The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (98 page)

Mai tries to jump free, but the cable yanks her back down. The ground meets her back hard, and despite all the protection, Mai gasps for breath and her vision blurs.

They drag her across the ground as she fights to breathe again, her body bouncing as the armor scrapes along the ground. She can hear the rumble of an old truck, accelerating, dragging her farther away.

She reaches up to the noose, trying to get purchase, but she’s being bounced around by the uneven terrain.

If they can drag her far enough away, she’ll be just one person in armor. Far from camp. Far from backup.

Mai screams with rage, and then suddenly, she’s free, tumbling along the side of the muddy road. On shaky arms she pushes herself up. First to her knees, then to her feet, every twitch and tremor amplified by the armor.

She pulls the cable up toward her until she comes to the cut edge, then looks around.

A cluster of blue-armored figures are walking down the road at her.

Mai turns her communications back on.

“Nong Mai Thuy?”

“Yes, Captain Nguyen?”

“We have some things to discuss.”

*     *     *

“Are you ready to go home?” Nguyen asked.

“No,” Mai replies. But she knows her preferences do not matter.

She’s standing in front of Nguyen’s desk wearing her old Marine Police uniform. Everything’s crisp and tight. Ribbons for bravery and accomplishment no longer feel like things to be proud of, but strange, non-functional baubles.

She should be in armor, not in this uniform.

“I guess the true question is . . . how do you move on?” Nguyen says. “I have two courses for you to consider.”

“Two? I don’t understand.”

“You killed two human beings, Nong Mai Thuy. All the while under orders to not leave your position.”

“I saved many lives,” Mai protests.

Nguyen flashes a smile. It isn’t a pretty thing. It’s an expectant one. Like a predator watching prey fall for a trap.

“Yes. The inhabitants of the camp call you a hero. But you may have killed many more than you would have saved down the road. It’s a moral dilemma. Academics sometimes ask you to ponder: would you push a man in front of a train to save everyone on the train? It seems like a silly question, yes? But here we are: soldiers. We often shove people in front of trains to serve a greater good. You just faced one of your own moral dilemmas, Mai. I can’t blame you for what you did. But we cannot succeed if we answer violence with violence here. Our duty is to weather these storms and stand between danger and our charges. And doing so, calmly, allows us the unfettered world permission to continue our mission here. You jeopardized the larger mission. The North Koreans will claim they were unjustly abused by a technologically superior invading army, no matter how ridiculous the claim. You put this entire mission in danger of failing. It is unacceptable.”

Mai considers the strangeness of this. The famous Captain Nguyen, who could be wearing three times as many medals as Mai if she chooses, who tasted violence on the Cambodian border, had eaten it for supper, is lecturing Mai about violence.

“So what is to become of me?” Mai asks.

“The Hague wants to court-martial you and send you to jail.” Nguyen taps the desk. “Personally, I think the court of world opinion would side with you, and you will not go to jail. You are the hero of Camp Nike, after all. But this will drag out in public and focus the attention in all the wrong places. The advertisers, the people who run this, and the generals back at the Hague, this will tarnish their images.”

Mai shrinks back without thinking. The subject of world attention. Media circuses. It sounds alien and horrific to someone who prefers their privacy.

Nguyen shoves a piece of paper forward. “If you think these people are worth protecting, if you think what the camps are trying to do is a good thing, then I suggest you take the second course.”

“And that is?” Mai asks.

“An honorable discharge. It is hardly your fault, really, that this happened. I should have seen the signs, your aggressive stance. A high need for justice. I ignored them because you were a good person with a good heart. I will not be making that mistake again. Sign these, and you can leave, but without any trouble to you, or trouble that makes our soldiers or country look bad. Go back to your family’s business. Go live a good life.”

Mai stares at the papers for a long moment, then signs them, struggling to keep any emotion from her face as Nguyen watches.

“Well done, Citizen Nong Mai Thuy,” Captain Nguyen says. “Well done.”

The next flight out of Camp Nike is in the pre-dawn morning. Mai sits alone in an aisle, looking out of the window as the plane passes up through the flittering green of the Point Defense Array. The North Koreans are busy probing its limits once again.

An extra reactor will be flown out to meet the needs of the camp soon. For now it is getting by on rolling blackouts for all non-essential power needs. Rumor is that a Californian solar panel corporation is going to ship enough panels next week for most civilian domestic needs, but the advertising details are still being negotiated. When they’re installed, it should help the camp come up to full power.

And she won’t be there to see any of that.

The aircraft continues its tight spiral up and up, always staying within Camp Nike airspace as it climbs. Eventually, once up to the right ceiling, out of range of all missiles and without the grounded North Korean Air Force to worry about, they will break out of their constant turn and head out for Hanoi.

“Miss Nong?” an airman asks. He crouches at the edge of the aisle holding a small wooden box in his hands.

“Yes?”

“Some of the refugees at the airstrip asked me to give this to the ‘hero of Camp Nike’, ” the airman says, and hands her the box.

She opens it to find a small bracelet held together with monofilament, decorated with charms made from recently recycled brass casings.

When she looks back through the window, the camp is lost under the clouds.

THE ANTS OF FLANDERS

Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986 and quickly established himself as one of the most prolific of today’s writers, particularly at short fiction lengths, and has managed to keep up a very high standard of quality
while
being prolific – something that is not at all easy to do. Reed’s stories such as “Sister Alice”, “Brother Perfect”, “Decency”, “Savior”, “The Remoras”, “Chrysalis”, “Whiptail”, “The Utility Man”, “Marrow”, “Birth Day”, “Blind”, “The Toad of Heaven”, “Stride”, “The Shape of Everything”, “Guest of Honor”, “Waging Good”, and “Killing the Morrow”, among at least a half-dozen others equally as strong, count among some of the best short works produced by anyone in the 1980s and 1990s; many of his best stories have been assembled in the collections
The Dragons of Springplace
and
The Cuckoo’s Boys
. He won the Hugo Award in 2007 for his novella “A Billion Eves.” He has also been active as a novelist, having turned out eleven novels since the end of the 1980s, including
The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, Sister Alice
, and
The Well of Stars
, as well as two chapbook novellas,
Mere
and
Flavors of My Genius
. His most recent book is a new chapbook novella,
Eater-of-Bone
. Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.

In the complex and inventive novella that follows, Reed delivers an Alien Invasion story, but a much more imaginative and conceptually daring one than the standard-issue Alien Invasion story featured in movies like
Independence Day
or
Battle: Los Angeles
, one where vast and vastly strange cosmic forces battle it out on an Earth they hardly notice, and where humans are no more important to the outcome, or any more able to change it, than the ants caught in the middle of the World War I battlefield referenced in the title.

Intruders

The mass of a comet was pressed into a long dense needle. Dressed with carbon weaves and metametals, the needle showed nothing extraneous to the universe. The frigid black hull looked like space itself, and it carried nothing that could leak or glimmer or produce the tiniest electronic fart – a trillion tons of totipotent matter stripped of engines but charging ahead at nine percent light speed. No sun or known world would claim ownership. No analysis of its workings or past trajectory would mark any culpable builder. Great wealth and ferocious genius had been invested in a device that was nearly invisible, inert as a bullet, and flying by time, aimed at a forbidden, heavily protected region.

The yellow-white sun brightened while space grew increasingly dirty. Stray ions and every twist of dust was a hazard. The damage of the inevitable impacts could be ignored, but there would always be a flash of radiant light. A million hidden eyes lay before it, each linked to paranoid minds doing nothing but marking every unexpected event. Security networks were hunting for patterns, for random noise and vast conspiracies. This was why secrecy had to be maintained as long as possible. This was why the needle fell to thirty AU before the long stasis ended. A temporary mind was grown on the hull. Absorbed starlight powered thought and allowed a platoon of eyes to sprout. Thousands of worlds offered themselves. Most were barren, but the largest few bore atmospheres and rich climates. This was wilderness, and the wilderness was gorgeous. Several planets tempted the newborn pilot, but the primary target still had its charms – a radio-bright knob of water and oxygen, silicates and slow green life.

Final course corrections demanded to be made, and the terrific momentum had to be surrendered. To achieve both, the needle’s tail was quickly reconfigured, micron wires reaching out for thousands of miles before weaving an obedient smoke that took its first long bite of a solar wind.

That wind tasted very much like sugar.

The penguins were coming. With their looks and comical ways, Humboldt penguins meant lots of money for the Children’s Zoo, and that’s why a fancy exhibit had been built for them. People loved to stand in flocks, watching the comical nervous birds that looked like little people. But of course penguins were nothing like people, and while Simon Bloch figured he would like the birds well enough, he certainly wasn’t part of anybody’s flock.

Bloch was a stubborn, self-contained sixteen-year-old. Six foot five, thick-limbed and stronger than most grown men, he was a big slab of a boy with a slow unconcerned walk and a perpetually half-asleep face that despite appearances noticed quite a lot. Maybe he wasn’t genius-smart, but he was bright and studious enough to gain admission to the honors science program at the Zoo School. Teachers found him capable. His stubborn indifference made him seem mature. But there was a distinct, even unique quality: because of a quirk deep in the boy’s nature, he had never known fear.

Even as a baby, Bloch proved immune to loud noises and bad dreams. His older and decidedly normal brother later hammered him with stories about nocturnal demons and giant snakes that ate nothing but kindergarteners, yet those torments only fed a burning curiosity. As a seven-year-old, Bloch slipped out of the house at night, wandering alleys and wooded lots, hoping to come across the world’s last T. rex. At nine, he got on a bus and rode halfway to Seattle, wanting to chase down Bigfoot. He wasn’t testing his bravery. Bravery was what other people summoned when their mouths went dry and hearts pounded. What he wanted was to stare into the eyes of a monster, admiring its malicious, intoxicating power, and if possible, steal a little of that magic for himself.

Bloch wasn’t thinking about monsters. The first penguins would arrive tomorrow morning, and he was thinking how they were going to be greeted with a press conference and party for the zoo’s sugar daddies. Mr. Rightly had asked Bloch to stay late and help move furniture, and that’s why the boy was walking home later than usual. It was a warm November afternoon, bright despite the sun hanging low. Three hundred pounds of casual, unhurried muscle was headed east. Bloch was imagining penguins swimming in their new pool, and then a car horn intruded, screaming in the distance. And in the next second a father down the street began yelling at his kid, telling him to get the hell inside now. Neither noise seemed remarkable, but they shook Bloch out of his daydream.