by Alex Oliver
What he also wanted was knowledge of who these people were and where they had gone. That part he intended to keep to himself.
He took the bag and his scanner out of there and let himself back into the Dash – it's name was Charity, inappropriately enough. There he hooked the scanner up to the on-board computer and let Charity see what her powerful translation program made of the language.
The sun was rising in the porthole of the galley as he printed out a three course meal from the recom unit. His internal clock told him it was over twenty Eos standard hours since he'd left. Just under a day, on this planet.
Not even the food took away his hollowness. He wondered if he'd been infected by something in the buried city – something that was actively scouring him barren and would leave him silent, dark and deserted as it was. But it wasn't that, he knew.
He and Aurora had taken a full planetary day at maximum speed to fly from here to the colony on the swoops. Which meant that even if it occurred to the criminals that he would come here – even if their subterranean monitoring system had tracked him here – even if they immediately hopped on the bikes and set out after him, they could not reach him for another three hours. He could stay here in perfect safety a little while longer.
But why would he want to?
Restlessly, he finished his tasteless food on foot, prowling around the small cockpit, checking the sensors for distant swoop signals, and the scanner to see if it had finally come to the end of its translation program. Drumstick in one hand, he descended the central ladder and checked out the cabins, which mocked him with their soft carpeted walls and their plush beds, elastic webbed so one could sleep in zero gee if one wished to dial down the local gravity.
What the hell was he doing? Angry, he swarmed back up to the cabin, took another look out. Still, no one was coming. His mind touched briefly on the thing he was not thinking about. No, he couldn't go back and make some kind of heroic rescue attempt that would convince Aurora he'd planned to help her all along. He couldn't. He wasn't a hero. She knew that. And he didn't care what she thought of him anyway. He had his own life to live.
“Computer.”
“Sir?”
“Set a course for Snow City.”
“The comet P3NX-549 in the Auahituroa system, sir?”
“That's the one.”
Like its launch, Froward's navigation had required the human touch – the need for a trained astrogator had been written into their woefully low-tech software, and the course calculation had needed hours to run without one. Charity did it in seconds. Far too soon.
“Course laid in.”
Bryant clutched at his hair again, and ow, that hurt. He couldn't go back. He wasn't sure how he was going to go forward, feeling as he did about himself, but he couldn't go back, and his time of grace while he didn't have to do either was coming to a close.
He had given her every advantage, and a weapon. She would be fine. He huffed out a long breath of anger, frustration and dismay, but it didn't shift any of the weight off his chest. Not to worry. Time to put this planet and its mistakes behind him. It seemed that despite everything Aurora had done, he had succeeded with his escape plan after all.
“Okay. Charity, let's get out of here.”
He just wished he didn't feel so miserable about it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jailbreak
Aurora had familiarized herself with the layout of the colony on the trip, though in truth there had not been much to learn. Prison/starter colonies were standardized and this one had not differed greatly from the museum at the heart of Novocasa, where she had walked with her parents many times.
She staggered into the corner of the chapel like a drunkard who can't decide whether he needs physical or spiritual support. The chapel's outer wall was built into the thick, defensive wall of the citadel and the shade there was so heavy that when she eyed her deformed left hand she could barely see it. But she could feel the opening in the palm just like a mouth. When she thought at it, told it to open, it did so, and a thick fluid oozed out. Shuddering internally at the sight, she wiped it down the wall, swaying back in disbelief when the bricks immediately began to smoke and melt.
This part of the citadel faced only the prison block and the trees of the orchard behind it. A hole in the wall large enough to crawl through might go unnoticed in the dark, and by morning it shouldn't matter, because they would be out of here. So she leaned her weight on her hand and pressed, slowly, silently burrowing through.
On the other side, she stood for a moment and brushed the scorch marks from her clothes. One of the guards who patrolled the prison block was visible to her left, his back to her as he rounded the far corner of the prison block, the light on his rifle picking out only what was ahead of him, blinding him to what else was moving in the dark.
She had two minutes before the second guard came around the near corner and saw her, but she wasn't going to be here for that. Just as the first guard turned left to patrol the far end wall, she slipped between the school and the prison and around the back, where only fruit trees watched her and whispered to themselves.
As she pressed her shoulder-blades into the bricks, she was reminded again of how grossly misshapen she felt. It nagged at her - the fact that these were not her shoulders, though they were, that every part of her spine that touched the wall was wrong. Even her breathing, scarcely audible even to her, was hollower and lower and not her own.
If she let herself, she would be ashamed. Was this what they felt then? Those men and women who were born in the wrong bodies? Did they spend their lives suffering like this? And had she thought to condemn them for trying to fix it? Bryant's anger seemed more justified to her now that she could barely stand to be in her own skin, now that every instinct she had clamored at her that she was, in this state, an intolerable mistake.
She was going to be very, very thankful when Bryant reset this, and she was going to think better of his medical ethics in future. No wonder he thought he had been doing a good thing and was furious to have been stopped. He might have been right about that all along.
But there wasn't time to worry over her existential crises. The patrol of guards continued, and now she could hear the second one approaching her position. He was not stealthy, he clearly suspected nothing, certainly not that when he rounded the corner of the building a form pressed flush against the wall, scarcely visible in the tree shade, would lunge out and grab him.
Aurora got her hand over his mouth and an arm around his neck before he had processed what had happened enough to protest.
His arm came up with the gun in it, but he could not twist enough to bring the barrel to bear on her, and she throttled him carefully into the dark, having to waste a great deal of thought on how to do it without killing him. She was not used to these arms, with their additional bulk and strength. She didn't like them much, they did not answer to her instincts like her own and the permanent state of uncertainty was wearing to the nerves.
A little over two minutes before the second guard came around the corner. She hefted the first over her shoulder and ran across open ground to dump this one in the woods, his hands tied with his own belt. She tore a strip from his sleeve to gag him, denuded him of radio and rifle efficiently, returned to her spot to do the same thing to the second.
Once that was achieved, she considered simply walking into the prison block through the door. But there would be a desk, and someone behind it with his hand on the trigger, ready for friends of inmates to try to start something, and walking head on into something like that would be noisy.
Instead she simply made a hole in the wall, growing increasingly fond of this new attribute of hers. Perhaps she could keep it when she changed back. Or perhaps that was hubris, wanting to be something better than human.
Guard change was in three hours, that was surely plenty of time to get everyone out, and then she would have to decide what to do about Bryant. He wanted to take the ship and get away, which to h
er mind was a dereliction of duty. Perhaps he could be restrained in his room on board until order was established, and then she could tell everyone that he was innocent and...
And they would all believe her, because they all had such good reason to trust her word above that of the legitimate government.
"What the?" someone behind the wall hissed, shocked but smart enough to be quiet about it. Aurora smeared another coat of acid on the edges of the hole - it was five feet high now and nearly wide enough to put an arm through. She knelt down to peer inside and found Mboge's bruised face looking back. One of his eyes was swollen shut, but the other flared wide at the sight of her. "Who are you?"
"What's..." said someone else, louder, further in, and Aurora pressed the air down beside her to say 'ssh!'
The hole was wide enough to slip through now and they had a lot to talk about. Best to do it somewhere where they would not attract attention. She crawled inside and held up a hand to stop Mboge from pushing past her and out.
"Mr. Mboge. I'm glad to see you." He looked very different from his normal spit-and-polish martinet, with dust and mud and bloodstains on his tunic and the tight braids of his hair unraveling into chaos. Behind him, all the men of the Froward's crew sat or lay on the dirt floor of a single large cell. They had already drawn together to conceal her from the view of anyone beyond the bars and they were watching her with a profound lack of recognition it took her minutes to register and understand.
"How do you know me?" said Mboge, as Ademola limped forward and peered hard at Aurora's eyes, at the nail polish that was still on her big mannish hands, and the remnants of her veil that she wore now like a pirate bandana to tie back her long, wavy hair.
Under the scrutiny, she wanted to cover it. She lifted a hand to at least tuck her fringe back under her headcloth, ashamed to be so exposed, and Ademola covered his mouth with a little gasp. "Captain Campos?"
"Yes," she growled, in a voice like stones falling deep underground. "Don't ask. It's a long story we haven't got time for right now. Where are the women?"
"Over there," Ademola pushed Ignatious out of her way so that she could look through the gap between him and Lt. Funar. Across the dim width of the corridor she saw concrete floor and then more bars, and far back from the bars, the Froward's female personnel were crowded together against the outer wall.
"Are they all right?"
"Hungry, thirsty, cold, like us," Mboge looked at her like he didn't believe his eyes, but he attempted to shake some dust from his jacket, brushed down his sleeves.
"They been in most days to threaten," Ademola added, his peaceable old face wrinkled with disgust, "And they touch. If one of the girls gets close enough to the bars, they touch. They tried that here too, but Mboge bit one. Practically chewed his nose off. They give him a good kicking, but they back off from us after that."
Mboge was beginning - finally - to get on Aurora's good side. She grinned at him long enough to elicit a grudging smile in return.
"Let me get to the bars."
The metal dissolved eagerly beneath her touch, and she had to hold up a hand to forestall another round of time-wasting questions. "Anyone else in here? How about the governor and his staff?"
"They hanged the Governor off his own palace," Ademola rocked a hand from side to side to show he couldn't be certain about this. "Or so they said. But someone's being held behind that wall." He pointed to the end of the open cell. "They come in and out with food. Enough for a half-dozen people, if they were all being slowly starved."
The dim corridor brightened suddenly as a door opened at the end of it and a silhouette appeared in the distant square of light. "Shut the fuck up," it said and smacked its hand against the silhouette of a rifle. "Tomorrow we get to find out if you're going to be ransomed. I'm telling you, they're not going to bother, and then I'm going to get first pick of the fresh meat. So shut the fuck up if you want me to be nice."
Aurora made a gesture for silence, and they held still, waiting, until the door closed again. Then she rolled out of the hole she had made in the bars and went over to the women's pen.
They had already peeled themselves away from the wall, were watching her with uncertain pleasure as she stroked the palm of her hand down the bars of their cell and the metal withered in response.
She was maybe going to have to take that 'monster' comment back too. Bryant could have asked for her permission first, but she'd scarcely have credited how useful this would be. Possibly she owed him an apology for the shaking and the harsh words. He'd been a truer friend to her and to the rest of the crew than any of them had deserved. The thought gave her a moment's warmth, before she found herself worrying about whether he was okay, whether he had been set upon by ravening gangs of sex-starved criminals. And those were not productive thoughts, so she dropped them.
"Aurora?" Dr. Atallah was the first to crawl through the gap to greet her. She had lost her hijab somewhere and her blue-black hair was full of dirt. She too was bruised over one cheekbone and her lip split, but her gaze was as level as ever. "But you are... How is this possible?"
Aurora wanted to ask 'are you all right?' Something about Lina's cool strength had appealed to her right from their introduction a bare three weeks ago, and she'd hoped to find a friend there. But this was a moment for command, not for sentiment.
"Do you have any injured who can't walk?"
"Three sir... um... ma'am. Um. Ademola isn’t going more than three steps. Rabinovitz and Banks can’t stand up."
"They're going to have to be carried. We'll be making a dash for the Governor's launch, which is in a silo beneath the mansion. Once we're there, we'll remove to a safer location and consider how to bring the colony back under control of its legal government. Mboge," she tossed him one of the rifles she'd taken from the guards. "Pick out teams to carry each man. Doctor, come with me."
The door opened again without warning. Aurora, on instinct, hurled herself into the shadow behind it, leaving Lina standing in the blaze of light, startled as a doe in headlights.
"How the hell did you get out, missy?" Their jailer was a large man with the melted look of one who had once been larger yet but who has lost a lot of weight too suddenly for his skin to catch up. He sounded both perturbed and pleased, as if a chance to manhandle Atallah outweighed her mysterious freedom in his mind. But he wasn't blase enough to walk in unarmed.
He cocked his rifle and pressed it into his shoulder as he slowly advanced towards Atallah. She held her poise, looking at him, and only at him, in disdain.
The moment he had cleared the door frame, Aurora kicked it closed. He realized there was someone behind him and turned, taking his aim off Atallah, and that was enough of a chance for Aurora to push the gun to one side and punch him out. Then there was another rifle to give out and Aurora tossed it to marine private Citlali.
Citlali caught it by reflex and pulled it to her like a child with a doll. All children of the kingdom, both boys and unmarried girls, were considered eligible to become kingdom warriors, but the marines preferred to train only men. How someone so round faced and angelic - if angels were made of terracotta and jet - as Citlali had ever been accepted into their hallowed ranks was a mystery. She guessed that the girl had been adopted as something of a good luck charm. Carried through training by team members who thought she was cute, and dumped as unsuitable for real duties as soon as those teams passed out.
"Citlali, you're my ranking marine. Get yourself a team together to give us cover when we make a dash for the ship."
Citlali blinked tears from her dark eyes. She swallowed, and her flower-adorned hands found a practiced grip on her rifle as she nodded. "Yes ma'am... ah?"
"Ma'am will do. When you've picked your team, guard the door."
The solitary cells opened inward as she dissolved the locks, and the stench of ordure and death pained Aurora like an old war wound. Lina pushed past her and was checking pulses before the starved and misery-dull occupants of the cell could turn their he
ads to react.
They were all so thin! Twenty of them sitting shoulder to shoulder, propped against the walls, dull eyed and silent, with the bones so sharp beneath the stretched cling-film of their skin they looked like they would push through at any moment, cut themselves to pieces from the inside out.
The smell oozed from an overflowing bucket in the corner. Two corpses, arranged like a dam between the sewage and the rest of the room, added their own top notes of sweet decay.
How the heck was she supposed to get these people to make a mad dash for the launch? Could they even stand?
"We didn't... " an old man with a white fringe of hair around his egg head was saying plaintively to Lina. "We didn't eat them. Andrews and Larson. They died three days ago and we didn't eat them. McKillip said we would, but we didn't. We didn't. We're better than that."
It took her a while to place his face, shrunken as it was, and then she wasted a good minute while this body decided what she really needed now would be blind, white hot rage. Stupid bag of flesh. She calmed it down eventually, turned all the ration bars she had on her out of her pockets and let Lina distribute them - a third each to each person - before she crouched down in front of him and said "Governor Selman? Is that you?"
"Who?" He tried to focus on her, managed it on the third attempt, swallowing a tiny bite of ration bar as if it pained him.
"Aurora Campos," she said, and grimaced. Behind her, Lina had begun supervising the removal of the other prisoners out into the cleaner air of the communal cells. Aurora took note of the fact that those who could not stagger were light enough to be lifted by a single crew-member.
"Weren't you supposed to be a girl? Fallen woman..."
"It's a long story."
"Angel of the phoenix nebula."
"He's well out of it, sir," Engineer Morwen Crouch said at Aurora's shoulder, peering down. They had all been denuded of com units and other personal possessions, but she had somehow managed to retain a pencil, which she wore now tucked in the mess of fiery red hair behind her ear.
