The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (70 page)

“I am still your superior officer —”

His protest was cut short by the goose-pimpling electricity, the smell of ozone and singed flesh. The major clapped a hand to his burned shoulder but he didn’t cry out.

“Any other questions, traitor?” the new soldier asked. “No? Good.” He shoved the major in, slammed the door shut.

Well, they were all being blooded.

The only other occupant in the van wore civilian clothes. He was leaning forward, saying, “Was that a gun? What just happened?”

Vasily swallowed hard, lifted the cross to his lips, kissed it, and the major stared straight ahead, his wide mouth tight, grim. Max didn’t say anything either as the van rumbled away. They all leaned as the van sped around a corner. Max’s stomach, still empty, lurched with it.

“Why is this happening?” Vasily asked. “We’re all on the same side. I don’t understand.”

“I heard they assassinated Mallove,” the major said, quietly. “Shot to the head.”

Max wondered if the comment was an observation or if it was bait. He glanced at the floor, glanced out the window. “No, they didn’t. I was there when it happened.”

All their attention focused on him now, including the soldier on the other side of the cage up front.

“Mallove and his assistant, Anatoly,” Max said, “and some other senior officer were on their way out. There were shots fired by the soldiers, but only after all three were shoved into a car and taken away.”

The major stared at Max; so did the guard up front.

“What do you think it means?” the civilian asked.

“It means Drozhin’s probably dead,” the major said. “It means Kostigan has taken over Intelligence finally. And if they shoved all three guys in a car, it means they’re dead as soon as the interrogations are done.”

The civilian laughed nervously. “Drozhin’s not dead. He’s got more lives than Lazarus. I don’t think he’s ever going to die.”

“All of you, just shut up,” the soldier said as the van pulled to a stop. He and the driver got out.

“They’ll be satisfied with killing all the generals and half the majors,” the major said, with a rueful glance at his own insignia. “Most of the rest of you can expect some interrogation, some time in a cell, then reassignment. It won’t be too bad.”

When the civilian, probably a contractor of some sort caught in the Education buildings, spoke, his voice rose sharply. “They’re taking us down to the cells? They told me it was an emergency evacuation.”

“Don’t worry, they don’t have enough cells for all of us,” Max said. The major stared at him hard, again, as if trying to figure out who he was.

“See, that’s what I don’t understand,” Vasily asked. “Why are we doing this to each other? We’ve got a planet to finish terraforming. Hell, there’s a whole galaxy to explore.”

That was the real question, wasn’t it? After three generations of terraforming, the planet was still hardscrabble at best. Like people, it was deeply resistant to change.

The civilian jabbed a finger at him. “How can you talk about terraforming —”

A fist hammered on the side of the van. “Shut the
fuck
up in there.”

They fell quiet. Max folded his hands on his lap, leaned back, savouring the smell of antiseptic cleaners mixed with sweat. These other guys were on their own. All he had to do was avoid anything stupid now, get into the system and stay alive until some of the Intelligence people noticed him and pulled him out. He had to believe that would happen.

The major hooked his tongue into his cheek, then spat blood on the floor.

“Hey,” Vasily hissed. “Don’t do that. The guard said not to do that.”

The major scuffed at the blood with the sole of his shoe, smearing the red stain everywhere. He was swirling his tongue for another spit when the back door swung open.

“Get out,” the guard said, using his gun to herd them into a large crowd of men milling around in a hastily thrown up enclosure in Calvary Park. The gate clicked shut behind them. Nervous guards from Intelligence and the regular services patrolled around the outside of the chainlink fence.

Max circled the perimeter once, estimated about a hundred and thirty prisoners, most of them low-level Education bureaucrats or headquarters staff like Vasily. All men, which meant the families were being taken somewhere else. He tried to count the guards, but the numbers kept changing as men came and went. No familiar faces either, but then only Drozhin and Obermeyer would know him. He asked questions, trying to find out what people knew, but all he learned was that you could ask a question at one end of the crowd and hear it repeated as a statement of fact at the other end a few minutes later.

On the second pass around, someone clutched his arm.

“You!” The civilian from the van, still smelling like cologne and breath mints. “You’re the one who saw Mallove get away free. Do you think he’s negotiating for our release? What’s going on?”

Max stared at him until he let go. “I think Mallove is doing everything in his power right now.”

Let him interpret that as he might. Max walked away, the civilian trailing after, towards a noise at the gate.

A bald colonel in the sand-coloured uniform of the regular services, backed by a small knot of similarly dressed soldiers and a flock of medtechs in green scrub coats, appeared at the fence. He kicked the chainlink at the main gate until the crowd all looked that way. He lifted a bullhorn to his mouth. “We know some of you were injured during today’s unfortunate safety evacuation —”

“It’s unfortunate more of you weren’t hurt,” someone shouted. Max moved away from the voice. All he wanted to do was stay clear of trouble; screw everyone else.

“— so you’re all going to get a quick medical inspection for your own records, to make sure everything’s fine, before we process you out of here. Be quick about it, co-operate fully, and everything will be fine. Line up, single file, at the gate. Stee-rip!”

The command echoed those the younger soldiers would have heard recently at basic training camp, and it settled down those men, including Vasily, who pushed his way to the front of the line, eager to comply. Max fell into line a little back of the middle, giving him time to hide how much he was unnerved. There was no reason to strip for a medical inspection, but getting men to obey seemingly reasonable authority was the first step to making them obey wrongful authority. If anyone knew that, a political officer did.

While the men ahead of him joked with the guards and fished for information about their release, Max removed his clothes and folded them, shoes on top.

A scuffle sounded at the very front of the line. “Hey, I don’t have any injuries in there!”

“Get used to it,” cracked a voice behind him. “You know Intelligence has always been a pain in our ass.”

Laughter rippled through the line as they shuffled forward one spot. Max stilled his face to boredom. If Education’s best men joked like sheep under these circumstances, either they didn’t know their history or they were idiots. Or both.

When his turn in line came, he handed over his articles and was directed behind a small temporary screen. One guard held a gun on him, another held a bigger weapon on the line behind him, and a third man scanned his clothes, then tore off all the pockets and ripped open the seams and hems looking for hidden pockets. He had none in this pair, which he’d been issued in prison. A fourth man in medtech green ran a quick scan over his skin for subdermal implants and weapons.

“Bend over,” the medtech said. “Nothing personal, just doing my job.”

Max grunted. For a quick body cavity search, it was done as professionally and quickly as a prostate exam.

“Next,” the medtech said.

Max’s clothes were handed back, more rags than not. The guard dropped the pockets and belt loops on a folding table with other confiscated items. Dressing again was a challenge, as thin as Max was – the drawstring had been torn off his underwear, so his briefs drooped, and without a belt, his pants sagged around his hips.

An explosive battering jerked Max’s head around. In the garden by the playground, across from the enclosure, a jackhammer-truck dug a trench. While Max tried to figure out what it was doing, a shoving match erupted by the medtechs.

“Bend over!”

“Bend over yourself!”

The remaining guards rushed over, slammed the protesting man to the ground, and punched or threatened anyone else in line who looked likely to argue. Max held his pants up at the waist and went to the table with the confiscated items. He skipped over a pocketknife and a razor-cutter to grab two frutein bars, the only food he saw. He ripped one open and smashed it into his mouth, then rolled the other into the fold of his pants where he was holding them up.

“You! Move on!” Max stopped chewing, nodded his compliance to the guard, and walked past the objector, now pinned to the ground by three men. Without shoelaces, Max’s shoes kept slipping off.

The inspected prisoners mobbed together near the fence, most of them, like Max, holding up their pants. They were subdued, angry, frightened: their attention was focused on the excavation machine beside the garden, where it jackhammered a large pit in the bedrock beneath the thin layer of soil. The grass had been carefully cut back in strips and moved to the side first, so it could be replaced.

“Would make a nice grave,” someone said.

“Not so nice,” said someone else, but Vasily was there, shaking his head, saying, “It’s probably for latrines.”

“Moron,” someone else shouted. “Why not truck in compost booths?”

“Maybe they don’t have enough,” Vasily said.

His innocence and capacity for rationalization was almost charming. Max avoided him. The officer with the bullhorn outside the fence waved the workmen to stop and climbed down into the hole. His bald head and shoulders stuck out of the top. He shouted orders, indicated a certain depth, climbed back out.

Most of the men began to say that it was a grave, but the hole wasn’t big enough for dozens of men. Max jostled his way into the middle of the mob for camouflage.

“Ow, watch my foot,” someone next to him said.

“Sorry.”

“You’re lucky all they took were your shoelaces,” the man said. “They took my boots. It’s like we’re all on suicide watch.”

“Worst case of suicide I ever saw,” Max said. “A hundred men shot themselves in the back, then filled in their own grave.”

A few men chuckled. Outside the fence, a van pulled up – Max thought it might have been the same one they’d been transported in, with the bloody floor in back. It drove slowly over the mounds of coloured stone until it reached the pit, where it unloaded a half dozen Adareans. One of them was Patience, who’d been waiting outside Mallove’s office earlier in the day. Seemed like years ago.

The jackhammer continued its work, sending up spectral clouds of dust in the twilight. A backhoe crowded up against the other side of the pit, scooping out buckets of broken rock whenever the jackhammer paused. While the Adareans milled around, their greenish skin looking sickly and pale, the last of Max’s fellow prisoners finished their “health” inspection and crowded up against the fence. Their cold, clammy skin pressed against Max as they tried to see what was happening outside.

“Weedheads!” one of the prisoners yelled.

“Go home, pig-men!” another shouted.

“Abomination!”

Within seconds, all their anger and fear and venom was directed at the Adareans. The chainlink rattled in rising pitch with their voices.

Outside, the Adareans clustered together. Even this far away, Max thought he could smell something sour waft from them. If the soldiers opened the gates and shoved the six into the compound right now, there’d be a massacre.

Instead the officer with the bullhorn stomped over to the Adareans, barking sharp orders, telling them to stand in the pit. When they hesitated, he waved his hands and guards rushed forward, shoving them down.

Tall as they were, the Adareans’ heads showed above the rim of the pit. “It’s not deep enough!” shouted one of the hecklers.

“Shoot them and they’ll fit,” shouted another and laughter rippled through the crowd. Max remained an island of silence.

Soldiers with shovels appeared around the hole and began spading the jackhammer gravel into it as quickly as they could. The Adareans shouted and struggled, but other guards kept them in place. Soon the weight of the stone pinned them where they were, until all that stuck above the surface was their bleeding, dusty heads.

The island of silence spread on Max’s side of the fence, broken only by someone’s half-suppressed laughter.

“They going to leave them there?” someone whispered.

No, Max thought, no, they weren’t.

The scene was another tableau, like the one in Mallove’s office. It reminded him of what they’d done, as guerillas, with the Adareans they caught during the revolution. But he wasn’t sure whether this was a sign that Drozhin was still alive and reviving old tactics, or that Kostigan had taken over and was reinventing them.

The men with shovels tamped the lumpy gravel down smooth around their Adareans. The long grassy hair on their skulls was coated with a layer of dust. One of the Adareans alternated between weeping and panting. A couple others lolled unconscious.

“Are they trying to plant them to see if they’ll grow?” one of the young men asked.

“What the hell are they doing?”

Teaching us a lesson, Max thought.

The work crew stepped out of the way while someone went to the equipment shed and liberated the mower.

Max turned away and left the crowd. He leaned on the far fence, head sagging, as the mower made its charge across the small park. As the first shrill scream sounded, he squeezed his eyes shut, and he kept them shut as the grinding sound of the blades whirred down to bare gravel.

A few prisoners cheered the executions; others laughed nervously, trying to get others to join them. One man retched. Most fell silent, and several drifted back towards Max.

The colonel with the bullhorn walked back over to the enclosure. “Listen up,” he shouted. “You’re all enemies of Jesusalem. You know in your heart what your crimes are, so we don’t need to tell you.”