Элинор Арнасон - The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirtieth Annual Collection

Yet nothing happened.

The next few moments of running lasted for ages, and then Mercer escaped the open ground, slipping back between tall buildings again. He was surprised. Disappointed, in a fashion. And then as he thought about the situation, he became terrified.

Was he going to have to run back and forth like a madman, begging to be noticed?

Or worse, could his enemies have anticipated his tactics?

The invaders weren’t here. He thought it and then believed it: Somehow they had slipped past all the watching, friendly eyes that guarded Mercer’s forest—the fanhearts and dewlanes and such. They had lured him here, and now they would steal his home.

He hoped Dream had healed enough to run away … using her legs and paranoia to keep her safe …

Thinking of her, Mercer slowed his pace just a touch.

Crack .

The first round missed, skipping off the pavement ahead of him, bouncing and detonating with a hot red flash. His momentum carried him through the explosion. Then he jumped to the left for no reason but to jump, to ruin the next shot. But the marksman guessed right and put an explosive charge into his chest, and the blast slammed against the hyperfiber armor and every rib beneath.

Mercer felt his feet lifting.

Then he found himself on his back, but perfectly conscious.

He rolled and stood and ran blindly toward the nearest door—a dozen tattler skins woven together and painted with yellow lettering that told all who passed the significance of this building. He was barely through that opening when two explosions went off together, flinging him onto the little Not stairs that led up into the nesting house.

Mercer picked himself up and climbed.

At the top of the stairs, a single guardian remained at his post—a sturdy, mature Not armed with authority and habit as well as a sapphire-tipped spear. The creature barked the traditional warning at the intruder, and Mercer replied by declaring his identity and demanding help. But the building was being peppered with grenades and kinetic rounds. The Not heard nothing that convinced him to quit, and he must have believed that this was one of the invaders. He lifted his spear and drove the tip downward, aiming for a gap in the unbreakable armor. Mercer had no choice but shove the Not aside, and when the creature stubbornly tried to find his feet again, Mercer used a short sword to finish the useless fight.

The nursery was built to never burn, which was helpful.

And it was tall, which gave him a sniper’s power.

But there were several doors and endless windows intended for ventilation, and that meant that no one fighter could keep the army at bay for long.

The gunfire fell off, vanished.

Mercer slipped into a long narrow room where the windows faced south, admitting the afternoon sun into a realm where unborn Nots lay inside their transparent cocoons—the first exoskins wrapped tight around half-defined bodies that were hung from the stone ceiling, each of those unfinished faces habitually following the sliding of the day’s light.

A pair of the cocoons had been shot.

Mercer measured the wounds and guessed the likely angles of fire, and he crawled between two windows and shucked off his pack and his rifle and pulled a dulled piece of mirror out of a pocket, using the dark reflection to study both of the facing buildings without letting the sunlight offer up his position.

Someone launched one kinetic round.

On the lane below, a single Not screamed and died.

Mercer made himself do nothing. Nothing. He would let the monsters sit and wonder if he’d managed to get away from them somehow. Make them crazy, at least for a little while. The next few minutes were spent unfolding and then studying a piece of high-technology—the highly detailed map of the city, including not only what the Nots had built in the last ten generations, but also every chamber and abandoned sewer and paved-over cave that no living creature besides him was aware of.

Nots were gathering in the lane below. Their long feet moved in a rough unison, a desperate muttering building. Dozens of them had crawled out of their hiding places. There could be a hundred of them, even more. Then he heard prayers to vanished gods, and thankfully, prayers intended for him. The Nots had learned about this fight at the nursery, and they were coming to rescue their children. Which wouldn’t have happened if the enemy had struck him in the open, in the Stonehenge. That would have been better for everybody, Mercer told himself.

“But you can’t live forever,” he muttered to himself. “Not wasting your head thinking about what-ifs, you can’t…”

The snipers opened up on the converging Nots.

Prayers turned to wailing screams. Across the lane, two windows sprouted guns, and Mercer lowered his mirror and lifted his rifle and turned on the laser sight, and then he came around smoothly, kneeling low, waiting for the first human face to fill the eyepiece before punching three fast shots between the eyes.

He pulled back, grabbed his gear and rolled and then ran hard.

Grenades dove through three windows, spinning and then exploding, sticky gobs of napalm splashing across walls and the helpless cocoons.

Mercer dropped beside another window and pulled out a single bomb. One of treasures that he stole from the original colony was the chemical knowledge of his species, and with the resources and ample time, he had managed to concoct some wonderfully potent species of pyrotechnics.

A hundred Nots were dying below him.

Again he wheeled and aimed, punishing the next human face with a single round of lead and gold and silver, and then he set the fuse and flung the bomb at the open window, his aim not quite perfect but the gray aluminum casing slipping across the sill and bouncing inside maybe two seconds before the blast incinerated flesh and bone, half of the apartment building shaken to pieces and collapsing onto the street below.

A fresh handful of humans joined the fight, spraying explosives through the nursery windows.

But Mercer had slipped away. He was charging down the back stairs, pack and rifle held high in one hand and maybe two dozen Nots coming up into the nursery from the flanking side of the building. They could smell burnt flesh, pure death. A peace that had lasted longer than their lives had been lost, and every old instinct forced them to act crazy and stupid, rushing up those same stairs even when they couldn’t do anything that would matter.

The human monster shoved his way into them.

His plan was find the latrine at the building’s low end and open the floor with a shaped charge and work his way up along the sewer line. In principle, he could reach the farmland without being seen again. But the smarter plan would be to pop up periodically, hitting his enemies with a few shot and blasts, making sure that their focus wouldn’t fade.

He wanted to make a very specific retreat.

That was the goal.

But Mercer didn’t expect to round one corner in the narrow hallway and find a human monster ready for him.

He threw his pack at the figure.

She had a long rifle meant to fire little bombs, and she managed to avoid firing until the pack had fallen at her feet.

Too late, he threw his rifle to his shoulder.

Her first shot struck the hyperfiber plate over his belly, bouncing off and detonating at his feet.

Mercer was flung back, his boots torn apart, feet burnt to the bone.

But then he had his shot to take, and he even managed to fix the laser on that point on her neck where half a dozen solid rounds would probably break the spine and cut the head clean off.

What made him pause was a mystery.

Maybe it was the woman’s age, which seemed very young, or how terrified she looked to him just then. Or maybe he was startled, noticing the swollen belly that made her nanofiber armor next to useless. Or it was her gun, which was the same type that Dream had seen in his armory—the model carried by that young couple who had tried so hard to kill her just last winter.