by Alex Oliver
Keene could hunch no more. The muscles of his jaw worked beneath skin that had crimsoned with shame or rage. "The colony was unviable," he muttered. Swann startled as if she had forgotten he was there, and then she did drop the smile, her lips tightening in annoyance.
"Yeah," Aurora scoffed, "it would have cost you too much money to evac your loyal troops from the planet, so you left us to die. But it doesn't cost too much to send three battlecruisers to wipe us out, because our survival is inconvenient, huh?” She raised her eyes directly to the camera, as if she could see through it to the fleet officers, the soldiers, the marines beyond. "We were loyal, we were doing our job, and they betrayed us. Is this the force you want to fight for? Before you attack us, ask yourself - Is this just? Is this what God would want? And if it isn't, who's the sinner then?"
Keene made a gesture and the guards crossed the cell like hawks swooping, both of them slamming into her, one at the shoulders and one at the hips. She let herself be manhandled, dragged upright and shoved into the wall, partly because she had no option and partly because it was good propaganda. Let them get vicious. Let them show the galaxy what they were made of.
Swann made a little tutting noise, as if she disapproved, but as soon as Aurora was secured against the wall, Admiral Keene bustled forward, self importantly. "Enough irrelevancies. What have you done to my ship?"
The guy looked pasty, like his life of sitting behind a desk had taken out whatever spine he had once had. When she smiled at him, something behind his eyes flinched.
So this was a good chance to find out if they'd noticed the missile launch, or her creeping takeover of the ship's systems. "What d'you mean?"
"Don't pretend you don't know. This nonsense that's being broadcast on my screens. Make it stop."
"You want us to disappear," she said. Apparently they had not yet discovered the second layer. Good. "As a colony, as people. You want us to shut up and let ourselves be wiped out peacefully. We think we deserve the chance to at least tell your people who they're killing."
"Encouraging desertion and mutiny!"
The worst thing was he was still pretty attractive, physically. She didn't like to think she'd been so preoccupied with the covering that she'd not noticed the rancid mess of his personality, but maybe he'd been trying to act decent in those days, like a fisherman putting out a lure.
"Yeah," she agreed. "Yeah, we encourage anyone aboard this ship who wants to join us. Why not? You don't care about your people or you wouldn't have left us to starve."
"It was a ship full of degenerates," Keene scoffed, "Queers and whores and rejects who couldn't meet Fleet standards. Criminals, failures, sinners."
"All the kind of people that God calls his own."
"Admiral!" Swann drew herself to her feet and stepped out from behind her desk. She had an aura that filled the room with the quiet feathers of invisible frost. Aurora felt the cold front wash over her long before Swann took the first step. "Please stop interfering with my interrogation."
Keene turned on her, "I will not be interrupted or ordered about on my own ship!"
Swann gave a little sigh, and unbuttoned the cuff on her left sleeve. She slowly began to roll it up, smoothing it around her elbow. Her forearms were silvered by a crosshatching of scars. In silence, she moved on to the right sleeve, settling the folds just right before she looked up, still mild, still gracious, but with something obsidian sharp underneath.
"Either deliberately or through stupidity, you are hampering my investigation. Either of these things provides just cause for me to investigate you, Admiral. And the prisoner has made accusations of misconduct on your part which I would be remiss not to investigate further. The abuse of power on the part of those in high rank to corrupt the innocence of our warrior virgins is--"
Keene's bracer beeped, signaling a high priority message. That wasn't good. Either they were being attacked or--
"Helm tried to make a standard course correction to compensate for the gravity of Cygnus 7. Their access was revoked, and none of the systems are answering commands. Our orbit is decaying and we have no control over the ship."
He gestured again, and Aurora's guards mashed her spine into the wall again, while the one on the right punched her hard in the nose. Pain flowered red across her whole skull for a moment, drowning out the data feeds and isolating herself in her own body. Blood slid nauseating down the back of her throat, and that was bad. If they hurt her enough, could she keep control of the bots? Because if she didn't, this plan was blown out of the water and she truly was helpless.
"What the hell did you do?"
No, it was okay. The feeds were back, and with them came a snap of connection and a sense of eagerness - new, unconquered territory to annex - that said the first torpedo had skimmed off the surface of Fatih Barhi, leaving its payload behind.
Keene bent to the bag that had been set by the door, bringing out a long, flexible wand like implement that crackled with electricity along its length. He snapped it with a crack that made Aurora's heart stutter in her chest, and sweat break out along her lower back. It was okay. It was still fine. All she needed was for the third torpedo to find its target, and then a few moments of connected thought. They'd have to give her that to stop her heart giving out. If they weren't going to kill her, there would have to be moments of rest between sessions. She could wait.
As if he read her thought in her face, or in the relaxed poise of her scarred body, Keene hesitated. Then slowly he put the whip back and zipped the carryall of torture implements shut. "You know what?" he said, thinking it out as he went in that careful, methodical way she had once liked about him.
He popped the button on his holster and drew his sidearm, slowly slid the scale up from stun to lethal. "I bet whatever it is, if we get rid of you, it stops. Kill you and the problem goes away? That's a sacrifice I'm willing to take."
"Good thing I'm catching it on video," Aurora couldn't help but say, "So our daughter can see it when she's grown."
"Video?"
Sure, that would be the part he cared about. Not Autumn's feelings, but the potential damage to his own public persona. But she couldn't waste time in the last few seconds of her life, thinking about Keene. Instead, she turned her head to face the camera directly. "Autumn, if you've been wondering why I didn't come for you, this is why. I haven't stopped loving you, and I never will. Not even death is going to change that."
"That's what people say until they're dead," Keene raised his weapon and motioned for Aurora's guards to step away. Without their restraining hands holding her up, she slid down the wall to sit on her bed shelf. She was too old for the empty defiance of standing for this when her head hurt so much she could barely think. "And afterwards everyone forgets them."
"You think we didn't think about this, before I came?" she whispered through the headache, bluffing. "If I die, the bots that are giving me control just carry on eating your ship until it dissolves around you. I have to be alive to keep it in check."
Doubt washed like cold sea water through the room, and then Keene laughed. "Right," he said, taking aim again. "You're a lying cunt and now you're going to die."
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Snow City PD
Nori and Mboge had been bundled together into the Snow City police’s station wagon--a metal repulsor-sled box barely two feet square. Mboge found himself oddly comforted when Nori curled into his arms and put his head down on his shoulder. The air slits in the box let in a spackling of light with which he could see Nori's fluffy dark hair, and a... He touched it cautiously with a fingertip - a dot in the back of Nori's neck where a thin ring of silver interrupted the skin and held open a tiny black hole, about a millimeter in diameter. Now he was looking, he could see a row of three more further down the boy's spine.
"Does it hurt?" he asked, brushing over the topmost hole, watching as a small grill slid back into the housing once his finger had passed.
"Hm?" Nori raised his head a fraction, enough to sh
ow Mboge that he wasn't following, and then laughed. "The ports? Of course not." But his face clouded. "I mean, a lot of the time they feel empty. I miss being connected. I miss being fully sentient, but that's not a physical pain."
"You're one of the cleverest people I've ever met," Mboge's head felt stuffed with cotton wadding at all the many things he didn't understand, didn't know how to deal with. "Why would you say you weren't sentient?"
Nori gave a little huff through his nose, and squeezed himself closer. That was rather appealing. It gave Mboge a warm little shiver of affection that he hoped would not turn itself into anything lewd. Cautiously, trying not to encourage anything of that kind, he slipped his hand into Nori's hair, which was as soft as he had imagined, and with a small caressing pressure encouraged him to put his head back down.
"You're from a dumb world. You wouldn't understand."
Nice, Mboge thought, insulted a little. But then he thought of their captors outside, walking them through the icy tunnels of the asteroid toward whatever passed for justice in Snow City, and he figured that now was not the time to be quarreling with his planet-mate. "You know what I don't understand? I don't understand how a simple shopping trip could go so wrong so fast."
"Our luck's got to change at some point."
Mboge was surprised to find he was smiling. "You believe in luck?"
Nori chuckled into his collarbone. "No, no actually I don't."
Some twenty paces later they were lowered into a chute, and slid like a bobsleigh down an icy incline to bounce from a forcefield at the end of it. Rushing noises, and scraped snow came up through the gaps in the box beneath their feet, and then the box plopped through the ceiling of a crowded room and unfolded around them, leaving them huddled together in the center dimple of a spherical room, where the two officers who had arrested them already sat on chairs hollowed out of the walls.
Something about the two of them reassured Felix. Maybe it was just that apart from their eyes - which had a graphed, crosshatched look and a tendency to flicker with internal lights - they were reassuringly human in appearance. The woman had a post-Algerian look to her, olive skinned, face like a hawk, that his Kingdom trained associations thought of as aristocratic. The man might have been from anywhere. His mid-brown appearance was universal.
"I am Scoff Goldstein. This is Scoff Najafi, investigating the case. And you are?"
Mboge didn't try to resist the urge to straighten up and salute, though he could practically feel Nori rolling his eyes at his back. "Felix Mboge and Nakano Nori, late of the Kingdom ship Froward."
"Legal ID?" His reassurance took a dive in face of Goldstein's outstretched hand.
"Ah, we... we've been declared legally dead by the Kingdom of the Book. My old reference is 10.2.142865HFN, born on Nyame. I don't know if you'll find any records under that."
A brief pause and information danced on the inside of their eyes like faint stars. Najafi raised her silver eyebrows into her cropped silver hair. "You want to tell me what you're doing here, lieutenant?"
"We were sent to buy food," Mboge started, deciding to leave Nori's inglorious entry into the story firmly under wraps. "Earth crops are failing our colony, and we need to buy enough food to tide us over until we can establish a working ecosystem. Yesterday I went to sell some antiquities to Freedom to raise money to buy food. My colleague was doing the same thing with Alder 52. I'm still not quite sure what happened, but Nori called me while I was with Freedom to say he was trapped in a cargo loader in a depressurized zone and needed to be rescued. Freedom and I made our way to him. Freedom can burrow through the walls and doesn't--"
"We're aware."
Mboge nodded earnestly, with the feeling that this wasn't going badly so far. "So we found Nori and got him into the tunnel, when we were attacked by cyborg zombie dogs. Freedom said that he would draw some of them off, and that he would meet us back at his shop the following day. The dogs pursued us to Freedom's shop, where Nori - who is an expert programmer - disabled the forcefield around Freedom's weapons, so that I could use one to defend us from the dogs. I blew one of them up, and another one got stuck in the wall. There must be evidence of that."
Her gaze said 'You let me be the judge of that,' but she just nodded to say he should continue.
"When we'd got rid of the dogs, Nori put the gun back down on Freedom's manipulator table, which re-secured it. I was drenched in guts by that point. So we thought it was safe to go have a shower and catch some sleep, and we came back to Freedom's shop just now to meet him as he told us to."
Goldstein looked at his partner and gave an eloquent shrug. He still wore the Jewish skullcap on his buzz-cut hair, which Mboge also found reassuring. For all his augmented eyes, he was clearly still a person who valued similar eternal mysteries to Felix. They had a point of connection there.
"That, uh... that's a good story. It might even be true. I've been monitoring your heart rate and respiration, and you clearly don't believe that you're lying." He rolled out a small desk from a niche in the wall. A square of silver metal folded out and became some kind of projector, casting a moving purple oval of light against the far wall.
Nori caught him frowning at it and explained: "It's an ID scanner. It'll give them your DNA print and identify any bots or other tech in your system. It's standard in places that have any self-respect."
"Right. Because your government knowing everything about you down to the last fiber doesn't sound at all invasive," Felix protested, but he still moved into the penumbra of the device when he was gestured to do so, and stood rigid while a tickling sensation invaded him from the soles of his feet up. "Your turn."
Nori stood easily in the light, with a bored, jaded expression that made Felix think of juvenile delinquents. It was oddly endearing.
"Okay," Najafi checked her wrist computer. "Congratulations, you're legally alive again. Since your current planet of residence has not sued for legal recognition from the Snow Chamber, I can't put that down as your affiliation, but it's no problem, we'll just put you down as travelers for now, and work out the minutiae once we find out whether we have a case against you."
"Can I have a word?" Goldstein took her by the upper arm and pulled her to the other side of the room, where a faint change in the color of the walls suggested there might be a door. They leaned together with the casual intimacy of people who had been colleagues or even friends for a long time, and Felix walked closer to Nori just to feel a flicker of the same warmth. It was always cold here, and he was not dressed for it.
"What d'you think they're saying?" he asked the little criminal, who must surely have a better idea about these things than he did.
Nori gave him a smile that raised the temperature in the room. "I think it's going to be good."
He was right. "Okay," said Najafi again, going around to another apparently unmarked section of wall and releasing another drawer, from which she took an applicator and two tiny foil wrapped packages. She peeled the first one open and sucked it up the syringe before giving a full body shudder as if she was casting doubts aside. "Here's the deal. I don't think we have enough reason to hold you just yet, so I'm going to tag you and let you go. If you do not agree to be tagged, you will be placed in detention and held without possibility of bail until Freedom is either found safe or there's a trial. Who the hell knows when that could be. If you agree to be tagged, you agree that we are permitted to monitor everything you do on Snow City and to record your experiences for later playback in court if appropriate."
Nori gave his 'business as usual' shrug again and held out his arm to be jabbed, which seemed pretty peculiar to Felix. Wasn't Nori the guy most likely to be sneaking around? Most likely to be inconvenienced by a round the clock watch? Was it just that he was confident his bots would be able to subvert it if necessary, or did he honestly not care? Felix cared.
"What kind of things are you monitoring?" he asked cautiously, as Najafi pressed the applicator to Nori's arm and it discharged with a flat snap that
sounded painful, though Nori didn't flinch.
"Everything."
"If I'm... on the toilet? Showering? I'm agreeing that a recording of that could be shown in court?"
All three of them were staring at him now with an expression that said they had no idea what his problem was. "If it was pertinent to the case, yes," Najafi agreed, like she was waiting for the punchline. "I'm not sure why it would be."
"Dude," said Nori, mysteriously, "what's the big deal? It's not like they don't already know that you're human. They'll only find out that you're so squeaky clean you can be used to polish windows."
"It seems... dishonorable," Felix grumbled. He didn't like it, but he could tell that giving in was inevitable. "But if you must."
"There's a word I haven't heard before, outside the history books," Najafi scoffed, but she was smiling as she administered the dose.
~
Now they were once more in Freedom's office, and Felix rubbed at the injection site as if he could cover the spy-ware with his hand. "Anything?"
Nori unbent from his crouch over Freedom's desk. He had managed to make it display a small screen, and claimed that it would be no problem at all to hack into Freedom's personal data cloud and track him from there. That had been half an hour ago.
"They, ah," Nori pushed his fingers into his hair, pulling them through from the scalp up. A day of this treatment had almost restored the oils taken out of it by the shower, but it still looked fluffy, like the black down on the chick of a crow. "They have better programmers here than I'm used to, and I can't," the hand slid down to the back of his neck, pulled away sharp as if the open port burned. "I don't have the memory or processing power I used to have."
It had been over a day now, and for all that the man was an abomination, Felix was still concerned for him. "Is it a matter of time, or--?"
Nori slumped forward, "I don't think I'm ever going to get it."
"All right then." In the last half an hour, Felix had been searching the shop's catalog. Now he punched in numbers and an automated warehouse system behind the walls produced his princely spacesuit, a slightly less ornate enameled dusk-pink one for Nori, and a snow density sensor that looked like a bulky gun. One simply pointed it at the walls and could see where the material was packed and where it had been recently loosened. "Let's do this the old fashioned way. Grab a spacesuit and a shovel--we’ll reopen the tunnel and go look for him."
