“No, no, pursuing your dreams, well, that’s not something you should be apologizing for! I’m just glad you finally found a friend!”
Helena glances over at Lily, who’s currently stuffing a container of cellulose toothpicks into the side pocket of her bulging backpack.
“Yeah, I’m glad too,” she says. “I’m sorry, Mr. Chan, but we have a flight to catch in a couple of hours, and the bus is leaving soon …”
“Nonsense! I’ll pay for your taxi fare, and I’ll give you something for the road. Airplane food is awful these days!”
Despite repeatedly declining Mr. Chan’s very generous offers, somehow Helena and Lily end up toting bags and bags of fresh steamed buns to their taxi.
“Oh, did you see the news?” Mr. Chan asks. “That vertical farmer’s daughter is getting married at some fancy hotel tonight. Quite a pretty girl, good thing she didn’t inherit those eyebrows—”
Lily snorts and accidentally chokes on her steamed bun. Helena claps her on the back.
“—and they’re serving steak at the banquet, straight from his farm! Now, don’t get me wrong, Helena, you’re talented at what you do—but a good old-fashioned slab of real meat, now, that’s the ticket!”
“Yes,” Helena says. “It certainly is.”
All known forgeries are failures, but sometimes that’s on purpose. Sometimes a forger decides to get revenge by planting obvious flaws in their work, then waiting for them to be revealed, making a fool of everyone who initially claimed the work was authentic. These flaws can take many forms—deliberate anachronisms, misspelled signatures, rude messages hidden beneath thick coats of paint—or a picture of a happy cow, surrounded by little hearts, etched into the T-bone of two hundred perfectly-printed steaks.
While the known forgers are the famous ones, the best forgers are the ones that don’t get caught—the old woman selling her deceased husband’s collection to an avaricious art collector, the harried-looking mother handing the cashier a battered 50-yuan note, or the two women at the airport, laughing as they collect their luggage, disappearing into the crowd.
Alastair Reynolds is the bestselling author of over a dozen novels. He has received the British Science Fiction Award for his novel Chasm City, as well as the Seiun and Sidewise awards, and was shortlisted for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards. He has a PhD in astronomy and worked for the European Space Agency before he left to write full time. His short fiction has been appearing in Interzone, Asimov’s, and elsewhere since 1990. Alastair’s latest novel is Elysium Fire.
HOLDFAST
Alastair Reynolds
1.
We were in trouble before we hit their screens. What was left of our squadron had been decelerating hard, braking down from interstellar cruise. Three hundred gravities was a stiff test for any ship, but my vessels already bore grave scars from the maggot engagement around Howling Mouth. A small skirmish, against the larger picture of our war—it would be lucky if my squadron warranted a mention in the Great Dispatches.
But nonetheless it had bloodied us well. Weapons were exhausted, engines overloaded, hulls fatigued. We felt the cost of it now. Every once in a while one of my ships would vanish from the formation, ripped apart, or snatched ahead of the main pack.
I mourned my offspring for a few bitter instants. It was all I could give them.
“Hold the formation,” I said, speaking from the fluid-filled cocoon of my immersion tank. “All will be well, my children. Your Battle-Mother will guide you to safety, provided you do not falter.”
An age-old invocation from the dawn of war. Hold the line.
But I doubted myself.
From deep space this nameless system had looked like the wisest target. Our strategic files showed no trace of maggot infestation. Better, the system harboured a rich clutch of worlds, from fat giants to rocky terrestrials. A juicy superjovian, ripe with moons. Gases and metals in abundance, and plenty of cover. We could establish a temporary holdfast: hide here and lick our wounds.
That was my plan. But there is an old saying about plans and war. I would have done well to heed it.
2.
The last wave of decoys erupted from my armour. An umbrella of scalding blue light above. Pressure shock jamming down like a vice. My knees buckled. The ground under me seemed to dip, like a boat in a swell. My faceplate blacked over, then cleared itself.
“Count.”
“Sixth deployment,” my suit answered. “Assuming an Eight-Warrior configuration, the adversary will have used its last suit-launched missile.”
“I hope.”
But if there had been more missiles, the maggot would have fired them soon after. Minutes passed, an iron stillness returning to the atmosphere, the ground under my feet once more feeling as secure as bedrock.
Then another bracket flashed onto my faceplate.
Optical fix. Visual acquisition of enemy.
The maggot leapt into blurry view, magnified and enhanced.
It was an odd, unsettling moment. We were still twenty kilometres apart, but for adversaries that had engaged each other across battlefronts spanning light-years, in campaigns that lasted centuries, it might as well have been spitting distance. Very few of us were gifted with close sight of a maggot, and our weapons tended not to leave much in the way of corpses.
Neither did theirs.
We stood on two rugged summits, with a series of smaller peaks between us. Black mountains, rising from a black fog, under a searing black ceiling. So deep into the atmosphere of the superjovian that no light now reached us, beyond a few struggling photons.
The maggot was quite brazen about presenting itself.
It must have known that I had used up my stock of missiles as well. The enemy knew our armaments, our capabilities.
I wondered if the maggot felt the same sting of loss and shame that I did. From a fully intact squadron, to a few ships, to just my command vessel, and finally just me in a suit, with the buckled, imploded remains of my ship–along with my children, still in their immersion tanks–falling into the deeper atmosphere.
Loss and shame? I doubted it.
The alien was a silver-grey for mcrouching on too many legs. It had come to
