The hounds bay in the distance, gaining ground, the howls louder with each footfall the five Resistance members hobble onwards.
The Recruit is shuddering with fatigue and the rest of them aren't much better off, The General's injured form pressing down on them all. Everything about him is wet now, the movement of his body, the hack in his throat, the way his eyes loll aimlessly in their sockets. The marsh pulls at them, the mire of the ground dragging their progress backwards with grasping, muddy fingers.
"We need to either find concealment or disguise our trail," The Gunner warns the Pilot when they pause to collectively take their breath, the Pilot lying the General against a scrubby bush that drags at the edges of her clothes. "Conglomerate tracking hounds will eviscerate us if we keep wandering blindly."
Seeing the Recruit's wide eyes, the Pilot shoots the Gunner a reproachful look which the women returns with a baleful one of her own, daring her to baby the Recruit, especially given how they have all witnessed horrors today and are struggling for survival as war rages around them.
"I think disguising our trail unlikely," The Mechanics says, looking to the vermillion stains the General has left all around them. The Recruit is morbidly surprised the General still has any blood left to bleed. He looks so wan in the fading light as to be putrid with paleness.
The Pilot's eyes snap to him, the Mechanics ire at the General's press ever the igniting wick between them. "Concealment, then," she says icily, polar ice caps shifting in her words.
"You know that will not work," The Mechanic repostes, the challenging tone in his voice leaving them all tired at the pettiness that lurks behind his proposed nobility. "We have to keep moving, find a stream, get into the denser foliage of the forests. Conglomerate hounds are bred for tracking. With his blood all over us, any place we hide will be lit with beacons."
The Gunner has a considering look on her face as if she does not want to agree with the Mechanic but knows he speaks the truth. Clearly the Pilot knows that concealment will be a death sentence for them all, but does not want to condemn the General to death, her compassionate streak as bright as a viburta seam in the mountains. The Recruit does not know what to do, shivering in his wet boots with exhaustion a layer of fatigue coating his skin and sinking into his muscles.
The Pilot grits her teeth, running a hand through her lank hair, water and sweat making saltlocks on her head. "His life," The Mechanic says lowly, "weighed against yours."
The undercurrent of meaning in that one ultimatum is indecipherable to the Recruit and the Gunner but has the General wheezing sloppily behind them and the Pilot looking furiously at the Mechanic, hating him for guessing her secret, knowing it for an eventuality but hoping to maintain it nonetheless. "I do not barter my life for others," she hisses to the Mechanic. "We just have to think-,"
"The time for thinking is done," The Mechanic says in a harsh rasp. "And I do barter with lives."
In their small circle, the Mechanic is closest to the General, the Pilot having paced to the other side as his antithesis, her anxiety turned into pacing. She sees his intent but distance inhibits her ability to stop him. Her lunge is too slow, a strange contrast to her quick mind and her hand is still reaching out as the inevitability of the Mechanic's movements play out.
He reaches to the General, burying the snub nose of his pistol into the rolls of flesh in the General's neck and executes.
The discharge of plasma wafts in the air, three stunned faces looking at a dead one.
The pulse pistol makes barely a sound as it fires, only a sharp zing, being so close to flesh. The General slumps over, a toy with its joints suddenly liquid and collapses into the scrubby brush, branches propping him up obscenely, his clothes and flesh sagging over the limbs to trail in the marshy water.
The Recruit can barely breathe, looking at the General's vacated body. Even The Gunner seems shocked, her eyes unnaturally wide.
The Pilot surges forward, a flash of fury so pure it ozonates on her face. "You monster," she spits at the Mechanic. "That was execution."
The Mechanic intercepts her and grabs her hard on her wounded arm. His thumbnail digs in and opens the wound fresh and her liquid anger transforms into a fog of agony. She slumps to her knees, The Mechanic holding her by her arm, crimson runneling down the upper half of her arm. When The Gunner steps forward, The Mechanic points his pistol between The Pilot's eyes, stopping the bigger woman cold.
The Recruit is frozen, watching the tableau in front of him. The Pilot looks up at the Mechanic with something approaching hate, a deep well of grief in her despite the painful position she is in. The loss of the General is still too fresh and open wounds create vicious anger in their meager group. The Mechanics face is cool and calculating, tinged with a smugness that is sickening given the death all around.
"You know as well as I do that he would have gotten us all killed," The Mechanic says, addressing all of them although the pistol aimed at the Pilot doesn't waver. She glares back, naked rancor on her face.
"It does not absolve murder," The Pilot hisses back, those multi-colored irises blazing like opaline stars. It does not matter that she is on her knees, his thumb deep inside the laceration on her forearm; she is the leader, calm, cool and merciless.
The Mechanic wrenches hard on her wound and the Pilot barely chokes off a gasp, The Recruit screaming at the Mechanic in denial on her behalf. The Gunner surges forward again, something protective on her face as she looks at the Pilot's twisted expression. There is a tipping point here, a change in the viscera that hold them tenuously together changing, ripping, stretching.
"But he wasn't the only one hiding his identity." The Mechanic's grey eyes burn on the Pilot. "Was he, Senator?"
The Pilot's face doesn't change, her pearlescent eyes twin fires in her pale face, something regal suddenly there despite the grime and sweat lines. Then she laughs humorlessly, a mocking smile creasing her lips.
The Mechanic tightens his grip on the pistol, pushing the barrel against the Pilot's forehead. "You think you figured it out?" she laughs at him. The Gunner and The Mechanic both watch with bated breath, The Gunner's hands steady on her ion rifle, posture ready to move, unsure which way that will be.
"You're the Senator," The Mechanic accuses, but the surety in his voice is fading at the way she ridicules him. "You're The Prince's wife."
"And what would the Prince's wife possibly be doing in a Resistance battle with the Conglomerate?" She asks. "Put that gun away, you're making a fool of yourself."
She slowly rises to her feet without moving her upper body, and The Mechanic keeps the gun on her although he allows her to rise. "That was what the General meant," The Mechanic says, searching her face for a tell that does not surface on the impassive pool of her liquid eyes.
"That was what he was meant to believe," The Pilot hisses at him. "Because we did not trust our secrets to spies nor to cowards."
The Mechanic looks like he wants to strangle her, all thoughts of the approaching Conglomerate danger subsumed by rage at her dismissiveness. The Gunner grabs him, bodily pulling him back with the inexorability of a glacier. "What do you mean?" she asks the Pilot. "If you are not the Senator, then who are you?"
The woman in question has dark brows furrowed over those characteristic eyes, eyes that have always set the Senator of Saa'be out among her counterparts. So'uan people do not have those eyes; only the Ji'ambii tribespeople do, that rare color that is not a color and all the colors at the same time. It is so rare that it is a defining characteristic of the Senator, those opaline eyes that glitter like lobona shells underwater. There can be no doubt that she is the Senator; those eyes are famous from the holo screens, the most remarked on characteristic she possesses.
"A body double," The Mechanic spits, the first to put the pieces together.
"A body double?" The Recruit asks in wonder. "Is it possible?"
The Gunner narrows her eyes at the woman who they know as the Pilot. "Those eyes are exceedingly rare among even the Ji'ambii," she says, her own pale skin a strong indication she knows this considering she is a tribeswoman herself. "No So'uan have those eyes. How did they find someone so similar in feature to the Senator?"
The Double, no longer just the Pilot, lifts her chin. "Lens," she says simply. "The Senator found someone who looked as close to her height, body type, coloring, everything else. The Prince is an alchemist; he created a special lens that changes my eye color." She meets their eyes one at a time, as if to underscore the strangeness of the color of her own. "Now, if we have spent enough time examining my credentials, The General is dead and the Conglomerate is coming."
"But why are they after you?" The Recruit asks, forgetting to be tactful. "How did we not notice you were the Senator's body double?"
The Double looks at him, something he cannot read on her face. Then she pulls a small device from her ear, something that looks like an earring. The moment she does, the Recruit feels as if a veil has lifted. The perception filter dissipates, the charade done, and features that were fuzzed in his memory now crystalize, the slope of her neck, the strong jawline, the dark brows now all easily recognizable in his memory. "Distortionary perception filter," The Double says quietly. "You've been seeing my face all alone, but the filter distorts your ability to remember it as the Senator's face. I did not intend to deceive you, but it was necessary to ensure that no one, not even our flight team truly knew who I was or it would compromise the mission."
"And what was the mission?" The Gunner asks, keying into the question that The Double did not answer.
A baying breaks the silence and the scent of the General's blood wafts towards them ominously. The Double looks over her shoulder at the approaching torch light of the Conglomerate guards. "I will tell you when we are safe," she hedges a promise. "For now, we need to move."