by Alex Oliver
Against his will, he found himself leaning against the lip of the chamber, his fingertips numb from the buzz of the stasis field inside as he drew as close as he could to the child without flash freezing himself. "Is this real?"
It could be. They'd both been on planet long enough for traces of their DNA to be everywhere. An observer with access to the insides of their minds would know they were in love. Might even know that Aurora desperately wanted her own child. It would not have been impossible to grow them a daughter, to put her in here like a lure or a bribe.
But his death had not been real. He turned the scanner on and drew it down the girl’s floating form. The pill-bug children had not been real. This was most probably just some new mind fuckery perpetrated on him by whatever process was supposed to test and select candidates worthy of opening the further door. Even though the scanner said she was a perfectly healthy infant child, she was probably not more than merely symbolically real.
A cold point on the scan results drew his attention. Something inside her - something of foreign origin? He narrowed the results down. It was beneath her skin, beneath the muscles of her chest and her ribs, inside the chest cavity, inside the complex ventricles of her left lung, underneath her heart.
The shape came into focus gradually. Round on the top, a straight bole with a fan shape at the end of it on one side. Bryant's teeth creaked in his jaw from clenching it. "Oh, you fuckers!" he said aloud, in the faint chance that the ancient designers of this test might be able to hear him. "You fucking bastards!"
Plain as the writing on the wall, the key needed to open the further door was embedded in the child's body. In the body of a child who might be his own daughter. Who might be Aurora's daughter.
It's not real, he reminded himself, but the thought couldn't gain any traction against the heaving swell of anger. It didn't matter that it wasn't real. Those ancients had thought this would be a good test of character, did they? He could just picture them coiled together into a ball of discussion, the fine hairs of their leg-feelers quivering with amusement as they worked out how best to test his... whatever it was they were testing. His resolve, or his ruthlessness, or the intensity of his desire to know what was beyond the door.
Wait. How had he just flashed back on a discussion huddle? How had he just remembered what it felt like to sense the world through the fibers of his claws?
He groaned, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes until the ache and the stars drowned out the alien memory. It seemed a little specific to be DNA-carried, but he couldn't really expect to have no symptoms at all as a result of splicing louse DNA with his own. He should stop getting sidetracked.
Yes, he really should. Fuck the designers of this test anyway. He knew what they wanted, but it didn't mean he had to give it to them. He had a fully set up operating theater in the city above. He could damn well take baby girl and operate on her properly. None of this 'we only take the people who can make the hard decisions' bullshit. He was better than that. "I'm going to get the key and save the child," he told his imagined listeners, already hunting for the switch to cut the stasis field. "Fuck you and your choices."
The switch turned out to be another dimple in the wall. When he put his finger in it, nothing happened - it took no blood sample - but he could feel a roughness in the metal, as though there was a superfine grill. So if it wasn't analyzing his blood, what did it want? Pheromones?
Wiping the finger under his armpit and replacing it made the wall click, and a control panel slide into place on the floor. His feet itched in his shoes, yearning towards it, and he toed the right shoe off and stepped with his bare skin onto the controls. A sensation of connectedness and intent, and the bright white static of the field hummed into silence. The pod's occupant sank slowly until she was lying as if asleep on its polished brass interior. She had a little button nose, and the curves of her closed eyelids were newly minted and perfect. Her hand, under her round cheek was maybe the most perfect paradigm of a hand he had ever seen.
"Hey," he murmured, filled with a wondering kind of ache, "Baby girl, wake up."
It's not real, a dutiful part of his mind reminded him, but he was too busy reaching in and nudging her gently by the warm, slight shoulder, while a fierce, awestruck protectiveness unlike anything he'd ever experienced flooded through him. "Come on now, wake up. Aurora is not going to believe it when she sees you."
The child stirred, opening tawny, desert colored eyes and smiling at him. He smiled back. Gods, it was going to be hard to have the first thing he did to her be crack open her ribs and fish around in her lungs. Even under anesthetic, even with the most delicate surgery, he didn't want to. He wanted to take her for ice-cream and make her laugh.
"Hi," she said, in Common, which should have worried him more than it did. "Did you come to save me?"
"Yes, honey," he took both her hands and pulled her out of the wall. Maybe the easiest birth ever on record. "But first there's something I need to do."
He stooped to put his shoe back on, but his foot wouldn't move. When he yanked back with all his force the sole of his foot burned shrill, as if he was trying to tear it off.
"Is 'Honey' my name?"
Now he could believe she'd been grown in a vat. She was watching him struggle as if she had no idea what he was doing, no idea it wasn't normal. "Yeah," he said, sure he had felt something give, "Yeah, if you like. Pull me, would you? I'm stuck."
She backed away, eyes rounding as if he had said something terrible. "Why do you want to get away? I thought you wanted to get further in."
"How do you know that?" Bryant swallowed, sick, suddenly, with the anger back under it, all the stronger because of that welling up of love. Disappointed in himself; he knew this was a test, a trick and he had still fallen for it.
Her turn to look disappointed. "I can't go out," she said gently, nodding toward the surface doors, which were - he saw with a sensation of inevitability - shut again behind him. "I can't go out. You have to agree to stay with me. You have to go in."
"I'm trying to go in," he yanked again at his foot. With a scorching, tearing pain, it peeled away from the floor reluctantly, as if it were covered in tiny hooks and he was tearing them out.
"Well, you know how," Honey insisted, her slight brown body held confident and relaxed as if she was perfectly at home. "And there's a knife on the console."
Bryant was pretty sure he would have noticed that, but once he'd got his shoe back on and went to look there was indeed a machete-type blade concealed amid the detail of the ornamentation. A long brass-golden blade with the heft and weight of an ax.
He laughed because it was all he had left to express his horror and disbelief and incredulity and the amount with which he was offended with all of this. "Honey, do you want to die? Is that what you're telling me? Wouldn't you rather come with me to the surface where we can get that thing out of you safely? And then you can have a mother, and friends, and... there's cows just arrived. And those shiny-eyed lemur things. I bet they'd make great pets. You could grow up. Me and Aurora, we'd love you. I promise." His quick eyes filled with tears. "I already do."
She seemed to catch his upset, backing away toward the further door, her chin crumpling. "I don't understand what all those those things are."
"We could teach you." He took a step toward her, hand outstretched in comfort and invitation. "Come with me. We can get that thing out, I can go in, And you can live."
She shook her head, pressing herself into the inner door as if he was threatening her, frightened now he was offering her a life. "I can't go out. This is what I'm for!"
Maybe he was looming? Maybe the translation matrix was dodgy and she was hearing something different from what he thought he was saying. "I don't kill people," he insisted. "That's a big part of who I am. I help people. I don't hurt them."
She spread her hands against the door, her fingers slipping into notches that looked like they had been designed specifically to fit her. There was a click from th
e exit as it locked, and a snap and scatter of sparks from the console. "Then you're not allowed in."
Even though he had half expected this, Bryant's skin tried to crawl to the top of his head as his heart became a fission generator of panic and denial. He could smell the creeping flames already, as the first wave of warmth swept up from the floor.
"Fucking hell!" He ran for her, lifted her over his shoulder and hurled them both against the doors, which held firm. A few dimples in the design might have been sensors, but when he put his own fingers, or hers, into them, nothing happened. He set her down in the patch of fire furthest from the flames. Probably not coincidentally it was closest to the console, closest to the brutal sharp sword in its scabbard of decorative filigree. "No! You can't do this to me again!"
Honey looked at the fire as if that too was a mystery to her, open delight in her wide smile. "It's pretty!" A moment later, before he could grab her, she had reached out to try to feel the texture of a flame.
"Eeeaargh!" Her scream echoed off the walls, piercing as a bird's cry. Outraged and betrayed, she turned and threw herself at Bryant. He caught her and pulled her close automatically, curling himself around her, pulling her in tight, as if that would help protect her. "Aaa!" Her tears slid down the side of his throat as she sobbed into his neck, pain and betrayal the biggest thing in her short life. "I don't want it! Take it away!"
Fire had begun to lick up the walls, to pool across the surface of the ceiling. Soon it would begin to drip down onto them. He could barely handle the idea of going through it again, but the idea that she had to endure it even once? No. That was not happening.
The weapon caught his eye again, gleaming, and yes, he knew it was logically better for him to kill her painlessly, spare her from this, take the key and save himself too, but right now they could all go and fuck themselves, trying to force him into this.
"You hear me? Fuck you, whoever you are. I'm not doing this!"
He took his shirt off and then his trousers, swaddling Honey in the material while his skin crisped in the heat. "Did you think I wouldn't find a third way? Because I fucking will. Fuck you!"
Then with a strength of mind he didn't know he had, he forced himself to wade through the flames, his tendons shriveling as he went, and slide her back into her stasis pod. The ground was glowing red hot when he put his bare foot down on it to seal the booth, and his flesh melted and ran from it, but the wires still took, and the last thing he saw before his eyes popped was the stasis field flicking on, was Honey floating, scorched but alive.
Fuck you, he thought again in a wordless wail of agony. You can kill me as many times as you like, but you will not make me a murderer. I'm better than that.
~
Aurora was outside, in the tiny hollow where she and Bryant had camped when they first landed on this world. The filaments of the trees had begun to change color, and now flowed downhill on the breeze in an undulating sea of pinks and purples. Even the algae that formed a mat over the surface of the lake had turned from teal to turquoise. The color palette made her think of spring, but the air was shivery and frost bright, and the wind smelled like snow.
She had come out for some fresh air while she commed Jenkins at the launcher and Lina at the citadel. From Lina's report, the mining of the old colony buildings would be finished by tonight. In the absence of an underground route between citadel and city, the skimmers had been going back and forth all week, emptying the colonial buildings of anything of use. Selena had radioed earlier from the middle of nowhere, thoroughly enjoying herself, having immediately recruited the best riders among the convicts to be vaqueros with her in her mission to move the herd closer to the city.
Aurora had picked out for them a valley full of bluegrass, with a three change sled route to it through the tunnels beneath the city. There, Selena and her party would be out of the way if the fight came to the city, but close enough that some regular delivery of cheese and yoghurt could be made. Pulling her winter coat more closely around her as a knife of wind sliced past, she was glad that Selena at least was as far away from the oncoming conflict as she could reasonably put her.
If the citadel fell with an expected level of difficulty, and the city remained hidden, there was a good chance that the Kingdom forces would assume they had won. She couldn't see them wasting years to make sure that every straggler was picked off. If that happened, then those in the city, and those in Selena's valley should be safe. That was her best case scenario.
If they found the city, all bets were off. The discovery of an alien civilization would make this world a prize worth devoting half the fleet to, and as many years as it took. Guerrilla living could not save them then.
She shouldn't have sent out Mboge and Nori with their evidence of alien life. Of course they would be captured. Of course the location of the planet would be tortured out of them, and then either some new enemy would come, or the Kingdom would find out and triple their attempts to take the world back. As a rebellious colony doomed to starve, they were not worth more than a few battleships. As a store of alien knowledge and technology they were a prize at best and a heresy at worst.
She caught herself sinking, got her mental hands under her mood and lifted it to God. This situation I have got us all into, I can do very little about. I offer it to you. You sort it out, Lord. Please.
Breathing out as if she had put down a heavy load, she returned her thoughts to what she could do, and toggled the comm. Jenkins smiled up at her from its small screen, distant welding sparks tattooing his blue-black skin with flashes of gold.
"Hey," she greeted him, glad he was as short on small talk as she was. "How's the casing coming?"
"We're nearly done," he turned to show her the source of the sparks - plating taken from defunct imps, welded together into a sphere. Inside, he shoved his arm in and showed her three layers of thermal insulation, and an inner sphere of plywood stripped from the barracks. When he angled his elbow, a small control panel came into view, little more than a view-screen, an arming and firing pin for explosive bolts, and a detonator switch for the skip mine they were using as a one-chance-only drive module, once in outer space. "If you started out now, it would be finished by the time you arrive."
She drew in another chest full of fresh, cold air as she offered this up too, letting it go - letting go of the idea of results, of the desperate "Please make it work!" She was going to try it, and if it worked, good. And if it didn't, and she was still alive, God would find another way. If she died, Lina and Carrow between them could take over, and anything from that point would be their problem.
"Okay," she nodded, smiling back, because the plan was kind of awesome in its desperation, and it would be an epic way to die if it did go bad. "I've got maybe half an hour of stuff to wrap up here and then I'll be with you. Prep for launch."
"Yes ma'am." He gave her a not-quite-ironic salute and signed off, and she strolled up the slope to the cave entrance which was the city's main door, glad that she had to squeeze sideways to get through it.
Her next stop was the impromptu media studio that had sprung up in the one o'clock degree of the city, closest to the wall. She came into what had been a large, bare enclosure carpeted by computers, and found it festooned with moving images. Tiny displays had been hooked into the light vines overhead, and as she walked she was surrounded by a cloud of video, seeing fruit trees and bonfires and lash-apples and ribbon trees and panoramas of distant mountains. On one display Lina was talking earnestly, looking queenly and ethereal in a golden hijab that Aurora knew she had sewn herself from the Governor's silk bedsheets. On another Nori spoke of the advantages of being able to build your own networks from scratch without preexisting flaws. A third showed the three chaplains talking about redemption, a new heaven and a new earth.
With all this movement and distraction going on, Carrow didn't see Aurora until she touched his narrow shoulder, and then he gasped and jumped, pressed one long hand over his mouth and nose and backed away. He looked
ever more like a scarecrow these days, bones and rags and bedraggled dirty blond dreadlocks, but he had the burning eyes of a man let off the leash at last. "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't see you there."
"How's it coming?" she asked again, watching him flinch before he smiled.
"Oh it's... it's done. A thousand hours of political commentary, philosophical debate, humor, beauty and... frankly, propaganda. Wait a moment." He dropped to the ground, cross legged in the center of the green alien tiles, and fired up his comm, which was connected by wire to the floor. Immediately, the floor came alight with data. Not, apparently the data he wanted. His face crumpled in confusion, and he began to crawl from one crack in the tiles to the next. "Where did I put it?"
"What are you looking for?"
"I compressed all of," he waved a hand at the hanging displays, all the talking heads and video logs, "this into a form that could be encoded in... Oh."
Aurora waited, but Carrow was now pushing himself back into the lotus position as if he had said quite enough.
"And then what did you do with it?"
"I gave it to Bryant Jones, of course, so that he could incorporate it into the nano he was building for you. I'm surprised he hasn't delivered it yet. He said it should be drone work to do, wouldn't take him a moment."
Bryant. Aurora took a step back, nodded. "You know where he is?"
Bryant had become a separate layer of anxiety all of his own, one she shied away from in public, where she could not afford to seem weak.
Carrow shook his head. "In his lab, I expect. I took the data over to him two days ago. I would have thought he would have got it to you before now, but he did seem distracted."
Now she was defensive on Bryant's behalf, and worried again, if worried was the right word for the thing gnawing on the inside of her stomach. "He's working on another project. Planetary defenses. I was hoping that if he got that up and running, I wouldn't have to go through with this, but..."