by Alex Oliver
They left the cowshed like a lone vaqueiro taking a spare horse, a couple of stray cows and a new calf out to its herd.
Aurora clung to the straps, jostled, hot and breathless with her face abraded by the rough hair on Tigre's chest. She told herself she could still fight if it became necessary. Just because this felt like being tied up and helpless in a small space didn't mean that was actually the case.
They slowed to a stop as a voice called out, "Dona Selena? What are you doing?"
But it was hard to remain still and silent at this moment when she really wanted to fight someone.
"Aurora's in the house,” Selena explained, sounding as briskly practical as ever. “There's going to be shooting. I don't want my cattle anywhere near it. They're like my children Jojo. You know that."
A man's chuckle sounded uncomfortably close. Aurora almost recognized it. Was that Jojo Marino? The spotty boy who used to live by the courthouse? The soldiers they had called in were local, then. How very short sighted.
"Maybe you should consider a husband, Selena. That's the saddest thing I've ever heard."
"But true."
Jojo hummed a rueful note. "Hm, yes. We all know it's true. Alright. Take them out to pasture. It'll be all over by morning and then you can come home in peace and honor. It will be remembered, in the time of judgment, that your family did the right thing."
"Thank you." Selena sounded strained, but Aurora hoped that would pass as the natural reaction of a woman forced to choose between her honesty and her only sister, a woman whose obedience was breaking her heart. A moment later they were moving again, jouncing forward in a forest of legs. She said nothing for three quarters of a mile and then Selena above her snorted "Sanctimonious idiot," and she couldn't help but laugh.
"You can come out now," Selena said, her voice still tight and unlike herself. "I can't see anyone."
"Where are we?"
"Flatlands, under the beeches."
Apparently Selena had previously untapped stores of strategic thinking, because the beeches were a group of about ten trees holding together what had been an island in the marshes, before the flatlands were drained. In the midst of their leafy tangle, outside observers would not see Aurora clamber down from her hiding place, overheated and stinking of horse, but she would be able to see out for miles and miles in every direction.
"Thanks," she straightened herself to her feet and stretched some of the jostle out of her muscles. She regarded the horse sweat soaked into her lace top with some regret. Really, by this stage she should have known better than to try. "But you should get on to the herd straight away so you're where they expect you to be when they come looking."
Selena's arm shot out and she smacked the hell out of a tree branch - it bounced away and back with a great ruffling of tiny leaves, and Selena made a noise that was half sob and half laugh. "I don't believe you. You act like you expected this!"
Aurora folded her lips under her teeth and bit them until her mouth filled with copper-warm blood. She turned her back on her sister and concentrated on breathing, breathing, keeping it down. No. She couldn’t deal with Selena being angry with her, not right now. She couldn’t even deal with Selena being angry for her. It was enough trouble wrestling down her own emotions and doing what needed to be done. Playing nursemaid too was beyond her.
Maybe she looked at the end of her tether, because Selena stopped mid rant. There was a silence, and then a hand came down to rest gently between Aurora’s shoulder blades. It nearly shattered her.
"And I don't believe Mãe and Pai. Or the rest of them," Selena bent in to say this, whispering fierce and eloquent - her words had come back in full flood. "We're your family. We should be looking after each other. Mothers and sisters and aunties and cousins and grandparents and grandparents' cousins and no one's in want because everyone's got someone to help them. That's how it's supposed to work."
Aurora licked along the lines she had bitten, feeling them sting and throb. It actually helped, the outer pain easier to bear than the inner. "I have got someone," she insisted. "Just not here. I shouldn't have come. I brought trouble on all of you for no reason."
"I don't believe you would have had no reason," Selena's hand traced small, warm circles on her back, the reassurance of it spreading down her spine and into her lungs. Selena’s voice had begun to lose some of its tone of brassy fury and regain humor and thought. "You're not like that. Tell me what you came for."
"I wanted," Aurora twisted her neck in an attempt to turn her face deeper into concealing shadows. "I wanted... forgiveness. I wanted to know - you know- that my mother still..." loved me.
"She does," Selena insisted. "She does, she just thinks she's been called like Abraham to sacrifice her child. I'm sure that's all. She can't have wanted to, but she must think giving you up to the authorities is the right thing to do."
Maybe mãe would have listened, if Aurora had gone to her in the kitchen. Maybe mãe was hoping to be able to say something that would have made this better, to give a private absolution she couldn't give in public. And Aurora hadn't given her the chance.
"But you came here for a practical reason too," Selena pressed. "Because if your people were starving, you wouldn't be at home eating a full meal. Not unless you thought it could help them too."
The disadvantage of a little sister ten years younger than you was that you always thought of her as a child - that little gap toothed sprite surrounded by a flock of orphaned animals. Aurora needed to adjust her mental image to take account of the fact that Selena was now a very capable and intelligent full grown woman.
Aurora managed to caw out a harsh laugh, but it was an improvement on the despair she had been feeling a moment ago. She squeezed the zipped compartment of her bag into which she had transferred the antenna-rubies. "And I also wanted to buy some of your cows."
The horses were standing close by, just outside the screen provided by the beech trees. Fausto and his mother Lula had ventured a short distance away, where Lula could crop the richer grasses atop the better soil of the once-inundated land. Fausto was now steady on his legs but still puzzled by everything around him. Because of him, there would be milk. Milk every day through the greater part of Cygnus 5's winter.
"We need at least one bull, three if you have them, and as many cows as you can spare - those that have just calved or are expecting."
Beyond Lula and the other stray cows, the flatland spread for fifteen miles in all directions. The mountains rose out of them in bashful, crouched shapes, blue in the distance, pink nearer at hand, as if they felt awkward for having disturbed the line of the sky. Aurora kept looking up, expecting to see the planet's ring, only to be reminded sharply that Novocasa didn't have one.
Selena huffed a laugh and set Tigre's saddle-blanket down over the crook of a tree. Apparently they were having a talk. It wasn't a bad idea, given that undoubtedly Charity had also been cordoned off, and it would be easier to get through that at night time.
Selena settled on the blanket, patting it until Aurora came to sit down too. Giving in to the suggestion, Aurora turned the bread rolls out of her pockets and handed half to her sister. They sat in silence while she breathed in the scent of warm bread and cheese and savored the taste bite by tiny bite.
"Is it a good place for cows?"
Mysteriously, Aurora found herself smiling. "Yeah. Yeah, it is, actually. We've got five heifers already and they're pretty much the only things that find enough to eat. Most of the native flora is OK for them. They need to take a wide berth of the lash bushes, but all of ours figured that out the moment they got slashed across the rump by a liana. Better than the vixi toadstools here, anyway. I know they mean a lot to you, but they'd mean a lot to us too. They might mean that we lived instead of died."
"Yeah," Selena's face firmed up into a resolute look. She'd made a decision. "They mean a lot to me. And you mean a lot to me too. You don't have to buy them. My carrier's on the house launchpad. If you can buy me enough time
to load them, I'll bring them all."
"What?" Grief had done something to Aurora’s brain because she wasn't following this.
"I'm coming with you."
"No!" Aurora exclaimed automatically - she couldn't let her baby sister walk into a war zone. But inside, the fragile thing that was her heart ached with a happiness that wasn't far from anguish. "I can't--"
"You don't know what it's been like here since you left." Selena yanked at her trouser leg as if it offended her. "Ever since Luiz Silva was elected it's been getting worse. Modesty laws - you know I was almost arrested last week for wearing pants. They can see where my legs are, they say. I say maybe they shouldn't be looking. Taxes on makeup - everybody says we shouldn't be wearing it but we must still be beautiful without it. Beauty surgeons condemned while everyone scrambles to fix themselves.
“Wages for women cut because it's wrong if they out earn their husbands - they bring shame to their household and emasculate their menfolk, and God designed the man as the head and the woman only as the helper."
"It's worse?" That was hard to believe. It had been, now Aurora looked back, actually harder on her pride to live here than it ever had in the service.
Selena's turn to look away. "My license to practice as a vet? It runs out this year. I don't think they're going to renew it. They say it's taking jobs away from the men. It's hubris, unseemly pride for a woman to support herself. I don't... I don't want to stay here, Aurora, and I do want to go with you. Please."
How could she say no to that? She leaned over instead to exchange another wordless, reassuring hug, feeling lightened and reassured, because maybe Cygnus 5 was going to be a good thing for other people too. Even if she was a little terrified at the responsibility.
"OK then. So far, we've got orbital defenses in place, so you need to remember to transmit 496 AlphaDiegoBravo on 345Mz in a tight beam to coordinates 55.22 by 0.08. That'll stop Bryant from shooting you down. Here's the plan..."
~
Two hours later, when the sun finally set, they were both on horseback, rounding up the herd. This was the blast of nostalgia Aurora hadn't had since touching down - familiar constellations overhead, and the lowing of annoyed beasts, and the warm bellows of Tigre's breathing between her knees, the long muscles of her thighs aching from a strain she'd grown unused to, in space.
They moved slowly, gathering up every straggler, Selena counting them off an exhaustive mental list. When the herd was complete, a black, shaggy moving mass of muscle hard to tell apart in the weak gray light of Aço, Novocasa's tiny moon, they guided it into the foothills and along the edges of the Espinhoso range.
Just beyond the spur that sheltered Charity, Aurora slipped off the horse and let it become one more moving body in the lowing torrent. On foot, she picked a cautious way over the rocks until she could see the guards. One man patrolled below her, another in the center of the mouth of the valley. Probably there was also one in the rocks and another opposite.
It only took a moment. A sound of approaching thunder and lowing. Dust was thrown up in an acrid cloud as the herd approached with a jangle and tinging of bells and thudding of feet, and the guard's head turned to see the cows pass like a tide coming up a river. Most interesting thing to have happened all night.
While he was distracted, she ran for it, not bothering with concealment. That was not the point. It was the man in the rocks who shouted, and then three of them were running towards her. But she had a head start. She put all her strength into speed and dashed for Charity's locked down hatch.
She was half afraid the ship would not let her in, but it must have been watching for her too. The hatch sprang open almost before she could touch it and bolted itself down behind her like Charity had folded her arms across her chest in defense.
"Drives are prepped for launch, ma'am."
"Let's just wait a bit."
Outside, Selena turned the herd toward home. Aurora watched to make sure none of the guards followed her. There was no reason why they should assume she'd planned the trick with Selena. She might have been waiting in concealment for some time and acted as soon as a distraction innocently came by, but if Selena needed a rescue...
But two of the guards were in a huddle around a com unit, and two were trying to fit a crowbar into Charity's hatch to pry it open. Selena and her cows trundled peacefully away towards the villa, where her grubby transport ship stood on the pad waiting.
"Ma'am. I must remind you that--"
"Yeah, OK."
If she left now they would scramble to get birds in the air to follow her. "Take us on in-space drive to the edge of the system."
"Ma'am, I am not a warship. I am not armed. They will surely send cruisers to intercept me and--"
"And that'll mean Selena can launch in peace while they chase me."
"And what about me ma'am? I am permitted to protest actions that may put my continued existence in danger."
Aurora felt curiously light, and it wasn't just the ship-gravity kicking in, more that she'd shed a bunch of ties she hadn't known were holding her down. The damn ship was really turning into a person and that was cool. "It's OK, Charity. You can spin up the ex-space drive at the same time so we can punch out if it looks like we're really in danger."
"And then they will follow me."
"And we'll be home where we've got the wrecker code and they haven't. They're still the ones in danger, not us."
A pause, and she imagined the ship was finely calculating probabilities. Aurora trusted her instincts that this was going to work, but it still reassured her enormously when Charity gave a flicker of lights that maybe passed as a shrug and conceded, "Yes, ma'am."
The local boys really were sloppy. She watched with disapproval in the rear scan how long it took for them to scramble warbirds out of Planicie. Surely longer than it would have taken in the days when she was in training. In fact the distant bright stripes of tail launch showed up from the main military base on the other side of the planet at the same time as the launches from their local field, even though the troops there would have been roused out of their beds.
Everyone said the planet was going to the dogs, and she'd taken it as the kind of thing every generation said about its successor. Now she wondered if it wasn't perhaps true.
"Ma'am, sensors indicate three large cruisers and two light clippers. The clippers may..." Charity sounded reluctant to admit it, "They may be faster than me."
Military ships rarely came with an AI. The last thing a commander wanted in battle was ships that worried about themselves. "Not as clever as you though, Charity. Can you fake some kind of drive problem to explain why we're not jumping out?"
Another flicker of the lights, and a change in the pitch of the in-system drives and then Charity said with a faint intonation of smugness. "I have brightened and darkened the nacelles to simulate a failed upcycle. It now looks as though we will have to de-carbon and run diagnostics. If that was the case, we could not try to jump again for an hour and fourteen minutes."
"Good job," Aurora watched the fast approaching vectors of the clippers, and the cruisers after, now all clear of the moon. In another seventeen minutes they would be far enough out of the ecliptic of the system for it to be safe to punch out of normal space and into the quantum chaos beyond, but she wanted to be sure that Selena had--
"Can you show me what's going on back at the villa? Whether Selena's loaded and locked yet?"
The landing comp screen flicked into the sleet of green numbers that represented the orbital satellite datastreams, and then coalesced into a picture - the tiny form of Selena on horseback, funneling a mass of cows up the filthy loading ramp of her squat ship. She was almost done - another twenty minutes and they'd be under hatches and safe, but...
Dust clouds rose to the left where the highway passed the edge of the Campos lands, and Aurora wished desperately that she had given Selena a radio, as the speeding shapes of Kingdom jeeps burst out of a dust-storm raised by their own wheels. Some
one down there had put it together - Aurora's escape, Selena's sudden decision to pack up and leave.
Get on board, she thought as though that would help. Get on board and under hatches. You can leave some of your cows behind, just don't get caught.
Thinking at Selena wouldn't cut it. She had to warn her somehow, but how did you get through to a woman on horseback from a thousand miles above her head?
"Charity, I know you don't have weapons, but can you launch a message capsule to hit the ground immediately in front of those jeeps?"
"My capsules are not designed for atmospheric reentry. It will burn up before it hits. Also I have been programmed to abhor violence. I am not permitted to kill anyone."
Aurora was increasingly picturing Charity as a maiden aunt, like auntie Assuncao, who made lace and wore it everywhere, even on her riding boots. "Burning up in the atmosphere is what I want. I want a bright flash of light, so she looks up and sees they're coming for her. I’m not trying to kill anyone - it's just a warning."
"Very well." The capsule launched with no sensation, just a tiny twinkle in the edge of the viewscreen, and Charity made a sound like the humming of bees. "The clippers are gaining."
"Yeah," Aurora had seen that. They were making up the distance she'd earned with her head start. Their ordnance almost certainly couldn't outrace them, so she didn't have to fear missiles until they were alongside, but if they had beam weapons they were going to come into range two minutes before Charity could jump. "How are your shields?"
On the screen, the message capsule had reached the atmosphere, was painting a meteor-streak across the sky. Selena looked up, went rigid as she saw the pursuers, and then, madly, slowed down. About twenty head of cattle still milled outside. She had time to ride up the gangplank, seal the hatch and take off without them, but she didn't, she wheeled her horse between the ship and the steers, leaned over and switched the closest one hard over the bony hips.