The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois; Jonathan Strahan

Author:Gardner Dozois; Jonathan Strahan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Space Opera, General
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Published: 2009-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

There was big trouble at the Bombay hotel. Apparently, the labor strike convulsing Dubai had some local echo in Bombay. The harried staff as sured Kipps that he had a room, a nice room, a palace fit for a cosmic hero: but it just wasn’t ready for him. Yet.

Having flown to his hotel through outer space, Kipps naturally carried no luggage. The mishap left him standing empty-handed in his sweat-stained uniform in a potted-palm, marble-pillared lobby.

Three goons in the lobby were staring at him.

The goons could have been police spies, or journalists wanting a scoop about him, or maybe even some Bombay mafia gunsels carrying their cheap gats into nice hotels. Maybe the three men were one of each variety of goon. In any case, the goons weren’t the helpful American spooks that Kipps had expected from the local embassy. He didn’t like the way the locals sized him up.

Kipps tried his satellite phone. Being a satellite phone, it couldn’t work indoors.

So Kipps left the hotel and entered the awesome blazing heat, urban racket, and the incredible Indian smell. The goons hastily followed him.

Kipps pointed his American-secured satellite telephone at the blazing smog-yellow sky. He attempted to call the local American embassy. The rugged phone seemed functional, but it wanted to synchronize with the chip inside his State Department passport. That interaction wasn’t working. Some fault with the phone, or with the passport, or with some federal interface that just didn’t hook up to another federal interface.

Whatever the glitch, his secure phone was useless.

So Kipps stepped inside a big, rattling, rust-eaten trolley. The goons also hustled into the trolley, jamming their way deep into the crowd.

Kipps muscled through the crowd and stepped off the far side of the trolley at the last second. The trolley thundered off with his pursuers trapped inside.

Then Kipps went for a walk. He chose directions that offered the fewest video cameras.

As every schoolchild knew, Bombay had been hit by a nuclear weapon. Bombay had been nuked, and Calcutta had been nuked. Due to the muja-hideen unpleasantries, there had been three more nukes beating the daylights out of hapless Kashmir.

The Bombay nuke had been a much heavier nuke than the dirty-suitcase versions smuggled into Houston and LA and Washington.

In Houston and LA and Washington, six years later, there were still big cigarette-butt blast zones where the feds wandered around with their Geiger counters and moaned about obscure isotopes that gathered in the thyroids of children.

Nothing like that visible around here. There had to be some similar atomic blast locale in Bombay, but, for the life of him, Kipps couldn’t find it. Bombay was absolutely packed with humanity. Bombay was seething with life and insanely huge. Bombay was a true twenty-first-century megacity, which meant that Bombay wasn’t so much a town as a province-eating brick-and-metal dinosaur.

There were sections of smoggy Bombay where mirror-glass spires blasted up tall enough to mock Chicago, but those spires were right next to barnacled checkerboard places—“informal urban areas”—made from scraps. From debris. Anything and everything, jigsawed and glued.

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