Captain Cosette

by R. Bruce Sundrud

  “Spinner?” she called.

  “May I help you?” asked the robot as it poked its lenses into the missile bay.

  “Could you count down from five minutes, saying the time out loud every thirty seconds?”

  “I can do that. Five minutes.”

  “Don’t start yet. Not until I tell you.”

  How long will it take to set each missile?

  There were five missiles she could reach easily, and she opened the side of each one. It should only take one exploding to set them all off, but she wanted to be sure and double-sure it would work.

  These things scare me to death, but here goes.

  She set the first missile timer for five minutes and thirty seconds, started the timer, and then pulled the wire that would have allowed the station command to shut it down remotely. They would see in the command center that it was armed, but they would not be able to disarm it without getting their hands into the missile as she had done.

  She would make sure they never had time to do that.

  She set the next missile, and the next and the next, her hands working swiftly and without thought. She timed it well; when she activated the last missile, she said to Spinner, “Start counting down now.”

  “Five minutes,” said Spinner.

  “Out, get out.” She pushed Spinner out of her way and rushed back to the terminal. She pressed the enunciator button again. “Cadet Rasora, if you are not in Maintenance Bay Three in sixty seconds, you will spend a week in the brig!” She turned to Major Dyson. “Get ready to shoot the keypads.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Garale said, his voice thick because of his swollen nose. “You can’t…”

  Cosette pointed to him and glared. “Shut up.” Garale closed his mouth.

  “Four minutes and thirty seconds,” said Spinner.

  Cosette ran to their rebuilt Union fighter and ripped off the security tape over the hatch. She climbed inside and powered it up.

  I can’t believe I didn’t check out the fighter before setting the missiles. Please, please, don’t let anything be wrong.

  To her great relief, every light showed green. The fighter had been sealed and untouched.

  She climbed back out.

  “Four minutes,” said Spinner.

  “Give me the gun,” she said to Dyson, “and you and Garale get in the fighter.”

  Dyson handed her the gun, but Garale shook his head. “Just leave me here. You don’t need me anymore.”

  Cosette grabbed him by the collar and hauled him to his feet. “Get in the back of that fighter and sit still. I won’t have your blood on my hands!” She looked at the blood that was now on her hands from his still-bleeding nose. She wiped them on his shirt. “There are no escape pods in this bay. Now get in!”

  Garale reluctantly climbed into the Alliance fighter, followed by Dyson.

  She walked back to the terminal.

  “Three minutes and thirty seconds,” said Spinner.

  Where is Rasora? What’s keeping him?

  She paced back and forth, wondering if she should disarm the missiles, if she should call for him again, if she should abandon everything and try to escape.

  Maybe he’s asleep. Maybe he’s being kept prisoner. Maybe he finally found a woman and is about to kiss her for the first time.

  No. Not Rasora. He had a dead twin that he was still mourning.

  A dead twin that was killed after I was taken away from my home…

  Home!

  She gasped as she suddenly realized that her memories of home were now free and uncovered. The file on strategy, a huge amount of information, had been covering them, and now that barrier was finally breached.

  I can remember! I can remember my childhood and everything!

  Rasora and his brother Imsami were the ones that took me away from my home. I tended vines in the highlands and I never had a loved one, not really. And my step-father whipped me when I damaged the ambrosia fruit vines!

  My own stepfather gave me the scars on my back.

  She had been mistreated, but now she saw it in perspective, and it made her more determined.

  “Three minutes,” announced Spinner.

  She shook off her childhood memories. It was time to start the recording, which was timed to run for three minutes.

  She pressed a key, and her recorded voice began to sound in every room throughout the station. “This is not a drill. You must evacuate this station immediately. Run to the nearest escape pod….”

  There’s no going back now.

  Rasora was too late; she could wait no longer. She needed time to fly the fighter safely out of the bay. She hoped that he had made it to an escape pod.

  She ran to the far door of the maintenance bay and shot the keypad, locking the door shut. She was running back to the first door when it hissed open.

  Rasora walked through.

  “You took your sweet time!” she shouted.

  “I was in the shower! Then I heard your voice and didn’t even towel off!” he shouted back. “What’s going on? What…”

  She saw armed soldiers running down the corridor behind him. She shot the keypad beside Rasora and the door slammed shut.

  Rasora spun around, confused. Cosette’s voice continued over the loudspeakers, “You now have only two minutes to evacuate this station.”

  “Two minutes,” said Spinner.

  “Spinner, that’s enough. Go climb in the hold of the fighter and lock yourself in! Rasora, get in the fighter and strap in! Run!”

  Rasora looked uncertain, but he didn’t argue, especially with Cosette holding a gun. He ran and leaped into the back of the fighter beside Garale. “Hey,” he said, strapping in. “What happened to your face?”

  “Go burn in Hades,” Garale mumbled.

  Spinner climbed into the small hold of the fighter. As the robot closed the hatch, Cosette noticed that their bags had not yet been removed. Security must have sealed their ship and then gotten busy elsewhere.

  Rasora’s gold rings are in my bag.

  She remembered Rasora’s rings, the ones she helped remove from his ears when his brother died. With her layers of knowledge sorted out, she remembered everything.

  And I’ll die if I stand here like a fool.

  She clambered into the pilot’s seat, hearing the soldiers outside the maintenance bay firing their weapons at the locked door.

  If they don’t use the escape pods, it’s not my responsibility. I gave everyone fair and honest warning.

  You are honorable, the voice whispered. Do not die the deaths of your enemies when you have offered them life.

  She fired up the engines and strapped herself in, conscious that a little over a minute remained before the huge missiles in the cruiser next to them would explode. She lifted the fighter off the pad and sent the signal that would open the sturdy bay doors. Warning lights began flashing overhead.

  The doors slid open, showing the distant stars through the shimmer of the air shield, the field that prevented station atmosphere from leaking into space. Before she could send the signal to allow her fighter to pass through the air shield, the bay doors closed again.

  “Command center is trying to stop you from leaving,” said Dyson.

  “Those idiots! They should be saving their own lives!”

  “Now what?”

  “We do it the hard way. Hang on!”

  Normally, ships would gently ease their way out of the maintenance bays using maneuvering thrusters. This time she was going to blast her way out. She didn’t bother looking to see if the soldiers had forced open the entrance to the bay. If they had, it was their own doom.

  She backed the fighter as far away from the bay doors as she could and fired a full-strength EMF pulse from her nose cannon, followed by a pair of tactical missiles.

  The EMF pulse fried the electronics of the air shield, and the missiles shattered the doors into fragments.

  The bay decompressed, blowing the door fragments out into
space. Cosette made sure there were no pieces of metal in their way and then gunned the fighter’s engines, not caring about the damage to the walls behind them. The station would be nothing but debris in sixty seconds anyway.

  They roared out of the bay at full acceleration.

  “Yeeeehah!” shouted Dyson. “That’s the way to do it!” He checked his screens. “Okay, I see escape pods all over the place, spreading out. Looks like a lot of people followed your warning.”

  “Thank goodness some will survive. There are only seconds until those missiles I armed….” Their engines died.

  “What happened?” asked Dyson.

  Cosette banged on her controls. “They’re using the override again.”

  “They’re going to steer us back to the station?”

  She pointed to her screen where the space station was visible. “They won’t get the chance. Watch.”

  For a moment the Union space station stood against the background of stars, a gleaming bastion of military might, a fortress city orbiting proudly around the planet Aquataine.

  Then it blossomed into a flare of fire and fragments as the five blockbuster missiles went off simultaneously, creating an incandescent inferno of destruction.

  Cosette regained control of the fighter as the override signal cut off. She opened the engines to maximum, racing to escape the spinning debris. “Why didn’t they escape?” she said. “Everyone else was leaving the station.” She clenched her hands to keep them from trembling and to control the sickness in her stomach. “Why did they stay behind and try to stop us?”

  “They thought you were bluffing,” said Dyson. “They didn’t believe that you could set off those missiles. We were prisoners. The missiles had fail-safes. I can understand their reasoning.”

  “I can’t.” She pointed the fighter’s nose towards the planet’s surface and tried to make her body relax. The battle that had begun in Garale’s room was over. “The right tactic for them would have been to evacuate. If it had been a bluff, the station would still be there. They could have returned.”

  “Military pride. They didn’t want to look foolish.”

  “Well, now they look…they look…I don’t want to think about it. I warned them! If they hadn’t planned on killing those villagers, and those innocent children, I might have found some other way…”

  “You did what you had to,” said Rasora. “You didn’t start this war. Why are we going back down to Aquataine?”

  Cosette wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “I need to drop off some trash.” She twisted in her seat so she could see Rasora. “And you! You dragged me away from home and stuck me in the military! I didn’t volunteer at all!”

  “Your memory’s back!” Rasora grinned. “You also remember that I hung around to take care of you? Right?”

  “Only after you stripped yourself naked and borrowed my underclothes!”

  “What?” Dyson asked. He reached back and poked Rasora on the knee. “You wore what?”

  “I…it was…” Rasora stuttered and spread his hands. “It’s too complicated. It was men’s underclothes, anyway.”

  Dyson nodded. “Sure it was.” He turned back to his screens. “I don’t see any pursuit, and the battleships aren’t in sight. When those ships do get to where the station used to be, they’ll be picking up escape pods for hours, anyway. They won’t have time to bother with us.”

  “That was part of the plan.”

  “So,” said Dyson, “what did you mean by ‘Drop off some trash?’”

  She gestured with her thumb. “Lieutenant Garale. I couldn’t leave him in the bay to die, but I’m not going to haul him around with us.”

  Rasora harrumphed. “I say we drop him off here and let him learn to fly.” Garale pressed fresh tissues against his nose and said nothing.

  Cosette chose a continent and plotted her descent.

  “I want to know,” said Dyson, “what made you get your memory back? And how you managed to get out of your cell, how you got a gun, and what happened to Garale’s face?”

  She double-checked their path and leaned back in her seat. She pressed her palms against her eyes, remembering. “Well, nothing would have happened if he hadn’t opened my cell. You and I would still be prisoners and Rasora would still be washing dishes.”

  “I wasn’t washing dishes,” said Rasora. “I was cooking. They believed me when I said I was an innocent bystander.”

  Dyson nodded solemnly. “Probably those women’s underclothes you were wearing.”

  “I wasn’t wearing any women’s underclothes!”

  “Just ignore him, Rasora. Anyway, Garale opened my cell, and…” By the time she recounted how she had managed to free Dyson, they were skimming the treetops.

  “Where are we now?” Dyson asked. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “An uninhabited continent in the northern hemisphere. Garale will have to build a boat to make it down to the fishing villages.”

  “What?” said Garale, breaking his silence.

  Cosette slowed the fighter and settled down near a brook running through a high meadow. Forested mountains rimmed the clearing, and in the distance the ocean showed as a pale blue mist.

  Cosette opened the hatch and looked at Garale. “Get out.”

  “But…but…” Garale lost his bravado and began to whine. “You can’t just drop me off here without weapons! I’ll die!”

  She drew the ion disruptor and aimed it at him. “Get out, or I’ll have the men throw you out.” Garale struggled out of the ship and half-fell onto the meadow, crushing some yellow flowers. “Throw him a survival pack,” she said to Rasora. “They’re under the back seats.” Rasora extracted a small sealed package and tossed it down to the ground.

  Cosette pointed to the pack at Garale’s feet. “There’s everything you need to survive, if you use your head.” She reached up and grabbed the handle of the hatch door.

  Garale spread his hands pleadingly towards Cosette, fear glistening on his round face, dried blood on his upper lip. “But…but, please…what will I do? Where will I go?”

  “Frankly, my dear Garale, I don’t give a damn.”

  She slammed the hatch shut and headed the fighter back towards space.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cosette eased back on the engines and guided the fighter along the flight path towards the Alliance military base, her emotions torn in two directions.

  Yes, she had successfully gone through folded space to the headquarters of the Alliance, where she was about to deliver Major Dyson back to his own military. He would be free, and she and Rasora would no longer be threatened by the Union, now that they were away from Sorine and Aquataine.

  On the other hand, the memories of her family had returned, the memories of her home life with the torment and the whippings. Though it had been only a few weeks since she had been taken away, it felt like years had passed and that her childhood had happened to someone else. Had her memories of home been implanted into her brain also? Of course not. Why would anyone put memories of sweat and abuse into her mind? But her home life felt faded and dim.

  Major Dyson, however, was alert and excited after his months of captivity. He grinned at her often, his eyes twinkling. She actually blushed at his enthusiastic praise of how she had engineered their escape. “Losing that station was a major blow to the Union,” he said, his hands expressive. “It supported a lot of fighting ships. We’ve got an opening now, and if we take advantage of it, we might stop the Union’s strategy of taking the minor planets from us.”

  Rasora sat in the back, quiet and introspective. Cosette knew that the loss of his brother weighed heavily on him. He had only interrupted his grieving to watch over her, as he had promised her stepfather.

  He’s a good man to honor his promise, when my stepfather had simply been faking his concern about me. Auguste would be happy if he learned that I had been killed in action. Then the family farm really would be his.

  Unless they’re just implan
ted memories. I was probably a princess somewhere, and my jealous sister, knowing I was more beautiful than she, arranged to have me…

  The capital city appeared below them as they descended through the cloud layers, a city that stretched as far as she could see. She marveled at the high towers, the broad streets, and the green spaces with lakes and trees. If she were ever to travel to Old Earth, she hoped it would look like this.

  When they had come out of folded space, Major Dyson had contacted the military base, identified himself, and requested permission to land. Now a pair of jet fighters climbed to meet them, escorting them along the flight path over the city.

  “Welcome home, Major,” radioed one of the pilots. “The top brass never did come up with a plan to rescue you, so I’m glad you made it out on your own.”

  “I had some help.” Dyson glanced at Cosette. She tried desperately not to blush, and concentrated on maintaining an even course. “I’ve got some new recruits for the Alliance with me. I hope you’ll have rooms, hot showers and a good meal ready when we land.”

  “Already set up. VIP treatment.” The pilot brought his jet closer. “You’ve got scrapes on your front armor there. Did you see some action?”

  “Collateral damage, nothing head-to-head. I do have some stories to tell, though.”

  “We’ll spring for the drinks. Wait a minute, scratch that. You’re an officer and you’ve got back pay coming. You can spring for the drinks. We’ll listen.”

  Dyson laughed. “Done. See you on the ground.”

  The pilot saluted, and the two jets peeled away. Cosette banked the fighter into the flight path leading to the military landing field.

  Dyson twisted in his seat so that he faced Cosette. “You really ought to stay here, you know. There’s paperwork and swearing-in to do, but after that there would be lots of work for you. We can use all that knowledge in your head.”

  “Thank you.” She hesitated. “But I need to go back to Sorine, if I can. It’s hard to explain, but I feel like I’m only partly here.” She looked at him, which was a mistake, because his pale blue eyes distracted her. “I…I don’t think there are any more unsettled layers from the teaching machine left in my brain, but somehow it feels like my personal memories aren’t my own either.” She looked back to her navigation screen. “I need, I know it sounds silly, but I need to reaffirm who I am. I need to go home before I can decide what to do with myself.”