The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (91 page)

Marilyn walked over to her Bronco and took her pistol from her day bag and stuck it in the waistband of her shorts and walked back to Jet, who was bristling and barking. The Range Rover had stopped at the bottom of the short steep slope. A blond, burly man stood in the angle of the open door on the far side, staring up at Marilyn as a second man climbed out. He had a deep tan and black hair shaved close to his skull, was dressed in black jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt. Black tattoos on his forearms, black sunglasses that heliographed twin discs of sunlight at Marilyn as he said, “How are you doing, Marilyn? It’s been a while.”

It was one of the men who’d worked for the security firm back in Port of Plenty. Frank something. Frank Parker.

“I’m wondering why you came all the way out here to find me, Frank. I’m also wondering how you found me.”

Marilyn was pretty sure that this wasn’t anything do with the Albanians, who liked to do their own dirty work, but she was also pretty sure that Frank Parker and his blond bodybuilder friend were some kind of trouble, and a smooth coolness was filling her up inside, something she hadn’t felt for a long time.

“I guess you don’t feel like coming down here, so I’ll come up,” Frank Parker said, and began to pick his way up the stony slope, ignoring Marilyn’s sharp request to stay where he was, going down on one knee when his black town shoes slipped on the frangible dirt and pushing up and coming on, stopping only when Jet started to bark at him, knuckling sweat from his forehead and saying, “Feisty fellow, ain’t he?”

“He’s a pretty good judge of people.” Marilyn told Jet to sit, said to Frank Parker, “I’m waiting to hear what you want. Maybe you can start by telling me what you’re doing out here. It’s a long way from Port of Plenty.”

“I wouldn’t mind a drink of water,” Frank Parker said, and took a couple of steps forward. Jet rose up and started barking again and the man held up his hands, palms out, in a gesture of surrender.

“I’m sure you have a bottle or two in that expensive car of yours,” Marilyn said. She was watching him and trying to watch his friend down by the Range Rover at the same time. Her Glock was a hard flat weight against the small of her back and she stepped hard on the impulse to show it to Frank Parker. If she did, it would take things up to the next level and there’d be no going back.

“I bring greetings from another old friend,” Frank Parker said. “Tom Archibold. He’d like to invite you over for a chat.”

“What’s Tom doing out here?”

Like Frank Parker, Tom Archibold had been working for the same security firm that had been employing Marilyn when her client had been blown to bloody confetti. She was trying her best to keep the surprise she felt from her face, but Frank Parker must have seen something of it because his smile broadened into a grin. “Tom told me to tell you that he has a little job for you.”

“You can thank Tom for me, and tell him that I already have a job.”

“He needs your advice on something is all.”

“If he wants my advice, he’s welcome to visit me when I get back to town tomorrow. My office is right in the middle of our little commercial strip. You can’t miss it. It has a sign with “Town Constable” printed on it hung right above the door.”

“He kind of needs you on site,” Frank Parker said.

“I don’t think so.”

“We really would like for you to come right away. It’s about your friend Ana Datlovskaya,” Frank Parker said, and took a step towards Marilyn.

Jet barked and lunged forward, and Frank Parker reached behind himself and jerked a pistol from his belt, Marilyn shouting no!, and shot Jet in the chest. Jet dropped flat and slid down the slope, and Frank Parker turned to Marilyn, his eyes widening behind his sunglasses when she put her Glock on him and told him to put his weapon down.

“Do it right now!” she said, and shot him in the leg when he didn’t.

He fell on his ass and dropped his pistol. Marilyn stepped forwards and kicked it away, saw movement at the bottom of the slope, the man behind the Range Rover raising a machine pistol, and threw herself flat as a short burst walked along the edge of the ridge, whining off stones, smacking into dirt, kicking up dust. Marilyn raised up and took aim, and the man ducked out of sight as the round spanged off the window post beside him. She got off two more shots, aiming for the tyres, but the damned things must have been puncture-proof. The Range Rover started with a roar and reversed at speed, its open door flapping. Marilyn braced and took aim and put a shot through the tinted windshield, and the Range Rover spun in a handbrake turn and took off into the playa, leaving only dust in the air.

Frank Parker was holding his thigh with both hands, blood seeping through laced fingers, face pale and tight with pain. “You fucking shot me, you bitch.”

“You shot my dog. But don’t think that makes us even.”

Marilyn picked up his pistol and told him to roll over on his stomach, patted him down and found a gravity knife in an ankle scabbard. She told him to stay absolutely still if he didn’t want to get shot again, and crabbed down the slope to where Jet lay, dusty and limp and dead. She carried him up the slope to her Bronco, set him in the well under the shotgun seat. Frank Parker had sat up again and was clutching his thigh and making threats. She told him to shut up and pulled the q-phone from its holster under the dashboard, but although she tried three times she could raise only a faint conversation between two people who seemed to be shouting at each other in a howling gale in a language she didn’t recognise. She tried the shortwave radio, too, but every channel was full of static; that wasn’t unexpected, as radio reception ran from patchy to non-existent in the City of the Dead, but she’d never before had a problem with the q-phone. A little miracle that fused alien and human technology, it was worth more than the Bronco and shared a bound pair of electrons with the hub station in Joe’s Corner, and should have given her an instant connection even if she was standing on other side of the universe.

Well, she didn’t know why the damn thing had decided to throw a glitch, but she was a long way from town, and Ana was in trouble. She found her handcuffs in the glove compartment and walked over to Frank Parker and tossed them into his lap and told him to put them on. As he fumbled with them, she asked him why Tom wanted to talk with her, and what it had to do with Ana Datlovskaya.

Frank Parker told her to go fuck herself, closed his eyes when Marilyn cocked her pistol.

“I can knock off plenty of pieces of you before you die,” she said. She was angry and out of patience, and anxious too. “Or maybe give you to the hive rats down there. I bet they’re still pissed off after you drove straight through their garden.”

After a moment, Frank Parker said, “We’ve taken over Ana Datlovskaya’s claim.”

“Taken it over? What does that mean? Have you bastards killed her?”

“No. No, no. It’s not like that.”

“She’s alive.”

“We think so.”

“She is or she isn’t.”

“We think she’s alive,” Frank Parker said. “She got out into the damn garden and ducked into a hole. We haven’t been able to get near it.”

“Because of the hive rats. Did anyone get eaten?”

“One of us got bitten.”

“Tom wants me to persuade her to come out.”

The man nodded sullenly. “Word is, you’re her good friend. Tom thought you could talk some sense into her.”

Marilyn thought about this. “How did you know where to find me? This is my day off, I driving around the desert, no one in town knows where I am. Yet you drive straight towards me. Were you following me?”

“You have a q-phone. We have a magic gizmo that tracks them.”

“Does this magic gizmo also stop q-phones working?”

“I don’t know. Really, I don’t,” Frank Parker said. “I was told where to find you, and there you were. Look, the old woman is sitting on something valuable. You can have a share of it. All you have to do is talk to her, persuade her to give herself up. Is that so hard?”

“We walk away afterwards, me and Ana.”

“Sure. We’ll even cut you in for a share. Why not? Help me up, we can drive straight there — ”

“What is it you want from her? Those figurines?”

“It’s something to do with those rats. Don’t ask me what. I wasn’t privy to the deal Tom made.”

“I bet. Think you can walk over to my pickup?”

“You shot me in the fucking leg. You’re going to have to give me a hand.”

“Wrong answer,” Marilyn said.

Frank Parker flinched and started to raise his cuffed hands, but she was quicker, and rapped him smartly above his ear with the grip of her pistol and laid him flat.

He started to come round when she dumped him in the loadbed of the Bronco, feebly trying to resist as she tied off the nylon cord she’d wrapped around his calves. “You’re fucked,” he said. “Well and truly fucked.”

Marilyn ignored him and went around to the cab and took out the q-phone and tried it again – still no signal – then put it in the plastic box in which she’d packed her lunch, and piled a little cairn of stones over the box. She didn’t really believe that Frank Parker had tracked her with some kind of magic gizmo, but better safe than sorry.

Marilyn drove west along the gravel flats of the playa and then north, into a low range of hills. She parked in the shade of a stand of cactus trees and at gunpoint forced her prisoner to climb down and limp inside one of the tombs that stood like a row of bad teeth along the crest of the hill. She told him to stay right where he was, and pulled a shovel from the space behind the Bronco’s seats and dug a grave and lined the grave with flat stones and wrapped Jet in plastic sheeting and laid him at the bottom.

She’d found him six months ago, chained to a wrecked car behind a service station on the coast highway, half-starved, sores everywhere under his matted and filthy coat. When the service station owner had tried to stop her taking him, she’d knocked the man on his ass and dragged him back to the wreck and chained him up and left him there. She’d spent two weeks in a motel farther on down the road, nursing Jet back to health. He’d been a good companion ever since, loyal and affectionate and alert, foolishly brave when it came to standing up to dire cats, hydras, and hive rat soldiers. He’d died defending her, and she wasn’t ever going to forget that.

Although she’d attended a couple of dozen funerals during her stint in the army, she could remember only a few of the words of the Service for the Dead, so recited the Lord’s Prayer instead. “I’ll come back and give you a proper headstone later,” she said, and filled in the grave, tiled more stones over the mound, and went to see to her prisoner.

Frank Parker was squashed into a corner of the tomb, staring at the eidolons that drifted out of the shadows: monkey-sized semi-transparent stick figures that whispered in clicks and whistles, gesturing in abrupt jerks like overwound clockwork toys. They haunted about one in a hundred of the tombs. Perhaps they were intended to be representations of the dead, or their household gods, or perhaps they were some sort of eternal ceremony of mourning or celebration or remembrance: no one knew. And no one knew how they had been created, either; they were not affected by the removal of every bit of rotten “circuitry” from the tomb they haunted, by scouring its interior clean, or even by destroying it. According to Ana Datlovskaya, they were manifestations of twists in the quantum foam that underpinned space/time, which as far as Marilyn was concerned was like saying that they’d been created by some old wizard out of dragon’s blood and dwarfs’ teeth.

Marilyn had grown used to the eidolons; they reminded her of old men at bus stops in London before the war, rubbing their hands in the cold, grumbling about the weather and the price of cat meat. Talking to themselves if no one else was about. But they definitely spooked Frank Parker, who watched them closely as they drifted through the dim air like corpses caught in an underwater current, and flinched when Marilyn’s shadow fell over him.

“I’m going to fix up your wound,” she said. “I don’t want you dying on me. Not yet, at least.”

She cut off the leg of the man’s jeans and salted the wound – a neat through-and-through in the big muscle on the outside of his thigh – with antiseptic powder and fixed a pad of gauze in place with a bandage. Then they had a little talk. Marilyn learned that Tom Archibold had been working for a street banker who’d bought out the gambling debts of a mathematician in Port of Plenty’s university. When the mathematician had come up short on his repayments, Tom had had a little talk with him, and had discovered that he’d been corresponding with Ana Datlovskaya about exotic logic systems, and had been helping her write some kind of translation programme.

“This is the bit you’re going to have trouble believing,” Frank Parker said. “But I swear it’s true.”

“You’d better spit it out,” Marilyn said, “or I’ll leave you here without any water.”

“Tom believes that the old woman found the wreck of a spaceship,” Frank Parker said. “And she’s trying to talk to the part of it that’s still alive.”

Just two hours later, Marilyn Carter was lying on her belly under a patch of the thorny scrub that grew amongst Boxbuilder ruins on top of the ridge that overlooked the arroyo and the giant hive rat garden. Ana Datlovskaya’s tarpaper shack was a couple of hundred metres to the left and somewhat below Marilyn’s position. Three Range Rovers were parked beside it. A burly man with a shaven head stood close to one of the Range Rovers and the blond bodybuilder Marilyn had chased off was scanning the hive rat garden with binoculars, a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. Seeing them together now, Marilyn realized that she’d seen them before. In town a couple of weeks ago, sitting at the counter in the diner. She’d paid them little attention then, thinking that they were just a couple of travellers passing through; now she realized that they must have been on a scouting mission.

The blond man fitted the stock of his rifle to his shoulder and took aim. Marilyn tracked his line of fire, saw a sentry standing chest-high in a hole. Then dust kicked up in front of it and it vanished as the sound of the shot whanged back from the bluffs beyond.