Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  "I didn't sign up for this," said Nori, later, shoveling snow behind him. Even with a shovel with a sharp force-field edge, the movements became wearingly repetitive at first, and soon exhausting. Mboge sighed and scraped the hole wider so they could move forward, closing it behind them.

  "You didn't sign up for anything. You're here to make up for your sins. Look at it that way. Every minute spent shoveling here is probably a day off your time in purgatory."

  "I didn't do anything wrong," Nori thumped the next load of snow heavily into place, translating anger into action in a way Felix approved of.

  "You were convicted of large scale tax fraud."

  "Because you morons couldn't understand that I was just part of the computer they hacked. The fraud happened through me, not by me."

  "You were a tool?" Felix said, feeling simultaneously eager to believe Nori spoke the truth, and charmed by the reflex insistence that it wasn't me, I didn't do it!

  "Not as much of a tool as you are," Nori grumbled back, and Felix had to chuckle, because the man was incorrigible and annoying, and on reflection, Felix was glad not to be alone in this.

  They had been going forward for forty two minutes. It felt like an eternity, but when he checked the scanner the trace of passage they had been following had disappeared. "Wait!" Turning around, he saw they had walked over a filled hole that opened straight down, a hole just the size of Freedom's shoulders, if 'shoulders' was the right word for the joints where his segments met his legs.

  There had been no sign of any struggle, other than the melted patches in the small cavern where Nori had waited in the loader. He couldn't tell if some of those were newer than others, but he had been able to see the hole, like the hole of a woodworm through a church pew, that had led out of the cavern on the opposite side. Down here, Freedom must have clawed, thinking himself safe from his friends and in his own element. Perhaps this sudden drop indicated the point at which he was surprised and captured.

  "Maybe they tunneled up from underneath and grabbed him," Nori hunkered down beside the area of slightly differently textured snow, frowning at it.

  "That's what I thought."

  "You've got to say these things out loud," he could practically hear the eye roll. "For the tracker implants. What they can't do is read your mind. They can only listen in."

  "They're listening to us now?" Felix didn't like that thought, though he supposed he had signed up for it.

  "Well duh," Nori jammed his forcefield shovel forcefully into the centre of the floor. "Thanks for telling them about my criminal conviction, by the way. You people destroyed all the records from my world. They might not have known about that before."

  "Oh, Maria Regina," Felix jabbed down with his own shovel, mortified. "I'm sorry. And the Captain said that was all over now and forgiven. I shouldn't have raised it again, I'm--"

  And the floor literally came up and swallowed him. Some arch had been displaced beneath perhaps, and the plug of snow they stood on fell in. A gushing, sliding slither - he was grateful this was an old fashioned, rigid suit - and they fell together in a grinding rush, right into the middle of a large pressurized chamber that had not shown up anywhere on the scanner.

  Rocks of ice and snow fell with them. It took Felix long seconds to gather himself from the shock of the fall, to scoop his way out of the rubble, to look for and pull Nori out, before he fully realized that he was surrounded. Then his gaze met the barrels of a dozen guns, and a muted bubbling growl over his shoulder rolled from the iron jaws of three more dogs, straining at the leash of a tusked female handler.

  The chamber had been hastily floored with what looked like packing crates, but around the walls an array of shelves held anything from ornaments to medical supplies. Freedom reclined nearby on a movable hover crouch that had obviously been made for him - it had pads of sensors, like the desk's sensors, and a speaker into which he could plug his voice. Floating in mid-air opposite him was a perfect silver sphere, where strange reflections and shadows formed the suggestion of a face. It meant nothing to Felix, but Nori gasped and scrabbled at the heap of spilled ice as though he meant to try to climb back out. "It's Alder 52," he hissed, when Felix noticed the fingers tightening on the triggers all around and tried to hold him back, "The one who nearly killed me. Freedom's in fucking league with him! I should have fucking known."

  "'In league' is such a weighted turn of phrase," said the sphere, turning gently on its axis as if to look at them, though it had no eyes. "We have a mutual interest in the goods you have offered for sale." It gave a little jet of electricity in the direction of the rucksack Felix still carried, the straps let out to their maximum capacity to fit over his armoured shoulders. "I see you've got them with you. Good. I'll take that."

  The dog handler came forward - a beautiful black woman whose ivory walrus like tusks had been decorated with inset gold bands. She didn't smile when she handed over their fortune to Freedom, but he wasn't sure she could.

  "And now," said the sphere, as Freedom tipped out the small pile of Louse data-tiles that were proving more valuable than Felix well knew how to handle. "Let's discuss where these came from, because - as we've just agreed - I think this is a planet that needs to belong to us."

  "We don't know where they came from," Nori protested, his voice strident with obviously fake bravado, while the dogs sniffed around his ankles, and Walrus-lady unlatched his helmet and twisted it off. "We shot down a ship. They were in one of the cabins, in the backpack, but we never found out who they belonged to or how they got them. Or we'd have gone there ourselves."

  "He stinks of lies," Freedom's synthesized voice put in. His couch had put out flower-like sensors, perhaps literally to smell Nori's honesty.

  "It's not a lie!" Felix protested, though he wasn't sure how convincing he managed to make it. "All we want to do is buy food and go home. There's no need for all this--"

  "This one's got jacks," Walrus Lady had Nori by the hair, was bending his head forward to expose the holes in his brainstem. "He's hackable."

  "Excellent," Alder 52 crackled all over with tiny lightning, while two of his goons rolled out a sinister metal gurney with restraining straps and an array of computers and wires they were apparently going to plug into Nori's head.

  "No!" Felix lunged for it, appalled by Nori's look of terror as he fought not to be forced and buckled down. "No, leave him alone!"

  A weight hit him in the chest. He toppled over, with the jaws of a robot dog barely an inch from his faceplate, his gun in its holster on his calf because he had needed his hands for the shovel. "Leave him alone!"

  "You can prep that one for surgery. We might need his brain too, but we sure don't need the rest of him."

  Felix's hand came up full of snow, which he mashed into Walrus woman's face. She leapt back, cursing and rubbing her eyes, while the dogs fell back with her, looking up at her and whining as if they were concerned.

  Right, he thought. I need to keep her distracted. He hurled another snowball before she could recover, and with his other hand reached down to try to unlatch the holster on his leg where he had fastened his gun. But the snowball trick didn't work a second time. Walrus woman just gave a sharp whistle, rising, then falling like speech, and the dogs refocused on him.

  His hands, in space gloves, were sliding and ungainly. He scrabbled at the latch of the holster but couldn't catch it in his metal fingertips before the first dog was back on him, knocking him flat again, its steel clawed paws on his shoulders.

  "No! No! Get the fuck off me!" Nori was shouting. The clattering noise of a tray of metal implements scattering under a blow almost covered the more sinister hiss of his helmet being unlatched. Hands were grabbing at Felix's suit too. A man's hands and a woman's, black with tattoos, and with needles implanted under the nail beds. He couldn't see their owners - they were behind him, staying out of the way of the dog. It hunched over him, growling, raising its head to look around, to warn others to stay away from its kill.

 
"Good boy," Walrus lady crooned to it, making it wag its stump of a tail. "You can take his face off, we don't need that."

  Felix laughed until his eyes watered, which was a merciful reaction to panic, but he managed to wrench his head aside, so the dog's first lunge came down on the snow by his shoulder, slicing a wedge out of it. It took a moment to recover, spitting rusty slush, and in that moment the ceiling of the room trembled and burst inward as four suited figures plunged down, already firing.

  A bolt of yellow light hit Felix's dog in the back of the head. I've been here before, he thought, as the fragments exploded all over him, but with the weight removed he could scramble to his feet, grab the handle of his shovel from the ice-pile and launch himself at the men surrounding Nori. Three of them, if you didn't count Freedom or the floating sphere. They had already plugged a cable into the back of his neck, presumably connecting him into some kind of brain picking machine. This was no time for niceties, so Felix went for the weakest first, clouting the lab-coated ginger boy on the side of the head with the spade, reversing the blow and catching the elderly man in the stomach with the handle.

  "This is the Snow City police. You have three seconds to throw down your weapons and surrender." Najafi's voice rang in his helmet, sounding very stern and official. He could have kissed her, except that she was about to be mobbed. There were at least a score of criminals down here, not counting the other two dogs, and only four officers, and everyone had begun to pull out weapons.

  Lines of code were still flowing up the monitor next to Nori. His eyes were open but glazed, and his lips moved as he breathed out silent numbers. He looked relaxed and blissed out and inhuman as the interrogation program worked within him, and Felix had a sudden intimation of how it could be possible for him to have been both the tool of fraud and not to have been involved at the same time.

  "Three seconds?" The final man was also dressed in a white coat, middle aged and unassuming, but there was something about the way he stood that told Felix this one had seen his share of fights. He was focused with intense concentration on the device he had wired into Nori's head, muttering to himself. "Three seconds might do it if I... We don't need brain or body to be functional afterward."

  "May God have mercy on you!" Felix yelled, feeling like he'd much rather God threw this man into the fiery furnace and put a boot on his neck to hold him down. He gritted his teeth against the desire to go for the man, to smack him in the face with the shovel, and instead he brought the shovel’s force-field edge down on the machine. It cleft through housing and innards in one smooth blow. Wires popped and coiled. Nori gave a fox-like bark of noise devoid of meaning. All his muscles went lax and he sprawled like the dead.

  A dog went for Najafi, and as she gunned it down, one of the other officers raised a bulky weapon to the hole in the roof and beyond it to the half mile of packed snow above and pulled the trigger. It looked as though the sun shot out of it - a white ball burning so bright he had to flinch away, close his eyes, even the private darkness of his head spotted with green after images. Why were they shooting at the ceiling?

  He opened his eyes to see the shot accelerating away, a fist sized tunnel opening after it. The cavern was bubbling like a kicked anthill as everyone dropped their guns and ran for the doors - which didn't seem to be opening. But it was only when he saw Walrus woman pulling on a face mask, whistling her dogs to scratch and chew a hole in the wall that the penny dropped.

  Forgetting vengeance, he shoulder charged the final scientist out of the way, found Nori's helmet discarded under the gurney, lifted him by the shoulders - his head lolled. No time to check for a pulse. Felix fitted his helmet back on - this too harder than it should be with his armored fingers - and latched it.

  The sunshot breached the last layer of ice and all the air in the room was sucked in a streaming blizzard up and out to join the comet's trail. Felix activated the crampons on his boots against the surge of air, curled himself over Nori, and held on as the police shot all those who were trying to flee, mowing them down from behind.

  A few moments later, they had applied a patch, and opened the doors with the laser cutters in their guns. The influx of warmer air from elsewhere on the comet made the ceiling drip like rain falling on the slurry of blood that was the floor, and Felix was happy that he hadn't kissed Najafi after all. This was a degree of policing he was not comfortable with.

  Najafi took off her helmet and her gauntlets, wiped her forehead, leaving a streak of blood.

  "You didn't have to kill them all," Felix protested, unsettled by how undisturbed she looked. He was a man of war, but war had rules this was--

  "Yeah, we did," she sighed. "We gave them a chance to surrender. They didn't choose to. You see where Freedom went?"

  Felix straightened from his protective crouch and looked around. Freedom's couch was empty. The sphere had probably been just a hologram and never here at all, but they were certainly both gone, and his backpack was gone with them.

  The police commandeered Freedom's floating couch to transport Nori's limp form back to their station, but allowed Felix to walk by it, occasionally reaching out to brush his fingers against Nori's throat. The pulse still thrummed there, but he had not closed his eyes, or blinked, or moved by himself before they reached the round white room in which they had first been tagged. Felix stripped him out of the rest of the suit and closed his eyelids, as he had done for many dead friends, and even though Nori's skin was still warm beneath his fingers, an ache went through him from the backbone to the skull.

  He stacked Nori's borrowed suit on top of the couch and then was finally able to get out of his own, piling it on top. It felt good to be out of the shell, even if his uniform was soaked through with nervous sweat, and cold against his back in the ice-walled room.

  Trying to conceal his face and words from Goldstein, who was filling in forms at his desk, he leaned in close to Nori's ear to whisper. "Wake up, Nori, it's over."

  He remembered that they were listening to him on his tag, and though he'd recently had cause to be glad of that, he couldn't help the jab of anger at being unable to speak clearly now. "Please Nori, wake up. I don't want to have to do this without you."

  "His protocols are just a bit scrambled, I bet," Goldstein said, raising his head to watch the pair of them with a tiredly sympathetic air. He'd been in the raid. He'd taken off a space suit in the green striped white of the police livery, putting it into a rack to have the blood and matter hosed off. The carnage didn't seemed to have troubled him. He still looked tanned, nut brown, even kindly. "Give him a sleep cycle, he'll reboot."

  "They said they didn't need him to live through it," Felix had put Nori on a shelf that seemed intended to be either a bed or seats. He put his back to it and slid down to sit on the floor beneath it, with Nori's hanging left hand in his hand. "What if they damaged him somehow?"

  Goldstein slid his console into the wall and leaned against the door. He looked to be in his forties, worn down and past protesting against things he could not change. "If you had resources, we would send him to the hospital, have him checked out and repaired. But that kind of medical treatment costs money, and if I understand your situation correctly, you have none."

  "We have priceless alien artifacts."

  Goldstein laughed as if he had said something very naive. "Do you have them?"

  Which seemed like pedantry to Felix. "Not at this moment," he said, "At this moment Freedom has them, but they belong to us by right, and when we get them back, we'll be able to pay for anything."

  The policeman was now looking apologetic. "We've investigated the report of Freedom's captivity and/or murder and found that he's doing fine, so there are no charges for you and your friend to answer. You're free to go."

  "But you are going to get us our artifacts back?" Felix didn't like the tone in the man's voice, the feeling that here too he had trusted too far.

  "We have no proof they were your artifacts to begin with."

  Oh yes, here it
came again, the swoop and drop of another firm place falling out from under his feet. "What?"

  Goldstein's look of apology deepened. He folded his arms as if to look casual and relaxed - it didn't work. "Both Alder 52 and Freedom are Snow City citizens, well known, well respected and well connected. The loss of a few hoodlums isn't going to worry them, but it's above my pay grade to come after them themselves."

  "But that's our property!" Felix protested, his fingers tightening on Nori's. "Our people need it back, so we can get food. You can't just let someone walk off with it because you know them and you don't know us."

  He really wished he could believe his own words, but they could, couldn't they? If they could wipe out a room full of people with only three seconds warning they could probably pretty much do whatever they liked.

  "You come from a world that has no legal standing in our courts, and start arguing with one of our most prominent citizens?" Goldstein shrugged, light reflecting off the buzz cut of his hair. "That's not going to go well for you when it's your word against theirs. My advice is leave it. Rejoice in your new found innocence, get yourself a job, or go home."

  Felix rubbed his forehead with stiff fingers. If he could iron out the creases, maybe he could convince himself that his life was not completely, completely - he didn't like to swear but it seemed an occasion for it - completely fucked up.

  "I need to buy fuel before I can go home. I don't have the money for that."

  "Work it is, then."

  He wasn't going to think about everyone in the colony waiting for him with desperate hope. People's bones had begun to show through their skin before they left. Ademola's broken ankle had stopped healing, and old wounds, healed years ago, had begun to open up again. Scurvy, Dr. Atallah had said. The Earth plants were dead, and the vegetation on Cygnus 5 did not contain enough vitamin C. "I need to get back with that food. I've got a thousand people starving back there."