Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  "You're mad," he threw the coverlet from the bed over the glass and marched to the door, outside of which he had left his shoes for someone else to polish. "You're an unfit mother in a failing colony. I don't know what you're playing at, but this hysteria is unbecoming of an officer of your rank."

  She was not listening to the poison that came out of his mouth. Not even defiance really blunted the edge of words like this. Silently, Bryant put a hand down on top of hers and squeezed, and all of a sudden she couldn't remember why she'd felt the need to talk to Keene at all.

  "Fine, I'll come get her," she said, the floating froth of her anger drawn off, something very cold remaining. "Bear in mind, I'm the woman who defeated five squadrons of Tyrennian troops with one battlecruiser on the Horsehead front. I am the heroine of the Phoenix Nebula and the Queen of Cygnus Five, and you are a pen-pushing inbred nobody who bought his commission. You think you're going to stand against me?" She laughed at the thought, and felt her certainty under it. Using cleaner methods, better men than this had tried to crush her before. It hadn't worked. "You haven't a chance."

  She switched the com off in the very middle of his outraged splutter and felt clean again. Clean and bright like a newly ground sword. Yes, there was probably going to be war, but she was ready.

  Bryant hadn't yet let go of her hand. She looked up to find him grinning from ear to ear, elated. "You are so hot when you're fucking up your enemies like Sekhmet in full roar. Is this goddess in the market for a concubine at all? I'm willing to give the position a try."

  He was a ridiculous man, but she was starting to think she loved him. "I would prefer a consort, actually."

  He gave her a long, stern look from eyes like ancient bronze, and she wondered if he knew that right now he was the only thing that could stop her. He could take the new heart out of her, if he tried.

  "We're probably not going to live very long are we?" he said, serious in the hush as Aurora flicked off her bank of screens and the walls went dark around them. He had a point.

  "If we make it through the winter, we have a chance," she replied, equally serious, tightening her hand on his, willing him to stay despite his cowardice, despite his talent at keeping himself safe. "But yeah. Our odds aren't great."

  He cocked his hip in a way that made her mouth go dry and smiled, wild and fey and charming. "Then fuck it. Why not?"

  On a certain interpretation of events, she had just asked Bryant to marry him, and he had just accepted. There was a future, within her grasp, in which she and Bryant raised her daughter together on a world where they would be free. She only had to reach out and make it happen, and she'd proved to herself on many occasions that when she tried she was perfectly capable of reshaping the galaxy on her own. Put her together with Bryant and his unstoppable brand of techno-wizardry, and she honestly believed the universe had better watch itself.

  It was kind of terrifying out here, on the raw edge of survival, with no one above her but God. But it was also the place for which she had been born. Why shouldn't she do this? Why shouldn't she and Bryant do this together or die trying? No more being a tool, or a felon, or a tame attack dog, she and Bryant had claimed love and land and life for themselves. With that kind of wild luck, they might just make it even yet.

  Destroyer:

  Cygnus 5, Book Two

  Alex Beecroft

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Homecoming is not all it's cracked up to be.

  Aurora set the Charity down in one of the pocket dustbowls on the rainless side of the Serra da Calvo, and sat in the cabin for a moment, appreciating the feel of home. Ship gravity had normalized to planet gravity the moment the engines were disengaged, and a heavy weight had settled on her, like the comforting pressure of a familiar hug.

  She stretched, to let her body acclimatize, and a satisfying rightness slid through every bone as she shed the persistent feeling that she was about to float away. Right. Good. She was in the place for which she had been made and she fitted there as though all her puzzle pieces had found their mates.

  Her mind was not equally at ease. She brushed the shoulders of the uniform jacket she had borrowed from Mboge, feeling the roughness of the material on the shoulder, where the patch that should have shown the winged scroll of a Kingdom warrior had been torn off. She was returning home in disgrace. A fallen woman, an unmarried mother, a soldier who had refused to die on command.

  She sighed and smoothed the fabric of her veil over her knee. On Cygnus 5, she had stopped wearing it. Modesty had not been something she strove for as de facto queen. But her mother... well, she could just see it being her mother's last straw. The woman was all too likely to take shame and conquest in her stride and yet balk at uncovered hair. For mãe then.

  Aurora raised the cloth to her forehead and pulled it taut before winding it tight over the coiled mass of her hair and knotting the ends around her bun. Strange how heavy and unwieldy it felt after only a few weeks of being without, like stepping back into a shoe she'd outgrown.

  "Charity?"

  "I'm here."

  "Don't open up to anyone except for me, OK? If someone tries to break in, take off and wait for me in orbit until I com you."

  "Yes ma'am," said the ship, a little reluctantly. Aurora's chief engineer, Morwen Crouch, had written a program that essentially forced Charity to acknowledge Aurora as her new legal owner, but Aurora had the impression that the ship wasn't completely convinced. The old governor of Cygnus 5, Charity's previous owner, had by negligence starved the convicts in his care to the point where they rebelled and did the same to him, but to Charity he had been a perfect gentleman with a beautiful voice and few unreasonable demands.

  The governor would not have set her down in this crushing place full of wind-swept dirt. Nor would he have given her orders that required her to use the AI with which she came equipped. So she had been built with her own judgment? It was computationally expensive to use and she preferred not to.

  At least, that was how Aurora interpreted the ship's small delay in replying to her. Anthropomorphizing, perhaps, but what else could you do, when you were trying to figure out another person? "Thank you," she said, sincerely, because that was all she could do about that particular problem.

  Aurora opened the main hatch and stepped outside, closing her eyes at the rush of nostalgia - at the smell. Dust and nutmeg and distant sugar cane fields, and cows. The scents of the oxygen rich air made her feel like she could work for years, and the faint ketone smell of the sparse powder underfoot that didn't yet deserve the name of 'soil' was the smell of youth.

  She set off for home, concentrating on the familiar landscape so she wouldn't have to think about how her parents were going to react on seeing her. It was going to be fine. This clench of dread and nausea in her chest was going to be relieved by a hug. Her mother would call her brothers, her sister, her cousins. Her brothers would bring their wives and children. There would be farófias, all cinnamon and lemon and sweet, and she'd know what it was to have her family around her again.

  Maybe.

  Within half a mile of her landing site she rounded a spur of rock and came out into more fertile land. Here the iron rich soil sprouted a mixture of scrubby copper colored native plants called Simeo's Cents. These were pressed by the hand of gravity into perfectly circular pads ranging from button to wagon wheel in size. Hardy Terran dune grasses, used to eking out a living on sand and water, were dotted among them.

  A half a mile later on and there were cattle, stocky long-haired cattle with crescents of white horn, browsing on the grass and the Simeo's Cents with equal indifference. A long time ago it had been discovered that the cows could digest the native flora. They went out into the barren lands and ate the inedible lichens that grew there. They carried grass seeds in their coats, and their dung was full of Terran micro-bacteria that colonized the dirt on which it fell and turned it into soil.

  After the cows had grazed an area for ten years or so, one could begin to plant soy
beans, then other beans. Then sugar cane. And with beans and beef, milk and sugar, what more did you need?

  Aurora had been at war for the past five years, and in that time she saw with no small pride that the cattle had extended her family's terraformed land to the very edge of the mountains. She needed some for her new world. That was also why she had come.

  The land fell away from the hills gently, the lone sentinel of the rock outcropping known as Papão looming like a giant with a runny nose just ahead of her, where a hydroelectric station harnessed the power of the spring on the bogeyman's side. The sky was bluer than she remembered, even with a light haze of pink dust high up where the winds whined like racing cars from pole to pole.

  But for the gnawing thing in her chest it was pleasant to walk through early spring sunshine down into grassy valleys. The cattle raised their heads to watch her as she passed, and she was conscious of their deceptively mild liquid eyes, and the sweet smelling huff of their breath. She kept a respectful distance because in truth the cattle of Novocasa had wicked tempers to match their red coats, and before it became beef all that muscle was a walking anti-personnel missile waiting for an excuse.

  They had bells around their necks - individually painted bells with their names and dates of birth, and her sister's contact number, so they could be returned if they wandered, like lost dogs or children.

  But she wasn't thinking about children. Definitely not thinking about how to get her own child back from its father. One problem at a time.

  After three more miles of grazing land she passed into bean fields, where hired hands she didn't recognize straightened to gaze at her as incuriously as the cows. She ducked her face into shadow, remembering sharply that she was no longer here as the family's hero. She was the dead come back to visit, and she hadn’t had the courtesy to wait until the festival to do it.

  When the villa came into sight, white as a dropped salt crystal in the midst of its grove of forest peach trees, she stopped to close her eyes, just for a moment. Then she breathed out a long breath, tucked the stray wisps of hair back into her veil and braced her shoulders. There were people moving down there in the colonnade of the house, and that distant blob of dawn pink in the flower beds below the balcony must be her mother.

  If so, she was oblivious of Aurora's presence, going about her daily tasks unaware that she was being watched. I could still walk away Aurora thought, with a tearing twist of hope and despair at the base of her throat. I could leave her in peace. But how was she taking it? All of it? Surely mãe needed a hug as much as Aurora did? Surely her mother's arms would always be open to her?

  She gave a short laugh at herself, because there was really only one way to find out, and began walking again.

  Mãe noticed her as she came out from under the trees and stepped onto the gravel of the path. It crunched under her footstep, and mãe looked up. A shock went through Aurora like a lightning strike, terror and yearning stealing her breath as mãe too jerked and gasped.

  A long moment. Aurora hoped her mother would move. She needed her mother to move towards her, to stir out of her petrification with a cry of joy. But it didn't happen, and her hopes lowered themselves as she got herself mobile again instead. She walked closer, but wasn't sure if she could move in for a hug or not. She wasn't sure if she dared to find out.

  "Mother?"

  Her mother's hands rose to press against her mouth. Beautiful polished fingernails, not immodestly colored, but perfectly buffed and polished to look chic. Aurora's nails were short and rough these days, and she'd forgotten that she aspired to keep them like mãe's.

  Her mother was more beautiful than her in every way and always had been. Except for the hair - Aurora had inherited her father's red-touched glossy black hair - but hair didn't count for much when one could wear a pink and peach and silver veil, and look like a pristine sunrise.

  She took another step forward and reached out to take her mother's wrists and gently tug. "Mãe, please say something."

  Mãe's eyes brimmed and she pulled her wrists out of Aurora's grasp and turned half away. "They said you were dead."

  The pink outfit abruptly became a cause of misery. I see you didn't bother to mourn.

  "That was always a lie, mother. That's why I had to come. I had to make sure you didn't think--"

  "And then they said you were a traitor." Mãe's mouth compressed, holding back tears or fury. Aurora felt the ground sliding away beneath her feet, she had to scrabble for purchase on something, or she would fall.

  "They betrayed me."

  "That's not how it works!" Her mother was shorter than she was, and petite by the standards of high gravity Novocasa, but fighting with her was infinitely worse than it had been fighting with McKillip. She didn't want to hurt Mãe, or to ever have her be disappointed or angry.

  "You work for your government. They don't work for you. You gave them the right to send you into situations where you might die. You don't get to rebel and become some kind of cangaceiro. It is a sin to rebel against the Kingdom of God."

  Aurora's brows twisted. She bent her head so the words would not fall on her face and stared at the impeccable gravel under her mother's feet.

  It had become so difficult to contain the anguish and the anger that she couldn't risk moving or speaking for fear of what she might do. It hadn't occurred to her before that her mother might have preferred it if she had died. That never would have occurred to her.

  As always, her silent unresponsiveness just escalated her mother's fury. "What has happened to the daughter I raised? You throw away your virginity. You get pregnant - you're not even married! You show no signs of remorse. You ask for no pardon, and the next thing we know you're overthrowing the legitimate authorities and setting yourself up as some kind of queen? How could you come back here and rub that in my face? You are a shame to me. The neighbors laugh at us now."

  The words stopped, briefly. Too briefly for Aurora to work her way past the burden of her feelings to give any kind of response, and again her silence was taken as provocation.

  "Tell me you are sorry!"

  She wanted to. She really did. She wanted to say whatever her mother needed her to say in order to earn praise and forgiveness. But she couldn't, because it wasn't true.

  Her mother hissed, breathing in through her teeth, driven beyond her endurance, and Aurora reeled as a slap she wasn't expecting cracked across her cheek.

  "You are a shame to all your family."

  When Aurora gasped in a breath it tasted like fire. She choked on it and her chest went into spasms. Her face tried to implode around grief and she found herself doing exactly what she'd been trying to avoid - sobbing as though she was four again, with wet cheeks and a runny nose. Ugly sobbing, abject and humiliating.

  Her mother gave a little growl. Aurora heard her move a step away, and was ready to lunge out and grab the woman, fall to her knees and hug her around the legs and beg her not to turn her back, not to go. But her mother made another noise, pained and angry and exasperated and then she was back with a handkerchief in her hand.

  "Oh," mãe said, as if she couldn't bear it anymore, "Oh, don't cry. Sweetheart, don't cry."

  Aurora caught her breath, grasping at the minimal comfort with everything in her. She got the sobbing under control, breathing hard and sniffing as her mother's perfumed hand caught her under the chin and wiped the linen handkerchief over her face with a deftly practiced touch.

  Aurora risked looking up at her. The faded brown eyes looked worried but oddly impersonal, as if this was a subroutine she had fallen into because it had become so ingrained she could no longer help it.

  "I'm sorry," Aurora managed, meaning that she was sorry to cry, but willing to let her mother take it as the apology asked for. She sniffed again, feeling drained and embarrassed. "I didn't mean to make things hard for you. The last thing I wanted was to bring shame to you and Pai. I..."

  Tears threatened again. She didn't even know what she wanted to say to them, t
hese honest, hardworking, law abiding people. She always forgot, when she wasn't here, that she'd left in the first place because she'd felt suffocated.

  Her mother gripped the tops of her arms and leaned in to brush Aurora's cheek with her own. A scent of orange-blossom and the buss of papery fine skin, and it wasn't the hug she'd wished for, but it was so much better than the slap that Aurora felt her spasming stomach muscles smooth out once more and her breath cool until it no longer burnt her throat.

  "I'm sorry too, darling," mãe said soberly. "You caught me by surprise. You couldn't have called and told me you were coming? I would have got the family together to welcome you home."

  Aurora discovered she still knew how to laugh, watery though it was. "I'm a fugitive right now, mãe. I had to keep a low profile."

  Her mother was fast cheering up, though there was a shadow of something still in her eyes. Doubt or weariness or second thoughts. "Well, Selena is in the cattle shed. I'll com Joachim, Miguel and Tiago and tell them to come over. I can make dinner. You should..."

  She looked Aurora over for the first time, now almost restored to her normal vivacity. "You should go take a bath and find some decent clothes. You look like a skeleton. I tell you this working in space and on other planets - flimsy planets - it isn't good for you."

  Leaning in, she put a hand on Aurora's trembling arm and peered. "When did you last pluck your eyebrows? And would it kill you to wear a little foundation? Not too much, just a little. People see you not caring about how you look and they will think I haven't raised you..."

  Her voice trailed off as she evidently remembered again all the other reasons why 'people' might disapprove of her parenting of Aurora. Then she shook her head. "Go get cleaned up. Put something nice on. Then you can come help me in the kitchen. You can explain everything to me before everyone else arrives."

  Mãe turned and strode off, leaving Aurora bruised and confused. It felt like a momentous thing to stir out of her paralysis and begin to walk towards the house after her mother, and she didn't know if she was relieved or disappointed by this first meeting. Perhaps the worst was over with. Perhaps her welcome would improve from now on.