by R. Z. Held
She heated herself a food pack in the small galley and shoved it into her face before returning to her bunk. Pyrus seemed to have done her some good, because exhaustion didn’t blank her mind entirely, but that wasn’t actually a net benefit. She was back to the excruciating boredom of the days of imprisonment, with the added image of screaming Installs to dwell on.
Nearly all Installs. Had all of those died or committed suicide? Had someone been able to help some of them?
Eriope roused and disappeared to the head, apparently too groggy to notice Genevieve was also awake. By the time Pyrus appeared, she’d scrunched herself into the back corner of the bunk, despite her back, because it felt safer, or perhaps because it felt like it would help her hold herself together better.
“Genevieve.” His voice was so kind, even barely above a whisper, it made her want to cry. She didn’t deserve such understanding as his. “Did you eat?”
Genevieve muttered her affirmative. When Carex didn’t even stir, Pyrus dared a more normal volume. “You should be resting, then.”
“Will you—?” Genevieve hesitated. Pyrus would need his rest for his next shift flying, and squeezing two people onto a one-person bunk wasn’t particularly restful. “Just for a while—” She held out her hands.
Pyrus didn’t hesitate. “Of course.” It took some banged knees and elbows to wedge them both in, but she was against his chest, feeling each breath and it helped, at least a little.
Still, sleep eluded her. “Can I borrow your wing?” she asked, finally.
“Borrow my…? Sure.” Pyrus clearly didn’t understand what she was getting at, but game as ever, he wiggled an arm free to unzip the back of his jacket and carefully unfolded his wings. Being at the outside of the bunk gave him a bit more room to expand them.
Genevieve delicately took the leading edge of the uppermost one. The carbon composite of everyone’s wing plates came with a brush of dark and light in different metallic colors, formed idiosyncratically in growth as fingerprints did, or so Pyrus had told her once. His tended toward a copper tone. She wondered idly if the ones she grew back would be colored differently.
She settled his wing over her shoulder, tucked just under the corner of her jaw. That was where her wings had ended up in her sleep sometimes, when she’d had anxious dreams. Now, she clutched the borrowed comfort to her and found sleep at last.
Sometime later, she partially woke to the sense that she needed to hang on. Something was—someone was stealing something from her—
“Love, I have to go pilot soon,” Pyrus rumbled, and Genevieve came to enough of an awareness of her surroundings to let Pyrus’s wing go. He was supposed to have sneaked off to his own bunk while she was out, earlier, so she hoped he’d been able to get at least a little sleep of his own with his wing in her death grip.
“Well, that’s a creative solution.” Carex’s voice, directed to Pyrus. Genevieve slitted her eyes to plot Carex’s location leaning on a forearm against the end of their bunk, and then subsided. With channels closed to them and no privacy to be found on a tiny ship, the least she could do was grant them some by pretending to still be asleep.
Pyrus’s weight shifted where he sat on the edge of the bunk and his wingtip brushed against Genevieve’s hip as he furled them. “What happened to the two of you?”
“They put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger to try to scare her into screaming for help to co-conspirators on a backchannel. Because of whatever local insurrection is going on at the moment.” Carex’s intonation carried a shrug without Genevieve needing to see it. “I objected.”
“And her back—?”
“Following orders for convenience in transporting her, but botched. The unalt holding the knife didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.” Carex’s following silence carried the weight of shared history. To do with the story he’d told Genevieve about wings being taken, perhaps.
“Oh, love,” Pyrus said, and he must have believed she really was asleep because he touched her hair across her shoulder so lightly, so gently.
“Her strength runs deep.” Carex’s matter-of-factness threw Genevieve off-balance. She hadn’t expected such a compliment from him, but she hadn’t expected defense or comfort either. “If anything breaks her, it will be knowing what she had to do to get us out.”
“She had no choice!” Pyrus said with an intensity not diminished by the softness of his voice.
“Just so you remember that.”
A pause from Pyrus, then— “And there are things that can be done. Reinstalling as soon as possible, for one. We might not even lose any planets.”
Carex gave a bark of derisive laughter. “Maybe ‘we’ should. Might do the empire a world of good.” A pause, fraught. “You know, my mother, when they were banging on the door to drag her to prison, she told us that there would come the day when my sister and I would be able to stand back and watch the empire burn. And my sister’s dead now, but it looks like I might still get my chance.”
Pyrus was too self-controlled to gasp, but Genevieve could feel his startled frustration wavering in the air. “You were always the most loyal of the two of us, Carex. Has it truly come to that?”
“Ha!” Carex rounded on his friend, visible as Genevieve stole another narrow view through her eyelashes. “I held rigidly true to the letter of the law, while you twisted and bent, always finding some spirit of it that you could believe in. Well, both the letter and the spirit are rotten. What is rigid snaps, but you’re still trying to bend.”
A heavy step in closer. “Look what it has made of us, Pyrus. Look what the Pax Romana empire has made of you and me and Eriope, and her.” Genevieve imagined a gesture to herself. “The empire takes loyalty and breaks us, by way of thanks. Each and every one. It made her into someone who had killed. She was hope, to all of us trapped into a life we can’t stand, but came the time when they just had to break her too.”
Genevieve curled up as if shifting in her sleep, pressing her face into the sheets so they wouldn’t notice her tears. She’d had no idea she’d meant so much to him, and now she felt too weak to bear the weight of it.
“Or perhaps we’ll manage to maintain sufficient momentum to avoid falling,” Pyrus said, lowering his voice again as he pushed up from the bunk and headed out of the room. He was quoting Genevieve herself, which perhaps ought to have made her feel the weight of everyone’s expectations that much more keenly, but instead anchored her, just enough. That had been true then, and was true now. They were going forward, to somewhere.
And once they arrived she’d find a new forward, to drive herself.
Part III
As they coasted in to the planet, in sublight, the four of them crammed once more around the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs. Ostensibly, Pyrus was the one piloting at the moment, but in sublight, and given that they hadn’t decided on the strategy and thus the accompanying course for approach, he was letting the ship’s system take care of it, and his conscious attention was on them. Genevieve had the copilot’s chair once more, to move clumsily through the maps and views the ship could provide her with.
Which left Carex standing as well as Eriope. She didn’t bother casting any side glances over to check how tired he looked, being on his feet for a substantial period. She was sure he’d catch her at it, and wouldn’t thank her for the concern. In her own case, she felt functional. Able to keep normal hours and walk around, at least. She doubted she’d last long with any kind of physical exertion. The two of them could use coms consistently as well, though there was no particular reason to waste the energy for this meeting.
“Any thoughts on where we set down?” Pyrus asked. He didn’t try to take control of the display as she settled on a satellite view of the main continent, which Genevieve appreciated. Eriope hadn’t been able to sit on her impatience the last few times they’d been at the display together, and wrestling over it wasted more time than the awkwardness of finger-presses took.
“I’m afraid it’s going to h
ave to be a spaceport. Without ground transportation, anywhere open enough is either too far away from civilization for us to walk, or will attract far too much negative attention. I don’t want to crush some farmer’s crops in a Pax Romana ship and end up greeted by a militia.” Genevieve found what she wanted on the map. “When I left, there was only the one spaceport, outside of Delta, which is the big trade city. Obviously.” She circled a finger above it, shifted over and fanned out her hand to encompass some of the densest urban footprint.
“According to the files, the facilities the Pax Romana put in aren’t that far away.” Pyrus brought up a highlighted outline on her map with nothing more than a moment of concentration. “Fairly typical. Use the local one until you’ve shipped in enough personnel and materials, but don’t bother lugging them very far before setting up your own.”
“Neither of which are great, given I was hoping to avoid being recognized by the Idyllians either—that’s a hell of an explanation to try to juggle—but the settlement where I lived is a good, six, seven hours of travel outside of Delta, so I think the risk is manageable.”
Eriope leaned forward—jostling Carex, because there was no way to avoid that in the cabin at the moment—and squeezed Genevieve’s shoulder. “Maybe they’d be happy to see you.”
“Given how desperate they were to get rid of me, I doubt it.” It wasn’t that Eriope’s words knotted up Genevieve’s stomach, precisely, it was more that they shattered her fragile state of denial that she could return to her home planet without dealing with any of the people there. What about her family? They hadn’t wanted her gone, but she wouldn’t blame them if they’d been relieved when she left anyway. Did she want to seek them out? What if she did, and they wanted nothing to do with her?
What if they were all dead, casualties of the early period of occupation, or this current resistance?
No. That wasn’t the direction in which her momentum lay at the moment. She could worry about that later. “I’m presuming we want the civilian field in service of not having to present your military identification and leave a trail—what do you guys think about going in as some spoiled brats with military connections? General Auntie Dearest lent me this fast ship to escape this chaos to somewhere safe, because we deserve it?”
“It wouldn’t be that hard for us to make false unalt military IDs. But no one would believe it for you, and besides, if we land at the military field, they’re not going to let us stroll off base afterward.” Pyrus murmured, clearly thinking hard. “Civilian false IDs would be much easier, and it would explain why we have a ship that still looks military, no matter what broadcast codes we give it. I’d like to think no Auntie Dearest exists who could be that stupid, but you never know.”
“Whoever is manning the traffic control has been rotting out here at the ass end of the empire for who knows how long. They’ll believe it,” Carex said, underlying growl back in action. “How’s your rich asshole impression, Eriope?”
Eriope drew herself up, but only the better to settle herself into a hip-shot lounge. “Better than yours or Pyrus’s, street trash,” she sneered. She held for the pose for a beat, then chewed her jaw as if the accent had left an unpleasant taste. “Damn, but I hated those kids at school. Still, gives me enough reference material for a conversation with traffic control at least.”
Carex nodded grudging approval but Pyrus slewed his chair around to consider Eriope with upraised brows. It must be a good impression indeed. Genevieve herself was no student of Pax Romana class dynamics. She’d cultivated her Linguan accent to be as neutral as possible.
Eriope anchored herself with a hand on the back of Genevieve’s chair and her attention disappeared. Genevieve waited for her to loop them all in to the conversation once she initiated it, but nothing happened. “They’re not answering,” Eriope said at length. “Suppose I’d better demand an explanation of the base.”
This time, a wince came faster. “Bounced me. Unless you have the military codes to prove your call is important, fuck you, is the lovely welcome message they have out at the moment.”
“Well, if no one is going to stop us setting down…” Pyrus’s turn to dive into unseen data. He surfaced with a frown. “Civilian field doesn’t have any traffic I can find at the moment. Maybe they grounded everyone until orders start flowing normally again?”
“Gives us a clear path, if they don’t try to shoot us down. And they damn well better not do that, even in the absence of orders, to a ship with military codes. The whole thing draws a hell of a lot of attention to us, but I don’t see we have much of a choice. Take us down.” Carex paused a beat, seemed to recall that he was in no position to give orders anymore. His growl rose to the surface for a moment. “If you agree—”
Eriope patted his arm. “We agree. Don’t strain anything.” He swatted her hand away, which seemed to soothe them both. After a few minutes of waiting as Pyrus lined up their course in which no objections occurred to any of them, first Eriope and then Carex retired to somewhere everyone wasn’t breathing down each other’s necks quite so badly.
Genevieve switched half the display’s view to a public weather camera feed from the spaceport. Clear skies, predicted to continue for several days, a little icon informed her. Getting late in the day, local time, with the light a heavy, orange blanket. There was nothing there that should have been able to make her homesick, just metal, plexi, and plascrete, bare, utilitarian lines, but she knew it was home. But not as she’d left it, and she wasn’t the person who’d done the leaving, so who knew what it would feel like when she finally did step onto a Delta street. Or her parents’ farm—hell, that might belong to strangers now, if they were dead or had had to sell with two of three children dead or gone.
She didn’t let herself ball up, knowing Pyrus would see, but she did switch back to a meaningless scroll of data from the ship’s engine status. “You okay?” he asked anyway, because he was Pyrus.
“I’ll do my breakdown when we’re on the ground and have somewhere to stay for the night. I won’t be able to put it off forever, I assure you.” An echo in her memory—self-destruct or self-medicate—of Carex’s “wisdom” on the topic made her smile, thin-lipped.
***
On the ground, things proved nowhere near that simple. Silence from traffic control continued all the way down, and as they gathered what they’d packed to carry out, not knowing what kind of accommodations might be available. The others settled their duffels with the strap across the chest, bag only slightly off vertical over the back, and Genevieve imitated them. As a last step, Pyrus and Eriope opened their wings slightly, checking they cleared. Carex twitched in the same rhythm, glowered, and strode to be the first out of the ship.
The door was set high, better for station airlocks than spacefields, and Pyrus paused to offer Genevieve an unnecessary hand down to the cracked asphalt. She accepted anyway, and once on the ground raised her head to find him frowning.
Gunfire spattered the sunset from the direction of the terminal. Genevieve flinched down, but stayed standing, given the others were. They must have made some bone-deep assessment of the sound’s distance, as Genevieve’s system popped up an analysis of the likely numbers a full beat after her initial reaction. Multiple origination points, well separated from their little group. Another spatter and her system decided with about 70% confidence that there were probably two opposed sides shooting at each other.
Pyrus set a hand on her elbow, reassuringly firm, as if he was perhaps worried that she’d skitter away from the violence and put herself in danger. No chance of that—she was perfectly happy to jump the same way as the career soldiers. The orange she’d seen on the weather camera had given way to a much weaker one, fading o
ff into twilight. The backlit contrast of buildings and trees against sky made it hard to make anything out visually, even with her system doing what magnification and post-processing it could.
Eriope made to free her sidearm, but Carex gestured her down with a jerk. This time, neither Eriope nor Pyrus seemed to even notice that he’d settled into command again.
Genevieve had obviously never wandered around the spacefield’s asphalt, even in the suborbital section, but she’d driven past one side or the other of the damn thing often enough.
