The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (51 page)

“I saved him, all right! Yessir. We got married, I had my children.”

Tentatively, she reached out a weathered hand, and I touched it. A lump suddenly blocked my throat, and my vision blurred. Somehow, all those years had passed and I’d never thought to look up any of those people—Turkey, Angel, Bud, Mr. Ackerman. Just too painful, I guess. And a little boy making his way in a tough world, without his parents, doesn’t look back a whole lot.

We grasped hands. “I think I might’ve seen you once, actu’ly. At a fish fry down at Point Clear. You and some boys was playing with the nets—it was just after the fishing came back real good, those Roussin germs’d wore off. Gene went down to shoo you away from the boats. I was cleaning flounder, and I thought then, maybe you were the one. But somehow when I saw your face at a distance, I couldn’t go up to you and say anything. You was skipping around, so happy, laughing and all. I couldn’t bring those bad times back.”

“I…I understand.”

“Gene died two year ago,” she said simply.

“I’m sorry.”

“We had our time together,” she said, forcing a smile.

“Remember how we—” And then I recalled where I was, what was coming. “Mrs. McKenzie, there’s not long before the last bus.”

“I’m waiting for Buck.”

“Where is he?”

“He run off in the woods, chasing something.”

I worked by backpack straps around my shoulders. They creaked in the quiet.

There wasn’t much time left. Pretty soon now it would start. I knew the sequence, because I did maintenance engineering and retrofit on US3’s modular mirrors.

One of the big reflectors would focus sunlight on a rechargeable tube of gas. That would excite the molecules. A small triggering beam would start the lasing going, the excited molecules cascading down together from one preferentially occupied quantum state to a lower state. A traveling wave swept down the tube, jarring loose more photons. They all added together in phase, so when the light waves hit the far end of the hundred-meter tube, it was a sword, a gouging lance that could cut through air and clouds. And this time, it wouldn’t strike an array of layered solid-state collectors outside New Orleans, providing clean electricity. It would carve a swath twenty meters wide through the trees and fields of southern Alabama. A little demonstration, the Confeds said.

“The bus—look, I’ll carry that suitcase for you.”

“I can manage.” She peered off into the distance, and I saw she was tired, tired beyond knowing it. “I’ll wait for Buck.”

“Leave him, Mrs. McKenzie.”

“I don’t need that blessed bus.”

“Why not?”

“My children drove off to Mobile with their families. They’re coming back to get me.”

“My insteted radio”—I gestured at my radio—“says the roads to Mobile are jammed up. You can’t count on them.”

“They
said
so.”

“The Confed deadline—”

“I tole ’em I’d try to walk to the main road. Got tired, is all. They’ll know I’m back in here.”

“Just the same—”

“I’m all right, don’t you mind. They’re good children, grateful for all I’ve gone and done for them. They’ll be back.”

“Come with me to the bus. It’s not far.”

“Not without Buck. He’s all the company I got these days.” She smiled, blinking.

I wiped sweat from my brow and studied the pines. There were a lot of places for a dog to be. The land here was flat and barely above sea level. I had come to camp and rest, rowing skiffs up the Fish River, looking for places I’d been when I was a teenager and my mom had rented boats from a rambling old fisherman’s house. I had turned off my radio, to get away from things. The big, mysterious island I remembered and called Treasure Island, smack in the middle of the river, was now a soggy stand of trees in a bog. The big storm a year back had swept it away.

I’d been sleeping in the open on the shore near there when the chopper woke me up, blaring. The Confeds had given twelve hours’ warning, the recording said.

They’d picked this sparsely populated area for their little demonstration. People had been moving back in ever since the biothreat was cleaned out, but there still weren’t many. I’d liked that when I was growing up. Open woods. That’s why I came back every chance I got.

I should’ve guessed something was coming. The Confeds were about evenly matched with the whole rest of the planet now, at least in high-tech weaponry. Defense held all the cards. The big mirrors were modular and could fold up fast, making a small target. They could incinerate anything launched against them, too.

But the U.N. kept talking like the Confeds were just another nation-state or something. Nobody down here understood that the people up there thought of Earth itself as the real problem—eaten up with age-old rivalries and hate, still holding onto dirty weapons that murdered whole populations, carrying around in their heads all the rotten baggage of the past. To listen to them, you’d think they’d learned nothing from the war. Already they were forgetting that it was the orbital defenses that had saved the biosphere itself, and the satellite communities that knit together the mammoth rescue efforts of the decade after. Without the antivirals developed and grown in huge zero-g vats, lots of us would’ve caught one of the poxes drifting through the population. People just forget. Nations, too.

“Where’s Buck?” I said decisively.

“He…that way.” A wave of the hand.

I wrestled my backpack down, feeling the stab from my shoulder—and suddenly remembered the thunk of that steel knocking me down, back then. So long ago. And me, still carrying an ache from it that woke whenever a cold snap came on. The past was still alive.

I trotted into the short pines, over creeper grass. Flies jumped where my boots struck. The white sand made a
skree
sound as my boots skated over it. I remembered how I’d first heard that sound, wearing slick-soled tennis shoes, and how pleased I’d been at university when I learned how the acoustics of it worked.

“Buck!”

A flash of brown over to the left. I ran through a thick stand of pine, and the dog yelped and took off, dodging under a blackleaf bush. I called again. Buck didn’t even slow down. I skirted left. He went into some oak scrub, barking, having a great time of it, and I could hear him getting tangled in it and then shaking free and out of the other side. Long gone.

When I got back to Mrs. McKenzie, she didn’t seem to notice me. “I can’t catch him.”

“Knew you wouldn’t.” She grinned at me, showing brown teeth. “Buck’s a fast one.”

“Call him.”

She did. Nothing. “Must of run off.”

“There isn’t time—”

“I’m not leaving without ole Buck. Times I was alone down on the river after Gene died, and the water would come up under the house. Buck was the only company I had. Only soul I saw for five weeks in that big blow we had.”

A low whine from afar. “I think that’s the bus,” I said.

She cocked her head. “Might be.”

“Come on. I’ll carry your suitcase.”

She crossed her arms. “My children will be by for me. I tole them to look for me along in here.”

“They might not make it.”

“They’re loyal children.”

“Mrs. McKenzie, I can’t wait for you to be reasonable.” I picked up my backpack and brushed some red ants off the straps.

“You Bishops was always reasonable,” she said levelly. “You work up there, don’t you?”

“Ah, sometimes.”

“You goin’ back, after they do what they’re doin’ here?”

“I might.” Even if I owed her something for what she did long ago, damned if I was going to be cowed.

“They’re attacking the United
States
.”

“And spots in Bavaria, the Urals, South Africa, Brazil—”

“’Cause we don’t trust ’em! They think they can push the United
States
aroun’ just as they please—” And she went on with all the clichés heard daily from earthbound media. How the Confeds wanted to run the world and they were dupes of the Russians, and how surrendering national sovereignty to a bunch of self-appointed overlords was an affront to our dignity, and so on.

True, some of it—the Confeds weren’t saints. But they were the only power that thought in truly global terms, couldn’t
not
think that way. They could stop ICBMs and punch through the atmosphere to attack any offensive capability on the ground—that’s what this demonstration was to show. I’d heard Confeds argue that this was the only way to break the diplomatic log-jam—
do
something. I had my doubts. But times were changing, that was sure, and my generation didn’t think the way the prewar people did.

“—we’ll never be ruled by some outside—”

“Mrs. McKenzie, there’s the bus! Listen!”

The turbo whirred far around the bend, slowing for the stop.

Her face softened as she gazed at me, as if recalling memories. “That’s all right, boy. You go along, now.”

I saw that she wouldn’t be coaxed or even forced down that last bend. She had gone as far as she was going to, and the world would have to come the rest of the distance itself.

Up ahead, the bus driver was probably behind schedule for this last pickup. He was going to be irritated and more than a little scared. The Confeds would be right on time, he knew that.

I ran. My feet plowed through the deep, soft sand. Right away I could tell I was more tired than I’d thought and the heat had taken some strength out of me. I went about two hundred meters along the gradual bend, was nearly within view of the bus, when I heard it start up with a rumble. I tasted salty sweat, and it felt like the whole damned planet was dragging at my feet, holding me down. The driver raced the engine, in a hurry.

He had to come toward me as he swung out onto Route 80 on the way back to Mobile. Maybe I could reach the intersection in time for him to see me. So I put my head down and plunged forward.

But there was the woman back there. To get to her, the driver would have to take the bus down that rutted, sandy road and risk getting stuck. With people on the bus yelling at him. All that to get the old woman with the grateful children. She didn’t seem to understand that there were ungrateful children in the skies now—she didn’t seem to understand much of what was going on—and suddenly I wasn’t sure I did, either.

But I kept on.

Walter Jon Williams

In his eclectically varied novels and short stories, Walter Jon Williams has tried a variety of approaches, ranging from hard science fiction to comic space opera and disaster epic. He is the author of a cyberpunk trilogy formed by
Hardwired, Solip: System,
and
Voice of the Whirlwind,
and the diptych of
Metropolitan
and
City on Fire,
which relates the intrigues that take place inside a forcibly enclosed city world powered by geomancy. He has also chronicled the adventures of irascible interstellar thief Drake Maijstral in the series of elegant farces, starting with
The Crown Jewels, House of Shards,
and
Rock of Ages.
His short fiction includes “Wall, Stone, Craft,” an award-winning novella that provides an alternate history based on Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein,
and the short stories collected in
Facets.
Williams’s disaster novel,
The Rift,
examines the catalcylsmic social and cultural consequences of a major earthquake along the New Madrid fault line in the Mississippi River valley.

Walter Jon Williams

S
PEAKERS IN THE HOSPITAL
ceiling chimed a series of low, whispery, synthesized tones, tones that were scientifically proven to be relaxing. Reese looked down at the kid in the hospital bed and felt her insides twist.

The kid was named Steward, and he’d just had a bullet removed that morning. In the last few days, mad with warrior zen and a suicidal concept of personal honor, he’d gone kamikaze and blown up the whole network. Griffith was dead, Jordan was dead, Spassky was dead, and nobody had stopped Steward until everything in L.A. had collapsed entirely. He hadn’t talked yet to the heat, but he would. Reese reached for her gun. Her insides were still twisting.

Steward had been lied to and jacked over and manipulated without his knowing it. Mostly it had been his friend Reese who had done it to him. She couldn’t blame him for exploding when he finally figured out what had happened.

And now this.

Reese turned off the IV monitor so it wouldn’t bleep when he died, and then Steward opened his eyes. She could see the recognition in his look, the knowledge of what was about to happen. She might have known he wouldn’t make it easy.

“Sorry,” she said, and raised the gun. What the hell else could she say?
Maybe we can still be friends, after this is over?

Steward was trying to say something. She felt herself wring out again.

She shot him three times with her silenced pistol and left. The police guards didn’t look twice at her hospital coat and ID. Proper credentials had always been her specialty.

CYA. R
EESE HEADED
for Japan under a backup identity. Credentials her strong suit, as always. On the shuttle she drank a star beast and plugged her seat’s interface stud into the socket at the base of her skull. She closed her eyes and silently projected the latest scansheets onto the optical centers of her brain, and her lips twisted in anger as for the first time she found out what had really gone down, what she’d been a part of.

Alien pharmaceuticals, tonnes of them, shipped down under illegal cover. The network had been huge, bigger than Reese, from her limited perspective, had ever suspected, and now the L.A. heat had
everything
. Police and security people everywhere, even in the space habitats, were going berserk.

All along, she’d thought it was friends helping friends, but her friends had jacked her around the same way she’d jacked around Steward. The whole trip to L.A. had been pointless—they had been stupid to send her. Killing Steward couldn’t stop what was happening, it was all too big. The only way Reese could stay clear was to hide.

She ordered another drink, needing it badly. The shuttle speakers moaned with the same tuneless synthesized chords as had the speakers in the hospital room. The memory of Steward lying in the bed floated in her mind, tangled in her insides.

She leaned back against the headrest and watched the shuttle’s wings gather fire.

H
ER CAREER AS
a kick boxer ended with a spin kick breaking her nose, and Reese said the fuck with it and went back to light sparring and kung fu. Beating the hell out of herself in training only to have the hell beaten out of her in the ring was not her idea of the good life. She was thirty-six now and she might as well admit there were sports she shouldn’t indulge in, even if she had the threadware for them. The realization didn’t improve her mood.

Through the window of her condeco apartment, Reese could see a cold wailing northeast wind drive flying white scud across the shallow Aral Sea, its shriek drowning the minarets’ amplified call to prayer. Neither the wind nor the view had changed in months. Reese looked at the grey Uzbek spring, turned on her vid, and contemplated her sixth month of exile.

Her hair was black now, shorter than she’d worn it in a long time. Her fingerprints were altered, as was the bone structure of her face. The serial numbers on her artificial eyes had been changed. However bleak its weather, Uzbekistan was good at that sort of thing.

The last person she’d known who had lived here was Steward. Just before he came to L.A. and blew everything to smithereens.

A young man on the vid was putting himself into some kind of combat suit, stuffing weapons and ammunition into pockets. He picked up a shotgun. Suspenseful music hammered from the speakers. Reese turned up the sound and sat down in front of the vid.

She had considered getting back into the trade, but it was too early. The scansheets and broadcasts were still full of stories about aliens, alien ways, alien imports. About “restructuring” going on in the policorps who dealt with the Powers. It was strange seeing the news on the vid, with people ducking for cover, refusing statements, the news item followed by a slick ad for alien pharmaceuticals. People were going to trial—at least those who survived were. A lot were cooperating. Things were still too hot.

Fortunately money wasn’t a problem. She had enough to last a long time, possibly even forever.

Gunfire sounded from the vid. The young man was in a shootout with aliens, splattering Powers with his shotgun. Reese felt her nerves turn to ice.

The young man, she realized, was supposed to be Steward. She jumped forward and snapped off the vid. She felt sickened.

Steward had never shot an alien in his life. Reese ought to know.

Fucking assholes. Fucking media vermin.

She reached for her quilted Chinese jacket and headed for the door. The room was too damn small.

She swung the door open with a bang, and a dark-complected man jumped a foot at the sound. He turned and gave a nervous grin.

“You startled me.”

He had an anonymous accent that conveyed no particular origin, just the abstract idea of foreignness. He looked about thirty. He was wearing suede pumps that had tabs of Velcro on the bottoms and sides for holding onto surfaces in zero gee. His hands were jammed into a grey, unlined plastic jacket with a half-dozen pockets all sealed by Velcro tabs. Reese suspected one of his hands of having a weapon in it. He was shivering from cold or nervousness. Reese figured he had just come down the gravity well—he was wearing too much Velcro to have bought his clothes on Earth.

Some descendants of the Golden Horde, dressed in Flieger styles imported from Berlin, roared by on skateboards, the earpieces of their leather flying helmets flapping in the wind.

“Been in town long?” Reese asked.

H
E TOLD HER
his name was Sardar Chandrasekhar Vivekenanda and that he was a revolutionary from Prince Station. His friends called him Ken. Two nights after their first meeting, she met him in the Natural Life bar, a place on the top story of a large bank. It catered to exiles and featured a lot of mahogany imported at great cost from Central America.

Reese had checked on Ken—no sense in being foolish—and discovered he was who he claimed to be. The scansheets from Prince mentioned him frequently. Even his political allies were denouncing his actions.

“Ram was trying to blame the February Riots on us,” Ken told her. “Cheney decided I should disappear—the riots would be blamed on me, and Cheney could go on working.”

Reese sipped her mataglap star, feeling it burn its way down her throat as she glanced down through the glass wall, seeing the wind scour dust over the Uzbeks’ metal roofs and receiver dishes. She grinned. “So Cheney arranged for you to take the fall instead of him,” she said. “Sounds like a friend of humanity to me, all right.”

Ken’s voice was annoyed. “Cheney knows what he’s doing.”

“Sure he does. He’s setting up his friends. The question is, do you know what
you’re
doing?”

Ken’s fine-boned hands made a dismissive gesture. “From here I can make propaganda. Cheney sends me an allowance. I’ve bought a very good communications system.”

She turned to him. “You going to need any soldiers in this revolution of yours?”

He shook his head. His lashes were full and black. “I think not. Prince Station is a hundred years old—it’s in orbit around Luna, with ready access to minerals, but it cannot compete effectively with the new equipment on other stations. Ram wants to hang on as long as possible—his policy is to loot the economy rather than rebuild. He’s guaranteed the loyalty of the stockholders by paying large dividends, but the economy can’t support the dividends anymore, and the riots showed he has lost control over the situation. It is a matter of time only. We do not expect the change will be violent—not a military sort of violence, anyway.”

“Too bad. I could use a job in someone’s foreign legion about now.” She glanced up as a group of people entered the bar—she recognized a famous swindler from Ceres named da Vega, his hands and face covered with expensive, glowing implant jewelry that reminded her of fluorescent slime mold. He was with an all-female group of bodyguards who were supposed to stand between him and any Cerean snatch teams sent to bring him to justice. They were all tall and round-eyed—da Vega liked women that way. He’d tried to recruit Reese when they first met. The pay was generous, round-eyed women being rare here, but the sexual favors were supposed to be included.

One of
those
jobs, Reese thought. She was tempted to feed him his socks, bodyguards or not, but in the end told him she was used to a better class of employer.

Da Vega turned to her and smiled. Uzbekistan was suddenly far too small a place.

Reese finished her mataglap star and stood. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

“A
N ARCHITECTURE OF
liberation,” Ken said. “That’s what we’re after. You should read Cheney’s thoughts on the subject.”

The night street filled with a welling tide of wind. Its alloy surface reflected bright holograms that marched up and down dark storefronts, advertising wares invisible behind dead glass. The wind howled in the latticework of radio receivers pointed at the sky, through a spiky forest of antennae. A minaret outlined by flashing red strobes speared a sky that glowed with yellow sodium light.

“Liberation,” Reese said. “Right.”

“Too many closed systems,” Ken said. He shrugged into the collar of his new down jacket. “That’s the problem with space habitats in general—they
strive
for closed ecological systems, and then try to close as much of their economy as possible. There’s not enough
access
. I’m a macroeconomist—I work with a lot of models, try to figure out how things are put together—and the most basic obstacle always seems to be the lack of access to data. We’ve got a solar system filled with corporate plutocracies, all competing with each other, none giving free access to anything they’re trying to do. And they’ve got colonies in other solar systems, and
nothing
about those gets out that the policorps don’t want us to know. The whole situation is far too unstable—it’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen because the data simply isn’t available. Everything’s constructed along the lines of the old Orbital Soviet—not even the people who
need
the information get the access they require.

“Prince Station’s main business is processing minerals—that’s okay and it’s steady, but the prices fluctuate a lot as new mineral sources are exploited in the Belt and elsewhere, and it requires heavy capital investment to keep the equipment up to date. So for the sake of a stable station economy, it would be nice for Prince to develop another, steadier source of export. Biologicals, say, or custom-configured databases. Optics. Wetware. Export genetics. Anything. But it takes time and resources—five years’ worth, say—to set something like that up, and there are other policorps who specialize in those areas. We could be duplicating another group’s work, and never know it until suddenly a new product comes onto the market and wipes out our five years’ investment. All this secrecy is making for unstable economies. Unstable economies make for unstable political situations—that’s why whole policorps suddenly go belly-up.”

“So you want the policorps to give away their trade secrets.”

“I want to do away with the whole
concept
of trade secrets. Ideally, what I’d like to do is create a whole new architecture of data storage and retrieval. Something that’s so good that everyone will have to use it to stay competitive, but something that by its very nature prohibits restriction of access.”