Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising
Page 1
OUTER
BOUNDS
I
Fortune's
Rising
Sara King
Copyright © 2012
All Rights Reserved
Sara King
Cover Photography by
NASA and STSci
and the
Hubble Telescope
Titles by Sara King
Guardians of the First Realm: Alaskan Fire
Guardians of the First Realm: Alaskan Fury
Millennium Potion: Wings of Retribution
Terms of Mercy: To the Princess Bound
Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising
Forthcoming
Outer Bounds: Fortune's Folly
Outer Bounds: Fortune in Flames
Guardians of the First Realm: Alaskan Fang
Terms of Mercy: Captive of the Dragon Lord
Disclaimer
(a.k.a. If You Don’t Realize This Is A Work Of Fiction, Please Go Find Something Else To Do)
So you’re about to read about cyborgs and aliens and laser pistols and life on other planets. In case you’re still confused, yes, this book is a complete work of fiction. Nobody contained within these pages actually exists. If there are any similarities between the people or places of Outer Bounds and the people or places of Good Ol’ Planet Earth, you’ve just gotta trust me. It’s not real, people. Really.
DEDICATION:
Outer Bounds: Fortune’s Rising is dedicated to the thousands of needy, less-than-patient, pushy, hungry-eyed addicts who spent four years bugging, pleading, egging, and cajoling me into finishing it. I used to try and list you all in every update, but as Outer Bounds skyrocketed in popularity, I have had to resort to blanket statements:
For those of you who were with me from the very first segment, kudos to you. It means you’re either 1) family, 2) friends, or 3) Millennium Potion: Wings of Retribution readers. Without your interest and encouragement, there would be no Outer Bounds.
For those of you who, upon finding out that Fortune’s Rising was not yet finished, wrote me scathing emails denouncing my lack of dedication to my chosen art and demanding to read everything else I’d ever written, you get bonus points. There were probably about 60 of you, and each one of you helped me get through some rough times. Thanks.
For those of you who read the infamous 4th Segment and then applied three years of cattle prods, threats, and blackmail to force me to write the 5th and final segment, I couldn’t have finally broken through my Writer’s Block From Hell without you. Your enthusiasm has kept me going all these years.
And for those of you with the plastic spoons, I am investing in forks. Steel forks…
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Anna’s War
Chapter 2: The Rebel Brothers
Chapter 3: A Dangerous Foreman
Chapter 4: A Smuggler’s Story
Chapter 5: Unit Ferris
Chapter 6: Wideman Joe
Chapter 7: A Friend for Anna
Chapter 8: Fun in the Mounds
Chapter 9: Another Dog to Whip
Chapter 10: Stepping Aside
Chapter 11: Dealing with a Sociopath
Chapter 12: Cold Knife
Chapter 13: Alone with Milar
Chapter 14: Runaway Joel
Chapter 15: Striking a Bargain
Chapter 16: A Brother’s Love
Chapter 17: Proposal Accepted
Chapter 18: A Game of Chess
Chapter 19: Doberman
Chapter 20: Deaddrunk
Chapter 21: Double-Patty Cheeseburgers
Chapter 22: Broken Hearts
Chapter 23: Harvest Time
Chapter 24: A Dangerous Duo
Chapter 25: A Hero’s Welcome
Chapter 26: Killer
Chapter 27: Decibel Levels
Chapter 28: A Doomed Smuggler
Chapter 29: Escape from Rath
Chapter 30: The Ferryman’s Dilemma
Chapter 31: One, Two, Three
Chapter 32: A Tight Fit
Chapter 33: Magali’s Choice
Chapter 34: The Red or the Black
Chapter 35: Cliffhanger
Chapter 36: Tatiana Flies Cargo
Chapter 37: Hijacked
Chapter 38: Playing TAG
Chapter 39: The Last Fifty Feet
Chapter 40: The Head Doctor
Chapter 41: Jersey
Chapter 42: That Night in the Desert…
Chapter 43: Science is Fun
Chapter 44: Incentive
Chapter 45: Milar’s Experiment
Chapter 46: Mind Games
Chapter 47: Dance Lessons
Chapter 48: Fortune’s Rising
Chapter 1
Anna’s War
The scream of the shift whistle tore through the military razor-wire and punctured the flimsy metal walls of the hut, startling Magali out of a dead sleep. She braced herself on the cot, heart pounding even though she’d had twelve days to grow used to the gut-wrenching shriek.
Immediately following the shift whistle came the tinny thunder of soldiers walking down the rows of huts, pounding on the doors with their rifles in case the ear-shattering screech hadn’t been enough for the eggers to drag their exhausted bodies out of their cots.
A soldier found their door and made a brief aluminum rumble before shouting, “Two minutes, folks. Be out here. Dressed and pissed.” Then she moved on, assaulting another egger’s hut with her badge of office.
Magali hated them.
Aching from not enough sleep, she climbed out of her cot and pulled on yesterday’s work clothes, still grungy and stiff with Shrieker slime from the day before. Once dressed, she squatted quickly at the bucket in the corner. Like most Yolk facilities, Yolk Factory 14 was still too new to have flushing toilets. They were lucky to have running water at all, considering the camp was little more than a bunch of metal huts haphazardly slapped together over the top of a Shrieker mound, then surrounded by razor wire. Magali’s sister and their quiet Aquafer roommate had fresh clothes to wear, but only because they had lost two hours of sleep to wash them at the communal facilities the night before.
Magali, who had earned herself three hours of direct Shrieker care for mouthing off to one of the foremen, had been so exhausted from the Shriekers’ constant proximity while feeding the beasts and checking their caves for ripening nodules that she hadn’t even had the energy to eat when the foreman had finally released her that night.
Five more years of this, she thought.
Eggers didn’t last five years. They were lucky if they lasted one. Getting chosen for the Shrieker mounds was a death sentence with no way out.
The United Space Coalition didn’t care.
Shriekers produced Yolk. A few drops of its concentrate could give even the slowest students a brief burst of high-level thinking and ultra-productive activity…an advanced society’s dream. For those who had the money to buy it, Yolk paid for its extravagant price tag with productivity hereto unknown before the colonization of Fortune. It made wise men out of fools, businessmen out of laborers, and orators out of bumpkins.
It also made dead men out of several hundred thousand healthy Fortuners every year, when their minds fell apart with Egger’s Wide—the permanent wide-eyed, drooling look of those who had spent too much time with the Shriekers.
Fortune had been a prosperous, growing colony right up until a government statistician found that Fortuners’ mean IQ fell well outside reasonable bounds. The subsequent studies found that Fortuners had more brainpower than the heart of the Coalition, which was pampered with every drug, technology, and procedure known to man. More study revealed that this was not due to a g
enetic bottleneck created by a handful of particularly gifted original colonists, but rather their custom of augmenting their diet with Shrieker nodules when crops failed.
Once the scientists narrowed it down to the Shriekers, Fortune hadn’t grown a soul in native population since. The colony had been on the decline for over thirty years, broken only by the infusions of criminals that the Coalition sent them to keep the Yolk farms stable.
That, and the soldiers.
Grimacing as another rattled their door, Magali checked to see that Anna was ready, then hurried to the exit. To go slow was to go without breakfast.
As soon as she yanked the door open and stopped in the cooler air of the threshold, Magali saw the Fortune Orbital hanging in the early morning sky like a blood-red star. Beside it and lower on the horizon, the alien Void Ring drifted nearby, a partially-completed silver arc that shone with the same intensity as the moon. With each day that passed, the half-moon of salvaged alien parts grew closer to a full circle as hordes of government engineers worked day and night to complete the massive structure. Her sister had told her that in less than a year, the Ring would be functional, and the Coalition would start sending waves of troops through it to start a new government hub on Fortune.
Magali shuddered, fighting down a sudden tightness in her gut. “Come on, Anna,” she managed, trying to sound upbeat for her sister’s sake. Glancing over her shoulder into the dim, too-hot interior of the tin shed, she growled, “Get your eight year old butt out here.”
“I’m eight years and a hundred and sixty-eight days old, so technically I’m nine, now.”
“That Standard or Colonial?” Magali asked, only half listening. The rest of her was still trying to shake off the unsettled feeling that she had been getting every morning since a Coalition crew had dragged the ruined Void Ring into Fortune’s orbit two months before.
Her younger sister snorted. “Colonial.”
Magali stepped into the two Size-9 slime-encrusted combat boots on the doorstep and laced them as she waited. “Lazy. It’d be easier to impress me with Standard.” She stood and tucked a clean rag into a pocket for cleanup later. “Now hurry up, okay?”
Anna threw her clean gray coveralls over her slim body and took longer than necessary to tie her laces. By the time she had followed Magali outside, most of the rest of the eggers were already in the morning formation. “I’m only seven years and two hundred eighty five days old Standard,” she said as she stepped into the sunlight and shielded her eyes as she squinted up at the Void Ring. Magali saw her sister’s face darken for just a moment before she pretended to yawn. “So it doesn’t sound as impressive.”
Magali laughed at her. “You had to think about it, didn’t you, Anna Banana?”
Anna scrunched her face and dropped her hand from the sky, giving Magali a dangerous scowl. “Don’t call me that.”
“Okay, Banana. I’ve got one for you.” Magali dragged her sister to the line of eggers gathering in the yard, then glanced down at her. “How old am I, Standard?”
Anna’s face immediately took on a bored look. “I don’t know.”
Magali lifted her brow. “Well figure it out.”
“Can’t.”
Can’t? That gave Magali pause. The last time Anna had said she couldn’t do something, half a Shrieker mound collapsed. She frowned down at Anna. “You can’t?”
“Yeah, can’t,” Anna said, watching the soldiers nudge the last few eggers into line with the butts of their rifles.
“Why not?” Magali demanded.
“Don’t know when you were born. Never asked, since I know nobody’s ever going to need to write it down on anything other than your tombstone.”
Magali squinted at her sister. “Why’s that?”
Anna shrugged. “You’ll figure it out.” When Magali continued to stare at her, Anna amended, “Eventually.” She started picking lint from her pristine, khaki-colored eggers’ uniform. Was it Magali’s imagination, or was the damn thing pressed? The perfectly starched, ever-present creases in her sister’s garb made Magali wonder just who the little twit had blackmailed to do her laundry.
“Okay,” Magali said, “I get it. Because I’m never going to amount to anything, is that it?”
Her sister raised a very unimpressed brow and flicked a piece of lint. “Bingo.”
“You’re punishing me for the Banana thing.”
“I hate bananas.”
“Would you rather I called you Anna Double-Patty Hamburger With Extra Mustard?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, Anna Double Patty Hamburger With—”
“You are so annoying.” Her little sister glared at her.
“And you’re so easy,” Magali said, grinning as she ruffled Anna’s hair.
Anna’s scowl deepened, but her mouth twitched in a smile.
The Camp Director took that moment to clear her throat at the front of the formation.
“It’s the cyborg,” Anna muttered, her smile disappearing instantly.
“She’s not a cyborg,” Magali said, under her breath.
But it couldn’t be far from the truth. The woman was hairless, having neither head hair nor eyelashes or eyebrows, and the translucent layer of her outer skin glittered and flashed with the gold filaments buried beneath. It was rumored in the camp that the Director was a former Coalition soldier, one of the super-humans that had crushed the last insurrection.
A Nephyr.
“Hello, ladies,” the woman said, flicking a tadfly off of her glittering arm. The thumb-sized bugs always seemed to swarm around the Director, even in the chill of morning. “How are we doing today?” Her voice held a tightness that could have been contributed to stress, or hating her life…or being a cyborg. Magali frowned at the woman, trying to decide if her sister was right.
“Business as usual,” the cyborg—Camp Director, Magali corrected herself—said. “Yolk’s coming due for harvest near the C-Block. I want a team down there twenty-four-seven, until it’s ripe.”
“It’s twenty-two-seven, moron,” Anna said. Several of the eggers close enough to hear Anna’s muttered comment chuckled, but Magali froze as the Camp Director’s dull brown eyes flickered toward her sister.
“Excuse me?” the Camp Director said, turning to face their section of the formation. Her skin glinted inhumanly in the morning rays. “Did someone have a question?”
Anna dutifully raised her hand.
“Anna, don’t,” Magali hissed.
The Camp Director’s face melted slightly. “And what was your question, little one?”
“Are you a cy-borg?” Anna asked in a singsong, childish voice.
Magali could have throttled her.
“No,” the Camp Director said. Her eyes meandered back up to Magali, a darkness crossing over them. “Who gave you that idea?”
“I read it in a book,” Anna said.
“Oh?” the Camp Director said, glancing back at her sister. In a pleased, patronizing voice, she said, “And what book might that have been, little one?” Her tone added, Robby Robot Goes to Town?
“The Consolidated Galactic Encyclopedia,” Anna replied. “It said that ‘a cyborg is a sentient combination of flesh and metal whose combined strength and utility is greater than that of an average natural fleshy creature of the same volume.’”
“Anna,” Magali warned.
Anna grinned at the Camp Director. “So I wanted to know what you call yourself, if not a cyborg.”
The cyborg’s eyes narrowed slightly, as if she were an exotic bird-keeper who was just beginning to realize that this particular parrot was actually a hawk in disguise. “Excuse me?”
“But then again, your utility is pretty close to nil, from what I’ve seen of you sitting on your fat ass all the time, so I guess maybe you’re not a cyborg after all. I wonder if they have a word for ‘lazy useless Coalition throwback’ in that book I read.”
“Anna!” Magali snapped, grabbing her sister’s arm and shaking it. All around
them, eggers were snickering under their breath.
The Camp Director stared at her sister for some time before her eyes once again moved to Magali. The Director’s voice was deadly cold. “Who taught her those lines?”
I hate you, Magali thought, glaring at her sister. Then, straightening, she said to the Director, “I did, Ma’am.”
“And you thought we wouldn’t figure it out?” the Director demanded. “You thought you could get away with teaching a seven-year old something like that?”
“Yep,” Anna said cheerfully. “She taught me real good.”
God I hate her. “I’m sorry, Director,” Magali babbled. “I won’t do it again.”
To her surprise, the Director’s face stretched in a smile. “I like you, kid. What’s your name?”
“Magali,” Anna gleefully offered up, smiling up at her as Magali’s guts wrenched with the instinct to flee.
“Make her a foreman,” the Director said to her ever-present assistant. The lean, average-looking man—an AI, some said, though Magali didn’t see it—nodded and made an adjustment on his handheld device.
Magali could only stare as the Director immediately went on with other business. Anna nudged her in the side once the formation had been dismissed for breakfast. “See? Cool, huh?”
Magali blinked down at her little sister as they walked down the dusty path to the cafeteria. “You did that on purpose, you shit?”
Anna scoffed. “What, you think it was an accident?” She snorted with disdain. “You weren’t getting enough sleep. Got rings under your eyes, and you smell like dried Shrieker slime. Figured you could at least start telling some dumb egger to clean your uniform for you so I don’t have to smell it all night.”
Magali grimaced at her sister. “Someday,” Magali said, still panting from the way her heart was pounding, “I’m going to give you a taste of your own medicine.”
“No you won’t,” her sister snorted.