by Alex Oliver
"Lunch," she got off to stretch and grab the canteens from their saddlebags. "If you want to talk, it's easier to do it without the wind. You've got fifteen minutes. If we push it we might be able to get to the outskirts of the colony this evening."
She was probably the deadliest person he'd ever met, which for a woman without any bots at all was saying something. He lost himself in a moment of daydreaming over how he could perfect her. She could use claws, and quick healing, and a suite of her own hunter-seekers to prevent anyone else from meddling.
"You don't want to talk, now we're down?" Out here, unwatched by her tribe, with no one around except him and God, her smile had been growing steadily wilder.
The loosening of her constraints was giving him a glimpse at something glorious, something he liked. No wonder those Egyptians back on Terra had seen Sekhmet the lioness as the force of God's wrath on Earth. Aurora had something of the same largeness and brilliance. And although it was scary, wouldn't it be something if it was his?
The innocent need have nothing to fear, but Bryant wasn't sure how to define innocence, was clear on the fact that his definition was probably different from hers.
He had of course given her nanites. Over the morning they had taken and propagated, and he could - if he wished - now exert all kinds of control over her. Technically he supposed that he had broken a promise, but look, he wasn't using them. She didn't have to know. He was just holding them in reserve in case she decided to do something stupid, self destructive. If he used them at all, it would be to help her, just as she had used her strength to help him.
There really wasn't anything wrong in that.
"Just," he said, trying to ignore a nagging voice in the back of his mind that called him a heel, "We could be flying over all kinds of archaeology without seeing it. This challenges our conception of the universe, and you're reacting like it's a sideshow. I don't understand how you can--"
"I do get it," she flopped flat on the long grass and stretched, hands behind her head, back arched, and she really ought not to do that, magnificent woman that she was, if she didn't want all kinds of things to arise. "I'd like to know what happened to them. Did something wipe them out? Did we? And if it wasn't us, then who? Is there some kind of threat out there that's going to come after us humans next?"
She sat back up, took a swig of water and grinned. "And when I've got my people back, I'm going to be pushing to find out about all that. But one thing at a time."
"Just to be clear," he said, not convinced that she really cared about this in the right way, but willing to put it aside for now, "we're going to the colony to free your crew and get hold of the Governor's launch, and then you're going to take me to Snow City and let me leave?"
Because she might be hopelessly naive but he wasn't sure he believed her.
She gave him a look that said she knew what he was thinking. "We're going to the colony to free my crew and whatever might be left of the Governor and his staff. We're going to restore order, contact the local peacekeepers, get them to send us a transport out of here. I'm assuming a guy like you can easily knock up some new identity papers once we get access to the Governor's software. You'll come with the Frowards to Golgotha hub and pick up a civilian transport from there."
As plans went, that sounded like a sock full of cockroaches - something he didn't want to touch even from a distance. She thought her own people would keep quiet about his sudden name change? Or did she think he could just change his face too?
"Look," he tried for calm and reasonable, as that seemed to work with her, "sneaking in quietly in the dead of night, breaking out your crew and making off with the ship, that's doable. But single-handedly restoring order? Being seen? Going out there in public in the day time and trying to lay down the law? They're going to eat you up."
She shrugged the pulse rifle on her shoulder as if to say that's what the last guys thought and Bryant found her confidence much less alluring now it was going to get him killed.
"Do I have to keep saying this? You are a woman. How many of them can you fight off? Because it's going to come down to that. They're going to see you and they're going to want you. All of them. So you can't do this in a fair fight. You can't. Break out, get away, come back later with reinforcements."
Something about her face punctured the pressure cooker of his conviction. She seemed to have grown heavier, and her mouth was hard bitten again like that of an old warhorse. "Lina's there."
"What?"
"Lina Atallah. Our doctor? And Morwen Crouch, and Lali Citlali, and ..."
"That doesn't mean you have to go rushing into the same threat!"
“It does, actually.” She laughed and stood. "You can't let them make you scared. Or they win without ever laying a hand on you. Come on. I want to scout the encampment out before we go in, so we'll find somewhere outside to camp tonight, talk this out further there."
Bryant wiped a bloodstain from the strap of his goggles, slid them back on, the band tight around his hair. His head and his shoulders ached, and anxiety sat like a bad meal in his gut, but he flew on obediently behind her, regardless, trying to come up with a third plan, something they could both live with. Something they could both live through.
That night they camped in the hollow center of a wild plant that seemed to prefer freshly turned soil. There was no wall or gate around the work camp - why would there be? One did not escape from a planet on foot. Instead its boundaries were marked by heaps of turned soil that faded into a garish emerald green, where plants whose seeds had been brought from Earth were beginning to colonize the planet for themselves. Around three quarters of the area, fields were laid out, growing Terran crops in the rich volcanic soil.
The volcano itself sat at two o'clock from their position, an old, crumbled thing scarcely worth the name, now blued over with this world's grass and festive with flowering vines.
To the south of the volcano, the remaining area of terraforming had been planted with Earth trees, yellow fruit of some kind hanging among the branches.
“Pears,” Aurora said, when he pointed them out, looking at him as though she pitied him. “And those are apples. That's a hazel thicket – where the nuts come from. Are you telling me you don't have trees on your world?”
“I'm sure we have perfectly adequate arboreta,” Bryant regarded the colony with a wary eye. It wasn't what he'd expected at all. “I've just never been interested.”
Tangled thickets of vines with trumpet-like pink flowers had sprung up on the margins of the colony where native plants met Terran invaders. For maximum concealment, they chose one on the outskirts of the fruit orchard. When they had pushed the skimmers into it they found it had a dome-like hollow inside, and the vines sprang back into place behind them, leaving them hidden and sheltered from the worst of the wind.
Between the bikes and the plant's central trunk there wasn't a lot of room left. Bryant rolled himself in one of the emergency blankets and tried not to be tormented by the inevitability of them both being caught and brutalized tomorrow. Could he persuade her to go for the ship, when she had injured crew to protect? Maybe.
Could he persuade her to protect herself? Probably not.
"You're worrying needlessly," she said, propping her back against the trunk, her foot in its big boot nudging his shoulder. "God's got it all sorted. It'll be fine."
Right. Because that had worked out so well for them both so far.
As the sun lowered and the light beneath the petals dimmed, he watched her fall asleep, very aware of how much had changed between them in such a short time to enable her to trust him that much.
What could he do? He'd been such a useless passenger on this ride so far, he owed her help. Owed it to her not to let herself get killed or raped.
He could mind control her, but (a) that was a hell of a struggle if the controllee knew it was happening, and she was too smart not to know. He would end up just making them both useless. And (b) she would hate that. "Mind rape" she'd called
it, which was disturbing because he hadn't thought of it that way before, and having thought of it made all the times he'd done it sound kind of sordid.
You certainly didn't defend people from one sort of rape by carrying out another.
In the increasing dark, he wormed himself closer to her until he could rest his cheek against her outstretched knee. He threw an arm over both her legs and when he was not kicked off, he pushed his hand between her trouser cuff and sock, curved it around her ankle. She shaved her legs. He had somehow not expected that.
At the touch, she gave a little jerk under his hand as if to wake, but he was already activating familiar, practiced subroutines and she was sucked back under, going still and heavy, her breath long and soft in the anaesthetic dark.
It wasn't a betrayal, he told himself as he set his bots to work. In the morning she would see it was the least he could do to help. He wasn't even touching her mind at all.
Not a betrayal. He allowed himself to fall asleep with his head pillowed on her knee. She'd be too disorientated to belt him for that when she came around, so he might as well take advantage of it while he still could, while she still thought he was a friend.
Take advantage, he thought muzzily as he drifted towards anxious dreams, well, maybe if she didn't want to be repeatedly taken advantage of she should try to be less damn naive.
And this was for her own good.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A rude awakening
The rumble of a deep, rough voice woke Bryant from his exhausted sleep. Outside, a setting sun was poking pink rays through the tangle of flowery vines that formed their dome. They had slept the whole day around, Campos anaesthetized, and himself just very very tired from all that flying and from the repair to his fractured skull before. But now Campos was also waking, face creasing in confusion at the sound of his own voice.
It must have been cold in the night. Bryant found he was spreadeagled over Campos' new body and had drawn the emergency blanket about them both. When he had closed his eyes, his companion had still been a woman, suggestions of softness about her frame, a certain sleekness, a roundedness that had felt welcoming even in slumber.
"What the?" Campos said, and Bryant scrambled up and away at the new wakeful horror in that subterranean voice. He put as much distance between himself and the Captain as he could without tumbling out of hiding.
He'd done good work though, he thought, as Campos traced the outlines of her man's face with her masculine fingertips, amber eyes flaring wide. Aurora's looks were more obviously handsome on a man's heavier face, and her stocky, powerful build suited the male body much better. She was still troll-like, but on a man it was an intimidating look, and Bryant licked his lips nervously as he waited for the inevitable explosion.
He didn't even register the lunge. One moment Campos was sitting up slowly, examining her new hands, in the next those hands were knotted in Bryant's jacket, and he was lifted bodily off his feet and slammed into the trunk of the tree with enough force to drive all the breath out of him.
He had sense enough not to fight back, just to hang there, defenseless and unthreatening, trying to whoop back enough air to fill his lungs without making too much of a noise.
"Cacete! What did you do?"
She'd been scary enough as a woman, as a man she was a terrifying motherfucker. Even the faintly feminine outrage in her eyes was frightening because it looked so out of place on features turned craggy and invulnerable.
"They're looking for you," Bryant wheezed. "They're looking for Aurora Campos. If you march in there looking like a woman, they're going to--"
"So you just thought you'd change my sex without asking me?" Campos shook him hard, whipping his neck back and forth, bashing the back of his head against the lowest branches. Bryant still didn't struggle, partly because he believed Campos wouldn't continue to hurt someone who wasn't fighting back, and partly because he knew he didn't stand a chance.
"It's an easy process. It's very safe."
"That's not the point! I don't even--" She dropped him and stalked stiffly over to her bike, moving as though she didn't quite know how to pilot this thing. That was undoubtedly true; her center of balance would have shifted and she'd be dealing with...
The look of discomforted disgust on her face would have been hilarious if it wasn't accompanied by anger. "Ew. I mean..." she squirmed as if her whole body was an ill fitting coat, shifting her shoulders and spreading her legs wider. Bryant made sure not to smile when she looked back, her eyes wild and distressed and still faintly innocent. "Ew."
"It's only temporary," Bryant reassured. "It's a really easy procedure to reverse."
He got a hand around his throat for his trouble, not squeezing, just resting there so that he could fully appreciate the knuckles against his jaw and the wide, rough span of it, and how easily it could choke the breath out of him.
"You did this with bots."
Bryant's gaze slid away from the face he had been admiring and onto the leaf littered ground. "Yes," he admitted, and was about to add something soothing, when the hand clenched around his airway and stopped the words in his throat.
"You promised you wouldn't give me bots."
His throat lengthened as Campos lifted, pulling Bryant up until he dangled from Campos's rock steady grasp, with his toes grazing the ground. When Campos shook him again he thought he could feel all the little vertebrae in there go click click click.
"I..." Getting both his hands around Campos's fist, he used them to raise himself up on his arms so his full weight was not bearing down on his throat. This posture was beginning to become a habit he'd be glad to break.
He coughed a little, pathetically. "I also promised to help you. This was the only way I could think of. You're faster, stronger and they won't recognize you. I did it to help."
"You promised me."
Bryant's humility was beginning to give out. He had honestly tried to do something good and this was how he was repaid? "Well, this may not have occurred to you, but sometimes when men want something from you, they don't always mean what they say."
Campos sneered and tossed him onto the ground, where he just barely managed to bounce from his tucked shoulder instead of the crown of his head. "No kidding. And you thought 'I know, I want to be in that select company too. I found out some bastard let her down and I thought 'well, that's a great example to follow. Let's see how I can top that.'"
She turned her back on him, bent over and leaned her forearms on the swoop, breathing long, timed breaths as if in a deliberate attempt to calm down. It gave him a good chance to appreciate her new sturdier legs and trim arse, outlined by trousers that were now that little bit too tight.
Bryant still didn't see what the fuss was about. "On my world, there were people who came to me to switch for an occasional weekend, or a holiday. You know? It wasn't all tragedy. Some people are flexible enough to enjoy having a bit of a change. You fall in love with someone who doesn't like your sex, you change it..." he shrugged. "It's only until we're out of here, and then I'll change you back. I promise."
"You promise," Campos scoffed, still leaning on the bike as if it was the only thing holding her up. "And we know how much your promise is worth."
Why exactly had Bryant half fallen for such a humorless, self-righteous bitch in the first place? "Fuck you! I'm trying to protect us both. How could you think it was a good idea to try to infiltrate an all male penal colony looking like a woman? This way you're scary enough so they won't try to fuck you, and hopefully - if you're protecting me - they'll think twice about trying to fuck me too. I needed someone to protect me. Did you give that any thought?"
Campos stood up slowly and squirmed inside her skin again, grimacing. "Why can't you just bulk yourself up?"
But she sounded a little calmer, more resigned. Bryant took the chance to dig some breakfast out of the panniers and hand it to her. She tore into it with a very familiar voraciousness. While it was true that the remodeling had not been comp
licated - based on her own unexploited genotype as it was - it had certainly been energy intensive. More so this way around than it would be when she fined down again.
"I have such a suite of enhancements already that integrating another change would be much more complicated for me. Every new enhancement alters the coding of everything else. Eventually you reach saturation. But you're a blank page," he smiled in a sort of wonder, because he'd never had a subject before with whom nobody else had ever interfered. He could make her so elegant inside it would make programmers and mathematicians weep. "I can write whatever I want."
"Can you stop me if I try to throttle you?"
It didn't sound like a rhetorical question. He understood it as a chance to be honest, to regain some small measure of trust. "I don't know," he said truthfully. "It takes a certain amount of time to get a stranglehold on the mind, and you're fast. I think you could probably kill me before I overpowered your will. But you don't want to do that."
"No?" Campos asked, her expression still faintly distressed. Her meaty fists clenched, as if everything itched inside and she wanted to get her fingers under the skin to scratch. "Because right now it's looking like a very attractive proposition."
"No," Bryant insisted. "Because I'm the only one who can change you back. If you kill me now, you're going to have to stay like that for the rest of your life. And imagine how well that will go down with the press. You think they'd take you back to command a ship as an ‘abomination’? Call it insurance, if you like, but you're not leaving here without me. I had to make sure of that."
Campos twitched her broad shoulders, looking like ants were marching up and down her spine. Her eyes were cold but maybe just a hint amused. "You're too clever for your own good, Jones. I wasn't going to leave you behind. You could have trusted me - you could have let me trust you. I'm sorry you haven't got it in your heart to do either."
Oh and now he felt like a heel again. What was it with her, constantly trying to map her limited black and white moral palate onto his grayshade world? She made everything look bad.