“That’s ridiculous. Ninety percent of our products are nothing more than improved versions of things that were already out there. The only reason the Pact and the rest of those non-intervention laws exist is to preserve the status quo. Avinar and everyone else break them all the time.”
Privately Hreaak agreed with him, but he was too professional to admit it. He was also too professional to continue indulging in these simian fits of sentiment. They were undermining his effectiveness and interfering with the job.
Kleaax took a deep breath and braced his hands on the table. “We’re arguing about the wrong things. The point isn’t the laws; it’s the principle behind them. What’s best for a developing world? It isn’t colonization. I’ve devoted my life to studying these things, and the records are appalling. Colonization is a death sentence to indigenous peoples. Between conflict, disease and societal stress, we’re talking catastrophic population collapse. There could be a ninety-eight percent die-off in the first generation alone.”
“A survival rate of two percent is better than none at all,” Hreaak said. “Besides, isn’t it hypocritical to talk about the evils of colonization when you’re living in a territory, which according to your own Lexicon, was colonized less than four generations ago?”
“It’s their planet!”
“In Avinar’s sector of influence. Our exo-post is still here.”
Hreaak’s scanners measured every blip and flutter of the anthropologist’s bodily functions. But he found himself wishing he could see the old Aviann’s eyes. Something was happening behind those distorting lenses. He could read it in the set of Kleaax’s jaw, and smell it in the sudden flowering of his shaving lotion. The pulse in Kleaax’s human suit sped, then steadied, like an antique internal combustion engine revving for action.
“And when was the last time anyone checked up on us?” Amusement rumbled through the words, like the echo of laughter in a subterranean cavern. “How long do you think it’ll take before someone comes looking for you?”
They’d retrieve his cruiser and his stratoflyer. Hreaak himself was expendable. He’d always accepted that fact the same way he’d accepted the weight of his vambrace.
“Special agents have a lower life expectancy than space marines in a plasma fight,” Kleaax continued. “I ran the stats for a class. Less than twenty percent survive to claim their pensions. Your bosses expect you to die on the job. They count on it.”
Hreaak hefted his weapons unit. “Is that supposed to be a threat?”
Kleaax shook his head. Hreaak dropped his guard for a milli-instant, and the old man roared: “Gorge, Brunhilda, attack!”
The dogs took off like someone ignited their farts. Hreaak knocked one aside. But the other clamped its jaws on his left hand. Instinctively, he pulled away. His arm exploded in agony.
The dog hung on, lips curled back from a wired steel jaw. Growling, it heaved its small body from side to side. Its metal teeth ground deeper, sundering the bones inside his palm. His hat dropped from fingers no longer able to grasp. The battle yodel of the other dog thundered in his ears.
He couldn’t think through the pain and the noise. He raised his vambrace to shoot, and barely stopped himself in time. He smacked the dog with the side of his fist.
It dropped, yelping, and scuttled out of sight. Meanwhile, the second dog had regained its feet. Its hind legs danced in preparation to jump.
“Don’t,” Hreaak said.
The dog whimpered and dropped to a squat. Urine poured from between its legs. And poured. And poured.
Stupefied by the pain of his shredded hand, all Hreaak could do was stare. Basic anatomy dictated the amount of urine an animal produced was determined by the size of its bladder, which was, of necessity, proportional to its mass. But apparently nobody had told the dog. According to the calculations spooling through his brain, the dog—which weighed about as much as a small chicken—had just pissed half its body weight. And it was still peeing. The urine gushed across the floor, splashing Hreaak’s boots, soaking the floor beneath them, and swamping what was left of his senses with its rank smell.
A sharp crackle and the hum of machinery drew his attention back to Kleaax. The anthropologist stood next to the tabletop P’lod generator. Searing white sparks arced between the domed poles. Smoke-colored goggles shielded Kleaax’s eyes from the glare, but the static discharge pulled his sparse hair into a ball of fluff. In keeping with his delusions of wizardry, he held a crystal wand in his right hand.
Hreaak’s head felt too heavy for his neck. He’d taken plasma burns that hurt less than his mangled hand. He was bleeding from a dozen cuts, and he was standing in pee. He was the one with the weapons unit. Why was he the one bleeding and standing in pee?
He still had a job to do. He primed his weapons array for a hip shot.
“Weevirril Kleaax, this is your last chance. It doesn’t have to end like this.”
The old fool laughed. “That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all day. Stay here. This is a whole new world. The past doesn’t exist. You can be anybody. Do anything. Nobody’s going to come looking for you. If they did they might have to pay you.”
The fingers of Hreaak’s right hand curved.
“Uh uh uh,” Kleaax warned. The tip of his wand quivered no more than the width of a barbule above the sizzling white sparks. “You might be fast, but no human body is as fast as lightning. All I have to do is twitch.”
And Hreaak was standing, surrounded by broken steel toys, in a liquid conductor with less resistance than water.
He kicked one of the rotors at Kleaax’s smug face and raced to the rubber mat by the doors. He spun on his heel. Raised his arm.
Something round and hard jabbed the base of his skull. His sensors screamed warnings he didn’t need. Steel. Oil. Gun.
The back door burst inward. Genny stormed through the opening, sighting over a short-barreled shotgun pointed at the bloody center of his chest. The void of space was warmer than her gray eyes. Her aim never wavered as she marched to Shiro’s side.
Hreaak could’ve taken her. He could’ve taken the human behind him. But he didn’t need his sensors or the analytics attached to his weapons array to know he’d never take both.
“Sweetums,” a nasal female voice brayed at the back of his head, “is this man bothering you?”
“Bellissima!” Kleaax caroled. “And little Genny, on the spot as always.”
“Sorry it took us so long. I was changing a tire when Genny showed up. Some fool blew his wheel on a curb. What’s wrong with Shiro?”
The dogs yapped excitedly from their respective retreats. Kleaax turned off the generator and pushed the goggles to the top of his head. “He’s had a nasty shock. He’ll wake up in a few minutes.”
Genny didn’t blink.
Hreaak should’ve been scheming, calculating, planning. Instead, he was floored by an unexpected sense of relief. He was relieved to be stopped. Relieved to be divested of agency. Relieved the only blood on his hands was his own.
“What do you want me to do about him?” the woman asked. The pressure on Hreaak’s skull increased infinitesimally, as if she needed to make a point.
“Just keep him still, May Belle.”
Kleaax wet a white handkerchief in the closest sink and bustled out from behind the tables. He moved with surprising grace for a human of his age and bulk.
Hreaak’s breathing slowed from force of habit. If Kleaax fouled Genny’s shot, he could disarm the woman behind him in an instant.
But Kleaax was too canny for that. Holding his wand in one hand and the wet handkerchief in the other, he sidled out the door and reappeared on Hreaak’s right. Tsk-ing softly, he dabbed the blood off Hreaak’s shoulder.
With a mental start, Hreaak realized their human suits were the same height. In fact, if you looked past the ravages of age and wear, and the cosmetic choices of complexion, feature and hair, their bodies were identical. They could’ve been printed from the same template, stamped from t
he same mold. Was it coincidence or a symptom of some deeper flaw—a shared compulsion that sent them chasing across the outstretched wings of the galaxy? In the name of Avinar. But it wasn’t for Avinar. Not really. To be honest—and a man with a gun to his head owed it to himself to be honest—he’d never once in all his missions used his cruiser to go home. Was the old man with his spectacles and spotted flesh, his unhealthy frame and illicit nest, a portent of his own future?
Would it be so bad?
Inside his human suit, Hreaak’s soul itched.
Kleaax waited. His gaze held neither challenge nor censure. Hreaak’s right arm sagged against his side, the burden of his vambrace almost too heavy to bear.
Maybe that’s why he didn’t resist when Kleaax smeared the blood-soaked handkerchief across the plates of his weapons unit. All AP cybernetic interfaces designed for field use were keyed to their host’s DNA. Kleaax knew. He’d been in the field for thirty years.
“Be careful, hon,” his nest-mate May Belle said. “This fella strikes me as a desperate character.”
“I suppose he is,” Kleaax agreed.
He rubbed the crystal wand over his wool sleeve and jabbed the point into the unobtrusive slot on the underside of the vambrace. A shock of electricity jolted up Hreaak’s arm. The weapons control panel vanished from view.
“But it’s nothing we can’t handle”—the weight of Hreaak’s vambrace dropped from his arm into Kleaax’s open hand—“together.”
Of War and Wings
Tansy Rayner Roberts
Fire. The sky is on fire, and your wings don’t work.
You twist and turn, struggling to soar up beyond the billowing clouds of smoke and steam, as so many soldiers do.
Your throat chokes on the smell of polished brass and burnt flesh, and you can’t fly any more. Your metal wings buckle under you, and the harness slips uncomfortably.
No, you should not have come here, into this.
You are seventeen.
You know how to dance, and make polite conversation. Your needlework is exceptional, and you are at least competent at the piano, if called upon to play a piece.
You do not know how to do this.
And yet, when the blazing, impossible lanterns of the alien ship blast full in your face, and it bears down upon you, in that moment you know exactly what to do.
Your musket fires, as if some other soldier has laid his hands over yours. You fall back, tossed helplessly through the sky by the ricochet.
But the alien falls faster.
Your first kill.
His ship bursts into flame as it hits the ground, and that is when you know that this is, after all, where you are supposed to be.
* * *
Three angels alight from the train at Paddington Station, their bronze wings pulled back tightly so as not to get caught in the folding doors. They walk along the platform, one of them limping, until they reach the long queue for shelter and food.
Angels are always given preference—whether that be a sleeping pallet in the stairways and corridors of one of London’s many underground stations, or a larger serving of rations. Still, these three show no tendency to swagger or throw their weight around. One of them even takes a bar of chocolate out of her pocket and offers it to the children clustered nearby.
The children divide the chocolate and scoff it down in a few moments of greedy delight, but not one of them takes their eyes off the gleaming bronze of the angel wings.
“Pease porridge again,” says Madge, unhooking her tin plate from her combat belt in anticipation. “I told you Paddington never has anything but pease porridge. I heard a rumor of roast pork at King’s Cross.”
“There are always rumors of roast pork,” Daisy says with a sigh. “I don’t believe there’s a pig been killed in this country in two months or more. Unless by the enemy.”
“Perhaps the enemy have eaten all the eggs, too,” says Peg.
The three of them have been flying together for six months, give or take, which makes them veterans in this war that has seen so many shot down over London’s skies. All three were christened Margaret, and they have been friends so long that it barely matters at all that Madge was once a lady’s maid, Daisy a milliner, and Peg the daughter of a Viscount.
When their turn comes around, they each receive a large ladleful of pease porridge on their tin plates, and a slice of some sort of pudding.
“Is it Jam Roly Poly?” asks Daisy, prodding the slice with vague interest.
“The currants are too close together,” says Madge, giving it a sniff. “It’s plum pudding, I reckon, or as close as they can get to it.”
“Criminy,” says Peg. “Is it Christmas already? I promised Aunt Ermentine in my last letter I’d try to get away for it. I suppose it’s too late now.”
“The enemy don’t care about carols and church and all that,” says Madge.
“Neither do I, much,” says Daisy, who rather likes to shock the other two when she gets half a chance.
The three of them select a spot on one of the abandoned platforms to lay out their bedrolls for the night, and to enjoy what warmth their meager supper has to offer them.
“They said it would all be over by Christmas,” says Madge. “Didn’t they?”
“I expect that’s just the sort of thing one says,” says Peg. She takes a bite of plum pudding before her pease, thinking how shocked Aunt Violet would be at all this—rubbing shoulders with girls of the lower orders, and then to top it all off, eating her pudding before her main.
“What are we to say now?” sighs Daisy, releasing the harness that holds her bronze wings in place. They clank and clatter as they fall on to the hard station floor. “It will all be over by Easter? That hardly has the same ring to it, and St Valentine’s is too close to be realistic.”
“I don’t know about that,” says Madge, wolfing her pudding down. “Reckon there won’t be enough of us left by Valentine’s to worry about it.”
This is no good. They have a whole two hours to rest and recover before their next shift in the sky, and if they grow despondent now, they will be wrecked by then.
“It could be worse,” Peg says lightly. “The Season starts in a few weeks. Why, I could be preparing myself for debutante balls and being presented to the Queen as we speak.”
The other two look at her, and laugh. It’s hard for them to imagine her in froth and finery. Peg cut her hair off weeks ago, to stop it tangling in the wings, and her face is never clean. The London sky is almost as filthy as the London streets, and the ships of the enemy give off such wretched clouds of grit and smoke that you can never entirely scrub it off your skin.
“How did you convince those high and mighty aunts of yours to let you play angel with the rest of us drabs?” asks Daisy. She’s light-hearted, but there is genuine curiosity in her voice. They’ve never talked about this.
“I didn’t,” says Peg. “Aunt Violet—she’s the worst of them—took me to the Alexandria to be kitted for my coming out. Silks and muslins, all that rot. Did you ever go to the Alexandria?”
The other two girls nod and smile. You can’t help but smile when you think of the Alexandria.
“My Sidney always wanted to work there,” says Madge. “He applied eight times, for their armoring and weapons department. They said he was good, but the list was so long, of blacksmiths and leatherworkers who wanted to work for them. He never made it.”
“My gran took me for tea there, when I was little,” says Daisy wistfully. “I’d never been anywhere so posh as that tea room. Tiny cakes the size of sugar lumps, and sandwiches thin as embroidery silks.”
The Alexandria was the first and most beautiful shopping arcade in England, all wrought iron and glasswork on the outside and the most exquisite shops and boutiques on the inside. Peg was eight years old when it first opened in Kensington, and even the dread aunts could not fault it for class and style.
“The Alexandria sold the best of everything,” Peg says. “So of course w
e went. The Paris fashions would be just in, Aunt Violet said, and Aunt Alice was planning my wedding trousseau in anticipation. But when we arrived, we were greeted at the door with a polite question. ‘Is it for the Season, or for higher purpose?’ I realized then, standing there, how wrong it was to plan for dances and tea parties and conversation when there was a war going on over our heads.”
“I bet your aunts loved that,” says Daisy. “Silly old cats. Even with so many men dead, and so many gals like us wearing wings, you’re still more likely to meet a husband in the services. What kind of man could you catch at the Season this year? Cowards and criminals.”
“You’re right, of course,” says Peg softly. She is not thinking of the imaginary Baronets that her aunts had dreamed up for her. She is thinking of Arabella Dray, the Steel Eagle, who flew more raids against the enemy than any other angel since this war began. Peg was her wingman three times over, last October, and they talked of so many things in between sorties.
Dead now, Arabella. Shot down over Whitehall. Garlanded with every posthumous honor that the Queen had to pin upon her corpse. Before her last flight, Arabella kissed Peggy in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. It wasn’t a kiss of chums, but a kiss of sweethearts. Such a precious thing a kiss could be, so fragile and barely lasting a moment. The world changed after that, irretrievably, and Peg has no idea how to change it back.
“So you ran away?” says Madge.
“Sneaked off, while Aunt Violet was talking to the proprietress about French lace. They were making custom armor not fifteen feet away, across the other side of the arcade. I’d heard the clang of anvil while they were measuring my stays.”
The other two girls grin at that, their hands brushing over the bronze and leather of their own armor. Only six months ago, Society though it was inappropriate for a respectable young lady to walk down a street unaccompanied. Now they can go anywhere, and be met with a salute and an approving nod. The armor isn’t an aberration. It is a revolution.
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