Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

“Godspeed, Richard,” she whispered, and, turning away, walked to her desk, seated herself, and tapped her terminal on.

Twenty-five years earlier:

Approximately 1300 hours

Wednesday 15 July, 2037

Near Pretoria, South Africa

Fire is a bad way to die.

Even as I jerk back against my restraints, consciousness returning with the caress of flames on my face, I know I am dreaming. It’s not always the same dream, but I always know I am dreaming. And in the dream, I always know I am going to die.

I suck in air to scream, choke on acrid smoke and heat. The sweet thick taste of blood clots my mouth; something sharp twists inside of me with every breath. Coughing hurts more than anything survivable should have a right to. The panel clamors for attention, but I can’t feel my left hand or move it to slap the cutoff. Jammed crash webbing binds me tightly into my chair.

I breathe shallowly against the smoke, against the pain in my chest, retching as I fumble for my knife with blood-slick fingers. The hilt of the thing skitters away from my hand. As I scrabble after it, seething agony like a runnel of lava bathes my left arm. I think I liked it better when I couldn’t feel.

The world goes dim around the edges, and the flames gutter and kiss me again.

The pain reminds me of a son-of-a-bitch I used to know, a piece of street trash named Chrétien. I never thought I could like a kiss less than I did his. I guess I know better now.

I try to turn my head to get a glimpse of what’s going on with my left arm, and that’s when I realize that I can’t see out of my left eye and I’m dying. Oh God, I’m going to burn up right here in the hot, tight coffin of my cockpit.

If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take… Hah. Right. The hell you say. Pain is God’s way of telling you it’s not time to quit kicking yet.

Whimpering, I stretch away from the flames, reaching out toward the impossibly distant hilt of my knife. I’m listening for movement or voices from the back of my A.P.C. Nothing. I hope to hell they’re all dead back there, or far enough gone that they won’t wake up to burn.

Something tears in my left arm as I lean against the pain, clinging to it as my vision darkens again and I hear myself sob, coughing, terrified.

Please, Jesus, I don’t want to burn alive. Well, we don’t always get what we want, Jenny Casey.

And then I hear voices, and the complaint of warped metal, and a rush of light and air that makes the flames gutter and then flare. They reach for me again, and I draw a single excruciating breath and scream with all my little might. A voice from outside, Québecois accent like the voice of an angel. “Mon Dieu! The driver is alive!”

And then scrabbling, hands tugging at my restraints, my would-be savior groaning as the flames kiss him as well. I catch a glimpse of fair skin, captain’s insignia, Canadian Army special forces desert uniform, the burns and blisters on his hands. Another voice from outside pleads with the captain to get out and leave me.

He squeezes my right shoulder, and for a second his gaze meets mine. Blue eyes burn into my memory, the eyes of an angel in a stained-glass window. “I won’t let you burn to death, Corporal.” And then he slides back across the ragged metal and out of my little patch of Hell.

The voices come from outside, from Heaven. That’s part of Hell: knowing that you can look up at any time and see salvation. “His goddamned arm is pinned. I can reach him, but I can’t get him out.” That explains why I can’t move it. I am suddenly, curiously calm. They’re arguing with him, and he cuts them off. “I wouldn’t leave a dog to die that way. Clive, you got slugs in that thing? Good, give it here.”

I hear him before I see him, thud of his boots, scrape of the shotgun as he pushes it ahead. What the hell. At least this will be quick.

I turn my head to look at him. He has a boot knife in his hand as well as the twelve gauge, and I just don’t understand why he’s cutting the straps of my crash harness. He cuts me, too, and I jerk against the straps, against my left arm. “Dammit, Corporal, just sit still, will you?” I force myself to hold quiet, remembering my sidearm and worrying that the heat will make the cartridges cook off before I remember how soon I’m going to be dead.

His voice hauls me back when I start to drift. “Corporal. What’s your name, eh?”

Spider, I start to say, but I want to die with my right name on someone’s lips, not my rank, not my handle. “Casey. Jenny Casey.”

I feel him hesitate, see his searching glance at my face. He hadn’t known I was a girl. I must look pretty bad. “Gabe Castaign,” he tells me.

Gabriel. Mon ange. It’s one of those funny, fixed-time, incongruous thoughts you get when you know you’re going to die. And then the knife moves, parting the last restraint, and he drops it to bring the gun up and brace it. I look at the barrel, fascinated, unable to look away. “Sorry about this, Casey.”

“S’aright,” I answer. “’Preciate it.”

And then the gun roars and I feel the jarring shudder of the impact, and there is only blackness, blessed blackness…

1930 hours, Monday 4 September, 2062

Hartford, Connecticut

Sigourney Street

Abandoned North End

… and the buzz of the door com hauling me out of cobwebby darkness and into the blinking light. My hand’s on my automatic, the safety thumbed off— “If I catch any of you using his finger, I will break it.” Master Corporal, I believe you would have —before I’m fully awake and the reality of the situation comes back to me.

My clothes are wet, my neck is killing me, and my damn glass has broken on the floor, littering it with pale blue shards and a wet stain that soaks into the cement. The book I was reading is still sliding from my lap, the arrogant, aristocratic silhouette of a long-dead movie director embossed on the spine. I catch it before it hits the floor, check the page number, and toss it into a crate with the others I haven’t gotten around to yet. They are all paperback, ancient, and crumbling. They — the universal them —don’t print much light reading anymore.

Holstering the sidearm, I creak upright and limp to the sink after grabbing my jacket off the chair I fell asleep in. I’ll be paying for that lapse of judgment for a while.

The buzzer again, the echo made harsh by the cement-lined, metal-cluttered cavern I call home. I raise my eyes to my monitors. Activity on only one — the side door, a single figure in a familiar dark coat. Wet hair straggles into his eyes; he stares up at the optic and gives me the finger. Male, Caucasian, under six feet, slender but not skinny. The monitor is black and white, but I happen to know that he has brown hair and hazel eyes and a propensity for loud ties.

I lean over the sink and thumb on the com with my left hand. “Mitch.”

“Maker. You gonna let me in?”

“Got a warrant?”

“Hah. It’s raining. Buzz me in or I’ll go get one.”

He’s kidding. I think. “Got probable cause?”

“You don’t wanna know.” There is a certain grimness in his voice that cuts through the banter. I stump over to the door and open it. He drifts in with a smell of sea salt and Caribbean foliage — the alien breath of tropical storm Quigley, which left its fury over the Outer Banks two days before. Seems like we get farther into the alphabet every year.

Turning my back and trusting Mitch to lock up, I think, I have to fix the buzzer one of these days.