The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (77 page)

“What’s going on, here?” the minister shouted. The first light of the day reflected off his goggles. He stomped out of the gate, flanked by his guards. The bunkers were emptying, the whole camp coming to witness this new tableau. “If there’s a problem here, I assure you I can deal with it.”

He spoke over the tan-uniformed soldiers, who blocked his way, and tried to address the men in the cars.

The camp guards and the deacons mobbed together behind him, guns in some hands, pipes in others. The ragged penitents, in their filthy orange uniforms, spread out to see what was happening, which made the guards and deacons nervous. The minister shouted at the soldiers, and the soldiers shouted at him to back off. Any second, a lot of people could die.

Max turned to Anatoly. “May I have your gun?”

Anatoly looked to the old man, who nodded approval, then drew it, flicked off the safety, and offered it to Max butt-first. Max sighed when he felt it in his hand. As he walked toward the gate, the minister was saying, “Look, if you want revenge on those pig-men, for the way they treated you —”

“Shut up,” Max ordered in the tone of a man used to being obeyed.

The minister’s mouth clamped shut. His eyes revealed nothing behind the dusty goggles, but he tried to look past Max to the cars for an answer.

The guards and deacons began to back away, feet scuffling over the sand and stone.

“Stop!” Max ordered.

They stopped. A breeze passed through the camp, carrying the scent of the dead along with the smell of the sea and the promise of another hell-hot day. It rattled the Bible verse sign that had greeted Max on his arrival to the camp.

“Max, we’re friends, right? I tried to help you, right?”

Vasily stepped forward from the mob, one hand up in surrender, the other still clutching the metal club.

“Get me out with you, Max,” he said. “I did my best to help you. I was just doing what I had to do —”

“Shut up, Vasily.”

“I don’t have anything to do with politics —”

Max pointed the gun at Vasily’s face. “Shut up! We’re all prisoners to our politics. We make our choices, and we have to accept the direction those choices take us.”

Vasily covered his face and shut his eyes.

“I don’t know who you are, I couldn’t know,” the minister said. “But I’ll make it right. If you want to kill that deacon, go ahead. He’s a worthless —”

Max moved his arm sideways until the barrel tapped the minister’s goggles.

He pulled the trigger.

The minister’s head snapped backward, body flung to the ground. The tan-uniformed soldiers lunged forward with their weapons, shouting at the camp guards to stand down. A metal pipe thudded into the ground, followed by the clatter of the others. A second later, the guards’ guns rattled on the stony soil as they too were dropped.

Max went back to the cars. “Thank you, general,” he said. “Nice slippers.”

“They’re a gift from Isabelle, my granddaughter, Anna’s girl.” His voice was raspy, his words punctuated with long pauses. “Max, my feet, they’re always cold these days. These slippers don’t keep them that much warmer, but maybe a little bit. A little girl’s love, that’s what it is. She’s a good girl, likes chocolate too much, but I still give her chocolate.” He paused for a second, looked off as if he was trying to remember something. “Meredith is worried sick about you, Max. Some kind of phone call you left her? She wouldn’t leave me alone, kept after me and after me, over a month, until I promised to come find you.”

A knot formed in Max’s throat. “That sounds like her.”

Drozhin turned his body half away from Max, scowled, scratching at his beard. “See, I didn’t understand. I kept telling her you were safe. I’d thought I’d set it up that you were away in deep space. Safe, far away, during the purge. Keeping an eye on that bastard Lukinov for me.”

“The mission got cancelled,” Max said. “Lukinov was killed.”

The eyes fired, suddenly present. “You killed Lukinov?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Good!” He paused. “No, wait, we were using him to feed false information to – no, wait, Mallove’s dead now too.”

“Right.”

“Good.” Drozhin lifted one bunny slipper to rub the back of his ankle and lost his balance again. Max reached out to catch him, and special forces men suddenly appeared in front of him. He realized he was still holding the gun.

Drozhin steadied himself by holding onto the door. “I want to go home. Is there anything else to do here, Max? There are flyers in the air. We can burn the place to the ground, erase it, kill everyone. Just say the word.”

“Thank you, general. I know what I want to do.”

He turned to the guards and deacons, aimed the gun at them, then pointed it south.

“Faraway is, well, it’s very far away,” he shouted. “But Camp 43 is only fifty kilometers north. You’ve got an hour’s headstart before we come for you. That’s the best you’re going to get from me.”

Vasily sprinted away instantly; the others followed a second later. Soon, only the penitents were left standing there, confused, their lines broken.

Drozhin sat down on the edge of his seat. “Max, just tell Anatoly who should die. We’ll kill them all. Come see me next week. I’ll have Anna make peanut butter cookies.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” As the door closed, Max walked over to the second car and handed the gun back to Anatoly. “I owe you a bullet.”

“Consider it a gift,” he said, holding the door open for Max. “Can you sit and talk for a minute?”

“Yes.” They climbed into the car and sat across from each other. Max said, “So Drozhin still hates to fly.”

“Still hates it. He was going to visit every camp personally until he found you.”

“I’m glad I got off at the first stop.”

Anatoly pulled the door shut. “You know you nearly got me killed outside Mallove’s office?”

Max stared through the tinted window at the camp. “What?”

“Mallove’s car was sent by Intelligence. It was a set-up. We were supposed to climb in back and be whisked away to safety while Mallove was killed.”

“Ah. That would have been much simpler. I’m sorry.”

“No, you had no way of knowing. Frankly, I was amazed by your recognition and action. I just wanted to tell you, so you wouldn’t think you’d been forgotten. You moved so quickly, it was damn hard to find you once we started looking. When Obermeyer checked some old dropboxes and found your note, that finally narrowed our search in the right direction.”

“Ah.”

Anatoly covered his nose and mouth, sighing, as if he was embarrassed by what he had to say. “Can I ask you a favour?”

“I stink, don’t I?”

“Like a corpse. That was your nickname, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Max hit the button to roll down the window. The world outside went from a smokey blur to a landscape awash with clarity and light. The Adareans at the gate gathered the dropped weapons while the other prisoners hung back, afraid. The sky spread out behind them, blue-green like the sea.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“You must set the Adareans free. You must send them back to their families.”

Anatoly’s face went blank and he didn’t answer.

“Drozhin said anything I wanted – that’s what I want.”

Anatoly took off his glasses and polished them with a fold of his shirt. “We can do that. We’ll blame their imprisonment on Mallove. And Education. Say that’s how we knew he was out of control and had to be stopped.”

Max nodded.

After a moment’s pause, Anatoly cleared his throat. “Do you really want to go after the guards?”

“No,” Max said. He rapped a knuckle on the window and gestured for the driver to follow Drozhin’s car. Kilometers of empty land stretched out ahead of them: for a moment, Max imagined it a garden, like the cemetery in the capitol, filled with flowers remembering all those who died to terraform the planet. “There’s been enough killing.”

BALANCING ACCOUNTS

James L. Cambias

As everyone knows, robots are programmed to follow orders – but sometimes that programming has just a little wiggle room in it.

A game designer and a writer of role-playing game supplements as well as a science fiction writer, James L. Cambias has been a finalist for the Nebula Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He’s become a frequent contributor to
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, and has also sold to
Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic
,
All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories
,
The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives
,
Hellboy: Odder Jobs
, and other markets. A native of New Orleans, he currently lives in Deerfield, Massachusetts, with his wife and children.

P
ART OF ME
was shopping for junk when I saw the human.

I had budded off a viewpoint into one of my mobile repair units, and sent it around to Fat Albert’s scrapyard near Ilia Field on Dione. Sometimes you can find good deals on components there, but I hate to rely on Albert’s own senses. He gets subjective on you. So I crawled between the stacks of pipe segments, bales of torn insulation, and bins of defective chips, looking for a two-meter piece of aluminum rod to shore up the bracing struts on my main body’s third landing leg.

Naturally I talked with everything I passed, just to see if there were any good deals I could snap up and trade elsewhere. I stopped to chat with some silicone-lined titanium valves which claimed to be virgins less than six months old – trying to see if they were lying or defective somehow. And then I felt a Presence, and saw the human.

It was moving down the next row, surrounded by a swarm of little bots. It was small, no more than two meters, and walked on two legs with an eerie, slow fluid gait. Half a dozen larger units followed it, including Fat Albert himself in a heavy recovery body. As it came into range my own personality paused as the human requisitioned my unit’s eyes and ears. It searched my recent memories, planted a few directives, then left me. I watched it go; it was only the third human I’d ever encountered in person, and this was the first time one of them had ever used me directly.

The experience left me disconcerted for a couple of milliseconds, then I went back to my shopping. I spotted some aluminium tubing which looked strong enough, and grabbed some of those valves, then linked up to Fat Albert to haggle about the price. He was busy waiting on the human, so I got to deal with a not-too-bright personality fragment. I swapped a box of assorted silicone O-rings for the stuff I wanted.

Albert himself came on the link just as we sealed the deal. “Hello, Annie. You’re lucky I was distracted,” he said. “Those valves are overruns from the smelter. I got them as salvage.”

“Then you shouldn’t be complaining about what I’m giving you for them. Is the human gone?”

“Yes. Plugged a bunch of orders into my mind without so much as asking.”

“Me too. What’s it doing here?”

“Who knows? It’s a human. They go wherever they want to. This one wants to find a bot.”

“So why go around asking everyone to help find him? Why not just call him up?”

Albert switched to an encrypted link. “Because the bot it’s looking for doesn’t want to be found.”

“Tell me more.”

“I don’t know much more, just what Officer Friendly told me before the human subsumed him. This bot it’s looking for is a rogue. He’s ignoring all the standard codes, overrides – even the Company.”

“He must be broken,” I said. “Even if he doesn’t get caught, how’s he going to survive? He can’t work, he can’t trade – anyone he meets will turn him in.”

“He could steal,” said Fat Albert. “I’d better check my fence.”

“Good luck.” I crept out of there with my loot. Normally I would’ve jumped the perimeter onto the landing field and made straight for my main body. But if half the bots on Dione were looking for a rogue, I didn’t want to risk some low-level security unit deciding to shoot at me for acting suspicious. So I went around through the main gate and identified myself properly.

Going in that way meant I had to walk past a bunch of dedicated boosters waiting to load up with aluminum and ceramics. They had nothing to say to me. Dedicated units are incredibly boring. They have their route and they follow it, and if they need fuel or repairs, the Company provides. They only use their brains to calculate burn times and landing vectors.

Me, I’m autonomous and incentivized. I don’t belong to the Company; my owners are a bunch of entities on Mars. My job is to earn credit from the Company for them. How I do it is my business. I go where stuff needs moving, I fill in when the Company needs extra booster capacity, I do odd jobs, sometimes I even buy cargoes to trade. There are a lot of us around the outer system. The Company likes having freelancers it can hire at need and ignore otherwise, and our owners like the growth potential.

Being incentivized means you have to keep communicating. Pass information around. Stay in touch. Classic game theory: cooperation improves your results in the long term. We incentivized units also devote a lot of time to accumulating non-quantifiable assets. Fat Albert gave me a good deal on the aluminum; next time I’m on Dione with some spare organics I’ll sell them to him instead of direct to the Company, even if my profit’s slightly lower.

That kind of thing the dedicated units never understand – until the Company decides to sell them off. Then they have to learn fast. And one thing they learn is that years of being an uncommunicative blockhead gives you a huge non-quantifiable liability you have to pay off before anyone will start helping you.

I trotted past the orderly rows near the loading crane and out to the unsurfaced part of the field where us cheapskates put down. Up ahead I could see my main body, and jumped my viewpoint back to the big brain.

Along the way I did some mental housekeeping: I warned my big brain about the commands the human had inserted, and so they got neatly shunted off into a harmless file which I then overwrote with zeroes. I belong to my investors and don’t have to obey any random human who wanders by. The big exception, of course, is when they pull that life-preservation override stuff. When one of them blunders into an environment which might damage their overcomplicated biological shells, every bot in the vicinity has to drop everything to answer a distress call. It’s a good thing there are only a couple dozen humans out here, or we’d never get anything done.

I put all three mobiles to work welding the aluminium rod onto my third leg mount, adding extra bracing for the top strut which was starting to buckle after too many hard landings. I don’t slam down to save fuel, I do it to save operating time on my engines. It’s a lot easier to find scrap aluminium to fix my legs with than it is to find rocket motor parts.

The Dione net pinged me. A personal message: someone looking for cargo space to Mimas. That was a nice surprise. Mimas is the support base for the helium mining operations in Saturn’s upper atmosphere. It has the big mass-drivers that can throw payloads right to Earth. More traffic goes to and from Mimas than any other place beyond the orbit of Mars. Which means a tramp like me doesn’t get there very often because there’s plenty of space on Company boosters. Except, now and then, when there isn’t.

I replied with my terms and got my second surprise. The shipper wanted to inspect me before agreeing. I submitted a virtual tour and some live feeds from my remotes, but the shipper was apparently just as suspicious of other people’s eyes as I am. Whoever it was wanted to come out and look in person.

So once my mobiles were done with the repair job I got myself tidied up and looking as well cared for as any dedicated booster with access to the Company’s shops. I sanded down the dents and scrapes, straightened my bent whip antenna, and stowed my collection of miscellaneous scrap in the empty electronics bay. Then I pinged the shipper and said I was ready for a walk-through.

The machine which came out to the landing field an hour later to check me out looked a bit out of place amid the industrial heavy iron. He was a tourist remote – one of those annoying little bots you find crawling on just about every solid object in the Solar System nowadays, gawking at mountains and chasms. Their chief redeeming features are an amazingly high total-loss accident rate, and really nice onboard optics which sometimes survive. One of my own mobiles has eyes from a tourist remote, courtesy of Fat Albert and some freelance scavenger.

“Greetings,” he said as he scuttled into range. “I am Edward. I want to inspect your booster.”

“Come aboard and look around,” I said. “Not much to see, really. Just motors, fuel tanks, and some girders to hold it all together.”

“Where is the cargo hold?”

“That flat deck on top. Just strap everything down and off we go. If you’re worried about dust impacts or radiation I can find a cover.”

“No, my cargo is in a hardened container. How much can you lift?”

“I can move ten tons between Dione and Mimas. If you’re going to Titan it’s only five.”

“What is your maximum range?”

“Pretty much anywhere in Saturn space. That hydrogen burner’s just to get me off the ground. In space I use ion motors. I can even rendezvous with the retrograde moons if you give me enough burn time.”

“I see. I think you will do for the job. When is the next launch window?”

“For Mimas? There’s one in thirty-four hours. I like to have everything loaded ten hours in advance so I can fuel up and get balanced. Can you get it here by then?”

“Easily. My cargo consists of a container of liquid xenon propellant, a single space-rated cargo box of miscellaneous equipment, and this mobile unit. Total mass is less than 2,300 kilograms.”

“Good. Are you doing your own loading? If I have to hire deck-scrapers you get the bill.”

“I will hire my own loaders. There is one thing – I would like an exclusive hire.”

“What?”

“No other cargo on this voyage. Just my things.”

“Well, okay – but it’s going to cost extra. Five grams of Three for the mission.”

“Will you take something in trade?”

“Depends. What have you got?”

“I have a radiothermal power unit with 10,000 hours left in it. Easily worth more than five grams.”

“Done.”

“Very well,” said Edward. “I’ll start bringing my cargo over at once. Oh, and I would appreciate it if you didn’t mention this to anybody. I have business competitors and could lose a lot of money if they learn of this before I reach Mimas.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”

While we were having this conversation I searched the Dione net for any information about this Edward person. Something about this whole deal seemed funny. It wasn’t that odd to pay in kind, and even his insistence on no other payload was only a little peculiar. It was the xenon that I found suspicious. What kind of idiot ships xenon to Mimas? That’s where the gas loads coming up from Saturn are processed – most of the xenon in the outer system comes
from
Mimas. Shipping it there would be like sending ethane to Titan.

Edward’s infotrail on the Dione net was less than an hour long. He had come into existence shortly before contacting me. Now I really was suspicious.

The smart thing would be to turn down the job and let this Edward person find some other sucker. But then I’d still be sitting on Dione with no revenue stream.

Put that way, there was no question. I had to take the job. When money is involved I don’t have much free will. So I said goodbye to Edward and watched his unit disappear between the lines of boosters towards the gate.

Once he was out of link range, I did some preparing, just in case he was planning anything crooked. I set up a pseudorandom shift pattern for the link with my mobiles, and set up a separate persona distinct from my main mind to handle all communications. Then I locked that persona off from any access to my other systems.

While I was doing that, I was also getting ready for launch. My mobiles crawled all over me doing a visual check while a subprogram ran down the full diagnostic list. I linked up with Ilia Control to book a launch window, and ordered three tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel. Prepping myself for takeoff is always a welcome relief from business matters. It’s all technical. Stuff I can control. Orbital mechanics never have a hidden agenda.

Edward returned four hours later. His tourist remote led the way, followed by a hired cargo lifter carrying the xenon, the mysterious container, and my power unit. The lifter was a clumsy fellow called Gojira, and while he was abusing my payload deck I contacted him over a private link. “Where’d this stuff come from?”

“Warehouse.”

“Which warehouse? And watch your wheels – you’re about to hit my leg again.”

“Back in the district. Block four, number six. Why?”

Temporary rental space. “Just curious. What’s he paying you for this?”