Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  His choice of modification became suddenly far less incomprehensible. It wasn't pretty but it suited well with his name. Feeling lighter of heart, Felix jogged along in Freedom's wake, sure now that they would make it with at least five minutes to spare.

  Ten minutes later they stopped at the end of a burrow of snow. "He is just on the other side," Freedom had a different voice in the space suit, this one more feminine as it came from the small speaker by Felix's ear. "Now I'll make an airlock."

  The implications of this came slowly as he watched Freedom build a wall of ice behind them both, sealing the air in. "But you have no suit."

  Two swipes of the clawed hands and the end of the corridor fell away. The spot of Felix's headlight against the distant wall became razor edged without air to scatter the light. It was difficult to get an impression of the space, stitching it together out of over-bright circles, but it seemed only to be a larger corridor.

  "I have a tardigrade modification," Freedom sounded smug. "I don't need air. Everywhere on this world is open to me."

  The circle of light picked out a circle of glass and metal, Nori's visor behind it and Nori's eyes welling with tears he was fighting not to shed inside his helmet. Nori put his hands on the glass and pantomimed trying to open it. A quick sweep of light confirmed it was a door just before Freedom's bony fore-paw tore it straight off.

  Nori swung his backpack on his shoulder and lunged for Felix's hand. It was a strange world where he felt better holding the little traitor's hand, but then this world was strange, and he did. He pulled Nori towards the hollow in the wall that was Freedom's airlock.

  And there was something on his wrist. A light. A red targeting light. Mboge dropped to the floor, rolled out of the way and extinguished his visor and headlight in one fluid trained move. Four spots up the corridor a little higher than waist height, and those were the indicator lights of Paton 'Annihilator' rifles with infrared targeting scopes. They could see him.

  A chunk of ice blew from the floor next to him, scuffing his gauntlet's fine polish. If this princely suit had full equipment, it would have... yes. He unlatched a pocket, brought out an emergency warming stick and snapped the top. Tossed it up the corridor towards them. Now all the scopes would see was that hot rod, blazing up the corridor like a tame star.

  Nori hadn't doused his light, was easy to find, crouching by the loader's track for cover. Felix shoveled snow over his faceplate and then pushed him fully into the alcove left by Freedom's airlock wall.

  "I don't know if you can hear me," he told Freedom over the suit radio, "But I need to get him out of here."

  The blackness in the corridor was almost absolute, only two tiny spots of the indicator lights now visible, and one targeting laser, sweeping from left to right a good hundred feet away from him.

  "Of course." Freedom agreed cheerfully in the dark, "Alder52 is a colleague of mine and would not dare to harm me. I'll go over the surface, see if I can lead them aside for a while. I will meet you where you are, tomorrow."

  "Okay. Thank you!"

  To Nori he said "Dig into the wall. There's going to be some turbulence." And then he dug at the airlock wall with his beautiful silver articulated gloves breaking the seal. Air poured out of the hole. Even from here he could hear the decompression sirens starting to yammer - the noise a vibration in the walls, translated through his hands and feet. But he dug on, shoved Nori inside as soon as the breach was wide enough. Hauled himself through after.

  He was going to seal it with another of the heat sticks. Melt the ice above it and allow it to fall in streams across the hole that would have frozen instantly and plugged the breach. That was his plan.

  But when he turned to do it, something else was coming through. Not a human with a rifle at all, it was something black and snapping, leaner than the tardigrade Freedom, and three quarters metal. Like a dog - like dog-shaped taxidermy, as though a bull mastiff hide had been inexpertly cleaned and stuffed with pistons. The red lights had not been indicator lights at all but eyes. As he raised his hand to try to seal the corridor it's steel jaws snapped through the end of his suit's middle finger. Its back legs were already pushing it further through, and the claws of a second were opening the hole in the airlock larger behind it. Oh, shit.

  The emergency services could deal with the breach. "Run!" he shouted, but Nori was already gone.

  Back the way he came, then. Felix's faceplate steamed up with sweat as he pelted with all his speed away from the dogs. Another had joined the first two, and they were fighting each other to get through, thank God. His breath strained the respirator in the suit as air continued to flow against him, pushing him back toward the jaws.

  Simultaneously, five figures in the bright neon yellow of the emergency services burst from a hastily hacked corridor to his left and turned up towards the breach, dragging an emergency airlock door behind them on a sled, while the snow gave way beneath the lead dog, and it scrambled through.

  "No!" Felix shouted as the repairmen turned towards the monsters. "You'll be torn apart! Don't!"

  But either their suit radios were on a different frequency and they could not hear him, or they considered the outrush of air a greater threat. They ran straight towards the abominable dogs.

  Felix winced under his foggy helmet and slowed, not sure whether he should go to help - what he could do if he did - and the dogs jostled and sprang past the workman, utterly ignoring them, came straight on for him.

  He forced his aching legs to get moving again, couldn't breathe in the suit any more, his panicked panting had overloaded the air supply. Unbuckling the helmet with one hand, he burst out of the corridor and slithered down the wall into Freedom's office.

  Nori was there - helmet and gloves off, crouching by the controls of the desk apparently safecracking? "This is not the time for your petty thievery!" Felix yelled, setting his borrowed helmet down on its rack. He could run faster without the whole suit, but could he take it off before the dogs arrived?

  "I'm opening that display rack." Nori gestured to the long shelf of weapons, closed off by a flicker of silver forcefield, and very well, Felix could see the point of that.

  "Quickly then!" He released the magnetic catches at his collar and cuffs, bent down to release the ankles. The front half of the suit unlatched from the back, letting him pull his feet from the boots and step out. There was always time to be neat, so he replaced all the items on their stands, his hands quick and steady, despite the baying that echoed like the cries of the dead out of the walls.

  He found his street shoes, pulled them on, and now he could hear the scrabbling of claws on ice. "Quickly please."

  "I've got it. I've almost got it. One minute."

  The first dog launched itself straight out from the hole in the wall. Time slowed down for Felix, letting him see its full ugliness. The parts of it that once were a dog still pulsed with blood, twitching organic life around a spine of steel, piston powered legs. The jaw was metal, but one eye was animal and it was furious and frantic and afraid.

  It sailed over his head, hit the far wall and was turning even as it fell the final few feet to the ground. Its half rotten dog's tail left a streak of matter on the wall as it gathered itself up to spring on Nori.

  Nori needed one minute to get at the guns on their shelf, but Felix wasn't thinking of that when he leapt into the dog's path, driving his lowered shoulder into its flank, trying to knock it away from the man.

  Certainly he had no reason to care about Nori, who had tried to rob him and worse, had tried to make off with the money they were to use for food. If Nori had not been stopped, a thousand souls might have starved to death. But Felix wasn't thinking of that either. It was his vocation - if he saw a threat, to fight it himself rather than leave it to harm those who could not fight, and right now all he was thinking was that he would not watch Nori die.

  His shoulder connected jarringly, and acidic pain tore through his neck and spine at the impact - bone and flesh against steel an
d pistons. The weight of the thing was much greater than he had anticipated too. His thrust barely knocked it aside from Nori, but it did divert its attention. As he scrambled back to his feet, the jaw with its diamond-tipped teeth swung back to him.

  He backed away as it got itself to its feet again. Maybe he could slowly move out of the door into somewhere more populous and hope that someone would intervene? Another glance around the room showed only a display rack of pottery and those beautiful prayer carpets.

  The thought felt as though it had been handed down especially for him, like a burst of reassurance and light in his mind. Not taking his thoughts away from the thing that was stalking him, but letting him view it without panic. The Lord is on my side. Who then can harm me?

  A second dog had stopped still mostly in the wall, what remained of its dog brain balking at the jump down. Felix put his hand on the door-release, and the one in front of him pounced. A brief, blurred impression of the mad red diode in its left eye and a tiny rainbow from the edge of its tooth, and he caught its head beneath the jaw, and locked his elbows, trying to keep it away from his throat.

  The stench was half decay, half roasting meat. The bones of his arms creaked and his shoulders were forced back flat against the wall. He thought someone shouted, outside, but no help came as his fingers slid in the slippery coating of cold fat where its neck had once been, and it pressed in, inch by inch towards his face. There was at least no breathing.

  It did not breathe. It presumably did not get tired. Felix kicked at its forelegs, but it was like kicking house-pillars. Not even a shudder translated through its frame. He concentrated all his strength into keeping it away just a little longer, and thought that perhaps the moment of reassurance had been to smooth him over his inevitable death. Perhaps he had been briefly touched by God because God wanted him not to suffer spiritual anguish when his face was torn off by this monster.

  Certainly no help would come from Nori. It would be to Nori's benefit if he died, leaving Nori in full possession of the ship and its riches. And indeed, since he represented the people who had torn Nori away from whatever life he had originally lived and abandoned him on a failing colony, one could not even resent that too much.

  If he was going to die, it would be tidier to do it without the clutter of resentments. He let them go just as his shaking arms buckled under the dog's assault. He closed his eyes, waiting for the teeth to tear through them, to open his cheeks down to the bone. But he was at peace. He was so at peace, in fact, that he thought at first the gentle light on his face was heaven, that the pain had been spared him and he was home.

  Only when it was followed by a disgusting wet tearing noise and the flop of cold meat against his face, something thick dripping down his nose, did he raise an aching hand and wipe cold matter from his eyes and look. He was in time to see another jet of what looked like a golden sun-ray out of the pistol in Nori's hand, and then the dog in the wall seemed to tear itself into shreds; the flesh exploded off the metal skeleton.

  The frame itself glowed white and then red, as the sides of Freedom's hastily dug hole bulged and rippled and rained down on it. A hiss of steam and then a whitening as everything that had been melted refroze, only the tip of the blackened jaw and the claws of its two front feet protruding from the ice.

  Nori put the gun down on Freedom's intelligent table as if he was afraid of it, but still yelped with disappointment when the table extruded two bands of metal and locked the weapon down.

  "Oh God!" he huffed, his eyes very wide as he looked at Felix, all his fox-like cunning knocked out of him by the immanence of death, and the fine bones of his face waif-like as a result. He looked spiky-haired and innocent, and maybe even worth being exploded over by an android zombie dog for. "Oh God! Wow, that's not a good look on you."

  And then he was laughing, rubbing his long hands together as though he was trying to rub his sins off, but laughing. "We have got to get you a shower!"

  Felix found himself laughing too. So he was not in heaven yet, that was probably just as well. Nakano Nori clearly needed a guiding hand, and he... He looked down at what remained of a once proud uniform, at the rust brown streaks over his bare arms, at the whatever it was that had just dripped from his hair. He needed help too. "You are quite right in saying that I need a shower," he agreed. "Also food and sleep. We will come back tomorrow, as Freedom suggested to me before your call."

  He put the remainder of the green stones into the backpack and slung it over his shoulder. Nori's giggles subsided, but his open, almost innocent expression remained. That was perhaps shock, and all Mboge could do about it now was make him rest. "Come on," he said. "We'll break one of the ruby sticks, and find ourselves a hotel."

  Not even dripping with blood and chunks of flesh did Felix turn heads on the main concourse of Snow City. Perhaps a few more people got out of his way than had when he arrived, looking spick and span. Otherwise the gambling and the eating, the talking, fighting and fucking went on as if he was aggressively none of their business.

  He had thought of himself as looking after Nori, but it was Nori who cracked the ruby stick under his heel and fed it into a machine he informed Felix was an automatic assayer.

  "We don't get to bargain with it," he said out of the corner of his mouth, with one eye turned to the display and one to the crowd. "But at least it's not programmed to be curious about where they came from, and we'll get whatever is the going rate on Snow City at present."

  The going rate for a heaped handful of rubies seemed to be enough SC credits to afford a cheap room for three nights, and all the food they could eat as long as it was vat-grown protein. By this point, Felix had learned to feel fortunate the news was no worse. He bought the cheapest station coverall he could find - rough, drab tan material with single-sewn seams that would undoubtedly rip at the first heavy activity, and hoped that the hotel would have laundry facilities.

  No concierge on the hotel desk meant he did not have to pass another set of deliberately disinterested eyes. He was thankful for that too.

  "I'm going to the showers," he said, trying to leave Nori at the hatch of their pod - they'd bought a double to economize. "I'm taking the bag with me. Please try not to be kidnapped while I'm gone."

  Nori's quick smile was more nerves than humor. "I'll come with you."

  Because he wanted another chance to steal the gems? Or because he was afraid to be alone? Felix couldn't tell, but he supposed that as long as he kept a careful eye on the bag, it didn't matter.

  At the word 'showers' he had been expecting tiles, drains in the floor, water flowing from overhead, not the bank of morgue-like hatches that confronted him. "Blast showers," Nori sighed, in a tone that told him this was a bad thing. "But look, " he opened what Felix had taken to be a cupboard, to show a small perforated drum inside it. "Clothes cycler - put your dirty uniform in this."

  Felix looked it over carefully. "There's no water pipe."

  "You've never seen one before?" Nori's tone now was incredulous and a mix of charmed and superior. "No one outside dumb-space uses water any more. This plots where the surfaces of the clothing are, and then it dematerializes anything else. Make sure you haven't left anything in the pockets."

  Being the oracle on all things high tech seemed to be cheering him up. Felix checked his uniform pockets and shoved the material into the cleaner. When closed, its door was still cupboard-like, smooth, slightly stained white ceramic. "How do you tell it what to do?"

  Nori laughed, "You don't need to. It works it out for itself."

  "And the 'showers'?" Felix eyed the doors with distaste. They looked like torpedo tubes, and he felt sure they would shoot him out into space rather than clean him.

  "Here," Nori opened a hatch and rolled out the mesh hammock inside. "Take your clothes off and lie down."

  This was all of a sudden a more intimate encounter than he was ready for, particularly when Nori's eyes didn't leave him as he stripped. Almost as unsettling as meeting Freedom for the
first time, the sense that he was seeing possibilities he had never dreamed could exist before. He lay down and hoisted the bag into his lap, in an attempt to retain what modesty he could.

  He expected Nori to argue that he should leave the bag outside, but perhaps the man knew that would be fruitless. He just said "Okay, I'll push you in. It'll start automatically when the hatch shuts. Close your eyes, don't breathe. It doesn't take long. Don't panic."

  And then he was rolled into the claustrophobic tube. Three white lights above him barely prevented him from feeling as if he was being buried alive, and then the airtight hatch sealed. He shut his eyes just in time as he was scoured to the bone by hot needles of pressurized water, solid as a slap in the face. He inhaled in shock, got water in his air pipe and by the time he had started to cough as if he was choking, the pressure wash was over and he was being pummeled by scorching air. Only a few seconds later, the hatch unsealed and he was rolling out.

  "I stood watch," Nori grinned at him like an eager puppy as he pulled what looked like Felix's perfectly clean uniform out of the cycler and passed it over. Felix was glad not to have to put the coveralls back on, though someone on Cygnus 5 would be pleased to have them. Food was only the highest priority. The convicts had been abandoned on the planet with only what they stood up in, and new clothing, now winter was drawing in, might be lifesaving too.

  "My poor hair," he said, looking at it in the reflective surface of the cycler. Hot water and hot air and no oil had not done it any good, now it stood on end around his head like a brittle cloud.

  "I like it better that way," Nori stuffed his clothes into the cycler as he undressed. He was a skinny thing, but then they all were.

  "Why are you being so pleasant all of a sudden?" Felix asked, suspicious.

  "I've always been pleasant!" Nori hoisted himself up into the shower's cradle with a practiced air.

  "But now I feel like you mean it."

  "I do!" It occurred to Felix that Nori might be attempting to seduce him, lying there naked and loose and rounded eyed with innocence, so Felix rolled him into his shower and put an end to it. Kingdom Warriors did not toy with members of their own gender. And Felix Mboge did not toy with anyone. The mere thought had always made him feel queasy.