The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (67 page)

The sound of one pair of hands, clapping.

“I’m proud of you,” says the wrong master.

I fix my bow tie and smile a dog’s smile, a cold snake coiling in my belly. The god-smell comes and tells me that I should throw myself onto the floor, wag my tail, bare my throat to the divine being standing before me.

But I don’t.

“Hello, Nipper,” the wrong master says.

I clamp down the low growl rising in my throat and turn it into words. “What did you do?”

“We suspended them. Back doors in the hardware. Digital rights management.”

His mahogany face is still smooth: he does not look a day older, wearing a dark suit with a VecTech tie pin. But his eyes are tired. “Really, I’m impressed. You covered your tracks admirably. We thought you were furries. Until I realized —”

A distant thunder interrupts him.

“I promised him I’d look after you. That’s why you are still alive. You don’t have to do this. You don’t owe him anything. Look at yourselves: who would have thought you could come this far? Are you going to throw that all away because of some atavistic sense of animal loyalty? Not that you have a choice, of course. The plan didn’t work.”

The cat lets out a steam pipe hiss.

“You misunderstand,” I say. “The concert was just a diversion.”

The cat moves like a black-and-yellow flame. Its claws flash, and the wrong master’s head comes off. I whimper at the aroma of blood polluting the god-smell. The cat licks its lips. There is a crimson stain on its white shirt.

The zeppelin shakes, pseudomatter armour sparkling. The dark sky around the
Marquis
is full of fire-breathing beetles. We rush past the human statues in the ballroom and into the laboratory.

The cat does the dirty work, granting me a brief escape into virtual abstraction. I don’t know how the master did it, years ago, broke VecTech’s copy protection watermarks. I can’t do the same, no matter how much the Small Animal taught me. So I have to cheat, recover the marked parts from somewhere else.

The wrong master’s brain.

The part of me that was born on the Small Animal’s island takes over and fits the two patterns together, like pieces of a puzzle. They fit, and for a brief moment, the master’s voice is in my mind, for real this time.

The cat is waiting, already in its clawed battlesuit, and I don my own. The
Marquis of Carabas
is dying around us. To send the master on his way, we have to disengage the armour.

The cat miaows faintly and hands me something red. An old plastic ball with toothmarks, smelling of the sun and the sea, with a few grains of sand rattling inside.

“Thanks,” I say. The cat says nothing, just opens a door into the zeppelin’s skin. I whisper a command, and the master is underway in a neutrino stream, shooting up towards an island in a blue sea. Where the gods and big dogs live forever.

We dive through the door together, down into the light and flame.

THE POLITICAL PRISONER

Charles Coleman Finlay

Charles Coleman Finlay is a frequent contributor to
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, and has also sold to such markets as
Beyond Ceaseless Skies
and
Noctem Aeternus
. His short fiction was collected in
Wild Things
, and he has also published the three novels (so far) of the Traitor to the Crown series, including
A Spell for the Revolution
,
The Demon Redcoat
, and, most recently,
The Patriot Witch
. He’s also written the stand-alone novel
The Prodigal Troll
. Finlay lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio.

In the intense and harrowing story that follows, he takes us to a far planet to tell the story of a political officer caught up in a civil war partially of his own devising – and one that he’ll be very, very lucky to manage to survive.

F
OR EVERYONE
’
S CONVENIENCE
, the execution grounds on Jesusalem stood next to the cemetery. The cemetery was the biggest public garden on the terraformed planet: families sacrificed part of their soil ration to plant perennials and blossoming evergreens, bits of garnish like little sprigs of parsley on a vast platter of rocks. The sight of the garden usually made Maxim Nikomedes feel welcome when he returned to the planet, even if he only glimpsed the flowers for a moment from the window of his limousine.

This return was different. An Adarean was scheduled for execution, and the mob that gathered to watch it blocked Max’s view. And for this visit, Max was riding in an armored car for prisoners not a limousine.

Max peered out the tinted window, but was met with his own reflection: he was a small man in his forties, with an acne-scarred face pale from years in the space service as a political officer. There were loose threads on his uniform where the rank had been torn off. He raised his hands to scratch his nose – the window flashed with the silver gleam of the handcuffs.

He looked past himself.

The crowd, dressed in their drab Sabbath clothes, shoved and shouted, surging toward the execution altar. They were pushed back by the soldiers from Justice, spilling into the road and blocking the car. Atop the altar, the Minister of Executions poured baptismal water over the Adarean’s bald green head. The crowd shook and roared in frenzy.

“You want to stay and watch them stretch the pig-man’s neck?” the guard asked Max.

Max had been ignoring the guard seated opposite him. The seasoned political officer turned his head with cold calm and lifted his handcuffed wrists, as if to say he had bigger worries. Soon enough, he might make an official visit to the execution altar. He would, at least, have a good view of the flowers in the graveyard.

Looking back out the window, he said, “What does it matter to me if an Adarean lives or dies?”

The guard craned his head around to talk to the driver.

“See that’s what I don’t understand,” he said, pointing the barrel of his gun out the window. “They’re like aliens. Adareans gave up their souls when they quit being human, so what’s the point in baptizing this pig-man?”

Max frowned while the guard and driver argued the merits of pre-execution conversion.
Pig-man
. It was odd how a man’s work took on a life of its own. Max remembered creating that propaganda term years ago, during the war with Adares. The people on his planet thought they were God’s Select, emigrating to a purer place where they could live a holy life. They fell into conflict with the emigrants to Adares, a population that claimed to be the next step, deliberate and scientific, in human evolution. To stir people up to fight a technologically superior foe, Max created the slogan
There is no evolution, only abomination
. Then he dug up some old earth-history on using pig-valves in heart transplants – the first step toward godlessness, changing man into something other than God’s own image. Max connected
that
to the genetically-modified Adareans, who stole genes promiscuously from any species, and called them pig-men. It was adolescent name-calling, improvized in the service of a war long since over. Who cared if the Adareans’ chlorophyll-laden skin and hair indicated more plant genes than pig? The religious population of Jesusalem, thinking swine unclean, had embraced the insult.

That was many years, and a different identity, ago. Max was vain enough to feel proud, and old enough to be ashamed. He loved his home, and had always served it any way he could.

Outside, the hangman fixed the steel cable around the Adarean’s neck. Tradition called for hemp rope, but there was so little natural fiber on the planet, despite decades of terraforming, that everything but their clothes was made from metal or rock. The minister began preaching the repentance sermon while the powerfully-built hangman forced the Adarean to kneel and bend his head. The crowd settled down to listen, and the driver nudged the car forward again.

Max continued to stare out the window. They hovered through dusty, unpaved streets, leaving a cloud of grit behind them, until they arrived at a big, concrete open-ended U. The Department of Political Education building.

The guard hopped out, weapon at his side, and held open the door. “It must feel good to be back, huh?”

Max looked up to see if the guard really was that stupid. His simple, frank face bespoke genuine belief. Max scooted across the seat and lifted his handcuffed wrists for an answer.

The guard waved his hand vaguely. “Nobody believes that charge of treason!”

Max winced at the word. In the old days, even a suspicion of treason meant immediate death. He walked quickly as if to escape the charge, crossing the courtyard to the entrance. More guards, these blissfully silent in their charcoal-coloured uniforms, opened the door. The lobby inside was an oasis of tan benches planted around a small blue pool of carpet.

A pale green Adarean leapt up from one of the seats and blocked Max’s way. “Please,” he said. “I must see Director Mallove while there’s still time to stop the execution.”

Depending on the length of the sermon – they could run for a few minutes or a few hours – it might already be too late. “Can’t really help you,” Max said, lifting his handcuffs in answer for a third time.

The guard steered Max around the Adarean. When the door to the stairwell creaked shut behind them, the guard grumbled, “Weedheads.”

“I’ll never get used to grass hair,” Max said. He doubted the Adareans converted much solar energy from their hair, despite all their talk of developing “multiple calorie streams”.

His legs ached in the full gravity as he climbed the stairs. He’d visited planets with elevators before: the older he got, the more he believed in the possible holiness of technology. When he went to Earth, he visited a museum about the Amish, a group of people who stubbornly lived in the past while technology swept others past them. The tour guide thought he’d find the religious similarities interesting. Max had begun to have sympathy for the galactics who looked at his planet as an oddity just like the Amish.

Too bad his people had never been pacifists.

On the top floor, the guard ushered Max past the admin – owl-eyed Anatoly, whose expressionless gaze followed Max across the room – to the office of the Director of Political Education, Willem Mallove. Max’s boss.

One of Max’s bosses. But that was complicated, and involved his old identity. Max filed that away in “things too dangerous to think about right now.”

Mallove sat posed, hand on chin, staring out the window. He had an actor’s face, handsome and charismatic with just the right hint of imperfection – a small scar that forced his upper lip into a minor sneer. His face had gotten him into vids when he studied off-planet on Adares, years ago, before the revolution. Rumour had it that his insincerity – the Adareans were enormously sensitive to nuances of emotion – had driven him out of acting. The spacious office was decorated with fabric wall-coverings, some rare wooden chairs, and the famous stained-glass desk with its images of the Blessed Martyrs – a ministry heirloom from before the revolution.

“You may leave us, Vasily,” Mallove told the earnest-but-stupid guard. His hand stayed posed on his chin.

“But, sir —”

“That will be all.”

Great – whatever happened next, Mallove didn’t want witnesses. The door clicked shut behind Max. He had an impulse to stand at parade rest, hands behind him – like all of the government bureaucracy, Education was part of the military – but the cuffs made that impossible.

“Sir, may I have these off?” Max lifted his bound wrists.

Mallove’s chair creaked as he spun around. Instead of answering the question, he pulled open a drawer, removed a gun, and aimed it at Max’s head.

“Someone in my Department is disloyal,” Mallove said. “What I need to know, Max, is it you?”

Max stared past the barrel into Mallove’s eyes. “Sir, if you want me to be disloyal, I will be.”

If it was going to be theatrics, Max could play his role.

They stared at each other until Mallove, with exaggerated casualness, placed the gun, still charged, still aimed at Max, on the desk and leaned back in his chair. “A big change is coming, Max. Before it arrives, I have to root out every traitor —”

Cold fear prickled the back of Max’s neck. “Is Drozhin dead?”

Mallove paused, frowning in irritation at the interruption. “I know we all think of General Drozhin as the man who eats knives just so he can shit on people to kill them. But even he is just another mortal man.”

“That’s why I asked. Is he dead?”

Mallove folded his hands together and looked away. “Not yet, not quite.”

Max held his breath. Dmitri Drozhin was Max’s other boss. Drozhin, the last great patriarch of the revolution, Director of the Department of Intelligence, in charge of the spies, the secret police, and the assassins. Max had been all three for Drozhin, including his deep undercover spy on Mallove. Max’s last mission in space, aboard the spy ship
Gethsemane
, had gone badly when his orders from Drozhin conflicted with his orders from Mallove.

And now here he was a prisoner. Very likely, he had finally been caught as a double agent. Maybe Meredith, his wife, from long ago and that other identity, would use their soil ration to plant flowers for him in the cemetery.

“Too bad,” he said to the news about Drozhin.

Mallove leaned forward, resting his hand on the gun. “What happened aboard the
Gethsemane
? To Lukinov, I mean.”

The implication was that he knew something.
Answer right, or I’ll still shoot you
. For once, Max didn’t think Mallove was acting. What could he say safely? What did Mallove know and what did he only guess? Max jerked his hands apart – the metal cuffs dug into his wrists as the chain snapped taut. He was thinking about this wrong: if he wanted to survive, the question was not what did Mallove know, but what did he want to hear?

“It would seem,” Max said, reciting the official version, “that Lukinov tried to sabotage the ship’s nuclear reactor, that he ended up killing himself when he botched it.”

Mallove sketched a whirligig in the air with his free hand, signifying his opinion of the official version. “Yes, but what
really
happened?”

What really happened is that Max caught Lukinov spying for Mallove. Max garrotted him and sabotaged the ship so he could return home to report to his secret boss. He paused for a second, trying to guess Mallove’s fear. “I don’t think Lukinov was selling us out to the Adareans, no matter what Intelligence says,” he said. “More likely it had something to do with his gambling habit.”

Mallove’s scarred lip twitched – a tell.

The gambling habit. That was probably how Mallove blackmailed Lukinov into spying for him. Now Mallove was afraid of being caught.

Max decided to push his luck. “I witnessed Lukinov gambling with the captain,” he said. “The sabotage was intended to cover up some secret, only it went wrong. I’m sure I was arrested on trumped-up charges in order to keep me from investigating the captain. If we find out who Lukinov had been gambling with at home before —”

Mallove interrupted. “That doesn’t matter. So his body’s still floating out there in space?”

“Yes. He was ejected during a hull breach in the radiation clean-up.”

“Well, you can rest easy. I’ve insisted that we recover Lukinov’s body. If anything’s been hidden, we’ll find it.”

Like the ligature marks Max left on Lukinov’s neck? That would wreck his story. “Excellent news,” he said.

Metal runners squeaked as Mallove pulled open another stained glass drawer and retrieved a crystal bottle of vodka with two tumblers. He filled one and took a sip. “How long have you been with Political Education, Max?”

Longer than you
, Max thought. He’d been there at Drozhin’s side when the old man decided to form Political Education. Together, they created a new identity for Max when he joined it as a mole. “Since the beginning. It was my first posting when I joined the service.”