The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (77 page)

Someone might have done a fly-by then hustled away. Ask knew he wouldn’t have been aware of that. But human beings could not leave a disaster alone. And Redghost, whatever else it had been, was definitely a disaster.

He even had a little bit of electronics, having at one point taken a pair of pack horses back to his cave and retrieved his surviving equipment. The passive solar strips used on so many Shindaiwa Valley rooftops were still intact, and he worked out a sufficient combination of salvage parts and primitive electronics to keep a few batteries charged. Space-rated equipment
lasted,
at the least. He had steady light by which to read at night – Shindaiwa Valley had boasted two hundred and eleven surviving hardcopy books by the time he’d gotten around to salvaging those. Four of them were actual paper printings from the Earth of his childhood, three in English that he could read. Their unspeakably fragile pages were preserved in a mono-molecular coating as family heirlooms.

He’d read them all over and over and over. He could
recite
them all, and some years did so just to have something to say to the goats and horses – the pigs never cared so much for his voice.

Still, reading and reciting those words written by authors long dead was the closest Ask could come to speaking to another human being.

In the mean time, his project had matured. Blossomed into success, in a manner of speaking. He’d spent decades carefully surveying, logging and replanting, even diverting the courses of streams to make sure water was where he wanted it to be.

When that had grown boring, he’d built himself a new house and barn. Living in the hospital had felt strange. The weight of souls there was stronger. Having his own home, one that none of the people before Day Zero had ever lived or worked or died in, had seemed important for a while.

So Ask had built the house at the center of his project. Made a sort of castle of it, complete with turrets and a central watchtower. A platform for a beacon fire, just to make the point. It wasn’t high enough to see his work, but when he climbed the ridge at the eastern edge of the valley – the one he’d first come down in those confused weeks right after Day Zero – he could glimpse what his imagination had engineered.

Eating a breakfast of ham and eggs the morning of March 17th, Aeschylus Sforza heard the whine of turbines in the air outside his home. Centuries of living alone had broken him of the habit of hurrying. He finished his plate a little faster than normal, nonetheless, and scrubbed it in the stone trough that was his sink. He pulled on his goatskin jacket, for the Shindaiwa Valley mornings could still be chilly in this season, and walked outside at a measured but still rapid pace.

Ask had realized a long time ago that it didn’t matter who they were when they came. The unknown raiders who’d stripped this planet, the descendants of those taken up by the attackers, or his own people finally returned. When they returned, whoever they were, he’d wanted to meet them.

That was why his house sat in the exact center of three arrows of dense forest, each thirty kilometers long and spaced one hundred and twenty degrees apart, each surrounded by carefully husbanded open pasture. A “look here” note visible even from orbit. Especially from orbit. Who the hell else would be looking?

Outside his front gate a mid-sized landing shuttle, about thirty meters nose to tail, sat clicking and ticking away the heat of its descent. The grass around it smoldered. Ask did not recognize the engineering or aesthetics of the machine, which answered some of his speculations in the negative. It certainly did not display Polity markings.

He stood his ground, waiting for whoever might open that hatch from within. His long walk was done, had been done for over two hundred years.

Time for the next step.

The hatch whined open, air puffing as pressure equalized. Someone shifted their weight in the red-lit darkness within.

Human?

It didn’t matter.

He was about to learn what would happen next.

Aeschylus Sforza was home.

THE INCREDIBLE EXPLODING MAN

Here’s the gripping story of a man who saves the world, only to find that he’s reluctantly obliged to save it over and over again.

Dave Hutchinson is a writer and journalist who was born in Sheffield and now lives in London with his wife and assorted cats. He’s the author of one novel and the novella
The Push,
which was nominated for the BSFA Award, as well as five collections of short stories. He’s also the editor of the anthology
Under the Rose,
and the co-editor of
Strange Pleasures 2
and
Strange Pleasures 3.

F
ROM A DISTANCE
, the first thing you saw was the cloud.

It rose five thousand feet or more, a perfect vertical helix turning slowly in the sky above Point Zero. Winds high in the atmosphere smeared its very top into ribbons, but no matter how hard the winds blew at lower levels the main body kept its shape. A year ago, a tornado had tracked northwest across this part of Iowa and not disturbed the cloud at all. It looked eerie and frightening, but it was just an edge effect, harmless water vapour in the atmosphere gathered by what was going on below. The really scary stuff at Point Zero was invisible.

The young lieutenant sitting across from me looked tired and ill. They burned out quickly here on the Perimeter – the constant stress of keeping things from getting through the fence, the constant terror of what they would have to do if something did. A typical tour out here lasted less than six months, then they were rotated back to their units and replacements were brought in. I sometimes wondered why we were bothering to keep it secret; if we waited long enough the entire US Marine Corps would have spent time here.

I leaned forward and raised my voice over the sound of the engines and said to the lieutenant, “How old are you, son?”

The lieutenant just looked blankly at me. Beside him, I saw Former Corporal Fenwick roll his eyes.

“Just trying to make conversation,” I said, sitting back. The lieutenant didn’t respond. He didn’t know who I was – or rather, he had been told I was a specialist, come to perform routine maintenance on the sensors installed all over the Site. There was no way to tell whether he believed that or not, or if he even cared. He was trying to maintain a veneer of professionalism, but when he thought nobody was looking he kept glancing at the windows. He wanted to look out, to check on his responsibilities on the ground. Was the Site still there? Was there a panic? Had a coyote got through?

It had been a coyote last time. At least, that was the general consensus of opinion – it was hard to be certain from the remains. The Board of Inquiry had found that the breach was due to gross negligence on the part of the officer in command. The officer in command, a Colonel I had met a couple of times and rather liked, had saved Uncle Sam the cost of a court martial by dying, along with seventeen of his men, bringing down the thing the coyote had become. You could tell, just by looking at the Lieutenant, that he had terrible nightmares.

The Black Hawk made another wide looping turn over Sioux Crossing, waiting for permission to land. Looking out, I thought I could see my old house. The city had been evacuated shortly after the Accident. It had taken weeks to clear the place out; even after dire stories of death and disaster, even with the cloud hanging over the Site, there were people who refused to leave. The fact that the skies by then were full of military helicopters, some of them black, hadn’t helped. The government had handled the whole thing poorly, and there had been a couple of armed standoffs between householders and the military. Then a bunch of asshole militiamen had turned up from the wilds of Montana, vowing to oppose the Zionist World Government or the Bilderberg Group or whoever the hell they believed was running the world. I was glad I’d missed the whole thing.

Further out, I could see the buildings of the Collider in the distance. From here, all looked peaceful. Apart from the cloud, towering over everything, it was as if nothing had ever happened here.

The pilot eventually got permission to make final approach and we landed in a park on the edge of Sioux Crossing. The park was ringed by prefabricated buildings stacked four high, offices and barracks and mess halls and control rooms and armouries and garages surrounding a big white “H” sprayed on the ground. The lieutenant jumped down as soon as the door was opened, and the last I saw of him was his back as he strode away from us towards the control centre.

“Talkative fucker,” Former Corporal Fenwick commented, hopping down from the helicopter beside me.

I sighed. A figure in fatigues was coming towards us from the control centre. The figure passed the lieutenant, and they snapped salutes at each other without breaking step.

“Welcoming committee,” said Fenwick. “Nice. I approve.”

“Shut up, Fenwick,” I muttered.

The figure was the base commander, Colonel Newton J. Kettering. He marched up to us and saluted. Fenwick returned the salute sloppily, as usual. I didn’t bother.

“Sir,” Kettering said smartly. “Welcome to Camp Batavia.”

“Well thank you kindly, Colonel,” Fenwick said. “Looks like you’re running a tight ship here.”

“Sir. Thank you, sir.” Unlike the lieutenant, Kettering didn’t look tired and ill. He looked alert and bright-eyed. He looked alert and bright-eyed to the point of madness. He was a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and he’d done three tours here, and I didn’t want to spend a minute longer in his company than I had to.

I said to Fenwick, “I’d better supervise the unloading.”

Fenwick gave me his big shit-eating grin. “I think that sounds like a fine idea, Mr. Dolan.” I wanted to punch him. “Perhaps Colonel Kettering could give me the guided tour while you’re doing that thing.”

“Sir, I was hoping you could join me in the Officers’ Club,” Kettering said. “We have a luncheon prepared.”

Fenwick’s grin widened. “Colonel, I would love to.”

“We need to get onto the Site as soon as possible,” I said to them both, but mainly to Fenwick. Kettering regarded me with a keen look of hostility. Fenwick pouted; he hated to miss a free meal. I said, “Colonel, it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to unload my gear—”

“Hell,” Fenwick put in amiably. “That’s
plenty
of time for luncheon. Right, Colonel?”

“Sir. Yes, sir.” Kettering gave me that hostile look again. I had already ruined his carefully groomed routine; he wasn’t about to let me ruin lunch too. Neither was Fenwick.

I looked at them both. “Half an hour,” I said. “No longer.”

Fenwick and Kettering exchanged a knowing glance.
Civilians.
Then Fenwick clapped Kettering on the back and said, “Lead the way, Colonel,” and they walked off. A few yards away, Fenwick looked over his shoulder and called, “Would you like us to send a plate out for you, Mr. Dolan?”

I shook my head. “No thank you, General, I’ll be fine,” I called back. Fenwick flipped me the bird surreptitiously and turned back to Kettering. The two of them, deep in conversation, walked towards the wall of prefabs.

I watched them go for a few moments, then went back to the helicopter, where, in the style of bored baggage handlers and cargo men the world over, half a dozen Marines were throwing my metal transport cases out onto the grass.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Careful with those things! They’re delicate scientific instruments!”

Actually, the cases were full of old telephone directories, for weight, but I had to keep up the charade.

I had been in a foul mood when I arrived for work that morning. I drove the short distance from home to the facility, stopped briefly at the gate to show my ID, then drove to the building housing the small control room Professor Delahaye and his team were using.

Most of them were already there ahead of me. Delahaye was over to one side of the room, conferring with half a dozen of his colleagues and grad students. Others were busily typing at consoles and peering at monitors. Nowhere, though, could I see the shock of white hair that I was looking for.

Delahaye spotted me and walked over. “What are you doing here, Dolan?” he asked. “Surely you’ve got enough material by now?”