by Alex Oliver
Even Captain Stolid, squat as a mountain troll under his blood red jacket, looked mildly surprised. "Captain Campos? Are you suing for mercy then, if you've chosen to make an appearance like that?"
"You think the dress makes me less who I am?" she said, because fuck him. "No, I'm just reclaiming some territory. Since we're going to be talking, how about you give me your name."
He gave a small shrug. "Onarici," he said. "Captain of the Fatih Bahi."
One of the three ships she'd destroyed. She was tempted to say "How's that going for you?" but it would be petty, and here on this narrow edge of survival, she didn't feel like being petty.
"Well, Captain Onarici, looks like you and your people are in the same position that I am. Stranded down here with winter coming and food running out. You can't get in here, we can't get out. Are we all going to sit and watch each other starve? Or are you going to join us so we can figure out a way of getting through this together?"
Onarici ducked his bullet-shaped round head and snorted. "You're well out of date with news, then, if you're not aware that a dozen super-dreadnoughts are in system right now."
Oh, that was a bitter spike of rage. Twelve super-dreadnoughts to wipe her crew out? When they wouldn't authorize a single transport ship to rescue them?
She caught the thought and wrestled it into her own service. Twelve super-dreadnaughts meant they were scared of her. It meant that maybe she was more powerful than even she knew. And she was not dead yet.
"They should be moving into orbit in three days," Onarici went on. "At which point, they will hit this place with everything they've got, beam, pulse weapons, warheads. All that will be left of that, ma'am, will be a crater, and whatever ragtag little bundle of traitors and criminals you're calling your people now, they will be dead."
"Word from Jenkins, ma'am," Midshipman Iverson whispered from behind her, having just got off her radio. "He confirms the ships."
"And you don't care," Aurora demanded, not really understanding this even now, "That they'll be killing good people who were on your own side?"
"It's unfortunate," Onarici shrugged again. "But you're not on our side now, are you? Or you'd give yourselves up."
"What?"
"That's my offer." He folded his hands behind his back and straightened up, doing a decent impression of a man trying to do a dirty job without getting soiled. "You surrender yourself to justice and at least some of you may live."
The trouble with being feared, of course, was that sooner or later someone brought out a big enough hammer to beat you down. Aurora's mind ran in panicked circles through plans of what she could do to take out that many huge ships and came up blank. Even if they strayed close enough to be taken out of the sky by the wreckers, the crew of twelve super-dreadnoughts was close on thirty thousand people. If she violated all her principles and shot down lifeboats, half of them would still get through, and her starving thousand could not hold off that many for long. Already people had started to faint from hunger. How much longer could she ask them to go on fighting?
Judging from previous events, the Kingdom would only execute her by poison. She could handle that if it kept Bryant alive and out of the machine.
"Am I clear? I give myself up and you let the rest of us go?"
Onarici barked a rueful laugh. "No, you've misunderstood me. All of you come out of there now and give yourselves up, or we level the place from orbit. You will each be re-tried. Those who have not taken part in rebellion, or who have been coerced into mutiny unwillingly may receive clemency." His expression softened slightly, as if he understood the desperate choice he was offering and pitied her. "I offer no guarantees, but I'm sure we're agreed that the innocent should not suffer."
"I'm going to think about it," Aurora allowed, not letting herself regret the dress, though it was harder to pretend to be invulnerable in it.
"You do that," he smiled, politely and with no visible triumph. It was an extra little gouge to think she might have respected him, if she'd ever served with him before. "You've got three days."
~
Having been directly queried, Jenkins had broken radio silence, and his dull eyes and worried face gleamed up from the floor of the control room. "They're not close enough to get good shots in yet. But they're still approaching. Yeah, three days is a good estimate. They'll be close enough to hit us, far enough away that we can only take out about two or three with the wreckers before we're done for."
Confirmation, though she'd hardly needed it.
"What else can we do in three days?" Aurora asked her war council – Bryant for the tech side, Atallah and Ademola as her specialists, and Bousaid speaking for the civilians.
Bryant was in his place at the hub of the computers, with one hand all but sunk into the stone and green sparks skittering over the back of his eyes.
Atallah, rubbing her hands over and over, had just come back from laying out their first casualty. Carrow, with all his promise, had not had enough fat or muscle on him to deal well with starvation. Lina had found him this morning, in the center of a waterfall of monitors across which was flickering his ode to Cygnus 5. He'd died sometime in the night, curled up in a ball on the floor.
"I--" Bryant peeled his hand back from the computers with a tearing noise and blinked rapidly, trying to focus on them. It did something complicated to Aurora's aching heart that it was her bare knee that caught his attention. When he reached out to touch it with that alien hand, she held very still so he wouldn't know that she flinched inside. "I might have solved the food problem."
"What?"
Where the hell had that come from? A desperate surge of hope flung itself up in the back of her mind like a fountain. If they weren't going to starve, they could leave the city to be blown up, let the Kingdom think they had won and regroup once they'd gone with a little more attention to stealth this time. Already her mind began turning over the thought of the network of mag-lev passages Citlali had been mapping out. They could evacuate the city down the tunnel that led to Selena's little valley.
Why the hell hadn't he mentioned it before? "How?"
Bryant smiled at her - a woolly smile, not a hundred percent there. No saying what the rest of his mind was doing. Something alien in an alien language, maybe. "I made some new bots to change everyone's DNA, splice it in with the DNA of the plant-life here... well. To cut a long story short, they'll give us a layer of local chlorophyll beneath the skin. Like plants, we'll be able to survive by photosynthesis. We won't need to eat again, except for pleasure."
Aurora's mind flung up a picture of everyone in various shades of green. Despite her hand, despite her new improved healing abilities and her short lived mental control over spaceships, the idea still creeped her out. It sometimes seemed the more they tried to survive here the less human they became.
But she'd take it, as a solution, if everyone else did.
"No." Lina's voice, tight and angry. She rubbed a flattened palm across her forehead, and God, you could see the skull under her fingers, the bony ridges of her eye-sockets standing out. "Aurora, I'm not criticizing what you've allowed to be done to you, but I believe that I am made perfect as I am. I won't go against the will of Allah by making myself into something he never designed."
"Not even if the choice is between life and death?" Aurora couldn't even argue against this. She'd felt the horror herself. She had to hope, believe, that being dosed full of nanobots while she was asleep had not separated her from the love of God, and having thus been altered once it had not seemed worse to let it continue. But if she'd had the choice, that first time, she too probably would have refused.
"I'm already dead," Lina smiled at her, surprisingly happy about it.
"Yes, ma'am," Ademola was cross-legged on the ground with his back against one of the tanks in which a devolved alien floated. "That's what I think too. Comes a time when you have to be true to who you are. There's a point where the consequences of winning are worse than those of losing. That's one of them
."
Bryant's laugh sounded like the clicking of a huge beetle. "You're all idiots," he said, presumably unaware that he was a living example of what they meant. Aurora loved him still, but she wasn't quite certain what he was, and she had to fight damn hard not to be repelled by what he was changing into. "Let the zealots die then. I presume you won't stop me from treating the ones who want to live?"
"I won't," Aurora sighed, wondering if there was some way she could get him to turn her emotions off. This see-saw from brief violent hope back into crushing despair was not helping her think. Still, it wasn't in her to give up. She sighed again and then held out her left arm, underside up. "You can do me first, then anyone else who wants. We've got three days, maybe others will change their minds by then."
Predictably, it was her crew who refused. Three by three - all they could fit in the patch of sunshine in the cave - those who had been treated cycled through the sunshine and improved. Those who had not been treated began to collapse in earnest. The children went first, Iverson and Banks, then Ignatious and Roimata and Rabinovitz. At the end of day two, Aurora visited the infirmary to find Lina unconscious by the bedside of a corpse. Bryant came on her there, crouched around the pain of her breaking heart.
She leaned into his hand as he touched her unveiled hair and felt him gather her up in a wiry, warm embrace. He smelled of sap and ketones, but underneath that was still an echo of himself, infinitely valuable and everything that she loved. "You need to inject them anyway," he said, the click in his voice less pronounced now he was whispering. "Sweetheart, you can't just watch them die."
She let out a little squeaky noise and then the tears came like a tidal wave, not enough, not nearly enough to express the pain and rage and misery, but all she had. "I have to," she gritted out. She would not force anyone to change their innermost being against their will. She would die before she did such a thing, always. "No. I'm not going to violate their last wishes or take away their faithfulness because I was too selfish to face the consequences. I won't!" She looked up at him through tear dazzled eyes and repeated it, begging for understanding. "I won't."
From this angle you couldn't see the green across his cheeks, or the iridescence of his eyes. He looked like he had when she fell for him, delicate and impish, freckled and wild-haired and mercurial. But mercurial was the problem, wasn't it? She didn't want everything to change. But there was something about the set of his mouth that suddenly made change inevitable.
"All right," he agreed, calm and decisive. "But I can't let this happen. Don't get me wrong, I'd let them all die even now, but I won't stand to watch this break you. There's something I can still do to fix this for you. All of it."
Aurora's grief put a noose around her neck and tightened. She tried to breathe but it was strangling her. "No."
Bryant smiled like a gargoyle - she would have called it a grimace if not for the element of twisted humor. God, he really could laugh at anything couldn't he? "You know I've got to do it. You can't respect their decisions and not respect mine."
"You can still get out," she urged him. What had happened to his cowardice? He was supposed to be the one who survived, even if he was the only one. "They can't keep you, you're too clever. You could give yourself up. Get out. Escape from the next prison and the one after that."
"I've finished with all of that," Bryant's creaking voice firmed up as he warmed to his decision. "This planet is my home now, and you're the one I love. You have to respect my decision to fight for you both."
He was right. She reached the bottom of her despair, a kind of shelf of ice just above annihilation. If she was to leave people their rights to determine their own future, she had to allow him his. And she had a responsibility to the rest of her people to sacrifice everything of her own to protect them. "How come you never respect my wishes?" She said, conceding the end of her world with a weary grumble.
Standing, he laughed and held out a hand for her to take. "I think we agreed a long time ago that you're a better person than me. Come on. Escort me to the machine."
~
There were lots of people in Bryant's head. So many he could hardly keep track of them, all their different priorities and emotions. Yes, at least one of them was devastated. That was the one who was walking beside an Aurora who had dried her face and stood up and now moved beside him with a tread like that of Atlas, trying to carry the weight of worlds on her shoulders. A part of him - the real part? - felt the bruising of his arm where her tight clasp drove his tendons into his bones. A part of him was mourning.
But a part of him was jumping up and down like a puppy taken for a walk in a big field. Finally! Finally he was going to unlock everything and understand everything, and with that knowledge he was going to make everything right again. Aurora would smile again, wouldn't she, when her enemies were destroyed and her world defended, and her people given space and chance to fix themselves and heal? Aurora cared about other people's autonomy, but Bryant didn't give a shit about that. He passed Bousaid on the way to the temple, the guy staggering and skeletal, with his stomach distended. Bryant was going to fix that whether they wanted him to or not.
The shadow of the temple felt like a warm bath to him now. He stripped the insulation from his hands and let them drink in the smells of choomra and kar. Bio-electricity moved through the walls and even nosed through the air towards him like welcoming anemone tentacles. He could feel himself trip the sensors in the doors, as all the hidden rooms around the walls came open.
"This is creepy, I'm not going to lie." Aurora was startling at his side like a hornet-bitten horse. "What's behind the doors?"
He shrugged. It was hard to put a human word to. Even the concept slithered away when he tried to express it in her language. He paused - give me a moment, let me do this as gently as I can - while she went to look.
"Just dust," Aurora looked back at him warily, rubbing her fingers together to feel the texture of the greenish-gray particles between her fingers. If he concentrated, Bryant could feel the pressure of her fingertips moving in little circles over him, oddly clammy and leathery and distinctly alive. "These weapons you're hoping for are probably long gone."
"I’d know if they were," he said, wishing he could think of something that would make this moment better for her but coming up blank. "But I'm still going. Come on, before they start shooting at us."
"I should have got you an honor guard." Aurora ducked into the tunnel behind him, her voice striving for normality and not quite getting there. "You should know how much we honor you for what you're doing here."
Now when Bryant put his naked hands against the rock, it drew him forward. He felt he could have lain down on the stone and been floated into place. The part of him that was still human was touched and incredulous at Aurora’s words. She thought of him as some kind of hero who should be walking through an arch of swords? He thought of himself as an explorer who was finally going to see the mysteries he’d always wondered about. He just wished--
There was a part of him, buried deep and battering at the walls, that was yelling 'no! NO no no no!" That was the part that had tried to save Honey, the part that had pictured them together pottering through the archeology and growing peacefully old. But he knew a fantasy when he saw it, and that kind of wish never came true. Certainly not when they were going to be nuked from space in the next few hours.
Aurora's com bleeped. Jenkins' voice came through, tight with guilt and dread. Jenkins would probably live because the Kingdom forces didn't know he was there under the caldera. He'd live to watch everyone else be wiped out, and then he'd be abandoned to starve. That future was a dirge under his words. "Captain Campos? They're here."
No time for regret, then. Bryant picked up his pace and jogged through the test room, where the hatches had now revealed themselves to be merely ornamental knobs and lines on the walls. He wasn't going to tell Aurora about Honey. That would be too cruel.
He stepped over the lintel into the utter dark of the inte
rface room. One hand was still wrapped around Aurora's wrist, and it jerked to a standstill when he tried to pull Aurora in with him. He pulled again, getting no further, probably bruising Aurora's hand against the dark forcefield. Of course, only those with Louse DNA were permitted in here. She couldn't get in. He was going to have to do this alone.
No. That deep buried part of him screamed, hurling itself at Bryant's mental walls. No. Whatever he'd thought, he couldn't actually do this. He couldn't, wouldn't just leave Aurora like this, with no farewell kiss and no 'I love you'. He couldn't.
As if she'd caught the thought, Aurora's hand twisted on his arm to get a better grip, and then she was trying to wrench him back. That wouldn't work either, because there were warships in orbit with bombs and if she didn't let him do this she'd be dead.
"Shit!" he sobbed, and extended his feelers to touch her skin. This was not how this was supposed to go. He'd hoped for something touching, something she'd find comforting, later. Not this. "I'm sorry." He sent a jolt of bio-electricity through her arm, quick and hot like a sting. Her grip loosened briefly, and that was enough. He pulled the rest of his arm through and stepped up to the recess.
There was no time for ceremony and thankfully none for thought. He stripped off and knelt down in the hole, feet tucked into one side, hands stretched out to the other. He bowed his forehead to the ground and felt the wires in his hair unravel and snick, tink, tink, tink, into tiny contacts along the edge.
There was a moment of potency, quiet, dark, while final calibrations occurred, and then he felt the world around him wake in a surge of power and joy like the back of a whale breaching the ocean in a smooth, unending curve.
He presented it with the fact that it was about to be destroyed by the twelve spaceships a light second above them and it was not pleased. Intelligent life again? Intelligent life intent on despoiling the planet it had been created to protect, again?
Long ago, the Knah had created it to restore their failing ecosystem, and it had seen that the worst threat of all to life on its world was its creators. Magnanimously, it had given them the chance to leave, or to stop being intelligent life. There had been time for magnanimity then. Now only the quickest solution would suffice.