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A HAND SETTLED LIGHTLY between her shoulder-blades, as if unsure it would be welcomed, and damn right, it wasn't. She wasn't ever falling for sympathy again and admiration and all of those other snares. She had known better, going in, she had known better when she was doing it, and she was getting no more than her just desserts, so sympathy would be false anyway.
... It was really just as well there had been so little of it. She waited with a lump of dull numbness in her chest for him to say 'Well, to be fair, you did fail. You wouldn't want a fallen woman to be looking after your child either, would you? I know I wouldn't.' That had been what all her friends had said. Some of them had stuck by her anyway and she was sure she should be more grateful, if not for the fact that they seemed so happy to have her finally knocked off her pedestal. If not for the fact that she felt they were all secretly despising her anyway.
"What a shit," Jones said, in a lowered, appalled voice that plucked at something fierce inside her, that chimed with her shameful wish to shove the general's face into a porthole until one or other of them shattered. "How long had you been fighting for these people?""All my life." His outrage on her behalf was bracing. Despite everything that told her this was her fault, she still felt the admiral had been cruel. No one had yet agreed with her, and it was so good to finally find someone who did. The fact that he was an Old Earth heretic should have made a difference, but it didn't.
"Fucker! Seriously, what a bastard. You should tell him where to get off. You should go and get her. He can't keep a mother from her own child, surely?"
She pulled herself together, trying to pretend that she did not feel shaky and embarrassed. Some warrior she was! To cover her reaction, she got out the billy can and set some water on to heat, so she could wash her face and straighten her hair and feel like a Captain again instead of a woman.
"He has every right. As my superior, he can order me away, and I can get shot for mutiny if I disobey. And as the father, his child is his property. I'm not married to him, so I have no standing at all."
"That's shit." Jones said again, and now he was glaring at her as if it was all her fault. "Why do you support a regime like that? Didn't it ever occur to you how fucked up it was?"
Truthfully it never had. There had always been other things to think about, big brothers to fight, exams to pass, training courses, wars to be fought, no time to ponder the very basics of society. School had said the Kingdom was a reversion to God's good ways, to simplicity and the natural, happy state of mankind after Terran society had become hopelessly corrupt. The People of the Book had triumphantly come together in the face of the Source's godless secularism, and had founded a society in which ancient differences were put aside, or reexamined and discovered not to be so very different at all.
Jones could say what he liked but a world on which everyone was constantly mechanically modifying themselves in the face of massive technological invasion of privacy and agency hardly seemed to contradict that.
And she'd never given a thought to unmarried mothers because it had never occurred to her that she would ever be one.
"Serves me right, huh?"
Jones' righteous look faltered instantly. "Shit," he said - which seemed to be his default when he couldn't think of anything to say - and launched himself to his feet. The bright yellow operating scrubs he wore were now stained with soot and lake residue, and yet he managed to look graceful in them, a wading bird of a man, as slender and stick-like as a heron.
What was he doing over there in the corner of the room? He was reaching up to untangle something from the thicket of woven vines that roofed this shelter. Closing a fist around something, he wrenched it off, returned to her looking sly and pleased with himself and yet wary as if he knew he was pushing his luck.
"Sorry," he rotated his closed hand and let it open with a flourish that would have made a stage magician proud. Inside was one of the little light sources that turned the night-time cavern into the heart of a galaxy. It came on a stem. When she took it to examine it closer she saw it was a flower, a globe-like flower of dense-packed luminous petals, each of which glowed a pearly, nacreous silver.
"You just gave me a flower?" She had to ask, because it didn't add up, but even before his nod, the crushed despair she had been feeling had given way to incredulous laughter, because, man, that was hilarious. It was so hilarious it didn't hurt at all.
"Have you forgotten I just killed two guys in front of you?"
He gave a sheepish shrug. "No, but I'm sorry I freaked about that too. I'd just never seen anyone die before in such a sudden, violent way. It was..."
She twirled the flower in her fingers and wondered if she was being mocked. But... maybe not. Maybe in this alien place it was easier to be human to one another. "You don't need to be sorry for freaking out about that. It's meant to be ugly. I had the shakes for a month after my first. I wish I could say you didn't get used to it, but you do."
This close to it, warming under her fingers, the flower bloomed a little more open to show golden stamens covered in pinpricks of light. A faint smell drifted from it like the fragrance of jasmine. It was delicate and beautiful and fragile, and really not at all appropriate for her, but she tucked it behind her ear anyway because why the hell not?
Jones smiled. He'd looked a little less like a ferret every hour she spent with him, and his expressions had become deeper, more nuanced. This one started out almost mischievous, traveled through thoughtful and ended up sad.
He turned away and hooked the billy can out of the fire with a spare branch, and the sense that he was retreating, closing something down, only became more profound as she washed her face clean of regret with a handkerchief dipped in warm water.
"What?" she asked, sitting back on her heels when she was done.
"We're going to get to the colony and you're going to leave me there, aren't you? Because that's your duty and you want to earn a way back in. Because, despite everything, you're still fighting for them, and you always will."
"I had a Type A, Padishah class," she said defensively, the words sounding cold to her, hollow, as if something had sucked all the juice out. "I was the first captain in the fleet, with thousands of people at my command. And I earned that. Perhaps I've also earned disgrace, but two or three years on the Horsehead front without me and I think they'll remember that forgiveness is divine. They'll remember that I won wars for them and they'll ask me to come back."
It was a little hope that she nurtured desperately, though it smouldered like a spark on wet tinder. This was the most awful thing she'd ever had to live through, but it might one day be over. She might still be able to come home.
"I've just got to hold it together until then."
"Because," Jones's smile was challenging, "You know there are antiquarians and archaeologists who would kill to get their hands on a whole damn alien city. We could go to the colony and steal the governor's ship, and sell this stuff, make a packet, live outside the law, independent and free - really free - for the first time ever. This is the find of the century, and we could mine it, slowly, for artifacts and information. And I could help you with that. We could share it. If you didn't turn me in."
His hopeful, entreating look winched her up out of the pit. Looked like there still was something of the weasel about him after all, but right now she found it almost endearing. At least he was honest about being dishonest.
"We've had this talk before." She brushed a fingertip over the flower in her hair, and again it made her smile. "I've got to find out what's happened to my people, free them. I've got to find out what's happened to the governor and his staff and somehow return the colony to order."
"That's what you want to do?"
Want didn't really come into it. She didn't know what she wanted, but it wasn't relevant anyway. She had a duty. "That's my priority, yes."
She looked down, feeling unanchored and unsafe as she always did before a major decision. "But after your freak out, I do believe that you're not a murderer. And if a person's body is a temple to the Lord, it's surely between Him and them if they choose to remodel it to His greater glory. So..." Lord let good come out of this. And if it's not what you want me to say, stop my mouth.
"So if you help me rescue my people, I'm going to make sure you get out of here free. All right? I'll say Bryant Jones died in the launch crash, and you can be someone new."
"You're going to make sure I get off this planet?" He rose and backed towards the door, hopeful and disbelieving and incredulous. "And then you're going to go back to your dull little life and perjure yourself every time you mention me?"
"What makes you think I would mention you?" Arrogant little toe-rag! Though truthfully she found the arrogance amusing too.
"I don't..." Trust you she guessed, and that stung, because he ought to know - everyone ought to know by now that she tried always to keep her word. She'd not been the one who blabbed.
Jones backed up another pace and halted, looking speculatively at his own hand. He raised his head and those odd plum-brown eyes shone clear as brandy, intense.
"Right now," he said, softly determined, "you can push me around, tie me up, pick me up, leave me or take me with you as you like, because you're stronger than me. I know you can smack my head on a rock and kill me like you did those two convicts. So I have to trust you - I have to trust that you won't do that to me."
"Okay," she agreed, not seeing where he was going with this.
He held out his hand. "So the least you could do would be to shake my hand on the deal. I won't mind control you, but you'll have to trust me on that. It'll be fair, see?"
Trust, like the trust he was willing to give to his government, except that he would be the one with his hand on the kill switch. Her skin crawled at the thought of invisible bots hopping from his hand to hers like germs, infecting her. But he had a point. She could in fact twist his head off with her bare hands, the fact that she couldn't yet see a situation in which she would feel that was necessary didn't mean she would never do it at all.
There came a point in most alliances where you had to decide if you really meant it or not. And maybe this was stupid, but one bad experience shouldn't prevent her from ever trusting again, should it?
"Fair?" she said, and took his hand. It felt warm and clean and eggshell breakable in hers, and she wasn't immediately aware of anything except pressure and heat and a kind of loosening in the chest that said she was no longer alone. "I can do fair."
And that was when she heard the smash and clatter of a bucket-full of pottery falling off an opening door. The doorbell had been rung. The convicts were here.