The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (92 page)

Well, she already knew they were mean. She hoped they were dumb, too.

The swollen sun was about an hour away from setting. Ana had once told Marilyn that because it huddled close to its cool red dwarf sun, first Foot should have been tidally locked, always showing one side to its sun, just as the moon always showed one side to Earth. The fact that there were sunrises and sunsets on first Foot was evidence of some stupendous feat of engineering that had otherwise left no trace, Ana had said: some forgotten race must have spun the planet up like a child’s top, giving it a rotational period of ten hours that over millennia had slowed to almost twice that.

The old woman loved to talk about the alien tenants – Boxbuilders, Fisher Kings, Ghostkeepers and all the rest – who had once inhabited the planets and moons and reefs of the fifteen stars linked by the wormhole network. Speculating on why they had come here and what they had done, whether they’d simply died out, or had been wiped out by war, or if they had moved on to somewhere else. To other stars, or to other universes. She’d told Marilyn that some people believed that the Jackaroo collected races as people collected pets, and disposed of them when they lost the lustre of novelty; others that the previous tenants had all been absorbed into the Jackaroo, to become part of a collective, symbiotic consciousness. Anything was possible. No one had ever been aboard one of the Jackaroo’s floppy ships, and no one knew what the Jackaroo looked like because they visited Earth only in the form of avatars shaped roughly like people. No one had much idea about the physical appearance of any of the previous tenant races of the wormhole network, either. None of them, not even the Ghostkeepers, who had built the City of the Dead and many other necropolises, had left behind any physical remains or sculptures or pictorial representations. Academics argued endlessly over the carved murals in the so-called Vaults of the Fisher Kings, but no one knew what the murals really represented, or even if the patterns and images discerned by human eyes weren’t simply optical illusions. All we really know, Ana liked to say, is that we know nothing at all. At least eight alien races lived here before we came, and each one died out or vanished or moved on, and left behind only empty ruins, odd scraps, and a few enigmatic monuments. But if we can find out the answers to those questions, we might be able to begin to understand why the Jackaroo gave us the keys to the wormhole network; we might even be able to take control of our fate.

Ana was full of strange notions, but she was also a tough desert bird who knew how to look after herself. Marilyn had had no trouble believing Frank Parker’s story that the old woman had taken off into the garden and climbed down into the nest to escape Tom Archibold and his men, and it certainly looked like they were hunkered down, waiting for her to come out and surrender. They couldn’t go after Ana because they’d be taken down by the hive rats, and as far as Marilyn knew the hole on top of the mound was the only way Ana could get in and out. It was a standoff, and Marilyn was going to have to go in and try to save Ana before things escalated. It was her job, for one thing. And then there was the small matter of doing right by poor Jet.

Marilyn crawled backwards on elbows and knees until she was certain that she wouldn’t be skylighted when she stood up. The Boxbuilder ruins ran along the top of the ridge like random strings of giant building blocks, their thin walls and roofs spun from polymer and rock dust by a species that had left hundreds of thousands of similar strings and clusters on every planet and reef and moon linked by the wormholes. Marilyn picked her way through the thorny scrub that grew everywhere amongst the ruins, and walked down the reverse side of the ridge to her Bronco, which she’d parked on a stony apron three kilometres south of the arroyo. She checked the shortwave again – still nothing but static – and lifted out her spare can of petrol and took rags from her toolbox and set off to the east.

She twisted strips torn from the rags around catchclaw and cloudbush plants, soaked them in petrol, and set them alight. Fire bloomed quick and bright and the hot wind blew flames flat amongst the dry scrub and it caught with a crackling roar. Marilyn walked along the track towards Ana’s shack with huge reefs of white smoke boiling up into the darkening sky behind her. A harsh smell of burning in the air, and flecks and curls of ash fluttering down. There was a stir of movement amongst the Range Rovers, someone shouted a challenge, a spotlight flared. Marilyn raised her hands as three men walked towards her, two circling left and right, the third, Tom Archibold, saying, “I was wondering when you’d turn up.”

“Hello, Tom.”

“You set a fire as a diversion, and then you walk right in. What are you up to?”

“The fire isn’t a diversion, Tom. It’s a signal. In about two hours, people from Joe’s Corner will be turning up, wondering who set it.”

Tom grinned. “You think a bunch of hicks can make any kind of trouble for us? I’m disappointed, Marilyn. You used to be a lot sharper than that.”

“Frank Parker said you needed my help. Here I am. Just remember that I came here voluntarily. And remember that you have about two hours. Maybe less.”

“Where is Frank?”

“I shot him, not seriously, after he shot my dog. He’ll be okay. I’ll tell you where to find him when this is over.”

“He won’t make any kind of hostage, Marilyn. He fucked up, I could care less if he lives or dies, much less about exchanging the old woman for him.”

“How about if I help you get whatever it is you came here for?”

Tom Archibold studied her for a few moments. He was a slim man dressed in a brown turtleneck sweater and blue jeans. Black hair swept back from his keen, handsome face, a Bluetooth earpiece plugged into his left ear. At last, he said, “What do you expect in return?”

“To walk away from this with Ana.”

“Why not? I might even throw in a few points from the money I’m going to make.”

He said it so quickly and casually that Marilyn knew at once he intended to kill her as soon as she was no longer useful to him. She’d guessed it anyhow, but now that she was in his power she felt a strong chill pass through her.

She said, “Is Ana still inside the nest?”

“Yeah. She ran off into the garden – into the hole atop that mound,” Tom said, pointing across the dusky arroyo. “We couldn’t follow her because of the damn rats. We’ve been picking off any that show themselves, but there are any number of them, we can’t get close.”

“You want me to talk her out of there.”

“If she’s still alive. We kind of winged her.”

“You shot her?”

“We shot at her, when she ran. To try to make her stop. One of the shots might have gotten a little too close.”

“Where do you think you hit her?”

“The right leg, it looked like. It can’t have been serious. It knocked her down, but she managed to crawl into the hole.”

“You were supposed to take her prisoner, but she got away, you wounded her . . . It’s all gone bad, hasn’t it?”

“We have you.”

“Only because I wanted to come here. Don’t you forget that. I’m curious, by the way. Why involve me at all?”

Tom smiled. “Either you’re bluffing, pretending to be ignorant to see if I’ll let something slip, or you aren’t really the old woman’s friend. Let’s sit down and talk.”

After the blond bodybuilder had quickly and thoroughly patted Marilyn down, she and Tom sat on Ana’s plastic chairs and Tom asked her every kind of question about Ana’s research. She answered as truthfully as she could, but it quickly became clear that Tom knew a lot more about most of it than she did. He knew that Ana and the mathematician in Port of Plenty had been working up computer models of the hive rats’ behaviour, and that they had been developing some kind of artificial intelligence programme. He also knew that Ana had discovered that the behaviour of the hive rats was strongly influenced by pheromones, but he didn’t seem to know that Ana had synthesised pheromone analogs.

When he had run out of questions, Marilyn said, “I can help you, but I think I need to talk to your client first.”

“What makes you think I have a client?”

“You wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to chase a rumour about a crashed spaceship. It isn’t your style, and I doubt that you have the kind of cash to pay for an operation like this. After all, you stumbled on Ana’s research when you were working as a debt collector. So you’re working for someone. That’s the kind of people we are, Tom. We put our lives on the line for other people. I believe that he’s sitting in one of those Range Rovers,” Marilyn said. “The guy guarding them hasn’t budged since I turned up, and you have a Bluetooth connection in your ear. That will only work over a very short range here, and my guess is he’d been using it to listen in to us, and feed you questions. How am I doing?”

Tom didn’t answer at once. Marilyn wondered if he was listening to his client, or if she’d pushed him too far, if he was reconsidering his options. At last, he said, “How can you help us?”

“I know the trick Ana used to get inside the nest without being killed and eaten.”

Another pause. Tom said, “All right. If you go in there and bring her out, you can speak to my client. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“You’re in for a surprise,” Tom said. “But right now, you had better tell me how you’re going to walk in there.”

“I need something from Ana’s shack.”

The hot air inside the shack smelled strongly of Ana Datlovskaya and the smoking oil lamp that was the only illumination. A woman lay on Ana’s camp bed. Julie Bell, another of Marilyn’s former colleagues. She was unconscious. Her jeans had been cut off at the knees and bandages around her calves were spotted with blood and the flesh above and below the bandages was swollen red and shiny.

“You should get her to a hospital right now,” Marilyn told Tom. “Otherwise she’s going to die of blood poisoning.”

“The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get out of here. What’s that?”

Marilyn had opened the little chemical icebox and taken out a rack of little brown bottles. She explained that they contained artificial pheromones that Ana had synthesised. She held up the largest, the only one with a screw cap, and said that a dab of this would allow her to follow Ana down into the nest.

“I don’t think so,” Tom said. “If that shit really works, we can do it ourselves.”

“It won’t work on men. Only women. Something to do with hormones.”

“Bullshit,” Tom said, but Marilyn could see that he was thinking as he stared at her. Trying to figure out if she was telling the truth or making a move.

“Why don’t you try it out?” she said, and handed it to him.

Tom volunteered the blond bodybuilder. The man didn’t look very happy as, in the glare of the spotlights on top of two of the Range Rovers, he edged down the path towards the edge of the hive rats’ garden. The sun had set now and stars were popping out across the darkening sky, obscured in the east by smoke of the fire Marilyn had set. When the blond man reached the bottom of the path, sentries popped up from holes here and there amongst the tall century plants, and he turned and looked up at his boss and said that he didn’t think that this was a good idea.

“Just get on with it,” Tom said.

Standing beside him, Marilyn felt a sick eagerness. She knew what was going to happen, and she knew that it was necessary.

The man cocked his pistol and stepped forward, as if onto thin ice. Sentries near and far began to slap their feet, and the ground in front of the bodybuilder collapsed as soldiers heaved out of the gravelly sand, snapping long jaws filled with pointed teeth. The man tried to run, and one of the soldiers sprang forward and seized his ankle. He crashed down full-length and then two more soldiers were on him. He kicked and punched at them, screamed when one bit off his hand. More soldiers were running through the shadows cast by the century plants and Tom pulled his pistol and aimed and shot the bodybuilder in the head, shot at the soldiers as they tore at the body. Dust boiled up around it as it slowly sank.

The surviving goon, the one who’d been guarding the Range Rovers, invoked Jesus Christ, and Tom turned to Marilyn and hit her hard in the face with the back of his hand, knocking her down. She sat looking up at him, not moving, feeling a worm of blood run down her cheek where his signet ring had torn her skin.

“You’re going down there,” Tom said.

“I need the pheromone first,” Marilyn said.

“Right now,” Tom said. “Let’s see how fast you can run.”

Marilyn had rubbed the suppressor scent that Ana had given her over her arms and face before she’d walked up to the shack and surrendered; the stuff she’d told Tom was a pheromone that would guarantee safe passage, but only for women, had been nothing more than the base solution of neutral oil, and gave as much protection from the hive rats’ aggression towards trespassers as a sheet of paper against a bullet. She wasn’t at all certain that it would keep her safe now that the hive rats had been stirred up, but she reckoned she had a better chance with the rats than with the two men silhouetted above her in the glare of the spotlights as she walked down the path.

The spotlights lit up a wide swathe of the garden like a theatrical set, stark and hyperreal against the darkness of the rest of the arroyo. The blades of century plants that towered above Marilyn, growing in sinuous lines and clumps between irrigation ditches, glowed banana yellow. The churned patch of dirt that had swallowed the blond bodybuilder was directly ahead. Marilyn stepped past it, feeling that her skin was about a size too small, remembering how she’d felt moving from position to position in the ruins of the outskirts of Paris, trying to pinpoint a sniper that had shot three of her squad. A hive rat sentry was watching her from its perch on a flat slab of rock, pink skin glistening, an arc of small black eyes glittering above its tiny undershot mouth. She took a wide detour around it and spotted others standing under the century plants as she made her way towards the mound.

The mound was ten metres high, shaped like a small volcano or the entrance to the lair of monster-movie ants, smooth and unmarked apart from a trail of human footprints. She trod carefully up the slope, aware of the hive rats scattered across the garden and the two men watching her from the bench terrace. At the top, a flat rim circled a hole or vent a couple of metres across. Marilyn stepped up to the lip, saw spikes hammered into the hard crust, a rope ladder dropping into darkness. Hot air blew past her face. It stank of ammonia and a rotten musk. She called Ana’s name, and when nothing came back shouted across to Tom Archibold and told him that she was going in.