The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats up and then kicks gently toward the forward end of the cramped habitat. The controls of the telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic clothing cleaner and the lithium hydroxide scrubbers: they’re already freed up, because he was conducting a wide-field survey of the inner ring, looking for the signature of water ice. It is the work of a few moments to pipe the navigation and tracking system into the telescope’s controller and direct it to hunt for the big foreign ship of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq’s mind urgently, an irritating realization that he may have missed something in the woman’s e-mail: there were a number of huge attachments. With half his mind, he surfs the news digest his scholarly peers send him daily: meanwhile, he waits patiently for the telescope to find the speck of light that the poor woman’s daughter is enslaved within.

This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with them. Let the hard questions answer themselves, elegantly. There will be no need for the war of the sword if they can be convinced that their plans are faulty: no need to defend the godly from the latter-day Tower of Babel these people propose to build. If this woman Pamela means what she says, Sadeq need not end his days out here in the cold between the worlds, away from his elderly parents and brother and his colleagues and friends. And he will be profoundly grateful: because, in his heart of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a scholar.

“I’m sorry, but the Borg is attempting to assimilate a lawsuit,” says the receptionist. “Will you hold?”

“Crud.” Amber blinks the Binary Betty answerphone sprite out of her eye and glances around at the cabin. “That is so last century,” she grumbles. “Who do they think they are?”

“Doctor Robert H. Franklin,” volunteers the cat. “It’s a losing proposition if you ask me. Bob was so fond of his dope that there’s this whole hippie groupmind that’s grown up using his state vector as a bong-”

“Shut the fuck up!” Amber shouts at him. Instantly contrite (for yelling in an inflatable spacecraft is a major faux pas): “Sorry.” She spawns an autonomic thread with full parasympathetic nervous control, tells it to calm her down: then she spawns a couple more to go forth and become fuqaha, expert on shari’a law. She realizes she’s buying up way too much of the orphanage’s scarce bandwidth-time that will have to be paid for in chores, later-but it’s necessary. “She’s gone too far. This time, it’s war.”

She slams out of her cabin and spins right around in the central axis of the hab, a rogue missile pinging for a target to vent her rage on. A tantrum would be good-

But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there’s a drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her head, and she’s feeling frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really mad now. It was like this three years ago when Mom noticed her getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a new school district-she said it was a work assignment, but Amber knows better, Mom asked for it-just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom is a psycho bitch control-freak and ever since she had to face up to losing Dad she’s been working her claws into Amber-which is tough, because Amber is not good victim material, and is smart and well-networked to boot. But now Mom’s found a way of fucking Amber over completely, even in Jupiter orbit, and Amber would be totally out of control if not for her skullware keeping a lid on things.

Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Borg, Amber goes to hunt them down in their meatspace den.

There are sixteen Borg aboard the Sanger- adults, members of the Franklin Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin’s posthumous vision. They lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com billionaire’s mind, making him the first boddhisatva of the uploading age-apart from the lobster colony, of course. Their den mother is a woman called Monica: a willowy brown-eyed hive queen with raster-burned corneal implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can corrode egos like a desert wind. She’s better than the others at running Bob, and she’s no slouch when she’s being herself: which is why they elected her Maximum Leader of the expedition.

Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing surgery on a filter that’s been blocked by toadspawn. She’s almost buried beneath a. large pipe, her Velcro-taped toolkit waving in the breeze like strange blue air-kelp. “Monica? You got a minute?”

“Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pass me the antitorque wrench and a number-six hex head.”