L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 35 Read online

  “What? Why, I’ll stripe—” And then the exec remembered that times and the battle fleet had changed. “Is he sure?”

  “Yes, sir. And there’s no signal light on his buzzer, sir.”

  The exec looked piercingly around him. He began to see a connection between the false signal and these blasticks. “Listen, you transports! I’ve been white. The skipper has been white. And what pay do we get for it. Somebody signaled a double buzz on the aft lookout’s meteor warning. And that somebody is in this room! How he did it, I don’t know—”

  “I know,” said the lieutenant, coming back from the wall. “The insulation is all frayed on that buzzer cable. Somebody leaned up against it and shorted it.”

  “Maybe!” said the exec. “But we’ve got little enough fuel without wasting it on acceleration to get away from a meteor that wasn’t even chasing us, much less existed! All right. I’ll grant that it was an accident. Even though two buzzes was the proper signal, it would take a genius to know which wire was which in all this maze. Well! So there was murder and mutiny brewing in here, was there? Master at arms! Get me irons. Plenty of irons. Until we get these hyenas landed we’ll be damned certain we can keep a finger on them. Quick, now.”

  Steve submitted gracefully and the man who affixed the irons to his wrists and ankles did not even glance at his face.

  A little while later Vicky Stalton edged close to him. She did not express cold contempt now. “I am sorry. It was wicked of me to play upon your emotions as I did—”

  Steve laughed brittlely. “Dear lady, you had little enough to do with that.”

  “You mean you deny that your mood—”

  “My mood,” said Steve Gailbraith, “seems to have changed. There were ghosts in this room.”

  He would have gone, but she held him back and made him face her. “I … I don’t understand you.”

  Steve shrugged and attempted to be careless about it, but small lights of anger were in his eyes where only misery and resignation had been before. “Could I stand idle, seeing hogs wallow where kings have trod? I’ve been a fool. I helped lift up an order even worse than that which existed before. Had those idiotic idealists like myself worked less for the cause, all that was worthwhile in this world might not have been blackened out.”

  There was a hard twist to his face now and a tenseness of purpose in him which reacted upon her like an electric shock. “I was an idealist,” he continued. “God help me! I thought that perfection could be attained, that people could be free. But the only freedom a people can enjoy is brought upon by a strong and merciful power, not by self rule, a thing for which they are not equipped. By holding ideals, I blinded myself to the quality of those with whom I had to deal. But that is done. I was sick. Now I am well.”

  “I thought—” she began.

  “You thought wrongly. I am cured by the poison itself. You are a very clever girl, no doubt. But limit your tricks to telling your muckers and dimers that white is black. I am not blind—now.”

  She seemed to be seeing him for the first time, and she had an uncanny illusion of a helmet upon his head and a gun in his hand and battle in his eyes. And when he walked away she seemed to hear, far, far off, a voice saying, “The end has come, Fagar.”

  Thanatos Drive

  written by

  Andrew Dykstal

  illustrated by

  QIANJIAO MA

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andrew Dykstal lives in Arlington, Virginia, where he works as a technical editor. He’s been a lifelong consumer of stories, and tipped over from affection to obsession when a few of his college professors persuaded him to major in English alongside political science. Between then and now, he’s taught high school English and humanities (with a weird jaunt into orbital mechanics), earned an MA in English from the University of Virginia, and inflicted countless half-formed short stories, novels, and poems upon a circle of dear and long-suffering friends, without whom he’d have finished going mad years ago. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. www.andrewdykstal.com

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Qianjiao Ma is a concept artist, background painter and designer, based in Los Angeles, working in the themed entertainment and animation industries.

  Qianjiao is originally from China. She has had a great passion for art and design from a young age. She came to the United States after high school, seeking further education. Qianjiao recently graduated from the Art Center College of Design with a Bachelor of Science in Entertainment Design.

  As with many of our winners, she is gaining a lot of recognition quickly.

  As a concept artist, Qianjiao’s new freelance clients include Warner Bros., Universal Studios, Rough Draft Studios, ShadowMachine, the Thinkwell Group, World Abu Dhabi and Universal Studios Japan. She has also worked in the animation industry. So far she has contributed as designer and painter for the Netflix Original Disenchantment and TBS’s Final Space. She is also an accomplished plein air painter, having exhibited her work in galleries in Los Angeles. www.q-draws.com

  Thanatos Drive

  Where were you when it happened, baby?”

  Alan Li knows he should keep walking. That’s the rule on a boulevard like this, and it goes double at nightfall—move fast, avoid eye contact, don’t let them touch you. But the question, or what’s behind the question, catches him like a choke chain: I look old enough to remember the Spasm? Nobody has ever thought he looked that old, or at least nobody has tumbled to it.

  For her part, the woman in the legacy green sequin dress looks like something out of a Vollmann fever dream. There’s no feigned sensuality there, just an air of endless exhaustion, and her blush cracks where she’s cut her makeup with red Missouri clay. Her bloodshot eyes are sunk into sockets that probably always look like they’re just done healing up from a bruise. Veins wander her legs, stark against skin pale with cold. She looks about forty, which means she might be half that.

  “Don’t be stingy, baby,” she says.

  There’s nothing he can say. He takes his bearings by what’s left of the Arch and walks on.

  She makes one final pitch: “The soils commonly known as red clay are in fact ultisols, the final product of weathering when there is no glaciation to create new soil.”

  Either she’s gone mad or he has. He keeps walking, fighting down the impulse to look back.

  Behind him, the woman picks her next prospect: “Where were you when it happened, baby?”

  The first flakes of October snow drift down, white and gray in the glow of the gaslights, and Li sees the world trapped in an immense glass eye stirring with the silvery threads of old nightmares.

  His contact is waiting behind the bar, out by the stills. Some were liberated from Prohibition museums in the greater St. Louis area. Li doesn’t want to know what the old man is fermenting; there hasn’t been surplus grain for twenty years, fruit is worth more fresh or dried, and every potato in North America is going toward efforts to create something on par with the old monocultures. Grass, maybe? Cassava-plus?

  Li accepts a tin cup of clearish liquid, takes the ritual sip, feels his eyes water. Godpuppets don’t drink, or so the local rumor goes. “You found me a job.”

  “Might’ve.”

  “I take it it’s the Doctor.”

  “Might be.”

  In the end, the price is a bit of gold the size of Li’s thumbnail, a pair of sunglasses, and four genuine Advil. What they call a night/day kit out East, where that flake of gold would be just enough to buy you a three-day hangover and maybe the clap.

  Out here, it will keep the moonshiner in shoes for another winter.

  The moonshiner gives him an address, a password, and a companionable hand on the shoulder. “The man’s PRA, so you watch yourself.”

  The People’s Republic of Austin. De
ep pockets if you live long enough to pick them. Li puts another Advil on the barrelhead. “Anything else I should watch?”

  A grin. “Saw the Doctor myself three weeks back.”

  “And you didn’t kill her.”

  “Hard to un-kill somebody. I got myself a thing about permanent choices. Amelie’s still human. Sold her new maps of the Turnwell Confederacy. And an old terrain one of western Nebraska.”

  “That’s in the Dust.”

  “Said she was human. Never said she was sane. That Delray of yours still running?”

  “You going to try to sell me something else?”

  “Tinfoil’s getting preachy about cars.”

  “It’s a fifty-seven. Good old Detroit metal. No microchips.”

  “You know that. I know that. Next Tinfoil technophobe you meet might not. I hear they burned a man for his well pump last month. Ought to trade up for a couple bicycles and an apprentice.”

  The moonshiner lets him copy a couple of maps gratis so long as he puts his own kerosene in the lamp. Li’s eyes ache by the end. “When did we get old?” he asks.

  “What, you were young?”

  The man from the People’s Republic of Austin is waiting in an upstairs suite over half a bookstore. He wears the Longhorn pin of an Ambassador and three pieces of three different suits.

  “You’re Alan Li,” the Ambassador says, flipping open a typewritten dossier.

  “I know that.”

  “You … find certain sorts of people.”

  “I know that too.”

  “How long have you been tracking the Doctor?”

  “Eleven years.” The answer is automatic.

  The Ambassador gives off a little flare of bureaucratic smugness. “That seems to imply you aren’t very good at it.”

  In his mind’s eye, Burden’s Ford is burning again, and he can feel the mud of the riverbank oozing around his elbow as he peers through a rifle scope at silhouettes faceless and yet recognizable, some of them terribly small. The full moon crests a cloud bank, and now their eyes are shining silver, smiling. Where were you when it happened? Forget the rest of the world and its lingering where-were-you-when-Kennedy-was-shot mindset. For him, it was never the Spasm that proved the indifference of all the old gods and the madness of the new one. This is his it. Eleven years ago.

  And he’s never been fond of flippancy.

  “Maybe,” he says. “Thing about tracking the Doctor is that when her work goes well, there’s nobody willing to talk about her. When it goes bad, there’s nobody able. Sometimes for a good mile around.”

  “From the stories I hear, you don’t take the time to ask questions in the latter case.”

  Li pictures the Ambassador flat on his back, screaming up at the smiling godpuppets while fine silver wires thread down into his eyes, his nose, his mouth. “No,” he says, pleasantly, “on account of how I’m smarter than a root vegetable.”

  A bark of laughter from his left snaps his head around. A woman dressed for travel slips in from the farther room. She’s slight, her brown hair bound back in a short tail, and her footfalls make no sound. Her jacket is cut loose, and Li would bet Prozac to pruno that there’s an arsenal under it.

  “Yes, Mr. Li,” she says, dropping into a chair, “you might be at that.” Her voice is smooth, low, touched with the same humor as her pale green eyes.

  The Ambassador cuts in. “This is Jackie Boon, our resident expert on Doctor Amelie Bourreau, high-splice, and all things cybernetic. She has a lead on the Doctor’s whereabouts.”

  So do I, Li doesn’t say. “So what do you need me for?”

  The Ambassador squirms. “Our own people have seen … limited success.”

  Boon is more direct. “The last four teams we sent after her didn’t come back. The sole known survivor of the fifth team returned with a high-splice node in his head and forty pounds of ANFO under his jacket.”

  That gives him pause. He’d heard about the bombing that took out half the PRA Department of Economic Development, but to learn that a godpuppet did it forces a change in perspective. For one thing, the PRA put out that a radical faction from some hick city-state in the mid-Atlantic was responsible, and they built a good bit of foreign policy around the lie. For another, to assert that a godpuppet targeted a government pursuing the Doctor has its own unsettling implications, not least of which is God taking an interest in Amelie Bourreau.

  “You think I’ll have more luck?”

  Boon shrugs, gives him a once-over. “You’re supposed to be a survivor.”

  “In any event,” the Ambassador adds, “you’ll have an advantage the others did not. Ms. Boon will be going with you.”

  “No.”

  The Ambassador names a figure.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Boon names another figure.

  “All right.” He might have fought harder, but he finds himself immediately and irrationally liking Boon. Laughing at a man in a Longhorn pin takes guts, and there’s something competent in how she moves, something he hasn’t seen in a long time. As long as he’s useful to her, she’ll have his back. After that, she won’t be the first slippery partner he’s outmatched.

  “And,” the Ambassador adds, “you will be taking the Doctor in alive.”

  Disbelief, then anger, then puzzlement. “Alive? Why would you want her alive? Kill her, and there’s nobody making new godpuppets. God would be better than half-dead.”

  The Ambassador gives no reply. Neither does Boon.

  “Fine. If you want her alive, we’ll need more support. That’s a four-man job. Maybe more. If it’s a party anyway, why not lend us a few of your hitters?”

  The Ambassador clears his throat. “There are reasons of state.”

  Boon gives the real answer. “We’ve had security issues with the identities of our wetwork people, and it’s about to get worse. In a few days, it’s going to be unhealthy to wear PRA colors north of the Arkansas River. This stays small.”

  Another civil war. He thinks of the copied maps folded in his pocket. Suddenly, being well north of St. Louis seems like an excellent idea. “All right. We can come to an agreement. In addition to my fee, I’ll need forty gallons of gasoline, ration kits for two people for fifteen days, and all the legacy .357 rounds you can give me. All pre-Spasm, all stored right, all new brass. None of that remanufactured stuff—I’ve seen too many ruptured cases.”

  The Ambassador doesn’t even try to bargain. That night, as Li tries to fall asleep over the moonshiner’s bar, this disregard for expense disturbs him more than anything else.

  After a while, he gets up and inspects his eyes and gums in the mirror. He finds nothing—no change, no glint of metal. In time, he sleeps.

  They set out westward at dawn, extra gas cans ratchet-strapped to the roof, Jackie Boon’s pile of luggage crammed in the back. She’s wearing aviators that cover half her face and chewing a wad of candied ginger. “I get carsick,” she mumbles through a mouthful. “Your car can smell like ginger, or it can smell like vomit. Your call, Alan.”

  “How about you tell me your new and promising leads?”

  “We think she’s headed for western Nebraska.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Did you know we have a list of five stops she’ll be making en route?”

  He blinks. “How could you know that?”

  “She and some of her clients use shortwave radio. Spell everything out letter by letter in cipher. I broke the encryption. Well, I have a method for breaking it, I should say. It takes time. The plaintexts are a few months old.”

  “How?”

  “I’d tell you, but the story goes back to Poland in the 1930s, and if the boredom didn’t kill you, I’d have to.”

  He glances at the crude, hand-built radio clipped to the dash, thinking. It took him a while to get used t
o the thing. Radios are the heart of networks, and networks are the heart of God. He designed the mount for quick disassembly should Tinfoil come calling, or if it caught his eye the wrong way. And this sort of dumb radio is known to be safe, is almost in common use. He doesn’t know much about ciphers, but he knows the one used by Amelie Bourreau has resisted decryption for two decades and is widely believed to be based on the naval version of the German Enigma machine. There’s only one explanation for the breakthrough, and it’s no comfort.

  “You built a computer,” he murmurs.

  Boon startles, which is oddly satisfying. “A crude, electromechanical one,” she says. “Perfectly safe. Nothing beyond 1940s technology.”

  He eases onto I-70, brings the Delray up to an easy thirty. The PRA is building computers. The north, frozen wasteland or not, is looking more and more attractive. “You know, that’s got to be one of the Doctor’s lines when she’s selling implants.”

  “What?”

  “That it’s all perfectly safe. Now give me an exit number.”

  She slouches in the bench seat and pulls her hat down over her eyes, sunglasses and all. “Just follow the signs for Columbia.”

  “That on your magic list?”

  “No magic about it.”

  “Sure.”

  They drive in silence for a while. Then Boon asks, “Do you always wear your hair like that?”

  He touches the rough shag that falls over his ears. “Yeah. Cuts down on sunburn. Why?”

  “I just notice things, is all.” Another long silence. Then: “‘Alive’ doesn’t mean ‘unpunished,’ Alan. She’ll answer for Burden’s Ford. You have my word on that.”

  Columbia has a population of almost eight thousand. Driving past the variously racked and hitched bicycles and horses, feeling the hustle and pulse of the city, Li feels like a plague doctor touring an overcrowded prison. If the Doctor did any work here, there’s a one-in-ten chance he’s walking into hell with untested backup.