by Alex Oliver
“Not very trusting of you,” Jenkins observed in a round, sonorous voice.
“Captain Campos does trust,” he admitted. “I mainly do paranoid levels of suspicion and coercion.”
“Not the most endearing of qualities,” Jenkins observed. He grinned, and a subtle feeling of ease crept over the conversation, as if it might turn out okay after all. “But perhaps wise.”
~
Aurora got the swoop out so that Bryant could shut the wrecker up tight behind them, then she handed it over to him with a slight qualm, leaning close to whisper, “Are you going to be all right?”
“I think so,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment. Nori stopped, mid movement as he was flinging a leg over the bike, balanced there, unnaturally poised, just long enough for Aurora to realize Bryant had frozen him. When Bryant let him go the movement carried on seamlessly. Nori settled onto the saddle with a frown and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, but seemed unsure about what, if anything, had happened to him. It was creepy to watch but it settled her anxiety.
It wasn't a secret, was it, that she was... involved with Bryant? Involved to the point of blurting out the things she was wondering about marriage and whether she could sleep with him first. Who on this planet was there to disapprove of her anyway? She leaned down and kissed him on the bridge of his nose. “Good luck.”
“You too.” He looked startled - embarrassed and pleased. “And you're a natural at the whole motivation stuff. It'll be fine.”
Aurora didn't wave the swoops off. That would be taking girlishness a little far. But she did stand for a moment, with her hands clasped behind her back, watching them dwindle. Then she strolled down the slope of the volcano, through the orchard and out to her battle ground outside the gates of the citadel.
The gates were still shut, and the streets were full, milling with men chewing over what was going on. She left her imps lying on their prisoners, because so far no one had stopped or challenged her. There was a lot of staring, one or two questions shouted to which she answered “Give me an hour, then come ask me again in the citadel.”
Her knee was tender but all of her felt better for the gentle exercise. It felt better to be out, unguarded again and visible, where doubters could see how unscathed she was after her fight.
The crowd closed up behind her as she walked to the citadel's door, found Saif Bousaid there, settled on the fallen battering ram with his legs crossed and his back propped against the doors as if to make the point that he could wait all day. He raised his salt-and-pepper eyebrows at her, clever eyed, challenging her to show him what she could do.
She cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled up at the roof. “Iverson!”
The girl's blond pigtailed head poked up above the parapet, looking eager and innocent, as if all of this was the most thrilling adventure. “Captain Campos?”
“Open the gates, midshipman. And Iverson?”
“Ma'am?”
“Next time you're in a siege and someone shouts up at you, don't look over the wall to see who it is. It's a good way to get your head blown off. There are gun-slits for a reason.”
“Yes ma'am. Sorry.”
The convicts trailed her in, eager to re-establish their claim to the comms building and the hospital, the chapel and the empty silo where soon, she hoped, Charity would once again be housed. But when they were in, they stood about aimlessly, wondering what to do, wasting good plowing weather.
Aurora mounted the stairs to the doors of the governor's mansion. "I know you've got questions. I'm going to take an hour to speak to my crew, and then I'll answer them. You come back in an hour, I'll be in the governor's audience chamber, and we will get this world sorted out."
It was an easy part to act - blithe confidence. As an officer, she'd been trained to display it at all times, whether or not she felt it. Got to put heart into the men, after all. But underneath it, as she strode briskly through the mansion to the nerve center in the basement, she quailed. She hadn't done well by the crew of the Froward. She had assumed they were incompetents. She had allowed her own misery to stop her from connecting with them on any level other than the professional, and now she'd brought them here, to the ignoble ends of their careers.
And she was going to offer them rebellion, and herself. Not much of a compensation.
Mboge came around the corner from the kitchens and fell into step with her, "The crew is assembled as you asked, ma'am."
"You don't actually have to call me that any more," she said, which was a wrench in itself. "I believe my commission has been revoked."
He smiled, and it was something more warmly private than his normal empty smile. "What am I going to say instead? 'Your majesty'?"
"I'm hardly that," she laughed, intensely thankful for him all at once, as they clattered down the spiral stairway together and out into the empty hangar bay where the whole crew of the Froward were assembled.
They had been preparing for this, clearly. Rents in their uniforms had been sewn up and stains sponged off. Crouch had even tied back the unregulation ringlets of her red hair. The ratings were drawn up in a square, the officers in two rectangles, perpendicular to them, first and second watches. She'd never seen them look so solemn and proud, certainly not when they were meant to.
Her heart swelled and pressed painfully against her breastbone.
"Captain on deck," Mboge barked, and everyone from Banks to Atallah stiffened to attention and saluted.
Aurora's eyes welled. She let them as she drew herself up and returned the salute, blinked them back with a sniff afterward. "At ease."
A moment to get her voice under control, to try not to feel quite so much. "Frowards," she started, faltered and drove herself on. "As I'm sure you've all heard by now, our government has abandoned us here and ruled that we are legally dead to them. I know I'm not the only one who takes this as an insult. You, who have served them faithfully all your lives, are not lightly to be thrown away, and I am furious on your behalf, as well as on my own.
“I know I've not been the best captain to you. I've been preoccupied with my own loss, and I let you down. I apologize to you for that. But I will not see any of you disadvantaged. If you want to go home, I will find a way to let you go home. But I..."
Every time she let it, the anger boiled up afresh and scalded her stomach again, but underneath it was something new - or perhaps something old that they had tried to take from her and failed. It was the knowledge that in a war between herself and the world, the world had better look out.
"I need you here. This planet where they've thrown me away? I have taken it, and I'm going to make it mine." She paused, because that wasn't quite right, she wasn't the only one betrayed here, she wasn't the only one with a renaissance. "Ours. We're going to make it--"
"You can't do that!" The governor and those of his staff who could sit up straight had been given chairs behind the Froward's formation. He was standing up now, shaky but outraged. "I'm in charge here. This is my colony."
"I'm sorry, governor." Aurora was a little sorry, looking at him. It was hard not to feel some regret at brushing aside so frail a figure. But there was still a little addictive joy in saying 'no' to authority. In saying 'fuck off' to the old, white-haired men who thought they fucking owned her.
Oh dear. Bryant's vocabulary was infecting her own.
"The offer extends to you too. I can send you home if you wish, or you can stay and I can find a use for you as a free member of this colony. But the Kingdom does not get to throw me away without consequences, and this is the first."
"This is mutiny!" The governor had to lean heavily on the back of his chair to stay upright, but he made an urgent hand gesture at his team nevertheless. "Stop her."
Someone tittered in the ranks. Probably from nerves - the thought of mutiny being so shocking, but the amusement caught. All the ratings and some of the officers laughed aloud at the thought of the colony's starved and kittenish administrative staff doing anything aga
inst Aurora. The governor sank back into his seat, crestfallen.
It was cruel. Aurora put a stop to it. "Enough!"
They fell quiet. She had to smile at them - at the obedience she no longer commanded but could only hope to deserve.
"You can't have it both ways, governor. You can't tell us we're legally dead and then insist we defer to your authority. What we have now is what we will make. And what I'm offering you - all of you who choose to stay - is a new world, a new start. We can make this place the haven of love, tolerance and justice the Kingdom pretended to be but never was. We can make it anything we want.
“If you want no part of this, I wish you well and I'm going to make sure you get back to your own worlds in peace. But I ask you to stay. Stay. Bring your families here, if they'll come. Help me make this place into what it should have been all along. I promise you that if you do, I will love you more fiercely than your own mothers could. I will fight for you with every last particle in me. I've had many crews, but none. None like you."
She had to stop, having trouble with her breathing again. Some of the middies were crying. She was going to make sure they got to see their families again regardless of what they decided. Ademola was glossy eyed beneath his sheltering hand, Atallah weeping openly as her words brought them to a halt, made them realize she was not going to somehow convince the Admiralty to take them back. She was not going to make everything as it was before, to make this not have happened.
Had she had that power, she wasn't even sure she would have exercised it. Go back to any organization that sheltered Keene? Not if they begged.
In the silence and the loss, the governor scoffed. "We've seen what kind of a mother you are."
Aurora, God help her, could have knocked him out of his chair and put her foot through his head if he hadn't been so weak. The words turned her to stone and made the air in the room flash freeze.
But they were just words. She'd heard worse. She shrugged them off. "I've been the kind of mother the Kingdom wanted me to be. That ends now. Now I'm going to be the person God intended me to be. Who's with me?"
Mboge broke ranks first. He stepped up beside her with that new smile. "Ma'am," he said, pointedly. "Queen or Captain, either will do."
Then she was surrounded.
"I'm disgraced already," Atallah offered a hand to be shaken. Aurora took it firmly and squeezed.
"Not here you're not. Here you're honoured."
Atallah smiled, and then Crouch was grabbing Aurora's wrist and leaning in to whisper "Can I bring my wife?"
'Wife' gave her pause. Love and tolerance for all possibly required some readjustment of her world view, but she remembered Bryant and his unabashed appreciation for her male form - how she'd found it hard to see why it made any difference - and decided to trust that God was love, and to go with that.
"Yeah," she looked at Crouch with delight, non-plussed at being handed this much trust. Certain that whatever else was true in the world, she didn't want to betray that trust. "Sure, contact her. If she wants to come, she's welcome."
Ademola stumped up, leaning heavily on his crutch. All his wrinkles looked lighter today and there was a glow in his eye. He juggled his support so he too could shake her hand. “There's no place out there for a marine who doesn't want to kill any more. I'll stay if you'll have me.”
“Gladly,” she looked at her watch, had to rub spattered blood off the dial before she could read it. “Ademola, can you get me a list by the end of the day, who's staying, who's definitely going. Make sure the governor and his staff are put somewhere secure. I don't think they have a takeover in them, but let's make sure of that. I hope I don't have to tell you that they need to be adequately housed and fed?”
“Of course.”
“Then find the pastors. See where they stand. I want a united service of consecration and thanksgiving by the end of the day. The pastors can do it if they're with us. Otherwise I'll leave it to you. Now I've got to talk to the civilians.”
“The criminals, ma'am?”
Everything had come apart in her head and was reshaping itself. She liked it. This kind of jubilant excitement she hadn't felt for twenty years. Throw out the old, bring in the new. She was ready for it.
“We're all criminals now, Ademola, haven't you heard?” She made sure not to laugh at the twist of his disgust, but she came close. Touched his elbow instead, reassuringly. “That's what the service is for. Forgiveness, reconciliation. We're all in this together, Sarge. Them too.”
A half an hour later, having grabbed a quick wash in one of the kitchen sinks and borrowed Citlali's hairbrush to shake out the dirt from her hair, she opened the door to the governor's audience chamber. Packed, sweaty and hot, it reeked of alcohol and bodies and fear. By that time she had had Crouch's help to fine tune the instructions to her imps. Using their dexterous under-limbs, she had peeled McKillip's men out of their armor and divested them of their weapons. The imps had trundled back ten minutes ago, laden with spoils, which Citlali had transferred to the fort's armory.
The girl was doing extraordinarily well for someone who had got through training as a mascot. Aurora was thinking of having her take over Ademola's job, while she used Ademola for more peaceable tasks.
She thrust open the doors, sent four of the recovered imps out before her to clear a path. Two flanked her as she walked in, and another four closed the box behind her. Inside the square of their protection Mboge and Ignatious formed an honor guard, their rifles on their shoulders, looking very solemn and severe in blood red jackets from which they had torn the patches.
A frisson of something, resentment or perhaps just curiosity, went through the packed room as she sat, with Mboge and Ignatious taking up position behind the chair, and the imps like huge metallic hounds dozing around it. She wasn't in general a believer in pomp, but it had its uses. One of them was to reassure people that it was okay to assume that she was in charge. As she wanted that right now, she was calling on the iconography of kingship with every resource at her disposal.
When Rabinovitz the purser limped forward and handed her a paper report it was purely a piece of theater - he had explained the situation while she washed, but this looked better.
The situation was that this planet's year was too long. Earth crops matured and made a respectable harvest in approximately three quarters of a year here, meaning that the harvest was not enough to support the colonists all year around. The seeds of winter-growing crops had been requested but had not been delivered. When that had become apparent to the inmates, it had been the straw that broke the back of their patience, and they had toppled the regime, only to realize that self rule hardly solved their problem.
"Thank you, Mr Rabinovitz. Mr Bousaid?"
Bousaid had been, as always, lurking at the edge of the crowd where he could see most and make the quickest getaway. After experience with Bryant, she appreciated that kind of foresight. He gave a start of surprise at having been noticed and then came reluctantly forward at her beckoning.
"Anyone here not trust Mr Bousaid?"
"Don't trust him not to sleep with my bitch," someone piped up, and a smile went through the crowd like a shooting star. "Otherwise he's okay."
"I know you're good with maths, Bousaid. If you would please go with Mr Rabinovitz and confirm what food stores we have, then you can work out how long we can stretch our rations, based on everyone getting the same."
"Yes Ma'am," Rabinovitz saluted, and Aurora ticked off the first item in her symbolic checklist.
She moved on to a list of names and called them out one by one, leaving six startled criminals looking up at her with guilty schoolboy looks. "Hatchett, Christie, Suleiman, Welsh, Peterson, Osgood and Jakes? You were keen hunters and fishermen on your own planets. Since we can't rely on Earth crops, I need each of you to take teams of at least two people and go bring in what you can. From my experience, the native fauna is edible. You see anything that looks like my imps here, leave it alone, otherwise shoot it, bag i
t, bring it home for testing. You can hand it over to the pursers here to be added to stores. Don't taste - we don't know what's poisonous yet."
She looked up. The six men she'd named were gazing at her with suspicion, but as she watched it turned into pleasure. "We're going to need rifles." Jakes pointed out, twisting his fingers together as if he expected to get them broken.
It seemed as good a place as any to give them the talk. "Here's the deal," she had borrowed a jacket from Ademola for this, so she would not have to talk to them bare armed, now she shoved her hands in the pockets rather than lock them behind her. "I promised to help you fix this, and I will."
She'd been called the lioness of the Kingdom for so long it had become a source of embarrassment to her, but now she could feel it. She could feel herself stirring and stretching, shaking the weights off her back. "My crew have decided that they also want to stay and help, so from now on we're all in this together. I'm going to start trusting you because as of now, you are my people too. I want you to remember that we took over this place by force of arms and we can and will do it again if you force us, but when you've remembered that, remember too that I promise you'll be better off with us than against."
She didn't expect them to nod - this was a battle that would only be won over months of feeding them and treating them right - but she let the silence endure until it was almost uncomfortable before smiling.
"On that note, hunters, go see Citlali at the armory and she will issue you a weapon. Any of you give her trouble and I will personally see to it that you end up with my fist in your brain. That goes for any member of my crew. Okay? You touch them and you die."
The hunters nodded and filed out as she moved on to point number three. "Mr Carrow?"
The political agitator and self-confessed queer looked even more like a scarecrow these days, long armed, long legged, now in his undershirt because his fine overcoat and flannel shirt had been taken by someone stronger. There were grazes along his right cheek and he was shuddering so hard he had to tuck his hands into his armpits to keep himself together. But he was watching her with fervor. "Me?"