The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (73 page)

I wasn’t sure of Cos’s physical ability to keep up, so I’d left him on the
Zhukov.
Nevertheless, I wanted to keep contact with him. We were streaming images from our helmet-mounted cameras, and pretty soon I heard his unmistakable voice say, “Kohn, I’m not getting a reading from the town. It’s all quiet. I don’t sense the colonists at all, either there or anywhere else.”

“How do you explain that?”

“I don’t.”

“You could sense them from space, and now you can’t even sense them from orbit?”

“I said I can’t explain it.”

We approached O-1 with leaden legs and labored breathing. We tipped back our masks, and despite the open furnace of the sun, the air felt mild, almost cool on our overheated faces. Little black animals with too many legs – hexapod rabbits? – scuttled through the grass at our approach. An animal somewhat like a hyena (heavy up front, small at the rear) loped out of a patch of blackish-greenish woods to the right, made a wide circle, and disappeared again. It ran with a rocking-horse motion, front-back, front-back. A flying creature with wide triangular wings dipped and hovered and flapped away clumsily. Its body looked tiny in proportion to its enormous wingspan.

In the distance low clouds had formed, red above, purple in the middle, blue-black underneath. Apparently a summer shower was on the way. To confirm my guess, lightning flickered – reddish lightning.

We entered the town. Unnerving silence. There’s a special emptiness to places where people ought to be, but aren’t. Signals from the ship told us which way to go, sending Morales up one crooked street, me up another. My platoon split, squads one and two to the right, three and four to the left. Hug the walls, guys. I found my own reactions interesting – nerves tight as catgut in a string orchestra, yet no feeling of fear. Just a very tense alertness. My senses seemed to have sharpened. Another small hexapod of some sort went scuttling around a corner, and I followed the sound of its many claws long after it had disappeared.

The buildings engraved themselves on my memory – every stone, every shadow. The only sounds between the growls of thunder were our boots scuffing and our equipment clinking and clanking. Streets didn’t meet at right angles – they and the intersecting alleys ran every which way, like braided channels in desert arroyos. The only shop signs were painted on the walls, like in Pompeii – Fud mart, Vin so ekselent, 20 booties in hous. The last one an ad for a brothel or a shoe store? No idea. The language had been changing in the mouths of colonists, just as it always does.

Marie spoke in my ear, then Cos. They agreed: still no sign of anybody in the town except us. Yet when a rooftile fell off and broke on the stones, everyone, including me, jumped. We emerged into an irregular open space surrounded by shops, all of them empty. Flesch Mart – butcher shop or slave market? By the look of it, butcher shop. A computer’s atonal voice spoke in my ear: “Lieutenant Kohn, right twenty degrees, enter broad street, see temple twenty-four o’clock.”

Nice to have guidance from the sky. And yes, there was the temple with its broad shallow dome, suddenly etched by a flicker of lightning against the backdrop of gunmetal clouds. We circled the plaza, sliding along walls as before. O’Rourke sent one guy to search every building as we passed. Chu was doing the same with his platoon. A private yelled in a high, strained voice from a second-floor window, “Nuttin’ ain’t here, Sarge!” and O’Rourke replied with a burst of profanity that broke the tension and left everybody chuckling.

We met under the portico of the temple. Morales and I panted up the steps and high-fived each other. The temple was round, with an outer and an inner circle of columns, and cool wind from the approaching storm whistled through it. The inside was a sort of Greek or Roman amphitheater, with stone bleachers meant to seat maybe two thousand people funneling down to a round central stage lit by a skylight in the dome. Embedded in a solid transplast column about six meters high and visible from every seat in the building hung a gleaming chrome model of DNA that seemed to seize and concentrate every bit of available light.

I felt awed and out of place, like an unbeliever gazing at the Ka’aba. One of the dumber peons asked loudly, “What is that *#@! thing?” But the others spoke in hushed voices, as people tend to do in temples, including those dedicated to gods they don’t believe in.

Absent, besides all the people, was any sign of danger. Through my helmet-mounted omni I summoned the shuttles, ordering them to move into the plaza just outside and lock up as before. Then we began settling down for the night. We had plenty of room to stretch out, because there were only seventy-two of us in all that vast space. People started turning on pocket glow lights and breaking out cold rations. Everybody carried food for three days, and the sergeants started circulating to make sure that nobody was fool enough to eat everything at the first meal. Morales and I stood by a column, watching the twinkle of little lights in the vast and steadily darkening space. The DNA model caught and reflected them all, and I guess a poet could have made something out of the scene. But we had no poets present, at least none I knew about.

“Before we start noshing,” Jesús said quietly, “there’s something I want to show you. We spotted it crossing the plaza. It’s not far.”

The shuttles were arriving as we set out. They settled down on the stones with all the usual racket and neatly parked themselves with airfoils almost touching. A little light rain began to patter and strengthened as we made our way to a low, windowless building with an industrial look to it. Next door stood another windowless building with the words Hir Ly Gretlie Luvved Ded chiseled on the lintel over the door.

“We can skip the first one,” said Morales. “It’s just a crematorium. We’ll need our lights in the mausoleum. There’s artificial lighting inside, but nothing’s turned on.”

We took out our pocket torches and gave them a twist and stepped inside. Our little cold puddles of light showed walls honeycombed with small square niches. Piled neatly on the floor were ceramic tiles that once had sealed the openings, and every one had the familiar Ladderite logo baked into it, plus a name in the colonists’ odd, awkward spelling system.

“God,” I whispered. “They even took away their dead. Were they that afraid of us?”

“I don’t see how they could’ve known we were coming. . . . Oh wait, their seer. They’ve got their own Cos. So they could’ve known.”

There was something wrong with that explanation, but offhand I couldn’t think what it was. We walked on, raising hollow echoes. Corridors branched off to either side, and all the walls without exception were empty honeycombs. Then thunder boomed and echoed down the aisles, and Morales and I turned and headed for the entrance.

Outside, the rain was heavier and the wind colder and the darkness darker. We broke into a trot and came up under the roof of the temple, gasping for air. Just in time, too – the rain had started coming down in three-meter cubes. We settled on the second tier, smelling like wet dogs, and started eating concentrated whatnot from our mealpacks. A private from Beth Platoon came by carrying six or seven canteens and asked if we’d like to have ours filled, too. “There’s lots of water,” he pointed out needlessly. We handed over our canteens and when the guy returned, swallowed gulps of cold stony-tasting water to wash down our rations. A simple meal, yeah, but it tasted like a feast.

“Pity the poor Ladderites,” said Morales. “Here we are scarfing up rations in their nice dry temple, and they’re out there in the wild wet woods. They must be eating cold food because if they tried to cook anything,
Zhukov’s
scanners would detect the heat and give us directions and we’d go out tomorrow and take them away at gunpoint.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “you have to destroy a civilization to save a civilization.”

After that bit of rather commonplace sarcasm, we posted guards and appointed Chu the Charge of Quarters for the night. Morales said buenas noches and rejoined his people. Somebody began singing – not the obscene ditty I’d have expected, but a sentimental tune called “Goodbye, Young Soldier.” The temple’s perfect acoustics carried every word to my ears, despite the storm raging outside, and I fell asleep listening to a strangely pure and haunting girl’s voice, like a reed instrument, asking, “What’ll I do/ When my guy/Is far beyond the sky?”

I never heard what she decided. I was exhausted, and fell asleep in about two minutes. And there I stayed until my helmet started squealing at me.

I vaguely remember rolling over, uttering an incoherent curse or two. Found my helmet, pulled it closer, and muttered the magic word, “Say.”

“Robair,” said Marie’s voice, though we’d agreed always to speak formally anyplace we might be overheard. That and her tone alerted me that something was very, very wrong and the sleep emptied out of my head with magical speed.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You have sixteen minutes to clear your command from that town and get as far away as you can.”

“We’re being attacked?”

“You’re about to be hit by a chunk of flying rubbish roughly twice the size of Mount Vesuvius. It must have entered Paradiso’s atmosphere on the far side of the planet, and it’s headed for an impact zone just offshore. Janesco tried to get it with a missile as it crossed the terminator, but missed. He hit it with the particle beam, but there wasn’t enough energy to deflect it. So move. Now.”

I let out a roar and the echoes went careening around the temple. Even if I did sound like Schlacht, there’s a time for a leader to be a loudmouth, and this was it.

We had to abandon a lot of gear, but in twelve minutes all of us were jammed into the two shuttles and strapped down and they were moving. As we lifted off, I thanked whatever gods may be for the sang-froid of machinery, which is impossible to frighten. For an instant I was certain that our nose was going to impact the dome, but it didn’t, and below us the pale temple and the dark town flowed back and away.

For the first time I checked my watch. It said 0404. The storm was mostly over, and the clouds had scattered in time for a coldly brilliant moon to break through. Only it wasn’t a moon, it was the mother of all asteroids, and it flashed to the east, lighting up the little houses of the town. Below I could see neat patchwork fields and dark woods and the face of a ridge of high land topped with a brushy growth of ebony forest. The impact was going to be tremendous, so I ordered both Aleph and Beth platoons to shelter behind the ridge.

We descended and hovered close to the ground, turning on landing lights whose cold glare etched oddball trees without leaves but with spiral fronds coiling upward around the trunks. Eyes flickered in the light, little creatures and big, eyes green or yellow or red, a whole swarming ecology we’d never know anything about, because at that moment the sky lit up. The shock wave hit, first as a wall of compressed air and then as a tremor that shook the hills. The ground surged – I’d never seen anything like it, though I’d heard of earth imitating water during earthquakes.

By now a gale like seven cyclones was howling and a lot of the town was flying over, fragments of houses and trees and everything else. Even in the lee of the ridge, waves of turbulence scoured the valley and made the flyers bounce around like sticks in a torrent. At that time I’d had no training in flying at all, so I had to trust the autopilot, which fortunately didn’t need any human coaching to retract the airfoils to minimum extension and rev up the engine to max power. We seemed to have lived through the worst, and I was almost ready to breathe again, when a freakish blast of wind came howling down the valley and swept both shuttles up into the fury above.

I’d heard stories of people being sucked up into tornados and living, and of course we had a solid transorbital ship to huddle in, but that’s essentially what we were doing anyway, we and rags of flying clouds and the endless torrent of spinning debris. As we tumbled over and over, I had fragmentary glimpses of things happening below, of glistening bare sea bottom, of a gigantic wall of water moving with a kind of majestic deliberation toward the shore, of fields and hillsides stripped bare, of wind-driven flames spreading horizontally in sheets. One thing I didn’t see was the other shuttle – it had vanished in the storm.

Then all I had time for was surviving, while our autopilot’s little mechanical brain fought to regain control of the flyer, end the tumbling, ride the gale, climb to quieter air above. We were essentially helpless, at the mercy of the machinery and every second expecting to run head-on against mountain heights that lightning flashes showed advancing with daunting speed from the west. Wind velocity? 303.5 clicks, according to our instruments. Now that’s wind.

At last we rose above the turbulence, the air thinned out, and the bucking and groaning stopped, except of course the bucking and groaning of all the guys, including me, who’d been shaken like peppercorns and now were throwing up half-digested rations all over ourselves and one another.

Our flight steadied. We were approaching the limit of the atmosphere. We flickered out of the planet’s shadow and seemingly headed straight for the huge red eye of the sun. Then I noticed that something else had taken control, that we were beginning to turn, that a small but bright star in the distance was no star at all, it was the
Zhukov.
We were foul and stinking and disoriented and terrorized, but we were alive and under the control of the mother ship, and I figured I’d take a lot of airsickness and bad smells for that.

The welcoming committee seemed to feel the same way. The whole cadre was waiting for us and broke into cheers as one by one we crawled up through the hatchway out of the shuttle, looking and smelling like rats from a particularly unsanitary sewer. Marie hugged me without regard to smell or protocol, then clasped the hand of each and every member of Platoon Aleph as they filed past, from O’Rourke down to the yardbirds, with a special warm word for every one of them. “Thank God you’re safe. . . . Welcome home. . . . You’re a true hero,” and so forth.