Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

Double shit—she said, “What’s wrong?” but knew.

He said, “It’s starting.”

She shook her head. “It can’t. It’s too soon.”

“It’s time .”

“Shit!”—a third time, and it was counterproductive and she knew it.

Boss Gui’s face was twisted in pain. “It’s coming!”

And suddenly she picked up the North American’s node.

“Sh—”

They were going to Nong Khai, from there to cross into Laos. Boss Gui wanted to expand the business, and business was booming in a place called Vang Vieng, a tawdry little mini-Macau at the foothills of the mountains, four hours from Vientiane—a place of carefully regulated lawlessness, of cheap opium and cheaper synths, of games-worlds cowboys and body hackers, of tentacle-junkies and doll emporiums and government taxes that Boss Gui wanted a part of.

A large part of.

There were families runningVangVieng but he was the Old Man, olfala bigfala bos blong ol man tod blong Kunming , and the Chinese had anyway bought up most of Laos back in the early privatisation days. He would cut deals with some, terminate the others, and slice himself a piece of the Vang Vieng dumpling—that was the plan.

She had advised him against it. She told him it was too soon to travel. She asked him to wait.

He wouldn’t.

She sort of had an inkling as to the why….

She was picking up the kid’s node right next to the driver’s.

Which was not good at all.

The driver’s, first: an incomprehensible jumble of emotion, in turns horny, soothing, driven, paused—the driver and the slug as one, their minds pulsating in union—hunger and lust made it go faster. Snatches of Beethoven—for some reason it calmed down the slugs. The driver not aware of the extra passenger—yet.

The kid wasn’t really a kid….

His node blocked to her—black impenetrable walls, an emptiness not even returning pings. He was alone in his own head—which must have been terrifying.

She had to get to the front of the train. She had to get on the slug. And Boss Gui was convulsing.

“Why are you just standing there, girl?”

She tried to keep her voice even. “I found the assassin. He is planning to kill the slug—destroy the entire train, and you with it.”

Boss Gui took that calmly. “Clever,” he said, then grimaced. His naked belly glistened, a dark shape moving beneath the membrane of skin. The Toads looked helpless, standing there. She flashed them a grin. “I’ll be right back,” she said. Then she left, hearing Boss Gui’s howl of rage behind her.

Running down the length of the train—through the dining car, past toilets already beginning to smell, past farang backpackers and Lao families and Thais returning to Udon from the capital—past babies and backpacks and bemused conductors in too-tight trousers that showed their butts off to advantage—warm wind came in through the open windows and she blocked out the public nodes broadcasting news in Thai and Belt Pidgin. The end of the train was a dead end, a smooth wall with no windows. She kicked it—again and again, augmented muscles expending too much energy, but it began to break, rusting old metal giving way, and fading sunlight seeped through.

How had the kid gotten through? He must have had gecko-hands—climbed out the window and crawled his way along the side of the train, below the window line, all the way to the slug….

She reached out—sensed the driver’s confusion as another entity somehow wormed its way into the two-way mahout/slug interface. Stop!

Confusion from the slug. The signals rushing through, too fast—horny/hungry/faster—faster!

He was going to crash the train. The driver: Who is this? You can’t—

She kept kicking. The wall gave way—behind it was the slug’s wide back, the driver sitting cross-legged on the beast, the intruder behind it, a hand on the driver’s shoulder—the hand grew roots that penetrated the woman and the beast both.

Hostile mahout interface initiated .

The driver was fighting it, and losing badly. No one hijacked slug trains.

On her private channel—Boss Gui, screaming. “Get back here!”

“Get your own fucking midwife!”

But she could sense his pain, confusion. How many times had he gone through it in the past? she wondered.

The hijacker had kept the driver alive. Had to—the whole thing had to look like an accident, the driver’s body found in the wreckage, unmolested—no doubt he planned to jump before impact.

Could he?

She crept behind him. Neither hijacker nor driver paid her any attention. And what could she do? Killing the hijacker would kill the interface—he was already in too deep.

Unless…

From Boss Gui, far away—“Hurry!”

Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if Darwin’s Choice had stayed behind. It was possible for kathoey to give birth, these days… could an Other foster a child? Would he want to?

Or he could have flesh-ridden a host… she would have kept the male parts just for that. If he’d asked her.

But he never did.

The hijacker must have had an emergency eject. She had to find the trigger for it—

Wind was rushing at her, too fast. It was hard to maintain balance on the soft spongy flesh of the slug. It was accelerating—too fast.

She was behind the hijacker now—she reached out, put her hand on the back of his head. A black box…

She punched through with a data-spike while her other hand—

Darkness. The smell of rotting leaves. The smell of bodies in motion, sweat—hunger, a terrible hunger—

“Who the fuck are you? How did you get in here?”

Panic was good. She sent through images—her standing behind him, the data-spike in his head—and what else she was doing.

“You can’t do that….”

She had pushed a second data-spike through his clothes and through the sphincter muscle, into the bowels themselves—detached a highly illegal replica-tor probe inside.

She felt the slug slow down, just a fraction. The hijacker trying to understand—

She said, “I am being nice.”

She was.

He had a choice.

The probe inside him was already working. It was the equivalent of graffiti artists at work. It replicated a message, over every cell, every blood vessel, every muscle and tendon. It would be impossible to scrub—you’d need to reach a good clinic and by then it’d be too late.

The message said, I killed the slug train to Nong Khai .

It was marking him. He wasn’t harmed. She couldn’t risk killing him, killing the interface. But this way, whether he got off the train or not, he was a dead man.

“I’ll count to five.”

He let go at three.

Light, blinding her. The wind rushed past—the driver sat as motionless as ever, but the train had slowed down. The hijacker was gone—she followed him back through the hole in the wall.

He was lying on his bunk, still reading his book. He wasn’t listening to music any more. Their eyes met. She grinned. He turned his gaze. She had given him a choice and she’d abide by it—but if the Toads happened to find out, she didn’t rate his chances….

Well, the next stop was in an hour. She’d give him an extra half-hour after that—a running start.

She went back to the boss.

“It’s coming!” Boss Gui said. She knelt beside him. His belly-sac was moving, writhing, the thing inside trying to get out. She helped—a fingernail slicing through the membrane, gently. A sour smell—she reached in where it was sticky, gooey, warm—found two small arms, a belly—pulled.

“You sorted out the problem?”

“Keep breathing.”

“Yes?”