by Alex Oliver
The klaxon brought her back, intensely irritating. She reached out a hand to switch it off, and the tactile sensation of the pressure and the click under her finger was an intensely new experience. Silence came like a blow, and then when her ears had become accustomed to it, she began to hear the crackle of flames. It was still hot as the cauldron of a volcano in here, and the air tasted of jet fuel.
A fire. Fuel! She raised a hand and slapped her own cheek. The sting on hand and face woke her up a little. They needed to get out of here before it blew.
Unbuckled from the pilot's seat, she almost fell as she tried to stand, her legs without strength, but she pushed herself upright, lurched over to Jones. He lolled limp on the deck, his great cloud of curly black hair concealing his face. She was about to feel for his pulse when she remembered how eager he'd been to touch her, the threat of mind control. Grabbing the hair instead, she twisted his head until she could hold a hand above his mouth, feel him breathe. He had a cut above the eyebrow that had bled like a juice-box, but he was alive.
Alive and limp and she wasn't carrying him. Quickly now, she took her knife from her belt, cut the fabric cover from the pilot's chair. Laying it on the deck, with the straps under it, she rolled him onto it and buckled him tight. A locker under the copilot's seat contained two backpacks with basic survival kit. She thought of salvaging this seat cover too, but she could hear something liquid trickling beneath the sound of the flames and the sound itched with threat.
No, enough. Throwing the backpacks on her left shoulder, she picked Jones's body up by the strap across his chest, and dragged him to the door. Slammed the control, expecting the explosion right then as she let the stream of new oxygen in with the open door.
The note of the flames changed, and there was a ping as of overheated metal parting under stress. Panic renewed her strength and she jumped down onto unknown alien vegetation, springy underfoot, strange-smelling. It didn't immediately explode, so she hauled Jones, managed to get him over her right shoulder, clothed legs under her hands, clothed waist against her neck.
Her strained back protested, but not enough to outweigh the risk of imminent fireball. With her prisoner in a fireman's carry she jogged away, and the moss rebounded under every footfall like a trampoline, making her knees and ankles ache from the strain but letting her make great bounding steps as she got as far away from the downed ship as she could before it--
Silence, wind in her face, and then a roar as an incandescent pile driver whammed her in the back. Scorching heat flowed around her ears and the nape of her neck. With a smell of singed hair and uniform she was flying. She dropped Jones, bounced off a tree, fell and curled up tight as burning debris thrummed through the air above them.
But the springy moss beneath her was wet and cool. She pressed her face into it as the fireball passed and might even have fallen asleep there if it had not also grown wet under her knees and elbows. The sound of burning had been replaced with a sucking gurgle as if the planet was turning a boiled sweet over in its mouth.
She forced herself up again in time to see the burning launch rip and scorch through the carpet of moss. It was bouncy because there was water underneath and as she watched, the ship slid slowly through the moss's punctured surface and sank. The closer edges of the blanket of vegetation were dipping under the lake beneath. Jones' feet were underwater, and he was still not awake.
Groaning, she hauled herself upright again, dragged him out of the water, got her burdens back on her shoulders and went in search of dryer ground.
About a click further on, a rock outcropping rose out of the moss-covered lake, and the trees of the water, with their teal-coloured, ribbon like leaves, gave way to trees of the land, silver like birches, with feathery aquamarine fronds. The sun had lowered noticeably toward the horizon, and it was becoming unpleasantly cool.
Typical of Jones to sleep through the whole thing. Dumping him on the rock, she gave him a quick once over by eye. Nothing else seemed to be bleeding, but a large bruise and an egg had come up over one side of his forehead. None of his limbs looked broken. If he was bleeding internally there wasn't a thing she could do about it. So. Shelter.
What she wanted to do now was lie down. Lie down, go to sleep. But that was a good way not to wake up again. So she stretched her aching back, wolfed down a ration bar and drank about a quarter of a pint of water from the canteen in one of the bags, then broke out the glowstick. All purpose saw come machete, come firestarter, the plasma blade made short work of cutting wood, from the green vines she used as string to tie the shelter together, to the young saplings she cut down whole to form the frame.
Sunset filled the sky with brass and amber as she worked. According to the briefing there were no large predators on this planet - it had been chosen to terraform because there was scarcely any animal life at all. But something was whistling in the distance, and twice small reddish furry things paused in the treetops to look at her with eyes like mirrors. She didn't like that.
Shadows lengthened. When she had the lean-to shelter finished and the platform underneath it stuffed with springy branches and dried leaves for softness, she rolled Jones onto it and covered him with a survival blanket. Drawing a log close to the fire, she wrapped the other blanket around herself and watched the warmth make her wet knees steam.
In each bag was a communicator. She reached for one, and it fit into her hand like a promise - a promise that she was not left here utterly alone with the only predator on the planet. A promise that she only had to call and help would come.
The darkness was alien and empty all around her and she wanted not to be alone. But someone on this planet had shot her ship out of the sky. Someone had deliberately tried to murder every last one of her crew. If she radioed for help, what guarantee was there that she wouldn't be heard by them instead?
She tucked the comm back in the bag. Tried to breathe normally around the fist sized lump of grief in her throat when she thought of the Frowards. She hadn't even had time to get to know her new crew before she'd let them down. But the lavender flames of the fire were soothing. She was exhausted and had done everything she could. Setting herself to wake if Jones stirred, she let herself fall into an uneasy sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A warm welcome
Bryant hadn't felt pain like it since he'd taken his first dose of repair bots at age ten. Given the howling, nauseating tear of agony in his head to which he woke, he must have fractured his skull at some point. He didn't remember when.
The darkness behind his closed eyelids alarmed him. Anywhere in the cells there would have been light - they turned it down in the 'nights' but never off. Here he lay in pitch. And there was an unsettling feeling against his face, as though the ship had been punctured and the air was streaming out. Except the air on the prison ship had never felt so fresh. This smelled of water and sap and crushed greenery - chlorophyll and the bacteria that lived in soil.
On his own world he'd smelled something similar only once - on a school trip out to the farming district, where they had been given rides in tractors and forced to interact with subhuman creatures raised to be sold for food. He'd found the whole experience unsettling. His rich parents had always put meat on the table as a status symbol and because they claimed they preferred the taste to that of the microfungal protein everyone else ate, but once he'd seen the flicker of near intelligence in the 'pig's eyes when it met his gaze, and watched the 'lambs' jumping for joy, he'd never been able to look at the dismembered, bleeding joints their cook brought out from the freezer again.
He'd associated the smell of grass with the thought of blood ever since, and now it did nothing to calm the raging fire of healing bots working overtime in his brain, or slow the swing of his perception down as the world slowly reeled about him and his mouth watered with nausea.
Memory took him to being dropped by stun gun in the Captain's launch. Had he been landed on the colony since? Was it all over? Cautiously, he cracked his eyes open, prepare
d to slam them shut again and fake unconsciousness if necessary in the face of any threat.
It wasn't completely dark. After an age adjusting, he was able to pick out a ceiling of feather-like leaves so close above him they almost brushed his nose. A faint pinkish-gold light was strobing over them. He stared at it for a long time, trying to work out if the pulsing was actual or due to his damaged head. Then it occurred to him that there must be some kind of light source to his right, and - mindful of his broken glass skull - he turned his head fractionally to see it.
He lay in some kind of rustic shelter, outside of which a campfire burned on rocky ground, the flames illuminating a sphere where white tree-trunks stood like pillars. Above him, something - tree tops, he hoped - sighed rhythmically like a sleeping giant. The sky was dark but for a pen-stroke of blueish white that rose like a rocket's tail and curled over the horizon. Some kind of planetary ring. What he took for a couple of bright stars at seventy two degrees blinked out and then reappeared at sixty nine and he realized with a lurch that they were eyes.
Between his shelter and the forest, on a tree stump, sat captain Campos, huddled over the fire. A silver blanket was tucked around her shoulders, and her stringently tied veil had come awry, showing a mess of wavy black hair straggling out of a ruined bun at the nape of her neck. A lock clung to the dried blood on her forehead and picked up auburn highlights from the fire. She looked like a thousand miles of wet road, hunched in defeat, with her eyes closed and the oddly colored flames playing over her face.
With her face gilded and softened by firelight, and undefended in sleep, you could see why some guy might have found her attractive enough to sample. Quite apart from the bragging rights of being able to claim that he corrupted the avenging angel of the Kingdom of Peace...
But those thoughts seemed uncalled for here in the quiet. Bryant had a blanket around his shoulders, a roof over his head and a fire keeping him warm, and she had presumably done that. He was away from the constant supervision of the other criminals and could afford to drop the hard man act a little. Enough to admit that it didn't really feel like fun to laugh about Campos' disgrace while she was filthy and asleep and had probably saved his life.
After another ten minutes he was recovered enough to risk moving a hand, trying to touch the wound on his head. That was when he discovered that his upper arms were bound around his chest with a seatbelt, and his lower arms similarly secured around his waist.
"What the hell?" he said, and wriggled in an attempt to slip free. Campos' head came up with a jerk as she focused on him. "What the hell?" he repeated, "What happened?"
Her voice was rough with sleep, thick with something in a minor key as she replied. "Someone shot us down."
"What?"
It had been sadness, he thought, or mourning. It was gone by the time she spoke again, as she sharpened up with wakefulness, but he'd heard it and he was surprised. In the days when she was a heroine, the newsreels had been full of propaganda about motherly instincts and how they translated into a wish to protect her people. It had sounded so fake he hadn't stopped to think it could be true.
"While you were trying to escape, someone on the planet shot us down. With rocks. That's what holed the bridge. I don't know if anyone on the Froward survived, but I managed to crash land here."
"On Cygnus Five?" he clarified, his heart sinking to match the aching void in his head. "The penal colony?"
She actually smiled at that, a sideways lift of her recurve bow of a mouth. "Yes. We're about eight hundred clicks away from the colony itself. It's nor nor east from here, under an extinct volcano. We can get there before winter if we set off tomorrow."
He wanted to roll over. He wanted something to eat to fuel the bots that were putting his skeleton back together. He wanted to pee. But most of all he didn't want to go to the penal colony. "Are you kidding? You're a woman and I'm a mede. If there's anywhere on this planet we don't want to go, it's there. Can you untie me, by the way? I don't know much about wilderness survival but I'm pretty sure I need my hands."
Something had shifted between the two of them. Perhaps with the destruction of her ship she had put off the mantle of 'Captain'. Or perhaps she was just too tired to keep up the bullshit. She'd crash landed? And dragged him to safety? And made him a shelter? And now that half smile had turned into the full beam.
Admittedly it was a full beam of 'I don't believe your cheek', but he found he liked it anyway. It gave her dimples.
"'Mede' is an intellectual?"
He grinned. "'Mede' is a pretty boy. The kind a powerful man might want in his harem."
"okay," Her eyes flared wide. He'd shocked her, she was actually that innocent. Then she raised her eyebrows and looked him up and down, recovering. "okay, I could see it. And you would object to that?"
"Maybe not if I was allowed to choose for myself, but..."
Her smile fell. "Yeah," she agreed, looking aside. "I don't think the abuse of prisoners in that way would have been permitted under a just Governor..."
Innocent didn't begin to describe it. She actually believed that? Could anyone actually believe that?
"But I also don't believe the Governor would be shooting at us, so the chances are he's not in charge any more."
"The lunatics have taken over the asylum," he said, unsurprised. These places were the arse-end of anywhere, rarely graced by visitors from outside. Prisoners were added all the time, garrisons rarely bolstered. Guards went native, found they had more in common with their captives than their employers, set themselves up as little kings and toppled their employers every day.
She looked at him as if she was about to say 'this is a penal colony, not an asylum' and it occurred him that she didn't recognize the idiom. In theory the entire galaxy shared a trade culture passed on by needle-net – shared stories, immersion vids and music – and he kept forgetting that Kingdom planets were really not like those of the Source.
Her planet must have been under Kingdom rule so long they'd forgotten they weren't free. She must have been born under it and raised by parents, grandparents who were born under it. It must feel like nature to her, thinking the way that she thought. He'd often said before that he felt sorry for the dupes who actually believed it all, but this was the first time he'd actually meant it.
"In a manner of speaking," she agreed, cautiously.
"So we're not going there, right?"
This smile was bitter. She reached up and tried to smooth her errant hair back under the cover of her veil. It didn't want to go. "The comm tower is at the penal colony. Any chance of finding out what happened is there. I need to know what attacked my crew and my prisoners. I want to know who died on my watch, and I want to know why."
"Why?"
She frowned at him as if she didn't understand what he was asking. "I'm sorry?"
"I mean, why do you need to know? Why put yourself in danger for that?"
"Because they're my people," she said slowly, as if he was the stupid one. The fabric of the veil – black, shot with the gold threads of rank – fought her as she tried to tie it tight. "I'm responsible for them."
"And you're responsible for me?"
Her baffled, offended look softened. "That too. I could hardly have left you to drown."
Bryant had had many friends over the years. If by friends you meant people who were interested in the fusion of nanites with surgery and willing to exchange information and possibly technology, sometimes even in meat space. All of them would have left him to drown, if the alternative presented any kind of risk to themselves. Which was rational of them. Perfectly so. And he had never resented it, until now.
"I need to pee," he said, uncomfortable and strangely upset. "Would you untie me, please?"
She regarded him thoughtfully, dropped her gaze and sighed. "I will untie you, if you give me your word not to touch me. To be clear. If you try to touch me on the skin anywhere, I will drop you so hard it breaks your neck. My mind is my own."
He laughed
at that, sharp and surprised. "Really? You're a product of medieval ideation, you're a propaganda dupe. I doubt if you've had an original thought all your life."
His concussion was still bad enough so that the laughter made the world swirl around him. He lost track for a moment. The next thing he knew, she was standing over him. She ripped the blanket off, seized him by the shoulder strap and flipped him onto his stomach. His head gave a metallic, screeching internal protest and his stomach lurched as a knee came down between his shoulder-blades and squashed him into the twiggy bedding.
He tried not to acknowledge that there was maybe, maybe a flicker of delight winding its way among the storm of fury and fear, but it dried his mouth out anyway and he breathed in deep to see if he could smell her. He was almost disappointed to gather from the click and the sudden looseness of the straps that the buckles were at the back, that she hadn't attacked him, she had just been a little brusque about helping.
"Well?" she said, when he was loose.
He lay pliant under her weight, only shifting his face to one side a little to breathe. "You can control me, physically," he muttered. "And I'm not allowed a way to fight back? How is that fair?"
Campos huffed in amusement, her hand on the buckle by his elbow, ready to re latch it if he said the wrong thing. "Who said anything about this was fair? I need your promise."
"Or what?"
"Or you can piss the bed."
Bryant had to admit that he was a little charmed. The mix of ruthlessness and naivety was not something he'd encountered before. Had it really not occurred to her that a hardened criminal like him might not keep his word? Bless her. How had she got to this age without being comprehensively taken advantage of?
"All right," he agreed. "I promise. I'll keep my hands to myself. No touching, not even while you're asleep."
He felt the slide of strap through buckle and then the pressure of her knee went away. Without it he felt unanchored, unstable again.