by Sara King
The fact that David had abandoned Fortune worried her. He’d been living here continuously since twenty-eight sixty-eight, six years after it was given to the Alphas as a reward for saving the universe from Emperor Giu Xi and his Triton acquisition-squads. Natalia snorted bitterly, remembering how quickly they’d taken it back, once Yolk was discovered. Humanity’s gratitude had been fleeting, at best.
But David had hung on. He’d stubbornly refused to leave when the Coalition requisitioned the planet, and when Orion had tried to oust him, he had single-handedly taken out whole packs of his glittering lapdogs, again and again, until Orion had eventually backed down. David had bled for this place, had been willing to die for it. A hundred and thirty-eight years on Fortune, then suddenly he just vanishes. She didn’t buy the story with Geo’s goons—there wasn’t a knife-wielding thug in the universe capable of stopping David Landborn, which meant he’d used it as an excuse to disappear.
But why? Orion stopped giving a shit about David and his mini-vendetta on the backwater planet of Fortune when it became clear Landborn wasn’t going to interfere with the Yolk trade. Besides, his ‘revolution’ was so far removed from reality that it was something Orion laughed about with his lieutenants over drinks at night, a good diversion for a chronic rabble-rouser. True, Colonel Bagham Steele had arrived recently with orders to ‘investigate,’ but Steele wasn’t even in the same playing field as Landborn. Most people in the know actually thought it was Orion trying to make Steele disappear.
Except it had been David that disappeared.
Which, really, could only mean one thing. Sirius had called him in. But what kind of emergency would make David drop everything and leave? Usually, she could sense the AlphaGens’ presence if they were on a planet, and ninety percent of the time could give the Alpha’s name if she got within a mile. Hell, it had been her job to locate Triton spies hiding in human cities, but in three weeks, she hadn’t been able to find a trace of David, anywhere. That pain in the ass Kestrel and Sirius’ abomination, yes. David, no.
So Landborn had left Fortune. That had instantly made Natalia sit up and take notice. Further, beginning about the same time she arrived on Fortune, she had got feelings of something else on the planet. Not an Alpha, but different. Dangerously different. She’d started to hunt it down, thinking she was dealing with an escaped Triton, but it had vanished before she could pinpoint it, only to have it show up again in the middle of her conversation with Patrick, this time coming from the Orbital. Her battle instincts told her to go up there and find it and kill it, immediately, but her gut told her Patrick was more important right now. Patrick and that damned key.
Besides. Orion was watching. She had to play her cards just right, or her painstaking efforts to remain neutral within the two brothers’ fiefdoms would come crashing down around her shoulders.
Natalia cursed inwardly. The key showing up on her kitchen counter hadn’t been what had spooked her. It had been the neatly-folded picture underneath it, with Landborn’s rigid signature in the lower corner. The picture had been of the Sun Dogs’ emblem—a dog’s head outlined across a multi-rayed sun. It had a tovlar katana broken in half in the dog’s mouth, representing the pre-broken, manufactured tovlar swords that were put inside the caskets of fallen Alphas in memory of their service. Sitting neatly atop it had been a single citrine crystal. It could mean only one thing…
David Landborn was going off to war…and he expected to die.
But how? The Tritons were dead. David was a nuisance, but as long as he stayed in the Outer Bounds, Orion had ignored him. Even David’s petty vendetta against the Coalition seemed to have been forgotten in favor of something else…
“So yeah,” Patrick said, coming up beside her, “you certainly wouldn’t know it by looking, but there’s actually a cave in there.” Patrick gestured towards the jungle cave that Natalia had thermal-imaged earlier. At her carefully calculated, feminine perplexed look, he grinned and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll show you.” He grabbed his father’s withered hand and said, “Come on, Dad.”
Natalia let him lead her into the jungle foliage, waiting patiently as he grunted and shoved at the overgrown, sticky foliage, cursing himself for not bringing a weapon. Natalia had weapons, in triplicate, but she let him struggle ahead of her, never liking to reveal more than she had to.
Eventually, the fifty feet of jungle thinned to a small stream running by an open cave mouth carved into one of the many rock faces of the Tear. As soon the cliff came into view, however, Natalia froze. The Sun Dogs’ emblem had been carved into the rock above the entrance.
Patrick noticed her gaze. “Yeah. Miles and I knocked our heads together over what it meant. Best we can figure, it was some sort of military unit he was in.”
But Natalia knew what it meant. It was the burial place of a Sun Dog. The tovlar sword was unbroken, meaning it was the first burial. The second one got the broken sword.
“Are there…bones…in here?” she suggested.
Patrick grinned, giving her a look like he thought she was being a squeamish girl. “Nah. David cleaned the place out good before he started dropping us here for training.” He ducked inside the cave. “Come on,” he called, his voice echoing off the sandstone walls. “I’ll show you.”
Reluctantly, Natalia followed.
Inside, the cave system was pretty much what Natalia expected to find in one of David’s training camps. There were places for recruits to learn survival skills, to do pushups, clean weapons, make meals over tiny fires—about the only glaringly absent fixtures were beds.
“David wouldn’t let us sleep in here when we were ‘on mission,’” Patrick said, when she asked. “He made us sleep under trees or propped up on branches or something. It was dumb.”
To a kid who didn’t want to learn soldiery, Natalia agreed. To her, though, the similarities to her own conditioning, so many decades ago, gave her goosebumps of unease. It almost looked like David had been trying to replicate it. Less food, fewer comforts, more extreme hunger and cold…
“Did David ever tell you why he was training you guys?” Natalia asked.
Patrick shrugged. “Said he wanted to start a program, push a bunch of people through it. Miles, Magali, me, and a few others were his ‘test cases.’ He was using us to work out the kinks before his big push.”
The ancestors be good. His abomination wasn’t going to be the only one. David had been planning to make an army.
“What kind of program?” she asked, as calmly as she could.
Patrick shrugged. “He said there was a war coming.”
That made her look at him. “A…war…coming.” Had David really planned to pit these kids against Orion? Orion and his lieutenants had fought Tritons. A few nights in the woods didn’t prepare a kid for that kind of horror.
“Yeah, he was real concerned about it,” Patrick said. “Kept saying it might wipe out the human race if he didn’t do something.”
Which, coming from just about anyone else, would have made Natalia write David off as a kook fresh off his meds. Coming from David Landborn, however, it gave her cold chills. “He said it was going to wipe out the human race.” Orion was perhaps a little too ambitious and maybe enjoyed his position and power too much, but he didn’t want to wipe out the human race. He needed the human race. Who else would caper to his whims and bring him his morning coffee? “He said that, specifically?” Natalia pressed. “That it might wipe us out?”
Patrick shrugged. “Never said the guy was too smart.” He snorted. “I mean, how’s a war on Fortune gonna wipe out the human race?”
But Natalia was getting cold chills all over. Things were not adding up, and it was beginning to unnerve her. “Where’s this door you wanted to show me?”
Patrick took her deep into the back of the training facility, to a plain rock wall that was flat except for a small round keyhole. “That’s it,” he said, gesturing at the door. “David would disappear in there for hours at a time. Never let anyone else in
side. Was super protective of it, even yelled at Anna when she tried to sneak—dammit, Dad!” Patrick ran to grab his father before he could fire the gun he’d picked up from the open crate in one corner. A laser pulse nonetheless went off, melting the rock a few feet from Natalia’s hip, only grazing her slightly. Cursing, Patrick wrestled the weapon from his father’s hands and threw the gun back into the crate, then started screaming at him about ‘No Touch’ objects.
While Patrick was wrestling with his father, Natalia pulled the key from her pocket, then imaged the door for traps.
It was a doozy, with at least twenty designed to kill not only regular humans, but several that would even disable something like her. Sonic and 3D also showed there was a fake key, nestled under the rug right in front of the door. With so much security on the room, David obviously wanted people to find it and die trying it, which made her nervous. She hefted the key in her hand, considering. If it was the wrong key, and she stuck it in there, she was going to be hurting for at least several hours afterwards, if she was conscious at all.
Which, she was sure, was part of the test. David wanted to know if she still trusted him. The bastard.
Taking a deep breath, Natalia lifted the key column to the hole and stuck the key inside.
Instead of an uncomfortable backlash, as she was half expecting, the door clicked and swung open. Natalia let herself in immediately, finding an ever-glow recessed in one corner. She flipped on the main light, then, gasping, hurriedly pushed the door shut behind her.
The room was filled with pictures.
Hundreds of them. Thousands. Hand-drawn in exquisite detail. Tacked to the walls, piled on the table, stacked on the shelves… There were so many that Natalia was totally overwhelmed, her eyes for several minutes unable to single out a picture and focus.
“Hey, Natalia!” Patrick called, his voice muffled by the solid rock and metal of the door. “You okay?! I saw you get hit!”
“I’m fine,” Natalia said, not even looking down. It would have already healed by now. “It missed me.”
Patrick hesitated. “You sure? I was pretty sure I saw it burn a hole through your pants!”
“Just the pants,” Natalia said, irritated that he wouldn’t take a hint. “I’m fine!” Her eyes had finally found one of the pictures to focus on, because it was front and center in the room, where she couldn’t help but see it. It was a side-shot of Natalia standing in the center of a roomful of pictures, while Patrick leaned against the rock wall on the other side, calling to her. In the background, Wideman Joe was looking at a gun crate.
Natalia frowned and pulled it off the wall. The artist was good, one of the better ones she’d ever seen, and it was unmistakably the scene she was now in. “What game are you playing, David?” she muttered. After examining it a couple moments, she dropped it to the floor and found another one.
It was Sirius, back-to-back with an eight foot, red and purple, multiple-eyed, armor-plated alien, a gleaming silver Celeste out and powered up, the two of them fighting a handful of greenish-gray humans on what looked like a ship or mining center’s scaffolding. It was definitely not the archon’s tiny outpost that the Tritons had overrun and incinerated a hundred and sixty years ago.
“That’s…weird.” Natalia yanked the image off the wall to get a better look.
Through a window behind their fight, there was a distinct picture of an odd rift in space, black and blue swirling around it in an unnatural, distinctive pattern, the space nearby still littered with debris from some alien attempt to harness it.
That’s the place they found near Terasus, Natalia thought, frowning. She found other visual references of the same rift, ships surrounding it like a swarm of bees. Other nearby images showed two enormous fleets in a showdown around a planetoid.
“Hey, the door locked behind you!” Patrick called from outside. “Can you let me in?”
“Hold on, I’m looking for a latch!” Natalia cried. Natalia found another picture, this one of an explosion. Two children were at its epicenter, but everything else the explosion touched left darkness in its path, the spreading void so expertly drawn it left her with chills. She squinted at it, then carefully laid it down on the table.
“David,” she said softly, looking around her. “What the fuck is this?”
It took her a minute or two to realize that the pictures, like everything else David Landborn did, were organized with obsessive detail. There seemed to be a whole section on Anna Landborn, and it made the chills she’d gotten from the explosion picture pale in comparison.
Someone had cataloged Anna’s pictures under separate groups. ‘Empress,’ was one, and underneath were pictures of people bowing and scraping at Anna’s feet, an elaborate throne in the background, or a diadem on her head. ‘Planet-Killer’ was another one. Dozens of pictures showed a teenaged Anna and an older man looking out a window as an entire, highly-populated planet exploded. Pasted right beside them were similar pictures of Anna making a sun go dark. ‘Savior’ was the third. Amid those, she was being recognized in an alien hall, filled with highly-ornamented alien officials, or in a lab, working alongside a young Cobrani man of her same age. Right beside that was the ‘Ruiner’ category. In these, Anna was often kneeling on a platform on Fortune, getting her head blown off by her sister as a ship came hurtling out of the Void Ring above them. In the same section, there were also dozens of images of whole worlds dead or missing, images of streets and markets filled with sick people, of suns and planets disappearing in impossibly huge blasts.
Across all of these, in thick black marker, David had written, ANNA IS KEY.
All the way to one side of Anna’s ‘section’ was a category entitled ‘Deaths/Executions,’ in which Anna’s death was shown in dozens of different ways. Some at the hands of AlphaGens, some at the hands of Milar or Magali or Geo, some at the hands of aliens, some at the hands of very sick-looking men and women…
Seeing the pallid, green-gray skin, Natalia froze. “Wait a minute.” She recognized that look, and the moment she did, she experienced a wave of full-body goosebumps. A hundred and forty-six years ago, at the very end of the war, when Emperor Giu Xi had realized he was losing, the Tritons had attempted to release something upon humanity that would have ended everything…
“Phage,” Natalia whispered. “Oh God, no.” She leaned closer to make sure.
Sure enough, the people in the photo had tiny, finely-penciled lines of white crust along the edges of their lips and eyes. Pre-transformation Phage. Meaning there were still some viable spores out there.
“Shit,” Natalia whispered. “Shit!” Why hadn’t Landborn told her?! She hastily started scanning the rest of his wall, trying to piece it together before Orion waltzed out of the jungle and saw it—the where and the how. She knew, deep down, Orion would want it for himself. If only to have the last viable spores sitting on a desk in his office, the power of knowing he could release it at any time—that lure, much like the ambition that had driven Giu Xi to try to transform humanity, was Orion’s failing.
Then Natalia found her own section and she stopped in horror. She saw her entry into the AlphaGen program, saw herself nervously entering the deconstruction chamber for the first time. She saw herself fighting an alien. She saw Ootaka Sama drawn, charged and crimson, as Wideman Joe—but a less insane-looking one—yelled at her, pointing to a dead Nephyr on the floor. She saw the drawing of her, Sirius, David, KayKay, and Daytona Dae along with twenty-four other AlphaGens standing in a group photo on their new planet of Fortune, grinning at the camera the day they’d first landed—their only real prize to come out of the political maneuverings after the Triton Wars. In Daytona’s arms was a freshly-swaddled infant, the very first. Everyone had been posed around her, their palpable joy permeating the page.
Orion was there, too, Kali out and driven into the ground in front of him, with the admiral smiling as he wrapped his shorter brother Sirius in a half-hug. Sirius, usually somber and quiet like all ancient masters, was l
eaning against his plain silver hanbō and had a huge, uncharacteristic grin on his face. All the big players, all of them were there, their faces detailed out with exquisite exactness, as accurate as a photograph. Natalia tugged it off the wall, her heart pounding. Nowhere, nowhere, was there an image like this. All the documents had been destroyed, all the evidence of their existence purged in the Pact. Most AlphaGens didn’t even remember what their squadmates’ faces had looked like—Natalia was one of only three who had been given the tools to find and recognize her fellows, and the other two had died fighting the Tritons. Yet, when she looked back at the wall, there were dozens of these pictures. Pictures of them huddled on dropships, pictures of funerals, pictures of them running across cityscapes or an open field, their tovlar swords ablaze, pictures of them gathered around Emperor Giu Xi’s unconscious body…
Oh my God, Natalia thought. Patrick drew these… The most secret, elite military force in the universe, creatures that shouldn’t even exist, and they could be exposed by a kid with a set of colored pencils.
Natalia’s first, selfish instinct was to kill Patrick. She’d spent far too long in hiding, praying that their existence would never be revealed, that the technology used to create her was long, long destroyed. David Landborn had obviously managed to recreate it somehow, which bothered her, but this was much, much worse. This put them all in one place, showed what they’d done…
And, in that chilling moment, Natalia realized that half of the faces depicted in the drawing were already dead. Half. Some of the other AlphaGens were succumbing to accidents, Orion had said, and she had believed him.
Yet there was another section on Landborn’s walls, and this one had more AlphaGen faces on it. Ones she recognized. Ones whose bodies she had found, whose caskets she had sent off into their mother star. Natalia went to that two-foot section of wall, barely able to hear anything over the pounding of her own heart. ‘Murders’ it said. And, in almost every picture, it had Orion killing one of her old friends.
