The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (86 page)

Every day the sun got bigger and bigger. I checked out a cube from the ship’s library and did some reading – even got interested in Universal History, which used to cause me terminal boredom in school. System H2223 had first been identified as a possible residence for humans by the ancients, meaning those fairly recent ancients who lived only a few centuries back, during the time of the Warring States.

All the wars delayed space exploration, but on the other hand the stimulus of fighting brought tremendous technical advances. Especially working out the nature of dark energy – natural antigravity – and finding in it at last the secret for exceeding the speed of light. So when we finally started star-ward we went better equipped and also had better theoretical understanding of our complicated multiverse. All of which was kind of neat to know, even though it told me absolutely nothing of practical value.

Otherwise I went on with life, doing P T with my guys, checking weapons, and attending formal dinners with the cadre, where Marie sat at the head of the table and I still sat at the foot, because the Table of Ranks had no slot for a commander’s lover. Drinking with Cos in the evenings, listening to him tell me that whatever was threatening Paradiso was drawing closer to it by the day, only he couldn’t tell me what it was, because it was “dark.”

“Think of it as a stealth object,” he suggested over his third beer one night.

“It is an object then?”

“I don’t know what it is. It’s dark.”

“Like an alien ship?”

“Might be. If the Zoo’s inside a nuke-steel egg, I couldn’t pick up their thoughts, you know. The object would be, yeah, dark.”

One night I woke up from a nightmare about a pit full of monsters with human faces – woke with a shuddering cry that brought Marie groggily back to consciousness.

“What’s wrong?” she mumbled.

“The thing that’s threatening Paradiso,” I said, wiping sweat from my face. “Could it be us? I mean, we’re coming to kidnap them and. . .”

“Mon cher, stop brooding. It’s quite pointless. We’ve got our orders and we’re going to obey them, that’s all. There’s no turning back.”

She was right, so I went back to sleep, and a few days later we entered orbit around the world that poor old Innocente had dreamed of turning into a new Eden.

Stepping out the first time on a planet of another star is something few humans have ever done. Or ever will, I guess. The memory of Paradiso remains today one of my life’s unforgettable firsts.

We debarked on an undulating plain covered with long coarse grass, or anyway something slim-leaved that looked like grass. The sun was about 45 degrees above the horizon, looking like the red eye of some cosmic beast that was eyeing us for lunch. The redness tinged and transmuted everything, giving the sky a purplish aura, turning blue-green leaves black, giving a perpetual sundown look to everything from pools of water to reflections in our facemasks.

We weren’t on breathing apparatus, by the way – no need for that. The air had too much oxygen if anything, and inhaling was like downing a flute of champagne. On the other hand, our combat boots suddenly seemed to be made of lead. The ancients had been able to spot Paradiso with their orbital telescopes because it was big – a hard-shelled Earth-type planet, of course, not a gas giant – but big for its kind. Suddenly I weighed something like a 110 kilos instead of my Earthside 87. As we lined up, all of us were moving like divers in weighted suits, and Morales and I agreed on ten minutes rest every hour until we adapted. I ordered the autopilots running the shuttles to close them up and use the lasers on anything that looked threatening, and it was time to start.

Aleph moved first, O’Rourke leading, me at the rear to keep everybody closed up. Morales’s Beth platoon fell in behind us. We topped a low ridge and saw the town founded by Papa Innocente. We didn’t know its name, so we called it O-1, Objective One. It was a pretty place, the small massive houses square-built of white stone with red or brown tile roofs, facing a little bay backed by low ridges that gradually grew higher until they turned into distant violet mountains. No tall buildings in the town, but one broad and deep structure with a shallow white dome, just faintly pink in the light. Through my helmet I heard Morales say, “Behold the temple,” and he turned out to be right.

I wasn’t sure of Cos’s physical ability to keep up, so I’d left him on the
Zhukov.
Nevertheless, I wanted to keep contact with him. We were streaming images from our helmet-mounted cameras, and pretty soon I heard his unmistakable voice say, “Kohn, I’m not getting a reading from the town. It’s all quiet. I don’t sense the colonists at all, either there or anywhere else.”

“How do you explain that?”

“I don’t.”

“You could sense them from space, and now you can’t even sense them from orbit?”

“I said I can’t explain it.”

We approached O-1 with leaden legs and labored breathing. We tipped back our masks, and despite the open furnace of the sun, the air felt mild, almost cool on our overheated faces. Little black animals with too many legs – hexapod rabbits? – scuttled through the grass at our approach. An animal somewhat like a hyena (heavy up front, small at the rear) loped out of a patch of blackish-greenish woods to the right, made a wide circle, and disappeared again. It ran with a rocking-horse motion, front-back, front-back. A flying creature with wide triangular wings dipped and hovered and flapped away clumsily. Its body looked tiny in proportion to its enormous wingspan.

In the distance low clouds had formed, red above, purple in the middle, blue-black underneath. Apparently a summer shower was on the way. To confirm my guess, lightning flickered – reddish lightning.

We entered the town. Unnerving silence. There’s a special emptiness to places where people ought to be, but aren’t. Signals from the ship told us which way to go, sending Morales up one crooked street, me up another. My platoon split, squads one and two to the right, three and four to the left. Hug the walls, guys. I found my own reactions interesting – nerves tight as catgut in a string orchestra, yet no feeling of fear. Just a very tense alertness. My senses seemed to have sharpened. Another small hexapod of some sort went scuttling around a corner, and I followed the sound of its many claws long after it had disappeared.

The buildings engraved themselves on my memory – every stone, every shadow. The only sounds between the growls of thunder were our boots scuffing and our equipment clinking and clanking. Streets didn’t meet at right angles – they and the intersecting alleys ran every which way, like braided channels in desert arroyos. The only shop signs were painted on the walls, like in Pompeii – Fud mart, Vin so ekselent, 20 booties in hous. The last one an ad for a brothel or a shoe store? No idea. The language had been changing in the mouths of colonists, just as it always does.

Marie spoke in my ear, then Cos. They agreed: still no sign of anybody in the town except us. Yet when a rooftile fell off and broke on the stones, everyone, including me, jumped. We emerged into an irregular open space surrounded by shops, all of them empty. Flesch Mart – butcher shop or slave market? By the look of it, butcher shop. A computer’s atonal voice spoke in my ear: “Lieutenant Kohn, right twenty degrees, enter broad street, see temple twenty-four o’clock.”

Nice to have guidance from the sky. And yes, there was the temple with its broad shallow dome, suddenly etched by a flicker of lightning against the backdrop of gunmetal clouds. We circled the plaza, sliding along walls as before. O’Rourke sent one guy to search every building as we passed. Chu was doing the same with his platoon. A private yelled in a high, strained voice from a second-floor window, “Nuttin’ ain’t here, Sarge!” and O’Rourke replied with a burst of profanity that broke the tension and left everybody chuckling.

We met under the portico of the temple. Morales and I panted up the steps and high-fived each other. The temple was round, with an outer and an inner circle of columns, and cool wind from the approaching storm whistled through it. The inside was a sort of Greek or Roman amphitheater, with stone bleachers meant to seat maybe two thousand people funneling down to a round central stage lit by a skylight in the dome. Embedded in a solid transplast column about six meters high and visible from every seat in the building hung a gleaming chrome model of DNA that seemed to seize and concentrate every bit of available light.

I felt awed and out of place, like an unbeliever gazing at the Ka’aba. One of the dumber peons asked loudly, “What is that *#@! thing?” But the others spoke in hushed voices, as people tend to do in temples, including those dedicated to gods they don’t believe in.

Absent, besides all the people, was any sign of danger. Through my helmet-mounted omni I summoned the shuttles, ordering them to move into the plaza just outside and lock up as before. Then we began settling down for the night. We had plenty of room to stretch out, because there were only seventy-two of us in all that vast space. People started turning on pocket glow lights and breaking out cold rations. Everybody carried food for three days, and the sergeants started circulating to make sure that nobody was fool enough to eat everything at the first meal. Morales and I stood by a column, watching the twinkle of little lights in the vast and steadily darkening space. The DNA model caught and reflected them all, and I guess a poet could have made something out of the scene. But we had no poets present, at least none I knew about.

“Before we start noshing,” Jesús said quietly, “there’s something I want to show you. We spotted it crossing the plaza. It’s not far.”

The shuttles were arriving as we set out. They settled down on the stones with all the usual racket and neatly parked themselves with airfoils almost touching. A little light rain began to patter and strengthened as we made our way to a low, windowless building with an industrial look to it. Next door stood another windowless building with the words Hir Ly Gretlie Luvved Ded chiseled on the lintel over the door.

“We can skip the first one,” said Morales. “It’s just a crematorium. We’ll need our lights in the mausoleum. There’s artificial lighting inside, but nothing’s turned on.”

We took out our pocket torches and gave them a twist and stepped inside. Our little cold puddles of light showed walls honeycombed with small square niches. Piled neatly on the floor were ceramic tiles that once had sealed the openings, and every one had the familiar Ladderite logo baked into it, plus a name in the colonists’ odd, awkward spelling system.

“God,” I whispered. “They even took away their dead. Were they that afraid of us?”

“I don’t see how they could’ve known we were coming. . . . Oh wait, their seer. They’ve got their own Cos. So they could’ve known.”

There was something wrong with that explanation, but offhand I couldn’t think what it was. We walked on, raising hollow echoes. Corridors branched off to either side, and all the walls without exception were empty honeycombs. Then thunder boomed and echoed down the aisles, and Morales and I turned and headed for the entrance.

Outside, the rain was heavier and the wind colder and the darkness darker. We broke into a trot and came up under the roof of the temple, gasping for air. Just in time, too – the rain had started coming down in three-meter cubes. We settled on the second tier, smelling like wet dogs, and started eating concentrated whatnot from our mealpacks. A private from Beth Platoon came by carrying six or seven canteens and asked if we’d like to have ours filled, too. “There’s lots of water,” he pointed out needlessly. We handed over our canteens and when the guy returned, swallowed gulps of cold stony-tasting water to wash down our rations. A simple meal, yeah, but it tasted like a feast.

“Pity the poor Ladderites,” said Morales. “Here we are scarfing up rations in their nice dry temple, and they’re out there in the wild wet woods. They must be eating cold food because if they tried to cook anything,
Zhukov’s
scanners would detect the heat and give us directions and we’d go out tomorrow and take them away at gunpoint.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “you have to destroy a civilization to save a civilization.”

After that bit of rather commonplace sarcasm, we posted guards and appointed Chu the Charge of Quarters for the night. Morales said buenas noches and rejoined his people. Somebody began singing – not the obscene ditty I’d have expected, but a sentimental tune called “Goodbye, Young Soldier.” The temple’s perfect acoustics carried every word to my ears, despite the storm raging outside, and I fell asleep listening to a strangely pure and haunting girl’s voice, like a reed instrument, asking, “What’ll I do/ When my guy/Is far beyond the sky?”

I never heard what she decided. I was exhausted, and fell asleep in about two minutes. And there I stayed until my helmet started squealing at me.

I vaguely remember rolling over, uttering an incoherent curse or two. Found my helmet, pulled it closer, and muttered the magic word, “Say.”

“Robair,” said Marie’s voice, though we’d agreed always to speak formally anyplace we might be overheard. That and her tone alerted me that something was very, very wrong and the sleep emptied out of my head with magical speed.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You have sixteen minutes to clear your command from that town and get as far away as you can.”

“We’re being attacked?”

“You’re about to be hit by a chunk of flying rubbish roughly twice the size of Mount Vesuvius. It must have entered Paradiso’s atmosphere on the far side of the planet, and it’s headed for an impact zone just offshore. Janesco tried to get it with a missile as it crossed the terminator, but missed. He hit it with the particle beam, but there wasn’t enough energy to deflect it. So move. Now.”