Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  She could see from here the straps and rectangular plaque of a personal shield on his bare chest beneath his coat. So just shooting him in the head with a rifle wouldn't do either.

  But his tiny pin head was his weakness nevertheless. She could still drive his nose up into his brain with the heel of her hand. Of course he'd expect it, but...

  He reached the cleared area beneath her, his men forming a circle around him, pushing the crowd back. All of a sudden it looked like an arena, and she couldn't help but notice that he looked like a man who'd never lost a fight.

  He grinned up at her, back in control. "I'm here. You want to fight me, come down and fight me man to man."

  There was a ruthless humor in his pale blue eyes that reminded her of Admiral Keene, and made her feel small - dishonored and helpless. That really annoyed her.

  "Right," she said, checking the citadel doors again. Still open, drat it. "Because you won't have your men mob me the moment I'm on the ground."

  He laughed - one of those laughs that sounds as painfully fake as it is. "You think I'm scared of you, mede? I don't need help to kick your ass. Come down here and we'll settle this in a fair fight."

  "You promise?"

  He covered his heart with his hand. "I promise."

  But the hand had slipped into the inside pocket of his coat. He brought it out with a disc launcher in it. She slammed on acceleration and altitude as fast as she could move, but he was faster. With a cough the weapon discharged, and its diamond covered disc soared out, rotating like a circular saw as it flew. It slashed the steering cables of her swoop casually as it went on to bury itself deep in the reactor core.

  She could hear the whine and feel the shrill heat of an engine that was about to blow itself sky high. No time to think. She plucked a hairpin out of the ruined rat's nest of her hair, gunned the accelerator and jammed the pin into it to keep it on full power. The swoop lurched and sped away and Aurora jumped from its saddle into the crowd, losing the rifles that had been strapped to the carrier, jarring her ankles and one wrist.

  The swoop flew on nearly three quarters of a mile before it blew itself up harmlessly over a distant alien stream, and she might have hoped the crowd would appreciate not having the fireball immolate them, but the crowd were drawing away from her like a hydrophobic liquid from a drop of water.

  It wasn't McKillip who ran in to that spontaneous arena to face her. It was nine of his men.

  She was going to have to get them to kill her, because, judging from their faces, she was not going to want to live as their prisoner. So she laughed and let all her contempt for liars shine out in the sound of it.

  "He can't even keep a promise," she told the crowd, turning to make sure she got a good look at their faces. "You want to be ruled by a man who can't keep his own word?"

  McKillip's men had seen her anti-pulse weapons shield too. They were slinging their useless rifles back on their backs and bringing out clubs, night-sticks, brass knuckles, a couple of knives. She swallowed, trying not to let herself appreciate how ugly this was going to get. Caught Gray's eye in the crowd, but he shook his head, looked away.

  She got the message clear enough as her two boldest opponents ran in for the kill - she was on her own. No one was going to help her now.

  She watched them both move, noticing a weak ankle on one, a blind eye on the other. Well, ever since she'd lost her daughter she'd been waiting for this. Maybe she was going down, but before that? Probably the only true thing Bryant had ever said was that she had a heck of a lot of anger stored up. Now she got to use it. She was going to make them all pay and pay hard before they finally took her down.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Attack of conscience

  Bryant pushed away a half finished plate of stew, dismayed to find that his lost appetite had not yet returned. The ship's computer had decided that local regulations required it to make a parking orbit of Cygnus 5 while it waited for customs clearance that would not come. He really ought to do something about that - give it the necessary override to finally push it out of the system. It was just that in about five minutes time they would be flying back over the colony and some stubborn, subconscious urge in him had said he wasn't allowed to leave without looking.

  What he would be able to tell from up here, he wasn't sure. Maybe the entire colony would be in flames? Maybe Aurora would have knocked down the citadel and... and there would be unicorns frolicking in the streets, and parades with balloons and candy.

  The scanner, now interfaced with the Dart's auxiliary computer and with the crystal block computer he had taken from the alien city, interrupted his seethe of uncompleted thoughts with a triumphant bleep. He shot to his feet as if he had been waiting for that very thing and snatched it up.

  On the split screen, lines of alien chicken-scratch writing were scrolling upwards, trailed on the right hand side by their Common equivalent. Even misery couldn't keep away a surge of triumph and anticipation as he set the cursor back to the top and began to read.

  Looked like the alien computer had located the ship's scanners and modified them to see through that green shielding rock. Either that, or this was an old map of what should be down there - he wasn't clear on that part - but the schematics were impressive either way. He could see paths, tunnels, caverns and underground power lines everywhere beneath him. The power lines - serious power lines - seemed to swirl like the paths in the city inward to congregate beneath the caldera of the colony's volcano. And there were some remarkable readings from--

  "Sir," the computer's calm polite voice could not be strained, but it had turned the volume up a notch. "Collision warning."

  "What!" Shit! He shoved the scanner off his lap and ran to the viewscreen, where he suffered perhaps the most vertiginous deja vu he had ever experienced in his life. Because there was a fading twinkle below him on the planet and he knew that what happened next was a dirty great ball of rock through the hull.

  "Um evasive maneuvers!"

  "Sir, I am not a military vessel, I am not equipped with software for evasive maneuvers."

  The sun was at forty five degrees to the ship. It shone on the planet, and it shone on the boulder that he could see climbing out of the atmosphere, glowing red on its upper surface, trailing hot vapor and clouds behind it.

  He didn't believe this. The thrust you'd have to get on something like this! How, how was this practical? Why would you do this? If you had the technology to do this, why wouldn't you do better than flinging stones. What the...?

  He yanked at his hair. Really? Really, this was not the point to be panicking. he just had to move the ship aside. He could see the thing coming, right there in the window, he should really do something! Oh shit, oh shit, not this again!

  With a wrenching effort of will, he threw himself into the pilot's seat, looked despairingly at the smooth expanse of gleaming metal in front of it. This wasn't like Aurora's pinnace, with big red buttons for the engines and pedals and... He couldn't even find the key to release the manual steering yoke.

  The rock had shed its trailing atmosphere now. He got an eyeful of it tumbling hard edged through airless space, the light on it like knives. Slow now, but with so much inertia...

  Maybe he could break it apart into small pieces that would bounce off the shield. "Weapons online!"

  "Sir, I am not a military vessel. I do not have weapons."

  Shit, shit, shit! He closed his eyes and flung his hands over them for good measure, but when the impact came it wasn't from the front at all, it was from the side, wrenching him out of his chair, and hurtling him against the wall. He was being squashed into the wall by g forces that tugged his skin and made his hair heavy. He untangled his limbs and fought his way slowly back to his knees.

  "Computer, what's happening?"

  The boulder was slipping sideways off the viewscreen. A split second of bowel churning fear as he thought it would reach the ship before they had cleared it to one side, and then it was past, flying out into empty
space, and he was still alive.

  "Portside maneuvering thrusters were engaged on full, sir."

  "Did you do that?" he asked, pulling himself into a crablike crouch in the corner where the g forces and artificial gravity made it hard to tell which was wall and which was floor.

  "No sir," the calm voice said, he thought mockingly but that was probably just his imagination. "Control of my systems has been overridden."

  "By whom?"

  It was inappropriate to feel what Bryant was feeling, but that didn't stop him. It started small, like a spark on dry tinder, but it was soon lustily ablaze. "Who by?"

  "I am receiving a transmission from the Governor, authenticated by iris and voice recognition. You are a thief and are no longer authorized to operate this ship. You will be returned to the penal colony to serve out your sentence."

  The Governor? By God, though. If the Governor was back in control that must mean that Aurora must have done it - she must have freed the man and gained access to the comms - and that meant she must have taken the citadel.

  And now she'd got his ship in an electronic grip and she was hauling him back to face her wrath. He laughed for joy, had to hold it in with both hands when it risked becoming a little hysterical. But by God, by her God, he was so damn elated by this he was starting to think it was what he'd dragged his feet and hoped for all along.

  ~

  Aurora's attackers also had shields, so she planted her feet and raised her rifle like a club, concentrating so hard on the first one's face she hardly noticed the blast of air that hit her from the side. It was the way bright lemon light slid across the bastard's puckered eyelid that made her realize there was a light above her, and an instant later the rifle was almost wrenched from her grip. Automatically, she held on hard, looked up, and there was Atallah astride an armored swoop. The doctor was hovering above the heads of the crowd, leaning down to try to pull Aurora up by the rifle.

  Aurora wound the strap around her wrist twice and nodded, pulling up as she felt the doctor accelerating away. She swarmed up the stock of the rifle and hauled herself onto the swoop's back.

  “Sorry I was late, ma'am.” Atallah's face was bright with fear and glee mixed, but her surgeon's hands were steady on the steering yoke as she took them over the citadel walls and down to the flitter park on its roof. A roar of laughter and cheering went up behind them that turned into angry yelling when the crowd tried to follow them into the citadel and found it locked against them.

  “Not a moment late,” Aurora grinned as she stepped off onto the gritty smoothness of the poured stone roof. She could see over the walls from here, could see McKillip force his way back through the throng to ram the closed doors with his shoulder and his fists. A moment later he stepped back, set his hands on his hips as if in thought, then barked orders she could not hear to his henchmen. She watched him pull a radio out of his belt and talk on it – to someone inside the citadel? Or to some as yet hidden hideout, to tell them to bring out the heavy guns?

  “Can we intercept their radios?”

  “Not yet,” Atallah flicked down the stand on her bike and restored some order to her new hijab. It looked like it had been torn from a hospital sheet, but Aurora understood the comfort of it, she didn't know how protestants like Crouch could go around uncovered all day long and not feel exposed. “But we did find our comlinks.”

  “Report.”

  “Most of them were watching the show, ma'am. We stunned fifteen in the comms lab and another ten in the kitchens and refectory. Rolled them outside through the hole in the back. Banks turned out to be handy at dry stone walling, so he's filling the gap as we speak. Lt. Funar posted guards there and on the front gate. We didn't know whose side the clergy were on, so we locked them in the chapel. The Governor's staff are in the hospital. Ademola is mobile enough on a crutch to stand guard over them.”

  Aurora took a moment to smile, though she wondered who'd been foolish enough to post such an excellent crew to the dead end cesspit of a job that was prison transport. “Good job, it sounds like.”

  “You didn't think we had it in us?” Atallah came to her side and stood watching the angry crowd by the gate with her. The edge of her heavy scarf – cream, with red stripes - flapped a little in the breeze and wafted unregulation jasmine scent in Aurora's direction, and she found herself wistfully wishing she could be so effortlessly feminine at a time like this.

  Never again, in this body, if she didn't get Bryant back to fix her.

  “I was sure you did. I never met a crew yet that couldn't move a sun out of orbit with enough motivation.”

  Atallah's smile took on a wry edge, as if she was holding something back, as if Aurora had been rude and she didn't want to say so. Aurora made a mental note to dig deeper into that when there was time, find out what it meant. But now was not the moment. “How's the recovery of the ship going?”

  Atallah handed her a comms link. “Morwen can tell you more. The last I heard it was on an automated flightpath and they had no chance of diverting the ship until it completed that pattern. But that was before I came up here. Things may have changed.”

  “Crouch? Come in please. This is Campos.”

  “Captain!” Crouch's voice was pleased but Aurora had the definite impression that her engineer was only partially present in the conversation, distracted by something else. “Good to know you made it. We've got him sir, but he's fighting back. I'm hauling him in slowly but he's making me work for it all the way, and there are some...”

  Silence, and Aurora heard her breathe “Holy shit, what's that?” as if to herself. “Iggy? D'you see that? What the hell is it?”

  More silence. “What?” Aurora insisted, perversely reassured by trouble. This had all been going far too smoothly so far.

  “Some...” Crouch could be heard flipping switches, her voice dopplering in volume as she moved around the control room, “Some kind of huge compound, underneath us. It just came on line. There's a massive amount of power being drawn, and a sleet of numbers down here. I don't know what they're--”

  This silence was even more ominous than the last. Aurora could practically hear Crouch's heart beat over the link. “What?” she urged again, hurrying for the hatch in the roof, the way down.

  “I think it's targeting information,” Crouch hissed. “I think some kind of underground superweapon is being swung round to aim at us. Oh shit! Get down in the basement asap, this thing's going to blow the top right off us.”

  Aurora took the spiral steps down the corner turret of the citadel two at a time, her fingers grazing over the inner column to keep her from tripping. The com unit felt heavy in her other hand. “Nothing you can do about it?”

  “I don't... I don't think so. It's not controlled from here. I'm just seeing information through relays.”

  Bryant could have tracked those links back, she thought regretfully. He could have wormed his way through the many layers of software and put himself in control in no time. But if she dragged Bryant down to a citadel that was about to be blown up by some unspecified weapon, the Governor's ship would be destroyed with it. She'd kill him.

  Which was frankly no more than he deserved. Except that wasn't fair, was it? He'd been innocently living a life where he helped others, only to be arrested, treated like a murderer and dumped in this place by a regime that didn't want to try to understand what he did. Why shouldn't he distrust her? She was already proved unchaste, disgraced, someone who couldn't control even their own bodily integrity. Why would anyone trust her now?

  She raised the com link to her ear. “How much time have we got?”

  “I'm not sure. Not long. Ten minutes?”

  Ten minutes was pushing it to evacuate, but it might be doable if everyone was told to assemble immediately. “Can you get the ship down any time in the next ten minutes?”

  “Not with the way he's fighting back, sir, no. Best estimate is half an hour.”

  Well, so. There was one person at least she could save. “Let
the ship go.”

  “Sir?” Crouch sounded disappointed. Aurora could understand that. She must be personally invested in winning, now. But this was no place for the personal.

  “No point in bringing the one working spaceship on the planet down here just to be destroyed. You can re-establish control once we've weathered whatever this is. And it’s ‘ma’am’, Crouch. Bodily modifications done to me against my will do not change who I am. Clear?”

  Crouch gave a little snort, bitter as black coffee. “If we weather it, ma'am. These readings are pretty--”

  Aurora paused on the stairs and then began running back up. She was remembering McKillip's men peeling off, heading somewhere, that radio call he made. It must have been to these people, to tell them to initiate the weapon. “Can you tell where the data's coming from? The location of this superweapon? I'm heading back to the swoops. Maybe I can fly wherever it is and stop it at source.”

  “Wait a moment,” a flurry of fingers on keys. Aurora fought not to say 'hurry up, we don't have much time.' Then Crouch exclaimed “Oh!” in a tone of voice that said she was grudgingly impressed. “It's some kind of missile launcher, with a mag-lev acceleration loop. Like a cross between a giant slingshot and a particle accelerator. It's pretty cool, ma’am, actually. Oh, and it's underneath the volcano. The caldera is its mouth. Wait a moment...

  “Okay. The control center is deep, lots of passages, no room for a swoop. I don't see a way in you could do in less than fifteen, and then you'd still have to fight whoever it was in charge down there.”

  “You should go anyway,” Lina had come to Aurora's shoulder as she spoke. She reached out and squeezed it in a gesture that was obviously sympathy. “You and Mboge and Citlali. We can weather one shot, and then you can stop them getting off another.”