The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Somerset returned Ty’s angry glare with woozy equanimity, and said, “If you kill me, you will only prove that I was right all along.”

“Then we’ll both be happy,” Ty said.

“She’s using us,” Somerset said, slurring every s, “and no one sees it but me.”

Maris grabbed the hypo from the medical kit and swam up to Somerset. “You can’t keep quiet, can you?”

“Silence is a form of complicity,” Somerset said. Its eyes crossed as it tried to focus on the hypo. “I do not need another shot. I can bear pain.”

“This is for us,” Maris said, and pressed the hypo against Somerset’s neck. The neuter started to protest, but then the blast of painkiller hit and its eyes rolled up.

“We could fly it right out of the airlock,” Ty said. “It wouldn’t feel a thing.”

“You know we aren’t going to do any such thing,” Maris said. “Listen up. Any minute now, the ship’s crew are going to notice that their boss is missing. What we have to do is work out what we’re going to tell them.”

Ty said, “I’m not giving her up.”

“We know Alice must have killed Barrett in self-defense,” Maris said. “We can testify-”

Bruno said, “Ty is right, boss. We know that Alice isn’t a murderer, but our testimony won’t mean much in court.”

Alice waved her hands to get their attention, then pointed to the workshop’s camera.

“It’s recording,” Ty said. He laughed, and turned a full somersault in midair. “Alice knows machines! She had the internal com record everything!”

Maris shook out a screen, plugged it into the camera, and started the playback. Ty and Bruno crowded around her, watched Barrett struggle through the airlock in his p-suit, watched him question Alice, his p-suit still sealed, his voice coming cold and metallic through its speaker. He loomed over her like a fully armed medieval knight menacing a helpless maiden. Her stubborn intervals of silence, his amplified voice getting louder, his gestures angrier. Alice shrank back. He showed her his weapon. And Alice flew at him, whipping a tether around his arms and body, the tether contracting in a tight embrace as her momentum drove him backward; she wrapped her legs around his chest, smashed his visor with a jack-hammer, and emptied a canister of foam into his helmet.

The camera saw everything; it even picked up the glint of the weapon when it flew from Barrett’s gloved hand. He flung his helmeted head from side to side, trying to shake off the foam’s suffocating mask; Alice pressed against a wall, unobtrusively out of focus, as his struggles quietened.

Maris said, “It looks good, but will it look good to the court?”

“We can’t turn her over to Symbiosis or the TPA police,” Bruno said. “At best, they’ll turn her into a lab specimen. At worst-”

“Where is she?” Ty said.

Alice was gone; the hatch to the airlock was closed. Neither the automatic nor manual system would budge it. As Bruno prized off the cover of the servomotor, Maris joined Ty at the door’s little port, saw Alice wave bye-bye and shoot through the hatch into Barrett’s sled. A moment later, there was a solid thump as the sled decoupled.

Maris and Bruno and Ty rushed to the viewports.

“Look at her go!” Maris said.

“Where is she going?” Ty said.

“It looks like she is heading straight to the Symbiosis ship,” Bruno said. “She sure can fly that sled.”

“Of course she can,” Ty said. “What do you think she’s going to do?”

“We’ll see soon enough,” Maris said. “Meanwhile, let’s get busy, gentlemen.”

Bruno glanced at her. “I do believe you have a plan,” he said.

“It’s not much of one, but hear me out.”

By the time Ty and Maris had hauled Barrett’s body to the shuttle, his sled had docked with the motor section of the Symbiosis ship. They tethered the body to the tank where Alice had slept out three hundred days, and tethered the weapon to the utility belt of its p-suit. Maris dragged some of the plastic insulation out of the tank’s hatch for dramatic effect, fired a couple of shots into the tangle of bags and tubes inside, then scooted back to look at her work. The tank looked like something had hatched from it in a hurry; Barrett’s body, with its mask of lumpy foam, hung half-folded like a grotesque unstrung puppet, its yellow p-suit vivid against the black film of the vacuum organism.

“It looks kind of cheesy,” Ty said doubtfully, over their patch cord link.

“If you have a better idea,” Maris said, “let me know.”

“Maybe it’s because I don’t think he would have had the sense to tether his weapon.”

“He found where Alice was hiding,” Maris said, “and opened up the tank. There was a struggle. She killed him and took his sled. The weapon is necessary. It shows he meant her harm. If we don’t tether it to him, it’ll drift off somewhere and no one will find it. So let’s pretend that in his last moments he was overcome with common sense.”

“Yeah, well, none of that will matter if the crew knew where he was going in the first place.”