Best Science Fiction of the Year Page 7

  The monster sags, shifting another bone in to take its place, moving what’s left of Beasley’s arm downward. In the corner of his eye Elliot sees Santos is on her knees, rifle braced. Her shot blows a humerus to splinters and the monster sags again. Elliot feels a flare of triumph in his chest.

  Motion in his peripherals. He spins in time to see the other seven bogeys swarm over the top of the Heron. He switches to auto on instinct and strangles the trigger, slashing back and forth. Bullets sink into the fungus, others ricochet off the Heron, spitting sparks. Some find bone but not enough. The rifle rattles his hands and then he’s empty and the monsters are still coming.

  He backs up, hands moving autonomously for the reload. Tries to get his bearings. Tolliver is still firing, still howling something he can’t make out. Santos is down, legs pinned from behind. Bony claws are moving up her back; Elliot sees her teeth bared, her eyes wide. Where is Mirotic?

  The answer comes in a jet of flame that envelops the nearest monster. It doesn’t scream—no mouth—but as Elliot stumbles back from the heat he can see the fungus twisting, writhing, blackening to a crisp. Mirotic swings the flamethrower, painting a blazing arc in the air. Elliot reloads, sights, fires.

  Suddenly the monsters are fleeing, scuttling away. Elliot fires again and again as they round the edge of the Heron. Mirotic waves the flamethrower, Elliot and Tolliver shoot from behind him, advancing steadily. One of the monsters crumples and slicks onto its neighbor, leaving its bones behind on the dirt. Elliot keeps firing until the glow of them is completely obscured by trees.

  “You fuckers, you fuckers, you fuckers,” Tolliver is saying, almost chanting.

  Elliot is shaking all over. His skin is crawling with sweat. “Check on Santos,” he says, and Tolliver disappears. There are aches in his back and arms and he can feel his bowels loosening for the first time in a long time. He needs to get the morphine back. He turns to Mirotic, to tell him as much, but as the big man snuffs the end of the flamethrower, he stumbles.

  A wine-red stain is blooming under his shirt. Elliot remembers the ricochet off the side of the Heron. Mirotic sits down. He methodically rolls his shirt up and exposes a weeping bullet hole in his side. Elliot can see the shape of at least one shattered rib poking at his skin.

  “Fuck,” Mirotic says, in a burble of blood.

  Shattered rib, punctured lung, and probably a few other organs shredded to pieces. Gnasher bullets were designed to disperse inside the body. “Where is it?” Elliot demands, squatting down face-level. “Where’s the morphine?”

  Mirotic’s face is pale as the old Earth moon. He shakes his head. He tries to speak again, says something that might be autosurgeon.

  “I’ll get the autosurgeon,” Elliot says, even though he knows it’s too late for that. “Where’s the morphine?”

  No response. Elliot frisks him, and by the time he pulls the vial out from Mirotic’s waistband his hands are slicked scarlet. He clutches his fingers around it and gives a shuddering sigh of relief. Mirotic’s eyes flutter open and shut, then stay shut. Elliot gets to his feet, head spinning, as Mirotic’s vitals blink out.

  When he goes back around the corner of the Heron, Elliot finds Santos is dead, too. One of the fleeing monsters drove a wedge of bone through her skull, halfway smashing her clamp. Blood and gray matter are leaking from the hole. A single spark jumps from the clamp’s torn wiring.

  Tolliver is crossing himself and his shoulders are shaking. There’s a fevered flush under his skin.

  “We’ll burn her,” Elliot says. “Mirotic, too. Any bones left, we’ll crush them down to powder.”

  “Alright,” Tolliver says, in a hollowed out voice. His eyes fix on the vial clutched in Elliot’s bloody hand, but he says nothing else.

  Lying on his cot with his limbs splayed limp, Elliot is in paradise. He feels like his body is evaporating, or maybe turning into sunlight, warm and pure. He can hardly tell where his sooty skin ends and Tolliver’s begins.

  “Did you kill him for it?” Tolliver’s voice asks, slurred with the drug.

  “Ricochet,” Elliot says.

  “Would you have killed him for it?” Tolliver asks.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Elliot asks back.

  As soon as they dealt with the bodies, he went to the tent to shoot up. Tolliver followed him, and when Elliot offered him the syringe, already high enough to be generous, he took it. Elliot doesn’t know how long ago that was.

  “What made you like this?” Tolliver asks. “What got you so hooked? What fucked you up so bad?”

  “There’s no one thing,” Elliot says, because he is floating and unafraid. “It’s never one thing. That would make it easier, right? If I was a good person, and I saw something so bad this is the only way I can . . . ” He puts a finger to his temple and twists it.

  “Forget,” Tolliver supplies.

  “Yeah,” Elliot says. “But there’s no one thing. This job kills you with a thousand cuts.”

  “But there must have been one thing,” Tolliver says. “One thing that got you stuck leading a con squad. Mirotic says. Said. Said you used to be somebody.”

  Elliot doesn’t want to talk about that. “Was it Santos?” he asks, running his fingers along Tolliver’s hip.

  “What?”

  “The nights I message you but you don’t come,” Elliot says. “There was someone else.”

  Tolliver shakes his head. “You really are a piece of shit,” he says, almost laughs. “You thought that had to be the reason, huh? Never thought maybe some nights I don’t really feel like fucking a drugged-up zombie who plays some pornstar in his optics the whole time?”

  “I don’t,” Elliot says.

  “Your wife, then,” Tolliver says. “That’s even more fucked.”

  “I don’t play anything in the optics,” Elliot says. “I just see you. That’s all.”

  Tolliver’s voice softens a little. “Oh.”

  On impulse, Elliot sends him the clip. He watches it at the same time, watches his daughter’s head turn, her bright eyes blink. “She’s grown,” he explains. “Twenty-some now. Her and her mother live on old Earth. Only thing they hate more than each other is me. If I was going to get out, it would’ve been years and years ago.”

  He moves his hand to Tolliver’s arm, wanting to feel the cool plastic of his flay under his fingertips.

  “They didn’t put me with a con squad as a punishment,” he says. “I volunteered.”

  He looks down into the exposed swathe of red muscle on Tolliver’s arm. There are tiny specks of luminescent blue nestled in the fibers. He feels a deep unease slide under his high.

  “I don’t want to get eaten from the inside,” Tolliver says. “I don’t want them using my bones.”

  The poison yellow nudge appears in Elliot’s optics.

  “Trigger me,” Tolliver says. “Right now. While everything still feels okay. You trigger me, and then do yours.”

  “Could take the arm,” Elliot says. “The autosurgeon.”

  “You said this job kills you with a thousand cuts.” Tolliver uses his good hand to find Elliot’s and squeeze it. “I’m not going to be a welder. I don’t want to be some fucking skeleton puppet, either. Let’s just get out of here. And let’s not leave anything behind.”

  His hand leaves, but leaves behind a cool hard shell. Elliot runs his thumb along the groove and recognizes the shape of Tolliver’s incendiary grenade. He cups it against the side of his head. He thinks, briefly, about what the pick-up team will find when they finally arrive. What they’ll think happened.

  He thinks of Tolliver’s file, the one he opened and read only once, how Tolliver had smothered his grandfather in his sleep and said it was to stop his pain, even though his grandfather had been healthy and happy. Nobody was good here. Not even Tolliver. But the two of them, they are a good match.

  Outside, the cyclops starts to wail. Elliot adds his upvote to the queue, and Tolliver goes limp in his arms. His thumb finds the grenade’s
pin and rests there. He thinks back to the last time everything still felt okay, then plays it in his optics, watching his daughter before she knew who he was.

  “She’s awake,” his wife’s voice sings. “Just looking around . . . ”

  Elliot breathes deep and pulls the pin and waits for extraction.

  Karin Lowachee was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her first novel Warchild won the 2001 Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Both Warchild (2002) and her third novel Cagebird (2005) were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. Cagebird won the Prix Aurora Award in 2006 for Best Long-Form Work in English and the Spectrum Award, also in 2006. Her books have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have appeared in anthologies edited by Nalo Hopkinson, John Joseph Adams, Jonathan Strahan, and Ann VanderMeer. Her fantasy novel, The Gaslight Dogs, was published through Orbit Books.

  A GOOD HOME

  Karin Lowachee

  I brought him home from the VA shelter and sat him in front of the window because the doctors said he liked that. The shelter had set him in safe mode for transport until I could voice activate him again, and recalibrate, but safe mode still allowed for base functions like walking, observation, and primary speech. He seemed to like the window because he blinked once. Their kind didn’t blink ordinarily, and they never wept, so I always wondered where the sadness went. If you couldn’t cry then it all turned inward.

  The VA staff said he didn’t talk and that was from the war. His model didn’t allow for complete resetting or non-consensual dismantling; he was only five years old, so fell under the Autonomy legislation. The head engineer at the VA said the diagnostics didn’t show any physical impairment, so his silence was self-imposed. The android psychologist worked with him for six months and deemed him non-violent and in need of a good home.

  So here he was, at my home.

  My mother thought the adoption was crazy. We spoke over comm. I was in my kitchen, she in her home office where she sold data bolts to underdeveloped countries. “You don’t know where they’ve been, Tawn,” she said. “And he’s a war model? Don’t they get flashbacks, go berserk, and kill you in your sleep?”

  “You watch too much double-vee.”

  “He must be in the shelter for a reason. If the government doesn’t want him and he’s not fit for industry, why would you want to take him on?”

  I knew this would be futile, arguing against prejudice, but I said it anyway. “The VA needs people to adopt them or they have nowhere to go. We made them, they’re sentient, we have to be responsible for them. Just because he can’t fight anymore doesn’t mean he’s not worth something. Besides, it’s not like I just sign a contract and they hand him over. The doctors and engineers and everybody have to agree that I’d be a good owner. I went through dozens of interviews and so did he.”

  “Didn’t you say he doesn’t talk? How did they interview him? How can you be sure he’s not violent?”

  “They downloaded his experience files. They observed him, and I trust them. The VA takes care of these models.”

  “Then let them take care of him.”

  She knew less about the war than she did about me, her son, except that the war got in the way of her sales sometimes. Just like I’d gotten in the way of her potential as a lifestyle designer, and instead of living some perceived, deserved celebrity, she’d had to raise me. Sometimes I wondered if I harbored that thought more than she did, but then she kicked my rivets on things like this and not even the distance of a comm could hide her general disapproval at my existence.

  Still, she was worried about the android killing me in my sleep. That might’ve been sincere. “The VA’s overcrowded. That’s why they allow for adoptions.”

  Because she was losing the reasonable argument, she targeted something else. The fallback: my self-esteem. “Why would they think you’re a good owner? You can’t even afford to get your spine fixed. How are you going to support a traumatized war model?”

  That was how she saw me—in need of fixing. “He can help me. I can help him.”

  Even through a double-vee relay I felt her pity. And I saw it in her eyes. That seemed to be the only way she knew how to care about me. I wasn’t going to do that to him.

  “Mark.” Saying his name in my voice brought him out of safe mode. He blinked but didn’t turn away from the window. He didn’t move. They’d said it would take a while. Maybe a long while. He’d been at An Loöc, Rally 9, and Pir Hul. The three deepest points of the war. Five years old but he’d seen the worst action. I wondered why none of the creators had anticipated trauma in them. So maybe they weren’t as fully developed as humans could be; they were built to task. But they were also built with intelligence and some capacity for emotional judgment because purely analytical and efficient judgment had made the first models into sociopaths. All of those had been put down (that they’d caught, anyway).

  “Mark,” I said, “my name’s Tawn Altamirano.” He knew that, they put it in his programming, but you introduced yourself to strangers. To people. “You feel free to look around my home. This is your home too. There’s a power board in the office when you need it. You can come to me at any time if you need anything.”

  He didn’t move or look at me. His eyes were black irises and they stared through the glass of the window, as if it could look back. Maybe he saw his own reflection, faint as it was. Maybe he wanted to wait until night when it would become clearer. Or maybe he just wanted to watch the maple tree sway, and the children walking by on the sidewalk on their way home from school.

  I had my routines pretty well established by now. Since my own discharge two years ago, and once the bulk of the physio was under my belt, I’d acclimated back home, got a job through the veterans program working net security for the local university. Despite what my mother said, I took care of myself. My war benefits allowed for some renovation of the bungalow—ramps and wide doorways and the like. When it was time for bed I left the chair beside it and levered myself onto the mattress. Some shifting later and I lay beneath the covers on my back, staring up at the ceiling. I didn’t hear him in the living room at all. Eventually I called off the lights and darkness led me to sleep.

  I didn’t know what woke me—maybe instinct. But I opened my eyes and a shadow stood in the doorway of my bedroom. For a second my heart stopped, then started up again at twice the pace until I saw that he didn’t move, he wasn’t going berserk, he wasn’t preparing to kill me. Of course he wasn’t. My mother didn’t know the reality. Going to war didn’t make you a murderer—it made you afraid.

  His shape stood black against the moonlight behind him, what came through the living room window on the other end of the hall.

  “Mark?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Mark, what’s wrong?”

  A foolish question, maybe, but he could parse that I meant right this second. Not the generality of what was wrong. Not the implication of what was

  wrong with him. What had drawn him from the window and to the threshold of my room?

  I pushed myself up on my elbows and opened my mouth to call up the lights.

  But he turned around and disappeared down the hallway, back toward the living room and his standing post by the window.

  He was still there in the morning when I rolled through the living room on my way to the kitchen. As if he hadn’t moved all night. Past his shoulders, in the early day outside, the children walked the opposite way now, some of them skipping on their way to school. A few of them held hands with their parents, mothers and fathers.

  “Do you need a power up?” I said from in front of the fridge. To remind him that he had a board in the office. No answer. So I took out my eggs and toast and made myself some breakfast. I had to give him time; it always took time.

  A little after fifteen hundred hours when the schools let out, I got a knock on my front door. I was in the office so it took me a few seconds to get to the foyer, punch open the door,
face the man and woman standing like missionaries on my porch. Behind them at the bottom of my driveway stood another man with three kids by his side. I looked up at the two directly in front of me.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Hello,” the man said, looking down at me. To his credit, he didn’t adopt the surprised and awkward mien of someone unused to confronting a person in a chair. If anything he seemed a little impatient. “My name’s Arjan and this is Olivia. We were just wondering . . . well, we were a little concerned about your . . . the Mark model in your window.”

  I glanced behind me toward the living room, saw the back of his shoulders and the straight stance of his vigil.

  “What about him?”

  “He’s creeping out our kids,” said Olivia. “Twice they’ve gone by and he’s just standing there. He’s not a cat. What’s wrong with him?”

  If you had a double-vee, you knew about the Mark androids. Ten years ago, the reveal by the military had garnered a lot of press and criticism, but ultimately people preferred sending look-alike soldiers into battle rather than their own sons and daughters. All of the Marks looked the same, so they were easily identifiable; nobody could mistake them for human despite the indistinguishability of the cosmetics. The adoption program had garnered similar press and criticism; the VA had looked into my neighborhood before releasing Mark to me. We were supposed to be a tolerant, liberal piece of society here.

  That was the theory, anyway.

  “He’s not doing anything, he just likes to look out the window.”

  “All day?” Olivia said.

  “Have you been outside my house all day?” Because otherwise why would it bother her if she only went by twice a day to pick up her kids, and that took all of two minutes?