Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising

by King, Sara

  Anna lowered herself slowly, her eyes riveted to his hand as it hovered over the transmitter. “I don’t know why you think you’ll find him in the government records. Coalers don’t give a damn about eggers. Five hundred thousand of them get the Wide every year and nobody cares.”

  In reply, Doberman said, “Joseph Whitecliff, of the Fifteenth Carrier Squadron. Assigned a ten year enlistment on Fortune. Married to a Fortune-born colonist, Vala Healthmore, in an unapproved ceremony on-planet. Fathered triplets thirty-two years ago, Patrick and Milar Whitecliff, identical, and a girl, Caroline Whitecliff, fraternal. One year later, Whitecliff’s command refused to recognize colonial marriages, ordered the Fifteenth to take a group of seventeen sedated Shriekers back to the Inner Bounds for study. There was a mishandling in the cargo bay, leading to a ship-wide Shriek by the transported aliens. Joseph Whitecliff was the sole survivor. Command discharged him to the colonies in the care of his wife, at that time living in the town of Deaddrunk Mines. Is this Wideman?”

  “No.”

  “Now this is interesting,” Doberman said. “Both of his sons have had their DNA, prints, physical, and biometric data all wiped clean. Yet Joseph’s DNA is a close paternal match to one Miles Blackpit, the only man in Fortune history who escaped the Nephyr Academy on Eiorus, and one of the eighteen fugitives on the Constant Vigil alert system.”

  When he looked, Anna’s capillaries had constricted, leaving her coloration several shades lighter than usual. “Stop giving me reasons to kill you, robot.”

  “Very well.” Doberman lowered his hand from the transmitter. “I only mention it because the same Miles Blackpit was just apprehended by the Nephyrs not two days ago.”

  Anna’s facial muscles lost tension and her musculature tightened on her frame. “What?”

  “He was found trying to kidnap a Coalition operator.”

  “The Nephyrs have him?” Anna whispered. It appeared as if, for once, Anna Landborn had completely forgotten to regulate her own biorhythms. Her breathing was fast, her heart-rate elevated, her eye-dilation indicating total shock. “You’re lying.”

  “He’s being held in this very station, as a matter of fact,” Doberman said. “If you had been paying attention to your ‘background noise’ like you were forcing me to do, you would have seen him.”

  Anna’s eyes flickered toward the screens, which now showed a base football game and a Shrieker harvest, respectively. “You’re lying,” she said, angrier.

  Doberman sighed and replayed his recording of the operator’s speech for Anna, transmitting the feed to the main screen. When he finished, he created a still-frame and zoomed in on the prisoner’s face. “He is the one with the decorative dermal pigmentations, no?”

  “We have to help him,” Anna said. Her eyes were riveted to the screen. Doberman’s sensors picked up a further increase in breathing speed, the result almost classifying as hyperventilation.

  Anna Landborn seems to be having a strong emotional reaction for the first time since I gave her my offer. Doberman assessed her condition a moment, then stored the information for future retrieval and processing.

  Anna’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you dare update your profile, you stupid robot.”

  “Already done,” Doberman said. “And, calculating the chances of getting a large, highly-visible colonial out of the base without compromising our own position, I unfortunately don’t think it’s a wise course of action, Anna.”

  “Well I do,” Anna said. “Where are they holding him?”

  “Section One, H-Block.”

  “The Nephyr compound.”

  “Yes, Anna.”

  Anna was biting her lip. “We need to get him out of there.”

  “I’m sorry, Anna,” Doberman said. “I am not equipped to deal with Nephyrs.”

  “I can make you equipped to deal with Nephyrs,” she said.

  “Even though I trust your desire to free this colonial, I do not trust your intentions afterwards. In fact, it very much fits your profile for you to decide to put a time-sensitive present for me in my chest cavity while augmenting my other processes. Therefore, I am not yet willing to allow you to tinker with my internal workings.”

  “I swear to you I won’t.”

  “Perhaps another day, Anna.”

  “Then let me deal with the Nephyrs,” Anna cried. “I got him out of there before. I’ll do it again.”

  “Unfortunately,” Doberman said, “On this, I cannot allow our intervention. The prisoner is too high-profile to approach safely without a great amount of forethought.”

  Anna’s body was making tiny, involuntary tremors, and Doberman saw evidence of extraneous excretions from her tear-ducts. Before she could speak, he added, “It’s no use faking tears, Anna. I have no latent paternal instincts to manipulate. I will not be taking you into the Nephyr compound.”

  Anna narrowed her tear-reddened eyes at him. “You stupid robot. I’m not faking it. Milar is my friend.”

  Doberman carefully examined her elevated biorhythms again, then said, “You’re getting very good at regulating your physiological patterns, aren’t you?”

  He was surprised when her capillaries expanded and she screamed, “I’m not faking it, you stupid robot!”

  Anna’s heartrate had jumped dramatically, and her chest was expanding at three times the speed of her unconscious rate. It was another aspect to her behavior that Doberman found incongruous to her profile. Further, her reaction was much more violent than he expected of a mere friend. He searched his log for instances of her using ‘Milar’ or ‘Miles’ and was stunned to find she had, indeed, shown some sort of consistent and genuine reverence for this colonist.

  …but that was completely not within her profile.

  And, while many of her comments had been compliments on the colonist’s brainpower, more than thirty percent were based off of his physical attributes.

  “A friend…” Doberman suggested, watching her carefully, “Or an infatuation?”

  Her face darkened to a shade of purple.

  “We will not be mounting a rescue,” Doberman said, making another adjustment to her profile. “Remember your bargain, Anna. Nothing that would seriously endanger us. A Nephyr could destroy me easily, and has the creative capacity of a human, so the likelihood of our being discovered is very high.”

  “What about indirect?” Anna said. “I could hack into the camp computer and deactivate the locks on the doors, give Milar an escape window.”

  “The Nephyrs have one of their own watching him at all times,” Doberman said. “Such a window would be useless.”

  Anna’s little fingers tightened on the magnetic disc. “Is there a Nephyr with him right now?”

  Doberman checked with the camp computer. “His lifeline is within ten feet of a Nephyr lifeline. I assume they are both in the same room, so yes.”

  “Fry the Nephyr’s lifeline,” Anna said.

  “No,” Doberman said. “The camp computer could trace the signal back to me and determine my chip number. We are not going to get involved in this. The prisoner is high-visibility. We would risk exposing ourselves without more time to plan and prepare.”

  “He’s torturing him!” Anna snapped.

  “Probably,” Doberman agreed.

  “Please, Dobie,” Anna said. Her eyes were leaking again.

  “No,” Doberman said. “It’s too dangerous to approach the prisoner in any way. Finish working with your apparatus or give it to me to destroy. Then get some rest. We’ll be leaving for Eiorus in the morning.”

  “I hate you,” she screamed, slamming her tiny fist across the desk, scattering the parts in all directions.

  “That’s fine,” Dobie said. “Clean up your mess or I will.”

  Anna’s eyes flickered back to the photograph of the prisoner. Eventually, her rhythms began to settle. “Who is that girl he’s looking at?”

  “The United Space Coalition operator that he kidnapped from her soldier.”

  “What’s
her name?” Anna snarled at him.

  “Captain Tatiana Eyre. An operator for the Eighth Pod, Fourteenth Squadron.”

  Anna’s eyes narrowed. “I thought the bitch looked familiar.”

  Chapter 28

  A Doomed Smuggler

  Magali struggled in the slime, trying to get her prybar seated in the hard little tendon at the base of a purplish Shrieker nodule. A few feet away, Joel worked beside her in silence. The other eggers were spread out, hunting nodules closer to the exit. She and Joel were the only two to have ventured this deep in the mines. So deep, in fact, that at first, Magali had thought Joel was trying to escape.

  Then the smuggler had sat down suddenly at a crossroads of chambers and begun prying nodules from the floor. He’d been filling his sack ever since. Almost as if that was what he’d been intending to do all along. He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that he’d briefly made Magali’s heart soar with hope that he was taking her out of the mines.

  Well, Magali thought, bitterly, He did put the Shriekers out of business. She had to give him some credit for that.

  Joel’s method, though slap-dash, had been more effective than any of the various chemicals the Director made them lace into the Shrieker food supply each time Coalition scientists concocted some new wonder-drug to make the aliens more docile, or, even more ambitious, render them incapable of a Shriek.

  All had failed miserably, sometimes killing their victims, or even bringing on a Shriek themselves.

  Yet Joel’s simple cardboard trick had been so effective that within twenty minutes, ninety-five percent of the hatching chambers were completely clear. Everyone had watched in awe as the Shriekers had simply gathered around the big red cardboard displays the smuggler had set up in the far corners of the mounds, effectively giving the eggers free run of the rest of the mines. Joel hadn’t even needed the two little sacks of cayenne pepper, which he had stuffed in the bottom of his harvest sack, instead.

  Now Joel was kneeling beside her in the slime, filling his own sack of Shrieker nodules like a good egger, looking for all the world like he planned on dancing to the Nephyrs’ tune and getting the Director as big of a bonus as possible.

  It didn’t make sense. Joel had no reason to help them. He should be getting as far away from here as he can, Magali thought, casting worried looks in his direction. She would never forget what they had done to Milar. Laughing, grinning Milar, more playful than his brother when they were children, had become a dark and sinister psychopath after only three months in their hands. And Milar had been a recruit, destined for the front lines. Who knew how long they planned to entertain themselves with the smuggler.

  He needs to get out of here, Magali thought, watching Joel work.

  After Anna and her team of doctors had sewed his skin back on, Milar had stayed in his room for weeks, letting no one inside except Patrick and Anna, the former because no one could keep him out and the latter because no one was stupid enough to try. The first time Magali had seen Milar after his rescue from the Nephyr Academy, it had been in a brief moment when she had been visiting Patrick unannounced, and had accidentally caught him sitting in the kitchen, a haphazard sandwich in his hand, another of Patrick’s cyborg sketches on the table in front of him. Milar had snatched up the sketch when he saw her, and the look he had given her had made Magali freeze like a startled deer, the darkness in the place of her old friend leaving her chilled. Before she’d recovered enough to say something polite, Milar had taken his sandwich to his room and slammed the door.

  He never had told her what the Nephyrs had done to him. Magali hadn’t asked. She’d been too afraid of what he’d say.

  Joel, you need to get out of here. Lose yourself in the caves. Fall on a Shrieker. Shoot yourself. Anything was better than doing a round with the Nephyrs.

  But as time went on, Joel showed no signs of slowing his harvest. He worked methodically, every so often glancing at the exits to the deep chamber they were in—so deep it wasn’t even on the foremen’s maps. The only light came from several chambers behind them, which was why she suspected Joel had stopped in the first place. To go further would have been to go blind.

  “What’s the difference between here and some place closer to the exit? Nodules are gonna be the same, wherever you go.”

  Joel’s eyes flickered toward her, but he kept working.

  He couldn’t understand her. Damn.

  Sighing, Magali dropped her prybar and held out one hand, palm-side-up. With her other hand, she made little running motions with her fingers across the palm, then pointed at the tunnel deeper into the mines. “You gonna run or what?”

  Joel shrugged and went back to work. Every twenty seconds, he glanced up at the tunnels deeper into the mines.

  “Look,” Magali said, louder, now. “I know someone who had a run-in with Nephyrs. Believe me, you don’t want to get caught. Whatever cash you think you can get from those nodules isn’t worth it. If you’ve got a way outta here, you should go.” She made little fleeing gestures again, and pointed at him insistently.

  The smuggler gave her an irritated look before he seated the claws of his prybar under another bright red nodule, shoved downward, and began levering his weight down against it.

  “If you can’t escape, you should shoot yourself. Really, you should. Nephyrs have this thing with skin. They like to peel it off.”

  Joel sighed deeply and looked at her.

  He doesn’t understand what I’m saying, Magali thought, miserable. All he understands is I’m making noise, and Shriekers don’t like noise.

  Magali picked up her own prybar with tears in her eyes. She wanted Anna back. She’d never been on her own before, at least not since Anna had turned five and started telling her what to do. It had been comforting, in a way. Following Anna had been easy, a habit that she had fallen into when the two of them realized that Anna’s brain could do things that Magali’s couldn’t. Anna was special, and Magali wasn’t.

  That she was alone now felt…terrifying.

  If Anna had been here, she would’ve had some brilliant plan on how to get every single person out of the mounds with a full harvest sack. She would have been able to flabbergast the Nephyrs and the Director with a synchronized, systematic, perfectly executed scheme that left no man, woman, or child behind. Not that Anna cared about leaving the children behind, of course. She simply would have done it to prove to the Nephyrs she was smarter than them.

  Even with Joel’s cardboard traps, moving the Shriekers out of the way meant nothing if the people harvesting the nodules were too weak to effectively work the bar, like the kid in formation. Even Magali was having a hard time at it…she’d only gotten thirty or forty.

  Hours passed, and Joel made no move to stop digging, only stopping to glance at the back of the caves every twenty to thirty seconds.

  Shriekers, Magali realized. If there were any back here, they would have collected around his neat little cardboard traps. Yet, as she worked, she saw what looked to be flashes of light in the tunnels beyond. She frowned and pointed.

  Joel had a grim look on his face. He nodded and got to his feet. In a smooth motion, Joel took the gun from her sack, then dumped his sack into hers, almost filling it. He cinched the top shut, eyed the remainder, and then got to his feet, the broken ends of his shackles jingling. Gun in hand, he wadded up his own bag and threw it against the wall.

  Seeing the empty sack abandoned in the slime, Magali knew that meant Joel didn’t have an escape route. No self-respecting smuggler like Joel would leave behind ripe nodules if he had a way out. He’d been helping her before he went off to die. She bit her lip against tears.

  “So now you’re gonna go find a Shrieker to fall on, is that it?”

  Joel’s gaze flickered towards her, then he moved toward the inner chambers where she had seen the flashes.

  “Thank you,” she cried, at his back.

  The smuggler hissed and put a finger to his lips, glaring back at her. Then he disappeared beyo
nd the edge of the mine’s ceiling lights, the guards’ gun clutched in his good hand.

  Magali picked up her nearly-full sack, blinking back tears. She turned to head back toward the entrance to the mines. Another hour or two somewhere else and she’d have enough nodules to leave the mines.

  Yet she found herself staring down at her prybar, unable to summon the interest to finish filling her collection sack.

  What was the point?

  Magali knew that the moment she emerged from the mounds, the Director would throw her in eggers’ prison. She’d shown she had rebel training. To coalers. Maybe the woman wouldn’t go so far as to execute her, but Magali could definitely see the Nephyr leaving her in the stocks for a few days out of sheer pettiness. She might even beat a conspiracy confession out of her and extend her enlistment, make her a lifelong egger, if the three guards didn’t get to her first. Or she might just hand her over to Colonel Steele and forget she ever had an egger by the name of Magali Landborn.

  So what was the point?

  Somewhere deeper in the mounds, Joel was going to kill himself. Alone, and in the dark, after he’d helped her fill her sack, and she was going to let him do it.

  Magali jabbed her prybar at a nodule, unable to see clearly through tears. She felt a soft squish as the bar impaled the nodule and unrefined Yolk began to seep out in a red-purple ooze, the infant Shrieker inside pulsing like a bloody maggot.

  Grimacing, Magali pulled her prybar out and wiped it on her glove. For a long time, she looked at the purple-red slime on her fingertips, then down at the ruined nodule that was still leaking its contents onto the transparent, bubbly slime of the cavern floor.

  It’s not right.

  The smuggler wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for her. From his first imprisonment, to his beatings and eventual outing as Runaway Joel—all of it had spawned from Magali tackling the head foreman and pounding her unconscious to save her sister. If Magali had taken the fall for that, she would have gotten a day or two in the stocks, maybe a few lashes at most.