The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (52 page)

Enyo sliced open the slick surface of the superpod with her weapon. There
was no rush of Tuataran atmosphere, no crumpling or wrinkling about the wound. No, the peridium had already been breached somewhere else. Arso and Dax hung back, bickering over some slight. Enyo wondered if they had known one another before Reeb picked them up. They had, hadn’t they? The way she had known Arso. The snapshot of Arso. Some other life. Some other decision.

Inside, the superpod’s
bioluminescent tubal corridors still glowed a faint blue-green, just enough light for Enyo to avoid stepping on the wizened body of some unfortunate maintenance officer.

“Don’t you need direction?” Reeb tickled her ear. But she already knew where the colonists were. She knew because she had placed them there herself, turns and turns ago.

Enyo crawled up through the sticky corridors, cutting
through pressurized areas of the superpod, going around others. Finally, she reached the coded spiral of the safe room that held the colonists. She gestured to Arso.

“Open it,” she said.

Arso snorted. “It’s a coded door.”

“Yes. It’s coded for you. Open it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s why you’re here. Open it.”

“I—”

Enyo lifted her weapon. “Should Enyo make you?”

Arso held up her hands.
“Fine. No harm. Fucking dizzy core you’ve got, woman.”

Arso placed her hand against the slimy doorway. The coating on the door fused with her spray-on suit. Pressurized. Enyo heard the soft intake of Arso’s breath as the outer seal of the safe room tasted her blood.

The door went transparent.

Arso yanked away her hand.

Enyo walked through the transparent film and into the pressurized safe
room. Ring after ring of personal pods lined the room, suffused in a blue glow. Hundreds? Thousands.

She glanced back at Dax. Both she and Arso were surveying the cargo. Dax’s little mouth was open. Enyo realized who she reminded her of, then. The recruiter. The one with the teeth.

Enyo shot them both. They died quickly, without comment.

Then she walked to the first pod she saw. She tore away
the head of her own suit and tossed it to the floor. She peered into the colonist’s puckered face, and she thought of the prisoner.

Enyo bit the umbilicus that linked the pod to the main life system, the same core system responsible for renewing and replenishing the fluids that sustained these hibernating bodies.

The virus in her saliva infected the umbilicus. In a few hours, everything in here
would be liquid jelly. Easily digestible for a satellite seeking to make its last turn.

As Reeb cursed in her ear, she walked the long line of pods, back and back and back, until she found two familiar names. Arso Tohl. Dax Alhamin. Their pods were side by side. Their faces perfectly pinched. Dax looked younger, and perhaps she was, in
this snapshot. Arso was still formidable. Enyo pressed her
fingers to the transparent face of the pod. She wanted to kiss them. But they would be dead of her kiss soon enough.

Dead for a second time. Or perhaps a fifth, a fiftieth, a five hundredth. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.

It’s why she piloted
Enyo-Enyo.

The woman waiting on the other side of the icy bridge was not one Enyo recognized, which did not happen often. As she guided the
prisoner’s pod to the woman’s feet, she wondered how long it had been, this turn. How long since the last?

“What do you have for us?” the woman asked.

“Eris is very different,” Enyo said.

The woman turned her soft brown face to the sky and frowned. “I suppose it must seem that way to you. It’s been like this for centuries.”

“No more methane?”

“Those wells went dry 500 years ago.” The woman
knit her brows. “You were around this way long before that happened. You must remember Eris like this.”

“Was I? I must have forgotten.”

“So what is it this time?” the woman said. “We’re siphoning off the satellite’s snapshots now.”

“I brought you the prisoner,” Enyo said.

“What prisoner?”

“
The
prisoner,” Enyo said, because as she patted the prisoner’s pod something in her memory ruptured.
There was something important she knew. “The prisoner who started the war.”

“What war?” the woman said.

“The
war,” Enyo said.

The woman wiped away the snow on the face of the pod, and frowned. “Is this some kind of joke?” she said.

“I brought her back,” Enyo said.

The woman jabbed Enyo in the chest. “Get back in the fucking satellite,” she said. “And do your fucking job.”

Back to the beginning.
Around and around.

Enyo wasn’t sure how it happened, the first time. She was standing outside the escape pod, a bulbous, nasty little thing that
made up the core of the internode. It seemed an odd place for it. Why put the escape pod at the center of the satellite? But that’s where the thing decided to grow it. And so that’s where it was.

She stood there as the satellite took its first snapshot
of the quadrant they moved through. And something … shifted. Some core part of her. That’s when the memories started. The memories of the other pieces. The snapshots.

That’s when she realized what
Enyo-Enyo
really was.

Enyo stepped up into the escape pod. She sealed it shut. Her breathing was heavy. She closed her eyes. She had to go home, now, before it broke her into more pieces. Before it
reminded her of what she was. War criminal. Flesh dealer. Monster.

As she sealed the escape pod and began drowning in life-sustaining fluid, she realized it was not meant for her escape.
Enyo-Enyo
had placed it there for another purpose.

The satellite took a snapshot.

And there, on the other side of the fluid-filled pod, she saw her own face.

The squalling children were imperfect, like Enyo.
She had already sold Reeb to some infertile young diplomatic aid’s broker in the flesh pits for a paltry sum. It was not enough to get her off the shit asteroid at the ass end of the Mushta Mura arm. She would die out here of some green plague, some white dust contagion. The death dealers would string her up and sell her parts. She’d be nothing. All this pain and anguish, for nothing.

Later,
she could not recall how she found the place. Whispered rumors. A mangled transmission. She found herself walking into a chemically scrubbed medical office, like some place you’d go to have an industrial part grafted on for growing. The logo on the spiral of the door, and the coats of the staff, was a double circle shot through with a blue dart.

“I heard you’re not looking for eggs or embryos,”
she said, and set Dysmonia’s swaddled little body on the counter.

The receptionist smiled. White, white teeth. He blinked, and a woman came up from the back. She was a tall brown-skinned woman with large hands and a grim face.

“I’m Arso Tohl,” the woman said. “Let’s have a look.”

They paid Enyo enough to leave not just the asteroid, but the Mushta Mura arm entirely. She fled with a hot bundle
of currency instead of a squalling, temperamental child. When she entered the armed forces outside the Sol system, she did so because it was the furthest arm of the galaxy from her own. When a neighboring system paid her to start a war, she did so gladly.

She did not expect to see or hear from the butchers again.

Not until she saw the logo on the satellite recruiter’s uniform.

Enyo ate her
fill of the jellified colonists and slogged back to the satellite to feed it, to feed
Enyo-Enyo.
Reeb’s annoying voice had grown silent. He always stopped protesting after the first dozen.

She found him sitting in the internode with the prisoner, his hands pressed against the base of the pod. His head was lowered.

“It was enough to make the next turn,” Enyo said.

“It always is,” he said.

“There will be other crews,” she said.

“I know.”

“Then why are you melancholy?” If she could see his face, it would be winter.

He raised his head. Stared at the semblance of a body floating in the viscous fluid. “I’m not really here, am I?”

“This turn? I don’t know. Sometimes you are. Sometimes you aren’t. It depends on how many snapshots
Enyo-Enyo
has taken this turn. And how she wants it
all to turn out this time.”

“When did you put yourself in here?” He patted the prisoner’s pod.

“When things got too complicated to bear,” she said. “When I realized who
Enyo-Enyo
was.” She went to the slick feeding console. She vomited the condensed protein stew of the colonists into the receptacle. When it was over, she fell back, exhausted.

“Let’s play screes,” she said. “Before the next
snapshot. We might be different people, then.”

“We can only hope,” Reeb said, and pulled his hands away from the prisoner.

SEMIRAMIS

Genevieve Valentine

The worst thing about being a sleeper embedded somewhere long-term was that inevitably, eventually, you started to care.

The worst thing about being embedded long-term as an administrator at the Svalbard Seed Vault was that when you inevitably started to care, you started to care about things like proper political geo-temperate arrangement of seeds, and there was
just no one else in their right mind who was going to care about that with you.

That was half the reason I recruited Lise.

Ever since Svalbard had been put under review, it had been hell and a half trying to figure out how to recruit a domestic cover who could carry seeds off the island. And for something this longterm in a place as small as Longyearbyen, you needed domestic cover, or people
started to suspect you for keeping apart.

The locals were out of the question, and once we were under review it was more than my life was worth to try to smuggle someone over if they didn’t already have some international clearance.

(“Under review”: the Global Coalition was interested enough in Svalbard to station spies at the ports.)

Lise had been a loose affiliate of my organization, years
back. She’d dropped off the map, but it only took two tries to contact her, and one meeting to convince her.

“Good choice,” said the guy who’d met her, when he called weeks later to seal the deal. “She’s got contacts at the mine at Sveagruva. She’s already on a plane to Oslo; she’ll catch a boat out to you next week.”

The rest of the timeline was already set, for the short-term: quick public
courtship, cohabitation. When our orders came in, she’d make the initial runs off the island, and then once there was a routine in place she could quietly vanish whenever things soured.

Until then she would live with me on Svalbard and keep an eye on Coalition business in town and whatever the mining company turned up.

I would keep making visits to the Seed Vault, taking inventory, ticking off
names on my list, waiting for the day when I’d get the order to move out two or three seeds at a time and pass them off to whomever the highest bidders sent to collect.

(The day I was really waiting for was the day I could tell someone, “This one’s drying up. We’ll be looking for some decent soil, to grow it for re-harvest,” and have their eyes light up, too.)

“Coalition Peacekeepers just showed
up – they blocked the port,” Lise says, knocking mud off her boots. “They’ve already dispatched a zoo team to look for polar bears.”

I whistle. “How many of them?”

“Enough to make sure you don’t get one fucking seed out of here,” she says. “Good luck.”

(She was a decent recruit – she’d done admin at the Millennium Seed Bank before it got militarized, had some clearance, had some brains – but
she wasn’t a believer, and it showed.)

I frown at the printout in front of me – scientific names and common names and country of origin marching in four-point font for 200 pages.

“We’ll find a way around it,” I say. “This could just be like the review. It could be years before we have to worry.”

We plan in years.

She shoulders her rifle. “I’m going out.”

Rifles are standard issue in Longyearbyen,
one of the few places you can still get one. It’s required outside the city, for protection against polar bears.

(She mostly goes out to the bird cliffs and takes shots at poachers.)

“Don’t kill anyone,” I say. We need to keep cover.

A gust of cold wind, and she’s gone.

Absently, I check off
Acer palmatum
on the list, but my concentration is already gone, and I end up staring out the window
at the shadows that gather inside shadows all over this place at night.

I don’t notice the Peacekeeper boats have moved into place until someone inside one turns on a light.

We measure time two ways.

One is the paper calendar I get at Christmas from the woman who poses, twice a year, as my sister.

Longyearbyen went nearly paperless after the Global Coalition’s Environmental Imperative was
released. (We had to preserve any trees that would grow, it said; now that the waters were rising, arable land was sacrosanct.)

Tax on physical mail was obscene, but the calendar was how I received most of my instructions, so I paid.

One random day a year was “Semiramis (observed)” – the day I sent my ID over a landline, by voice.

I chose the name; she was the queen for whom they’d built the
hanging gardens in Babylon.

By then I had started to care.

“Happy Semiramis,” Lise always said when she checked off that calendar day, in a tone that made me feel like I was giving away too much.

It was the only paper in the house, save the printout of the Seed Vault inventory. That had been granted exemption – pulp for the good of the nation.

Lise was the one who started ticking off days
on the calendar, the very first year she arrived.

I hadn’t asked why. We didn’t like each other enough back then to get into a round of questions, and by the time we’d reached a truce it wasn’t worth asking. In this line of work, you learn just to live with people.

The other way we keep time is by tracking how much coal is worth.