by Alex Oliver
"Using the brains God gave me to better the lives of my fellow creatures," he insisted, his voice rising as they closed in. The reek of his own fear filled his nostrils and his mouth and made him gag.
"We read what you did to that kid." Petros raised a skeletal hand and landed a fingertip gently on the tip of Bryant's nose. He closed his eyes, fairly sure that was where it was going to come next - a hard poke in one or other eye.
"They took him off the table before he was finished!" Bryant was still angry about this. He thought he'd be angry about it until the day he died.
"How many cuts about the neck was it? And you're still claiming it was some kind of accident?"
Eighteen wasn't really a child, Bryant told himself again, and the boy had wanted it so much. Everyone had heard of the fabled mer-people of Genovefa. Who was he to say his client couldn't run away to become one? They would have been workable gills if he'd been allowed to finish - if he hadn't been torn away from the table with the bloody scalpel still in his hand, while the state-approved butchers had tried to sew the boy up again. He could have told them that would never work.
"I tried to save him! I was in the middle of an operation. If they'd only let me finish, he'd still be--"
The jab came not to his eye but to his nose. Two fingers up his nostrils, jammed in until he feared they'd fracture the nasal cartilage, even the bone, and then press in to pierce his brain. He grabbed Petros' wrist, but his full strength couldn't shift it as he was raised on his tip toes, pain like white noise static, high shrieking out of the speakers of the universe. Needles, needles and where was his vaunted intelligence now?
He clung on tight to Petros arm, hanging from it, as Janika's first punch whammed straight into his sternum and shocked his heart into missing its beat. There was nothing soft or sleek about Hiraku's bony knuckles as they slammed into Bryant's belly. All the little organs! All the trauma, the broken blood vessels, the potential for rupture. He hated it. He hated the ugliness of it as much as the pain. He was not a violent man and he didn't approve of this.
Fucking Campos. He'd been so careful to prevent any of this from being traced to him, and she had seen through the whole thing in milliseconds, pulled the rug out from under him and left him to what was, he supposed, the punishment he deserved for betraying his own principles so thoroughly. Never again, then. Violence was never a solution. Especially when it lead straight to him being hurt.
Pulling himself up fractionally while the beating continued, he managed to get the fingers out of his nose, keep his precious brain intact. That was the important thing. Everything else would...
His lips brushed the side of Petros' hand. Probably expecting to be bitten, Petros snatched his hand away, threw Bryant to the floor against the bars, and then there was kicking. Endless kicking of rubber soled shoes against the undefended bones of his shins and forearms. He crammed his back into the protection of the bars and curled, curled tight, trying to protect his face and ribs and belly, defended only by the fact that the three men were in each other's way.
Bryant snivelled in the circle of his arms, crying out when the blows fell, trying to swallow down bile, not to throw up and choke on it. Bile in his brutalised nose would be like vitreol in the face, and it hurt enough as it was. Even breathing made him want to hurl. When the clang on the bars came again and the blows stopped he did weep in thankfulness for a long, humiliating moment before he could pull himself together and look up.
The Captain wore faint traces of annoyance around her mouth. He supposed that meant she hadn't intended for this to happen, but if that was the case then she was too fucking stupid for sympathy.
"Twice in one day?" she stepped back to sweep a cold discouraging eye over Janika, Petros and Hiraku. "You three? Fasting for the rest of the week and three hours of compulsory prayer morning and evening. As for you, Mr Jones. Bring him out."
No nonsense this time. Lieutenants Funar and Roimata simply sprayed the whole room with their stun rays. Bryant too. He was conscious of a kind of a hilarious disorientation like the wooziness one could feel, coming out of anaesthetic, and then he woke up and he was covered in bandages and poultices, sprawled on a narrow bench with a bare milimetre of padding, locked in solitary confinement.
This cell contained only a bench bed and a bucket, and it too was closed off by an old fashioned lattice of iron bars, locked with an old fashioned mechanical lock.
"Accurate to the minute.” Outside those bars, Captain Campos checked her watch and gave Dr Atallah the minute lift of the lips that served her for a smile. Miserable bitch. "Nicely done."
Oh yes, nicely done. Bryant didn't roll his eyes, but only because they were red and puffy and they hurt. The doctor had probably treated him with gloves on. Campos had undoubtedly not touched him at all. He found himself studying her hands as if he could see his bots on there. Strong hands, but nicely shaped. He saw with surprise that she'd painted her nails with clear gloss, and that was one step away from the full Jezabel. It was kind of pathetic seeing a woman so butch make any gestures at all in the direction of femininity, especially if it had served her so badly in the past.
Still, it didn't hurt to be polite. "Thank you," he croaked, his throat sore and his mouth dry.
"Let me get this clear," she said, "I don't care what they do to you when you get there, but while you're on my ship you're under my protection, child killer or not."
The nail varnish had been lying - there wasn't anything feminine about her at all. Cold hearted bitch.
"You're taunting me about children?" he mocked, forgetting about politeness again, and prudence, hit on the raw. The boy wasn't a child, and Bryant wasn't the one who killed him. "They tried to cover it up but word still gets around, you know. How dare you judge me, you fallen woman."
The captain's face barely changed. Nothing about her posture - a kind of casual battle-readiness - altered in the slightest, but he got a blast of chill from her as if hell had just frozen over. He laughed. "'Fallen' is the right word, isn't it? I've seen the pictures in the gossip rags of that 'holiday' you spent on Rigel Gamma 15 with a belly like a barrage balloon. Where's your child now, then? Where's your wedding ring? 'Holy warrior of God' my ass. You're no better than the rest of us. You ought to be on the other side of these bars."
Her eyes blazed, and a muscle clenched in the corner of her jaw. He really thought for a moment she would reach through the bars and punch him out and, even though his hind brain wailed in protest at the thought of being hurt again, the part of himself that was really him said 'Yes!' He'd strip a bit of strength for that, if he could get her skin on his skin long enough for his little bots to hop across.
But "Ma'am," Atallah put a long, narrow hand on the captain's arm, the pair of them an offence to Bryant's sensibilities even in their dress. Atallah's hair was covered with the military hijab, Campos's with its Christian equivalent, which they preferred to call a 'veil'. Black, over their crimson jackets like shadow over blood. "He's got no decency, but that's hardly a surprise."
They were the ones with no decency, ashamed of their own hair. Probably scared of provoking lust – not that there was much chance of that.
Campos's attention remained locked on him like a pointer dog for a moment more, and then - again, without moving at all - she seemed to droop. The corners of her mouth turned down fractionally; she shook the words off like a bird ruffling its feathers and sighed.
"Thank you, Lina." She considered Bryant for a moment longer. Bryant got the impression of someone who was thinking through how to do a distasteful job to the best of their ability. Not because they wanted to, but because it was their duty.
"I'm sorry," she said at length, fixing him with a resolute gaze. “Both for the insult and for inadvertently causing you harm. Believe it or not, I would have put you in solitary earlier if I knew you were in danger.”
He didn't want her apology. That had been the whole point of his rudeness - to get her to go away, to get her to behave like an enemy, so
he could think of her as one. "Whatever we have both done, you are a child of God, Mr. Jones, and in so far as you are in my keeping, you will be treated well."
Then she tapped her cudgel on the bars, once twice, three times, a light little pinging reminder. "But whatever you have heard of me, don't mistake it for lack of resolution. Don't push me to do anything you will regret."
He didn't think it was possible for her to get colder but she did, so frigid it was a wonder the steel bars didn't shatter at her sub-zero disdain. "You are perilously close to getting on the wrong side of me, Mr. Jones. I don't think you'd like that. I don't have a lot left to lose."
CHAPTER THREE
Victory
Bryant licked his split lip, feeling it scabbing beneath his tongue. The little wound pulsed hot for a moment and then was gone. He cursed the lack of forethought that had given him healing nanobots that could not be switched off. All over his body he was flushing hot as his bruises and cuts were wiped away and his enhanced immune and healing response kicked in.
He was so hungry! The pain of the bruises had not been anything in comparison with the roaring ache of his stomach, the feeling of being stripped to the bone that was worse when you knew it was accurate. He would gladly have traded some of this healing for more power to control others.
But he hadn't thoroughly planned out what he would do if he was imprisoned on a prison transport ship, because he had always thought he would be too clever to end up here. That assumption clearly needed to be revisited.
Not now, though. Ravenous or not, nearly at the limits of what his physical form would bear without injury, it had to be now. There were store-rooms full of food somewhere that would be his once the ship was.
He lay on his back on the hard mattress and let the feverish healing do its worst, while he closed his eyes and activated Ignatious' bots. Good. Apart from a headache the guy felt fine. Much though Bryant despised the Kingdom warriors, he wouldn't have wanted to actually hurt one. It would be nice if they appreciated how gentle he was being, when he could have waited until the bots had spread throughout the crew and then exploded them all from the inside.
Concentrate, man, damn it!
Ignatious was not high up the command chain, but he still had low level access codes for the ship's computer, and any access at all was enough for Bryant. He guided the man over to a console and had him enter his password. Meanwhile some of the specialized bots he had engineered for the man emerged from Ignatious's fingertips and established a transmitter and receiver from the Froward's computer to Bryant's brain.
Good thing he was lying down. This was a little more complicated to steer than a man, since Ignatious and Ramjet had their own autonomous systems to fall back on. But Bryant had plenty of experience at operating his computer at home by mind control. He waited out the information overload, discovered the patterns and focused in on the operations that interested him, ignoring the rest for now.
Navigation first. He set the computer to plot a new course to Snow City, that famous den of vice - or famous free trading port and refuge, depending on your point of view. As the entire city was buried in the core of a comet that traced a notoriously eccentric path through the trinary system of Auahituroa, and the Froward's computing power was laughable, the calculation might take a while.
He left it to run in the background until it was finished. The moment it went operational they would know something was up. At which point, judging from the captain's tendency to blame him for everything, they would come for him. He could afford to let things wait a while, eat something, allow her suspicions to simmer down...
Then, hard to explain the sensation, it was as if he caught an eddy in the stream of mathematics as the navigation computer began to work. His hollow stomach squirmed as he tore his attention back to to the calculations. Current position data. Oh shit.
Bryant had thought he would have a week to play with this. Seven days to unravel the puzzle in a way that did least harm to anyone, specifically to himself. They weren't supposed to arrive for seven days!
Semi-panicked and semi-outraged, he found the log, found the series of entries in which Engineer Morwen Couch requested permission to increase the drive efficiency, received it, and the Captain moved the schedule up. Dry, boring little sentences, and yet what it meant was that they were less than a day away from their destination. The ship was already maneouvering through the Cygnus system in preparation for coming into a tight orbit above Five.
He had less than a day to take the ship and get the hell out of here before he ended up being landed on a planet from which he would probably never escape, where he would look back on solitary confinement like a heaven he'd never have again.
Bryant covered his eyes with both hands and groaned. Other fucking people! Why? Why did they have to mess up all his plans? He was going to do this quietly, gently. He was going to take them over one by one, get them to drop him off at Snow City and go about their business. No mess, no trouble. And now Campos had to fuck everything up in the name of what? Punctuality? Efficiency? Trying to brown nose her way back into acceptance? Fuck her.
In a brief moment's distraction, he wondered who had. What would it have been like? A guy would need balls of steel to... Yes, well, he wasn't going there.
All right, all right. This could be salvaged. He could still do this, there was no need to panic.
He set trawlers to strip the ship's database of all the access codes he would need, and while that was running, he turned his attention back to Ignatious.
Life was determined to be hard on him today, because Ignatious was in the mess hall, tucking into some kind of red stew with a yellow paste underneath it, and if Bryant hadn't kept his mental discipline rigid, the experience of the taste would have flooded all other thoughts from his head. As it was, his mouth watered, and tears leaked a little under his covering fingers. He was so hungry! So very hungry.
Then he had a brilliant idea. An idea of sheer genius.
There was a slab of something that looked sweet, crystallized sugar on the top of it, by Ignatious' right hand. Whatever world the chef was from, the cuisine was not one Bryant recognised, but he thought he knew sugar when he saw it. He suggested that Ignatious really wanted to get out of here with his meal. Really wanted privacy. Really wanted to take his bowl of stew and slice of cake and eat it elsewhere.
He suggested it so strongly that Ignatious's system responded with a surge of alarm. Reminding himself to be more subtle, Bryant reiterated the suggestion and added the thought that perhaps it would be fun to eat this outside the cage in which the solitary prisoner was currently starving. Show him what came of disobedience, get a little bit of his own back in a way that wouldn't lead to a reprimand.
Oh, and maybe he'd better pick up the keys on the way. In case that reprimand wanted to go a little further.
Far too long later, he smelled the man coming, smelled something earthy and pungent and savoury, and as soon as Ignatious was within reach, he abandoned all attempts to be subtle, established a stranglehold on the man's mind and got him to pass the food through the bars, then unlock the door while Bryant was wolfing it down.
Oh so good! So good! It was the best thing that had happened to him since his capture - a day that he wasn't thinking about. Oh, the roundness, the fullness, the softness of the mouthfeel of the food, and the energy he could feel pouring into him with every swallow. He finished the stew before Ignatious could take the keys off his belt, finished the cake - still didn't know what it was, brown and nutty and intensely sweet - just as the cell door swung open and he could step out.
Time was of the essence now. If they hadn't seen the breakout on monitors yet, they soon would. Already twice as strong, he set off for the bridge at a sprint, dragging a stumbling Iggy behind him by the brain.
Fortunately, he seemed to have come into some luck at last. It seemed Iggy hadn't been the only one in the mess. It must be time for the evening meal - he'd lost track - and the Kingdom soldiers made a bi
g deal out of eating together once a day. The bridge was staffed, of course, but it was a skeleton staff. As he flattened himself into the bulkhead to look through the door he could see only two people, one in the command chair, one at the comms, and at least one of them looked like a cadet barely out of school.
Outside, Cygnus Five already swam large in the view screen, pale tan and aquamarine, and shit. Shit, if they weren't already in orbit they would be by the end of dinner.
Iggy looked a little flustered after his run. His slicked back hair was beginning to escape from its gel and curl up in licks like the heads of inquisitive black swans all over his head. He stood like an automaton, but there was something raging in the depths of his eyes – Bryant was a long way past hiding from him that he was being coerced.
Bryant pushed Iggy into another run, straight through the open doors and into the bridge. The two crewmembers on duty scrambled to their feet. Through Iggy's eyes, he read the names on their shirts: Citlali and Rabinovitz. "Ignatious?"
"Captain wants you in the mess." Forcing words out of him was horribly complicated. Bryant had to let go of everything else to do it. He almost forgot that he was crouching directly outside the door, exposed in plain sight. Shuffling further down the corridor until he could hide around an intersection, he prayed nobody came walking down it, prayed that his luck would hold.
Except that he had no one to pray to. Certainly not the god that made these people what they were.
In a conditioned reaction, Rabinovitz was already half way out of the door when Citlali asked "Why?"
Some of Bryant's panic fed through in Iggy's reaction. "I don't know, do I? She said it was urgent. I had to run all the way to take over from you. Go!"