The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (32 page)

Lena stepped to the nearest larva—a rubbery oval, half a man tall—and roughly cut a slit along its top, releasing a putrid stench. She delved her hand inside, coating herself in the nutrient goop, and sought out the rudimentary form. Finding it, she pulled it out with a puckered slurp and cast it away. She tipped the larva over and let the goop sluice out.

A mighty squeal came from the adjoining chamber. Nursery workers rushed past to defend their imperiled queen. Enemy soldiers swarmed over the matriarch’s bloated abdomen, stabbing and tearing and biting. Spouts of clotted fluid sprayed from her wounds. She made a half-hearted effort to shrug them off, tossing a few off with a flaccid crunch, but their numbers were too great.

The larva was a hollowed-out shell now. Lena stared at it, heart pounding.
Artem, you sure as hell better show me some gratitude.
She clambered inside, wiping the lubricant over herself as she hunched down into a fetal position. She nearly gagged from the stench, but forced herself to pull the slit closed, leaving only a small gap for air. The last thing she heard before the enemy surged into the nursery was a lurching crash and an awful, otherworldly screech.

In the darkness and decay, she waited.

Soon enough, Lena was hoisted up by an enemy worker. She dared not move, but by tilting her head she was able to catch glimpses of the world outside. Most of the view was obscured by the underside of the worker’s head—a thick bristled hide, tapering to its claw-like mandibles—but she also saw the enormous gasters of others ahead. With the constant patter of the insect’s legs against the rock, it felt like she was in the middle of a stampede.

Tensed up, it didn’t take long before her muscles began to ache. Then burn. Her right arm went dead. She gritted her teeth against the pain, tried to transport her mind somewhere—anywhere—else. She wondered what she’d say to Artem to make him listen. He wasn’t easily swayed once he’d made up his mind.

Her bearer slowed up.

Was she there already?
The insects moved fast, but it didn’t feel like she’d traveled far enough.
Maybe some kind of bottleneck?

And then she glimpsed it.

Head shaved down to fine stubble. Two whirring, mechanized eyes—hot coals in a cold inhuman face. A muscular arm with a metallic exoskeleton. The slicer. Oh yes, slicer was the right word, no simple mercenary here. This
thing
was an efficient blend of sinew and purpose and engineering. It was heading in the same direction, gaze roving over the passing insects. She prayed it hadn’t found Artem yet.

She ducked a little deeper into the cocoon, held her breath. The sound of the slicer’s motorized rhythms receded. The stampede settled down into a more ordered march. She was in enemy territory.

She risked a small stretch, releasing the pressure on her arm. She lost track of her bearings, their path a hodgepodge of sharp turns and inclines. Without a decent map—the second colony’s nest still largely uncharted—she was terrified that she might never find her way back. She sought landmarks wherever she could: a skein of minerals in a chamber ceiling; the shape of an arch; an unusual rock formation.

If the nest was anything like the first—a chaotic riddle of thousands of passages and hundreds of chambers—it was probably an exercise in futility. She might walk dozens of kilometers and never find her way out. She repeated a mantra to herself, mouthing the words in the darkness.
Artem will know the way. Artem will know the way.

She tried not to think of the unspoken conditional:
If he’s still alive.

They left her with the rest of the stolen larvae and pupae in a cavernous storage chamber. When she could only hear the background hum of the nest, she heaved herself out of her cocoon. She stripped off her sodden undergarments, lodged the clothes in the pod, and swiftly applied the new colony’s pheromone.

A worker at the chamber entrance rushed over. It seemed confused to find her there, but after probing her it turned its attention to a pupa that was nearing maturity. Lena rapped out a pattern on its head. Ana had taught her the action—a command to retrieve fungal pap for the queen. The worker set off. Lena grabbed her pack and jogged after it, grateful that it paused at the chamber entrance to pick up the right trail. She kept her harpoon gun in hand, ready to fire.

Unlike the original colony, the tunnels teemed with activity. She encountered several castes she hadn’t seen before: a small, frenetic beast that ferried debris away from tunneling sites; a type with a proboscis-like extrusion sensitive to mineral deposits; and a lumbering insect with a long balloon-like sac on its underbelly. The last was one of the fabled kamikaze caste. An insect loaded up with more toxic acids than Genotech’s entire biochemical division. The other nestmates gave it a wide berth. Lena did likewise.

After the worker collected some pap in a nearby garden, it led her off to an almighty chamber. The chatter of several hundred insects and a thousand myriad rumblings filled the cavern, while the smell of moist organics prickled Lena’s nose. In contrast to the dying queen, this gargantuan matriarch positively glowed with vitality. The great curving bulk of its abdomen shone, while its flesh beat with powerful pulses. Lena wondered if it had any inkling its colony had won the battle for Vesta.

“Lena!”

Artem. Thank God.

Lena tracked the sound of his voice to one of the side vestibules, where she found him gesturing her over. She went to embrace him, but he grabbed her hard and pulled her down amongst the giant fungi. “What the hell are you doing here?” he spat, keeping his voice low.

Only trying to save your ungrateful ass.

“How did you find me?” His face lit up. “It’s Ana, right? She’s alive.”

His mind worked fast. Too fast, sometimes. Lena nodded, glad to be the bearer of good news.

Artem’s smile was short-lived, though. “If you’ve come to talk me out of this, forget it. And if you’ve come to give me help, I don’t need it.”

“Like you didn’t need help when the corps came knocking?” It felt good to stand up to him for once. “Look where that got you.”

He blinked, shocked.

“I’m not blaming you.” She took a deep breath. “You don’t have to fix everything on your own, Art.”

He bobbed his head up, looked across the chamber towards the entrance. “Were you followed?”

“Shit, Artem, are you listening to me?” Lena punched a saucer-shaped fungus head. “No, I wasn’t followed.”

“Good, we’ve still got time then.”

“Artem, stop! You got a death wish? For what? Revenge?”

“Revenge? You think this is about revenge?” He gritted his teeth, stared hard at Lena. “Okay, I admit it. I won’t be sorry to put this animal down, but that’s not it. I’m doing this for all those miners who live short, shitty lives, for those guys who if they don’t cop it out in the belt, die of the raddies when they get back home. If she dies,”—he nodded at the monstrous queen—“belt mining stays in the dark ages.”

“No, stupid. If she dies, we lose six months’ work. If
you
die,”—and here, suddenly, a knot of emotion choked her—“we lose everything.”

He examined her face, which she held up, proud. Then he picked up a loose rock, rolled it in his hands, while he stared across the chamber. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

Lena didn’t say anything, just listened to the rhythms of the nest, inhaled the pungent smells of life and death. There was a harsh beauty to this world.

After a while, Artem got to his feet.

They left together.

She thought he was leading her to safety.

She thought their fleetness of foot, their silence, their persistence in keeping to minor passages, were tactics to
avoid
the slicer. Any moment she thought they’d emerge from the riddled, evolutionary-honed chaos of the nest and come across the clean engineered lines of the space-rafts.

She thought wrong.

Artem wasn’t
avoiding
the slicer, he was
tracking
it. The realization came too late to argue the toss—came when they almost ploughed straight into the back of the monster. It was trudging away from them, crossing a large pit-shaped chamber, the space churning with insects. She imagined they would’ve met a swift death if it hadn’t been for the noise and motion of their nestmates.

Artem ducked down, pulling Lena with him so they were hidden by the monstrous bodies. A din of clicks and burrs and taps echoed off the hard igneous walls, but Lena could still hear the whirring, metronomic stride of the slicer.
Zzzt-klank. Zzzt-klank. Zzzt—

It stopped.

She would’ve been furious if she wasn’t so shit scared. She slowed her breathing, held herself still. Her legs trembled, muscles exhausted. Artem motioned for the harpoon gun.
Wait
, she wanted to say, but his face was hard and unyielding. She leaned over to pass him the gun, the reflex to obey as natural as blinking. Still the compliant sister, a small part of her whispered, taunting.
Only as a last resort
, she tried to tell him with her own face set stern. It was almost in his hands, when she had an idea. She drew it back from him, delicately twisted the pack off her back, and retrieved the aerosol from inside.

Artem’s eyes lit up, understanding. The aerosol held the original colony’s scent. If he were forced to fire, dousing the slicer in the scent would give them a fighting chance of escape. She passed him both the gun and the aerosol.

The slicer began moving again—began moving away from them. Lena let her head slump, felt her tension draining. Then she turned to Artem, and watched in horror as he stood up, jammed the aerosol can into the harpoon tip, and took aim—

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The slicer turned full about, unleashing some type of explosive pulse.

Artem fired.

A tunneler took the full brunt of the pulse—its heavy abdomen flying apart with a terrific crack—but they were still thrown like rag dolls by the blast. The spiked harpoon must’ve hit the slicer because around it a storm of fighting broke out. The shot didn’t have the consequences Artem had intended though. The slicer was like the calm eye of a hurricane, impervious to the carnage that whipped about it, blade fields cutting its opponents to pieces in a carnival of false color. This thing—this cold-hearted killer, this inhuman machine of flesh and blood and metal, this monster of rhymes and nightmares—would kill them.

She couldn’t move, could barely breathe for the thought. “Artem,” she screamed.

No reply.

Artem wasn’t going to save the day. Artem was still down, keeping a low profile, licking his wounds—or worse.

Dazed, she watched the strange caste of insect with the pendulous, bulbous sac amble past. Before she lost her nerve, she clambered onto the bloated insect, gripped its antennae like reins. She wheeled it about to face the slicer, struck a simple pattern on the side of its head. As the insect charged, its enormous sac inflated. Ten yards from the target, she leapt off, landed painfully on a rocky outcrop. She got up just in time to see the immense gland burst, throwing searing, toxic fluids all over the slicer and the pit floor and a few of the fleeing insects and, to her horror, her brother.

“Artem, oh Jesus, Artem.”

He hadn’t been cowering. He’d been crawling closer, still fighting whatever the odds.

She stumbled to his side, glanced at the wound that slashed across his torso, neck, and around the side of his face. He was alive, but in so much agony that it was a curse as much as a blessing. Nearby, an acidic whorl rose off the seared tissue and corroded metal of what remained of the slicer. The gurgled scream that had greeted the monster’s demise still echoed in her mind.

“You did good,” Artem croaked, spittle flecking his lips. “You make sure that newsman knows you’re a hero.”

“Shh, shh.”

She used all the elements of her limited med-kit: painkillers, salve strips, gauze pads. Still he cried in pain. She lifted him to lean on her shoulder, felt a sticky warmth against her arm. His pain hurt her deep.

What hurt her more though was his betrayal of her trust.

Their space-raft looped in a high eccentricity—five hundred klicks at furthest, two at closest—orbit around Vesta. Nik had switched on the emergency distress beacon as soon as his and Ana’s space-raft had launched, and help was on its way from Pallas. He’d also had the smarts to inform the United Interplanetary Space Authority that he’d sighted outer system pirates—another remnant of the Fringe Wars—in the vicinity. Military vessels, bound by standard protocol, would be vectoring in to secure the local volume. There’d be no more slicers.

The colony was safe.

They were safe.

Lena set Artem up in a loose mesh-cradle, pumped him full of meds. The weightlessness helped him deal with his blistered skin and corroded flesh, but he still moaned in pain. He’d make it though.

“What will you write?” she asked Nik when their space-rafts had line-of-sight comm as they shot close over Vesta’s plains.

“What I always do.”

Below, Lena spied movement. A flinger stood on its hind legs, antennae twitching at the stars. It circled about, drew back its muscular tail. A whiplike blur later, a glittering speck raced into the heavens. “What’s that?”