by Sara King
“Fucking Nephyrs,” Patrick whispered. “They’re worse than the Tritons, and she’s screwing one.” That was probably the worst part. Magali knew what they’d done to his mother. She knew what they were capable of…
And she was clinging to one for all the world to see.
Natalia seemed to watch him closely a moment, then offered, “You said Milar and Anna broke you two up? Why?”
Patrick felt his shoulders hunch on a wave of bitterness. “They wanted Magali to kick off the Revolution. I was in the way.”
Natalia snorted. “You mean your brother and Anna didn’t wanna lose their sidekicks.”
Patrick grimaced and looked at Natalia.
“Hey, I’m just calling it like I see it,” Natalia said, holding up her hands. “You followed him everywhere. Magali did the same. It was always Milar or Anna calling the shots. You and Magali were always in the background.”
Patrick made a face. “David Landborn was always telling me not to be such a follower.”
“What were you supposed to do, surrounded by that?” Natalia demanded. “Milar’s basically the next boomstick-carrying Ghani Clyde, and Anna’s…” She let herself trail off. “Well…Anna.”
“Yeah,” Patrick muttered. “I’ve been living in their shadows since I was a kid.”
“And not just theirs,” Natalia insisted. “Even Magali’s got that weird talent with guns. I saw her a couple times—total deadeye shot. Like, ridiculously good.” She was watching him all-too-closely. “That can’t be normal.”
Patrick grunted. “Her dad was pretty tough on her, making her practice all the time.”
“Sure,” Natalia said, “but that kind of accuracy? Stuff like she does, that can’t really be trained. You sure there’s not something…special…about her?”
The way the woman said it almost sounded like she expected there to be. Patrick frowned at her, then just shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe she’s got a partial Yolk Baby thing going on. I mean, what else could it be?”
Natalia cocked her head at him, seeming a bit perplexed, then seemed to shake herself and let it drop. “So what about you?” she insisted. “You were in the same womb with Milar. You were in the same place when your mom ate those nodules. But you’re not a Baby…are you?” She looked confused.
Patrick sighed. “You know, everybody says it’s because the mom eats the nodules, but Mom never touched that stuff. She hated the way they smelled. Closest thing she ever did was crawl into a cave with her sister to pick some nodules the year we were born. Some old guy down the road was dying and his last request was some Shrieker nodules to help him think straight.” Patrick shrugged. “Who knows. Yolk Babies could just be a myth.”
Natalia was watching him very closely. “It’s not a myth.”
“Well, obviously,” Patrick muttered. “But I mean, at least with Milar and Caroline and I, there wasn’t a lot of evidence for the whole in-utero nodule thing. I mean, look at us. Triplets, yet the best thing I can do is draw, and I’m not even that great of an artist. There was this kid Miles was playing chess with who could do drawings within drawings. It was creepy cool.” Patrick shrugged. “Caroline was good at making baskets, but not really any more than usual. And not much of anything special about me.” And that, too, burned. He’d always been overlooked, always been second fiddle to Miles, who was some sort of an amalgamation of Magali’s fighting skills and Anna’s genius.
“Interesting,” Natalia said, shaking her head. “Haven’t you ever mentioned that to anyone?”
“Mentioned what?” Patrick muttered, feeling himself getting more and more depressed the more he thought about his beloved brother. Even then, Miles was probably in bed with his girl, whispering sweet nothings, totally forgetting the war he helped to start.
“The triplet thing. That you and Miles and Caroline weren’t all Yolk babies,” Natalia said. “I think everyone just assumed you all were.”
Patrick shrugged. “Mentioned it to David,” Patrick said. “He said keep my mouth shut unless I could prove it, and we both knew I didn’t have a chance of proving anything at that point—Mom was long dead, and Dad, well…” He gestured disgustedly at Wideman. “He’s an imbecile.”
“David was always very focused on his goals,” Natalia noted.
Patrick snorted. “David Landborn was an asshole. A paramilitary special-ops wannabe rabble-rouser asshole that everybody loved.” He still couldn’t understand that. He was such a total, controlling, narrow-minded bastard to everyone around him, yet the whole world wanted to fall on their knees before him and name him King of the Universe.
Natalia looked amused. “You sound like you have less than pleasant memories of him.”
It was all he could do not to tear up at her words, thinking of all the crap he’d gone through since Mom had sent them to Deaddrunk to live with Landborn. “Yeah.”
“I remember all the time you spent drawing,” Natalia offered. “Don’t sell yourself short. They were good. What happened to them?”
Patrick snorted. “Aside from the ones I drew for Miles, David always took them from me, like he was trying to hide them. Never once put one up.”
“Because you never wanted to be a soldier,” she prodded, “and he knew it. He was hoping to discourage you from the creative side of things in the hope that you’d start paying attention to the ‘manly’ side of things.”
Patrick shrugged.
“Oh come on,” Natalia said. “Anyone who saw you as a kid knew that. You were always off in a corner, sketching on that pad of yours. You cringed every time a gun went off. You hated the violence.”
“But mom gave me over to David Landborn, drill sergeant extraordinaire,” Patrick said, feeling the bitterness all over again. “Got us out of the way so she could go kill herself.”
Natalia reached across the table and put her soft, feminine hand on his arm in a commiserating gesture. “That wasn’t fair of her, Patrick.”
Patrick suddenly found it hard to see through the tears. “We got him, too. We got the floater. We were just a day too late. A day.”
Natalia frowned. “Got who, Pat?”
Wiping his eyes, he just shook his head. “A Nephyr took a liking to Mom. Visited once a year. Milar and I laid a trap for him. Buried him in the front yard.”
Natalia peered at him closely a moment, then said, “I take it his visits were unwanted?”
“He was raping her,” Patrick said, tightening his fist over his fork.
“Did you ever go to the Coalition authorities about that?” Natalia demanded. “They have a whole division dedicated to keeping the Nephyrs in check. I mean, it’s at the core of what the Nephyrs are. They were made to fight the Tritons—the moment they start slipping into that kind of territory, they’re removed from the herd.”
“Are you kidding?” Patrick demanded. “Nephyrs do whatever the hell they want on Fortune, and Mom was just a colonist. Nobody cares about the colonists on this fucking planet.”
“What are you talking about?” Natalia demanded.
“They kicked mom and us kids to the curb the moment Dad got the Wide,” Patrick growled, shocked she couldn’t see the inequality. “He wasn’t even dead yet, and they wouldn’t even keep us in base housing. Wouldn’t give her any benefits at all.”
“That’s the biggest line of bullshit I’ve heard all month.” Natalia pulled out a datapad and began typing in search entries. “Ha!” she eventually cried. “Right there.” She turned the pad around to face him.
Front and center at the top of the page was a military ID with Patrick’s mother’s face on it, including her date of birth, Migratory Number, and a link to her DNA of record.
“What’s that?” Patrick muttered, not wanting to look further.
“Well, aside from the fact she had an ID card, which means she was accepted as your father’s dependent, look closely at that second page,” Natalia said. “It says she went missing after your father’s death, and that her benefits are still at large, pending t
ransfer to the surviving kin of one Joseph Whitecliff.”
Patrick frowned at Natalia, then read the page more closely. When he was done, he looked up sharply. “This page required a government clearance.”
Natalia gave him a sly grin. “Anna Landborn isn’t the only one with skills.”
Patrick grunted, then looked at the page again. It was bittersweet to see his mother’s face again, after so long. They had been too poor to own even a basic r-player in his youth, so his only images of her were the ones he had drawn from memory.
“It says there was an eight million credit death benefit because he got the Wide,” he said, frowning.
“Probably more like twelve million, now,” Natalia said. At his sharp look, she shrugged. “Gotta pay interest until it gets paid out.”
“But he said the Coalition didn’t give a shit about us anymore,” Patrick insisted. “That Dad never mentioned us in his will.”
Natalia gave him a flat look. “Let me guess. Is this the same upstanding guy who was raping your mother on an annual basis?”
“Well, yeah,” Patrick began, “but—”
“Tell ya what,” Natalia said. “I bet, if I place a call in to the base personnel coordinator right now and tell him I found Patrick Whitecliff, they’d drop twelve million in your account, no questions asked.” She cocked her head at the datapad screen, frowning. “And shit, and it looks like your dad had put in for a two-mile homestead on Mezzan and another on Gilgabesh before he got the Wide. Looks like he won them both.”
Patrick blinked, the numbers suddenly making it hard to think. “On Mezzan?”
Natalia shrugged. “You could probably still nab them. They’re in his name. Just gotta fill out the proper paperwork.”
“Two miles? Each?” Patrick was stunned. They hadn’t been offering two-mile parcels on any of the Daytona 6 Cluster planets for decades.
“Must’ve gotten in before they tightened down the homesteading giveaways,” Natalia said. She grinned. “Lucky you. Forget the death benefits. Do you know what two square miles of Mezzan will get you on the current market?”
Patrick swallowed, because, after all of his research with Magali, he had a pretty good idea. Mezzan was considered a sweet-spot paradise, probably one of the closest planets to Old Earth that had yet been found, completely full of unique and exotic flora and fauna, and homesteading tickets had gone fast. He and Magali had been looking at spending fifty thousand on a single tiny claim. “Depends on which two miles.”
“From what I heard, they stopped giving out anything but two acre parcels—too many city kids from the Core coming out here vying for the claims, so lottery managers were trying to shuffle some of them off to places like Oric or Stain.”
“What kind of idiot names a planet ‘Stain?’” Patrick anxiously laughed, still a bit emotionally overwhelmed by the knowledge that his father had left him with a homestead on Mezzan and trying desperately to hide it from the beautiful woman sitting across from him.
“It means something different in another language,” Natalia said, shrugging. “I think it’s Germael for ‘water’.”
Patrick stared at the numbers on the datapad, trying to wrap his head around what he was seeing.
“You know what this means,” Natalia said.
Patrick just shook his head, thinking how badly he wanted to share it with Magali, and how she’d ditch the Nephyr the moment she found out their dreams could finally come true.
“It means you can go get yourself a new girlfriend and have a real life. Leave your brother to screw around with his little war. You can do your own thing.”
Jerking back to face Natalia, he said, “My brother intentionally broke us up. As soon as she finds that out, she’ll want to go back to what we started. We had been planning a life together.”
Natalia snorted. “No, she was planning to use you to get away from dear ol’ Dad and his paramilitary crap. She wasn’t a pilot. You were.”
Patrick frowned. “She wasn’t using me.”
“Come on,” Natalia said. “Patrick.” She typed in something else on her datapad, then held up the image of Magali clinging to Jersey, giving Patrick a pointed look over the screen. “Is that the picture of a woman who’s patiently waiting for you to come back to her because you were wrongfully separated?”
Patrick grimaced and looked down at his plate. He’d stopped eating again, and this time, he didn’t feel capable of finishing. He shoved the eggs aside, still unable to face that picture of his girlfriend and her new lover. “I should be getting back. Milar’s gonna be wondering where I am.”
“Right,” Natalia said. “Because he came running to rescue you when you put out that distress call.”
“You mean he didn’t?” Patrick asked.
Natalia shook her head and lowered the datapad back to the table. “Didn’t even come looking. As far as I saw, I was the only one who showed up. Jeanne and Joel disappeared after their big heist in Rath—word is they grabbed over seven thousand bags of nodules and vanished. Magali’s off romancing that Nephyr, calling herself the Face of the Revolution, and Milar’s still busy getting cyborg nookie in the North Tear. You ask me, you’ve been getting the short end of the stick all along, Pat.”
“That’s nothing new,” Patrick said, anger rising again at the thought of his brother ignoring his distress calls because he was cuddling with his precious Captain Eyre.
Natalia stood up and gingerly took his plate of eggs. “Sorry. I know it’s a sore spot.”
“Not your fault my brother’s a douche,” Patrick muttered.
She chuckled. “True enough. Anything you want from the kitchen?”
“Just a comm,” Patrick muttered. “I need to let them know I’m alive.”
“Sure.” Natalia turned and walked out, taking his plate with her.
On the datapad she’d left on the table, Patrick’s mother’s face stared back at him, looking small and frightened in the light of whatever government camera had taken her official picture. He could just imagine it—a colonist in homespun getting swept off her feet by one of the highest-ranking flyboys in the Coalition fleet. It must have been her dream come true. She’d told him once how, in the first few months of living with Patrick’s father, she kept thinking she was in heaven, having running water and refrigeration even when the generator wasn’t on. It had all been so new and amazing, everything so clean…
Under his mother’s name, Patrick’s eyes found the words, Benefits owed: 8,000,000 United Space Coalition credits. Status: Unclaimed. Possible payees: Vala Healthmore-Whitecliff (suspected deceased), Milar Whitecliff, Patrick Whitecliff, Caroline Whitecliff.
They didn’t even know Caroline was dead, Patrick thought, miserable.
“You look troubled,” Natalia said, coming in to sit down across from him again, setting a comm between them. “What’s the issue?”
“Apparently,” Patrick muttered, “those guys in the personnel department missed the memo that Coalition forces killed Caroline in one of their ‘drafts.’”
Natalia flinched. “Caroline’s dead?”
“Nephyrs and regular infantry,” Patrick said. “Came into town, ‘drafted’ a bunch of girls, then did whatever they wanted to them for a few days before they got bored and moved on.”
“You got proof?” Natalia asked, suddenly incredibly focused and alert. “Graves? DNA? Anything we can use to pin ’em?”
Patrick gave her a curious look. “Pin who?”
“The bastards giving everyone a bad name!” Natalia snapped. “The Nephyrs know they’ve got bad eggs in the ranks, but they’ve been unable to figure out which guys are causing all the damage because the colonists are so terrified of them. That’s one of the things I can’t stand. The Nephyrs were formed to protect people, damn it.” She slammed a fist into the rough wooden table, making it shudder. “Give me their names and I’ll kill them myself.”
She was so intense it almost seemed like her eyes were glowing. For a moment, it crossed Patrick’
s mind that she looked as zealous as David Landborn, when ranting about Coalition corruption. He swallowed. “Milar and I already killed the guys who did it. Or, rather, Milar did. I couldn’t watch.”
Natalia relaxed a bit, leaning back in her chair. Under her hand, the table was cracked. Patrick frowned at it, wondering if it had been cracked before she hit it. It had to be, he decided. A woman her size couldn’t possibly have the power to damage a heavy chunk of Fortune wavewood…
“No wonder David lost it,” Natalia said. “He’d taken Caroline under his protection.”
Patrick felt his face harden. “Some ‘protection.’ He was just a gun-waving peacock. Never did actually protect anybody. All he did was brainwash us and force Magali to fight.”
Natalia’s head snapped up like he had insulted her personally. “Patrick, you and your brother were living with one of the greatest—” She stopped herself suddenly. “Someday, he’ll tell you why. Until then…” She sighed and pulled a little black cylinder from her pocket and set it down on the table between them. “David left me a key. I need you to help me find the lock.”
Seeing the cylinder, Patrick stiffened. He knew exactly what lock that key opened.
Natalia glanced at the jungle canopy above them, noting the thermal images of various Fortuna fauna, most fliers and rodents no bigger than a monkey, as well as one crouching jaguar—not one of Sirius’s ganshi, thank Aanaho—which seemed to be content to watch them from afar. She glanced back at the trail ahead of them. Using the thermal view, the darker outline of a cave was easy to distinguish about fifty feet ahead of them through the jungle, but she switched back to a normal view and waited for David’s adopted son to point it out to her, anyway.
In the jungle behind her, Orion waited with his glittering lapdogs, expecting this dumbass kid to lead them to his damned Aashaanti hive-beacon. Natalia doubted they would find it—she knew David didn’t trust her completely, and there was no way he would have just handed it to her, knowing what he and Sirius promised that damned archon. Hell, that David had trusted her at all was concerning, almost like she was blundering into a gigantic trap. It left a bad feeling in her gut, and had Orion not been monitoring her and asked about the key David had left her, she would’ve dropped it into the ocean somewhere.