by Alex Oliver
Crane was faster and more maneuverable in her superior suit, but she was also lighter and had to fight not to be simply thrown off into space. The naval suit was heavier, gave a harder punch and had magnetic boots that gave it a secure footing on the deck. Even without the blaster there was a chance its occupant could shatter Crane's faceplate with a blow. But Aurora thought the woman was managing. She kept out of the way until Crane slid a long blade out of her gauntlet and slashed at the squaddie's oxygen hose.
She couldn't blame the woman, but she didn't want anyone dead either, so she dived at the squaddie's back when he was distracted by the gleam of the blade, and got both arms around his upper arms, drew him in tight and immobilized him, “All right, son. Don't make us kill you.”
“That was a fucking ruse,” he gasped, sounding betrayed. “To get your people inside. I believed you! I pushed for this, and you--”
Oh, he was young, by the sound of it – probably still a middie, a child officer learning his trade on the job. She gentled her voice a little. Not enough to sound insincere, but enough to match his unhardened softness.
“Stop trying to kill us and I'll show you proof.”
He quietened into passivity in her arms. When the fight went out of him, Crane slid her dagger back into her glove and nodded. “I'm going to take the rest of them and secure the bridge. You beam the video straight to their screens. It'll help.”
“Sure,” Aurora agreed, ashamed again that she was going to have to ask this, but better safe than sorry, right? “Try not to kill anyone.”
“Heh,” Crane huffed, “I know how to do diplomacy, don't worry. After a giant space station this will be child's play.”
She followed the last of her troops into the airlock, leaving Aurora alone outside with the squaddie. Close examination showed he had a camera strip rigged around his helmet and lights on his shoulders, not yet switched on. She peered at his face that looked about fourteen years old in the light of his helmet HUD. “What's your name, son?”
“Ben, ma'am,” he said after a moment's thought. The suit's shoulders couldn't slump but now the pirates had left a brittleness went out of him. “Midshipman Ben Two Horses. Are you really the Aurora Campos who defeated the Heptarch's fleet over UT3-5XY? The Angel of the Phoenix nebula? Did you really find an alien civilization and escape from an Inquisitor, and have yourself thrown into space inside a meteor just so you could rescue your baby?”
Oh, embarrassment and joy rolled over her in equal measure. She had a fan! She'd thought she'd left all that hero-worship behind when she became a fallen woman, that her reputation was forever sullied and irredeemable. Though she hadn't liked being a symbol, a media sensation, having it back was like regaining a piece of her soul she hadn't known was lost. “Yeah, that was me. I'm still just trying to do my best to protect everyone, you know? Let's go show your people the state of their ship, so they don't try to do anything that's going to kill them. Okay?”
“Yes ma'am.”
They walked together along the hull to the ruin of the engine mountings. Every other step they had to jump or sidle over a vein of pontoth. The engine track looked even worse from close up. If the engines came on, it could rupture at any moment, and cut into the spongy ruination of the hull beneath it.
“It's amazing she's still holding air at all,” Aurora observed quietly as they walked 'downhill' towards a gun mount. “And you see that pitting? Try to fire that, it's going to blow backwards and outward, make a crater in the side. Just one would take out the gunnery deck, and they're all like this. I came here because I wanted to stop you from blowing up Cygnus 5, but right now I think if you try, you're the ones who're doomed.”
Ben bent down, his fingers stretched towards the gloopy mass oozing from the barrel of the pulse cannon, and she pulled him away with the reflection that kids never did think before they touched. “Don't get that on your suit.”
“Oh,” he straightened up and gave her a look almost as green as she was. “I-- I didn't-- ”
The comms feed on which Aurora had been keeping half an ear now burst into raucous noise. Crane had arrived, she thought, preparing herself to hear the other woman's cool and competent voice.
“Sir?” Ben was asking nervously, “Guys? Are you all right over there? Are you seeing this? This stuff is everywhere! What do I do?”
The feed crackled once more, the sounds of yelling and stunners, of blaster fire and combat giving way to the crackle of equipment fire and panting and quiet. Then the worst voice possible said “Aurora? It's you out there, right?”
She exchanged a glance with Ben. His camera had been seeing her face for the past half hour, so there was no point in denying it. “Yes, Keene. It's me.”
“It's one thing infiltrating a space station when no one knows you're coming. It's quite another trying to do it to my ship when I'm prepared. I've got your little friends here, caught red handed attempting piracy against a Kingdom ship. If you don't get down here and surrender to me in the next ten minutes, I’ll start killing one every minute until you arrive.”
The flesh of Aurora's back kept trying to draw itself up and reform around the pod on her shoulder. That was what it felt like, anyway, as she stood in the airlock with Ben, ignoring the pleading looks he kept sending her way. The pod was as mirrored as the rest of the suit, anyway. At a cursory glimpse there was nothing about it that said baby carrier. If she kept quiet about it, she might be able to rescue Crane and her people and get out again with no one the wiser. They might not take Autumn away from her again.
They wouldn't. She wasn't going to let them.
“I didn't know this--”
She huffed through her nose at Ben's downcast voice, then reached up to grapple with the seals of her helmet, unlatching them just as the pressure lights outside went green. “It's okay, kid. You're doing your best, I get that.”
“I could have let you launch off. You could be on that other ship right now, safe.”
Despite his discomfort, he was still taking little inquisitive glimpses of her green skin. She took off her gauntlets, both to show she wasn't carrying weapons and to free the acid-mouth in her left hand. “No I couldn't. I don't leave my men behind.”
“But they're pirates, aren't they? They deserve--”
“They're not pirates,” she let a stern coldness drop into her tone at that. “Maybe you didn't hear them announce themselves earlier. They're ambassadors from Snow City, which is a neutral state recognized by the Kingdom. They came to defend Cygnus Five because they have a treaty with us. They're just a little more hands on than most diplomats.”
The double clunk of the outer door deadlocking closed followed by the inner door unlocking sounded mushier than its usual crisp click. That was probably pontoth in the seals. She wondered if Bryant was aware of this in some way, would be able to control the actions of this distant batch to benefit her. It seemed too poor odds to gamble on. Instead she nudged the comm in her neck plate and whispered “Xan Hu?”
“They've got my people,” the reply came, so very calm it was like the event horizon of rage. “Get them out.”
“I'm going in after them,” Aurora agreed. “I don't have a plan right now, but--”
“I don't want to have to blow that ship up with you on it, but if it stops them bombing C5 and loosing that stuff on the galaxy, I will.”
Ben had been following this conversation with a frown of consternation as he flicked at the open buckles of his own gloves. Aurora glanced at him and away, full of a kind of miserable tenderness for the hopeful tilt of his young cheek. She was doing this for him too. “If you have to blow me up on here, know that I forgive you. Humanity comes first, of course.”
“Mm,” Xan Hu hummed, unimpressed.
The inner door hadn't opened an inch before it was crammed with the mouths of blasters. Aurora considered using Ben as a hostage but didn't have the heart. Instead, she curled one arm around her helmet and raised the unmodified hand. “Don't shoot. Ben's in here, and I'm
coming easy anyway.”
The blasters belonged to marines. They gestured her out, being careful not to come within grabbing distance and closed in a box around her to the point where she could barely see the knot of fellow middies and their lieutenant helping Ben out of his suit with eager curiosity. “Are you all right? She didn't hurt you?”
Ben whispered something sotto voce, and all their heads turned to watch her as she was marched off.
Her subconscious registered something desperately wrong with the bridge even before she'd fully stepped through the door. Crane and her eighteen man squad stood against the view-screen wall, stripped like she was of helmet and gauntlets but otherwise still suited. Their missing equipment was piled together in the aft pilot well, squashing the pilot in charge into a third of his station. But none of that gave her the creeps the way the dead monitors did. Even the main view-screen was blank, as though they were in an underground bunker rather than in outer space.
“You didn't let them see the footage of the pontoth,” she accused, turning in place to look at all those sources of vital information now silenced. “You sent Ben out but you didn't like what he saw, so you censored it.”
Keene was across the whole length of the bridge from her, separated by two lines of marines – one keeping the Red Cats at blaster-point, one aiming at her – but he had turned at her footfall. At her sudden stop, she heard Autumn snuffle in her ear, waking up, and switched off the audio link to the pod in case she cried and was heard.
“Associating with pirates now, my dear. How appropriate.”
The tremble of sheer rage that began in her heart and spread to her fingers via her lungs took her by surprise. That was new. “Snow City's ambassadors are protected by Kingdom treaty...” she paused, hoping Xan Hu was alert and had not been lying about this.
A sound of typing, followed by “Number 009475W598GHS5, dated 134 PF by your calendar, 12 Year of the transit of the Ox by ours,” and Aurora repeated the details as though she'd always had them to hand. “They came aboard to stop you from destroying this ship and all the people on her. Why are the screens blank?”
Keene's smug smile wiped out like the thin ice it was. “Helm,” he turned to the bow pilot, who was hunched over the navigator's seat with his hands in his hair. Aurora recalled that the calculation of a jump so precise it could be done within mere miles of a space station had taken Xan Hu three days. “Is that jump ready?”
“N-no, sir,” Helm raised a harried red face. “I-I'm not confident of all the factors yet. The other ships keep moving, and that damn p--” he cut himself off rather than say pirate ship, glancing at Aurora almost as if in apology. “Pursuer is-- I can't be sure of her mass or intentions.”
“Close enough will do,” Keene tutted at him, “I want jump on my mark.”
Helm's position was also a well, built deep to insulate him from chatter in normal working conditions and shrapnel in combat. He couldn't see his comrades out of it and only Aurora was close enough to see the horror in his eyes.
“Three,”
“Sir, I--”
“That might be safe if the Principality was strong enough to absorb a little stress,” Aurora rode over him. “But she's barely holding together as it is. Why are the screens blank?”
A stir by the door as Ben and his coterie of other kids edged past the guards. Ben had de-suited but was clutching the band of his helm camera in his hand, the box itself bouncing on his hip. Feeling blessed, she raised her eyebrows pointedly at Helm, urging him on.
“We were told the p-pursuing ship was jamming them, ma'am,” he said at last, her title slipping out by accident or habit. “And that if they did come back on we wouldn't be able to trust them. You said- You said they weren't reliable either.”
“I did, didn't I? Ben, that's your helmet cam, right? Why don't you show and tell everyone what you saw.”
“Two. One. Mark!”
Helm's hand hovered above the button and then slid aside as Keene came stomping up the deck like he was bending into a gale. “Did you just fail to carry out my order, major?”
“Sir,” the guy's face was as rigid and yet as mortified as the face of a raw recruit being yelled at by a drill instructor. But he found his footing and his voice was clear, “the safety of the jump is my responsibility. It is within my purview to overrule an unsafe jump for the safety of the vessel and crew.”
“Major Hewlett, you are relieved of duty. Report to the brig until I can deal with you. Aft pilot to helm.”
Aurora nodded to Hewlett as he passed – all she could do to acknowledge that someone had seen him do the right thing – and in the pause while the aft pilot extricated himself from the pile of helmets and walked up to take control, the sergeant in charge of Aurora's marines beckoned to Ben. “Let's see that then.”
“I can display it on the main screen,” Ben suggested in a tiny voice. “Just press here and--”
“I forbid...” said Keene, and trailed off when the recording began to play, showing the corpse of a ship that was barely holding itself together. It looked worse than Aurora had remembered it, when she had had other things on her mind. It looked much worse now she was helmet-less and inside the fragile craft.
“Shit,” said Hewlett, on his way out of the doors to put himself into jail. “Look at the engines! I was right to refuse. I was right!”
“Right to refuse a direct order? Right to mutiny?” Keene tried to recover his poise, but the effort itself was horrible in front of that screen full of seething decay. “I'll tell you what's right. We are the Kingdom. We do not bow to whores or pirates or green skinned freaks or alien spawn. We are going to take this ship to Cygnus Five--”
“A protectorate of Snow City under the treaty,” Crane called out. “Just to make that clear. You're talking about attacking a world under our protection. Starting another war with another ally.”
“And we're going to wipe this alien threat out of the galaxy--”
“All that will achieve is to remove the one thing that's slowing it down,” Aurora chimed in, feeling the atmosphere of the bridge come tentatively to her hand, like a nervous feral animal. “You saw what happened before we could get control of the InfiniTech stuff. Take out Cygnus Five and that's what will happen everywhere in the galaxy that this stuff has touched. All our stations, the home worlds, all the ships. You will doom yourselves and all mankind if you succeed. That's not what God wants of you. He didn't create all the brilliance in this galaxy and call it good just so we could wipe it out in his name.”
“You're in league with it!” Keene howled, losing his last shred of composure. It wasn't the first time she'd seen him like this, but it was the first time she'd been able to feel a kind of sorrow for him, as though he had lost everything at the moment he'd tried to take it away from her. She had risen from that defeat, and he had sunk.
“Look at you, you're not even human anymore. You're a devil. You always were a devil. I tried to cast you out, but--”
“What are you doing to fix it? The pontoth? You talk a good game about us not blowing up Cygnus Five, but how are you making it better?” Aurora’s marine sergeant sounded accusing, but he had put his gun back on his shoulder instead of in his hands, and he was actually inviting her to talk.
She wished she had better things to say. “We're studying it, hoping to be able to create an antigen to fight it. Mean time we're concentrating on slowing its operation down to give us as much time to find a solution as possible. Worst comes to the worst, we can try to slow it to the max. You know? If it has a half life of a couple of million years, we can ignore it because age and death'll get there first.
All the eyes on the bridge were on her now, torn between hope and disappointment. She slumped a little and let the exhaustion and despair of the last month show in her face. “Yeah, I wish I had a miracle cure to promise you, but I don't. It's not despair and it's not a fairy tale. It's just more hard work and hope, like life itself. That's how you know I'm telling you the truth.” She
licked her lips and watched Keene choke on the words that he couldn't quite spit out, knowing that no one was listening to him, that even his own bridge crew on his own ship were listening to her.
Probably, if she lived long enough, she'd look back on it as a moment of triumph, but right now she just wanted to get Autumn home in time for bed.
“But whatever you believe, this ship's about to fall apart around you. You're not going to achieve anything with this as your grave. Let us evac you back to Seraph base on the Red Cat, and the other Admirals can take it from there.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Morwen stages an escape
“With all due respect, ma'am,” Lali said, facing off against Leibniz while plaster dust rained down on them all and mixed into slurry with the blood puddling at their feet, “A small force will be faster, more mobile.”
“You'll leave us,” Leibniz had put on her diamond ring immediately after the battle, and it shone like a drop of clear water on the hand she'd folded over her walking stick. “If you take the ship with a small force, you'll leave the rest of us here the way the warden did.”
“I wouldn't!” Lali tried to wipe drying blood from beneath her nose. She was a far cry from Priya's delicacy, but Morwen liked that. It was nice to be the one who got rescued, sometimes.
“We don't know you,” O'Donnell agreed. “We trust Leibniz, not you. We all come, or none at all.”
Someone down on the command level was wrestling with the lifts, trying to redefine their programming to shut Morwen out. But more concerning was the list of OF tags scaling the long ladders that ran through the access tunnels parallel to them. If they knew they had to do that, they'd probably also come equipped with cutting equipment to get through her shut doors. “There's thirty guards converging on us right now,” she said. “So let's make a decision fast.”