Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising
Read Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising Online
Authors: Sara King
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 4
th
Segment and then applied three years of cattle prods, threats, and blackmail to
force me to write the 5
th
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…
Chapter 11:
Dealing with a Sociopath
Chapter 15:
Striking a Bargain
Chapter 21: Double-Patty
Cheeseburgers
Chapter 30: The
Ferryman’s Dilemma
Chapter 34:
The Red or the Black
Chapter 36:
Tatiana Flies Cargo
Chapter 39:
The Last Fifty Feet
Chapter 42:
That Night in the Desert…
Chapter 45:
Milar’s Experiment
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 genetic 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.
And, Magali knew, Anna was
right. Magali had nothing that could even compare to Anna’s quirky,
egotistical—sometimes even vicious—eight year old brain. There
was
no
comparison. There was just…Anna.
“Besides,” Anna said, yawning.
“The only thing you’re good for is pulling a trigger, anyway.”
Killer,
Magali heard
Wideman say again. She cringed inside. “Shut up, Anna. I told you I don’t
wanna hear about that.”
“What, still afraid you might be
a robot?”
A robot who could hit a
starlope from a mile off…with iron sights.
“I said shut up, Banana,” she
warned. Magali knew she wasn’t a robot. During one of her more gloomy days,
after another of Anna’s taunts, she had cut open the bony part of her wrist,
just to make sure.
