by Alex Oliver
When the crew started criticizing her, it meant they trusted her, she reminded herself. They trusted her to listen and not lash out. That was something, even though the implied rebuke sat heavy on a soul already weighed down.
Nodding in farewell, she passed down the length of the room, smiling at the invalids and trying to absorb their sense of hope, rather than focusing on the fact that all of these people had chosen death over polluting their humanity with gene-enhancements, like her. She should not have come here for comfort. Comfort clearly didn't exist in Aurora's life anymore. She would have to do without.
“Lina,” she reached the final bed with a twist of regret and relief. Lina Atallah had not yet tried to sit up, but someone had tucked a pillow behind her back and a bag of some kind of nutrient solution had been set up on a pole next to her, fed into her hand by a tube. Without the fat and muscle of her face she scarcely looked like herself.
“S getting better,” she whispered, feeling Aurora's eyes on her. “Can feel it already.”
Though she could barely move her hands, her hijab was perfect, neatly folded and pinned around thinner hair. Half collapsing next to her mattress, Aurora felt condemned by the headscarf – she had left her veil off long ago. Ademola was right. She was drifting away from her people, her beliefs. She might not have lost her trust in God, but it looked that way to others, and wasn't that half as bad?
“I'm so glad,” she gasped, and all of a sudden she was crying. “I'm so glad. I need all of you out there. I need your guidance. Yours especially Lina. I… I want so badly to win that I… I forgot the cost.”
Lina's smile was like a skull, Aurora could see the teeth even under her lips. “'S what you want in a Captain - victory. This's not like you. What's…?”
Aurora hadn't meant to do this. Not to come and cry about her own problems in front of a woman who had suffered so much herself. What kind of a selfish monster was she becoming? “I don't know how to stop the extinction of mankind,” she started, which was kind of funny in itself. Surely this problem was above her pay grade. “And I should be worrying about that, but Bryant's nearly gone – sucked in to the fucking planet - and I don't know whether Autumn is alive or dead. I don't know what to do to save them. And Ademola thinks I'm losing my faith. I don't know. Am I? I never wanted to be a criminal or a queen or a god damned mutant. What if I can't put it right – all of it? What if my...”
He had asked. She had said yes, back when all of this felt more like a game she could win. “What if my fiancé and my daughter are dead because of me. What if all the people I persuaded to take enhancements are damned, because of me. What if I've doomed the human race? My mother, and yours, everyone.”
Her hands were full of salt water, stinging along the line of the acid-mouth in her palm. This had been the first alteration Bryant had given her, and there had been plenty of time to ask him to take it away again. But the ability to spit acid from a hole in her palm had proved so useful that she no longer wanted to be without it, ugly as it was. She watched it open and close, smacking its lips, and choked with sheer revulsion at herself. There wasn't time for this. Wasn't time. Even now there was barely five minutes before she had to speak to Xan Hu. Total collapse was not…
She curled further into herself, set her forehead on the edge of the bed and sobbed.
~
Aurora woke with a swirling, heavy sense of confusion. Beneath her cheek, the sliding, linguine-like leaves of ribbon trees slid and settled in the mattress on which she lay, the texture soft but weird and the scent beginning to smell like home. Where…?
The city's ever present flower lights twined up the woven wall immediately to her left, and to her right she saw the legs of a more substantial bed, the base of an IV stand. Hospital. She had cried herself into some kind of nervous breakdown, and she had--
Foda-se
She had missed her meeting with Xan Hu.
~
“No matter.” Xan Hu welcomed her into their ship an hour later. On waking Aurora had berated herself about how dreadfully she was messing everything up, and Lina had tapped her on the crown of her head in what might have been a slap if the woman had had any muscle left.
“Your sister came looking for you,” she had said, her own voice already noticeably stronger after a night on the IV, “after you were ten minutes late. She told us not to wake you and she told the ambassador that there was an emergency in the infirmary and you would reschedule. Believe it or not, you are allowed to sleep.”
Aurora supposed she must feel better for it. Certainly the strange thinness of her perceptions had worn off, and the sense of overwhelming panic could be muted again. But now she felt stunned and stupid, and the crushing weight of the depression she'd had since Autumn's birth was heavier than ever on her aching shoulders.
“Sehk Heongu was impressed both by the decisiveness of your victory on the ground and the power you have released into the galaxy,” Xan Hu went on now. They turned to walk Aurora from the hatch through an airlock door and then into corridors lined with tawny carpets. “Shoes please.”
Aurora stepped out of her boots without a qualm, because the carpets were gorgeous. Every red-gold shade from champagne to spilled blood, they were woven with little hunting scenes and scripts of different kinds that she could not read or even recognize. Grip-bars of carved and polished wood punctuated the corridors at even intervals, making them navigable in zero gee. The lighting shone from behind intricate grille-work of polished metal and cast complex shadows on the walls. It was not what she expected from a spaceship and it intrigued her.
“Letting the pontoth loose? In hindsight I wish I hadn't. I'm not sure what's impressive about the decision.”
Xan Hu glanced over their shoulder and smiled, the lights painting golden snowflakes on their cheek. “She thought as much – that it was a thing you had done on instinct. She liked that. You have the will to survive and triumph. She too would destroy the universe before she would let herself be beaten. She felt you were a kindred spirit.”
“I'd never even heard of her before last month,” Aurora scoffed, watching with interest as a panel opened in the corridor behind her and someone else came out. They were wearing a powered exosuit, their face concealed by an armored visor. Behind them, before the panel slid closed again, she saw a room of gleaming bronze with what looked like stasis chambers lining it – human shaped cylinders of smoked glass and curving copper ornament, ornate as the lighting panels. “And now I hear she's one of the most important people in the galaxy. Or so my lieutenant Mboge told me, last time we spoke.”
After a left and a right turn, the corridor ended in a fabric door painted with a scene of a sinuous red leopard sunning itself in a tree. Xan Hu slid it aside and gestured her into what looked like a sitting room complete with piles of cushions and a low round table with a duvet cover fringing it.
“Put your feet under the cloth,” Hu eyed her with some amusement as if it was perfectly clear to them that she was at a conversational and cultural loss. “Like this.” They sank to their knees and slid the cloth over them to waist height. That seemed easy enough. Aurora followed suit and it was like dipping her aching feet into a warm bath. A heater beneath the table gave out an old fashioned, radiant heat that massaged her bones and muscles in a way convected heat never could.
A touch on the table brought a white drink to the surface in a heavy brown bowl. She watched Hu raise it in both hands and sip, then she followed suit, hoping this wasn't a ritual she was flubbing. The drink was like a watery pudding – milk, butter, honey and spices. The best thing she'd tasted for a very long time.
What a well named ship, she thought, with a bowl of milk in her hands, half lying, half sprawling in a patch of warmth. How much she would really like to be a cat at this moment.
“Perhaps by now you have come to realize the benefits of not being known,” Hu sipped their own drink, enigmatically beautiful, “by those you cannot trust.” They wore pink silk today and drop earrings of
jade, and an outlawed disintegrator-pistol strapped to their right thigh. Pirates, she thought again, criminals like me. It made something battered and defiant stir in the back of her mind. She was only doing what she thought was best for her own people. Perhaps the same was true of Sehk Heongu. Perhaps she had finally found an ally in this world of men's rules.
“My employer is behind many of the great people in the galaxy. If you give her the respect she is due, she can give you anything in return. If you can name it, and you can pay the price, whatever you want can be yours.”
What price to save the human race, Aurora thought. But no, if Sekh Heongu could do that, she would do it for her own sake. What price to save Bryant? But no, Aurora needed him where he was, containing the pontoth for as long as he could, buying time for everybody else.
What did she want, other than not to be herself? Not to have to make the kind of decisions that killed her people, that peeled away her faith and her humanity one strand at a time.
She thought about exosuits – a ship full of armored pirates at her command – and about Keene who had let his ship get infected. About Morwen and Lali who might even now be watching helplessly as Autumn wailed and the hull around them dissolved inch by inch.
“I want my daughter back.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Morwen is pretty done too.
Morwen Crouch had had enough of playing the hero. It felt like several centuries ago that she had left Cygnus 5 on a quest to find Captain Campos's baby and bring her home. She hadn't been one hundred percent sold on the idea even at first – whatever her father was like, the child surely deserved better than to be torn like a war prize between her terrible parents.
But still, she'd started out on the mission gladly. The captain had said she could find her wife Priya on the same trip. She had gone into this soaring on the thought that soon she and Priya would be re-united. She would bring Priya back to their new planet and they would make their final stand there together. Whether she lived or died, it wouldn't matter because Priya would be there with her. Their love would sanctify the moment whatever their fates.
Now she stood on the bridge of Keene's flagship. Autumn was crying by the door in the arms of an orderly. Morwen’s own arms were locked in front of her by magnetic cuffs. There was a guard behind her and another to the right where Marine Private Citlali stood in the same predicament. They had almost done it, but almost wasn't good enough.
On the main view-screen, Captain Campos looked nothing like herself – out of uniform, bare-headed, the solid muscularity of her reduced, but somehow still jarring, in a blue dress. She looked desperate, and that was new too. Morwen had supposed she would always be in control. She would never be outmaneuvered or weak or set in front of an enemy too big for her to handle. But they had all been humbled over these last few months, which was saying something given that they'd started off as the disgraced dregs of the fleet scraping a dishonored existence on a prison transport.
The ship juddered beneath her. Knocked off her feet, Lali staggered sideways and bumped into Morwen's elbow. Lali looked terrified, and that thought forced Morgan to re-engage with their situation. What was going on now? What had she missed while she was wallowing?
Her brain felt slow, dark and fuzzy as if she was peering at a night-time world without her glasses on. There was a cloud of something spreading out from Cygnus 5? Something that would touch and destroy their ship, like uncontrolled nano?
Her first thought was 'about time.' If Priya didn't want her – if Priya, in fact, would rather play dutiful wife and mother to the family that had been forced on her – why shouldn't Morwen just close her eyes and let the dust of space devour her? It hurt, it hurt so much to think of going on alone.
“Damn it, Keene!” Captain Campos burst out, a sound of pain that almost made Morwen feel listened to. “I don't care. Take her somewhere safe then. But if you're going, go. Stop posturing. Get her to safety. Now!”
The light strips by the door blared red unexpectedly as an alarm sounded on one of the bridge monitors. Morwen looked over there instinctively, and saw the output of one of the engines in a tailspin, even as the comms station next to engineering glitched for a moment, freezing and flickering before it righted itself.
Lali was looking in Morwen's face, like she expected Morwen to do something about this. But why? What was the point?
“She's right!” Lali shouted. “We need to go while we still--”
She choked and seized up, her mouth opening wide as though something was squeezing around her throat. Her back arched and veins stood out in her pretty neck as though there were worms under the skin. That… No.
Morwen stirred out of her slump, stepping back so she could see what was going on. The bloody guard had tasered the girl. The little black box was still in her hand as she pressed the prongs more firmly into Lali's inner arm. Lali convulsed again but didn't go down, grasping at her tormentor's wrists to hold herself up.
As Lali convulsed, everyone on the bridge was looking at her. Morwen's guard stepped forward to help his colleague, turning his back to Morwen. And maybe she wasn't as finished as she would have liked to think, because the sight of his comm in his back pocket had her moving without thought or regret.
“Get off her!” she shouted, angry enough for it to sound genuine, and shoulder-checked him to cover up the small movement of her hand into his pocket. He turned and hit her across the ear with the butt of his own taser. She rolled with the blow using the impact as a chance to crumple to the floor. Writhing as if in pain from the fall, she siezed the chance to slip the com into her thigh pocket unnoticed.
She managed to press the pocket closed before the taser connected with her own shoulder and electricity kicked her in every particle with a kick like a centaur's hoof. She smelled metal and burning flesh, felt her heart try to burst. There was a moment's blackness, but she forced herself out of it. Forced herself to concentrate on to the slick cold of the deck under her cheek, the taste of blood in her mouth, the febrile hammer of her abused heart.
When she raised her head it was to see Lali kneeling. She looked almost demure, with her head bent, her guard's boot between her shoulders, and her gaze cast down. Again, it lit something in Morwen, a kind of protectiveness perhaps, just a sliver of light in the despair of her heart. Lali was round faced and pretty, quick to smile. Her hair was black and sleek as a fall of oil. She deserved to have a crown of white anthers and hyacinths purple as an emperor's cloak. Not this.
As if she knew Morwen was watching, Lali raised only her eyes, caught Morwen's gaze and then looked deliberately at the arm-rest of the navigator's seat, which was within lurching distance from them both. The navigator had been drinking something out of a mug and had left it to go cold, with a metal tea-spoon still in it.
Morwen had spent enough time in the cells of Cygnus 5 to know that was a shiv in the making. Her spine still felt like water and her arms like noodles, but she couldn't turn down a request for help from Lali.
“Captain Campos is right though,” Morwen got her knees under her and pushed herself back to her feet. She could feel the tension in the crew, the fear that their belief in Keene was barely restraining. “Look – look at the readouts. We've already lost one engine. The comms are on the fritz. If we stay here arguing, we're toast. We need to--”
Without warning, all the readouts changed at once. The feed from Cygnus 5 cut out in favor of sleeting static. Keene's face went red as a sunset as he rounded on Helm. “What just happened?”
Helm's payot quivered as he drew himself rigidly to order. He swallowed. “I take full responsibility for my actions, sir, but she was right. One of the engines is disintegrating. The longer we stayed there, the more chance it would reach the others, and then we would not be able to escape at all. I jumped us into an unoccupied system, sir. Just to buy time.”
“You had no authority--” Keene began, but Morwen could have kissed the guy and that was saying a lot.
“Thank y
ou!” she exclaimed. “But it's still going to spread if we don't get it all off ASAP. You've got to get people out there in space suits. Just cut the whole engine off and jettison it. Don't try to fix it – don't touch anything – and then leave it behind. That way we might still make it somewhere that'll let us breathe before the ship dissolves around us.”
“Shut her up!” Keene commanded, furious. “These whores don't make policy on my ship. Can we have some discipline here, please!”
Morwen had served under him before, but he hadn't seemed so pathetic then. What had happened to him to peel away everything that used to be good? Maybe he too had something eating at him inside, and now the thinness of what was left was beginning to show? Right now, she didn't have time to care. She saw the guard coming at her with taser raised, and threw herself at his knees, bowling him over.
He went crashing into his mate, who stood over Lali. As the other guard was trying to catch his balance, Lali surged up beneath his boot and knocked him over backwards.
Cries of alarm rang out on the bridge as someone called for more security. Morwen forgot all her aches of mind and heart by balling up both fists in front of her and driving them into her guard's stomach. Yes! It wasn't quite a taser but it would do.
He went for her eyes, grabbing her around the head and trying to squeeze his thumbs into her eye sockets. She kneed him as hard as she could, then reached down with both hands and made a grab for his balls, hoping to tear them right off.
Lali leaped on his back, pulling him away from Morwen, towards the rows of officers' stations. Everything was glorious for a moment, and then Lali's guard got her round the waist and pulled her bodily off. The pair of them ricocheted away.
As Lali went sprawling over the back of the navigator's seat, her guard got his arm free enough to tase her a third time. This time she curled up around herself, tight as a mummy-bundle, slid off the navigator's lap and lay on the floor, face down.