by Alex Oliver
"You're completely unaugmented?"
It felt like the first time he'd actually looked at her, and not at some figment of his own imagination. And yeah, he thought she was ugly, but prettiness had never really been on her to do list anyway, so she gave an internal shrug and smiled. "That's right. And you're crawling with little robots inside you?"
He smiled back. "I am, yes."
She fed the fire another log and felt the heart of a lost city press against her own. A whole civilization gone, and they were sitting here at odds over the definition of normal? Mankind never changed.
"Wow. That's weird."
CHAPTER TEN
The Captain was a girl once
The faint sssh and crackle of the fire was comforting in the silence of the dead city. Once, something small flitted past the door with a flap and peeping, this world's equivalent of a bat, perhaps, going out for a night of hunting, but otherwise when Jones didn't speak it became so quiet that she could hear the water outside sliding down its channel in the street.
If he wasn't a murderer, there was no real surprise he hadn't wanted to end up here. In fact, by fighting not to end up here he was only fighting for justice. She smiled at herself. Right. That was going a little far in the opposite direction. Technically she was supposed to be just as queasy at the thought of him giving some child gills as she was about him killing them. But... but she could kind of understand the appeal of that, the lure of being free to swim as far and as deep as you liked into the ocean and not drown.
And things would have been a hell of a lot easier for her if she had been a man. Was that why it was a sin? Because sometimes if you did the hard things anyway they made you stronger?
But if they defeated you instead, and made you turn to the sin of suicide as the only thing you could stand any more, what then? Why wouldn't it be a good thing to be able to cure that problem like it was a broken spine?
A lot of people didn't like thinking about these things. Most of her family, to tell the truth, didn't have a lot of appetite for debating the finer points of why something was a sin and why it wasn't. They found it a relief not to have to work it out for themselves, just to stick by the rules and know everything was being done right. But if she'd been like that she'd have been married twenty years ago, probably have grandchildren on the way now.
Twenty years ago, she couldn't imagine why she would want that. Now the thought of it tore her heart out and trampled it. She had to push the heels of her hands into her eyes to hide the shine.
"Everyone on Eos has bots," Jones was still smiling into the fire. He was pretty, with that smooth curve to his cheek and the spackling of freckles. They were on his bared forearms too - fewer than on his exposed skin, but still sprinkled over the tawny brown in umber stars. She wondered if he had them everywhere and then told herself off for immodest thoughts.
On the other hand, since she was ruined already...
"We're injected with government issue nano as part of the registration of a new child, so you're always tagged with your identity. They prevent violence and crime, so it's of net benefit to everyone."
"Knowing your identity prevents violence?" Thinking of pristine newborn babies being injected with machines was disturbing enough to dampen her mood. She was, on balance, glad about that.
"There are enforcer functions coded into the government nano." He must have seen her frown of incomprehension, he went on, "If a person is suspected of a crime – if an official report is filed – then the bots make them turn themselves in for questioning. Stop them from being able to lie to the police."
He grinned at her challengingly, "Of course, that just means there's a thriving black market for bugs that disable the government's nano. But that's delicate work, only for the best of us. You can't tamper with govbots too directly or you activate their kill switch."
"Kill switch?" she asked, really creeped out now, wondering how he could still be smiling.
He shrugged. "Yeah. I mean, if you're a clear and present danger to everyone around you, the government has the right to switch you off."
Belatedly, he seemed to realize what he had said, what it must sound like to her. He held up both hands in a gesture of surrender. "We trust them not to do it unless it's necessary. Just like Kingdom folks trust your government not to send around someone like you to drill a hole in their head if they don't comply."
It wasn't like that at all. "I can refuse though," she insisted, "Because I'm not a machine. If I take a look at you and I think 'this man is not a clear and present danger at all' I can refuse to shoot."
"Then they shoot us both." He threw the wrappers of his rations into the fire, where they burned up in long green flames. She was about to say something about his cynicism when he gave a bitter laugh and went on. "I suppose that's the one good thing about a Kingdom takeover. Your lot were too stupid to find the kill switch, and then you burned down the government offices and all that information was lost. You could have just switched us off, but you chose to come in like Neanderthals and do it personally with your fists and guns instead."
"We freed you," she said, disturbed to hear this in more than one way. She'd spent a lifetime protecting people from horrifically invasive, mind controlling governments like this. She'd rather hoped the people she liberated would be thankful for it. "You accuse us of being the thought police when your government can literally turn you into automata at the flick of a switch? At least force leaves the mind free. In your inward person, between you and God, it leaves you free to pray if nothing more."
"What good does that do you if you're dead?" Bryant shuffled an inch or two sideways, taking his shoulder away from where it was propped against her own. The air that flowed into the gap felt interstellar in its chill.
"Better dead than a slave," she said, and silence fell again. Distantly, something chimed. A clock, counting hours for busy pillbug children whose remains they would surely have found if it had been genocide. Jones was looking at her again, startled into taking her seriously, and it came over her with a pang of misery that the last time she had had a conversation like this had been...
Had been never. She'd never met anyone before who was both interested in these things and safe to talk to about them. Saying some of these things aloud - well it felt like home.
Jones laughed. "That's supposed to be my line."
She smiled back, chewed the last mouthful of her ration bar, savoring the homely taste of cinnati syrup, whey and oats. Wondered if she could afford sleep, or if she had to wait him out. It would be ideal if they could sleep turn and turn about, one on watch at all times, but that would only happen if she could really trust him to keep his word. "Don't give me bots, okay?"
"Okay," he said, warm and easy. "Even if I touch you, I won't give you bots."
Her mind chose that moment to give her the phantom feeling of what it might be like to have his arms around her, lean her face against his cheek, maybe slide one of those delicate, finely calibrated hands up under the waistband of her shirt, and that was going entirely too far. She stomped on the thought hard. She was a kingdom warrior, pure of body and mind - and all right, she'd stuffed that last part up royally once already, that wasn't license to keep doing it over and over again.
"So what's your story?" Bryant had his back to her, pulling out one of the survival blankets from the pack. It wasn't really cold, but she did the same as an excuse to hide her burning face. Being wrapped in blankets and drowsy gave the whole exchange a feeling of warm companionship that she hadn't had since sleepover parties at school. But that was a lie, because he despised her. Rightly so.
She remembered his taunts on Froward, "Where's your husband? Where's your child?" and bitterness twisted her lip. "I'm sure you've viewed the news."
"Yeah," he touched her sleeve like an apology. "But the news said I was a murderer and I'm not. So maybe you...?"
How had they come to this? How had a bit of inadvertent cannibalism and a day sitting in the ruins of an alien civili
zation brought her to the point where she wanted to tell him, she wanted to be absolved? But it had.
"There's not much to say. On Novocasa, family is very important to us. Girls marry, become mothers early, and then well, that's your life gone, isn't it? I wanted to see everything first, and to become a holy warrior was the only way. I don't regret that. I've been good at it. Star systems attack each other, and I stop it. But if you're a woman, they make you leave if you marry, because they say it's a woman's task to stay at home and raise the children."
Eloquence had never been one of Aurora's strengths. This wasn't coming out right. She couldn't get across the frustration and the bafflement and the growing, aching awareness of the ghosts of little hands that could have been in her hand. The choice every day between children and a career that she thought meant something good. Though perhaps she'd been wrong about that.
"I don't see why a man couldn't be as good a parent as a woman," she insisted, the press of tears behind it making it come out vehement, aggressive. "Some men don't want to fight. Some men would like to stay at home and see their children's first steps and hold their hands and teach them words and..."
She had to stop and cover her face, drive it all down. Squash it down, because she couldn't speak through it. She swallowed it like bile, got a grip, calmed, breathed out a long huff of a sigh, and tried to smile.
"I said this to Admiral... I said it to one of my superiors one evening. We'd been on a long campaign together, and he was clever and handsome and attentive and... He had a way of making you feel you were the one island of competence in the fleet, but that he hadn't forgotten you were a woman too. I didn't know..."
What it was to feel desirable, before then. It had been dazzling, a revelation that she had still not worked through - the experience of an entirely different kind of self. It had felt like enchantment. Like all the things she had been taught about love suddenly made sense, and it would be spitting in the face of God himself to hold back.
But she couldn't talk about that. She barely even knew how to think about it. "I thought I was in love..."
No, that was unfair to herself. "I was in love."
Like that made anything better.
"The campaign was his last. He was retiring in victory, and he said – well - why didn't we start a family? We would be married in the eyes of God, and I had leave owed. No one need know. He would take care of her, and I could see her. I could come home to them both every chance I could get, like a man coming home on leave. And I could see her..." Against her will, her voice had raised an octave and stuck in her throat. She tried shaking her head but it didn't shake it loose, and tears that she couldn't hold inside were leaking from the corners of her eyes.
"I trusted him. Why shouldn't I? I thought he was the best man alive. And he took my daughter out of my arms at the hospital, and he told everyone-- He told everyone that it had been a test of my chastity and I had failed and I was an unfit mother and I would never, ever see her again."
Now she was crying properly, conscious of how grotesque it was - she, a trained killing machine who looked like a troll, weeping in great, ugly, retching sobs, with tears and snot streaming down her face. "And I don't know her name! I don't even know my own daughter's name."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
And the rogue was a doctor
A hand settled lightly between her shoulder-blades, as if unsure it would be welcomed, and damn right, it wasn't. She wasn't ever falling for sympathy again and admiration and all of those other snares. She had known better, going in, she had known better when she was doing it, and she was getting no more than her just desserts, so sympathy would be false anyway.
... It was really just as well there had been so little of it. She waited with a lump of dull numbness in her chest for him to say 'Well, to be fair, you did fail. You wouldn't want a fallen woman to be looking after your child either, would you? I know I wouldn't.' That had been what all her friends had said. Some of them had stuck by her anyway and she was sure she should be more grateful, if not for the fact that they seemed so happy to have her finally knocked off her pedestal. If not for the fact that she felt they were all secretly despising her anyway.
"What a shit," Jones said, in a lowered, appalled voice that plucked at something fierce inside her, that chimed with her shameful wish to shove the general's face into a porthole until one or other of them shattered. "How long had you been fighting for these people?""All my life." His outrage on her behalf was bracing. Despite everything that told her this was her fault, she still felt the admiral had been cruel. No one had yet agreed with her, and it was so good to finally find someone who did. The fact that he was an Old Earth heretic should have made a difference, but it didn't.
"Fucker! Seriously, what a bastard. You should tell him where to get off. You should go and get her. He can't keep a mother from her own child, surely?"
She pulled herself together, trying to pretend that she did not feel shaky and embarrassed. Some warrior she was! To cover her reaction, she got out the billy can and set some water on to heat, so she could wash her face and straighten her hair and feel like a Captain again instead of a woman.
"He has every right. As my superior, he can order me away, and I can get shot for mutiny if I disobey. And as the father, his child is his property. I'm not married to him, so I have no standing at all."
"That's shit." Jones said again, and now he was glaring at her as if it was all her fault. "Why do you support a regime like that? Didn't it ever occur to you how fucked up it was?"
Truthfully it never had. There had always been other things to think about, big brothers to fight, exams to pass, training courses, wars to be fought, no time to ponder the very basics of society. School had said the Kingdom was a reversion to God's good ways, to simplicity and the natural, happy state of mankind after Terran society had become hopelessly corrupt. The People of the Book had triumphantly come together in the face of the Source's godless secularism, and had founded a society in which ancient differences were put aside, or reexamined and discovered not to be so very different at all.
Jones could say what he liked but a world on which everyone was constantly mechanically modifying themselves in the face of massive technological invasion of privacy and agency hardly seemed to contradict that.
And she'd never given a thought to unmarried mothers because it had never occurred to her that she would ever be one.
"Serves me right, huh?"
Jones' righteous look faltered instantly. "Shit," he said - which seemed to be his default when he couldn't think of anything to say - and launched himself to his feet. The bright yellow operating scrubs he wore were now stained with soot and lake residue, and yet he managed to look graceful in them, a wading bird of a man, as slender and stick-like as a heron.
What was he doing over there in the corner of the room? He was reaching up to untangle something from the thicket of woven vines that roofed this shelter. Closing a fist around something, he wrenched it off, returned to her looking sly and pleased with himself and yet wary as if he knew he was pushing his luck.
"Sorry," he rotated his closed hand and let it open with a flourish that would have made a stage magician proud. Inside was one of the little light sources that turned the night-time cavern into the heart of a galaxy. It came on a stem. When she took it to examine it closer she saw it was a flower, a globe-like flower of dense-packed luminous petals, each of which glowed a pearly, nacreous silver.
"You just gave me a flower?" She had to ask, because it didn't add up, but even before his nod, the crushed despair she had been feeling had given way to incredulous laughter, because, man, that was hilarious. It was so hilarious it didn't hurt at all.
"Have you forgotten I just killed two guys in front of you?"
He gave a sheepish shrug. "No, but I'm sorry I freaked about that too. I'd just never seen anyone die before in such a sudden, violent way. It was..."
She twirled the flower in her fingers and wondered if she was being
mocked. But... maybe not. Maybe in this alien place it was easier to be human to one another. "You don't need to be sorry for freaking out about that. It's meant to be ugly. I had the shakes for a month after my first. I wish I could say you didn't get used to it, but you do."
This close to it, warming under her fingers, the flower bloomed a little more open to show golden stamens covered in pinpricks of light. A faint smell drifted from it like the fragrance of jasmine. It was delicate and beautiful and fragile, and really not at all appropriate for her, but she tucked it behind her ear anyway because why the hell not?
Jones smiled. He'd looked a little less like a ferret every hour she spent with him, and his expressions had become deeper, more nuanced. This one started out almost mischievous, traveled through thoughtful and ended up sad.
He turned away and hooked the billy can out of the fire with a spare branch, and the sense that he was retreating, closing something down, only became more profound as she washed her face clean of regret with a handkerchief dipped in warm water.
"What?" she asked, sitting back on her heels when she was done.
"We're going to get to the colony and you're going to leave me there, aren't you? Because that's your duty and you want to earn a way back in. Because, despite everything, you're still fighting for them, and you always will."
"I had a Type A, Padishah class," she said defensively, the words sounding cold to her, hollow, as if something had sucked all the juice out. "I was the first captain in the fleet, with thousands of people at my command. And I earned that. Perhaps I've also earned disgrace, but two or three years on the Horsehead front without me and I think they'll remember that forgiveness is divine. They'll remember that I won wars for them and they'll ask me to come back."
It was a little hope that she nurtured desperately, though it smouldered like a spark on wet tinder. This was the most awful thing she'd ever had to live through, but it might one day be over. She might still be able to come home.
