The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

Then the weapon, whichever it was, blew up.

34822.7.16 4:24:6:20—5:23:10:13

Moving image, recorded at 24 frames per second over a period of 117 minutes 15 seconds by spin-stabilized camera, installation “Cyrus,” transmitted via QT to COS Liberation, on Gaugamela station, and onward to Community Outreach archives, Urizen:

From the leading edge of the accelerator ring, it is as though the ring and the mass that powers it are rising through a tunnel of light.

For ten million kilometers along the track of the neutron star’s orbit, the darkness ahead sparkles with the light of antimatter bombs, fusion explosions, the kinetic flash of chaff thrown out by the accelerator ring impacting ships, missiles, remotely operated guns; impacting men. Through the minefield debris of the ring’s static defenses, robotic fighters dart and weave, looking to kill anything that accelerates. Outreach has millennia of experience to draw on, and back in the Community a population of hundreds of billions to produce its volunteer missionaries, its dedicated programmers, its hobbyist generals. Many of the Babylonian weapons are stopped; many of the Babylonian ships are destroyed. Others, already close to Babylon’s escape velocity and by the neutron star’s orbital motion close to escaping from it as well, are shunted aside, forced into hyperbolic orbits that banish them from the battlefield as surely as death.

But the ring’s defenders are fighting from the bottom of a deep gravity well, with limited resources, nearly all the mass they’ve assembled here incorporated into the ring itself; and the Babylonians have their own store of ancient cunning to draw on, their aggregate population a hundred times larger than the Community’s, more closely knit and more warlike. And they have Ninurta.

Ninurta, the hunter of the Annunaki, the god who slew the seven-headed serpent, who slew the bull-man in the sea and the six-headed wild ram in the mountain, who defeated the demon Ansu and retrieved the Tablet of Destinies.

Sharur, the Mace of Ninurta, plunges through the battle like a shark through minnows, shining like a sun, accelerating, adding the thrust of its mighty engines to the neutron star’s inexorable pull. Slender needles of laser prick out through the debris, and Sharur’s sun brightens still further, painful to look at, the ship’s active hull heated to tens of thousands of degrees. Something like a swarm of fireflies swirls out toward it, and the camera’s filters cut in, darkening the sky as the warheads explode around the ship, a constellation of new stars that flare, burn and die in perfect silence: and Sharur keeps coming.

It fills the view.

Overhead, a blur, it flashes past the camera, and is gone.

The image goes white.

The transmission ends.

VI. SURVIVING WEAPONS

It was cold in the control capsule. The heat sink was still deployed and the motors that should have folded it in would not respond. Ish found he didn’t much care. There was a slow leak somewhere in the atmosphere cycler and Ish found he didn’t much care about that either.

The battle, such as it was, was well off to one side. Ish knew even before doing the math that he did not have enough fuel to bring himself back into it. The dead star was bending his course but not enough. He was headed into the dark.

Ish’s surviving weapons were still burning mindlessly toward the ring and had cut by half the velocity with which they were speeding away from it, but they too were nearly out of fuel and Ish saw that they would follow him into darkness.

He watched Sharur’s plunge through the battle. The dead star was between him and the impact when it happened, but he saw the effect it had: a flash across the entire spectrum from long-wave radio to hard X-ray, bright enough to illuminate the entire battlefield; bright enough, probably, to be seen from the cities.

Another god died.

There was a sparkle of secondary explosions scattered through the debris field, weapons and platforms and nomad fighters alike flashing to plasma in the light of Ninurta’s death. Then there was nothing. The ring began, slowly, to break up.

Ish wondered how many other platforms were still out here, set aside like his, falling into Apsu. Anyone who had been on the impact side was dead.

The weapons’ drive flares went out.

The mended icon was still where he had fixed it. Ish shut down the displays one by one until his helmet beam was the only light and adjusted the thrust bag around the helmet so that the beam shone full on the icon. The look in the Lady’s eyes no longer seemed accusatory, but appraising, as if she were waiting to see what Ish would do.

The beam wavered and went dark.

BABYLON CITY 2:78 233' S:2 54' / 34822.10.6 5:18:4

Record of police interrogation, Suspect 34822.10.6.502155, alias Ajabeli Huzalatum Taraamapsu, alias Liburnadisha Iliawilimrabi Apsuumasha, alias “Black.” Charges: subversion, terrorism, falsification of temple records, failure to register as a foreign agent. Interrogator is Detective (Second Degree) Nabunaid Babilisheir Rabisila.

RABISILA:

Your people are gone. Your weapon’s been destroyed. You might as well tell us everything.

SUSPECT:

It accomplished its purpose.

RABISILA:

Which was?

SUSPECT:

To give you hope.

RABISILA:

What do you mean, “hope”?

SUSPECT:

Men are fighting gods now, in Gish and Sippar.

RABISILA:

A few criminal lunatics. Lord Anshar will destroy them.

SUSPECT:

Do you think they’ll be the last? Two of your gods are dead. Dead at the hands of mortals. Nothing Anshar’s soldiers do to Sippar will change that. Nothing you do to me.

RABISILA:

You’re insane.

SUSPECT:

I mean it. One day—not in my lifetime, certainly not in yours, but one day—one day you’ll all be free.

VII. A SOLDIER OF THE CITY

A ship found Ish a few months later: a ship called Upekkha, from a single-system nomad civilization based some seventeen light-years from Babylon and known to itself as the Congregation. The ship, the name of which meant equanimity, was an antimatter-fueled ion rocket, a quarter of a league long and twice that in diameter; it could reach two-tenths the speed of light, but only very, very