Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (45 page)

Chapter
40

The
Head Doctor

“Walk faster, traitor, or I’ll
start plucking hardware right now and save the doctors the time.”

“Yeah, whatever, loser,” Tatiana
muttered, but she stepped up the pace, anyway.  She was wearing cuffs and
ankle-shackles that made it incredibly difficult to do anything more than a
slow shuffle, and the bigger, taller Nephyrs weren’t slowing down for her.

Up ahead, surgery patients and
doctors stepped aside to watch the procession of eighteen Nephyrs, two Internal
Investigations Officers, twelve Base Security personnel, and six
specially-assigned, assault-capable Gryphon units.  Tatiana lifted her chin and
tried to ignore the wide eyes from the side-corridors and open room doors. 

Screw ‘em.

Guilty
.  It still rankled
her.  They hadn’t even given her a
trial
.  Sure, they’d got the whole
thing on camera, right down to her getting down on her hands and knees so Milar
could stand on her back and retrieve his shackles, but jeez.  Not even a
trial
. 
What was this, the Stone-Age?  Surely she deserved a few minutes to explain her
innocence, maybe have a few pity-parties in front of the cameras.  But no,
they’d kept her locked in almost complete solitary ever since they’d dragged
her back to Rath.  Her conviction had been delivered to her via the smug sneer
of a Nephyr Lieutenant-General.  They’d fed her gruel. 
Gruel.

Now they were going to remove her
hardware before the Nephyrs got her.  Full correction.  To the death, spare the
potty-breaks.  Damn, this sucked.

The Nephyr on point turned down a
side-corridor marked SURGERY and Tatiana slowed again, looking up at the big
white letters on the sign with trepidation.  “Taking a
right!
” the next
Nephyr in line shouted.  Several Nephyrs down the procession repeated the
call.  As she turned the corner, she saw the big teal double-doors up ahead and
Tatiana felt her feet slow further.

“Move it, tiny,” the Nephyr
behind her snapped, slamming a heavy hand into her back, tumbling her into the
Nephyr in front of her.  Nobody bothered to help right her when she fell.  In
fact, one of them grabbed her by the arm-shackles and started hauling her
forward, giving her the option of stumbling to her feet or getting dragged.

“I bet you stole a lot of lunch
money as a kid,” Tatiana muttered, struggling back into a standing position. 
“Lot of good it did you, eh?”

The Nephyr holding her
wrist-chains gave her a grin that left her with goosebumps.  “Oh,” she said,
“I’m not too displeased with the results.  I get to skin me a little operator bitch. 
Always wanted to do that.”

“Such lofty goals,” Tatiana
muttered.  “Remind me to nominate you for the school board.”

The Nephyr woman holding her
chain looked up to one of her companions.  “I want her tongue.”

Tatiana swallowed down bile and
muttered, “Tastes like chicken.”

“Actually,” the Nephyr woman
said, smiling at her, “it tastes like pork.”

She is not bullshitting me,
Tatiana realized, looking up into the woman’s icy-calm face. 
Fuck me, I am
so screwed.

“See,” the woman continued, plucking
at Tatiana’s orange prisoner’s jumpsuit as they walked, “sometimes we’ll carve
a chunk off and eat it in front of ‘em.  Bit of thigh or backstrap or, if
they’re boring, the tongue.  Fry it right on the spot in a little salt and
butter and garlic, slice it up nice, throw in a few onions for flavor.  Hell,
we’ll even offer ‘em a piece, if they’re hungry.”

Definitely don’t be boring
,
Tatiana thought immediately.  Then, with a sudden wave of hysteria, she
realized that she was planning on doing her damndest to entertain Nephyrs as
they flayed her alive.  She swallowed, hard. 

“Taking a
left
!” the lead
Nephyr shouted, from up ahead.  Two Nephyrs had stopped to hold open the
double-doors as the procession passed through, revealing row after row of
double-doored surgery rooms.

Oh man,
Tatiana thought,
seeing the first surgeon in blue scrubs and a facial mask, standing off to one
side, watching.  She felt her heart start to thunder in her ears. 
Oh man…

Then the Nephyrs were parting,
leaving her a black-clad corridor into an open surgery room.  Inside, she could
see an operating table and a nice, big array of tools and electronics.

They were gonna tear out her
hardware.  She was
never
flying another soldier.  Never flying another
anything
. 
She was grounded, man, and she hadn’t even gotten laid out of the deal.  Seeing
the guy with the syringe standing beside the bed, it finally started to sink
in.  His assistant, a
much
smaller woman who appeared to be some sort of
dwarf, had everything but her eyes hidden by a facial mask.  She was seated on
a short stool, playing with a scalpel, shaving her fingernails.

Shaving her…fingernails?  Wasn’t
that, like, against some sort of health code?

The doors slammed shut behind her
and two Nephyrs set the deadbolts, top and bottom, leaving Tatiana alone with
four escorts and two surgeons.  Tatiana slowed again, as they drew closer to
the spotlit center of the room, and the female Nephyr in front of her laughed. 
“Aww, I think she’s starting to hyperventilate.”  She shoved Tatiana, hard, and
Tatiana went careening into the operating table, upending the
carefully-laid-out trays and spilling medical instruments in a metallic clatter
upon the floor.  “Get on with it, docs,” the glittering broad said.  “I want
this bitch back in time for dinner.”  She gave Tatiana a wink.

The dwarf stopped shaving her
fingernails and narrowed her eyes at the instruments on the floor.  In a
high-pitched, childlike voice, she said, “I’m sorry, did someone ask the lawn
ornament to talk, Dobie?”

The man beside the bed said, “I
don’t believe they did, Anna.”

“I see.”  She paused and held her
tiny hand out to inspect the back of her nails.  “Execute them, please.”

“As you wish, Anna.”  As the
Nephyrs were frowning, the man raised a hand and pointed a finger at the Nephyr
closest to her, then raised a finger at each of the three others, and Tatiana
had just enough time to see the tips of four of his fingers fold back, exposing
small black tubes, before she heard a collective
pop
and jumped.  In
that instant, all four Nephyrs suddenly collapsed, their bodies shuddering.  It
had taken only a second.  The man lowered his arm, blew smoke from the four
steaming barrels jutting from his hand, then the tips of his fingers folded
back into place and he dropped his arm back to his side.  When Tatiana looked
down, the Nephyrs’ brains were oozing gray-pink slime out an empty eye-socket.

“Niiice, Dobie.  Your aim is
improving.”

“I continue to modify myself as
time allows, Anna,” the man said. 

Listening to the
perfectly-calculated pitch of his voice, Tatiana frowned.  “Wait.  Is that a…
robot
?”

“Wow, she’s a bright one.” 

“Her statistical record indicates
she is, Anna.”

The girl—it
had
to be a
girl, Tatiana realized, maybe only five or six—snorted in disdain.  Giving
Tatiana a considering look, she blew on her fingernails, then rubbed them on
her shirt.  “Dobie, help her onto the table.”  She pulled off her mask and flung
it aside.  “We’re gonna have some fun.”

Tatiana froze.  “The…table?  What? 
Why?”

The girl’s smile was icy.  “So I
can experiment on you, of course.”

Tatiana’s face fell as the robot
moved to grab her by an arm and pull her towards the table.  “What?”

“Oh, you actually thought you
were getting rescued, didn’t you?”  The kid laughed at her.  “Oh no, sweetie. 
Oh no.  This will be much, much better.”  Smiling, the girl got off her stool
and started walking towards her.  “You see, you killed my friend, and I didn’t
want the Nephyrs getting first whack at you.”

As the robot bodily hefted Tatiana
onto the table and cinched down the wrist and ankle restraints, Tatiana frowned
down at the little girl, struggling against hyperventilation.  “I don’t know
what you’re talking about—who
are
you?”

“They skinned him, you know,” the
little girl said, twisting the scalpel in the light, looking at the blade.  “All
those pretty dragons—one of the Nephyrs decided to tan it and use it as a
coat.”  She looked up at Tatiana with a smile that left Tatiana cold.  “She’s
dead now.”

Dragons…  It took her a moment to
make the connection. 
Milar
.  “I didn’t kill him!” Tatiana cried, as the
robot buckled her head to the table.  She frantically strained against the
straps holding her down.  “I helped him escape!”

“I see.”  The girl smiled and
lowered the scalpel to the metal tray.  Idly, she picked up what looked like a
circular bone-saw.  Pressing the button, the blade shrieked in a high-pitched
whine as she watched it thoughtfully.  “Dobie, perhaps you could replay the
scene in question for our new friend?”  She turned to smile at Tatiana.  “Since
her memory seems to be so…fragile.”

“As you wish, Anna.”  The scene
immediately came up on the operating screen, which the girl twisted so that
Tatiana could see.

A man, hanging from his wrists in
a tiny concrete cell, his skin hanging on a hook beside him.  Tatiana
recognized the sinuous red and black serpents and felt sick.  “Oh my God,” she
whispered.  “I thought he escaped.”

Jeanne said he went down,
she remembered. 
He went down and they skinned him alive.

“Took him four days to die,” the
little girl said.  “The Nephyrs running the show were quite disappointed. 
Seems one of their techs arrived with a highly virulent form of bacteria on
their sterile medical equipment.  What a shame.”

Four days…  Tatiana frowned,
remembering the charges that the Lieutenant General had read to her the day she
returned.  He’d left her the paper to examine, after he’d left.  The date had
been in the upper left-hand corner.  Blinking at the kid, she said, “But I’ve
only been back two days.”  They had
escaped
four days ago.

She saw a flicker of confusion in
the girl’s face before she shook herself and continued, “So here’s the deal.  I
need guinea-pigs, and I don’t like you, so I’m going to run a few experiments
before I hand you back to the Nephyrs.  Sound like fun?”

But Tatiana was frowning at the
skin.  The dragons looked wrong, somehow.  She’d gotten a really good look,
earlier, back when the bastard had been teasing her, and the nose of the red
one was tucked over the black one’s back, instead of behind it.  “Kid,” she
said.  “I don’t know who that is, but that’s not Milar.  The red dragon is
wrong.”

The girl frowned at Tatiana a
long moment, then reluctantly glanced at the screen.  She cocked her head at it
a moment, then turned back to Tatiana.  “Explain.”  She still had not turned
off the bone-saw.

“I went back and rescued him from
the Nephyr compound,” Tatiana babbled in relief.  “Four days ago.  He had a
little EMP wand in his knife and he used it to disable some Nephyrs.  I took
out his lifeline and stuffed him in my soldier and flew him back to his
brother.  I took out a couple of Bouncers with his ship, then we spent a couple
days laying low, staying under radar.  Then there was a big firefight over
Deaddrunk.  I flew a TAG and took out a pod of operators and about a dozen
Nephyrs.”

The girl wrinkled her nose.  “Dobie?”

“An unarmed cargo ship wiped out
three Bouncers on patrol over the western jungle,” the robot said.  “Two days
later, there was a fight over Deaddrunk, but the information is classified,
pending a Director’s code.”

Narrowing her eyes at Tatiana,
the girl shut off the bone saw and swiveled the console back around and began
typing something into the screen.  A few moments later, she cocked her head,
looking genuinely surprised.  “Huh.  She’s telling the truth.”

“It appears that way, Anna.”

The girl tapped her fingers
against her cheek a moment, glancing at the screen, then to Tatiana, then
back.  “Says Miles and Patty went down in the north end of the Tear.  There’s a
huge search out for them right now.  Most operators north of the equator have
been deployed.  Big firefight.  They found the ship, but colonial resistance
isn’t allowing them to land and do a thorough search.”

Tatiana let out a huge breath of
relief.  “Oh thank God.  See?  I’m on your side.  You can let me go, now.”

The girl spun the console away
from her and gave Tatiana an easy smile.  “You’re right.  I could.” 

The girl made no move to
disengage the shackles holding Tatiana to the stainless-steel table.  Instead,
she smiled, and Tatiana felt the coldness of it in her soul.

The girl switched on the bone saw
again.  “But, like I said, I need a guinea-pig, and I don’t like you.” 

“Listen, you crazy little bitch,
let me
go
!”  Tatiana jerked at the restraints, but didn’t even succeed
in rocking the table.

“You see, you got a bunch of
pretty pictures, where all I ever got was screams.”

Tatiana blinked at her.  “Pictures?” 
Was the girl psychotic?  “What the hell are you talking about?  Let me
go
. 
Somebody
help
!”

The little girl laughed.  “Screaming
is good.  That’s what they’re expecting.  The surgeons were ordered not to use
anesthetics, so I figured, why not?  Makes for more interesting dinner
conversation later.  You know…horror stories to tell your kids?”  The girl
chuckled and stepped forward with the saw.

Tatiana shrieked and tried to
thrash her head aside, but the robot had strapped it brutally—and
effectively—to the table.

“Now, before we start,” the kid
said, bringing the spinning blade within centimeters of Tatiana’s left eye, “I
want to be very clear about something.”