by Alex Oliver
Aurora wanted to turn around, run back and shake her. What was she doing? She might have known that Selena would not leave one of her babies behind, but this was not in the plan.
"I must remind you I am not a military vehicle." This time it seemed to be said apologetically. "I believe my shields are inadequate to protect you from a military issue beam weapon, even the light issue Ekuwa 57 commonly carried on Kingdom clippers."
"We can hope they'll try to capture me," Aurora said, still more worried about Selena. At least while the space forces of the planet were following her, they would be well out of position to get to Selena's tub, Terezinha, when she launched.
Which she was showing no signs of doing. The jeep had pulled up on the launch pad, and five armed marines poured out. It looked like they were talking - gestures with the arm not cradling a rifle, Selena making little harrying jabs with the horse, but from up here-
Oh God! She figured out what Selena was up to only a moment before Selena gave one of the already agitated cows another smack. It tossed its horned head and gored its neighbor, who made a run for it to get away, taking her herd-mates with her. One of the marines took a shot at Selena. He took a shot at Aurora's sister! But Selena had swung down behind her horse and the shot passed over her head, spooking the cattle even further.
Novocasa's cows had short tempers. They put their heads down and charged.
When the dust cleared Selena was back on the horse, herding the last stragglers on board. She dismounted and sent the horse in, shut the cargo hatch, walked over to the jeep and seemed to be radioing for someone. An ambulance, perhaps, to come pick up the fallen marines. She took their guns and their food packs and then finally, finally she got inside and shut the hatch.
Aurora breathed out. "How are we doing?"
"Five seconds," said Charity, humming again. Was that a nervous habit? A tic like the clearing of a throat to indicate a thought she was uncertain of expressing?
"Something you want to say?"
"If I shut off life support for fifteen minutes I could increase power to the drives sufficient to draw ahead again."
"We only need seven seconds. Do it."
"There should be no harm to you. It may become a little stuffy, and cold, but..."
"Do it."
"Please tell me you won't blame me if anything goes wrong."
Shutting off life support while a human depended on it was probably pretty traumatic for a luxury yacht AI. The majority of Aurora's birth family might have disappointed her, but her strange new found family just kept on impressing. "I won't," she said, watching another second tick by. "I'll remember that you were trying to save my life."
“Are you sure?”
Distantly, but not distantly enough, the first of the clippers opened fire. Aurora could see the red laser mouth open, but would not be able to see the beam itself until it struck - in less than one second. "Please!" she urged.
The cabin lights went out, artificial gravity cutting with it. She grabbed for the handhold on the back of the captain's chair as a jolt of acceleration tried to throw her into the wall. Screens were still operative, and she watched as Charity rolled to allow the beam to slip harmlessly past her stubby atmosphere wings. "Four seconds to jump distance, Ma'am. Engage ex-space drive on contact?"
Selena's ship was still climbing out of Novocasa's gravity well. If Aurora left now, it was possible her pursuers would go after her sister. "They think we're still re-running up after a drive fail, don't they? Do you think you can keep ahead of them until Selena has jumped?"
"I cannot allow you to remain without life support for more than fifteen minutes, ma'am. You would begin to suffer from a combination of hypothermia and anoxia, and that is unacceptable."
It was nice that Charity worried about her. Aurora'd begun to feel pretty attached to the ship herself. Better than an aunt - aunts, after all, called the authorities to have you arrested.
Heh, another thing she would do better not to think about right now, though she noticed that she was poking holes in the stained lace at the collar of her camisole as if she wanted to tear it all apart. She pushed herself out of the chair to float in the center of the unheated cabin like a shark in the ocean. "Where are your suits?"
An internal monitor lit up with a route. She took a look, then flew weightless and easy down the ship's spinal corridor and into the medial airlock. Four suits hung there, lined up in storage. She climbed into the shortest, located air tanks and power packs and coupled everything on. "How long have I got now?"
"Three hours."
"More than enough time, right? Let's lead them a long way away from our cows."
Over the next hour and a half, Charity honed her cat and mouse skills, keeping both cutters occupied. Occasionally she held still enough for one or other of the cruisers to line up a shot and then dodged out of the way. By the time the cabin had iced over, and they had cleared the Oort cloud on the edges of the system, Charity had begun to show a subtle flair in her maneuvers as though she was enjoying herself, and Selena was long out-jumped to safety.
Aurora took a long last look at the world of her birth, reduced to a distant copper-colored star, and sighed. The moment she took her eye off it, it was lost in a universe of other planets far more remarkable, Kingdom worlds and Source worlds and others that claimed no allegiance to either. Even Earth was out there, full of ruins and regrets. It didn't do to get too attached.
The countdown clock ticked a final second and she sighed. "Okay, Charity, run up the drive for real this time. Let's go home."
Out, then. Outside time and space, into the churning state of potentiality that lay beneath it all. In theory they were traversing a course, going from place A to place B. In a slightly more complex theory they were not going anywhere - they had simply taken themselves out of reality and punched themselves back in again at a different place. The state in between - well. It made no sense to say it passed. It made no sense to say it was even a state. One moment she was outside Novocasa, the next she was thousands of light-years away, on the outskirts of the Cygnus system, just cruising past the huge sandy bulk of Cygnus seven, the system's kindly comet catcher.
"Life support back on please," Aurora said, checking her boards to make sure nothing had been accidentally quantum shifted. "And well done, Charity. You're becoming quite an adventurer."
"It is my goal to please," the ship replied in a markedly more friendly voice than she had used before. "Life support will be fully restored in ten minutes. Please do not remove your helmet until the all clear is sounded."
The curling storms of Seven shone pale champagne light into the cabin. Aurora yawned, and toggled the radio. Her own voice came through, in a recorded message asking for authorization code, warning a visiting spacecraft that it would be shot down if it did not reply. Selena's answered, reading back the code she had been given from where she had written it on the back of her hand.
And then - Aurora’s heart made an undignified somersault - Bryant's voice, giving a flightpath. "Is that Aurora?"
Selena sounded surprised, amused. "No, it's... uh... it's her sister."
"Oh..." Bryant turned on the charm. It made Aurora want to smack him and hug him all at once. "You're the pretty one? The one who got all the brains of the family? I've heard about you. Now I can't wait. Hurry down."
Selena laughed, disbelieving but still a little flattered. "That was the plan."
Aurora flipped her own communicator, "Stop flirting with my sister, you worthless piece of scum."
"Darling, is that your dulcet tones I hear? I meant nothing by it, as you well know, but you're welcome to punish me anyway."
Oh God, that man. He was the most embarrassing thing she'd ever had in her life, and he still made her forget for a while that her own family didn't want her. He still filled her veins with alcohol and set her alight.
"You filthy-mouthed reprobate," she started, and the proximity sensor's blare cut off her sentence before she could think of an endi
ng. "What's that?"
It had been concealed behind Seven, close in to the shadow of Seven's diamond moon, but now the sensor boards lit up with reports of power sources. One, major, in orbit, speckled with minor generators and surrounded by a bustle of tiny craft with tiny engines, had to be an Archangel sized battleship. Several, minor, buzzing in and out of the moon's sparse ring of iron rich rocks, she was not sure about. She focused the sensors as tight as they would go, and her stomach turned inside out.
Those were drones. Not the simple, clunky remote control drones of Kingdom ships, but the sleek, self-determined robots of the Source worlds, capable of undertaking human tasks and doing them perhaps better than any human could. If she had to take a guess at what they were up to, she would say they were manufacturing landing craft - a fleet of landing craft so tiny the planet's formidable mass-driver defenses could never shoot down all of them.
The battleship was the Rafael. If she had a full complement, that meant there were close on two thousand men aboard. Twice as many as Aurora’s whole colony. If Rafael landed even five hundred trained and well fed soldiers against her convicts, everything would be over in days. Aurora had to warn her people, and she had to get them ready, and she couldn't think right now of anything effective she'd be able to do to defend them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The hope of Snow City
Felix Mboge had been sent out with a small fortune in alien gems to buy food for the Cygnus Five colony at the notorious free-port that was Snow City. He had thought, when he left, that his problems would not have begun until he had arrived at that smugglers’ den, but as usual the universe had other ideas.
Mboge had a weakness which he tried to conceal by being the glossiest, most pressed and irreproachable soldier in all the Kingdom worlds. He had decided to occupy the week in subspace by manually swabbing down the Froward's empty cabins, so that the ship - having been swarmed over by criminals in the process of her repair - could be disinfected and made tidy again.
He had polished the bridge until its scuff marks were wiped out and everything gleamed, and now he was working on the deserted mess, scrubbing around the bolted down legs of the chairs with a toothbrush and prying the hardened gum from beneath the kitchen counter and the tables.
For a man of his fastidiousness, it should have been a relaxing break, and he did find it calmed him down. Simple, manual work and a clear result, a feeling of satisfaction as the decking took on a blued steel gleam. But--
There it came again. The faint sound of something whispering. Was that a footstep, or was it just the shudder that mysteriously worked through port maneuvering thruster five at irregular intervals?
Felix Mboge's weakness, which he had fought all his life to conquer, was that he had a wild imagination. Heart athunder and skin prickling, he took his toothbrush out of the mess and made his jumpy way back to the bridge.
Froward was not a large ship - crew quarters for fifty and accommodation for a hundred and fifty prisoners. Environmental plant sufficient to produce air and manage the waste of two hundred persons. Not large at all, by spaceship standards. But huge when it was only him on board, when he could hear the echoes of his own footsteps go hurrying off in every direction as he strode, and sometimes come back at him out of time.
Was that? He stopped, snapped his head around to peer where he thought he'd seen movement. Was that a light?
He hadn't needed to go to the convict cage, or the utilities that surrounded it--the small infirmary and the guard station with its banks of monitors--so he had kept it unlit. Corridors in that direction faded into darkness, as though the nothingness outside had found an entry. Anything could be in there.
Putting his brush and broom down as he re-entered the bridge, he went straight for the life signs monitor. It showed, as it had done the last fifteen times he'd checked, that - apart from the prisoners securely locked in the hold - he was alone on the ship.
Or at least, that nothing human was with him.
Maybe the movement he thought he'd seen had been one of the ship's preprogrammed drones, tapping along an internal corridor rather than scrambling over the hull? He didn't know what he was afraid of, but he wasn't sure being surrounded by spider-like maintenance drones with their own purposes was an improvement.
No, it would be, though. Because that floating light reminded him of his mother's stories. It could be an adze. Flying down empty corridors like an innocent firefly, its abdomen glowing. If it put its light out, he wouldn't see it at all until it was crawling on his sleeping face and drinking his blood.
That wouldn't be so bad, as long as it didn't make him ill. What would be worse would to turn a corner, when he thought he was alone, and find it standing straight in front of him in its human form. There'd be a moment of overwhelming shock, of horror, the mere anticipation of which made him feel sick, and then it would attack, and if he was lucky it would only eat his heart and liver. If he was unlucky, it would possess him, and then what would become of this ship with its cargo of jewels, and of the men and women who were waiting, starving, for Felix to buy food and bring it home?
Intellectually, he knew his fears were nonsense. He didn't believe in monsters, not even monsters from Terra, whose biodiversity had been staggering. But intellectually knowing a thing and feeling it, those were different matters.
He wondered if there was any way to influence the tiny nanobots Bryant had put into him by way of a parting gift. If he had a hand of fire like Captain Campos, he wouldn't need to be afraid of any vampire or witch. But although he could faintly sense the presence of his new anti-technological immune system, it was similar only to the way that he could faintly sense his own skin. It was there, but there wasn't a lot he could do with it.
Hungry and bad tempered from it, he watched as the nav computer guided Froward outside the system's gravity well and all the controls for the ex-space drive lit up green. Nearly there, thank God. He re-ran the jump calculations to double check they were correct - they were - lifted the safety plate from the jump enabler and fixed his eyes on a star on the view screen as he flicked the switch. The ex-space engines cycled up to maximum with a screaming whine. No sense of movement, and although his gaze was fixed, he still didn't catch the moment where everything changed. Simply all of a sudden the star field was different, and the engines were whining back down once more.
Nothing could have happened when they were outside the universe. By definition - for anything to happen it would have needed time and space to happen in. But had anyone told the monsters that? What if there were more now? What if they lived and bred out there and he had brought more of their kind back with him?
What if he stopped trying to terrify himself and checked the course?
With an effort, he did just that.
The course appeared to be fine. Snow City was on sensors already - a small mass, about the size of Earth's moon, without enough weight or density to deform the space around it for light-seconds, but bright - the brilliant white of water-ice. Under the down-spots of its trail of ships and satellites it might have been a pierced ivory ball surrounded by a mist of graphite, if every fleck of graphite had been a ship.
The sight took his mind off witchcraft for a moment. Outside Kingdom space, outside Source space, this was a place he'd only heard rumors of - as mythical, he had thought, as the adze. But here it was, and here--
Damn it! That was a noise. No amount of cursing himself could convince him that jangle and clatter down the infirmary corridor could be anything other than something knocking over a tray of tools.
He considered that the life signs board was still blank. He considered that the implements knocked over were probably scalpels, bone saws, skull drills. He could be in a parking orbit above Snow City in another twelve hours time. Perhaps he should just pretend that he hadn't heard...
Captain Campos had borrowed his jacket to go home, to talk to her family, but his shirt had the single silver line of piping around the cuffs that proclaimed hi
m an officer. He might have a vivid imagination, but he was an officer and a gentleman, and he was not going to be frightened away from his own duties, especially not by his own mind.
He drew his sidearm as though that would protect him from magic, but instead of trying to run a single firefly down through all the corridors of the ship, he went to the environmental control board and closed all the doors around the infirmary, all the escape routes between himself and it.
Another check, and still no life signs. His pulse sounded noisy in his veins, like he was an audio beacon for bloodsuckers. He stepped out of the bridge and locked it down behind him. The main corridor of the ship disappeared into darkness in both directions, and the silence was listening to him, he was sure of it.
Working his dry mouth to get some saliva in it, so he could swallow, he stalked silently towards the infirmary, releasing doors as he came to them, sealing them behind him as he passed. The corridor lights flickered above him, and as he passed out of the main drag and into the convicts' wing they extinguished altogether. He reached down with sweaty hands and unbuttoned a pocket, drew out his torch, didn't actually want to see what might be outlined in the circle of light when he switched it on.
Noise up ahead, and he really wasn't imagining it - a scratching, like metal claws on a metal door, and a muttering in no language he recognized.
He didn't want to see, but he steadied the torch against his gun and hit the final door control to let himself through. And - oh dear God - there was a floating light, a point of light floating at head height in the dark infirmary. It was--
His mind bucked fear off and twisted. No, wait! That wasn't a firefly coming towards him, it was a head torch, the light sifting down to draw sinister shapes out of a sallow face that--
A face that he recognized. That kid who'd been hanging out with Bryant. Nori... Nori something. The one who Bryant had said must not on any account be allowed to come to Snow City because he could not be trusted. Now he was close, and he was smiling, and he had - Felix startled away, repulsed and freaked out because Nori had put out a hand and stroked him on the cheek.
