The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Ellen Datlow ed.

  He handed his sidearm to one of the soldier girls and let her see that his slim, leather document case—a graduation present from his mother to “My son, the lawyer”—contained nothing but papers and photographs. Haines gave a nod, and the second MP unlocked the door with a key on a long chain fixed to her belt, stood aside so Dice could step in, then shut the door behind him.

  The prisoner, wearing baggy green coveralls and looking far plainer and much more ordinary than in her infamous photographs, was sitting on her cot, knitting something that was beginning to take the shape of a multicolored squid. She saw Dice’s bars, stood, and saluted.

  He returned the salute and told her to sit down.

  “I already told them I don’t need a lawyer, sir.”

  She was very young and tightly wound, shoulders hunched defensively, hands clutching her knitting to her chest, muscles jumping in her face, but her gaze was hard and defiant.

  Dice leaned against the wall and folded his arms, tried to look as unthreatening as possible, and told the woman, “My name is Franklin Dice, Private Montori. I’m a lawyer, yes, but I’m not your lawyer. I’ve come here to find out what happened, and I was hoping that you and I could have a friendly off-the-record talk.”

  Montori’s expression became even more guarded. “You sound like you’re some kind of cop. Maybe I should see a lawyer after all.”

  Dice gave her his best smile. “It’s a little early for that, Private. Between you and me and the wall, it isn’t even clear that a crime has been committed, let alone whether you should be accused of anything.”

  “Maybe that’s true, sir, but I reckon I’m definitely under arrest.”

  “As I understand it, you’re under observation. What we have to do right now is work out where we go from here. But I can only do that if you help me.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but they aren’t going to let me go anywhere,” Montori said with flat finality, and started clacking her needles again without taking her gaze from Dice’s face. Five balls of different-colored wool were being worked together, around strips of foil from candy wrappers.

  Dice wondered if she was trying to improve on Wing Co Brown’s design for protective headgear.

  Private Christine Montori. Chris Montori.

  This month, she was one of the most famous faces on the planet. And not in a bubbly, trivial Britney Spears sort of way.

  She was from one of those mountain places in flyover country where “this girl’s army” had seemed a better career path than getting married to one of her cousins and dropping a bunch of two-headed babies before she was old enough to vote. A week ago, no one born outside the county had heard of her hometown. Now it was under siege by the world’s media, and her fellow citizens had declared that they were behind her 100 percent. Their pastor had just hosted a celebratory Klan-style burning of X-Files DVD box sets and L. Ron Hubbard books, and there was talk of a march on the White House to protest the witch hunt against their fairest daughter for something that as far as they were concerned wasn’t a crime at all, and her unconstitutional incarceration on a rock halfway around the world.

  That something was torture of the enemy. Or at least, accessory to torture.

  What Private Christine Montori had done was pose for pictures next to one of the Prisoners of the Action, smiling as if she’d just been elected Gangbang Queen at the County Fair. Although it was still classified information, journalists had begun to catch on that it was almost impossible to get a good image of the POTAs on anything that relied on pixels rather than silver nitrate or color-dye film stock. Everything electronic, from a cellular phone to a top-of-the-line DV camera, pictured the Prisoners of the Action as nothing more than grayish blurs, ghosts. Christine Montori was just plain unlucky that her still-unidentified partner in crime, snapping away with a cheap disposable camera that used good old-fashioned Kodak film, had come up with clear, pristine, funny-yet-terrifying images of one of the alien invaders. She was unluckier still that, despite standing orders against passing any images of anything at all on Great James to civilians, the camera had been smuggled off the island to a journalist who’d turned it into the biggest scoop since the Zapruder movie.

  The iconic photograph showed Christine Montori in combat fatigue pants and cap, bare-chested, tummy sucked in, tits stuck out, with guns in both hands, one aimed at the ceiling, one pointed at the smallest and topmost of the POTA’s three spheres that was all too easy to call a head. Her black bra was wound around the head-lump like a cartoon baby’s bonnet. Below it, three filmy apertures that weren’t eyes were wide open, surrounded by cilia as erect as mascaraed lashes, seeming to stare in terror and panic. There were greasy holes in its bubbly torso, with vivid purple interiors. Dice understood all the Prisoners had them, but anyone who didn’t know would assume they were wounds.

  The POTA did have an actual wound, in fact, but that was hard to make out from the pictures that flashed around the world. Thoughtfully, the unknown snapper had taken detail shots and, a subpoena later, they were in the folder Dice had been given in DC. Below the three apertures that weren’t eyes was a larger, triangular aperture that wasn’t a mouth. The POTAs didn’t ingest food in any way their captors had been able to record. The “mouth” was an ovoid cave leading to three peanut-size lumps made of crystalline sections of the single vast molecule from which each POTA was woven. It was theorized, not entirely in a jocular manner, that this ingress might be some kind of sex organ, which raised the horrible probability that the next occupant of this “secure hospital” cell would be some stupid soldier boy who tried to fuck the thing. At least that wasn’t Montori’s kick.

  Until the pictures appeared, none of the geniuses in charge of the POTAs—frustrated at getting nothing useful out of their captives and no doubt suffering from various degrees of Island Fever, their experimental, security, and containment procedures growing increasingly sloppy—seemed to have noticed what had been done. The aperture had been stuffed full of a substance that turned out to be common sea salt, of which Great James had an unlimited supply, and then sewn shut: not with surgical sutures from a medical kit or the kind of regular needle and thread someone like Montori might have access to for uniform repairs, but with thick, black twine.

  Mouth filled with salt, and sewn shut.

  That was horribly familiar. Like every other island where slaves had fetched up, Great James had once incubated its own version of voodoo, though Dice’s working assumption was that the tradition had been reimported by some GI from Louisiana or the Caribbean. Pins in dolls. Teterodotoxin jabs to make mindless slaves. Frenzied dances. Papa Legba, Baron Samedi, and Erzulie Freda. What had been done to the Prisoner was what a voodoo practitioner did to a zombie when it had outlived its usefulness and needed to be put back in the grave again for good.

  So far, only Private Montori had been fingered for the crime, if that was what it was. But she’d had associates. Dice had been sent to find out who they were.

  He unzipped his document case, took a detail blowup from the folder, and held it in front of Montori’s face. “Let’s try a few easy questions, Private. Nothing difficult, nothing you haven’t been asked before. If you can provide answers, I can promise it will do you a great deal of good.”

  She scowled at him, her needles still clacking away.

  Dice said, “You don’t believe me, and I can understand why, but it happens to be true. It’s why I’ve been sent here. I know that what happened wasn’t your idea, that you were tricked into helping out. So how about taking a look at this?”

  The POTA wasn’t in this slice of the image, which included the edge of an observation window. The shutterbug had snapped his own reflection. A dark-skinned male in a white robe and a black top hat, camera and hands covering most of his face.

  Captain McAndrews’s initial investigation had yielded three possible suspects: privates Walter Garrett, Shaq Fuqua, and Tozer Dinkley. All three, like Montori, worked maintenance at the pits where the POTAs were held. All th
ree had been interviewed at length by Captain McAndrews; all three had denied any involvement and produced stand-up alibis.

  Montori didn’t even bother to look at the photo.

  “I respectfully decline to answer, Colonel.”

  “Taken as read, Private. No one wants to rat on their bunkies. But look a little closer and tell me who this is?”

  Behind the photographer, nearly out of frame, was another party. Precisely, the sleeve of another party. White, not fatigue or camo green.

  Montori blinked. Dice knew McAndrews hadn’t shown her this detail because it had emerged only after digital enhancement. He thought she was genuinely surprised. But then she shook her head and clacked her needles a little faster.

  Dice said, “That isn’t one of your bunkies, is it? Could it be one of the scientists? If it is, you see, I can’t help but wonder if you were co-opted into one of their experiments.”

  Montori had jabbed herself with one of her needles. Blood trickled into her knitted squid, soaking through the weave stitch by stitch as if purposefully.

  Her mouth worked; words emerged reluctantly, as if forced out under torture. “I…respectfully…decline…”

  “Was it an experiment, Christine? Or should we call it a ritual?”

  Dice spent another ten minutes trying to cajole her into opening up, but she wouldn’t answer any of his questions and grew more and more agitated, although she never once stopped knitting.

  At last, when he was sure that he had pushed her as far as he could, he told her, “You’re upset, Christine. It isn’t surprising, in the circumstances. What I want you to do now is think about what I just showed you, and think about this: If someone ordered you to do what you did, you aren’t under orders now. I will see you later, we will talk again.” He rapped on the cell door; when the MP opened it, Montori held up her work and stared straight at Sergeant Haines.

  “Six hundred and ninety-four,” she said.

  “Well done,” Haines said, and tossed in a package of cigarettes, which bounced ignored on Montori’s cot.

  Her needles began clacking again. Dice looked at Haines.

  “Stitches since the door was opened,” the sergeant explained, as if this was something that had to be checked and recorded.

  The door was shut and locked; Dice holstered his Beretta.

  “Why is she allowed knitting needles? She could have someone’s eye out with those things. Or her own.”

  “It keeps her calm, sir. She’s under observation, twenty-four seven.”

  “She has a bad case of Island Fever, doesn’t she?”

  “As bad as it gets, sir.”

  “Bring in Garrett, Fuqua, and Dinkley. Put them in individual cells, tell them I’m going to talk to them, and tell them who I am and why I’m here.”

  “You’re aware, sir, that they have already been interrogated?”

  “I’m aware. Bring them in, individual cells, tell ’em who and why, leave them to stew. When you’ve arranged that, you can take me to see the scene of the crime.”

  An officer was waiting outside—a suntanned woman with untidy blond hair, studying the ground to one side of her shoes like a shy teenager trying at once not to attract the attention of a boy she liked while getting a full ogle of him. “Lieutenant Shane, sir,” she said with nervous abruptness and stuck out her hand, as if expecting it to be kissed by Casanova.

  Dice shook her limp, damp paw.

  Haines said, “If Private Montori had a lawyer, sir, it would be Lieutenant Shane.”

  “This is well outside my area of expertise, Colonel,” said Shane.

  “It’s outside anyone’s area of expertise, Lieutenant.”

  “Anne-Louise,” she said, inappropriately. “Most of my cases fall into the she-said-I-could-rape-her or he-was-asking-for-a-broken-head categories. This is, um, out of this world.”

  “Well, we don’t know that, do we, Lieutenant? It comes under what I guess we should call inappropriate speculation. I don’t care whether the POTAs are from Mars or Missouri. All I care about is what was done to one of them here, how it happened, and who did it. Have you talked to Private Montori? Have you advised her to shut up?”

  Lieutenant Shane twisted the toe of one shoe behind the heel of the other. “She won’t talk to anyone.”

  “Is that because she’s crazy or crazy-smart?”

  “It’s all…foof,” said Lieutenant Shane, waving her hand butterfly-style, sticking out her lower lip and blowing a directed blast of air up to shift her fringe. Thirty years old going on twelve, staring at him with lovesick puppy eyes. “Foof and folly-faraw.”

  Dice, taken aback, said, “No kidding.”

  After the Action was over, the military took possession of the surviving aggressors. The POTAs. After all, the military had won the war; they were goddamn entitled. No one in the Pentagon was about to admit they were out of their depth. Within a few days, interrogators who’d wasted years learning how to bellow, “Where’s your secret chemical weapon dump?” in seventeen Mideastern and Asian languages were demoted to glorified prison wardens, and Intelligence moved in. Spook debriefers did no better with the Prisoners than anyone else, but took longer about it and used up more electricity.

  After everyone despaired of getting conventional answers out of the POTAs, the White House did what they probably should have done in the first place and called for scientists. Frank-Einsteins and bubblebrains in Colonel-Stock-speak. Of course, since the president and his aides were calling the shots, they didn’t trawl universities for whitecoats who might have the first idea about where to start. Instead, they went straight to the pharm and biotech corporations that had contributed to their campaign funds. If they couldn’t get intel from the POTAs, they might at least stumble across commercial applications that could line the pockets of everyone involved. A little reverse engineering and, who knew, the whole crapshoot might pay for itself with a zero point energy propulsion unit or some other piece of far-future indistinguishable-from-magic technology. Eventually, the sellout scientists from Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Pharm, and what no one these days called the Military-Industrial Complex got fed up and brought in resentful, envious, poverty-stricken ex-classmates from the universities who’d been trying to get on Great James ever since it had become the POTAs’ prison. Experts in disciplines with obscure names: xenobiology, cryptozoology. Self-styled geniuses who’d spent years of hermetic study compiling dictionaries of dolphin language or decoding the semiotics of bee-dances. There’d even been a science-fiction writer along for the ride.

  Months passed. A year. The Action subsided into the basement of the nation’s memory and the public’s famously short-term attention span moved on to new distractions: earthquakes, political scandals, movie-star romances and divorces, pop-star pregnancies, the jump-the-shark fourth season of a Fox series. Until the Montori scandal erupted, the whole show had employed just one single, solitary public relations officer, whose job had been to keep the journos drunk, drugged, and fucked back on Diego Garcia, the nearest thing to an R&R facility in the archipelago. The pap pack took tours of picturesque coral reefs and lightly rewrote pdf press releases about “ongoing research,” “flawless security,” and limp human interest stories.

  Meanwhile, a few results from the labor-intensive and horribly expensive studies trickled in. The POTAs were found to be each woven from a single molecule of triple-stranded buckyball tougher than diamond, doped with heavy metals, and bristling with catalytic sites. They secreted, or excreted, impacted crystalline versions of the same molecule, spindly shards that bonded to anything, be it stone or flesh, worked in so deep they could not be removed. There had been many casualties among those who had encountered the Prisoners after they had crashed. These crystals might be shit or might be babies. No one knew. Like viruses, it was hard to tell if the Prisoners were organic or inorganic, live or dead. When one was sliced up by an X-ray laser, every piece remained active and wriggling, like so many lizards’ tails; allowed to reunite, they fused
into a single ball that gradually resumed the correct shape, three spheres of diminishing size balanced one on top of the other.

  Similar experiments suggested that nothing short of the ground zero of a nuclear explosion could destroy the Prisoners: Kinetic weapons sliced through them with no effect; they deflected the shock waves of explosions, withstood vacuum or Mariana Trench pressures, immersion in liquid helium or molten lead. And they were all linked in some undetermined way. Hurt one, and the rest reacted in identical fashion, like the twins in The Corsican Brothers or—and this struck sparks—the victim of the curse and the doll into which voodoo pins were stuck.

  Most research quickly foundered in a quicksand of theory and countertheory. It wasn’t even a given that the Prisoners, prized wriggling out of the jagged wrecks of their croissant-shaped shells like the soft parts of so many limpets, were the actual enemy. They could as easily be engines, hood ornaments, or Pet Rocks.

  The shells were on Great James, too, baffling a whole other crew of aerospace grant-guzzlers and naval aviation boys. Whether or not the POTAs were the pilots, the shells were destructive—after the attack on Washington, DC, Dice had seen slices cut out of national monuments to prove it, and row after row of dead people with crystal shrapnel shot through them—but if they followed any battle plan or system, it was hard to tell. Their formations had moved fast and cut random swaths through cities, but they might as easily have been mowing a lawn as fighting a war, rearranging the world to suit some arbitrary aesthetic impulse. Plenty of folk would disagree, especially those with crystal working through their bodies like cancer. Plenty of folk said it didn’t matter whether the POTAs were culpable or not; they should be put down just to be on the safe side.