by Sara King
Colonel Steele had been on the front page of David’s file, though his name hadn’t been under the rank of colonel. It had been as a two-star general.
Milar yanked the cuttlesilk away from his face, brought his gun up and fired at Steele’s chest. His EMP blast caught the Nephyr in the torso, and there was a weird flicker as his fake skin took on the picture-perfect look of a man’s skin, then flickered back to that of a Nephyr. Steele never even twitched. “Ah,” he said, smiling and lifting his head to look at Milar. “There he is. Our long-lost brother, come back to us at last.” Steele cocked his head. “That’s an interesting cloaking device. Where’d you get it?”
“Made it myself,” Milar lied.
Steele grinned, clearly not believing him. “So which brother are you? I heard one of you was screwing our illustrious leader of Fortune before I made her my bitch.”
“Shoot him,” Jersey growled.
“I did,” Milar snapped.
“Shoot him again!” Jersey shouted.
“Yes,” Steele said, sounding amused. He was now looking directly at Milar even though Milar had flipped the silk back over his body after firing. “Please. Shoot me again. I’m sure our tech department would love to figure out how you got an EMP pulse into projectile form. One of those children you stole from our last shipment, no doubt.” He cocked his head. “Same one who made the cloak?”
Around Steele, the other six Nephyrs looked nervous.
“Pocket-sized EMP won’t work on them,” David had insisted, when Milar had recovered enough to suggest he and Patrick carry around a wand, instead. “Takes something stronger—usually a nuclear blast.”
Milar’s heart was pounding again, the same pounding thunder that he’d felt staring back at David Landborn, knowing for the first time that whatever stood there in front of him wasn’t human. In the background, Steele was detailing out the particulars of his time with Magali.
“Shoot him!” Jersey snapped.
“They like to work alone,” David had told him. “Hide amongst Nephyrs. Like sharks imitating the goldfish. You can tell them by a small silver node above their left ear that just brushes the surface of their skin. It’s the size of a pencil eraser, and it’s what produces the simulation of Nephyr skin. He’s second-class AlphaGen, back before the schism. The process almost rejected him, so he’s much weaker and slower than the others who survived deconstruction, and he can’t shift his own skin.”
“Goddamn it, you sick fuck, Miles!” Jersey snapped, turning to look at him. “Shoot the bastard!”
Milar turned and shot four of the six Nephyrs behind Steele. They went down as skinless piles of meat, too startled to scream.
“Oh, I see,” Steele said, his grin fading. He turned to look behind him as his men started screaming and thrashing on the floor. After a moment, he turned to raise an eyebrow at Milar. “Got a level head on your shoulders, eh, boy? Sure you don’t wanna join up?” He chuckled.
“Pretty sure,” Milar said, popping a new clip into his gun. This one he aimed at Steele’s face.
The SuperSquader straightened, watching his weapon with alert curiosity. “And what have you there? Another fun little trinket for our scientists to unravel?”
“I’d call it more of an electronic enema.” Milar said, smiling. On the ground, the Nephyrs’ dying comrades were still screaming.
“He’s bluffing,” Steele said. “Energy signature’s not right.” Then, grimacing, he turned and said, “And shut those four up. They’re dead anyway.”
The two Nephyrs behind Steele gave their writhing comrades a hesitant look. “Sir,” one of them said, “if we could get them to quarantine—”
Steele reached out, grabbed the Nephyr by the head, and yanked him close. “Do you really think,” Steele said, “those idiots are going to survive a war until we can get them to a hermetically sealed room?”
“But it’s just the skin,” the man said from under Steele’s palm. “It’s replaceable—”
“Really?” Steele said calmly, “show me.” And with that, Steele made a face of concentration and started to squeeze, straining. To Milar’s shock, he watched Steele’s fingers sink, little by little, through his comrade’s energy field. At first, the Nephyr he held frowned at him, looking confused, but then jerked and started trying to push away. The second Nephyr took a nervous step back as Steele’s fingers finally penetrated his companion’s energy barrier, immediately lost all resistance, and punctured the man’s skull. The man’s cranium collapsed, and gray matter squirted from his open eye sockets. As it did, the energy barrier over his body fizzled out, leaving yet another naked Nephyr.
Relaxing, Steele threw the twitching man to the side and flicked brain tissue from his fingers.
That, Milar thought, taking a step back, shouldn’t be possible.
“Now,” Steele said to the survivor, “shut the others up and watch the hall while I deal with these two.”
Without hesitation, the remaining Nephyr efficiently began crushing the larynxes of his companions, eliciting strangled gurgles as their flayed bodies kept kicking, hands desperately reaching for their friends’ legs, then eventually went still.
Jersey, too, was backing away. “Miles?” he asked. “Got any ideas what the fuck?”
“Got an idea,” Milar said grimly. “He’s one of the original Nephyrs.”
“The man gets a hug!” Colonel Steele cried in faux merriment. His arms were clasped behind his back as he casually kept pace with them. He grinned. “Now. Which one of you wants to die to save your more worthy companion?”
Milar snorted. “We don’t die that easy, Fluffles.”
Steele laughed. “Oh, I assure you. You do.” He glanced at Jersey. “But I’ll wait until one of you picks first. Then I’ll let the other one go tell everyone what a coward he is.”
“Yeah, I heard about your choices, Steele,” Jersey spat. “Fuck you, little man.”
Colonel Steele cocked his head at Milar curiously. “So you want him to die?”
“Yeah, right,” Milar snorted. He raised his gun—
Steele lunged forward and shoved Jersey through a wall, while at the same time kicking the gun out of Milar’s hand so hard that both metal and bones shattered from the impact. Then he had Milar by the throat, his smooth, glassy skin like cold marble around Milar’s neck. “Choose. One of you to live. Right now.”
Milar bit down a scream and struggled against the sudden animal panic that was building inside from being held in that way by a Nephyr. Looking into Steele’s cold blue eyes, they both knew that it would only take a twitch of Steele’s fingers to kill him. “Fuck you,” he managed. His hands, though, were trembling.
Steele cocked his head, recognizing something within Milar. To his horror, the man started to grin. “I’ll be damned. Those three months in cadet intake… You developed a phobia, didn’t you, Miles?”
“You’re so full of shit it’s—”
The Nephyr squeezed ever so slightly, and Milar shuddered with a whimper, his whole body locking up in sudden terror. Even his broken hand tightened in reflex, eliciting a shudder.
Steele grinned. “The big bad Nephyr hunter—how many have they attributed to you, now? Thirty?—is afraid of his own prey.”
“It’s more like fifty,” Milar rasped, but his voice betrayed him. It broke in time with the shaking of his body, until all Milar could think about was the hand around his neck, and the razors they’d used to cut his skin off his body, eleven years ago.
It’s not the same guy, Milar tried to convince himself. He wasn’t the one who did it.
“This is delightful,” Steele laughed. He turned to find Jersey crawling out of the debris from the wall he’d just punched through. “Brackett, did you know your friend, here, is terrified of you? Watch!” He reached out and gently pinched Milar’s right pectoral, grinning. Milar heard himself whimper like a frightened kid.
“Leave him alone,” Jersey growled, tugging a big chunk of concrete from the rubble.
“Pick, Brackett,” Steele insisted. “His life or yours? Who is gonna live through this little exchange?”
Jersey’s response was to hit Steele in the back with a few hundred pounds of concrete, making it explode into particles across the hall, peppering Milar with pulverized rock. Milar barely felt the rock chips that embedded in his skin—between his terror, the pain in his broken hand, and the Nephyr completely shutting off his air, his world was narrowing to the translucent arm that held him.
“Ow,” Steele sneered. As Milar twisted and kicked at him in desperation, Steele turned to face Jersey, who was picking up another massive chunk of rock. “And just what are you going to do with that, princess? Hit me over the—” The Nephyr’s voice caught as his attention drifted past Jersey to something further down the hallway, at where his lackey was squatting over the corpse of one of his dead companions, examining the puncture wounds Steele had left in the man’s skull curiously. From the end of the hallway, an unarmed woman in prisoner’s orange was casually walking up behind him, maybe five-five, five-six at most. Her skin was dark, near-black, and her eyes were reflecting a bright amber from the white halls, even from this distance. Her arms and face, exposed to the harsh fluorescent light, almost seemed to shimmer with sweat.
“Shit,” Steele whispered, releasing Milar in a spasm. “Shit.” He started backing away, letting Milar fall to his knees, his airway suddenly open again. Milar sucked in a frantic breath, then another, crawling desperately from Steele, towards Jersey.
A moment later, the squatting Nephyr in the hall noticed the approaching prisoner and stood up. “Hey,” he growled, “nobody told you you could—”
The prisoner punched the Nephyr’s head off.
What was left of the Nephyr’s skull slid down the opposite wall in a paste, and the rest of his corpse folded over onto the floor in front of the newcomer.
The woman in orange glanced at Jersey, then Steele, then Milar. Lips pressed together in a grim line, she stepped over the corpse and started towards them.
Steele spun and ran.
The woman in orange immediately shifted her attention to Jersey, never slowing. As she got closer, it was quite clear that her skin had an unnatural hue, almost like it was eating the light, and it wasn’t the overhead lights making her eyes glow. Jersey stumbled backwards, blinking in confusion.
The prisoner reached the rubble created in Jersey’s scuffle with Steele and started over it with inhuman smoothness, heading for the only Nephyr that remained in the hall. Jersey, looking startled, was holding up both hands in peace.
Milar realized the woman planned to kill Magali’s lover-boy like she’d killed the first. The woman pulled back a fist…
“Wait,” Milar croaked, barely able to make his throat work. “He’s…okay.”
The redheaded woman hesitated. Very slowly, she turned to look down at Milar. “You’re David’s protégé?”
“Yeah,” Milar managed.
“And you vouch for this guy?” She gestured with a dismissive thumb at Jersey, who had his back up against the wall, watching the woman warily.
Milar grimaced, and even though it was against every fiber of his being, he nodded.
The prisoner lowered her hand, but she didn’t look happy. She was scowling at Jersey, then turned back to squint at where Steele had disappeared. “Damn it. You guys just blew a six month operation.”
As the woman spoke, her dark, light-eating skin shifted back to an almost sickly white to match her fiery red hair. Her eyes lost their yellow hue, becoming a vivid, leaf green. “I was this close to catching that bastard. He was scheduled to visit my cell tomorrow.”
“What…” Jersey flinched when the woman whipped around to glare at him. “Are you?” he squeaked.
The woman gave a very unladylike grunt. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” She grinned and clapped Jersey on the shoulder. “Good job punching that Nephyr’s head off, though. Real scary skills, man.”
Jersey blinked and shied away from her, obviously confused. “But I didn’t—”
The woman’s smile slipped and her green eyes sharpened.
“Yep,” Jersey said quickly. “Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.”
“Must be all those drugs they feed you in the Academy,” the redhead said, still watching Jersey carefully.
“Right. Drugs.” Jersey gave a nervous laugh, but made no move to leave the relative safety of the wall.
The prisoner grunted again and turned to look at the exit. “Where the fuck is David? I can’t believe he’s letting that floater run around on his planet.”
Milar winced at ‘his’ planet, because that’s exactly how Landborn had acted the entire time Milar had been living under his roof—like the planet belonged to him, and everyone living on it, including Milar and his siblings, were uninvited guests. “David’s dead.”
The woman’s eyes sharpened. “How?”
“Geo’s goons came in the night and—”
The woman interrupted him with a snort. “Knew Steele’s too much of a pussy to try to do it himself. Figures.” She sighed. “Ah, well. I just spent six months eating meat puree packets and oatmeal for nothing. Wouldn’t be the first time.” She glanced behind them at the empty hall—the technicians and clerks had dropped their weapons and bolted when brains had started squirting from skulls. “Take it Dave finally kicked off the rebellion, then?”
“David’s dead,” Milar repeated.
“But you are rebelling?” She seemed almost curious. Then, frowning, she caught sight of the destroyed altrameter musker sprawled on the floor. “Ooh. I love those swords.” She walked over, easily yanked one free—shattering the musker’s titanium, death-locked fingers in the process—and spun it this way and that, grinning like a kid. “I’ve got a collection. Did you know they change the poem on the blade depending on the year it was made?”
Milar, who had never gotten a good look at a musker sword, just shook his head.
The orange-clad stranger expertly offered up one side of the sword for Milar’s perusal. He swallowed and straightened at the proximity of the sword’s monomolecular edge to his neck, but, when she didn’t cut his throat with it, took a moment to read the inscription. Stamped into the wavy blue-black steel just under the blood-holes were several lines of calligraphic text, but in a language Milar had never seen before—and Milar knew a lot of languages.
She must have noticed his confusion. “It’s Old Japani,” the woman said. “The company that produced the swords made them throughout the War. Supplied ’em to the Alliance to fight the Tritons, right up until the Encompate disbanded the company and executed the family that made them as sympathizers. Good stuff. Works great.” She grinned at them again, but there was a very clear warning in her gaze as she flipped the sword over her petite shoulder to settle on her deltoid with a practiced flick that left Milar’s nerves humming. “I love the way every poem is different, and I’ve seen them all.”
Beside him, Jersey swallowed hard, and Milar was right there with him. Nobody spoke Old Japani. Not even Magali’s little brat sister. It had been purged. Speakers of it had been labeled sympathizers by the Encompate and killed or exiled after the war, since the Tritons’ native language had been Old Japani.
“Yeah,” Milar said, clearing his throat, “poem probably says something about long live the Coalition or some bullshit.”
The stranger’s gaze never wavered from Milar’s face. “Actually, it says, ‘May the passage of time be whittled away by the blade of perpetual bliss.’ Belonged to an elite soldier before they confiscated them all after the Sun Dogs got Giu Xi. Man that was fun. When they finally took the Platinum City, the Dogs burned his palace and buried his six councilors alive in this huge pit, like five or six miles deep.
Sirius carved it out with a ship’s cannon so that bitch Ari could die a slow, miserable death for the twisted shit she pulled on Dormus. She was claustrophobic. Screamed for weeks—had a recorder down there, transmitting.” The woman was grinning, and the way she said it, she was there. Talking about a battle that took place a hundred and forty years ago like it was yesterday…
Oh shit, Milar thought. Oh shit, oh shit.
Milar swallowed, realizing the stranger was watching him very closely. Like a predator. Immediately, he started to feel sick. If she was telling the truth, the woman before them was either a Triton or an AlphaGen, and Milar didn’t know which was worse. Both of them were supposedly all dead. Myths. Great warriors that destroyed whole cities in their epic clashes. Horror stories told to little children who didn’t behave.
Apparently, Jersey was having the same thought, because the Nephyr’s face looked as stunned as Milar felt.
The perky redhead cocked her head to examine the rippling blue-black blade with unmistakable reverence. “Sword’s looked exactly the same since the War. Not a scratch on it. God I love these things. Did you know originally, they were made to be energized to puncture Triton armor?”
Milar shook his head, because, like Old Japani, all the records pertaining to the Tritons had been destroyed in the Purge. Most people didn’t even know that the Sun Dogs had existed, but he’d been there when Anna hacked the Encompate’s private files, and the Sun Dogs, an ultra-specialized team of AlphaGen special ops, had featured prominently in many of the top-secret sections. Anna had spent a couple minutes reading about the Dogs’ near single-handed defeat of the Tritons before getting bored and moving on to experimental weaponry. He now wished he’d shoved her away from the console and read the file from front to back.
