Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  "And my parents?" Lali asked. They probably wouldn't want to come, but they would want to be asked.

  Captain Campos grinned, and that was much more like herself. She was reassuringly solid when she grinned like that. She made it easy to believe there would be a planet to come home to. A world with a future.

  "Sure," Campos said easily. "Bring anyone who wants to come. Let everyone out there know - we are here to stay."

  ~

  The battleship was still pretending it wasn't there, in low orbit around Seven, and it was easy enough to sneak past it to the minimum jump distance from Cygnus's system.

  Morwen spent the two days getting out of the system, and the further three days moving into a controlled orbit around Salvation (70 Ophiuchi A #3), Keene's home planet, working on identity chips for the ship and its occupants. Keene's home planet was not his planet of origin - rather he had settled here the moment he reached Admiral rank and could afford it. Salvation, it seemed, was only for the wealthy.

  That was fine. Morwen was neither but she could fake both like a native, and after a long period of surviving on boiled bitter berries and insects, it was time both of them had some fun. She had her first installment of amusement on watching Lali slip the identity chip into her bracer. The girl's round eyes went wider still. "I'm a princess?"

  Morwen smiled. She and Priya had played that game when they were young and fancy free. Priya had always had prettier manners than her, and enjoyed the element of dress up more, so Morwen had usually been companion, or tutor or lady's maid. This time she was listed as 'hand maiden,' which had a nicely Biblical ring to it and might reassure the locals.

  She hoped Priya wouldn't mind her playing their game with her shipmate, but Lali in her marine uniform got so few opportunities to be girly she'd felt moved to give her the chance. It was possible that the young woman was butch because she preferred it that way, but Morwen had caught her occasionally stringing their cargo of rubies together into necklaces and festooning herself in front of a mirror in one of the staterooms, and she didn't really think so.

  "Princess of a colony so new no one has yet heard of us," she said. "It doesn't mean you have to be.... frilly, unless you want to ."

  "I... actually am," said Lali shyly. "I mean, my family claims to be descended from Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin, who was the grandson of the Emperor of Mexico on Old Earth. No one..." she looked away with the pointed casualness of a woman caught by surprise by her own emotions. She felt more about this than she had expected to feel. Morwen wasn't sure for a moment whether she had done something terrible or something unexpectedly fine.

  "No one takes us seriously," Lali went on once she had controlled her voice. "But. It was important to them. My parents. It was important to them to know that we had survived, all these years. The line of Acacitli survived conquest and slavery and moved out to claim the stars."

  "I didn't mean to make light of something important to you," Morwen hastened to say, and got a smile like a half moon in reply.

  "I know," Lali said, "I just wondered how you had known, but perhaps God guided you. I would like, just for once to claim that back, even though it's been so long."

  "All right then. You choose the outfits."

  Rather than waste fuel landing, they docked at one of the ring of orbiting shuttle stations and took their rubies to the assayer. The station's corridors were lined with white marble, and the assayer's name - Arthur Berday and Son - incised and gold leafed over the door.

  Morwen hadn't had a change of clothes for three months, and had survived an emergency landing, a siege and too much foraging since then. Whatever it was that left small gritty piles of dust all over the launcher's complex she still hadn't discovered, but the dust itself had turned her black uniform trousers charcoal gray, and dimmed the blood of her jacket to maroon. She felt the assayer's gaze on her like a disinfecting forcefield.

  "Ladies," he said, smoothing a hand over a bald head that seemed to have bulged through his hair, leaving it clinging on in an ice white fringe around his ears. "Are you lost? The pawn shops are on satellite 4, level two."

  Lali's look of being an impressed yokel from a backwater planet turned into a flinch, and Morwen didn't like that. She leaned forward and emptied her bag of gems onto the desk with what she hoped was disdainful nonchalance.

  Stick rubies rolled everywhere, falling into the plush cream carpet, glittering dark and angry in the station's faintly blue-tinted light as they fell like a rain of fire off both sides of the desk and scattered. The essayer - Berday or son, she didn't know or care - jumped back, surprisingly light on his feet for a man gone to low gravity fat, and then went down on hands and knees to gather them back up.

  "The princess is travelling incognito," Morwen informed him, proud of them both for standing very poised and still, as though a fortune in rubies was beneath their dignity, letting the man scrabble for them like the merchant that he was. "She wishes to gain an experience of the lives of the common people so that she may rule more wisely when the time comes. It is for that reason only that I will not insist on satisfaction."

  Though the truth was that fighting a duel with this man would be murder. He bent like a man who had rheumatism in every joint, and breathed, on straightening up, as though he had run a marathon. His expression and attitude had totally transformed by the time he had placed the gems into the cushioned recess on his opulent table.

  "I apologize most sincerely, your highness, madam. I should have recognized your quality earlier. In my defense," he gave a nervous, annoying laugh, "I am better at reading gems than people."

  "I should hope so!" Lali scoffed. "Get on with it then." With a dismissive wave, she walked over to the shop window from which she could look out into the hub of the torus shaped station, from which shuttles were arriving and departing like a string of beads. Morwen could almost see the royalty there herself, a kind of unshakable pride that said "Do what you will, but you will never touch me." Or perhaps that was just marine self-confidence. She didn't know. Her own ancestry was Irish, and it had been a long time since they had had kings.

  She was well aware she had unsettled the essayer, and used the fact to its full extent to persuade him to value their rubies high, and to contact a colleague in the neighboring Bank of The Redeemer to set them up an account into which he could pay their money. Fourteen million dinar, an amount she could hardly believe in, let alone claim to own.

  "I think," she went to tuck her hand into Lali's elbow, intending to shepherd her out of the shop, remembered that one did not casually tug at princesses just in time and turned it into a bow with accompanying sweeping hand gesture, "To appear as common people on Salvation we need to move a little up market, ma'am. Clothes or shoes first, or dinner?"

  Lali pointed through the window to a tiny restaurant, with a queue outside its shut doors that stretched back to the hub elevator. "Dinner. Let's go there. And I don't think we need to wait in the queue, do you?"

  Five hours later, weary, footsore but much better fed, they whisked their bustles inside a first class shuttle for the surface. Fashion on Salvation apparently ran to the Victorian, and Morwen observed her lilac kid leather boots with some pleasure as the tips peaked out from beneath her mint green day dress. Lali wore gold silk, and behind the smooth obsidian bun of her hair an intrepid hairdresser had pinned a fan of green and burned orange and peacock blue feathers that set off the reddish copper of her skin and made all the fellow passengers on their ride turn to look.

  "Of course, we're traveling incognito," Morwen told anyone who showed the slightest interest. "The princess is interested in experiencing other cultures without the kerfuffle that might be caused by being known. I'm sure you know how it is."

  Some of the joy of her pretense faltered as she stepped out onto the planet. A perfect wind, just cool enough, caressed her face, and small, fluffy white clouds sailed overhead. The spaceport stood on a hill from which the land fell away in patchworks of fields, divided by flowering h
edges. At two o'clock a distant pink marble house sat among a clover leaf of pools. At five, a moor with what must be fake stone circles encircled another big house, and at nine, a third was surrounded by a canopy of woodlands.

  Camouflage netting at eleven o'clock covered a tin roof beneath which several people were lying on the ground. Thin smoke drifted from a campfire there, but as soon as she noticed the smoke it was put out.

  "What's that?" she asked the severe man who claimed to be 'Lord Anderson's valet, ma'am,' and he sniffed in disgust.

  "Agricultural workers, ma'am."

  "They don't have houses?"

  "Some of them do - the ones who work hard over a generation or more can earn a nice little nest egg. Most of them are too fond of lazing in the sun and stealing from their betters. But don't worry, they'll be moved on when the hedge laying is done. No one wants to look at them longer than they have to, I assure you."

  "Of course not," Morwen exchanged a glance with Lali. All three peoples of the Book were supposed to agree on the fact that the poor were under God's protection - that they should be helped and not exploited like a shameful secret. One expected Mammon to be worshiped more than God in the Source worlds, but here on a planet called Salvation, it seemed bitter.

  The thought only grew as they checked themselves into a silver-leafed room at the closest hotel to Keene's mansion. The poor were never quite visible - came to the door of the hotel kitchen in the evening begging for scraps but scattered when she looked in. For a small coin, one would sweep away horse droppings from before her feet as she crossed the road, but they always ran if she tried to talk to them.

  By the time the rumor mill had informed her of a masked ball at Keene's house, and she had bought tickets for the princess, she was thoroughly sickened of this place, the invisible underclass who were only ever definitively seen when they turned up as corpses on the church steps, and the laughing overlords who didn't notice even that.

  "We've got to get that baby out of here," Lali said, echoing her own sentiments as they waited for the tailor to bring their fancy dress costumes for their final fitting.

  Morwen nodded. "Yes. I don't see any of these people getting through the eye of a needle. She doesn't want to grow up like that. For the sake of her soul."

  "But on the other hand we can't take her into battle, no matter what the Captain might want."

  That thought sounded like disobedience. She opened the door of her room to the tailor and his assistants and tried to ignore it in favor of her costume, a red velvet robe and knitted silver net mesh intended to make her look like Joan of Arc.

  “You bought a flitter?"

  Lali nodded. "It'll be delivered to the masque just before midnight."

  "Well," she decided, when the clothes were finished and hung up and they were combing out today's ridiculously impractical hair styles. "As we're much more likely to be caught and hung out to dry than to stand a chance of getting near her, we can worry about where to take her once we've got her."

  ~

  "The Goddess Coatlique of the Aztecs, and Joan of Arc."

  It was all very medieval, Morwen thought, as they had to pause to be announced by a poe-faced butler. The play acting, dress-up charm of the whole thing had worn off for her, and a creeping revulsion begun to take its place.

  She made one last adjustment to the off-putting mask Lali had chosen, trying to balance it so that the two golden serpent heads with their eyes and blood drops of rubies both appeared to be rising out of Lali's jeweled collar. Her own helmet was already stuffy and impeding her vision, the eye holes set so far away from her eyes they gave her tunnel vision.

  This was it then. She took a deep breath and strode into the party at Lali's side.

  A little ripple of astonishment went through the crowd at Lali's appearance - the mask was the least of it. Her necklace was of hollow silver hearts, enameled bright red, and her skirt was made of enameled green serpents that stirred and nosed at the air as she walked. Coming as a heathen god to a party of true believers had been a calculated risk, but it was paying off.

  Silence, and then everyone was turning to look. Morwen could hear the shocked whispers spiral out into the crush of Cleopatras and angel Gabriels. There were at least four other Joan of Arcs in the reception room alone, and one of them had been to the same dressmaker as she, was all but identical to her, except for the few twists of black hair that poked from beneath her gilded helm.

  "You okay?" she asked quietly, feeling suddenly bad about leaving Lali in the middle of this pack of astonished rich people.

  "I've handled worse than this," Lali's voice was eerily girlish, coming out of that monster face. "Good luck."

  She took a step forward and was instantly surrounded by socialites, all with opinions on her costume it was vital for them to share. Feeling welcomely invisible, Morwen took a step back, out of the crowd, already scanning the walls for computer ports.

  Out of the reception room, she strayed into a ballroom where live musicians were playing antique instruments from a balcony above the dancing. Subtle electronics amplified the music, and a door opened off the balcony into more utilitarian portions of the house, but walking up those stairs would be obvious. She moved on, into a long gallery lit by stained glass lanterns, where someone was already prying up the carpet and organizing a sliding contest.

  A young woman in a French maid's uniform offered her a flute of champagne from a silver tray. She gave an internal wince at the lack of imagination, but watched as the maid returned to the kitchen through a door disguised as a piece of the rich oak wood paneling.

  A roar of laughter distracted everyone as the first guest to try sliding crashed into the legs of an onlooker, knocking them off balance, and Morwen slipped easily into the walls.

  There were servant's stairs, so narrow and steep she could hardly climb them in the red velvet bell of her dress. They came up into a service corridor, tiled like the walls of an institution. She clearly didn't belong here, so she picked up her skirts in one hand, blessed her soft, noiseless shoes, and set off at a jog for the nursery.

  It would be above the adults' quarters, somewhere secluded where the child could not wake her father by crying in the night. It would have...

  More stairs, and then, thank God, a computer port next to a neat stack of boot-blacking equipment. As she'd left most of the crowd behind on the lower levels, she took the time to plug in a hand com and download the plan of the house. Did she need the wiring diagram too? No, someone was coming - she could hear their footsteps measured and slow approaching along the right wing. But she knew where she was going now.

  Up more stairs to where three stooped little doors huddled under the eaves. The fourth was locked with an electronic lock, and those footsteps were still coming. Did they know she was here? Were they following her?

  She tore the helmet off, so she could press her ear to the fourth door as she connected her com to the lock and ran her best skeleton key program. The tumblers in the lock clicked into place one by one while the accompanying scan stripped the nursery computer of whatever information it contained.

  The feet were on the stairs beneath her, ascending. Somewhere distantly, a roar of laughter sounded like an accusation, and then the door snicked open. Tearing inside, she closed it and set her back to it as she slapped the com contact back down to re-lock it. Only a moment later, someone tried the latch. Morwen watched the handle turn, the door shake enquiringly and didn't dare turn for long moments in case she made a noise that let the person outside know she was there.

  Stealing a baby. It never looked good. She should have taken a leaf out of Lali's book and come as one of the Sidhe. Even martial saints looked askance on kidnapping. Even she herself was not entirely sure that this was right.

  After a short eternity, the footsteps began again, fading away, and she turned to find an empty room.

  This must be a servant's room - bare wooden floor, bare whitewashed walls sloping up into the sharply canted roof. A
scrubbed oak table was the right height for a changing space, and an empty crib in the center of the room mocked her with its bars, like a little square cage for an experimental animal that had somehow been allowed to escape. The baby was missing.

  Night fragrance curled through the partially open window, like miles upon miles of flowering meadows, and she was struck all of a sudden by a feeling of immensity and insignificance. She was a thing whose troubles were meaningless and would soon be over.

  Then the alarm went off.

  The footsteps were back, thundering up the stairs with friends. Hell. She snapped out of the weirdly existential moment and shrugged fake chain mail and velvet dress over her head, pulled up the hood on the dark blue skin suit she wore underneath and fastened it over her face. Her mesh handbag contained a coil of super-strong rope and - after watching the captain's example - a box full of syringes of acid in carefully padded recesses. She took one out and applied the acid to the base and tips of all the bars over the window but one. That one, she knotted the rope around.

  They had begun hammering on the locked door before Morwen could push the bars aside, and jump through, rope belayed around her body, but they had not burst through before she was on the ground.

  Her bracer arm was up by her face. She turned on voice activation with the tip of her nose. "Lali? It’s a bust. Get out."

  And then she was down, running for the flitter with the double snake logo parked half way along the house's 'turning circle'. The rope quivered behind her and then began to rise as someone inside the house pulled it back up. Maybe for DNA testing. They knew they'd had an intruder now.

  She reached the flitter without incident, the night holding its breath around her, and primed the powerpack, ready to go as soon as Lali reappeared. She should have made a bright spot of gold and green and sacred hearts as she passed under the light above the door, but nothing. The door opened, then closed. Then it opened again, and five white-uniformed men with shotguns ran out, followed by the seethe of an eager crowd.