The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (66 page)

If we live long enough to need to, Irizarry thought, but had the sense to keep his mouth shut. You didn’t talk defeat around a politico. And if you were unfortunate enough to come to the attention of one, you certainly didn’t let her see you thinking it.

Mongoose forged on ahead, but Irizarry noticed she was careful to stay within the range of his lights, and at least one of her tendrils stayed focused back on him and Sanderson at all times. If this were a normal infestation, Mongoose would be scampering along the corridor ceilings, leaving scattered bits of half-consumed tove and streaks of bioluminescent ichor in her wake. But this time, she edged along, testing each surface before her with quivering barbels so that Irizarry was reminded of a tentative spider or an exploratory octopus.

He edged along behind her, watching her colors go dim and cautious. She paused at each intersection, testing the air in every direction, and waited for her escort to catch up.

The service tubes of Kadath Station were mostly large enough for Irizarry and Sanderson to walk through single-file, though sometimes they were obliged to crouch, and once or twice Irizarry found himself slithering on his stomach through tacky half-dried tove slime. He imagined – he hoped it was imagining – that he could sense the thinning and stretch of reality all around them, see it in the warp of the tunnels and the bend of deck plates. He imagined that he glimpsed faint shapes from the corners of his eyes, caught a whisper of sound, a hint of scent, as of something almost there.

Hypochondria, he told himself firmly, aware that that was the wrong word and not really caring. But as he dropped down onto his belly again, to squeeze through a tiny access point – this one clogged with the fresh corpses of newly-slaughtered toves – he needed all the comfort he could invent.

He almost ran into Mongoose when he’d cleared the hole. She scuttled back to him and huddled under his chest, tendrils writhing, so close to out of phase that she was barely a warm shadow. When he saw what was on the other side, he wished he’d invented a little more.

This must be one of Kadath Station’s recycling and reclamation centers, a bowl ten meters across sweeping down to a pile of rubbish in the middle. These were the sorts of places you always found minor tove infestations. Ships and stations were supposed to be kept clear of vermin, but in practice, the dimensional stresses of sharing the spacelanes with boojums meant that just wasn’t possible. And in Kadath, somebody hadn’t been doing their job.

Sanderson touched his ankle, and Irizarry hastily drew himself aside so she could come through after. He was suddenly grateful for her company.

He really didn’t want to be here alone.

Irizarry had never seen a tove infestation like this, not even on the Jenny Lind. The entire roof of the chamber was thick with their sluglike bodies, long lure-tongues dangling as much as half a meter down. Small flitting things – young raths, near-transparent in their phase shift – filled the space before him. As Irizarry watched, one blundered into the lure of a tove, and the tove contracted with sudden convulsive force. The rath never stood a chance.

Nagina, Mongoose said. Nagina, Nagina, Nagina.

Indeed, down among the junk in the pit, something big was stirring. But that wasn’t all. That pressure Irizarry had sensed earlier, the feeling that many eyes were watching him, gaunt bodies stretching against whatever frail fabric held them back – here, it was redoubled, until he almost felt the brush of not-quite-in-phase whiskers along the nape of his neck.

Sanderson crawled up beside him, her pistol in one hand. Mongoose didn’t seem to mind her there.

“What’s down there?” she asked, her voice hissing on constrained breaths.

“The breeding pit,” Irizarry said. “You feel that? Kind of a funny, stretchy feeling in the universe?”

Sanderson nodded behind her mask. “It’s not going to make you any happier, is it, if I tell you I’ve felt it before?”

Irizarry was wearily, grimly unsurprised. But then Sanderson said, “What do we do?”

He was taken aback and it must have shown, even behind the rebreather, because she said sharply, “You’re the expert. Which I assume is why you’re on Kadath Station to begin with and why Station Master Lee has been so anxious that I not know it. Though with an infestation of this size, I don’t know how she thought she was going to hide it much longer anyway.”

“Call it sabotage,” Irizarry said absently. “Blame the Christians. Or the gillies. Or disgruntled spacers, like the crew off the Caruso. It happens a lot, Colonel. Somebody like me and Mongoose comes in and cleans up the toves, the station authorities get to crack down on whoever’s being the worst pain in the ass, and life keeps on turning over. But she waited too long.”

Down in the pit, the breeder heaved again. Breeding raths were slow – much slower than the juveniles, or the sexually dormant adult rovers – but that was because they were armored like titanium armadillos. When threatened, one of two things happened. Babies flocked to mama, mama rolled herself in a ball, and it would take a tactical nuke to kill them. Or mama went on the warpath. Irizarry had seen a pissed off breeder take out a bulkhead on a steelship once; it was pure dumb luck that it hadn’t breached the hull.

And, of course, once they started spawning, as this one had, they could produce between ten and twenty babies a day for anywhere from a week to a month, depending on the food supply. And the more babies they produced, the weaker the walls of the world got, and the closer the bander-snatches would come.

“The first thing we have to do,” he said to Colonel Sanderson, “as in, right now, is kill the breeder. Then you quarantine the station and get parties of volunteers to hunt down the rovers, before they can bring another breeder through, or turn into breeders, or however the fuck it works, which frankly I don’t know. It’ll take fire to clear this nest of toves, but Mongoose and I can probably get the rest. And fire, Colonel Sanderson. Toves don’t give a shit about vacuum.”

She could have reproved him for his language; she didn’t. She just nodded and said, “How do we kill the breeder?”

“Yeah,” Irizarry said. “That’s the question.”

Mongoose clicked sharply, her Irizarry! noise.

“No,” Irizarry said. “Mongoose, don’t—”

But she wasn’t paying attention. She had only a limited amount of patience for his weird interactions with other members of his species and his insistence on waiting, and he’d clearly used it all up. She was Rikki Tikki Tavi, and the breeder was Nagina, and Mongoose knew what had to happen. She launched off Irizarry’s shoulders, shifting phase as she went, and without contact between them, there was nothing he could do to call her back. In less than a second, he didn’t even know where she was.

“You any good with that thing?” he said to Colonel Sanderson, pointing at her pistol.

“Yes,” she said, but her eyebrows were going up again. “But, forgive me, isn’t this what cheshires are for?”

“Against rovers, sure. But – Colonel, have you ever seen a breeder?”

Across the bowl, a tove warbled, the chorus immediately taken up by its neighbors. Mongoose had started.

“No,” Sanderson said, looking down at where the breeder humped and wallowed and finally stood up, shaking off ethereal babies and half-eaten toves. “Oh. Gods.”

You couldn’t describe a rath. You couldn’t even look at one for more than a few seconds before you started getting a migraine aura. Rovers were just blots of shadow. The breeder was massive, armored, and had no recognizable features, save for its hideous, drooling, ragged edged maw. Irizarry didn’t know if it had eyes, or even needed them.

“She can kill it,” he said, “but only if she can get at its underside. Otherwise, all it has to do is wait until it has a clear swing, and she’s . . .” He shuddered. “I’ll be lucky to find enough of her for a funeral. So what we have to do now, Colonel, is piss it off enough to give her a chance. Or” – he had to be fair; this was not Colonel Sanderson’s job – “if you’ll lend me your pistol, you don’t have to stay.”

She looked at him, her dark eyes very bright, and then she turned to look at the breeder, which was swinging its shapeless head in slow arcs, trying, no doubt, to track Mongoose. “Fuck that, Mr Irizarry,” she said crisply. “Tell me where to aim.”

“You won’t hurt it,” he’d warned her, and she’d nodded, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t really understood until she fired her first shot and the breeder didn’t even notice. But Sanderson hadn’t given up; her mouth had thinned, and she’d settled into her stance, and she’d fired again, at the breeder’s feet as Irizarry had told her. A breeding rath’s feet weren’t vulnerable as such, but they were sensitive, much more sensitive than the human-logical target of its head. Even so, it was concentrating hard on Mongoose, who was making toves scream at various random points around the circumference of the breeding pit, and it took another three shots aimed at that same near front foot before the breeder’s head swung in their direction.

It made a noise, a sort of “wooaaurgh” sound, and Irizarry and Sanderson were promptly swarmed by juvenile raths.

“Ah, fuck,” said Irizarry. “Try not to kill them.”

“I’m sorry, try not to kill them?”

“If we kill too many of them, it’ll decide we’re a threat rather than an annoyance. And then it rolls up in a ball, and we have no chance of killing it until it unrolls again. And by then, there will be a lot more raths here.”

“And quite possibly a bandersnatch,” Sanderson finished. “But—” She batted away a half-corporeal rath that was trying to wrap itself around the warmth of her pistol.

“If we stood perfectly still for long enough,” Irizarry said, “they could probably leech out enough of our body heat to send us into hypothermia. But they can’t bite when they’re this young. I knew a cheshire-man once who swore they ate by crawling down into the breeder’s stomach to lap up what it’d digested. I’m still hoping that’s not true. Just keep aiming at that foot.”

“You got it.”

Irizarry had to admit, Sanderson was steady as a rock. He shooed juvenile raths away from both of them, Mongoose continued her depredations out there in the dark, and Sanderson, having found her target, fired at it in a nice steady rhythm. She didn’t miss; she didn’t try to get fancy. Only, after a while, she said out of the corner of her mouth, “You know, my battery won’t last forever.”

“I know,” Irizarry said. “But this is good. It’s working.”

“How can you tell?”

“It’s getting mad.”

“How can you tell?”

“The vocalizing.” The rath had gone from its “wooaaurgh” sound to a series of guttural huffing noises, interspersed with high-pitched yips. “It’s warning us off. Keep firing.”

“All right,” Sanderson said. Irizarry cleared another couple of juveniles off her head. He was trying not to think about what it meant that no adult raths had appeared in response to the breeder’s distress. How far had they ranged through Kadath Station? How much of it did they consider their hunting grounds and was it enough yet for a second breeder? Bad questions, all of them.

“Have there been any disappearances lately?” he asked Sanderson.

She didn’t look at him, but there was a long silence before she said, “None that seemed like disappearances. Our population is by necessity transient, and none too fond of authority. And, frankly, I’ve had so much trouble with the station master’s office that I’m not sure my information is reliable.”

It had to hurt for a political officer to admit that. Irizarry said, “We’re very likely to find human bones down there. And in their caches.”

Sanderson started to answer him, but the breeder decided it had had enough. It wheeled toward them, its maw gaping wider, and started through the mounds of garbage and corpses in their direction.

“What now?” said Sanderson.

“Keep firing,” said Irizarry. Mongoose, wherever you are, please be ready.

He’d been about 75 per cent sure that the rath would stand up on its hind legs when it reached them. Raths weren’t sapient, not like Cheshires, but they were smart. They knew that the quickest way to kill a human was to take its head off, and the second quickest was to disembowel it, neither of which they could do on all fours. And humans weren’t any threat to a breeder’s vulnerable abdomen; Sanderson’s pistol might give the breeder a hot foot, but there was no way it could penetrate the breeder’s skin.

It was a terrible plan – there was that whole 25 per cent where he and Sanderson died screaming while the breeder ate them from the feet up – but it worked. The breeder heaved itself upright, massive, indistinct paw going back for a blow that would shear Sanderson’s head off her neck and probably bounce it off the nearest bulkhead, and with no warning of any kind, not for the humans, not for the rath, Mongoose phased viciously in, claws and teeth and sharp edged tentacles all less than two inches from the rath’s belly and moving fast.

The rath screamed and curled in on itself, but it was too late. Mongoose had already caught the lips of its – oh gods and fishes, Irizarry didn’t know the word. Vagina? Cloaca? Ovipositor? The place where little baby raths came into the world. The only vulnerability a breeder had. Into which Mongoose shoved the narrow wedge of her head, and her clawed front feet, and began to rip.

Before the rath could even reach for her, her malleable body was already entirely inside it, and it – screaming, scrabbling – was doomed.

Irizarry caught Sanderson’s elbow and said, “Now would be a good time, very slowly, to back away. Let the lady do her job.”

Irizarry almost made it off of Kadath clean.

He’d had no difficulty in getting a berth for himself and Mongoose – after a party or two of volunteers had seen her in action, after the stories started spreading about the breeder, he’d nearly come to the point of beating off the steelship captains with a stick. And in the end, he’d chosen the offer of the captain of the Erich Zann, a boojum; Captain Alvarez had a long-term salvage contract in the Kuiper belt – “cleaning up after the ice miners,” she’d said with a wry smile – and Irizarry felt like salvage was maybe where he wanted to be for a while. There’d be plenty for Mongoose to hunt, and nobody’s life in danger. Even a bandersnatch wasn’t much more than a case of indigestion for a boojum.