Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (15 page)

The next twenty-three revolutions of their planet about their sun brought more change in both them and us than the previous thousand. The star became almost ringed with machines to absorb its power and send it to the growing fleet. For ourselves, we laid another thousand and twenty-four eggs. There were no royal feedings; we needed every hive-queen we could produce. We could wait. Interestingly, we had now become "Empress" Anathor in human language, a queen of queens.

When the day came, we joined the human dignitaries. In deference to our feet, we met on the deck of the Mars gravity level of Fiji Tower. Prime Minister Thaddeus Zwicky personally escorted us to Empress Marie, Prince Consort James, and Admiral Jai of the home guard.

All but Thaddeus wore some version of their military uniform, a show of solidarity with the thousands that would soon follow Admiral Sun and Princess Ann toward Orion.

James motioned us to our place and waved to the stars above us. "The light from propulsion beams reaching the first wave should arrive at any moment," he said.

Almost before he stopped speaking, a thousand new stars ignited above us, then grew tails that flowed back toward us like contrary comets bound away from the Sun. Two hundred and six of those were hive-ships of our hive's daughter queens.

"Fare well, our sons and daughters," Empress Marie said.

They did fare well; the Canid hive did, in fact, recognize overwhelming superiority and the most awful deed contemplated proved unneeded; they retreated to their home system without violence. Three hundred years later we, the Children of Light, left Empress Ann and the human stars for another story. Marie sent her farewell from Earthmind.

The Orionas, blissfully unaware of any of these events, continue to make their pottery, their poetry, and their music. Perhaps, in another turn of the galactic wheel, they will also pay it forward.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Diving universe novel,
City of Ruins,
just won the Endeavor Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy novel by a Northwest writer. The novel contains, in expanded form, the novella, "Becoming One With the Ghosts" (
Asimov's,
October/November 2010), which won our Readers' Award. Kristine's fourth Diving novel will appear later this year. The most recent novel in her acclaimed Retrieval Artist series,
Blowback,
came out in December. Kristine is also editing
Fiction River,
a new anthology series. The first issue has just been released through WMG Publishing. An exciting new character must pick up the pieces of her life in the author's latest story for
Asimov's.

Skye stands over the unbelievably fat man, feet spread as far as they go so she can straddle him, and clutches the spear in her right hand. His eyes are wild, but he's past begging. Tears stain his face, and his lower lip trembles.

She doesn't hate him. She should hate him, right?

She doesn't look up, either, because if she looks up, she fails, but she feels like stepping aside. Even though she's in a simulation, everything feels real—there's an actual wind blowing her long black hair (over her face, dammit), her footprints depress the grass around the fat man's body, and the light of the fading sun seems too bright to her untrained eye.

Plus she can smell this guy. He smelled like garlic when she first arrived at his estate, pretending to be an escort that he had hired, and now he smells like sweat. Not healthy manly sweat, but flop sweat, tinged with fear so powerful that if there were predators in this simulation, they would come from the woods beyond in droves.

But there are no predators here, not even her. She's supposed to be one, but it's just not working for her.

"I asked this before, and I'm going to ask it again," she says,
sotto voce
to her handler, just like she's supposed to if something goes horribly wrong with the simulation. "A spear? Really?"

She knows the answer. Her handler has given her the same answer for two full days.
You have to be ready to use everything around you.
The story she's acting out here is a simple one: the fat man's bodyguards disarmed her at the door, so she grabbed what was near to hand.

But she hadn't arrived at any door, and there were no bodyguards. She just appeared inside the estate, near the fat man, conversation already in progress. She
stood with her hands folded in front of her while he talked, and scanned the room that overlooked the manicured grounds, searching for weapons.

The fat man had no idea she would grab a weapon (and the spear was handy), then end up like some kind of warrior, chasing him down that perfect lawn until he tripped and sprawled in front of her. Not half an hour ago, those bulging eyes twinkled with the idea of sex.

Now she's supposed to plunge that spear into him. Preferably into his heart where he'll die immediately, but considering what he's (supposedly) done, impaling him in the eye isn't bad either. It'll make him scream and hold him in place and then she can go back for a more suitable weapon, like a knife or a laser pistol.

She'd prefer a laser rifle—hell, she'd prefer some air-to-ground missiles—because she doesn't like looking at this guy's face. Even if it is simulated face.

It's a simulated face that's crying, because, apparently, that's what the fat man did the day he really died, when a real assassin killed him nearly a decade ago.

Skye stabs the spear into the ground beside her, then uses it for balance so she can step away from the fat man. He sits up, his lower lip still trembling.

"Thank you," he says, his voice wobbling. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

This is the point where her best friend MingLee said,
Screw it,
plucked the spear out of the ground and ran the guy through. She wasn't supposed to tell Skye the experience in this simulation (or any simulation for that matter), but she had, in whispers, when they were off the Guild grounds, on holiday.

I guess that's when I knew I could do this,
MingLee said.
They say you have to have a lot of anger in you to qualify, and I had no idea I had any anger at all until that fat man sat up and treated me like his savior for letting him go.

He isn't treating Skye like a savior. He's thanking her, sure, but she can see in those bulging eyes of his that he's trying to gauge her, to see how badly he can fool her before he manages to escape.

She sighs. "You're really a piece of work," she says to him, then shoves him backward with her booted right foot.

He starts crying again. She'd wager that in other simulations, people would kill him for those tears. But she's not other people.

Nor is she a good candidate.

She thought she was angry about everything. Apparently, she's not.

Still, what anger she had started the day she arrived at the Assassins Guild. She'd been ten, ragged and hungry, so thin that she could see the outline of the bones in her hands. She'd been told she was going back to her parents, and instead her uncle (if indeed, he was her uncle: it had never been proven) brought her here.

The Assassins Guild looked like a prison to her, but then, everything on this part of Kordita did. The Guild took up the area of a small city and it was a fortress, literally and figuratively. Outside its gates, it seemed so formidable that she had no idea how people would enter it.

The gates, seemingly made of blond river stone, towered above her. Columns rose on the right and on the left, apparently holding up the actual door in the middle.

Only it wasn't a door so much as the image of a door. If she put her hand in it (and she didn't at that moment; she only learned this later), she would discover that the image rippled, faded, and showed the actual entrance behind it. The entrance had three different airlocking systems, filled with all kinds of identification monitors and DNA checks.

Almost no one entered the Guild this way; those who tried usually died. But her so-called uncle hadn't known that, not that he would have cared.

He spoke to that rippled door as if someone were there.

"I'm leaving the kid here per her parents' instruction." He glanced over his shoulder to see if she was listening. She was, but she was also trying not to look at him. He had a long thin face, something like her mother's but not enough like her mother's to think they were related. Besides, his black eyes were shifty, looking at Skye, then looking away, like people did when they lied.

He turned back to the door, and said, "Either you let her in or you don't. It's not my business. I will say, though, that I doubt she'll live longer than a week without a good meal. And that's on you guys, not that
assassins
would care about anyone's life, right?"

No one answered. Nothing happened at all. There wasn't even any indication that anyone had heard his message.

Skye thought he would try again. But apparently, she didn't even warrant a second try.

He shrugged, and backed away from the door. Then he turned toward her, tousled her hair, and gave her the fakest smile she'd ever seen.

"Good luck, kid," he said almost like he meant it, and walked away.

Her breath caught. She wasn't going to yell after him. She knew better than to do that. But part of her couldn't believe he was walking away.

He was the last tie to her parents. How would they find her? She couldn't imagine that they would want her someplace called the Assassins Guild, but she couldn't imagine a lot of things about her parents, things that they would later say or do.

Of course, they wouldn't try to find her. They never did.

She swallowed and raised her chin as her so-called uncle disappeared over the horizon.

She didn't cry. He wasn't worth the tears. Besides, she was already used to people discarding her. Her parents had tried for years, and had finally succeeded six months ago—only because she stopped trying to find them.

She wasn't going begging back into their good graces. Not any more—she could feel that resolve, even now.

She sat down, wrapped her scrawny arms around her scrawny legs, and rested her cheek on her knees. She could still hear her so-called uncle cursing even though she could no longer see him. He was going on about money owed, payment denied, and revenge exacted.

Not that she cared. She was done. No one wanted her, and she wasn't even sure she wanted herself.

She decided to wait until he'd been gone at least an hour. Then she'd try to find her way back to that slow-moving train he had taken her on. Maybe she could take it back to the city. She knew how to survive in a city; she could pick a pocket, steal an identity, and scrounge food better than anyone she knew.

She had a plan. But surprisingly, the Guild changed it.

And they changed it by opening the gate.

Skye sits in the debriefing room. She hasn't expected to come here; she was told she'd be debriefed inside the simulation. Apparently she failed so badly that no one wanted to visit the interior of the simulation with her.

The debriefing room is purposely devoid of anything except a table, two chairs, and of course, the replay walls that are able to show her failure in both 2D, 3D, and full virtual. Right now, the walls are off.

Maybe she's going to get thrown out of the Guild, although she isn't sure if that's even possible. After all, she owes them a small fortune for fifteen years of room, board, and education. Theoretically, she's supposed to work off the money as she apprentices with someone.

But she's not going to apprentice with anyone now. No one's going to want her. She already has a reputation for failing to play well with others, and now she can't even kill a mass murderer properly.

Or, better put, she can't even replicate the murder of a mass murderer properly.

Oh, wait. She's supposed to call his death an assassination.

The Guild defines
assassination
and
murder
differently. Assassination is a targeted death, done for reasons other than passion. Murder usually happens in a moment of passion, often without planning, but usually in response to some kind of emotional stimulus.

Assassination, properly done, is actually legal. The Guild is registered with hundreds of cultures on dozens of planets, and gets called into service whenever a major criminal (usually a mass murderer) escapes local justice and moves to a jurisdiction that protects him. Or won't give him back. Or simply lets him exist.

Treaty after treaty makes it okay for members of the Guild—and for other licensed assassins—to get rid of legal targets, targets already convicted elsewhere of provable crimes.

Sometimes the Guild even goes after folks whose heinous crimes can't be proven in a court of law, but who are clearly guilty. That requires a bit more finesse, and a lot of proof from either the person (government, business,
whatever)
hiring the Guild, or proof from the Guild itself.

Ten years ago, the fat man was one of the unconvicted—he'd actually bribed his way free. He'd murdered dozens of people, including some of the jurors on his very first trial five years before, the one that made someone—Skye isn't sure who—figure out that this guy was too slippery to convict of anything; he just needed to be executed.

Execution
is another word that the Guild says is different from murder. But Skye isn't sure of that either.
Execution,
as she learned in school, is simply what murder/assassination/death caused by others is called when a government does it.

She knows the lecture she's going to get now, in this debriefing room.
You can't have pity for these guys,
her handler will say. Then she'll hear a recitation of everything the fat man ever did, probably the same damn recitation (with actual footage, in some cases) that she heard when she moved to this training level.

It took her a while to get here. Her hand-eye coordination isn't the best. She required extra training just to get through weapons proficiency, and she passed it by such a low margin that she wasn't sure they would move her forward.

But those anger tests, they got her a lot farther than anyone expected.

She might have bad hand-eye coordination, but she has enough anger for twenty assassins.

Or maybe twenty-five.

Or so they told her—before this simulation.

She didn't make friends in the Guild. What was the point of friends? You'd just have to leave them anyway. Or they'd abandon you when it mattered.

From the moment she walked through that door into the Guild, she stayed on her guard. She expected them to throw her out. No one did.

They threw her in a class with a dozen other kids her age. Those kids paid real money to come here—or their parents had paid it. The kids were supposed to learn a trade, and
assassin
was one of the hardest trades of all.

You had to be smart, because you had to outthink your opponents. You had to be strong, but that could be trained. You had to be charming, or else no one would befriend you. And you had to have an ability to be forgettable, or your usefulness would end after your first few jobs.

The Guild tested for all of that—or at least, it tested the things it could test for. It could test for smarts, but charming appeared over time. Forgettable was something that couldn't be tested either. And the Guild believed that anger would become strength over time.

Skye mimicked charming. She told people what they wanted to hear.

All the kids had parent stories, so she had parent stories. Some of them were even true.

Usually the parent stories got exchanged when the kids were in the gardens. The gardens inside the Assassins Guild were extensive, and were supposed to be calming. The kids had their own garden, filled with plants of all kinds—although none lethal. There actually was a lethal garden, locked and hidden, something the students got to use if they made it through regular schooling and moved into Assassins school proper.

Skye loved the garden, mostly because of the sunshine. Lots of stone paths widened into flat areas where kids could lie down and study the bugs in the dirt. She hadn't seen bugs in their natural environment before coming to the Guild; she'd only seen bugs on ships or in restaurants or in low-rent space stations. There the bugs were disgusting, a sign of filth. Here, they were normal and desired, usually to keep the plants alive.