by Alex Oliver
“Then why,” Morwen twisted close enough to snarl at her. “Why would she leave me for someone she didn't care about? No – don't answer. I already know. She did it because she was afraid. Because they hounded her and shamed her. They scared her, and it worked.” She tucked her lips under her teeth and bit down, keeping in fresh tears. “Fear is stronger than love. That's why the Kingdom talks about love but rules by force. We were...” She had to pause, shake her head, before she could catch her breath again, steady her voice.
“We were wrong – Captain Campos, Ademola, all of us. We thought we could start again, properly. Actually create a world where everyone was accepted, respected, loved. But it's never going to work because we're broken inside. Everything humans touch we ruin. Maybe that's original sin at work, I don't know, but love isn't enough. And if it isn't, then what's the point of any of it?”
“Maybe she just didn't deserve you,” Lali's hand moved by itself from Morwen's shoulder to her hair, and stroked. Even though it had been shorn short of its initial glory, it still felt as lively as it looked, both bouncy and sleek. “After all, your love didn't fail. Still hasn't, not really. I would never have thought it was possible to stand up and say “I have a wife,” if it hadn't been for you. But you made that claim out loud and now that means on Cygnus 5 everyone gets that chance. You know? You went out with your wife and you fought together, and yeah, she was a casualty, but you won the war. Things are better because you stood up and fought.”
Lali had lost track of what she was trying to say – couldn't even pick her way backwards through her own thoughts to find whatever gem-like piece of morality she was going to wind up with. It didn't matter though, because Morwen had turned her head into the palm of Lali's hand, squirmed backwards so her spine pressed gently on Lali's thigh and grown lax and heavy against her. That had been what she needed all along – a comforting touch, not a pep talk. Smiling at her own emotional ineptitude, Lali carried on stroking her corkscrew hair and let her sleep. We're not perfect, I guess. But things are better for just trying.
Since no one had come in to separate them, and Morwen hadn't shoved her away, Lali pulled the blanket off the bunk above and lay down next to the engineer's sleeping form, tucking her knees behind Morwen's knees and draping an arm around her waist. Morwen still twitched in her sleep from aftershocks of the taser, but so did Lali, and they were both too tired and too warm to care. With the scratchy blanket around her ears and the faint creamy smell of the nape of Morwen's neck against her nose, she felt strangely content with her fate, even if it did end in execution.
Sometime in the night Morwen must have turned over, because Lali awoke far more entangled than the night before, her head on the swell of Morwen's chest. A tug on her scalp was Morwen's hand in her hair, returning the petting. Lali scrambled to her elbows, so she could look up into Morwen's face with a mingled hope and apology. She wouldn't be stroking Lali's head if she was angry or upset, would she?
“Hey,” Morwen whispered, like she was half asleep or beaten soft. “I didn't expect to find you like this.”
“Are you okay with it?” Lali asked, and daringly reached out to stroke a hand down Morwen's arm. “I don't want to presume and I know you've just had a break up. It's not a good time. But I don't know how much more time we've got, and I wanted to say that maybe I could love you, if we had a chance. I didn't want you to think the fault was with you.”
Morwen rolled away, covering her face. It looked like a rejection, so Lali had scrambled to the edge of the bunk and thrown her feet over before she heard the laugh. If she could call it that. Maybe more of a sob.
“Don't go,” Morwen said. “Just hold me please. I can't-- I can't deal with any of this right now, but don't go.”
“Sure.” Lali settled back down. Had only got Morwen's lanky frame in her arms once more before the slot in the bottom of the door rattled. Two trays of oatmeal and apple juice were pushed through.
At the clatter, Lali rolled to her feet, her heartbeat racing and her fight instincts revving up all by themselves. Probably a good thing, because when the closed viewing frame in the top of the door slid open and a pair of eyes peered in, she and Morwen were demurely separate, Morwen hidden under a pile of blankets, Lali with her hand in her pocket, nudging the nearly sheered end of her spoon.
“Who is that?” she shouted, watching the two inch high rectangle of gray eyes fasten on her. “Are you going to tell us what's going to happen to us? When are we getting our trial?”
“Trial?” it wasn't Keene's voice but it sounded like him – a similar intonation of disbelief in her temerity thinking she was owed anything. “What in Heaven's name makes you think you two deserve a trial? Honestly! Your guilt is transparent and your punishment obvious and already approaching.”
“What?” Lali asked, more in bemusement than curiosity, even as Morwen shoved the blankets away and sat up to listen. No trial? They'd decided already? “Is that legal? Don't we have rights? You can't just--”
“What are you going to do with us?” Morwen cut in, afraid but already resigned.
The eyes closed, like the eyes of a cat slow-blinking because it's particularly content with its lot. “We are currently en route to the penal colony of Base Three Prime. We'll drop you off there and forget about you. You can be put to a use appropriate for you, while we tell the galaxy how merciful we are to let you live at all.”
Lali finally snapped the handle off the spoon, and folded it into her cuff. Morwen disassembled the comm she had pocketed until the most vital components were reduced to a size she could hide in the tight spirals of her hair. There would be strip searches and cavity searches, Lali didn't doubt that. Their clothes with the convenient pockets would certainly be taken away. But when a search was imminent, she could hide her shiv under her tongue, and as their captors had already cut their hair perhaps they would not think to examine it again. These were the best options she could think of, at least.
With that done, there was nothing more they could do to prepare. So they simply sat shoulder to shoulder and waited. Morwen still seemed listless, demotivated, but Lali was fuming internally at the thought that she had not been important enough for a trial. Fuck them anyway.
“Ironic, huh?” she muttered, as a hollow clunk beneath their feet and a judder through the walls indicated that the Principality had docked with something. “Another penal colony. What d'you say we treat this one like the captain treated Cygnus 5? Like a resource we can use to get back at these people.”
Morwen sighed, rubbing her red eyes. She still looked tired and shaky though she had done almost nothing but sleep since she was put in her cell. “I'm more worried about what he meant by 'appropriate use'. We're not going to be farming if we're on a space station.”
“It doesn't matter,” Lali concluded as footsteps echoed down the corridor toward them. “We're going to use them, not the other way. We're the Frowards, right? We've had practice.”
That was a marine thing – not to allow yourself doubt, nor to give way to thoughts of defeat. She knew better than to admit even to herself that yes, it sounded sinister, and she didn't want any part of it.
With a rattling of bolts and locks, the door swung open. “All right ladies, out you come,” said the gray eyed lieutenant who stood outside, with an escort of four armed guards.
The blasters at Lali's back convinced her to walk forward and hold out her wrists to be shackled again. Patience. Two prisoners on a ship full of guards could be contained more easily than a horde of them on a space station.
“Move.”
They were walked down to the nearest hatch by this flunky. From the glossy, highly pressed look of his uniform he was probably straight out of officer training school, and had never seen a real battle, never come face to face with a non-textbook situation. To Lali he looked very self-important and yet also like a kid playing dress up. It was the first time in her life she'd had the experience of feeling old. Not actually as bad an experience as she'd expe
cted. She fully intended live a long life doing more of it.
“Keene not seeing us off then?” she asked, mostly just to irritate him, though the intel might be useful.
Grey-eyes sneered – his name tag read Fayid, but Lali didn't figure on being around him long enough to need his name. “Admiral Keene has already left the ship. Did you think you were important enough to delay him?” He laughed. “We docked with Seraph base before coming here. He and his daughter are safely away from you, and I have no doubt he's already readying the armaments to blow your little shithole of a colony out of the sky.”
Seraph base! Lali almost stumbled. It was the Kingdom's big hitter as far as weapons went. They claimed if you pulled all the power out of that thing and aimed it on a planet, the combination of nukes and ramjets and lasers could break a planet open to the core and then ignite it, leaving a new asteroid field and no survivors.
Morwen, who had been shuffling along with her head down stopped abruptly and raised it, turning to Fayid with a look of horror in her eyes. “You have to tell him not to do that.”
Fayid laughed again and gestured for the guard to prod Morwen in the back with the muzzle of his rifle, trying to get her moving. “Yeah, of c--”
“No, listen,” Morwen insisted. “If the control for the pontoth is on Cygnus Five then, if you remove them, all you’re doing is getting rid of the off switch.”
“Well, you would say that.” Fayid nodded again, stony faced, and this time the guards got Morwen by the upper arms and dragged her forward, stumbling as her feet fought to keep up with her body. “But let me drive this through your head. It's not your problem anymore, girlie. You're done playing any part in this.”
“It's a problem for the whole human race,” Morwen said, pedantic in that engineer way that Lali kind of admired. When she knew something, she damn well knew she knew it. That was comforting. “Stop posturing! We're facing galactic extinction and you're--”
They hit her again, after which Lali hit them, one in the kidneys and the other a bruising kick to the back of the leg. She thought for a moment she was going to get tased again and preemptively mourned for her poor brain, but in fact the biggest guard just picked her up by collar and belt and threw her in the airlock like a parcel, shoving Morwen in behind.
The metal door whirred and locked, and a moment later the door on the other side unlocked and slid open to reveal a wall of meteorite pocked metal painted white and streaked with rusty looking debris. This was the space station's hatch door, and it opened jerkily, with a rattling, whining groan of servos that spoke even to Lali of poor maintenance and borderline space-worthiness.
A billowing of shared air brought the first smells from their new home. Damp. Rust. A foetid locker-room smell of old sweat and something cloying, floral even, like perfume gone dusty in an abandoned room. It smelled like showers and athlete's foot, and Lali didn't want to take a step closer, but a sound of bolts withdrawing behind the outer door said if she opened it now it would be to the vacuum, said she could choose between sweaty air or none at all.
Morwen still stood like she was half dead, so Lali looped an arm around her waist and helped her take the short walk out of the hatch, into the space that opened beyond it. “Remember,” she whispered. “This is going to be our kingdom. It's a fixer-upper, but...”
The space beyond the hatch was a perimeter walk. The station seemed to be a large hollow sphere with the artificial gravity centered on an administrative building about half a mile below them. Hatches ran around the circumference of the globe, and in between them were viewing windows, though all she could see in them were pinpricks of stars. A thumbnail sized solitary sun shone like an ice-chip on the opposite side of the station, visible even from here. At this mid-level there was nothing but the walkway. A roof closed off the upper levels from sight – there must be cells up there, and beneath them there were curving tiers of other rooms, and then that admin block. But here you could see from side to side, the sphere of the station bisected with glass. Perhaps the inhabitants were meant to come up here and reflect how distant they were from anything else in the universe, how little the outside cared.
Currently, though, the window gave a good view of the Principality, maneuvering thrusters winking into bursts of light as she turned to leave the prison behind. She was a beautiful thing, and Lali was glad to have a moment to just admire. As a girl it had been pictures of spaceships that had lured her away from the world her ancestors had fought so hard for, and she could still feel the allure. There was something magical about Principality's long, sliver spearhead shape, with the notch where her engine array rested like a jeweled belt. They had reconformed the array, so there was no clear gap where the damaged engine had once been, but…
But there was a shadow on the sleek shining surface of the hull, a shadow cast by an engine that wasn't there anymore. She didn't register it as more than an unconscious wrongness until Morwen gasped by her side and swore. “Shit!”
“That's--”
“Infection,” Morwen agreed, leaning forward as if that could bring the distant ship into sharper focus. “And look. That's just the worst spot. See the lines?”
Lali didn't, at first. Not until Principality turned another degree and the angle of the sun's light on her hull shifted enough to bring them into sharper relief. Not discolorations, but places where the smooth mirror finish of the hull had raised up an inch or so, as if there was something running underneath. A fungal root system fanning out from that one lost engine over the whole body of the ship, breaking out, here and there, in other dark spots. Especially around the mouths of the projectile weapons, and the comms equipment, and the docking ports.
“Wave goodbye to your past, ladies.” The woman who'd spoken had been approaching around the circumference of the station for some time now spoke. Athletic looking, Lali decided, not an ounce of fat on her, but plenty of muscle. Tough as nails. She had close-cropped silver hair and one hand in a flesh-colored glove. Ex-marine maybe, or something even more highly trained. The two drab trustees who accompanied her were long streaks of snot by comparison.
“I'm Warden Lucas. You can call me ma'am. I will call you G619 and G620. You will be given a medical check up, deloused, disinfected, re-clothed and shown to your cells, but I wanted to look at your faces first. I do this with all my girls and I never forget a face. Life here can be peachy if you cooperate. If you don't, I'll throw you out of an airlock myself. Accidents happen, and no-one checks up too carefully when they do. Welcome aboard.”
“Ma'am,” Lali gave into the urge and saluted. Even a hard case officer was still an officer.
“I'm not here for conversation,” Lucas jerked her head to her minions as if to say 'process them.' “You've got to earn the right to talk to me, and you're not close yet.”
By contrast to Lucas' hardness, the scrub's hand when it curled around Lali's elbow was unpleasantly soft, almost clammily so. She was an old woman with lank white hair and white-rimmed colorless eyes, stooped and surely too old to still have to do a job like this. Lali regretted having to be difficult, to make this grandmother's life difficult for her, “But the Principality's been infected by the ponthoth.”
“By the what?” Lucas made a dismissive gesture, but stopped walking away.
“It's like a rogue nano,” Morwen took over. “It wants to wipe out intelligent life in the galaxy. It's eating away at the Principality from the inside. She'll fall apart before long.”
Warden Lucas raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “What d'you want me to do about it?”
“Warn them,” Lali burst out. “Obviously. Let them come on board.”
“Let's say that's true,” Lucas's gloved hand twitched like a drumbeat by her side, clenching and releasing in a regular drumbeat of aggression. “You want me to dock this plague ship to my clean station. No. Tough for them, but if they're carrying something like that they can just fucking stay out there and die. It's not my problem.”
“It might--”
Lali's heart gave an exhausted twist within her as yet again Morwen got hit for speaking out of turn. It was like she didn't know when it was going to happen, or she didn't care. This time Lucas snapped the nightstick off her belt and rammed it almost lazily into Morwen's stomach, pressing Morwen's neck down further as she doubled over to work through whether she needed to breathe or heave.
While she struggled, Warden Lucas turned her back and walked away. No help available there, Lali thought. You had to be hard to get ahead in a military that thought you were created by God to be empathetic and caring and a great mother. But sometimes you could go too far. She dragged her guide over to Morwen's side, thankful that at least Morwen's trustee was not harassing her.
Morwen's trustee, in fact, looked like she'd have a hard time harassing a breath of wind. Quite apart from the pasty complexion of someone who hasn't been outside in years, a dew of sweat shone on her face and hands. Her eyes randomly unfocused or darted to one side or the other as if she'd heard screams.
There was a distant hubbub, but it sounded more like children playing--high pitched and joyous--eerie in this setting. It was not a sound she'd ever expected to hear again, and certainly not here.
“You've got to learn when they've had enough,” she said, putting a hand out to stroke Morwen's hair and then remembering the hidden data-disc pieces and drawing back in case she disturbed them. “Then you stop talking just before.”
“But...” Morwen coughed, pressed a hand to her stomach and tried to straighten up. “I've got to tell them--”
“Have you got a death wish?” Lali's concern came out sounding sharp and angry. “Because of the whole thing with Priya? Are you trying to punish yourself? Because that's counterproductive and--”
“Shut up!” Morwen snapped back, some color returning to her face as anger drove everything else out. Both of their guides flinched from the sound of conflict as though they had walked into an electric fence, and that was perhaps the most effective thing they could have done to make both Lali and Morwen control themselves. Whatever had happened to the poor creatures to make them this ghostlike, Lali for damn sure wasn't going to be a part of it.