Чарли Андерс - Nebula Awards Showcase 2018

I slammed my open hand down on the vibrating control box. Only the abort button should still be active, but actually hitting what I aimed for proved difficult with the violent shaking. Another sudden lurch made me bite my tongue again, but this time everything stopped abruptly. The gee pressure, the brain-addling vibration, the brilliant white rocket exhaust were all gone, leaving me in quiet darkness.

My tongue and head ached. I couldn’t focus my thoughts but knew I had to hurry. I’d killed the missile early—how early, I wasn’t sure—and I would be coming at Veronica’s ship too fast. I unbuckled the harness and triggered a program Huizhu had loaded into my suit. The tiny thrusters adjusted my orientation, then moved me forty meters “up” away from the missile.

I could finally see Veronica’s ship. It was a faint grey spot surrounded by blinking lights and coming right at me.

“Suit?”

“Yes?” Its voice sounded eerily like Huizhu’s.

“Locate approaching spacecraft.”

“Done.”

“Keep me in its approach path, but use all thrusters on full power to make sure I stay ahead of it.”

“Understood.”

The thrusters fired and jerked me backward. The ship had already grown to fill half of my view. The speed differential displayed on my visor HUD decreased much too slowly.

“I cannot accelerate enough to stay ahead of the ship,” my suit said. “Impact in two seconds.”

I pulled the grapple gun from my belt and made sure the line was attached to my harness. When the ship filled my visor completely, I fired. The hook shot away to my right, trailing a carbon-fiber line not much thicker than thread. It looked weak, but I knew that thread would cut me in half before it would break.

A heartbeat later, Veronica’s ship and I met at roughly ninety-eight kilometers per hour. Pain shot through my arms and chest as I bounced and skidded across the ship’s skin until my grapple line caught and yanked me to a sudden and agonizing halt.

I hovered on the edge of consciousness, but luckily the fiery pain each breath ignited in my chest kept me awake. Broken ribs?

“Suit? Status,” I croaked.

The suit reported four broken ribs and a probable concussion. All things considered, I’d been lucky.

If Veronica and the baby were still alive, every second might make a difference, so I didn’t have time to nurse my wounds. Since her ship wasn’t under thrust, the long crawl around to the hatch was in null gee and therefore much less painful than it could have been.

The airlock functioned properly and showed full cabin pressurization, so I went inside. With a gasp and a groan, I removed my helmet and gloves. I heard only the hum of equipment and hiss of moving air. At first I could smell nothing but the burnt aroma of space radiating from my suit, then I thought I detected the faint scents of urine and blood. My heart sank as I advanced into the control room. Veronica was still strapped into the pilot’s chair.

Using the missile had enabled me to reach them only twenty-six hours after her call for help, but it still hadn’t been fast enough. An amalgamation of fluids—mostly blood—had collected in an undulating, gelatinous clump around Veronica’s legs. Small tear globules still clung to her dead eyes and her arms floated lazily in front of her in a sleepwalker pose, but I didn’t see the baby anywhere. I pulled myself around her chair several times, finding an open crate of baby formula and the scattered, drifting remains of a first-aid kit, but there was still no sign of Ernesto’s body. Just as I was ready to start searching the rest of the ship, I heard a small whimper above me.

Partially wrapped in a blanket discolored with yellow and brown spots, the baby was floating against the cabin’s ceiling near one of the return vents. Airflow must have eventually carried him there once he’d slipped from his mother’s arms. He blinked at me, then offered a pitiful wail.

INTERCEPT: 0 DAYS, +1 HOUR, +19 MINUTES

I touched Veronica’s cold cheek. “Goodbye, Veronica. I’m sorry I never answered your calls.”

Holding a cleaned-up and fed Ernesto securely in the crook of one arm, I winced at the pain in my ribs as I sealed the body bag with the other hand, then turned toward the camera. It was on and had been on and transmitting the entire time.

“Hello, my name is Jager Jin and this is Ernesto Perez.” My swollen tongue and throbbing ribs made speech difficult, but I continued. “We are on an elliptical orbit that will bring us back to the Mountain in a little over ten months. I was ordered by my employer, the Jīnshān Corporation, to kill Veronica Perez before she could give birth. When it became obvious I wasn’t going to follow those orders, they cut me out of the command loop on my own ship and sent the instructions remotely to the ship’s AI. If you track and recover my ship before Jīnshān operatives destroy it, the whole thing is recorded there.”

I laid a hand on the body bag. “You all witnessed Veronica’s death—caused at least tangentially by Jīnshān —but they only achieved part of what they intended. Her child is alive and I will do everything in my power to keep him that way.”

I was just about to turn off the camera when Ernesto squirmed and started crying. I didn’t stop him. He had plenty to cry about. His short life had already been difficult and would only get worse, but listening to that cry I knew he would be fine. Like his mother, he had a strong and powerful voice.

Seanan McGuire lives and works in Washington State, where she shares her somewhat idiosyncratic home with her collection of books, creepy dolls, and enormous cats. When not writing—which is fairly rare—she enjoys travel, and can regularly be found any place where there are cornfields, haunted houses, or frogs. A Campbell, Hugo, and Nebula Award–winning author, Seanan’s first book ( Rosemary and Rue, the beginning of the October Daye series) was released in 2009, with more than twenty books across various series following since. You can visit her at www.seananmcguire.com.

The girls were never present for the entrance interviews. Only their parents, their guardians, their confused siblings, who wanted so much to help them but didn’t know how. It would have been too hard on the prospective students to sit there and listen as the people they loved most in all the world—all this world, at least—dismissed their memories as delusions, their experiences as fantasy, their lives as some intractable illness.

What’s more, it would have damaged their ability to trust the school if their first experience of Eleanor had been seeing her dressed in respectable grays and lilacs, with her hair styled just so, like the kind of stolid elderly aunt who only really existed in children’s stories. The real Eleanor was nothing like that. Hearing the things she said would have only made it worse, as she sat there and explained, so earnestly, so sincerely, that her school would help to cure the things that had gone wrong in the minds of all those little lost lambs. She could take the broken children and make them whole again.

She was lying, of course, but there was no way for her potential students to know that. So she demanded that she meet with their legal guardians in private, and she sold her bill of goods with the focus and skill of a born con artist. If those guardians had ever come together to compare notes, they would have found that her script was well-practiced and honed like the weapon that it was.