Sister Unknown

Maria

Date: March 2833

Knight Captain Columbia Western let the lash of her whip fly and grinned as the bladed tip struck the dead-center of the bulls-eye ten meters away. The crackle of electrical discharge lit up the chamber, and her fellow Knight whistled appreciatively at her aim.

She threw a look back at her Master, who regarded the young woman with a patient but annoyed expression. "Columbia," she said, and the young Knight glanced up to the balcony of the target practice chamber. The other Knight hid a smirk and prepared for it to hit the fan.

"Yes Master?" the woman's sharp soprano conveyed just enough annoyance to make the point while little enough that her master would not necessarily be able to reprimand her for it. She had enough tongue-lashing to concern herself with without inviting more.

"I thought you were supposed to be practicing low-grav combat simulations with Master Bronco today." The Master managed to convey amused disgust in a calm, near-monotone. Annie Oakley held up a data card that carried the day's duty roster and waggled it meaningfully before dropping it off the balcony.

Columbia flicked her wrist and the whip lashed out, catching the small object in midair and flicking it off at a random angle-- to shoot out and smack into Knight Grailen's armor with a loud clang.

Annie Oakley looked suitably impressed, but her foot tapped impatiently.

"Grailen."

The Knight snapped to attention. "Yes ma'am?"

"What're you doing here?"

Grailen's face reddened. "Well, um, that is--"

"Mmhmm. KP the next week, my friend, and two weeks for your whip-wielding companion."

With that, she turned and left. Grailen could see her shaking her head in amused frustration.

Columbia flicked the whip again, smacking the target dead center again. "I know my father served under her, but I don't really feel like taking her orders..."

"Or anyone's," Grailen noted with a roll of his eyes.

"Yeah, well, I got my own concerns and I don't like getting drafted. Can you get me passage like you said you could or not?"

"To Mercury? Probably. But I will not do it without you telling me why. I'm tired of you thinking I'll put my neck on the line for you without you having the decency of at least telling me why!"

"Family business, I told you."

"Forget it," Grailen said with a downward chop of his hand.

"Damnit Grailen--"

"My final word on the matter," the Knight said with a shrug, and turned to leave.

The whip curled around his leg and tripped him. Fury filled him and he turned, yanking viciously on the cord, but it slithered out of his grasp. "Grailen, you said you'd help," she said shrilly, hurling the whip off to the side and stalking over to the wall, leaning herself against the burned and blackened bulls-eye. "If you must know, I need to find my family, my twin sister and my big brother. I've managed to trace them to Mercury."

"What makes you think they're still alive?"

She shrugged. "Tycho got me the Fantasma roster."

"And they're there?" Grailen raised both eyebrows, looked down at his dented armor and frowned. "But why were they sent there?"

"The Knights that killed my parents sent Adriana there to get rid of her, and my brother escaped and fled to Mercury just after the murders."

"Knights killed your parents?" Grailen said softly, looking around to confirm no one was listening. "Why?"

"They called them traitors."

"But--"

"I'm with the Pack because they know my father was no such thing, and because the Empire can't touch me here. And they have the records to prove what happened and shove it down Petresun's throat..."

"But with no eyewitnesses--"

"Adriana saw it happen. She was only ten but I'm sure she remembers. She can provide the final proof I need. And at the reception next month we can bring it up to Petresun... surrounded by Wolf Pack officers who will seek honor even over the Emperor."

Grailen frowned deeply. "You're suggesting an open rebellion in the Emperor's own court?"

"The Emperor is corrupt. He doesn't deserve to lead."

Grailen did not comment, for to agree would be treason... and he knew that if he spoke he would have to agree. The experiments...

But no. He pushed those thoughts out of his mind.

Columbia went and retrieved the whip, testing the sharpness of the affixed blade with her finger. "So will you help me or not?"

Grailen sighed. "Why not?"

"Oh good!": she said brightly, cracking the whip at Grailen's chest to ding off his armor. He glowered at the white mark of gashed metal.

"If you knock it off with that damned thing," the Knight growled.

-----

Date: April 2833

Columbia's dropship went down in the Caloris region, attacked by a Cybrid anti-aircraft battery on its deceleration burn. Columbia cursed creatively as the vehicle split in two pieces, the main stem of the ship and the drop box where she was stuck in the cockpit of her Disrupter. She let loose another brief-- but heartfelt-- burst of obscene comments as she checked the vector of her dropbox. There was no way to get the craft's backbone into position for dock, she noted, but even with that thought the other half of her ship bloomed in a flare of white light as the Cybrids finished the job.

Columbia allowed the Disrupter to roll over to the main door of the drop box, keyed the opening code into her command panel, and watched golden-white rock whiz by beneath her. As the ground approached she aligned the tank and drove off into space.

The tank struck the ground at a very shallow angle, and bounced. By this time Columbia was unconscious, and the second jolt-- nearly fifty kilometers away from the first impact point-- knocked the gun off the tank's turret. The screeching of tread on rock at a thousand kilometers per hour awakened her, and she gazed out the window with pain-fogged eyes as the landscape whizzed by.

Ten minutes later the tank finally came to rest, doing so by slamming at a hundred fifty kilometers per hour into the base of a cliff.

Columbia muttered something about doing the time warp with her skull and blacked out.

-----

Consciousness returned several hours later, and her first act was to empty her stomach into the waste receptacle next to the command chair. After this she felt much better, and the lack of great amounts of blood in the mix told her that her internal injuries were minor. Unfortunately, her broken bones-- all four limbs and half her ribs-- put her in bad enough condition she barely noticed.

The tank was not in extremely good shape either; most of the tread servos were ripped clean off, and the armor was buckled like tissue paper in many places. The hiss of coolant leaks-- and the more deadly green glow of reactor shielding breaches-- told her that getting out of the vehicle would be necessary if she wished to survive more than ten minutes... and she blessed whatever gods there were when the turret opened up on command without her having to do a manual force.

She crawled out of the turret and into the shadow of the cliff, dropping the whip as she did so. She watched the weapon slip slowly through the busted tread mount to fall on the glazed rock of the Mercurian surface. She fell off the tank, new pains adding to her already considerable catalog thereof, and lay there in the shade about half a meter from the razor-sharp interface between the black shadow and the blazing white of sunlit ground.

She was going to die here. It would be foolish not to admit it. There was nowhere to go, no way to get help, no way to get the vehicle working again. She would have been unable to do that even had she been uninjured, as bad off as the vehicle was.

As she thought this, the vehicle bucked and the body blew apart into fragments as the small reactor blew up. Columbia knew that the radiation from the explosion would be far above the lethal limit.

She began to laugh, the motion shooting pain through her broken ribs and ruptured lungs. How many ways could she die, anyway?

"Suit... computer activate," she gasped, and the HUD in the helmet popped into view in front of her face with a musical chime. "Record log... and store."

"Awaiting input," the thing told her.

"Whoever finds me... please forward this message to Adriana Galisborough of... Fantasma." She squinted at the sharp line of day-night. Was it moving closer to her?

No matter. She felt the deep, gut-level burn of first-stage radiation poisoning in her abdomen, but there was nothing left in her stomach to purge so she only had to contend with the coughs.

"This is... Columbia Western, your twin sister. You will have no memory of me, I'm sure; the Empire's goons were probably quite effective in erasing your memories after they butchered out parents. But I know that trauma like that is harder to erase and you probably have some... memory of that..." Her recitation was interrupted by another fit of coughing.

"If you remember, take it to the Wolf Pack. Our father was one of them, and they honor his memory. They will see to it there is justice..."

That line of sunlight was indeed approaching.

"Know this also... we have a brother. His name is Marcus... though he might have changed it. He resides in Fantasma even now, according to the records Tycho..."

Her arm felt hot, and it wasn't the pain of injury. The light of Mercury's sun flashed brilliance off the arm of the suit, and she dragged it into the shrinking shadow.

She was kind of surprised her arm still moved. She had been so quick and sure of movement, but with shattered bones none of her grace was evident.

Her mind wandered away from the log recording, to her youth. She'd been a dancer in New York when she was about twenty, and was pretty good at it. She had this silly gold costume that she used when her troupe put on a reenactment of an old play, what was it called? She couldn’t remember.

The gold top hat always looked so cute in the mirror, and she grimaced as she considered she was about to die in a fat, ugly spacesuit helmet. So much for stage presence. Her teachers would have been horrified.

She began to sing in a wavering voice, coughing every few words but not interrupting her song.

So intent was she on her singing, she didn't notice when the sunlight shined into her helmet, and her vision disappeared in a white blaze. She turned her blinded eyes eastward, and cast a single, final thought. Remember me, sister. Remember me.

Mercifully, she blacked out, surrendering to the whiteness.

-----

Somewhere in Fantasma Colony, Delithita pruned the roses and sighed. Soon the Cybrids would attack again, and this time Fantasma would have to be evacuated. The knowledge was disturbing... but something else was on her mind, something she could not grasp even using every mental discipline Maria had taught her.

A face, short red hair like her own, brown eyes, a whisper in a high, sharp voice. Remember me...

She frowned, and turned back to her roses.

She clipped the dead stems away, trimmed off most of the thorns, watered the plants and fertilized them. When she had completed her task, she went to her quarters, and no matter how she tried she could not figure out why she was crying.

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