by Alex Oliver
"Captain," it was Crouch again, but she found herself thinking differently of the woman now she knew Crouch too must know what it felt like to be abhorred for having fallen in love. There was a kinship there.
"I've got an incoming call from the governor's ship. Which, unfortunately has already been un-wedged from the weapon and moved to a silo. It's Bryant Jones. The one who broke out of our cells and took the bridge? He says you'll want to speak to him." She scoffed. "I said you had other things to worry about than one errant--"
"Put him on viewscreen," Aurora interrupted. Everything was unmoored now, and strange. It was hard to tell who was an ally and who was an enemy, hard to tell what to feel.
"Yes ma’am. Here you go."
Bryant's freckled face blinked into existence in the center of the room as the screen flowered out once more. Artificial light brought blue highlights out of his cotton-candy hair and made his faintly red toned, mahogany eyes look dull as bloodstains. Or maybe that was worry, because he looked like a kid who's been caught with his hand in the cookies, defiant and anxious and gearing himself up to lie about it.
She remembered that he'd thrown her away too, but it didn't prevent the stir of exasperated fondness in the depths of her at the sight of his guilty face.
"Hi," he said, cocking his head to one side in a nervous shrug. "It's me."
"So it is."
"I ah. I saved your life. You can thank me if you like." Maybe he'd expected shouting because he was thawing already, his mouth tilting up and lines of humor adding to the lines of stress around his eyes.
"It was pretty heroic, though I say it myself. I feel you would have been impressed if you'd seen it."
Unbelievable. Mboge and Atallah were both staring between the two of them like they couldn't work out what they were seeing, and some lightness came back into Aurora's bones. Today was terrible, but Bryant was somehow always amusing.
"I did see it," she acknowledged. "I was standing on the roof. I saw you come down like a meteor and ram the only working spaceship on the planet into a hole. Are you mad?"
"It was the only way I could think of to save you," he said, and now she wished there weren't other people in the room, listening. She wished that sounded more like a lie. He threw her away, he wouldn't...
Except that they had let him go. She had let him go, and what he'd done with that freedom was to turn around and come straight back.
She didn't know what she was supposed to believe about that but this was not the place to be talking about it. "What's your situation?" she said instead. It was an acceptable substitute for 'are you okay?'
"Maybe you should come over and see," he said with a smile. It didn't look strained or coerced. He wasn't holding himself as if there was a man just out of shot with a blaster trained on him, but then he was a good liar.
"Show me the room."
Amused, he picked up his com unit and turned it. She got a quick 360 of the control room of the governor's launch and a glimpse of hangar out of one of the portholes. "I'm actually in control here at the moment,” said Bryant breezily. “I've got a whole bunch of criminal tech support guys pinned down in the corridors, and the boss of this colony is going to notice when I'm not dragged up in front of him tomorrow. If he hasn't already. I don't know about that part, I've got the doors locked and guarded. But you could come down the caldera on a swoop. I'll have one of my people show you in."
Her mind reeled at the thought. How the hell had he managed to secure an entire mechanised compound on his own? But of course, if it was mechanised, Bryant must have been in his element. He had certainly managed to wreak havoc enough on the Froward. She really needed to stop thinking of him as endearingly harmless. He was actually kind of terrifying.
"Your 'people'?"
His expression of false bravado faltered, showing weariness and yearning under it. "Please. I've done this much, but I don't dare open the door and I don't know what to do next."
She had no idea what made him think she had a clue either, but she was the Captain, and it was her job to know. Maybe something would occur on the flight across. "Okay," she nodded. "I'll be coming in high, and soon."
He nodded jerkily back, pressing his lips together for a second, and right. Yes. Now she could see that he was scared and all alone over there, and trying not to show it.
"Give me twenty minutes."
After she cut the connection, Mboge and Atallah were silent for a moment, but they watched her from their separate seats with the same look of patient incredulity. She'd been thinking that they just couldn't have been very good at their jobs to end up here in the reject bin of the penal service, so now she was ashamed of herself. She had ended up here too after all, that should have told her something.
"So..." Lina prompted after a moment. There was a renewed attack on the door - the thudding sounded like someone had found axes - but it ceased in seconds with another volley of stunner fire.
Eventually the charges of the guns would run down, and the criminals would be free to chop down the doors, but Aurora had done the maths and they'd all be dead of starvation by that point, so it wasn't a present concern. What was a present concern was trying to explain Bryant to her crew when she wasn't certain she understood exactly what was going on with him herself. The sense of giddy relief at hearing his voice was making it hard not to smile, inappropriately. But she didn't like to imagine what they would make of that.
"You remember Jones broke out of containment on the Froward?"
They nodded together, though it seemed a very long time ago.
"He ran into the Froward's pinnace. When I followed him he launched her. I'd just got him under control when we were clipped by the second rock. We crash landed five hundred clicks away and had to survive together while we got back here. He, ah..."
No sense in not spitting it out now. She had no superiors any more who might gainsay her, and her crew could not now betray Bryant even if they tried.
"He told me he was falsely accused. I believed him. I swore if he helped me get the colony back under control, I would get him out of here. This--"
She gestured with both hands to her male body, suffered a renewed stab of misery at the reminder of it, and then the startling realization that it could still be put right. "This abomination was a piece of 'help' he sprung on me against my will, but..."
It could still be fixed. Something loosened in her chest, she could breathe again, and with the release some of the weight smoked off her back. "I have to admit he was right. It came in very handy. But if he's got a secure location and time, I'm going to go and get it changed back. If that place is under his control, there must be something we can do with it that'll give us an edge. You're in charge here in the mean time, Mboge."
"Yes ma'am. Give me five minutes to detail you some cover fire before you set off."
Mboge's suggestion was a good one. As soon as the crowd around the base of the walls saw movement up on the roof a hail of pulse fire and cutting discs rose all around them, but Aurora took the bike up in a tight spiral, building altitude as she held position as close to the center of the citadel as possible, where the shots could not bend over the walls. By the time she'd risen enough for the distant shooters to have a direct line of sight, the shots and discs were spent by the time they reached her. She stabilized in the thin cold wind above the clouds and leaned into a wide turn that would take her out over orchard and ribbon trees, to the glassy black slopes of Mount Kolima, where she could take a spiral down into the throat.
Several small roads cut into the mountain at ground level, and a little way into each tunnel a mesh gate had been closed over the path. No one yet seemed intent on breaking in. The crowd outside the citadel must not have realized that this facility too had been lost. But when McKillip saw her fly down into it, he would surely realize then, and even if he could not breach the mesh gates, there seemed nothing to stop him from just climbing up and lowering himself into the caldera as she was doing.
At least
, so she thought, until some kind of aiming array- a tube that folded out in several interlocking pieces - folded itself back behind her and blocked her exit. She descended into hewn rock, where emergency lights gleamed blue and could not illuminate a darkness large as worlds.
"Hi," said Bryant's voice on the bike's radio, "I'm infiltrating your carrier signal. Just follow the yellow dot. It should be safe, everyone I know of is locked up except for me.”
The bike's guidance screen flashed green a moment and then displayed a map of the compound with a destination marked with a flag, and a little arrow for herself. She flew down onto a mag lev track made by giants, saw intricate machinery covered in dust. Crude wooden pulley systems so new they still smelled of sap were patched over the gaps. Clearly there were parts of this machine the criminals could not understand, and currently they were being operated by muscle power and grappling chains.
It grew warmer, and she thought she heard a skittering as of many legs against the walls. A final corner and there was the governor's launch in a repair cradle, and there, leaning outside it, trying to seem innocent, was Bryant Jones looking thin and sleepless and ill at ease.
She had no idea until that point that she was going to park the bike, swing off it, stride up to him and then kiss him until neither of them could breathe. It just seemed the only thing that adequately expressed how she felt, and he did not let out a word of complaint.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Aurora fights back
She backed him into the ship, crowded him there with this new body of hers and for a moment just reveled in the bouncy handful of his curls she had clenched in her hand, and the slick inviting warmth of his mouth. Bryant had made a shocked noise at first and then gone wonderfully pliant, but now he wormed a hand between them and pushed against her chest. She reluctantly let him speak.
"Obviously, I don't have any objections, but are you going to be happy with yourself if you fuck me like that? I mean, you arrested poor Carrow for being gay."
She didn't want to be forced to look at the big picture right now, but the moment's pause had given her space to feel how peculiar arousal felt in this form, rampant hormones and wrongness combining into something she didn't want called to her attention. "I'm still a woman."
Bryant laughed. "Well, yes. But I don't suppose your inquisitors would see it like that."
Aurora no longer had a reason to care what the arbiters of morality in her own society thought, and that was an odd feeling. This was between her and God, and God's way - she'd always known His way was a lot more like freedom than theirs.
She stepped away nevertheless and let Bryant right himself. He looked less wary now, but still insecure and nervous. A blush glowed under his freckles and his mouth had gone soft. He looked up at her with eyes like port wine and smiled. "Hello again."
"I... uh... haven't stopped because of the gay thing," she said eloquently. "Doing anything in this body is peculiar but I could--"
"You could wear it for me sometimes? Maybe?"
It seemed appropriate that he should tell her that he wanted to be with her in the same words with which he invited her to do something she had been brought up to believe was a perversion. He was altogether a refreshing change of perspective, and she found she liked that.
"Maybe," she agreed. "But for now, I really need to be changed back. I can't think in this thing. I want to feel like myself again. Is there time?"
"Fast is energy-intense, but we have lots of food on board, so I can make it fast." He was watching her with what looked like stunned affection, far more open and less complicated than any expression she had seen on him before.
"What?" she asked, not sure what she'd done to deserve him looking at her like that.
"Are you..." he licked his lips, "Are you going to say anything about me running out on you? Aren't you angry?"
And no. As it turned out, she wasn't. She hadn't really expected much from him, and he had exceeded those expectations. Yes, there had been a dodgy part in the middle when it had looked like a betrayal, but...
"You came back." She finger-combed the rumpled hank of his hair back into place in its cloud. "Right now, that's everything I need to know."
His eyes filled, and he scrubbed his knuckles across them impatiently. "I guess it's hopeless to try to persuade you to come with me to Snow City and just leave all this to deal with itself?"
She didn't see how she could get her whole crew and the governor's staff over to the mountain and on board when taking the guards off the gate and the hole in the wall would leave the citadel undefended. And besides, she'd heard the helpless anguish in Gray's voice and seen the anger in the crowd against their current leaders. No one seemed to be working. Crops weren't getting planted or tended. Eventually the stores would run out and there would be no more to replace them.
This was devolving into a situation where the last man alive would end up eating the corpses. She couldn't just run out on that.
"Yes. Yes it is."
Bryant patted the Dart as if he was comforting it, and now there was some familiar guardedness back in his face, reassuring in its normality. "And if I launch the ship while you're unconscious, changing, and set a course for Snow City anyway how likely is it that you'll drag us back here and you'll never want anything to do with me again?"
Oh, this was honesty and open negotiation and... she checked herself from allowing the novelty and hopefulness of it to sweep her away. This had the appearance of honesty and open negotiation. She'd only find out which it actually was when they were through it and looking back.
"One hundred percent."
He nodded, looking resolute. "That's what I thought." and motioned her to come aboard. "Let's get you changed, then, and then we'll make a plan."
"I'd like to keep the hand." She reached out for him with it and he closed his fingers over the palm with complete confidence that she wouldn't hurt him, and a smile.
"I thought you'd like it once you got used to it."
Maybe she'd done one thing right this trip at least, because evidently there was at least one person in the universe who thought she should not lightly be thrown away.
"'Like' is putting it too strongly. I think I'm going to need it."
~
When she woke and was herself again it was like a discordant piece of music had finally come into tune. It shouldn't have been a big change, but it turned unbearable disharmony into beauty, easy as sliding a bow correctly over a violin string.
She stretched, and her body was hers once more. Her clothes fitted comfortably loose, and her hands were her own hands and even the pitch of her breathing delighted her. It was so good she had to curl on her side and cry about it for a few seconds, gulping out the relief, and the misery she'd only just realized she'd been accumulating since she was misshaped.
She'd had a large meal before going under, but Bryant was kneeling by her bedside with another, chicken flavored vat meat and a baked apple. He gave her a smile as she sat up that had shades of professionalism in it, as if her reaction was nothing new to him. It said he was accustomed to this overflow of joy, as if he'd done this a thousand times before. It occurred to her that, indeed, he had. This was the life he wanted to go back to so much - a life of saving people, one by one, of freeing prisoners and healing the sick.
She wiped her face. Surely there had been just as much light in the world when she was a man, but she hadn't seen it like this, hadn't felt... hadn't been herself.
"So... I was thinking. Maybe sex?"
Aurora laughed and stood up. Oh, that was good! She took off her veil, combed out the mess of her hair and wound it back into a bun, secured with her last three hairpins. She had the veil held tight across her forehead in preparation for pulling the ends back to tie the whole thing taut around the bun when she wondered who exactly she was hiding from.
God knew what she looked like with it and without it, she was as intimate with him as she would be with a husband. So it wasn't for his benefit that s
he wore it. But what man looked at her, covered or not, and thought 'sexual temptress'? Other than Bryant, of course, and he was unique.
She let it drop to the floor of the cabin, had the sense that a lot of other things had fallen with it, but she would find out what they were later. This was not the time.
"Later," she promised. "First I've got a world to conquer. Tell me what the situation is here."
"Ooh," Bryant laughed, but he also looked much more like himself. Irrepressible. "I'm liking your megalomaniac side. Very sexy."
She didn't have time for his nonsense either. "Report."
Apparently, he had remotely reactivated the robots working in this installation, and used them to incapacitate the humans working here. Then, after he'd called her to say he was here, he'd had his drones remove all the workers into a large narrow room with one of those mirror smooth rills of water down the center.
"I think from their records that it's a bathroom, but they've been gone nearly a thousand years, so the water should be fit to drink. They don't have any food in there, but I hoped you'd come up with an idea about what to do with them long before they starved. I had the imps weld them in. It gave me the creeps thinking of them getting out and surprising me while I slept. But we can easily un-weld them again, if you have a plan."
Aurora did not yet have a plan, but leaving the criminal scientists where they were for now sounded good. They should keep in there just fine until she could determine whether she was going to be the one who would release them. First things first.
At her request, Bryant brought one of the 'imps' into the hangar. It came trundling on its many legs just like a woodlouse - a woodlouse the size of a pit pony, made of a titanium-like metal, swirled with pink and green patterns. A second set of limbs were folded tight across its belly. When it was required to do something, it sat itself up on its end and folded them out. Pincered and longer, much more dexterous, they worked like arms, and they carried a diverse suite of cutting tools.