by Sara King
Steele walked up and kicked her in the head hard enough to make the back of her head slam against her shoulder-blades.
The maelstrom yanked her bones back into place, realigning her spine before she even hit the ground. Using that momentum, she spun and kicked him off the ground before he could use the gun on her again. Steele went flying backwards, hitting the concrete in a roll. When he scrambled back to his feet, he looked afraid. He gave her one long, uncertain look, then said, “David?”
Magali hesitated, frowning at him.
But Steele had started to back up. “No, not David. Oh God, they made another one. Those fuckers…Sirius is making more!”
“More what?” Magali rasped.
Without another word, Steele turned and bolted.
“He’s getting away!” Tatiana cried in the background. “Get that prick!”
Magali would have, but already, she felt that maelstrom subsiding, leaving shaking and adrenaline-seared limbs in its wake. She went down to one knee, weaponless, clothing in tatters, totally exhausted.
“Yeah!” a young man beside her screamed in the slight accent of Silver City. He was bleeding from three different wounds, his injured head wrapped in his own sweat-stained shirt. “Fuck yeah!” He jammed his rifle towards the sky enthusiastically. “We won!”
Nearby, another guy screamed, “We won! Aanaho, we won!”
“She did it!” a smuggler cried, slapping her back as more people began to cheer. “The Killer’s Revolution took Rath!”
“It’s not my Revolution!” Magali screamed, grabbing a broken, head-sized piece of concrete and hurling it to explode against a nearby building.
All around her, people exploded into cheers, as if she’d said something inspiring.
Even as Magali was starting to turn, ready to correct them, once and for all, Tatiana Eyre grabbed her by the arm. “They won’t understand. You’re not a person to them.”
Magali stiffened and glanced down at the smaller woman, ready to tell Eyre and all of the rest of them where they could shove that robot-talk.
“You’re their hope,” Tatiana finished, looking up at her. “And it’d be cruel for you to crush it.” She seemed to be in one of her rare lucid moments, and that was the only reason Magali didn’t rip her arm away and yell at the gathering anyway.
Magali was still glaring at Captain Eyre when Honor dropped to the airfield behind her.
“Reinforcements from the Orbital coming in!” Pan cried from the open hatch, his voice being drowned out by the roaring engines. “We’ve gotta move! Come on!” Even as he spoke, Nephyrs were dropping from the sky to land on the pavement by the hundreds, hitting the gathering from within. Immediately, the people on the streets began to scream and scatter, running to their transports, or, in many cases, into the arms of Rath’s reinforcements. The thundering footsteps of soldiers began to shudder the streets, buildings crumbling as operators took out walls in their haste to reach the scene, and the whipping roar of Bouncers incoming overhead made her heart stammer with sudden terror.
Magali, weaponless, couldn’t help the multitudes rapidly dying around her. She turned to look for something to use to fight…
Tatiana was suddenly right there in front of her, stopping her, the unconscious ganshi cub tucked under one arm, the other hand on Magali’s chest, shoving her backwards, towards the ship. “They’re not going anywhere,” she snapped. “We grabbed the ships. Comm’s down. Orbital’s got no supplies to feed them, so all these rubes are stuck in Rath with no electricity and no hot water. Come back and get them once you’ve got a plan, or you’re just gonna have to buy more flowers. Get me?”
Magali managed to tear her eyes from the massacre in the streets. “They’re dying because of me.”
“No,” Tatiana shouted, still shoving her up the ramp and into the belly of Honor with the mass of fleeing rebels. “They’re dying for you. There’s a really, really big difference, and if they’re out there making those sacrifices in vain, I’m gonna kick your goddamn ass myself.”
“But…” Magali whispered. Now that she was on the ship, their pilot was blasting the engines, leaving hundreds in the streets, dying at the hands of the Orbital’s reinforcements.
“Listen to me,” Tatiana said, as the ship rocked and the grav generators groaned from the strain of avoiding their pursuers. “We won,” Tatiana said. “We accomplished everything on our docket. We took or sabotaged everything they need to survive on this planet. They don’t even have flushing toilets now. And believe me—the grunts get really bitchy when they lose their flushing toilets. Give it a couple months and nobody’s gonna want to live in Rath. They’re gonna give us this planet, Magali. It’s ours. That was the end.”
Magali managed to focus on Tatiana’s face. “What do you mean?’”
“We showed them they’re not untouchable. We hit them where it hurts, we brought them to their knees, and the whole planet saw it,” Tatiana said. “Fortune’s not gonna put up with their shit anymore and they know it. If they’re smart, they’re gonna pull back to some other planet in the Daytona 6 Cluster like Mezzan or Oric and they’re gonna wait ten years for reinforcements to get here from the—” Tatiana irritatedly paused to wave off the kid who showed up with medkits and fistfuls of nanos.
“But Pan said she was shot…” the kid babbled. “Told me to get her on her on a cot and administer nanos…”
Tatiana pointed at Magali’s stomach, the clothes of which hadn’t even been damaged by Steele’s close-range assault. “See that?”
The kid nodded.
“Does that look like she sustained close-range laser fire to you?”
The kid shook his head.
“Then stop wasting time and go find someone who actually needs your help.” As the kid hastily turned to go, Tatiana snapped at his back, “And tell Panner he can start spewing orders when he figures out how to shave!” After their initial rush out of Rath, Drogire had settled Honor into a more straight-and-level course as they shot out over the uncharted jungle.
Then, without pausing for breath, Tatiana turned back to Magali. “We won. Or, rather, the closest thing to it without actually exterminating every Coalition loyalist on the planet, which I honestly think would be a mistake. We don’t have to, see? We can starve out the rest of them, now. Either they surrender because they’re hungry or they surrender because the Coalition retreated to Mezzan and they’re stuck on an alien planet they probably never wanted to visit and they just wanna go home. Either way, we win.”
Thinking of Steele, Magali felt that maelstrom sizzling within her again, tightening her hands into fists. “I’m going to kill that man.”
“And when you do,” Tatiana said, “I’ll be right there to cheer you on.” She pushed Magali over to a corner, where it was just them, the rest of the soldiers cheering off to the side. “And just so you know, nobody else saw that fight in the whorehouse. Nobody saw what happened. Just me, and I swear I won’t tell a soul, so please don’t kill me.” Then she grimaced. “And even if I did tell somebody, you could say it was the drugs Steffen gave me.”
Magali frowned. “What?”
“Dude,” Tatiana whispered, lowering her voice even further as she looked around. “It’s not like nobody’s heard of guys like you. Sure, it’s real hush-hush and you’re like ghosts, only a handful left, but somebody had to win the war with the Tritons. You’re an AlphaGen.”
Magali squinted. “Alpha-what?”
Tatiana laughed too loudly and nudged her with an elbow. “Oh, yeah. Okay. I get ya. Alpha-what.” She snorted. “Okay, so long as we’re cool. I hear you guys like your privacy.”
“What privacy?!”
Tatiana’s only response was a chuckle and a playful chuck on the shoulder. “I’m gonna get back to the cockpit. You did awesome out there. I lost count, but I think you took down like fifty Nephyrs by yourself. No wonder you guys did so well against Emperor Giu Xi’s death guard in the Platinum City.” And then, grinning, the diminutive cyborg
saluted and jogged for the cockpit with her ganshi in tow, leaving Magali staring after her in confusion.
She must be drugged out of her mind, Magali thought finally, somewhat surprised the little cyborg had managed to keep up—and not get shot—the entire day.
On the ship all around her, men and women were cheering and hugging each other, but Magali’s eyes were on the medics moving through the group, seeing the wounded squirm and cry on the floor. As she watched, one young man with a chest wound coughed up one last sputter of crimson, eyes wide as his body went into death-shakes.
Seeing that, Magali’s already tattered spirits plummeted. Inevitably, she remembered the men and women who had gotten cut down around her as she escaped. She remembered fleeing the fight that she had started as the enemy dismantled her companions, their deaths distracting the Coalition long enough for Magali and Tatiana to escape on Honor.
What was wrong with these people? She wasn’t a leader. Like Anna loved to keep reminding her, she was a nobody. She hadn’t even wanted to be there…
And yet, today, people had died for her.
Across the room, Tatiana stepped out of the ship’s only bathroom, in a fresh jumpsuit sans blood-splatters. Seeing Magali looking, the cyborg gave her a knowing wink, like they shared some sort of important secret, before turning and disappearing into the cockpit, discarding her bloodstained T-shirt in a careless pile of bloody, burned shirts in one corner. Magali stared at the pile, unable to tear her eyes from the brilliant crimson stains. Stains that wouldn’t have been there if she’d just jumped off that cliff, instead of climbing down it.
Those men and boys on the floor were dying because of her, for her.
After starting the riot in Silver City and ‘liberating’ her first Yolk camp, Magali hadn’t thought she could feel any worse.
She’d been wrong.
CHAPTER 30: The Burdens of Loneliness
(a.k.a. Technobabble, Part 2)
7th of June, 3006
The Junkyard (Nonexistent Section)
Fortune Orbital, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
Anna woke and opened her eyes, already processing what she would have to do that day to keep this political chain reaction from cascading into a smuggler vs. rebel civil war, or that experimental drug from backfiring on its unwitting test subjects due to a lack of the proper catalyst injected into their daily rations, or those top-secret labs from getting discovered by Very Bad People with Very Tiny Brains—VBPVTBs, she liked to call them.
“Hey Dobie,” she said, sitting up, “do a quick discovery risk assessment on the four labs with the largest allocation of our resources and make sure the VBPVTBs have been fully engaged with the distractions we’ve set out for them in Silver City, Borgotello, and Rath.”
Instead of his usual “Yes, Anna,” or an inane question like, “are you talking about the highest allocations of mental or physical resources, Anna?” he remained quiet in his corner.
Frowning, Anna turned to look at him.
Dobie was gone, his usual austere wooden chair empty.
Immediately, Anna remembered why, and it left a cold spot in her stomach, realizing that he was somewhere else. He was never somewhere else. He was always there, watching over her as she slept, keeping the VBPVTBs at bay. She swallowed and glanced at the door, not even remembering if she’d locked it or not. Had she locked it? That had always been Dobie’s job…
Anna squinted at it, decided that her robot may be a backstabbing, Pan-loving, defecting traitor, but he wouldn’t leave her sleeping alone in an unlocked room. She turned back to face the wall.
Dobie was gone.
So what? She still had a planet to run. There were twenty-three Coalition pilots that had turned themselves in after their comrades had gone down in balls of fire during their merry chase after Joel in the Tear three weeks ago, and some of them were doubtless spies sent to infiltrate rebel ranks. She still needed to get down to Wing 5 and interview them, and have Dobie tell her which ones were lying.
But Dobie was gone, off running Pan’s fool’s errand for him, saving lives. How incredibly inconsiderate.
Irritated, Anna rearranged her schedule. She needed to check on her experiments tucked away in the Junkyard, anyway. Some of those tube rats were probably really tripping out right now, and it would be best to observe them before the drugs wore off. She also had a meeting with Peter and Ellie scheduled for 14:00, but she could tell them to come early. If Dobie still wasn’t back by the time she finished chatting with the do-gooders, then she could hijack another Coalition satellite to spew random gibberish back at them when they tried to navigate anything more complicated than a go-cart.
Then she realized what she was doing.
Anna didn’t need Dobie to tell if a few scumbag Coalition cockpit-monkeys were lying. She’d done a perfectly good job of analyzing people’s reactions before she’d picked up her six-foot crutch. She immediately reworked her schedule, putting ‘Interrogate the Pilots’ at the top of the list. She got to her feet to go do that, even going so far as to take three steps from the bed, when she realized she was going to have to walk across a good section of the Orbital completely unguarded.
As the magnitude of that fact hit her, Anna sat back down on her bed.
The bastard. He’d left her.
She immediately scratched trying to make her way through the Junkyard off her list, too. She’d traversed it a dozen times upon arriving at the Orbital without a second thought, but she’d always had Dobie at her side, so she didn’t bother wasting processing power on something he simply took care of. After all, with all his upgrades, he was more alert than an altrameter and had the firepower of a Gryphon, and the best part was most people couldn’t even tell he wasn’t human, so it was a total surprise when he whupped their tube-rat asses. She didn’t have to think about it.
But now she did, and it made her guts twist in rage.
He’d left her. What would Ellie think if she showed up without Dobie to—
Anna realized suddenly she couldn’t leave her room. She swallowed, hard, remembering how many people she’d pissed off in the last two weeks, many of whom were even of middling intelligence. And Pan and Ellie… Well. They had promise. The moment they found out she was unprotected, they would launch their campaign to get rid of her.
Or, at least, that’s what Anna would do, in their place.
Feeling awkward, possibly even like she had the flu, Anna got up and stumbled over to the door to check if it was locked. It was. It even had the gornatev anchors bolted in place, something that Dobie must’ve gotten really creative to accomplish, since it could only be done from the inside.
Then, still feeling odd and shaky, Anna went back to her bed and stared at the wall. She couldn’t talk to Peter without Doby—the twit would gloat. He’d love to see her all alone. He’d love to rub her face in the fact that Dobie had disobeyed her, had left her because Pan asked him to…
Anna wasn’t scared of Pan. And Ellie, well, the tubblet was more interested in ingesting the latest brand of corn chips than pursuing galactic domination. Anna again got up to head towards the door, but hesitated when she saw the empty chair.
She could just wait until Dobie got back…
Then a horrible thought occurred to her. What if Dobie didn’t come back? What if, because she had refused to help upgrade him out of spite for him disobeying her, he got destroyed in the battle for Rath? How many bots had they said there were guarding the complex? Six hundred and fifty? Against a single Ferris? And it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Magali and Milar would sic Dobie on the worst of them, just so that he could tragically ‘die’ because they were ‘overwhelmed’ as they were out there valiantly ‘saving lives.’ They would jump at the opportunity. Hell, the mere fact that Pan had brought it up meant that they were all in on it.
One Ferris against…six hundred and fifty?
Anna went to her r-player and checked. Six hundred and seventy-two, including four altrameter muskers. She
swallowed, the first real tingles of dread beginning to niggle at her. Dobie didn’t have the firepower to take on a musker, and she hadn’t given him enough shielding to defend himself against a group of Gryphons, should five or six team up on him at once.
The more she thought about it, the more Anna was filled with dread. Even with Mag-The-Machine at his back and that pussy Nephyr taking the hits for him, Dobie didn’t have much chance against an altrameter. She would have offered a few improvements, back when Pan was recruiting him, but Dobie had gone against her wishes, without even asking, so she hadn’t seen a need to help him in any way.
I’ll upgrade him, she thought, staring at the white polymer of the wall. I’ll give him machinery nobody’s ever heard of before.
…granted he even came back.
Then Anna realized she was agonizing over whether or not a robot that had betrayed her was going to come back. She snorted in disgust at her own weakness and got off the bed, her decision made. Dobie could come or go. She didn’t care—she had more important things to worry about, like the fate of Fortune and breakfast.
She actually made it to the door this time before the sheer fact that she was alone stopped her cold.
This was, she realized, the first time she’d tried to face the world without backup. Prior to Dobie, it had been her weaponry-gifted big sister or Milar-the-Backstabbing-Badass. She’d always had someone to take the heat if things got messy.
Swallowing, Anna took her hand off the latch, staring at it. It was almost at head-height with her. She was small. Most of the world could kick her teeth in and bash her face into the sidewalk and no amount of brains would be able to make them stop.
Immediately, that indignant side of her regained control. What was she, some sort of pussy? She didn’t need anyone to back her up. She was an army unto herself. All she had to do was look cute and innocent and then, when they least expected it, stab them in the stomach with their own scissors.
And yet, it was hard to escape the fact that beyond that door were countless people who wanted to kill her. People that, for whatever dumb reason, had a grudge against her. And, unfortunately, Pan, Ellie, and the other Yolk Babies were at the top of that list. She was actually a little surprised that they hadn’t busted down her door yet. Anna, unlike the other pussyfoots, got things done. So what if Geo was missing half a ball? Anna had gotten the information she wanted from the jiggling white maggot, and it hadn’t taken months of schmoozing to get it, either. Besides, looking at history as a model for the future, the universal gene pool wasn’t exactly desperate for another of Geo’s sperm to get lucky.
