Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (27 page)

“Cutting out the lifeline they
put in my neck.”

Tatiana froze.  “No.”

“Tough.”  He handed her back the
knife.  “You know where they put it?”

“I can see the stitches,” she
snapped.  “But I said no.  I don’t know what to look for.”

“You’ve got me to talk you
through it,” Milar said.  He knelt in front of her, bowing his head so she had
a good view of the back of his bull neck.  “See the lump?” he said, pressing on
it with a big thumb, “Slice it open, but don’t pull on it yet.”

Tatiana glanced at the door. 
Standing, she was only slightly more than eye-level with him.  “How long is
this going to take?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Milar said. 
“We can’t go anywhere until I’ve got this thing out.”

Which was probably true.  His
lifeline was probably being monitored by the minute, at least by one of the
base AIs.

Looking at the knife in her hand,
Tatiana grimaced.  “I’ve never cut anything in my life.”

“Think of it as a steak,” Milar
said.

“It’s not a steak.”

“Think of it as
me
, then,”
Milar said.  “And
hurry the hell up.
”

“Okay!” Tatiana cried, sticking
the knife into his neck.  When it began to bleed, she grimaced.  “I think I hit
the wrong spot.”  Her blade was sticking out a full two centimeters below the
lump.

“That’s nice,” Milar gritted. 
“Try again, please.”  His tone added,
Before I turn around and throttle you.

“Uh.”  She pulled the knife out,
and, pinching the lump, tried again.  This time the skin parted easily beneath
the blade and she could see a gleaming nugget of bloody metal underneath. 
“Okay.”

“See it?” Milar demanded.

“Yes,” she said.  She gripped it
with her fingers.  “Want me to pull it—”

“
No,
” Milar cried, panic
clear in his voice.  “No.  You have to separate the battery cap first.”

“What’s a battery cap?”

“Okay, here’s where it takes
concentration.  Get as much blood off of it as you can and grab either side of
the capsule and tug it apart.  It should separate in the middle, allowing you a
pretty good view of what’s inside.”

“Uh-huh,” Tatiana said, wiping
the thing off with the sleeve of her uniform and prying it open.  It made a
little clicking sound and moved apart.

“Okay, this is really important,”
Milar said.  “You have thirty seconds to disable the battery cap or it’s going
to send the juice into my central nervous system and paralyze me for good.”

“Why didn’t you say that before?”
Tatiana cried.  “And what’s the battery cap?”

“It’s a little black ball on the
inside.  There’s a notch in the top for a screwdriver.  Put the tip of the
knife in it and twist counter-clockwise ‘til it falls out.”

Tatiana located the thing and lowered
the tip of the blade toward the slot.  The knife refused to hold steady.  “I’m
shaking too bad,” she cried.

“Squid, you’re gonna be shaking a
hell of a lot worse when those Nephyrs put you up on the rack because you were
helping me and let me die.”

Nothing like a nice little dose
of terror to narrow one’s field of vision to the task at hand.  Tatiana’s world
shrank to the little black knob the size of a pinhead.  “Got it,” Tatiana said,
the moment the blade was seated.  “Now twist it, right?”

“
Counter
clockwise,” Milar
warned.

“O
kay!
” Tatiana screamed,
twisting.

A minute later, Milar said,
“Well, I’m not drooling on the floor, so it looks like it worked.  Now all you
gotta do is pull it out.”

“Pull what out?”

“The lifeline.”

“Why?  It’s dead.”

“Dammit,” Milar roared, “You took
out the defense system.  Not the tracking beacon.”

Grimacing, Tatiana pinched the
tiny capsule and gave it a tentative tug.

“Gotta pull harder than that,”
Milar said.  “And faster, too.  That Nephyr’s gonna come back wondering why I’m
not screaming.”

“Ewww,” Tatiana said, once she
started to see the pink wires emerge from his spine.  “Oh gross, gross.”

“It’s fine.  You’re doing fine. 
Just go slow.  Those things can still get triggered if you jiggle them. 
Please
go slow.”

“This
is
slow,” Tatiana
snapped.  “Oh God.  This is icky,” she said, flinching away from the grodie
thing she was pulling from his neck.  “You owe me big time, collie.  Big time.”

“I know,” Milar said.  He was
absolutely still beneath her.  “We’ll talk about it later.  Just go slow and
don’t rush it, ok?  And
dear God
stop jerking it!” 

“I’m not!”

“You
are.
”  She could see
the muscles in his jaw standing out. 

Tatiana grinned to herself as she
worked.  “Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it?”

“There’s no payback when we’re both
dead.  Just calm down and let it come out on its own.  Like a virgin.  No need
to rush it.  It’ll come around in its own time.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“And make sure you don’t let any
of the little wires touch each other when they come out.  Very bad mojo.  As
soon as you can, just set it down gently on the floor and back away.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Tatiana said. 
“Ugh.”  The last electrode finally came free and all four of them danced around
like the little legs of a spider.  Disgusted, she threw it to one side.  The
thing left a bloody smear across the concrete wall, then made a metallic tinkle
as it collapsed in a wiry heap in the corner.

Milar glanced at it.  “You know,
you don’t listen to instructions very well.”

“Sue me.”  She grimaced and wiped
her bloody hands on his dragony back.

Milar glanced over his shoulder
at the bloody smear, looked up at her with a raised eyebrow, then heaved
himself to his feet.  He retrieved the EMP wand, took the knife from her, then
offered a hand.  “Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?” Tatiana
asked, keeping a wary distance.

“To bust up a few glittering tree
ornaments,” Milar said.

“Do I have to come?” Tatiana
asked, giving the EMP wand a nervous look.

Milar shrugged.  “Use that little
AI trick of yours to get the door open for me and then you can sit here and
suck your thumb for all I care.”

Tatiana narrowed her eyes. 
“You’re a real prick, for somebody who needs my help,” she growled, slapping
her palm to the biometrics pad.

Milar sobered and hefted the EMP
wand.  Facing the door, he said, “You’re gonna need a lot of mine before this
is over, squid.  Stay behind me, and call it even.”

“Whatever,” Tatiana muttered,
trying not to look like she was about to pee herself.  “Maybe I should have the
knife.”

“No.”  Milar said.  “You’d drop
it.”  He stepped outside the moment the door opened.

Narrowing her eyes, Tatiana
followed him.

Chapter
26

Killer

“Do I have everyone’s attention?”
a harsh female voice demanded.  “I’m only going to say this once.”

The air in the cavern still stung
with the acrid taste of ozone, and the eggers stood frozen in petrified
silence.

“Good,” the woman said.  She was
a dim outline in the darkness, the eggers on all sides having backed away from
her, leaving her standing alone except for two other women at her back.

“Now listen carefully.”  Magali
held her breath as the woman swung her gun back toward her end of the group. 
The woman passed her over, then swung back, keeping the barrel moving at all
times.  Behind her, her two terrified-looking companions were huddled against
the wall.  All three looked to be recent draftees…  Until Magali saw the
Coalition codes tattooed into their arms.

Guards.

Naked guards.

Confused, Magali tried to piece
together just what was happening.  As nude as they were, it was unlikely the
guards had come down here prior to the Harvest.  Not smugglers, then.  They had
to have been in formation with the others when the Director and her ‘friends’
relieved them of their garments.

“Good,” the woman with the gun
said.  “What’s going to happen is you all are going to go down into the mines,
fill up your sacks, and bring some back here for my friends and I.  A few from
each sack—we’re not greedy.  The three of us don’t know jack shit about
Shriekers, so it’s best for everyone involved that we don’t go anywhere near
them.  With me so far?”

No one spoke.

“Good,” the woman said.  She
pointed into the mines.  “We hate to do this to you, but we’re not eggers. 
We’re citizens.  Director thinks she’s gonna teach us some sort of lesson,
spending a day down here in the slime, but she’s about as stupid as she is
ugly.  We were just doing what everybody does.  Bullshitting.  Passing the
time.  Playing cards.  Maybe screwing, if it was an off-day.  How the hell were
we
supposed to know he was Runaway Joel?”

Oh crap,
Magali thought,
glancing at Joel.  “Joel,” she whispered, “get your head down.”

Joel merely blinked at her.

“Down,” Magali urged.  She
pointed at the woman with the gun and tugged his wrist downward.  Joel
reluctantly sank into a hunched crouch.

“Speaking of Joel,” the woman
continued, “I saw him in the formation tonight.  The good Director let him out
to play, didn’t she?  Where is he?”  She began searching the gathered eggers
with her eyes.  “I have something for him.”

“Shit,” Magali muttered.  “Don’t
move.”  She placed a finger to her lips and held it there, for Joel’s benefit.

The guard with the gun waited a
few more minutes, then laughed.  “Don’t wanna come out for my gift, eh, Joel? 
How about this.  I start shooting until you get your scrawny ass up here.”

Magali glanced down at the
smuggler, who was looking up at her, obviously close to panic.  Magali knew
what was going through his head.  For all he knew, they were going to shoot
him.

For all Magali knew, he was
right.

“Fine,” the guard said, after no
one moved.  She stepped toward the huddled eggers and raised her gun to a
woman’s temple.  Her countenance tightened in that look she knew all-too-well
from Patrick’s psychotic brother. 
She’s going to do it,
Magali thought,
horrified. 
She’s going to shoot her.
  The guard’s  finger began to
squeeze on the trigger.

“He can’t understand you,” Magali
cried, dragging Joel to his feet.  Thankfully, he didn’t resist.  When the
guard twisted to look at her, Magali continued hurriedly, “The Director had her
robots destroy his language centers.”

The guard, upon seeing Joel, gave
a bitter frown.  “She muted him?”

“Yes,” Magali said.  “I stayed
behind and—”

“Shut up.”  To Joel, the woman
said, “Get over here.  My sisters and I have been itching to give you a good
thrashing for what you did to us.  Got us demoted and
flogged,
you sonofabitch. 
My gift is I’m going to kill you after we’re done with you, so that when the
Nephyrs come to extract their due, all they find is a corpse.  You might
deserve a good beating, but you don’t deserve that.  Now get
over
here.”

Joel simply stood where he was. 
When it was obvious the woman expected something of him, he gave a helpless
shrug and glanced at Magali for help.

“Please don’t hurt him,” Magali
said, knowing by the woman’s resentful look that she planned to do just that. 
“He doesn’t understand.”

The guard snorted.  “And he
doesn’t know how to play poker, either.  Yeah, right.”  She narrowed her eyes
and lifted her gun so it was pointed directly at Magali.  “Joel, get up here or
I’m shooting your pretty friend in the face.” 

Staring down the barrel, Magali
had never been so frightened in her life.  Every muscle wanted to freeze up and
relax, all at the same time.  She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see anything but
the muzzle in front of her.  Round and around in her head, all she could think
was that all the woman had to do was twitch her finger and Magali would never
think anything, ever again. 

Anna wouldn’t have flinched.  She
would have coldly stared the woman down and told her exactly how impressed she
was with her substandard gun and her limited intellect.  She would have regaled
her with blood-chilling tales of their father’s training, of how every single
person in Deaddrunk was taught to kill from birth, of how the woman’s gentle
Coalition upbringing could never prepare her for the horrors she was going to
experience in the next few seconds, if she didn’t drop her gun.

Magali wasn’t Anna.  Magali’s
guts twisted with diarrhea and her legs shook so badly they threatened to
collapse.

Beside her, Joel did not move,
though now he was frowning as he glanced from Magali to the guard.

“I’ll help him,” Magali said,
trembling all over.  She made a point to move and speak very carefully, lest
the woman’s trigger finger twitch.  “Okay?  Please don’t shoot.  Please.”  She
gently took Joel’s good hand and pulled him forward.

Joel followed her docilely,
obviously not understanding what the woman had in store for him.  Seeing his
placid look made Magali so frustrated she wanted to scream.

She can’t actually plan to
kill him,
Magali thought, as she brought him abreast of the woman. 
She’s
just trying to scare him.

Joel came to a tranquil halt in
front of the guard, though his eyes had become wary as the gun switched targets
to center on his chest.  The woman peered up at his face, then glanced down at
his ruined hand and grimaced.  “Aanaho, what did she do to him?”

“She slammed his hand in a door,”
Magali said.

“I’m not talking to you, kid,”
the guard snapped.  “I’m just trying to figure out why the Director was stupid
enough to send him down here.”  She gestured at the smuggler’s bruised body,
his swollen face, his maimed and twisted hand.  “You’re obviously in no
condition to
stand,
much less harvest Shrieker nodules.”

“Director’s already taken a
pretty big chunk out of him,” one of the guard’s companions commented.  She
sounded disappointed.  “Not much left for us.”

The guard with the gun gave a
cruel snort.  “Oh, there’s plenty left for us.”

“Please don’t hurt him,” Magali
said again.

“I said
shut up,
” the
guard snapped, swinging to look at her.  She took a step forward.  Magali saw
her foot kick out, had a moment to cringe, then lost her breath as it slammed
into her stomach and sent her to her knees in the slime.  The old shame of
failing her father’s tests, of hitting the ground hard after Milar tore her
legs out from under her, returned.  She saw tears.

Killer.
  With the word
came a long-buried memory of a schoolyard chant, of standing in Wideman’s
garden, of how she had done everything to change his single word for her.  She
had played with dolls, had studied drawing and art, had pretended to be sick
and read books.  She had refused to participate in her father’s war-games, had
let Anna and Milar and Patrick and Jeanne find and ‘kill’ her early, so she
could go sit out the rest of the games and watch, instead. 

Killer
, Wideman’s voice
whispered to her again.  And, instinctively, looking at the casual way the
woman held the gun, the softness in her muscles and posture, Magali knew she
could.

No!
Magali’s mind
screamed.  Anna was the killer.  Milar was the killer.  Magali wanted to be a
mother, a wife.  She wanted to meet her soulmate and have a home and raise
children in some peaceful town, in some place where every man, woman, and child
was not trained to murder people, where little kids weren’t forced to hold guns
and little old men didn’t spew nonsense that was written down and memorized
with awe.  Where a child’s future wasn’t defined by a single word.

Killer,
Wideman’s voice cackled
at her.  Magali squeezed her eyes shut, forcing the tears of pain down her
cheeks.

“Sorry,” she whispered, holding
up her hands as she carefully got to her feet.  “Sorry.”

The guard whipped the gun back
around to face Joel, who had taken a step closer with his good hand
outstretched.  “You don’t like me hurting your girlfriend there, Joel?” the
guard laughed.  “Maybe we should hurt you, instead.”  She stepped forward and
delivered a similar kick to Joel’s already-bruised midriff.

Killer,
Wideman’s voice
said again, as Joel collapsed with a heart-wrenching groan of pain.  The
smuggler curled into a ball as the women laughed, his eyes on Magali,
pleading.  The gun-woman noticed this and jeered, “What, Joel?  You think your
doe-eyed little girlfriend is gonna help you?”  She chuckled cruelly and pulled
back her foot to deliver another kick.

Magali’s gut twisted as she saw
Joel’s face go blank with resignation, a strangled whimper escaping his
throat.  Before she could think, Magali stepped forward and grabbed the woman’s
pistol.  She twisted the weapon up and back, then wrenched the gun forward
until something in the woman’s trigger finger snapped.  The woman screamed.

When Magali stepped away, the gun
was firmly in her hand.  A moment later, the implications of what she had done
began to make her heart pound.  Looking at the guard, who was now nursing her
crippled hand, Magali swallowed hard.  “Sorry, I didn’t mean…”

One of the woman’s companions
stepped forward with a knife in her hand.  Her face was filled with cruel
purpose.  Magali backed up another step, her fingers loosening on the gun in
regret.  “I didn’t mean to—”

“You’re dead, girl,” the
knife-wielder said.  It was a cold promise.

Magali’s heart began to hammer as
the woman started to circle her.  She was afraid of close combat, almost as
much as she was afraid of heights.  Of all the village’s ‘games,’ this was what
she had feared the most, what she had always failed in no matter how hard she
tried.  She just didn’t have the coordination.  Time and again, Milar had
thrown her to the ground at her father’s direction.  Time and again, Magali had
stared at the ground in shame, holding a sore joint in humiliation as her
father chastised her for being slow and stupid.

The woman was circling around
behind her, splitting her attention, giving the other two guards a chance at
her back.  It was so much like she remembered in her ‘fights’ with Milar,
pinned under his merciless stare, that a whimper began to build in her throat. 
Father hadn’t cared that she wasn’t built for fighting.  He didn’t care that
Milar had been almost a hundred pounds heavier than her.  He didn’t care that
the last thing she ever wanted to do was find herself in hand-to-hand combat. 
He only cared that she became Wideman’s ‘killer.’

The guard’s face was filled with
dark promise, the knife gripped tightly in one hand, her Coalition-issue blade
weaving as the woman danced from foot to foot.  Magali knew that, unlike her
practices with Milar, this woman wasn’t going to let her get back to her feet
if she took her to the ground. 

Not this.  Please not this.
 
She’d struggled to avoid this.  Her whole life.  Magali took a step backwards,
the gun burning in her hand.  Her sister would have simply raised the weapon
and fired.

I’m not Anna,
Magali
thought, her entire body vibrating with fear and adrenaline as she followed the
woman’s body with the barrel of her gun. 
I’m not a killer.

“What’s the matter, egger?” the
woman sneered, as she circled, “That gun’s only got one shot every three
seconds.  Afraid you’ll miss?”

“No,” Magali whispered.  She
watched the woman circle, thinking of the village Anna had killed, of the way
her sister’s brown eyes had been filled with excitement as she spoke of the
slaughter.  She remembered Milar, boasting to Patrick about torturing a man
when they thought she couldn’t hear. 
They
were the killers.  Why hadn’t
Wideman called
them
‘killer?’  She was
nothing
like them.

Wideman had to be wrong.  She
wasn’t a killer. 

Magali raised the gun and, eyes
scrunched closed, squeezed off a warning shot.

It went over the woman’s shoulder
and lodged in the slimy wall with a bubbling hiss.

For a moment, the guard stood
there, glancing down at herself, looking shocked.  Then she gave a scream of
triumph and lunged.

As the knife moved toward her,
Magali’s whole world seemed to slow down to individual beats of her heart.  She
watched the knife hurtle toward her organs, saw the little red CHARGE light on
the gun as it recharged.

Killer,
Wideman’s eerie
voice said again, made all the more eerie because the whisper seemed to come no
further than an inch from her shoulder. 
Killer, killer…