Alicia Ann Fox
originally appeared in Gambit
The flight deck was still as a tomb is still, filled with the death that had appeared on the viewscreen. No-one moved at first, they had been stunned as if by a heavy blow. At last Tarrant's fumbling fingers of themselves manually cut off the gory image of Blake's execution, replacing it with a black void sprinkled with delicate multicolored lights.
Vila said weakly, "I feel sick." The sight of spurting blood had caused his face to become like white chalk.
"That was Blake, wasn't it?" Dayna asked. "You're sure?"
"Oh yes," Cally said in a choked voice. "It had to be. Did you see the teleport bracelet?"
Avon had been standing before the screen; he now turned and wandered to the flight deck couch and sat, rather too suddenly to be as casual as he wished to appear. "Didn't do him any good, did it?" he said harshly, accusingly.
Cally ignored this unnecessary assault. "I didn't feel anything," she said quietly and painfully to the room in general. "I thought that I might have done."
Vila blanched, if it were possible, even further. "You mean when Gan--"
Cally seemed to shake herself out of some inner vision. Turning to Vila she said quietly, "No. No, there was nothing." Except from Blake himself.
"What are we going to do now?" Tarrant asked, when he could speak. The effect of the transmission on his recently met crewmates had shaken him; he hadn't realized exactly the mythical power Blake had held over them. Tarrant had already seen Cally's dedication and indomitable will, Avon's arrogant self-sufficiency. Both of them, bereft in the flash of projectile fire of their former leader, had crumbled.
Zen had overridden the combat scenario which Liberator's crew had been involved with and filled the viewscreen with a transmission directed to them from the anti-Federation government on Plautus. At first there was no visual, only a voice speaking out of a logo of green and gold stripes.
"Witness the death of a murderer! A man who shames the rebellion! A false leader who assaulted mere children, and destroyed our protection against the Andromedan invaders!
Tarrant forced the vision that had followed from his memory. He didn't want to remember that he, like Avon and the others, had been hoping to find Blake alive so that the crew of the Liberator once again could accomplish the impossible. His tentative aspirations had been yanked from beneath his feet, and there was no one to depend upon but himself, a ridiculously young master pilot. "What are we going to do now?" he asked.
Cally lifted her head, encompassing the flight deck with her eyes. "Blake must have companions for his death," she stated.
From his seat Avon said in a persuasive eerie purr, "But Cally, the rebellion killed him. Whom exactly are you planning to kill in return?"
"It can't do any good! He's dead, can't we just forget all this?!" Vila looked toward the exit as if to leave, but was obviously afraid to run away.
Cally, to Vila's greater distress, ignored him. She advanced towards Avon with a measured tread, staring at him as if she had never seen him before. "Individuals killed Blake," she said in an uncharacteristically harsh tone, "and it was not his time to die. Therefore he was murdered. I will kill his murderers, if you must know, Avon."
Avon opened his mouth to reply, then closed it. For once in his life, he had nothing to say.
"You really did hate him, didn't you?"
There was a frozen pause before Avon, enraged, surged from the couch, but once on his feet he stood foolishly.
"I'm sorry," Cally said to Vila, almost inaudibly. "That was uncalled for, wasn't it?"
"I should say so," Avon replied in a brittle voice, desperately reasserting himself after his loss of control. Firmly he clasped his hands behind his back. "Perhaps we should discuss this from a different angle."
"Perhaps we shouldn't discuss this at all," Vila said. "Perhaps we shouldn't be trying to kill each other because--because Blake--"
Dayna interjected quickly, "None of you are making much sense. You've had a shock, so have Tarrant and I, maybe we should talk about this later."
"I could use a drink," Vila said, as if to himself.
"No, Vila--" Cally began.
Accusingly he looked at her. "Why not?" He wandered down to the viewscreen area and ventured to poke Avon in the arm. "C'mon, I need a social drink, then. I've got some good stuff, Avon."
"You would."
"Cally?"
"Vila--"
"Oh, get off it, Cally!" More quietly he said, "It will do you good."
She said nothing. Vila exited quickly, ostensibly to fetch his "good stuff", but as soon as he was out of hearing range of the flight deck he sank to the floor and put his head in his hands. "Oh my God," he said in a muffled voice. He had the despairing feeling that Cally and Avon were refusing to believe what they had seen, but Vila had felt the impact like a blow to the gut. He and Blake had had their differences, to be sure, but that hadn't meant he hadn't liked the man personally.
He didn't want to weep, didn't want to be ridiculed for his base grief. He hadn't witnessed the extinguishing of the rebellion's great light in the darkness, he'd seen the death of Roj Blake, who'd come back to a desolate prison planet for the sake of a herd of common criminals.
Among those common criminals had been Vila Restal.
After an interminable time he got to his feet and trudged wearily to his cabin, trying not to think of what was probably happening on the flight deck. He listlessly extracted a bottle of brandy from its hiding place and poured himself two fingers worth, which he recklessly swallowed all at once without his usual ritual of inhaling and tasting in tiny sips.
The liquor steadied him, warming his cold insides. He stood and rubbed his eyes. "Damn crazy rebels," he snarled. "Bloody murderers."
Avon didn't see Vila's return, but he closed his hand around the glass that the thief put into it. He lifted it slightly, as if in a toast, before he drank it down in one swallow. Feeling as if he had been dropped from a great height, he leaned back in to the couch abruptly. "Cally's right," he found himself saying. "We have to go after those bastards. We can't let this stand." He waited for someone to demur. No one did; perhaps Vila hadn't heard.
Dejectedly, Vila mumbled at last, "I don't like it. But they murdered him, for no good reason."
Tarrant said, "If we're criminals, we should act like criminals, and strike back," and immediately stared back down into his glass, swirling the liquid.
"It leaves a bad taste," Dayna commented, not referring to the brandy, which she wasn't drinking, "but we don't have any choice. We can't let this go. We wouldn't let the Federation get away with this. It would be hypocritical to let the rebellion get away with killing one of us."
Avon wore a sour expression but he didn't rebut her statement. "Zen," he commanded, "give me the origin of the transmission we have just seen."
"The City of Light on the planet Plautus."
"I'll set a course," Tarrant said, his voice seeming very loud.
"And when we arrive?" Cally asked, addressing Avon alone.
For a moment he looked blank. "We find out how they managed to get hold of Blake in the first place. Then we look for who gave the order."
Reluctantly Cally took the glass that Vila had been holding out to her and drank it quickly. She coughed, and her expression settled into something a little less like implacable death. "I'll do it," she said. "Don't try to argue with me."
"Cally, not alone!" Dayna protested. "We're all in this together, aren't we? I'll go with you."
"Only one of us need be responsible for this death, or these deaths," she replied steadily. "And there will be less danger if I go alone."
Vila was unable to speak; though he saw the necessity for revenge, he thought the whole idea was the height of lunacy. He didn't want to do it himself...but he didn't want Cally to do it either...a meteorite crashing in to the City of Light would have served the purpose nicely.
"There's no argument," Avon said from his outsider's stance near the viewscreen, "but you're not going alone. That would be incredible stupidity."
In an even yet confrontational tone Cally answered, "Not stupidity. Caution."
Flatly he replied, "I'm going with you."
A precipitous silence fell. "All right," Cally yielded.
#
The City of Light was less impressive than its name suggested, less ethereal and bright, less tall. Roseate brick was the major building material, a legacy of the faraway time when colonists were encouraged to use local materials rather than pre-fabricated domes with built in systems for the distribution of mind-dulling suppressant gases. The architecture was rectangular; the streets broad, regularly patterned, and lined with indigenous shrubbery. Harsh white light spilled from lights set into building walls onto the sidewalks, casting delineated shadows. The air smelled of industry.
Avon leaned against a rather dirty wall, in the dark. Cally stood partially in shadow and fastened her coat over the gun at her hip. "Let's go, " she said.
Wordlessly Avon followed her down the street, alternately squinting and trying to recover his vision from the bright lights. They were an effective deterrent to innocent pedestrians as well as to thieves, it seemed. If these two particular pedestrians could by any stretch of the imagination be called innocent.
The brisk walk was calming his nerves, Avon decided. Adrenaline made him hyperaware of his surroundings; every breath of wind shivered along his skin. Consciously he mediated his breathing as they neared the monstrous squatting administrative building, built of the same pink brick with the addition of a columned fa