Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  The lower half of the view-screen wall transformed into readouts, even as Six grew closer, darker, looking much more solid now. Lali's mood of safety and condolence snapped quickly back into military alert. Three large signals in Seven's orbit must be battlecruisers. They seemed to be...

  "Are they accelerating towards each other?"

  "Yes. They are on a collision course. I have pinged their computers, which are not responding. In precisely three minutes fifty two seconds they will ram one another. At that speed there is a 97.66 recurring probability that they will all be destroyed."

  A fierce joy made Lali bare her teeth in a grin. So maybe the captain's reputation had not been blown out of all proportion at all. How the hell had she managed that? "Nice."

  She walked over to her door and toggled the intercom to the bridge. "Hey Morwen, are you seeing what I'm seeing? We might get through this after all!"

  "I'm seeing lifeboats," Morwen's voice was still almost accusatory with misery. "Lots of them."

  Oh, so that was what the little streaks were, yellow on the screen, each little dot at the tip of them numbered. "They're heading for Five!"

  Of course they were. Five had just become the only place where those crews could survive long-term. So getting rid of the battleships had not actually helped. There was still an army landing on the colony's doorstep. "At least they're landing without air-support, right?"

  There was a little bell noise from Charity, as though she was clearing her throat. Ond one of the lifeboat trails was highlighted red. "This one is actually coming towards us," the ship said, sounding nervous. "I cannot tell if it has detected us, or if it's attempting to rendezvous with something else."

  "Rendezvous with what? There's nothing out here." Lali was only a private but she already knew enough to have developed that feeling, like a cold wind on the back of her neck. That feeling where everything is going to shit.

  "It is communicating with something by pinholenet. I cannot break the encryption but--"

  Simultaneously, two things happened. A small crackling sun burst in electric violence at the intersection point where the three doomed battleships collided, spilling their ruptured plasma tanks into space. The flash cracked like lightning across the view-screen and then burnt out, but its angry light reflected in dazzling blades from the sides of a dozen super-dreadnoughts as they flashed back into reality at jump distance from Cygnus Seven.

  "The lifeboat's hailing us," Morwen's nervous voice crackled over the intercom. "Oh shit! Oh shit, I knew this wouldn't work. I don't know why I agreed to--"

  "Put it through to me." Lali wished Charity had a face, so they could exchange worried glances, but she had to content herself with stroking the wall.

  The view-screen partitioned itself. The partition went dark, flickered, and then there was Admiral Keene, as she had almost known he would be, smiling almost exactly the greasy smile she would have expected.

  "Young woman," he began, not even trying to turn the smug down. "We knew you would turn up here eventually. My fleet has you trapped in the gravity well of Cygnus 6. Surrender now and prepare to be boarded, and perhaps your life may be spared."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The Pirate Queen

  The name of Sekh Heongu had saved Felix’s life, but the bluff that he was under her protection was about to be called. "Take it," Walrus-woman had made a connection on her com, now she thrust it at Mboge as though it was a scorpion.

  Felix took it and tipped his cheek to it, "Hello?"

  Someone laughed on the other end of the connection. Not a woman, so this was probably not Sekh Heongu herself. It would be a flunky of some sort. "You asking to be hit?"

  "I'm calling in a favor," Felix said, calm now that he was on his last chance. The opportunities for getting everything wrong had been narrowed down to only one, and that made everything pleasantly simple. "There are two of us. We're friends of Bryant Jones, and he told us to contact Sekh Heongu because we are in need of help."

  Laughing boy on the end of the line snorted at this, but the tone was marginally less dismissive. "Wait while I check."

  The last zombie dog pushed its rotting nose and metal teeth further into Felix's crotch as he waited. He tried to step away casually, but its handler shook him warningly by the arm. "He's faster than you," she whispered. "One little lunge and snick and you'll be screaming in a higher register. I think we're gonna do that anyway, when they get back and tell me you're a lying cunt."

  Time slowed and then stopped altogether, and he had almost resigned himself to standing here forever with a patch of cold drool and oil soaking through his trousers. Then the voice returned. "Okay," it said, "you can come in."

  "I need you to repeat that to my companion, please. We are being held captive." Felix offered the com back, feeling a certain petty smugness when walrus-woman took it gingerly between two fingers as if it would bite.

  "Yes, sir," she said in reply to whatever the flunky said to her. "I'll bring them."

  A click of her fingers, and the dog came to her side, its head and tail lowered, its steel spine bowed in a crescent of disappointment that mirrored its mistress's mouth. "Up you come," she said, jerking her head at Nori to get him to stand. “Let's not keep her waiting."

  "Who is this woman?" Felix asked, helping Nori to his feet and then keeping his arm around the man's waist, more for his own comfort than for Nori's support.

  "You really don't know?" Walrus lady's mouth was stretched by her tusks to the point where her smile looked painful, but some of her bluster had faded now that he was no longer her target. "She's like, the queen of this place. I guess. Unofficially, I mean. You don't find her on documents or computer records, but the people who know, they know hard."

  "There was a..." Nori's voice started faint, but firmed up as he walked. His stumbling stride became more confident with every step. "There was an Earth pirate called that, back in the single days. Lots of sailing ships. They never caught her and she grew rich and old and retired well."

  "That's right," walrus-woman led them out of the park and back towards the docks. They passed through corridors lined with pressure doors, their breath steaming in clouds around them. Aching goosebumps stood up on Felix's arms. "Some people say this is the same woman, come back for another life. Snow City is kind of her retirement home. She bought it, she owns it. Police think they're keeping law and order, but they're just keeping the trash off the streets for her. You better hope she likes you, because this lady's got a fleet in numbers I can't begin to count."

  Had she indeed? A wild hope leapt up in Felix's heart. This pirate woman had a fleet? And he had one favor to ask of her? Instead of simply begging for a hold full of food and their ship to be returned, could he ask for military intervention? If - at this instant - battleships were attacking Cygnus 5, could he send a fleet to fight them off? Maybe that was what he had been placed here for? So that he would finally be in the right place to bring exactly the right help at exactly the right time. That would be very like God's planning.

  The hope kindled up to a warm blaze of faith. He hugged Nori and then let him go so that he could straighten up, straighten his clothes, and pass his hands over his recently-shaved head as if that would neaten the millimeter of hair that had already grown back.

  One unmarked warehouse door out of a thousand. It opened as they approached, and a nondescript warehouseman in gray coveralls nodded at Walrus-woman and her dog. "Thanks Alice. Leave them with us."

  'Alice', Felix thought, with a weird twist of affection, watching Walrus-woman depart. He wouldn't have thought she could be comforting, but the overt threat of her fangs and her hell hounds didn't creep him out in the same way as the neatly turned out warehouseman. The guy was utterly unmemorable, mixed brown in his gray outfit. Even looking straight at him it was hard to remember his face.

  This person opened the door wider and ushered them through, then closed it from the outside. The sound of the door closing said it was airtight, and there
was no other way out. The room within was small, domed as most rooms were on the comet. It contained a couple of large red silk cushions, a short-legged ceramic table littered with magazines, and a cabinet lacquered deep glossy scarlet and gold.

  They sat cross-legged among the cushions and waited for three hours. Nori's patience ran out first. He cursed and flung himself to his feet to examine the room. The locked door wouldn't open to his touch or his tugging. "It's another fucking trap," he said, rounding on Felix as though this was Felix's fault. Felix's faith wavered a little but he clung to it with determination.

  "She's probably a very busy woman. Just sit down and wait a little longer."

  "Right," Nori scoffed. "Because we've not been double crossed at least five times already. When are you going to wise up?"

  After examining the walls, Nori turned to the cabinet. It was locked with an ornamental bronze padlock, but Nori had picked that before Felix had got himself together enough to protest. "What are you--"

  Inside was the gleaming silver cube of a high tech safe. "Now shut it again," Felix insisted, feeling his grasp over the situation slip away from him. "What if she's watching us?"

  "Look," Nori pulled a couple of jack wires out of his pocket which Felix had not seen him acquire, "maybe she's bored. I know I am. But really, you don't put me in a room with a device like this and not ask me to crack it. That's asking too much."

  Well, this was certainly a test of some kind, but of what? The woman was apparently a pirate. Maybe she would appreciate someone with the skill to unlock the safe door. Maybe it was a metaphor of some kind? "I should sit on you!" Felix protested, but he didn't.

  Maybe there'd be a poison in the box and they'd gas themselves? Maybe the whole point was to get them to fight? He blew out a hard breath of annoyance and settled back, because whatever kind of test it was, it was possible they had to complete it in order to proceed.

  Another half an hour passed while Nori wrestled with the safe - hard work, if the dew of sweat on his forehead and his pinched closed eyes were to be believed. Felix read an article about how to set up a space-plankton farm, wondering if they could seed Five's ring with vacuum-tolerant organisms that could be harvested for protein. Then there was a click and the sound of Nori's long triumphant sigh.

  Felix looked up sharply, in case it was poisoned gas or other biohazard. He was in time to see Nori reach in and take out a cut glass vial filled with pale lilac liquid that seemed to be trying to climb up the sides of the bottle to get out. "What is it?"

  "I... ah." Nori gave him a speculative look, with too much calculation in it and not enough affection for Felix's preference. "It claims that there's just enough here to make one person invulnerable."

  After the long time of tedium, that made Felix laugh. "Oh," he said, "They want us to fight over it? To think something awful's going to happen, and the one of us that gets the dose will be the one to live? I don't think so."

  "It could be useful to be invulnerable," Nori speculated, with the bottle cradled in his hand like a giant diamond.

  "I'm sure it could," Felix reexamined the room for signs of cameras, but again came up blank. "If it was possible, but I don't think it's possible. I think they're just testing our characters. They want to see what we'll do. Put it back."

  Nori opened the stopper and sniffed. "Smells like pink," he said as though he was reluctantly abandoning a dream. "I guess you could be right." He set the bottle back and shut the door on it, sealing it in. "I said we were in this together, right. I did mean it."

  "Congratulations." The light in the room brightened and warmed as the far wall flickered and revealed itself to be a curved view-screen. On the other side sat a woman in yellow silk hanfu with sapphire blue dragons winding up her trailing sleeves. Despite the talk of her having retired, if this was Sekh Heongu herself, she looked to be in her early thirties. She was bright eyed and moon faced, with hair shorn almost as short as Felix's. "You have my interest. Both of you are clever. One is talented and one is honest. The cleverness I expect from friends of Bryant Jones. The honesty perhaps less so. What are your names?"

  "Felix Mboge..." A small internal debate and he added "Ma'am. And Nakano Nori. We are ambassadors from Captain Aurora Campos on Cygnus Five."

  Heongu smiled, and there Felix could see the age in her face, in the practiced, world-weary turn of her expression, as though she had seen everything in her life already and she recognized this as a recurring theme. "Oh," she said, "Then why have I been told you are dealers in antiquities?"

  'Remember, you speak for a sovereign nation,' Lina Attallah had told him. 'We may be weak now, but later we may be strong.' This was perhaps the best chance he would have to stop the war against his colony before it wiped them all out. It required a little lying but he was getting some regular practice in that these days.

  "We wished to talk to you, but not to spread our business about the whole comet. Ma'am, you are queen here in all but name, just as Captain Campos is queen in all but name of the colony on Cygnus Five."

  "Not for long, I hear. She took down three battleships but I think even she will find twelve super-dreadnoughts too much to handle."

  Twelve super-dreadnoughts? Felix wanted to slump back down to the cushions. It didn't occur to him to ask how she knew these things. If she really was as powerful as 'Alice' said, she would need to. But shit. How were they going to get out of that? He threw caution to the wind and with it his qualms about allying with pirates.

  "I have, as you must know from your informants, something of immense value to trade. If you help us to overcome this attack on our colony--help us to drive back the fleet and push through the recognition of Cygnus 5 as a sovereign world--you will be the one with whom we share these things. I offer you an exclusive trade partnership in exchange for help now, in our hour of need."

  She was a pirate. He should really have been blowing her out of the sky, but right now he was desperate. Desperate for Lina's sake and the Captain's and Bryant's and Nori's above all. Maybe that desperation came through. She gave him a long, stern look. It was like being looked at by a nuclear warhead, cold and yet seething.

  "You're right at least in thinking that I empathize with a wronged woman who is ready to tear out the throats of her oppressors. I will talk to your captain, and if she impresses me... then we shall see."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Battles Lost and Won

  Aurora was going to be glad to blow the fucking citadel stairs sky high. Again, she ran up out onto the battlements, where Ademola and Lina were standing by their swoops. Apart from the three of them, the citadel was empty--everyone else had been sent back to the city. A peculiar stillness had fallen on the old building, as though it knew its days were numbered.

  Aurora strolled to their side, where she could see out through the toughened plexiglass windows of the ramparts. The day was mockingly peaceful. The small saurians that served Cygnus 5 five in the place of birds were flitting after pollinators in the clear evening air. A scent of water and wildness, underlain by the smell of cooked pears and wood smoke, swung on the breeze past her, as Cygnus Five’s ring rose like a fountain, gold-green, into a sky of floating amber cloud. Deliberately, Aurora breathed in deep and let her shoulders relax. It was the moment before the storm, and all the more beautiful for that.

  The forces who had run to the lifeboats had been running for their lives. Most of them were in shipboard uniform. They’d had no time to swing past the armory first and sign out weapons. Initially, after they arrived, they had been leaderless and confused, focused more on meeting their own survival needs than on any attack. Ademola and Lina had been able to discourage the small scale sounding-out raids on the citadel by flying over them and dropping leaflets and stones, while the swoop riders took the time to shuttle the last few members of Aurora's crew away to the hidden city.

  As the numbers of downed lifeboats grew, however, their organization had become more martial. They had drawn up the boats in a large circle to
form the outer defensive wall of their own camp, and they had torched the fields around it. Even the fruit trees. Smoke still wisped up from where the orchard had stood, and Aurora looked at the blackened stumps of the pear trees whenever she wanted to harden her heart about the prospect of fighting men and women of the service to which she had once dedicated her life.

  Inside the ring of settled boats, an ammunition dump and a field kitchen had been constructed. Each lifeboat came equipped with rations for a month, and they had watched these being unloaded and centralized with a kind of wistful envy, as though food was something they remembered from a long time ago but no longer believed in.

  "Are you sure there's no way we can take the food with us?" Lina asked now. The Kingdom troops were beginning to tool up with whatever armor and weaponry they had salvaged. It was clear an attack was imminent.

  "I wanted to raid the supplies and blow up their ammunition dump before we left," Aurora agreed, "But I'm thinking that's a logistical nightmare. We can't carry enough on the swoops to justify the risk. If they'd left it in one of the boats, we could have taken that one, but with three of us against - how many are there, d'you think?"

  "Must be at least three hundred, and more arriving all the time."

  "Yeah, with three of us against three hundred, we might be able to sneak in and steal a lifeboat, but we're not going to be able to load it up first." She abandoned that as a nice idea that simply wasn't possible. Bryant might yet be able to alter their genomes enough to enable them to survive on Cygnus 5 flora alone. That was an issue for later, if there was a later. "No, we stick with the plan. Blow the citadel, scatter on the swoops, then carefully make our way back to the city while doing everything to be sure we're not followed, okay?"

  "We've got it, ma'am." Ademola saluted, as a squad of ten riflemen filed out of the gap between the nearest boats and formed up into a square. Behind them another twenty men trundled a tree trunk on a patched-together carriage formed out of bent hull plating. Lifeboats did not come with the advanced siege equipment on which a ground assault usually depended, and whichever senior officer was in charge over there was having to improvise.