Fortune's Folly (Outer Bounds Book 2)

by Sara King

  “This is Anna Landborn,” the stranger said, calmly gesturing at his little girl. “She would like to have a chat with you.”

  The name sounded familiar, but Geo couldn’t place it because he was so totally shocked that a guy would have the titanium cajones to try and get him to give a career pep-talk to his kindergartener. “Excuse me, you colossally stupid fuck?” Geo managed.

  “She only wants a few minutes of your time,” the man replied, almost apologetically.

  Snorting, Geo pressed the button a few times, intending to have his bodyguards blacken him up a bit before sending him away.

  His bodyguards arrived from the break-room at a run, an impressive rush of six huge, burly young men that Geo had wooed over from the Coalition barracks. Without even flinching, the stranger stepped in front of the child and lifted both arms. His forearms, biceps, and shoulders instantly folded outward, expanding into the unmistakable bristle of dozens of different shotguns, machine-guns, grenade launchers, Laserat, electron pulse, and laser-sights, all aimed on Geo and his employees. The six burly men stumbled to a halt.

  “Please leave,” the little girl said, stepping from behind her father’s legs. “Dobie’s a very good shot, and I’m still covered in gore from the last time.”

  Their wide eyes fixed on Dobie’s guns, then on Anna’s glistening red shirt, Geo’s guards carefully put their guns down and backed out of the room.

  “And close the door behind you!” Anna called at them.

  Geo heard the damned traitors follow instructions—and then lock it.

  “So,” the little girl said, fixing her eyes on Geo, “you and I are going to have a talk.” She gave him a cute, childlike smile. “But don’t worry. I’ll speak slowly, so that even a fat albino scum-monkey should be able to understand.”

  Geo blinked, his heart pounding. Landborn… Why did that name sound familiar? He accessed the chip in his head, found the entry, and immediately shut the file again, his heart pounding.

  “Oh fuck me,” Geo whispered. His eyes went momentarily to the big guy with the nondescript face, but dropped back to Anna a moment later.

  “Yes,” Anna said, giving him a vicious smile. “Fuck you.” She gestured to her friend, who had lowered his arms again, all the weaponry folding perfectly back under the skin in under a second. “Dobie, here, is going to remove a testicle for each time you lie to me…and he’s very good at determining a lie. You could almost call it a sixth sense. And a seventh. And an eighth…” She turned back to him, grinning. “Ready, Mr. Thane?”

  Geo felt his heart begin to pound like a jackhammer. Anna Landborn was a myth. A malignant little wraith that had been haunting the Orbital for the past couple of weeks, and the surface of Fortune for a few years before that. He had seen what she had done to Tatiana Eyre close-up, and it had left him with goosebumps. If there was one name whispered more fearfully in the dark corners of the Junkyard than Geo’s own, it was that of Anna Landborn.

  A seven-year-old child that not even the Orbital cameras could nail down.

  “Fuck,” he whispered. He started to stand, but the seven-year-old girl said, “Sit down, please, Mr. Thane. Dobie enjoys practicing on moving targets, and he has a new explosive round that is delightful to behold. Kind of like abstract art.” She gave him a creepy little grin.

  Swallowing, Geo sat. She couldn’t know, he thought. She couldn’t possibly know…

  “So,” Anna said, beginning to casually pace the room, “when you killed my father, did you gain any financial or political benefit from it?”

  Geo’s heart constricted, realizing how totally screwed he was. He swallowed, glancing at Anna’s companion, wondering if he could get out of the room before he got blown away. Deciding against it, Geo thought of the outrageous amounts of money the Nephyr had paid him to kill David Landborn. It had been the easiest seven million of his life, and the Coalition had even given him access to restricted ship technologies in return for his cooperation. “I…”

  “I take that back, Dobie,” Anna said, her eyes narrowing. “If the corpulent maggot says anything that could be construed as a mistruth, you’ll take half a testicle at a time.”

  “Financial,” Geo said. “Money and resources.”

  “And approximately how much money did you earn for killing him?” Anna continued, resuming her calm march across his office, hands clasped nonchalantly behind her back.

  “Only seven million,” Geo gritted. “The real prize was the off-the-books tech they gave me to soup up my ship.” Geo watched her reaction tensely. All he had to do was make it through this meeting, then he would be on that ship until his forces assisted in the raid against the colonists, and Fortune once more belonged to the Coalition.

  “Define ‘they,’” Anna said.

  Geo thought about accessing his chip and giving her the dictionary definition of the word, just to be a wise-ass, but then he realized he’d probably lose half a testicle for it, and decided to change tactics. “It’s a Nephyr splinter group. They’re responsible for hunting down defectors.”

  Anna stopped pacing to frown at him. “Defectors? From the Nephyrs?”

  Geo wasn’t exactly sure, since David Landborn hadn’t been old enough to be in any of the major wars, and as far as Geo had known, he’d never been part of the Coalition Space Force, and he certainly wasn’t a fucking Nephyr. He’d even had some of his guys look the man up, searching for some dirt. They’d found nothing. Nada. Jack and Shit, and Shit fled town. He hesitated, knowing that if his answer displeased the little wretch, he could very well lose body parts.

  “Dobie, I’m thinking perhaps we should also have a penalty for responses that take more than three seconds to begin,” Anna said, watching Geo closely. “How about a pinkie per offense?”

  “That sounds fair, Anna,” her companion replied.

  “I don’t know!” Geo cried. “I did some checking up on Dave back when I was just starting to work with him—I like to have a solid history on the guys I’m dealing with. Except… David didn’t have one. I mean, there wasn’t even a record of him arriving on Fortune. Everyone knows he landed with Daytona Dae, but there’s no pictures, no nothing. It’s like your father just appeared here.”

  “So you have no idea who he was before,” Anna said.

  Geo detected the trap and narrowly avoided it. “He was military trained,” he offered.

  “Obviously,” Anna growled. “The neurotic chimp wouldn’t let me eat breakfast before I’d done fifty pushups.” She started pacing again. “So aside from money, what kind of resources did they give you?”

  “Ship tech,” Geo said quickly. “An undetectable hull, a black market super-ops engine, weapons that can take down operators… Put my ship right up there with Honor.”

  Anna stumbled to a halt and turned, frowning. “What kind of no-name colonist is worth that kind of equipment?”

  Geo had wondered that same thing, when the Nephyr had walked into his office and made the proposal. He had dropped a vial of a strange drug that not even Geo had heard about on his desk and said to put it in David’s food to ‘keep him docile.’ Geo, of course, had sold that drug to Cheyenne Ross at a premium—two hundred grand for the vial—and had given Martin a much cheaper replacement to subdue the fool.

  “Your father, apparently,” Geo said, remembering how odd it had been. Steele had been quite specific on the way he wanted Geo to kill David, almost cult-like specific, the kind of thing that brought to mind offerings of blood and a ring of black candles and animal sacrifice. Creepy shit. At first, Geo hadn’t believed the man really was a Nephyr like he claimed—he hadn’t glittered—but then the first million down-payment had arrived in his bank account and it really hadn’t mattered much to him after that.

  “Adopted father,” Anna replied. “I cross-checked my family’s genetic codes when I was five because I wanted to prove my sister was a mistake. I was half right. Both of us were adopted. Good ol’ Mom and Dad had a Very Big secret, and you’re gonna tell me wh
at that was or you’re going to lose your capacity to have children much before your time.”

  Geo blinked. He’d been thinking about how the little bitch was going to fry the moment the Coalition retook Fortune with his help, only days from now, so he wasn’t ready for her ultimatum. He quickly tried to think of something to placate her.

  “I think your dad was older than he let on,” Geo said. “Once, when Dave got drunk, he told one of my guys that he’d fought in the war against the Tritons.”

  Anna hesitated, frowning. “He did?”

  “When I first met him, almost thirty years ago, I heard him use a few references that didn’t make sense, too,” Geo added. “Old stuff. Mostly military terms that aren’t used anymore, archaic laws and tech that no longer apply, a couple times referencing being in battles nobody’s ever heard of, then clumsily covering it up with a different place, different battle. It made me curious, so I looked it up,” Geo said. “There was an entry with his DNA dating back to midway through the Triton wars, but all the information had been wiped, even his picture.”

  Anna was watching him very carefully, now. Geo thought he’d made an impression, but then she said, “You’re telling me you were working with my father for nearly thirty years and you killed him for, what, fifty million in fancy goods?”

  “He made a deal with Runaway Joel,” Geo said, shrugging. “Was smuggling Yolk behind my back, outside our arrangement. These things happen. It’s just business.”

  Anna seemed to consider that, then nodded. “Dobie, take his pinkie. Down to the knuckle, please. For business purposes only.”

  Lightning-fast, Anna’s companion crossed the room and grabbed Geo by the wrist in an iron grip. Then, before Geo even had a chance to take a breath and scream, the man’s finger became a blade and he had cut Geo’s left pinkie off at the base of the knuckle.

  “Don’t scream,” Anna said, as Geo opened his mouth in startled horror. “I have a headache. Probably the blood loss. I already downed three sodas on the way here, and all those third-degree nannites are still demanding more liquids.”

  Shuddering as blood began dribbling from where he gripped his severed pinkie stub in his fist, Geo swallowed down the scream in his throat.

  Anna bent down to pick up the twitching digit where it had tumbled to the floor, then tossed it onto the desk in front of Geo, smearing blood on his holoparch. “Now,” Anna said. “Let’s try this again. Who is my real father, and why did he leave my sister and me with a paramilitary asshole on Fortune?”

  “I don’t know who he is,” Geo babbled. “I always thought it was David.”

  “So you would willingly leave two children fatherless for fifty million credits in illicit goods,” Anna insisted. “Dobie, take his other pinkie.”

  Geo tensed and tried to fight it this time, but it was like fighting the hydraulic power of a ten megaton machine. He screamed as the blade came out and his finger came off.

  “Please!” Geo sobbed. “I’m telling you the truth!”

  “I know,” Anna said. “I said I’d take testicles for mistruths.” She smiled sweetly. “I never said anything about what I’d take if your answers displeased me.”

  “You little—” Geo choked on his snarl, realizing that to finish his sentence was to ensure himself losing more parts.

  Anna gave him a satisfied smile when it was clear he would not continue. She returned to pacing as he pressed his spurting stumps against his shirt to slow the bleeding. “Now,” she said. “You are an arrogant, selfish, money-grubbing leech sucking on the ass of society.” She stopped to look at him. “Aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Geo managed, wanting to kill her.

  “You were going to backstab us when we attacked Rath, throw all of your forces at us while we threw everything we had at the Coalition. Weren’t you?”

  Geo got an icy wave of goosebumps. If the colonists knew he was playing both sides, he was as good as dead. He held his tongue, seething inside as he watched her pace.

  Anna looked back after his moment, grinning as if his silence pleased her. “Of course you were. So you know what I did?”

  “I’d like to know where you’re getting your information,” Geo growled. So he could eviscerate the bastard and throw his wife and kids into a bog.

  “I got my information,” Anna said, “by hacking your brainstem.”

  Geo froze and swallowed, hard. The guy who’d installed the hardware had assured him it was totally unhackable, its processes completely encrypted by the best Aashaanti sentog the Bounds had to offer. It was the only piece of braintech he’d adapted to his daily life, and it had taken his son Martin sixteen years to convince him to get one. That Anna Landborn had hacked into his very brain left Geo feeling profoundly vulnerable, violated beyond anything he’d ever experienced before.

  “Now,” Anna said, “we were talking about your plans to betray Fortune, and, in doing so, betray me. What do you think I did, once I unraveled your moronic scheme?”

  Geo thought of all the pilots that had gone silent and felt the wellings of dread sucking the energy from his guts. “You killed them,” he whispered.

  “I killed them!” Anna agreed, clapping her hands together. “All of your guys. Boom. Dead.” She made a little exploding gesture around her head. Then her look went deadly cold. “You do it again, you become my pale, maggoty mind-slave.”

  Geo’s heart was pounding so hard he couldn’t think.

  “You see,” Anna continued, “as a bloated white pustule sucking up sustenance from the cheesy crack of civilization, you do still have some use to me. For instance, you can give me the names of the Twelve.”

  Geo’s heart hammered to a sudden stop. How could she possibly know the existence of the underground Yolk-running group? They were the titans of the Yolk trade, and they killed anyone who leaked info about their operation. No, beyond killed. If there was anyone Geo was more afraid of than this demonic child, it was the Twelve and their leader, Sirius.

  “You can go get fucked, little girl,” Geo said.

  Anna actually blinked at him. “Dobie?”

  “It wasn’t a lie, Anna,” the man—robot??—replied.

  Anna seemed to consider that, and Geo tensed, waiting for her next act of horror.

  “Ears aren’t necessary,” Anna said finally. “Take one of those.”

  Geo lurched up and away, but he couldn’t stop her companion from grabbing him by the head and slicing away his left ear.

  “I only deal with one of them!” Geo babbled. He could feel blood rushing down his cheek and the side of his neck, and he was starting to realize she was just as insane as the tube-hustlers claimed. “Cheyenne Ross. She buys a large portion of my raw Yolk, the stuff I don’t send to the Core with smugglers.”

  “Cheyenne Ross,” Anna said thoughtfully. “How do you communicate with her?”

  “She sends a kid,” Geo said. “A courier. He takes the nodules away and I get a deposit in my account.”

  Anna’s eyes sharpened. “Same kid every time?”

  “Yes!” Geo cried. “Same one. Cobrani, but with blue eyes. Weird white streak in his hair.”

  “Wardenburg Syndrome,” Anna said, sounding thoughtful. “Lots of Cobrani have it. High percentage of the recessive genetic in the original colonists. Rare to find a Cobrani out here, though… They’re shit-poor. Only one I ever saw was trapped in a Yolk camp with the Wide.” She glanced at Dobie. “You seen any Cobrani kids recently?”

  “No, Anna,” Dobie said.

  Anna grunted. “When’s he show up to make the exchange?”

  Geo hesitated. “He shows up…whenever he wants to. I give him all the nodules I have and he leaves. I get paid a few days after, based on the amount of Yolk that was refined out of it.”

  “So Cheyenne’s on the Orbital somewhere,” Anna said. “Dobie, make a note.”

  “Yes,” Geo lied, remembering the way Quad often appeared out of nowhere. “She’s gotta be around Fortune somewhere. Too fast for the credits
to reach my account otherwise.”

  “Mr. Thane is lying,” Dobie said, stopping his heart cold.

  Anna halted her pacing and slowly turned back to him, a predatory smile on her face. “Oh really.” Still looking at Geo, she said, “Dobie, do we remember what happens to Mr. Thane if he lies to us?”

  “He loses half a testicle, Anna,” the man replied calmly.

  “So go on,” Anna said, gesturing dismissively.

  “Wait!” Geo screamed, floundering backwards to the floor as Dobie lunged towards him. “She’s back in the Core! I have her Universal ID. You fucking keep that fucker the fuck back or you don’t fucking get anything.”

  Anna gave him a merciless look. “Mr. Thane, I really don’t believe you are in a position to make demands. Half, Dobie. But cleanly. And cauterize it after. It is, after all, just business.”

  Geo screamed himself hoarse as the man complied.

  “Now,” Anna said, as her companion finished and Geo curled up on himself on the floor, “You will tell me everything you know about this woman, and give me a way to contact her directly, or you will lose the rest of your ability to produce your sad, lackluster spawn in anything resembling a natural manner.”

  In a flood, Geo told her everything he knew about Cheyenne. How she was fat, how she was one of the Twelve, how she was of the Second House, how her House had rights to distribute Yolk to eight of the hottest planets in the Core, how she appeared to be the Founder’s right hand, how she had been one of the very pillars of the illegal Yolk black market system for as long as it had existed.

  “Was she the one who contracted you to kill my dad?” Anna asked.

  “No,” Geo babbled, because he was terrified of lying to her, now.

  “Who gave you the kill contract?” Anna demanded. “I want a name.”

  “He was a colonel,” Geo babbled. “Steele… Something like that.”

  Anna seemed to recognize it. “Steele is harassing eggers, not hunting defectors. Dobie, take the other—”