Rich Horton - The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

It was in the last months of the struggle, while I was over the border in Free Alaska commandeering armaments, that I first felt the gears slipping. Four degrees coldly Fahrenheit outside. With a wind that felt to be removing skin slice by micrometric slice. Fortunately I was inside, and alone, when it happened, having just entered a safe house there. I remembered walking in and stepping towards the bathroom. Now I was on the floor, with urine puddled about me. How long? Five, six minutes by my timer. Vision blurred—a consequence of the fall? Taste of metal, copper, in the back of my throat. And I couldn’t move.

That was far too familiar, a replay of week after week in rehab, frantically sending messages to legs, arms and hands that refused to comply, Abraham urging me on.

I doubt the immobility lasted more than a minute, but hours of panic got packed into it. I began to remember other stutters and misfires, each gone unremarked at the time. Now they took on weight, bore down.

“What are you thinking?” Fran will ask not long after, on our visit to Merritt Li’s final foothold.

“An old sea diver’s creed,” I tell her, unsure myself of the connection, thinking of the fighters we took down there, of Merritt Li going down, of my own fall and my jacked-up system, “the one thing a diver forgets at great peril: If it moves, it wants to kill you.”

Then I tell her what happened at the safe house, what it means. Simple physics, really. Put more current in the wire, it burns out faster.

“When did you know?”

“From the first, at some level—wordlessly. One sleepless morning in Toledo I got up, tapped in, and pulled the records. I wasn’t supposed to be able to do that. They had little idea what I could do.”

I, the soft machinery that was me, was failing. Sparks failed to catch, messages misfired, data was corrupted.

I had, I supposed, a few months left.

We never knew how Merritt Li came to be there.

His and my courses were set so as to bring the two of us together, close enough to rendezvous anyway, every three hours. When he didn’t show at the old waterworks, I went looking. We both carried ancient low-frequency ’sponders we thought wouldn’t be tapped. Guess we were wrong. They knew I was coming.

He had two of them back against a wall of stacked, partly crushed vehicles, tanklike cruisers from the last century. Two others, halfway across a bare dirt clearing hard as steel, had turned away to intercept me. Where numbers five and six came from I have no idea, they dropped out of nowhere like Dorothy.

A couple of them had weapons we’d never seen, the kind that, if you go looking, don’t exist. Focused toxin’s my guess. Or some fry-brain electronic equivalent. I saw nothing, no muzzle flash, no recoil, no exhaust, when one of those locked on Li lifted his handgun, but I saw the result. Li went down convulsing, limbs thrashing independently as though they belonged to different bodies.

Three of the four coming for me fell almost at the same time, one down, two down, three, without sound or obvious reason. Once I’d dealt with the fourth and looked again, the two by Li were on the ground and still. The whole sequence in just under sixteen seconds.

Movement atop a battered steel shed to the right took my attention, as it was meant to do.

Never show yourself against the sky.

Unless you’re purposefully announcing yourself, of course.

She came down in three stages, over the side and catch with the left, swing to the right, drop and turn. Faultless as ever. No sign of what weapon she’d used. I recalled her late interest in antiquities, blowpipes and the like. One violinist wants shiny new and perfectly functional, another’s always looking for old and funky, an instrument that makes you work to get the music out.

Her hair was cropped short and had tight curls of gray like steel filings in it. The row of geometrical earrings, circle, square, triangle, cross, was gone from the left ear. Otherwise not much had changed. Musculature stood out in the glisten of sweat on her skin. Yellow T-shirt, green pants.

“Interesting choice of clothing for someone doing her best to be invisible.”

“Figured if it came to it and I stood dead still, they might take me for a vegetable.”

Blood had pooled in Li’s face, turning it purple, then burst in a scatter of darker splotches across it. Limbs were rigid. No respiration, no pulse. A pandemic of that: No pulse or respiration in the ones she’d put down either.

“Here we go leaving a mess behind us,” I said.

“Ah, well.”

“With a bigger mess waiting ahead.”

“Ah, well again.” She snatched the mystery weapons from those by Li. “We hit the floor with whoever shows up on our dance card.” Then looked around. “No eyes out here. No trackers.”

“Chosen for it. So they’re not government.”

“Who can say?” At the time we believed them to be a single team, didn’t understand there were three factions at work, a tangle of forces.

Fran had dropped to a squat and was breaking down one of the weapons. “Indications are, they think of themselves as freedom fighters. Then again, who doesn’t? Freedom from taxes, bureaucracy, using the wrong texts at school? Or maybe they just want to tear the house down. Maybe we should have asked them.”

She stood and brought over the gutted weapon. “Ever seen a power source like that?” A bright blue marble with no apparent harness or connection, spinning gyroscopically in a chamber not much larger than itself. “Have to wonder what else they have.”

“Six less footmen, for a start.”

“There’ll be backup. We should be missing.”

“Missing, we’re good at.”

“Have been till now.”

She retrieved the second weapon and we started away. Darkness had begun unfurling from the ground and the air smelled of rain. Insects called to one another from trees and high grass, invisibly.

“When I was a child,” Fran said, “no more than four or five, there was a cricket that sang outside my window every night. I’d go to bed, lie there in the dark and listen to it sing, night after night. Then one night it didn’t. I knew it was dead, whatever dead was, and I cried.”

Fran as a child, crying, I could scarcely picture. “Why were these six, and the others, on you?”

She pulled the power source from the first weapon, discarded its carcass. “They weren’t.”

She’d been working a private job much like that of mine back before the team in dark gray cars came for me, and stumbled onto something that wasn’t right. She finished the job and took to side roads, kicking over traces till she realized that both job and not-rightness were come-ons. Hand-tied lures, she said, designed to bring her out. So out she came. They were stalking her. She was stalking them, coming in and out of sight. Getting a fix on them. Who they might be, how many.

“They were moving around in teams, randomly, and about where you’d expect, train stations, transfer points. They’d see me, hang back, never close. Which was how I knew it went deeper. So I stepped it up.”

“And they stepped in.”

“Maybe they got impatient. Maybe like me they decided to push to see what pushed back. And I sent a message up the line to you—which is what they anticipated.”

By this time we were moving towards the central city but on back streets long forsaken, block after block of abandoned warehouses and storage facilities from a past in which people were driven to accumulate so much that it spilled over. We’d spotted a few stragglers of the kind that, once seen, quickly vanish. Tree dwellers brought to earth, I think of them, on the ground but never quite of this world.

A razor-cold January morning. Snow falling past the windows—silently, but you can’t help looking that way again and again, listening. How could something take over the world to such degree and make no sound? The room’s warmth moved in slow tides toward the windows, tugging at our skin as it passed by. Even the machines were silent as I did my best to become one with them.