by Alex Oliver
“Well,” Leibniz tutted, smiling. “If the Eagles’ve been at the front they can handle a little fight.”
“What's 'sundries'?” Lali asked Iris as the three of them were marched back to the showers, given scented soap to wash with, conditioner for their hair, which the long-term inmates wore long and loose. Iris didn't reply, and Lali was kept too busy removing the shiv, concealing it in her hands and mouth as she showered, securing it behind her ear when she was told to show her empty palms.
“Clean,” Iris said. “Pretty. You’ll do.”
She would have been pretty herself if she had not had such a cold gaze – the only person with natural red hair Lali had ever seen other than Morwen – but there was something about her slenderness and her blue laser eyes that put Lali in mind of an abandoned cat, lurking by a trash heap, neglected, feral and vicious.
Iris opened a cabinet in the locker room adjacent to the showers and took out new clothes, shoving them at Lali as if they burned her. Lali understood why when she touched them – they were gauze. Trousers that even with two thin layers of blue gauze were semi-transparent, they fastened loosely around the hips with a single drawstring. A scarf of matching blue gauze with a subtle gold thread gleaming in it was the only thing offered for the top half of the outfit.
“If I say, 'this had better not be what it looks like',” Lali offered, twisting the fabric between her hands, at a loss for what to do with it in the absence of underwear, “You would say…?”
“Let me help you with that.” Immi took the long scarf from her hands and wound it beneath her breasts, across her back, crossed it in front and tied it in a bow behind her neck, leaving her to position her chest in the overlap. Throughout the process, Immi didn't look at her once.
“This has got something to do with the unscheduled ship, right?” They weren't going to tell her, obviously. But she thought she could have a good guess by now. “That sour-faced warden's running some kind of a brothel. Whoring out the prisoners to… Kingdom ships? Oh shit!” she exclaimed as it all clicked together. “That's why I heard children? Don't tell me that's one of your exports too? She sells the girls and then she sells the kids to adoptive parents?”
Immi examined the exact folds of her own wrap. The third girl, whose discarded name tag read Evans. J, and who looked resigned to her own gilded paraphernalia, opened her mouth, looked at Iris's murderous expression, and shut it again.
“Who the fuck am I going to tell?” Lali demanded. “Just – am I right or not?”
“She doesn't sell all the kids,” a tick jumped in Iris's jaw. Her gaze could have stripped steel. “Some she keeps, to ensure obedience. It's how you get to be a trustee if you're young. If you cause any trouble, she'll sell my kid and put me back into rotation. So don't. Lie back and think of wherever it is that you come from, and maybe you'll get cigarettes out of it, or a merit. The better you are, the faster you get out of cleaning the crappers. Let's go.”
Even the loose, sandal-like footwear they had been issued on registration was denied them now. They walked out of the showers and onto the walkway barefoot, entirely surrounded by guards, and headed for the nearest lift spar.
Lali shook off the paralysis brought on by nausea and disbelief. Some people really did love money that much, she thought. Some people probably even thought the prisoners deserved to suffer, criminals all of them, and mere incarceration too good for them. Someone probably thought they were helping in the war effort by giving the troops something to live for. Someone had managed to convince themselves they were doing everyone a favor.
Someone wasn't getting a seat on the trip out of here.
But that thought brought her back to more useful topics. “So the Eagle is docked with us right now? Is it a big ship? Can we take it?”
“Take it?” Immi squeaked, as the elevator rumbled and shook down fifty levels, and the far-off administration building came into focus. Another pre-fabricated citadel, almost indistinguishable from the one they had occupied on Cygnus 5.
“How many crew has it got? Weapons? If we could let all the prisoners out, I bet we'd outnumber them.”
“I told you not to get ideas.” Iris tried to ram Lali in the stomach with her baton, but a step back and a carefully judged curl and clench took most of the force out of it.
Angry and out of patience, Lali grabbed the baton and pulled Iris forward a step. “And I told you this station's falling apart around us. I don't know how long we've got but your kid's going to die if you do nothing. You've got to get them out of here. We've got to get everyone out of here, and this ship might be the only chance we get.”
Right down at the bottom of the station, the administration building was surrounded by a sparse park of darkness-loving plants. The tiny distant sun shed a twilight over all, and tall spires of full-spectrum lights only brought the gloom up to a winter day under full cloud. The impression of being outside on a gloomy, rainy planet was strengthened by the patter of water off the distant roof above, as the moisture of the breath of a couple of thousand people condensed and continually dripped.
There was something reassuring about the shape of the administration compound – the same over endless planets in Kingdom space. Something that said 'familiar' and 'home'. But Lali had never associated home with sexual slavery before, and didn't want to start.
As they passed through the large, processional entrance, she noted the state of the gates – rusted. Looked like they'd never been shut, but then why should they? Where was there to go from here?
She expected them to be taken to the large complex of rooms that formed the main building – what had on Cygnus 5 been the Governor's mansion and the control rooms – but instead they were hustled to the side, where the hospital and barracks had been. Occasional orderlies, passing them in the corridors, made a production out of looking away, not seeing, not knowing. Well fuck them, Lali thought. When she was putting together her army, they wouldn't be in it.
Iris unlocked what had been the convalescent ward on Cygnus 5. It opened with a key and a key pad, and fingerprint recognition – a great deal more up to date than anything else she'd yet seen on the station. Immi took a deep breath beside Lali, and clutched at her arm in an attempt to reassure her, or perhaps just a request for support. On her other side, Ekibe had begun to pray silently, her lips moving and her eyes downcast.
“The officers get the fresh meat,” Iris sneered, angry with their hesitation or their misery. “So show a bit of respect. This is Eagle's command staff. Be thankful you're not being thrown to the crew. It's not going to kill you. Get in.”
“I've told you what's going to kill us,” Lali objected, letting herself be pushed inside. Nice. Someone had decorated. There were black couches with a high gloss that said they were all synthetic and easy to hose down. The floor was tile and sloped inward towards a decorative grate. Lamps around the walls cast gold and pink mood lighting on easy wipe-down marble walls, and Lali wondered how much 'it's not going to kill you' was a lie. Something about the room's hygienic appearance suggested an accommodation for the spilling of blood.
That might just come in handy.
Lali put her revulsion aside. Thank God, there were only five of them, lounging on the couches with drinks in their hands. All in the blood-red and black uniform of Kingdom warriors which she had once been proud to wear. The door closed and locked behind her as the captain stood up.
Blaster on his hip. Stiff fabric around the wrist where a drop down knife must be concealed. Another one in his boot, just creasing the leather. He seemed to be the only one with a firearm, but she spotted knives on the others too.
She'd have to get the blaster first. With the blaster, she'd have them. Without it, against five men who knew how to use knives? No chance. Subtly, she took a step towards the captain and then hesitated, raising a hand to her hair, as if coy or afraid. The shiv slipped into her fingers like a lifeline.
“New,” he said, and closed the distance between them. He was thankfully not
a tall man, but wide, with a build that spoke of muscle beneath a layer of fat. Not a guy who'd go down easily in a fair fight.
'Violence is a shocking thing to normal people,' Lali's marine instructor had once told her class. 'They have to work up to it. So you see it coming every time. You're prepared, every time. I'm going to teach you how to be abnormal – how to strike so fast they're not going to know it's happened until they're already dead.'
As the captain's fingers closed around her jaw, perhaps intending to pull her face into the light for a better view, Lali shoved the shiv straight into his jugular and ripped upwards. Even as the blood hit her face, she was popping the holster of the blaster open and hauling it free of the already falling body.
He had the guts to scrabble weakly at her ankle as she turned to shoot the major in the face. He went down. A second lieutenant, pulling at his sleeve for a knife, stopped when she shot him in the knee and screamed instead, falling and screwing himself up around the injury. But where was the--
Instinct warned her just in time as an arm went around her throat from behind, pulling her off balance. She hit back hard with her free arm, jostling the knife thrust so it just drew a hot red slice across her ribs instead of sinking between them. She couldn't turn in the choke hold, couldn't breathe either, her ribs aching as they tried to force air in, her vision graying. White stars floated wherever she looked, and she thought she heard screaming, but it might have been the roaring in her ears.
Aiming down, she shot her assailant in the foot, but he just roared out a curse and tightened his grip. Fuck! And now everything was going dark around her and it was all she could do to keep a grip on the blaster that he was fumbling to pull away from her with his off hand.
A distant “Oh, bugger it,” pierced the sirens of panic in her head, and a moment later the arm around her neck spasmed, tightened, loosened, and fell away. Her sight returned with red edges and showed her Iris, surrounded by stunned guards, slitting the first lieutenant's throat with his own knife while she held him down with her shock baton between his shoulders.
“You fucked me over when you killed the first one,” Iris snarled, kicking the body away so its pumping blood flowed more neatly into the gutter. “Now I've got to protect my kid some other way. My boy gets out with me, in the first trip.”
“Deal.” Lali grinned, watching the fifth officer trying to defend himself from both Immi and Ekibe. Ekibe had actually climbed on his back and was trying to scratch his eyes out. Immi was kicking his shins and trying to break his fingers.
“You want to go and get him? I think we've got things covered here. We'll meet you by the lift in ten. I've got to break Morwen out.”
Iris nodded, kicked the unconscious guard nearest her, and opened the heavily locked door, leaving it open as she slipped out.
“Girls! Girls! Whoa, you need me,” the final officer protested, going still between his tormentors as he noticed Lali approach. “I've got the access codes. If you think you're going to take the ship, you can't. Not without me. I need to be alive, or you'll never--”
Lali shot him in the face then took a step back and did the same for the guy who was still clutching his injured knee. She didn't feel like mercy. Not while she was dressed like this. “Immi? Ekibe?” They looked at her with a kind of sickened dazzle, as something in their heads was cracked open at the idea that they too could kill. “Thanks. Grab the knives. All of them. We're going to want them.”
“What about the access codes, though?” Ekibe asked, as she rifled through their pockets for good measure, coming up with their ID chips and communicators. “What if we did need him?”
“Nah,” Lali grinned. “I've done this before. Trust me. You don't need a traitor when you've got the best engineer in the fleet. Let's go get Morwen and the rest of your friends.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Morwen finds her leadership qualities
Morwen eyed the door as it slid closed behind Lali, trapping her in this room full of hardened criminals. She wasn't worried about that, she discovered, wasn't worried about herself. No, but she didn't want anything to happen to Lali – Lali, who was so endlessly cheerful, who enveloped her in comfort like the kindly night, whose dark hair she could imagine closing around her face as they kissed.
No. She shouldn't think of that. She shouldn't betray…
Except that Priya had already betrayed her. It was the first time the thought came without sharp edges, arriving more as a balm on her mental wounds than a re-opening. “What's happening?” she asked Leibniz, who was leaning back against the wall, O'Donnell's pillow between herself and the sweating metal. “Where are they taking her? They're not going to hurt her?”
“She looks like a young woman who can look after herself,” Leibniz said evasively as she scratched beneath her wig. “Now tell me what you can do with that comm thing. We've only ever managed to get hold of one once before and it was confiscated fast.”
Some of the girls had already gone back to playing cards or magnetic darts. One was writing something. Another brushed past Morwen in a hurry and could be heard throwing up into the toilet. They were, if Lali was to be believed, her troops. But Morwen was not a leader, she was science staff. Her job was to report things as they were and let someone else decide what to do about them. It was a relief to be able to do that now with Leibniz.
“There's a minor data-field in the wall by my bed,” she said. “I can pick up news, and with enough time, I can probably track other signals back to the station's other comms channels – so we'd be able to hear what the guards are saying to each other and to control. If I could get the data-disc close enough to a major data hub, I should be able to start gaining control of the central computer. And from there I should be able to do anything – open the doors, put the screws on lock down--”
“Take the place over.”
“Yes.” She hadn't imagined, all that time ago when she strove so hard to be the best systems engineer in her class, that she would end up taking over worlds with it. At the time she'd had to be that good merely to avoid being automatically dismissed because it was well known women couldn't be good at tech.
“Are we really going to dissolve?” the tattooed woman asked, half incredulous and half shaking. “That wouldn't really happen, right? I mean, they'd have found a way to stop it by now.”
Her name seemed to be Hauptsmann. S. With her sleeves rolled up, Morwen could see a series of long, pink, recent scars that looked like they'd been deliberately placed to deface the mandalas of her blue and green arms. Underneath all the ink it was hard to tell that she was very young, maybe even still a teen, but once Morwen saw it she found it hard to forget. “We really are,” she nodded solemnly. “I mean, the fact that there are more ships coming in and out than I thought means it'll be slower. But it can't be long before they quarantine us, and then… Well. Last time the stuff was off the leash, it ate a whole planet in under a day.”
“Let me see the news broadcast again.” Leibniz gave a commanding gesture, indicating that Morwen should sit on the bed and hold up the comm far enough away for her old eyes to focus. “I think it would not do to be too cautious. This ship, the Eagle? From the numbers of crew who come aboard, I would say it wasn't large. We'd be lucky to fit a single level on it – 200 people at once. But if I am to help you with this, you agree that our floor goes first.”
“Of course,” Morwen agreed. “We'll have to shuttle back and forth. It'll be easiest to start with the people who are closest.”
“Then come over here,” Leibniz beckoned her closer, and stooped to indicate a small circular jack port in the base of the door , half concealed by the untucked blanket of her bed. “They bring mediscan equipment in every so often to check up on the girls' health. It plugs into the wall there. Is that more like what you need?”
Morwen dropped to her knees on the gritty, greasy floor with genuine excitement – a feeling she'd almost forgotten she was capable of. Just having it again made her aware that it was pos
sible she might live, that she might one day be better. She might fall asleep with her face soothed in the night-blossom smell of Lali's hair, and wake up in the scattered petals of a wilted flower crown.
She pressed the data-disc to the port in trepidation, almost afraid to hope for the best, but when she closed her eyes and concentrated on the back of her eyelids, where the neural interface would show the tiny disc's heads-up display, the command menu had tripled.
“Okay,” she whispered, like a medium invoking the spirits, “I'm going to try to establish control over the main station computer.” A memorized program downloaded from her head as she spoke, already running through the options for administrator passwords. “And I'm looking for the interface where the Eagle is docked to the station. I should be able to hop over that and begin getting control over the ship.”
“You were on a prison transport detail,” O'Donnell said, though she didn't sound as resentful a that as Morwen might have imagined from someone who was a prisoner herself. “Our guards are either morons or psychos – people they're glad to be rid of. None of them could do this. Why the hell'd the higher ups want to get rid of you?”
The search for the Eagle wasn't turning up any results, but she could feel the security on the station's computer thinning. “Gay,” she said, off hand, no concentration left for talking.
“Oh, in here who isn't?”
She felt the moment when the computer let her in, and it was almost like touching her tongue to the pole of a battery – a jolt of not entirely unpleasant oversensitivity. Then she was sunk well away from other humans, her mind filled with electronic possibilities and flow paths. Where was the Eagle?
Half of her crew seemed to be in the room that had been the banqueting hall of the Governor's mansion on C5. The CO2 monitors and life signs were going wild over there where the list of Eagle ID tags was too long to read. A smaller concentration of five Eagle tags over in the hospital building were accompanied by four life signs tagged as prisoners.