by Alex Oliver
Engine or not, a childish wail of disbelief at having been abandoned fought to break free of Morwen's throat. It was choked off by Iris's hand, squeezing on her windpipe.
“Get us out of here.”
Morwen broke the woman's grip with an ease that said Iris wasn't really trying. “Oh yes, threaten your engineer. That's very clever. Do you know how to repair an engine? No? You need me. That means you do what I say.”
Lali laughed, as the other girls from G6 emerged slowly from their hiding places and gathered together once more. “Yeah, it does. So tell us what to do now, ma'am.”
They found the control room first, already moving more as a squadron than as a mob – Lali on point with her blaster. Ekibe had picked up a nail-gun from the machine shop and taken guard of the right flank. Immi was a possible weakness on the left flank, but looked formidable with her plasma cutter, and Iris with her flamethrower brought up the rear. Already some enterprising convicts and a few guards with more stealth than muscle had broken away from the fighting overhead and made their way to the control levels, looking for guidance or weapons. But neither were expecting the armed squad of G6.
By the time Morwen’s company reached the citadel, they had disarmed enough guards so that everyone had at least a stun stick, and even the most frightened were beginning to look startled awake by their own successes.
The doors to the citadel building were locked, but yielded easily to the plasma cutter. Morwen stepped into the computer room with a sense that finally she was coming back to her element. Booting up the mainframe, she examined the state of things, Lali hanging over her shoulder to look.
From the tags it seemed that most of the fighting was still isolated by level. The guards of H level, for example, were fighting the prisoners of H level. On Level B the guards' tags were stationary and registering no life signs, while the prisoners had begun the long climb down the ladders. On level F, however, the prisoners were alive but stationary – cameras showed them cuffed to their beds - and their guards were on their way up to meet the Level B convicts in the walls.
“I'll deal with this,” Lali told her, slipping into a seat next to the PA system. “You go deal with the engine.”
“Gladly.” Morwen opened disused access corridors down to the hollow heart of the station, where the engine stood rusting. She found the records of its maintenance, and set to work figuring out what had gone wrong with it, why it had never been repaired. She had to read it over three times when she found the final record, her heart slamming against her ribs in a disbelieving pulse of joy.
“They just marked it as inoperative! It said in the records it was defunct but actually all they did was take out the catalyst cells. As long as the primer pods and the catalyst cells are in storage – and they say they are – I can have this working again in half an hour!”
Access was from within the command station – a square in the floor that lifted up into a trapdoor, with another of those long ladders beneath it. She memorized the layout of parts storage in the adjacent rooms, stored parts numbers and access numbers on her data-disc, and then took a blaster pistol from the rack and a torch from someone's desk and descended.
It was a long meditative descent. Her hands and feet found the rungs automatically. The stairwell was an unchanging tarnished silver shaft around her. The center of the world took her foot by surprise when she stepped on it with a dull metallic clink. The curvature of the room was discernible both in the arch of the ceiling above and in the deck plates below. The dusty room, cluttered with parts, was full of silence, but when the engine in the tiny core was alive, it must tremble.
This is too easy, she thought as she found the disconnected parts in the lockers where she expected them. She didn't want to jinx it with the thought, but never in her life had she had a repair job go exactly as planned the way this one was. Things stuck, the parts were wrong, the access was blocked or rusted shut. You didn't just take out the part, put a new one in where it belonged and have everything go to plan. Why is this so easy?
Still she pried up the engine cover, exposing the mass of circuitry and the walkways beneath the floor. Bending down to snap the catalyst into its dock, she caught a smell she didn't expect. Engines that had been out of use for years typically smelled of cold grease and dust with perhaps a top note of vinegar from batteries that were cannibalizing themselves. This smelled like earth. Like soil and water and stone in a way that gave her a pang of homesickness, though it shouldn't because she had not grown up in a place with soil.
What was it that the smell reminded her of anyway? Gardens? Priya's window box experiment that the wind and acid rain had torn away after only a week? No. It was a more recent connotation than that.
A public address system crackled over her head, startling her out of her thoughts. Lali's voice, calm and commanding, said, “Residents of Base Three Prime. This is Lali Citlali of Cygnus Five. By now you probably know that the Warden and command staff of this facility have abandoned you here to die. Yes, that includes such guards as are still alive. The Kingdom has abandoned you just as it abandoned me. I am in possession of the control room, where my colleagues are currently working on a plan to repair the station's on board engine. When it's operative, we will transport ourselves to Cygnus Five, where we can be evacuated to safety. I urge you therefore to stop fighting, lay down your weapons and await rescue. Thank you.”
Would they be evacuated? Morwen flipped up the coupling clips on the first primer pod and wiggled it snugly into place. She and Lali had been sent out to bring Captain Campos's daughter home, not another load of convicts. The thought of a cool welcome after all of this suffering made her curl up and shrivel inside, even though Aurora's intention had never been to send them to a brothel.
Well, whatever would come, it was time. She slipped the final clips together and slid the covers back over the exposed parts.
Lali's voice was much tinier coming out of the data-disc, and much less calm. “Shit,” it said. “Morwen, how's it doing?”
“What's the problem?”
Even over a comm link, Lali's laugh was cherishable, though her words were tense. “They seem to have taken that as a challenge. Now every faction that's capable of moving is coming down the wall ladders toward us. We're about to have an angry mob outside. I sure hope this works.”
The control panel on the wall was scrolling through start-up procedures even as she spoke. Morwen knelt down to scribble calculations on the dusty floor with her fingertips as she worked out how to insert the base into the Cygnus system as close to Five as possible. She could place it opposite Cygnus Four, in apogee with its orbit matched, and Captain Campos could use the Froward, if it was back, to ferry them down from there.
If Aurora was still in charge, that was. She'd had the look of a woman unraveling even at the point when they left and things had only gone downhill from then. Who would be in charge if she wasn't? Who else would have the control to force a nervous population to bring in more criminals?
Well, not her problem. She had the mathematics in hand at least, resolving all the factors into a set of coordinates. Feeding them into the navigation computer, she thumbed the data-disc. “Lali?”
“I don't know what kind of a ride this is going to be. Brace yourself.”
“You've got it already?”
“Yes.” Of course, who knew what other faults might have accumulated in an engine that had lain unused for so long. It might just explode under them at the first sign of strain. “Lali. In case something goes wrong--”
The sound of a blaster bolt, and that same angry buzzing of voices, not like thunder now but like the hum of a kicked hornet's nest.
“Are you…?”
“It's getting hairy out here. Just throw the switch, sweetheart. Please.”
Sweetheart. Despite the danger of the situation, Morwen was smiling when she punched 'engage.'
An escalating whine built beneath the floor, healthy-sounding at first and then developing a warble that m
ade her grit her teeth. “Come on, come on,” she urged the neglected machine. “You can do it. Come--”
A crash like the clashing of planet-sized cymbals, and the whole base shuddered as the deck plating bulged in the next room. Fire spurted from beneath the floor in a tall pillar that singed the ceiling, and then something worse surged out of the fissure.
In the center, where it was deepest and most active, it looked black, though its outer tendrils were a familiar jade green. She had found the source of the stone smell, found where the infection the Principality had brought had taken root and multiplied. At the explosion of some overstretched part of the engine, the pontoth within had been thrown up onto the deck and already it was beginning to eat its way toward her. Even as she watched, the readouts on the wall flickered and died.
She backed away slowly, then turned and double timed it up the ladder so fast she barely registered the burn of her muscles or the raw overworked panting of her lungs.
Scrambling over the lip of the door, she dropped it and backed away to where Lali stood by the monitoring screens, blaster trained on the outer door. “That's not good, right?” Lali asked, stretching out a hand to stroke down Morwen's arm, in a gesture that almost allowed her to catch her breath.
Except she couldn't do that, could she? She'd failed. They'd had one hope and it was her, and she'd failed.
“The engine's full of pontoth,” she gasped. “The pontoth got there first.”
The closest monitor was showing the tags of the guards dispatched to take them down, back when they still thought Eagle was their ticket out of here. The guards with the saw. They were to be commended for their diligence, at least; they were still coming. They had fought their way across the open plain outside the control building and were just beginning a wary advance, one by one, into the residence itself.
Morwen watched as Lali steadied her heavy blaster on the top of a monitor. She leaned in and kissed the nape of her neck. Lali reached up a hand for hers and squeezed. “When the power pack gets to fifteen per cent,” she said, in a tone that meant ‘I love you.’ “That's when you take the last shot for yourself.”
“Got it,” Morwen managed a smile, dredged out of some well of inner strength she didn't know she had, specially to make Lali feel better about this. “I'm going to take down that--”
“Red Cat to Base Three Prime.”
The voice came out of the PA system Lali had left on. Even as its echoes faded, they could hear running feet coming to a halt and shouts fading into silence as the crowd understood that someone was out there. Someone had come for them.
“What – what do I?” Lali was fumbling among switches on the dash, trying to reply, so Morwen stepped up, opened the channel. “This is Base Three Prime requesting emergency evacuation ASAP, Red Cat. Can you help us?”
She called up the external monitors – one out of the three was still in orbit, still functioning. It showed a sleek, high tech craft of a design she'd never seen before. But there was visual signal with the incoming audio. She flicked over to that, and there was Aurora Campos, looking green as grass and hugely relieved, with a swaddled baby in her arms. “That's exactly what I came to do. Lieutenant Crouch, Private Citlali, it’s a miracle to hear your voices again. I thought you were dead until Jenkins forwarded your call. I'm reading a hangar just below your location. Is it safe?”
Over this whole adventure, Morwen had occasionally thought she didn't trust the Captain, but now with the weight of responsibility falling from her just at the sound of Campos's voice there was no denying that she did.
“It's fine, ma'am. You're clear to land.”
Lali leaned in to the mic, and she too looked suddenly younger, her face smoothed and relieved. “There's unrest on board, ma'am. If you have forces you can send to secure order and make sure the evac isn't a stampede, that would be much appreciated.”
Aurora grinned. “I've got the best. Let's get you out of there, okay? We'll be with you in ten.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Felix chooses immortality
Sending Aurora off to have an adventure had been the right thing to do, Felix Mboge thought as he watched her stride back into the city at the head of the first hundred of the colony's newest members. She had regained the bounce in her step that turned it from a military march to something closer to a strut.
In her absence, Felix's procedures for swearing in new citizens had had a great trial run on the InfiniTech Utopia people, and had been streamlined to perfection. They were easily robust enough to now accommodate a couple of thousand convicts. Over the next two days, they would get their shot of Green--as his team had taken to calling the combined pontoth plus photosynthesis gene therapy shot. They would be interviewed about their talents and skills, given a residence in the city or neighboring towns and expected to organize themselves to work at the things they were good at.
He had been delighted to find a small group of mind-linked folk, who he understood from Nori would be called a creche, who specialized in logistics, and he had put them to work immediately on the work that was beginning to become too complex for his own spreadsheets to handle. Dubbed the Immigration Task Force, they had done so much in so little time he was beginning to feel superfluous again, and here was Aurora back, to take over the few military tasks that still survived.
He was glad she was here – he was – but he understood how she felt when her gaze kept straying to the center of the city, to the temple beneath which both their lovers now lay cocooned.
“Felix. How's it been?”
“Good, ma'am,” he said automatically. “We have re-homing people down to a fine art. We've got the beginnings of a hand-made textile industry using the inner fibers of the reeds along the lake's edge. The flower-tops have a fluffy seed with extremely high insulation properties, and the stem gives a smooth fabric. A couple of carpenters made some looms, so we're turning out quilts for when it gets cold. Bousaid's going to want to talk to you about elections, but currently he's working on entertainment propaganda designed to make us all feel like one happy family. Speaking of which...”
She had a baby in a sling on her chest. A weird sight, to be honest, because the thought that someone as good at killing as her was also capable of giving life was unexpected. “Is that your daughter? Congratulations on getting her back.”
Aurora smiled down on the baby with a softness of which he hadn't thought her capable, brushing a finger down the curve of its snub nose. The child watched the finger solemnly and then squinted at Felix as though it found him very puzzling. They regarded one another as fellow creatures who had no real need to get to know each other better.
“This is Autumn,” Aurora looked up at him with an echo of her maternal smile, a kind of private glow about her that he felt he was trespassing on. “Do you want to hold her?”
“I… think I'd rather not,” he apologized, his stomach aching with how much he wanted to hold Nori and no one else. “I don't really get on well with children.”
Aurora gave him a skeptical look. “Well, you're going to have to learn. There's going to be a lot of them about, before long.”
“Sorry?” That was news to Felix.
“There were thirty-six under-five-year-olds being held hostage on Prison Base Three Prime,” Aurora scowled. “To keep their mothers in line.” But then she dropped that grudge and almost nudged him. “And we're mixing an all-male penal colony with an all-female prison population. There'll be babies everywhere by the spring.”
That thought didn't appeal either. It wasn't that Felix minded in principle whether other people wanted to have sex or not, but he had gone into the army in part to be away from the constant reminder – all the marrying and procreating and birthing and the incessant talking about the processes thereof. He didn't think it was wrong, but it still made him uncomfortable, aware that he was different than everyone else, but with no desire to join in.
What would be the point of him in a society like that? The Immigration Task For
ce was doing his current job better than he could. He didn't want whatever busy, fruitful society they would make with their blend of high tech and handmade. And not wanting this made it worse to think that Nori had given up everything for it.
“Are you okay, Felix? You look like shit.”
Apparently casual swearing was part of their culture now, Felix noted, alienation growing every second. He didn't want to go back to being who he used to be, but he didn't want to be this, either. Prudish, peripheral, abandoned, while Nori was off reshaping the world.
He supposed Aurora must have caught the swearing from Bryant. And at the thought of Bryant he sat down quickly on the edge of one of the public gardens and hugged himself because Nori wasn't there to do it for him.
“Nakano Nori went into the machine.” He had to gasp it because his throat had clenched. “I loved him. I don't want to see this new world we're making without him.”
“Oh Felix, buddy.” She eased herself down next to him looking genuinely devastated. “Why? Why did he do that when Bryant was already there?”
“They took Nori from a group mind.” These days, when Felix looked back, the impeccable service record he had prided himself over felt like a criminal past of his own. “We took him from a group mind, and he went a little mad with the isolation. So he – he wanted it. But he also figured that he was good at it, trained for it. And he has got more control over the Preserver – the planet's AI. He's making progress with it, holding himself together in a way that Bryant couldn't. He strolled through that test that nearly broke Bryant in half an hour. Not to be rude, but he says Bryant's great at nanotech, but he's not a patch on Nori when it comes to shared consciousness. Bryant keeps losing himself, getting distracted.”
Aurora said nothing for a long time, letting the baby suckle on the tip of her middle finger in lieu of a dummy. Her voice was soft and personal when she broke the silence, one mourner to another. “Do you think they're going to work this out? Save us all? Do you think it's going to be worth it?”
