by Alex Oliver
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Aurora has had enough
Aurora Campos might have doomed the whole human race, the Kingdoms of the Book, the Source worlds and all the non-affiliated little places in between, but the thought was too big for her to process. She felt it like a low roar in the background of the screaming denial that came of knowing her baby was on Keene's ship, out there where the cloud of boiling death-stuff threatened to eat the walls from around her.
It could have come into contact with the hull already, could even now be bubbling and spreading, turning everything it touched into more copies of itself.
Keene's expression, large on the monitor, taking up a whole wall, was pettily pleased with her reaction as he watched her swallow the desire to scream. Instincts of action made her jittery, even starved and tired as she was. She clenched her fists. “Keene. Stop gloating. Either get the hell out of here before the pontoth hits you, or come down here where you'll be safe.”
Behind Keene's magnified head, Aurora's chief engineer, Morwen Crouch, stood in chains. Marine private Lali Citlali was just visible as an edge of black plait and an elbow beside her, but Morwen's expression gave Aurora the creeps. It was so defeated.
“I will leave,” Keene hadn't had enough gloating yet, and if Aurora could have flung out there into the biohazard-rich soup that the entire Cygnus system was slowly becoming, she'd have punched a hole in his ship herself out of frustration. “But not by your order.”
His picture gave a tiny judder as he swayed on his feet, righting himself instantly. Lali staggered out from behind him and her wide eyes and fallen mouth were visible as she gazed at a monitor to her right.
“What was that?” Aurora demanded, only long battlefield experience keeping her tone calm, her voice tight despite the dread.
“Shit,” Lali looked straight through the monitor at her, sweet round face paling. “We've been grazed, ma'am. I don't know if any got through the shields, but--”
The shields didn't cover the engine and thruster ports. That meant some piece of debris carrying the pontoth could have grazed close enough to the ship for flecks to be drawn towards the ship's defenseless places, drawn by the ship's gravity, or by the pontoth's inhuman mind.
“Keene!” This time he actually smiled at Aurora’s note of terror. He actually had the nerve, the stupidity to smile. “It's too late to leave. It's on your ship already. You can probably make it down here before everything dissolves around you. I'll guarantee your safety if you do.”
Keene scoffed, and she had to give it to him that he could pull off blithe unconcern with the best of them. There'd been a time when she would have been reassured by that – when she would have thought the battle can't be going so badly or Keene would be more worried. But stupid overconfidence was practically the only thing he could do right. “Listen to me, Admiral. I don't care if you live or die, but think of your daughter. Think of Autumn. She deserves to live.”
“If I came down there it would kill her faster,” he said, turning to look across his ship's bridge to where one of the nurses from medbay held their child. Aurora strained forward, her nose almost to the view-screen, in an effort to see her daughter. This was the closest she had been to her baby since Autumn had been ripped from her arms a moment after the birth, and Autumn was crying and red faced, her mewing wail at the same time infinitely precious and infinitely unbearable.
It took Aurora a precious moment to realize Keene was probably right. The Destroyer had reluctantly accepted Cygnus Five's settlers as part of itself because they had shared atoms – air, water, food particles – with it. They had incorporated it, in a sense, into their own bodies and it recognized them as its own. But the forces that had landed recently to try to recapture the colony had not been so lucky. She had watched their blood boil off and their bodies turn to ash in moments, in front of her horrified eyes. She still regretted the death of dour Captain Onarici. She would have liked to make peace with him, in a different life.
“I can persuade the planet to spare you,” she blurted, though she couldn't be sure of that. Maybe when she went back to the hollow in the center of the temple where Bryant lay like the pit inside a cherry, she would find he had lost even the last fragments of his humanity. All the time when she couldn't be there with him, the planet was whispering to him, the Destroyer was thinking through him, and the wires in his blood and brain were multiplying, tying him tighter in. Would he even recognize her by now? If he did, would he care?
“You're talking to planets now?” Keene shook his head, carding a hand through his pristine hair – silver as the stars. “Not satisfied playing Queen. You want to be God too?”
This was not the time for blasphemy. Aurora sent up a quick arrow prayer of apology for him, all garbled up with the please, please save my baby that felt increasingly like the only thing she could think. She could feel it eating her up inside. “Damn it, Keene! I don't care. Take her somewhere safe then. But if you're going, go. Stop posturing. Get her to safety. Now!”
An alarm sounded on one of his bridge monitors. Autumn's crying ratcheted up to the point where Aurora wanted to smack her own forehead into a wall because that would have been less painful.
“She's right!” Lali shouted. “We need to go while we still--”
Lali guard tased her in the side, once and then a second time when she didn't immediately fall. Aurora threw herself against the view screen, teeth bared. “You fucking monster, Keene...”
Her fists met static – an eerie slide of white motes on a gray background – and passed through to impact against the wall. Thinking about the pain running red down her arm helped her not to throw up or to scream. She whirled on Jenkins instead, who was struggling with the city's cobbled together comms, trying to re-establish a signal.
“Did they jump?” Aurora was still not screaming, but the yell was close. Jenkins wasn't military – he was some kind of prince back on his own world, and she could tell he didn't appreciate her shouting in his face, but she couldn't rein it in. “Did they jump or did they blow up? Tell me!”
His once ebony face now bore a tint of holly green from the chlorophyll in his skin but he colored up dark nevertheless and his eyes flashed. “With this equipment? No matter how loud you ask, there's no way to tell.”
She'd actually reached for his jacket, intending to shake him, but his fire and his dignity rebuked her. She stepped away as fear hammered up her throat like vomit. Covering her mouth with one hand and her eyes with the other, she stood in the light of the comm screen until Jenkins snapped it off and in the dark afterward for far too long.
She'd won a war. If she'd lost two women and a baby it was fewer dead than normal. But…
The whole universe couldn't balance out that loss. What did it profit her to have gained the world if she had lost her soul in the process? Bryant, she thought, wanting to run to him, but he was a monstrosity now and--
Jenkins' hand came down in the center of her back, gently grounding her. “But they jumped, I'm sure of it. Some technician decided to ask for forgiveness instead of permission, and they jumped. That's the truth.”
That was certainly what she would have to make herself believe. After three deep breaths, she managed to fake it, nodding. Jenkins took his hand away and they stood, awkwardly saying nothing while she smoothed down her inappropriately festive dress.
A light shone out from his comm-board, and he leaned closer to the flickering surface for a moment before beckoning Aurora closer. She gave him a smile of thanks and looked down into the stern face of Sekh Heongu. That was not a woman before whom she could afford to show weakness. She straightened her shoulders and nodded to the woman, feigning an equality she intended to make real.
“I hear strange rumors of your battle,” the pirate woman returned the nod with an edge of wariness. “Heaven defends you extravagantly. How then can I be against you? I send to you the aid I promised, brought by my emissary Xan Hu and by your own men, returned to you with bounty. Expect th
em, and if you can, rescue them from your over-zealous defenders. Our friendship will be cut short, should anything happen to Xan Hu.”
“I will do everything I can,” Aurora promised, though at the moment all she felt capable of was lying down and crying. “Thank you.”
Sekh Heongu signed off with the brusqueness of a busy woman, and Aurora smiled more genuinely at Jenkins and walked out of the comms station into the dome of the city.
It lay as quiet around her almost as it had been when she and Bryant first discovered it. How long ago that seemed now. But a beep on her wrist comm had her looking down into her sister's dirt-smeared face. Selena was coin-sized on the tiny screen and wind-blown, thinner than she had been but less thin than anyone else in the colony. Aurora headed out of the city even as one of her many burdens slipped from her back. She smiled.
“Selena. I'm so glad to see you unharmed. Did any of them come your way?”
Selena hissed a nervous laugh through her teeth. Something about the sway of her picture said she was riding. Of course she was riding.
“A troop transport found the valley,” she shook her head. “But they'd barely set down when...uh--”
On closer inspection the smudges on Selena's face were the same greenish gray as the pontoth. She had it on her cheek and her fingers, and it was just sitting there, inert, as it had been when Aurora first saw and dismissed it as a few piles of dust.
Aurora strode up the stone steps at the city’s cave entrance and out into the sunshine again. In the clearing, just outside the front door, the other colonists who had been adapted to photosynthesize through their skin sat or lay, stripped to the very edges of decency so they could soak up as much radiance as possible. The wind was fresh and welcome against Aurora’s face, and the sun – oh, the sunlight was butter on her own new chlorophyll cells. She drank the light up like soup. “They all dissolved?” she guessed.
Selena laughed again, humorless and horrified. “Yeah. What was that?”
“Bryant called it pontoth,” Aurora said, stripping her dress off again to join the throng trying to make up for months of starvation all at once. “Sort of like the planet's immune system. It wants to get rid of all intelligent life, but Bryant managed to persuade it to leave us 'til last. It's going to take apart the rest of the galaxy first.”
This time the laugh was less shock and more disbelief. “Well shit.”
“Mae would wash your mouth out,” Aurora scolded, feeling the dread inside ease a little at the pleasantry. She could do this – she could carry on. These people needed her to carry on.
“Will it get to her?” Selena asked, covering her mouth and whispering it. “Will it get to Novocasa? Are all our family except us going to end up as piles of dust?”
No, maybe actually Aurora couldn't. She hadn't even thought of that. Hadn't thought of the stuff rolling over the fertile fields of her homeworld, eating up the vaqueros and the gardeners, the farmers, her cousins and brothers and mother and father as it went. Maybe she couldn’t do this any longer after all. Couldn’t fight the whole universe over and over while everything she’d ever loved died around her.
She folded to her knees on the springy, mossy teal blue plants that passed for grass here and her mind went a long way away, running from its problems into darkness.
“Hey. Hey!”
It felt like a long time before Aurora could scramble herself back together again. The physical weakness of starvation was easing, but she was tired, so tired, and she wanted to cling to that state of blissful nothingness, which was better than her nightmare filled dreams. But the tiny picture of Selena on her wrist looked like it was on the verge of panicking, and in the distance she could hear something grumbling, growing louder by the second. A low earthy sound and something higher with it, almost musical.
“What the hell? What now?”
“Don't zone out on me like that!” Selena snapped, relief manifesting itself as anger. “Remember what Pa says? Whatever your tragedies...”
“The cows don't care.” Aurora snorted, because yes, your heart could ache all it liked, but every morning and evening the cows would need to be milked. She had to get on with this too.
“Speaking of cows,” Selena's look of strain flicked into a grin, “you should be hearing us about now. I gathered you weren't under attack anymore, so I'm bringing the herd in.”
Well, she hadn't expected the noise to be good news, but good news was welcome. She commed down to the infirmary, where those who had been too principled to accept the gene therapy that allowed for photosynthesis were now lying in the final throes of starvation. Their chief medical officer, Dr. Lina Atallah was one of them, so it was Ademola she spoke to – a marine who’d had enough of killing and, in his fifties, was trying to learn a new way of life. He too had rejected the therapy, but he’d had more fat and muscle on him to begin with and was only just beginning to weaken now.
“Sergeant,” Aurora smiled at him. He looked gray under his gray hair, the wrinkles in his dark brown face harshly scored on skin sagging from rapid weight loss. “If I send you broth in the next half hour, can you save them?”
“I don't know, Captain. I don't know enough about any of this. Some people, their stomachs have shut down already. They might not be able to digest it. Sugar-water would be better.”
“I don't have that,” Aurora wondered when Mboge and Nori, along with Sehk Heongu’s envoy would arrive. Aid was coming, if she could just hold on that little bit longer. “Make do with what you've got for now. There's no more you can do for them than that.”
~
Selena was shockingly green in person, even to the extent of having a teal tint to the roots of her hair. She too had stripped to absorb the benefit of the sunshine, tying up her t-shirt under her breasts and wearing her riding boots with long socks and shorts. Their parents would have been appalled, but Aurora barely waited for her to dismount before she had rushed over and was hugging her tight. The feel of being held in capable, strong arms almost broke her down again. She had to step back and mine some of that shrieking fury inside to snap out “I'm going to need you to kill some of your cows.”
“Glad to see you too,” Selena rolled her eyes. “Some of them are still giving milk. You can have the milk.”
“I'll take the milk too,” Aurora insisted, eying the individually painted bells around each cow's neck. Selena knew each of them by name, had delivered most of them, doctored and tended them. They were for milk and for terraforming. She hadn't brought them here expecting to have to kill them. “But I need at least one for broth right away. People are dying here, Selena.”
“I thought you had ships coming with food.” Selena bent away from her, leaning into her horse's neck. The horse too was an interesting khaki shade beneath its chestnut hair, but seemed content about it, pricking its ears towards the crack in the stone that was their city's unassuming front door.
“I do, but--” Aurora stopped herself. Shit. “But the pontoth isn't going to recognize them. The minute they arrive in system they're going to be attacked.” Shit. She covered her eyes and bowed forward into the darkness, feeling like her sanity was a bubble in a boiling cauldron. She didn't know if it was worse to carry on rolling or to pop.
“I suppose Petra is getting old,” Selena offered, gently. “I don't suppose she'll calve again. All right. They can have her.”
She walked over, the horse clopping behind her, and put a hand on Aurora's arm. Aurora took strength from it. “Is there anything you can do to make the pontoth inactive? It didn't touch us. Surely it can be switched off?”
Every avenue of contemplation was a land-mine these days. Aurora tried to paste on enough indifference to at least convince her sister she could do this, even if she couldn't convince herself. Mother of God, she didn't want to go back there – to go back to the heart of Cygnus 5, the heart of their planet and talk with it. Not when it held half of her heart too.
But hey, you didn't always get what you wanted in this life, did yo
u? And she had all her people depending on her. She would do it for them.
“I guess I'd better go talk to Bryant about that. If anyone can do it, he can.”
“He'll just unplug himself, right,” Selena patted her arm as if she didn't know what the fuss was about. She probably didn't. She hadn't seen.
“If there's a 'himself' left.” Oh God, now Aurora's lower lip was trembling and her chin had scrunched up. She wasn't going to bawl, she told herself. Firmly, furiously. She had too much to do. She was a god damn invincible warrior queen. She was not going to--
“Aah!” She managed to convert the tears into a scream, yelling out and punching the nearest frond-topped tree. A shiver went through the ribbon-like leaves, and three silver-eyed cat-baby lemurs scrambled onto the top of the trunk, hooting at her.
“Sweetie?” Selena handed off her horse to one of the sunbathers and called over the young man Aurora had originally picked to look after the colony's herds. They had a brief conversation about cows while Aurora picked bark out of her knuckles and tried to convince herself her harsh breathing was pain, not sobs. “I've asked him to make sure the invalids get fed. All right? Do you want me to come with you?”
She didn't want to go at all. Didn't want to go down into the dark and find Bryant entombed, overgrown by the planet like a fucking fungus. She didn't want to see it again. She wanted him back with her. Wanted him to hug her, to squeeze her with his skinny arms and make some stupid off-color remark. She wanted five minutes. Five minutes for herself and the man she loved. Was that so much to ask?
Except that in that five minutes, Mboge and the lifesaving food he'd brought could have arrived at a system thoroughly poisoned with destructive alien stone-based nanobots. If she didn't pull herself together, that could be happening right now.
But she couldn't go alone. She nodded, painfully, and moved one hand from her eyes to Selena's wrist, glad – so glad – that her sister was there with her. “Yes please. Please come with me. I can't-- I can't bear looking at it.”
