by Sara King
“A ship,” Jersey said, golden filigreed body still stiff from the rebuke. “As far as we can tell, the whole Tear was made by an ancient crash of an Aashaanti mothership, which finally died a few days ago. You know how the Snake turned almost neon blue-green the last few days? That’s the hiveship’s body draining into the northern tributaries. The robots are guarding its final resting place.” Everyone had seen the increased blue-green color to the Snake, the smell of the water becoming so overwhelming that whole villages along the Tear had been forced to relocate.
“Uh-huh,” Anna said, clearly unconvinced. She continued to peer at the black arm with its alien components. “Any live aliens?”
“They all died,” Magali said. “We explored the ruins. Not much left after the cave-in.”
“It was huge,” Jersey told her. “Like the size of a planetoid. Laced with tovlar supports. Way too big to come through the Void Ring.”
“An ark,” Anna said, sounding pensive. “The Aashaanti did spend the last few years of their civilization trying to save their own species.” She grunted. “Well, that would explain some stuff.”
Magali frowned at her. “What stuff?”
Her little sister waved off her question as if it were irrelevant. “The native flora and fauna doesn’t all stem from the same evolutionary tree. Basically, during the crash, looks like some of their food crops and livestock got free, installed themselves on Fortune.”
“The Shriekers,” Magali said, stunned.
Anna just grinned at her. “Come on. You never wondered why Shriekers were only on this continent?”
“What, and you had?” Jersey countered.
Anna gave him a look like Jersey was the stupidest knuckle-dragger on Fortune. “Of course I had.”
Which, in all fairness, Magali knew was probably true—Anna thought about everything. Especially the things nobody wanted her to think about…
Her little sister sighed, leaned back with the bowl of sweetpods, and kicked her tiny, booted feet up on the table. She was wearing a miniature spacer’s outfit, professionally tailored and freshly laundered. “So let me get this straight,” Anna said, carefully picking out another pod, then gesturing with it. “After you abandoned me, you want me to forget it ever happened and help you and your band of merry men take down a military base that’s got a higher security rating than the Nephyr Academy itself.”
“You always liked a challenge,” Magali gritted.
“They have the satellites, which could blow you out of the sky,” Anna said, counting out a finger. “They have the Orbital, which could blow you out of the sky.” She extended another finger. “They have over forty soldiers stationed at Rath alone, all of which could blow you out of the sky.” Three fingers, now. “They have thirty Bouncer pods tasked with protecting that facility, and those guys specialize in blowing things out of the sky.” Four fingers. “Hell, I’ve heard they even have four altrameter muskers, so even if you manage to land, they’ll cut you into stew meat in half a second.” Anna popped the sweetpod into her mouth and crunched loudly it as she chewed, “and somehow you think we can use this…” Anna idly shoved the alien robot arm across the table at her, “…to take Rath by force. Like, oh, I dunno, you think I can make inviso-warriors with Nephyr-killing hand-to-hand weapons or something.”
“Yeah,” Magali said, resisting the urge to strangle her.
Anna just seemed to find that amusing. “I’m so far ahead of you it’s not even funny.” She went on picking at her snack, daintily popping the pods into her mouth one at a time, wincing when she got a sour one.
“Care to elaborate?” Jersey growled. Magali could see that the little twit was getting to him.
“You mean aside from the brain trust I just put together?” Anna snorted. “I’ve already got a bead on taking the satellites offline and reprogramming them to work for us. Their fleet’s global navigational systems are already down, care of my new friends—” then, at Jersey’s surprised look, Anna demanded, “What, you guys are just squatting around like sitting ducks and you never wondered why they haven’t come to obliterate you yet?” She snorted with disdain and looked at Magali again. “And then there’s Geo. The pink-eyed walrus is offering up fifty ships in exchange for fifty percent of whatever Yolk’s stored in the vaults of Rath.”
Magali glanced at Jersey, hesitating to say the obvious—that Rath wasn’t holding much Yolk, not anymore.
“What?” Anna demanded.
“That Yolk…” Jersey began.
“There’s none of it left in Rath,” Anna said. “I know. I was on the line giving Jeanne authorization from the Orbital when she pulled the heist.” She chuckled. “Geo said he wanted a share of what was in Rath. The ruby-eyed tapeworm never specified that there actually had to be any Yolk in Rath.”
Magali grimaced. “You use him like that, Geo’s gonna be pissed.”
“Let him.” Anna shrugged. “If the jiggling maggot’s too stupid to do his research before striking a deal, that’s on him.” She cocked her head. “So where did they stash it all? I could use some for my experiments.”
Magali exchanged another warning glance with Jersey. The last thing she wanted was her demented little sister to discover that splattering someone on the inside of a ship with a few thousand sacks of Yolk would somehow imprint their consciousness into the electronics. She could already see it in her mind—Anna inviting prospective ‘recruits’ in for a quick ‘spin’ in their new ‘ships’, and then putting a bullet through their heads and letting them wake up to the knowledge that she had some sort of override implanted in their hulls, and to disobey her would be to fly into a supernova.
Jersey didn’t catch her meaning, however. Mournfully, he said, “Jeanne crashed and became—”
“Dead,” Magali said quickly. “She became dead.”
Anna narrowed her eyes only slightly, but then shrugged. “Where’s the Yolk?”
“The crash was pretty intense,” Jersey said slowly, watching Magali. “Ripped open all the bags, broke open all the nodules.”
“Like going through a meat grinder,” Magali agreed. “Nothing left.”
Anna snorted in clear disbelief. “Yeah right.” She sighed and leaned back. “All that Yolk and I don’t think they want to share, Dobie.” She cocked her head at them. “You know, now that I think of it, maybe there’s things I don’t wanna share. Like, oh, I dunno, my brain?”
“We can get you some sacks,” Magali grated. “We confiscated a few hundred bags from those Yolk factories we shut down. You want them, they’re yours.” The last thing she was going to do was take Anna to that broken-down ship in the jungle to beg a few bags from a woman who didn’t know she was dead.
“You know what I think?” Anna said, her humorless gaze on her sister. “I think you guys need me, but you’re too self-righteous to ask.”
Magali felt every nerve in her body suddenly fire with the urge to reach across the table for Anna’s throat. “Anna,” she said evenly, “we are asking.”
“No you’re not,” Anna said, shoving the bowl back across the table at Magali. “You’re offering me a piece of electronics in return for saving your asses from the fire you started.”
“You started it!” Magali shouted, jumping to her feet in rage. “You’ve been gunning for this for the last three years, Anna! Don’t even pretend you don’t wanna see us take Rath.”
But Anna’s reply was only a smug look. “I don’t have to help you to take Rath. I could wait for them to wipe you all out, huddled here on your little mountainside, and then go on with my plans anyway, once you’re all corpses on the waves. I could use your unfortunate deaths to spawn a martyrdom movement, and throw the coalers off that much faster, just like I was planning to do before you idiots called me down here to look at an alien robot.”
And, in cold chills, Magali realized her sister was totally serious.
Anna continued to watch her. “You need my help. Say it.”
Magali swallowed, caught between
fear—Anna never threatened to do something unless she was perfectly capable and willing to do it—and rage. “Anna,” she began, because it was the only thing she could force out of her throat.
“Say it,” Anna said, “or I’ll just stick to my plan.”
“Did you just threaten her?” Jersey said.
“She knows it wasn’t a threat,” Anna said, her eyes never leaving Magali’s face. “It’s a fact.”
Swallowing down her rage, Magali said, “Anna, I need your help.”
Anna cocked her head at Magali. “You sound angry. Dobie, does she sound angry to you?”
“Her biorhythms do appear to suggest a violent emotional response,” Dobie replied.
Anna clasped her tiny hands together and leaned over the table towards Magali. In a patronizing sneer, she said, “Now sister. Why would you be angry with me for asking you to acknowledge a simple fact?”
“Careful, kid,” Jersey growled. “Pretty sure that robot of yours can’t stop bullets.”
“Yeah, you keep assuming that, cupcake,” Anna said, without even looking at the Nephyr. She still hadn’t looked away from Magali’s face. “You left me to die, Mag. And now you’ve dug yourself a hole too deep to crawl out of, so you’re begging me to go get a rope and haul you out.” Her brown eyes darkened. “I’m still deciding if I want to.”
“Maybe we’re deciding if we wanna let you leave alive,” Jersey began, slamming a hand down on the table. “You think I can’t kill a robot?”
Magali touched his shoulder to stop him. “Anna,” she said softly, “I don’t know where you’ve been or what you’ve been doing, but if you don’t help me get Patrick out before they kill him, I’m going to hunt you down and put a bullet between your eyes.” She reached out and touched her younger sister’s hand gently. “And that’s a fact, because, ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been teetering this really thin line between good and evil. You let Patrick die, I will make it my mission in life to see you pay with every ounce of blood you have in that demented little husk you call a brain, and I will hang your limp body up like a flag for all your enemies to see.”
Anna actually seemed surprised by her answer. “You have changed.”
“Yes,” Magali said, bitterness rising on a tide within, “I have.”
Anna grunted and pulled away. “Dobie, grab the arm. We have work to do.” She stood.
Magali reached out and grabbed Anna’s sleeve, holding her in place. “If Patrick dies…” she warned.
Anna snorted. “You actually think they’d kill him?” She scoffed. “Sweetie, ask your pet Nephyr over there. Patty’s the best leverage they have. They’re gonna use him to dupe idiots like you into turning yourselves in—or, gee, calling up your little sister on a universal band so they can track it back to its source and get you both in one spot.”
Magali froze.
Anna nonchalantly tugged her arm away. “And Milar’s right. Get your asses to the North Tear. You’ve got a couple hours before they crack the code and launch a strike on this place, and my friends and I don’t have the satellite overrides up and running yet. Find a hole and hunker down until I come back.” She turned to go, then stopped and said, “Oh, and I’ll be taking all of those sacks of Yolk you ‘liberated’ from those mines with me. And don’t try to cheat me. The camp records were very exact about how much they had in their vaults when you hit.”
Then, seeing Magali’s flustered look, Anna grinned, popped a final sweetpod into her mouth, and, crunching it, said, “See you guys in a couple days.” Without another word, she turned and led the robot off the ship, taking the Aashaanti tech with her.
CHAPTER 22: The New Leadership
1st of June, 3006
Inside the Alien Defense Grid
Fortune, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
The air in the command tent was stuffy, the summertime heat of the North Tear alone enough to make most of Magali’s companions take off their shirts to wring out the sweat. Jersey’s Nephyr skin made him immune to the heat, but he was visibly miserable in other ways. The swarms of tadflies that hadn’t found the glittering surface of Jersey’s body buzzed incessantly against the camouflaged fabric protecting them from the sun—hand-painted because no one could afford the fancy high-res cuttle-cloth the Coalition used in all its forward operations.
The whole of the ragtag rebel leadership was seated on stumps and logs because no one had thought to bring chairs. They had been forced to leave their cots and camping equipment behind in the last Nephyr ambush on their supply run to Silver City. They had no insect netting, so no one was getting much sleep. Tempers had already flared, and there was blood in the trampled, sticky slickgrass from where Drogire had crushed Maylay’s nose before Jersey had separated them.
The gathering was tense, every face having lost its good nature days ago. The constant threat of Nephyr attack, plus the hard truth that the Coalition had air superiority in just about every sense of the term, was putting a pall of foreboding on the gathering. Even tucked inside the ‘shredder perimeter,’ as they had begun calling it, they had no idea when the Coalition satellites would find them and start dropping bombs on their heads.
Magali sat at the head of the makeshift table—a piece of prefabricated siding that Carvin had draped across four stacks of crates—watching everyone argue. Most wanted to hit Rath with everything they had in an attempt to shut down the satellites. Others were arguing that air support on Rath was too heavy, and that the Orbital had sent down twelve Bouncer pods and ten additional operators to defend the hub of its Yolk operations.
With Captain Eyre, their one operator, down for the count due to Magali’s sister’s insanity, as well as the fact they hadn’t heard from Anna in over a week, it didn’t look as if they stood a chance in the air. Even with Runaway Joel on their side—if he ever crawled out of the jungle again—the numbers put them at a twenty-to-one firefight. The sadistic fucks on Rath had started kidnapping random Fortune citizens daily, now, and were broadcasting their ‘corrections’ along with Patrick’s ongoing torture, then hanging their skinless bodies on the walls to dry in the sun. Earlier that morning, Milar had threatened to take Honor and fly against Rath, blowing up everything he saw until he went down in ball of flames. Because she knew Milar never threatened to do something he wasn’t fully prepared to execute, Magali had called yet another meeting of her motley ‘leadership’ to try and coordinate something, anything that would make the Nephyrs stop killing people, but in six hours, they’d come up with nothing.
It was looking bad. Really bad, and everyone knew it.
Magali, who had no answers, felt more and more helpless as time went on. The only reason she was even at the table was because Jersey and Roxy had told her it was expected of her. After all, this was her mess. Most of them were waiting for her to miraculously clean it up.
“You know,” Anna’s unmistakable singsong voice called from the tent entrance, “you really should get someone other than a drooling monkey to safeguard your secret communications.” Hearing it, Magali immediately tensed.
“Who the fuck are you?” Drogire demanded, standing. “Go tell your parents you’re not allowed to wander around camp.” He obviously hadn’t had the pleasure of seeing Magali’s little sister in person yet.
Anna snorted and ducked inside. Without realizing it, Magali began gripping the table’s edge with white knuckles. Behind her, another nondescript man followed, obviously another bodyguard—or maybe the same robot with different appearance modifications. Without even looking at Drogire, Anna walked up to the table, took a piece of jerkied starlope meat from the pile, and began chewing on it as she looked around the room. “Where’s Milar? I heard he was threatening to go in there, guns blazing, to rescue Patty.”
“Out getting water,” Jersey gritted. “You said you’d be back in a couple days.”
“Meh,” Anna said. “I had other things to do.”
Seeing Anna’s casual manner when people were dying, when they were bei
ng tortured, Magali again felt the urge to hurt her sister, really hurt her. She has no soul, she thought. People are dying and she doesn’t even care. She knew Anna had shoved her down this path, knew that, by breaking up her and Patrick, the callous little bitch had pushed her into a role that had already seen her kill several hundred people after Magali had sworn she would never kill anyone, had made Wideman’s ‘prophecy’ turn out to be more than just the ramblings of an incoherent imbecile. As all eyes at the table turned to Magali to say something, all Magali could think of was how badly she wanted to pick up her rifle from where it leaned against the table, center its sights on Anna’s smug face, and pull the trigger until the magazine exploded.
Drogire glanced between them, looking confused for a moment. “Wait,” their current top pilot said. “Magali? That’s your sister?”
“In the flesh,” Anna said, grinning around partially-masticated meat.
“Anna Landborn,” one of the men at the table gasped. Like she was some sort of goddess or something.
“Been an interesting couple of weeks,” Anna said, chewing loudly. “I got sold by my sister to the Nephyrs. I escaped said Nephyrs, then went shopping in the top-secret Coalition laboratories on Rath. Found some interesting stuff, made some alterations, and created a walking, talking Shrieker. Too bad she couldn’t listen to instructions. She’d probably be alive right now if she had.” Anna snorted, totally smug, totally secure in her belief that Tatiana Eyre was no more.
Magali couldn’t help it. She opened her mouth to tell her little sister how utterly wrong she was, but she caught an odd head-shake from the man—robot?—behind her. As she frowned at Anna’s companion, who was now once again utterly motionless, Jersey said, “Seems to me that hobbling our only operator pilot wasn’t the wisest course of action in the long run, Anna.”
