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THEY WERE DOWN TO HAGGLING over fine details, while Lina collected all the food she could find in the building and was pressing the Governor and his staff to take a little more, to store what was left in their pockets so they could take a nibble as often as they desired. The sight gave Aurora a stir of faint pride, that even in this place where no one could be trusted, there was still kindness to be found.
"Okay, it's going to take me ten minutes to get out there, a few more before I start drawing some fire. I'm going now. You count off and move on fifteen. God be with you all."
"And with you," Citlali gave the ritual refrain, then put her illuminated hand over her mouth as if shocked to be so forward.
They're kids and invalids, Aurora addressed the Holy Spirit with the familiarity of long friendship. Be good to them, please. And she strode out of the door like she had been doing all night - like a man who had every right to be there.
Round the back of the jail and into the orchard. She checked to make sure her two victims were still sleeping like babies, gave them a quick zap of stunner to be sure. Then she broke into a jog, threading her way through the trees, back the way she and Bryant had come only... in another life.
The trumpet like flowers on the dome bushes closed up at night time, looked like hundreds of stuck out tongues. Parting the vines brusquely, she found her cache of weapons and the two swoops inside like something unearthed from a forgotten civilization. Maybe what the physicists talked about was true, and Bryant's decision to leave had created a whole new parallel universe. That would be why it was surprising to find that things in the past had actually happened the way she remembered them. Surprising that they hadn't also turned out to be lies.
Yeah, well she could philosophize about that as much as she liked when this was over, when she'd dragged the little bastard out of his stolen ship and tossed him into a pit full of snakes. Right now she had more important things to do.
Loading all the purloined rations into one bag, she buckled it on, strapped three rifles on her back and the rest of them onto the swoop's carrier, picked up the bazooka and cradled it in her elbow. Then she swung onto the swoop's seat, turned the running lights up high, and burst out of concealment through the screen of lianas, roaring into the sky at maximum power.
Oh yes. This never disappointed. She was going to leave love behind - it was not for her. War. War was her calling and delight, and all she really needed in her life.
She circled the colony once, to draw attention, keeping low enough to foil any potential missile launchers that might be situated on the citadel roof. Then she swung in on an approach that took her to hover in the square where the outcasts of the new order had been having their poor solitary party around their bonfire.
The two parallel streets of the colony were already thronged with men looking nervously at the sky, yelling and shoving at one another. Whatever else it was, Bryant's treachery had been an effective diversion in itself. The colony was stirring like an ant's nest under a stream of boiling water. Men were hanging out of the windows of the barracks on either side, and best of all for her purposes, many of them had come out of the Governor's Palace to stand looking dazed on the lip of the auto-closing silo and to pick fights over whose fault this was.
They were stirred up and looking for someone to blame. She set the swoop to hover in eye line from the citadel gates, but beyond the bonfire, so that whoever was in charge inside would have to come a long way out to do anything about her.
A crowd began warily to edge its way in her direction. She recognised her friend from earlier in its vanguard.
"Hey! You! Guy with the gray scarf. You said I should fight McKillip? Well here I am. How about you bring him out to me."
He jumped guiltily, looked about himself from side to side as if to say 'not me! I didn't do anything.' But the crowd seemed to exhale and solidify as if they knew they had purpose now. If anything else it was a free show, and they might get an explanation out of her, even if they wouldn't believe it.
"He doesn't come when I call," Gray-scarf-guy was still trying to look unimportant, uninvolved.
"No?" Aurora asked, liking the way mockery gave her ugly voice a bear-like growl. "He doesn't come and give you an explanation of what just happened with the colony's only spacecraft? Was he on that? Is he even still here or has he just run out on you? Has he taken the only ship on the planet and left you to face Kingdom reprisals on your own?"
A murmur through the onlookers, and she could see she was attracting attention in the citadel too. A steady stream of the drunk and curious was trickling out of the citadel's doors to join her swelling crowd. And one purposeful figure was taking the stairs two at a time, going in.
"Who the hell are you anyway?" Grey shouted up at her, twisting the ends of his scarf in a motion that made her think of garrotting. This was a place for murderers after all.
"I'm new here, and I don't like what I see," But it wasn't Grey's scarf that whipped out towards her - someone else in the sea of heads beneath her had a lasso. She gunned the motor a little to rise an extra foot over their heads and when the lash of the rope came again she nailed it with the pulse rifle, dropping ashes and sparks glowing into the night.
"Those kids hanging outside the mansion. Did McKillip do that?"
A shot came out of the crowd. She saw it coming, but she let it impact harmlessly from the personal shield she had buckled across her chest. The flare of blue light licked up her from boots to crown and died away, leaving the crowd beneath her murmuring.
"They..." Gray wasn't looking at anyone any more, only his feet. "They did what you're trying to do. I told you. This is the way to get yourself hanged."
"That's great," Aurora sneered, "And you like that, do you?"
"It's not as though we've got much choice."
She laughed, watching over his head as someone came down the stairs from the mansion. Fur inside his coat, and an escort like a king's court. And yes, she'd peg the man as this little planetary king at a glance, not so much because he was huge and grizzled and built like a silverback gorilla, but because the bodies of the people around him seemed to open to him, chests and throats bared.
They were an ugly lot themselves, wearing the blood red greatcoats of kingdom warriors over a hotchpotch of filthy rags, every one of them with a side arm and the scars that said they knew how to use it. Shaved heads and scalp locks and long hair matted with bones, and they walked around him like they knew who was boss. She wondered if they'd watched as the Governor's staff struggled not to eat their dead. If they'd laughed. Fury came over her again like a tsunami.
McKillip and his lads stopped on the steps down from the mansion, and that was no good. She wanted them outside the citadel altogether. Outside the main gates which could then be secured behind them.
"McKillip!" she shouted. "Come out and fight me, you coward."
He had a voice like a kettle drum, and she could feel the force of his gaze from up here, hundreds of meters away, though he was pretending not to be interested.
"I got better things to do than fight with every jumped up nobody who thinks he can take me. Double rations for a month to whoever shoots the bastard."
Four of McKillip's men peeled off and began to stride down the stairs and out - yes - out of the citadel altogether. She hoped this little rigmarole was at least keeping everyone's attention off the hole in the back wall. Perhaps even now Atallah was easing the Governor's staff onto beds in the hospital, while Crouch headed down to the comms labs.
"Go ahead and try." Aurora spread her hands in invitation as another plasma bolt fizzled into nothingness on her shield. That had been from a different assailant. She marked their locations and faces on the kill list in her head. And then there was a clink and a sharp hot pain in her knee and she swiveled the scoop in time to see an arrow rebound from the housing of her bike's reactor, its head having come close enough to score a shallow red cut along her leg.
Without shifting the bazooka from her left arm she grabbed the closest rifle with her right and loosed a shot that burned the bow to ashes in his hands.
The crowd had come a little close for her liking, so she fired a couple of warning shots into the ground by their feet to drive them back. "I don't want to hurt any of you except maybe McKillip. I don't think you're on his side at all. If you were, wouldn't you be inside with the rest of them, stuffing your faces, instead of out here going hungry on rations that he controls?"
Gray raised his head, his fingers still fretting the tassels at the ends of his scarf. "He said we'd get out of here. Some of us. And he'd use the ship to bring in food and women for the rest."
"And instead he started hanging people," came a tight, nervous shout from the far boundary of the crowd.
"And now he's lost the ship," someone else agreed.
"He said we were free. What he meant was that we had to work for him!"
Even over on the mansion steps, they must have been able to hear the shift of sentiment, the bubbling up of anger through the shallower waters of fear.
"You kill him," McKillip bellowed. "You kill him, or I will, and then I'll have got the taste for it and who knows where I'll stop?"
"Threats," Aurora laughed, though she was beginning to feel for the convicts herself. She knew what it was like to fall for bright promises, how sick you felt and how stupid once you realized you'd been betrayed. "Did any of you sign on for that? Being bullied by men who are no better than you? Because I sure as hell didn't."
"You come out!" Gray raised his head and his voice, and she was struck cold by the anguish in his eyes. "You come out and answer for my boy. You come out and answer for Ricky, or you are a coward. You are."
McKillip's face suffused with blood. He set his shoulders back and his neck forward and charged out of the citadel like a bull, his men hard pressed to keep up with him.
"Thanks," Aurora nodded to Grey as she would to any of her crew who had done a hard thing well.
"You'd just better fucking win." He dashed angry tears from his face with the heel of his hand, and frowned. "Where's your boy anyway? Freckled kid with whiskey colored eyes."
Aurora could not guess what the combination of hurt and grief was doing to her new face, but Grey seemed to read something in it that he understood.
"I lost him."
"Yeah," he said darkly. "It goes that way."
All McKillip's men were out now, striding towards her, and they were dragging the onlookers with them. The citadel was emptied. No doubt somebody would be manning the comms rooms. There'd be a few cooks conscientious enough to be washing up, a few spies and thieves taking advantage of the exodus to sift through whatever goods had been left behind. But even the Froward's motley crew should be able to handle that.
Aurora had a moment of fierce triumph at the thought. Sometimes things did go right. Rare though that had been of late.
But no one had yet shut the gates. So it looked like she'd have to carry on with this rabble rousing a little while longer. She hoped it meant that the crew were busy securing the mansion and not that they'd been found and killed already.
Another thing not to think about. She studied McKillip as he strode towards her and her mood of exultation settled once more into dread. Something about the way his long strides ate up the ground, fast, powerful, making his men have to lope beside him just to keep up, said he was faster than a normal human. And the bulk of his frame made his head look tiny by contrast. That was not natural.
'Augmented for combat' she thought, not even pausing for a stab of cold at the fact that the inner voice that said it was Bryant's.
He'd said it happened in the Source worlds, but she hadn't ever seen it before. So the guy would have extra speed, extra strength. Anything else? She hugged the bazooka's reassuring curve to herself, wondering if she should just fire on him. That would be unwise. If he was as fast as her he'd roll out of the way of a bazooka, and she would have proved herself treacherous for nothing.
She could see from here the straps and rectangular plaque of a personal shield on his bare chest beneath his coat. So just shooting him in the head with a rifle wouldn't do either.
But his tiny pin head was his weakness nevertheless. She could still drive his nose up into his brain with the heel of her hand. Of course he'd expect it, but...
He reached the cleared area beneath her, his men forming a circle around him, pushing the crowd back. All of a sudden it looked like an arena, and she couldn't help but notice that he looked like a man who'd never lost a fight.
He grinned up at her, back in control. "I'm here. You want to fight me, come down and fight me man to man."
There was a ruthless humor in his pale blue eyes that reminded her of Admiral Keene, and made her feel small - dishonored and helpless. That really annoyed her.
"Right," she said, checking the citadel doors again. Still open, drat it. "Because you won't have your men mob me the moment I'm on the ground."
He laughed - one of those laughs that sounds as painfully fake as it is. "You think I'm scared of you, mede? I don't need help to kick your ass. Come down here and we'll settle this in a fair fight."
"You promise?"
He covered his heart with his hand. "I promise."
But the hand had slipped into the inside pocket of his coat. He brought it out with a disc launcher in it. She slammed on acceleration and altitude as fast as she could move, but he was faster. With a cough the weapon discharged, and its diamond covered disc soared out, rotating like a circular saw as it flew. It slashed the steering cables of her swoop casually as it went on to bury itself deep in the reactor core.
She could hear the whine and feel the shrill heat of an engine that was about to blow itself sky high. No time to think. She plucked a hairpin out of the ruined rat's nest of her hair, gunned the accelerator and jammed the pin into it to keep it on full power. The swoop lurched and sped away and Aurora jumped from its saddle into the crowd, losing the rifles that had been strapped to the carrier, jarring her ankles and one wrist.
The swoop flew on nearly three quarters of a mile before it blew itself up harmlessly over a distant alien stream, and she might have hoped the crowd would appreciate not having the fireball immolate them, but the crowd were drawing away from her like a hydrophobic liquid from a drop of water.
It wasn't McKillip who ran in to that spontaneous arena to face her. It was nine of his men.
She was going to have to get them to kill her, because, judging from their faces, she was not going to want to live as their prisoner. So she laughed and let all her contempt for liars shine out in the sound of it.
"He can't even keep a promise," she told the crowd, turning to make sure she got a good look at their faces. "You want to be ruled by a man who can't keep his own word?"
McKillip's men had seen her anti-pulse weapons shield too. They were slinging their useless rifles back on their backs and bringing out clubs, night-sticks, brass knuckles, a couple of knives. She swallowed, trying not to let herself appreciate how ugly this was going to get. Caught Gray's eye in the crowd, but he shook his head, looked away.
She got the message clear enough as her two boldest opponents ran in for the kill - she was on her own. No one was going to help her now.
She watched them both move, noticing a weak ankle on one, a blind eye on the other. Well, ever since she'd lost her daughter she'd been waiting for this. Maybe she was going down, but before that? Probably the only true thing Bryant had ever said was that she had a heck of a lot of anger stored up. Now she got to use it. She was going to make them all pay and pay hard before they finally took her down.