Fortune's Folly (Outer Bounds Book 2)

by Sara King

  “I’ll taunt her into going to get the robot,” Tatiana said. “Then, as soon as she’s clear of the others, I’ll plaster her brains all over the wall.”

  “Technically, with that kind of energy weapon,” Milar said, “all you’ll really accomplish is a small hole the size of a thumbnail.”

  Tatiana stumbled to a halt. “You’re kidding.” She had been expecting blood and gore. She’d relished the idea of blood and gore.

  Milar sighed. “Here,” he said, unstrapping his pistol and its explosive-rounds from his vest and handing it to her. “Make it messy.”

  Looking down at the gun that was much too big for her hands, Tatiana couldn’t help but grin like a fool. “Oh, I will.”

  “Just make sure you don’t take the shot where anyone can stop you,” Milar warned. “Act normal until you actually pull the trigger. The last thing we want is a botched execution and a pissed-off Anna.”

  Tatiana grunted, her eyes fixed on the tent. They were almost to the tiki torches, now, and it was getting to the point that all she could think about was seeing Anna’s brains. She could envision it so vividly that she could see the gray spatters dribbling down the sides of the tent, the red gore caught in the others’ hair. Imagining the looks of horror, the total shock of her fellow rebels’ faces was like sweet nectar for her soul.

  Tatiana was grinning when she reached the entrance to the tent and glanced at the two Laserat-toting guards who, after a nervous look at the blinking thing in her forehead, quickly nodded for her to pass.

  Milar flipped the tent flap open for her and held it. “Just stick to the plan,” he warned. Inside, Tatiana could hear the little gremlin’s voice.

  “…But she’s never gonna be able to use it effectively. I mean, look at it. It’s almost four feet long. It’s gonna be like trying to wield a chainsaw made for freakin’ Paul Bunyan, you know?…”

  Just the sound of that syrupy voice laden with enough malice to drown a city was enough to make Tatiana’s neck hairs stand on end. She started through the door.

  Milar’s arm dropped to block her path. “Stick,” he warned, “to the plan.”

  Inside, the demonling continued, “Going up against a Nephyr? What if he takes it from her? I think it’s gonna be fun to watch, but it’s dumb, and it’s gonna get her killed.”

  “I know,” Tatiana growled up at her lover. “I’m not stupid, Milar.”

  Reluctantly, Milar lifted his arm and let her duck inside.

  “Again, fun, but maybe not how we want to be using our resources, you know?” Anna finished.

  Then Tatiana saw the little twit, and all Time seemed to stop. Her soulless, beady black eyes, greasy black hair—dyed so she could avoid Coalition security as she ran around commandeering their labs and surgery rooms—her casual sprawl back in her chair, the sarcastic quirk to her thin lips…

  “Hey tinkerbelle,” Anna laughed, catching sight of her in the doorway, “how’s that third eye treating you?”

  Tatiana raised her gun to Anna’s head and pulled the trigger.

  The moment her head exploded, Tatiana realized that Anna wasn’t like her sister, after all. Instead of a supremely satisfying wide-eyed moment of shock before her AlphaGen properties healed her, Anna’s skull simply detonated into a thousand gory fragments that splattered the inside of the tent and all who occupied it, coating Tatiana’s face, chest, arms, and lower torso with blood. A moment later, her tiny, headless corpse fell over backwards, taking her chair with it.

  “Oops,” Tatiana said, into the stunned silence that followed. She cocked her head, staring at the corpse, waiting for it to piece itself back together and get up and spew more bullshit.

  Anna Landborn stayed dead.

  “Weeellll,” Tatiana said, turning to a wide-eyed Magali, who was, like the rest of the tent, covered in Anna-gore, “on the plus side, looks like I spared you all the trouble of kicking her ass for being a satanic cornchild with a knife fetish.” She took a few more moments to digest the corpsified child she had created, then noticed the cyborg standing beside Magali. “Oh, hey Jersey,” she called, giving him a friendly salute with the weapon. “Been a long time!” The last time she’d seen him, they’d gone home from the bar and had hot, wild sex for like twelve hours straight. He’d been a real champ. Then he’d slept for like twelve hours straight, which was disappointing. She’d brought him coffee, though, and it had started all over again.

  Jersey stared, his mouth open.

  “You should meet my new ganshi jaggle, Babe. He’s bad ass. He killed a starlope by himself yesterday.”

  Did she just kill the demented shit? Jersey was thinking. With a gun? Somehow I thought it would take an exorcism or something…

  “Or maybe not.” She sighed, remembering Jersey’s dislike of cats. “Oh well. Still, we should catch up whenever you’ve got a chance. Being all alone on that mountain all the time—I’m seriously starting to think I’m going a little nuts.” And hell, maybe a little competition for Milar would get his head off of the skeenk’s perfect tits. Then, without another word, she turned and walked out, brushing past a stunned-looking redheaded skeenk on the way.

  CHAPTER 42: The Abundance of Spring

  12th of June, 3006

  Inside the Alien Defense Grid

  Fortune, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds

  Anna stepped out from behind the tree, seeing the spatter of brainmatter silhouetted by camp lights as darker splotches on the insides of the tent. “Well,” she said, as Dobie approached her from the darkness, “I guess they don’t want my help.”

  “Apparently not,” Dobie said. He didn’t sound surprised.

  “And aside from my sister being a backstabbing floater, that went well,” Anna said.

  “Indeed, Anna,” Dobie said. “They thought nothing of me carrying the corpse in there under the guise you were tired of walking—I find it somewhat shocking to see the lengths they are willing to believe you would go for your own comfort. By their reactions, I assume you could have even had me carry you into the tent in a palanquin and nobody would have objected.”

  “That’s it?” Anna snorted. “A palanquin? Dobie, I could’ve had twenty slave boys carry me in there and they wouldn’t have batted an eye because it only fits with what they expect to see.” She gestured at the pawns still milling inside the blood-spattered tent. “Nobody questions genius, Dobie—that’s the great part about it! It’s why I make sure to establish enough egocentric, outrageous ‘patterns’ that they think they can figure me out, so they won’t question it when I do something I want to hide in plain sight.” Anna went back to watching the tent, listening to the proceedings via the little transmitter that Dobie had planted in the dirt under the table for her.

  “I will say that you did a very good job of intentionally establishing patterns of outrageous egotism,” Dobie said.

  “Nice, Dobie,” Anna snorted. “Sarcasm befits you.” She watched the meeting finally adjourn and the cleaning crews start working on her decapitated corpse. “It’s all a game, Dobie. One they just lost. Hardcore.” She wasn’t sure how she felt about her sister and all of her toadies just standing around and watching as the midget cyborg decapitated her. Their biggest objection had been at the gore, and whether or not there were enough handkerchiefs and moist towelettes to go around. Even though she had already experienced it in Quad’s Multidimensional Clusterfuck, to witness it in person was…irritating.

  As people began milling from the tent, Anna sighed. “Well, I suppose it’s time to disappear for a few years.”

  “The masses obviously can’t appreciate your genius,” Doberman said.

  Anna turned and squinted at him, trying to decide if he was being sarcastic. When the robot just looked at her placidly, she said, “You really are getting better at that.”

  “I try,” Doberman said.

  Anna watched the remaining figures from the tent disperse, then turned to go.

  A redheaded woman was leaning against one of the boulders
behind her. “Hello, Anna.”

  Immediately, Doberman stepped between them.

  The woman gave a wry smile to Dobie, then returned her attention to Anna. “Remember me?”

  Anna, who did remember the woman from her multiple gruesome ends, nonetheless said, “Remember you? No…should I?”

  “You were young,” the redhead said, shrugging. Still, she almost seemed disappointed. “Oh well. It was a long shot.” Sighing, she said, “I don’t suppose you want to let me open up your robot and check to make sure he isn’t violating any sections of the Triton Initiative.”

  Anna glanced at Dobie. Since he was violating at least six of them, the last thing she was going to do was let the woman open him up. “No thanks. Dobie, let’s go home.”

  The woman sighed, deeply. “Thought so. Goddamn it, why can’t you kids just take a lesson from history, you know? I mean, we spent a hundred and twenty one blood-soaked years fighting the Tritons and their hyper-intelligent pets, throwing whole planets of young men and women at them to be turned into fertilizer. There’re still battlefields out there where there’s nothing for miles in any direction but guns and sun-bleached bones. All those lives lost in the war, and what do you kids do? You go right back to blurring the line between man and machine like the Wars never even happened.”

  “The Tritons are ancient history,” Anna said. “And we have a present-day war to fight, going up against a tyrannical government about eighty thousand times our size, one I very much intend to win. Excuse us.” She turned to go.

  “Stop.” The command in the redhead’s tone came from someone definitely used to authority. Anna turned to look at her slowly, hackles prickling.

  “That’s how the Tritons justified it,” the old biddy said in that I Know Better Than You lecturing tone. “They started with just a single planet, and claimed they needed the additional tech for ‘agricultural manpower.’ They were still claiming ‘agricultural manpower’ when they advanced into our territory and started massacring our cities with their super-soldiers and war-beasts, lining people up by the millions who wouldn’t volunteer for cybernetic mind-control implants so they could be shot.”

  Anna, who had of course known that and therefore spent long hours of her life devoted to the memorization of Ghani Klyde, one-time advisor to the deliciously ambitious Emperor Giu Xi Triton, had actually planned to use a similar strategic model. She wasn’t about to waste her breath trying to justify that to this old wench, however. “Look,” she said, “I don’t think I caught your name…”

  “Kestrel Klaane,” the woman said. “You can call me Kestrel.”

  “Listen, KayKay,” Anna said, citing the video she’d recovered from the Rath military compound. “Dobie and I are busy. We’ve got an experiment due for observation in the next two hours.”

  Kestrel stiffened momentarily, then recovered and crossed her arms over her scantily-clad bosom. “I’ve heard about your ‘experiments.’ Are they willing subjects, Anna?”

  Anna rolled her eyes. “I don’t have time for this. Dobie, we’ve gotta get you a recharge soon.”

  “Oh, he’s not going to survive this,” Kestrel said casually. “But before I obliterate your pet, Anna, I want to know where you got the body double.” She cocked her head. “Quad come visiting you? You two maybe been having a little interdimensional playtime now and then?”

  “Quad?” Anna said, giving the woman her most confused look. “Quad what?”

  Dobie backed her up perfectly. “Quad is a young boy who’s been visiting me at night, while you sleep.”

  Anna frowned. “Is he the one who gave you those claws?”

  “I wanted to tell you,” Dobie said, “but he asked me to keep it secret.”

  “Of course he did,” the redhead muttered. “I’m gonna have to have a little chat with his mother. Until then…” She scowled at Anna over her crossed arms. “Where’d you get your double?”

  “Cloning process,” Anna said. “Fried the brain before it had a chance to form, used ventriloquism and remote electrical stimulation to manipulate small muscle groups.”

  “Sure you did,” KayKay said. She clearly didn’t believe her. “Those untried young men and women back there maybe’ve never seen the difference between freshly-exploded bodies and hours-dead exploded bodies, but I have.”

  “Good for you,” Anna said. “Dobie, let’s go. If she tries to stop us, kill her.” Then she turned to go.

  KayKay’s skin shimmered and darkened as she lunged forward, grabbed Dobie by the throat, and lifted him completely off the ground before ripping off his arms and pinning his body against her knee. From there, she ripped out his braincase, threw it to the ground, and crushed it with her heel. She threw the discarded mass of broken electronics aside with a grunt. It had taken little more than a couple seconds.

  As Dobie’s exposed innards shorted out and his body’s automatic systems twitched with no brain to control it, KayKay stepped forward, grabbed Anna by the front of her shirt, and lifted her bodily off her feet. Kestrel’s eyes were glowing yellow as, into Anna’s face, she said, “You have some very big shoes to fill. Some of the greatest this world has ever seen. You will stop sullying his name and you will stop being an evil little shit, or next time I come to visit, those will be your brains on the ground.” Then she dropped Anna unceremoniously beside her obliterated robot.

  On her ass, in the dirt, Anna stared at Dobie’s body in horror, her mouth agape. “Dobie…”

  With a smug grin, the redhead flicked some stray mechanics off her low-cut blouse and left her there, staring at the body of her friend.

  After Kestrel boarded Honor and disappeared, Anna dropped the ruse and said, “Okay, Dobie, you can come out, now.”

  At that, Dobie’s left pinkie twitched. Once, twice, then it started to get shoved across the ground as something pushed at it. A moment later, another finger exactly like it began to push out of the interdimensional hole that Anna had made for her friend, still connected to the dead Dobie’s pinkie.

  Eventually, the void-black wall widened, allowing Doberman to climb back from the interdimensional space he’d been occupying. Immediately, Anna noticed the cold that seemed to be rolling off him, freezing ice crystals to the forest detritus at his feet. “Well,” she said, “that went even better than expected.”

  “Indeed,” Dobie said. “Did you analyze the shift?”

  “Oh yes,” Anna said, ducking down to pick up her r-player, which had recorded the entire exchange. She zoomed in on the woman’s skin as it was undergoing its transformation. “It looks like some sort of organic nannite-liquid-crystalline combination, probably using Aashaanti psychic imprint technologies. Fucking hypocrite is as much of a machine as you are.”

  “I suspected as much when my decoy became completely decommissioned in less than four seconds,” Dobie said.

  “Well,” Anna said, tucking her r-player into her pocket. “How’s it feel to be dead?”

  “Interesting,” Dobie said. “How did you know she wasn’t human? All of my scans were reading completely normal.”

  “Remember that day I asked you to find me video of you fighting robots in Rath?” Anna shrugged. “I started poking around for footage you hadn’t deleted and came up with this really cool exchange between her and a Nephyr in Rath’s top-secret experimental wing. Fun stuff. I put it to music and study it when I’m bored.”

  Doberman seemed to consider. “Are you saying she’s a Triton?”

  “Nah,” Anna said, waving that off dismissively. “Too goodie-goodie holier-than-thou for that. She’s something else. Probably something that was made to kill them.”

  “I still think that between your armor and Quad’s claws, I could have taken her.”

  Anna grinned. “Oh, you’ll get your chance, Dobie. Gimme a few years to get you totally decked out, first. Then let me grab some popcorn while you totally kick the shit outta her.”

  Dobie seemed to consider that a moment, then said, “Anna, I don’t think you’
re using your potential to its greatest effect. Eight-year-olds rarely have enemies.”

  “They’re not my enemies,” Anna said. “They’re my pawns.” She grinned. “It’s a really big difference.”

  Her robot glanced down at his own dismantled double, then said, “Anna, I’ve been thinking about something.”

  “Only one thing?” Anna snorted. “You’re living in a paradise, my friend.”

  Dobie trudged on, undeterred. “Word will reach the Core that we destroyed Rath in at most five years. It will take the Coalition about a month to form an armada big enough to retaliate, then it will take five years to return. That puts you, Pan, and Ellie at precisely eighteen when the fleet arrives.”

  Amused, Anna said, “Oh, I see. You’re trying to get me to buddy up with Pan so he doesn’t get the hots for Ellie and team up with her against me. Yeah, I thought about that.”

  Doberman just frowned. “No, I think you should treat other human beings better.”

  “Why?” Anna demanded, nudging his dismembered corpse. “The brainless pussies don’t deserve it.”

  Doberman cocked his head. “You told me you took an interdimensional tumble through time and space, experiencing your own death exactly six thousand, eight hundred and thirty-eight different times. Didn’t that teach you anything?”

  Anna snorted. “Of course it did.”

  “Now I’m curious,” Doberman said. “Because it doesn’t seem as if you plan to amend your behavior at all.”

  “Amend it?” Anna laughed. “Dobie, you ever heard the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge?”

  Doberman looked perplexed. “Of course. A Christmas Carol is part of the required literary dataset for standard Ferrises, in order to better blend with our human commissioners. Ebenezer Scrooge is a stingy, selfish fictional character created by the great ancient storyteller Charles Dickens who experiences the past, present, and future in order to undergo a character change for the better in a moral tale that spans the ages.”