Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (4 page)

Milar’s sneer—followed by the
re-application of his beetle-green sunglasses—was all she needed to confirm her
assessment.

Oh crap.  Send Aunt Cherry a good
form-letter, try not to mess up her eulogy, pick her a pretty casket with some
purple in it, ‘cause she was toast, baby.  Tatiana could see it in his eyes. 
They were gonna kill her.  Or worse.

Milar grunted and wrapped big
fingers around the insectlike chip.  He sheathed his knife.  “Take her back to
the ship.  I’ll take care of things here.”

Tatiana’s eyes narrowed.  “What
do you mean, ‘take care of things?’”

For all his reverential staring
earlier, Milar’s bow was now filled with harsh sarcasm.  His ridiculously long
leather coat brushed at his ankles as he bent at the waist.  “To stage your
heroic and tragic death, of course.”  His eyes caught on the lapel of her
emergency jumpsuit and his face contorted in a sneer.  “
Captain.
”

“Easy,” Patrick said, though if
it was meant for Milar or, Tatiana, she couldn’t be sure.  Then it hit her. 
Her
death
?  Tatiana froze.  “Oh, you are
not
that stupid.”  Was
he?  A soldier was worth a fortune, but on the other hand, an operator was
worth a pretty penny too, just for the tech she carried in her body.  Besides,
if they blew up her soldier, nobody would know what happened to her…

Straightening, Gigantor smiled. 
“I guess we’ll see, won’t we, sweetie.” 

Tatiana’s eyes narrowed.  “Who
wears sunglasses at night, anyway?  You look like a lobotomized space monkey
who found fashion in a cheap adventure mag.  Where’d you get the leather
jacket, knucker?  A dead walrus?”

Behind the sunglasses, Milar’s
face was flat.  “Off a dead Nephyr.”

Tatiana laughed in his face. 
“Yeah, right.  You?  A Nephyr?  Next you’ll be telling me collies bathe
regularly and power cores crawl outta your ass.”

“All
right
,” Patrick said
much too quickly, tugging her away from the bristling leather-clad thug. 
“Let’s go before you get yourself scalped, okay?”  Then, despite Tatiana’s
frantic kicks and struggles, the big man began to push her into the darkness of
the sticky alien forest, away from her soldier.

“Let go of me!” Tatiana cried. 
“I am one of the best Coalition operators in my Pod.  If I go missing…” 
They’ll
what?
she thought, verging on despair.  
Train a new one?
  There were
over sixty operators in this section of space.  Not many, but not
irreplaceable, either.  Tatiana’s supreme ability to mesh with metal and AI
would be missed, but not mourned.

Especially when they discovered
she freaked out again.

No!

“Let
go!
”  When she landed
another good kick to his shin, Patrick’s breath hissed between his teeth and he
stopped, spinning her to face him.  They were well out of sight of the fire and
there was no sound but the buzzing of alien insects.  Tatiana went utterly
still as he glared down at her, every molecule of her being suddenly aware that
she was Coalition and he was a colonist and they were four thousand miles from
any authorities.  Even in the cities, Coalition fighters who ran afoul of the
locals went missing at night and their bodies washed up in the Shrieker lakes,
or they were uncovered in the bog pits, or were simply never found at all.

“Listen,” Patrick said, squeezing
her shoulder, “No offense, lady, but if you kick me again, I’m gonna sock ya
one.”  He provided a sizeable fist at eye-level, for her careful consideration.

“Take me back to my soldier,” she
said, locking gazes with him, pointedly avoiding the fist hovering near her
nose.

“No.  I’m taking you to see
Wideman Joe.” 

“Wiseman
who
?  Listen,
knucker, do you have
any
idea of the kind of deep shit you’re getting
yourself into?  Removing a lifeline’s a federal crime.  They’ll come down on
you so hard it’ll make your head spin.”  She glared up at him, but was
distracted by the constant, nagging dribble of blood down her back.  “And I’m
bleeding,
jackass.  Fix it.”

“I got some nanostrips on the
ship,” Patrick said.  He grabbed her elbow and started walking again, tugging
her with him.

Tatiana had the choice to follow
or have the metal bands cut deeper into her wrists.  She struggled over the
alien landscape, her small size and bare feet making it difficult to keep up.

She froze when she saw the ship. 
A colonial ultralight cargo ship, it was nevertheless capable of transporting
her across the globe.  And, with the Coalition only having thirty six Yolk
factories and four major cities on a planet larger than Old Earth, Patrick was
quite literally telling the truth—the Coalition would never find her.

“Come on,” Patrick said, giving
her a gentle tug on her arm.  “It’ll work out.”

“You are so dead,” she whispered,
but she followed him up the steps.

Inside, Patrick motioned her over
to one corner of the cramped and cluttered cargo bay, then pressed the button
to shut the door and seal them inside.

“Might as well get comfortable,”
Patrick said, dragging a heavy metal chair between her and the door.  He sat
down and reached under his grungy leather jacket to pull out an age-worn,
rectangular—

“Is that a
book
?” Tatiana
asked, a bit shocked.  Never in a million years would she have guessed that a
colonist would have carted something as clumsy as a book across five years of
space.  Even back in the Inner Bounds, it was a rare find.  The last printing
press had gone out of business many centuries ago.

Patrick grunted.

“
Why?
” Tatiana demanded. 
“They’re so…” 
Useless, bulky, old…

“The Coalition banned the great
philosophers on electronic media,” Patrick said.  He held it up.  The cover
read,
The Life and Works of Ghani Klyde.
  He smiled.  “This is one of the
only copies left, though a friend of mine has been translating them back onto
electronic formats.”

Tatiana realized her mouth was
hanging open.  “You’ve got Ghani…Klyde?  In your
hands?
”  Never mind
that a two-bit colonist on some nowhere planet in the Outer Bounds could even
read
Ne’vanthi.  Tatiana herself could barely read it, and she’d spent two years
stationed outside the Ne’vanthi capital during the Pauper Rebellion.

“Yep.”  Patrick proceeded to
crack open the ancient tome and his golden-brown eyes started to scan the words
upon the aged pages.

Tatiana was so shocked by this
new development that she didn’t know whether to laugh at his bluff or run away
screaming.  It had to be the former, she decided.  Colonists were
not
that smart.  If her briefings were any indications, they were spear-toting
Neanderthals who threw rocks at soldiers when they were hungry. 

“Ghani Klyde was a
traitor
,”
Tatiana blurted.  “He brainwashed the Circle’s children into rebellion just by
writing a few lines in his blog.”  It made the fact that Patrick was holding
his words as they were meant to be read all that more unbelievable. 
A
bluff,
she decided. 
He’s bluffing.

“Uh-huh,” Patrick said, nodding. 
“He was a traitor.  He was also a tactical genius.  He masterminded one of the
most efficient war machines in the known universe.” 

Mercy of the Phage,
Tatiana thought, in horror,
He’s actually read the damn thing.

When she could only stare at him,
Patrick returned his attention to the book. 

Still, Tatiana was suspicious.  “Where
did you learn Ne’vanthi?”

“Friend taught me,” Patrick said.

She estimated that maybe ten
people on Fortune, aside from Tatiana, had actually been to the slave-trading
nowhere-planet of Ne’vanth.  Tatiana narrowed her eyes, once more beginning to
suspect that this was somehow a ruse.  “What friend?”

“You wouldn’t know her.”

Deciding to call his bluff,
Tatiana said, “Miserable
gakeii
.”

Patrick jerked his head up,
raising a brow.  “I always liked that one,” he said, in Ne’vanthi.  “The
Ne’vanthi have such…colorful…curses.”  While his Coalition New Common had about
as much refinement as her Fleet Admiral’s gangrenous toenails, Patrick’s
Ne’vanthi was flawless.  It made
her
Ne’vanthi look like the random
hooting of an inbred chimpanzee.  Tatiana stared at him, jaw agape.

Patrick went back to his book. 

Tatiana’s curiosity piqued
despite herself.  She eased herself around Patrick’s chair and glanced over his
shoulder, wondering if she could bite out a jugular before he beat her to death
with his big metal chair…

Patrick snapped the book shut and
scowled.  “Like hell I’m letting you get behind me, coaler.”  He jabbed a meaty
finger across the room.  “Go.  Now.”

Glaring, Tatiana began to trudge
back and forth along the far wall, eying the exit, wondering if she could press
the unlock switch and get outside before the brute caught her.  Damned little
chance of that, with her hands trussed behind her like a Troop-Day turkey.  She
could still feel blood dripping down her fingers, and it was getting worse,
despite how much she tried to keep her hands still.

“Pacing isn’t going to get you
out of here.”

“Screw you, knucker.”  She paced
harder.

Patrick sighed, “Well, at least
have the decency to bleed in one place.”  He motioned at the line of ruby
droplets she had spread across the floor of his ship, squished and smeared by
her bare feet.

Seeing that much blood, Tatiana
suddenly felt nauseous.  She stopped pacing.

“Thank you,” he said.  He looked
like he was going to say more, but the sound of an explosion made him jerk.

Tatiana grinned.  “My cavalry,”
she said.  “I hope you’re ready to expand your horizons, rebel, because the
Nephyrs are gonna tear you a new hole.”

“Naw,” he said, turning back to
the book he was reading.  “Milar just killed you.”

Tatiana froze.  “My soldier…” 
Its loss was like a pang of ice, stabbing her in the stomach.

He grunted.  Didn’t look up from
the book.

“You bastard!” she stammered. 
“That’s a billion-dollar machine!  You could’ve…sold it or something!  Why’d
you have to blow it up?!”

“One less coaler war-machine to
worry about.”  He kept reading.

Scowling, Tatiana went back to
pacing.  As the minutes ticked by, her soldier burning, the chances of rescue
by the Coalition growing increasingly slimmer by the second, Tatiana struggled
for something to say that would somehow change his mind. 

“I can pay you,” she muttered.

“Not enough, pumpkin.”  Patrick
turned another page.

Irritated by his distinct lack of
concern, Tatiana narrowed her eyes and forgot her attempts to negotiate. 
“There’s nowhere on this planet that you can hide from the Coalition.  It’s got
the fastest ships, the biggest guns, and the most brains.  When the Nephyrs get
you, they’re gonna make you scream for days before they let you die.”

“Uh-huh.”  He sounded bored, but
she could tell by the sudden tightness in the colonist’s face that some aspect
of what she had said had gotten through to him.

He
is
afraid of
Nephyrs,
Tatiana realized with delight.  Most people were, she reasoned. 
Psychotic bastards that they were.  But that didn’t mean she couldn’t use them
to her advantage.  She continued on gleefully, “The last treason correction I
saw, the guy lasted four weeks.  A rebel.  The Nephyrs strung him up and tore
off skin until you couldn’t see anything but muscle underneath.  They had him
in a sealed room, see.  Everything was sterilized.  Humidified.  IV fluids.  No
chance of infection.  It was friggin’ awesome.”

She was lying, of course—Tatiana
had never been able to find the stomach to watch a correction, any correction,
but her fellow operators had raved about them enough that she had a pretty good
idea of what went on.

“I have tapes if you want to see
it,” she prodded.  “It’ll give you a good idea of what’s coming to you, collie
bastard.”

Patrick slammed his book shut and
scowled at her.  “You talk a lot, for something I could squish with my pinkie.”

Tatiana narrowed her eyes. 
“Skinned alive.”  She showed her teeth.  “That’s what’s gonna happen to you if
you don’t let me—”

Patrick was out of his chair in
an instant, and Tatiana gulped as he strode forward and forced her into the
wall.

With one hand planted on either
side of her head, he leaned forward, until their faces were almost touching. 
“You wanna talk about torture?  Let me tell you about torture.  It happened to
my sister.  A regiment of Coalition forces kidnapped her when she was working
ryegrass in the fields.  We found her corpse buried a mile from their campsite,
once the regiment moved on.”

Tatiana met his gaze stare-for
stare.  “Shouldn’t have been a rebel.” 

He gave her a mirthless grin. 
“Yeah.”  He reached up and picked a sticky twig off the dark blue fabric of her
all-purpose soldier’s jumpsuit, then flicked it off to the side.  When he met
her gaze, his amber-brown eyes were hard.  “See, only thing was Carol wasn’t a
rebel.  Never had a bad thought toward the Coalition in her life.  That
regiment took fourteen women from our settlement that day, all pretty girls. 
Hauled them from their homes, calling them traitors, but it weren’t no secret
why they took ‘em.  They were bored and they were Coalition, so they could do
whatever the hell they wanted.  Called it a ‘correction’ and all was right with
the world.”

Tatiana swallowed, hard, and
looked away, a sick feeling forming in her gut.  “You’re lying,” she muttered. 
Yet she’d heard the rumors, read the logs, listened to the dark confessions
over too much drink…

Patrick grabbed her chin and
forced her to look at him.  “Of the eight that came home alive, all but two
were pregnant.”  His smile was bitter, now.  “Only reason
they
weren’t
pregnant was ‘cause they were too young.”