by Alex Oliver
Citlali hesitated a moment longer, a round faced young woman who'd been doodling blue flowers on the backs of her terracotta hands. He wouldn't have immediately selected her as the sharpest tool in the box, but appearances could be deceiving. Frankly this ship had better personnel than it deserved.
In desperation, Bryant urged Iggy forward. He put the man's hand down on hers "Look just go, okay? I've got this covered. "
Although the bots didn't have time to get established, the gesture itself wierded the cadet out enough to wrench herself away and say "Yes, yes, okay. Keep your hands to yourself, man. We're going."
A moment later he heard their footsteps depart on the way to the mess. He breathed out a long, shaky sigh of relief, rounded the corner and - clamping down hard on Iggy's desire to throttle him as he passed - he ran into the bridge.
Standing beneath the turning planet, lit by blue green light, he considered his next move. As soon as the cadets reached the mess, the game was up. Iggy's game was up too. Iggy wasn't going to be a lot more use, and keeping him under control was likely to prove a distraction.
"Thanks," he said to the man, watching the flare of rage in his eyes as Bryant remote piloted him back outside the doors. "You were very helpful."
He shut the bridge doors, and then shut the reinforced anti-decompression plating over the top of them before he let Iggy's mind go. The armour was far too thick for him to hear Iggy curse him once he was finally set free. But he could vividly imagine it.
Using the life support console, he drew up a schematic that pinpointed each crewmember's whereabouts. They were indeed most of them in the mess, which was a solid block of green dots.
Two dots – which must represent the cadets - were approaching from the north east, followed by the single dot that must be Iggy. A guard showed up outside the main prison compartment, and two were stationed in a room that must be the armoury. He waited for the cadets to run into the mess, and then he shut the blast doors around the area, sealing the crew in.
The armoury had its own door, which he shut and locked down with its sentinels sealed inside. Decompression doors between the bridge and the cage locked the final guard away from him, and Iggy would be no threat.
Straightening up from his hunch over the console, he linked his hands behind his head and stretched, hearing his back realign with a celebratory crack. Though he hadn't had time to appreciate it before, he regarded the bridge with proprietorial pride. It was painted a white that had aged into dirty cream over the years, with the grime of human handprints browning all the consoles and scuff marks all over the walls. The planet hanging in the front view was altogether too close, but the triumph was exquisite regardless.
Take that he thought, checking again to see if the nav computer had finished its calculations - 68% done. He set it to implement the course change immediately it was ready. Take that, all you men of violence, all you Kingdom Warriors. And take that captain Campos. I've got less to lose, and you're already on my bad side.
By now she'd know, of course, but he toggled the ship's PA because he could, and because he liked to think of her wincing a little when she heard his voice. This wasn't completely personal, but by god, some of it was.
"Captain Campos? You may have noticed by now that you've been locked in the mess. Shortly you will notice a course correction as we depart for Snow City, where I will allow you and the other prisoners to disembark, unharmed. From there you can find your own way home, because I am taking..."
Victory was as sweet as crystallised sugar on his tongue. He had to laugh, smug lord of all he surveyed. "Oh, I'm sorry, that's not entirely accurate. What I meant was; I have taken your ship."
CHAPTER FOUR
An explosive intervention
Meal times always gave Aurora a lift of the spirit, even now, when her spirit's wings had been broken and she'd fallen face down into the quagmire of disgrace and despair.
She gave a short, internal snort of self-mockery at that thought and looked around. Still romanticizing herself, then? You'd have thought she would have learned. Neither her triumphs nor her disgraces were uniquely important. She shared this humiliating post with all of these people. No one here was the Kingdom's finest; she'd found a resting place surrounded by the dregs and although she was still coming to terms with that, they were not so bad.
On the Reşadiye, she used to have a captain's table at the head of the mess. It would have been clad in linen as white as water-clouds, seen from above. Four lieutenants and twelve midshipmen all in shiny uniforms would have sat poker-backed there, alongside the master and the engineer and the science chief, the chaplain and the doctor. There would have been a sense that dinner was a solemn ceremony. That they ate beneath the canopy of a great civilization, and above that, beneath the gaze of God the merciful.
The crew would have looked up at the officer's table and gauged their mood for signs of how well the latest campaign was going. So it was habit now to smile and eat heartily, and encourage free and positive conversation, even if what she really wanted to do was to lie down and cry.
On the Reşadiye, one entire wall had been a viewscreen, and she and her people would sit and eat from silver plates aware they were floating in the glories of space, lit by whatever sun or planet or nebula they were fighting over today.
The Froward's mess was six grey metal tables bolted to the floor in lines of three. She sat where she could find a space and ate from a billy can like everyone else. This was supposed to humble her, perhaps, but in practice it threw her back to her days in the midshipman's berth, when the only way to go was up.
Truthfully, the clash of forks against cheap tin and the din of voices threw her further back, all the way to Novocasa and family meals on the cool verandah of her grandmother's house. Novocasa was a hot, semi-tropical world, and her people had a culture of eating as communally as possible, and also as often.
The kitchen and the dinner table soothed all wounds. Upset? Come, come into the kitchen and Ama will give you something. Then she would sit at the great table, or be handed an onion to chop to cover the tears, and they would rustle up farofa or empanada while they talked it over. Usually by the time they sat down with plates of hot food and mouths full of spices, sweating in the hot kitchen with the wind streaming through all the open doors, whatever problem it was didn't seem so insurmountable any more.
Aurora's family... well, in common with everyone else in the kingdom, they had been very disappointed in her, but she clung to the belief that if she went home, plates might be broken, and everyone might shout themselves raw, but afterwards... afterwards they'd make brigadeiro and eat them with coffee, and she would get to weep in her mother's arms.
Damn it. That train of thought led nowhere she could afford to go, here where she was still newly in command and trying to prove that one mistake, no matter how huge, did not negate two decades worth of excellence.
She passed a surreptitious hand over her eyes, making sure they were still dry, and looked around the Froward's small mess. The cross-Kingdom habit of a daily shared meal was a good one, letting the crew see each other as family. And these, these were her family now, all of them as disgraced or as just plain useless as she was, God bless them.
She leaned a little closer to her second in command, Felix Mboge, trying to pretend she had been listening to his story about the cage fighting gambling ring he had been invited to join on Yari Yari, and how he had instead reported it and had it broken up by the authorities. Chances were the authorities had already known and given tacit permission, chances were that it had started up again the moment Mboge had left, but she didn't say so, just nodded at his satisfaction and said "That was well done, Mr Mboge."
They were a week into the voyage, and he'd told the story three times already. He was proud of it and she knew better than to trample on a fellow officer's pride.
Though pride was a sin. The thought recalled Jones to her, vividly. A beanpole of a man. Black, like Mboge, but a paler shade, his oval f
ace freckled all over like a plover's egg and his shaggy hair, which curled naturally into tight spiraled ringlets, worn like a bouncy cloud. At a casual glance, he was no threat. A man whose armbones she could break in one hand. Yet when she looked at him, fragility was the last thing she saw. No, that was a snake. A little brown vine snake of the kind that had been harmless when it left Earth, but had developed potent venom in its new home.
Hoping that he was learning his lesson in solitary, she turned back to her meal, but she had barely eaten two spoonfuls of mamaliga when running feet in the corridor outside startled her. Citlali and Rabinovitz skidded through the mess doors and caught her eye. Citlali had made a paper flower to go behind her ear and it was barely clinging to its place, tucked beneath the edge of her veil. Rabinovitz was so scarlet in the face and breathless he couldn't speak.
"Ma'am?” Citlali said, as if she expected some kind of command, was waiting for Aurora to speak. “You asked for us?"
"I did not." Aurora got to her feet. As she did so, the doors to the mess whirred and clanged shut and she heard the double thud that was the sound of decompression seals slamming into place on the outside. "What the--?"
Six packed tables' worth of crew were now scrambling up, threatening uproar. She looked sharply over their heads to the marine sergeant Ademola. In her last ship just the look would have been enough. This crew was not so sharp. Ademola's silver brows drew down in perplexity, knowing that she wanted something, not knowing what it was.
"Sergeant. Order please."
Ademola widened his eyes in a look of Oh yes, of course. Then he lifted two empty metal cups and bashed them together with a noise like the clanging of a cracked bell. "All right, everyone. Shut up and sit down."
Most of them obeyed, and then Jones' voice came over the tannoy. "I have taken your ship," and they were back on their feet again, shouting.
Aurora had a moment of actual emotion - a bright flash of fury that made her feel almost alive again. With a tight sigh, she glared at Ademola and Mboge and said again, "Get the crew in order."
Huh. Jones must really think she was out of it if he expected to get away with this. It was a challenge. An outright god damn personal challenge. Maybe she hadn't lost her wings after all because she could feel them stir at this, feel herself separate from the mud of her downfall for the first time this year.
He'd sent Citlali and Rabinovitz away from the bridge. Therefore the bridge was where he would be. He'd probably locked down the blast doors there too. She'd work out how he managed that later, but if he had the bridge then he had the lifesigns monitor. He would be able to follow their movements via the transmitters sewn into their uniform jackets.
"O'Kane?"
The ship's cook came to attention, tried to salute and realized with his arm half way up that he held a ladle in his hand. He aborted, but not before he had spattered marine private Silva with flying mamaliga. "Ma'am?"
"I want you to unscrew the cover of the kitchen air vent and remove any blockages."
O'Kane hoarded food in there, and he kept a screwdriver with a ratchet head in one of the cabinets to open and close it. The hoarding of food was a punishable offense, and Aurora had been considering how to approach letting him know it was happening and suggesting it should stop, without allowing it to go on his record. The man was so pale he looked half way to ghosthood already. She was certainly not going to frighten him over being paranoid about where his next meal might be coming from.
By his start and anxious look, she guessed he was wondering now how much she knew. She raised an eyebrow that said “I know everything,” saw him swallow and then think it through. She knew, but she was giving him time to get it cleared away. She knew, but she was offering mercy.
Finally he grinned. “Yes ma'am.”
She was glad now that she hadn't brought him to task for it earlier. Without that egress, this would have been more difficult. Not impossible – because the beams of their stunners could be adjusted until they were tight enough to melt metal. They could, in time, have cut a hole in the floor and dropped through to the lower level. But air vents – there was just something satisfying about doing this with the vents.
O'Kane picked up a chair to stand on and ducked back into the galley to unscrew part of the wall.
"Jackets off, everyone. Mboge, I want you to take a detail to the cage. He may be letting the other prisoners out. If so I want them stopped."
"Yes ma'am." Mboge saluted, called out six names, and hopping onto the chair in the galley hoisted himself up and into the ventilation system. His team followed, more or less smoothly.
The uproar in the mess had died down now, as it became clear to her crew that she had this in hand. They were still standing, but all their faces were turned to her, all of them listening out for what they should do. It was the first time she had felt them turn to her for guidance, the first time she had known that they too would come together under her hand in time, that she'd make something even of the Kingdom's freaks and rejects, given time and challenges enough.
She could almost have thanked Jones for that. Would do, when he was back in his cell, chained hand and foot to the floor.
"Ademola, you're with me. Crouch, take a party to the engine room to guard against sabotage. Lt. Roimata, you'll take a detail of your own and accompany me for now."
"Ma'am."
"Dr. Atallah? You're in charge here in the mean time. Have someone account for the crew who were not at dinner. I want to know if anyone's dead."
"Yes Ma'am."
Jerking her chin to Ademola to give her a boost up, she wriggled into the ventilation shaft. It was a tight squeeze, full of airborne dirt now embedded in grease. Her fingers slipped in it, and the tips of her boots slid across the metal without gaining purchase, only her fabric covered knees providing any friction.
It remained level for about ten feet and then sloped downwards to where an access tube connected to the corridor on the next level down. A short crawl and then a slide, and at the bottom of it O'Kane had already opened the hatch and the first party had crawled out.
She squeezed her way out into the crew quarters, grease rubbed up her bare arms, waited for Ademola to emerge out of the wall like a strange birth - and she was not thinking about birth right now.
"Ma'am?"
"Follow me," she said, waiting for Roimata and her party to emerge. Midshipman Banks came last, snagging the sleeve of his jacket as he emerged. She winced. "Banks! I said 'jackets off'."
"But it's cold," the boy whined, rubbing his elbow and then rubbing the back of his head when Roimata cuffed him there.
Aurora took two deep breaths. "You think I give orders for my own amusement, midshipman? Jones is in the bridge right now, where the lifesigns detector is. That winged scroll in your jacket is currently giving him data on your position. If he's paying any attention at all - and I think he is, because he's a clever man - he now knows we've broken out of the mess. I don't know what reprisals he's likely to take, but I can think of two threats to our lives we may be be facing because you, son, decided it was a bit too chilly to do as I said."
Banks was coming up for his fourteenth birthday. Two years older than she had been when she started in the service, but he was child enough to look like he was going to cry. "Drop it here," she said, relenting on the full chewing out. "Maybe he won't notice, and maybe, if we hurry, we can get to the bridge before he sends the hull repair robots after us."
She set off at the distance devouring trot that had become second nature on ground ops, Ademola drew alongside. "This isn't the way to the bridge."
"No," she agreed and gave him a side-eye that said 'do you want a lecture too, or are you going to trust me?' Wisely, he went for the latter, and five minutes later all nine of the party were clustered in the air refinery, where the engineers kept plastic vats of hydrofluoric acid, and an array of containers in which to carry it.
"Oh," he said and broke out in a delighted grin. "Of course. We've got to get through
the bridge doors. I hadn't thought of that."
She threw him a bottle and a pair of gloves from the nearest shelf. "Everyone load up. When you're done, Roimata, your party will go to the armory. I'm assuming he's locked that down too. You will break in, arm yourself and join me at the bridge. Ademola? Since you and I have sidearms already, we're going to make a start on the bridge."
Ademola had wiry silver hair and the lines on his ebony dark face were so deep they might have been scraped tight with thumbnails, but his grin had a startled youthfulness, as if she'd reminded him of a time when he believed he was going to be a hero. "Yes Ma'am," he saluted.
Another trot, the Froward's corridors institutional and bland, like school and hospital corridors. Half of her didn't believe anything interesting could happen at all in the scuffed, off white and olive drab monotony. The other half was listening out for the clang and clatter of robot feet, because she didn't know what Jones could do, but she'd be damned if she underestimated him again.
Breathing hard, she turned the final corner. Ahead, where one long coverless corridor converged on the bridge, she skidded to a halt outside an unexpected barrier.
“What the hell's this?” Ademola asked behind her, and then the pause for thought, “Ma'am.”
“He's certainly thorough,” she allowed. “There are several sets of emergency decompression panels along this corridor in case one is breached. He must have noticed us leave the mess, figured out this would be the way we came and took steps to stop us.”
She took the vessel of acid from her pocket and dripped a viscous stripe down the center of the steel and rubber panel, stepping back hastily as it began to smoke.
Halfway down the corridor a PA point broke the monotony with its black and yellow hornet-stripes. The crew had radios, but Jones didn't, and she wanted to have a word with him now. A rude one by preference.
She toggled the switch. “Slamming doors on us, Jones? You know we're going to come through them. And the more you make us work for this, the more annoyed we're going to be when we get there.”