Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  Bryant had gone head to head with a problem bigger than he was, and so far it was winning. It happened sometimes. "Time's run out." She nodded again, ending the conversation. "Thank you for this," and headed for Bryant's lab.

  With so many people exploring the tunnels, going on longer and longer foraging trips, Bryant's 'lab' - actually a many chambered building centered on an operating-room-cum-amphitheater - was deserted. No one in the antechamber or the specimen room. "Bryant?" she called and paused in the doorway of the theater with an achy kind of dread. This was where she had found him collapsed last time.

  Sure enough, she recognized the bundle of jumpsuit and big boots underneath the operating table. He lay as if dead, but when she sprinted up, her heart bruised from having been through this once already, she could feel the pulse in his throat. She rolled his head onto her shoulder, got an arm around his back and the other beneath his knees and lifted. His one visible eye pinched shut and he made a sound of pain and protest, but she shook him regardless, angry with him for doing this when she needed him, angry with the planet for doing this to him, angry with herself for saying she'd be gone in half an hour, for not having the time or emotional resilience to deal with this now.

  "Bryant? Bryant, wake up."

  He sobbed in the back of his throat, tried to turn his head to hide his face further against her neck, and one of the tight spirals of his explosive hair brushed against her lips, unyielding as a wire. Startled, she laid him down on the operating table. Was this why he had stopped her touching before? She pushed her hands into the cloud of his hair and touched grooved metal antennae. He raised a hand to try to shove her away, and what she had thought was dirt on it she saw now was a carpet of tiny gray wires.

  No. She shook him again, less gently, until he opened his eyes and squinted at her, wrapping one hand around her nearest wrist. The feel of those filaments against her skin was itchy in every way. "What the hell did you do?"

  No. Bryant was a survivor. She'd trusted that. No matter what happened, Bryant would find a way to torque it to his advantage. Bryant would come out laughing even from a firebombing from space. She'd rebuilt so much of her fragile emotional security on the knowledge that Bryant's survival was a firm foundation. "In," she checked her watch, "five minutes, I'm going to have to go get ready to fucking fire myself into outer space. When, exactly, were you going to tell me about this?"

  "When you got back," he gave her a grin so haunted that her anger threatened to snuff out in place of the terror underneath. "Obviously."

  What had happened to make him look that way? How much of a chance was there that he would honestly tell her?

  Gingerly, he stretched his limbs and back, then rolled over to take two small vials out of one of the instrument pockets hanging from the side of the table. "Here. You need to ingest one of these. The nano'll propagate on the way to the citadel and be deliverable by spit in approximately an hour. The second vial can be delivered by hand without taking your space suit off. I said I would have it ready, didn't I? So please don't be angry."

  Dropping her head into her hands, Aurora sat on the table next to him. She gave a bark of unhappy laughter. "I don't want to go on what might be my last mission angry with you either." She smoothed the hair back from his face, tried not to look at where the wires punctured his skin, disappeared into his skull. "But what the hell did you do?"

  He fitted himself back into her arms, nuzzling against the side of her neck, smoothing his long hands along her spine. The warmth of him was just right and he still smelled like himself. The tension went out of her back instinctively, even though something childish, girlish in her was remembering her mother, was telling her that she would always be left, that there would always be something in the lives of those she loved that they valued more than her.

  "I'm more convinced than ever that the answer to the colony's survival is behind that door," he said quietly, reassuringly. "But it's just a little harder to get through than I thought. I wanted to have done it already, so you wouldn't have to do this. I mean, what are you going to do, one person against a battleship?"

  That was rhetorical, obviously, because she'd explained the plan and he'd agreed to it. "I'll be fine. I want to know what's happening with you."

  She meant 'I want to know that you're going to be okay,' but he took it as 'I want to know your nefarious plan,' and huffed.

  "I'll tell you when you get back."

  That was unacceptable, because "What if I... what if I don't get back?" How could she leave him, knowing the planet was changing, maybe killing him. Maybe doing something worse?

  "Then it won't matter, will it?"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Inquisitor

  Aurora checked her spacesuit's seals and tanks with a steady hand. She'd pushed the skimmer full speed all the way back and gained herself five minutes, which she’d used to crouch in the middle of nowhere and scream at the sky. She'd let herself sob until the timer on her bracer went off, but it hadn't made her feel better, and she'd still had to mount up again and go on.

  Bryant was a formidable bastard, she knew that. She'd just have to trust that he knew what he was doing - that he would get through this and still be himself when he came out the other side. After all, she was asking him to trust her to come back from this suicidal stunt. If he could do that, she could have some faith in him too, right?

  If only he'd cared more about staying the same. But his whole life revolved around turning people into something new. He gave a kid gills, for God's sake. He'd made Aurora a man, briefly, and accepted her new form with an enthusiasm she just didn't get, if he had liked the old one. He was fluid at heart, happy to pour into whatever shape was offered, and she was solid, and couldn't help but see the constant change as a kind of attrition. Couldn't help wondering how he would stay himself, even stay human, when everything else had altered.

  Arriving at the launcher, she firmly stuffed these worries back in their box and nailed a lid on them as she checked her spacesuit. Everything came up green, and she pulled it over herself like a very high-tech shroud. Stumping up to the capsule Jenkins had made for her, she folded herself into its cramped center, let him strap her down and tuck more insulation and padding around her, until she was swaddled like a glass ornament in bubble wrap to be posted across the world.

  Jenkins wriggled the control board underneath her right hand.

  Click, the intercom sounded in her ear. "We'll be tracking you from here, giving you trajectory figures in a live stream. The skip mine drive can only be used once, because..."

  She zoned out a moment. Like most scientists, he had a tendency to explain things she'd known for years. He didn't need to tell her that skip mines had been designed to be launched from within an attacking ship - to take themselves out of the bomb bay through ex-space and reappear inside an enemy ship, primed and ready to explode.

  "So I'm going to call out 'three, two, one, go and on 'go' you hit the trigger. The drive will skip your capsule inside the main loading bay of the battlecruiser you saw on Seven. We don't know if the bay is pressurized or not so--"

  "I'll wing it from there," she nodded, trying to look eager and confident, while also trying not to throw up. Theoretically this was a great plan, but she knew better than to trust to theory where deep space battle was concerned. "Okay, let's go."

  A last look at the ring of hungry faces behind Jenkins, and the chains on the distant crane lowering like sinuous rain all around, then the hatch was welded closed, and darkness fell except for the square of bright view-screen. A jolting sensation as two of the loader's imps raised the capsule between them and a third fastened the chains beneath, and then the screen blurred as she was swung up and up, through a connecting passage, and lowered onto one of the magnetic sleds of the accelerator.

  The first circuit was slow, winding up only to two hundred miles an hour, with the next - even with her reinforced suit - she began to feel the acceleration, feel the padding at her back yield, giv
e way, compress with little squeaky noises. The pressure sat on her lungs like a house as her eyes blurred and then shut down. Her skull ached. Her air mix automatically compensated for the bare, shallow gasps that was all she could manage, growing richer with oxygen, managing, barely, to keep her from blacking out as she was accelerated up to launch speed.

  And then the release, like a wrecking ball to the back. She was hurled forward into her restraints, into the padding, as her imagination supplied her with the unwanted picture of this un-powered capsule being flung into the sky.

  God, she hoped they'd got the maths right - hoped that hammer blow had been enough. She blinked her blurry eyes back into operation, and concentrated on breathing. In for eight, out for eight. Telling herself she was not on edge, not looking out for any feeling of falling, not focusing on what it would be like to fall backwards into the planet's gravity well, strapped in and plummeting like a stone.

  But the wrecker crew had had plenty of practice by now. After half an hour of purgatory, all the weights on her began to ease. Her unsecured legs tried to swim up to head height, and her long exhale felt easy and free. Zero gee.

  Crackle. "Aurora, do you hear me?"

  "I copy."

  "Your trajectory's good. You're going to pass the mass limit for the skip drive just about..." a pause. "Now." A sound of clattering, as if he was inputting something on an old fashioned keyboard. "Alright, best of our scans say the battlecruiser has moved just a little, we're recalculating your launch points now."

  Moved? If it was under drive, maybe that meant it had completed the drop pods and that the invasion was imminent. She didn't have much time.

  "You hear me?"

  "I do."

  "Get ready to engage the skip drive in three," she sighed, pleasantly buzzed on oxygen, though the suit had turned the mix back to normal by now. "Two. One."

  She flipped the cover off the switch. "Go." and engaged.

  Nothing in a human being was equipped to sense ex-space. From her point of view she was simply just outside Five's orbit one moment and just outside Seven's the next. The tiny low grade viewscreen didn't even flicker as it changed from a view of distant stars to a view of the exterior of an archangel class battleship.

  The exterior? From this distance a com call back to Jenkins would take twelve minutes to reach Cygnus 5 and a reply take twelve to get back to her. Someone had messed up the maths and she was lucky not to have been embedded in the planet that hung white and blue and blazing in the upper left quadrant of the screen. Outside? That would complicate things.

  Well, she had no drives on this thing, no way to change its course, and already it was beginning to curve past the ship on its way into the outer dark. Time to ditch the shell. She thumbed the detonator for the explosive bolts.

  Her swaddling absorbed the blast. All dark for a long blink and then the two halves of the shell split apart and spun off. The padding glinted in long ribbons as it unraveled in the world's icy light and she gave the suit thrusters a three second burn to convert her outward course into a long curve towards the ship.

  She counted her breaths, keeping them down, keeping her heart rate calm, and sailed silently over the ship's waist. Shield generators showed in her visor as orange bonfires of radiation, active, protecting the hull from orbital debris like herself. She risked another burst to lower herself into the ship's shadow, down past the stripes of burning dots that was an armed bank of photon cannons. They were running hot, and she felt a burst of disapproval for the waste of power, even as her lungs tried to crawl out of her mouth as she sunk past all the open gun-mouths.

  By now, she had been supposed to be inside. The tank readout on her visor flicked into orange. Five minutes of air left.

  Okay then. She swallowed her innards and floated further back, past particle cannons and maneuvering thrusters, to the swept out 'wings' where the solid ordnance weapons trained their gaping mouths forward.

  Since the shield vaporised anything solid that was passed through it, even the ship's own ordnance, the mouths of the torpedo tubes were unshielded in battle. With a little finesse on the thrusters, Aurora maneuvered herself inside one.

  As her mag boots clung to the hull, her sense of up and down reorientated itself. Now it seemed she stood in a cylindrical room, twice as high as herself, at the end of which the snub nose of a readied torpedo was painted deep blue and covered in gilded stars. It was a rich captain who could afford to prettify his weapons. She felt a little smug, tipping a single dose of bots out of the container mounted in her gauntlet and dotting it in the center of one of those stars.

  One point five seven minutes of air left. The seal around the torpedo was snug and the walls around her featureless. No hatch, no airlock, no way in. That was a deliberate precaution against boarders. She would have brought explosives if she'd known, but she'd been assured she'd come out inside, wouldn't need them. So now what?

  One minute, and a sound traveled up her suit inside the leg, transmitted by the vibrations of the deck. Something scratchy, clicky, metallic. She turned just in time to see a long metal leg with a pincer attachment curve over the lip of the torpedo tube, and another, and another, and then the body of the ship repair drone followed them. It telescoped itself upright and scanned her with a net of blue light.

  Fifty eight seconds. God help me. Her careful breathing raced for a moment before she forced it back down, taking stock of its legs. Pincers, radiation probe, suction cup, nothing she could use. But even if there had been a saw, she couldn't have wrestled a ship drone any more than she could have wrestled a bulldozer.

  Maybe it would take her alive? Haul her inside where she wanted to be? Maybe if she surrendered?

  Four of its limbs unfurled a net between them. She'd almost decided to go with the plan of being captured when she spotted the tell tale shiver of the net's filaments on her visor. The damn thing was electrified. If she let it touch her suit, she would be boiled in it like a lobster.

  Forty two seconds, and it was kind of hilarious how it always came to this. She laughed, and slammed her hand against the wall, making it spit out a steady drool of acid. Her spacesuit glove dissolved first, her inner pressure suit tightening to avoid explosive decompression as all her remaining air howled out around her wrist. Her hand slid against the cold, cold metal wall, so cold it felt like fire, and she fought against the scream and the instinctive inhale that must come after, and pushed.

  For too long it was just the unfathomable cold and dark, ice crystals forming under her closed eyes, and then her hand went through and warm air jostled out of the puncture. She could feel herself dying - it was like being gloriously drunk, and her head was away with the fairies, while her body pumped acid with desperation and the hull breach grew.

  The ship drone closed in on her from behind. That was what saved her life - drove her to squirm through the gap and fall sobbing and shivering into the ship's artificial gravity. She curled up there, waiting for the net, not sure if death by lightning could be any more painful.

  But it didn't come. The ship drone had identified a hull breach, and that took a higher priority. It retreated through the hole, anchored the net to the sides of the hull with magnetic fixing points, and sprayed some kind of quick drying polymer over the top. The outflow of air ebbed and stopped, and Aurora managed to get her helmet off and breathe deep before she heard the sound of running feet coming her way.

  Two paces down the corridor was an emergency PA point. It was the nearest piece of electronics she could see. Pulling herself up by the wall, not looking at the blackened mess of her hand, she stumbled to it, managed to get the intact glove off her other hand and empty the vial of Bryant's bots onto the wires.

  Then she let herself collapse again. She was on her knees curled over her frostbitten hand when the security team rounded the corner, shivering too hard even to look up at the boot that clipped her jaw and kicked her finally unconscious.

  ~

  Aurora was still shivering when she wo
ke, a full body tremor like a seizure. Something beneath her was cold and smooth, the air above it warmer by contrast. Her hand screamed and screamed at her, and beneath the agony a kind of crawling, itching sensation was like being eaten by wasp larvae without the benefit of being numbed first.

  Her skin was alive to the movement of the air in a way that made her deeply uncomfortable, even in the hinterlands of unconsciousness. She scrabbled her way back to her body, to awareness, with all the willpower she could muster.

  The smooth thing beneath her was a metal shelf, or the floor. Her cheek recognized an all but invisible line of welding, raising a welt on her cold flesh. And her flesh was cold because...

  Oh the fuckers! She was cold because they'd stripped her down to her pants and breast-band. They’d taken her shoes and her suit, and the ill fated yellow silk top, which had been one of her favorites in better days.

  She cracked her eyes open a sliver, trying to gather information without alerting anyone she was back. She saw nothing but a small, bare metal cell with a shelf for a bed and a bucket in the corner. The only sign of life was a red diode in the corner furthest away from the door, where a camera must be, its fish eye trained on her.

  What bastards they were. A prisoner might have been searched under her command, but they would not have been thrown into a cell with no clothes at all. Nor would she have taken a female prisoner's veil or hijab. The only purpose that could possibly be served by that was to humiliate them, to take away their modesty, and to rub their face in the fact that the whole ship could be watching on the other side of that tiny red light.

  Well, let them. She was forty-two years old, bred for high gravity and trained for war, scarred by wounds come by honourably, fighting for these people. She felt no need to apologize for that.