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

In an impoverished world, human bone could be a precious resource for any woman expecting to give birth.

Was her pregnancy to blame?

Unless there was no hesitation at all. Maybe the first blast hurt Mercer worse than he had realized, and he wouldn’t have gotten off any kind of return fire before she shot again, blindly but with extraordinary luck.

The man was flat on his back, on the hard stone floor, and the bomb passed between his belly plate and chest plate.

His hyperfiber contained the blast, making it worse.

Guts were shredded and his heart quit and those scorched lungs opened up to the air, and he howled and dragged himself backward, and she fired one last time, aiming carefully and missing by quite a lot.

Mercer shot her once in the forehead.

The bullet knocked her off her feet, giving his body time to rouse several anaerobic metabolisms. Then he dragged himself close enough to use the diamond sword, hacking at that long limp neck until it was cut through, and he set two of his big bombs on long timers and left them under his pack, and he took only his rifle and sword and a pair of grenades, crawling to the latrine door, flinging in one grenade and then another, battering a wide hole in the floor before he pulled his near-corpse to the edge.

He clung there, smelling the rancid chemistry of an alien sewer.

Mercer asked himself if life could be worth this kind of misery.

Then he rolled and fell into the gaping hole, his impact cushioned by water and the stinking gelatinous filth. And because the building above him was about to collapse, he forced his battered body to stand, and he convinced his exhausted legs to march upstream, his guts held in place under his hand while his thoughts, such as they were, revolved around the woman that was still waiting for him.

She began to work even before her feet quit tingling. Following Mercer’s precise instructions, she slipped into the armory and found everything that she needed and filled the same huge pack that the man had used when he came to rescue her, all but dead on the shoreline. Then she stomped her toes a few times, just to make certain that her legs had recovered. Shouldering the pack took three attempts, and the hike proved far harder than she had imagined. But there was still daylight when she reached the hilltop, and she dropped the pack against the magna-wood tree with its camouflaged blind. The next few hundred breaths were spent studying the slope to the south. The big fires down by the sea were beginning to die back. She wasn’t certain about the timetable, which meant that she might already be late. But Mercer had been explicit: The trap would work or it wouldn’t work; they would never get a second chance.

The incendiaries were not particularly large, but he had promised that they had a hard kick. And the fuses could have been any brown cord, which was why she invested a few moments cutting an extra length of fuse and wrapping it around the magna-wood trunk before setting one end on fire.

In two hurried breaths, the entire fuse turned to sparks and ash.

As she had hoped, the water-gorged bladders protected the old wood. No premature fire had been started. She fixed her first bomb to the trunk’s base, on the south side, and tied in the brown cord and laid it back to where she would sit unseen. Then she grabbed several bombs and all of the fuses and worked her way down the slope, selecting only in the largest and the weakest trees.

Mercer had gone past the barricade to put up a good brief fight. He wanted to do just enough to get every human’s attention and rage, and then he would lead that army on a long, painful retreat, bringing them here during the night, hopefully leading them through this particular drainage.

Her job was to mine this slope and then hide, waiting for that perfect moment when she would drop the entire forest on their heads.

The little bombs would spray fire, and if enough of the trees’ watery bladders were punctured, and if enough deep wood was splintered and exposed to the atmosphere, then what would begin as an avalanche would turn into an enormous, cleansing bonfire.

With each bomb set and each cord laid back up on top of the hill, she found herself more and more believing in Mercer’s plan.

About when she expected to hear gunfire, the muted explosions began to drift from below. She paused occasionally, listening carefully, trying to piece together an accurate picture of the war. But then came a final big thud followed by silence, and she returned to her work as the sun set and night rose up from the dried streambed and then fell from a sky full of close bright and astonishingly colorful stars.

Her hands knew what to do in the dark, and she soon discovered that every bomb was set and there was no more fuse to cut and splice and lay out.

Satisfied, she returned to the hilltop and the hidden place where thirty cords lay together, waiting for any excuse to burn.

She listened for another battle, preferably from some place nearer.

None came.

But she didn’t let herself worry. Not yet. Having fixed her future to Mercer, she found herself willing to accept his skills and experience, and his confidence, and what she considered to be his bottomless well of luck.

The man was coming, she told herself.

As time passed, the Gold Moon rose over the eastern sea, washing the hillside with its slippery wet light. Maybe in the next breath or two, Mercer’s armored body would appear. She pictured him shoving his way up along the drainage, defiant and unbowed, firing back a few times just to make his pursuers hold their pace, and then pausing at a predetermined point and signaling his survival to her with that bright red laser.

She had to believe that he was coming, didn’t she?

But then at some point, without warning, her mother interrupted her unheard-of devotion.

“Run,” the dead woman advised.

In the softest whisper, the daughter asked, “What?”

“That man is lost,” declared the ghost. The phantom. The memory. “You know where you left your pack. So run to it now and push on, and don’t bother looking back.”

She said, “No.”

Then after a long listen to the silence, she admitted, “He should have been here by now.”

“Lost,” the phantom repeated.

Perhaps so.

“And if those monsters find you, then you’re lost as well.”

She told herself to remain in her hiding place. To give Mercer time, to give him every chance. But her body was suddenly possessed with energy, nervous but ready, and the best she could do was make herself stand slowly, stepping nowhere, watching the valley below and discovering a numbing despair that had been secretly brewing for a long while.

From the opposite slope came the hard quick voice of an ollo-lol.

To give her mind some job, she began to count her quick breaths.

“Remember what I told you, daughter?” the phantom continued. “Before my death, you were kneeling over me, tending to me. But the dying have few needs, except to be heard.”

“I listened,” she reported, interrupting her count.

“What a beauty, life is. I told you. And I promised you that small moments in every day would contain some lovely good thing to soothe the eye or sweeten the nose or linger inside the happy ear.”

“Quiet,” she begged.

But the phantom refused to obey. Quietly but with force, it reminded the grown daughter, “I promised you one treasure for your day.”

She realized that she was weeping, and she had been weeping for a long while now.

“What was the treasure, daughter?”

“No.”

“I was dying—”

“You weren’t dead yet,” she muttered, probably too loudly.

“I was lost,” the phantom said.