by Alex Oliver
Pulling her itching hand into her lap, she rolled up into a sitting position, cross-legged. Her head swam briefly, and she almost made a lunge for the bucket to throw up, but the urge passed.
The urge passed with startling rapidity, in fact. When she first woke, there had been a stiff ache in the cavity of her chest, as if her lungs had frozen, but that too passed almost as soon as she noticed it. The hand she dragged onto her knee had been wrapped in transparent bandages and looked appalling - a mess of plasma and blood and black, cold-burned flesh - but when she cautiously tried to flex it, the fingers answered her, bending, weak but on command.
And she was ravenously hungry.
Leaning her head back against the supporting wall, she huffed a small laugh of relief. To think she'd once been against nanobot enhancement. Thank God Bryant had paid her scruples no regard and added enhanced healing to the cocktail of bots she had drunk before coming. It had probably saved her hand.
An image of Bryant unconscious on the floor, looking devastated and oddly betrayed while the wires grew out of his hands, flashed back to her, and she was almost grateful when the door clanged and rolled open. This was where they sent in an inquisitor to soften her up. She wasn't afraid of any--
But the man in the doorway was not an inquisitor. It was like feeling her spacesuit fail a second time, feeling the air rush out of her and the piercing cold fill her lungs. Thank God she was sitting in a position from which it was not possible to fall, a position that looked casual and at ease. It would have mattered to her if she had stumbled, if her legs or hands had shaken at seeing Admiral Keene again.
He was just the right side of perfectly groomed, ruffled only enough to look like he was too much of a real man to pay such things any mind. His silver hair shone like an ice moon, and the creases around his eyes spoke of joviality, good nature. He still looked intelligent and interested and capable, and she had to swallow down an intense spike of hatred because of that, because it was true that he was all of those things. He was just hollow and rotten on top.
She locked eyes with him, watched his faint smugness waver for a moment beneath the glare and then reform.
"Aurora. I am very sad to see this day."
Mellifluous voice. That was what she'd noticed first. He could read the kitchen duty rota for the day and make it sound liquid-sweet as molasses. She liked Bryant better, with his tendency to squeak when he got excited.
He came all the way in, trailed by a female guard for propriety's sake. "We gave you too much responsibility," he went on, as if unconcerned by her silence, though she saw his shoulders twitch at being ignored. "Captain of a battle cruiser? Commodore of a fleet? It's too much to put on the delicate shoulders of a well bred young woman."
Aurora slid her eyes to the guard, whose face remained studiously blank. She gave an internal shrug, knowing that no one out there could look at her shoulders and think 'delicate'.
"It's no wonder that it led you to wickedness and eventually to treachery." Keene didn't come within lunging distance of her, just presented his profile to the camera, tragic and understanding and forgiving.
"It led me to wickedness?" she scoffed, amused at the moment, but with a deep disgust beneath it. "Right. Because you had nothing to do with it."
His polished surface rippled faintly, showing sharpness underneath. "I am hardly the first man to have fallen foul of a temptress. I have been forgiven for that."
"And I've been punished and thrown away," she said, noticing that the word 'temptress' had brought a stifled smile to the guard's lips. Aurora had to agree. If he was casting her as a femme fatale, he would have done better to let her keep her clothes on. "Funny how that works."
He rounded on her, quick, as if jabbed, the smugness mere wisps now, something more angry underneath. "You are not even ashamed!"
"You're the one who chose to strip me. Why the hell should I be ashamed?"
Some of the crawling feeling in her hand resolved itself into data, making a weird intrusive jangling behind her eyes. Her head reeled as she worried again that she was going to throw up. All over his shoes if she could. God, how had she ever...? She felt a decade older than she had been last year, barely recognized that Aurora at all anymore.
"And hardened beyond remorse," he had hopped back on his hobby horse. She tuned him out. The nano she had seeded in the corridor was now propagating, feeding information to her own bots and thence to her conscious mind. The sensation was a little like waking up, a little like making sense of a puzzle that she had been unable to grasp before. Not unpleasant, but distracting.
"Obviously we will have to reconsider our policy of allowing women to serve as Kingdom Warriors. It does violence to your very nature."
Aurora opened her eyes fast enough to see the guard shoot Keene a troubled look that rebounded off his turned back. Not her business any more - Cygnus 5 was her business now - but she could just imagine how all the women in the fleet were feeling on hearing that. Good. It would make the next step far more effective.
"I hope you understand that you are a taint to which I will never allow my daughter to be exposed."
Aurora waited out the white hot explosion of anger, though her ribs hurt from keeping it inside. "That's where you're wrong," she said, when her voice was steady. "I'm still coming for her, Keene. I'm coming for her right now, while your back is turned."
The admiral smiled a beautiful, pitying smile, his good humor restored. "Oh my dear," he laughed with an intonation that made her want to bite his fucking head off, "If you mean those two harpies you sent to my house, they were identified and destroyed long before they got close."
Even the feedback from Aurora's bots went silent, leaving her floating in a great white bubble of 'no'. Morwen, with her swift mind and her freckles? Lali, who everyone treated as a mascot, despite her valiant, capable heart? "No."
He looked up from a message on his bracer and laughed, very pleased with himself. "Oh yes. I'll have the Inquisitor show you the footage. She's just arrived on board."
"Arrived from where?" she managed though her throat had closed, and she could feel everything sliding out of her fingers like water. Tightening her grip wasn't going to help.
His grin just broadened. "Did you think we only had one ship? I expect you thought you could fight one off, didn't you? That's why I brought three."
She didn't know how long she had, so she choked back the desire to grieve, compressed it down into a little pellet and swallowed it whole. She would have welcomed time to pray too, but with the internal equivalent of an apologetic glance in God's direction she laid herself flat on the bed shelf instead and closed her eyes to concentrate on the messages she was getting from her bots.
The moment her eyes were closed, it was as if she had stepped into a vast space where thrumming channels of golden light entered and tangled with each other and left again to unknown destinations. She found the largest and thought about sticking her mental hand into it, plugging herself in.
At first there was only a faint drifting sensation, and then the current of information seized her and sucked her in and swept her away.
A dense impenetrable storm cloud of information, crackling all over with electrical discharges, must be the inside of the ship's main computer. She couldn't make head or tail of that, so she just concentrated on visual readouts all over the ship. When he discussed how he used his own bots, Bryant had spouted some technobabble about his patented programming interface which converted user intentions into commands. Beyond 'just think what you want it to do and it will do it,' she hadn't actually been listening, but that was the pertinent part, wasn't it?
She thought about the media package Carrow had put together and sent it to all the visual devices she'd identified, could see it herself from the inside when, all over the ship, the informational screens began to show Cygnus 5 propaganda.
Their screens flickered, clearing to show sunrise over the Ziplock Mountains with the long, sinuous shapes of silver humming-snakes a
twinkle in the turquoise sky. Then a cut to Lali's shoulder, over the rifle she carried lightly, and the headband she had begun to wear, into which she had shoved a luminous flower over each ear. Her uniform jacket was off, and her bare arms gleamed terracotta red in the light of dawn, under the shadow of her braided hair.
Aurora was caught for a moment, observing it like a penance – the last recorded words of this girl whom she had been told was already dead.
"It's fantastic," Lali was saying to the camera, which had now swept round ahead of her to take in her military uniform, her big boots and jaunty, confident stride. "I mean, you hardly realize you're being disrespected - you get used to it when it's every moment of every day - but here we have a chance at equality. Here there really is neither Jew nor Muslim, man nor woman, but we are all equally loved and valuable. I wasn't sure at first that I'd done the right thing, staying. But I am now. You should come too. We'd welcome you like the heroes you are."
Another soundbite, this time from Ademola, limping down an avenue of pear trees. "I thought there was nothing left to me but war, but here I finally get a chance to make something grow."
And then Bryant, looking bright eyed and whip-sharp. It struck her like a dart how much more rounded his cheeks had been, how much less haunted his expression, how the shape of his head looked different now, the softness taken out of his curls. "Hey all," he was saying, with a smugly sensual, lazy grin, "Guess who's back in business? I can still make you into whatever you want to be - I have that skill - so if you need me, drop by. But in return I'm going to need you to do what you can to get the Kingdom forces off my back. You want my skills? Step one is to stop them from wiping me and my friends out. You can do it, guys. If you don't, your best chance to ever live your dream is wiped out with me."
She tore herself away with an ache of nostalgia for the happier time that had been starving to death a fortnight ago. Lali was dead already, apparently, and that version of Bryant was gone. But she would fight for what was left. She left the propaganda files running, and under their cover turned her attention to the navigational and targeting systems.
They were more complex to get to grips with, but that was good because it meant she didn't have to think about anything else, not Lali or Morwen or Bryant, or the life signs detector currently tracking a red tag marked Inqtr Swann moving toward the transport tube leading to the detention level. She wasn't stupid enough to tell herself she wasn't scared of the Inquisitor. Death for her these days was no big deal, but being broken? She didn't fancy that.
Swallowing, forcing herself to concentrate, she located the other two ships, hiding on the dark side of the tidally-locked moon from which Keene's ship was mining materials for drop pods. They would make things a little more complicated, but not insurmountable. She disabled the explosive charge in the torpedo she had infected with bots on the way in, locked its guidance system on the larger ship - the Fatih Barhi - and chose a low power, stealth launch option, suitable for battles where one was trying to look like a drifting rock.
The torpedo ambled out of its tube. She suppressed the automatic alerts that would have informed the weaponry officer that the ship had just taken a shot at its companion.
Inqtr Swann's icon grew larger as it rose closer to the detention level, only a hallway and a shield generator bulkhead and a guardroom intervening between them and her now. Aurora's head felt pulled apart by all the data-streams, not sure which one was her own any more, but she had better move fast while she still had a little time to herself.
Mentally, she combed Dragon's infected wires, pulling together a second packet of bots, guided it - God, her head was splitting - along the walls, to the inner hull, then to the outer. She helped it slide like an inquisitive slug through the crystal matrix of the outer hull and onto torpedo #495, already loaded in starboard tube25.
A sound outside the door - footsteps, someone paused to make an observation - and she launched the second package toward Alexander and tamped down on any evidence of what she'd done.
A slow launch meant a slow traverse, even accelerating all the way. It would take hours for the torpedoes to bounce harmlessly off their targets, and hours after that for the bots they carried to propagate through the systems of the other ships. She really hoped the interrogation would start soft, so she was still in possession of her own mind when the time came when she was ready to use it.
The door whirred open. Aurora considered sitting up, but she was already so hungry that she felt she was a skin bag containing some ravenous, alien creature, barely stopping it from bursting out of her belly and going on a rampage. Getting back to her own head, identifying the data-streams that were her own nerves, her fingertips and arms and legs, was more complicated than she had imagined.
She was thankful for that. It kept the punch of fear muffled as the inquisitor walked in.
Inqtr Swann was a woman. Surprise and a certain amount of relief gave way to suspicion. The inquisitor was a pleasant looking middle aged woman in a veil and a severe civilian gown, who smiled at her as she waited for a chair and a desk to be brought in from the hall.
Aurora had found the camera lines out from this room by now. She had been planning to broadcast her torment to all the news sites, so that everyone could see the brutality of the regime. It hadn't been a fun thought, but as a plan to create sympathy for her little colony it seemed like a winner. Inqtr Swann's smile, and the careful way she arranged her scarf over her knee, gave Aurora second thoughts about that.
The woman looked like everyone's mother. Once beautiful, now with that little shade of plumpness to her cheeks that spoke of safety and plenty and comfort. Laughter lines bracketed her mouth and her eyes, which were brown as peaty water and shrewd.
Keene stood behind her, looking at once crestfallen to be outranked on his own ship and self important, like a child who's run to the teacher to tell. A burly guard took up position in the far corner of the cell and another waited before the door.
Swann smiled up at him. "Could you turn the heating down please? It's very hot in here."
Even with her enhanced healing, Aurora still felt that the cold of the universe had infiltrated the marrow of her bones. She was still shivering. She had thought imperceptibly shivering, but perhaps Swann had noticed, and this was her first step toward making Aurora so cold she would not be able to sleep, not be able to recover fully or think clearly. If there was time, after all, one didn't have to be overt with the torture. She felt a certain amount of relief, knowing the woman was an enemy, though a subtle, patient one.
"Aurora," Swann's veil was a similar pink to the veil Aurora's mother had worn the day Aurora had been driven out. She didn't imagine that was a coincidence, but it still gave her a twinge of guilt and sorrow and yearning against her will. "Sit up please, so we can talk."
Both guards looked at her, measuring. Through her headache, she tried to do the maths. Was it better to refuse and be forced, or to give way and establish a habit of compliance that might be useful to them later?
She chose the option that kept their hands off her and hauled herself slowly back upright. "I'm very tired," she volunteered, mostly for the invisible watchers behind the camera's red light. "I nearly died. I need a drink and I'd like to sleep."
Swann tutted at her, with a reproachful look that reminded her of her grandmother and almost managed to provoke the same kneejerk guilt. "Aren't you ashamed of yourself? What happened to you? You were a beacon of hope to all our young women, and now..." she spread her hands with a pitying look, offering Aurora herself, stripped to her underwear, "here you are, imprisoned, defiled, convicted and condemned. This is not the time for you to be defiant. This is the time for you to confess where you have gone wrong and ask for forgiveness."
Training said 'don't give them anything. Just name, rank and number. Don't volunteer, don't be drawn in.’ But Aurora had to play for time, and she had to play for an audience, and she had a number of things she wanted the galaxy to know.
"You
asked me what happened?" She nodded at Keene, whose eyes flared in alarm. "He did. You want to trace all of this back to where it started? It started with his decision to break his promise to me and steal my love and my child and then to try to get rid of me when I became a nuisance to him."
Didn't it sound petty, put like that? If she'd have been reading it in a news-feed she'd have thought, "Stupid girl thinks the whole universe revolves around her." Except of course that for her, it did.
Keene's shoulders rose to almost touch his ears. He looked like an embarrassed tortoise. But Swann just settled in her seat like a psychiatrist encountering something rather dull. Something she'd seen many times before. "You are responsible for your own life and your own choices, aren't you? The shame of saying yes, when you should have said no is your shame."
She left the thought like a turd in front of her desk.
Aurora couldn't say she had no shame. That would not play well, and besides it wasn't true. She bent her head a little while the headache pulsed in visible light behind her right eye.
"You chose evil. You chose to step from being a holy virgin to being a whore. That's quite a fall to take while still claiming you didn't know what you were doing."
Deliberately, Aurora thought of Bryant, conjured him up bit by bit. Bryant with his impudent smile begging her to sleep with him and sticking around despite her refusals. What would this woman think of the fact that Bryant had turned her into a man and then begged her to fuck him? That would probably blow the top off her judgmental head and finally cause her to drop that smile. Maybe she should do that when she got home, just to stick it to them. And to stick it to old Aurora too, to whom all of this guilt would have clung like tar and feathers.
As Bryant would put it, fuck them. Time to go on the attack.
"I'm not a whore. I never got anything out of the deal except this," she indicated the prison cell with a shaky hand. "But even if I was, I would have more honor than Admiral Keene, who had the whole crew of my ship and an entire colony condemned to death just to finally get rid of me."