by Alex Oliver
In place of a mess or dining room where everyone might rest and eat together and talk, the hotel had another bank of machines. "If you thought the shower was weird, this will blow your mind," Nori grinned, his fine hair fluffy around his angular face. He seemed to be taking great joy in Felix's rustic inexperience, so Felix didn't mention that he had in fact seen food printers once, on a world he had liberated such a long time ago he didn't now remember the name.
The memory unsettled him too, because what did 'liberated' mean, when the government that followed could do to its citizens what it had done to him?
"What do you want? I'm going to eat Manhattan."
Nori selected from a series of options and stepped back to let the machine squeeze out its fast drying edible paste. Apparently Manhattan was some sort of town, because a chocolate coloured model of its tall buildings built up on Nori's plate.
"What does it taste of?" Felix asked, amused. He was hungry enough even to eat this mechanized slop and be thankful for it.
"It's the brown sort," Nori looked at him as if he was stupid.
"But is it chocolate? Or coffee? Or crayfish? Or yam?"
That was a foreign language, apparently. "I don't know what you mean. It tastes brown."
"Show me what to do."
The machine printed him something that looked a little like fried plantain. It tasted of... a powerful sweetener, rice that had gone dusty with storage - maybe a hint of mouse-droppings there - and a bitter, earthy, mushroom-like aftertaste. It was delicious for the first five mouthfuls, by the sixth it was barely tolerable, and by the tenth it was so disgusting that he left it unfinished. Fortunately it was dry enough for him to put the remainder in his pocket for later.
They had both grown unused to a full meal. Nori did the same with his. They climbed the ladder up to their pod, unlatched it and crawled inside, as he chewed on his bottom lip.
"Something you want to say?" Felix asked, vitally aware of the slightly larger tube in which they lay, where steel walls arced up from a base of waterproof foam and the bedding smelled of too many people before them. It had been a hard day, and he was ready to put it down and sleep. But if he did, would Nori just paralyze him and make off with the bag again?
Nori lay on his side, propping his head up on his hand, his threadbare clothes beaten soft by their cleaning. He looked desperately poor and hungry, and exhausted. "You saved my life."
Felix smiled, tucked himself around the bag like a child with a stuffed toy, and drew the bedding over his shoulder. "Mm-hm."
"I didn't think you'd come."
He pictured what it must have been like to sit in the utter dark and wait for the end, shivered. "The captain says we're all crew now. That means you're mine to take care of."
"I was going to take all the money and run."
Felix chuckled. "I know. And are you still?"
"I thought I would find people here who were my friends. Well... not friends, but people who were on the same wavelength. Gestalt-mates, people who understood me, who felt like home."
Such a bewildered voice. Felix wormed a hand out under the quilt so he could close it around Nori's arm. Parts of him wanted to move even closer, to hug the boy, but he did not want to give the wrong signals. A lot of people found it hard to distinguish a hug from a sexual advance--he had learned this to his discomfort in the past. "They let you down."
"They tried to kill me, and you rescued me. You took that dog off me, nearly got your face ripped off."
That sounded heroic, but it hadn't been. It had been the only thing he could do. Might as well praise the grass for growing.
"What I'm saying is..." Nori sounded exasperated by his lack of response, "that I think I'm better off with you."
"That is what we're fighting for," Felix agreed. "We have all found a place where we can be better off. In the morning we will buy them a hold full of food and clothes and seeds, and we will make it work."
"I thought you had no imagination at all," Nori whispered sleepily. "I'm starting to think that what you were imagining was just too big for me to see all at once."
"Go to sleep," Felix murmured, amused.
"Hmm."
In the morning the bag of treasure was still under Felix's arm. The food dispensers served pink paste, which tasted of sweet moldy rice, mushrooms and artificial fruit and came in a limited selection of sunburst shapes. Felix folded his new coveralls into the rucksack with the few credits he had left, and shaved both his face and his hair with the depilatory wand in the shower room. Though it would grow back into a shadow by the end of the day, it was still neater than unoiled curls.
They left with the other transients, thrown out into the concourse's unending neon at the end of sleep shift. Walking briskly the way he thought he had come, they still managed to get lost. Fifteen minutes of wandering up identical corridors with no idea where he was, and then they came out in a park he recognized.
In the center of the domed room shone a full spectrum light on a pole. Moss and lichens grew directly from the icy walls and, overhead, flowers reached down for their tiny sun. "This way,"
Only ten minutes late, they turned into the corridor where Freedom had his shop. That was when Felix had his first warning that it was going to be another long day. Station security, in their bright red and white jumpsuits, surrounded the door. One man was unrolling biological hazard tape, while an older woman had turned and was watching Felix and Nori with cutting eyes.
"What's going on?" He asked her. "Is everything all right?"
"Suppose you tell me what you're here for, sir?"
"I left an artifact with Freedom yesterday. He asked me to come back in a day when he'd had time to test it."
"What time yesterday?"
Nori had already taken a step away, now he plucked at Felix's sleeve. "Maybe we should come back later."
If it was intended to make him look innocent, it didn't. Security whipped a scanner out of her leg pocket and held it out. "If you could put your hand on this, sir."
A second security man came out of the shop, this one with a rifle. Nori swallowed and pressed his palm into the woman's tablet. The display turned red.
"Your prints match the prints found on one of the victim's guns. A gun that was out of its legal secured display unit, and had been discharged at least twice."
The stones on Felix's back weighed him down. He could almost feel them radiating a malicious alien smugness as if they knew they were cursed. "There is an explanation for that," he said while his dry pink breakfast writhed in his stomach.
"I'm sure there is." The security guard reached behind her back and brought out handcuffs. "A little before the weapon was discharged, Freedom was reported missing. He has not been seen since. The gun was designed to dematerialize living tissue. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this."
"No, I can't," Nori gritted out, though Felix was sure that was a lie. He could.
"Nori Nakano, Felix Mboge, I am arresting you for the murder of Freedom of Snow City. Come with me willingly, or you will be shot where you stand."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Princess and the Spaceship
"Steak," Morwen Crouch whispered in delight as the ugly spaceship's hatch lifted and cow after cow began to amble out into the main hangar beneath the launcher's caldera. They had wicked horns on their shaggy red heads, and a look of panic in their none-too-docile eyes, and Lali wondered how 'cow' had ever been an insult, because these things were awesome.
"Milk, yoghurt, cheese," Lali added with a grin. "We probably shouldn't start by killing them, but they're walking food regardless."
When the day's hunting or gathering was done and the frugal evening meal eaten, Lali liked to come up here to the control room of the launcher to work on her maps. Always hungry, it was good to have something to do to take her mind off her stomach, and Morwen's deep communion with computers, even alien computers charmed her.
In training the other marines had not had a lot of time for
the geeks, but Lali found Morwen's silence comforting. With Captain Campos gone, she felt more keenly the glances of the thousand men in the settlement. So far they were taking the captain's warning seriously and hadn't tried anything, but there'd been enough polite interest, enough offers of "come and share my meal, sweetheart," to make her ill at ease.
It was better to come here instead, where if she wanted to be alone she could take the smallest mag-lev sled and pole herself down one of the unmapped tunnels, with a head-light on her forehead like the strap of a basket, as if she was poling down a river of souls.
She measured off the next length on her tablet and then drew the room she'd discovered. There had been nothing in it but piles of dust and those vine-like light flowers, and the scratches of alien calligraphy on the wall, but three passages led from it, so maybe it was some kind of way station or toll booth. Her theory was that the passages bored under the whole world, connecting this launcher to all the others. Possibly connecting the launchers to the city, and the city to other cities on the other side of the world.
Flying the spaceships in atmosphere was prohibitively costly in terms of fuel - they needed to use what they had of that for controlled re-entry only. And the bikes - well, they had enough bikes for five people. But if Lali could find mag-lev passages to the other side of the world, they could at least outrun winter. Even while the majority hunkered down in their city they could send gathering parties to wherever it was Autumn next, never risk stripping one place so bare it would not grow again.
She thought it was a good plan, but without power to the sleds, it was taking forever to map even the closest tunnels, and cows had just bought her more time.
"If you'll exit your vehicle now, Ms Campos, I'll get her moved into a silo so the hangar can be prepped for the Charity."
Morwen raised an eyebrow at Lali. "The imps can deal with putting the ship away on their own, if you want to go meet her?"
Another woman in the settlement would be so welcome. Lali nodded and put down her stylus. A short walk between scurrying imps later and they were out in the hollow of the mountain, where the magma had once been. An angry herd of cattle now seethed in place of the fire, making a noise like the horns of hell. A woman who looked just enough like Captain Campos to be intimidating stood between two nervous horses, with a hand on the headstall of each.
"Ms Selena Campos?" Morwen stepped up to do the talking. She always drew the eye anyway, with that coronet of copper-red hair, her skin so pale you could see the flush of the blood underneath. Any paler and you'd be able to see the individual strands of muscle. Lali wasn't sure it was a good look, but she never could quite keep her eyes away. "I'm Morwen Crouch, the chief engineer of this facility. This is Private Lali Citlali of the marines. Welcome to Cygnus 5, you are literally a lifesaver."
"Well, I'm an accident waiting to happen at the moment," said Selena. "Where should I put them?"
Morwen keyed in the code to open the hangar doors to the main passage that led outside. As soon as a gap was open wide enough for a cow to squeeze through, they were out, and the sound of their lumbering gallop rolled through the mountain like a drum.
A moment later, the imps came boiling out of the walls, and the hangar crane squealed out of its rest position, on wheels that badly needed oiling.
"What the--" Selena exclaimed, craning her neck to take in the beetle-like machines now swarming up her ship and attaching the crane's hoists to any lifting point they could find.
She looked a bit like Captain Campos in the face, Lali thought, and she had something of the same high-gravity burliness. But she was taller and younger, and dressed in an expensive business suit with smudges of dirt and blood over the cuffs and knees that suggested there was quite a story behind her arrival. She was bringing the colony food, and a new spaceship, and another woman, but the bloodstains suggested she should have been welcomed without any of them, as someone who needed refuge.
"Ms Campos?" Lali gave her a grin that she hoped would set her at ease, "Don't be concerned. They're repair drones controlled by the computer here. They're going to put your ship into a mag-lev cradle and move it into a silo so the Captain can come down."
"The captain? You mean Aurora?" Selena quirked a startled smile, which Lali echoed.
"Yes. Do you want to wait here and watch?"
Selena took another circle, eyes wide, taking in everything, mouth half open, but then she sighed. "I'd like to, but you have a herd already, don't you?"
"A very small one," Lali said, "Does that matter?"
Selena laughed. "Oh yes. I understand there was some tension when Aurora tried to merge your herd with the herd of criminals? Cows do a similar sort of thing when they first meet strangers - swearing, pushing, fights - just to sort out who's in charge. I'd better get out there after them. I don't want any of them to hurt each other."
She swung up into the saddle and trotted out, leaving Lali feeling a little shell-shocked. She had expected more disorientation, more awe at the relics of an alien race, more regret at having left her own home behind. Forceful and single-minded women, those Camposes.
But very much needed. The moment the Terezinha was clear of the hangar, the Charity was coming down hot. Everything seemed to hold its breath, even the imps on the walls pausing, and then Charity's tailfins hit the rock and a weight Lali hadn't known she was carrying rolled off her shoulders. It wasn't that she didn't trust Dr. Atallah, who had been left in charge while the captain was gone, just that the doctor was a doctor, not a commander, and Lali was always worried that she would be too soft, too healing, when sometimes what a bastard needed to change his mind was a good hard kick in the balls.
"Welcome home, captain." She said, the moment Campos's feet hit the deck. Campos herself looked strange in a civilian pantsuit, with a yellow silk camisole on that brought out the gold in her brown eyes. She didn't look right around the face either, as though this bounty of renewable food had been bought at too high a cost.
Lali wondered if she should say anything about that. But Campos just breathed in and hardened and said "Report."
"Nothing to report, ma'am," Lali snapped, immensely relieved by returning to business. "Your sister's down safely and supervising the merge of her herd with ours. Otherwise, situation normal."
"Crouch? Nothing on scans?"
"No ma'am."
"Scans are crud then," Campos was already striding out toward the original settlement, where the courier bikes were kept. Lali and Morwen trailed after. "I passed a battleship behind Cygnus 7. It's building landing craft."
Crap. Lali didn't know what was some people's problem, but she didn't bother trying to work it out. The story of her ancestors had been that sometimes someone more powerful just wanted you dead. Claiming it wasn't fair did little to help.
"Our firing rate is up to two shots a minute," Morwen seemed to feel the same way. Why waste energy being outraged when you might need it to survive? "But that's not going to be enough against multiple waves of single-person landers coming down at once."
"That's what I thought. They're probably going to descend here - this is where they think we'll be. So I want Terezhina moved to a silo on the Big Island launcher. Obviously a cattle-transport is not a pleasant option, but if the worst comes to the worst we can fit everyone in her hold and get out."
"And Charity, ma'am?"
Campos's stride faltered. They were all three of them in sight of the main doors now, the space-ship sized vault-thick doors that from the outside, when shut, looked like a rock wall. Now they stood half open and a long, narrow finger of light reached back for them, smearing their shadows deep into the volcano.
The captain's face held an expression Lali had not seen on her before and barely recognized. Uncertainty? Doubt? She didn't like it.
"Charity keeps telling me she's not a military ship. I don't feel I can force her into a war she wasn't built for. And I made a promise. On an unsecured com channel. A promise that's probably been seen by the whole galax
y by now."
"Ma'am?" Lali prompted, when it seemed she wouldn't go on. Campos gave her a vulnerable look, and that was even more worrying than the doubt.
"I said I'd come for Autumn. My daughter," she clarified as though anyone needed the reminder. "It was a stupid promise. I shouldn't have warned him. I should have waited until we were stable. I shouldn't bring her into a war zone. But every day lost is another day I won't get back. I want her earliest memories to be of me, not him. Besides, you just need your family to be around you at a time like this. You know?"
Lali did know. It was not done for a tough marine to miss her nantli, but she did, every day increasingly. Her parents must think she was dead by now. Dead or wicked. "Ma'am," she agreed, going for a tone that she hoped said 'I sympathize, I just can't say so because I am too macho.'
"I can't leave Cygnus 5 while there's a battleship in orbit to be fought. But I made a promise, in public, and I do not go back on my word. If I can't go myself, I must send someone."
Lali's heart did something complex in the cupped hands of her ribs. "You mean me?"
"You and Crouch, yes. Bryant's needed here, Jenkins can handle the launchers, but Crouch is my best technical guy and you are a hell of a marine. I've got to send my best for this."
"You want us to steal your child from her father and bring her to you?" Morwen asked, smoothing down her hair with such vigor that she dislodged the stylus from behind her ear.
Campos's face hardened, all those disturbing human expressions locked away inside. "Problem?"
Lali looked sideways at Morwen, and thought about adventure among the stars, and going to places where worthless rubies could be traded for food, and maybe seeing her parents again, if they could get that authorized.
Clearly Morwen had the same thoughts. "Can I get my wife on the way back?"