Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  She tugged at the other restraint, and her frost-burned hand gave her the answer. It was almost healed. She had fast-healing bots in her system and they were mopping up the toxin faster than it could flow in. A few moments more and she would be back to herself.

  "Well, we don't have enough time to go through it again," said Swann, her pleasant tone now slightly suspicious. "You'll have to trust me that it's all in order. Do you trust me?"

  "Yes," Aurora said, automatically, remembering that the ship she was on was falling towards Cygnus 7. She reached out for the three ships to which she was now connected, and felt her way towards the controls, hoping to do this quietly, gradually, learning as she went along. "Yes, I trust you."

  "Good." Swann leaned over and set her hand on Aurora's forehead, tracing the sign of the cross with her thumb. She looked tired but satisfied. "Then we will proceed to the execution."

  "You said I was forgiven," Aurora's surprise meant the words were sharper than she had intended. She should have played along for longer. But Swann was already pulling a bag of blue liquid from her case. She laid it on the nearby table almost ceremoniously, and Aurora gathered that this was the poison she was going to put in the IV next.

  "You are," Swann smiled a relentless smile at her. "But human justice must also be satisfied. You have committed crimes for which you must pay."

  Shit. Aurora tested the strength of her bonds again. Metal cuffs around wrists and ankles. She pulled, but she wasn't going anywhere. The last of the fuzziness dissipated from her bloodstream, and she plunged into the links with the ships like she was swimming.

  Here - here was the navigation computer. She pulled Fatih Barhi out of its dive and set it on a collision course with the other two ships, set them accelerating towards the same spot. They'd meet somewhere in the oort cloud and annihilate each other. Just in case the crews got them back under control, she had them fire all their ordnance into empty space, sent their repair drones to wreck the generators for the beam weapons.

  She opened her eyes again in a profound moment of peace, knowing it was done and done well. Maybe it was pride, but it pleased her to think she would end her service life with the defeat of one more fleet.

  Quiet still, she watched as Swann fitted the bag of poison into the drip, and picked up a battered service book, to read the service for the dying. Did she have to accept death now, though, she wondered, an idea stirring in her still sluggish mind. Or was there still a chance?

  The door slid open and Keene ran in, hair on end. Bless him, the man was terrified and furious. "What have you done?!"

  "Out!" Swann insisted but Keene pushed her towards the door, where the waiting guard hustled her outside and away.

  "Get to the lifeboats. I'll deal with this."

  Lifeboats! There was an idea. Aurora grinned up at him, half naked and exhilarated, and - if she had to be honest - smugly triumphant, because she could hear the tick-ticking noise in the corridor outside.

  "You bitch, what have you done?"

  It felt fantastic to ignore him and address her words to the security camera, to the innocent soldiers who were listening in. "Your ships are locked into a collision course which you cannot correct. You have seven hours to get your people out. I promise you that lifeboats landing on Cygnus 5 will not be shot down. If you can survive to find us, you're welcome to join us."

  "Look at me!" Keene shouted. He waved the pistol under her nose, but she was looking behind him as one of the repair drones over which she had now extended her power scuttled into the room on its claw-tipped, piston-powered legs. It lifted the admiral up by the back of his collar, twisted his gun out of his hand with another leg and sawed through Aurora's restraints with a third. She creaked uncomfortably to her feet, still hurting from the electrowhip, and took a long, contemplative look at Keene. He was trying to wrestle his way out of the machine's grip with as much success as might be expected.

  Slowly, Aurora smiled. She wasn't a petty woman, she hoped, but surely a little payback was allowed?

  When she'd stripped the admiral of his uniform and put it on, she left him in his underwear, hogtied in IV tubing. Then she ran for the lifeboats, her ship-drone escort clearing the way.

  ~

  In case the bridge crew of Keene’s ship had scanners they could still force to work for them, Aurora assumed they would be tracking the path of her lifeboat, and landed it at the citadel. It was now vital not to give away the location of the city. Only a small crew of techs still lived at the site of the old colony, working on the wrecker and trying to map out the mag-lev network beneath it. Jenkins was the foremost of these. When Aurora stepped out of the boat into the weed-grown desolation that had been the bonfire square outside the citadel walls, it was Jenkins who was there to meet her, the light of Cygnus Five’s ring shining silvery-green on his bright smile.

  "Well. I thought you were doomed, but now I'm beginning to see why your legend precedes you."

  Aurora smiled in return. She'd eaten half of the lifeboat's emergency rations on the way down, and felt as if she could indeed; she felt solid, strong and revivified. Beating Keene so roundly, so satisfyingly, had left her feeling invulnerable. She was not finished. Not yet. "Where's Dr. Atallah?"

  Jenkins gave a good-natured shrug, as though her lack of small talk amused him. He jerked his head to the right, just as Lina Atallah jogged out of the command room and outraged propriety by hugging Aurora hard.

  "I watched," she murmured into Aurora's neck, as Aurora gave in to the desire to hug her back. "That was scary for a bit. When you were drugged. I thought it was over for sure. I thought you wouldn't pull out in time and she would kill you. She made it sound so--"

  "It's okay," Aurora put a tentative hand in the center of Lina's back and patted, hopefully soothingly. "I don't know what it looked like, but I don't remember any of that part. So it doesn't count. Right?"

  "I almost thought myself that we were wrongheaded and acting against the will of Allah."

  Swann must have done quite a number on her while she was asleep. Aurora wondered what she'd been persuaded to say. Had she cried? How much she'd undermined the message the colony’s recordings had been trying to give? "If they had to drug me to make me say that stuff," she pointed out, “it can’t have had much merit sober. You still know better, don't you?"

  Lina let go and stepped back, wiping her eyes on the heel of her hand. "I do," she said, her face hardening, "And I'm not going to forgive them quickly for the way they treated you. That was hard to watch."

  Aurora could see that. It was worse seeing a friend in danger than it was being in danger yourself. She laughed, "It was pretty good to live through. I uh... I wasn't sure how it would be, facing him again. That was the bit I was nervous about. I'm not nervous anymore."

  Lina laughed too, "He did look pretty sad in his underwear. Not that I looked, of course. I am not one to go looking at naked men."

  "Of course," Aurora grinned, then sobered. "But let’s talk war. The lifeboats are going to start coming down any moment. You ready?"

  "The wrecker's prepared," Jenkins said, turning to regard the volcano's slope and the path up to its front door with a proprietary air. "We've got minimal rations for the crew for about two weeks. I thought you said you weren't shooting anyone down?"

  "No lifeboats," she confirmed. "But once HQ hear of the loss of three ships, they may send more. Besides, we're going to sacrifice the citadel, so I need your people on sensors and communication."

  Above their heads, a flash of light gave the whole sky an empty brilliance for an instant as something white skimmed across the atmosphere. It would be the first of the lifeboats, falling like a meteor, unguided, something having gone wrong with its gravity drives. They waited to see if it would pull out of its streak, but it just burned on, over the horizon, to fall like a stone hundreds of miles away.

  "You'd better get inside," Aurora said, breathing out and in, deliberately, to psych herself up for the next step."

  "Y
es Ma'am," Jenkins sprinted off to the launcher, and a moment later they saw the concealed door hiss into place behind him.

  Lina and Aurora strode back to the citadel to put up a convincing retreat.

  "All the outer buildings are mined," Lina said, back to business after that brief moment of humanity. "We've got all the inner computers slaved to the console in the chapel - so we can look like we're still occupying the control room even while we make a break for it out of the back wall. The control room itself is wired to blow once it's breached. It's going to be a hell of a bang. We want to make as much destruction as we can, to camouflage the fact that both the records and the bodies are missing."

  From her bracer, she flicked up a series of holographic maps of the minefields and the wiring of the citadel. Aurora considered them and was impressed. "Good work," she said, passing into the over-gilt opulence of the governor's throne room with a kind of itchiness down her back that said yes, yes, let's blow something up.

  There she picked up her own bracer, which she had left behind to preserve security in the event of capture. She strapped it back on. The buckles were loose and the thing twisted annoyingly around her thinner, shrunken arm - since being shot down, she had lost a significant amount of weight. "How're we doing for food?" she asked. "Cows made any difference?"

  "They did for a while," Lina sighed. "But Selena reports that the milk's drying up. Apparently while they'll eat the local flora, they don't seem to be getting enough nourishment out of it to do more than survive. She's afraid she’s going to have to kill all the unweaned calves rather than watch them starve too."

  That must be breaking Selena's heart, Aurora thought, with the lightness of her victory sliding off her shoulders and the weight of survival settling back onto them. She nodded. "Yeah, we really need Mboge to get back with that food. You hear anything new from him?"

  "No ma'am. Still penniless and stuck, the last I heard."

  What made her think she could do this? What made her think she could still win? She gave Lina a rueful look, because right now it didn't matter. She was committed to the fight regardless. "Anything new from the girls? Crouch and Citlali?"

  Lina looked embarrassed, twisting her hands in a distress that bled in her voice and made it shake. "They were reported dead, ma'am, remember? I don't think we'll hear from them again."

  Under the merciful influence of the drugs, she had, in fact, managed to forget that little revelation. It shook her with as deep a pang as it had the first time. She had sent them to death in her own selfishness, and for what? It would hardly have been kind to wish this hungry scrabble for existence on Autumn anyway. "May God hold them in his hands," she said, because there was nothing else to say. "And all of us."

  There was a boom outside as something broke the sound barrier overhead. One of the sensor screens tracked it in a glowing green curve as it overshot the citadel, turned, and settled into the middle of the kale patch, crisping all the precious seeds beneath it. Two more followed it, and then another three came down equidistant around the citadel. Coms crackled in her ear as Ademola, on the citadel roof, gave calm instructions to his swoop team to stay put.

  The crews of three battleships were descending, too fast to be picked off one by one. Aurora needed to manage this battle to look like a defeat. If it seemed they'd been driven out and their place of power razed to the ground, there was some hope they might then be left to starve. After which they could rebuild from the hidden city, away from the Kingdom’s malicious gaze. That was the plan and it was a good one, though inaction at this point made Aurora feel like she was buried under an anthill.

  She put her rifle down and called Bryant.

  She barely recognized him now. Something about the shape of his face had changed so completely there might have been a different skull under it. An elusive shimmer of iridescent green dusted the hollows under his eyes, and his hands were now visibly furred beneath by a carpet of wires. She didn't know where his irreverence had gone, because the man who sat twitching in his laboratory now looked hurt and haunted, and she wished she could reach through the com screen and shake him. Shake him and then hug him and tell him to stop scaring her like this.

  But the smile when he saw her was so radiant, so sweet and so desperate that it brought tears to her eyes. "Hey," she whispered, guilty now that she could not go to him, nor give him the help he obviously needed. "I'm back."

  "I'm so glad," he said, and tears the color of green tea seeped from his eyes. "I knew there was a reason to come back. I knew! At least, I hoped--"

  "Come back from where?" she asked, and then with a flare of memory and hope. "You got the door open? Were you right? Is there something in there that can help?"

  Bryant tried to smooth a hand through his hair, but winced away, as though he had touched a fork to a filling. "I think... I think there is. It... they told me there were weapons, that there was a way--"

  A smooth bubble of gaseous joy swelled in her heart until it pressed on the inside of her ribs. "So it was worth the--" a circular gesture around her head to indicate the antennae. "That's fantastic! What can you do? Can you give me a rundown before it all starts?"

  "I--" his face crumpled into tears, and he pressed the back of his hand to his nose, the fingers shaking, shaking. Her joy turned into horror as if she had been bodily turned inside out, because surely if it made him look like this even before he'd used it, how could it be worth it?

  "I don't know exactly what I can do," Bryant said, with a peculiar blend of eagerness and horror. "It wants me. It's got a missing piece, the device, and that piece is me. Or it could be me. But if I fit myself into the machine, I'm not coming back. I mean... I'm not actually sure what I am right now, but if I took that further step, that would be the end of me. I. I mean. Something else would be born, and that might be glorious, and I'm not saying don't do it. But--"

  "It wouldn't be you anymore?" she finished, shivering at the thought, because no. No. Losing Bryant would be the same as defeat. She'd lost Morwen and Lali and that was enough. No more.

  "Then I'm saying we don't do it," she told him, furious again, ready to fight this damnable possibility and grind it underfoot. Bryant was not collateral. Everything else could go but not him. "You stay away from it. You undo whatever it was you did to yourself - don't tell me you can't. You-- You get human again, Bryant, so I have something to win for. You hear me?"

  "No, but I--"

  She wasn't listening. This one thing. He could damn well do this one thing for her. "That's an order!" she said, and cut the call.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Morwen's Farewell

  Facing down Jai Kumara’s blaster, Morwen was braced for death when Priya threw her arms about her and made herself a human shield. Morwen didn't know what to feel. On the one hand, everything was burningly intense - the texture of the mint green silk of Priya's sleeve against her face, the scent of her glorious hair. On the other, Morwen's ability to care seemed to have deserted her, overloaded perhaps. When Priya begged 'Don't! Don't hurt her!" all that came was a sense of weariness and weight.

  She opened her eyes anyway, in time to see Jai's chin crumple beneath his fine mustache, as the arm holding the gun drooped toward the floor. "It's true then?" he said, sounding almost as hollow as Morwen felt. "That they forced you to marry me? That it was never by your own choice at all?"

  He looked to be in his fifties, a little corpulent, soft around the stomach and the jowls, and with long streaks of gray in his slicked back hair. She would not have expected the obvious desolation that showed in his eyes, the genuine unfeigned emotion. She wanted to shout at him "how could you not know?!" but she could imagine the answer. When he looked at Priya's spiritless defeat, he would have seen modesty. When he looked at her tears he would have seen virgin nerves. He was a man - of course he would have thought everything was about him.

  Priya let go of Morwen and uncurled slightly, as though she was not afraid, and some buried, exhausted part of Morwen was both jea
lous and relieved at that.

  "I..." Pulling a handkerchief from her pocket, Priya smoothly rose to her feet and went to press it to her husband's cheek. He let her, and Morwen hugged her own knees, putting her face down on her folded arms so as not to watch.

  "It was a choice I made," Priya went on, again with that folded forged steel edge that was so new in her. "I'm not going to go back on it now. I am... content with you."

  Oddly, Morwen had to stifle a laugh. Poor bastard! That was a lukewarm thing to hear from one's wife. "When the police came to question her about the incident at Admiral Keene's house, did you pull a gun on them too?" she asked. This at least still mattered to her.

  Jai looked at the gun as if he had forgotten he held it, then he placed it on the mantelpiece and rubbed his hands to take the stain off. "I did not permit them through the door," he said stiffly, cold and perhaps offended. "She was never in any danger. No thanks to you."

  It was funny though, wasn't it? All of that effort, all of that blind abandoning of the captain's mission. Her numb heart dropped further - that blind abandoning of Lali when they were supposed to be a team. All of it and for what? This man had already done everything she could not, simply by being born male.

  "You're not coming with me, are you?" she asked, but she already knew the answer. Priya's hand was on Jai's arm as they stood together in their beautiful house surrounded by all the luxuries and respect that a good position in society could confer.

  "I hold by my bargains," said Priya, looking guilty - as well she might. That was a lie, wasn't it? She held to them until she was... But there Morwen's outrage faltered. She held to them until she was tormented out of them. Who could be blamed for that? Everyone had their own breaking point, and Morwen had just come too late to save Priya from hers. "And we're," a smile, shy, aware it was unwelcome. "We're expecting a baby. I couldn't go off into a war zone. I don't think you should either. We would give you a shuttle--"