Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (24 page)

Once the Director had finished
buttoning her glove, she patted Magali on the shoulder with a painfully heavy
hand.  Leaning close, the Director said, “I’ll only give you one warning.”  Her
brown eyes held icy promise.  “You may have played in the majors for awhile, by
proxy, but your time in the sun’s over, kid.  Your sister isn’t ever coming
back, and you ain’t got the brains to fend for yourself.  Not around Nephyrs. 
You open your mouth again and you’ll end up sharing space with Joel tonight.”

The Director gave her another
good-natured pat on the shoulder, then spun and returned to the podium, leaving
Magali her tongue and Joel curled in the dust.  “All right, folks, we’ve wasted
enough time with smugglers and their whores.  Form a channel from the exit to
the ships.  The first ones should start filtering out in a few hours.  You have
my permission to entertain yourselves with any collie who comes out without a
full sack.  Some of them are going to try to cheat and use rocks, so when we
dump them out, I want you all ready to catch the ones who try to bolt…”  Her
voice grew less distinct as the Director joined the group of Nephyrs, still
issuing instructions.

Magali glanced down at Joel and
lowered herself to the ground beside him.

The smuggler’s eyes were squeezed
shut and he was hunched over on his knees in the dust.  His good hand cradled
the one the Director had crushed.  Tears wet his cheeks, dripping onto the
depleted nanostrips on his thigh.  His uniform and his collection gear lay
scattered and forgotten on the ground beneath him.

Anna would have been able to tell
her what bones the Director had broken, what tendons had been damaged, and
approximately how much force the Director had put into her grip.  Her sister
would have been able to look at the pain in the man’s eyes and talk about what
areas of the brain he’d just lost as if he were a broken toaster.  She would
have had no qualms with leaving him there, sobbing quietly on the ground to be
shot by the soldiers, so that they could begin the scramble to fill their sacks
in the mounds.

But Magali wasn’t Anna. 
Agonized, Magali reached out and touched the smuggler’s shoulder.

Joel opened his eyes and gave her
a look of such gratitude that it brought tears to Magali’s eyes. 

“I’m so sorry,” Magali whispered.

Joel squeezed his eyes shut. 
Tears traced down his bruised cheeks.  He sucked in a huge breath and let it
out in what should have been a sob.  The ragged wheeze that came out instead
left Magali aching for him.

“I’m so sorry,” she said again. 
She felt tears burning her own eyes and knelt beside him, choking on the grief
building in her chest.  She reached forth to gather up his sack and his prybar,
then tentatively took his good hand to help him to his feet.  “Can you stand?”

He gave her a blank look.

He can’t even understand me,
Magali thought, horrified.  She’d heard of head-wounds that destroyed
everything—wiping every scrap of language from the victim’s brain.  “Come on,”
she whispered through tears, “I’ll help you.”  She made a show of leaning back
to give him support in order to stand.

Joel stayed where he was,
refusing to look at her.

Magali gave a nervous glance at
the last stragglers shuffling into the mines.  She and the smuggler were the
only two humans left on the parade deck.  Nearby, she could feel Nephyrs
watching them. 

“We need to get going,” she
whispered.  “The others are leaving.  They’ll shoot us if aren’t in the mines
by the time they lock the doors.”

For a moment, it looked as if
Joel would ignore her and stay there until the Nephyrs came to kill him.

“Please,” Magali whispered.  She
gave his good hand a gentle squeeze, trying to dispel some of the despair she
saw in him.

Joel’s eyes flickered to their
hands, then back to her face.

Magali quickly gathered up his
equipment and stuffed it under one arm.  Then, to her relief, he allowed her to
pull him to his feet and lead him between the Nephyrs guarding the entrance
into the mines.

Magali stepped into the dim
orange darkness of the Shrieker mounds, gently pulling the smuggler behind
her.  As soon as she was inside the first cavern, she stopped dead in her
tracks, staring into the darkness with instinctive panic. 

The Director, expecting Shriekers
to be more volatile, had dimmed the lights.  Only one in ten of the small LEDs
set in the ceiling were giving off any illumination at all.  Magali could
barely see her own hand in front of her face.

The other eggers were milling
uncomfortably, a tight knot at the very edge of the cavern.  Childlike sounds
of terror echoed against the slimy walls.  Everywhere, people were crying.  No
one was making any move to enter the mines.

The lights flickered.

Spending the last months in the
Shrieker mines, Magali had become used to the flickering lights.  The solar
generators often missed a beat whenever the camp power grid was being shifted
from one battery system to another, or from charging to discharging.

Yet, seeing them flicker
now,
while she was naked and nervous, when the Shriekers were down there, guarding
their hatchlings, when the Nephyrs were outside, waiting to tear her apart, the
spike of terror that clawed its way up from her stomach left her heart thudding
against her lungs.  She backed up a pace.

Joel gave her hand a squeeze.

Startled, Magali looked up.  She
had been so unnerved that she’d forgotten he was with her. 

Joel gave her a weak smile.

“Thanks,” Magali whispered.

The smuggler gave her a blank
look, and she cursed herself.  
He can’t understand you, Mag, and you have to
rub it in.
  Guiltily, she squeezed his hand back, and Joel gave her a
nervous smile.

“Good luck, folks,” one of the
human guards called from the doorway behind them.  However much Magali had
hated to see him at the gates before, the man’s face was familiar, and unlike
the Nephyrs, he sounded almost apologetic.  There was a definite look of
anguish in his eyes before he cleared his throat and tore his eyes from the
frightened mass of eggers, focusing it on the wall, instead.  “Doors will open
again in four hours.”  He stepped back, and from outside, she heard the
metallic screech of the main door swinging shut.

They’re going to lock us in
here,
she thought, terrified.

Suddenly, the smuggler’s hand in
hers was the only thing keeping her from turning and rushing towards the
Nephyrs silhouetted in the exit.  Several other eggers were not so anchored,
however, and ended up getting brutally shoved back into the mines.  One man’s
chest collapsed under the pressure of the Nephyr’s push, and he lay there in
the slime inside the door, writhing and choking, unable to breathe.

He turned blue and died.  A young
girl—probably a daughter—dropped to her knees in the slime beside him and began
to cry.

Then the heavy, bomb-proof doors
slammed shut.  The resounding boom made Magali jerk out of reflex.

Harvest time,
she thought,
a coldness pooling in her gut.

She had a full ten seconds to
consider that before several eggers in the dim huddles near the front of the
group screamed.

“Everyone listen up!” a woman
from up ahead suddenly shouted.  It was the voice of someone used to command,
and Magali didn’t recognize it.  Had the Nephyrs followed them in there?  “All
you collie bastards are going to
listen
if you wanna live through the
next ten seconds, you get me?”

Beside her, Joel tensed. 

From somewhere close, Magali
heard the heat-crackle of an energy weapon.  Bits of the roof collapsed.  More
people began to scream.

Above the din, the woman shouted,
“And yes, I’ve got a gun.”

Chapter
24

A Dangerous
Duo

“Huh.  They’re all dead.”  Anna
tapped a glass-covered body bearing the strange forehead node, frowning at the odd
titanium lump. 

“It would appear that way, Anna,”
Doberman said, glancing at the door.  “You have ten minutes and fifty-three
seconds until the morning technician arrives.”

“I can count, thank you,” Anna
said.  She moved to another case, checked the history on the chart, then moved
on to the vacuum-sealed tube.  They had all died within forty-three hours of
the implant.  Most within thirteen.

“It doesn’t look like this is
operator technology,” Anna mused, tracing the contours of the node in her
mind.  “There’s no hookup.”

“Interesting,” Doberman said, in
a way that suggested he really was interested.  It was one advantage to having
a robot as a companion.  He wasn’t sarcastic, and he understood about fifty
percent of the stuff Anna said.  That made him forty-nine percent more
interesting than anyone she had ever met.

Anna moved on to the records
panel.  The screen was locked and dark.  “Open it,” she said, stepping back.

The robot obediently opened the
panel with the Director’s password.  It was another advantage to having a robot
as a companion, Anna mused.  It didn’t get all pissy when she told it what to
do.

As soon as the screen was up, Dobie
stepped aside, allowing Anna access.  “Eight minutes fourteen seconds,” he
said, as she moved to the controls.

“I don’t need a play-by-play. 
Just tell me when we’ve got thirty seconds left.”

“As you wish, Anna,” Doberman
said, then went silent. 

Scanning the reports, Anna was
initially confused as to what she was seeing.  Quickly, however, she began to
get interested. 
“…allow a concentrated blast of psi force to reproduce the
same effects as a specimen of Shrieker Fortuna…”

“Thirty seconds,” Doberman said,
looking utterly calm.  A human in his situation probably would have been
sweating and dancing around like an idiot, whimpering that they were going to
get caught and the Coalition was going to find them and kill them.  For once, Anna
was grateful for the lack of theatrics.

“Download it,” Anna said,
nodding.

Doberman moved forward and placed
a hand over the dataport for a heartbeat before retracting it, and saying,
“Twenty seconds.”

“Erase the rest,” Anna said.

A moment later, Doberman nodded. 
“Fifteen seconds.”

“Grab that,” Anna said, pointing
to an unfinished node in the box on top of the workbench.

“It’s unfinished,” Doberman said,
grabbing it.

“Yeah, whatever,” Anna said. 
“Let’s go.”

They passed the technician in the
hall on their way to the next corridor, twenty seconds late for his shift.  The
chump technician even stopped to ruffle Anna’s hair and speak baby-speak to her
about what she was going to do as a Nephyr.

“Kill people who deserve it,”
Anna said.

“Oh?” he asked, a stupid,
patronizing smile on his face.  “Like who?”

“I dunno,” Anna said. 
“Scientists, probably.”

The technician laughed. 
“Scientists?  What kind of scientists?”

“The kind who keep killing their
test subjects because they’re too stupid to realize what they’re doing wrong.”

The technician left after that.

“You know,” Doberman said, as
they walked away together, “It would have been easier for us if you had not
done that.”

Anna shrugged.

Forty-six seconds later, the base
alarm began going off.  Anna never flinched, and she was impressed when
Doberman continued to stroll forward as if nothing was happening.  Another
benefit to working with a robot—they didn’t panic like imbeciles and make
everything worse. 

Hearing footsteps behind her,
Anna paused.

The technician came panting up
behind her.  “You!  Kid.  What’s your name?”

Doberman whirled and punched his
face in.

Not just punched him in the
face.  Punched it
in.
  Anna was impressed.

“Nice job,” she said, as the
technician crumpled.  Doberman was already moving again.  “You ever kill anyone
before, Tinman?”

“Just a few dozen eggers,”
Doberman said, calmly leading them out of the hall and into another corridor.

“Really?  What did you do with
the bodies?”

“Buried them in the peat bogs.”

“Cool.  What’d they do?”

“They drank too much strawberry
soda and ate too many double-patty hamburgers with extra mustard.”

Anna frowned.  “Was that
sarcasm?”

“No.  It was right after a
Harvest.  Director didn’t need all the mouths to feed, since they wouldn’t need
them for another three years.  It was mostly the ones displaying symptoms of
Wide, though I killed a few of the children, too.  Oh, and anyone who didn’t
show up with a full sack when Harvest day was over, it was my job to execute
them before they…” 

Doberman went silent as a man
approached them down the hall.  “Unit Ferris,” the man said, “There’s been a breach
in this sector.  I will take your charge to the spaceport.  Go secure the south
side of Seven-C.”

“Of course, Unit Gryphon,”
Doberman said.  “Give me your arm for the transfer.”  He began unlocking the
cuff holding Anna to him.  Anna felt a brief stab of fear.  Would Doberman
betray her?  She had tried to kill him twice already today. 
Maybe I
shouldn’t have done that,
she thought, biting her lip.  If he handed her over
now, she could sing all she wanted to about sentient robots and no one would
care, let alone try to find him.

The other robot held out its arm
for the transfer, and Doberman grabbed it and twisted it off. 

Then, as the Gryphon turned to
look at the damage, Doberman put his fist through the side of the robot usually
protected by the arm and ripped out the brainbox.  As Anna watched in awe, he
crushed the brain between nothing but his thumb and pinkie.

Thumb and pinkie?  “Cool!” Anna
cried, delighted.  “I didn’t know you were such a showman, Dobie.”

“Next time,” Doberman said,
dropping the wreckage, “You are going to keep your mouth shut, Landborn.”  The
robot calmly locked the cuff back around his wrist and began to run at
precisely the right speed for Anna to keep up.

“Maybe,” Anna agreed.  “Where’s
the node?”

“My back pocket,” Doberman said.

“Just don’t sit on it,” Anna
said. 

“Agreed,” the robot said.  “Can
you run any faster?  They’re going to be sealing down this section of the base
in eighteen seconds.”

“No,” Anna panted.

Without a word, Doberman picked
her up and broke into an inhuman sprint that made her actually feel Gs.

They made it outside the sector
in fourteen seconds.  Doberman set her down as the doors slammed shut and
locked behind them, then resumed walking again as if nothing had even happened.

The robot wasn’t even breathing
hard.

He’s good at this,
Anna
mused, walking placidly beside him.  Up ahead, a group of coalers in riot gear
rounded a corner and ran toward them.  She stared sullenly at the floor as they
approached, back to playing the part of an unwilling Nephyr draftee.

Two of the coalers stopped.  With
a surge of disgust, Anna realized that they were both had the glittering skin
of Nephyrs underneath the assault equipment.  “Unit Ferris, where are you going
with that recruit?”

“Eoirus, sir,” Doberman replied.

“Why are you in Sector Six?  The
spaceport is in Sector Three.”

“I tricked the stupid thing into
taking off the cuffs,” Anna sneered, jerking backwards and twisting her wrist
in a mini-tantrum as Doberman remained utterly immobile above her.  She kicked
Doberman in the leg.  Then, when he didn’t budge, she kicked him again,
harder.  “Stupid robot.  Let me
go!
  I want to go home.  I don’t
want
to be a Nephyr.”  She stomped her heel on the toe of his boot.

The robot looked down at her. 
“Anna Landborn, I have been granted full authority by Director Yura Nalle of
Yolk Facility 4, North Tear, to remove any body parts impeding your progress to
the Academy.  Cease kicking me.” 

Perfect,
Anna thought,
delighted.  She was even more pleased that she absolutely believed he would rip
off her arm in the name of their cover, should she continue to kick him.

Anna kicked him again.  Then,
glaring up at the robot, Anna desisted her struggles with a disgusted sigh. 
“Almost got out, too, before the stupid heap tracked me down.” 

“You got a
Ferris
to
release your cuffs?”  The glittering cyborg stared at her in disbelief behind
his black-tinted riot-suppressing mask.  “How?”

“I quoted Article Twelve-H of the
Unwilling Draftee Act,” Anna snapped indignantly.  “…‘a draftee has the right
to defecate in private, as long as the draftee makes a recorded oath upon his
or her honor not to flee the premises on pain of a ten-year enlistment
extension.”

The man laughed and winced. 
“Sucks for you, kid.”  Then the Nephyr motioned to his companion and they
hurried after their friends into Sector Seven.

“Article Twelve-H?” Doberman
asked, once the coalers were out of earshot.  “I was only aware of G.  When was
H added?”

“Approximately thirty seconds
ago,” Anna said.

“Ah,” Doberman said.  He started
walking again, dragging Anna quite realistically for several yards before she
relented and followed along beside him. 

“So when are you going to take
this thing off?” Anna asked, jiggling the handcuffs.

“Maybe in a year or two,”
Doberman said.

Anna winced.  “You can’t be
serious.”

“You laced my hamburger with EMP
grenades.”

“Oh.”  Anna licked her lips. 
“Maybe I’ll stop that.”

“It’s in both of our interest
that you do.”

Anna scoffed.  “You didn’t put a
bomb in my brain.”

Doberman gave her a flat look. 
“I assure you I did.  Two of them.”

“Whatever.  You’ve appealed to my
logical side.  I’ll stop trying to kill you now, robot.”

Doberman looked down at her. 
“You thought I was going to hand you over to the Gryphon, didn’t you?”

Anna froze, and Doberman kept
walking, dragging her for real, this time.

“Because,” Doberman said, once
Anna finally, grudgingly, began walking beside him again, “Your biorhythms
spiked quite violently there for a moment.”

“I was trying to keep it
realistic,” Anna muttered.  “Wasn’t sure you could destroy him.”

“I could have simply told him to
leave,” Doberman said.  “I wanted to test a theory.”  He glanced down at her. 
“And your capillaries are expanding.  You’re lying.  You thought I was going to
give you to the Gryphon.”

“You had no reason not to,” Anna
muttered.  “If you weren’t so stupid, you would’ve realized you could’ve gotten
rid of me back there.”

The robot glanced down at her
again.  “Have you ever had a dog, Anna?”

“If you’re going to compare
yourself to a dog, spare me,” Anna said.  “You’re not a dog.”

“Humor me.”

“Yes, I know what a damn dog is
like,” Anna said.  “Willing, obedient, happy to please.  Loyal.  Trustworthy. 
Wouldn’t eat your corpse even if it was starving.  You’re not a dog.”

“What kind of dog was it?”
Doberman asked.

“It was a Doberman.  And it
wasn’t my dog, it was my mom’s dog.  They got trapped in the silver mine
together.  Still had water and air.  Starved to death.”

“The dog didn’t like you, did
it?”

“No, it was a stupid piece of shit
that only liked my m—”  Anna choked, realizing the direction of his
conversation.  “You tricky sonofabitch!” she cried.  “You were updating your
profile, weren’t you?!”

“This makes much more sense now. 
Thank you, Anna.”  The smugness in the robot’s voice oozed across the tiles
around them.

Anna narrowed her eyes.  “I hate
dogs.”

“But you sleep better around
them.”

“I never
had
a dog, you shit,”
Anna snapped.  “And my mom’s dog hated my guts.  Tried to bite me every chance
it got.”  She was angry now.  She knew the robot was only adding more facets to
his profile, but she didn’t care.  “Mom wouldn’t get me a dog because she
caught me cutting open her cat in the backyard.  That’s what I think about
pets.  Great laboratory experiments.”

Doberman stopped and looked down
at her.  “I’m not going to bite you, Anna.”

Anna snorted and looked away. 
“You’re just a stupid robot.”

“I’m
your
stupid robot,”
Doberman said.  “And I’m not going to bite you.”

He seemed to be waiting for
something, confirmation that she agreed he wasn’t going to bite her.  Anna knew
it would be an excellent time to tell him to prove it, and to use his
redirected processing pathways to slip a bomb into
his
brain.  But,
instead, she heard herself say, “Okay, Dobie.”  Like a little girl.  Like a
goddamn, crying little girl.

Anna swiped her eyes with her
sleeve and said, “Walk.  Before I figure out how I’m going to use your newfound
sentimental side to my advantage.”

“Ditto, Landborn.”