by Alex Oliver
She passed over that data, going down into the schematics of the station, looking for information exchanges at the docks. Port 4 was flagged as occupied, but nothing was being exchanged between the ship there and the station, not even water. Not even air. They were locked up tight, and the heat sensors on the port's walls registered a dozen spots that might be plasma canons, charged and aimed at the station. Whoever was left in charge of the Eagle was paranoid and already on guard.
Perhaps there was a way around the length of the docks so they could approach the ship unexpectedly from behind? Morwen returned to the station specifications to follow power lines and access tubes. A thick vine of power conduits led to a surprise at the center of the station. Apparently the station had once had its own engine. The bulk of it remained, decommissioned and dead below the admin building like a perfect metaphor of its heart.
A dead engine was no use to her. As she tried to stop herself from imagining what might happen if she lead two hundred prisoners in a charge down the docks straight into the mouths of Eagle's plasma cannons, a high alert protocol burst in her mind like a red firework.
The computer too had realized there were four life signs with nine ID tags – that this correlated to something going the hell wrong, particularly as all nine tags had now moved out of the room they had permission to occupy.
Idly, Morwen scanned the tags again and kicked herself. “G620 is Lali, isn't it? Are G603 and G611 Immi and Ekibe?”
“Other way around, yes.”
“Who's T908?”
“That's Iris – fucking trustee. Is she still with them? Ha, what a come down--”
“They're being chased,” Morwen cut off Leibniz’s gloating, watching as the G6s emerged from headquarters into the patchily surveilled wilderness that was the gardens, and a dozen OF tags poured out in pursuit. At the same time, a cleaning duty was directed to bring body-bags to the room they'd just vacated.
“Oh shit, I think they killed them.”
“They killed the girls?” Leibniz sat bolt upright, startling herself into a coughing fit. All the other members of bunk-room G6 crowded round Morwen as though they could egg their sisters on or save their lives just by listening in.
“No,” Morwen struggled with her concentration, the two different speeds and types of communication threatening to rip her mind apart. “No, I mean I think the girls must have killed the Eagle's officers and taken their tags. They're heading for the lift. There's a UR122 with them?”
“Unregistered? That's Iris's boy,” Leibniz nodded. “She wouldn't leave without him. Get everything you need to take with you, girls. This is happening now.”
“What?” Morwen asked, caught on the wrong foot as she kept open the doors on the lift for Lali's party. When they were in, she closed the door and let them rise, then locked down all the other shafts so that no one could follow.
“Your little friend must have decided there was no time to waste,” Liebniz reached under her mattress and brought out a photograph and a diamond ring, stuffing both of them into her bra. “Can you get our door open? We need to go before the guards on this level get wind of this and come for us. We all get punished for the crimes of our own dorm, even if we can prove we did nothing but sit here like good little girls.”
Shit, Morwen thought, losing track of where Lali's party were in her sudden shift of concentration on the combination of the dorm's door. “It needs biometrics!” she growled, frustrated and increasingly stressed. “A fingerprint from a guard. I can't bypass--”
The sound of booted feet thundered in the hallway, making the deck underfoot tremble. The stubborn door hissed open by itself and guards in padded armor with stun-sticks poured in. There was one per prisoner, so they could get the stick across each woman's throat and drive her into the closest wall with it.
Morwen flicked the data-disc up her sleeve as she was pulled to her feet by the hair. Earlier, she had turned her cuffs up inside her sleeve specifically so the disc would fall into the pocket this made, and she'd be able to present both hands, convincingly empty, as she rose.
“Everyone in this room is on crew rec duty until further notice,” the guard captain announced. His little eyes gleamed as faces fell around the room, and O'Donnell snapped “Not Leibniz!”
“Everyone. Put a bag over her head, no one will care,” he said, pressing the stun baton into O'Donnell's neck until she fell. She carried on shaking for long minutes after she'd been released. “But someone very specific in this room has been tampering with the station computers. So before that happens, we're going to have a strip search until we find out who.”
The data-disc would be found, and if she allowed the search to happen before it was, Morwen would lose the room's sympathy. She took a moment to close her eyes and concentrate hard. The disc was still close enough to her body to pick up her electrical field, close enough to control, so she wiped the tags on Lali's group. They were… still going up? They'd paused at floor G, but had not disembarked from the lift. Perhaps they'd seen the guards pouring in, given up rescue as a bad job and were moving on to try to take the ship without her.
She could admire that as a plan. She didn't have to feel that, once again, someone had moved on without her. She was a big girl now and she wouldn't be hurt. Never again.
The pain in her heart joined a pain in her throat as the guard in front of her leaned his baton on her neck. What else could she do from here? Oh yes. She could make the door malfunction, so that it would close but would not lock.
“Come on. Clothes off.”
She opened her eyes again to see the guard next to her put out a hand and clench it in the sparse curls of Leibniz's wig. He was going to uncover her, before all these other men and before God.
“I have it,” she burst out, a part of her still stubbornly refusing to believe that anyone would mistreat a woman that old, someone who had surely been through so much already. She pulled it out from her sleeve and held it up. “It's a Fleet data-disc. I stole it from the ship that brought me here.”
“Well, aren't you a naughty girl?” he circled her while Leibniz, released, re-sat her head-covering over her real hair and leaned in to tap him on the back of the knee.
“Excuse me, young man. What are they doing to evacuate us? I presume you'll be on the first ship out, but--”
“Evacuate?” he scoffed. He was a bland looking man, mid-brown in all respects and neither good-looking nor particularly ugly. A forgettable man, except for the unlit shock baton in his hand. Lali would probably have broken his arm and taken it by now, but Morwen was sure that if she tried, she would end up face down on the deck. If she was lucky she would just end up beaten unconscious, but she didn't want to be unlucky.
She still had her brains, though. “Didn't you hear? That's why I was checking the station. It's been infected with this pontoth nanotech. The stuff from the news? The stuff that ate InfiniTech Utopia and the attack fleet on Cygnus 5. It's working its way through this station right now. We could start losing atmosphere any moment. Are there lifeboats? You guards must have a way out, right? But you won't just leave us here. What's the plan?”
The guard looked to his second – an older man, whose face was bearded with Polynesian tattoos. He had already stepped away from O'Donnell, leaving her narrow eyed and glowering, but unhurt. “Is this some kind of--?”
“I did hear the Warden left at 08.50 this morning. A personal emergency, she said. Took half the command staff with her and left behind the half everyone knows she hates. Used the prison bus to do it.”
Probably didn't go to Cygnus 5, Morwen thought, so she'll be spreading the stuff to wherever she went. “She's run off on you,” she concluded out loud. “On all of us. She's left us to die.”
Brown guy tapped into his comm as all around the room the other guards loosened their choke-holds on the prisoners so they could listen. “Grandmother's funeral, is what it's down as here. But she'd have known about that last week, right? She'd have had that booked for at least t
wo or three days. She wouldn't just have left.”
“If you give me the disc back, I can show you where the pontoth's already dug in, where the comms are already failing and the walls are getting thinner,” Morwen offered. Not extending her arm but just gently unfolding her fingers a minimal gesture of beckoning. “She's probably emptied the accounts too. Why don't you check that?”
“Why don't you shut up and let me think, whore?”
Morwen narrowly resisted kneeing him anyway. From further down the room a highly pressed young guard with terrible acne said, “I heard it reduced the orbital factories of Safe Haven to dust in like two hours. There were fifteen hundred people dead. Nick, I think--”
“You shut up too, Junior. But comm down to the accounts department and ask them to look.”
A tense standoff reigned in the room as Junior spoke with the admin staff, but more than half of the guards moved away from their prisoners, congregating in the center of the room to whisper together. The girls took a step away from the walls, or used the opportunity to sit on the edges of the beds.
While Nick glowered at Junior, O'Donnell edged slowly around behind his back until she too could sit down and slowly slide one hand underneath her mattress.
The tinny sound of a small voice raised in indignation and disbelief came out of Junior's comm. It hardly needed him to repeat it louder, but he did it anyway as if relishing the experience. “She said yes. She's just opened the safe and there's nothing in it. There should be everyone's wages and the cut from the Eagle in there, but there's nothing. And she says the Eagle's running cannons hot. They're demanding to talk to their Captain. He's missed a check in and now his tag's disappeared.”
“If the Eagle leaves we're going to be stranded here,” Morwen cut in urgently. “If she's taken the money, it means she wants us destroyed with the evidence. She's not going to evacuate any of us. She's leaving us all to die.”
Another moment of silence, of indecision, a feeling of things tipping inside two score silent heads.
“What're we going to do, Nick?” Junior asked, but Nick only shook his head.
“We have to persuade Eagle to evacuate us,” said the man with the Maori tattoo, gently as though the thought had to be cautiously stalked. “What has happened to their Captain, anyway?”
Hauptsmann too was reaching under the bed, Morwen noticed, and with the realization came the knowledge that she wasn't the only one. Morwen wasn't great at reading atmospheres but it seemed to her that after a slight lag, the tension was ratcheting up again behind the guards' backs, as they turned to one another for answers and failed to keep an eye on their prisoners.
“My guess is that Lali killed them,” she said, and watched Hauptsmann's eyes widen and light up with something silver and sharp.
“Lali?” Nick's attention was back on Morwen, grudgingly. She was a distraction to him now. Without any evidence but her own intuition, she was suddenly sure his next move would be to lock her and the other girls back in again and try to appeal to the Eagles to evacuate the guards and leave the prisoners to rot. A bunch of whores, after all. Who would miss them, right?
“Marine Private Citlali,” Morwen clarified, glad to have a chance to say her name. “They put her in a room with Eagle's captain. I don't know what was supposed to happen, but now he's dead, and she's loose. She's probably storming the ship right now. She'll come back for me, I know that. But you? You'll need to be a bit politer before we take you along.”
“Fucking cunt!” Nick thumbed the activate button on his baton, swung it back so he could get a good swing into the pit of her stomach. The next thing she knew, O'Donnell had drawn a full length walking stick out from under Leibniz's mattress and hammered him across the backs of his knees.
He folded over with a look of surprise and dropped the baton onto his own arm, electrifying his muscles so he could not turn it off again. The guards, who had been edging together in a confused and distressed huddle in the center of the room, all turned to look. That was when the other prisoners attacked.
Hauptsmann jammed something between the ribs of the nearest guard and pulled it out again with a gush of gore. As he turned to try to hit her with the baton while he held pressure on his side, she scored the single blade of a dismantled pair of scissors down the inside of his elbow, cutting tendons.
He dropped the baton. At the same time, now that Nick was thoroughly unconscious, O'Donnell pressed the off button on his baton with the rubber ferrule of her stick and kicked it to the woman in the next bed. Then she turned to crack her cane across the back of the head of the man trying to subdue Leibniz. Leibniz had thrown her blanket over her assailant's baton and was pulling on it, fending his other hand off with a knitting needle.
A man screamed behind Morwen, and she turned to find Junior clutching at his eye, while a slight, ghostlike girl drew out from his eye-socket a sewing-machine needle lashed to a pencil.
Everyone was screaming now. Tattooed guy yelled instructions to the guards that they couldn't hear over the battlecries of a room full of furious women.
A stun baton skittered over the floor and came to rest within Morwen's grasp. Biting her lip, she picked it up, aware that this wasn't the time to hold back but at the same time reluctant to subject anyone to the agony she'd been through too many times already.
The surprise of the attack over, the guards were regrouping. Twelve of them were left standing. They set their backs to each other and grimly dialed up the voltage on their sticks until a hit would be lethal. From the front, it was now all but impossible to attack them without coming into contact with that wall of electricity. The ghost girl tried anyway and they let her burn, pressing the stick to the center of her chest until the room was full of the smoke of roasted flesh.
Morwen didn't know what to do. Not without a piece of tech to bend to her will. She scanned the ground and found it, rolled out of Nick's grasp – her data-disc. Snatching it up, she looked for Lali. Lali would know, she was trained for battle.
And Lali's ID tag was directly overhead, not quite on floor H, not quite on floor G. With a great leap of the heart, Morwen looked up just as the plasterboard ceiling burst apart, and Iris caught her fall using the nearest guard's hair and cut his throat on the way down. Lali gave Morwen a salute from the edge of the hole they had cut through the deck, and hunkered down to pick the rest of the guards off with clean blaster shots to the head.
“They'll be coming to investigate the noise,” Lali shouted down. “So lock the door behind you and boost yourself up here. We're going for the ship.”
She pulled Morwen up herself. She looked like a walking wet dream, the shape of her strong legs and the graceful curve of her waist barely concealed by some kind of harem outfit now opaque across the chest with spattered blood.
“You-you are so...” Morwen tried as they grinned at one another, and a pain she'd told herself she wasn't feeling – the pain of being abandoned, apart – gave way to exultation and awe. “You are so...” Beautiful? That didn't convey the half of it – the terror, the goddess like force of destruction that nevertheless endured, created, allured. “I--”
Lali leaned in and kissed her on the mouth, stopping her pathetic attempt to make sense, or perfecting it. “Thanks for thinning them out for me,” she beamed. “Thanks for stopping the other lifts. And yeah. Me too.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Nori wants a world
“I don't expect you to understand,” Nori said, tapping the syringe to make sure any air bubbles had dispersed. “But I have to. I'm perfect for this. I'm made for it. And Bryant is… He doesn't have the first clue what he's doing.”
He'd found the vial of DNA splicing nano in one of Bryant's boxes and refined it so it would no longer take weeks to take effect. He was alight with the thought of really connecting to the AI, to the planet. To be able to swim in and out of all those preserved minds, and all those living ones scattered about the planet in which pontoth had replaced some of their cells, some of their a
toms. He'd be so big again, so fast again. It would be better than ever, stranger than ever. He wanted it.
But he didn't even need to plug in Felix's headset to know that Felix didn't. Felix's full mouth was pinched tight, and he stood at parade rest with the rigidity of a man trying not to jostle an internal wound.
An internal wound that I gave him. Nori bit his own lips, which didn't help the inexplicable way his eyes kept welling with tears. It had only been three days and he was so, so fucking sick of being miserable. Fleeing to the planet's core would solve that too. So why did he feel like a glitch in the system that couldn't be rooted out?
They stood outside the open doors of the antechamber of the Destroyer, within sight of the mound of wires that was Bryant, and Felix's gaze kept flicking from Nori's face to Bryant's prone body, which looked more than ever like a pile of fungus. “No, I think I do understand.” Felix rubbed a hand over his shaved head, smoothing over the small patches of irritation where the sensors of his net had glued and unglued from his skin. “I've felt how much you miss it. I wouldn't… I don't want to get in the way of anything you think you need to heal you--”
Nori didn't want Felix to be unreasonable about this. So why was it that his acceptance and understanding was also bad? Why couldn't Felix be selfish for a while, so Nori would have something to kick back about?
“It's not just that I want this,” he tried to tell the man. Felix looked so abandoned already, in front of the overwrought gates with the great golden designs, lit by a lantern they'd set on the floor. Yellow-gold light pooled around his feet and swelled upwards, making him look tall, like he waded in the surface of a sun.
Unintentionally, Nori closed the distance between them and gathered Felix up in a hug. Warmth seeped through his clothes and, as he nuzzled into Felix's throat, his chest felt bruised at the thought that he might not have this again. He would not have this again, because the moment the contents of the syringe went in, he would cease to be entirely human. His smell would change. His skin would change, as wires erupted from it, and Felix might never touch him again. He might be repelled.
