entrepreneur, a butterfly wrangler, a museum administrator and (God help him) a Wall Street recruiter, all of which, in the aggregate, may have prepared him for nothing except the creation of speculative fiction. His work has appeared in publications including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Podcastle, and Escape Pod. The story of his battle against giant Japanese spiders was the first true-life memoir published in Weird Tales. He is a graduate of the 2008 Clarion workshop, and a founding member of the stunningly talented New York-based writers’s group Altered Fluid.
THE MUSE OF EMPIRES LOST
Paul Berger
Aship had come in, and now everything would change. Jemmi had recently become adept at crouching under windows and listening around corners, so when the village went abuzz with the news, she heard all the excitement. She was hungry and lonely, and she thought of Port-Town and the opportunities that would be found there now, and she left the village before light. She went with only the briefest pang of homesickness, and she went by the marsh trail rather than the main road, because if she had met any of her neighbors along the way, they would have stoned her.
The path was swallowed up by the murky water sooner than she expected, and the gray silt sucked at Jemmi’s worn straw zori with each step. Poor old Sarasvati, always laboring to bestow ease and prosperity upon her people, and always falling a bit more behind. These were supposed to be fields, but the marshes stretched closer to their houses each year. She couldn’t even get any decent fish to breed there. In the village they clucked their tongues and said that was old Sara’s nanos going, as if anyone knew what that meant or could do anything about it. But sometimes you could melt handfuls of this silt down and chip it into very sharp little blades that would hold their edge for a shave or two and could be bartered for a bite to eat. Sometimes you could see it slowly writhe in your hand.
Now that the village had turned against her, Sara was Jemmi’s closest and only chum. When Jemmi was at her most alone she would sit quietly and concentrate on a tiny still spot deep in her center and maybe think a few words in her heart, and a spark would answer, and a huge warm and beloved feeling would spread through her. She knew that was Sara speaking to her. Everyone wanted Sara to listen to them, but Sara barely ever spoke back to anyone.
By midday Jemmi struck a road, and the next morning she reached Port-Town. Her parents had taken her there once when she was little, so she already knew to expect the tumult and smells and narrow streets packed with new faces, but the sheer activity spun her around as she tried to track everything that moved through her line of sight. Jewel-green quetzals squabbled and huddled together under the eaves of high-peaked shingled roofs, and peacocks dodged rickshaw wheels and pecked at the dust and refuse in the streets. There was plenty of food here if she could get it, and fine things to own, stacked in stalls and displayed in shop windows.
She was drawn most of all, though, to the mass of humanity that surrounded her—she could practically taste their thoughts and needs as they swirled by. The townsfolk were thronging towards the old wharf, and she let herself be swept up with them. Sometimes men or women brushed against her or jostled her without a glance or a second thought, and she grinned to herself at the rare physical contact.
An ambitious vendor had piled bread and fruit into a wooden cart at the edge of the street to catch the passers-by,
and Jemmi stopped in front of him.
“Neh, what ship is it?” she asked above the din.
“Haven’t you heard, then?” he replied. “It’s Albiorix!”
Jemmi thought he was mocking her until she caught the man’s exultant smile. Albiorix—no ship had stopped here for more than a generation, and now this! Albiorix was the stuff of legend, a proud giant among ships, braver and broader-ranging than any other. If Sarasvati was on Albiorix’s route now, they would all be rich again.
“Who was on board, then?”
“No one’s seen them yet. Looks like they’ll be debarking any minute.”
Jemmi checked her urge to race off towards the wharf. She put her hand on the vendor’s forearm and smiled her warmest smile, and as he stood distracted and fuddled she swept an apple and two rolls into her pockets. She turned and ran before the man’s head cleared.
The crowds along the quay were packed tight and jostling viciously, but Jemmi plunged in and no one noticed or resisted as she slipped right up to the barrier. A boy was standing near her. He was clear-eyed and honey-skinned and probably about two years older than she was. Judging from his clothes and the rich dagger that hung at his belt—the hilt bound with real wire—his family was quite well-to-do. With visions of regular meals and a roof over her head, she sidled towards him. The boy looked over her rags and begrimed face and straightaway disregarded her. Jemmi held firm and let the motion of the crowd press him close to her. The back of his hand brushed against her bare wrist, and he unconsciously jerked it away. She shifted her weight so that she was a fraction closer to him. The next time he moved he touched her again, and she imagined that he was not quite so quick to pull back.
The third time they touched she kept her hand against his, and the boy did not pull away. He turned shyly to Jemmi.
“Hello,” he said. “My name’s Roycer.”
At that moment, the entire length of Sarasvati trembled with a gentle impact, and the crowd’s cheer was deafening.