Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  ~

  “Well,” said Selena, as they walked past the statue of the many-armed louse god and down a tunnel that looked jade-lined like something out of an ancient emperor's tomb. “This was not what I expected.”

  “It's worse, somehow, right?” Aurora had picked up her composure as she was picking up lantern and ladder, but it still creeped her out – the sense of being swallowed by something ancient and inhuman.

  “This is all pontoth?” Selena picked up a foot and waggled it, causing eddies in the tendrils of grey-green dust that now swirled up and down the corridor. Stepping in it felt like stepping into the center of a school of piranha, knowing it could strip you bare in seconds, hoping it wouldn't choose to.

  “I guess,” Aurora grunted. “Bryant tried to explain the whole thing to me, but we were all half mad with hunger and other crises. I didn't listen well.”

  The room where the path became a hole in the floor was now a whirlpool of pontoth, as some tendrils sucked down to the passages below, while others billowed out and up. She could feel the dust coat the inside of her nose as she dropped the ladder into the room below and swarmed down it.

  “It's thinking,” she explained, watching the pontoth move. “The whole planet is thinking, using this stuff like we use electric current through neurons. That's why it can communicate with the pontoth out in space – it's all connected somehow. It was sleeping and we woke it up, even though the aliens who lived here before warned us not to.”

  Selena laughed, though she had untied her t-shirt and drawn the top of it over her nose and mouth, as if that could keep the stuff out. “Well no one who knew anything at all about humans should have expected us not to press the big red button.”

  “You think we'd have learned, after the Garden of Eden.” They had reached the open doors of the sanctuary from which some forcefield banned even light. Somewhere within this wall of darkness lay Bryant, cabled to the floor.

  “The 'fortunate fall',” Selena shrugged, looking at the carvings all around her with a loving irreverence that seemed too light for the occasion, “without which we would not have free will at all.”

  Aurora's panic and grief made a break for the surface of her mind. To quiet it down, she shoved her finger in the sensor, felt the slice and the hot pain of a millenia old blade. “Not feeling up to the theology today, sis.”

  “In this place theology is everything,” Selena insisted. “We're meeting an alien intelligence. God's probably the only thing we have in common with it.”

  “And Bryant,” Aurora insisted. “Hey, Bryant. Let me in.”

  Nothing. The swirl of alien thoughts went on unchanged. Aurora's injured heart sank further into the tarpit of her regrets, but she took her bloody hand and beat on the edge of the open door. She watched as her fingers slipped wrist deep into nothingness and then stopped. Anger added a match to the tar.

  “Let me in, you shape-changing, spiral-haired, no good deviant. I need you to help me. I need a doctor.”

  “Mother of God.” Selena took a step back as the utter darkness snapped off and the inner, interface room became visible. The hollow in which Bryant lay was now a mound of tendrils. Aurora didn't follow Selena any closer. She could see just a fingertip's worth of Bryant's dark skin, with his ridiculously endearing freckles, and just a tendril of his wild, soft dandelion head of black hair. Already she wanted to collapse to her knees and cry.

  “What do you need?” The swirling dust built itself into a simulacrum of him, too smooth, too filled out. How was he even getting nourishment in there? How was it keeping him alive, and why?

  “Who am I talking to?” Aurora asked, wishing for his eyes, even for the backstabbing twinkle in them that she once hadn't felt able to trust.

  “I am arkimet ne ne hatogh, hara yin dohme,” the construct said, his gaze somewhere between Aurora and Selena, as though he didn't recognize either of them. Aurora scraped her regulation boot down her shin so that the outer pain was worse than the inner.

  “Speak Trade please.”

  There was a little twist of expression about the lips, a wryness as though Bryant found her amusing. “I am the preserver of the world, one who serves.”

  “Bryant, are you in there? Can you hear me?”

  Again, the smooth stone face twitched as though it had a live personality behind it, and she swallowed. He wasn't gone yet, not entirely. She wanted to say I love you. Come out of there please. We'll figure out some other way of turning the machine off. Come home to me, please. But she was a Captain and a Queen before anything else and she needed him where he was.

  “I need you to deactivate the pontoth Bryant. Turn it off. My daughter's on a ship out there in it, and Mboge is coming down with food. I need you not to destroy them. Not to destroy anyone. Turn it off now.”

  “I'm trying.” For a moment the figure was all Bryant, as though he had fought his way up to the surface and stood before her under the barest layer of green paint. It set her heart thundering and made her want to reel back in horror, because it wasn't him at all. He was still under the floor. “I'm slowing it down as far as I can. Maybe I can direct it away from ships trying to land here, for now. I don't know. There's so much going on. I lose concentration and--”

  Silence again as his face smoothed back out. She had the sense that the planet had swallowed him, and even though the planet was hers she hated it for that. She was going to have to fight this thing, wasn't she? At some point. It could go on the list, after the rest of the galaxy had come to heel.

  “We have heard you,” said the statue with the face of her lover. It was probably the best she was going to get right now. They'd find out if it had worked by seeing whether Mboge's relief ship came apart in orbit or not.

  The city's location was no longer secret, so Aurora had no compunctions over letting the Froward and its accompanying ship settle to the rocky ledge just to the west of the entrance. The second ship had appeared on their comms as SCS Red Cat, under the captaincy of Xan Hu, Sehk Heongu's ambassador. She let Selena run off to oversee the butchery of her elderly cow and went to meet the newcomers.

  The Red Cat was a sleek, fast little thing. It had the audacity to shine as it floated to its landing site as gently as a wing-feather. But its hatch stayed shut as Aurora welcomed Mboge back to Cygnus Five. He stepped out into the sunlight, looking dazed and unwound, younger than he had been. Aurora's relief at the sight of him was almost like a bruise on top of all the sharper emotions. It shouldn't have hurt to see him with hope cautiously glowing behind his eyes.

  As she shook his hand, she noticed that he had cut off his carefully straightened and gelled down hair, and that the black of his uniform had faded into a rusty maroon. She pulled him into a brief unprofessional hug, glad to have at least one of her wanderers back.

  As the healthy colonists started unloading his cargo of food, Aurora took another look at the Red Cat. Still closed, still waiting.

  “You're green, ma'am,” Mboge murmured. “And very non-regulation in uniform.”

  “I don't think I'm worrying about regulations right now, Felix,” Aurora admitted, raising her eyebrows at him, because all this time he had been standing with his left hand clasped in the right hand of Nakano Nori as though they were sweethearts. There was obviously a story to be told there. Bryant had warned her not to let Nori go to Snow City. Bryant had marked him as one hundred percent likely to take their tech, sell it for himself and disappear on them. Apparently it hadn't happened like that. “I see you two are getting on better.”

  “He saved my life,” Nori mumbled as though he was resentful at being forced to make an account of himself, but he didn't let go. Simultaneously, Mboge said, “I was very glad he came. I would have been lost without him.”

  Are you sure we can trust him? Aurora might have asked, if she had been alone with the Lieutenant, but the thought of Bryant stopped her. She wouldn't have trusted him when all this started. She would have been right not to. Things changed. People changed. But not
if you were hanging over them, second guessing their goodness.

  She nodded. “Well done then, both of you. I think you might just be in time. You might have saved us all.”

  Mboge rubbed his palm over the dark bristles of his shaven head and glanced sideways at the Red Cat. “But at what cost?”

  He wasn't allowed to be cynical. That was her job. She dredged up a smile for him, suddenly tremendously glad to have his quiet efficiency back. “One we don't have to worry about until we're through the other side.”

  Nori too seemed changed, though it was harder to put a finger on why. His expression had opened a little and his posture relaxed. He still stood like he was trying to catch echoes of a conversation that wasn't happening, but he stuck to Felix's personal space like he never wanted to be alone again.

  She knew how that felt. Fighting back a morning-star of misery she noticed that at last the hatch of the Red Cat had slid open and a platform was lowering from it with a showy hiss of hydraulics.

  “I'm glad you decided to come back, Nori,” she said. “With Bryant occupied, I'd like to put you in charge of his laboratory. See if you can pick up his work. I know it's...” blasphemous… “advanced, but if anyone can understand and use it, you can. Lieutenant, please see that the food gets to the infirmary at once, and then find someone to arrange a victory-cum-welcome party for the ambassador from Snow City this evening. The people deserve a chance to celebrate.”

  “With that stuff eating its way across the galaxy?” Mboge asked, wide eyed.

  “Eat, drink and be merry,” Aurora said with a smile, “for tomorrow we die.” She shook her head. “Let's just have one good night. Okay? If we're going to get up again and deal with this tomorrow, I think we need it.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” he reached out as she was turning away and touched the blue flounce of her sleeve. “Are you okay, ma'am? I heard they tortured you.”

  That! Amid all her concerns, that had… she could still feel the drug conditioning, but her bespoke immune system was clearing it out. If she lived, it would be the least of her problems. “I'm fine, LT. I've had worse.”

  A single figure now stood on the Red Cat's ramp in an armored exosuit. Even as she watched, the figure stepped down onto Cygnus 5's soil and slowly – much more slowly than had happened with the Kingdom troops earlier – the soles of their metal boots began to smoke.

  “Shit!” said Nori, tearing his hand from Felix's grasp and sprinting for the city. The armored person was reaching for what looked like a release latch on their shoulder. Aurora ran to them, holding out both hands.

  “Don't take the suit off yet. Back towards your ship. When you're close enough, peel the suit and jump to the ramp without touching the ground.”

  “What's happening?” Xan Hu's voice was a pleasant alto through the voice changer of their helmet.

  “The pontoth was told to let your ship through but it doesn't recognize your suit. The suit is already being consumed. One of my men has gone for something to mark you as a friend…” At least she certainly hoped that was what Nori was up to. Angering one of the most powerful women in the galaxy by allowing her ambassador to be eaten in their first step on the planet was not how she had planned this to go. “Until then you need to stay as little in contact with the planet as possible.”

  Xan Hu did as she asked, backing until their calves brushed the entry ramp and only then releasing the catches on the exosuit. They sprang for the metal platform just as the feet of the suit dissolved into dust and the ankles began to smoke.

  They were no more identifiable as man or woman even in their socks – the loose indigo tunic and trousers were unisex, as was their short black hair. The elf-like beauty of their face was strong for a woman but delicate for a man. There was no sign that they weren't totally human, but Aurora had been modified enough herself not to take that for granted. She supposed it didn't really matter in the end. God was God of all, human or alien or enhanced being alike. She was done with making him small so he could fit inside her own conception of Him.

  “I'm sorry about this,” she said, deciding not so much to regret the cocktail dress as to own it. “We lurch from one crisis to another as always.”

  Xan Hu had a smile of great charm and carried themselves with the poise of a person who knows they're the most dangerous thing in the room. Aurora took note. Fate had forced her into this alliance with what she understood to be a distant crime-lord, but it hadn't escaped her that according to the Kingdom sponsored media she was a crime-lord herself. In this pinch it didn't do to be too picky over one’s friends.

  Nori bolted back out of the city with a syringe in his hand and offered it to Xan Hu with his eyes pinched and his sides heaving.

  “What is it?”

  “Little bit of…” Nori panted, “local plant and animal material, local water, trace denatured pontoth. Basically...” he straightened up and wiped his forehead with his jumpsuit sleeve. “It's to make your body look to the planet like it's been here all along – like one of us.”

  During the speech, Xan Hu had taken a rod from the wall and used it to scan the contents. “There's no poison and no active nano,” they confirmed, still with their head bowed over it, torn.

  “I can come in,” Aurora offered, understanding very well the desire not to put things into your bloodstream when you didn't know what they were. Maybe Hu was unmodified after all, the way Aurora had been before all this. “Into your ship, I mean. If you don't want to risk setting foot here.”

  Hu looked up from the syringe as if pleased, but their smile was startled. “You would be willing? I could just raise the ramp with you inside and fly off. There is a bounty on you, you know. I could take you to Seraph Station and sell you there.”

  “I'm sure you could,” Aurora countered, almost yearning for it. Please someone, anyone, take all these decisions out of my hands. “That would actually make my life a hell of a lot simpler. But Sekh Heongu promised me an alliance if I could defeat my enemies. I don't make a habit of distrusting my allies, and I won't believe she would break her word until I see evidence of it.”

  Hu bowed a little as they handed the syringe back to her and for a moment they looked like an embarrassed housewife, remembering that the dishes are still in the sink and clothes on the floor. “You will give me half an hour? Let me make the place fit for a guest? I was not expecting...”

  Aurora wondered how honed that youthful, hapless charm really was, but she smiled anyway. “Sure. Though you're going to miss the party this evening. It was supposed to be for you.”

  Xan Hu actually looked distressed – they were obviously a person for whom manners mattered a great deal. Not quite what Aurora had expected from either a smuggler or a pirate.

  “I guess we can have it around the ramp. It's a shame, though, you won't be able to come inside and see the city – the spiral streets and watercourses, the flowers that glow and the rocks that think. The imps.”

  “I could give you a camera and ask one of your men to do it for me,” Hu said, looking with regret at the pile of dust that was now their suit. “We could watch it together over drinks.”

  Drinks! What a bizarre thought. There were people in the galaxy who did that. Aurora couldn't imagine herself being one. Not while--

  Not while her baby might be dying out there.

  The intrusive thought almost knocked her on her ass. It made her gasp and flinch. No, she couldn't afford to think like that right now. What she needed was to talk to a friend. To claw something back with her own fists from the dark.

  “Sure,” she said again and let Hu drop a 360 degree scanning headband into her hand. “I'll arrange it. I'll see you then.”

  She passed the headband on to Bousaid, with instructions to walk slowly round the city and into the temple, but to avoid the missile launch control rooms, the comms, and Bryant's research. “Tourist info,” he agreed, looking almost happy these days – starvation hadn't phased him now that the prospect of violence had been removed. “Will do
.”

  With that under way, she took herself to her quarters to put on trousers and boots, in which she always felt more prepared for the world, and then went down to the infirmary.

  Ademola was in a chair, looking more bright eyed already than he had been when she last visited. His hair was silver as a knife and his cheekbones looked so sharp they might cut the skin stretched tight over them.

  “Isaac,” Aurora smiled, trying not to allow the knobs of his finger joints to rebuke her, “I hope you've had soup?”

  “I have,” he sketched the smallest of nods as though anything more emphatic would shake his head from his neck. “My stomach aches, but it holds. You look fat, ma'am. And green.”

  Aurora looked down at herself, the pants and the camisole top that hung off her where once there had been a solid slab of muscle. “I could do to be fatter,” she lamented, “but it's coming back. And I don't mind the green.”

  “I understand why you did it,” he slurred, tired from the rigors of digestion and conversation. “You had to stay alive to save us. But I'm glad I didn't give in to the temptation. I am glad that God has chosen to keep me alive as a true human, so that when I do come to him he will recognize me as one of his own.”

  “Right,” Aurora summoned up a smile even for this. Well, here was a fault line developing in her little society already. When she looked at the sparsely clothed mattresses in the infirmary – really just grass from the meadows inside bags of blankets – and the emaciated forms lying on them, she didn't want to see purist fanatics. She didn’t want to see people who would try to undermine what she was trying to build here before it had even had a chance to come into its own. She wouldn't think like that. But she would tell Bousaid - who had taken over from Callow as head of her media team - that his propaganda broadcasts needed to focus more strongly on unity.

  “You should get some sleep, Isaac. Worry about the theology when you can stand up, okay? We missed you.”

  She let him catch her hand as she turned to walk further in. He opened his mouth to say something. Something kind, she thought from his eyes. “Don't forget, this world is only a temporary thing. Don't lose sight of the eternal, ma'am.”