by Alex Oliver
"Ma'am," Aurora insisted, offended that the woman couldn't still tell. "Time's moving on. You'd better carry him.”
"Yes, um. Yes Captain."
She could live with Captain. When they were all congregated in the outer room, she scratched a rough map of the compound on the dirty floor with the toe of her boot, Mboge, Citlali and Atallah coming close to examine it.
"I've already made a breach in the citadel wall here. That's where we need to head if we don't want to run the gauntlet by the doors." So, she hadn't fully thought this part out previously. She had hoped everyone was fit, able to sneak out the way she had sneaked in. But with almost half their party needing to be carried there wasn't a chance of getting down to the silo without being spotted.
Not unless everyone in the citadel was looking the other way. That meant a diversion. It would make things a little more complicated and risky, but she could manage that.
Even as she was thinking it, the floor shook beneath her feet. Dust pattered down from the rafters as an immense hollow roaring filtered in from beneath the closed door out to the office and thence to the street. Something outside was thundering.
Aurora felt her new, stronger chest crumple as though a mountain had fallen on it. She could practically feel the imprint of her spine on her stomach, as all the soft things inside her tried to shut down in denial.
She opened the door. The jail's outer foyer was empty, but through the windows she could see the plume of superheated smoke above the mansion, and then the rise of a burning blue inferno, as the impulse engines of a departing spacecraft lifted, slowly, slowly but with increasing speed over the com tower, above the first layer of low lying cloud. And then the craft's atmosphere wings slid out and it banked up there in the thin fumes of the mesosphere, leaving a fast dissipating trail ghostly in the light of the planet's ring.
She watched it for all of two seconds, but they were as long as the first night she spent without Autumn. Long enough for her to realize that she had been betrayed, and to hate Bryant fiercely, and to hate herself worse.
Then she snapped back into action, because what else was there?
"Okay," she turned back to her crew, who were crowding the room behind her, gaping at the sky in the windows. "So we're going to have to retake the colony from here."
"But that was the ship!" Mboge objected. "Someone stole the ship? We're trapped here with a hoard of criminals."
"They're trapped here with us," Aurora insisted, her mind already grappling with this. There wasn't time to blame herself. That game would be for later, if there was a later. "And yes. It looks like someone's stolen the ship. So we need to take the citadel and hold it for long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Governor?"
Improved by the few hundred calories of ration bar and a sip of someone's water, it only took him one attempt to focus on Aurora this time. "Captain?"
"What can you tell us about the situation?”
“Man called McKillip,” he whispered. “Made himself a trustee. Got his own toadies into trustee positions too. Staged a coup one night. He's not...” He paused to pant softly, close his eyes and martial more strength. “Not actually popular. But his men are the worst. Strong, ruthless. Bout. About twenty. The rest... the rest are hangers on. Sheep. They don't care who's in charge as long as they eat.”
“This McKillip? Is he proud?”
“Like a demon.”
Good. That would make things easier. “Okay, you leave him to me. Your job is just to remember all the access codes. Crouch?"
"Captain?"
"What happened to the Froward?”
“Knocked into collision course with the planet, sir. We got her down mostly whole. She's parked on the other side of the caldera.”
“Can you repair her? If so, how long?”
Crouch sucked air through her teeth like a salesman trying to convince a customer that their proposal will not come cheap. “Yes, but not without letting everyone on the planet know about it. There's extensive hull damage. Most of the repair drones were lost in re-entry. I didn't get a good look before we were shipped off here but my guess is two, three months work with welding equipment, exposed on the outer shell.”
Aurora smiled at her to show she bore no ill will for the bad news. “No point in sending a team to repair her until we've established control here, then.”
“No sir.”
“Ma'am.” Crouch's inability to remember a simple title didn't give Aurora a high opinion of her abilities, but you worked with the tools you had. “Right then. Crouch, you'll take the Governor down to the comms lab, where you will override the programming on the Governor's launch. With iris recognition and voice match you should be able to wrest control from the thief and drag it back here by the tail. He does not get away, you hear me?"
"I hear you." Crouch touched her pencil as if it was a talisman and grinned, showing the unexpected gleam of a golden molar. "Yes sir. But how are we going to get in?"
"Mboge and Citlali will be in charge of that. I’ll cause a distraction and draw as many of them out beyond the citadel walls as I can. While their attention is fixed on me, you infiltrate, then you lock and fortify the doors behind you, plug the hole in the wall and prepare for a siege. There is a flitter park on top of the citadel. When you're in possession you take a swoop and come rescue me. I'll probably need it by then."
She gave them another five minutes. Citlali and Mboge had their heads together over the scratched map of the compound, planning their routes of attack. The hardier of the governor's staff had recovered enough to pull themselves to their feet by the bars and stand with their foreheads pressed into the metal. Her forces were out numbered and outgunned in every way, and she was a fool.
She was such a fool she couldn't afford to think about it right now. That tearing sensation from one side of the chest to the other and all down her backbone, that was psychosomatic and it would ease soon enough if she just paid it no mind.
Here she was and this was the situation they were in. There was no damn option left other than to handle it and either win or lose as God decreed.
She didn't honestly care which. A last desperate gamble? Getting her worthless head blown straight off? It didn't sound like a bad option right now.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Single Combat
They were down to haggling over fine details, while Lina collected all the food she could find in the building and was pressing the Governor and his staff to take a little more, to store what was left in their pockets so they could take a nibble as often as they desired. The sight gave Aurora a stir of faint pride, that even in this place where no one could be trusted, there was still kindness to be found.
"Okay, it's going to take me ten minutes to get out there, a few more before I start drawing some fire. I'm going now. You count off and move on fifteen. God be with you all."
"And with you," Citlali gave the ritual refrain, then put her illuminated hand over her mouth as if shocked to be so forward.
They're kids and invalids, Aurora addressed the Holy Spirit with the familiarity of long friendship. Be good to them, please. And she strode out of the door like she had been doing all night - like a man who had every right to be there.
Round the back of the jail and into the orchard. She checked to make sure her two victims were still sleeping like babies, gave them a quick zap of stunner to be sure. Then she broke into a jog, threading her way through the trees, back the way she and Bryant had come only... in another life.
The trumpet like flowers on the dome bushes closed up at night time, looked like hundreds of stuck out tongues. Parting the vines brusquely, she found her cache of weapons and the two swoops inside like something unearthed from a forgotten civilization. Maybe what the physicists talked about was true, and Bryant's decision to leave had created a whole new parallel universe. That would be why it was surprising to find that things in the past had actually happened the way she remembered them. Surprising that they hadn't also turned out to be lies
.
Yeah, well she could philosophize about that as much as she liked when this was over, when she'd dragged the little bastard out of his stolen ship and tossed him into a pit full of snakes. Right now she had more important things to do.
Loading all the purloined rations into one bag, she buckled it on, strapped three rifles on her back and the rest of them onto the swoop's carrier, picked up the bazooka and cradled it in her elbow. Then she swung onto the swoop's seat, turned the running lights up high, and burst out of concealment through the screen of lianas, roaring into the sky at maximum power.
Oh yes. This never disappointed. She was going to leave love behind - it was not for her. War. War was her calling and delight, and all she really needed in her life.
She circled the colony once, to draw attention, keeping low enough to foil any potential missile launchers that might be situated on the citadel roof. Then she swung in on an approach that took her to hover in the square where the outcasts of the new order had been having their poor solitary party around their bonfire.
The two parallel streets of the colony were already thronged with men looking nervously at the sky, yelling and shoving at one another. Whatever else it was, Bryant's treachery had been an effective diversion in itself. The colony was stirring like an ant's nest under a stream of boiling water. Men were hanging out of the windows of the barracks on either side, and best of all for her purposes, many of them had come out of the Governor's Palace to stand looking dazed on the lip of the auto-closing silo and to pick fights over whose fault this was.
They were stirred up and looking for someone to blame. She set the swoop to hover in eye line from the citadel gates, but beyond the bonfire, so that whoever was in charge inside would have to come a long way out to do anything about her.
A crowd began warily to edge its way in her direction. She recognised her friend from earlier in its vanguard.
"Hey! You! Guy with the gray scarf. You said I should fight McKillip? Well here I am. How about you bring him out to me."
He jumped guiltily, looked about himself from side to side as if to say 'not me! I didn't do anything.' But the crowd seemed to exhale and solidify as if they knew they had purpose now. If anything else it was a free show, and they might get an explanation out of her, even if they wouldn't believe it.
"He doesn't come when I call," Gray-scarf-guy was still trying to look unimportant, uninvolved.
"No?" Aurora asked, liking the way mockery gave her ugly voice a bear-like growl. "He doesn't come and give you an explanation of what just happened with the colony's only spacecraft? Was he on that? Is he even still here or has he just run out on you? Has he taken the only ship on the planet and left you to face Kingdom reprisals on your own?"
A murmur through the onlookers, and she could see she was attracting attention in the citadel too. A steady stream of the drunk and curious was trickling out of the citadel's doors to join her swelling crowd. And one purposeful figure was taking the stairs two at a time, going in.
"Who the hell are you anyway?" Grey shouted up at her, twisting the ends of his scarf in a motion that made her think of garrotting. This was a place for murderers after all.
"I'm new here, and I don't like what I see," But it wasn't Grey's scarf that whipped out towards her - someone else in the sea of heads beneath her had a lasso. She gunned the motor a little to rise an extra foot over their heads and when the lash of the rope came again she nailed it with the pulse rifle, dropping ashes and sparks glowing into the night.
"Those kids hanging outside the mansion. Did McKillip do that?"
A shot came out of the crowd. She saw it coming, but she let it impact harmlessly from the personal shield she had buckled across her chest. The flare of blue light licked up her from boots to crown and died away, leaving the crowd beneath her murmuring.
"They..." Gray wasn't looking at anyone any more, only his feet. "They did what you're trying to do. I told you. This is the way to get yourself hanged."
"That's great," Aurora sneered, "And you like that, do you?"
"It's not as though we've got much choice."
She laughed, watching over his head as someone came down the stairs from the mansion. Fur inside his coat, and an escort like a king's court. And yes, she'd peg the man as this little planetary king at a glance, not so much because he was huge and grizzled and built like a silverback gorilla, but because the bodies of the people around him seemed to open to him, chests and throats bared.
They were an ugly lot themselves, wearing the blood red greatcoats of kingdom warriors over a hotchpotch of filthy rags, every one of them with a side arm and the scars that said they knew how to use it. Shaved heads and scalp locks and long hair matted with bones, and they walked around him like they knew who was boss. She wondered if they'd watched as the Governor's staff struggled not to eat their dead. If they'd laughed. Fury came over her again like a tsunami.
McKillip and his lads stopped on the steps down from the mansion, and that was no good. She wanted them outside the citadel altogether. Outside the main gates which could then be secured behind them.
"McKillip!" she shouted. "Come out and fight me, you coward."
He had a voice like a kettle drum, and she could feel the force of his gaze from up here, hundreds of meters away, though he was pretending not to be interested.
"I got better things to do than fight with every jumped up nobody who thinks he can take me. Double rations for a month to whoever shoots the bastard."
Four of McKillip's men peeled off and began to stride down the stairs and out - yes - out of the citadel altogether. She hoped this little rigmarole was at least keeping everyone's attention off the hole in the back wall. Perhaps even now Atallah was easing the Governor's staff onto beds in the hospital, while Crouch headed down to the comms labs.
"Go ahead and try." Aurora spread her hands in invitation as another plasma bolt fizzled into nothingness on her shield. That had been from a different assailant. She marked their locations and faces on the kill list in her head. And then there was a clink and a sharp hot pain in her knee and she swiveled the scoop in time to see an arrow rebound from the housing of her bike's reactor, its head having come close enough to score a shallow red cut along her leg.
Without shifting the bazooka from her left arm she grabbed the closest rifle with her right and loosed a shot that burned the bow to ashes in his hands.
The crowd had come a little close for her liking, so she fired a couple of warning shots into the ground by their feet to drive them back. "I don't want to hurt any of you except maybe McKillip. I don't think you're on his side at all. If you were, wouldn't you be inside with the rest of them, stuffing your faces, instead of out here going hungry on rations that he controls?"
Gray raised his head, his fingers still fretting the tassels at the ends of his scarf. "He said we'd get out of here. Some of us. And he'd use the ship to bring in food and women for the rest."
"And instead he started hanging people," came a tight, nervous shout from the far boundary of the crowd.
"And now he's lost the ship," someone else agreed.
"He said we were free. What he meant was that we had to work for him!"
Even over on the mansion steps, they must have been able to hear the shift of sentiment, the bubbling up of anger through the shallower waters of fear.
"You kill him," McKillip bellowed. "You kill him, or I will, and then I'll have got the taste for it and who knows where I'll stop?"
"Threats," Aurora laughed, though she was beginning to feel for the convicts herself. She knew what it was like to fall for bright promises, how sick you felt and how stupid once you realized you'd been betrayed. "Did any of you sign on for that? Being bullied by men who are no better than you? Because I sure as hell didn't."
"You come out!" Gray raised his head and his voice, and she was struck cold by the anguish in his eyes. "You come out and answer for my boy. You come out and answer for Ricky, or you are a coward. You are."
McKillip's face suffused with blood. He set his shoulders back and his neck forward and charged out of the citadel like a bull, his men hard pressed to keep up with him.
"Thanks," Aurora nodded to Grey as she would to any of her crew who had done a hard thing well.
"You'd just better fucking win." He dashed angry tears from his face with the heel of his hand, and frowned. "Where's your boy anyway? Freckled kid with whiskey colored eyes."
Aurora could not guess what the combination of hurt and grief was doing to her new face, but Grey seemed to read something in it that he understood.
"I lost him."
"Yeah," he said darkly. "It goes that way."
All McKillip's men were out now, striding towards her, and they were dragging the onlookers with them. The citadel was emptied. No doubt somebody would be manning the comms rooms. There'd be a few cooks conscientious enough to be washing up, a few spies and thieves taking advantage of the exodus to sift through whatever goods had been left behind. But even the Froward's motley crew should be able to handle that.
Aurora had a moment of fierce triumph at the thought. Sometimes things did go right. Rare though that had been of late.
But no one had yet shut the gates. So it looked like she'd have to carry on with this rabble rousing a little while longer. She hoped it meant that the crew were busy securing the mansion and not that they'd been found and killed already.
Another thing not to think about. She studied McKillip as he strode towards her and her mood of exultation settled once more into dread. Something about the way his long strides ate up the ground, fast, powerful, making his men have to lope beside him just to keep up, said he was faster than a normal human. And the bulk of his frame made his head look tiny by contrast. That was not natural.
'Augmented for combat' she thought, not even pausing for a stab of cold at the fact that the inner voice that said it was Bryant's.
He'd said it happened in the Source worlds, but she hadn't ever seen it before. So the guy would have extra speed, extra strength. Anything else? She hugged the bazooka's reassuring curve to herself, wondering if she should just fire on him. That would be unwise. If he was as fast as her he'd roll out of the way of a bazooka, and she would have proved herself treacherous for nothing.