The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Ellen Datlow ed.

  He had blue dreams.

  It was an old one—he was back in basic, drill instructor’s endless shout invading his skull, every bone and muscle aching, drawing punishment details from latrine digging through potato peeling to corpse retrieval. Senator Bliss was in his squad, sounding off about economic benefits as crystal armor-plate grew under his skin, distorting his face, swelling his uniform. Rose-of-Mary Bliss was singing “You’re in the Army Now,” accompanied by the Great James Island band with their mutant bugles and steel voodoo drums.

  Then it was the Action, and he was in DC, frozen in a crowd as a whizzing shape, whirling like a child’s top, swooped, scattering shards. Dice ignored flak as it passed through stone buildings and soft people like a buzzsaw through balsa wood. Everyone around him was dead or had run off, but he had to stand still.

  The flying shell hovered in front of him.

  It was weathered, deeply striated, with coral edges as sharp as razors. It had apertures like facial features, opening and closing with faint wet sounds. Spiny, multijointed limbs emerged, probes or Waldos reaching for him, drill-bit appendages homing in on his forehead, where he knew blue dots wavered as guide marks for incisions.

  “You should wear your hat,” said the alien, with Wing Co Brown’s voice. “A fella’s not dressed without the old titfer.”

  Dice was awake, staring up at a fluorescent circle buzzing behind steel bars high in a wall gouged and scratched with soldiers’ graffiti.

  The bit about the long insect legs with drills was his imagination. As far as he knew, no such appendages had been observed during the Action.

  His heart still hammered. He was covered in cooling sweat.

  Something was making a faint clack-clack-clack, as regular as a clock.

  Chris Montori’s knitting needles, in the cell across the corridor.

  Dice sat up. His head felt as swollen and light as a balloon, bobbing on the end of his neck when he stood and slid back the iron cover in the cell door’s little barred judas. The two MPs had their backs to him, engrossed in adding detail to the edges of the design spread from floor to ceiling on either side of the door of the cell across the corridor. When Dice called out to Montori, one of the MPs glanced at him over her shoulder. She had several different-colored chalks stuck between her teeth. After a moment she shrugged, and went back to her work.

  Clack clack clack—the needles.

  Dice said, “Private Montori. A word, please.”

  “Is that you, Colonel Dice, sir? I’m pretty busy.”

  “So I see. That’s some design.”

  “I always liked to knit when I was little, sir. Momma said I had a gift for it.”

  “You have a gift for drawing, too.”

  Dice was certain that the MPs had caught Montori’s particular strain of Island Fever.

  Montori’s voice said, “I guess. But girls like me, we don’t get to go to college and study on art. We flip burgers, waitress at the Dairy Queen, make babies, or join the army.”

  “You won’t ever have to flip burgers or wait tables, Chris. You’re too famous for that now. There’s already a Movie of the Week in the works.”

  “You old sweet-talker you.”

  “Talking is what I do, all right. What I want to talk about right now is the situation we’re both in. How about helping me out, Private? How about asking one of your apprentices to unlock my door. It’ll only take a few seconds, and I promise I’ll leave you all be. You can knit and draw, whatever else you want, to your heart’s content.”

  “Can’t do that, Colonel, sir.”

  The needles’ pace picked up. Clackclackclack.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of anyone, Christine. I’ll make sure of that.”

  Dice meant it. He was certain that Chris Montori was no more than a stooge. A magician’s box-jumper. The girl who held the man’s cape, smiled big-time, and made graceful poses while he pulled live doves from a handkerchief.

  Clackclackclack. After a long moment, Montori said, “What about the Blues?”

  “The Blues?”

  “The poor puppies in the pits.”

  “Whatever’s planned for the Prisoners, I want to stop it.”

  Clack-clack-clack, the pace slowing now. Dice hoped it meant that he had her attention.

  “The Prisoners are just like you, Chris. Recruits. Grunts. Victims of their circumstances. They were left behind while the ones who gave them their orders got away.”

  Clack-clack-clack. Montori said, her voice querulous, “How do I know you’re not funnin’ me?”

  “I had a dream just now. About the Action, and about me.”

  “Yeah. I have dreams about the Blues, too. Everyone does, on the island, all the time. But ever since…well, you know what, mine have been different.”

  “You want to help them now.”

  “I want to, but I can’t. I can’t face them again.” Clack-clack-clack. “If I get you out, will you do right by them?”

  “By you and by them, Chris.”

  “All right,” she said, and one of the MPs turned away from the intricate design and lifted a ring of keys from her belt, unlocked Dice’s door.

  He walked out of the door in his loose, unlaced boots. He was about to thank Christine Montori when the end of the corridor collapsed in a soundless blast of dust and grit.

  Someone stepped through.

  Wing Commander Brown.

  The Wing Co slapped dust from his tattered blue uniform. He was wearing his black watch cap, and carried in the crook of one arm what looked at first sight like a baby tuba. No, it was a conch shell, ornamented with crystal. He seemed painted with woad, blue lines in a grid fashion, outlining his skull. The lines were pulsing. It must be some sort of optical illusion.

  Dice wondered why he felt so calm. The first symptom of GJS was refusal to admit the infection. So surely it couldn’t be anything to do with Island Fever.

  The two MPs were working at their design—Chris Montori’s design—as if nothing had happened.

  “This is just your size,” Brown said, and slid a watch cap over Dice’s head. The foil lining scraped his scalp. Brown stepped back, studied Dice’s face.

  “Starting to see things more clearly, aren’t we? It’s not just the Prisoners that were getting to your brain waves, old mate. There’ve been many other emissions and transmissions and whatever. You’re free of them now, and a spot of the old potential is sparking in the noggin. You’ll be doing sums backward in your sleep, I’ll be bound.”

  The blue grid on Brown’s face was fading now.

  “Time for a stroll? It’s nearly dawn. You know how the song goes, ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon…’”

  “‘There’s a rising sun’?”

  “That’s the ticket. Sun-a-rise, she bring in de morning. Oh, by the way, here’s a pair of bootlaces, and a belt. Thought you might need them. The only ties I’ve got are my regimental colors. As a heathen Yankee you’re not entitled to wear them, so you’ll hae to dae withaet, as the Scotchman sayeth. Hope that’s not too big a disappointment.”

  Dice laced his boots and belted his pants.

  Brown led him through the neat hole punched in the wall of the cell block.

  The song had it right. There it was: a rich, electric-blue horizon, shading to purple-black, with a star canopy brighter than a city dweller could dream. Dice looked up, seeing the sky in a literal new light, transfixed like the first hominids by the join-the-dots pictures of the constellations.

  “Our friends aren’t from ‘up there,’ old thing. It would make things easier if they were.“

  Dice adjusted his scratchy cap, and Brown clamped a hand over his head.

  “Naughty-naughty. Caps must be worn at all times on the quad. Tassels denote prefects, who must be obeyed unto death. Appearance in public without a cap constitutes a Minor Offense and three Minor Offenses are a mandatory DT. Detention, that is, not delirium tremens. Appearance in public with delirium tremens is straight to the Head for six of the b
est and no argument.”

  Dice tried to focus and saw through the brig wall: Chris Montori sat up in bed, still knitting.

  He had a brief spasm of panic—he had developed X-ray vision!

  He remembered the joke about superheroes he’d made to Haines, and wondered if he could fly.

  Then he saw the rubble and smelled the sharp tang of concrete dust.

  “A little bit FUBAR,” Brown said. “I blew out rather too much wall. Silly me. Your friend promised guides’ honor she’d stay put, so no harm done.”

  The two MPs outside Chris Montori’s cell door were under her spell, but where were the others? There should be sirens, roll calls, deployments, a clampdown, bodyguards piled on Senator Bliss to protect him from assassins.

  “Ah, there’s the clever part, you see,” said Brown, answering a query Dice had not voiced aloud. “Silent explosion. Well, not really silent. It’s just something a friend of mine rigged up out of this bit of old shell.”

  Brown held up the ragged trumpet. Its ridges and flecks of crystal were pulsing with blue light.

  “It takes the bang, and makes it go somewhere else. I daresay some fellers in China got a fright, but they’ll be used to it by now.”

  Montori smiled at them, and snapped off a salute. “Good luck with the Blues, Colonel. I know you’ll do right by them.”

  Brown clucked like a hen. “Come on now, Dice. Don’t dillydally.”

  Dice had been in the Pentagon during the Action, as baffled and panic-stricken as everyone else in the chain of command, from the commander-in-chief to the Newark, New Jersey, dogcatcher. As the swath of invaders cut south toward the border between Canada and the United States, all the alerts reached triple-redball and the president was evacuated from his second-best ranch in Montana to some Cold War–era mine shaft a mile under Kentucky by the Secret Service, where he declared war against the unknown enemy, vowing that they would be smitten utterly. On his live televised address, the president kept referring to the enemy as “analiens,” but ADR retakes fixed up the slip for the taped versions that would go on the public record; the “Analien Invader” speech would go down as one of those “it would have been nice but didn’t really happen” media legends.

  Dice remembered the unholy, guilty, puzzled relief that broke out when the attack on Washington bypassed strategic centers of government and military command. Instead, the UFOs cut up a few tourist sites and directed their greatest force at an area of low-income, predominantly African American housing that senators a lot less reactionary than Jubilee Bliss tended to label a crime-ridden ghetto. Earth’s first victory over the hostiles was actually scored by a posse of incredibly tooled-up drug-slingers who had somehow kept a stash of RPGs in reserve against anyone trying to claim their territory. They weren’t on the official history, either—two of their three hits had been on flying terrors; the other had taken out a school bus.

  After gearing up for a response against a purposeful, planned attack, it was almost a disappointment when it turned out that the “invaders” acted more like the weather than an army, devastating, impersonal, and not wholly predictable. Deadly shrapnel rained upon underinhabited, unimportant hinterlands as solidly as upon sites of strategic importance and areas with high-density populations. The attack did not even proceed in straight lines or with the prevailing winds, but shifted in a zigzag pattern that metastasized into some sort of fractal before analysts could get their heads around it. Once, half a dozen of the “enemy” deviated several hundred miles just to obliterate an abandoned farmhouse and the surrounding property, leaving unscathed an adjoining military research base, and then heading out to sea to dive-bomb a shoal of squab.

  Like everyone else, Dice watched the Action on television. He was a soldier, but he was also a lawyer. So with a dozen fellow uniformed lawyers, he sat in front of a TV set in a lounge deep in the Pentagon’s hive, watching everything Fox could show, speculating about how the Big Green Machine was going to pull the nation’s ass out of the fire and how many lawsuits for reckless endangerment and property damage they were going to have to deal with when the dust settled.

  As it turned out, except for clearing away the dead and tidying up the wreckage, it was all over by dinnertime. The UFOs were reclassified RFOs—Recognized Flying Objects; although being recognized wasn’t the same as really knowing what they were. By the time the first instant book about the Action was number two in the Amazon.com listings, Dice was in Guam, investigating a drug cartel run by a corrupt chicken-hawk colonel and an enterprising corporal in the motor pool; when the first TV movie about the Action aired on NBC, he’d discovered that the chicken-hawk colonel had powerful friends in places that counted; as Bruckheimer’s movie of the Action entered pre-production, he was given a solo mission to the worst place in the world, to put a Band-Aid on a scandal the army was doing its best to bury.

  And now he was on the front line of a fight for the hearts and minds of creatures that definitely didn’t have hearts, and probably didn’t have minds—certainly not minds as human beings understood them. Here he was, on the back of Wing Commander Brown’s antique bicycle, heading for the island’s recreation area at approximately sixty miles per hour.

  The Wing Co had his feet off the pedals, which whizzed around in a noisy blur, powered by a contraption made from a wire coat hanger and a Duracell battery, another invention of Lieutenant Glass, he of the giant holographic cross.

  Dice sat on the mudguard, hanging on to the Wing Co’s waist. Yelling into his ear, “You got hold of the camera and sent it to the journalist, didn’t you?”

  “Guilty as charged, sah!”

  “This better not be some kind of British plot to take back St. James.”

  “Not in the slightest, old bean. It’s a humanitarian plot to let the world know what’s going on here. God bless the Queen, sah, but Her Government is mostly a frightful shower with their heads so far up your Yankee arses that they can look out through their big fat belly buttons. Call me mad if you must, but I was hoping that your great nation would be shamed into doing the right thing.”

  Dice noted that the Wing Co was dropping his krazy-kat lingo. “You were hoping for a big investigation. Trouble is, the Pentagon doesn’t much care what happens to the POTAs as long as it doesn’t embarrass them. So all you got was me.”

  “I’m sure that if you had enough time, you’d have worked everything out. The conspirators are as cunning as tax inspectors, but also as crazy as coots. Unfortunately, time isn’t on our side.”

  “Why me? Why do you need my help?”

  “If I did this on my own, a British officer taking on the US Army, it would cause an almighty diplomatic stink. Some folk remember who burned down the White House in 1812, and worry that we’d like to do it again. But you’re a lawyer from the Pentagon. It’s your job to conduct internal purges and the like.”

  “Do we have any other allies?”

  “I’ve been handing out my hats, but I only had one roll of special tinfoil. Anyway, not many want to wear them.”

  “The hats really work?”

  “Another of Glass’s doodads. The tinfoil is chemically tinfoil, but Glass worked out a treatment that changed its quantum-mechanical properties. At least, that’s what he said, but he also claims to have glimpsed God’s hinderparts, poor fellow.”

  Brown halted the bicycle, as if at a railroad crossing with a train due. Dice got off, insides still rattled, mind racing.

  “Let’s get to the barracks,” he said. “I can round up some men…”

  “They’ll be asleep,” said Brown. “Or worse. That soup had something worse than piddle in it. The super-souped-up soup. Anyone who partook of it will be knocked out for the duration, and it wasn’t only served at the VIP table.”

  Dice had taken only a spoonful, which had been enough to put him under for a couple of hours. A bad feeling rising through the blissful hum in his head, he said, “So it’s just you and me?”

  “More or less, old chap.”

/>   Dice wondered who was in the cult. Haines and Shane, of course. Chris Montori had been a priestess, but the Blues had got to her. At least one of the scientists was involved.

  “It’s Wing or Susal,” he said. “Or Wing and Susal. How am I doing?”

  “I believe Wing is the inside person,” Brown said. “Susal’s just a lone drummer marching to the beat in his head. Why don’t you ask me who’s really in charge.”

  “Ah, Senator Bliss?”

  Brown giggled. “Wrong end of the stick, dear boy. Bliss is blissed out on soup, snoozing with his sidekicks. Didn’t you notice who was only pretending to spoon soup into his gob? The guilty party is…aargh, they got me!”

  Dice stopped breathing as Brown’s eyes bugged out as if a dagger had just thunked between his shoulder blades. Then the Britisher rattled on again.

  “Sorry: ill-judged attempt at comic relief. Won’t happen again. I’ll just come plain out and say that it’s Colonel Stock. He’s Head Man in the Cult of Conspiracy. He’s the Butler What Did It.”

  Dice couldn’t quite see it.

  “Stock wants to turn the POTAs into zombies?” he asked.

  “Oh no,” said Brown, giggling again. “He doesn’t want to turn them into zombies. He believes they are zombies, controlled by some insidious higher power. Gods of the Outer Darkness or some such. Stock spent a year in Haiti at the end of the last century, part of the peacekeeping force. Picked up some damn funny ideas if you ask me. What he wants to do with his silly ceremony and the salt is kill one of the Prisoners and draw down that higher power, so he can get something from it. Don’t ask me what. He’s bonkers.”

  That rang some dissonant bells.

  “In voodoo, priests invite possession by spirits called loas,” Dice said. “It’s not Western demonic possession; it’s as much caging the force inside you as it is being controlled by it. The priest takes on aspects of the loa’s power, beefs up with its juice. That’ll be what Stock wants. Powerful Juice. Not surprising, really. He’s got as far as he can in the army, and they aren’t going to bump him up farther than Great James. His job here is just to make sure there’s enough toilet paper and shoo away journos. The Frank-Einsteins get to issue all the orders that count. If you can’t get a promotion or a medal or anything approaching respect, you swallow an almighty loa and become Lord of the Earth. In theory. Of course, there’s no danger of it actually working.”