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"I'LL GO AFTER THE FIRST strike," Aurora said, looking out at the calm night sky, where the ring's faint reflection made a dim brown crescent through the sparse stars. It seemed a paltry sort of sky under which to die, but she guessed you didn't get to choose that kind of thing. “If we're still alive by then, there will be a point to it.”
"Then we should get below," Atallah plucked at her sleeve. The doctor's eyes were calm and sharp, as though Aurora's immobility was a symptom she recognized. Aurora thought It won't make a difference but couldn't bring herself to say it. She breathed in and then out, letting go. After all, there were worse ways of dying. At least it would be quick, and clean, and pretty damn spectacular.
"I'm sorry," she started, "that I hadn't had a chance to get to know any of you. You've all..." She was going to say "made me proud," but something was happening above the volcano, and it was not what she expected. A bright golden red star had appeared directly above it and appeared to be falling - no, not falling, accelerating towards it.
The light grew larger, and she could see a shape inside it - a vessel of some kind, with the deltawing shape of the governor's launch and flames around its glowing bow. Her heart stopped her throat as it plunged out of the atmosphere and straight into the mountain's crater. Her hands cramped with clenching and her teeth ached as she ground them, tense, waiting for the explosion.
Was that Bryant? What kind of a stupid, magnificent move was that for a man who was naturally such a weasel? Had he lost his mind? Had he... Had he killed himself to save them?
That didn't seem at all like the man she thought she knew.
But then coming back at all didn't seem like the treacherous, self-centerd scumbag she thought she knew.
"What the hell was that?" She cast a startled glance at Atallah, found her with her hands over her mouth, wide eyed and clearly no better informed than she was herself.
Still no sound of an explosion, and the glow over the caldera had dimmed as if the incandescent craft had cooled, and the machine under it gone dormant. Aurora turned and sped down the steps, toggling the comms while she ran.
"Crouch?"
"Ma’am?"
“What just happened? Was that the governor's Dash?"
"Um..." Someone was shouting on a channel in the background. She heard Crouch flicking through screens, and the rolling trundle of a wheeled chair being pushed between stations. "Yes. I think it must have been. It's been flown into the bore of the launcher and wedged there, and it looks like the weapon's been taken off line."
"Is it..." Whole, she wanted to ask. Did he bring it down whole? Or did he kill himself doing it? He wouldn't have, though, would he? Wouldn't have endangered himself. He'd have figured out a way of buying them time that didn't involve risk to his own skin.
"I can't really tell what's going on over there," Crouch sounded apologetic. "Everyone's yelling at once. But the launch has been aborted, which means the whole sequence will have to be reset and the blockage cleared before they can fire at us again."
Again Aurora paused on the stairs. This was getting to be a habit. "So we have a window to fly over there and secure the place. I want Mboge and Citlali to meet me at the swoop pad asap. Atallah? You and Ademola take charge of the siege while I'm gone."
A ping from the com interrupted her, she toggled it on again. "Ma’am?"
"Headquarters has answered our request for assistance. Where will you take the call?"
HQ calling? They always liked you to show your face to them, and that was a potential disaster right now, with Aurora looking like a particularly rugged man. Even if she disabled the viewer, her voice gave her away at once.
Well, the blocked launcher could wait five minutes while she found out how long it would take for their relief to get here. If there was a force stationed in the Fuxi system it could be as little as two days. How things turned! She'd been surrendered to death only moments ago, and now there was no end to the good news. She loped back down the stairs for real this time, down the corridor between staterooms the back stairs to ground level.
"Tell Mboge to get to the governor's audience chamber. Let's look like we're officially in control. He's going to take it for me, as I'm a little... unconventional right now."
Crouch laughed. "Is that what they're calling it these days?" And it occurred to Aurora sharply that this was the first time anyone had mentioned her change, and maybe that was remarkable.
"You never did say what happened," Atallah smiled at her, jogging effortlessly at her side as they swung past the formal dining room from which O'Kane had pilfered all the plates.
"I..." she wasn't sure how to explain this without also reminding them that Bryant had broken out of containment, that she'd come to the planet with him. Without getting into the whole subject of whether he was alive or dead, a defamed innocent or an escaped criminal. She wasn't entirely sure herself on that point. "I had an accident with some nanobots. I'm on the lookout for someone to turn me back. This..." wasn't my choice seemed ungrateful somehow, however true it was. "Has turned out pretty handy, but I'm hoping it won't be permanent."
"Is it ... weird?" Atallah gave her a fascinated, skeptical look, woman to woman, and she had to laugh, skidding into the main reception room just as Mboge came jogging through the further door.
"So weird," she rolled her eyes. "And gross. Don't tell any of the men I said so."
Atallah grinned. After examining the setup of the room, she positioned herself behind the view screen, where she should not be picked up by HQ's cameras. Mboge nodded at Aurora and at her gesture settled himself in the governor's chair. Aurora stood by the door, where she could observe the conversation with the shadow of a velvet curtain cast across her face - the only part of her that was still vaguely recognizable to anyone who might know her.
Mboge smoothed a hand down his braids and twitched the creases of his trousers straight. At some point during the siege he must have located a clothes brush, because there wasn't a speck of dust on his uniform, and his brass buttons gleamed. When he was satisfied, he raised the com to his mouth. "Morwen? Connect us up please."
The viewscreen expanded, and then half of the room seemed to slip into light and cloud. This sector's HQ was on top of a needle sky-hook in the ex-Source planet of Hector. However dull the dusty, file filled room and the sallow man who sat behind a scuffed desk there, the panoramic windows showed a floor of clouds in every direction, with a greenish sun turning their soft hollows into strewn emeralds.
Aurora didn't know the admiral behind the desk. His uniform read Lehmann, and he was a small, frail-looking elderly man, whose skull-cap seemed to be pressing his face toward the floor. He returned Mboge's punctilious salute with a more worn version of his own.
"You are not Captain Campos."
"No, sir." Mboge put both hands down on the arm rests of the throne and did not turn his head in Aurora's direction, though he looked like it was a struggle. "She is..." his natural honesty warred with the instructions he had been given to tell the Admiral that Aurora was otherwise occupied, and compromised on "Indisposed. I am Lt. Felix Mboge, her second in command. She asked me to take the call. We're very glad to hear from you sir.
“The situation is this: The criminals here have taken over the colony and begun using a weapon they found to attack passing ships. They shot the Froward down when we came close enough. We have managed to take possession of the colony's citadel and to temporarily disable the weapon, but we're outnumbered a hundred to one, the governor and his staff have been maltreated and are very weak, we're in a siege position and we would welcome backup. How soon can you come to relieve us and re-establish order?"
Admiral Lehmann lifted his dark eyes to look at someone off screen, and fidgeted with his stylus, making a note in the corner of his writing area. Aurora's hopes plummeted right then, even before he began to speak. The words came after her certainty and only held it down.
"Mr. Mboge," the admiral stroked his fingertips down the shell of his ear as if he was petting a dog. "Your request for assistance has been discussed. The threat level of the colony is minimal, and the impacts of its secession are unimportant to our long term plans. As a result, I regret to tell you that we have determined that it would not be cost effective to mount a relief expedition."
Cost effective?
It was worse than she'd thought. Worse than she could easily comprehend. She'd known it would be bad since she saw the look in his eye, but this didn't make sense. She'd thought he was going to say that they couldn't spare a force at present from the Horsehead front, that a rescue might take months. But not that they weren't even going to bother to try.
Lehmann swallowed and his gaze skittered off screen again. "We will of course send the appropriate condolences and compensation to your families, who will be told that you died as heroes and martyrs of the faith."
"No." Mboge half rose from his seat. "That is unacceptable. We have children on board. Midshipman Iverson is twelve years old, and in perfect health. You can't just—"
"On the contrary," Lehmann's voice grew brassy with anger. "You sacrificed your lives for the Lord the moment you signed up. This service is not required to explain itself to you."
"It's not your order, though, is it?" Aurora was angry enough and despairing enough to step out of the shadow and let herself be seen. "I can see you hate this. Who authorized it? Who was it who thought leaving us here to die would solve all their problems?"
Lehmann didn't recognize her, that was clear enough from his uncomfortable smile, but he reached out and angled the transmitter, so the man standing behind his view screen could be seen.
The floor fell out from beneath Aurora as a wash of cold so profound she thought she'd dived into liquid oxygen punched the breath out of her. The man's clear blue eyes and refined, patrician handsomeness made her arms ache with emptiness and her bent back fingers throb.
She thought she wouldn't live through the shock, but she did. Her daughter's father, Admiral Keene, carefully sweeping his inconvenient misdemeanors under the rug.
"I'm sorry," Lehmann adjusted his screens again and looked out on the vibrant summer sky. "But the decision has been made. there's nothing more to say. Good bye."
He leaned forward and cut the connection, leaving Aurora with a dark pillar in her vision where Keene had stood, and the knowledge that no help was coming. Worse than that was the knowledge that they had been abandoned because of her. Keene had seen a chance to wipe his personal history clean and he had taken it. Banks and Citlali, Atallah and Crouch, Mboge and Ademola and all her other people, they were being thrown away, because of her.
The knowledge was so heavy she literally could not stand up under it. She staggered to one of the audience chairs, her boots obscenely loud in the stunned silence. Sinking down there, doubled over, she hid her eyes behind her hands.
A long silence. From outside, came the percussive sound of something being hammered repeatedly on the compound doors, and the zap of stun rifles. Then silence again.
Atallah came to sit beside her, folding her long hands on her lap rather than daring to touch. "Ma'am? What do we do?"
"This is my fault," Aurora admitted, unable to think past that. She felt so sick with despair and guilt she thought she might physically throw up. "Because I am an embarrassment to them. But they could have... they shouldn't have sacrificed you too. I'm sorry."
One of Atallah's hands escaped its controlling grasp and crept out to squeeze Aurora's knee. "I..."she began, hesitant at first and then picking up speed. Her gaze looking away from Aurora, fixed on the far corner of the floor. "My father was cruel, to myself and to my younger brothers and sisters. I told the police. I had him arrested. I brought shame to my name and my whole family."
Mboge leaned down to wipe a scuff off his shoe. "I was delegated to transport senator Tarr on his victory tour around the inner systems,” he said slowly. “I found out that he had been interfering with the midshipmen and I told the press. They tried to claim that I was the criminal, but they could find no evidence against me, so I was sent to this petty little penal transport to keep me out of the way. If your disgrace had not been so public, I would have carried on thinking I was the only one of whom this was true, but..."
"Crouch had a lover," Atallah interrupted, as if startled into speech. "Or there were rumors of it. Another woman. No one could prove anything, but..."
Mboge laughed suddenly, bitter and nervous, but bright, as though he was adding pieces together to make a picture he could not believe he had never seen before. "Ademola refused to execute his prisoners because they were bound. It is not just you, Captain, who is an embarrassment to them. You, me, the doctor, Crouch. I wonder how many more. Citlali – she's good at what she does but no one wants to admit a tiny little girl like that could be a formidable marine. So they bury her here. All of us who were too honest, or too good, or who made a single mistake after a lifetime of heroism. We're... inconvenient.”
He laughed again, like a bearing of teeth. “They want to bury us all. We cannot let them. We must not let them. Captain, tell us what to do."
Aurora had always been successful. Her family, mother and father, elder brothers and little sister, had loved her and and that had seemed normal. It had seemed normal to have people around you who liked and valued you. Normal for life to be a series of challenges to be overcome one after another, each one leading on to something bigger.
She'd trusted Keene because she'd never had cause to distrust anyone before. But he had knocked the foundations out from under her once and now he'd just done it again.
That there were people who got thrown away had never occurred to her. She'd thought that was the whole point of God's kingdom - the whole point of fighting to bring people into the Abode of the Book, the Kingdom of Peace. So that they would be brought under the control of a government that took its sacred duty to care for them seriously.
But Bryant had been falsely arrested, Atallah and Mboge cast out for trying to bring justice, she and Crouch shown no mercy at all. It wasn't...
How was she supposed to go on from this? Her whole life, she'd believed in these people, in their goodwill and their wisdom, and they had made it clear that she was nothing to them. The fingers of her left hand ached where they had been broken in a firefight on New Atlantis, and the dog tag on which she had had engraved the initials of all her dead friends slid further down her chest as she bowed her head lower.
What was there left to fight for?
"Aurora," said Lina gently. "Your crew needs you to get up. Please get up."
Maybe that would be enough. She uncurled, pulling the necklace out from the collar of her shirt and rubbing a thumb over the tiny letters. They were too small to be seen by the naked eye - engraved under microscope - but they made a faint bittersweet roughness under her fingertips, almost filling one side. None of them would want her to give up either, though that was easy for them to say, well out of it as they were.
She tucked it back and rubbed a hand over her face. "Okay.” It took an obscene amount of effort to drive her thoughts out of their standstill, but she applied it. “Okay, let me think. So, no relief. But the option of getting out on the governor's launch is back on the table, so I need to—"
Her com link chimed. She stood up to answer it, trying to work some vigor into her blood by pacing. "Go ahead."
"Captain," it was Crouch again, but she found herself thinking differently of the woman now she knew Crouch too must know what it felt like to be abhorred for having fallen in love. There was a kinship there.
"I've got an incoming call from the governor's ship. Which, unfortunately has already been un-wedged from the weapon and moved to a silo. It's Bryant Jones. The one who broke out of our cells and took the bridge? He says you'll want to speak to him." She scoffed. "I said you had other things to worry about than one errant—"
"Put him on viewscreen," Aurora interrupted. Everything was unmoored now, and strange. It was hard to tell who was an ally and who was an enemy, hard to tell what to feel.
"Yes ma’am. Here you go."
Bryant's freckled face blinked into existence in the center of the room as the screen flowered out once more. Artificial light brought blue highlights out of his cotton-candy hair and made his faintly red toned, mahogany eyes look dull as bloodstains. Or maybe that was worry, because he looked like a kid who's been caught with his hand in the cookies, defiant and anxious and gearing himself up to lie about it.
She remembered that he'd thrown her away too, but it didn't prevent the stir of exasperated fondness in the depths of her at the sight of his guilty face.
"Hi," he said, cocking his head to one side in a nervous shrug. "It's me."
"So it is."
"I ah. I saved your life. You can thank me if you like." Maybe he'd expected shouting because he was thawing already, his mouth tilting up and lines of humor adding to the lines of stress around his eyes.
"It was pretty heroic, though I say it myself. I feel you would have been impressed if you'd seen it."
Unbelievable. Mboge and Atallah were both staring between the two of them like they couldn't work out what they were seeing, and some lightness came back into Aurora's bones. Today was terrible, but Bryant was somehow always amusing.
"I did see it," she acknowledged. "I was standing on the roof. I saw you come down like a meteor and ram the only working spaceship on the planet into a hole. Are you mad?"
"It was the only way I could think of to save you," he said, and now she wished there weren't other people in the room, listening. She wished that sounded more like a lie. He threw her away, he wouldn't...
Except that they had let him go. She had let him go, and what he'd done with that freedom was to turn around and come straight back.
She didn't know what she was supposed to believe about that but this was not the place to be talking about it. "What's your situation?" she said instead. It was an acceptable substitute for 'are you okay?'
"Maybe you should come over and see," he said with a smile. It didn't look strained or coerced. He wasn't holding himself as if there was a man just out of shot with a blaster trained on him, but then he was a good liar.
"Show me the room."
Amused, he picked up his com unit and turned it. She got a quick 360 of the control room of the governor's launch and a glimpse of hangar out of one of the portholes. "I'm actually in control here at the moment,” said Bryant breezily. “I've got a whole bunch of criminal tech support guys pinned down in the corridors, and the boss of this colony is going to notice when I'm not dragged up in front of him tomorrow. If he hasn't already. I don't know about that part, I've got the doors locked and guarded. But you could come down the caldera on a swoop. I'll have one of my people show you in."
Her mind reeled at the thought. How the hell had he managed to secure an entire mechanised compound on his own? But of course, if it was mechanised, Bryant must have been in his element. He had certainly managed to wreak havoc enough on the Froward. She really needed to stop thinking of him as endearingly harmless. He was actually kind of terrifying.
"Your 'people'?"
His expression of false bravado faltered, showing weariness and yearning under it. "Please. I've done this much, but I don't dare open the door and I don't know what to do next."
She had no idea what made him think she had a clue either, but she was the Captain, and it was her job to know. Maybe something would occur on the flight across. "Okay," she nodded. "I'll be coming in high, and soon."
He nodded jerkily back, pressing his lips together for a second, and right. Yes. Now she could see that he was scared and all alone over there, and trying not to show it.
"Give me twenty minutes."
After she cut the connection, Mboge and Atallah were silent for a moment, but they watched her from their separate seats with the same look of patient incredulity. She'd been thinking that they just couldn't have been very good at their jobs to end up here in the reject bin of the penal service, so now she was ashamed of herself. She had ended up here too after all, that should have told her something.
"So..." Lina prompted after a moment. There was a renewed attack on the door - the thudding sounded like someone had found axes - but it ceased in seconds with another volley of stunner fire.
Eventually the charges of the guns would run down, and the criminals would be free to chop down the doors, but Aurora had done the maths and they'd all be dead of starvation by that point, so it wasn't a present concern. What was a present concern was trying to explain Bryant to her crew when she wasn't certain she understood exactly what was going on with him herself. The sense of giddy relief at hearing his voice was making it hard not to smile, inappropriately. But she didn't like to imagine what they would make of that.
"You remember Jones broke out of containment on the Froward?"
They nodded together, though it seemed a very long time ago.
"He ran into the Froward's pinnace. When I followed him he launched her. I'd just got him under control when we were clipped by the second rock. We crash landed five hundred clicks away and had to survive together while we got back here. He, ah..."
No sense in not spitting it out now. She had no superiors any more who might gainsay her, and her crew could not now betray Bryant even if they tried.
"He told me he was falsely accused. I believed him. I swore if he helped me get the colony back under control, I would get him out of here. This—"
She gestured with both hands to her male body, suffered a renewed stab of misery at the reminder of it, and then the startling realization that it could still be put right. "This abomination was a piece of 'help' he sprung on me against my will, but..."
It could still be fixed. Something loosened in her chest, she could breathe again, and with the release some of the weight smoked off her back. "I have to admit he was right. It came in very handy. But if he's got a secure location and time, I'm going to go and get it changed back. If that place is under his control, there must be something we can do with it that'll give us an edge. You're in charge here in the mean time, Mboge."
"Yes ma'am. Give me five minutes to detail you some cover fire before you set off."
Mboge's suggestion was a good one. As soon as the crowd around the base of the walls saw movement up on the roof a hail of pulse fire and cutting discs rose all around them, but Aurora took the bike up in a tight spiral, building altitude as she held position as close to the center of the citadel as possible, where the shots could not bend over the walls. By the time she'd risen enough for the distant shooters to have a direct line of sight, the shots and discs were spent by the time they reached her. She stabilized in the thin cold wind above the clouds and leaned into a wide turn that would take her out over orchard and ribbon trees, to the glassy black slopes of Mount Kolima, where she could take a spiral down into the throat.
Several small roads cut into the mountain at ground level, and a little way into each tunnel a mesh gate had been closed over the path. No one yet seemed intent on breaking in. The crowd outside the citadel must not have realized that this facility too had been lost. But when McKillip saw her fly down into it, he would surely realize then, and even if he could not breach the mesh gates, there seemed nothing to stop him from just climbing up and lowering himself into the caldera as she was doing.
At least, so she thought, until some kind of aiming array- a tube that folded out in several interlocking pieces - folded itself back behind her and blocked her exit. She descended into hewn rock, where emergency lights gleamed blue and could not illuminate a darkness large as worlds.
"Hi," said Bryant's voice on the bike's radio, "I'm infiltrating your carrier signal. Just follow the yellow dot. It should be safe, everyone I know of is locked up except for me.”
The bike's guidance screen flashed green a moment and then displayed a map of the compound with a destination marked with a flag, and a little arrow for herself. She flew down onto a mag lev track made by giants, saw intricate machinery covered in dust. Crude wooden pulley systems so new they still smelled of sap were patched over the gaps. Clearly there were parts of this machine the criminals could not understand, and currently they were being operated by muscle power and grappling chains.
It grew warmer, and she thought she heard a skittering as of many legs against the walls. A final corner and there was the governor's launch in a repair cradle, and there, leaning outside it, trying to seem innocent, was Bryant Jones looking thin and sleepless and ill at ease.
She had no idea until that point that she was going to park the bike, swing off it, stride up to him and then kiss him until neither of them could breathe. It just seemed the only thing that adequately expressed how she felt, and he did not let out a word of complaint.