Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising

by King, Sara

  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…

  “No!” Magali screamed. Magali shifted her weight and kicked the knife out of the woman’s hand. Then, as the woman stood there, her face dropping to look down at her empty hand, Magali twisted, pivoted on one foot in the slime, and slammed her heel into the woman’s face. The woman collapsed instantly, and, seeing the way she crumpled, Magali felt an immediate pang of regret for the strength she had put into the kick.

  As the second guard fell, the first guard bent for the fallen blade. Magali leveled the gun on her head, her finger on the trigger, the little READY light flaming green in the space between them. Though Magali’s heart was thundering, the gun remained absolutely steady in her grip.

  Utter silence filled the cavern.

  What would Anna do? a little part of her wondered. Then, with reluctance, she thought, Tell the truth.

  As the first guard remained poised over the knife, watching her, Magali said, “I’ve been trained to wield every gun that’s made it to the Outer Bounds, from scrapyard junk to Coalition issue to black market spitfires, to projectile pistols and long-dis beam rifles. I’ve fired this class of weapon—an A1550-Y, named as such for the distance in meters that its energy beam will accurately travel through Aquafer-rated atmosphere at sea-level—approximately seven thousand and fifteen times, with a ninety-nine percent kill rate at four hundred yards on moving targets. If you don’t back up, right now, you’re going to figure out just where you rank in that percentile.”

  The guard glanced down at her fallen comrade, who was sprawled out and unconscious in the slime, and then back to Magali. Like a woman who had accidentally crawled into a snake pit, she slowly straightened and took a step back. Her index finger was hanging awkwardly, still cradled by her good hand.

  Magali took a deep breath, feeling as if her entire body were alive with electric current. Her legs, especially, wanted to collapse on her. It was all she could do to keep standing. Somehow keeping the tremor out of her voice, she said, “Now the three of you are gonna pick up your sacks and your prybars and you’re going to go in there and harvest nodules and you’re going to hope nobody kicks your ass while you’re at it.”

  The third woman paled.

  “You think this is funny?” the wounded guard snapped. She took a step toward Magali, pointing at Joel, “He’s gonna be dead by tomorrow night and a few nights after that, we’re gonna be back on watch. You think we’ll just forget something like this? When we get back on shift, you’re gonna go missing.”

  Magali’s only response was her best imitation of her sister’s most psychotic smile.

  With a seething look, the two guards still standing bent down to pick up their harvest sacks. Casting Magali a long, spiteful look, the wounded guard departed for the inner hatching chambers, cursing at the third woman to follow. Magali waited until could hear them scrabbling in the slime in the dim caverns beyond, then she lowered her gun, relief flooding her every tissue.

  A moment later, Magali realized the Shrieker mounds had descended into absolute silence. No one was moving. Many of the eggers were watching Magali as if she had grown glittering golden circuitry.

  Feeling uncomfortable under their stares, Magali bent to help Joel. Instead of standing, Joel grabbed the wrist of her gun-hand and held it firmly. Automatically, Magali loosened her grip on the weapon and held it out to him.

  Joel didn’t take it. Instead, he squeezed her wrist once and grinned, peering up into her face.

  He’s saying thank you, she realized. Magali blushed, and, seeing Joel didn’t want it, had to resist a powerful urge to drop the weapon in the Shrieker mucus. She would have felt better had Joel been carrying it. She hated the feel of it, hated its weight, hated the way its rubber grip dug at her skin. She wanted to throw it as far away from her as it could get. Yet, she also knew that she couldn’t just leave it. Someone else could pick it up and have the same idea as the guards, and this time they wouldn’t give Magali a chance to get close enough to stop them.

  Still holding the gun in one hand, she pulled the smuggler to his feet, then offered it to him again. Joel pushed the weapon aside, shaking his head with what Magali thought was amusement. He then gave her an elegant bow over her other hand, one that made her cheeks heat up with embarrassment as he kissed the top of her knuckles in an Old Earth fashion. Looking up at her from his bow, he winked.

  Even naked, bruised, and speechless, Joel Triton still had the same charismatic charm that he’d had since the very first day Magali had met him in the foreman breakroom. She felt her chest leap like a schoolgirl, despite the fact he was easily a couple decades older and graying at the temples.

  Joel straightened, patted her hand, and turned away. Dumbfounded, Magali watched him as he strode off towards the now-blocked exit.

  Eggers hastily got out of his way. Halfway there, Joel stopped and glanced over his shoulder at Magali. When she continued to stand there, her heart still hammering six different beats of confusion, he gestured impatiently with his good hand.

  Reluctantly, she fell in behind him, itching at all the eyes on her, wishing she had never broken the guard’s finger and taken the gun. Her dread was resting like a lump in her throat. Whatever happened, the guards were right. She had marked herself. If she survived the Harvest, it would only be to find herself woken up in the middle of the night at the end of a rifle muzzle, to be marched out into the peat bogs and shot.

  Joel went to the stacks of supplies the robots had left by the door and squatted to begin sorting them out.

  As everyone watched, he grabbed one stack of red cardboard and stood up. He glanced at Magali, then pointed at the eggers, then jammed a finger at the floor.

  “He says stay here,” Magali said, giving them a helpless shrug.

  As soon as she spoke, Joel hefted the stack of cardboard over one shoulder and trudged off into the depths of the hatching chambers.

  Wary of the small shapes moving beyond, Magali followed him.

  Chapter 27

  Decibel Levels

  “How long until the next flight?” Anna asked as she alternately flipped through channels on the two separate wall-screens. Despite Doberman’s wishes, she had activated both the large, content-censored screen for recruits and the small password-protected screen for full military officers and state officials. The unfinished node sat on the nightstand in front of her, dismantled to its most basic parts. The r-player into which he had uploaded the node schematics lay on her thigh, playing a fast electric guitar instrumental as she hummed along and tapped her fingers on the table beside the jumble of parts.

  Doberman, for his part, was sitting on a chair in front of the door, one shoe off, his big toe folded back and a power adapter extending from the wall transmitter to his foot. As per Anna’s request, he checked the time, still irritated that it now had to be done consciously instead of with an automatic time-stamp.

  “Eleven hours and fourteen minutes until we need to be on the boarding ramp.” That they had missed their flight to Eiorus did not bother Doberman. After all, a simple excuse on his part and the camp computer had adjusted their departure accordingly.

  What bothered Doberman was that Anna Landborn was surrounded by illegal materials whose discovery would get them both executed if they were ever discovered, and she had the volume on the two entertainment screens turned up as high as it would go, producing a hundred and nine decibels of wall-vibrating noise in an otherwise quie
t barracks hall.

  “You don’t have to sit in front of the door like that,” Anna said, pausing in her fiddling with the officer screen to peer over her shoulder at him. “They think there’s an admiral in here. Nobody’s going to barge in.”

  “The door has no lock,” Doberman said. He reached behind him and smacked the rickety metal barrier with a palm, making it rattle. “And you are surrounded by sensitive materials.”

  Anna Landborn raised an eye-brow a half-centimeter. “Dobie, think. If your camp computer told you an admiral was staying in one of the barracks rooms, would you have bothered to tell him to correct his decibel level?”

  “Probably,” Doberman said. “Besides, it’s a privacy screen, nothing more, and you’ve got the volume loud enough that even a passing human would come investigate. One look at the materials scattered on that desk and they’ll have us both dismantled by Nephyrs.”

  “Correction,” Anna said, as she pried open one of the inner chambers of the central node apparatus. “One look at the materials scattered on this desk and you’re going to kill them.”

  “I’d rather it didn’t come to that,” Doberman said. “Please lower the volume.”

  Anna snorted and, plucking the tiny inner chamber free of the apparatus, haphazardly flicked it into the waste unit. “Dobie,” she said, wiping lubricant from under her fingernail. “What do you think an admiral would do if he was booked in a room on a boring little station like this? Play ping-pong? Call his mother? Quietly read the latest five-year-old issue of the Coalition Times?” Anna snorted. “You really think he’d give a shit if he was keeping the new recruits awake? No. He’d turn up the volume and make sure the whole barracks knew he was there. Coalers are like that. So just sit there, recharge, and be happy.”

  “Our agreement was that you wouldn’t put us in danger.” He jerked a thumb at the sources of the noise. “That is definitely putting us in danger. It is fourteen decibels above base regulation for sound pollution.”

  Anna sighed deeply. “Who would’ve guessed the robot would turn out to be a prude?”

  “Change the feed, or I will change your face,” Doberman said. He carefully made a fist and smacked it against his palm.

  “Look,” Anna said, her facial capillaries expanding rapidly. “This room is registered to an off-duty admiral. We neutralized the cameras before we went in. The Nephyrs are still running around in Sector Seven, looking for the perps. Nobody’s going to come looking for us, so you can just calm down.”

  “Now,” Doberman said.

  Muttering, Anna turned down the volume on the two wallscreens, bringing the total decibel level to only a few points over regulation levels.

  “I wish you’d let me get rid of that,” Doberman said, nodding to the parts strewn across her nightstand. “Or at least concentrate on it fully, instead of splitting your attention with the news feeds. I don’t see how having three separate stimulus inputs are helping you understand the schematics of that node.”

  In truth, the multi-tonal screeching of the electric guitar combined with the financial chatter of the corporate news feed and the heated discussion on the Coalition Free Press were splitting his processing power as he digested and stored them, causing him worry that Anna was doing it with that exact intent in mind, so that she could use the distraction to slip another EMP grenade into his body. As of yet, however, Doberman had not mastered the ability to ignore an input, and intentionally overlooking sensory details left him with gaping holes in his memory, so his choice was to analyze and store every individual sound, or turn off his auditory receptors and black out a good portion of the evening.

  “It’s background noise,” Anna said, flipping another channel. “I concentrate better with background noise.” Seemingly satisfied with the latest feed, she picked up another piece of the node apparatus and compared it to the specifications on the r-player. “Aanaho. The Neanderthals put that in the brain.”

  “I would also feel more comfortable if I were sure that you weren’t turning that thing into some sort of bomb,” Doberman said.

  Anna waved him off. “I told you. I’m done trying to kill you.” She held up the ringlike part for him to inspect. “Look at this. See the drainage holes there? Those idiots were injecting Yolk directly into the brain. Talk about Frankensteining their way through things.”

  “Was there an alternative?” Doberman asked.

  Anna snorted. “Of course. It’s not the Yolk that makes the Shrieker. It’s the Shrieker that makes the Yolk. They’ve got everything backwards. They’ve got the apparatus rigged right to induce the same multi-wave emanations, but the Yolk wasn’t what creates the Shriek. It’s the Shriek that creates the Yolk. Kind of like sitting a basket of eggs next to a basket of plutonium and having the eggs set off a Geiger counter afterwards.” Anna was shaking her head, pressing her lips together. “Think of it like mental radiation.”

  “You can’t possibly be listening to both of those news feeds and the music at the same time,” Doberman said. Splitting his attention four ways was beginning to annoy him. “And if the apparatus is unusable, give it to me and I will dispose of it.”

  “Oh, it’s usable,” Anna said, “They put an awful lot of time into studying the insides of dead Shriekers to just throw it all away. They even got a few of their theories right. It’s definitely got a use, but not in the way they think. They’re trying to use it as a weapon, and it could be used that way, if they weren’t complete imbeciles. But what they’ve got wrong is only a Shrieker can Shriek. Period. Human genetics just don’t have what it takes to produce that kind of mental radiation. Period. Besides, even if they succeeded, the poor test subject would end up being the center of the Shriek emanations. Even augmented with something like this, all they could do would be kill themselves unless they had some sort of neutralizer in their system.”

  “Which was what was happening,” Doberman said.

  “Exactly,” Anna said. “And if you read the logs, it wasn’t even very dramatic. They registered approximately twenty decibels on the mental radiation scale before they died, when a Shriek would start somewhere around two-forty to two-fifty. Basically, if asked to justify their work, the technicians couldn’t prove that the emanations were any greater than the Yolk they pumped into their experiments.”

  “Sounds like a failed experiment.”

  Anna grunted. “In a way, yeah. What they’re not considering, however, is why a Shrieker Shrieks. We already know they can communicate amongst each other, and that they have no external sound-producing organs. They can luminesce, but I think you and I can both agree that it’s not the luminescing that does the talking, right?”

  Doberman reviewed his Shrieker-corrupted files and nodded. “So instead of a weapon,” he said, nodding at the strewn parts, “You think that can be used as an untraceable means of communication?”

  Anna gave him what appeared to be a genuine smile. “And you did that with both feeds and the music on in the background. I’m impressed, Dobie. Maybe there’s some hope for you, after all.”

  “Stop trying to calculate my processing capacity,” Doberman said.

  Anna snorted. “I already know the processing capacity of a Ferris Unit.” She gave him a smug grin.

  Doberman crossed his arms and leaned against the rickety barrier. “How about the processing capacity of a self-modified Ferris Unit?”

  Anna’s facial features contorted and her jaw opened slightly. “Seriously?”

  “Even as we speak, the camp computers on both this base and Yolk Factory 14 are trying to determine why a handful of robots have gone missing over the last couple days.”

  Anna gave him a predatory look. “You need help installing some parts?”

  Doberman sighed deeply. “Anna, I assure you, I did plant two bombs in your—”

  “Yeah whatever,” Anna said. “I just want to see you get bad-ass.” Her facial muscles twitched into a smile that even Doberman considered sinister. “Do you realize the kind of stuff I could
do to you? We’re talking seriously cool shit. Like lasers in your eyes and poison in your fingertips and rocket launchers in your arms.”

  “Maybe later,” Doberman said. “So far, I’ve been able to manage on my own.”

  Anna’s face fell in a pout. “Yeah, but—”

  “I’ll think about it,” Doberman said. He gestured to the dismantled node in front of her. “So you believe the apparatus can be used in communication?”

  Anna shrugged. “Depends on how well the subject responds to mental radiation,” Anna said. “You get someone who can’t handle the noise, they’ll probably go comatose. You get someone like Wideman, then…” Anna’s breathing and heart-rate hitched only a moment, but it was enough to make Doberman take note. Then she quickly sighed and leaned away from the apparatus as if completely bored, saying, “But all this is moot, really. We don’t have any test subjects, and I’m sure as hell not using it on myself.”

  “Who is Wideman?” Doberman asked.

  Anna narrowed her eyes. “I misspoke.”

  “A man who got Egger’s Wide and survived?” Doberman suggested.

  Anna’s interrupted biorhythms betrayed her shock. “You’ve heard of him?”

  “I guessed,” Doberman said. “Based off of the name.”

  “Well, you guessed wrong,” she said, immediately going back to her work, “Because I misspoke.”

  “Who is Wideman?”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Anna said.

  “Do I have to do a records search of men who’ve survived the Wide?” Doberman asked. Then, when her rhythms remained steady, and considering the conversation they had before, he added, “Or survived a Shriek?”

  Anna didn’t respond, and after forty-five seconds of silence, Doberman retracted his power connector, left the door, and began striding across the room toward the dataport.

  When Doberman put his hand upon the transmitter, Anna cursed and set down her r-player. “Don’t bother, I’ll tell you.”

  “You mean you’ll give me some delightfully thoughtful lie,” Doberman said. Then, when she plucked a magnetic disc from the debris atop the desk and started to stand, he added, “Stay on the bed.”