Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (3 page)

He took his gun from his hip and
pointed it at her.

Narrowing her eyes, Tatiana
strode toward her soldier.

The man threw out an arm and
snagged her, dragging her back against his chest.  He was bigger than her—much
bigger.  Tatiana froze.  At a hundred and fifty centimeters, she had been too
short to be a Nephyr.  Instead, they’d taken her high IQ and molded it around
brain-signals and war games and top secret weaponry.  Her instructors had
always assumed that she would never need to face the enemy hand-to-hand,
because the only way rebels were ever going to be able to open the belly and
drag her out was if she gave the order to the soldier to open the hatch.

Now, outweighed by more than forty-five
kilos and shorter by over thirty centimeters, she was suddenly very acutely
aware of why she had not been chosen for the Nephyrs.  She was short.  Even for
a girl.

And he was tall.  Even for a guy.

The bastard would pay.

Tatiana tried to pry the thick,
apelike arm from around her middle, but when it remained firmly in place, she
blurted, “When the Coalition gets done with you, you’re going to be pissing out
a bag on your hip.”

He laughed.  “As long as they use
plastic…I’m allergic to latex.”

Tatiana twisted around to face
him and stuck a finger in his chest.  “You’re committing a federal crime.  Let
go of me.  Now.” 

The effect wasn’t as terrifying
as she would have hoped.  She found the top of her head at approximately the
same height as a nipple, peering up at the base of his chin, what seemed like kilometers
of dirty leather jacket separating them.

He leaned back so he could grin
at her as he said, “I don’t think so.”

Tatiana froze as he shifted,
setting his gun out of her reach atop her soldier’s hydraulics.  She tried not
to feel the places where their bodies touched as he unhooked something from his
belt. 
A knife?  A gag?  A garrote?

You are a Coalition fighter,
a part of her ranted. 
You operate the most fearsome machines in the word. 
Pull your goddamn head out of your ass and take charge.

She jabbed her finger back into
his chest.  “You have twenty seconds to tuck your tail between your legs and
get the hell out of here before I call in the Nephyrs.”

“Uh-huh.”  Still holding her
pinned to his torso, he raised something to his mouth and said, “Milar, you
really
need to come look at this.”

Usually, even the whisper of
Nephyrs was enough to make colonists jump with panic.  This guy sounded like
she had told him teddy bears were going to tickle him with feathers.

“You think this is
funny?
”
Tatiana cried.  “You think assaulting a Coalition operator is
funny?
 
You’re setting yourself up for execution, pal.  A full correction. 
Nephyr-style.”

He peered down at her, grinning. 
“From what I saw, you’re pretty close to that yourself.  What’d you have?  Some
sort of nervous breakdown in there?  I heard Coalition don’t take too kindly to
their operators going chickenshit on them.”

“Who is Milar?” she managed, her
throat stiff with fury.

“Milar’s my brother,” he said.

“Who are
you?
”

His amber-brown eyes were
teasing.  “I’m Patrick.”

She squirmed, but the arm across
her backbone might have been iron.  Exhausting herself, she poked him again. 
“You’re making a mistake, Patrick.  Operators are the most highly-trained
federal employees out there.  The moment I don’t show up for debriefing,
they’ll come looking for me.  They find out you kidnapped me and you’ll be
executed for—”

“They won’t find me,” he
interrupted.  “Or you, either.”

Tatiana froze, unnerved by his
sheer confidence.  “If you kill me—”

“You’ll do what?”

Silence hung between them as he
grinned down at her.  Tatiana became acutely aware of how their bodies were
touching—and where.  If she were back in her barracks room, boredly flipping
through teaser mags, she would’ve paid to see him naked.

He’s a hunk,
she thought,
unable to stop herself,
And you haven’t gotten laid in two years.

“I’ll haunt you,” she blurted. 
“I’ll haunt your bathroom and scare the crap out of you every time you try to
take a dump.”

A smile began to play at the
corners of his lips.  “We’re not going to kill you.  We’re going to take you to
see Wideman Joe.”

He really was going to kidnap
her. 

No.
  This time she began
to struggle, and in earnest.  She kicked out at his shin and, at the same time,
bit down hard on his arm.  He cursed…

…but he didn’t let her go. 
Instead, he grabbed her hands, pulled them behind her back, and cinched them in
place with some sort of cold, sharp metal banding. 

“Ow, alien spawn, those hurt,
what the hell, you bastard!”  She kicked him again and started running for her
soldier.

“Hold up!”  He caught her by the
waist, his big fingers brushing the sensitive waste nodes a hands-width under
her breasts.  “Just calm down.  We’ll take them off once we get you safely on
the ship.”

They’re going to take me away
from my soldier.
  She was so dead.  “No, dammit!”  Tatiana kicked and
twisted in his grip, wrenching her wrists until the cold metal sliced into the
skin and she felt blood dripping down her fingers. 
Damn
but the bastard
put them on tight.

“Hey, easy.”  Big hands grasped
her wrists and kept them from twisting behind her.  “You’ve never been in these
before, have you?  Nephyrs use them on rebels.  They tighten with pressure. 
They’ll literally cut your hands off if you struggle too much.”

Tatiana screamed her frustration,
but stopped moving.  Instead she stamped her foot and started cursing his name,
his family, his heritage, his village, his Sign…

From the woods, someone laughed. 
A man entered the ring of firelight, and for a moment, Tatiana was so shocked
she could only gape.  Either both Patrick and Milar were robots made in the
same factory, or they had shared the same womb, at the same time.  Milar had
the same laugh lines as Patrick, the same broad shoulders, the same metallic
red-brown curls—even their chiseled jaws shared the same reddish
I-Shave-When-I-Feel-Like-It bristle.

Milar, however, had two scaled
beasts tattooed up his neck, obscuring the skin of his throat.  From what
Tatiana could see, it was a small part of a much larger tattoo, the feet and
tails of a red and a black dragon that climbed all the way to his ears and out
to his fingertips.  Further, his curly auburn hair was much longer than his
brother’s, unfurled halfway down his back, tied back with a wide black leather
strap.  To top it off, he was wearing a black leather trench coat, black
military-issue workboots, black pants, black shirt, and beetle-green,
black-rimmed sunglasses.  At night.   

Tatiana came to the sad
conclusion that the poor, unwitting fool had probably been gene-spliced with a
peacock.

“Looks like you caught yourself a
feisty little Shrieker, Pat.  What did you wan—”    Upon drawing close, Milar’s
words cut off with a stare.  He yanked his glasses off, revealing startled
golden-brown eyes.

“Oh hell,” was all he could
manage, staring at her.  Unlike Patrick’s rough colonial speech, Milar’s
Coalition New Common was almost flawless.

“Then you see it?” Patrick
demanded.

“Yeah.”  It sounded like a
croak.  “Merciful Aanaho.  We’re not
ready.
”

“Well we better
get
ready,
wouldn’t ya say?” Patrick demanded.

“Get ready for what?” Tatiana snapped,
not liking the way the brute was staring at her.  “Let go of me.  Get my
goddamn hands out of these things.  They cut me.”  She could feel blood
dribbling off her index finger, and it was bringing up bile.  “They
cut
me,” she said again, biting down panic.

Patrick ignored her.  As did
Milar.

Then, to her frustration, they
switched to a rough colonial dialect she had never heard before. 
Automatically, Tatiana gave her soldier the order to translate it.  Then she
realized she wasn’t in her soldier.  She cursed and fought back tears.

After a few minutes of hurried
conversation, their eyes flickering to her, to her soldier, and to the
half-completed Void Ring above, Milar suddenly switched back to flawless Coalition
New Common.  “Duck your head down,” he ordered.  He drew a nasty-looking
hunting knife from a sheath on his belt.

Tatiana froze when she realized
he was talking to her.  Duck her head down?  Why would he want her to duck her
head—

She froze. 
Oh no.
 
Tatiana straightened as far as she could go and pressed her rigid spine against
Patrick’s chest.  “You stay away from me!”

Milar snorted and moved toward
her.

She kicked him.  Right in the
crotch.

“Oh crap.”  Patrick tugged her
backwards away from Milar, who was crumpling on the ground, the big knife
fisted in white knuckles, his red face straining with veins. The dragons on his
neck bunched up, their scales glistening and pulsing ominously, like they were
about to tug themselves free of his throat.

“I’m going to kill her,” Milar
said, between clenched teeth.  One hand on his crotch, he started to get to his
feet.

“Dammit, Milar, she didn’t mean
to—”

“She
kicked me in the junk!
”
he roared.

Tatiana felt Patrick balk. 
“Well, yeah, she meant to do that.  But she’s scared and—”

“Like hell I’m scared!” Tatiana
snapped.  “You two are so dead.  You are assaulting a
Coalition officer.
 
Or are you two knuckers so high on testosterone that doesn’t that register to
your puny colonist psyches?”

Milar glared at Patrick, then
stepped in sideways and grabbed the top of Tatiana’s head with a big hand and
wrenched it down.

Tatiana cried out as muscles
pulled in her neck, but she twisted and struggled to keep out of his reach
anyway.  “Stop it, you simian bastard!”

“Easy,” Patrick said.  “He’s just
going to—”

“
I know what he’s going to do!
” 
Tatiana screamed.  “And I’m going to kill him!”  She started kicking her foot
in Milar’s general direction.

Milar growled something under his
breath.  Still holding the top of her head, Milar ducked so that he was looking
up at her downturned face.  He brought his knife up so that it was a centimeter
from her right eye.  Tatiana froze.

“Milar…” Patrick warned.

“See this, coaler?” Milar said to
her, ignoring his brother.  He twisted the hunting knife so that Tatiana got a
rotating view of its blade, glittering in the firelight.  Smiling at her, he
growled, “This ain’t exactly the best equipment to work with, sweetheart, so
unless you want me to chop off your damn head, I’d hold real still.”

“Maybe we should take her back to
the ship to do it,” Patrick said.  “We’ve got anesthetics.”

“And have them realize she left
the crash site?”  Milar snorted, still watching Tatiana.  “No.  We’ll do the
little government shit right here.  Help me hold her head.”

“No!” Tatiana screamed, trying to
twist away again, but she simply didn’t have the strength to resist Patrick’s
grip.  They propped Tatiana’s head against the leg-hydraulics of her soldier
and Patrick held her skull in place while Milar massaged the back of her neck
with rough fingers.

“Got it,” Milar said, pinching a
sensitive bit of flesh against her spine.  “No sweat, right, coaler?”

“Screw you,” Tatiana muttered.

Milar gave a cruel laugh.  “Maybe
someday, sweetie.” 

Tatiana cried out when she felt
the knife lance the flesh between his fingers.  “That’s got electrodes in my
spine!” she babbled.  “You pull it out, you’ll kill me.”  She tried to
struggle, but Patrick held her head utterly motionless against the soldier, her
body firmly held in place with his bulk.

“Don’t move,” Patrick said
softly.

Something metallic scraped in her
neck.  Then clicked.

Tatiana felt her guts roil as she
felt a tugging sensation in her spine, like worms crawling through her flesh. 
She closed her eyes and shuddered. 
This can’t be happening.

“There!”  Milar released his hold
on her neck and backed away.  “You think you’re the first coaler bastard we’ve
operated on, Princess?”

Patrick released her head and
withdrew, allowing her a good look of the thing they’d removed from her. 
Tatiana could only stare at the object in shock.  Milar held the government
chip out triumphantly before her, grasped in a pair of multi-tool pliers, the
four foot-long filaments glistening pink with blood, twitching like legs and
feelers on an insect. As she watched, he squeezed the pliers and crushed the
circuitry.  She saw little crackles of electricity sizzle down the coppery
wires before they went still.  Staring at it, she could only manage, “That’s
programmed to kill me if it’s removed before my enlistment is up.”

“Just a myth,” Patrick said.  He
wiped away the blood that was now running down her backbone from Milar’s
ministrations.  Then he hesitated.  “Well, sorta.  It could’ve killed you, but
we’ve done it enough times we pretty much got the hang of it.  Gotta knock out
the battery cap before you start pulling anything out, otherwise it’ll start
frying neurons.”

“You actually pulled out my
lifeline
?” 
Tatiana had never been so unnerved in her life.  “Are
you
the reason
Coalition fighters keep disappearing on Fortune?  What are you doing with
them?  Using them for sick experiments?  What’s wrong with you people?  Don’t
you know the Coalition’s gonna hunt you down and make you scream like little
babies?”  Then she blinked.  “
You’re
the rebel brothers they just put
out the bulletin on.”