by Sara King
“Agh!” Patrick cried, sloshing the tea off his pants. “Dad, I told you not to yell in my ear when I’m sleeping!” He was so tired of being the one who always got babysitting duties because everyone else had more important things to do, like have dinner and fornicate.
“Twenty Nephyrs!” Wideman screamed again at the top of his lungs.
Yeah, right. Patrick sighed and dropped his head into his hands.
His father stopped screaming and, as if nothing had happened, began caressing his latest creation—a carrot—and giggled like a twelve-year-old with an action figure of a dragon-covered bad boy. It was one of the games he liked to play, waking Patrick up in the worst possible way whenever he was trying to catch a nap, just to watch him jump.
Patrick sighed and went to find something to mop up the tea. He hated the fact he was stuck babysitting his drooling, incontinent, gibberish-spouting imbecile of a father because Milar—and possibly Jeanne, if that blush on her face as she and Joel ditched Wideman on him was any indication—was busy getting laid.
What was it about a couple of fancy tattoos that got the girls’ attention, anyway? Aside from the black and red dragons inked over about fifty percent of his twin brother, they looked identical. Same rugged face, same amber eyes, same chiseled body, same auburn hair… It was that damn knife, it had to be. While Patrick liked to grin and flirt with girls, Milar liked to threaten them with monomolecular weaponry. That had to be what was turning them on. Whenever they holed up in one place long enough for Patrick to try to find a date for the night, he got turned down flat. Yet, whenever Milar walked into a goddamn room, sporting sunglasses regardless of time or weather and pitch black garb that never changed, he had girls drape themselves on him, so many he had to shake them all off at the end of the day because he was ‘saving himself for something better.’ Which apparently meant a pint-sized cyborg with an attitude problem and headache-inducing mind powers.
Not that Patrick really wanted to jump back into the market—he was still trying to get over the fact that Anna and Milar had deliberately sabotaged his relationship with Anna’s big sister. Magali had been everything he’d ever wanted in a girl. She was innocent, smart, sexy, sensitive… She’d put up with Anna for eight years, so she obviously had to be some sort of angel. Hell, they’d been planning to move off-planet together.
But no. She was dead, forgotten as some nameless egger in the Yolk mines, and Patrick couldn’t even go look for her body because he was busy making sure Wideman didn’t dig around in the composter or stick his dinner fork in the electrical socket.
Disgusted, Patrick finished mopping up the tea with an old shirt and tossed it into the laundry pile. That was another thing they expected him to do. Laundry. While Jeanne and Milar were off cavorting, Patrick was supposed to wash their nasty underwear and bleach their discolored pits.
Wideman slapped his hand down on the table, palm-side down, startling Patrick out of his reverie. “Twenty Nephyrs!” he said, focusing on Patrick with the total attention of a lunatic.
Patrick felt a little tingle of unease and went to the window of their safe-house in Silver City to check for Nephyrs. Things had been real quiet after that weird riot earlier that morning, when crowds of people had been running, fully-armed, in the streets, heading towards the spaceport. Patrick, alone with Wideman to keep tabs on, had simply barricaded the door and sat against the wall with a twelve-gauge, hoping whatever was going on in the west side of the city wouldn’t bleed over into this sector.
Though Patrick didn’t see any Nephyrs outside his window, everyone in the streets was armed, and a lot were getting drunk and cheering.
Nervous, now, Patrick switched on the feed. The first thing that came up was Joel’s ‘daring’ and ‘utterly miraculous’ fight over the Tear with that ‘unidentified soldier operator.’ Ground-based video of jaw-dropping aerial maneuvers showed again and again, with Joel’s TAG doing things that a ship shouldn’t be able to do, flying loops around the Bouncers and soldiers—supposedly the Coalition’s best.
Then the images of Joel’s dogfight cut out with a sudden, “—and it has been confirmed, folks. The woman who single-handedly killed twenty Nephyrs in Silver City just liberated Yolk Factory 14. Ladies and gentlemen, we have just confirmed—Yolk Factory 14 has been liberated!”
Patrick’s breath caught. Instinctively upon hearing mention of Magali’s Yolk factory, he knew who had killed those Nephyrs. Magali’s alive! he thought, on a wash of relief. With it, however, came a sinking of dread, like a man looking at his own gravestone. He knew that, for Magali to have done something so unlike her, something had to have gone very, very wrong. She hated hurting people. She couldn’t even stand the sight of a paper cut, much less a bullet wound.
When the scene on the news shifted to show an earlier-that-morning view of a massive crowd cheering in the west side of the city, Patrick swallowed, recognizing Magali detained by a Nephyr in the center of the mayhem.
…or was she? He’d spent four years learning her subtlest body cues, and when Patrick looked closer, he realized she was clinging to the Nephyr not like a captive, but like a frightened lover.
“What.” Patrick squinted at the picture. “The fuck?”
Then the screen was showing a different scene, with dozens of eggers reuniting with their families. Big smiles, tears, happy embraces… No Magali. The Nephyr, though… He was everywhere, usually in the background, directing the survivors, apparently on the colonists’ side.
They were trusting a Nephyr? Oh, that was just brilliant. Was Milar seeing this? And what had the glittering freak done to Magali to make her snap like that?
Patrick glanced again at Wideman, desperately wondering just how much shit the little old fart could get into if he went looking for Magali for a few hours.
Wideman cocked his head, scrunched his face with concentration, and peed himself.
In the background, the reporter went solemn. “Ladies and gentlemen, we just got a report that the Nephyr we keep seeing at Magali Landborn’s side is Jersey Brackett, of the legendary Brackett clan in Six Bears, South Tear. The sole survivor of the slaughter there twenty years ago.”
Patrick went cold. Not only was he going to have trouble competing with the last surviving Brackett, he knew upon hearing his former girlfriend’s name on the waves that she was doomed. With an assault so public, her picture brazenly posted before the masses as a hero, the authorities in Rath would send everything they had to bring her in for a public correction and execution. Milar and Patrick’s tiny acts of sabotage and resistance were nuisances that could be overlooked. This wasn’t. This was war.
“Oh no, Magali,” Patrick whispered. “They’re gonna kill you.”
His father tugged insistently at his sleeve, but Patrick ignored it. He started to pace. Magali was not only alive, doomed, and cuddling up to a Nephyr, but Patrick was trapped in Silver City with Wideman in the middle of an all-out rebellion. Any minute now, the entire Coalition Space Force was going to level this place, and he didn’t even have a ship. This was bad. Really bad. He went to the tiny portable comm system in the corner and, using the public Silver City booster, tried to call Jeanne. She didn’t answer.
“Damn!” Patrick cried, watching more footage of gun-toting idiots cheering in the streets of Silver City, their excited masses apparently oblivious to the fact that operators were about to show up and crush them with their soldiers. They thought they’d already won. By killing twenty Nephyrs. Aanaho, they were so screwed.
Patrick tried to call Jeanne again. “Come on,” he muttered into the mic. “Come on! Shoot the skinny prick already and answer the comm!”
Nothing.
Patrick gave a frustrated scream. Things were happening out there and he was chained to a demented egger. He flipped the band to Milar’s link, knowing his brother wouldn’t be able to respond, but he needed to get out of there, and he needed to do it fast. “Miles,” he said into the mic, “if you’re listening, you asshole, get to Silver
City and pick me and dad up. The shit is really clogging the engine intake, and things around here are about to get really nasty.” Then he put down the comm a little too hard.
Wideman Joe insistently tugged his sleeve again, carrot clutched in one hand.
“Yes, I know you peed yourself,” Patrick snapped. “Give me a minute to think!”
Magali was off running around with a Nephyr, painting a huge target on her back, Silver City was in open rebellion around him, and Patrick was completely without transport. He really needed to get somewhere safe, and fast, before the cavalry arrived.
Wideman tugged his sleeve again, holding out the carrot. “Skin!”
Patrick groaned and rolled his eyes. “Goddamn it, Dad, we don’t have a peeler here. We had to leave it in Deaddrunk, okay? Just make do with the knife.” He turned back to the problem at hand.
“Unofficial reports are saying Landborn and Bracket intend to hit more Yolk factories before the end of the week…”
“Oh, well, isn’t that just great?!” he shouted at the screen. “Go ahead and tell the hornets you’re gonna kick their nest. Genius!” The fight was starting without him, and obviously this Brackett kid was working for the Coalition. Starting a ‘rebellion’ so people could get their hopes up, only to undeniably squash it into oblivion before it gained any traction. Like popping a pimple before it could fester.
Outside, people were howling and dancing in the streets. A volley of gunfire went off, joined by others, muzzles aimed at the sky.
Patrick stomped over to the comm and picked it up again. “Jeanne!” he shouted over the gunfire, leaving a message on her machine, “I don’t know if you’re watching the news while you’re getting distracted by that playboy bastard, but Silver City just declared war on the Coalition. You hear me? This place is going nuts!”
No response.
“Argh!” Patrick slammed the comm aside and started pacing again, checking his watch, desperate for Jeanne to come knocking on his door by nine o’clock, as promised. He couldn’t leave without some sort of backup. Wideman was too much of a loose cannon, and, in the right circles, too easily recognized.
Jeanne didn’t arrive by nine. Not that night, not the next morning, not the morning after that. As Nephyrs began to flood the streets, putting down the riots with brutal efficiency, Jeanne and Joel remained completely unresponsive to Patrick’s desperate hails. Patrick waited for them to respond for two and a half days. No one was dancing in the streets anymore, though there were plenty of corpses collecting tadflies—colonist corpses. He hadn’t seen a single Nephyr go down. When Patrick moved away from the window to watch another development on the waves—another Yolk factory overrun and more eggers reunited with their families, as well as a brief glimpse of Magali herself, being ushered onto a captured Coalition patrol ship by that same damned glittering Brackett—Wideman came up and tugged his sleeve again.
“I’m out of vegetables!” Patrick cried, nerves frayed to the very core. A Nephyr squad had been going door-to-door across the street, confiscating colonist weaponry, and sooner or later, they were gonna get to Patrick. Patrick had more guns than a Ne’vanthi smuggler packed away in the closet, and he knew that wasn’t gonna look good on a sweep. He paced back to the window, peeling back just enough of the curtain to get a look at the Nephyrs even then standing outside the opposite door.
His dad waddled up and tugged on his sleeve again. “Skin,” he insisted, shoving the carrot at him.
“Aanaho Ineriho!” Patrick cried, brushing it aside, heart hammering as he tried to decide what to do. Moving Wideman usually involved Wideman screaming and flailing and making a scene. When Wideman insisted on shoving the carrot at him again, Patrick forcefully turned him around and pointed him back to his carving corner. “Go carve the other side. I’m busy!” One of the Nephyrs was crossing the street, eying the common door three stories down. “Damn,” Patrick muttered. “Damn, damn.”
But instead of making him back off, like his rebuffs usually did, Wideman Joe turned back, grabbed Patrick by the hand, and insistently dropped into his palm a peeled, chewed-up carrot. As soon as it touched Patrick’s skin, a vivid image formed, wriggling through Patrick’s mind like maggots.
He saw a big man skinned on a Coalition table, Nephyrs moving in the background. Cameras everywhere, big viewing windows on all sides. An IV line in arm and leg. Restraints. The unfortunate person’s skin was hanging from a rack a few feet away, stretched like a starlope hide, left to dry, doubtless to be made into some grisly Nephyr cape. Then the image moved, zooming in on the skin of the man’s face, on the freckles, the curly auburn hair…
Back on the table, the man regained consciousness and gave a ragged scream.
“Oh, lookie,” one of the Nephyrs said. “He’s awake again. Told you that serum doesn’t let you pass out for long. Now.” He picked up a strip of wood and slapped it gently against his palm. “What did you say your brother’s real name was?”
“Milar,” the man on the table croaked out.
Patrick dropped the carrot and backed away, heart thundering completely out of control. Below, the Nephyr pounded on the downstairs door, its fist like heavy glass thumping against the starwood frame.
A moment later, a sharp pain in his hip made him look down. The feathery puff of a little red dart stuck from his thigh. Blinking, Patrick looked up and saw a feminine shadow moving at the window he had just vacated before he felt his legs weaken beneath him. He slumped to the ground, his father’s screaming becoming faint, distant…
CHAPTER 8: Friendly Assessments
18th of May, 3006
Interstellar Courier Ship
Outer Bounds
Anna glanced around the ship, sniffing with boredom. She would have much rather spent the afternoon watching the latest developments of the Revolution from the privacy of her hastily-evacuated section of the Orbital’s Junkyard, but she’d gotten word that the Coalition was panicking due to Magali’s antics and had gathered up all of its ‘unique’ draftees to ship off to the Nephyr Academy before they could get ‘reacquired’ by colonist forces.
The haste with which the coalers had decided to relocate this particular shipment had piqued Anna’s interest enough to show up for departure—they obviously thought they had a couple Yolk Babies on board. So far, however, all she saw were a bunch of bawling idiots who couldn’t stuff two whole brain cells in a burlap sack without rendering themselves drooling half-wits in the process. She yawned, and would have gone back to the Orbital and her Yolk-addiction experiments had the ship not already been en route to the Core, which made things inconvenient.
“Line up!” a Ferris shouted into the room. “Stasis procedures will begin in two minutes. We will call each draftee by name. When you are called, you will remove your clothes and follow your escort into the cryogenic prep station.”
Anna yawned again. Damn she was tired. Having to get up in the middle of the night to catch a flight sucked. She’d almost skipped it.
The robots forced their draftees into a semblance of a line, with Anna close to the rear. She checked her r-player, then executed her pre-made program to hack the ship’s navigation system.
“Hey, why does she get an r-player?” one of the draftees whined loudly, a big hairy kid that made a face at her.
Scratch the Sasquatch, Anna thought. She smiled at him. “I’ve got a special mandate.”
Towards the front of the line, the robots took their first victim, who began to scream and thrash as they dragged her into the room, where her howls continued.
“What special mandate?” the Sasquatch snapped. Loudly, he demanded of Dobie, “Hey, Ferris, why are you letting her have an r-player?”
Several other robots turned to look at Anna’s r-player, then at Dobie. In the background, the girl they were prepping for cryo continued to scream and curse.
“Article Seventeen A of the Unwilling Draftee Act specifically forbids the use of personal electronics by special candidates,” the closest robot r
eminded Dobie.
“I hacked him,” Anna said. She smiled brightly.
The other robots in the room gave her a curious look. “Government robots cannot be hacked,” the closest robot responded. As if she had forgotten.
“Uh-huh. Yep.” She went back to her r-player and began tinkering with the ship’s flight plan. In the cryo prep room, the girl was screaming for her mommy. The other kids in the line, however, were giving her odd looks. Anna yawned again. “Jeez it’s late. Why do you guys insist on chartering the flights in the middle of the night?”
“The zero hour is the traditional departure time for long-distance government flights, Overlord,” Dobie said.
“Holy shit,” one of the kids closest to Anna said. Several more jaws fell open.
The girl in the cryo room stopped screaming, obviously having been given a knockout drug to shut her up.
The robots in line turned back to stare straight ahead.
“Kay McClellan!” the robot in charge shouted. “You’re next!”
A spindly, waiflike, blonde girl stepped out of line, swallowing as she looked around at the dispassionate robot faces. When nobody moved to help her, she reached for her pants, shaking.
“Hey!” Sasquatch shouted at Anna from three draftees down. “Did you really hack that robot?”
Kay McClellan, who was getting undressed, hesitated and glanced down the line at them.
Anna sighed and rolled her eyes.
“He’s bringing unwanted attention, Overlord,” Dobie said. “Would you like me to neutralize him?”
“Nah,” Anna said, without looking up. She kept tapping at her r-player. “Lessee. Where do we wanna go? I was thinking back to the Orbital, but I could so go for a cheeseburger, and there’s this awesome cheeseburger joint in Silver City.”
Several of the kids’ eyes widened.