To the Victor

by R Coots

  She blinked at him, questions clear on her face. Probably wondering if her translator chip was working. Or if he’d actually used all the words she thought he had. His expression must have been enough to discourage her. He’d given her an incredible amount of leeway in the past few hours, but there were some lines you didn’t cross with the warlord. That was a sure way to get yourself killed if you were a soldier, or sent back to scutwork if you were a tech or another of the women. They’d all learned that if he said he knew something, then he knew something.

  “Get in there,” he told her. Once he was sure she wasn’t going to trip and break her neck, he turned back to the other techs. He had atmospheric and geologic left. He pointed at the atmospheric one. “Get up to the surface. Send Quinn down here. Tell him I want a status on the evac.” She nodded and took off.

  The other woman watched him from under her lashes, sullen exhaustion seeping from every pore. He watched her back for a moment, trying to decide what to do with her so he could get the feeling of jellified acid off his exposed skin. Finally, he shrugged and pointed back to the control room. “You able to use the equipment in there?”

  She nodded, jaw set.

  “Then hook in. Get everything you can. I want to know who put this here and why. And then I want to know who repurposed it. Got me?”

  She nodded again, spun on her heel, and stalked off. He watched her go for a minute, as much because she filled out her uniform perfectly as to be sure she’d actually do what she’d been told. Then he looked back at the Room of Hell. It deserved the capital letters. He hadn’t run across many long-term cryo facilities in his life, but he knew what a properly set-up one should look like. He almost wished he had one of his old Academy instructors here, just so he could watch the man have an apoplectic fit.

  Picking his way through the clear spots on the floor, he headed for the computer-tech. “Well?”

  “The system’s been in sleep mode for years. Decades, maybe.” She tapped a few more things on her slate and turned it to show him. “Whoever put them here wanted to make sure they would stay in the caskets, even if they were found. And that nobody could so much as start the wake process without the right passcodes.” She frowned, slid a bar to the side, and pointed at the scrambled mess of Imperial block letters mixed with Fleet script. “It doesn’t make sense. Short-term cryo is easier to set up. If you plan to come back in your lifetime, why lock them down like this?”

  He didn’t bother looking for patterns on the slate. The Fleet didn’t dick around with training its people. Some of the computer techs were as good as any Imperial Crack. This woman might even be one of the prodigies. He’d stick to things he knew how to run. “Can you get through it? We can wake’m up, might be able to answer your questions.”

  She took the slate back, irritation and bad humor fizzing over her skin like diluted acid. “Opening the caskets will be easier than making the system start the drips.”

  Syrus snorted, but kept his mouth shut. She wasn’t a med-tech. She was just as unqualified to make guesses about cryo as he was. The Navlad Empire still used cryo to send out long-range scouts for new Barbicans or to deal with criminals and renegade sai when the legal system couldn’t cope. In the past three or so years, he’d never heard of the Fleet using the tech. “Milord?”

  He looked up to see Quinn standing in the doorway, squinting at the light and the mess of the room. Clapping the computer-tech on the shoulder, Syrus told her to do what she could about the caskets and waded over to the other man. “Status up top?”

  Quinn nodded his head in a shortened bow. “As you said, there are more of the creatures. They are sitting on the edge of the clearing. Watching.”

  Syrus hooked his thumbs in his belt. “Good thing we’re doing evac from the roof then. How’s that going?”

  Quinn gave a half shrug. “It is as clear as it can be, milord. We could not remove the trees from the sides of the bunker, but they have been trimmed so as to leave the roof open. It will be a tight fit for the ship, but it should be manageable.”

  Syrus tipped his head to one side and gave the man a look. He was as muted as ever, but something in the set of his jaw . . . After a moment, the second gave in. “The men are displeased.”

  “Tell me something new,” Syrus replied. Of course the men were displeased. They usually were, unless they were pounding a planet to dust.

  Quinn shook his head. “All but one of a squad dead. The others wounded. The tech—” His eyes flickered down, to where the tags of the soldiers and the woman’s collar were wrapped around Syrus’s wrist. “If we knew it would be dangerous, we should have left the techs behind. Or brought more men.”

  “Or maybe you people should give your women better armor when they go planetside. And something other than a popgun to defend themselves with.”

  A solar flare of rage erupted from the second. Then it was gone. The expression on the man’s face stayed as blank as ever. Syrus had to hand it to him. Quinn knew how to hide what he was feeling. Which meant that checking his face for blisters would raise far too many questions. Instead, he grinned and leaned back against the door frame. “You got a problem with the orders I’ve been giving, Quinn?”

  “You are the warlord,” he replied, bowing his head. Which meant jack shit if the man ever decided to stop playing puppeteer behind the throne. The tightrope the two of them had been walking the last three years felt a little wobbly. The longer Syrus stayed with the Fleet, the more he figured out and the less influence Quinn had over his decisions.

  But the man kept following orders, including the ones that’d landed them in this room. Looked like he wasn’t quite ready to stick a knife in his warlord’s back. So Syrus decided to take Quinn at face value for now and look back at the room instead.

  The tech was still standing next to one of the caskets with her slate propped up on its edge, typing furiously and muttering curses under her breath. Syrus laughed to himself. The Fleet women liked to put up a front of unflappable competence. She must have felt safe enough to vent now that he wasn’t standing next to her.

  So long as she got it out somehow, he didn’t care if she tried to hide it from him or not. People who tried to keep their emotions hidden didn’t usually do a very good job of it. Being around them was like being wrapped in wet wool. Itchy and extremely annoying. Eventually he started prodding them, just so they’d blow up and give him a bit of peace.

  “There is one thing, milord.”

  Syrus looked back at his current wet blanket and sighed. Prodding the man would likely end them all up in pieces. Syrus wasn’t sure even he would survive the fallout if the man ever did let loose. “What now, Quinn? Riots up in the Fleet? Someone trying to take over? Make it interesting, please.”

  “The pilot forwarded this. Likely to you as well.” Quinn held out his slate.

  “What am I looking at?” Syrus turned the slate sideways, trying to make sense of the data. It looked familiar. “A dummy-sat? What, did the thing malfunction?”

  Quinn shook his head. “No milord. It’s another Fleet sat. It came through the Barbican behind us.”

  Syrus raised his eyebrows. “I thought we came through the only address on the gate.” Check against the count when he’s yelling at the rard.

  Quinn’s eyelids lowered. “It was the only key techs could find in the last system, but—”

  Syrus waved at him with the hand not holding the tablet. “Yeah. Doesn’t mean the Barb here had that address.” Syrus flipped through the data. The Fleet put dummy-sats through Barbicans so they could latch on to the housing on the other side. They had two functions. One, to keep the gateway between systems open. Sometimes a Barbican was coded to reset the locks, even after the key had been given. Unless a ship transmitted the key just as it breached the grav shield that contained the Barbican’s wormhole, they slapped up against the laws of physics and lost. The dummy-sats also acted as a relay for whatever sats the Fleet sent to scount the system ahead after the Barb was unlocked. Ba
sic system data, for the most part. Astronomical information, traffic, so on. Syrus had sent out at least five splinter Fleets since he’d put on the Helm. The records said there were more out there, older, pushing through their sections of the Barbican network. But this was the first he’d heard of a Branch meeting back up with the main Fleet.

  “We sure this is Fleet? Empire hasn’t gotten hold of the dummies? Copied them?” As far as Syrus knew, the Empire never used dummy-sats, but it was always a possibility. He wasn’t interested in hailing a Branch of the Fleet just to find he’d really let an Islosar of the Navlad Military know where they were. The Fleet was good, but it wasn’t equipped to deal with a full space battle. Not after the system they’d just taken.

  “See here.” Quinn flicked the screen of the slate a couple times, then tapped. A line of code resolved into a thorny bush growing out the top of a human skull, complete with unfurling leaves and a hinged jaw. The sigil of the Kuchen Fleet.

  Syrus fought the urge to curl his lip.

  If Quinn noticed, he didn’t say anything, just kept the information coming. “Even when the Empire has found the dummies, it’s not been able to fake the code that encrypts the seal. They’ve tried, yes. As of yet they've only produced poor imitations. So far, this system hasn’t noticed that their gate has been infiltrated.” He tapped the screen again. The eye sockets lit from inside, and the slender branches on the main trunk of the gnarled digital bramble grew slightly, more leaves budding out. A tiny neon-green snake slithered down the warped wood as it emerged from the skull’s nasal passage and disappeared into the tangle of roots anchored somewhere behind the jaw. Syrus ignored the tone of the man’s voice, which told him he’d have known the seal was intact if he’d been Fleet and not an outsider, and handed the tablet back. Privately he was of the opinion that the closer they got to the Core of the Empire, the more likely it was that Imperial loyalists would find a Crack who could break the coding on the seal and duplicate it. If they could do that, they wouldn’t be dumb enough to let the Fleet know they’d noticed someone cracking open their Barbican. Hopefully he’d be long dead before that happened. There were a lot of solar systems to Conquer before the Fleet made it to the capital.

  “Check with the stat-sats sent into the next system. Get a scout over to the last Barbican and have them send a message to the Branch Fleet. Let them know who we are. I’m not having a bitch fight over who gets first rights to any system while there are two branches of the Fleet in spitting distance.”

  Quinn’s lips thinned. Every so often, the fucker forgot Syrus had been surviving as Warlord with this bunch of testosterone-hyped freaks for more than a while now. Instead, he looked at his warlord and saw an outFleet invader. And they wound up having a little discussion. Like this one.

  Syrus leaned in so he could see the hard eyes under the helmet. “What Branch of the Fleet do I lead, Quinn?”

  “You don’t lead a Branch.” The man’s words were clipped and hard. “You are Warlord of the Turan. Main trunk of all the Fleets together.”

  “Then whichever warmonger complains, that’s what you tell him. You fuckers put me in charge. I didn’t ask for it. But I won’t fucking sit on my thumb and let you people tell me how to run my Fleet. He has a different key to try from his end, that’s fine. He can use it from here. After he checks in. He doesn’t like how I do things, he can Challenge me.”

  Quinn saluted, turned on his heel, and walked off.

  Grumbling about bastards and pissants, Syrus went back to the tech and the caskets. “Well?” he snapped at her. “You made any progress?”

  “Yes and no, milord. I was about to come get you. I’ve unlocked the seals. You’ll have to open them yourself.”

  Finally. He started with the closest casket. When the tech made as if to help him, he waved her off. Fleet born or not, she didn’t have the muscle to manage it. Carefully, first one end and then the other, he inched the cover off the edge of the casket. Gravity took a while to realize that he was moving something and could use a hand, but once he’d pulled enough of the lid away from the box, all he had to do was keep it from getting out of control and knocking him over.

  The tech had disconnected as many of the wires and tubes as she could, so there wasn’t much left to get tangled when he caught the thing with the toe of his boot. Not the smartest thing he’d done today, but not the dumbest either. At least the boot was armored, so he was only dealing with bruises, not broken bones. Getting his foot out from under the lid was less fun. A few muttered curses and a punch to the top edge of the lid and he was free. He only tripped over a cable once on his way to the other box. The lid for that one came off just as easily.

  Now, without the fogged synthglass in the way, he could see who was inside.

  She would have been beautiful if she hadn’t been so close to death.

  Her pale skin was yellowed and chalky. A clear breathing mask covered the bottom half of her face, its curved lines distorting the shape of her lips, which should have been full and red but were a dusty sort of mulberry instead. Red hair peeked out the edges of the skullcap covering her head. Nobody had figured out how to make hair stop growing in cryo. The net built into the neck of the suit was full and then some, billowing around her head like some sort of amorphous creature from the oceans. He revised the estimate of years and put his guess firmly in the Decades column.

  Trying to ignore the march of memories through his mind and the medicinal smell in his nose, Syrus pulled off his gauntlets and reached in, gritting his teeth against the feel of the gel that half-filled the casket. It was meant to cushion the body. Help keep the temperature down, too. That it hadn’t dried and turned to rubbery plastic was good. Meant the seal had never been damaged. At least not till he and his people showed up. That also meant it was cold as a frozen zone planet and he was going to lose his fingers if he left them in there too long.

  The slipsuits were designed to let the gel through. Something about hydration and keeping friction down. He’d listened to the lecture once, but it was one thing to hear about it, another to see—

  There. A pulse. Faint, but still there. The suit was looser than it should be. When he cupped the back of her head and started to lift, the skullcap nearly came off. Grumbling, he stuck his other hand in and eased her up. Malnourishment at the very least. From the fine lines in her skin, dehydration too. And whatever current had been run through the suit to keep her muscles stimulated, she’d been in here too long for it to counter the atrophy. He needed a med-tech to look her over to be sure of the damage, but it looked like she was on her last legs.

  The computer-tech made a small noise over on her side of the room. Lowering the woman back into the box and making sure the breathing mask hadn’t shifted, Syrus shook cryo gel off his hands and went to check on the tech. She stared down into the other casket with a look of horrified fascination, hands outstretched and trembling. Hitching himself over the lid on his side of the unit, he propped a hip on the edge and looked down.

  And got blasted by a wave of condensed anguish that would have put a neutron star to shame. He nearly fell off the box, saved only by grabbing for the edge. “What the fuck?” he gasped, once he could breathe again.

  “I know milord,” the tech said, completely misunderstanding his reaction. “If she’d stayed in here another year. Another month, even!”

  She was skeletal. There was no other way to put it. The slipsuit lay in wrinkles and folds over her body where it should have been tight and smooth. The bones of her cheeks were sharp, even with the oxygen mask in the way. And her skin . . .

  Once, in another life, Syrus’d been dragged over to a tanner’s booth in the market and made to stand while piece after piece of animal hide was held up to his arm. Straight tanned hide would never work. It was too pale. Eventually they’d found a warm brown dye called, of all things, saddle. It had only been slightly darker than his skin. The logic had been that if people mistook his shirt for his skin, they’d just think his family was too po
or to afford activating it in the first place. Not much better, but enough to keep storekeepers from booting him out the door anytime he was sent to run errands. Nobody wanted someone with his glyph anywhere near their oh-so-precious merchandise.

  This woman, though—she was darker than him. Dusky-brown skin that wasn’t quite ebony, but didn’t match any of the lighter woods either. The yellow cast looked to be the same jaundice as other woman. The light was bad, and he was blocking most of it, but that didn’t keep him from seeing the finely webbed lines and high relief of the cracks that said she hadn’t been properly hydrated in a long time. The woman in the first coffin was in bad shape. This one was worse.

  “Get up to the surface,” he told the tech. “Get Quinn back here. Or one of the others, if he’s still talking to the pilot.”

  She took one look at him, anger long gone, and ran for the door. He heard her stumble once, but didn’t look to see if she was ok. His attention was all for the women in the caskets. He needed to get the various IV lines and sensors unhooked from the slip suits before Quinn showed up and asked why he was doing this.

  If he left them here like this, well. His little-used conscience would have something to say about that on his deathbed.

  >><<

  Quinn took one look at Syrus, arms full of stick-thin woman and covered in cryo gel, and headed straight for the other casket to fish out the other woman. Together they picked their way back across the floor, collected the computer-tech at the door, called the geo-tech out of the control room, and headed for the surface.

  The setting sun smacked Syrus right in the eyes. He winced as he crouched to lay the woman down on the silcrete in front of the bunker. The gel had dried into a tight rubbery layer over his armor, and his hands had gone numb long before they made it up to the ground level. By the time he got the cap off her head and the mass of hair pulled out of every bit of the suit it had grown into, he had most of his eyesight back. The soldier standing guard stared at him.