by Alex Oliver
"I've just got to hold it together until then."
"Because," Jones's smile was challenging, "You know there are antiquarians and archaeologists who would kill to get their hands on a whole damn alien city. We could go to the colony and steal the governor's ship, and sell this stuff, make a packet, live outside the law, independent and free - really free - for the first time ever. This is the find of the century, and we could mine it, slowly, for artifacts and information. And I could help you with that. We could share it. If you didn't turn me in."
His hopeful, entreating look winched her up out of the pit. Looked like there still was something of the weasel about him after all, but right now she found it almost endearing. At least he was honest about being dishonest.
"We've had this talk before." She brushed a fingertip over the flower in her hair, and again it made her smile. "I've got to find out what's happened to my people, free them. I've got to find out what's happened to the governor and his staff and somehow return the colony to order."
"That's what you want to do?"
Want didn't really come into it. She didn't know what she wanted, but it wasn't relevant anyway. She had a duty. "That's my priority, yes."
She looked down, feeling unanchored and unsafe as she always did before a major decision. "But after your freak out, I do believe that you're not a murderer. And if a person's body is a temple to the Lord, it's surely between Him and them if they choose to remodel it to His greater glory. So..." Lord let good come out of this. And if it's not what you want me to say, stop my mouth.
"So if you help me rescue my people, I'm going to make sure you get out of here free. All right? I'll say Bryant Jones died in the launch crash, and you can be someone new."
"You're going to make sure I get off this planet?" He rose and backed towards the door, hopeful and disbelieving and incredulous. "And then you're going to go back to your dull little life and perjure yourself every time you mention me?"
"What makes you think I would mention you?" Arrogant little toe-rag! Though truthfully she found the arrogance amusing too.
"I don't..." Trust you she guessed, and that stung, because he ought to know - everyone ought to know by now that she tried always to keep her word. She'd not been the one who blabbed.
Jones backed up another pace and halted, looking speculatively at his own hand. He raised his head and those odd plum-brown eyes shone clear as brandy, intense.
"Right now," he said, softly determined, "you can push me around, tie me up, pick me up, leave me or take me with you as you like, because you're stronger than me. I know you can smack my head on a rock and kill me like you did those two convicts. So I have to trust you - I have to trust that you won't do that to me."
"Okay," she agreed, not seeing where he was going with this.
He held out his hand. "So the least you could do would be to shake my hand on the deal. I won't mind control you, but you'll have to trust me on that. It'll be fair, see?"
Trust, like the trust he was willing to give to his government, except that he would be the one with his hand on the kill switch. Her skin crawled at the thought of invisible bots hopping from his hand to hers like germs, infecting her. But he had a point. She could in fact twist his head off with her bare hands, the fact that she couldn't yet see a situation in which she would feel that was necessary didn't mean she would never do it at all.
There came a point in most alliances where you had to decide if you really meant it or not. And maybe this was stupid, but one bad experience shouldn't prevent her from ever trusting again, should it?
"Fair?" she said, and took his hand. It felt warm and clean and eggshell breakable in hers, and she wasn't immediately aware of anything except pressure and heat and a kind of loosening in the chest that said she was no longer alone. "I can do fair."
And that was when she heard the smash and clatter of a bucket-full of pottery falling off an opening door. The doorbell had been rung. The convicts were here.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The locals are unfriendly
Okay, so philosophical debate was one thing, but it was not her strength. This she liked better. "Jones?"
"I guess you get to call me Bryant now," he said, clearly not picking up on her new urgency. Although there were a lot of complicated factors involved in being on first name terms, she left that all for later.
"We're about to have visitors."
Color drained from Bryant's face, leaving his freckles standing out like exclamation marks.
"While they're still reeling from the discovery of the city, I need you to get around to the walkway at three o'clock from the entrance. That'll be behind them, and I'm going to be keeping them occupied."
She tossed him one of the comms from the bag. "Take this, tell me if there are any more of them outside. Stay in the green rock areas when you can and don't get spotted."
He gave her a flicker of a guilty look, as if to say 'I feel bad about leaving you to do this all alone, but... hey... it's your funeral." But she expected no more than that from him, civilian noncombatant weasel that he was.
He nodded. "All right."
"Get going. Good luck."
Civilian though he might be, he certainly knew something about evading hunters. Probably been bullied a lot as a child. He edged through the door, keeping flat to the sides of the buildings which were overhung by woven roofs, where the crims coming in on the walkway would not spot him. Good for him.
Dismissing him from her mind, she got up on some kind of pill-bug furniture and poked her hand into the roof. Tugging, she managed to nudge the vines and wires apart enough for her to see through one gap and aim the muzzle of her pulse rifle through the second. The convicts came down with torches, the idiots. She could see the swinging twinkle of them far above, gave it another few paces, so they could get closer, so Jones - Bryant - could get further away.
One of them was carrying a scanner. As they came closer she could tell it from the square greenish-white light of its screen. And that meant they knew which hut she was in. No benefit in hiding any more.
She took careful aim at the scanner. There was an advantage they didn't need. Quiet now, quiet and peaceful inside, all her regrets gone to ground for some safer time, she breathed in and out in this last moment before it all began, focusing.
She pulled the trigger, and the rifle's packet of superheated plasma flashed across the cavern like lightning, smacking straight into the scanner, through it and then carrying on, burning a hole the size of a fist through its holder's chest, caramelizing his heart. He reeled backwards and fell off the walkway, his body falling over a wall, cracking its back as it rebounded. She took aim at the next.
A distant shout, and a throwing motion were all the warning she had. She leaped down from her perch and was sprinting out of the door by the time the grenade hit the roof, tangled there and exploded. Flowers, wires and debris stung her head and shoulders as the blast shoved her in the back.
Anyone up on the walkway would see her running through the uncovered spaces of the city. they had the high ground. In fact--
A bolt of plasma hit the tiny canal next to her, making an instant dry gap and a vapor cloud, under the cover of which she ducked into the next building. This was circular, two story - their half-assed grenades might take the top off but wouldn't reach below. It seemed to be some kind of theater – there were tiers of benches arranged around a circular stage in the center of which a table with restraining straps said something she didn't like to hear. Operations, maybe. Not torture. Though if it was torture she didn't feel so bad about the accidental cannibalism.
Silence outside. Was that their only grenade? Braced against the wall, she sidled towards one of the windows. Ah, they were running too fast to lob another, running to get off the perch high above the city where they were exposed to her fire. There had been four of them. One was dead. Two had already reached the ground and presented difficult targets among the litter of buildings. So she dropped the last with a goo
d shot to the head, clinical and probably kinder than he deserved.
"Fucking bitch!" a voice yelled down among the shadows of the government building cum archive Bryant had activated earlier. "You fucking cunt! We are going to--"
A scuffle. "It's Campos isn't it?" Another voice cut in, pretending to be softer, to be civilized, urbane. But she'd been betrayed by a voice like that and she could hear the undertones loud and clear. "We'd been told you were good. But there is only one of you and only one exit out of here. Eventually we can just starve you out. Why not come now? You're a valuable hostage. You won't be harmed."
As he'd been talking, she'd run up the stairs, made a hole in the roof and wriggled out. Lying flat there, she had a sight on him now. He was standing in the wreckage of their shelter, with his hands spread, just so very reasonable. Silver haired, something corporate in his past, no doubt, with twinkling blue eyes and lines of what purported to be wisdom in his face. She hated him so much she felt almost ashamed to squeeze the trigger and watch him burn.
It was one thing being good at what she did. It was quite another to take an unholy pleasure in it.
Yeah, well, this was not the best time for recrimination. She gave herself a mental shake, because the other guy - foul mouth guy - was nowhere to be seen. From the weapons fire, he knew where she was. She didn't know where he was, nor if he had another grenade. That was unacceptable.
Plus #4 should be taken alive if possible as a potential source of intel.
Tugging a vine loose, she rolled to the side of the roof and then allowed it to unravel slowly, letting herself down into the dim flower-lit street. Across a tiny square carpeted with some kind of blueish luminescent worms, the door of an imposing building stood ajar. She sprinted across the spongy mat of worms, flattened herself against a wall and went in through a basement window, silent, alert, trying to smell him, hear him before he heard her.
It seemed empty. Some kind of research lab? The floor was striped with the crystalline consoles Bryant had activated in the other building, and the rest of the floor space was covered with crystal shelves, this time covering preserved specimens. These too were wood-louse-like, beginning with things she would swear were identical to her regretted fish, ending with something larger, with more feelers, more claws, with a wider variety of... hands? A wider variety of termini to their legs.
Even as she sidled toward the other side of the room where another window promised an exit, keeping her back to the cover and her attention on the endpoints of the corridor of glass and the ceiling above her, a little seed of relief had time to crack open in her chest. The aliens who lived here had been created from the fish. She had not eaten an intelligent being.
Good. That was good.
Who had created them, though? And where had they all gone?
Not really her problem right now.
She got to the window. During this hunt she'd been gradually moving closer and closer to the center of the underground city, where the dome of the cave was highest and the buildings beneath it rose to three or four stories. This guy, this fourth guy was a tougher proposition than the others. Maybe he knew to get to higher ground. Even if he didn't, she did. Whichever way you looked at it, she needed to be on top of that spiral jade green building by the black lake that shone like a mirror beneath the cavern's many lights.
If he was already there, she was taking her life in her hands sprinting down the pavement that carried another of those little canals in its curving path from circumference to center of the cavern, but that just made it all better, clearer. She wasn't sure who was the hunter and who was the hunted at this stage, but--
No, scratch that. She was the hunter, always. So where was her prey?
This door too was open. In the air, on the back of her open mouth, she caught a faint reek of cig smoke and sweat. She padded in silently, and it was dark in here, closed off from the luminous sky. Just an impression of vast spirals, and an idol in the centre of it, stroked bright along its edges with glowing moss. Passages lead off from the chamber in an echo of the way the walkways of the city spiralled out to the circumference.
Keeping away from the light, silent; silent, so he wouldn't know she was coming, she edged towards the first corridor.
And her communicator crackled at her waist. "It's okay," said Bryant's voice, loud and distinct. "There's two two-person swoops, but there doesn't seem to be anyone else up here. Are you all right?"
She threw herself flat as a plasma bolt seared its way over her back. Scrambled up as soon as it was past and was running. The blast had come from the third tunnel. She had three seconds while the chamber recharged before it could fire again and she had counted two point four when she ran straight into him, blinded by the bright light of the shot in this heavy gloom.
She heard his grunt of surprise, felt him sway back from the impact, but his hand shot out and fastened in her veil. With that as a guide - because both of them were fighting blind - his other hand found her throat. And yeah. No.
Using his grip to locate him, she brought her knee up, rammed it hard enough into his crotch to lift him off the ground. That certainly took his mind off strangulation. She heard him wheezing, felt him withdraw just a second and then there was a snickt and a little push against the metal of her belt buckle that her hind brain - faster than her conscious thoughts - recognized as a knife.
Filho da Puta! Well, she certainly wasn't blind-fighting a guy with a knife. His knee was still pushing against hers. That was plenty to give her an estimate of where to shoot. She brought her rifle up between them and shot him through the spine.
"Captain Campos?... Aurora? Are you all right?"
She leaned down with one hand to make sure there was no pulse, toggled the communicator with the other. "Bryant? Yeah. I got them. Give me twenty to check their pockets and I'll be with you."
Twenty minutes later, now with four rifles and a pulse gun, she climbed out of the city to find the sun was rising. Bryant had been huddled by one of the swoops, his knees clutched to his chest, his face turned up into the sun, but he gave her a smile and a ration bar in celebration. "You're quite scary, you know that?"
She did. She grinned at him, stretching in the sunlight of another day she was lucky to see. The morning smelled of rain and honey, and the wind on her face was pleasant after the airless dark downstairs. Dear Lord, sometimes it was still good to be alive. "The innocent need have nothing to fear," she said, because it was pat, but she liked to think it was true.
She gave the swoop a once over. Held together with spit and prayer, it was an ugly, many-welded thing, but simple enough to operate, and she swung herself into the saddle with a feeling of relief. It would be good to be flying again. "Right. Onward to the rescue."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
For her own good
The innocent need have nothing to fear, Bryant thought repeatedly over the course of the day. The swoop's engine burnt the inside of his legs where they pressed against it, and the steering was heavy, with a pronounced tug to the right, with which he had to constantly wrestle. There had been a sense of exhilaration and escape at first in the blur of the planet beneath him, in the speed, and the proximity of a relatively advanced piece of machinery, but that had worn off after the first couple of hours.
He'd also been interested to see what was for him his first alien planet. People had come to him on Eos, if they could afford it, and he had known his own neighborhood from catacomb to skyhook, but he had never been beyond.
Eos had been settled for centuries, and intensively urbanized. Initially it had provided factories to supply the next wave of colonists with spaceships and habitats, then gradually it had branched out into the production of all kinds of technology. The people who had settled there, and the people who grew up there liked cities. They liked to be surrounded by the works of human hands, the noise of their neighbors, and the knowledge that someone would hear them if they screamed, even if no-one would dare intervene.
All this wasted g
round, covered with different kinds of vegetation, creeped him out, to be honest. Possibly there were other signs of civilization underground. Maybe the whole planet was undermined with cities and transport tubes beneath the apparent wilderness on its surface. He wished he had not left the scanner in the alien library, but on the other hand it would need as long as it could get to parse out the potential meanings of the alien language. Possibly, even if this place was riddled with structures, if they were all capped with scan resistant stone, the scanner would have been of no use anyway.
He wrenched his swoop back into a straight line again and glared at Campos' bent back. She was keeping a good hundred feet ahead of him, crouched down over the steering yoke to minimize air resistance. He didn't think she needed to go this fast. Speed freak. No wonder her ideas were so medieval. Her thoughts had probably never had time to catch her up.
Struggling with the motor, he managed to draw up alongside, so he could shout. "If we went slower we'd have a better chance to spot any more alien ruins."
"If we go slower we lose the element of surprise," she shouted back. "They're going to be expecting us and it'll be harder."
It was very unfair of her to have a reasonable explanation. He didn't think she'd quite grasped the enormity of what they'd found.
"Seriously?" He said, "Do you know how huge this is? A whole preserved alien civilization!"
"They found ruins in Proxima Centuri" she slowed marginally to frown at him. "We've known there were aliens out there since Terran days."
"The ones on Proxima Centauri were tentative at best. Mud huts, stone tools, some kind of extinction event probably wiped out by meteor. Proof of concept, that was huge, yes. But this? This is far, far more amazing."
Abruptly, she decelerated to a stop, and he overshot, having to swing back in a tight circle and land next to her in a small clearing carpeted by biscuit-colored grasses. "What's up?"