The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 18

be able to stop me making sure of that.

“I was sorry to hear about Hemans,” I said. Hemans had been taken out by a sniper eight months before.

I had no reason to think that he and Alice were particularly close, but it seemed only polite to offer my condolences.

“Me too,” she said. “It always upsets me to hear about my friends being shot.”

“What happened at the manor really wasn’t a conspiracy,” I told her, although I’d never beenentirely sure. “It was a genuine mistake. It’s in the nature of Armed Response Units that they sometimes make mistakes, especially when they’re working in the dark.”

“I remember Dr. Hemans saying the same thing, afterward,” she admitted. “But some mistakes work out better than others, don’t they?” She wasn’t talking about the wayward ways of mutation. She was talking about the freak of chance that made me go on when I should have turned back, and the one that had made Ed and Kath pause to pull me out of the fume-filled corridor and down the cellar steps to safety.

She was talking about the freak of chance that had made me go on when things got tough at the Home Office, blowing my career in government in order to make sure that nobody could put a lid on it even for a little while, and that the government couldn’t even make a convincing show of governing the unfolding situation. She was talking about the mistake that Hemans and his colleagues had made when they decided to try something wildly ambitious, and found that it succeeded far too well. She was talking about the fact that science proceeds by trial and error, and that the errors sometimes turn out to be far more important than the intentions.

“Yes they do,” I agreed. “If that weren’t the case, progress wouldn’t be possible at all. But it is. In spite of the fact that every significant advance in biotechnology is seen by the vast majority of horrified onlookers as a hideous perversion, we do make progress. We keep on passing through the looking glass, finding new worlds and new selves.”

“You’ve been practicing,” she said. “Do you really think you can talk yourself back into the corridors of power?”

“Not a snowball’s chance in hell,” I admitted. “But I did my bit for the revolution when I had the chance-and there aren’t many of nature’s humans who can say that, are there?”

“There never used to be,” Alice admitted. “But things are different now. Human history is only just beginning.”

On the Orion Line - Stephen Baxter

Here’s a harrowing look at the proposition that a soldier’s first duty is tosurvive,especially when trapped behind enemy lines, especially when those “enemy lines” are in the depths of interstellar space, thousands of light-years from Earth, and you have no ship, no shelter, and only a quickly dwindling supply of air. In those circumstances, you do anything you haveto do to survive-if you’re strong enough to actually doit, that is!
Like many of his colleagues here at the beginning of a new century-Greg Egan comes to mind, as do people like Paul J. McAuley, Michael Swanwick, lain Banks, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Brian Stableford, Gregory Benford, Ian McDonald, Gwyneth Jones, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, David Marusek, Geoff Ryman, and a half dozen others-British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for the last ten years or so with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the “hard-science” story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the Cutting Edge of science which bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.
Baxter made his first sale toInterzonein 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Zenith, New Worlds,and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well. Baxter’s first novel, Raft,was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux,and the H. G. Wells pastiche-a sequel to The Time Machine-The Time Ships,which won both the JohnW. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels, Voyage, Titan, Moonseed,and the three books of the Mammothsequence,and the collections Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequenceand Traces.His most recent books are the novels Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space,and a novel written in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days.

The Brief Life Burns Brightly broke out of the fleet. We were chasing down a Ghost cruiser, and we were closing.

The lifedome of theBrightly was transparent, so it was as if Captain Teid in her big chair, and her officers and their equipment clusters-and a few low-grade tars like me-were just floating in space. The light was subtle, coming from a nearby cluster of hot young stars, and from the rivers of sparking lights that made up the fleet formation we had just left, and beyondthat from the sparking of novae. This was the Orion Line-six thousand light years from Earth and a thousand lights long, a front that spread right along the inner edge of the Orion Spiral Arm-and the stellar explosions marked battles that must have concluded years ago.

And, not a handful of klicks away, the Ghost cruiser slid across space, running for home. The cruiser was a rough egg-shape of silvered rope. Hundreds of Ghosts clung to the rope. You could see them slithering this way and that, not affected at all by the emptiness around them.

The Ghosts’ destination was a small, old yellow star. Pael, our tame Academician, had identified it as a fortress star from some kind of strangeness in its light. But up close you don’t need to be an Academician to spot a fortress. From theBrightly I could see with my unaided eyes that the star had a pale blue cage around it-an open lattice with struts half a million kilometers long-thrown there by the Ghosts, for their own purposes.

I had a lot of time to watch all this. I was just a tar. I was fifteen years old.

My duties at that moment were non-specific. I was supposed to stand to, and render assistance any way that was required-most likely with basic medical attention should we go into combat. Right now the only one of us tars actually working was Halle, who was chasing down a pool of vomit sicked up by Pael, the Academician, the only non-Navy personnel on the bridge.

The action on theBrightly wasn’t like you see in Virtual shows. The atmosphere was calm, quiet, competent. All you could hear was the murmur of voices, from the crew and the equipment, and the hiss of recycling air. No drama: it was like an operating theater.

There was a soft warning chime.

The captain raised an arm and called over Academician Pael, First Officer Till, and Jeru, the commissary assigned to the ship. They huddled close, conferring-apparently arguing. I saw the way flickering nova light reflected from Jeru’s shaven head.

I felt my heart beat harder.

Everybody knew what the chime meant: that we were approaching the fortress cordon. Either we would break off, or we would chase the Ghost cruiser inside its invisible fortress. And everybody knew that no Navy ship that had ever penetrated a fortress cordon, ten light-minutes from the central star, had come back out again.

One way or the other, it would all be resolved soon.

Captain Teid cut short the debate. She leaned forward and addressed the crew. Her voice, cast through the ship, was friendly, like a cadre leader whispering in your ear. “You can all see we can’t catch that swarm of Ghosts this side of the cordon. And you all know the hazard of crossing a cordon. But if we’re ever going to break this blockade of theirs we have to find a way to bust open those forts. So we’re going in anyhow. Stand by your stations.”

There was a half-hearted cheer.

I caught Halle’s eye. She grinned at me. She pointed at the captain, closed her fist and made a pumping