The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (43 page)

The Dog.

He unbarred the door and held it open. She was soaking wet, shivered in the unseasonal cold.

Desperate and intimate and voiceless thoughts flowed through his mind like sound. Her camouflage T-shirt clung to her shoulders. Blood oozed from a hailstone cut above her left eye. She wiped rain from her face, and he caught sight of the razor-sharp dew claw on her forearm. If she wanted the house, she could take it from him. He stepped back, swinging the door wider.

“I’ll get you some dry clothes.” He put the gun down and went into a backroom.

He felt her gratitude and uncertainty follow him.

The Dog knelt in front of the fireplace and held her hands spread-fingered toward the fire. She turned to look over her shoulder. He handed her some old clothes that had belonged to his wife, and a towel. She stripped in front of the fireplace with immodest military efficiency. Soft velvet fur thinned on her breasts and thickened somewhat at the swell of her vulva. She dried herself with the towel and dressed. The remains of her home stained her feet milky green.

“I’m sorry. Are you hungry?’

He opened a packet of dehydrated chicken soup and dumped it into the tea kettle.

“It will take a few minutes”

He added another log to the fire and stirred the soup mix. Ants boiled from the log and stepped into a miniature hell. They crisped in the embers. The Dog sat on the threadbare couch and curled her legs under her and tucked her hands between her thighs. He was not afraid even though there were strong reasons for baseline humans to fear Dogs. They were stronger and smarter, exotic and dangerous, beautiful, and, above all else, different. She was typical of her kind.

she asked.

“Yes, I was a soldier once.” Most soldiers of the old USA featured some viral-delivered enhancements. He saw pretty well in low-light conditions, couldn’t run to fat even if he wanted to, and healed a bit faster than before. The processes that modified him had created her from scratch.

“Maybe you’re a woman.”

She smiled against the exhaustion that threatened to overwhelm her. Her canines protruded a bit from her lips. He served the soup.

“You’re safe here.”

She finished the soup and set the bowl down on the end table.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She slouched down on the couch and closed her eyes to sleep.

He waited for the fire to burn down to a safe level. He pulled down a comforter from the back of the couch and covered her. He curled on the adjacent sofa and fell asleep.

Under M’ling’s ministrations, the backyard bloomed with fruit and vegetable and flower. Low-level agents of the Department of Faith Formation intruded several times, but each time she sensed their presence and vanished. At night, when the air cooled, they talked. She told him how a sniper killed her handler in Venezuela, and how she ripped the sniper’s throat out with her teeth. She told him how she battled back from the psychic shock of his loss, her inability to accept another handler, and her escape from the decommissioning facility. In turn, he told her about fighting in Taiwan during the I-War with China, and later in Virginia, during the Second Civil War. They slept together, at first for companionship, and then for something more. At night he stroked the length of her body, soft velvet over hard muscle.

Stories of handlers that slept with their Dogs were ubiquitous in rocket-shattered Taiwanese cities. Contemplating bestiality with manufactured creatures of ethereal beauty was the least of sins in that brief and violent war. Handlers and their Dogs returning from long-range patrols self-segregated at the firebase, and it only added to the mystery and speculation. Once, on a mission, his fire team found a handler carrying the long, lithe frame of his Dog, not over his shoulder, but in his arms like a bridegroom carrying his bride. The handler, agonized with fatigue, refused to let anyone else touch her. He fell to his knees and then collapsed from exhaustion over her body. They convinced him to bury her. Over the grave, the handler cried and murmured gentle words, and when he had finished he said, “I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“I can’t. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“You can’t.”

When they looked away the handler shot himself in the head and they dug another grave.

At the time he could not understand the connection, the powerful bond between Dog and handler, each devoted to the other so intimately that the descriptive terms ascribed to the connection were meaningless. It was what made them such a terrifyingly effective weapon system.

Now he thought they worked well together, in a way in which he never expected to do again.

She stood and looked to him.

He heard a vehicle pull into his drive. He walked to the front door and waited. A man wearing a modified Roman collar, a badge, and a sidearm walked towards his porch. Two other men scanned the area. He opened the door before the man knocked.

“Major Jackson, I am Reverend-Inspector Carlyle.”

“In what capacity are you here today?”

The man looked perplexed. “What do you mean?”

“Are you here as a reverend or as an inspector?”

“Both. Always.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I have traces unexplained by your statements. Where is the abomination?”

“On my front step.”

The reverend-inspector grinned with professional malice and indignation.

“Right. Harboring an abomination is a capital offense.”

“Every offense is a capital offense these days.”

“The purest metal comes from the hottest fires.”

“Clever.”

The reverend-inspector was the worst kind, a thick layer of true believer over a core of bully, the type to shout damnation on the street corners yet never lift a finger in a poorhouse or soup kitchen.

“May I come in?”

He stepped forward and was pushed back.

He moved his hand to draw his sidearm.

“Do you think that you can draw that weapon before I do something about it?”

The reverend-inspector moved his hand away from the weapon. Confusion and genuine fear crossed his face. He was unaccustomed to resistance.

“I have full authority . . .”

“Major.”

“What?”

“Major. What you want to say is:
Major, I have full authority.
You will address me by my military rank. I’ve earned it, and you are not coming in my house without a warrant. This isn’t the United States. Are you a Yankee?”

The reverend-inspector’s face darkened at the insult. “Major, your story to my associates was unconvincing. There were no squatters in the woods. And I found these.” He held up silver dog tags that flashed in the sun. “When I come back it will be with a warrant.”

He stepped onto his porch, and the reverend-inspector stumbled backwards down the two steps.

“If you come back, we will duel over any further insult. Do you accept? I’ll register our intent with the county.”

The inspector flushed red, unprepared for the personal challenge. Duels were rare, but permitted between CSA landowners and military officers.

“I, I . . .”

“I thought not. Get off my property.”

The reverend-inspector turned, stalked to his county car, and drove away.

M’ling emerged from the other room and pressed her body against his back. She wrapped her arms around him, and leaned her head on his shoulder.

“He will come back.”

He locked his desk drawer and stepped into the hangar. The helicopters inherited from the USA were slotted in their spaces but immobile for a lack of spare parts. All the mechanics he supervised had already left for Friday services, a euphemism for drinking moonshine in the back room of the local roadhouse.

He drove past a chain gang of un-saved and un-white conscripts supervised by mirror-shaded, shotgun-toting deputy-deacons. He stopped at the toll bridge and honked his horn for the attendant to lift the reflector-bedazzled log gate that blocked his way. The attendant came out of the booth and walked away from him.

“Hey, I need to get home,” he yelled to the attendant, but the man entered the tollhouse and closed the door.

“Under new management, Major,” said a voice from behind the driver’s window. His door was wrenched open and a gun pressed against his temple.

He reached for his own gun in the glove box.

“No you don’t, Major. No you don’t. Please step out.”

The pressure from the pistol barrel eased and he unfastened his seatbelt. He stepped out and recognized the highwaymen, a former military unit that did the unchristian work it took to enforce a Christian state. The man with the gun to his head pistol-whipped him, and he dropped to his knees. Two more heavy blows pounded on his head. Stars exploded, but he held to consciousness.

Rough hands grabbed him and dragged him into the surrounding woods. Twisted hemp rope secured him face-down over the hood of a car. They were strong and fast and, like him, ex-military.

“Major, what is good?”

He spit blood out of his mouth. Some of his teeth felt loose.

“I said, what is good?”

A fist punched him in the back of his head, bouncing his face against the hood of the car. ’19 Mustang, he thought. The last year they made them.

“I’ll tell you. Good is that which pleases God, and what pleases God is what I have to do. To the matter at hand: There is an abomination in our midst, and it needs to be purged. Fire has to be fought with fire, an abominable act for an abominable act.”

A knife sliced open the back of his pants and eager hands jerked his trousers down. He breathed in fast, fearful pants.

“Where is the abomination?”

He remained silent.

“When we are done you know what you must do.”

When they finished taking turns, they cut him free, and he fell to the ground. They left him alone and walked back to their camp behind the tollhouse. Darkness fell, and he pulled himself up and limped to his truck. Warm blood dressed his legs and back.

He drove home naked and broken.

He did not need to explain.

She knew.

He radiated humiliation and pain.

She reached for him, but he kept walking through the house to the backyard. He stepped into the small pool converted into a fishpond and sat in the water up to his neck. Carp and brim nibbled at him. In time, he went to bed, and she lay next to him, her hand on his chest. Between them, in the still of the night, thought and feeling ebbed and flowed in a gentle tide.

He awoke alone, his throat raw, his insides dirty. In the bathroom, he looked in the mirror and saw a small snowflake tracery of white on his cheek. He drank tepid water until he gagged. She was not in bed and he went in search. The backdoor to the living room lay open to the night. Dark clouds scudded across the full moon. M’ling stood on the steps in the pool that he sat in earlier. She glowed ghostly in the pre-dawn light, a specter worthy of darkest fear. The water lapped at her ankles. Naked and alien, she washed shadowed blood from her forearms and chest and mouth.

The highwaymen did not know what they had unleashed.

Predatory eyeshine regarded him with love. She stepped from the pool and embraced him. Retractable-clawed hands caressed the fibrous cluster at his cheek. Her dew claw rested across his throat. She would do it if he asked.

“No,” he said. “I want every minute.”

He made arrangements. The doctor visited him and injected him with an expensive antifungal that slowed the progression but could not stop it.

Long ago, the doctor, then a medic, paralyzed with fear over the onslaught of incoming artillery rounds, had curled into an exposed fetal ball in the open battlefield. The major, then a captain, had dragged the doctor into the shelter of the root ball crater of a fallen tree. Anti-personnel shells burst overhead, filling the air with white-hot blades of Yankee metal. They outlasted the fierce barrage and survived the night and spoke no more of it.

The doctor owed him.

“Do this for me and our debt is settled.”

“I will.”

The thirty-foot-long speedboat rolled under the topside weight of three big outboard engines and six fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel on the aft deck. Big men dressed in night camouflage unloaded alcohol, pornography, medicine, and other hard-to-find necessities. The run back to Cuba would take twenty hours, but in less than two they would be beyond the decrepit CSA Coast Guard.

By the light of the half moon, the fungal rhizomes luminesced. The fibers spread across his face and neck and reached for the thoughts in his head. The smuggler crew kept their distance. As she embraced him, his hand drifted to the swell of her belly. He pressed, feeling for a kick, but felt none. Maybe it was too soon.

“Our daughter.”

She kissed him one last time and boarded the boat.

As the boat receded into the night, sadness attenuated. His connection grew weaker and weaker until he could no longer feel her. He dropped to the wet ground, empty and hollow.

By unthinking instinct, he selected a dead pine that offered unobstructed access to the wind. Compulsion drove him to the topmost reaches, and he swayed in the amber morning light, rocking to-and-fro in the breeze. He thought his last thoughts of love and war before bizarre biological processes bundled his memories into microscopic spores that erupted from him in a pink haze to be scattered on the winds.