by Alex Oliver
"Okay," she sounded warmer. "Go piss. But don't wander off. I don't believe you can tell north from south, and I've got the food."
Bryant tried to stride out to the edge of the firelight, but the blinding pain in the head, the nausea and flashes of illusory fireworks in front of his eyes was enough to convince him to forego the tough guy act and hobble. Shuffling carefully down hill, he lost the light in mere feet, long before he reached anything that could be called cover.
He had of course intended to escape. There was a whole planet out there in which he would be free of her assumptions and responsibilities and guardianship. He could have gone a long way in the dark, long enough to lose her.
Except he'd tried that on the ship and here she still was. Perhaps she would follow him wherever he went? Perhaps she was the kind who would track him down forever, single minded and stupid, thinking they were sacrificing their life on the altar of honor, when actually they were just making themselves and everyone around them miserable.
Unzipping, Bryant took a slash against one of the spindly white trees. There wasn't much light to tell but did his urine look dark? He was probably still bleeding inside. And he was tired and his head hurt, and he wanted to lie down.
He wasn't going to get involved in any kind of epic hunter and hunted drama if he could help it. That would be embarrassing and tedious. And besides, she had the food.
So when he had relieved himself, he zipped himself back up and returned, halting out of the darkness into the firelight, to ease himself gingerly back down on the pallet of branches and feel the fire's wash of warmth soothe his aching everything. "Is there something to eat? I'm ravenous."
"You eat a lot for such a skinny guy," she put her head on one side and considered him with a lazy self confidence that he wasn't used to from women, and certainly would not have expected from one raised in the Kingdom. "Here," she passed him a ration bar that he could barely open, his hands shook with need for it.
"Fast metabolism," he lied, sinking his teeth into sugar, chocolate and fat - blessed fat. "You got any more of these?"
"That's half a day's ration."
"Then let me have the second half and we'll call it a day."
"You hit your head pretty hard," she said and zipped the bag she had taken it from. "Let's just wait to see if you're going to throw that back up first. Meantime, you should get some more sleep."
With some of the crumpling feeling in his stomach eased, he thought he could do that, his eyelids drooping at the suggestion. A few more hours of rest, with this new fuel, and he might be rebuilt inside enough to make an escape attempt in the morning. But...
"What about you? Are you going to lie down too? I'll keep all my body parts to myself, I promise, and you surely must need to sleep as well? You've been through a shock."
Campos gave him a peculiarly complicated look, and yes, there were lines of fatigue in her face, shadows under her eyes that said she was close to dropping herself, but she was very far away from curling up in any kind of shelter in the arms of a man she didn't know or trust. He supposed she could hardly be blamed for that.
"If you're so hungry, I'll go fishing," she said instead. "I'm awake anyway, and you should..."
He didn't hear what he should do, just faded out gently with his survival blanket drawn up around his ears, and the last thing in his mind the faint gold flicker in her brown eyes as she watched him slip under, into the dark.
When he woke again, the sun was up. He didn't know how long he had slept, but although Campos was sitting by the fire again in the same position she had been last night, her face was washed, her uniform pristine. She had evidently taken the chance to take off the veil and re-do her hair from the start. She was impeccably covered up now, and he found himself regretting that, wondering what she'd looked like with it loose. Loose and wavy and black with a reddish ruby gleam. Huh. Possibly getting a fetish over her hair was not what the veil was supposed to achieve, but it was delightfully ironic and he felt no need to try and fight it.
She was also basting liquid over the crisping skin of a large oval something, impaled on a stick supported by two wooden tripods over the fire. For all the resurgence of her neatness, her expression seemed to have relaxed even further. Her mouth no longer curved down, and her lips had flowered out a little, like she wasn't pressing them hard together any more.
The smell of the thing was buttery and savory, something like an artichoke cooked in goose grease with a hint of licorice. Bryant sputtered and coughed as his own saliva choked him, nothing about the smell hitting his poison-detectors at all. "Smells amazing," he said, in response to her startled evaluating glance. "I somehow didn't picture you as a cook."
When she had satisfied herself that he was not about to lunge for her or try some nefarious trick, she looked back at what she was doing, which appeared to be catching the juices of the thing in a shell of some sort so that she could ladle them back over the top. He thought that had been his designated interaction for the day for a while, let the conversation lapse into profound silence. The night's breeze had died down and the white trees were revealed to be very tall. If there was noise and scampering going on up there in the canopy it was too far away to hear.
The land sloped down for a few meters beyond where he had got to last night, and then turned into a perfectly flat, level expanse of sapphire blue moss, from which teal blue trees poked their weeping willow heads. Just where the rock met this expanse a small hole had been torn and he could see the moss floated on a fibrous root system over a lake of still, dark water. And at that thought he realized he was parched as well as starving.
"Can I drink the water?"
"I don't know," Campos said again, and nudged a blackened billy can out of the fire. "But I boiled some. You want to give it a try, be my guest."
He rolled off the mattress and stretched, infinitely improved on yesterday, came over to draw up another large log, cut with some kind of burning tool. Cut by her, presumably, and now he was beginning to feel almost guilty about everything she was doing to keep him alive. He took a good swallow of the lukewarm water and said, in some kind of repayment, "It's not poisonous. There are some interesting organic chemical residues, but they're inert."
She gave him the evil eye so bad he wished he hadn't spoken. "How can you tell?"
It was a strange thing to be homesick about, but he was. "My homeworld is very technological, very... uh..." He couldn't think of a good way to put it, and that fact unsettled him. "I mean - well it's not uncommon for an enemy to put something in your food or drink, or your air supply. Poisons or neurochemicals or nanobots. Obviously you try to avoid eating with others but sometimes off-worlders insist on it because it's part of their culture. On those occasions, it pays to be equipped with a suite of detectors, and mine are second to none."
It took him a long time to work out her expression, because he came from a civilized world and he was not used to being looked at with pity and contempt, particularly not by a recidivist savage like her. His generous mood ebbed at the look, but he kept the insult inside and accepted a slice of artichoke thing on a plate of bark in silence.
His outrage lasted for a bite, and then he closed his eyes and gave a whine of bliss as his pinched stomach and depleted reserves recognized that they had come home. Then he stuffed everything in as fast as he could go and licked plate and fingers after.
Campos laughed. "On my world we do a lot of cooking and eating together," she shrugged. "We do most things together. We're farmers mostly, with big families all of whom work on the land. We raise food and we eat it, and that's ninety nine percent of everything that isn't... that isn't raising children."
Her voice fell. He gathered that a pleasant memory had turned into a raw wound. At that thought he wondered for the first time what her disgrace had meant to her. It had given him a kind of savage satisfaction to contemplate the fall of the Kingdom's holy virgin, but none of it looked quite the same now he was getting to know her.
"What are we eating?" he reached for the piece of shell she had been using as a cooking implement in an attempt to hack some more off.
"I don't know." Taking the peace gesture for what it was, she smiled at him. "Looked like a woodlouse when it was alive, but it went for a bit of ration bar on a hook, so I figured if it could eat our food, we could eat it."
His heart stuttered and his gut lurched. "It was a living creature? And you killed it?"
Again with the evil eye - this time she looked at him as if he had just insulted her cat, "You kill children, but you won't eat meat?"
And somehow that was it. He'd softened towards her enough to see her as a person, enough to have some sympathy for her stupid, filthy, primitive hide, and she wouldn't move an inch in return? Fuck her then. He threw himself to his feet, hands clenched. "I do not fucking kill children! I SAVE children. I save them from people like you."
Her face tightened. It was like watching a Gorgon's gaze working. Her eyes went flinty cold and she stood up, slowly, making a point. And yes, he got it - she was stronger than him and trained in combat and perhaps he should have been--
A hum was all the warning they had before something silver flashed overhead, and with a burst of fire the shelter blew apart. Burning logs scattered in every direction. Bryant was still standing, gazing up at the sky, trying to work out -- it was a flitter, a single person anti-gravity bike armed with--
And a fist sized ball of plasma sailed past his elbow, burned a smoldering hole in the ground by his foot, as Campos grabbed him by the collar and half tossed, half hauled him into the shallow scoop of earth in the side of the hill that hadn't been a good enough cave to camp in. She hunkered down in front of him, one hand on the floor in a sprinter's crouch, stun gun in the other, just as a second flitter followed the first.
"Who--"
"Ssh!"
In the quiet, Bryant could faintly hear the riders shouting to one another. "It's her, I saw her. She'll fetch a moon's ransom."
"Could've been anyone, how d'you--"
"They said, di'nt they? The prisoners. There's only one woman. Who else would it be?"
The voices had dopplered away, turned, and now they were growing stronger again. The hum of the sweeps' engines whined closer like a swarm of angry bees. They were after Campos? Maybe Bryant could bargain with them somehow. Offer her up in exchange for transport off world?
She shifted minutely forward, like a jaguar waiting to pounce. She had knotted her veil around her bun, and a sliver of the back of her neck was bare before him. She might not even feel it if he brushed fingertips there. He reached out, and hesitated, and didn't know why.
The two sweeps were almost neck and neck as they passed overhead, low now, swinging around to get a point blank aim with their plasma cannon. He saw two men, scarred and filthy, muscle, skin and teeth, and they scared him more than she did. He dropped his hand just as Campos shot the first one full in the chest with the stun ray.
With a flare of ice blue light the stun ray reflected off a personal force shield. The driver laughed and the mouth of his plasma cannon flared open, so that Bryant could smell death like burning magnesium in the back of his mouth.
"You just walk out of there easy and you won't be--"
Bryant assumed the word was going to be 'hurt', but at that moment Campos pounced. She'd narrowed the stunner's beam, shot clean through the engine of the second flitter. It exploded in a churn of yellow light and jagged lumps of metal just as she gave a flying jump and leaped straight up onto the steering yoke of the first. She seized its rider by his matted scalp-lock - his eyes still bewildered - and smacked his forehead hard into the controls just as a chunk of semi-molten debris from the second flitter sliced and burned through his body and the central float mechanism beneath it.
The wreckage of man and flitter thudded to the ground. Campos landed solidly, bent kneed and alert in the middle of it. She ducked back into shelter looking disappointed but exalted at the same time. Glowing with victory - a shine in her eye and a lightness to her tread. Bryant fought the desire to huddle away from her.
"Fig! I wanted that flitter."
"You just..." Bryant looked again at the pieces of meat among the wreckage. Here was a hand torn jagged out of an arm, wrist-bones white. "You just killed them!"
She looked at him as if he was a puzzle she couldn't fit together "I'm a soldier," she said, gently as if explaining to a child. "It's what I do."
He leaned over and threw up on her feet.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The abandoned city
"Come on," Campos said after a moment of silence. "We've got to find somewhere else to shelter."
"You killed them!"
"Yes, so when they don't radio in, or arrive home, their buddies are going to send reinforcements to look for them, and we need to not be here to be found."
Bryant found himself crying, crying as he had not been able to cry since his arrest. It had been years and years of misery since Eos passed under Kingdom rule. Bryant had been a highly reputable persona surgeon before the new laws. Going underground, learning to work in secret, trying to remember that he was a criminal now, these things had been one long humiliation after another. Then the boy's death and the guilt, and the trial, and the relentless fear ever since, and he was...
He covered his eyes with his hands and sobbed as something opened up inside him and all of that capped terror and sorrow welled out and spilled, and he was shaking, getting no benefit from the gulps of air he was trying to choke down while his nose and eyes watered.
A hand slipped under his elbow, and an arm went around his back, lightly squeezing, as Campos started him walking in a gesture that was as much comfort as coercion. He walked where she guided him, supported by her strength, and tried to hate her, but couldn't quite make it.
"That must have been quite some concussion," she murmured, absolving him of the vomiting and the panic alike. "Just come over here, sit down a while. I've got you."
She lowered him to the ground somewhere uphill. Her hands tightened momentarily before she let go, and he managed to get himself together enough to look up, to see her wary, baffled, concerned expression. He sniffed and dried his nose on his sleeve, his eyes on his palm.
"You really haven't seen anyone be killed before, have you?" she asked, as if this was unthinkable. "But how can that be? You're a murderer."
And he was tired of being misjudged - tired of trying to pretend he was hardened and invulnerable inside. "I'm not a murderer. I was in the middle of an operation. I would have closed him up. He would have been fine. But they stopped me. They stopped me and he was my responsibility. They were so busy cuffing me that they let him bleed out.
“Your fucking enforcers. They killed him. Not me. I save lives. I don't do..." he waved a hand at the corpses, the miscellaneous body parts. "This. You're not going to blame me any more, okay? You don't get to do this and then call me a murderer, okay? Just - while we're traveling together, that's my demand. You remember that I don't do this."
Campos hunkered down in front of him, smeared with soot and blood. Unapologetic. "okay," she said mildly. "You cut up perfectly healthy people and deformed them for a living, but you're not a murderer. I get it."
"You don't fucking 'get it!'" He could have punched her 'understanding' face if he hadn't been sure that would not end well for him. "I changed people who wanted to be changed into what they wanted to be changed into. I made people's dreams come true. I stopped kids born with the wrong body from killing themselves, because I could give them the right one.
"And don't try to say you follow the party line and disapprove of all modification on principle. Something gave you those reflexes and that strength. Look at you, you're a fucking troll. That's not Earth normal. If you're enhanced for combat, don't be a fucking hypocrite and say people aren't allowed to enhance for pleasure - or survival."
She gave him that Gorgon's eye again, and he supposed the troll part had been rude but right now he didn't g
ive a fuck.
"okay," she said again, and got up to stand over him, all self-righteous strength while he was huddled in his tears. "This isn't the time. Get yourself pulled together, we're going on a hike." Striding away, she picked up the two bags from the campsite. He saw her sorting through the pieces of mangled sweeps and bodies, finding the necklace-like control center of a personal shield on one corpse. More trail rations in a pannier, a pulse rifle still in the grip of a severed hand. What looked like money and a scanner in the pockets of the other dead man.
As she was testing to see if one of the pulse cannons could be removed from its mount on the sweep, Bryant's conviction that everything was unbearable and would be unbearable forever began to crumble. A new resilience, maybe even comfort, stirred beneath it. It was good to have said these things to her. Good to have been heard, not to have to carry it around in silent resentment forever because he was too afraid to speak.
He took a deep breath and wiped his face one last time, oddly renewed and clear. It pleased him that Campos gave him a worried glance when she returned, with her face clouded as though she were thinking, and two rifles over her shoulder. She tossed him one of the salvaged ration bars in what he thought must have been a gesture of peace and then turned to sweep the scanner over the rocky land that swept up from the lake.
"Interesting."
"What?" he asked, intrigued by the fierce satisfaction on her face despite himself.
"See that cave up there?" She pointed at a black scratch further uphill that he had taken for a shadow, but which - now she mentioned it - had nothing around to cast it. "It doesn't show up on this scanner."
"Poorly calibrated equipment," he offered, not quite following her argument, but willing to go with it for the sake of restoring amicability. "The curse of every expedition, I hear."
"Let's hope it's the curse of this one," she flashed him a smile. "Come on."