by Alex Oliver
When the imp sat up she tried pushing it over. It was like pushing the supportive wall of a house – the thing was heavy as a horse and cart. When it walked there was nowhere on the upturned boat shape of its back to gain purchase, or to stick a weapon. It simply nudged and nudged and pushed and herded her out of the way. it seemed to have no will of its own, only obeying the commands Bryant typed in on the Frankenstein's monster of his computer, staying still and passive as a rock otherwise.
"How many have you got?"
"There are about three hundred."
"About?"
"Some of them are listed on the inventory but not hanging in their racks. They might be lying unpowered in a room somewhere, or they might have been destroyed. I don't know."
"Three hundred isn't bad." They weren't exactly imaginative soldiers, but they were scary looking enough to impress a rabble that already wasn't completely committed to the idea of dying for their king.
Bryant shrugged apologetically. "They have issues. On half of them the power packs are so degraded they have to be recharged every five minutes. if you're thinking of taking them outside I don't think that will be viable."
"Hundred and fifty is--"
"Hundred and two."
She let the plan of a direct frontal assault go. "A hundred and two is not really an army."
"No, and I won't. I won't tell them to hurt people. I know you have no reason to believe me but after all of this, I won't let you or anyone else turn me into a killer. I won't."
He was the sweetest thing. Aurora reached down and squeezed the hand he had clenched around his remote control. "It's okay,” she said, “Can you give me twenty? And let me have one of those control stations?"
He sighed and then smiled at her. "That, I can do. In fact, I can give you this amazing thing."
He ran back to the cabin, returned with a palm sized green stone, hastily set in a hand-plaited necklace of fine wire. "I thought it was purely ornamental when I nicked it, but I think now that it's their equivalent of a datadisc."
She looked blankly at him and he grimaced. "A little computer that you keep in your pocket? On Eos it would be considered a bit archaic - we keep all that stuff in our bots - but you can't tell me you don't even have that?"
"The techs might. The rest of us? Nope. Just pen and paper."
"Oh God, you people! All right then, this is a little alien computer. I've given it a translation interface. So all you have to do is tell it what you want and it will translate that into alien language commands. I'll sync the best twenty drones to it, and you can order them by their number. One to twenty, all right?"
What a useful man he was to have around. She smiled. "All right.” She slipped her arms around him and squeezed. When he looked up in shock she remembered she had not hugged or kissed him in this form before. The feel of his slender arms around her was more immediate, more real than it had been when she was someone else, and she thought if she started kissing him now she wouldn't want to finish. So she dropped a little brush of lips across his forehead and moved away. “Thank you.”
“Just win,” he said. “Okay? I'm going to make sure that I'm safe. You never need to worry about that. But you? You need to win, all right? I didn't fly a spaceship down a volcano just for you to kill yourself anyway.”
“I will win,” she said, lightly but feeling that it might now be possible.
“You promise?”
She found that so touching she didn't want to spoil it by pointing out that it was the sort of thing that was largely out of one's own hands. She would do everything she could, at least. “I do.”
~
Aurora hung on the swoop high above the citadel and watched as her score of imps trundled their slow but unstoppable way out through a gate that clashed closed behind them, down the slopes of barren glass and into the colony.
From up here she got a good view of McKillip, who was now harrying some of the less favored criminals as they worked on lifting a newly cut and stripped tree trunk into a harness adapted to let it hang between the two plow horses. That was a battering ram. With that, his personal guard - the twenty men with personal shields - could stand beneath the stunner fire untouched and batter the door down, fearing nothing worse than having a few loose household items dropped on their heads.
The crowd of surly onlookers had grown rather than dissipating over the last hour as the news that there had been an attack on the wrecking ball spread. She could only imagine the rumors Bryant had caused with his fiery fall, and the fact that the mountain was shut down and impregnable. Not good PR for McKillip, that was for sure.
The crowd had seen her imps now. The alien robots hardly needed to push themselves a path through to the square in front of the citadel - people got out of their way instinctively. In fact it was hugely amusing to Aurora to watch the cries of fear and revulsion, though she supposed that if she had not been prepared for them by finding their city, she too might have been disconcerted by enormous gleaming metal bugs.
As they parted the last clump of idlers, one of McKillip's men saw them coming, let off a diamond disk. It raced buzzing and glittering in the early light of sunrise toward the first imp's head.
"Number one, roll." She told it urgently, and it tucked itself inward exactly like a pill bug, getting its delicate antennae out of the way. The disc rammed into one of its plates and cut half through with a squeal, and stuck there.
"Unroll and continue."
She wasn't sure if it was harmed, but it placidly emerged again, stroked a feeler with one of its front legs in a movement she had not told it to do, and carried on forwards.
"Numbers one to twenty. Form a circle as large in diameter as you can defend."
It turned out they thought that was a circle fifty paces across. They stationed themselves equidistant around the circumference, sat up on their bases and folded out their welding limbs.
She'd practiced this maneuver before she left, so she had a pretty good idea of how impressive it was. "Two second plume of flame please."
By adjusting the air mix of their welding jets, Bryant had given them flame throwers. It did her heart good to watch as the first, boldest criminals eased themselves closer to this alien presence and were blown back by a simultaneous roar of orange fire.
Under cover of their recoil and their shock, she set the bike down in the center of the circle, and climbed off. When the convicts recovered, she found herself also in the center of a circle of eyes. The crowd reformed at a safe distance around her barrier. She smiled at them, even though there was a great deal more leering than there had been last time. "Where's McKillip? We have unfinished business."
"McKillip is right here." The man's voice came from behind her, from underneath the citadel's main gate. With his shield he was immune to stunners, and that close to the walls even a midshipman with a catapult couldn't bring a stone to bear on him. He'd been hacking at the door with one of the axes the colony had been provided with to chop down trees, and he had already exposed one of the hinges. She had not come back too soon.
Now McKillip walked to the edge of her circle and then began to pace around it as if to force her to turn to watch him. She picked out the greatcoats and the rifles of his supporters among the spectators. They were all converging on her.
"McKillip is right here," he repeated, "But who the hell are you, sweetheart? And how come you haven't crossed my radar earlier?"
Sexual harassment was something familiar that she had not missed. She laughed and nurtured her anger secretly. "I'm Captain Aurora Campos. I'm in charge now."
"You look..." He came closer, though not close enough to be instantly immolated if she gave the order. His ridiculously out of scale head tilted as he examined her clothes and then her face. "Familiar. You're that bloke who challenged me earlier."
"That's right," she didn't put much stock in it but she had a vague hope that this conversation could be kept civilized. "You agreed to single combat. Winner takes charge. You tried to cheat, so
I've..." she waved a hand to indicate the drones, "brought some referees this time to make sure it's fair."
"You were a man," he insisted, his face wrinkled in on itself like a winter apple. She wondered what he wasn't getting about that. With his expanded frame and huge muscles, he must not be unfamiliar with the idea of modification. Maybe he came by his some other, less reversible way.
"Yup, I was. Accident with my tech support. It's better now."
"And now you're a woman. What? You wanna come fuck me? I mean we've all heard what a slut you are."
It went home like a punch to the gut. She had forgotten to expect such an attack. She'd grown used to being treated like a person instead of like an object, or a freak, and now she felt outraged and sickened by the sheer unfairness. Then she was angry.
"Slurs?" She laughed, cold and ready to kill him. "Very grown up. You going to fight me or are you going to stand there spitting out words like a coward? Because I can just run you over with these things. I'm giving you a chance out of the goodness of my heart, but I'm beginning to think you're not worth it."
He wasn't worth it. This little pantomime was not for McKillip's benefit but for that of the onlooking crowd. He had ruled them by being stronger than they were. The easiest way for her to replace him would be by proving that she was stronger than him, and yes, her being a woman would be seen as a sign of weakness until she proved otherwise. Might as well get that off the table right from the start.
But he was scum, and he was stronger than her, and she wasn't so noble that she was going to be stupid about this. "Well?"
He smiled the smile of someone who's within inches of getting everything he wants. "Let's make this clear. You beat me, you get to be in charge. Okay. I beat you, your people surrender to mine. I was going to say you'd be my bitch, but that doctor is prettier. I think I'll give you to Dig."
The strengthening sunlight did no kind things for the man who looked up and grinned at that. He'd obviously been on the other end of a face full of vitriol, his features melted and his cheek holed so that she could see the teeth and tongue through it.
She had a plan. It was possibly not a good one, but she knew she couldn't beat him otherwise, so it would have to do. "If you beat me you get to do what you like," she said carefully, not agreeing to her people's surrender.
He didn't insist, just stripped out of his coat and let it fall. No one picked it up for him.
"No weapons, just hands."
He looked around as if to say 'all these ridiculous demands' and if he faltered inside at the silent avidity with which the onlookers were watching, he didn't show it, just took the pulse pistol and knife out of his belt. Spreading his hands, he turned around slowly to demonstrate there were no other weapons on his leather-clad person. It just confirmed that he was deeply padded all over with muscle. That even she probably could not hit hard enough to seriously damage him.
"Okay?"
"Okay." She took a deep, calming breath and felt herself settle into battle readiness. This was going to hurt but let it come. "Four and five draw apart by a foot."
McKillip was already moving, not walking but sprinting into the ring, straight at her, and he was fast. He was blindingly fast. She barely had time to yell "Reform!" and close the gap behind him before he was on her. He swung, she twisted out of the way a fraction too slow and the punch grazed along the side of her face, his two rings scoring long red wounds.
But she was behind him now. She didn't try any kind of attack, just threw herself straight at him, climbing up the back of his legs so she could get an arm around his throat, twist her own legs around his waist and cling.
"Huh," he scoffed, as she found that even his throat was too muscular to get a choke hold on, "You fight like a girl."
But there were no walls around him to slam her back into, and the strength of his arms was not greater than the strength of her legs, and as he was trying to pry her off, so he could hit her properly, she rammed the palm of her left hand into his face and pumped acid into his eye.
A moment. He twitched as if it was cold, as if he didn't know what was going on, then he made a high pitched wordless keening noise as it it was all he could do not to scream. His right hand left off trying to prize her leg off him and punched hard into her inner thigh. An agonizing impact and a tearing hot sensation as the rings cut deep into the flesh. Not deep enough for the artery. It was only pain, pain and the insult as the bones of her leg and hip flexed but did not break.
His other hand came up behind him and grabbed her hair by the bun. It was an awkward angle for him but he slammed her forehead forward into the back of his head. A blinding pain and her vision grayed out for a second, but she kept her hand where it was, as the acid destroyed his eye and ate outward into the bone of his skull and inward into his brain.
His mouth opened and his screams bubbled out, no longer sounding even slightly human. He punched her in the kneecap and she felt something crunch. Agony was blurring out her eyesight again, but she held on. Things were softening under her palm. She pushed and something gave with a soggy crack. Then he was falling and she was falling with him with her hand buried in his brain.
She hit the ground and rolled, coming up to one knee, the other aflame beneath her. Her right hand was on the stones, her left - dripping blood and brain matter - she held in front of her, waiting for him to get up, come for her again.
It didn't happen. Above her, the risen sun reflected as a sheet of pure blue ice off the planet's ring. Her eyes stung with the glare as she got herself to her feet, leaning most of her weight on her left leg, her knee a torture device under her.
So that had worked. There were other steps that had to be taken next. This was not a time to just stop.
McKillip's hollow face gaped at the crowd. They gaped back. It was not quite the general rejoicing she had hoped for.
"What the hell did you do?" Dig yelled. "How did you do that?"
"It doesn't matter," she said, sharpening back up as fast as she could. "I won."
"Like hell!" he shouted. He took a long run up, planted a foot on the slope of the closest imp and used it to vault himself over, coming at her with an ax.
He was no faster than any other Earth normal human. She had plenty of time to turn to her bike, pick up the disc-gun that rested on top of the pannier, aim and take his right leg off just below the knee. He sprawled to a stop on the dusty stone and dirt of the courtyard, and fumbled to stem the flood of blood out onto the dirt.
Aurora would have gone over and put a tourniquet on the leg, but she wasn't sure her own would support her, and the last thing she wanted right now was to fall down. Better to look invulnerable and stern than that.
"Anyone else?"
"You said no weapons," it was her old friend the guy with the gray scarf. Arabic ancestry, she guessed, with mid brown skin and keen eyes. He looked troubled, as if it didn't suit him to replace one liar with another, and she found she quite liked him for that.
"No weapons but hands," she corrected, holding them up palm out, so they could see. None of her was a secret, after all.
It got some grudging chuckles among the crowd, suggesting that they appreciated honesty, but they also appreciated a certain level of cleverness. She relaxed enough to nod at Dig, whose hands had slipped numbly away from his wound and who had by now slumped, unconscious, into a widening pool of his own blood.
She raised her eyebrows at gray-scarf-guy. "What's your name?"
"Saif," he dragged out the pause before "Saif Bousaid," almost as if he wanted to watch Dig bleed to death in front of him.
"I'm going to let you through, Saif, so you can get this guy's bleeding stopped. But if you attack me I'm not going to be as lenient with you as I have been with him." She dropped her head and muttered to the green gem of her necklace to move imps four and five aside again.
He came through, drawing off his belt as he did. She watched him buckle it tight around Dig's thigh. The blood flow slowed to a trickle as she felt the
silent crowd all around her waiting to see what she would do next.
In the quiet, the sound of two swoop engines whining above them filled her with pride and relief. Mboge and Atallah flew out from the citadel to hover above her, disc-guns in the crooks of their arms. "Nice to see you looking more yourself, ma'am," Atallah called, her soprano voice clear above the quiet whisper of the breeze.
"Thanks, doctor," she called up. "Got a patient for you. Take him to the hospital and do what you can for him."
"Yes Ma'am." Atallah landed, efficiently hauled Dig onto the back of her swoop and left again, setting an excellent example of prompt obedience for the crowd and letting them know that under her rule they would be cared for as if they were her own.
Aurora could have done with some medical attention herself, but that wasn't happening yet, so she hauled herself onto her swoop's saddle. Sitting looked authoritative and took the weight off her knee. Nevertheless she was grateful for Mboge providing aerial protection overhead.
She cast her eye over the crowd. To tell the truth, without fear or prejudice to blind her, most of them looked like ordinary enough men. Ordinary men who had been hungry and worked hard and were hoping for something better than that in future. She could give them that.
"Here's the deal," she started in a voice she'd trained to carry over the mess deck of an A Class Padishah battlecruiser. "I have taken your citadel and your wrecking facility. The only working spaceship on the planet is currently under my control. You have barely adequate food stores for three months and nothing planted in the fields. Now I could take my people out of here, take the ship and leave. If I was thinking only of myself, that's what I'd do. I'd let you lot starve. But what I see here is that you need me."
Some shuffling. They didn't like what she was saying, but they couldn't protest that it wasn't true. She caught a glimpse of nervous face she recognized from the Froward’s brig, peeking out from behind two of McKillip's champions - the gangling, good natured visage of Carrow who had been sent here for the blasphemy of running a satirical paper, and for being gay.