by Alex Oliver
She'd thank him when she wasn't getting raped, he thought, but then decided it was a little tasteless to say so. "You must have wondered how much easier your life would be if you were a man," he said instead, making it flippant, trying to draw out the horror so it stopped poisoning them both. "Now's your chance to find out. And, um... you make a fine looking man, in case you wondered."
"Yeah?" Campos had relaxed enough to scoff, amused at that thought.
"Oh yes. Very, um. Very rugged." He smiled, half deliberately flirtatious, half genuine. "I'm going to be proud to be your boy."
Campos side-eyed him as though she believed the entire speech had been bullshit. She was now hugging herself, arms wrapped around her thick waist, fingers arched as she pressed her polished nails into her flanks, as if she was either unconsciously trying to peel off this new skin, or to scratch the infesting nanites out as though they were fleas. She looked capable and dangerous and untouchable, like a creature carved out of rocks, until you looked in her eyes, and then she just looked uncomfortable as hell, and a little frightened.
And actually Bryant had done so many sex change modifications it hadn't occurred to him until now that he'd never done one this way around. He'd never taken someone who was as perfectly attuned with and as lazily confident about their body as Aurora, and deliberately put them in one that didn't fit right instead.
"It's only temporary?" she asked, sounding like she was ready to let go of the last of her anger, like she really wanted to believe it was going to be no big deal, but she couldn't, not quite.
"Of course. As soon as we're safely on board ship, I'll turn you back."
"Because I feel like," she shifted stance again, maybe trying to find a way to stand that would make it easier for her to ignore the existence of her new genitals. "This is awful. I feel so... vile and, dear God the way I sound! And... I just want to kill something. I want to break every damn thing in my path and kick the hell out of the pieces."
Bryant couldn't help a little chuckle at that. "Well, I'm guessing you have a lot of anger left over from how you've been treated this last year."
"Is that what it is?"
Campos would have to stop looking at him like that - with Aurora's naivety and that very masculine passion - because it was giving him much more interesting ideas for what they could do with the morning than striding into a jailbreak.
He swayed forward to put a hand on Campos' newly flat chest, feeling the curve of pectoral muscles under his palm. Warmth rushed over him. He licked his lips. Yes, he could think of many better ways to spend a day, and they all involved inspecting his handiwork as close as possible.
Of course, if he did suggest it, Campos wouldn't go for it, negotiating as she was for the role of virgin mother. She'd probably--
A big hand raised his chin, and then Campos was kissing him, clumsy and demanding and insistent. Kind of unpracticed, intensely sweet. The sexual tension he'd been repressing since they first landed drove him up to meet it, he got his arms around that broad back, wound himself around Campos tight, felt her arms tighten around his ribcage until he couldn't breathe, and that set off a whole mardi gras of fireworks down his spine and behind his eyes.
It ended before he was ready, and he was set on his feet, swaying, with his eyes closed and his heart thundering, hot with delight from head to toe. He opened his eyes reluctantly, to see Campos had recovered her small, cynical smile. It looked even more world-weary on that rugged face, but it was a lot better than despair.
"What was--?" Bryant tried.
"For good luck."
So they were really going to do this- going to walk into a prison compound which at the last count had held over five thousand men, and free a half dozen prisoners and somehow take the place back under the rule of law. Good luck? She'd bloody need it.
He didn't say so of course. What he said was, "You're Aurora Campos. You make your own."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Inevitable betrayal
The planet's ring was more pronounced from here than it had been where they had first camped. It slanted across the night sky as a band of icy blue light a good meter across. He could almost see the propeller turbulence of some of its debris, like a faint pattern of Celtic knotwork traced in brighter and dimmer strokes.
It cast enough light for them to see where they were walking, but turned the world beneath it twilight blue and tricksy, all the trees looking like stark black holes against the luminous sky.
The evening breeze was full of fragrance, and the little creatures with the mirror eyes had taken up residence on the Earth trees as easily as on their own. Bryant could hear them chittering to each other as he passed, and he only hoped they were not giving away his position to someone who cared in all the wrong ways.
The wind sighed in the trees. He reached up and picked a pear that dangled above his head and it tasted like alien sunlight, like sweet water and grit, both the fresh taste and the hit of sugar fortifying to body and spirit alike.
Campos waited until he had finished and wiped his hands. "You ready?"
I never will be. But he couldn't put it off forever. He licked his fingers again and nodded.
"Okay then. I'm going to assume the prisoners we brought on the Froward have been liberated. That means there's a whole bunch of new people the locals don't yet recognize. If we're seen and challenged, we say we just arrived and don't know where we ought to be. okay?"
Ooh, she was trying subterfuge? It wasn't really her strong point, but he appreciated the effort. He managed the flicker of a smile. "All right."
She took his arm and they strolled together out from under the trees. To their left three huge circular lakes full of reeds fed into one another. Water lilies bloomed atop them and there was a rustling and trickling, and a faint stink of human and other waste. To their right, the first building of the colony was completely dark, and he could just guess at large, inhuman shapes jostling inside it.
"What the?" he said, because he had imagined rusty corridors and perhaps rock breaking, or slaving in open caste mines over poisonous minerals, not lilies and fruit trees.
"Sewage treatment," Campos indicated the ponds, "and that'll be the livestock barn, or maybe the stables." She sniffed the air knowledgeably, "Barn, I would guess. I smell cows and pigs - there's no mistaking pigs."
Bryant tried to twitch his arm out of her grip. Not that he would object normally, but he had engineered something special for her left hand, and it should be coming on line any moment now. He didn't want the first thing he knew about it to be the point where it burned through his arm.
"This looks like a farm" he sneered, almost disapproving, disappointed. There had been terrible stories about what the Kingdom did to its prisoners, but this didn't appear to fit them.
"Yes," Campos said, guiding him past the back of the barn. A cut through a few paces wide separated the barn's end wall from a long, cheerless building of bricks the color of the ash on the volcano's lip. This was one long featureless wall on the outside, and they couldn't tell if it was barracks or prison or something else. "The colony needs to be self sufficient in food, and good hard work is healing to the soul. What did you expect?"
"Flogging posts," he whispered back. There didn't seem to be anyone around but he knew better than to count on that lasting. "Gallows. Torture chambers, I don't know. Not..."
A whinny in the distance brought back wrenching memories of that school trip and something atavistic, perhaps reaching all the way back to Earth. "Not horses and..."
At the other end of the snicket they stepped out into a street lined with trees and flowerbeds. From this side, the long endless building was a succession of smaller units broken up by white-rimmed windows and doors, all of which were open.
"Not horses and horticulture."
On the other side of the street there rose a wall more like that of a medieval fortress, from which arrow slits peered down on the doings of the colony beneath it. Bryant could feel eyes behind the peepholes,
and movement behind the windows and doors of the kitchens and workshops and barrack houses in the sturdy building to his left. He thanked his own forethought that he was not wandering through this scrutiny on the arm of someone who was obviously a woman.
"We believe that every human life is sacred," Campos rumbled in her new cavern-like voice, "and that one purpose of imprisonment is redemption, to give the sinner a second chance to live a purposeful and useful life."
Yeah, yeah, he'd heard that before. He'd just always assumed they didn't really mean it.
"And then the plan is to introduce breeding stock from the women's prisons and hey presto, new Kingdom world."
Campos looked at him uneasily, as well she might. "It's done carefully," she said, "Respectfully. They... correspond first. And why not let them have families, once they've proved they can be responsible? Novocasa was settled this way, and we're happy. "
"Hey, sweetheart! Give us a smile."
They'd come to the round turret at the corner of the fortress. Beyond it on the left the long building terminated in a stable block where enormous animals drowsed in their stalls and crude earth-turning machinery hung on the walls. He might have spared it more examination if the public square on the right had not held a bonfire around which a dozen men were warming themselves, and the closest one had not broken away and approached, predatory grin on his face.
Bryant looked automatically at Aurora to see how she had taken this instruction, but Aurora's face was closed and smooth and forbiddingly male. Bryant realized with a sinking feeling that the guy had been talking to him.
Others were coming now, folding themselves up from tree-trunk seats, mugs in their hands. They had a newly disreputable look, as though they'd only just stopped washing this month, hadn't quite reached the bottom of their slide into depravity just yet but were accelerating towards it gleefully.
The first guy was close enough now for Bryant to smell the liquor on him, alcohol and aniseed and the peanut-filth stench of his clothes. He reached out a hand to Bryant's hair and Aurora knocked it aside. "He's mine."
A pause, as the onlookers stopped to watch and think. Bryant ducked behind Aurora as his admirer gave a steely-eyed laugh. "You're new, right? It's a bloody commune, mate, we share and share alike."
Beyond the bonfire, the single large gate of the fortress stood open, and there were glimpses of further buildings inside, the thick cabling of wires up their sides and satellite communication gear in metallic forestry on their roofs. The technology called to Bryant, familiar, safe, clean in comparison with the unreconstructed human filth that was going on here. He didn't want to be here, didn't want to be dealing with this. How had Aurora talked him into it anyway?
Campos smiled too, like a drawing of knives. She had caught the hand that had been raised to Bryant's hair and now she twisted it backwards. The convict tried to kick Campos's leg out from under her, but she just stepped forward instead in a maneuver that Bryant didn't quite catch, but which left her standing over the man - the convict buckled to his knees with his arm twisted up behind him and held straight out, his head down.
He was panting, “shit shit shit,” through his gritted teeth while Aurora adjusted her grip a little and pressed upwards, bringing tears to his eyes. "Stop!"
"You want me to break the arm?"
"No!"
"Then don't fucking touch him."
"Okay okay!"
"You promise?" she said, and Bryant could have punched her himself, because he knew exactly how the guy would take that.
"Yeah, I promise."
The moment Campos let go, the guy was up, driving his already lowered head into Campos' newly acquired balls. She gave a soft cough, more of astonishment than pain, and Bryant looked frantically around him for a rock, a stick, a weapon of some sort, hearing laughter from the onlookers like a wolf-pack baying.
Aurora doubled over, but she grabbed the guy's belt as she did so. Straightening up, she flipped him over, lifted him entirely off the ground and dropped him on his head. He gave a sharp cry. For a moment Bryant was scared she'd killed him in front of his friends - that would surely not end well, but when she nudged him under the shoulder with her foot he groaned and tried to crawl away.
She let him, catching the eye of the next closest, a man with a long gray scarf wound many times around his throat. "Anyone else?"
"I leave the new blood to McKillip." He shrugged, with a nervous look towards the citadel's open door. "But if he decides to take your boy, you'd better say 'yes sir, how many times'. We're under new management now."
"Maybe I should have a word," said Aurora, like the straightforward idiot she was, and this was her plan, was it? She was just going to walk up to the door and announce herself? How the hell had she managed to lead troops if this was her MO?
"Maybe you should," scarf-guy leaned down to help Bryant's admirer back to a seat. Then he raised his voice so that all the onlookers could hear, "Execution tomorrow, guys. Wear your best."
Bryant startled as Aurora took hold of him again, with the right hand this time, and gave him a shove towards the citadel, but she returned scarf guy's smile with bloody-minded bravado. "Maybe, but not mine."
Walking the last five hundred yards from the bonfire's penumbra of light into the citadel's gateway was a worse repetition of how it had felt to walk down the central isle of the remand center, of how it had felt to eat at the mess in the Froward - although there he had been fairly sure the guards would intervene if anyone got too aggressive. He'd promised himself he was never going to feel like this again, and now he was full of sickening fury to find that was another promise he had not intended to keep.
The dark under the gateway was a balm to his stinging pride and eyes. When they were fully under cover Campos leaned in towards him, and he had to fight the wish to fold himself into that sheltering body, and just shiver. God he hated this. He hated every moment of it. He hoped she'd reassure him. Just an 'are you okay?' would have helped, but what she said was "What the hell did you do to my hand?"
She held it out and he traced the mouth-like shape that had opened in her palm. It had seemed like a good idea last night, but now, with her his only protection against these bastards, accidentally making her furious with him seemed like a mistake.
"I thought you might need it to get through the doors. It was your move on the Froward which gave me the idea. It's secreting a powerful acid." He shook his head blindly in the dark, anticipating her questions. "Don't worry, your palm and skin are immune. I wanted to protect you. I thought you should have a weapon."
"So you made me into a monster?"
His urge to burrow into her embrace and feel safe waned. Fear and pride took over his tongue. "You were already that."
A silence and he had time to regret he'd ever lived.
"We're going to talk about this later," she said at last. "For now, I need you to find out where my crew are being held. Do you need a main computer room for that?"
He swallowed down anger and hurt, though it weighed heavy as a singularity in his stomach. He still had to get out of here and he needed her for that. "No. Get me anywhere with wires and I'll do the rest."
In the midst of the medieval walls, the Governor's mansion sat like an Ancient Greek temple, fronted with columns and Biblical carvings. It would have been more impressive if he hadn't known it was mass produced out of concrete and molds. One exactly like it had been poured where the President's bunker on Eos had once stood.
Here were the whipping posts he had expected, though they were so new they still smelled of fresh sap. Here too, a set of hastily erected A frames held a cross beam from which three corpses dangled by the neck, blood congested faces still fresh. 'New management' seemed like an increasingly bad thing.
From inside the mansion came the dull, ominous roar of a large group of drunken men having a good time.
"No sentries," Campos nodded up at the top of the thick walls, where a guard and lookout should have been patrolling.
> "That's good though, right?"
She scoffed, "Good for us, but sloppy. I'm not rating this McKillip, if that's their new boss."
Bryant's stomach squirmed - he had seen far too many dramas in his time to let something like that go by, "Don't say that! The moment you say things like that, everything goes to hell."
Campos gave him a startled smile, and he thought he'd delighted her, shocked her a little out of her melancholy. It felt like an achievement to do so, and he wondered when he'd started caring, and how long it would take him to learn how to stop.
They passed by the main door of the house - too obvious - and walked quietly around a barracks for the soldiers, now empty, with all the mattresses missing and the doors levered off the storage lockers and piled out in the street for kindling. In the gym next door, five men were lifting weights and one was going through some kind of martial arts routine on the padded floor. Bryant tried to walk casually, like a man who belonged here, but fortunately none of them were looking out of the windows into the dark, and they passed by without incident.
In the angle of the curtain walls, a small infirmary for the garrison sat dark and empty, and at ninety degrees to it, a Chapel of the Book was lit and a solitary Muslim was making his devotions to the star on the wall that marked the accepted notional direction of Mecca.
"Infirmary," Bryant suggested.
"Okay."
No doctor came hurrying out to meet them as they walked in. The beds here had also been denuded of mattresses and blankets, the drug cabinets broken into and rifled. Many of the computers had had a foot put through them, but Bryant found one in the operating theater that powered up, and he ate three ration bars that he had brought in his pockets while he waited for his bots to crack the passwords and encryption, get him into the network and into the Governor's machine beyond it.
Campos slouched in the doorway while he worked, rubbing at her hand as though it ached, occasionally still writhing as if her whole body distressed her. "How's it going?"