by Sara King
Jeanne put her picture on the viewscreen. She had tears in her eyes. “When you were a baby, I sang you a silly lullaby about a spider down a well. I never was a good singer, but you liked it. Whenever we had the money, we went to the little shop down the road and you got Ultimate Chocolate-Chunk ice cream with a drizzle of raspberry sauce. Your first crush was a heartthrob named Dorgie Petty, a Ne’vanthi runaway who stowed away on one of the freighters to Fortune, then hid in an alley around the corner from where we lived. Coalition forces found him and sent him to the Yolk mines. They sent us his corpse because nobody else would take it, and you’d called him a few times over the waves, so they thought you were next of kin.”
Daytona was frowning at the screen, at the way her mom was crying. She turned to Joel, confusion on her face. “Where is she? The Coalition got her?! Is she in jail?”
“No,” Joel said, his heart breaking. “She’s not in jail.”
“The last time I hugged you, it was the night before the last time you asked me to tell you about your dad. You’d just made your first loaf of sourdough bread, start to finish, and you were so excited you just hugged me out of the joy of it. It made me so happy, I didn’t push you away even though I was still mad about the way you’d spent your whole savings on a two-month rental on a picked-over junkyard and its cramped little shop.”
Daytona self-consciously glanced over her shoulder at Joel. “Mom, what’s going on?”
“Daytona, baby, I need you to do something for me,” Jeanne said.
“O-okay,” Daytona said. “Um…what?”
“Go into the lower hold. Room 3.”
“Hey, Jeanne, maybe she should wait…” Joel cautioned.
Daytona frowned at him, then at her mom’s picture on the screen. “What’s down there?”
“Something you need to see. Please, Daytona.”
Obviously curious, and yet painfully unaware of what she was about to discover, Daytona turned from the cockpit and carefully made her way down into the lower hold of the ship, Joel following closely behind. As she went to open up Room 3, however, Joel covered the door release with his hand.
“I was there,” Joel told her, when she looked up at him curiously. “I want you to know I was right there and I saw it all. It’s not in your head, it’s real. We don’t know how it happened, but it happened. Okay?”
“Uhhh,” Daytona said, making a nervous sound. “Okaaaay…”
“I also want you to know,” Joel said, “that I’m here, okay?”
She made a scoff of dismissal. “Yeah, okay. You don’t get to play Dad that fast, buddy.” She shoved his hand away and pressed the door release.
Jeanne’s body was in a cryo casket in the back of the room—a casket that was sealed, but wasn’t connected to power. It was, in essence, a locked box, and the heat and humidity of the jungle hadn’t done the corpse any favors. Joel swallowed as Daytona flipped on the lights and, seeing it was the only thing in the room, crossed the floor to get a better look. Once she saw the lid, she frowned slightly and leaned down. Joel had tried to pretty Jeanne’s body up, but there was no hiding the way she died—or the fact that she had expired three weeks ago.
“Aanaho!” Daytona gasped, throwing her hand to her mouth and stumbling backwards. Her breaths started to come in ragged pants, her eyes fixed to the casket. “Mom!” the last came out in a horrified scream.
“I shot myself,” Jeanne said softly. “The whole ship was full of Shrieker nodules. We went down, bags got broke, Yolk was everywhere. When I woke up, I was…this.” She was now using one of the closed-circuit intercom pads inside the room to display her image. “I thought you never wanted to talk to me again. I felt like I’d lost everything. I’d lost the very last thing that was important to me in the world, and not even a hold full of Yolk could bring that joy back to me.”
“Mom!” Daytona sobbed, still looking at the casket, tears streaking down her face. She started shaking her head. “No, Mom. Please no…”
“But I didn’t die,” Jeanne went on. “I should have, but I didn’t. I became something…else. The ship…it’s like I can feel everything inside it, can manipulate it. It’s like it’s my body now, Day. I can feel your tears on your cheeks because it changes the moisture in the atmosphere. This thing you see around you—all broken and busted up—it’s me.”
Daytona sniffled, finally tearing her eyes from the tomb, finding the image of her mother on the wall. She swallowed hard, shaking all over.
Stuck on the screen, Jeanne was sobbing. “Somebody gave me a second chance, and I’m here now, Day. I’ll never leave you again, okay? I swear, baby. I swear.”
Daytona hesitantly took a step closer to the image, then reached up and touched the ship’s wall beside the intercom, looking into the picture. “Mom?” It came out as a whisper.
“Yes, honey. It’s me. Mom.”
Daytona hugged the wall, leaning her forehead against the metal, crying. “Mom, oh God no, Mom…”
“It’s okay, honey. I’m here for you. It’s okay.” The image on the wall looked powerless, her face twisted in agony.
Joel swallowed hard, fighting back tears. Then, because he couldn’t watch helpless any longer, he walked up and drew the girl into his arms like her mother so obviously wanted to do. Daytona grabbed his shirt in tight fists and, as he pulled her tight against him, started sobbing into his chest. Joel held her for hours, feeling her heartbeat under his palm, wishing more than anything he’d answered those calls, that he’d been there for her, knowing, deep in his soul, that he’d found the family he’d always wished he’d had.
Hours later, the comm buzzed and Jeanne said softly, “The rebels are asking for you to fly Honor into Rath. The planetary governor challenged Magali to fight him, and they worry he could have set up something nasty on the flight in.”
One time, maybe as little as a few hours ago, the thought of flying through a trap would have excited Joel like nothing else. Now, though, Joel didn’t even take his eyes off the child in his arms.
“Fuck Honor,” Joel said, into his sleeping daughter’s hair. “I’ve got family.”
CHAPTER 44: Improv
12th of June, 3006
Rath Airfield
Fortune, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
Magali took a deep breath, trying not to count down the seconds until Drogire dropped her in Rath. The alien ‘weapon’ sat across her knees, basically a repurposed arm of an Aashaanti robot that had been welded to stiffen the joints, then jury-rigged with a spare battery that had been hastily welded to the end and taped into place for good measure. It had a trigger release that someone had taken from a doorbell, and the arc often sputtered and flickered when she swung it. Because, Pan had explained to her, there was a loose contact somewhere within the arm from when they’d torn it off the robot with a bulldozer—there had been no visible screws or bolts to dismantle it—and they didn’t have time to fix it, so they just had to hope it didn’t short out the rest of the way before she was done gutting Steele. Worse, the alien motor required kinetic energy—a sharp jerk was necessary to get the blade spinning before the onboard motor would even engage.
The whole thing was unwieldy, weighing at least forty pounds, and the ovoid arc-blade vibrated so much when it spun that it felt like her arm would fall off after only a few seconds. As if that weren’t bad enough, one of the Babies had thought it was a cool idea to give it bright green rubberized grip at the bottom—the wrappings probably stolen from a holoball racquet. Unfortunately, the battery only lasted for twenty minutes of continuous use, ten of which they’d used up in Pan’s demonstration after they’d cleaned up Anna’s corpse. The ‘weapon’s’ creators had therefore cautioned her against holding down the trigger for long periods of time, as if the threat of losing an arm from the jarring wobble wasn’t enough of a deterrent.
Riding toward Rath to duel a Nephyr, Magali was acutely aware that she was carrying a piece of cobbled-together junk. She was even more painfully aware that sh
e was about to go on global television, in front of six million colonists, all of whom she knew were already tuned into the holostreams, crowded around their boxes with nervous anticipation.
But Magali started this fight. Now she had to finish it.
The only positive that Magali could see about the whole situation was that, once she held down the doorbell, the entire arm blanked out of existence, totally invisible to the naked eye.
“Okay,” Pan said, squatting beside her like a nervous hen. “We didn’t have time to hijack the waves and make the weapon. Whatever happens on that feed, it’s gonna go live all over Fortune. You sure you got this?”
Magali grunted. She took another look at the image of a bound-to-a-chair, tattooed Patrick that was still being broadcast across Fortune, the countdown timer over his head. It had reached twenty seven minutes and thirteen seconds. The Babies had already ascertained it wasn’t a fake. As she watched, he sniffed and looked to one side. To Magali’s eyes, he appeared beaten, broken under the weight of his brother’s twin dragon tattoos, something that was doubtlessly a sick mockery aimed at Miles, since Patrick had been the one to make them—and it was something that the Coalition had probably made hurt very, very much. It unfurled another rasping flame of rage, thinking what Steele had done to him, a man that had been a lover and a friend.
Even then, Jersey, KayKay, and Milar were off rescuing him from some secret compound only Kestrel had known about. Magali hoped that the flirty, supremely confident woman wasn’t just playing them all, like Captain Eyre seemed to believe.
Pan hadn’t stopped talking. “…, so Mona Rohrer just got back to me after running some more simulations and said the battery drains twice as fast if you use anything more than twelve-second bursts. So yeah, just remember not to hold that button down for more than a few seconds at a time and you should be good.”
Magali continued to stare at the exit hatch, wondering if she was going to survive the next twenty minutes.
“And remember there’s this little plug on the side that’s your kill-switch. Say Steele’s gonna take it from you. The minute it gets out of your hands, that cord attached to your wrist is gonna yank out the plug and boom, power shuts off and it’s just a lifeless piece of junk in his hands. We took it off an outboard boat engine motor. You know, the ones that are supposed to stop the boat dead if you fall out?” He swiped his hands definitively. “Total junk if that little pin comes out.”
Magali turned slowly to face him.
Pan reddened. “I mean, it’s not a piece of junk—it only looks like one. But if the kill switch goes off, it will be, just don’t bump it or get the cord caught on anything, because then it’d be a huge lump of metal stuck to your arm slowing you down and you might as well drop it…”
“Pan?” Magali said.
“Yeah, Ms. Landborn?” Pan said, in almost a nervous chitter.
“Shut up.”
“You got it.” Pan hastily got to his feet and went to the cockpit. He came back several minutes later. “Uh, in between telling Drogire he needs to polish his ‘scales’ and trying to nap in her ‘den’ under the console, Captain Eyre says we’re gonna land in less than twenty seconds.”
Magali felt the line of her mouth tighten along with her fingers on her weapon.
“You sure you can do this?” Pan asked. He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “You can still back out. Nobody would blame you.”
Magali slowly turned to look at his childish fingers and continued looking at them.
Pan quickly removed his hand. “I mean, uh, we’re all rooting for you.”
The landing gear started to unfold from the ship’s belly, so Magali stood up in silence. As the door started to open, allowing a beam of dying sunlight to enter the ship’s cargo bay, Pan quickly got out of view. Alone to face whatever was on the other side, Magali took a deep, steadying breath, and stepped out onto the ramp to see what Steele had in store for her.
She half-expected a sniper to take a potshot at her the moment she showed herself, but there was nothing waiting for her in the dusky light but twelve eighty-ton soldiers lining the parade grounds and a few dozen Nephyrs standing at attention. Steele wanted her in front of the cameras before the fireworks started.
“Welcome!” Colonel Steele called from the center of the open area between the towering soldiers. He was wearing black fatigues with gun holsters strapped to each thigh, his chest, and his hip. “You wanna wait to do this until you get your camera crews set up?”
“Don’t have any camera crews,” Magali said, starting down the ramp towards him.
Steele chuckled. “That afraid of losing, are we?”
“Nope,” Magali said, reaching the bottom of the gangplank and crossing the pavement towards him.
Steele’s eyes narrowed. “You can’t block off our signal. It’s being broadcast everywhere. Eight different stations. Live.” He gestured to the Coalition camera crews behind him, utterly smug. “They’re gonna see everything.”
“Didn’t try to block the signal.” Approaching Steele and his gathering at a leisurely walk, Magali pressed the doorbell on her weapon, only realizing afterwards she had forgotten to give it a shake to get the blade primed.
The gesture made Steele notice her ‘weapon’. “What is that?” It came out as a half-laugh, half-snort, like she was stepping off her ship to fight him with a handful of garbage. Which, she supposed, she was.
“It’s something some of my friends made me,” Magali said, jerking it to try and get the blade spinning.
“Uh…huh.” Steele looked less than impressed. “You don’t have something…” he gestured at the soldiers bristling with armaments that towered over them, “…more refined?”
“You didn’t give me much time to come up with something,” Magali said, slowing to a stop in front of him. She grunted, jerking it again, trying to get the blade to flip over and prime the stubborn alien motor. “Had to improvise.”
He’s gonna want to make you mad before he tries to kill you, Tatiana had counseled her. He’s gonna try to piss you off, engage your systems.
Magali had winced at ‘systems’. It was still difficult for her to come to terms with the fact she was something…inhuman…but at least Tatiana’s repeated shots to the forehead had left her less afraid of the bastard in front of her.
A grin slowly broke out over his face. “You actually believe what those colonists are saying about you being divinely favored, don’t you?”
“It’s the only real explanation,” Magali said. She jerked the weapon again. Nothing happened.
Steele laughed and raised his voice. “The only explanation? You hear that, everyone?! The collie actually thinks she was sent here by the gods.”
He’s gonna mock you first, make a show of it, Pan had chimed in. He needs to make it a big reveal.
From the lines of Nephyrs, several laughed, but it was tense. They obviously knew what Magali had done to their fellows, and they weren’t happy to be at this particular formation.
Steele turned back to her. “Either way this goes, I win,” Steele said, that smooth confidence back on his face. “You do know that, right?” He crossed his arms over his chest with total superiority. “You fell right into my trap, little hen. Soon the world will know your secret.”
Steele is Super Squad, so you’re gonna have a real fight on your hands, Mag, Pan said. That’s what he’s counting on.
“We’ll see.” Magali yanked at the weapon again. It tried to catch, sputtered, sparked, and then died, the conduits not making contact at the right time.
Steele’s arm snapped out and he grabbed Magali by the throat, squeezing, dragging her up onto her tiptoes. “Smile,” Steele said up at her, smirking. “This is all on camera.”
“Good.” Magali hitched the blade again. The shorted motor finally caught, and the arm itself disappeared as the oval arc-blade immediately started to spin and roar.
Steele frowned and glanced down at the place where the weapon had disappeared
. “What the…?”
Magali kicked him away from her, heaved the weapon up, and, as Steele raised an arm defensively to stop her, cut straight through the appendage, lopping it off at the elbow.
As Steele’s eyes went wide, seeing the stub, she twisted, swung the blade around, and hacked off his other arm. As he started to back away, mouth open in shock, Magali swung at his neck, severing his head at the shoulders, then kicked it aside with a roundhouse to the cheek, sending it bouncing across the asphalt.
Steele’s headless corpse already beginning to spasm and fall, Magali swung the blade as hard as she could at his center mass, catching him in the torso and splitting him in half. Then, as methodically as if she were butchering a pig, Magali kicked out, knocking his top half off his bottom half, and started eviscerating it.
As the pieces of his top half floundered and blood from his truncated limbs sprayed her with crimson, Magali spun and cut his still-standing bottom half apart, again and again, until there was nothing left but chunks of meat and bone. Then she turned to face the gathered Nephyrs and soldiers, dripping gore, the entire exchange having taken only a couple of seconds.
“Anyone else?!” she screamed, as the blade roared like a miscalibrated chainsaw in her hands. “The gods tell me he wasn’t enough of a challenge!”
For a long moment, she faced off against the contingent of Nephyrs and their heavy-armaments backup, waiting for their next move. Then, like a herd of starlopes, they bolted.
Nephyrs and soldiers ran in all directions, the bigger machines quickly outpacing their smaller, glittering counterparts, their thundering feet making the ground beneath Magali rumble as they didn’t stop for anything, crunching vehicles and houses and fences in their desperation to get out of her way while their glittering companions hurdled the same obstacles with the speed and endurance of champion triathletes.
Magali released the doorbell trigger and glanced down at what remained of Steele. His head had come to a rest a dozen feet away, facing the sky. She wandered over to it. Strangely, the stench of electrified formaldehyde seemed to be wafting across the airfield, strong enough it made her stomach recoil.
