Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (21 page)

“Of course,” Anna said.  “I just
want to do a little recon on the Base Director.”  She grinned at him and nodded
at the meal she had shoved toward him.  “Now eat your hamburger.”

Doberman glanced down at the
meal. 
This does not fit her profile.
  “Why did you get me a hamburger?”

For twenty-four seconds, Anna
said nothing.  Then she sighed.

“My sister said something earlier
that has been bothering me,” Anna said.  “She’s right.  I don’t have any
friends.”  Anna looked down at her hands, biting her lip.  “And you said I was
so deficient you took off ten whole points.  I’d like to try and fix that.”

She wants a friend?
  It
didn’t fit her profile, either.  Somewhat perplexed, Doberman picked up the
burger and was about to bite into it when he realized that Anna Landborn’s
biorhythms had spiked.  Slowly, he lowered the burger back to his plate and
sighed.

“You’re not going to eat it?” 
Her entire body’s musculature had stilled and facial tension was peaking.

“I’d rather see what you put in
it, first.”  Doberman peeled off the bun.  Inside, a small black nodule rested
nestled between the onions.  He nudged it off of the hamburger with a fork,
then when further visual inspection produced nothing else, he replaced the
bun.  “Where did you get an EMP charge?”

“I carried it around with me, in
case a stupid robot ever tried to kidnap me.”

“What excellent foresight.” 
Doberman lifted the hamburger once more to his lips.  “You know,” Doberman said
conversationally, as he took a bite of his sandwich, “You are unbelievably
predictable in your sociopathy.”  He chewed, analyzing and assessing each
flavor family individually.  After much debate, it was the slight tangy-burn of
the onions he decided he liked best.  Doberman decided he would have to acquire
more, somehow.

Across the table, Anna Landborn
was staring at the little black nodule, sulking.

“So,” Doberman asked, taking
another bite, “Are you going to stop trying to kill me or am I going to have to
search you thoroughly?”

Anna grimaced and looked away. 
“I’ll stop trying to kill you.  I was just bored.”

“Bored.”  Doberman was about to
take another bite of his sandwich when he realized that Anna’s breathing and
heart-rate were calm.  Too calm.  Frowning, Doberman lowered the sandwich again
and gave it a sonic scan.

A second, much more dangerous
capsule had been embedded in the bread of the bun, only a half-centimeter from
the edge of his last bite-mark.

Under her breath, Anna muttered,
“Damn.”

“You realize,” Doberman said,
carefully plucking the metallic capsule free, “If I die, you die.”

“I’m not going to die,” Anna
said.  “You didn’t plant that bomb in my brain.”

“I assure you I did.  Two of
them.”

She shrugged.  “When are you
going to take me to Seven-C?”

Sighing, Doberman finished his
burger.  Yes, he definitely liked onions.  The meat, though, he could do
without.  Too many metallic signatures for his liking. 

Then, wiping mustard off of his
fingers, he said, “Do you still need access to a computer, or was that just a
distraction?”

“Distraction,” she said.  “I
already know his password, just like every other Director on Fortune.”  She
gave him a pleasant smile.  “You said it yourself—I didn’t sleep much in the
Yolk camp.”

Chapter
22

Broken
Hearts

Milar flinched and took a step
back, glancing down at his radio as if in shock.  Tatiana used the extra room
he’d given her to step around the tree, ready to use it as a shield if she
needed to.

Milar didn’t seem to notice.  He
was still staring down at his radio.

Then, switching bands, he lifted
it back to his mouth.  With an unsteady voice, he said said, “Pat, you heard
that?”

“Milar, you gave us the all
clear!  What the hell are we going to do?  We try to evacuate again and they’ll
shoot us down!”

Slowly, Milar lifted his
yellow-brown eyes to Tatiana’s face.  “I’ll take care of it, Pat.” 

Tatiana went cold.

Into the radio, Milar said, “Just
make sure nobody starts any trouble.  Jeanne and Dave, especially.”

“What do you mean, ‘you’ll take
care of it?’  How the hell do you ‘take care of it,’ Miles?!”  Tatiana heard an
edge of panic to Patrick’s voice.  “They’ll come at us with everything they
have!”

“Just be ready to let them search
you when they come.  And Pat…”  Milar hesitated, watching Tatiana.  “Make sure
you don’t look like me.”

Patrick went silent on the other
end.  Softly, Milar’s brother said, “Miles, what are you going to do?”

Tatiana froze when Milar
approached her.

“I have a GPS on my belt,” Milar
said.  “I cut out my identification chip, but show them the scars and get them
to take a DNA sample and it’ll collaborate your story.  I’m an escapee from the
Nephyr Academy.  A vigilante with an axe to grind.  I disabled your soldier and
then forced you out using anti-soldier tactics I learned in the Nephyr
Academy.  I was hauling you cross-country, avoiding all the traces of
civilization in order to stay off the grid.  I was going to sell you,
black-market, to a buyer who was going to take you off-world and dismantle you
for your hardware.  They don’t need to know about Deaddrunk.”  He handed her
the radio.

Tatiana stared down at it, too
unnerved to say anything.

Milar touched her chin, made her
look up at him.  “Please don’t let them hurt my brother.”  He set the gun on
the ground between them.

Then, before Tatiana’s mind could
comprehend what had just happened, Milar backed up and got down on his knees on
the forest floor.  He put his hands behind his head and stared past her,
focusing his gaze on the trunk of a tree.  His face had gone blank and
lifeless, like a doll someone had put in his place.

As soon as he was out of reach,
Tatiana snatched up the gun and backed away, holding it on him.

For long moments, they stayed
like that.  Milar never even looked at her.

He wants me to shoot him,
Tatiana realized, in horror.  The gun suddenly felt like molten lead in her
hands.

“I’ll turn around, if that’ll
help,” Milar said quietly.  His eyes did not move from the tree.

“What are you doing?” Tatiana
asked.  Her throat felt too tight.

“You know what I’m doing,” Milar
said.  He still stared past her, unseeing, his voice flat and emotionless. 
“I’m asking you to spare my brother and our town.  I’m asking you to keep this
between us.”

“You want me to kill you.”

Milar’s gaze hardened and he
looked at her.  “You’ve done enough of it while you were safe inside the belly
of a soldier…why should you have trouble now?”

When she just stared at him,
Milar glanced back at the tree and said, “Once you shoot me, take the GPS
locator from my belt and give them your location.  Then, if you’re kind, you’ll
make sure I’m dead.  I’ve already done one round with the Nephyrs.  I don’t
think I can handle another.”

Tatiana realized the gun was
shaking in her grip.  She took another step back.  “Throw me the GPS.”

“You can have it once I’m dead.”

“Give it to me
now,
” she
snapped, trying not to let him see the way her hands were shaking on the gun.

Holding her eyes, Milar slowly
lowered one arm to yank a small device from his belt.  He tossed it to her and
returned his hand to his head and his gaze to the tree.

Tatiana flinched when she
realized the device really was a GPS.  Biting her lip, she flipped the radio to
the universal channel and said, “This is Captain Tatiana Eyre.  My coordinates
are 38.93201 south, 70.67004 west.”

After a moment, the Bouncer
captain said, “Roger, we’ve got two Pods from the space station coming to
secure the town.”

“Negative,” Tatiana said,
watching Milar’s face.  “We’re outside the town.”

“Hold tight, Captain.  We’re
coming to get you.”

Milar took a deep breath, then
let it out slowly.  “It would be nice if you shot me in the head, that way they
won’t get a good look at me and see Pat.”

“I can’t do that,” Tatiana
whispered.

Milar whipped his head around to
glare at her.  “Why not?  This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” 

Tatiana couldn’t think.  This
was
what she had wanted.  And yet…

After a moment, Milar’s face
darkened and he stood.  “Fine.  Coaler chickenshit.  I’ll do it myself.”  He
got up.

“Get back on the ground!” Tatiana
cried.

Milar snorted and started
stalking towards her. 

“Get on the
ground!
” Tatiana
snarled, backing away.  “Or I’ll shoot you in the foot and tell them
everything, I swear.” 

Milar hesitated.  “How much
are
you going to tell them, squid?” 

“Haven’t decided yet,” Tatiana
said.  She was shaking all over.

Then, reluctantly, Milar got back
to his knees.  He stayed that way in silence for long minutes, until they heard
the sound of engines in the distance. 

“You think leaving me alive for
the Nephyrs is doing me some sort of favor?” he asked softly.

No,
Tatiana thought,
biting her lip.  “Just go, all right?  Get out of here.”

“They’d level the town,” Milar
said, unmoving.

“I’d tell them you went the other
direction.”

“They’d still level the town.”

For the longest time, she could
only stare at him.  “I can’t shoot you.”  It came out barely more than a
whisper.

He smiled.  “Sure you can,
sweetie.  Point it at my head, pull the trigger.  Not that hard.  Ask Pat. 
I’ve done it plenty.”

“Please go,” Tatiana whispered.

Milar glanced at her.  She saw
something in his eyes, something that made her soul ache.  For long moments, he
said nothing.  Then, as the distant cry of engines became an overwhelming roar
overhead, she had to strain to hear his words.  “We could’ve had something
neat,” he said softly.  “Wideman said so.”  Then he reached down, pulled the
knife from his belt, and stabbed himself in the chest.

Chapter
23

Harvest
Time

Magali punched the aluminum
siding of her empty hut and barely felt the gouges the metal screws left in her
knuckles.  Someone had turned in Runaway Joel.  Someone with an axe to grind. 
Someone who didn’t want Magali to get out of the Yolk mines.

The little bitch.

Magali punched the wall again,
then, when her hand broke open and bled, she kicked the sheet-metal until her
toes hurt and the whole hut was rattling around her.  A voice from the next
building over shouted at her to keep it down.

Anna had stranded her here to die
of Egger’s Wide.  Purposefully.  As if eight years of sisterhood meant nothing
to her.

It probably doesn’t,
Magali thought, disgusted.

Magali closed her eyes and leaned
her head against the wall and thought of the razor wire.  On the other side of
it was freedom.  All she had to do was get to the other side.

It was the guards that kept her
from trying.  The camp had seventy-six of them, each armed to the teeth with
automatic laser rifles, POP grenades, pepper spray, and sonic spurs.   There
were always at least four of them on guard in each tower at any time.  That was
eight holes in her back—four from either direction—should she decide to try the
wire.

The shift siren went off in a
sudden, wailing moan.  Knowing that it wasn’t time for the shift-change, Magali
closed her eyes and prayed it was a malfunction or an emergency roll-call. 

Just one blast,
she
thought fervently. 
No more.

The siren blared again.  And
again.  Magali collapsed against the metal wall, her breath sliding out of her
in despair.  She wasn’t going to have the chance to climb the wire.  She was
going to harvest Yolk first.  The Shriekers, like all the natural fauna on
Fortune, were on a three-year cycle, and every three years, almost a million
eggers died in the depths of the Shrieker mounds on Harvest Day.  It was a
different day for every camp, different for every mound, but one thing always
remained the same: half the people who went down never came back up.

Five more long bursts confirmed
Magali’s fears—it was the signal that the Shrieker nodules were ripe, and that
every man, woman, and child who wasn’t carrying a gun would be handed a sack
and locked in the mines until they could return with it full of nodules.

The Shriekers, meanwhile, would
be anxiously roaming the nesting caverns tending the hatch, and anyone who got
too close, or was too careless, could trigger a camp-wide Shriek.

“Outta bed!” a woman’s voice
shouted as the butt of a rifle made a reverberating clang against the outer
wall of Magali’s hut.  “Harvest time.  Everyone in line on the central strip. 
Move!
”

It was the one day that both the
male and the female side of the camp mingled.  The nodules would only be ripe
for twenty-two hours and the Director didn’t want to waste time giving two
speeches.  Magali had heard it said once that every nodule, every
single
nodule that was pulled out of the mounds, was worth the crummy five-year salary
that the Coalition paid to those eggers that managed to survive their draft.

Reluctantly, Magali tugged her
studded harvest gloves out from under her cot and took the collection sack and
the lightweight prybar from against the wall, then followed the flow of the
bleary-eyed eggers out into the central yard outside the Director’s compound. 
As soon as she was standing in the light of the overhead LED floodlamps, she
froze. 

Everywhere, Coalition soldiers in
black fatigues stood watching them with suspicious, glittering gazes beneath
the glass shield of their riot-gear.  

Looking at them, Magali got a
chill.  Nephyrs.  The Forty-Third battle squadron.  All first-class
graduates—the Academy’s best.  Killing machines.  Brought in to guard each
Harvest as it became available, to safeguard the nodules from the moment they
left the mines to the moment they were loaded onto the ship.  Their cold eyes
felt even more distant and inhuman than that of the Director.

Scratch getting shot while
escaping over the wire.  If she tried to leave during Harvest, Nephyrs would
simply tear her apart.

Anna’s going to be just like
them,
Magali thought, miserable.  She looked again at their cold,
expressionless faces, trying to divine some idea of what was happening to her
sister. 

Seeing them stare coldly back,
their merciless faces projecting an utter lack of compassion, Magali realized
something. 
She’s already one of them.  Just doesn’t wear the circuitry.

As soon as she got close to the
central strip, Magali recognized the tall, gangly form of the outed smuggler
standing near the back corner of the formation, gloves on, a digging tool in
one hand, a collection sack in the other.  She went to join him.

Instantly upon seeing her, the
smuggler stiffened.

“You look like you pissed off a
Nephyr,” Magali said, taking in his bruises as she stepped into line beside
him.  She glanced down, saw the shackles on his ankles.  “They’re letting you
in on the Harvest?”

Joel gave her a long look.  His
face was bruised, with a dark spot forming against his jaw.  One eye was
completely swollen, and his body was hunched, like his stomach hurt him. 
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” he said finally.

“Should’ve taken my offer.”

Joel glared, his entire body
rigid, his every breath emanating fury.  Finally, he said, “The only reason I’m
not putting my fist through your face,” he said, “Is because my hand hurts.” 
He showed her his fist, which was a swollen mass of blood and awkward angles. 
He dropped it suddenly, “And I couldn’t give you the pummeling you deserve
left-handed.”

Magali felt her stomach turn at
the brutality and she stumbled backwards a step.  Because she could find
nothing else to say, she managed, “That…looks painful.”

“The Director crushed it in a
door after she got tired of pulling off fingernails.”  Joel was glaring at her,
his unwavering stare alive with accusation.  He gave her a bitter grin.  “Must
have made your day, to hear that, eh?”

Repulsed, Magali grimaced.  “No,
not at—”  Then she realized what he was trying to say.  Taken aback, she said,
“I didn’t turn you in.”

“Sure you didn’t.”  Joel snorted.

Magali’s heart began to pound. 
“You actually think that I’d do something like that?”

He snorted.  “Ah, so our
conversation, you getting pissed, me getting nabbed—it was all a coincidence. 
That makes so much more sense now.”

“I didn’t do it!”

His blue-green eyes were hard. 
“Your little brat of a sister would have.  In a heartbeat.”

“Yeah, and I’m
nothing
like her.”  Magali spoke it with such vehemence that she felt the pressure in
her lungs.  “
Nothing.
”

Joel frowned at her.  He looked
like he wanted to say more, but then the Director climbed up onto the podium at
the forefront of the formation and raised her voice.  “Everyone here?”

The man in Coalition gray at her
side checked his tally, then said, “Everyone is present except fourteen eggers
with the Wide, Director.”

“Good,” the cyborg said.  To the
gathered eggers, she said, “Strip.”

No one moved.  Eggers glanced at
each other, nervous.

“You heard me!” the Director
snapped.  “Last Harvest, we caught six eggers trying to smuggle nodules out in
their underwear.  So strip.  Everything in a pile.  If you thieves are going to
steal Yolk, the only way you’re gonna do it is by shoving nodules up your
asses—which we’ll be checking later. 
Take your clothes off
!”

For a moment, Magali thought she
had misheard the Director.  She joined the other eggers in glancing back and
forth, trying to discern if it was some kind of joke.  When she realized the
cyborg was serious, however, Magali had never been so humiliated and angry in
her life.  Around her, a couple of eggers had begun to reluctantly comply, but
most stood around, giving each other nervous looks.  Beside her, Joel had begun
to remove his bright yellow prisoner suit and was glaring at the Director from
under a frown.

Up on the podium, the Director
scanned the reluctant crowd, then said, “Fine.  My friends are going to start
going down the lines.  If any of you colonist fools aren’t undressed in thirty
seconds, I’m going to have the Nephyrs do it, for you.”

As the black-clad Nephyrs of the
Forty-Third battle squadron moved into the formation, the rest of the eggers
hastily complied.  Magali followed suit, throwing her clothes in a pile at her
feet, then snagging up her collection sack to cover her chest and groin, her face
burning.

A blue-eyed Nephyr with the
arrow-gripping fist of Colonel embedded in gold in the glittering skin above
his elbow stopped in front of her.  He searched her face, then his eyes lazily
wandered down to pause on where her breasts were bunched up under the canvas,
her arm holding them in place.  The Nephyr looked back up at her, his
glittering lips curled in a smile.  Magali shuddered, clenching the sack
tighter to her chest.

“She told you to undress,
collie.”  There was cruel amusement in his eyes.  He lifted his hand, reaching
toward the canvas material. 

Magali froze, seeing the intent
on his glittering face.  Coldness doused her soul.  “My clothes are off,” she
said, trying not to sound desperate.

“I need to make sure now, don’t
I?” the Nephyr said, his glittering fingers hooking under the canvas covering
her chest.  “Take it off.”  He gave it a gentle, patronizing tug.  “Or I will.”

Magali knew she could lower the
canvas or it would be ripped away.  Reluctantly, she lowered it.

“Ah,” the blue-eyed colonel
said.  The Nephyr stood there, soaking in her nakedness, as Magali’s face
burned with hatred and humiliation.  She stared at her feet, horrified and
afraid, feeling as if she had retreated into a tiny corner of her brain to
escape the Nephyr’s lustful stare.

“You know,” the blue-eyed colonel
said, as if they were friends at a bonfire, having a conversation over
freshly-killed starlope.  “Harvest gets pretty stressful.  You get back out, I
bet a pretty thing like you’d love to celebrate tonight, wouldn’t you?”  He
lifted his hand and began tracing down her shoulder with a glass-hard finger,
toward her breast, leaving a wormy sickness in its path. 

Magali squirmed out from under
his inhuman touch, taking a step backwards, pulling her canvas back up.

The Nephyr smiled.  He leaned
closer, until his presence was giving her goosebumps.  “Tell ya what, collie,”
he said softly, “Once it’s all over, I’ll come looking for you.  Save you the
trouble of trying to find me.”  Then he cocked his head, a little smile on his
face.  “Unless, of course, you don’t want me to wait.”

Horrified, she realized he was
going to rape her.  Right there.  In front of everyone.

At the lust in his eyes, Magali
knew that Anna was right.  Colonists weren’t people to the Coalition.  This
Nephyr was going to do whatever he wanted to her in full view of the other
eggers.  And nobody was going to stop him.

The sick feeling welled up in her
gut, until she was swallowing down bile.  She squeezed her eyes shut,
trembling.

“Hey asshole,” Joel said.

The Nephyr turned from her.

Joel motioned at the prisoner
jumpsuit puddled around his legs.  “Can’t get it off with the shackles on, dipshit.”

Magali shuddered in relief as the
Nephyr colonel moved away from her and walked a circle around Joel, his gold
filigreed face twisted in a sneer at the smuggler’s naked, bruised body.  Joel
endured the perusal, peering back with equal disdain.

As he walked, the black-clothed
Nephyr said, “Nalle has something special planned for you tonight if you
survive the Harvest, smuggler.  Some interesting entertainment for the
Forty-Third.  It features you,” he cocked his head with a sick little smile,
then added, “and screaming.” 

“Lookin’ forward to it.”  Joel
spat at the Nephyr’s boots.

The blue-eyed Nephyr chuckled as
he made another pass, Magali completely forgotten.  Finally, he said, “I can
see why she finds you so amusing.”  He stopped and squatted beside Joel and,
taking the chain between Joel’s legs in either hand, he pulled. 

The chain snapped as if it had been
made of strands of hair.

Then, standing, the Nephyr shoved
Joel hard enough to throw him into the eggers behind him, knocking them all
down in a group.

From the podium, the Director
said, “I put those chains on him for a reason, Colonel Steele.”

The Nephyr named Steele snorted. 
“You’ve got a hundred and forty-five Nephyrs guarding the compound, Nalle. 
Your little plaything won’t get far.  And if he does…”  The male Nephyr
grinned.  “I’d enjoy the opportunity to hunt him down.”  Then Nephyr Steele turned
and strode further down the ranks without another word.  Magali allowed herself
to breathe again.

Gasping, Joel stumbled back into
line.  “Bitch,” he muttered, following the retreating Nephyr with his gaze. 
There was a deep red hand-print on his chest, already starting to bruise.

“Thanks,” Magali whispered.

Joel glanced at her, and there
was apology in his eyes, and anger, as if he somehow felt responsible for every
awful thing ever committed by the male sex.  After a moment, he made an
embarrassed grunt, then bent to check the bandage over his thigh, his wounded
leg obviously bothering him.  She saw that the last nanostrip patch had run out
and hadn’t been replaced.  Blood and greenish pus was oozing from around the
depleted strip, now a bright pink instead of a neon green.  Even from that
distance, the wound smelled funny, like goat cheese.

That’s going to kill him if he
doesn’t get another nanostrip on it,
Magali thought.