Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (8 page)

Chapter
6

Wideman
Joe

Tatiana woke to the sound of
quiet murmurs.

“Damn, Pat.  How much you give
her?”

“Gimme a break, Miles.  I gave
her what I always give ‘em.  Besides, I think she’s coming outta it.  Her
eyelids just flickered.”

“Unnggh.”

“Yep, she’s coming outta it.  You
awake there, Princess?”

Tatiana pried open an eyelid.  It
felt sticky and thick.  “Bastard.”  But it sounded like, “Masturlg.”

There was a long pause.  Then a
big shadow moved over her head and Tatiana felt a warm hand on her forehead,
prying open her other eyelid. 

“Unnggh!” Tatiana cried, throwing
the hand away from her in disgust.

What happened was much less
dramatic—her arm flopped a few centimeters across her chest and stayed there.

“You O.D.’d her.  Aanaho, Pat.  She’s
tiny
.  She can’t be more than four-nine.”

Four-nine…  Tatiana’s drugged
mind numbly tried to make sense of that, then, in horror, realized it was
Colonial for her height—which they had underestimated by at least five
centimeters. 
I’m four-foot-eleven
, Tatiana fumed, making the mental calculation. 
Four-eleven
!  She tried again to throw the hand away from her eye, and
this time managed to nudge it slightly.

Milar chuckled.  “Well, she’s
coming around, anyway.”  He let her eyelid slide closed and backed away.  “Look
at her.  She looks pissed, Pat.  Man, she ain’t gonna like it when we put her
back under.”

Like hell,
Tatiana
thought, forcing her fingers to move.  Like an arm coming out of a numbness
from sleeping on it, she slowly began to get feeling in her outer extremities. 
When she at last was able to sit up, she felt like her head had exploded.  She
lifted a hand to her head—and immediately toppled off the couch.

“Whoa,” Patrick jumped up and
grabbed her.  “You need a few more minutes there, pumpkin?”

You call me pumpkin again and
I’m going to have my soldier shove his foot up your ass.
  “No,” she
replied.  “I’m fine.  Thank you.”

Patrick grunted, then pushed her
shoulder back against the couch and held it there.  “You don’t look fine.  You
look like a Shrieker hit you.”

“I’m fine.  Leggo.”  She shoved
his arm away.  Immediately, she started to slide sideways down the sofa back,
but her scowl stopped Patrick from reaching for her again.

They were in a large room that
smelled of smoke and what an ancient memory identified as insect repellent. 
Dead Fortune animals adorned the walls, and there were several couches
scattered about, a few of which held other colonists, all of whom were leaning
forward, staring at her.

“Who are they?” she muttered,
peering at them through a headache.

Patrick glanced over his shoulder,
then cleared his throat in what sounded like embarrassment.  “Ah, well,
admirers, I guess.”

Milar snorted, but he didn’t
object.  Instead, he watched her like a cat analyzing the activities of a fly.

Admirers?
  Tatiana tried
to remember her last battle on Muchos Rios, before getting transferred to the
Outer Bounds.  She’d gotten a Third Commendation for it, made a few headlines
back home on Gorgon, but it hadn’t made much of a splash anywhere else.  Had
one of these idiots gotten hold of the video or something?  Was she a
mini-celebrity here?

Somehow, considering the way
Patrick and Milar had welcomed her, she didn’t think that was very likely.

“So,” Milar said, once she’d
managed to prop herself up and stay there, “You ready to see Wideman Joe,
Princess?”  He had stripped off his long leather jacket and his shades, but the
rest of his body was decked out in black, from his big military boots to the
form-fitting black jeans to the heart-stopping way his too-tight T-shirt
stretched against the muscles in his chest.  When she didn’t reply, he learned
forward, stretching the cloth even tighter as he waved a big, dragon-covered
hand in front of her face.  “Still with us, Tiny?”

“Bugger off, knucker,” she
muttered, forcing herself
not
to think about the way her captor’s
well-defined pecs were jiggling in front of her.  She brought her hand to her
head and held it, focusing on breathing.  Patrick got up and disappeared for a
few moments, leaving her with Milar and the starers.

She heard water running in
another room.  In the chair in front of her, Milar continued to analyze her
every movement, like she was some sort of doomed lab experiment.

“Where’d Patrick go?” she asked,
trying not to squirm under Milar’s dark gaze.

Milar smiled, though it was laced
with sarcasm.  He leaned forward, smirking at her as the chair creaked under
his weight.  “You prefer my brother stayed to watch you, Princess?” 

Tatiana said nothing.

Milar chuckled, and it made the
hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

When Patrick returned, he had a
glass of water in his hand.  He offered it to her.

Scowling at the twins, Tatiana
drank it all.

“Sorry,” Patrick muttered.  It
almost sounded like he was apologizing to his brother.

Milar snorted.  “I ain’t.  Coaler
broad deserves to get the crap scared outta her once in awhile.”  He stood
abruptly.  “Now get her off her ass.  Little tramp’s up—now we’re just burning
daylight.”

“Come on,” Patrick said, giving
Milar an irritated look, “Let’s go see Wideman.”  He nodded at Tatiana.  “Can
you walk?”

Realizing Patrick was going to
carry her if she didn’t walk, Tatiana struggled to her feet, glaring at them
both.  “You are both dead men.” 

Milar laughed and stepped closer,
towering over her like a mountain.  “Really?  Is that before or after we waste
your pretty ass and hide it in a Shrieker pit?”

“Leave her alone,” Patrick
muttered, grabbing her under an arm to steady her.  Tatiana felt the laser
pistol on his belt dig into her thigh.  “Stop trying to scare her, Miles.”

“
Scare
me?”  Tatiana
laughed and jabbed a finger into Milar’s thick chest.  Glaring up into his
piss-brown eyes, she said, “When I get my way, the rest of you are just gonna
be uncomfortable.  I think he’ll be naked.”

Milar lifted a brow.  “Naked
where, sweetie?”

Tatiana grinned.  “Wouldn’t you
like to know.  As soon as the government finds out you’ve kidnapped me—”

“The only people who know you’re
even
alive,
darlin’, are the handful of people in this room.”  Milar
leaned closer, hazel eyes sparkling with malicious glee.  “And believe me. 
None of them will miss an arrogant little operator squid when she disappears.”

Tatiana narrowed her eyes and
stood on her tiptoes to scowl up at him.  “When the Nephyrs get here, they’re
gonna take your attitude and your dime-store leather jacket and shove ‘em up
your ass.”  Then she looked him lazily up and down.  “Or stuff ‘em down your
throat.  Same diff, in your case.”

Patrick quickly pulled her away
from his brother, clearing his throat.  “
All
right, then.  You seem
cognizant enough.  Let’s get you to Wideman.”

“Yeah,” Tatiana said, still
glaring up at Milar.  “Let’s get me to Wideman.”  Turning, she let Patrick lead
her from the room.  His pistol, she noted, was not snapped down.

Behind her, Milar made a derisive
snort.  “It’s like the little squid actually thinks she’s going to come out of
this alive.”

“Shut it, Miles,” Patrick
growled.  Then he waved at the other colonists in the room.  “And keep them
here.  Joe doesn’t like a lot of visitors.”

“Yeah,” Tatiana called over her shoulder. 
“Keep them there,
Miles
.”

She was delighted to see him
scowl just before they turned a corner.

“You
really
shouldn’t
provoke him,” Patrick muttered, once they were stepping through a screened
front porch.  He glanced over his shoulder.  “Milar is…dangerous.”

Tatiana rolled her eyes.  “Yeah,
whatever.  What’s he gonna do, beat me to death with his sunglasses?”

Patrick stopped to stare at her,
blinking at her stupidly for a moment.  Then, seemingly shaking himself, he
pulled her out across the rickety back porch and down a cobblestone path.

“You seem like the reasonable
twin,” Tatiana said.  “You want to come out of this alive and healthy, right?” 
Then she looked him up and down.  “Well, at least alive.  Pretty sure you’ve
got some health issues already.  You know, like IACS?  Incurable And Chronic
Stupidity?  That’s a big one.  Heard it’s been goin’ around these parts.”

“Miss,” Patrick said, “it would
be better if you just kept your mouth shut.”

They emerged into a big garden,
screened from the outside world with a short wall of brush.  With Patrick’s callused
hand still firmly holding her arm—more, Tatiana began to think, to keep her
from running than to hold her up—they walked up to the stick-thin man hunched
over next to one of the leafy rows.  He was tiny—barely larger than a child. 

He’s smaller than me,
Tatiana realized, surprised.  She watched him as they approached, interested
now.

The tiny little man had something
yellow in his lap and was bent in concentration over it, humming a tuneless little
song that was all the more creepy for its childish lack of regard to pitch.

“Joe?” Patrick said, sounding
surprisingly tentative.  “You busy, Joe?”

“Hmmm, hmmmm, hmmmmmmmmmmm,
huuum, haa, haa, hummmmmmmm.”

Now that Tatiana was closer, she
could see the end of a yellow zucchini or some other form of squash sticking
out from under the tiny man’s grip.  He had a small knife in the other hand and
was peeling it.

“Joe,” Patrick asked again.  He
sounded even more nervous now.  “I’m sorry to bother you, Joe, but I think we
found one of ‘em.”

The miniature man swiveled in the
dirt, drawing the zucchini to his chest with a skinny arm.  With the other, he
held out the knife.

Pointed it at them, rather.

“I’m sorry, Joe!  We’re not here
to take your carving,” Patrick babbled quickly, obviously very upset.  He
backed away several paces, his heels spraying rich black dirt over her ankles in
his hasty attempt to get away from the tiny man with his paring knife.  “We
just want you to tell us if it’s her.”  He flourished a hand at Tatiana.  “Can
you tell us if it’s her?”

Then the sticklike man’s eyes
fell on Tatiana and she swallowed hard.  His eyes were too wide. 
Way
too wide.  “What’s wrong with him?” she whispered to Patrick.

“Egger’s Wide,” Patrick whispered
back.  Then, louder, “Is it her, Joe?”

“Is
what
me?” Tatiana
demanded.  “What the hell is going on?”

When Patrick only tightened his
grip on her arm, she frowned at the man with the zucchini.  He had started to
drool. 

He had also gone back to
carving.  The madman’s tongue slipped out of his mouth and he started to pant
as he whittled away at the head of the zucchini.

“This is ridiculous!” she
snapped, wrenching her arm out of Patrick’s grip.  “You carted me off to see an
idiot with the Wide?”  She turned—

—And ran right into Milar.

Milar sneered at her.  “Going
somewhere, sweetie?  There’s a bed upstairs, if you feel like doing a little
entertainin.”

Tatiana backed up and scowled up
at him. 
Yeah.  Definitely naked.

“Nah, I think I’ll pass,” Tatiana
said.  “Reptilian isn’t my style.”

Milar’s face darkened and he
stepped forward, making her stumble backwards again.

Tatiana narrowed her eyes. 
“Don’t do that again.”

“Or what?” Milar demanded. 
“You’ll pout?”  He did it again.  Tatiana had to catch herself on a garden
stake to keep from falling over into a patch of cabbage.

“Cut it out,” Patrick said, in a
hushed whisper.  “Can’t you see he’s working?”  He hadn’t even looked in their
direction.

Milar gave Tatiana one last,
lingering glare with his piss-brown eyes, then grunted and glanced back at the
tiny crazy man.  “He say anything about her?”

“No,” Patrick said.  “Just wait.”

And then, to Tatiana’s amazement,
two grown men stood up to their ankles in the soft soil of a vegetable patch,
watching in awe as a madman finished carving his zucchini.

When he was finished, the skinny
egger scrambled forward in a crablike crawl and shoved the zucchini up at
Tatiana, his eyes showing whites all around. 

The first thing Tatiana noticed
was that the egger’s arm bore the double-planet symbol of the Fifteenth Carrier
Squadron.  The Fifteenth contained the specially trained pilots who ferried the
Nephyrs, operators, and their soldiers back and forth through deep space. 
Seeing it here, on an egger, almost made Tatiana lose her breakfast.  It was
either somebody’s idea of a sick joke, or she might have worked with the
guy…years ago.

The wide-eyed egger jerked the
zucchini and made a grunting sound.  Tatiana’s eyes fell to his offering.  The
zucchini looked like someone had tried to feed it to a horse, then changed
their mind after the animal had made it halfway through.  The body had no
discernible features of any kind and loose pieces fell off with regularity as
it trembled under its maker’s white-knuckled grip. 

The egger grunted again.  He
stared at her, wide eyes boring into hers with the rapt attention only the
truly insane could manage.  Holding the knife the way he was, Tatiana
instinctively got the idea he would stab her if she reached for it.  She tried
to back up, but ran into Milar.

“Take it,” he said into her ear. 

“You take it,” she growled.

“He’s offering it to you,”
Patrick said.  His voice sounded…odd.  Like it was full of reverence. 
Reverence…for a skinny little cretin and his mangled zucchini.

“Screw that!” Tatiana snapped. 
“He’s going to try to stab me.  You collies are crazy.”