The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Page 40
She wore a cheongsam and had an orchid behind one ear, still dressed for Colonel Stock’s dinner. She held out her hands to show that they were empty.
“Aha, the Dragon Lady,” said Brown. “Insidious Eastern temptress.”
“Actually, I was born in Romford, Essex,” Wing said.
She stepped around the taped body of her colleague, not giving him a second glance, walked across to her workstation, and studied the spiky traces on screens.
“You’re not part of the Happy Hounfort, Dr. Wing?” asked Dice.
“Hounfort?”
“Voodoo cult.”
“Oh that. No, not my scene at all.”
“But the soup didn’t send you to sleep, either.”
Wing shrugged, more important things on her mind than being implicated or ruled innocent. Dice made a mental note that someone had mockingly put the baffles on Susal after he was mummified, and he remembered who owned the things.
“This is the behavior I mentioned earlier,” she said, turning to the bank of monitors. “Highly synchronous movement. It’s almost like a dance, isn’t it?”
“They’re jumping beans,” he said.
Every time the POTA in the flooded silo hit the water, a mini tsunami broke against the observation window. The thumping pulse of its dance was a continuation of the drumbeat—had it learned the offbeat rhythm, or had Stock had his drummers sync with a pulse set by his big blue zombie? The floor trembled beneath Dice’s feet; hanging light fittings swung to and fro overhead; a standing pattern of waves, target rings, appeared on the surface of the water in the chamber. Dice wondered how much longer the observation window would take the stress, saw with a start that something was growing across the lower edge, brachiate crystals like magnified snowflakes, growing right in front of his eyes.
Something was growing through the water, too. Jagged kelp extending through twenty feet of water, virulent green light pulsing in time to the pulse of the Prisoners’ dance. Haines’s body was gone, devoured by a holdfast of spines.
Wing noticed it, too, and stepped up to the window. “This is a new form,” she said, rapt with fascination.
“Stock was going to load it into the Prisoner,” Brown said.
Wing considered this, head cocked to one side. She might have been assigning the experiment a catalog number.
“Whatever it is,” she said, “it could spread through all the silos now you’ve flooded them. The POTA may have added its own secretions to the mix. The growth is guided—see?”
“It’ll be all through the silos,” Brown said.
The crystal stalk had pierced the surface of the water, its top flattened out into a kind of cup. The POTA dropped down onto it, like a coin in a slot.
There was a long moment of quiet. The water calmed. Stock’s body, facedown, eyes open, bumped against the window.
The POTA—like all the POTAs—balanced on its edge on a crystal cup that suddenly grew up around it. Then, newly enshelled, it began to spin like a top.
Dr. Wing clapped her hands like a delighted child.
“What are they doing?” asked Dice.
“I’d say they were getting ready to leave.”
Dice knew she was right. He could feel a tremendous yearning that wasn’t his, and knew Chris Montori had sensitized him somehow. The dream had been hers. Needles dug into his ears. He yawned and something popped inside his head.
Dr. Wing studied her computer screens, said, “Subsonics. It’s causing overpressure. Interesting.”
One of the screens cracked across, like a soprano’s wineglass.
Dice said, “Will the silos hold?”
“We’ll soon find out.”
Brown had his hands over his ears, fingers under the rim of his cap. Garrett shook his head. He had a nosebleed.
Dice felt something shirr his internal organs. Vibration transmitted through the floor turned his muscles to water and he sat down hard, dropped the Glock. His vision was blurring. Something burst wetly inside his sinuses and he snorted blood. The air was singing. Beyond the glass, the POTA was a ghostly blue sphere spinning inside wreaths of steam. The top layer of the water was bubbling, boiling; the tall observation window shimmered and sang.
“Wing Commander,” Dice said. “If we can pop the covers of the silos, I suggest we do it right now. Free Willy after all.”
“I don’t think so,” said Dr. Wing. She had fallen into a swivel chair, was resting her right hand on the computer console, aiming a snub-nosed .38 at Brown, deathly pale but grim and determined.
Brown grabbed his shell, started to raise it, and she fired. The round blew the shell to shards, caught Brown in his shoulder, and threw him against the control panel.
“These are important experimental specimens,” said Wing, “and I won’t let you interfere with the work.”
“Bitch,” Garrett said, and lurched forward. He was bleeding from ears and eyes and nose, his face a mask of blood.
Wing kicked her chair around and Garrett stumbled into her and they went down in a clumsy tangle.
“If you could give us a hand, old thing,” Brown said to Dice. “I seem to have come unstrung.”
Dice went to the control panel. It was a bewildering array of switches and buttons. He had no idea which would flip the silo caps.
“Look for services humor, pal,” gasped Brown, eyes rolling into a swoon.
Wing and Garrett were fighting like children. Pain drilled through Dice’s skull, the super-audible whine vibrating his brittle bones. His vision swam.
Whatever happened next was down to him. He had no standing orders to cover the situation.
He found a panel of controls for the monitors, and switched to EXTERNAL VIEW. A new set of images came on the bank of TVs—lumps of concrete surrounded by scrubby, sun-blasted vegetation. Some of the slabs that sealed the silos were decorated with elaborate graffiti. One had the skeleton of a beach umbrella fixed into it. All were starting to crack, but the plugs installed at the end of the Cold War still held. Dice knew his head would explode before the caps shattered. Unless they could be shifted, everyone in this room would be dead of burst blood vessels—or brains—before the POTAs were free and about their incomprehensible business.
Services humor? What had Brown meant? Why couldn’t he have just stated his case clearly?
Dice had to wipe blood-tears from his eyes and concentrate.
A section of the master board consisted of twenty handles, dirty and long unused. A faded sticker above them read DO NOT ATTEMPT WORLD WAR THREE UNLESS THE SILO LIDS ARE IN THE UPRIGHT POSITION. There must be hydraulics or explosive bolts, or some other manual means of opening the bottles to let the rockets fly. Dice turned Handle Three, and there was a rush as the pressure inside popped away.
Sunlight fell into the silo, onto the floodwater and the spinning coin of the Blue.
Dice turned the other handles, as many as he could manage, as quickly as possible.
On the monitors, one by one, silo caps popped like champagne corks. Groves of crystal trees sprouted from them.
The pressure was gone. The vibration was still there, but shifting to a different, nonlethal register.
“The silos are open,” Dice told Brown, who was stirring. “Launch imminent.”
Was this Stock’s fault? Or would it have happened anyway? Being dead and all, the CO would certainly be taking the blame when Senator Bliss insisted on a full inquiry. Four or five other scandals could probably be laid at his door in a tidying-up exercise.
Dice hauled Brown off the floor and sat him in a swivel chair.
The Prisoners departed in precise formation, hanging above the mouths of the silos for a moment, then shooting skyward.
Brown whistled.
Dice prayed to God and Papa Legba and the Founding Fathers that Willy and his brothers were heading for the open oceans, and not about to institute a program of laying waste to the world’s coastal cities. Perhaps the Blues didn’t realize they had been tortured. Or perhaps they
didn’t have the human need for vengeance.
Wing cursed them roundly in working-class British with the odd Chinese word spat into the invective. Garrett was on his hands and knees at her feet, bleeding from nose and ears, but he’d managed to pin the sleeve of the scientist’s cheongsam to the console, burying his big knife to the hilt. She couldn’t get free.
By the time Dice and Wing Co Brown got out into the open and stood on the surface of Great James Island, the blue sky was empty apart from twenty white contrails that wind was already shaping into a row of upside-down question marks. All aimed north, and abruptly truncated.
Gone, through their own rabbit hole. Gone back to wherever they came from or on to wherever they were going next.
Out of the glare and heat-haze, Chris Montori wandered toward the silo, smiling like a six-year-old at her birthday party, trailing her knitted squid. Rose-of-Mary Bliss, saved from soporific soup by anorexia, was browbeating an MP, demanding immediate access to the base commander and medical attention for her sainted father. A couple of soldiers were picking their way through lumps of shattered concrete, peering into what was left of the mouth of Silo Three.
“That’s the end of that,” said Wing Co Brown, a hand pressed to the superficial wound in his shoulder, eyes bright and excited under the rim of his watch cap.
Dice wondered what he had just done and how he would answer for it.
Rose-of-Mary ditched the MP and charged up and demanded to know who was in charge.
Dice pointed at the wing commander. Rose-of-Mary did a double take, then fastened on Brown, bombarding him with questions.
Dice tuned out the shrill, vengeful angel and looked up at the empty sky. His scalp felt hot and itchy—he was still wearing the ridiculous and now superfluous cap. He took it off and folded it against his heart.
ELLEN DATLOW was editor of SCI FICTION, the multi-award-winning fiction area of SCIFI.com, for almost six years, and fiction editor of OMNI for more than seventeen. Over her career she has worked with Susanna Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Jeffrey Ford, Octavia E. Butler, Garth Nix, Gregory Maguire, Ursula K. Le Guin, Bruce Sterling, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, George R. R. Martin, William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Carroll, and others.
She has co-edited (with Terri Windling) the six Snow White, Blood Red adult fairy-tale anthologies; A Wolf at the Door and Swan Sister, both children’s fairy-tale anthologies; and three young adult anthologies: The Green Man, The Faery Reel, and The Coyote Road. She has been editing the horror half (with Terri Windling, and now Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant) of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for over twenty years. She and Windling also coedited Sirens and other Daemon Lovers, an erotic fantasy anthology, and Salon Fantastique, a nontheme fantasy anthology.
Solo, she is the editor of two anthologies on vampirism, Blood Is Not Enough and A Whisper of Blood; two anthologies on SF and gender, Alien Sex and Off Limits; Little Deaths (sexual horror), Lethal Kisses (revenge and vengeance), and Twists of the Tale (cat horror); Vanishing Acts, an anthology on the theme of endangered species; The Dark: New Ghost Stories and Inferno, a nontheme, all-original-horror anthology. She guest-edited issue 7 of Subterranean magazine, spring 2007.
Datlow has won the World Fantasy Award eight times, two Bram Stoker Awards, the International Horror Guild Award, the 2002 and 2005 Hugo Awards, and the 2005 and 2006 Locus Awards, for her work as an editor. SCI FICTION won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Website.
Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention, for “outstanding contribution to the genre.”
She lives in New York City. Her website is www.datlow.com.
The stories contained in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original
Compilation and preface copyright © 2008 by Ellen Datlow
“The Elephant Ironclads” copyright © 2008 by Jason Stoddard
“Ardent Clouds” copyright © 2008 by Lucy Sussex
“Gather” copyright © 2008 by Christopher Rowe
“Sonny Liston Takes the Fall” copyright © 2008 by Elizabeth Bear
“North American Lake Monsters” copyright © 2008 by Nathan Ballingrud
“All Washed Up While Looking for a Better World” copyright © 2008 by Carol Emshwiller
“Special Economics” copyright © 2008 by Maureen McHugh
“Aka Saint Mark’s Place” copyright © 2008 by Richard Bowes
“The Goosle” copyright © 2008 by Margo Lanagan
“Shira” copyright © 2008 by Lavie Tidhar
“The Passion of Azazel” copyright © 2008 by Barry N. Malzberg
“The Lagerstätte” copyright © 2008 by Laird Barron
“Gladiolus Exposed” copyright © 2008 by Anna Tambour
“Daltharee” copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey Ford
“Jimmy” copyright © 2008 by Pat Cadigan
“Prisoners of the Action” copyright © 2008 by Paul McAuley and Kim Newman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Del Rey book of science fiction and fantasy: sixteen original works by speculative fiction’s finest voices / edited by Ellen Datlow.
p. cm.
1. Science fiction, American. 2. Short stories, American. I. Datlow, Ellen. II. Title: Book of science fiction and fantasy.
PS648.S3D45 2008
813'.0876208—dc22
2008004948
www.delreybooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-50782-2
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