Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  Her feeling of fuck them, fuck them all rose up in empathy. The Kingdom had cast her off, and it had told these people they were criminals. Fair enough, some of them were, but she understood that did not make it easier for them to bow their heads and put them back into the yoke. They had decided to die as free men, and she could admire that.

  She grinned at Carrow, and he ducked away from her gaze, red to the roots of his hair. "I get that you don't want to go back under Kingdom control. The Kingdom have washed their hands of me too, and my crew, and I no more want them than they want me. What we've got here is a new start. Something that's all of our own. As of now, your problems are my problems, and I will fix them."

  Bousaid laughed sharply and flinched as every eye in the crowd turned to him. "What you say is true, and we've known it for months. There isn't enough food to take us to harvest, and every transport brings more mouths but no supplies. Why should we not make merry now and die happy, since we must die anyway?"

  Aurora felt a little differently about the Governor, weak from starvation on his hospital bed though he was. Why had he let it get this bad? Had he also been living it up while his charges starved? If so... well, she still didn't approve but she could see the justice of what had been done to him.

  "I can fix this," she insisted again, raising her chin and looking out, trying to catch as many gazes as she could, trying to be as certain as they needed her to be. “Instead of sitting on your backsides waiting for death, give me the three months you've got left to turn it around.”

  “What about these bastards?” Bousaid waved a hand at McKillip's followers, singled out in the crowd by their greatcoats and rifles and the pockets of empty space they generated around them, where no one wanted to stand too close.

  “Identify power sources,” Aurora murmured sotto voce to her imps. She picked up the pendant from her chest and detailed a single imp to each.

  “These gentlemen are going to hand me their weapons and their shields.”

  The closest was perhaps a white man, it was hard to tell, he was so covered with red and blue tattoos. The whites of his eyes were dyed red, and his canine teeth had been extended with titanium spikes. He bared them at her. “Like fuck we will.”

  He lunged forward, getting through the gap in the imp circle before Mboge buried a disc in the top of his shoe – it sliced through, left him with his toes neatly exposed to the air. Glancing up, he found Mboge looking smug. “Warning shot.”

  “You fuckers, we are not--”

  “Engage to disable,” Aurora instructed, and the sheltering circle of her bodyguards broke up with a crash as the imps touched down on their stomachs and scurried toward their targets. The tattooed guy was overwhelmed at once, pinned down with a giant alien bug on his back. The others got some shots in first, but were bowled over regardless. The one furthest away from her, who began running toward the fields, changed his mind half way there, took off his weapons and armor and backed away from the pile. She let him go and left the imp to squat on the weapons cache until she could get one of her crew to pick them up.

  She hadn't told the crew any of this yet. She really hoped they would be on board with it, because the last thing she wanted was to have to fight them too.

  Seeing McKillip's men face down in the dust, an ugly movement went through the crowd. One or two kicked at the exposed limbs, or knelt down by the outstretched hands to pry off rings, but when a silver-haired man looked like he would stamp on tattoo-guy's fingers, Aurora shouted “That's enough.”

  She got a filthy look for her trouble, but he stopped. “I need work gangs to get back in the fields. You're late with planting but maybe not too late if you start right now.”

  “You're just like all the others!” he shouted, giving a final backwards kick at his victim's wrist. “Who the hell put you in charge?”

  “I did,” Aurora pointed out, because that should be obvious. Post battle shivers were racking her arms and her burning knee. To disguise them, she swung her leg over the seat of the swoop like she had somewhere more pressing to be. She fixed him with a deliberately unimpressed stare and pushed her flyaway hair off her face with a gore-red hand. “You want to make something of that?”

  He caved. “I guess not.”

  Mboge sent a diamond disk ricocheting off the ground in front of him, leaping up off the stone and twinkling like a million dinar earring in the strong morning light.

  “What?” the guy recoiled, looking hurt.

  “No ma'am,” said Mboge with inflexionless steady calm. With a wild surge of warm affection, she could have kissed him for his unwavering support and his stiff, punctilious sense of right and wrong.

  The guy looked at Mboge in astonishment, at the silent crowd, all busy pretending to be somewhere else, and then at Aurora.

  She raised an eyebrow. His shoulders slumped. He surrendered, bringing the rest of the colony with him.

  “No ma'am.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Logistics

  The imps had no visual sensors, so Bryant had had to follow the whole thing with infrared imaging and sound only. He suspected he had lost most of the nuances of the thing, but he'd seen and winced at Aurora's broken knee, a spike of bright blue on the sensors that perhaps correlated with increased blood flow, or perhaps measured pain, he couldn't yet tell.

  Watching her dissolve McKillip's brains out with acid made him thankful there was no video. It filled his mouth with spit as it was, made him wonder how much he was responsible for the uses to which his clients put his augmentations. But he put it behind him as he brewed up a batch of nanites to repair her knee. The truth was he wasn't responsible at all – that was all on her, and quite probably it had been justified anyway. Besides, even without the acid Bryant had given her, she would probably have only gouged the man's eyes out with her thumbs instead. She was a ferocious creature, and he really wished he didn't find that so hot.

  The nanites were ready by the time she arrived, solitary still, settling down the caldera like an autumn leaf.

  Her uncovered hair was full of dirt. She looked worn and in pain, and serenely beautiful. He wanted to kiss her but felt it would be impious in this mood. She seemed to be carrying something grander than herself, like a pair of furled wings at her back. Victory maybe. Maybe this was what victory looked like, scuffed and bloody to the elbow and unnaturally quiet.

  "Are you all right?"

  She tried to get off the swoop but couldn't bend her leg to swing it over. Biting off a little cry of pain she said "Yeah, I'm fine. Just tired," which was obviously military code for "I feel like shit."

  He flourished the first two fingers of his hand at her, like a priest giving a blessing. "I've got bots that can fix your knee, if you want?" and felt a glow of triumph at the way she closed her eyes and angled her throat towards him, inviting him to touch her there.

  "Thank you," she said, sighing at the touch of his hand and then again, more deeply when they began to work, numbing her first before they tackled the inflammation and damage. "When it's fixed I want to talk to your prisoners."

  "You're going to let them out, aren't you?" He didn't like that plan. He'd been trying to watch his prisoners ever since she'd left, but the bathroom had been frustratingly tech free, and he had no idea what was going on behind the door he'd welded shut on them. Nothing good, he was sure.

  "Probably," she agreed. "We can't keep them in there forever."

  "But it can wait until later," he urged. It wasn't just his personal concerns talking, part of it was professional. She'd been through two major remodels and now a complex repair in under a week. Professionally he wanted to see her rest. "Come on, there are proper beds aboard Charity. We can snuggle up, go to sleep. You can deal with it in the morning."

  A gleam of softness touched her face and was gone. "No. I need to talk to your prisoners straight away - since I'm here - but then... oh damn. I can't put off talking to my crew any longer. And they're not even my crew any more, technically. What am
I going to tell them, Bryant? I don't know what to say."

  Persuasion was not one of Bryant's strong points. Not unless it came from a well calibrated control of the subject's nervous system, and ever since Aurora had called that 'mind-rape' in a passing comment he'd felt a little squeamish about it. "Eat something," he said instead, "then take a twenty minute nap - I'll time you - and by that time I'm sure you'll have figured it out."

  Wonder of wonders, she did as he said, letting the repair job finish itself in peace. He sat by her bedside as he had with many of his patients and wondered when he had become the sort of man who shaped his life around what someone else wanted.

  She didn't mind him touching her any more, so he carefully combed the worst clumps of dirt and blood out of her hair and tried to figure out why he didn't feel more trapped. The cabin of the Dash felt like home with her in it, exhausted and sleeping like the dead, her arms covered in dried blood and her feet, still in their boots, stuck out over the edge of the bed.

  It wasn't that he was shaping his life around her desires so much as that he wanted her, and having lost everything of his own, any kind of life that came with her seemed as good as any other. Better than any other because she was in it.

  His thoughts wandered, as they often did, back to her body. Even relaxed there was no disguising the laugh lines in the corners of her eyes, and the way her brow furrowed even in sleep. She'd seen a lifetime of fighting already and the only person who'd ever said he loved her had been lying.

  Bryant's fist clenched by itself where it rested on his knee. He'd forgotten what it had been like to look at her and see something unattractive. Now she practically glowed in his sight, and the way she moved seemed like brutal poetry, and even the brawny strength of her squat little form seemed sexy as hell. He didn't know what she was going to do when she woke up, but he really couldn't think of a better option than to tag along and find out.

  He checked his watch, leaned over to wake her up with a kiss. She smelled of dead people, which was not quite as romantic as he'd hoped, but she breathed out in a little 'mmm' of pleasure and tilted her mouth up to meet his, soft and welcoming, and after that he didn't care. He pressed in just as she woke up properly and pushed him away.

  "The conquering of the world is finished," he protested. "How about the sex now?"

  She grinned. "Nope. Now we consolidate our hold and win our people's trust. And as regards the sex thing, in case you've forgotten, I'm still a good Christian girl. Just because I got it wrong once doesn't mean I don't try harder next time."

  Whoa. Whoa, wait one moment. Bryant scrambled away from the bed like he'd been shoved. Was she suggesting they should wait until they were married? Was she really talking about marriage? What the fuck?

  She put her feet down, sat up and gave him a startled look, as if she hadn't been expecting that either. As if she knew she'd just implied something that drew a line neither of them had ever expected to see on their radar.

  After a few moments he managed to shut his mouth. The same time, she stamped on her right foot, testing out the strength in her knee. He wished she wouldn't do that, but it should hold. It should be woven together with new little platelets by now. "Go easy on that," he said nevertheless, and felt the world settle into its new shape, absorbing the unthinkable idea and turning it into a part of itself. "It's not going to finish healing for another couple of weeks. I'd tell you to use a cane but--"

  "No way," she agreed, her expression wary. "But I'll sit when I can. And Bryant? Thanks."

  They'd been through this before. He'd run out on her, he'd been going to abandon her. She'd be a smear of debris on a molten crater by now if he had not changed his mind and come back, and he still thought she should be angry about that, not grateful. It made him feel safe that she wasn't, but he didn't deserve it.

  "Thanks for this, for taking the facility, saving our lives, everything."

  Oh God, it was absolution in case he wanted to say goodbye. It was "I'm sorry I spooked you with that implication of matrimony. You can leave with my blessing," and he absolutely didn't want that either.

  "Let's go talk to my new colleagues," he said and held open the hatch for her to go out first.

  ~

  When the two imps he had brought with him had finished cutting open the door it fell with a cloud of dust and sparks into absolute darkness. There was no movement in the darkness for a long time. Aurora held Bryant back from going inside to see what was happening. “Let them come to us.”

  Finally a spare, scrawny-looking young man came shuffling up to the door like he expected it to bite him. His narrow, tip-tilted eyes were red with sleeplessness, and his shirt read Chishiki wa chikaradearu. Bryant felt instantly better, because this looked like a kindred spirit. He had been expecting more muscles, less nerdery.

  The youth looked him up and down and seemed to come to the same conclusion. "What's going on? The compound drones attacked us and left us in here. I thought we were going to die in there! They welded us in!"

  Maybe not sleeplessness. Maybe his eyes were red because he'd been crying.

  "What's your name?" Aurora asked. Someone who didn't know her would think she was very stern, but Bryant could see the smile hidden in the corners of her mouth.

  "Are you a woman?"

  Really the kid ought to be able to tell, with that rack, Bryant thought, and hey he was allowed to think so, wasn't he, without signing up for a lifetime's commitment?

  "That's irrelevant for the purposes of my question. What's your name, son, or shall I talk to someone else?"

  "Nakano Nori, um, miss."

  "Okay, Nori." Aurora raised her chin to make it clear she was also talking to the people behind him who had not dared approach. "What happened was that Mr. Jones here took control of this facility for me. This colony is mine, now. If you think you can work with that - take orders from me, do what Mr. Jones tells you, then I can let you out. If not, you stay in. If you come out and give him trouble, we've got a couple hundred drones here says we can put you back in whenever we please."

  “Can we still work with the accelerator?” Nori's gaze flicked between the two of them imploringly. Hacker, Bryant thought, the boy's arms were so thin he could almost see the bones. Not a fighter, at least. Maybe the sort of fellow who siphoned off money from unwary banks, wrote malware as a hobby and a challenge and didn't understand how much the average user wanted to kill him. His smile for Bryant was cunning and yet innocent. Insatiably curious. “How did you take control? All the software is in an alien language. It would be so much easier if we could actually work with the code.”

  “Can he work with the accelerator?” Bryant asked Aurora, because he understood the concept of chain of command.

  “He can do whatever you want him to do,” she said. “But there are a couple of things I need you to work on first. One, we need food, fast. Two, if we're going to thrive, sooner or later the Kingdom's going to notice we're not all dead. I want us in a defensible position by then, and the place that comes to mind is already equipped with power and invisible to scanners.”

  Bryant felt something bigger than lust and infatuation move in the back of his mind. Shit. Shit, that nap must have done her good. He'd still been preoccupied with how to survive the next half hour and she was already planning a new civilization?

  “You're talking about the alien city?”

  “There's an alien city?” Nori took a step closer, and behind him a dozen other scientist types pushed themselves away from the walls and stood up, no longer even pretending not to listen.

  “There is an alien city,” Bryant repeated, the future unfolding in front of him. He grinned fiercely at Nori in the hopes that he had found someone who might actually be of help, but he also closed his hand around the young man's wrist and gave him a dose of the same bots he had used on Iggy. Better safe than sorry. “You're not going to believe how amazing it is. And it's ours now.”

  Again, the sensation of opening up, of his future being bigge
r than he had been allowing himself to hope. He looked at Aurora for confirmation. “It is ours now?”

  She let the smile slip out of hiding. “Yup. They left me on this planet so now it's mine. Shut this place down for now, take Nori here with you and go tell me what you can do for us.”

  The bots Bryant had designed for Ramjet had been quietly improving themselves in the back of his mind ever since, and were now faster acting and enabled tighter control. He wasn't happy with letting his prisoners out, so he made sure to shake hands with all of them as they passed, infecting them with the new generation.

  None of them seemed quite as fearsome as he had supposed. At least, not while Aurora stood at his shoulder. But he mentally pulled their records from the governor's computer and picked out a white bearded man called Jenkins, whose ebony black skin and gentle dignity put Bryant at his ease, and to whom they all seemed to defer.

  Jenkins was the defeated figurehead of a coalition of space traders whom the Kingdom had accused of smuggling refugees and undesirables to freedom. That seemed a safeish record to bank on for some level of responsibility, though nothing was certain in this universe. His colleagues seemed to like him at least.

  The others stood awkwardly in the anteroom and watched him, waiting to be told what to do. If he was going to go check out the alien city as Aurora wanted, it meant he was potentially leaving Charity in their hands. He didn't like that. Wouldn't put it past them just to drill a way into Charity and flee. After going through all of that pain to get hold of the spaceship, he wasn't abandoning it that easily, trust or not.

  “Okay,” he said eventually. “While I'm gone, Jenkins will be in charge. He and the rest of you will take welding equipment and begin repairs on the Froward. I'm going to give you half an hour to get anything you need and then I want you outside. I will then lock the facility down and set the drones to kill anything they find inside the gates.”

  Aurora gave a little bark of laughter as they scurried away in response to his threat. Maybe because she knew he would do nothing of the sort, maybe because she found his attempts at being senior-officerish adorable. But she didn't contradict him, and he liked that.