Fic: Dirtsucker
Written for the prompt Vorkosigan Saga, Piotr Vorkosigan, leaving Barrayar.
Title: Dirtsucker
Content: PG
Length: 2100 words
Summary: Piotr in space.
General Count Piotr Vorkosigan had never broken atmosphere from his home planet in the twenty-six years since the first galactic travellers had jumped through the recently-opened wormhole. He preferred to keep his feet firmly on his own soil, with solid rock rather than cold vacuum around him.
Now he was in a shuttle about to leave the planet for orbit. Worse, he was disarmed and bruised, a prisoner, alone. His two men had been shoved into the adjoining cell, separated by a thin wall. Kly and Ezar--well, Kly would take care of Ezar, and nobody would be interested in a minor Vorbarra when they had the leader of the Resistance for a prize, bearing him off to the Ceta Admiral aboard his orbital station for preliminary interrogation. He was not going to be killed, the Cetas had assured him with feigned cheer. No, he was destined for the Celestial Garden to be presented to the Ceta Emperor as the greatest trophy of this war.
The shuttle's engines began to roar, and Piotr was glad he was alone then, because as the shuttle took off, the bottom fell out of his stomach. He swallowed frantically, but to no avail, and barely grabbed the waiting bag in time. They screamed up, the howling noise and pressure and dizziness overwhelming him, and even his sickness was not enough to distract him from the other sensations, all of them wretched. After several minutes the frenzied roar began to settle to a steady hum and the whirling subsided, but Piotr still felt awful.
There were two Ceta guards outside looking in, observing his pale sweating face and miserable huddle in the corner of the cell with obvious amusement.
"Dirtsucker," one said clearly over the intercom, then grinned and flicked a switch. Abruptly, Piotr was in free-fall. They'd turned off the artificial gravity in his cell. He muttered archaic Barrayaran curses: may plagues curdle their balls, may stranglevine devour their crops, may their children have three heads. He lost contact with his secure corner, drifted loose and retched again, but at least now he had nothing left to bring up. He struggled frantically to get a grip on something, anything, flailing around in the centre of the cell. The guards were doubled over laughing.
Rage filled him. He was Vor, he was a Count, he was Vorkosigan, and they were just two Ceta space-techs who would probably faint at the sight of blood. He'd killed thousands like them.
He collided with the wall again and scraped his arm against it, breaking open the half-healed gash from the other day. Blood began to run messily over his arm and float off into space. He huddled in the corner and retched again, then went still, blood smeared over his cheekbones like ghem-markings.
Time passed while he thought hard about how he'd moved in free-fall, and what had happened, remembering, analysing, planning.
"Hey! You hurt?" came the Ceta voice over the intercom again.
Piotr moaned, his head hanging.
"Shit. They wanted him alive," he heard one of the guards mutter. "You idiot!"
The cell door opened and one of the guards pushed in, moving competently in free-fall. Piotr watched him under his eyelids, moaning and mumbling thick curses in Barrayaran Russian, and braced his legs up behind his body against the wall.
The nearer guard came up beside him. Piotr waited and watched. Then he pushed with his legs, and his hands closed around the Ceta's neck. In a powerful twist he snapped it, and still holding the corpse he cannoned into the other guard, slamming him into the wall. They bounced, and the guard writhed and tried to jerk away, but Piotr got him in a headlock that cut off the blood to his brain. He blacked out and went limp, and Piotr grabbed his disruptor from his holster and shot him with it.
Thirty seconds later, armed with all the guards' weapons and the code-keys from their pockets, Piotr was out of his cell. A quick test found the right key for the adjoining cell, and he opened it.
"My lord," Kly said in awe--and, Piotr noticed, a fear that matched his own. Kly wasn't a spacer either, and he was green-faced and sweating, but he moved quickly out of the cell, eyes alert. Ezar said nothing, but he took the disruptor Piotr gave him.
"If we can take this shuttle," Piotr said, "can you get it back down onto the ground without killing us?"
Ezar nodded. Unlike Piotr, he'd had space training with Prince Xav and had learned norm-space piloting and engineering. The privileges of rank, if you considered it a privilege to float around empty vacuum in a tin can. But it was useful now.
"Good." Piotr's back-up plan had been to keep a Ceta alive to fly it for them, but that was much riskier. He'd had a good view of the shuttle as he'd boarded: small, not more than half a dozen spacers crewing it, two guards--well, they weren't a threat now. But he didn't know enough to be certain where to go next.
"This isn't my terrain," he muttered. "Ezar. You're guide. Where are we?"
Ezar pointed up the passage. "Cockpit's that way. That's where most of the crew will be, I'd expect. Could be the wardroom the other way. And engineering."
Piotr considered. "All right. Kly, you go down towards engineering. Kill anyone you see. Ezar, you're with me."
Armed with nerve disruptor, stunner and knife, Kly moved off on the more familiar task of killing Cetas. Piotr followed Ezar towards the cockpit. There wasn't any cover in this damned corridor. Indoor fighting, floating above his planet... at least the killing would be the same. They passed a third cell, empty, and a small round door. He pointed it out to Ezar, who shook his head.
"Access hatch."
They ran light-footed to the door at the end, and Ezar looked at Piotr, then moved in front of him. Piotr frowned but didn't argue. They took up firing positions and Ezar slid the door soundlessly open. There were three Cetas inside, sitting around a table doing paperwork, and a door beyond that Piotr supposed led into the cockpit itself. Ezar and Piotr opened fire on the same instant. The third man dove beneath the table with a shout, but Piotr leapt in after him, found his line and shot him too.
"He could have disturbed the others," Piotr whispered. "Quickly."
They burst on through the next hatch, but there was only one man there, bent over his console, headset on. The pilot. Ezar walked soundlessly up to him and stunned him before the man knew he was there. The pilot slumped, headset half-throttling him. Red warning lights bleeped on the display. Ezar slid instantly into the seat, grabbed the headset and shoved it over his head. "Shit," he muttered, "it's not like... oh. Okay." His hands found the controls. Piotr watched, furiously helpless.
"All yours," he said with feigned calm, clasping his hands behind his back and standing straight as Ezar struggled for control of the shuttle.
A minute later, Kly arrived, whistling a two-note signal to avoid being shot as Piotr whirled around. "All secure, my lord," he said to Piotr. "I found two Cetas in Engineering. Shot them both."
"Good. Ezar, what are our options now?"
"We're going to enter the sensor range of the Ceta mothership in two minutes," Ezar said. "I don't have the correct responses to their challenge even if we wanted to try to board."
"Can you land this shuttle? Away from the Ceta base?"
"It'll land anywhere flat," Ezar said. "But if they notice anything--there's a destroyer that can launch assault shuttles and pick us off before we can land. Not to mention missiles and armed aircars from the base."
Piotr frowned. "Fake a problem. Let them think the shuttle is crashing. Then bring us down..." Piotr paused, thinking. He might not know space, but he knew his planet. They'd been taken from the Ceta shuttleport they'd built near the village of Tanery, and all the surrounding District was full of Cetagandans and their sympathisers. But little more than a hundred miles north were the Dendarii mountains. "Bring us down near Newchester, then."
Ezar's eyes flashed from the console to his face for a moment, but he didn't argue. Newchester was in a deep, narrow valley in the southern arm of the Dendarii mountains; it would take skilful piloting to bring them down there, and there were guerrilla positions all around it. But if Ezar couldn't pull it off they would be dead anyway, or prisoners again, and Piotr wasn't going to let himself be taken alive twice.
Now to wait. Piotr had waited while men carried out his orders before, but on this unfamiliar battlefield he had no way to judge how it was going.
"Strap yourselves in, please," Ezar said, then looked at the console again. "Ah. This shuttle is armed after all, but it's a two-man affair. My lord--" He made a gesture.
Piotr sat in the indicated place. He was going to get a chance to shoot back, then. He looked at the gunner's console. The instruments were not like those he had seen before, but if there was anything he knew how to do, it was shoot Cetagandans. As Ezar started to fake the shuttle problem, he began to work out how to use the weapons he had, barely hearing Ezar muttering into his headset.
"They seem to be buying it so far," Ezar said after a few minutes. "But when we head into the mountains it will all go to hell."
Piotr gave a choppy nod. The shuttle was shaking about now as part of the problem Ezar was faking, and it was harder to focus on his console as they tumbled towards Barrayar. Piotr charted their progress by Ezar's face, pale and set with concentration, but calm. The din became overwhelming as they entered the atmosphere, and Piotr refused to let himself think about what would happen if this went wrong. Better dead on his own soil than alive in Ceta captivity.
The tumbling stopped, the shuttle levelled out, and suddenly Piotr caught a glimpse of red-brown hills through the viewport. Kly gave a whoop. "Not there yet," Ezar muttered.
Piotr gave his full attention to the weapons console now, trying to identify what was around them. There was the Ceta base, that was the direction Ezar was taking them....
"Time for the fun, my lord," Ezar said suddenly in the light, amused voice that meant they were in serious shit, and the shuttle swerved wildly. Something exploded not far away. The Cetas were firing on them from the base. Piotr began to select his targets, then launched the shuttle's rockets. One was destroyed by a counter-missile, but the other hit near the Ceta missile emplacement.
"Ha," Piotr muttered under his breath, trying a second shot at the other emplacement, but Ezar thrust the shuttle forwards and they were out of range. Then new icons appeared on his screen, and he stared at them in bemusement.
"Fighters," Ezar said. "I'm going low. Let them get stuck in the treetops."
The wild chase over the hill country only lasted a few minutes, but it felt like hours as Piotr tried to get clear shots at their pursuers and Ezar tried to shake them off by weaving in and out of valleys, always working his way north towards Newchester. Piotr damaged one of the pursuing fighters, and another lost their trail, but the third managed a direct hit, and Ezar swore as the shuttle rocked and red lights began to flash.
"Come on, only a few more minutes," Piotr muttered to the shuttle as if coaxing a foundering horse. The hills were growing steeper and the valleys narrower, and Ezar was flying like a man possessed. Piotr gave a low whistle as they swerved wildly into a ravine, then suddenly he had a clear shot at the last fighter. He gave a fierce grin and fired. The Ceta fighter went up in a fireball, so close that some of his instruments were blinded, and then they were in Newchester.
The shuttle skidded and rolled over onto its side on landing, and there was an awkward climb to get out. Piotr dropped first down from the hatch and landed rolling on Barrayaran turf, ignoring the gasps from the local guerrilla fighters who had come out to capture the occupants of the shuttle and found their leader instead. He didn't get up for a minute, just sat there and pressed the palms of his hands into the red moss. He was home.
Ezar extended a hand to pull him to his feet, grinning exultantly.
"So that's space," Piotr said to him. "Not bad for a first attempt, but I think I'll stay a dirtsucker."
Crossposted at http://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/68500.html
Title: Dirtsucker
Content: PG
Length: 2100 words
Summary: Piotr in space.
General Count Piotr Vorkosigan had never broken atmosphere from his home planet in the twenty-six years since the first galactic travellers had jumped through the recently-opened wormhole. He preferred to keep his feet firmly on his own soil, with solid rock rather than cold vacuum around him.
Now he was in a shuttle about to leave the planet for orbit. Worse, he was disarmed and bruised, a prisoner, alone. His two men had been shoved into the adjoining cell, separated by a thin wall. Kly and Ezar--well, Kly would take care of Ezar, and nobody would be interested in a minor Vorbarra when they had the leader of the Resistance for a prize, bearing him off to the Ceta Admiral aboard his orbital station for preliminary interrogation. He was not going to be killed, the Cetas had assured him with feigned cheer. No, he was destined for the Celestial Garden to be presented to the Ceta Emperor as the greatest trophy of this war.
The shuttle's engines began to roar, and Piotr was glad he was alone then, because as the shuttle took off, the bottom fell out of his stomach. He swallowed frantically, but to no avail, and barely grabbed the waiting bag in time. They screamed up, the howling noise and pressure and dizziness overwhelming him, and even his sickness was not enough to distract him from the other sensations, all of them wretched. After several minutes the frenzied roar began to settle to a steady hum and the whirling subsided, but Piotr still felt awful.
There were two Ceta guards outside looking in, observing his pale sweating face and miserable huddle in the corner of the cell with obvious amusement.
"Dirtsucker," one said clearly over the intercom, then grinned and flicked a switch. Abruptly, Piotr was in free-fall. They'd turned off the artificial gravity in his cell. He muttered archaic Barrayaran curses: may plagues curdle their balls, may stranglevine devour their crops, may their children have three heads. He lost contact with his secure corner, drifted loose and retched again, but at least now he had nothing left to bring up. He struggled frantically to get a grip on something, anything, flailing around in the centre of the cell. The guards were doubled over laughing.
Rage filled him. He was Vor, he was a Count, he was Vorkosigan, and they were just two Ceta space-techs who would probably faint at the sight of blood. He'd killed thousands like them.
He collided with the wall again and scraped his arm against it, breaking open the half-healed gash from the other day. Blood began to run messily over his arm and float off into space. He huddled in the corner and retched again, then went still, blood smeared over his cheekbones like ghem-markings.
Time passed while he thought hard about how he'd moved in free-fall, and what had happened, remembering, analysing, planning.
"Hey! You hurt?" came the Ceta voice over the intercom again.
Piotr moaned, his head hanging.
"Shit. They wanted him alive," he heard one of the guards mutter. "You idiot!"
The cell door opened and one of the guards pushed in, moving competently in free-fall. Piotr watched him under his eyelids, moaning and mumbling thick curses in Barrayaran Russian, and braced his legs up behind his body against the wall.
The nearer guard came up beside him. Piotr waited and watched. Then he pushed with his legs, and his hands closed around the Ceta's neck. In a powerful twist he snapped it, and still holding the corpse he cannoned into the other guard, slamming him into the wall. They bounced, and the guard writhed and tried to jerk away, but Piotr got him in a headlock that cut off the blood to his brain. He blacked out and went limp, and Piotr grabbed his disruptor from his holster and shot him with it.
Thirty seconds later, armed with all the guards' weapons and the code-keys from their pockets, Piotr was out of his cell. A quick test found the right key for the adjoining cell, and he opened it.
"My lord," Kly said in awe--and, Piotr noticed, a fear that matched his own. Kly wasn't a spacer either, and he was green-faced and sweating, but he moved quickly out of the cell, eyes alert. Ezar said nothing, but he took the disruptor Piotr gave him.
"If we can take this shuttle," Piotr said, "can you get it back down onto the ground without killing us?"
Ezar nodded. Unlike Piotr, he'd had space training with Prince Xav and had learned norm-space piloting and engineering. The privileges of rank, if you considered it a privilege to float around empty vacuum in a tin can. But it was useful now.
"Good." Piotr's back-up plan had been to keep a Ceta alive to fly it for them, but that was much riskier. He'd had a good view of the shuttle as he'd boarded: small, not more than half a dozen spacers crewing it, two guards--well, they weren't a threat now. But he didn't know enough to be certain where to go next.
"This isn't my terrain," he muttered. "Ezar. You're guide. Where are we?"
Ezar pointed up the passage. "Cockpit's that way. That's where most of the crew will be, I'd expect. Could be the wardroom the other way. And engineering."
Piotr considered. "All right. Kly, you go down towards engineering. Kill anyone you see. Ezar, you're with me."
Armed with nerve disruptor, stunner and knife, Kly moved off on the more familiar task of killing Cetas. Piotr followed Ezar towards the cockpit. There wasn't any cover in this damned corridor. Indoor fighting, floating above his planet... at least the killing would be the same. They passed a third cell, empty, and a small round door. He pointed it out to Ezar, who shook his head.
"Access hatch."
They ran light-footed to the door at the end, and Ezar looked at Piotr, then moved in front of him. Piotr frowned but didn't argue. They took up firing positions and Ezar slid the door soundlessly open. There were three Cetas inside, sitting around a table doing paperwork, and a door beyond that Piotr supposed led into the cockpit itself. Ezar and Piotr opened fire on the same instant. The third man dove beneath the table with a shout, but Piotr leapt in after him, found his line and shot him too.
"He could have disturbed the others," Piotr whispered. "Quickly."
They burst on through the next hatch, but there was only one man there, bent over his console, headset on. The pilot. Ezar walked soundlessly up to him and stunned him before the man knew he was there. The pilot slumped, headset half-throttling him. Red warning lights bleeped on the display. Ezar slid instantly into the seat, grabbed the headset and shoved it over his head. "Shit," he muttered, "it's not like... oh. Okay." His hands found the controls. Piotr watched, furiously helpless.
"All yours," he said with feigned calm, clasping his hands behind his back and standing straight as Ezar struggled for control of the shuttle.
A minute later, Kly arrived, whistling a two-note signal to avoid being shot as Piotr whirled around. "All secure, my lord," he said to Piotr. "I found two Cetas in Engineering. Shot them both."
"Good. Ezar, what are our options now?"
"We're going to enter the sensor range of the Ceta mothership in two minutes," Ezar said. "I don't have the correct responses to their challenge even if we wanted to try to board."
"Can you land this shuttle? Away from the Ceta base?"
"It'll land anywhere flat," Ezar said. "But if they notice anything--there's a destroyer that can launch assault shuttles and pick us off before we can land. Not to mention missiles and armed aircars from the base."
Piotr frowned. "Fake a problem. Let them think the shuttle is crashing. Then bring us down..." Piotr paused, thinking. He might not know space, but he knew his planet. They'd been taken from the Ceta shuttleport they'd built near the village of Tanery, and all the surrounding District was full of Cetagandans and their sympathisers. But little more than a hundred miles north were the Dendarii mountains. "Bring us down near Newchester, then."
Ezar's eyes flashed from the console to his face for a moment, but he didn't argue. Newchester was in a deep, narrow valley in the southern arm of the Dendarii mountains; it would take skilful piloting to bring them down there, and there were guerrilla positions all around it. But if Ezar couldn't pull it off they would be dead anyway, or prisoners again, and Piotr wasn't going to let himself be taken alive twice.
Now to wait. Piotr had waited while men carried out his orders before, but on this unfamiliar battlefield he had no way to judge how it was going.
"Strap yourselves in, please," Ezar said, then looked at the console again. "Ah. This shuttle is armed after all, but it's a two-man affair. My lord--" He made a gesture.
Piotr sat in the indicated place. He was going to get a chance to shoot back, then. He looked at the gunner's console. The instruments were not like those he had seen before, but if there was anything he knew how to do, it was shoot Cetagandans. As Ezar started to fake the shuttle problem, he began to work out how to use the weapons he had, barely hearing Ezar muttering into his headset.
"They seem to be buying it so far," Ezar said after a few minutes. "But when we head into the mountains it will all go to hell."
Piotr gave a choppy nod. The shuttle was shaking about now as part of the problem Ezar was faking, and it was harder to focus on his console as they tumbled towards Barrayar. Piotr charted their progress by Ezar's face, pale and set with concentration, but calm. The din became overwhelming as they entered the atmosphere, and Piotr refused to let himself think about what would happen if this went wrong. Better dead on his own soil than alive in Ceta captivity.
The tumbling stopped, the shuttle levelled out, and suddenly Piotr caught a glimpse of red-brown hills through the viewport. Kly gave a whoop. "Not there yet," Ezar muttered.
Piotr gave his full attention to the weapons console now, trying to identify what was around them. There was the Ceta base, that was the direction Ezar was taking them....
"Time for the fun, my lord," Ezar said suddenly in the light, amused voice that meant they were in serious shit, and the shuttle swerved wildly. Something exploded not far away. The Cetas were firing on them from the base. Piotr began to select his targets, then launched the shuttle's rockets. One was destroyed by a counter-missile, but the other hit near the Ceta missile emplacement.
"Ha," Piotr muttered under his breath, trying a second shot at the other emplacement, but Ezar thrust the shuttle forwards and they were out of range. Then new icons appeared on his screen, and he stared at them in bemusement.
"Fighters," Ezar said. "I'm going low. Let them get stuck in the treetops."
The wild chase over the hill country only lasted a few minutes, but it felt like hours as Piotr tried to get clear shots at their pursuers and Ezar tried to shake them off by weaving in and out of valleys, always working his way north towards Newchester. Piotr damaged one of the pursuing fighters, and another lost their trail, but the third managed a direct hit, and Ezar swore as the shuttle rocked and red lights began to flash.
"Come on, only a few more minutes," Piotr muttered to the shuttle as if coaxing a foundering horse. The hills were growing steeper and the valleys narrower, and Ezar was flying like a man possessed. Piotr gave a low whistle as they swerved wildly into a ravine, then suddenly he had a clear shot at the last fighter. He gave a fierce grin and fired. The Ceta fighter went up in a fireball, so close that some of his instruments were blinded, and then they were in Newchester.
The shuttle skidded and rolled over onto its side on landing, and there was an awkward climb to get out. Piotr dropped first down from the hatch and landed rolling on Barrayaran turf, ignoring the gasps from the local guerrilla fighters who had come out to capture the occupants of the shuttle and found their leader instead. He didn't get up for a minute, just sat there and pressed the palms of his hands into the red moss. He was home.
Ezar extended a hand to pull him to his feet, grinning exultantly.
"So that's space," Piotr said to him. "Not bad for a first attempt, but I think I'll stay a dirtsucker."
Crossposted at http://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/68500.html