by Alex Oliver
“But I can only do it if I believe this is the best of all possible worlds.” Bousaid took the slate back and pressed its edge into his bleeding lip as if he was embarrassed to be caught saying something so honest. “And if you're going to back out on the new government, I can't--”
“No, no,” Felix still felt sick with loss, but this was a thinning of his internal cloud to the point where he could almost guess where the sun was behind it. “Your plan is better. I think I spotted some media types – actors, directors – on the crew manifests. You can have the warehouse in sector 5 to work in, and I'll send them along to you, once they've naturalized.”
This time when Bousaid rose, Felix got him by the hand and shook it. How surprising that such a nervous nobody should turn out to be a cultural force and innovator. It went to show how little he knew of the God given talents of anyone, until they blossomed. “Thank you,” he said, “for making it your business to help. We are on the same side, you and I. I don't actually want to make this a military dictatorship anymore than you do, believe me.”
“I almost do.”
When Bousaid left, Felix took his break, going up to catch the late afternoon sun as it shone over the verdant moss of the lake. The leaves of the ribbon trees were shedding and rustling underfoot, good to pack into mattresses, and – if boiled and pounded – a source of fiber that could perhaps go into the prospective fabric industry. Right now though, all he could think of was that they looked like a carpet of mating snakes under the trees, their colors turned from teal to yellows and oranges, even a few blacks. He wished vainly for a cigarette or some other small ritualistic comfort that would occupy his body and distract his mind for five minutes of peace. At least the rush of energy as sunlight turned to sugar in his skin kicked his mood up for a moment, though he knew it was at the expense of a later slump.
It was strange to be alone in his head again. Strange to have lost Nori's grief for his creche-mates, only to replace it with the creeping fear that he would never see Nori again. The decision to send Captain Campos away for some relief from watching her loved one in the same position seemed even more correct now. He wondered how she had distracted herself from the horror of Bryant's fate for so long.
In the absence of a cigarette, he whittled the bark off a fallen twig, aware of the eyes watching him from the portholes of the spaceships sharing the plateau with him. He cut the twig to a cigarette shape and clamped it between his teeth. There was just enough sap left in it to taste of maple syrup, and there was something comforting about that tiny sweetness between his lips, as the cold wind whipped up the fallen leaves like the arms of angry octopuses.
He didn't feel a lot better when he returned to his desk, but he worked on for another four hours. Then he bruised his forehead from falling asleep sitting and toppling face forward. The incident told him that bed was inevitable, so he had better embrace it.
The sight of his thin mattress made him stop on the threshold of his room and tell himself, out loud, “I don't want to.”
Of course he didn't. He didn't want to go back down the room whose imaginary fire had made the muscle of his leg seem to peel off in long strips. He didn't want to go and sleep where Nori sat like a corpse and the walls grew through his skin.
But he had promised, and he was a man who kept his promises. So, he put his mattress on his shoulder, rolled up the headset in his blanket and dragged all of it down to the temple.
Lights on the sides of the passages flickered on before him as he walked and went out behind him, as though they were escorting him. He knew it was supposed to be an honor, but it felt like an execution party.
Lights came up in an arch over the wall where Nori leaned, cruelly highlighting the way that his face and hands were now entirely cocooned. At some point he had drawn his knees in to his chest, and his feet, now flat on the ground, were also firmly secured as he crouched there like a Peruvian mummy. Though it made Felix sick to approach, he still secured his own wires to his head and brought his poor, stone-age connection as close as he could manage to the layers of thin tubes and wires encircling Nori's head.
They felt like spun plastic, like glass, and they didn't give to his touch. When he tried to tease the strands apart, they didn't move, snug from Nori's throat and face to the crown of his head.
Felix pulled his fingers away as if burned, and laughed in lieu of sobbing, the jack of his headset falling from his hand. He couldn't push it through to the port at the back of Nori's neck. The fucking jealous, overweening, murderous machine wouldn't let him have this one thing. This one thing he'd told himself would make everything bearable. This thing that meant he didn't lose Nori completely had been taken away from him.
He slumped onto his side on his mattress and groaned so deep it was as though he really was hacking up tar. “You said it wouldn't be the end,” he protested, eyes closed and his nose thick and hot as he tried not to cry. “You said we'd still be able to talk at least. What am I going to do if you're--”
A hand like Nori's hand stole across the stubble of his hair, brushing it backwards, bringing out a full body shiver in him as he realized the hand was cold. “I didn't know if you'd really come,” said Nori's voice, close to him, as though the man himself knelt by the bed, petting him and smiling.
He opened his eyes, bracing himself to see Nori with all the ports torn out, bloody and ragged. But the figure bent over him, sheltering him in its shade, was the jade green of pontoth, its face smoother than Nori's, simplified and uncanny.
An impulse rose in him to scramble away, to run, but he didn't, caught by how right its eyes looked, by the way in which that cold stone hand had warmed against his cheek as the texture of its skin adjusted to become more human. “Good, right?” it said, and that too was very Nori – very excited and self-obsessed and oddly endearing. “I'm refining it all the time. It's like 99% me. I've only got the planet doing autonomic stuff.”
As he spoke, he was flinging back the blanket and easing himself down beside Felix, cold as a statue at first, but then warm. “Do you like it? I made it for you.”
The smell was wrong – caves and water, mud and stone – but the warmth released tensions in him he hadn't known he had, and when he curled into its embrace, the shape was perfect. If he hid his face against its chest, it was easy to pretend his cheek was against Nori's ugly Snow-City coverall and everything was safe and simple again.
“You're so clever,” he muttered, feeling sleep close over him like an anesthetic.
“I know, right?” Nori laughed.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Aurora finds kindred spirits among the pirates
It took the Red Cat two days at sublight to gain enough distance from the Cygnus system to jump into ex-space. Not because her engines were inadequate or her speed slow, but because Xan Hu continued to refine her jump coordinates with real-time data sent directly from Seraph base.
For the first day, Aurora was confined to her cabin, a comfortable room--with metallic peonies on the walls and an over-large real water shower--that the locked door turned into a cell. She had used the time to catch up on a deficit of sleep, detangle her hair and attempt to restore the hard worked fabric of her uniform to a state where it would not attract instant attention, by pressing her patch and rank stripes back onto the sleeve. She felt oddly buoyant, playing truant from her responsibilities like this, with only her own concerns to fret about for once.
On the second day, the door opened to her testing hand, and she was able to step out, not into the carpeted corridors that were the ship's public face, but into the areas reserved for its crew. These too were elegant. Even the metal walls were etched or embossed with designs, the emergency hand holds wound around with colored silk and finished with tassels that bore small bells.
As she explored, she began to pass members of the crew. Humans of all colors and degrees of augmentation from the pure to the wolf-man, a couple of virtual presence devices, and a robot with the word “Grinder” hand-painted in
brush strokes across its white plastic chest. Of them all, only the robot acknowledged her, bowing and intoning “Captain,” in an accent that concealed any undertone of derision, if there was one.
The faces that watched her without expression were scarred. Hands twitched above blasters, or in the pockets of coveralls where small knives could be concealed. Conversations, though held in a trade language she didn't recognize, stopped as she passed and started up with more venom afterward.
She knew the feeling. Even without the tell-tale flash of clan tattoos from beneath the cuffs and collars of their clothes, everything about these people, from their spacer pallor to their swaggering walk, said 'pirate.' They knew she wasn't their natural predator anymore, but that knowledge hardly helped when they saw the uniform.
“Are your people going to be able to work with me?” she asked, as she reached the bridge, where Xan Hu knelt in front of a knee high monitor, putting the last touches to the calculation of their destination coordinates.
“They are not required to work with you.” Xan Hu looked up and smiled at her, gesturing for her to come sit on the cushions beside them. “They are required to work with me, while you slip off on your own to infiltrate.”
“Maybe,” Aurora admitted. “But speaking of which, how'm I going to infiltrate anywhere looking like this.” She held out her green hands to Xan Hu, who this morning was dressed in a dove gray under-tunic beneath a charcoal one, and who had tied a square of red fabric over their bun, keeping their hair almost painfully secure. They looked very pared back and ready for action without in any way looking less elegant than usual.
“That part is easy,” Xan Hu sent the coordinates to the computer, finally. A holoprojector by their knee surrounded them in projected screens, on which Aurora was shocked to see real-time feeds from a number of navy ships. She'd never heard of Sekh Heongu before all this, yet all over the Fleet, officers were obviously taking kickbacks from the woman in exchange for data.
“Here,” Xan Hu offered her a cosmetic gun loaded with foundation spray. “Neck and face. You can wear gloves or do your hands too. Quickly though. We've got ten minutes.”
Aurora uncapped the spray and walked over to the nearest porthole for a reflective surface, passing the mist of cosmetic over her face twice and being careful with the spirals of her ears. There was still a green tinge to the corners of her eyes and the inside of her mouth, her tongue, but hopefully she wouldn't need to speak. “Ten minutes? It took two days to get to out-jump distance.”
“Mm,” Xan Hu agreed, smug as a cat, “but Seraph base is a space station and doesn't have a significant gravity well. I've been spending that time calculating the in-jump. I can drop us in so close to the docks that we'll be able to step across.”
Aurora smothered a feeling of disapproval. Habit tried to tell her that the only honorable way of fighting a ship to ship battle was to come out into real space at a safe distance from each other and charge together, firing cannons broadside as the two ships passed. War was flying hunks of metal, the slow motion flower of explosions against the absolute dark, the risk of explosive decompression and a clean death from the vacuum, not grappling in the enemy's corridors in a way that made things personal.
But of course, if you were a pirate, the ships were a resource it made no sense to waste. Better to get a boarding party inside and bring the knives into play.
“You know the place?” Xan Hu asked, when it became clear she had nothing to say.
“I've passed through there more times than I can count.” She considered the question further, “but I’ve never been stationed there. I'm not intimate with the layout.”
“Then take this,” they offered her a larger wrist comm, already displaying a map. “The highlighted area is Keene's quarters. My sources tell me he keeps Autumn there.”
Every single time, with wearying predictability, the sound of Autumn's name pumped a dose of joy, despair and fury into Aurora's veins, making her feel almost nauseous. She wanted nothing more than to rush to her and never be held apart again. But, “No. I gotta talk to them – stop them using the fusion driver to blow up C5, so we can keep a handle on the pontoth. It's the future of the human race, you know? I can't claim my baby is more important than that.”
“No,” Xan Hu rose gracefully to their feet. They had no more jewelery on this morning than a single pair of pearl earrings, but that tiny bead of glister was enough to turn the angle of their jaw into something ambiguously feminine. By now, Aurora figured it was too late to ask.
“No,” Xan Hu said again, bracing and kindly. “But that is why you have allies. I will tell them of the threat and deal with them if they will not listen. You will find your child. We will achieve both things, together.”
Xan Hu lead her to the airlock, where the crew were dressing for battle. Their suits were things of beauty, Aurora thought, glad to be able to distract her mind with them. They were hard shelled exo-suits, perfectly reflective as a defense from lasers and a means of camouflage alike. Tracing their silver joints were threads of bluish running lights like the lines of cuffs and zips on clothing. Power packs at wrists and ankles sent out jets of plasma, both for weapons and for maneuvering thrusters.
Aurora's suit had a backpack like the roof-top box of a sports car, or perhaps more like the papoose of an Inuit woman. It was a tiny, padded, pressurized container for an infant child.
“Why… would you have come with one of these?” she asked, smoothing her fingertips down its curved faceplate as the boarding party tooled up around her.
A moment of silence, and then, “You aren't the only mother on this ship,” the ruddy-cheeked woman next to her muttered, meeting her gaze grudgingly. She had dry, unreflective black hair and rough skin that looked almost wind-chapped, in a way Aurora associated with explosive experts, and her suit bore an incised design of a flying crane, outlined in white lights.
“This is yours?” Aurora asked, feeling ashamed for a moment of her prejudice against pirates.
“It was,” Crane gave a tiny smile. “She's too big for it now. But she's waiting for me to come back and tuck her into bed. Let's make this fast.”
Aurora thought of a little crane, maybe curled up under a kotatsu like the one in Xan Hu's visitor's suite, and prayed to God to keep them all safe for the child's sake. “Fine by me.”
Suited and with inspections passed, she flexed her powered fingers in the hard gloves as they strode in a pack to an empty hangar with a strange set-up of flat pillars clogging the mouth of the door. Crane showed her handholds shaped into the metal, grasped her own and settled into an alert crouch.
Barely two heartbeats later, a hiss and thunder through the floor signaled the air being sucked from the airlock. Strobing red lights by the hangar gate warned of hard vacuum as the outer wall lowered and retracted. Crane held out a hand with three fingers extended, folded the first into her palm, the second, the third. As the artificial gravity cut out, she twisted herself up by the hand-hold until her feet were flat against the pillar, legs bent. She pushed herself forward with strong legs, gliding head first out of the bay, straight for the slowly turning curve of Seraph base's fan of docking stations.
Aurora scrambled to follow, shot herself towards the space station like a ballistic missile. She'd seen this station many times on a safe, long approach – an elegant design. Its long cylindrical body was capped at one end by a sphere of toughened glass panels that faced the sun, inside which were gardens and farms for the long term residents. At the other end, the curves of multiple docks arched from a central assembly point like the segmented rind of an orange.
On a normal approach, one's ship would have identified itself a good five hundred miles away and gently drifted in to a berth on one of those segments, with the comms officers on both ship and station refining coordinates all the while. A cushy job for the folk on station, but a boring one. It was easy to imagine the curses, the panicking and running around that was going on in Seraph's control room now that a fast, h
igh-tech cruiser registered to that cesspit of villainy, Snow City, had jumped in to real space a bare hundred meters from their outer masts, jumping every traffic queue and priority in place.
Sneakily, Aurora was impressed by the Red Cat's strategy. She followed Crane's lead and threw out her hands ahead of her to give a millisecond burst of her jets. She brought herself to a standstill, close enough to the rotating wall of the station to simply reach out and grab on. As she halted, she saw the ship itself turn in for a landing, firing all thrusters in a flamboyant salute. Whoever was running about in the traffic control room, thrown off their guard by the ships' sudden appearance, would be too busy adjusting flight plans and picking up their spilled coffee to have noticed the few camouflaged, unpowered objects it had left behind.
Almost certainly unseen and unexpected, Aurora followed Crane hand-over-hand across the surface of the station until their group came to the outer door of an emergency airlock. Crane attached herself to the code pad via a cable and set her dimly lit face against the metal door, closing her eyes as the lock picking program did its job.
“Won't they notice this door being opened?” Aurora asked, slightly horrified by how easy this was.
“Maybe,” Crane admitted. Close enough now so that Aurora could attempt to puzzle out the writing just under her jaw. Was it Burmese? Nepali? Bryant would be able to tell. She chided herself for the way the thought wrung her of strength just when she needed it. “If they're being diligent. And then they might check the readouts to be sure there's been no emergency. And there hasn't. So they'll tell themselves it's just a maintenance worker coming in the wrong way. They never bother coming to look.”
“You've done this often?” Aurora's disconcerted horror returned, imagining off-shift workers sleeping in their bunks, trousers down, and officer's kids running around in the gardens while the pirates sneaked in. She was one of them now.