by Alex Oliver
His mug – unbreakable tin – rolled to a standstill next to her, the last inch of liquid in it spraying out in a brown stain. There was no sign of the spoon. It must be under her, or in her hand, or already in her pocket.
Morwen smiled even as she went down too. She stayed down this time, head squeezed between the floor and the guard's boot, clinging to those two solid things so the charge of the electricity wouldn't shake her apart.
Boots walked up to her face. Shiny boots. She could see her red hair reflected in them like an immodest sunset. “Very well,” said Keene's voice over her head. The thread of outraged irrationality seemed to have drained from it. Perhaps he'd had long enough away from Aurora to recover his command over himself. At any rate, this was a quieter, more even tone.
“There is something in what you say,” he admitted. She was surprised when he didn't kick her in the face. “But I'm not risking any of my people out there messing with that stuff.” He shoved at her guard to move him off and then turned Morwen's head gently with the toe of his boot. He almost looked kind now, with that little smile. But it was too late to convince.
“If this ship scuppers, then you and your friend die with it. In light of that fact, I'm going to let you two suit up and deal with it. Save us all and you may get some remedial treatment when we arrive. Refuse, and I'll toss you out of the airlock right now. I don't have time for finesse.”
“Fucking hands are still shaking,” Lali said over the suit radio the moment they were pushed into the airlock. “It's like he wants us to die.”
“Probably does,” Morwen agreed, easing the cutter's fuel tank on her back. The ship's artificial gravity did not extend beyond the airlock, but in here the whole outfit of space suit, cutter, air tank and magnetic boots was so heavy she wanted to lie like a smear on the deck. There was something very bracing, though, in Lali swearing. It was like hearing the voice of a grizzled marine sergeant out of the mouth of a Persian kitten.
“Idiot,” Lali sniffed, invisible behind the gold overlay of her faceplate. “Like we won't take everyone else with us if we fail.”
The airlock finished cycling, and the hiss of released air fell off into the dead silence of empty space just beyond Morwen's ear. She punched in the exit code and waited for the door to slide open, waited for the tiny jolt in the back that was the last few particles of air sucking out around her into the void.
“Is your nose still bleeding?”
“No, it's okay.”
Thank God for that. Morwen grabbed the airlock lip and concentrated on the shift of planes as 'down' changed direction. She clambered crabwise over the edge and stood up, feeling the weight of her suit and pack disappear, and the muscles in her toes ache as they instinctively tried to grab on to the hull of the ship. If Lali's nosebleed started again, filling her helmet with floating globules of blood while they were half way down the ring of engines, she could suffocate on it before getting back inside.
“It's beautiful, right?” Lali straightened up beside her, taking a breath as she gazed out at the magnificence of the galaxy. They had jumped to the very end of one of the spiral arms and could see almost every star of the Milky Way swirled across the darkness like a Van Gogh brush stroke, full of energy and coruscating with light.
“Yeah.” Morwen's merely human panic and despair faded at the sight, revealed as cosmically insignificant – a cold balm to her inflamed feelings. “I guess this'll still be here even if we are all wiped out. All the humans, I mean.”
“But who will appreciate it without us?”
She wondered if that mattered. If God was the kind of artist that liked his work to be admired and enjoyed. “The Lice, I guess. Maybe they're watching us from wherever they fled to, holding a clenched feeler to their forehead and going 'fucking idiots, we did warn them.'”
Lali laughed, the sound of it as bright and as strange as the incandescent globe of star stuff in the center of the sky. Increasingly steady on her magnetized feet, Morwen led the way to the engine array.
On an Abram Nimrod 208 like the Principality the engines were mounted on an external track that girdled the whole ship in the middle. Their trim could be balanced by moving them slightly around the track, to which they were coupled and from which they took their power. It was engine radius 3/2 that had glitched, and as soon as they got close enough it was easy to see why.
The other modules opened like cups to the sky, their internal arrays sharp edged and sparkling. R3/2 was slumped into itself like an over-ripe stinkhorn mushroom, complete with the ink, except that this was slowly roiling like a bowl of wet flour and yeast.
Morwen breathed out through her teeth, thinking about fluid mechanics and momentum and how to keep the engine array functional for the long term. “Okay. I want to keep the track unscathed if you can, so we can rotate the other engines into conformation without this one. So you want to cut just at the coupling mechanism here.”
She indicated the spot to Lali but held up a glove to stop her from starting at once. “We don't have anything to contain the liquid except for the bowl of the engine itself. So we're going to have to cut it free very very gently, not puncturing the integrity of the cup, and we're going to have to push it away very carefully, so none of it spills or slops out. Okay?”
“Got you,” Lali huffed. “How are your hands?”
They'd both been shot full of incapacitating levels of electric current, Morwen imagined Lali's fingers were shuddering inside her gloves. Her own certainly were. But the gloves cushioned it a little and they certainly didn't have time or authority to go back and insist that someone else should do it. “They'll do.”
“If it all goes wrong,” Lali said, her voice clogged and small, “I'm glad I'm out here with you. I'm glad I got to die beside you.”
It felt a little bit like being tased again – a twisting, painful shock that left her newly and painfully aware of herself. Her marriage to Priya had been nominal for years, ever since she accepted the job on the Froward. It had kept her a long way away from home and she had hoped that it would keep Priya away from the gossips and the haters.
They had sent pictures and messages a lot at first, but communication fell off, and as Priya was being bullied into marrying a man for the sake of her family, so Morwen was perhaps growing more attached to the idea of their relationship than the reality of it. And now even that was gone.
But the past few months that she had spent in Lali's company had been… 'nice' felt like a passionless word, but they had been. They had been soothing. She had enjoyed Lali's competence and her cheerful face. Even now, she was leaning on Lali's indomitability, and the knowledge that in her pocket the marine had a tea-spoon soon to be sharpened to a point.
“Let's just not die,” she said, not quite ready to acknowledge these things out loud. Not even to herself. “Let's concentrate on that.”
Even with two of them working on opposite sides of the engine mount with plasma cutters, their progress was slow. The whole array was built to withstand extremes of temperature, even to be resistant to attacks from plasma weapons. As they worked, cutting through the metal, painstaking sliver by sliver, the pontoth seethed in its cup. The surface of the liquid bulged as if there were live things in it, and Morwen half expected it to lunge out of there and fasten itself like a snake around her helmet.
“You get the feeling it's alive?” Lali asked, a star reflecting in her faceplate as she bent over the point of fire.
“As I understand it, it kind of is,” Morwen whispered. “I wonder if it recognizes us. We probably breathed a whole load of it in, down on the planet. Maybe it thinks we're friendly.”
“Hope so,” Lali drew back, and the end of her cutter and the star in her face flicked out together. “I'm through.”
Only a millimeter of coupling still held the dissolving engine to the track, but already the underside of the cup had discolored, looked like it was beginning to bulge out.
“Lali,” Morwen insisted, “come and cut this last bit.
I'll hold the cup in place while you do so it doesn't spill.”
It was hard to read body language in the pressurized suits, hard to tilt the head or raise the shoulders, but Lali's step back still had an element of horror. “I'll do it,” she said quickly.
“I don't want you to risk touching the denatured part. It might recognize us but it doesn't know our suits.”
“Well, I don't want you to risk it,” Lali snapped back. “I'm a marine, ma'am, and you're a command track engineer. It's my job to do the stupid shit so you don't have to. With respect, ma'am, you are worth more than me.”
Morwen blamed the tasers for the way she almost burst into tears. But if she wasn't worth anything to Priya, she certainly wasn't important to anyone else. “Bullshit, Lali. You have family, I don't--”
“Look, it's going to be coming through any moment,” Lali interrupted, striding forward two paces and curving her gloved hands around the thinning, dimpled metal. Morwen wanted to gasp, to shout 'no', but she also didn't want to waste Lali's time. She snapped her own cutter back on and played it tight on the final shred of metal. It glowed red, blue, white, softened but did not break. Lali lifted and jiggled the engine as much as she dared. The sides of it were blackened, bubbles forming there like blisters. A tiny droplet formed in the center of the largest swelling and beaded up as though ready to float away.
“Shit!” Morwen nudged the soft metal of the mount with the nose of her cutter, jarring the final link to break.
“Got it!” Lali exclaimed, lifting the engine like a poisoned chalice in both hands. She bent her knees as though she meant to jump straight outward from the hull, pushed up and hurled the engine hard as she could straight upwards, keeping its dark contents steady inside it.
Morwen watched, calculated. The trajectory looked good. She brushed the pieces of broken mount from the track and turned. “Back to the airlock before it bursts.”
More comfortable in mag boots than she was, Lali bounded close to catch up with her and then overtake. “You’re not going to radio command to tell them to get ready for jump?”
“You know they'd go with us still out here if I did.”
Lali hissed, already at the airlock, twisting the lock open. “I wish I didn't believe that – what the Hell have I feel fighting for all my life if my own service would do this to me – but I know it's true.”
She sat on the edge, jumped down and in. Morwen took one last glimpse at the engine as it dwindled into the distance. It was coming apart already into jagged pieces and round, infectious liquid globules. It shouldn't be possible but she thought they'd slowed, that they were being drawn back to the ship, either by its gravity or by their own will.
She shook the sight off, hurled herself into the airlock, where the artificial gravity caught her and smacked her into the floor.
“Go!” Lali was shouting into her comm, “Go right now before it comes back.”
Morwen forced herself to her feet and pulled the outer door of the airlock closed, sealing them inside, and as she did her helmet comm was alive with bridge commands confirming jump coordinates, giving the order… She held her breath… Confirming jump achieved, engines all go. No further anomalies to be found.
Since she was already up, she hit the repressurization sequence, her faceplate fogging as damp air touched the space-cold plassteel.
Lali was also on her feet, her arm curled possessively around the plasma cutter in the same loving grip she used for her rifle. “You know,” she said, speculatively, “I'm pretty sure Captain Campos could take this ship single handedly, armed with one of these babies.”
It was an exhilarating thought, even if Morwen suspected she was no Captain Campos. She checked the readout – only 10% fuel still remained, but that might be enough for a bluff. “Okay,” She smiled, lifting the sun visor of the helmet so Lali could see it. “But you're the expert on this. You tell me what to do and I'll follow.”
The pressure equalized in their tiny room. Lali gave her an appreciative look that warmed her heart as she hit the door release. She tried not to think about what it would be like to be on the receiving end of a plasma cutter – too hot, sharp, devastating to even notice, surely, too much for the human body to register without going into overload.
Still, as the door slid back to reveal five troopers with rifles trained on her head and welding shields held in front of them by buddies with blasters, something in her felt genuinely relieved to be able to surrender.
“Tactical retreat?” Lali asked through the corner of her mouth as she surrendered her weapon.
“Tactical retreat,” Morwen agreed, ready to lie down even on a cell floor and feel sorry for herself for a good long time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
But Lali is ready to fight
Lali folded her arms behind her head and looked up at the ceiling of the main holding cell of the Principality's brig. Scrubbed ceramic tile that smelled of disinfectant, it was empty but for the two of them. Four shelves on either side of the room with four narrow foam mats on top were bunk beds, and in the corner furthest from the door, an uncovered toilet gave out a cold, damp stench even though neither of them had used it yet.
This isn’t so bad, she thought, letting her eyes drift shut. Her body still crawled with aftershocks of electricity, stabbing pains and aches, and her lungs felt seared and raw in her chest. The headache had passed through blinding by now and was settling into the kind of low grade miserable that usually indicated the day after an assault course or a barracks party.
She thought of her parents on their lake, taking the slime from the river bed and turning it into gardens. If the pontoth came there, maybe it would recognize that they were helping their planet, not pillaging it. Maybe it would realize that intelligent life could be a boon and not a curse, and it would leave them alone.
Maybe they would have died of old age before it spread that far, and she would only have to mourn the final loss of the line of princes.
Maybe Aurora would fix it by then.
She drifted away, and surprisingly imagined what it must be like the pontoth itself – to be spread out thin over the whole galaxy, slowly discovering new worlds, deciding whether or not to remake them in its own image. It would live on, if they all died. If you could call that living.
When she woke, bleary but aching less, she was thankful only to have her own problems to solve. She looked over to Morwen, who was still asleep, her hair like a camp-fire on the thin mattress, her skin so translucent Lali could see the shadow of her irises behind her closed eyes. Since she had been off the Froward and on various worlds beneath sunshine, she had developed golden freckles across her nose and cheeks, and Lali found herself wanting to brush her fingers along them.
She'd always liked girls – the grace, the softness, and the sweetness of them. But she'd always liked boys too, and that had been the choice that wouldn't have landed her in jail. She'd dated a few boys because it was just easier. Safer, they said, less sinful. But she'd never quite understood that, why one was sin and the other wasn't, particularly when fornication with other women wouldn't leave you pregnant and disgraced the way Captain Campos had been.
Whatever, she thought, abandoning the sleepy musing about ethics when it threatened to become too tangled for her to follow. The point was that she was in jail already. They were probably going to take Morwen and her to some courthouse at a base or even a Kingdom planet and try them for making a damn close job of stealing Aurora's baby. So what more could they do to her? Why shouldn't she fall just a little in love?
She looked back and noticed with a little shock that while she had been debating with herself, Morwen's eyes had opened. Morwen was watching her with a look of defeat she'd never seen on her face before.
Unsettled, Lali squirmed beneath her blanket enough so she could get her hand into her pocket and bring out her dearly bought spoon. She pulled up her legs to form a tent beneath her knees where she could twist the bowl of the spoon back and forth, back and forth, w
ithout the movement of her hands showing on whatever cameras were undoubtedly watching them.
“You okay?” she asked, feeling the metal of the spoon’s neck weaken beneath her fingers. Trying not to stare too hard at the way Morwen's chest rose and fell when she sighed.
“Not… great. To be honest.” Morwen rolled to face the wall. It wasn't an encouraging posture but Lali chose not to take it as a rebuff.
“You don't seem yourself,” she agreed. “D'you want to talk about it?”
A little huff of breath. “No. Yes. I don't know.”
Lali laughed, hoping it sounded as fond as it was. “Well, that's narrowed it down. I'm guessing it's something that happened with your wife?”
“She-” Morwen's voice wobbled. She curled up tighter, grabbing her blanket and pulling it in over her shoulder. “She isn't that any longer. She never was, really. Not… legally.”
Lali held in her first trained, marine reaction of “No shit.” There was still a ten year sentence for same sex relationships. No one would have married her legally to another woman. But saying so would make Lali a jerk and hurt Morwen, and she wasn't up for that. “Just in your heart, right?”
“Yeah,” Morwen's throat sounded sore. “Just. It was love, you know. They tell you that love will conquer all. They tell you it's the greatest power in the universe, and the nature of God – that we should want to be as God is and love as he does. But it's not true.”
Now she was crying, her back shaking, her breathing choppy. Lali could see her hand with its bitten nails let go of the blanket and creep down to wipe her face. She wanted to kick the whole universe until she made the weeping stop.
Instead she twisted the loosened head of her spoon back into place, tucked it in her pocket and walked over there, to sit in the scoop of the bed delineated by the curve of Morwen's spine, put a hand on her shoulder and squeeze.
“I think it is though,” she said, because it was just so hopeless to think otherwise. “I mean, that love is infinite and infinitely good.”