Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  It’s a challenge. One I intend to meet. It rushes me, moving through the water with an ease that shouldn’t be possible for something with its body.

  I swing Padma around, operating with the efficiency only programming and nerves of fiber optics can bring about. I fire. Twin reports ring out, deafening my auditory systems to all other noises hanging below the explosions.

  The Enemy reels as plumes of fire blossom over its plate-like chest. Tails whip across the surface of the ocean in a frenzy. Silver collides with water, foaming on contact and sending up pillars of steam that vanish almost as quickly. The monster’s body cracks like it’s being pelted by a storm of river stones. But it doesn’t stop.

  I take it for what it’s worth: A minor problem. Solution: Destroy the Enemy without reservation. Maximum effort and energy expenditure.

  I re-prime my cannon, loading up all secondary barrels. I’m down to my last two uranium slugs. It’s too precious to fire. But I have my flechettes, tucked away somewhere in the terrible ingenuity of Padma. The gun spits once, twice, thrice, peppering the Indian Ocean with razor-sharp slugs of steel that rip through the air like a metal storm.

  The feedback is terrible. A lance of cold electricity rakes the inside of my left arm as I track the creature’s movements. It surges forward, tails beating across the ocean to the sounds of wet thunder. Calculations flood my mind to answer a problem I hadn’t even considered: How fast is it closing in versus the speed of my cannon and the resulting explosion radius?

  Answer: Too fast.

  A part of me pauses at the results. I see the numbers and know the exact measures I need to take, but the math doesn’t add up. My vision flares. The math always adds up. Not now. The numbers make sense, but not to a man who remembers a burning building, smoldering bodies, and that he’s tottering in place.

  Vishnu screams at me, clearing my vision, commanding me to fire. But I am Vishnu. And I’m torn. Something visceral manifests in my gut, knotting and writhing like a bundle of spastic eels.

  I lower the cannon.

  And the Enemy slams into me.

  I teeter, but something keeps me from falling over. My body pivots and I feel it grow farther away. One of my fists balls and crashes into the side of the Enemy. Another thundercrack as its shell splits from the impact.

  Vishnu screams at me. The cannon. The cannon. My hand shakes, and the cannon feels like a dream. I can’t make sense of it. It’s formless—an idea that a man who’s lost everything clings to. A tool for revenge that can’t come. My other hand forms a stiff shovel, plunging itself into broken shell as it tries to stitch itself back together.

  A terrible warmth spreads over my fingers as I root through its insides. Its silvery mass clings to my digits, registering a series of numbers related to bodily temperature, volume, and the chemical makeup of the Enemy.

  I push the data aside—push Vishnu aside. A primal scream builds in my chest, rattling its way through my throat. It’s the noise of a man who has lost everything. A man who’s nursing the fire of a burning building deep within him. The kind of fire that sets your marrow alight.

  I use it to drive my hand deeper into the Enemy, rooting around inside its body. A mass, like a bundle of roots, brushes back against me. I close my fingers around them and rip. The mass resists me, sending the crustacean-like monster into a twitching frenzy.

  It thrashes, trying to shake me free. One of its pincers clubs my side as it brays in warbling tones.

  The impact shakes through me, registering on two levels: Vishnu takes it in with a calculation reserved for machinery. Sensors, feedback, line failures, energy pathways recalculated, recalibrated.

  I feel like I’ve been hammered by clubs.

  The creature yowls, mandibles clicking in staccato beat.

  I ignore it as the heat inside me builds.

  “Vishnu—Babaji, come in. Your readings…all over the place. We think you’re desyncing, Babaji. Repeat—desyncing. Acknowledge? Return to base. Babaji!”

  Desyncing, me? My minds turn to Kali. Vishnu remembers her, a goddess. A destroyer. I remember what she’d been pushed to. What she’d done. And how she went out.

  I CAN’T LEAVE NOW, I try to tell the crackling line, but nothing meets me but the hiss of static.

  One of the Enemy’s tails lances overtop its body, coming down to drive the bony spear-end into my shoulder.

  Instinct, not programming, drives me to reach overhead and grab hold of the monster’s tail. I dig fingers of steel, driven by man’s iron resolve, into the armor-skin. I hold tight, remembering my other arm—remembering Vishnu. I prime my cannon, load my last uranium slug, and fire point blank.

  The explosion knocks me back like a ragdoll. Sensors in my arm scream. Brilliant light, too many shades for me to make out, wash over my sight. The heat prompts a series of numbers to scrawl over my vision. I tune it out, feeling the inferno instead. I’m reminded of the first time I touch my hand to a gas burner, despite my mother’s warning. The heat is of a temperature where all I feel is just the first flash. The rest is a numbing weight I can’t process. My skin is heavy. Too heavy. The Enemy is screaming. It is reeling.

  I stagger back, planting my feet as Vishnu’s thoughts echo in the background.

  “Babaji—” Static crackles behind his words. “—desyncing. Return—”

  The words fall away, carrying no meaning to me.

  Water plumes in the distance. A second pillar erupts next to the first formation. Two more creatures, mirroring the one in front of me, emerging, skins glowing red and steaming from the heat and the water.

  Vishnu runs a calculation on the odds of survival.

  I ignore it, fixing my gaze on the thing that staggers and screams. My chest aches. Vishnu tells me, us, that our plating is scorched. Bits of my torso are slagged to near unrepairable status. My cannon tires to prime itself, failing. The weapon’s mouth is the sort of orange you find in volcanos and metal shops. The metal warps in front of me, losing the hot and violent color as bits of globular steel fall into the ocean to send up gouts of steam.

  I twist, jamming the burning and ruined weapon into the dying Enemy’s face, pressing those terrible snapping mandibles into the ocean, holding it down until the tail stops whipping and the arms stop ripping at my skin.

  “Babaji, disengage. Babaji, come home! Desyncing—You’re—”

  Maybe I am. But I have a duty. Then they made me Vishnu, The Protector. I/we won’t fail. Can’t fail.

  “Babaji, your mind…the signals. Come back!”

  I/we force my/our wrecked cannon deeper into the shattered shell, twisting the arm back and forth until it buries well within the Enemy. The weapon still pulses in accordance with our will. The knots in our stomach, the molten anger, the cold crackle of Vishnu’s resolve… We channel it all.

  Electricity arcs through us, making its way into the weapon, where it all goes wrong. Everything within our arm expands. The power falters for a wink, flashing out before coming back to scream. Fire builds within the cannon and finds its way out. Metal warps and gives way under the explosion. Carmine light, tinged with smears of vermillion, blossom across our vision and deep within the Enemy’s body.

  I stagger back from the force. Hydraulic fluid, along with an assortment of other viscous liquids, stream from the remnants of my arm. The Enemy before me is a ruined and smoking shell. Noxious white bubbles out from what’s left of its shell, spilling onto the ocean.

  I ignore it all to focus on the two creatures closing in. Vishnu is screaming that his systems are shutting down. His systems? My systems. We’re supposed to be one. I’m not sure what changed.

  “Babaji…”

  Vishnu’s screams are distant now, growing further away. The darkness swirls on the moonlit sea. My limbs are like grains of sand, loose and crumbling before me. I stagger forward a step, sinking deeper into the ocean.

  “Babaji, disengage. Come back. Come back!”

  Flicker. I can see them. I can see my wife a
nd daughter. There they are, standing on the water. She’s running to me, leaving her mother behind. Something’s wrong with the way she runs.

  Flicker. My daughter closes on me, mandibles clacking a discordant and percussive beat. Except she’s not my daughter anymore. She’s the Enemy.

  Enraged, we right myself, twisting to launch an uppercut with my remaining fist. I fall short. Pincers slam into my shoulders. The pain drives Vishnu back into me, or me back into him, like two lightning bolts striking each other. The world becomes a pixelated haze that takes its time to clear. I/we can feel it, the steel skin tearing, the servomotors dying, the energy delivery subsystems winking out in showers of terrible sparks.

  Our ruined forearm hisses spitefully, still steaming. It punches through the air-water almost of its own accord. The metal catches the moon’s light in full for a passing second, looking like it’s made from pearls, not steel, and then it buries itself in a mouth full of shredding teeth and is ripped from me.

  Metal screams. We scream.

  “Babaji, other Shikari incoming. Come home. Babaji!”

  The Enemy in front of me opens a pincer and slams it into our torso, braying in a challenge.

  We answer it in kind, releasing a warbling cry of whining metal and the cavernous booms of combustion engines.

  We shove the creature back.

  “Babaji, stop. You’re desyncing. Stop.”

  Wrong. We’re not desyncing. His words make no sense to a machine. We’re merging. Becoming something more. Vishnu is more than a machine now, more than a man.

  The second Enemy arrives, slams into me. A knee joint explodes.

  We scream again, clawing, gripping, pushing both creatures in front of us with our one good arm and the tottering bulk of our chest. We dig deep, clawing at what I can of our operating system core. There are things here we can use. The chemical makeup of the fluids pouring out of me. The conduit lines that spark in their death throes. And, here, here—our nuclear heart, the great engine-furnace that powers our every move.

  Kali died deluded: a goddess of death, meant to bring that to our enemies. She brought it out on our subjects, on the ants, on our families.

  Vishnu would die concluded. Resolved. A protector. Sparing the ants. Keeping them from screaming, burning, teetering and tottering like a man had so long ago.

  We scream louder, pushing the Enemy back, hanging onto it like grim death. We need to get them out. We need to get them away. Our heart responds to old subsystems buried deep within me, throwing up a myriad of fail-safes in my way. Are you authorized to do this? OP-4 level clearance required. Are you sure? Runtime diagnostics required. Confirm damage threshold?

  A blazing pincer cuts through the night, burying itself in our side. It digs in. Metal mandibles sink into our shoulder. We are being pulled apart.

  “Babaji!”

  That’s what they call us. We’re their god. Their protector. My wife. My daughter. My crew. All of them.

  “Babaji!”

  Vishnu. That’s who that title belongs to. Not the man inside him. Am I still one?

  Are you sure you want to do this, asks our heart. This will result in critical damage.

  We don’t want to destroy our heart. But yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

  The ocean threatens to swallow us now. It creeps over my waist as the light before my eyes dims. It drags us away, machine and monsters locked in terrible combat, towards its dark depths.

  Are you sure you want to do this?

  Damn right we do. We are a god, and you will listen.

  Command accepted. Nuclear core critical. System will destruct in 3…2…1.

  And then the world explodes. Wiping out the monsters, wiping out the machine, wiping out the man. A new sun is born on the Indian Ocean.

  And finally, there is peace.

  Excerpt from The Tea Master and the Detective

  by Aliette de Bodard

  The new client sat in the chair reserved for customers, levelly gazing at The Shadow’s Child—hands apart, legs crossed under the jade-green fabric of her tunic. The tunic itself had been high-quality once, displaying elegant, coordinated patterns, but it was patched, and the patterns were five years old at least, the stuff that got laughed at even in a provincial backwater such as the Scattered Pearls belt. Her skin was dark, her nose aquiline. When she spoke, her accent was flawlessly Inner Habitats. “My name is Long Chau. You have a good reputation as a brewer of serenity. I want to use your services.”

  The Shadow’s Child stifled a bitter laugh. Whatever her reputation was, it hadn’t translated into customers fighting to see her. “Go ahead.”

  That gaze again from Long Chau. The Shadow’s Child was used to respect or fear; to downcast eyes; to awkwardness, even, with people who weren’t used to dealing with a shipmind, especially one that wasn’t involved in passenger service.

  The Shadow’s Child’s body—the metal hull that encased her heartroom and her core—was far away from the office compartment they were both in. The avatar she projected into the habitat wasn’t much different from it: a large, sweeping mass of metal and optics that took up most of the office, shifting between different angles on the hull and ports, giving people a glimpse of what she was really like—vast enough to transport merchant crews and supplies, the whole of her hanging in the cool vacuum of space outside the orbitals of the Scattered Pearls belt, with bots crowding her hulls and sensors constantly bombarded by particles. She could have made herself small and unthreatening. She could have hovered over people’s shoulders like a pet or a children’s toy, as was the fashion amongst the older shipminds. But she’d lived through a war, an uprising and a famine, and she was done with diminishing herself to spare the feelings of others.

  Long Chau said, “I’m going into deep spaces to recover something. I need you to make a blend that keeps me functional.”

  Now that was surprising. “Most of my customers prefer oblivion when they travel between the stars,” The Shadow’s Child said.

  A snort from Long Chau. “I’m not a drugged fool.”

  Or a fool at all. The name she’d given, Long Chau, was an improbable confection of syllables, a style name, except as style names went it was utterly unsubtle. Dragon Pearl. “But you’re drugged, aren’t you?” The Shadow’s Child asked. She kept her voice gentle, at that tricky balance point where customers had trust, but no fear.

  An expansive shrug from Long Chau. “Of course I’m drugged.” She didn’t offer further explanation, but The Shadow’s Child saw the way she held herself. She was languid and cool, seemingly in utter control, but that particular stillness was that of a spring wound so tight it’d snap.

  “May I?” The Shadow’s Child asked, drifting closer and calling up the bots. She wasn’t physically there, but physical presence was mostly overrated: the bots moved as easily as the ones onboard her real body.

  Long Chau didn’t even flinch as they climbed up her face. Two of them settled at the corner of her eyes, two at the edge of her lips, and a host clung to the thick mane of her hair. Most people, for all their familiarity with bots, would have recoiled.

  A human heartbeat, two: data flowed back to The Shadow’s Child, thick and fast. She sorted it out easily, plotting graphs and discarding the errant measurements in less than the time it took the bots to drop down from Long Chau’s head.

  She gazed, for a moment, at the thick knot of electrical impulses in Long Chau’s brain, a frenzied and complex dance of neuron activation. For all her computational power, she couldn’t hope to hold it all in her thoughts, or even analyse it all, but she’d seen enough patterns to be able to recognise its base parameters.

  Long Chau was drugged to the gills, and more: her triggers were all out of balance, too slow at low stimuli and completely wild past a certain threshold. The Shadow’s Child accessed Long Chau’s public records, again. She finally asked a question she usually avoided. “The drugs—did your doctor prescribe these to you?”

  Long Chau smiled.
“Of course not. You don’t need a doctor, these days.”

  “For some things, maybe you should,” The Shadow’s Child said, more sharply than she intended to.

  “You’re not one.”

  “No,” The Shadow’s Child said. “And perhaps not the person who can help you.”

  “Who said I wanted to be helped?” Long Chau shifted, smiling widely—distantly, serenely amused. “I’m happy with what I’ve achieved.”

  “Except that you came to see me.”

  “Ah. Yes.” She shook her head with that same odd languidness. “I do have… an annoying side effect. I’m more focused and faster, but only in a narrow range. Deep spaces are well outside that range.”

  The Shadow’s Child had never dealt very well with dancing around the truth. “What are you talking about? Anxiety? Traumatic reaction?”

  “Fuzziness,” Long Chau said. “I can’t think in deep spaces.”

  It wasn’t unusual. Time and space got weird, especially deeper in. It took effort to remain functional. Some people could, some people couldn’t. The Shadow’s Child had had one lieutenant who spent every dive into deep spaces curled up on the bed, whimpering—it had been a hundred years ago, before the brews got developed, before brewers of serenity started doing brisk business on space stations and orbitals, selling teas and brews that made it easier for humans to bear the unknowable space shipminds used to travel faster than light.

  “You could stop taking the drugs. It would probably help,” The Shadow’s Child said.

  “I could.” Long Chau’s tone made it clear that she wouldn’t even consider it. The Shadow’s Child thought for a while, reviewing evidence as she did. Long Chau was entirely right. She was no doctor; merely a small-rank brewer of serenity struggling to make ends meet. And she just couldn’t afford to ignore a customer.

  “I could make a blend that would suit you,” The Shadow’s Child said.

  Long Chau smiled. “Good. Go on.”