Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  "Sneaky bastards, are they?"

  "Sneaky, certainly, ma'am. But I believe they were all from legitimate shipyards."

  She smiled despite everything, finding something endearing about Charity's self-exploration, her slow blooming into personality.

  "I want you to put me down on New Daska in the Bull Ring Spaceport, but I don't want them getting their hands on you, so take off again immediately afterward and keep evading pursuit until I com you to come and pick me up. Alright?"

  "Yes ma'am."

  She wasn't sure if she was imagining the tone of uncertainty in the ship's voice, anthropomorphizing, but she found herself asking as they made their braking orbit "Do you have anyone, Charity? Anyone you want to bring to Cygnus 5, to make a home with?"

  "I had no one, ma'am. I do not have memories of my designers. The governor was my first owner, but I don't believe he understood I was sentient. Everyone who has ever trusted me, or asked something of me that could only be given by a person is now on Cygnus 5, except for you and Private Citlali. I wish you would not go into danger, where I cannot help you."

  Morwen didn't know how to answer that. She leaned her face against the wall, spread out her hands and pressed them into the metal. "This is a hug, Charity. It means thank you for your good wishes, and reassurance that it will be all right, and reinforcement that you are important to me too."

  Then she wiped her leaking eyes and strapped on her backpack and waited to land. The door opened the moment they touched ground and she was running, past the refueling techs and the customs inspectors, toward one of the jeeps they had come out in. She wrenched open the door of the first. Someone inside raised a warning hand, but Morwen just shot them in the face with her stunner and yanked them past herself out of the door, tumbling them onto the runway.

  The techs and officials by Charity's fins wheeled and ran towards her as Charity's hatch latched and her engines roared back into life. Even here, three hundred yards away, Morwen could feel the prickly, crawling nausea of the magnetic anti-gravity force, as the electricity in her cells misfired and her blood forgot momentarily which way was up. She hotwired the jeep with fingers that felt like radio static, as the officials, closer to the blast, crumpled, threw up or fainted.

  Charity was already accelerating out into the greenish sky. Morwen she sped towards the barrier that separated the roads inside the spaceport from those without.

  If she'd had time, she would have fabricated a cover story, allowed the inspectors on board, played eccentric wealth and self-determination while she relied on her ID forgeries to come in undetected. But she didn't have time. They knew about Priya. They'd probably come for her already. And Priya was sweet.

  God that was the worst thing. Priya was so caring that it upset her when anyone she knew was hurt. They'd met in basic training, and even then it had been obvious that Priya would never make a soldier. She couldn't bring herself to stab even the practice dummies. The one and only time the unarmed combat instructor had got her to hit him, she had burst into tears afterward and apologized. For a week.

  Priya had actually bought him a cake, Morwen remembered. This six foot tall, shaven-headed gorilla of a man, who had given no sign that he'd even felt her blow. She'd bought him a cake to say sorry anyway.

  There were probably better ways to run to the rescue than with engine gunning and pieces of crash barrier careening off the windshield - more intelligent ways. Less detectable ways. But Priya was delicate, like an orchid. She survived only because she had lived in a place where she was sheltered from the horrors of the world. And the thought of those horrors coming upon her when Morwen was not there to defend her, apparently did something to her ability to react rationally. A stealth attack might have been better, but she was coming in with the two-by-four to the face regardless.

  Sirens whined on behind her as spaceport security piled into ground-speeders and followed. She had landed in the early morning, and mist churned up rainbows around the jeep's wheels as she barreled down into Styx's knife edge river valley, eerie looking as it cut through the black volcanic rock. Above her, the searchlight of a helicopter locked onto the jeep's back wheels, and something hissed as it narrowly missed her ear.

  At the deepest part of the river, a bridge carried the road over and out toward the city on the sea-cliffs, but if one drove on past the bridge, tunnels led into the warrens beneath the older city, built before New Daska embraced Kingdom rule with its ideals of simplicity. She took a handbrake turn and screamed into the underpass, where no one drove now because of the acid that dripped from the ceiling, where rain had percolated through city smog and turned into something bitter.

  Maybe over hundreds of trips it would wear a car's roof away, but this once it might just bubble the paint and she hardly cared about that.

  One of her pursuers made the turn, the other overshot. This was a long straight stretch, under the thickest of the skyscrapers. Morwen kept one hand on the wheel and managed to get the other out of the window. Thumbing the stunner's wheel around to tight beam, she shot at the pursuing lights.

  Something stung her above the eyebrow - she thought maybe just a piece of loose tile from the corridor until the streaming blood fell into her eye. She squinched it shut and shot again and the lights popped and shattered.

  She fell back into her seat, clinging to old memories. Security behind her could still follow her by the glow of her own lights up ahead of him, but another ninety degree turn was coming up ahead, fifteen seconds from here. She switched off her own lights - absolute darkness fell - and counted. Five six. Unbelievably the patrol car was accelerating, she could hear its engine noise growl.

  Ten, eleven. She braced herself against the back of the seat, her forehead throbbing and tight.

  Fifteen. She threw the brake on, the wheel to the left, took the brake off again and slammed her foot down. About half a mile down here the road veered sharply left. She didn't have an accurate count--she wanted light to handle that--but for now she slowed, the engine quietened, and a distant roar told her that blind, in the dark, her pursuer had passed the end of this tunnel, was still accelerating away on her old course.

  A moment later a boom and a rattle of ceramic tiles against the roof, a wash of red light down the distant corridor told her he had met the t-junction at the end of that route, without the advantages of Morwen’s intimacy with these tunnels, achieve by spending every last one of her leaves down here, as a place she and Priya could reliably be unseen for days on end. She snapped her headlights on low beam and drove past the bend in the corridor before the second vehicle could see her disappearing tail-lights over the flicker of the explosion’s dying flames.

  Thirty minutes later, she drove out of the warren on the fourth level above ground. Here the interlocked buildings began to separate out into their constituent towers, and the fifty-story car park on mac Cumhaill Street would not have done her any good even if the auto-lifts still worked.

  She pulled her hood up to conceal her bright hair. It was always dim in the old city, even above ground, because of the shade of the towers, and local sentiment was that they were good people here, so why should the government need to watch them day and night? The wreckage of a security camera she passed on the way to the stairs, so new the vandalized wires were still sparking, confirmed that sentiment had not changed. So maybe she'd get to their apartment door without being spotted. This precipitate, ridiculous run--maybe it would work yet.

  Every third level as she slogged up the stairwell, a window gave her a view of the wreckage of the city. Moss grew on the glass of the skyscrapers, and birds nested in any protuberance. Here and there, an accessible window got scraped by one of the misfits who chose to live here rather than in the widespread small towns that had replaced the city. Often these cleared patches would have balconies of reclaimed wood screwed together beneath them, and on warm days laundry would still be hung out. On level twenty-four she craned her neck up to see if she could see Priya's, but their balcony was n
o longer visible.

  Well, she'd been gone a long time. Maybe it fell down. They tended to. One of her fondest memories was of lying in bed beside Priya during the winter of the winds, feeling the tower shake and hearing the balconies above them rattle down like heavy hail while they lay safe together.

  The door was the same, halfway along the walkway, a waist high white wall behind her to deter from accidentally falling off, with three identical faded red painted wooden doors on either side of it. Number 3130. Their home, their refuge - their den of vice, depending on how you saw it.

  At least the cut over her eye had stopped bleeding. She put her hood down and knocked, as a giddy joy bubbled up out of her adrenaline-soaked system and popped in her head like champagne bubbles. Priya, her wife in all but legal terms. God, it had been too long. Just to see her would--

  The door opened. The woman on the other side was not Priya, but an elderly black woman with thinning hair and a stiff, defensive, terrified look in her eye.

  "You're not Priya," Morwen said, stupidly, because for a moment it was the only thing she could think of.

  "She doesn't live here anymore." Without moving her head, the woman darted a quick glance to the obscured hallway beside her. "Would you like to come in?"

  The smell of fear and the darting glance, and the - was that a click? As though the safety had been nudged off a weapon? "Where is she?" Morwen asked, because she still couldn't get past wanting Priya. Where was she? She was meant to be here!

  "She hasn't lived here for a year. This is my house now. Please--"

  The woman staggered and jerked backwards as someone pulled her out of the doorway with a hand to the collar. Morwen's internal scream of protest cut off into cold calculation as she found herself staring down the barrel of a gun, a Kingdom policeman behind it. She could get under his arm, knock his shot awry...

  But that stood a chance of getting the elderly woman caught in the crossfire.

  "Hold your wrists out in front of you, crossed."

  As she worked the angles, the doors on either side of the apartment slammed open simultaneously, two more policemen bursting out of each as further doors cracked and curious onlookers peeked at her. Fight them all, keeping the civilians unharmed? She couldn't see how, not with one eye gummed shut and her head ringing and her gut hollow for the want of her love.

  She backed slowly away from the door.

  "Surrender immediately, or we will shoot."

  But she knew far too much to ever let herself be captured. The access codes to Cygnus 5's space defense system, for example. She could not let those fall into enemy hands.

  She felt so hollow she expected to float. But when she turned and vaulted over the protective wall behind her, flinging herself off the edge of the skyscraper, she fell. She still fell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Inhuman Trials

  As the early warning sensors alerted Bryant to the presence of a speeder bike coming in fast, he put down the cabling he was attempting to trace to its source, and actually came to the surface. Stepping out of the cavern of the city - now beginning to feel homelike, safe - he realized he hadn't seen the sun for over a week. The wind, tussling with his hair, smelled familiar, and the distant dot that zoomed up at a reckless pace and resolved into Aurora on a speeder made him feel at one with the whole world.

  He liked it, this blue, perpendicular place, with the ribbon-like leaves of the trees undulating towards the moss-capped lake. He liked the ring in the sky, faint gold at this hour, as though the whole planet was wearing a wedding band. And these days it no longer freaked him out so much that his thoughts strayed in the direction of marriage whenever Aurora was around.

  How could they not, when she looked like that? With her hair loose and her uniform discarded in favor of some kind of silky top that sleeked over the magnificence of her breasts as if it was crying out to be touched. Objectively, the woman was nothing to write home about, shorter and more robust than galactic standards of beauty required. Too much muscle, not enough willowy pliability, but Bryant's wayward hair ached to be clutched in her fist. As a man, she had crushed him up against the nearest surface and kissed him relentlessly a few times. He hadn't yet managed to persuade her to do it as a woman, but the prospect of trying made him feel as happy as if he'd had a square meal.

  She looked harried though, and hurt. Well, she could take that out on him too and if it did her good it would make him happy too. "Aurora! Moon of my delight!" he said, and actually broke into a jog to meet her.

  Her kiss had a flavor of desperation and sadness that he didn't like, but the feel of her arms around him, and the fact that he managed to get his hands under her jacket to feel the slickness of the silk over her spine and her too-prominent ribs delighted him anyway. "Look at you," he said, "You scrub up nicely. I feel this top requires more extensive study. How about you come into my lair and we work on that?"

  It didn't elicit the laugh he'd hoped for, but she did smile and shove him in the chest with a casual strength that he allowed to knock him back, because it made his heart feel stronger, and his breath come hard. This no sex before marriage thing was going to kill him, but what a way to go.

  "Yeah," she said, the smile settling into an affectionate gaze. "In another lifetime, when we're not about to be invaded. What can we do to defend the planet from a couple thousand small landing craft? Individual landing pods, I mean."

  "It's great to see you again too. I missed you," he fired off, because (a) it was true, and (b), it gave him time to think. He wondered if it could be called an advantage of this new adventurous lifestyle of his that news that would have had him panicking with terror half a year ago now only elicited a feeling of 'oh, now what?'

  "Well," having spend so long apart from her, he wasn't letting go yet. He wound both hands around her elbow and let her tug him in the direction of the city. One of the ambulatory stinging vine plants had parked itself by the apparent cave mouth that was the city's main external entrance, and they both edged past it slowly, cautiously, trying not to make the flowering ends of its vines stir like snakes as they passed.

  "While you were away, we managed to bring the launcher under Fourteen Anglerfish Harbor online. That completes the coverage of this hemisphere. I've been working on trying to power up the mag-lev tracks that lead through the core to the other side of the world, so we can get people over to work on the further ones, but..."

  The bots he'd made to enable him to interface with this world's technology kept running unexpectedly into a wall there. He wasn't superstitious, not like Aurora and her primitives, but he also didn't believe in ignoring data, and part of the data was that he was unsettled, unsure. With every new step, the computers on this world should be opening to him. With every database he accessed, he refined his methods. He should be getting better results.

  "But?" Aurora prompted, as they walked out onto the viewpoint where the concealed stairs opened into the cavern and one could look down on the webwork of light-flowers and the roofless structures of the city, grown up like filaments of crystal from the bowl of rock beneath.

  "But I get the feeling something's stopping me."

  Even though he'd lived in this place for nearly half a Cygnus year now, he felt the same awe, standing here, as he had felt when they first saw the place. It was his now, and he loved it with a fierce proprietorial love, but still he knew it had been someone else's before, and he wished, he really wished he could meet one of those fore-comers, one of the Natives, and ask them what had really happened, beyond all the religious talk about a Destroyer with a capital D. Why had they really had to leave?

  "Even if we could get launcher coverage over the whole planet in time," Aurora moved closer to him, and he almost lost what she was saying in the feel of her ribcage moving as she breathed. She was wearing perfume - something spicy, flowery, like cloves and jasmine, and it made something turn over inside him. What could he say? He liked that she was tough and macho and soldierly, but it turned out he l
iked her feminine side too.

  "The launchers aren't fit to combat drop pods. It would be like trying to fight off a cloud of midges with a golf club."

  Bryant didn't know what a golf club was, but he got the picture anyway. "And you want me to magically come up with something better?"

  They moved forward again, walking in step, so that her hand could tuck itself into his back pocket, and he could rest his own on the flare where her waist bloomed out into wide hips, so he could feel the swing of them through his fingertips.

  "Can you?" she said, looking tolerantly amused with his distractibility.

  He sighed, because he didn't know. That was where he ran into the wall again. "Let me show you something."

  No longer abandoned, the city wasn't exactly packed either. He waved to Jenkins and Iverson who were coming out of the building he thought of as his surgery. Currently it was more the hub of the computer network of the new colony, but one day he would have it to himself again, be able to turn his skills back to their original purpose.

  He led her into the center of the city - the lowest point, where a perfectly circular lake was fed by the runnels of water that curved in elegant spirals down the main roads. There stood what Bryant thought of as a ziggurat, but everyone else referred to as 'the cathedral'. The Lice's place of worship, presided over by a statue of a god who looked just like them.

  "I haven't been in here since we were being hunted," said Aurora, looking around herself curiously. Bryant's team had planted light vines along the corridors in whatever vessels they could find. A spray of gold and green flowers in what was perhaps a bathtub had just begun to clamber up the walls and light the doors Bryant had brought her to see.

  There could have been some kind of aircraft in there, if the size of the doors was diagnostic. He wasn't sure what metal they were made of, but it had an oily bronze finish, and it blunted diamond drills. A couple of half hearted white score marks that rubbed off beneath his thumb was the only mark they had made on it, despite almost a week of trying to take samples.