Fortune's Folly (Outer Bounds Book 2)

by Sara King

  They moved on to arc weaponry—technology that Anna had adopted from the Aashaanti shredders guarding the wreckage in the Tear—and tovlar-laced structural and armor augmentations, finally working in the palm node allowing him to harness the kinetic energy of the galaxy.

  “Huh,” Anna said, as she finished tuning the last of the equipment inside Doberman’s wrist, only inches from the hidden claws. She was looking at his fist.

  Dobie, who had been on edge throughout the entire process of installing the palm-node, knowing how close she was to discovering Quad’s claws, jerked at her pensive sound and nervously covered the ovoid claw exit tubes with his fingers. “What, Anna?” he asked.

  She looked up from his knuckles with a snort. “Since when do you answer me with a ‘What, Anna’?”

  “My processes have been irregular lately,” Doberman offered. “I believe the aftereffects of the Shriek are ongoing.”

  “Obviously,” Anna muttered. Her eyes had drifted to something on the floor near the couch. Doberman located it, then flinched when he realized it was another one of Quad’s sunflower seeds—Quad liked to spit them everywhere while he was working. Dobie had thought he’d gotten them all.

  She shook herself. “So this is the kinetic pulse activator.” She tapped his wrist with her soldering iron. “It’ll release that three-foot sphere and flatten anything out there. You let this baby loose, prepare to get messy. Like stomping on a grub with a boot, baby.” Anna slapped the final chamber closed on his arm. “Also gave you an extra six hundred arc rounds, in case you run out—should take care of anything that gets in your way until I can replace it.” Anna paused, turning to clap his chest cavity closed. “Okay. That should about do it. You should now be able to exterminate my enemies with extreme prejudice, namely the cyborg pussy and her betrayer boyfriend.”

  Which, Doberman decided, made an excellent excuse to talk about something that had been bothering him while he sat there, watching her work. “Anna, I think we should talk about your interactions with your fellow human beings.”

  “What about them?” she asked distractedly. She had gotten her r-player out and was connecting to his core.

  “It’s disturbing me how little you seem to care about those around you,” Doberman said. “Even your purported friends fear you.”

  “As they should,” Anna said, sounding preoccupied. “I’m smarter than them.”

  Thinking of Quad, Dobie said, “Anna, someday you might meet your match.”

  “Pan’s not much of a match,” Anna snorted. “I have contingencies in place to kill him within thirteen seconds if he pisses me off.”

  “I’m not talking about Pan,” Dobie said.

  Anna’s head came up sharply, her gaze intense. “Who are you talking about?”

  Doberman quickly backpedaled. “A hypothetical situation,” Doberman said. “Should you ever find yourself faced with this hypothetical person, I think it would be better to have previously developed the interpersonal skills required to face him as a friend rather than as an enemy.”

  Anna reluctantly returned her gaze to her device. “There is no one like me, Dobie. You’re about to see that in action.” She gestured at his newly-installed kinetic pulse generator. “You wanna test it?” When she looked up at him, there was an oddness to her face that triggered something uncomfortable within Doberman. He had a strange, brief impulse to test the device on her.

  “You told me not to use it while inside a pressurized compartment like a ship or space station,” Doberman said. “Besides, I’m not comfortable using up a third of my battery power on a ‘test’.”

  Anna didn’t seem to be talking about the kinetic burst when she said, “What a shame.” Then, before that could trigger Doberman’s danger protocols, she went back to tinkering with her r-player. “Lessee. It should be self-evident, but knowing you, you’ll need instruction manuals for the equipment I added…” She frowned. “What the hell is a Quadinator?”

  “A failed experiment into quad cannon head-mounted guns,” Dobie said, quickly erasing it from his files, along with the rest of Quad’s recently-added manuals. “Too much weight for maneuverability.”

  “I see.” Anna’s eyes had returned to the space between his knuckles. Slowly, she looked up at him. “Next time you want to get altered, Dobie, come to me.”

  Doberman felt a strange, eerie discomfort at the cold look in her eyes, but he decided it was probably just his nerves. Anna couldn’t possibly know about Quad. He’d made sure of it. He’d erased everything that could have led her to the child.

  But Anna’s look only grew icier. Very quietly, in a voice he had to amplify to hear, she said, “I’m not stupid, Dobie. Please remember that, when you think your simpleton robot processes are outsmarting me.” Then, with startling finality, she tapped the screen on her r-player, and Doberman felt himself lose control of his body an instant before he blacked out.

  CHAPTER 36: Quad to the Rescue

  (a.k.a. Technobabble, Part 3)

  11th of June, 3006

  The Junkyard (Nonexistent Section)

  Fortune Orbital, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds

  “Oh no!” Anna cried, dropping to her hands and knees beside Dobie. “Dobie!” Anna started to scrabble at the electronics she had been fitting into her friend, looking close to panic. “Oh no, what did I do?! Dobie, talk to me!”

  Realizing that Dobie hadn’t so much as twitched after he dropped to the floor—and that the turquoise fire of the Yolk energy was fluctuating wildly, strands of it seeming to rush from Dobie’s processors to Anna’s r-player—Quad lunged forward to run a diagnostic.

  Anna had tears in her eyes when she looked up at him from where she knelt on the floor, red-faced, wet-cheeked. “Wh-who are you?” she whimpered, looking understandably alarmed.

  “Don’t worry,” Quad said, frowning at Dobie as he began reading the energy vacillations in various parts of his body and running systems checks in his mind. “I can help.”

  “You…can?” Anna babbled. “But Dobie…I saw him die.”

  “He’s not dead,” Quad said, locating the source of the error. “Looks like that last implant you gave him triggered some sort of internal surge. His programming just reset to last known working specs. He’ll be fine.”

  “But Dobie’s special,” Anna said, sounding beside herself. “What if he doesn’t…come back?”

  “Nah, it’d take a bigger blow than that,” Quad said, grabbing Anna’s r-player and entering her personal code, then faking the biometrics to get it opened up so he could work with it.

  Kneeling on the floor, Anna’s eyes narrowed slightly, but Quad didn’t notice. He was too busy reversing the surge that seemed to be pulling the Yolk energy from Doberman to her r-player, which would result, theoretically, in Doberman being stuck inside her r-player. It took a moment or two to reroute Anna’s mistake—indeed, it was a short that had caused a plasma overload in the ninth crucible, which had sent Dobie into autoshutdown to preserve his sensitive onboard electronics—then he patched it up and handed it back to her. “There,” he said, dropping the r-player back into her hands. “You had a short in the ninth crucible.”

  Anna was peering at him like he was some sort of snake. It was then that Quad realized he’d literally appeared out of nowhere, hacked her r-player, diagnosed the problem, and fixed her robot in less than twenty seconds, and she still didn’t know who he was because he still hadn’t found the courage to let her know he existed. Well, permanently. He’d been thrilled with the five minutes and thirty seconds he gave himself whenever he could get away with it, but he’d never allowed himself to go beyond that, despite how easy and enjoyable it was to talk to her. Swallowing hard, not ready to broach the subject to her now, in this clumsy situation, Quad reached for TimeMagus’s bag of marbles.

  “That was amazing!” Anna cried. “Dobie…he’s awake!”

  Quad hesitated, then looked up at her, stunned at the excitement in her voice. “Well, of course he’s awake
. I fixed him.” Indeed, Doberman was babbling Ferris-base systems checks as he rebooted. Due to the severity of the short, he’d probably be out for another six minutes.

  “Yeah, but how?” Anna blurted. “I couldn’t even run a diagnostic in the time it took you to fix it.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Quad said, breaking into a grin. “I ran the diagnostic in my head before I grabbed your r-player.”

  “In…” Anna’s brow furrowed, “…your head.”

  “Uh-huh!” Quad said. “Best way to explain it is that I can see and experience all frequencies in all dimensions at once—side effect of an experiment I ran on myself a couple years ago. Most people wouldn’t be able to analyze that much data with any intelligibility, but I can. Mom says I’m special.”

  Anna was wiping tears away from her face, now. “So, wait, you’re multidimensional? How’d that happen?”

  Quad opened his mouth to tell her, then winced. “Mom told me not to talk about it.”

  “Where is your mom?” Anna pressed. “She on Fortune?”

  “No, she’s back on Trinoi,” Quad said.

  “Oh,” Anna sounded dejected. “You see her often?”

  “Oh sure,” Quad said. “Whenever I want.”

  “On…Trinoi.” She peered at him. “You realize that’s five years away.”

  Quad felt his discomfort grow. That, too, his mother had been very clear on—he wasn’t to tell anyone he could travel to and from the Core at will. “I—” He again reached for the backskip marble.

  “Anyway, that was really cool what you did with Dobie,” Anna said, wiping her face again. “Did you see what I was doing with his upgrades? Really freaking advanced stuff, huh?”

  Quad wouldn’t have called it ‘advanced,’ but it was clear that Anna was proud of them. “Well, I guess…”

  “You…guess.” Anna scowled at him a second, then, “Please explain.”

  “So here’s the problem,” Quad said quickly. “You’ve got a lot of your theories right, but the implementation is kinda…well…lazy. I mean, the capacitor on your Forlean field was using an incorrect charge for its required load, and the Aashaanti arc weaponry really needs to be self-contained inside every bullet, otherwise, I mean, why would you want it to drain his battery with each discharge?”

  Anna frowned at him. “There’s no battery in the universe that can contain an Aashaanti arc reaction inside a space that small.”

  “But that would be where you’re wrong!” Quad cried with growing excitement. “See, there’s these Aashaanti crystals—well, they’re not really Aashaanti, but the Aashaanti were stealing them from the Kelthari at the end of the Phage War because they were desperate, so it looked like they were Aashaanti when archaeologists started finding them—that can basically store an unlimited amount of power. I mean, of course there’s a limit, but we’re talking like putting a sun inside something the size of your fist.”

  Anna peered at him a moment, then said, “Are they orange? Kinda like…moving clouds inside? Like a sunset?”

  “Yeah!” Quad cried. “Why, you found some?” That excited him. Sirius had taken all of his, saying they were too dangerous to leave lying around…

  “A fat old man had some stuffed away in his safe,” Anna said. She frowned. “So can they be safely broken apart? The ones I found were a lot bigger than a bullet.”

  “Oh, easy,” Quad said, grinning. “Just take a hammer to them. They break up real nice—they’re really a lattice of hexagonal prism polyhedron crystals with even shear-points lengthwise. Breaks up like safety glass.”

  “And I can use them to power a bullet?” Anna asked, turning to face him. “I never thought of that. How?”

  “Well, you’ve obviously gotta charge them first,” Quad said, “but that’s super easy, because they absorb energy of any form—heat, light, radio waves, motion… Seriously, you can just shake them to give them a charge.” Then he winced. “Probably shouldn’t use your hand, though. They’ll freeze your fingers to it in like, less than a second.”

  “I noticed,” Anna said.

  “And shaking them won’t produce much charge, obviously,” Quad said. “We’re talking only a couple of watts. The real impressive stuff is when you throw them at a star.”

  Anna cocked her head. “What, like Trinoi’s?”

  Quad blinked. “Well, yeah, but that would kill a lot of people.”

  “Would it.”

  “Yeah. Get a good sized Kelthari crystal and poof, the sun goes bye-bye. Just cold, hard, superdense matter and a fully charged crystal left over. No heat whatsoever.”

  “Interesting,” Anna said. “And then what? Is it stable to carry around afterwards?”

  “Weeellllll,” Quad said, “that’s the rub. Because of its lattice structure, when it’s carrying a good charge, it’s incredibly sensitive to certain sound frequencies and physical trauma. I mean, it kind of operates like a beehive—individual cells aren’t all that potent, but when they’re working together, they can store factors of ten more than their individual parts. Only drawback is that, when a fully charged crystal is broken apart, all that extra energy’s gotta go somewhere.”

  “So you’re telling me those little orange crystals I found could not only destroy a star, but they could then be dropped from, say, orbit, onto a planet and destroy that, too.”

  “Yeah,” Quad said, nodding. “Gotta be careful.”

  “Indeed,” Anna said, looking thoughtful. “I don’t think I caught your name.”

  “It’s Quad!” Quad said. “Mom named me after the four different times I died and they revived me before I was born.”

  “Tough labor?” Anna asked.

  “Well, no, not really,” Quad said. “My mom was bitten by a Shrieker and died. Sirius kept me alive in his lab until I could breathe on my own.”

  Anna frowned. “Shriekers don’t have teeth.”

  “Well, the Shriekers here don’t,” Quad said. “But there’s some on Terasus that are mean. And gross, too. Kinda like the walking dead.” Then Quad realized he was already five minutes into their conversation and reached for a marble again.

  “I saw that upgrade you gave Dobie,” Anna said. “Wicked cool, those claws. Almost like, what, light-sabers, right?”

  Quad immediately felt himself grin widely. “Well, yeah. It’s the same equipment that Jedi-Wolverine uses.”

  Anna frowned at him only a moment before her excitement returned and she said, “Wait. Have you met him?!”

  Quad grinned. “No. He’s really good at hiding. I’ve been looking, though.”

  “Uh-huh. So how’d you come up with his stuff if you didn’t meet him in person and he didn’t give it to you?”

  Quad flushed and glanced at his feet, embarrassed. “Oh. Well. I, uh.” He swallowed, thinking of how much he’d stolen from all of his favorite heroes. “I mean. He didn’t give me permission to use it, but it was easy enough to figure out.”

  “Easy.” Her eyes narrowed.

  “I know!” Quad cried. “I should’ve asked first. It’s just that I couldn’t find him and it was really obvious—I mean, well, I did have to spend a few hours to figure it out, but it’s not like he owns the tech, right?” Then he flushed, realizing that Jedi Wolverine probably did own that tech.

  “So you stole it. From Jedi Wolverine.”

  The horror of that fact, combined with the pointed way she was staring at him, suddenly made it hard to breathe. “Oh no,” Quad whispered.

  “But don’t worry,” Anna said. “I won’t tell anyone, and I know Dobie won’t tell anyone.”

  Quad swallowed and nodded, too overwhelmed to speak, bombarded by visions of a pissed-off Jedi Wolverine tearing into his bedroom one night to take revenge.

  “You know, Dobie’s told me a lot about you,” Anna said. “He was really impressed with all the stuff you gave him for the fight in Rath. You saved his life, you know. Was more than a little disappointed you took it all back.”

  Quad flinched. “I only to
ok it back because he told me to.”

  Anna’s eyes narrowed for a split second before the moment passed. “He told you to.”

  Embarrassed, Quad said, “Yeah, he didn’t think you’d want to know I was out there. He thought you’d try to…” He swallowed.

  “Dobie told you what, exactly?” Anna pressed.

  Nervous, Quad blurted, “That you’d try to kill me or something. But that’s dumb, right?”

  “Totally,” Anna said. She cocked her head at him. “Hell, with you being multidimensional, is that even possible?”

  Quad snorted. “Not easily. You’d have to tinker with an Aashaanti anchor to reverse its stationary pattern to actively attract, then set up a spherical Yewe-Gibbs field to prevent the passage of energy in any direction, then kill me, which would be tough, because you couldn’t give the command from the outside, so it’d have to be something inside the sphere with me, and even then, I’ve got the Alpha mechanics, so it’s not just a simple knock-over-the-head. We’re talking serious internal damage, organs crushed, head severed, that kind of thing.”

  “How about a charged Kelthari crystal going supernova?” Anna suggested.

  “Yeah, that’d do it,” Quad said, “but only with the Aashaanti anchor holding me in place.”

  She cocked her head at him. “So you are jumping around. I thought so. Is it hard to do?”

  “No way!” Quad laughed. “Well, probably for other people, but everything about tech just makes sense to me, and I can feel all the anchors, all the time. Have since I was little. It’s just a matter of reaching out to them.”