Captain Cosette

by R. Bruce Sundrud

  “Don’t know. Did you try the mess hall?”

  “No. The fighter’s ready to launch.”

  “Too bad.” He laid his arm over his eyes. “I could use another hour’s sleep.”

  “You can sleep strapped into the cruiser. As soon as I find the Major, we should leave.”

  He swung his feet off the bunk and started fumbling with his boots. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  “I’m not trying to be bossy, but it’s dangerous for us to stay here.” She headed towards the mess hall.

  I am too being bossy. I’d better watch that.

  The mess hall was empty, and when she called, there was no answer. She checked both of the bathrooms and the kitchen, but they were empty also.

  As she was leaving the dining area, she noticed something lying by the back door. It was a pair of boots, and someone’s legs were still in them.

  She ran to the back door and found Major Dyson sprawled under a dining table. He was alive and breathing, but unconscious. He was wearing his dress shirt, but his jacket with his insignia was missing. The back door was open, and she understood why. Lieutenant Garale had taken the Major’s jacket so he could have the key without actually touching it.

  She shook Dyson’s shoulders and called his name, but he was out cold. “Rasora!” she shouted.

  I’ve got to do something. Do I stay with him until he recovers or do I go after Garale?

  Every moment she hesitated, Garale got further away.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rasora stumbled into the room, still fastening his shirt. “What do you want… Hey! What happened to Dyson?”

  Cosette got to her feet. “Garale knocked him out and took his jacket with the key. You help Dyson; I’m going after Garale.”

  “You’re crazy. Let me chase him; you don’t know how to fight.”

  “Can you track him out there in that forest? Are you a tracker?” She tried not to sound frantic but time was slipping away.

  Rasora opened the door and looked at the scattered forest outside. “Well, no. But I know how to fight and you don’t. He’d kill you.”

  “I know how to track him. The ship can scan for his bracelet. He can’t hide.”

  “Then let’s both go.”

  “We can’t.” Cosette pointed to Dyson, who was beginning to groan. “He might be hurt worse than he looks. You need to stay with him.”

  “Take a disruptor pistol with you, then. Don’t give him a chance to hurt you.”

  “Don’t worry; I’ve got no sympathy for Garale.” She took Dyson’s pistol from his hip, clicked off the safety, ran from the mess hall and climbed into the fighter. Moments later she was in vertical takeoff mode, hovering over the compound.

  Okay, you wretched man, where are you hiding?

  She reached a hand towards the scanner module, and hesitated.

  If I start scanning, they’ll be able to sense it if one of the orbiting battleships is passing overhead. But there’s no time to waste. I’ve got to get Garale back in order to protect the soldiers hiding in the fishing village.

  They would just have to leave before any attack party from the battleships arrived. She hoped Major Dyson would be on his feet when she got back.

  She flicked on the scanner, and rotated the ship.

  There.

  The screen showed the metal bracelet and key, along with other bits of metal on Garale, moving through the woods. She sent the fighter forward, skimming the treetops until she hovered over the signal.

  I don’t want to kill him. But how am I going to stop him?

  She remembered the look-see probe, and how it used its EMF gun to fry the guidance units of the damaged fighters. Her fighter was equipped with the same gun, only on a larger scale.

  You are really not going to like this, Garale.

  She had no way to contact the fleeing lieutenant, no loudspeaker, no way to say “Stop or I’ll shoot.” She backed up several meters, lowered the fighter’s nose, and fired the EMF gun at low power.

  The scanner showed that Garale had stopped.

  She maneuvered the fighter as close as she could and landed it. After cutting the engines, she drew the disruptor pistol and opened the cockpit. Garale was screaming.

  She jumped to the ground and walked over to him. He was on his knees, pouring handfuls of earth on his wrist, trying to cool the bracelet. The jacket lay beside him, smoldering.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she said, keeping the pistol aimed at him and a good distance between them.

  “You almost burned my hand off, you….” He cursed loudly at her, still putting moist earth on his wrist.

  “Turn around and get back to the compound, Garale. And run, or I’ll put another pulse into that bracelet.”

  Garale stood, hugging his wrist to his midsection, his round face red with anger and pain. “You…you…”

  “Shut up.” With Union warships probably on their way, she was in no mood to be gracious. She gestured with her gun. “The compound’s that way. Now go!”

  With a snarl, he grabbed the jacket with his good hand and started jogging back the way he had come.

  That bracelet just got fried and won’t work any more, but I’m not going to tell him that. He might try running away again.

  She wasn’t going to carry him back in the fighter. She would have no way to pilot and to keep him under guard at the same time. Her threat to fire another electromagnetic pulse into the bracelet was real and sufficient.

  She raised the fighter and followed him back to the compound.

  Rasora was there when they arrived, and Major Dyson stood beside him, his hand pressing a wet cloth against the side of his head. Relief washed over her. Dyson was going to be okay.

  Rasora held Garale at gunpoint as Cosette landed the fighter.

  “I’ve got blisters! I’m burned!” whined Garale.

  “Get him in the fighter,” Cosette said, “in the back. Rasora, take the key from the jacket and keep that gun on him at all times.”

  Garale shouted, “I need something on these burns!”

  “There’s a first aid kit in the fighter. Now get in!”

  Garale climbed up into the fighter and slumped in one of the rear seats. Rasora followed him in and tossed the first aid kit at him.

  “We need to grab the packs and lift off immediately,” Cosette said to Dyson. “I had to use the scanner to find him, and if they’re paying any attention at all, they’ll already have ships coming down from orbit.”

  Dyson winced and tossed the wet cloth aside. “We’d better move fast.” As they ran into the compound, he added, “That was clever, hitting Garale with an EMF burst. How did you think of that?”

  “That’s what the LK-C probe did to the guidance units to burn them out. I knew it would heat up the bracelet, but I wasn’t sure how much.”

  “You know, you’re getting pretty feisty for a country girl.” He grabbed the three men’s packs and hefted them easily.

  She slung her own pack over her shoulder.

  It’s heavy. I keep forgetting I have Rasora’s gold rings.

  “I don’t know what I am, any more,” she said. “It’s like I’m a dozen people rolled into one and there’s not much of the real me left.”

  “There’s a lot of you still left, my friend. Those other dozen people in you would have thrown a missile into Garale and called it square. The real you is a better person than that.”

  “Thank you.” She threw the packs into the fighter’s small hold and waited for Spinner to clamber in. She latched and sealed it, and then she and Dyson climbed into the two front seats.

  “Strap yourselves in,” she said to everyone. “You’re in for a fast ride out of here.”

  “You pilot, I’ll navigate,” said Dyson, strapping himself in.

  “Done.” She opened up the engines and lifted the nose.

  With a roar that slammed them into their seats, the fighter lifted off and hurtled skyward.

  “Tell me what you see,
” she said.

  “There’s a fighter below us that must have been coming from somewhere else on the planet, and I’m picking up a cruiser coming down…. What’s this? There’s a full-size command station in orbit! How could they build a space station so fast?”

  “They didn’t. They can move them, remember? One of the secrets I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”

  “It’s launching fighters. We’re being painted by sensors on both sides. No missiles fired yet.”

  “They’re after us, all right, but at our acceleration they’re about to lose their window of opportunity.”

  The fighter’s engines began to quiet down, and Cosette frowned. “That’s not right! I’ve got the throttles wide open. Why are we slowing down?” She dialed the engines down and back to full strength, but there was no response.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Dyson.

  “I don’t know.” She tried maneuvering thrusters, but got no response from them either. “It’s like my controls have been disconnected.” Their fighter turned, and began traveling towards the orbiting command station. Dyson tried the copilot’s controls, but could get no response either.

  Wait a minute. I salvaged our guidance unit from the crashed Union cruiser…

  Cosette banged her fist on the console. “I know what it is!”

  “What?”

  “There was an extra piece in the guidance unit I salvaged, a Union modification. It’s an override!”

  “You mean…”

  “They’re controlling our ship. Their power-hungry military came up with a way to override a pilot’s control of his ship. There’s nothing in my training that mentioned it.”

  Dyson began unstrapping himself. “We could pull the guidance unit.”

  “No, that’s no good. If we start to drift, they could fire a dumb missile and we would have no way to avoid it. As long as they can control us, they won’t destroy us.”

  Dyson slumped in his seat and watched the station getting larger on the screen. “Then there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Behind them, Garale began chuckling. By the time they were being drawn into the station, he was laughing out loud.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Lay down there on those tracks,” said the short angry man, pointing his feathered spear, which was taller than he was.

  “You’ll never get my shoes,” said Dorothea, drawing herself up to her full height, which was taller than the short angry man, before lying down on the tracks with the yellow wooden ties.

  “I’ll tie these ropes delicately,” he said, still angry, “but when that maglev comes by, you’ll not only be merely dead, you’ll be most sincerely dead!”

  Cosette switched off the small screen and resumed pacing back and forth in her cell. The screen was built into the wall by the door, forcing her to read standing up, and lately she could only take Renée Chevalier in small doses.

  The Union soldiers had not only put a fresh bracelet on her, they had put her in a high-security cell. Lieutenant Garale had yelled accusations that she was the ringleader, that she was responsible for his imprisonment and his burns, that she was smuggling Major Dyson back to the Alliance, and that she was a traitor of the worst sort.

  Major Dyson was taken under custody and taken to a cell by heavily armed guards. Rasora sat quietly during the commotion, and she didn’t know what had become of him.

  The small screen in the wall had access to a very limited library. She knew, from her memories of the station’s schematics, that it was also a monitor. She was careful not to change clothes in front of the screen, not that she had much to change. She had two sets of Union underclothes and two cheap yellow coveralls that all prisoners wore, plus a pair of station work shoes.

  As far as she could tell, their fighter had been hijacked by the same space station that had been orbiting Sorine. Certainly it had the same schematics. Below her lay the water recycling tanks, and on the level above, the officer’s lounge. Sometimes in the silence of the night she could hear a faint strain of party music. The officers lived well. Lieutenant Garale was likely enjoying himself on the floor above, his burnt wrist tended and bandaged.

  Major Dyson would be held in one of the cells in this same wing. For all she knew, he could be in the cell beside her, but there was a sound field on her cell as well as a sturdy door, so shouting did no good. Tapping on the walls produced no responses.

  Meals were delivered three times a day, better food than she would have expected. In the economy of the orbiting station, a portion of the food prepared for the lower ranks and staff was diverted to the prisoners. No one was going to do extra work to make trays of deliberately bad food for them, but then no one went out of their way to make sure the trays arrived warm and without the liquids congealed either.

  A day passed, and then another, and then another.

  She paced, did sit-ups, and squeezed what entertainment she could from the screen’s library. It was a dumb terminal, and in spite of all her knowledge, she could not access anything useful.

  She could read from the screen only by standing in front of it, or she could sit and listen to lectures on correct thinking and obedience. She guessed that whoever had assembled the library had deliberately avoided anything genuinely entertaining – there were no video productions, and no music except “inspirational state-approved” classics and marches. The screen was only active during the day, and she slept restlessly at night, hearing the occasional thumping of music from the lounge and the whine of the pumps beneath her floor starting up and shutting down. She wished the sound shield would cut off sounds from above and below. It was maddening.

  One meal contained a surprise. Buried under a hard roll she found a small scrap of paper that read simply, “The twin has kitchen duty.” Rasora had been put back to work. He had probably pled that he was just an innocent bystander in Cosette’s schemes.

  Good for him. That would be the right thing to do. I wish I was repairing ships instead of sitting here rotting.

  She refused to rot.

  She devised different exercises: strength training, balance, and aerobics. Part of the “background” files that Professor Roland had tossed up on the screen had included physical training regimes. She was in decent shape to begin with, having worked at….at…

  And there her memories stopped. Her body was toned and healthy, but she had no idea what she had been doing the past years of her life to get that way, no idea what her previous labors had been.

  Perhaps I worked in a factory, or tended livestock. Or I was a rich man’s daughter, playing at sports until my sense of patriotism had caused me to…

  None of that seemed right.

  She sat on her cot and inspected her hands.

  Who am I? Where did I come from?

  The door clicked, hissed, and slid to one side.

  It’s not time for a meal. Who could that be?

  The sound field shimmered away, and in the doorway stood an officer with his hair slicked back and a bandage around his wrist.

  Lieutenant Garale.

  Alone.

  “Ah, prisoner Cosette.” He smiled like a schoolmaster about to whip a hated child. “Have you been enjoying your days of luxury?”

  She remained seated. She was not about to show any deference to this wretch, nor was she going to talk to him.

  He continued, “You let me sit in that brick cell on that planet for a full week. Did you come visit me? Did you see if I was comfortable or not? Here at least you have water you can trust and no insects to bite you. Aren’t you grateful?”

  She stared at him.

  “Not feeling talkative at the moment? It doesn’t matter.” He reached outside the door of her cell and picked up the key to her bracelet. “Come with me.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Did you know that you have a different model of bracelet on your arm? Look what it can do.” He pressed the side of the cylindrical key, and she felt a burning in her wrist that made her cry out with pain, a bu
rning as though her hand had been pushed into a roaring campfire.

  He lifted his finger off, and the burning stopped. She looked at her wrist, amazed to find her skin whole and untouched. She remembered that she had felt pain like that before.

  Somewhere.

  “Clever, is it not?” He looked at the key with admiration. “Very useful for disciplining stubborn prisoners.” His voice sharpened. “Now get up off that cot and come with me or you’ll be on the floor begging for mercy.”

  She stood up, smoldering with resentment, and walked out of her cell.

  He tapped the keypad and closed the door to her cell. “I had to call in some favors to get your cell code. Now walk beside me and behave. I’ll have my finger on the key button the whole time, so don’t even think about attacking me…” he chuckled, looking down at her, “…or trying to escape.” He patted the thin flat gun on his hip. “If you do run, I could cut you in half with my disruptor and there wouldn’t even be a hearing.”

  I don’t know what you have in mind, but I’m not going to plead or bargain.

  Garale led them out of the cell block, up a flight of metal stairs, and after a short walk took a left corridor.

  He’s taking me to the officers’ quarters.

  She stopped.

  Garale sighed with exasperation. “Come along, prisoner. I promised to show you my quarters once, and I always keep my promises. Don’t worry, no one will interrupt us.”

  “No.”

  “Ah, she does talk. But you need to say ‘yes,’ not ‘no.’” He pressed the button, and she groaned with the torment.

  He held the button down. “Say yes,” he said through clenched teeth. “It won’t matter anyway, because I’ll drag you into my room if I have to.”

  She shouted and swung at him, trying to hit him with the burning bracelet. He stopped pressing the button, grabbed her wrist and pulled her up against him. He twisted her around and wrapped his arm around her throat.

  “Listen to me, you stupid little girl.” His teeth pressed against her ear, his voice reptilian. “You are going with me into my room, and you will do whatever I want because you have no choice. I’m stronger than you are, I’ve got the key, and I’m an officer.” She struggled to get free, but he had a chokehold on her. “If you had come with me that first day, back when that moron, that boyfriend of yours interfered, you’d have had an easy life, maybe moved up the ranks, but no,” he squeezed her throat tighter, “you had to play the rebel.”