Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

That is a decent Is Like, but I am far too distressed to add it to any list. I must recover from this. I have to work.

This is an access tunnel between Reactors D and C. Reactor B was taken off-line roughly two hours ago. My target is very likely somewhere near Reactor C, though Array security and normal dog-and-handler teams have not located it. They have cleared the area to allow Carol and me to work uninterrupted. The tunnel is several kilometers long and will eventually flank a steam vent from Reactor C.

Carol drops her hand to my side again. The touch calms me only slightly. “Check here,” she says, gesturing to a dark crevice running beneath the joint of two support beams that I have stepped past in my distracted state.

It’s embarrassing to have missed something, but I am also grateful that Carol caught it. Doing a good job is my highest priority. I check the spot Carol indicates and resolve to miss nothing else.

I recognize Carol’s pattern. She’s searching with me now the way she searched with Mack. This inefficient, clumsy labor is how Carol enjoys working, the thing she lost when I joined her team.

The thought makes me hesitate. Carol stops, too, watching me carefully. She is watching for signals because this search is like a search with a dog that isn’t EI. It’s the kind of search that made Carol love SAR.

I step forward, careful not to give any false signs that I am picking up a scent. Instead, I am tracking an idea.

Maybe I should not recover.

Maybe I should continue to need Carol’s assistance on this search.

Already she’s behaving differently toward me. Perhaps she’s feeling the connection that she has missed. She’s thinking that she and I can do SAR together on Anders’ team until my body fails me and I am forced into retirement by my physical limitations, like a real SAR dog.

I could make Carol not want to retire.

Needing her assistance on this search might not be enough. It may be the beginnings of a connection, but how would I maintain that in our regular work? I can’t affect this slow and ineffective manner forever. Still, since I do need her help at the moment, it is worth using the situation for my benefit.

Even with these thoughts agitating my mind, I stop automatically as my nose whips my body to the left. Thoughts stop. Visual goes on low priority since it is rendered useless by the random movement of drones up walls, drones crawling along the crease of the wall and floor, drones dipping from overhead.

I reach with my hearing, tuning out the deep hum of the MFA, though I can already tell this track is at least several minutes old and its maker likely out of earshot. But most of my thought is with my nose, sucking air, sorting smell.

Interest, I ping.

“I can tell,” Carol says. She sounds pleased. Out of habit she taps her radio to report in, then pockets it when she remembers where we are.

I begin to work the scent back to its source.

Rodent, the nasty uric shredded-fiber feces smell of rat, and something subtler as well, not exactly matching the profile I was given, but close, not a common rat, certainly not a rat living down here in the cement and oil and cleaning supply smells, but a domestic rat from bedding and laboratory and eating well, but there’s something else and I can’t quite—strange, but then I have never tracked a bodydrone so I don’t

Fades and descends, the air isn’t still down here, heat and minute ventilation currents tugging through time and space in feathery curlicues along a branching corridor where it’s quieter and into a four-way crossing where the smell is not lost but

Interjection of small sour electrical fire, quick and here and grading off

Below the intersection a vent shaft billowing upward, target scent burst into an impossible array of

Not impossible but

Carol is behind me, out of the way of the scent trail, she is actually quite good at staying out of the way of

Rat

Slightly greater density of time-sodden molecules wafting back along the edge of the grating gathered like tufts of shed hair at the edges of

Along the access tunnel and the trail grows dimmer and dimmer, but I am sure this is the right tunnel, the arrow was large and heavy, I work the air hard, I am sure this is the

“Sera,” Carol says, but I am hunting the air, and I don’t acknowledge so she says again, “Sera.”

Another thirty feet down the tunnel and still no scent, but I am sure it will be here somewhere, it will be here, the path was so clear

“Let’s check the other turnoffs. We can come back if they’re dry. Sera.”

She actually takes the handle on my harness, and at first I stiffen and resist, which I have never done. Carol has never pulled me off a trail. I am confused why she would not trust my nose when I am the search dog and she is the handler, and I am the one who says where the trail goes, and she is the one who interprets. My heart starts beating hard. I walk with her, but it is hard not to pull back to where I was.

We enter the center tunnel, to the right of the path I was on. Fifteen feet in I pick up the rat.

Carol was right.

Interest, I ping and hurry down the track.

“Yes,” Carol says, following behind me.

Minutes later the trail fades again, lost somehow in the backdraft of time and movement, or perhaps hidden by a clever track-layer. Are bodydrones smart in that way? I suppose they are as smart as whoever is running the drone.

I backtrack and pad down a turnoff, but it is a dead end. I work the trail’s end, attempting to find the lost thread.

A drone skims my head. I flinch and press my belly to the floor.

“Shit,” Carol says. “Their proximity settings must be disabled. That thing nearly got you.”

I had forgotten the drones while I worked. I pant. The trail is gone, lost somewhere in this narrow hallway. The grating under my paws vibrates with this place’s pervasive rumble. I wish that endless sound drowned out some of the drone-sounds, but I can hear them.

I catch myself whining again.

I move before Carol feels the need to comfort me. I do not want her new sympathy for me to turn into pity.

We continue down the tunnel, passing additional junctions. I make cursory checks of the intersecting tunnels. Time moves strangely. I know from the schematics I was given that we are nearing Reactor C. I have lost the trail. I am not doing the best job possible. I need to find a way to make Carol connect with me. I don’t want to retire. I want to do SAR, like I was trained at ESAC. Beetle-sized drones swarm at points on the walls and, as we approach, scatter like my thoughts.

Carol’s radio makes a sound. “Ah,” she says. “Anders? Do you copy?” There is radio voice that I can’t discern. Carol reads our exact location off her screen. “Sera had something, but lost it,” she says. “Copy. We’ve had the same experience. Thanks.” She speaks to me. “Array security are herding some drones out of the C-through-E corridors for us.” She turns her attention back to the radio. I scan down the hallway, watching beetle-drones scuttle into the cracks between the floor grating and the wall. There is a scent of the faintest memory of electrical fire, a wire short far off. It’s out of place. I turn my nose toward it.

The ground’s vibration builds suddenly and then it is a bellow, the tunnel shaking with it. Lights judder in their fixtures and down the hallway the last of the little drones chatters across the floor, legless in the tumult. My vision dances. Carol ducks and crouches toward me, looking up. The temperature in the passageway shoots up twenty degrees, hot suddenly where it had been only warm. It is muggy, thick, and humid. The grating beneath us rattles in its housing.