Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (5 page)

“Sorry,” she whispered.

 He scanned her face, his eyes
still hard.  “Just cut the bullshit, okay?  Milar would return the favor in a
heartbeat, if he heard you talking about torturing folks like that.”  His face
tightened in a wry grimace.  “Knowing what you bastards did to her, sometimes I
think I would, too.”

“I didn’t know,” she whispered.

“Yeah.”  Patrick released her
roughly.  “Whatever.”  With a parting scowl, he went back to his chair.

Tatiana licked her lips.  “I
really didn’t—”

“Just shut up.”  He picked up his
book again.  “You open your mouth again and I’ll gag you.”

Feeling cold, Tatiana slid down
the wall and drew her knees up under her chin.  “Sorry,” she said again. 
“Really.”

Patrick gave her a dark scowl,
but stayed in his seat.

Milar strode onto the ship almost
twenty minutes later. 

“What the hell took so long?”
Patrick demanded as soon as he saw his brother.

Milar glanced at Tatiana, who
hadn’t moved from the wall, then glanced at Patrick, still in his chair, then
grunted and pushed the button to shut the door and seal them inside.  As he
did, the sleeve of his black leather overcoat slid back far enough to expose
the glistening scarlet and ebony scales of dual dragons, twining up his arm.

They must cover most of his
chest,
Tatiana thought, eying the dragons’ limbs that peeked above his
shirt, clawing up his neck, locked in perpetual battle across his throat. 

Then Milar turned from the hatch,
took off his sunglasses, and locked eyes with her.  In that instant, Tatiana
forgot to breathe.  There was such malevolence in his gaze that she felt like
she was going to puke. 
He looks like he wants to kill me,
Tatiana
thought, sinking into the wall under the stare.  She saw his dragony fist
clench once.

“Miles?” Patrick asked,
tentative, now.

Milar held Tatiana’s gaze for
what seemed like an eternity.  In that time, Tatiana felt the cold metal of the
wall behind her pressing into her spine as she shrank backwards, trying to
avoid the sheer hatred she found in his gaze.  Suddenly, saying nothing, Milar
jammed his shades into his pocket, stalked across the room, climbed the
scaffolding to the upper deck, and disappeared through the hatch above,
slamming his fist on the airlock panel to seal himself inside the cockpit. 

Patrick frowned at the cockpit,
then at Tatiana, then, after a moment, stood up and walked over to the
scaffolding.  “Miles?” he called up the stairs.

He got no response.  After a few
minutes, the ship jolted and she felt her stomach lurch as they took to the
air.  Patrick frowned up at the cockpit, but didn’t leave Tatiana alone in the
hold.  Pity.

“What are you going to do with
me?” Tatiana asked, after it was clear Milar wasn’t coming back.  On an alien
planet, on an enemy ship, away from the safety of her soldier, she felt more
alone than ever before.  It hadn’t truly hit her how much danger she was in
until she felt the thrust of the engines lift her away from her last known
whereabouts, destined for some unknown part of a planet filled with uneducated
barbarians who hated her on sight.

Patrick turned away from his
brother’s abrupt and moody disappearance—
probably another mineral deficiency
,
she thought with glee—with a scowl.  Tatiana froze, remembering what he had
promised should she continue to speak.  “I’m sorry.  I’ll be quiet.”

Patrick gave her a long look,
then, with one last frown at the cockpit, went back to his big metal chair.

She stared at her kneecaps for
another ten minutes before the sound of the book snapping shut made her lift
her head.

Patrick was standing, crossing
the space between them, a long white rag dangling from his hand.

“I said I wouldn’t talk!” she
cried.  She scrambled to push herself sideways down the wall, bare feet
scrabbling for purchase on the sheet metal.  She only succeeded in sliding
backwards, until her wrists and shoulder-blades gouged into the floor.

Panic surged when Patrick reached
her.  She clenched her jaw shut and closed her eyes.

For several heart-pounding
moments, she lay there, every muscle tense.  Then she tentatively pried an eye
open.

Patrick knelt above her with the
rag in his hand, his hazel eyes unreadable.  “Sit up.”

Tatiana squeezed her jaw harder
and shook her head stubbornly.

Sighing, he reached down and
pulled her up by the shoulder.  Then he withdrew a key from his leather vest
and released the bands from her wrists.

As the metal fell away, clinking
against the floor, Tatiana blinked.

“Let me see your wrists,” Patrick
said.

She tucked them to her body and
vigorously shook her head.

Seeing that, Patrick rolled his
eyes.  “Come on.  Let me
see
them.  Before you bleed to death, twerp.”

That was a good point… 
Reluctantly, she held them out.

He hissed upon seeing the oozing
cuts and gouges.  Even Tatiana, who had lived with them, hadn’t imagined they
were that bad.  She felt her stomach lurch.

“Hold on,” he said, getting to
his feet.  He tossed the white rag at her—bandages, she realized, stunned—and
went to a shelving unit secured by a cargo net.  He removed the net and from a
compartment drew out a bundle of neon green strips.

“Here,” he said, kneeling in
front of her again.  He pulled a strip free from the bundle and removed the
adhesive.  “These’ll help.”

“What are they?” Tatiana asked.

“Nanostrips,” he said, grabbing a
wrist.

Tatiana yanked her hands away and
skittered backwards in a hurry.  At his scowl, she said, “I’m wired with enough
electronics to power a city.  Nanos are bad mojo for an operator.”

Patrick’s frown cleared and he
glanced down at the exposed strip.  “Really?”

“Yeah,” she said, perking up
slightly.  “Won’t help anyway.  I’ve got resident bots patrolling, to keep out
intruders.  A whole strip will probably fry something.”

“Huh.”  Patrick replaced the
strip and returned the strip back to the bundle.  He got up again, dropped the
nanostrips back into the compartment, and returned with regular adhesive
first-aid strips and a bottle of alcohol.  He held them up.  “These do?”

Tatiana nodded, a little
mystified by his sudden change in demeanor. 

She flat-out stared, however,
when he gently took her hand and daubed it with bandages wetted in alcohol.  It
burned like hell, but she just kept staring.  Her mind once again wandered to
what she did when she was bored, and whether Patrick would be good material.

A smile quirked at the corner of
Patrick’s mouth as he worked.  “I think we got off to a wrong start.”

She blushed, realizing she was
gaping at him like a schoolgirl.  Looking at the wall, she straightened and
said, “You’ve committed three federal offenses in the last hour.  Assault,
kidnapping, and destruction of Coalition property.  If you had any idea of how
dead
you are going to be by tomorrow morning…”

Patrick wiped more dried blood
and debris from the wound.  “What’s your name?”

Tatiana stiffened further.  “If
this is a ploy to get vital Coalition data off of me—”

“Tatiana, right?”

Her mouth fell open and she stared. 
“How did you…?”

Patrick looked up and grinned at
her.  “Good.  Should’ve asked earlier, but we were pretty sure.  It’s hard to
miss…”  He cleared his throat and looked back down at her wrist.  “Anyway,
sorry about ruining your day.”  He wrapped gauze around the wrist and patted it
down, then moved on to the other.  “If you don’t mind my asking, why were you
outside your solider?”

I do mind,
she thought
bitterly.

Patrick glanced up, saw the look
on her face, and laughed.  “All right, we’ll leave that one alone for now.”

She let him work for a minute,
then muttered, “You were pretty close to the truth, what you said earlier.”

He quirked an eyebrow at her. 
“About you having a nervous breakdown?”

She ground her teeth together. 
“I like to think about it as having a sudden and acute need to get out of tight
spaces at random, inconvenient times throughout my life.”

For the first time, he really
smiled at her.  His dimples returned, and Tatiana felt her heart give an extra
thud. 

Then he said, “A claustrophobic
operator.  Isn’t that like a carrot that’s afraid of orange?”

Her eyes narrowed and the extra
heartbeats receded.  Clearing her throat, she glanced at the ship around them. 
“So you can fly?”  She slapped the steel wall behind her.  “You and Milar are
both pilots?”

Patrick shrugged and reached for
the second bandage.  “Yeah.  I’m a little pathetic compared to my brother, but
I can get ‘er off the ground if I need to.”

“Still,” Tatiana said, “You must
be proud.  I hear that’s uncommon for a colonist.  Where’d you learn?”

He grinned.  “A little undercover
operation near the North Tear.  Trained quite a few of the pilots where we’re
going.”  He tucked the bandage tight and glanced at her.  “What about you?  Can
you fly one of these things?”

Tatiana snorted derisively.  “I’m
an
operator.
”

He glanced at her with a raised
brow.  “I’ll take that as a no.”

Tatiana yawned.  “So where
are
we going?”

“Little place called Deaddrunk
Mine.”

Tatiana tried not to twist her
face at yet another ridiculous colonist place name.  “That’s…quaint.”

He grinned at her, reading
between the lines.  “True, though.  You’re new to a place, you name it whatever
most strikes you about it.  Some drunk tripped on a rock and died outside town
while taking a piss.  Turns out, the rock that killed him was a nugget of
ninety-five percent pure silver.  Became one of the best mining towns on
Fortune…before the government started the Yolk draft.”

Tatiana yawned again, so tired
she felt dizzy.  “Lots of people in Deaddrunk, then?”

He snorted.  “You mean does the
Coalition know it’s there?”

“
Do
they?”

His face contorted in a scowl. 
“They better.  They took another Draft from it just a few days ago.  Make a
point of visiting twice a year, any time they need more meat for the
slaughter.”

Tatiana fought another yawn and
wondered if blood loss was making her sleepy.  “So it’s got what, a thousand? 
Two thousand inhabitants?”

Patrick laughed.  “Try two
hundred.”

“Two hundred?” Tatiana raised her
brows.  “And the Coalition drafts eggers out of it?”

“Every six months,” Patrick
muttered.

“A little town like that…must not
have many pilots.”  She felt like she was getting loopy…like she’d slammed a
good stiff drink and was just now starting to feel the effects.  Peering at him
through heavy lids, she said, “You put something on the bandages, didn’t you?”

Patrick reddened and rubbed the
back of his neck.  “Ah, yeah.  I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”  As he spoke,
he set the bottle of liquid aside.  Not alcohol then.  Tatiana cursed for not
noticing the label. 

“Bastard.”  But her eyelids were
drooping.  “There a lot of pilots in that town of yours, Patrick?”

“Naw, just a handful,” he said. 
“Like you said, it’s pretty rare for a colonist.”  He reached behind him and
grabbed a cargo mat.  “Here.  Put your head on this.”

“No, dammit.”  But she was
already falling over sideways.  He caught her and eased her down onto the mat. 
“You mess with me…” she slurred.

“I won’t,” Patrick promised. 
“Just thought you could use something to sleep.”

“You mean you didn’t want me to
see how you get to Wideman Joe.”

He reddened again.  “You’re
sharp.”

Sharper than you think,
Tatiana thought.  But she had already passed out.

Chapter
3

A
Dangerous Foreman

Being a foreman, Magali realized,
wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.  Foremen, for example, didn’t eat at
regular intervals like the rest of the eggers.  They ate whenever they could
catch a spare minute to breathe, if they ate at all.  Between consoling
panicking eggers who were convinced the next Shriek was coming and scurrying
between incidents of the shit generally clogging the engine intake, life as a
foreman was one hellacious stress-fest after another.

It did have its good points,
however.  As a foreman, Magali had direct contact with the male side of the
camp, which allowed her a much-needed change of scenery.  She even found some
men she known back in Deaddrunk, though none of them really wanted to
reminisce.  Not only did their Coalition babysitters discourage socializing,
but every egger in the camp had long-since come to terms with the fact that
they were all going to die here.  The past, Magali knew, only served to make
them that much more bitter about the present.

Some didn’t even recognize her,
even after she named the little silver-mining town and her family’s tiny
general store.  Those were usually close to developing the Wide, and even their
own work gang avoided them.

For the rest, the constant fear
of the next Shriek had hardened them to any conversation about going home. 
Magali had tried every chance she got, but as soon as she mentioned ‘getting
out,’ their eyes had darkened and they’d found something else to do.

One thing Magali learned with her
newfound contacts was that a lot of people on the male side of the camp had
tried to escape, but nobody succeeded.  The Director gave attempted escapees
thirty lashings on their first attempt, and fifty on their second.  On their
third attempt, she gave another fifty lashes and put them in the stocks for a
week.  On the fourth attempt, they were hanged. 

So far, there was only one person
in camp who had ever been put in the stocks.  The lashings were usually
enough.  Despite their fear of the next Shriek, eggers learned to fear the
Director more.  A Nephyr’s arm was many times stronger than a fully-grown
man’s, and the Director’s whippings were known to break bones.

Another dubious benefit of being
a foreman, Magali found, was that they were privy to choice bits of blood-chilling
information that Magali would have much preferred to not know.

For instance, there had been two
minor Shrieks since Magali and Anna had shown up almost two weeks ago, and each
one had cost almost a hundred egger lives.  Further, those eggers that hadn’t
been in the direct blast radius had suffered severe breakdowns and had
deteriorated to the mental states of perpetually-panicked three-year olds. 
Magali had seen them, hunkered against the aluminum siding of their old bunks,
booted from the Camp by the Coalition soldiers, yet hadn’t put it together
until now.

Already, she’d seen one of those
women die.

Magali had tripped over her on
her first day in the Camp.  The woman had spent the night huddled outside
Magali and Anna’s hut—
her
hut, Magali had discovered later—and had
suffered some sort of heart attack during the night.  It had been her limp arm
slumped across the doorway to the hut that had nearly cost Magali a broken
neck, when she was emerging for the morning lineup for the first time.

Magali grimaced when she
remembered the way Anna’s face had been completely devoid of reaction upon
seeing the corpse. 

“Where did you
think
we
got a spare hut from?”
Anna had asked, while Magali had hyperventilated. 
Then her little sister had calmly stepped over the corpse and gone to
formation.

“There’s something wrong with
her,” Magali muttered under her breath, not for the first time.  She thought
about what her sister would be like in twenty years, and felt sick.

“Something wrong with who?” a
very tall, very lanky man asked of her.  He lobbed a rag covered in Shrieker
slime at the bin towards the back of the foreman’s breakroom and slumped into a
chair.  Heaving a huge sigh at the ceiling, he muttered, “God I hate this
place.”

“I’m Magali,” she said.  “And
ditto.”

The man groaned as he threw his
arms behind his head and turned to face her.  “Joel.”

Magali noticed that his right leg
was wrapped in bandages, with the neon green edges of nanotape sticking out
from underneath.  She nodded at it.  “Shrieker?”

The man glanced down at his
skinny leg.  He laughed.  “Nah.  Pissed off albino.”  He leaned forward and
tugged open the breakroom’s tiny fridge.  Rooting around inside, he found a
strawberry soda and dragged it out, slamming the fridge shut with a foot. 

Looking at it, he muttered,
“Don’t know what the hell they were thinking.”  He held the bottle out so she
could see it.  “All of a sudden the Camp Director starts ordering nothing but
strawberry soda.”

Magali grimaced.  Upon arriving,
Anna had hacked into the Camp Director’s personal hub.  Never mind getting them
the hell out of there—her sister had done it so she could have ready access to
her favorite beverage.

Popping the cap with a sigh, Joel
leaned back and took a big swig, surveying her over the bottle.  “Haven’t seen
you around here before,” he said once he’d finished and wiped his mouth with
the dirty back of a suntanned arm.  “You just make foreman?”

“Yeah,” Magali said.  “This
morning.  What about you?”

“Three years,” the man said.  He
yawned and checked his watch.  “Shit.  Two more hours to go before shift.”

Magali’s eyes fell back to the
green edges of nanotape protruding from the bandages.  “Another foreman do that
to you?”

“This?”  The man gestured at his
leg, then laughed.  “Naw.  This was done by a real piece of work I used to do
business with, back before he dumped me in this joint.”

Magali stared.  “You’ve had that
wound for three
years?
”

He grunted and took another swig
of pink soda.

“But…”  She gestured at the
wound.  “I thought that was nanotape.”

“It is,” he agreed.  “But the
bastard dipped his knife in nanos of his own, the anti-knitting kind.  The
little fuckers have been at war since he stabbed me.  I think his are
winning.”  He took another long drink, then tossed the empty bottle into the
waste bin atop the slimed cloth.  “But hey, nice meeting you.  I’ve gotta go
stop my dumbass crew from kicking up another Shriek.”

Joel got up and was limping from
the room when Magali called, “You look familiar.  What’s your last name?”

He glanced back at her. 
“Triton,” he said.

Magali frowned, feeling like she
should know it somehow.  “Do I know you?”

His green-blue eyes scanned her
face.  “Don’t think so.”  Then, turning, he left.

Magali stared after him.  Could
he be
that
Joel?  The smuggler known as Runaway Joel?  The one her
father had done business with, back before the accident?

She quickly dismissed the idea.  Runaway
Joel’s face had been plastered on every official surface for as long as Magali
could remember.  He’d been stealing from government depots and undercutting
Coalition quotas since Magali had been a kid.  There was no way the scrawny,
bearded man she had just seen could be the same clean-shaven criminal she had
seen on every wanted poster on Fortune.  The soldiers would have executed him
the moment they had him in custody.

Still, with a haircut and a
shave…

A call on her radio cut her train
of thought short.  “Hey sis.  You might wanna get down here.  Some idiot’s
trying to talk to a Shrieker.”

Magali grabbed her handset in a
spasm.  “Anna?  How’d you get a radio?”

“Took it from the dumb old hag
trying to get us killed.  I think she’s got the Wide.  Oh shit.”  Magali heard
a series of grunts, then Anna panted, “
Hurry
, sis.”

Already breaking into a run,
Magali yelled into the receiver, “Don’t touch my sister!”

She received no reply.

Magali shoved her radio back onto
her belt and sprinted towards the mounds.

The concrete corridor ended in a
locked door.

In an attempt to prevent
smuggling, Coalition regulations required that all Shrieker farms be locked at
all times—regardless of who was inside.  Now Magali threw the door open and
dove into the dank air beyond, ducking low to keep from scraping her head on
the slimy ceiling. 

As soon as she entered, the
relative mental peace that Magali had earned in the breakroom became a familiar
knotting sensation in her mind as she grew closer to the Shriekers.  The static
was a constant blur in the back of her head, an itch curable only by exiting
the mounds at the end of the shift, and was enough to drive everyone exposed to
it over the edge, given enough time. 

Magali spent the next ten minutes
slipping on the thick, slimy mucus of the Shrieker tunnel as she scrambled to
find the chamber with her sister while avoiding the toxic-colored, dog-sized
blobs of flesh that were the Shriekers.

When she found the room with her
sister, Magali froze.  Anna was on the floor, covered in translucent slime, a
wiry woman with a pinched face and a foreman’s black coat standing over her
tiny body.  A radio lay in the mucus a few feet from Anna’s fetal form.  As
Magali watched, the foreman dropped onto her knees and started hitting Anna
with her fists.  Despite the beating, her sister was biting back her screams,
letting out only small grunts as the blows struck her tiny body.

Instantly, Magali saw why.  A few
feet away, a brilliant red-and-purple Shrieker was engulfing a pile of lakeweed
that they had left for it, its dull black eyes completely oblivious to the two
humans in the cavern.  Everyone else on the team had fled, probably crowding
the exits and banging on the doors in a panic unheeded by the foremen and
soldiers outside, terrified the thing was going to Shriek. 

It took Magali only a moment to
take this all in, and even less to react.  She threw herself at the senior
foreman and they went down together, sliding through the mucus toward the
feeding Shrieker.

“Stop!  It’s right—” Anna cried,
sitting up behind them.  Her words choked off and her eyes went wide.

Magali wrestled out of the other
foreman’s grip and froze.

The Shrieker was looking at her. 
Its lumpy, egg-shaped body was turned inquisitively, its damp black eyes fixed
on her torso.  A headache was building, the constant fuzz at the back of her
mind becoming an all-out migraine from the Shrieker’s proximity.

“Don’t move,” Anna whispered
behind her.

The chief foreman—a cranky old
woman by the name of Gayle Hunter who had been working the mounds for over
seven years—scrambled to her feet, spitting insults, not even noticing the
Shrieker.  When Magali glanced at her, slowly, trying to motion at the
Shrieker, to show that it was listening for them, the woman ignored her. 
Something about her face wasn’t right.  The woman’s eyes were too round, with
little crescents of white above and below the iris.

Magali gasped.  Anna was right. 
The woman had Egger’s Wide.

“How
dare
you?” Gayle
snarled.  “I’ve been a foreman seven
years
, girl.  I could take you to
the Director and get you carted off to the stocks for touching me.  How
dare
you touch me?”

“The Shrieker,” Magali whispered,
motioning with a twitch of her finger.  Every other part of her body was still.

Gayle turned to face it fully,
then sneered at the knee-high lump of brightly-colored flesh.  “You think he
scares me, you little shit?”  She glanced back at Magali and snorted laughter. 
“That’s David.  He’s not like the other ones.  See that notch in his tail?  Got
it when a guy ran over it with a food cart.  Never Shrieked, never did
nothing.  He never hurt a soul.  Did you, David?”  She looked back at Magali,
her too-wide eyes staring out at her above a beaming smile.  “See?  David
wouldn’t hurt you.  He’s just curious.”  Cooing back at the Shrieker, she said,
“Aren’t you, my little angel?”

“Magali,” Anna whispered.  “Let’s
get out.  Now.”

Magali started to back away, but
Gayle caught her by an arm.  “You afraid of Shriekers?  Don’t be ridiculous. 
They’re just babies.”  Then, before Magali realized Gayle’s intent, the older
woman shoved her hand down at the Shrieker’s brilliantly-colored flesh.

Magali bit back a scream as her
fingers touched cold, sticky skin.  The Shrieker flinched back and its whiplike
tail thrashed, dragging it away from them, into a hollowed-out pocket of the
cave.

Gayle laughed and started to
follow.  “Don’t be scared, David.  She won’t hurt you, little baby.  I’m
here.”  Her hand was like a vice on Magali’s arm as she started walking toward
the cornered Shrieker.

Magali yanked her hand away and
stumbled backwards.  The Shrieker’s big black eyes were still fixed on Magali’s
torso.  Shriekers, Magali knew, had horrible eyesight.  Their black eyes were
simply a collection of nerves grouped together in order to detect motion.  It
didn’t know
what
she was, just that she had touched it.

“Magali, careful,” Anna
whispered. 

Behind her, her sister looked
terrified.  Unlike everything else in her life, Anna could not pull the
Shriekers’ strings to make them dance to her tune.  She was just as helpless
around them as everybody else.  Several times after a shift, Magali had caught
her sister hyperventilating in a corner of the hut, when she thought no one
else was around.  Anna had always blown it off like it had never happened, but
Magali knew it bothered her sister to be so vulnerable for such a large part of
each day.

Following the Shrieker into the
cave, Gayle bent at the waist and knee, murmuring and holding out a hand like
it was a feral dog she was trying to tame.