by Alex Oliver
Fortunately Aurora and her people had had a lot more time for that. Now she activated the loudspeaker by the main door and prepared to give them one last chance not to do this. "Brothers and sisters and sibs. I've lived all my life as one of you. I've shed my blood and lost my youth in this service. I'm not your enemy. I'm asking you now not to do this. Wait. Wait to be rescued. And if they abandon you too, then join us."
Behind the ram, in the rearguard, surrounded by another ten riflemen, a glint of green light stabbed off gold braid as the force's commander raised his head. Not Keene - he was younger, black haired, heavy browed, heavy set. Dogged looking. He met Aurora's distant eye and looked for a moment as though he would speak, but then he shook his head as if to say it wasn't worth it, and came straight on.
Well he's seen me, at least, she thought. He knows there's someone alive in here and in command. Also he was straightforward, and not overly imaginative. These were useful facts, and she nodded, pleased. "Let's go."
They dropped the swoops down into the inner courtyard. Reassured that a frontal attack was underway, Aurora expanded the escape hole she had made through the chapel wall. Her hand was almost entirely healed by now, only a little shiny and stiff where the new skin had not worn in. She left Ademola there to cover the breech and guard the swoops, while she and Lina ran for the control room.
The riflemen were beneath the door, above which Crouch, before she left, had wired a bank of stunners to be operated from Aurora's control chair. As soon as they got in range, Aurora picked the first rank off. The advancing troops hauled them out of the way and came on, while the riflemen returned fire on the door, their plasma bursts heating the concrete, softening the muzzles of the stunners embedded in it. Stunner number three's power pack overheated and died, but Aurora took out the next rank of those who were hauling the ram, and it rolled on top of their fallen bodies and stopped.
"Give it up. Give it up," she found herself whispering, dreading the moment they broke through the door. Inside the citadel, they had relied on explosives and pulse weapons. If their attackers got in, they would begin dying for real, and Aurora wasn't sure how she was going to live with that.
They did not give it up. While the ram-bearers disentangled their fallen comrades from the wheels, the riflemen concentrated their fire on the stunner rank above the door. Aurora picked the rest of them off before the whole bank of stunners overloaded, but they too were dragged away to recuperate back at camp, and replaced by their captain's honor guard.
More troops were now making their way out of the encampment - these without guns, but armed with wooden nightsticks and shillelaghs they'd cut from the nearby trees.
The last stunner failed. The ram rolled up until its carriage touched the doors, and then its company unbuckled the carriage and left the ram swinging from a framework of wood and rope. They began to pull it back, and Aurora keyed up the firing program in control of the plasma rifles in the outer wall corridor.
"Maybe we should just run," Lina said uncertainly, watching the virtual AI come on line. It queried the minefield in the outer exercise yard between the walls and the citadel door, returned a negative. Queried the explosive charge beneath the hangar that would turn the place into a smoking crater, and asked for access. "I don't like the thought of killing our own people. Can't we just disappear?"
"You know we can't," Aurora rested her fingers on the capped switch that would give the AI control. The boom and crack of ram against door felt like the soundtrack to her whole life, like the ache in her heart. "If we disappear, they'll know they need to look for us. We can't afford that."
"There must be some other way!" Lina insisted, grabbing her hand and stopping the activation.
"You tell me what it is."
That was when the message board in front of the communications chair lit up. Lina took her hand away, looking wary and hopeful, then ran to open a connection.
Aurora didn't recognize the woman in the picture, her close cropped hair almost masculine in contrast with the drape of her gleaming, Imperial yellow robe, but she recognized the hard calculation of command in her obsidian eyes.
"You are Captain Aurora Campos, in charge of the Cygnus Five colony?"
"I am," Aurora's fingers traced the arming button as she tried to figure out who this could be. "And you?"
The woman smiled. "I am... what you might call a kingmaker. Your people have asked for my help and that of my fleet--"
Your people? If Crouch and Citlali were dead, this must be someone on Snow City. Someone brought in by Mboge and therefore trustworthy. And then the word 'fleet' filtered past her concern for her people and set off a little bomb of hope in her chest like a raging fire.
"... And have agreed that you will trade the artifacts exclusively with me."
Mboge had found an art history buyer with money to burn? That was a turn around. The last thing she'd heard he was starving on the street. Well, good for him. Maybe she could borrow some of his luck. She grinned up at the floating head and shoulders on the view-screen. "If you bring your fleet in now and save us, yeah. We'd owe you that."
Lina had both hands flat against her cheeks as if she was holding down a smile, because she didn't know yet whether she dared to believe this. But this was good - this might work. They could get out, go into hiding. If the kingmaker's fleet turned up with enough force even Keene might back down. This could still pass without anyone being lost on any side.
"How fast can you get here?" Aurora asked, flicking the guard back over the arming button with a visceral sense of satisfaction at the click.
The kingmaker raised her left hand. The third and fourth fingers were stumps, cut off after the first knuckle, and the palm was tattooed with a chrysanthemum. "As I'm sure your people will tell you, I prefer to test those with whom I work. This is a large investment I am considering, and so a large test is required."
Okay, so Aurora was getting the gist of this already. She gave a short bark of disillusioned laughter, and let the departing joy settle into her bones as fire. She should have known it wouldn't be that easy. Tempted as she was to feel betrayed at having something she wanted offered and then snatched away, she refused. It wasn't as if she had lost anything, after all. She had just been presented with something new to gain.
"I see you understand me," the nameless woman's smile broadened a touch, almost enough to make her look genuinely interested. "If you survive the coming attack, you will have proven yourself to me. We will speak again then, or not at all."
The viewscreen went dark. Lina laughed and picked up the pulse rifle she had propped by her seat. "I suppose that would have been too easy. Well, all of us are already sacrificed to Allah. Those we kill today will only return to him, to paradise evermore. They should be thanking us."
Aurora reflected the martial humor with a chuckle, as she flicked the cap off the arming button and pressed it. There. Now the citadel's main computer had charge of the minefields and armories, and the final self-destruct. It would fight the defense of the compound for them. They merely had to keep up the pretense that there were human defenders here at all.
Into the grand entrance hall, then. They took a pillar each and settled behind them, waiting. Hunger passed across Aurora's mind like a slow bleeding wound. She had already begun to forget what it felt not to be oddly stretched out, floating above the world in a haze of discomfort. As the sound of the main gates falling boomed across the parade square, she focused on the gnawing of her gut, because soon--
Boom! Soil and flesh peppered the entrance as someone trod on the first mine. Aurora had tried hard not to let it get to this. She had not forced them to come after her. That they were here, dying, was their own choice. They could take the consequences of that.
Yeah, right. But still she felt it like a new emptiness on top of the hunger.
There was a quiet pause, except for the faint susurration of voices as the invaders talked over the problem of the mines. Well, she couldn't let them do that. She leaned
out of cover long enough to see them - two technicians, ahead of the main force, one bending over to look at the crater from which a charred arm-bone protruded. Aurora shot the bending one in the leg, and a moment later Lina's shot took the second in his shoulder. He staggered, took three stumbling steps forward and triggered a second mine.
This time she was looking full at the explosion and could have sworn she felt the blood spatter warm against her lips. It's their choice. They can always go away.
They didn't, of course. Instead the bull-burly captain came to the gate and surveyed the minefield with a pondering look. Aurora shot him in the chest, but he was distant enough that the plasma bottle had dissipated, and the rush of fire just singed black the area above his heart and crisped the ends of his hair. She wondered who he was - she knew a lot of captains by reputation, but very few by sight.
What would he do? The battle formations suggested he was a by-the-book sort, but that didn't tell her much. Most people started off by the book - it was what they did in situations the book didn’t cover that let her know what they were really made of. Keene had always had a knack of finding good captains, though. It was that to which he owed his success.
This one just looked at the sky and then sent an aide to... oh shit.
To keep up the pretense that they were still occupying the citadel, Aurora had sent the horses back to their stables. Two of them. They'd been eating whatever Earth crops had not yet died, and had fattened a little. Now a nervous ensign, with a shield of lifeboat-door ceramic plating, led the roan to the edge of the furthest crater, pointed it at the inner fortress and switched it hard. It bucked and then cantered straight toward Aurora, got half way across before it too stepped unwisely and was blown to pieces.
Crouching behind his shield, the ensign marked the path behind it and came on, leading the second horse to the edge of the new crater. Lina's shot at the ensign reflected from his shield, Aurora - regretfully - lined up to shoot the horse in the head, and then considered. She didn't actually want to keep them from getting in. Nor did she want this to take all day. So she took another shot at the ensign's unprotected feet.
He collapsed, yowling. Spooked by the wailing, the horse fled most of the rest of the way before it too triggered an explosion and was killed.
Good move, Aurora thought, as she and Lina retreated to the banqueting room entrance, taking themselves out of the crossfire of rifles set up in the anteroom. Here the AI itself would give the impression of surrounding riflemen, flicking up moving reflections in the polished walls and holograms by the doors. She checked the timing on her bracer. Even though they'd made it across the mines faster than expected, things were getting tight.
"You make sure the mainframe's been purged of all records," she said, with a jerk of her head to send Lina to the audience chamber. "I'll see if they need distracting here. Time's short. Meet you in the chapel in ten."
"Got it." Lina disappeared as Aurora watched the first riflemen pick their way across the bloody path and begin to fan into the entrance hall. There were fifteen seconds before the AI deployed and she wanted them further in. She picked off a couple who had flattened themselves to the inner walls, making sure they could see that her fire came from the next room in. One of them had retrieved the ensign's shield as he came. He made a charge at the door and the others followed after, bit between their teeth. They were far from the influence of their stolid commanding officer and they could feel the place cracking under their force.
Their careful progress became an onslaught, filling the anteroom. When the AI's rifles came into play they couldn't help but fall like flies. Aurora led them into the banqueting hall like she was leading them into a hail of knives, and then she ran and they poured after.
Out into the kitchen corridor as the wall lasers began to fire behind her. Down the steps and out into the courtyard. Ademola waited by the swoops with a disgruntled expression, as if he had wanted to help but was still relieved that he had not had to kill again. "No trouble here. I don't think they're round the back."
"Don't think" was not ideal, but it would have to do. As Lina bounded up with huge strides, they saw her pursuers - five of them - burst out of the audience chamber window and roll to their feet.
"Let's go," Aurora kicked the swoop to life and burned a hole in the painted wooden camouflage they had used to conceal the breach in the wall.
Lina barred the chapel door behind them and they flew out one after another, low through the stumps of the orchard and its misty blue smolder.
Yes! Aurora thought in triumph. Ten seconds before everything blew and it looked like they were going to make it--
Fire curled around her leg. She batted at her knee to douse her burning trouser, pain fleeting red through her mind, like the scream she thought she'd heard. She looked for Lina. There she was, looking down, fist in her mouth like she was going to be sick. Where was--?
Another burst of flame boiled against the side of Aurora's face, this one fainter as she outdistanced the range of the enemy rifleman. Someone had had the sense to go to the roof of the citadel, to be watching for an escape. He had shot down Ademola's swoop. Aurora watched it spiral earthward, and the no in her chest felt as though it would blot out the stars. Ademola was slumped over the steering yoke, unmoving, but she couldn't tell if he was dead. "No! Fuck!"
She turned to go back for him, but her pursuers were now through the chapel gate, sprinting out and surrounding him. Bending down, one of them peeled him off his bike, limp as the dead. The others put their rifles to their shoulders and filled the sky around Aurora with flame.
She met Lina's eyes and saw there what Lina shouldn't have to say to her; ‘Leave him. We need you more.’ And it was true. Clenching her teeth until they squeaked, she rode away.
A moment later the top of the citadel bulged out in flame and fell in on itself with a crackling, groaning rumble. It felt like a betrayal to hope Ademola was dead, or at the very least brain-damaged enough not to be able to talk. But God, she did.
~
Aurora had arrived at the city in stealth, sure she hadn't been followed, and she'd been greeted in the entrance cave by an armful of Bryant. And sure, he smelled weird now, and the touch of his sensor-furred hands creeped her out a little, but she'd clung to him for a long three seconds and felt like everything was going to be okay.
Since then, at his orders, she'd gone down to the roofless enclosure in which they'd first stayed, which she thought of as her house, eaten some flavorless soft cheese, and taken a twenty minute nap. But now she was arguing with him that she needed to go back.
"If Ademola's alive they could be torturing him right now. If they get the city's location out of him then we are well and truly lost."
"Hey, boss," the shout came down from the top of the spiraling entrance ramp. Ramjet, one of the ex-convicts, was yelling over the whole city for her. "Guess who turned up after all."
Aching to stay in bed, wrapped around the not-quite-human form of her beloved, Aurora felt the universe fall out from under her. She rolled out of her emergency blanket, stamped into her boots and ran.
Ademola and his swoop were in the cave. Ramjet was propping Ademola up while Lina examined the raw, weeping wound on his scalp, and Aurora would have hugged him, but she didn't get this. She didn't get it at all.
"Gabriel," her sharp tone made him raise his head and look at her, puzzled. Bryant, now wearing insulating material over every piece of his body except his face, huffed up the slope with a tool kit under his arm. "What happened?"
"They must not have seen me," Ademola gritted out, panting as he fought to think and speak through the pain. "I must have fainted - from the agony of the plasma burst. When I woke, I was on the ground. No one was around me. I could hear them digging through the ruins, but they must not have reached me yet. I had twisted the yoke as I fell, but I fixed it and then I came home." He nodded, as if to drive home the next point. "I was careful not to be followed."
Mother of God. Aurora re
vised her opinion of Captain Dogged further upwards just as her stomach sank in despair. That didn't check out at all. She had seen the enemy surround Ademola. If they weren't there when he woke, there could only be one reason. "Check the swoop."
"I had that thought." Bryant had unwrapped his hands, and was passing them over the machine in long strokes. It took him seconds to unlatch the seat, reach underneath, into the engine, and bring out a tiny device the size of a thumbnail.
"Get all the way inside, everyone." Aurora put her head into her hands, just as the first of the pursuers' lifeboats cracked through the ribbon trees and settled heavily into the clearing outside.
"Congratulations, genius." Bryant summed up bitterly. "They put a tracker on you. They followed you all the way home."
~
After snipers at the entrance picked off five of the enemy as they warily approached, and then another ten as they rushed the place, the captain in charge came just to beyond range with an attache and a loudspeaker, and asked to speak to Aurora.
She considered piecing together a decent uniform out of loan garments from the rest of her crew, but that wasn't her any more. It hadn't been for some time. Instead, she put on the dress she'd brought from home, a sky blue dress with a fitted bodice and a flounced skirt, more suitable for dancing flamenco than for warfare. She wasn't sure why she felt it was appropriate. Maybe it was just the last opportunity she'd have.
It had been meant for Bryant, and it got a whistle out of him, and a rare human smile. These days she was more strengthened by a small triumph like that than she ever had been by her rank patches. It made an impression on the enemy too, as she stepped out of the darkness of the cave into the finger of light that fell inside. Her snipers, back in the dark, were covering her. No one on the other side was close enough to take a shot, but they were close enough to see and murmur, thrown off-stride and disconcerted.
