The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (17 page)

“Dad,” you say, “When you hear the Information Center, do you—”

But you interrupt by hitting yourself again.
Go away, go away, GO AWAY
. This time it takes. With a shock, I realize that it’s
my turn to feel, and what I feel is this: me and everything else receding into a rapidly shrinking circle, a tiny angry pupil.

The corridor’s closing; I’m an ant up a vacuum cleaner.

Then I come to, and it’s just me, all me – alone in my fancy house, chair tipped back onto the floor. There’s a broken glass beside me. I want to see how it ends. But I think I know how it ends. I think it’s you
who doesn’t, Grace. My back is killing me. I get up from the floor; I stumble to the kitchen and palm some pills down my throat and drink cold water from the dispenser.

I look at the clock on the wall.

Only minutes have passed for me, just a few of them, but for you, oh you, Grace, for you it’s been years and years and years.

BOOJUM

Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

The ship had no name of her own, so her human crew called her the
Lavinia Whateley
. As far as anyone could tell, she didn’t mind. At least, her long grasping vanes curled – affectionately? – when the chief engineers patted her bulkheads and called her “Vinnie,” and she ceremoniously tracked the footsteps of each crew member with her internal bioluminescence,
giving them light to walk and work and live by.

The
Lavinia Whateley
was a Boojum, a deep-space swimmer, but her kind had evolved in the high tempestuous envelopes of gas giants, and their offspring still spent their infancies there, in cloud-nurseries over eternal storms. And so she was streamlined, something like a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her sides were lined with gasbags
filled with hydrogen; her vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it; her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae.

Where there was light, she could make oxygen. Where there was oxygen, she could make water.

She was an ecosystem unto herself, as the captain was a law unto herself. And down in the bowels of the engineering
section, Black Alice Bradley, who was only human and no kind of law at all, loved her.

Black Alice had taken the oath back in ’32, after the Venusian Riots. She hadn’t hidden her reasons, and the captain had looked at her with cold, dark, amused eyes and said, “So long as you carry your weight, cherie, I don’t care. Betray me, though, and you will be going back to Venus the cold way.” But it
was probably that – and the fact that Black Alice couldn’t hit the broad side of
a space freighter with a ray gun – that had gotten her assigned to Engineering, where ethics were less of a problem. It wasn’t, after all, as if she was going anywhere.

Black Alice was on duty when the
Lavinia Whateley
spotted prey; she felt the shiver of anticipation that ran through the decks of the ship. It was
an odd sensation, a tic Vinnie only exhibited in pursuit. And then they were underway, zooming down the slope of the gravity well toward Sol, and the screens all around Engineering – which Captain Song kept dark, most of the time, on the theory that swabs and deckhands and coal-shovelers didn’t need to know where they were, or what they were doing – flickered bright and live.

Everybody looked
up, and Demijack shouted, “There! There!” He was right: The blot that might only have been a smudge of oil on the screen moved as Vinnie banked, revealing itself to be a freighter, big and ungainly and hopelessly outclassed. Easy prey. Easy pickings.

We could use some of them, thought Black Alice. Contrary to the e-ballads and comm stories, a pirate’s life was not all imported delicacies and
fawning slaves. Especially not when three-quarters of any and all profits went directly back to the
Lavinia Whateley
, to keep her healthy and happy. Nobody ever argued. There were stories about the
Marie Curie
, too.

The captain’s voice over fiber optic cable – strung beside the
Lavinia Whateley’s
nerve bundles – was as clear and free of static as if she stood at Black Alice’s elbow. “Battle stations,”
Captain Song said, and the crew leapt to obey. It had been two Solar since Captain Song keelhauled James Brady, but nobody who’d been with the ship then was ever likely to forget his ruptured eyes and frozen scream.

Black Alice manned her station, and stared at the screen. She saw the freighter’s name – the
Josephine Baker –
gold on black across the stern, the Venusian flag for its port of registry
wired stiff from a mast on its hull. It was a steelship, not a Boojum, and they had every advantage. For a moment she thought the freighter would run.

And then it turned, and brought its guns to bear.

No sense of movement, of acceleration, of disorientation. No pop, no whump of displaced air. The view on the screens just
flickered to a different one, as Vinnie skipped – apported – to a new position
just aft and above the
Josephine Baker
, crushing the flag mast with her hull.

Black Alice felt that, a grinding shiver. And had just time to grab her console before the
Lavinia Whateley
grappled the freighter, long vanes not curling in affection now.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dogcollar, the closest thing the
Lavinia Whateley
had to a chaplain, cross himself, and she heard him mutter,
like he always did,
Ave, Grandaevissimi, morituri vos salutant
. It was the best he’d be able to do until it was all over, and even then he wouldn’t have the chance to do much. Captain Song didn’t mind other people worrying about souls, so long as they didn’t do it on her time.

The captain’s voice was calling orders, assigning people to boarding parties port and starboard. Down in Engineering,
all they had to do was monitor the
Lavinia Whateley’s
hull and prepare to repel boarders, assuming the freighter’s crew had the gumption to send any. Vinnie would take care of the rest – until the time came to persuade her not to eat her prey before they’d gotten all the valuables off it. That was a ticklish job, only entrusted to the chief engineers, but Black Alice watched and listened, and
although she didn’t expect she’d ever get the chance, she thought she could do it herself.

It was a small ambition, and one she never talked about. But it would be a hell of a thing, wouldn’t it? To be somebody a Boojum would listen to?

She gave her attention to the dull screens in her sectors, and tried not to crane her neck to catch a glimpse of the ones with the actual fighting on them. Dogcollar
was making the rounds with sidearms from the weapons locker, just in case. Once the
Josephine Baker
was subdued, it was the junior engineers and others who would board her to take inventory.

Sometimes there were crew members left in hiding on captured ships. Sometimes, unwary pirates got shot.

There was no way to judge the progress of the battle from Engineering. Wasabi put a stopwatch up on
one of the secondary screens, as usual, and everybody glanced at it periodically. Fifteen minutes ongoing meant the boarding parties hadn’t hit any nasty surprises. Black Alice had met a man once who’d been
on the
Margaret Mead
when she grappled a freighter that turned out to be carrying a division’s-worth of Marines out to the Jovian moons. Thirty minutes ongoing was normal. Forty-five minutes.
Upward of an hour ongoing, and people started double-checking their weapons. The longest battle Black Alice had ever personally been part of was six hours, forty-three minutes, and fifty-two seconds. That had been the last time the
Lavinia Whateley
worked with a partner, and the double-cross by the
Henry Ford
was the only reason any of Vinnie’s crew needed. Captain Song still had Captain Edwards’s
head in a jar on the bridge, and Vinnie had an ugly ring of scars where the
Henry Ford
had bitten her.

This time, the clock stopped at fifty minutes, thirteen seconds. The
Josephine Baker
surrendered.

Dogcollar slapped Black Alice’s arm. “With me,” he said, and she didn’t argue. He had only six weeks seniority over her, but he was as tough as he was devout, and not stupid either. She checked
the Velcro on her holster and followed him up the ladder, reaching through the rungs once to scratch Vinnie’s bulkhead as she passed. The ship paid her no notice. She wasn’t the captain, and she wasn’t one of the four chief engineers.

Quartermaster mostly respected crew’s own partner choices, and as Black Alice and Dogcollar suited up – it wouldn’t be the first time, if the
Josephine Baker
’s
crew decided to blow her open to space rather than be taken captive – he came by and issued them both tag guns and x-ray pads, taking a retina scan in return. All sorts of valuable things got hidden inside of bulkheads, and once Vinnie was done with the steelship there wouldn’t be much chance of coming back to look for what they’d missed.

Wet pirates used to scuttle their captures. The Boojums
were more efficient.

Black Alice clipped everything to her belt and checked Dogcollar’s seals.

And then they were swinging down lines from the
Lavinia Whateley’s
belly to the chewed-open airlock. A lot of crew didn’t like to look at the ship’s face, but Black Alice loved it. All those teeth, the diamond edges worn to a glitter, and a few of the ship’s dozens of bright sapphire eyes blinking
back at her.

She waved, unselfconsciously, and flattered herself that the ripple of closing eyes was Vinnie winking in return.

She followed Dogcollar inside the prize.

They unsealed when they had checked atmosphere – no sense in wasting your own air when you might need it later – and the first thing she noticed was the smell.

The
Lavinia Whateley
had her own smell, ozone and nutmeg, and other
ships never smelled as good, but this was … this was …

“What did they kill and why didn’t they space it?” Dogcollar wheezed, and Black Alice swallowed hard against her gag reflex and said, “One will get you twenty we’re the lucky bastards that find it.”

“No takers,” Dogcollar said.

They worked together to crank open the hatches they came to. Twice they found crew members, messily dead. Once
they found crew members alive.

“Gillies,” said Black Alice.

“Still don’t explain the smell,” said Dogcollar and, to the gillies: “Look, you can join our crew, or our ship can eat you. Makes no never mind to us.”

The gillies blinked their big wet eyes and made fingersigns at each other, and then nodded. Hard.

Dogcollar slapped a tag on the bulkhead. “Someone will come get you. You go wandering,
we’ll assume you changed your mind.”

The gillies shook their heads, hard, and folded down onto the deck to wait.

Dogcollar tagged searched holds – green for clean, purple for goods, red for anything Vinnie might like to eat that couldn’t be fenced for a profit – and Black Alice mapped. The corridors in the steelship were winding, twisty, hard to track. She was glad she chalked the walls, because
she didn’t think her map was quite right, somehow, but she couldn’t figure out where she’d gone wrong. Still, they had a beacon, and Vinnie could always chew them out if she had to.

Black Alice loved her ship.

She was thinking about that, how, okay, it wasn’t so bad, the pirate game, and it sure beat working in the sunstone mines on Venus, when she found a locked cargo hold. “Hey, Dogcollar,”
she said to her comm, and while he was turning to cover her, she pulled her sidearm and blasted the lock.

The door peeled back, and Black Alice found herself staring at rank upon rank of silver cylinders, each less than a meter tall and perhaps half a meter wide, smooth and featureless except for what looked like an assortment of sockets and plugs on the surface of each. The smell was strongest
here.

“Shit,” she said.

Dogcollar, more practical, slapped the first safety orange tag of the expedition beside the door and said only, “Captain’ll want to see this.”

“Yeah,” said Black Alice, cold chills chasing themselves up and down her spine. “C’mon, let’s move.”

But of course it turned out that she and Dogcollar were on the retrieval detail, too, and the captain wasn’t leaving the canisters
for Vinnie.

Which, okay, fair. Black Alice didn’t want the
Lavinia Whateley
eating those things, either, but why did they have to bring them
back?

She said as much to Dogcollar, under her breath, and had a horrifying thought: “She knows what they are, right?”

“She’s the captain,” said Dogcollar.

“Yeah, but – I ain’t arguing, man, but if she doesn’t know …” She lowered her voice even farther,
so she could barely hear herself: “What if somebody
opens
one?”

Dogcollar gave her a pained look. “Nobody’s going to go opening anything. But if you’re really worried, go talk to the captain about it.”

He was calling her bluff. Black Alice called his right back. “Come with me?”

He was stuck. He stared at her, and then he grunted and pulled his gloves off, the left and then the right. “Fuck,”
he said. “I guess we oughta.”

For the crew members who had been in the boarding action, the party had already started. Dogcollar and Black Alice finally tracked the captain down in the rec room, where her marines were slurping stolen wine from broken-necked bottles. As much of it splashed on the gravity plates epoxied to the
Lavinia
Whateley’s
flattest interior surface as went into the marines,
but Black Alice imagined there was plenty more where that came from. And the faster the crew went through it, the less long they’d be drunk.

The captain herself was naked in a great extruded tub, up to her collarbones in steaming water dyed pink and heavily scented by the bath bombs sizzling here and there. Black Alice stared; she hadn’t seen a tub bath in seven years. She still dreamed of them
sometimes.

“Captain,” she said, because Dogcollar wasn’t going to say anything. “We think you should know we found some dangerous cargo on the prize.”