“Come on outside.”
“Right.”
“And bring that stuff with you.” Edsel picked up the shining helmet and the black box and followed Parke outside. The sun had almost disappeared now, and there were black shadows over the red land. It was bitterly cold, but neither man noticed.
“Did you hear what they said, Parke? Did you hear it? They said I was their leader! With men like those—” He laughed at the sky. With those soldiers, those weapons, nothing could stop him. He’d really stock his land—prettiest girls in the world, and would he have a time!
“I’m a general!” Edsel shouted, and slipped the helmet over his head. “How do I look, Parke? Don’t I look like a—” He stopped. He was hearing a voice in his ears, whispering, muttering. What was it saying?
“ . . . damned idiot, with his little dream of a kingdom. Power like this is for a man of genius, a man who can remake history. Myself!”
“Who’s talking? That’s you, isn’t it Parke?” Edsel realized suddenly that the helmet allowed him to listen in on thoughts. He didn’t have time to consider what a weapon this would be for a ruler.
Parke shot him neatly through the back with a gun he had been holding all the time.
“What an idiot,” Parke told himself, slipping the helmet on his head. “A kingdom! All the power in the world and he dreamed of a little kingdom!” He glanced back at the cave.
“With those troops—the force field—and the weapons—I can take over the world.” He said it coldly, knowing it was a fact. He turned to go back to the cave to activate the Synthetics, but stopped first to pick up the little black box Edsel had carried.
Engraved on it, in flowing Martian script, was, “The Last Weapon.”
I wonder what it could be, Parke asked himself. He had let Edsel live long enough to try out all the others; no use chancing a misfire himself. It was too bad he hadn’t lived long enough to try out this one, too.
Of course, I really don’t need it, he told himself. He had plenty. But this might make the job a lot easier, a lot safer. Whatever it was, it was bound to be good.
Well, he told himself, let’s see what the Martians considered their last weapon. He opened the box.
A vapor drifted out, and Parke threw the box from him, thinking about poison gas.
The vapor mounted, drifted haphazardly for a while, then began to coalesce. It spread, grew and took shape.
In a few seconds, it was complete, hovering over the box. It glimmered white in the dying light, and Parke saw that it was just a tremendous mouth, topped by a pair of unblinking eyes.
“Ho ho,” the mouth said. “Protoplasm!” It drifted to the body of Edsel. Parke lifted a blaster and took careful aim.
“Quiet protoplasm,” the thing said, nuzzling Edsel’s body. “I like quiet protoplasm.” It took down the body in a single gulp.
Parke fired, blasting a ten-foot hole in the ground. The giant mouth drifted out of it, chuckling.
“It’s been so long,” it said.
Parke was clenching his nerves in a forged grip. He refused to let himself become panicked. Calmly he activated the force field, forming a blue sphere around himself.
Still chuckling, the thing drifted through the blue haze.
Parke picked up the weapon Edsel had used on Faxon, feeling the well-balanced piece swing up in his hand. He backed to one side of the force field as the thing approached, and turned on the beam.
The thing kept coming.
“Die, die!” Parke screamed, his nerves breaking.
But the thing came on, grinning broadly.
“I like quiet protoplasm,” the thing said as its gigantic mouth converged on Parke.
“But I also like lively protoplasm.”
It gulped once, then drifted out of the other side of the field, looking anxiously around for the millions of units of protoplasm, as there had been in the old days.
Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
Pest control is a necessity everywhere, even on a space station, and this station was overdue for a heavy dose of it. Particularly since the pests were breaking through from another dimension, and leaving holes through which even bigger alien creatures could emerge into our space, creatures which were much too dangerous to be called mere “pests” . . .
“Moongoose” is set in the same universe as the authors’ “Boojum,” a story I heartily recommend, and last year’s podcasted novelette, “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward.” And this story will provide extra fun for H.P. Lovecraft fans, spotting all the places where his story titles, place names, and so on have been pressed into unusual service. That is not dead which can eternally be referenced and in strange footnotes, even death may die.
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary for fun as a child, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Campbell Award winning author of 25 novels and almost a hundred short stories. Her most recent series is the Eternal Sky trilogy from Tor, beginning with Range of Ghosts. She and Sarah Monette have written two novels and a number of short stories together.
Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.
Sarah Monette was born and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; she began writing at the age of 12, and hasn’t stopped yet. Appropriately, her PhD in English Literature was earned with a dissertation on ghosts in English Renaissance revenge tragedy. Her novels include Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, and Corambis. Her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, will come out from Tor under the pen-name Katherine Addison. She won the Spectrum award in 2003 for her short story “Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland,” and many of her short stories have been cited on Best of the Year lists, and included in anthologies of the year’s best sf and/or fantasy. She currently lives in a 107-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, and a husband. (There’s also a horse. He does not live in the house.) Her website is www.sarahmonette.com.
MONGOOSE
Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
Izrael Irizarry stepped through a bright-scarred airlock onto Kadath Station, lurching a little as he adjusted to station gravity. On his shoulder, Mongoose extended her neck, her barbels flaring, flicked her tongue out to taste the air, and colored a question. Another few steps, and he smelled what Mongoose smelled, the sharp stink of toves, ammoniac and bitter.
He touched the tentacle coiled around his throat with the quick double tap that meant soon. Mongoose colored displeasure, and Irizarry stroked the slick velvet wedge of her head in consolation and restraint. Her four compound and twelve simple eyes glittered and her color softened, but did not change, as she leaned into the caress. She was eager to hunt and he didn’t blame her. The boojum Manfred von Richthofen took care of its own vermin. Mongoose had had to make do with a share of Irizarry’s rations, and she hated eating dead things.
If Irizarry could smell toves, it was more than the “minor infestation” the message from the station master had led him to expect. Of course, that message had reached Irizarry third or fourth or fifteenth hand, and he had no idea how long it had taken. Perhaps when the stationmaster had sent for him, it had been minor.