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BRYANT HADN'T FELT pain like it since he'd taken his first dose of repair bots at age ten. Given the howling, nauseating tear of agony in his head to which he woke, he must have fractured his skull at some point. He didn't remember when.
The darkness behind his closed eyelids alarmed him. Anywhere in the cells there would have been light - they turned it down in the 'nights' but never off. Here he lay in pitch. And there was an unsettling feeling against his face, as though the ship had been punctured and the air was streaming out. Except the air on the prison ship had never felt so fresh. This smelled of water and sap and crushed greenery - chlorophyll and the bacteria that lived in soil.
On his own world he'd smelled something similar only once - on a school trip out to the farming district, where they had been given rides in tractors and forced to interact with subhuman creatures raised to be sold for food. He'd found the whole experience unsettling. His rich parents had always put meat on the table as a status symbol and because they claimed they preferred the taste to that of the microfungal protein everyone else ate, but once he'd seen the flicker of near intelligence in the 'pig's eyes when it met his gaze, and watched the 'lambs' jumping for joy, he'd never been able to look at the dismembered, bleeding joints their cook brought out from the freezer again.
He'd associated the smell of grass with the thought of blood ever since, and now it did nothing to calm the raging fire of healing bots working overtime in his brain, or slow the swing of his perception down as the world slowly reeled about him and his mouth watered with nausea.
Memory took him to being dropped by stun gun in the Captain's launch. Had he been landed on the colony since? Was it all over? Cautiously, he cracked his eyes open, prepared to slam them shut again and fake unconsciousness if necessary in the face of any threat.
It wasn't completely dark. After an age adjusting, he was able to pick out a ceiling of feather-like leaves so close above him they almost brushed his nose. A faint pinkish-gold light was strobing over them. He stared at it for a long time, trying to work out if the pulsing was actual or due to his damaged head. Then it occurred to him that there must be some kind of light source to his right, and - mindful of his broken glass skull - he turned his head fractionally to see it.
He lay in some kind of rustic shelter, outside of which a campfire burned on rocky ground, the flames illuminating a sphere where white tree-trunks stood like pillars. Above him, something - tree tops, he hoped - sighed rhythmically like a sleeping giant. The sky was dark but for a pen-stroke of blueish white that rose like a rocket's tail and curled over the horizon. Some kind of planetary ring. What he took for a couple of bright stars at seventy two degrees blinked out and then reappeared at sixty nine and he realized with a lurch that they were eyes.
Between his shelter and the forest, on a tree stump, sat captain Campos, huddled over the fire. A silver blanket was tucked around her shoulders, and her stringently tied veil had come awry, showing a mess of wavy black hair straggling out of a ruined bun at the nape of her neck. A lock clung to the dried blood on her forehead and picked up auburn highlights from the fire. She looked like a thousand miles of wet road, hunched in defeat, with her eyes closed and the oddly colored flames playing over her face.
With her face gilded and softened by firelight, and undefended in sleep, you could see why some guy might have found her attractive enough to sample. Quite apart from the bragging rights of being able to claim that he corrupted the avenging angel of the Kingdom of Peace...
But those thoughts seemed uncalled for here in the quiet. Bryant had a blanket around his shoulders, a roof over his head and a fire keeping him warm, and she had presumably done that. He was away from the constant supervision of the other criminals and could afford to drop the hard man act a little. Enough to admit that it didn't really feel like fun to laugh about Campos' disgrace while she was filthy and asleep and had probably saved his life.
After another ten minutes he was recovered enough to risk moving a hand, trying to touch the wound on his head. That was when he discovered that his upper arms were bound around his chest with a seatbelt, and his lower arms similarly secured around his waist.
"What the hell?" he said, and wriggled in an attempt to slip free. Campos' head came up with a jerk as she focused on him. "What the hell?" he repeated, "What happened?"
Her voice was rough with sleep, thick with something in a minor key as she replied. "Someone shot us down."
"What?"
It had been sadness, he thought, or mourning. It was gone by the time she spoke again, as she sharpened up with wakefulness, but he'd heard it and he was surprised. In the days when she was a heroine, the newsreels had been full of propaganda about motherly instincts and how they translated into a wish to protect her people. It had sounded so fake he hadn't stopped to think it could be true.
"While you were trying to escape, someone on the planet shot us down. With rocks. That's what holed the bridge. I don't know if anyone on the Froward survived, but I managed to crash land here."
"On Cygnus Five?" he clarified, his heart sinking to match the aching void in his head. "The penal colony?"
She actually smiled at that, a sideways lift of her recurve bow of a mouth. "Yes. We're about eight hundred clicks away from the colony itself. It's nor nor east from here, under an extinct volcano. We can get there before winter if we set off tomorrow."
He wanted to roll over. He wanted something to eat to fuel the bots that were putting his skeleton back together. He wanted to pee. But most of all he didn't want to go to the penal colony. "Are you kidding? You're a woman and I'm a mede. If there's anywhere on this planet we don't want to go, it's there. Can you untie me, by the way? I don't know much about wilderness survival but I'm pretty sure I need my hands."
Something had shifted between the two of them. Perhaps with the destruction of her ship she had put off the mantle of 'Captain'. Or perhaps she was just too tired to keep up the bullshit. She'd crash landed? And dragged him to safety? And made him a shelter? And now that half smile had turned into the full beam.
Admittedly it was a full beam of 'I don't believe your cheek', but he found he liked it anyway. It gave her dimples.
"'Mede' is an intellectual?"
He grinned. "'Mede' is a pretty boy. The kind a powerful man might want in his harem."
"okay," Her eyes flared wide. He'd shocked her, she was actually that innocent. Then she raised her eyebrows and looked him up and down, recovering. "okay, I could see it. And you would object to that?"
"Maybe not if I was allowed to choose for myself, but..."
Her smile fell. "Yeah," she agreed, looking aside. "I don't think the abuse of prisoners in that way would have been permitted under a just Governor..."
Innocent didn't begin to describe it. She actually believed that? Could anyone actually believe that?
"But I also don't believe the Governor would be shooting at us, so the chances are he's not in charge any more."
"The lunatics have taken over the asylum," he said, unsurprised. These places were the arse-end of anywhere, rarely graced by visitors from outside. Prisoners were added all the time, garrisons rarely bolstered. Guards went native, found they had more in common with their captives than their employers, set themselves up as little kings and toppled their employers every day.
She looked at him as if she was about to say 'this is a penal colony, not an asylum' and it occurred him that she didn't recognize the idiom. In theory the entire galaxy shared a trade culture passed on by needle-net – shared stories, immersion vids and music – and he kept forgetting that Kingdom planets were really not like those of the Source.
Her planet must have been under Kingdom rule so long they'd forgotten they weren't free. She must have been born under it and raised by parents, grandparents who were born under it. It must feel like nature to her, thinking the way that she thought. He'd often said before that he felt sorry for the dupes who actually believed it all, but this was the first time he'd actually meant it.
"In a manner of speaking," she agreed, cautiously.
"So we're not going there, right?"
This smile was bitter. She reached up and tried to smooth her errant hair back under the cover of her veil. It didn't want to go. "The comm tower is at the penal colony. Any chance of finding out what happened is there. I need to know what attacked my crew and my prisoners. I want to know who died on my watch, and I want to know why."
"Why?"
She frowned at him as if she didn't understand what he was asking. "I'm sorry?"
"I mean, why do you need to know? Why put yourself in danger for that?"
"Because they're my people," she said slowly, as if he was the stupid one. The fabric of the veil – black, shot with the gold threads of rank – fought her as she tried to tie it tight. "I'm responsible for them."
"And you're responsible for me?"
Her baffled, offended look softened. "That too. I could hardly have left you to drown."
Bryant had had many friends over the years. If by friends you meant people who were interested in the fusion of nanites with surgery and willing to exchange information and possibly technology, sometimes even in meat space. All of them would have left him to drown, if the alternative presented any kind of risk to themselves. Which was rational of them. Perfectly so. And he had never resented it, until now.
"I need to pee," he said, uncomfortable and strangely upset. "Would you untie me, please?"
She regarded him thoughtfully, dropped her gaze and sighed. "I will untie you, if you give me your word not to touch me. To be clear. If you try to touch me on the skin anywhere, I will drop you so hard it breaks your neck. My mind is my own."
He laughed at that, sharp and surprised. "Really? You're a product of medieval ideation, you're a propaganda dupe. I doubt if you've had an original thought all your life."
His concussion was still bad enough so that the laughter made the world swirl around him. He lost track for a moment. The next thing he knew, she was standing over him. She ripped the blanket off, seized him by the shoulder strap and flipped him onto his stomach. His head gave a metallic, screeching internal protest and his stomach lurched as a knee came down between his shoulder-blades and squashed him into the twiggy bedding.
He tried not to acknowledge that there was maybe, maybe a flicker of delight winding its way among the storm of fury and fear, but it dried his mouth out anyway and he breathed in deep to see if he could smell her. He was almost disappointed to gather from the click and the sudden looseness of the straps that the buckles were at the back, that she hadn't attacked him, she had just been a little brusque about helping.
"Well?" she said, when he was loose.
He lay pliant under her weight, only shifting his face to one side a little to breathe. "You can control me, physically," he muttered. "And I'm not allowed a way to fight back? How is that fair?"
Campos huffed in amusement, her hand on the buckle by his elbow, ready to re latch it if he said the wrong thing. "Who said anything about this was fair? I need your promise."
"Or what?"
"Or you can piss the bed."
Bryant had to admit that he was a little charmed. The mix of ruthlessness and naivety was not something he'd encountered before. Had it really not occurred to her that a hardened criminal like him might not keep his word? Bless her. How had she got to this age without being comprehensively taken advantage of?
"All right," he agreed. "I promise. I'll keep my hands to myself. No touching, not even while you're asleep."
He felt the slide of strap through buckle and then the pressure of her knee went away. Without it he felt unanchored, unstable again.
"Okay," she sounded warmer. "Go piss. But don't wander off. I don't believe you can tell north from south, and I've got the food."
Bryant tried to stride out to the edge of the firelight, but the blinding pain in the head, the nausea and flashes of illusory fireworks in front of his eyes was enough to convince him to forego the tough guy act and hobble. Shuffling carefully down hill, he lost the light in mere feet, long before he reached anything that could be called cover.
He had of course intended to escape. There was a whole planet out there in which he would be free of her assumptions and responsibilities and guardianship. He could have gone a long way in the dark, long enough to lose her.
Except he'd tried that on the ship and here she still was. Perhaps she would follow him wherever he went? Perhaps she was the kind who would track him down forever, single minded and stupid, thinking they were sacrificing their life on the altar of honor, when actually they were just making themselves and everyone around them miserable.
Unzipping, Bryant took a slash against one of the spindly white trees. There wasn't much light to tell but did his urine look dark? He was probably still bleeding inside. And he was tired and his head hurt, and he wanted to lie down.
He wasn't going to get involved in any kind of epic hunter and hunted drama if he could help it. That would be embarrassing and tedious. And besides, she had the food.
So when he had relieved himself, he zipped himself back up and returned, halting out of the darkness into the firelight, to ease himself gingerly back down on the pallet of branches and feel the fire's wash of warmth soothe his aching everything. "Is there something to eat? I'm ravenous."
"You eat a lot for such a skinny guy," she put her head on one side and considered him with a lazy self confidence that he wasn't used to from women, and certainly would not have expected from one raised in the Kingdom. "Here," she passed him a ration bar that he could barely open, his hands shook with need for it.
"Fast metabolism," he lied, sinking his teeth into sugar, chocolate and fat - blessed fat. "You got any more of these?"
"That's half a day's ration."
"Then let me have the second half and we'll call it a day."
"You hit your head pretty hard," she said and zipped the bag she had taken it from. "Let's just wait to see if you're going to throw that back up first. Meantime, you should get some more sleep."
With some of the crumpling feeling in his stomach eased, he thought he could do that, his eyelids drooping at the suggestion. A few more hours of rest, with this new fuel, and he might be rebuilt inside enough to make an escape attempt in the morning. But...
"What about you? Are you going to lie down too? I'll keep all my body parts to myself, I promise, and you surely must need to sleep as well? You've been through a shock."
Campos gave him a peculiarly complicated look, and yes, there were lines of fatigue in her face, shadows under her eyes that said she was close to dropping herself, but she was very far away from curling up in any kind of shelter in the arms of a man she didn't know or trust. He supposed she could hardly be blamed for that.
"If you're so hungry, I'll go fishing," she said instead. "I'm awake anyway, and you should..."
He didn't hear what he should do, just faded out gently with his survival blanket drawn up around his ears, and the last thing in his mind the faint gold flicker in her brown eyes as she watched him slip under, into the dark.
When he woke again, the sun was up. He didn't know how long he had slept, but although Campos was sitting by the fire again in the same position she had been last night, her face was washed, her uniform pristine. She had evidently taken the chance to take off the veil and re-do her hair from the start. She was impeccably covered up now, and he found himself regretting that, wondering what she'd looked like with it loose. Loose and wavy and black with a reddish ruby gleam. Huh. Possibly getting a fetish over her hair was not what the veil was supposed to achieve, but it was delightfully ironic and he felt no need to try and fight it.
She was also basting liquid over the crisping skin of a large oval something, impaled on a stick supported by two wooden tripods over the fire. For all the resurgence of her neatness, her expression seemed to have relaxed even further. Her mouth no longer curved down, and her lips had flowered out a little, like she wasn't pressing them hard together any more.
The smell of the thing was buttery and savory, something like an artichoke cooked in goose grease with a hint of licorice. Bryant sputtered and coughed as his own saliva choked him, nothing about the smell hitting his poison-detectors at all. "Smells amazing," he said, in response to her startled evaluating glance. "I somehow didn't picture you as a cook."
When she had satisfied herself that he was not about to lunge for her or try some nefarious trick, she looked back at what she was doing, which appeared to be catching the juices of the thing in a shell of some sort so that she could ladle them back over the top. He thought that had been his designated interaction for the day for a while, let the conversation lapse into profound silence. The night's breeze had died down and the white trees were revealed to be very tall. If there was noise and scampering going on up there in the canopy it was too far away to hear.
The land sloped down for a few meters beyond where he had got to last night, and then turned into a perfectly flat, level expanse of sapphire blue moss, from which teal blue trees poked their weeping willow heads. Just where the rock met this expanse a small hole had been torn and he could see the moss floated on a fibrous root system over a lake of still, dark water. And at that thought he realized he was parched as well as starving.
"Can I drink the water?"
"I don't know," Campos said again, and nudged a blackened billy can out of the fire. "But I boiled some. You want to give it a try, be my guest."
He rolled off the mattress and stretched, infinitely improved on yesterday, came over to draw up another large log, cut with some kind of burning tool. Cut by her, presumably, and now he was beginning to feel almost guilty about everything she was doing to keep him alive. He took a good swallow of the lukewarm water and said, in some kind of repayment, "It's not poisonous. There are some interesting organic chemical residues, but they're inert."
She gave him the evil eye so bad he wished he hadn't spoken. "How can you tell?"
It was a strange thing to be homesick about, but he was. "My homeworld is very technological, very... uh..." He couldn't think of a good way to put it, and that fact unsettled him. "I mean - well it's not uncommon for an enemy to put something in your food or drink, or your air supply. Poisons or neurochemicals or nanobots. Obviously you try to avoid eating with others but sometimes off-worlders insist on it because it's part of their culture. On those occasions, it pays to be equipped with a suite of detectors, and mine are second to none."
It took him a long time to work out her expression, because he came from a civilized world and he was not used to being looked at with pity and contempt, particularly not by a recidivist savage like her. His generous mood ebbed at the look, but he kept the insult inside and accepted a slice of artichoke thing on a plate of bark in silence.
His outrage lasted for a bite, and then he closed his eyes and gave a whine of bliss as his pinched stomach and depleted reserves recognized that they had come home. Then he stuffed everything in as fast as he could go and licked plate and fingers after.
Campos laughed. "On my world we do a lot of cooking and eating together," she shrugged. "We do most things together. We're farmers mostly, with big families all of whom work on the land. We raise food and we eat it, and that's ninety nine percent of everything that isn't... that isn't raising children."
Her voice fell. He gathered that a pleasant memory had turned into a raw wound. At that thought he wondered for the first time what her disgrace had meant to her. It had given him a kind of savage satisfaction to contemplate the fall of the Kingdom's holy virgin, but none of it looked quite the same now he was getting to know her.
"What are we eating?" he reached for the piece of shell she had been using as a cooking implement in an attempt to hack some more off.
"I don't know." Taking the peace gesture for what it was, she smiled at him. "Looked like a woodlouse when it was alive, but it went for a bit of ration bar on a hook, so I figured if it could eat our food, we could eat it."
His heart stuttered and his gut lurched. "It was a living creature? And you killed it?"
Again with the evil eye - this time she looked at him as if he had just insulted her cat, "You kill children, but you won't eat meat?"
And somehow that was it. He'd softened towards her enough to see her as a person, enough to have some sympathy for her stupid, filthy, primitive hide, and she wouldn't move an inch in return? Fuck her then. He threw himself to his feet, hands clenched. "I do not fucking kill children! I SAVE children. I save them from people like you."
Her face tightened. It was like watching a Gorgon's gaze working. Her eyes went flinty cold and she stood up, slowly, making a point. And yes, he got it - she was stronger than him and trained in combat and perhaps he should have been—
A hum was all the warning they had before something silver flashed overhead, and with a burst of fire the shelter blew apart. Burning logs scattered in every direction. Bryant was still standing, gazing up at the sky, trying to work out—it was a flitter, a single person anti-gravity bike armed with—
And a fist sized ball of plasma sailed past his elbow, burned a smoldering hole in the ground by his foot, as Campos grabbed him by the collar and half tossed, half hauled him into the shallow scoop of earth in the side of the hill that hadn't been a good enough cave to camp in. She hunkered down in front of him, one hand on the floor in a sprinter's crouch, stun gun in the other, just as a second flitter followed the first.
"Who—"
"Ssh!"
In the quiet, Bryant could faintly hear the riders shouting to one another. "It's her, I saw her. She'll fetch a moon's ransom."
"Could've been anyone, how d'you—"
"They said, di'nt they? The prisoners. There's only one woman. Who else would it be?"
The voices had dopplered away, turned, and now they were growing stronger again. The hum of the sweeps' engines whined closer like a swarm of angry bees. They were after Campos? Maybe Bryant could bargain with them somehow. Offer her up in exchange for transport off world?
She shifted minutely forward, like a jaguar waiting to pounce. She had knotted her veil around her bun, and a sliver of the back of her neck was bare before him. She might not even feel it if he brushed fingertips there. He reached out, and hesitated, and didn't know why.
The two sweeps were almost neck and neck as they passed overhead, low now, swinging around to get a point blank aim with their plasma cannon. He saw two men, scarred and filthy, muscle, skin and teeth, and they scared him more than she did. He dropped his hand just as Campos shot the first one full in the chest with the stun ray.
With a flare of ice blue light the stun ray reflected off a personal force shield. The driver laughed and the mouth of his plasma cannon flared open, so that Bryant could smell death like burning magnesium in the back of his mouth.
"You just walk out of there easy and you won't be—"
Bryant assumed the word was going to be 'hurt', but at that moment Campos pounced. She'd narrowed the stunner's beam, shot clean through the engine of the second flitter. It exploded in a churn of yellow light and jagged lumps of metal just as she gave a flying jump and leaped straight up onto the steering yoke of the first. She seized its rider by his matted scalp-lock - his eyes still bewildered - and smacked his forehead hard into the controls just as a chunk of semi-molten debris from the second flitter sliced and burned through his body and the central float mechanism beneath it.
The wreckage of man and flitter thudded to the ground. Campos landed solidly, bent kneed and alert in the middle of it. She ducked back into shelter looking disappointed but exalted at the same time. Glowing with victory - a shine in her eye and a lightness to her tread. Bryant fought the desire to huddle away from her.
"Fig! I wanted that flitter."
"You just..." Bryant looked again at the pieces of meat among the wreckage. Here was a hand torn jagged out of an arm, wrist-bones white. "You just killed them!"
She looked at him as if he was a puzzle she couldn't fit together "I'm a soldier," she said, gently as if explaining to a child. "It's what I do."
He leaned over and threw up on her feet.