Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (14 page)

Chapter
12

Cold
Knife

Veera unlocked their cuffs as
soon as their ship was out of sight over the treetops.

“Thank you,” Patrick said,
wincing as he pried the blood-crusted metal from his wrists.  Young Dave handed
him the bundle of nanostrips and he started applying them to the cuts.  Only
the sound of the adhesive being removed punctured the silence that followed.

“One you boys mind explaining
what that was all about?” the elder Dave asked.  The huntsman looked the least
upset of any of them, though his gaze was deadly.  He was fingering the big
knife he used for skinning starlopes.  “‘Cause I really want to know.”

“Patrick, here, just gave the
government all our names because some pretty little squid batted her eyes at
him,” Jeanne said.  Her dark stare was enough to give him goosebumps.  “Isn’t
that right, Pat?”

“Damn right it is,” Milar asked. 
“I sure as Hell didn’t do it.”  He crossed his arms over his chest and scowled
at him.  He was still naked, and hadn’t asked to borrow someone’s coat.  No one
had offered.

Patrick grimaced.  “I didn’t
realize she was—”

“Didn’t
realize?
” Milar
snapped.  “She asked you to name all the pilots in town and you don’t think
anything of it?”  He waved a dragon-tattooed arm in the direction of where
their ship had disappeared.  “Do you realize the little squid is running off
with our ride to spill her guts to the Coalition while we hike twenty miles
back to town?  Do you realize we are dead men?”

Patrick reddened.  “Maybe she
wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to escape if you didn’t keep telling her we
were gonna dump her in the Shrieker mounds,
Milar.
  You were terrifying
her.”

Milar stepped closer, until they
were eye-to-eye.  “Terrified is better than skipping off in our ship, you
stupid bastard.”

“The only
reason
she
skipped off in our ship was because—”

“Quiet!” young Dave shouted.

Milar and Patrick turned,
blinking at him.

“Listen,” young Dave said,
peering at the treetops behind them.  “It’s a long ways off, but the engines
are going ballistic.  Almost like she intentionally put it in a stall.”

The seven of them paused to
listen.  Sure enough, the engines were roaring full-throttle, and the sound of
trees cracking was audible even above the screaming mechanics.

Milar glanced at Patrick.  “Think
the little squid was lying about being able to fly?”

“No,” Jeanne said, shaking her
head.  “She was bristling with titanium, and I’ve seen those electronics
before.  They only put the body nodes on their best operators.  I pray to God I
never encounter one on my Yolk runs.  Those types can fly a Shrieker through
Hell, if they had to.”

A grinding screech cut her off. 
There was series of loud snaps from the forest in the distance, then silence.

“She went down,” Milar noted.

“Then your ship malfunctioned,”
Jeanne said.  She shrugged and took Wideman Joe by the arm.  “Whatever.  It’s
your problem, now.  C’mon, Joe.  Let’s get you back home.”

Then, as she was passing, she
stopped and said, “And Patrick?”

Patrick looked up.

Jeanne’s glittering green eyes
darkened over her human-molar necklace.  “If you ever give my name out to a
coaler again…”

Reddening, Patrick said, “I
won’t.”

“Good.”  Jeanne turned.  “Come
on, y’all.  Let’s leave these boys to their own hole.”

Veera was the last to leave.  She
sighed and patted Patrick on the shoulder.  “Come back with us.  I’ll fly you
two back to the crash site.  It’ll be easier to spot from the air.”

“Screw that,” Milar said.  “I’m
not giving her another six hours to play with my ship.”

Veera looked at Milar and
sighed.  “I was young once, too.  Had a grand ol’ time of it, too.”  She
glanced from Patrick and to Milar and back.  “But boys, I think you might’ve
bit off more than you could chew, with this one.”  She cleared her throat
uncomfortably.  “I know Wideman’s shown you some things…”  Her eyes found Milar
and stayed there a long moment, then she gave the treeline an unhappy look. 

Milar’s face darkened.  “Don’t
worry about the coaler tramp.  I’ll take care of her.”

Veera laughed.  “I’m sure you
will.”  She shook her head.  “No, I wasn’t talking about that.  I was talking
about this war that you two are so set on.”

Patrick groaned.  “Veera, not
again…”

She held up her hand.  “Just
before I got Milar’s call, I heard a report on the waves.  Seems like a whole
village fifty miles south of the Snake went quiet about five hours ago.  Town
called Cold Knife.  A crag-hunter went in to investigate after his mother
didn’t answer her phone.  He found every soul in the place dead.  Most lined up
and killed out in the fields.  Government boot and soldier tracks everywhere.”

Pat felt himself go cold.  The
shock must’ve been written across his face, because Veera gently patted his
arm.  “Just wanted to warn you.  The others will know soon enough.”  Then, in
silence, she followed the other pilots back to town.

For a long time, neither Milar
nor Patrick spoke.  Then, softly, Patrick said, “We took her just south of the
Snake.”

“Yeah,” Milar muttered.  His face
had gone hard.  “The little squid got a list of names out of you—who’s to say
she didn’t find a few minutes to make a call, too?”

Horror at what they had done
overwhelmed Patrick.  “We got a whole village killed.”

“No,” Milar snapped, turning on
him suddenly.  His face was livid.  “
She
got a whole village killed,
Pat.”  Without another word, he broke into a purposeful jog in the opposite
direction as Veera and the others.  Towards the ongoing sounds of the crash.

Seeing the way his brother was
moving, Patrick suddenly felt a pang of fear for the girl’s safety.  He had
seen that look before, the day they found their sister.  Eight regiment
fighters had died within the next eight days, their bodies buried in little
mounds near where Milar had shot them in the head.  Patrick started to call
out, then stopped himself.

Why should he?

She’d called her buddies and
they’d wasted an entire town.

Whatever his brother did to her,
it was well deserved.

Patrick turned and went to catch
up with Veera and the others.  He wasn’t going to stop Milar, but he didn’t
want to see it, either.  Even when they’d avenged their sister, he had never
been there to watch his brother mete out justice.  He had helped Milar drag
them onto the ship, then had quickly found something else to do, well out of
earshot.

Milar had been all too happy to
have them to himself.

Afterwards, Patrick had never
seen the corpses, since Milar always had them buried by the time he returned,
but judging from how long it took his brother to radio him back, shooting them
in the head wasn’t all he did to them.

Patrick just hoped that when
Veera flew him back with the salvage ship, he didn’t happen to spot the little
unmarked grave. 

Chapter
13

Alone
with Milar

Tatiana woke to a faceful of
console.

Groaning, she lifted her cheek
off the bloody controls and immediately began to choke on the burnt-rubber
smell wafting through the cabin in hazy black layers.

Tatiana struggled to find the
release catch on the seatbelt, then threw the shoulder straps off and slid to
the aluminum floor, dizzy with fumes and the blow to the head.

Concussion,
she thought,
sleepily.  The fumes weren’t so bad on the floor, and she’d never been so tired
in her life.  Off to one corner of the cockpit, she could see orange tongues of
flame licking up from the wiring under the copilot’s instruments panel. 
Somewhere, an alarm was going off.

Engines,
she thought,
dizzy.  She’d never shut them off.  Even then, they were shoving the nose of
the craft through the trees, plowing slowly through the forest like a derailed
train.

Biting back a cry at the spike of
agony in her shoulder when she moved, Tatiana crawled back up to the pilot’s
chair and hit the shutdown sequence with her good hand.  Then she fell from the
seat and hit the floor hard.  Immediately, Tatiana’s lungs emptied in a scream
as a blast of searing pain arced through her shoulder and up her neck. 

She blacked out.

Tatiana woke on her back,
gasping, her right arm limp and immobile.  Her spine felt like it was on fire,
and one of the nodes in her chest had been loosened by the impact with the
safety harness, and even then blood was leaking from its ruined coupling,
pooling between her breasts.

Heat to one side of her face
brought Tatiana’s attention back to her surroundings.

The fire was still burning, and
while the heat itself wouldn’t kill her, the fumes were already turning her
vision a dark shade of red.  Or was that the concussion?

Tatiana was so tired she couldn’t
think.

She lay there for what seemed
like forever, fighting sleep.  The level of the smoke was growing closer to her
face with every breath, trapped in the cockpit by the sealed hatch, and yet she
couldn’t bring herself to care.  All she wanted to do was close her eyes… 

No.

Instinct made her roll over and
start crawling toward the exit.  Smoke swirled around her, searing her lungs,
making her feel like she’d swallowed liquid plastic.  Gagging, she reached the
hatch and touched it open.

Milar was standing on the other
side, fully dressed.  A belt of cargo rope kept his pants on his hips. 

No,
her mind whispered. 
That
is not possible.  I saw him leave…

For a moment, she thought it was
another illusion, something the crazed egger’s hallucinogenic vegetables had
left her.

Then he squatted in front of her
and jerked her head up to look at him.  There was no mistaking the firm grip on
her chin as his fingers pried at her scalp and came away scarlet.  Then he
grunted and released her, standing again.

He moved out of the way as a
cloud of smoke billowed out ahead of her, then, giving her a dark look, stepped
inside and wrenched a fire extinguisher from the wall above her head.

Tatiana lowered her forehead to
the floor, feeling the sticky pull of blood in her scalp as she listened to the
sound of a fire extinguisher behind her.  Her eyes were drooping shut again.

“Hey.”

A foot nudged her in the side. 
Gently first, then harder.

Let me sleep,
Tatiana
thought.

“Hey, dammit.”  Big hands grabbed
her arm and wrenched up.

Tatiana screamed.

The hands dropped her.

She hit the deck hard, though she
barely felt her lip split against the metal flooring.  She was so tired.  She
closed her eyes again.

Milar reached down and tugged her
over onto her back.  The motion ground at her shoulder and the loose node in
her chest and Tatiana whimpered, squeezing her eyes shut against the pain.

“Aanaho, that’s a lot of blood.” 
To her horror, Milar unzipped the front of her jumpsuit.  She tried to push his
arm away, but he just batted it aside and reached down to prod at the loosened
node.  He grimaced.  “You want the good news or the bad news, sweetie?”

Tatiana closed her eyes.

“The good news…”  Tatiana
shuddered as he pushed the node back into place, feeling metal and synthetic
anchor lines sliding back under her skin and through her flesh.  “…is that it
didn’t come all the way out.”

Thinking about the arteries it
would have severed if it had, Tatiana felt sick.  She swallowed down bile.

“Also, I’m pretty sure you broke
your collarbone.  Wouldn’t be too surprised if you knocked your brain around a
bit, too.  But that’s not the bad news.”

The tone of his voice forced
Tatiana’s eyes open. 

The darkness in Milar’s face was
terrifying.  “The bad news—for you anyway—is that it looks like my brother
decided to leave the two of us alone for awhile.”  He had a knife in his hand. 
He tapped it on his thigh as he smiled at her, his lips parted cruelly. 

Tatiana started to sit up, but
Milar’s hand came within a centimeter of her injured shoulder and hovered
there, in warning.  She slumped back to the deck.

“I want you to tell me
something,” Milar said, his yellow-brown eyes watching her face closely.  “And
I want you to think about it really hard before you do.  All right?”

Tatiana licked her dry lips,
tasting the blood there.  Dazedly, she nodded.

For a long moment, Milar just
squatted in the hall, watching her.  Then, quietly, he said, “Did you call for
your friends to rescue you?  Does anyone else know we captured you?”

He’s getting ready to kill me,
Tatiana’s panicked mind thought.  Fear—as well as the clean air from the open
hatch—was rapidly dragging her back to her senses. 
He wants to know if
there will be any retribution.  He wants to know if he’ll take the heat when
they can’t find me.

She opened her mouth.

Milar touched her lips.  “Think
about it, sweetie.  No lying.  One way or the other.  Did you call anyone?”

Tatiana froze.  There was
something about his voice that set off warning bells in her mind.

If I tell him I called,
her mind argued,
then he’ll keep me alive as an insurance against when they
come to rescue me and—

But they didn’t know.  Tatiana
was all alone.  To the world, she was dead, and she was looking up at her grim
reaper.

Milar was going to kill her.

Lie,
part of her
screamed. 
You lie and at least he’ll spare you a few more days.

“Yeah,” Tatiana said, stronger
than she felt.  “I called.  Told them everything.  They’re gonna find you and
crush your pathetic little rebel hideout and drag you and your idiot brother
back for correction and I’m gonna laugh.”

Milar’s face hardened.  “Really.”

“Sure are,” Tatiana said.  “I
told them about you and your brother and blowing up my soldier and pulling out
my lifeline and kidnapping me.  Told them the name of your ship, and about
Wideman Joe—”

Milar’s face had grown
increasingly dark until she mentioned Wideman Joe.  Then he cut her off
suddenly.  “Stop,” he said, frowning.  “You told them about Wideman Joe?”

“Yeah, and how I’d escaped and
was on my way to the base and I even gave them my coordinates, so you’d better
hightail it out of here right now.”

A sudden clearness came over
Milar’s face.  “You’re lying.”

“No I’m not.”

“Really?”  He jerked a thumb over
his shoulder at the cockpit.  “You made your call from here?”

“Yeah,” Tatiana said, though she
was growing suspicious of the odd look on his face.  “Why?”

Milar stared at her for the
longest time.  Then he cursed.  “I knew it didn’t make sense.”  He held up a
thumb and forefinger in front of her face.  “You were this close, you little
government squid.  You realize that?  This close.”

“What are you talking about?”
Tatiana snapped.  “I made the call right after I left you and your friends
off.  They know where I am and they’re going to come rescue me any minute, so
you better run while you still can, creep.”

Milar’s face eased into an amused
smile.  “Really.  And you made the call from here.  On my ship.”

“Of course!” Tatiana said.  “It
was the first thing I did.”

Milar snorted.  “Let me show you
something, sweetie.”  He got up and went to the pilot’s console.  From
underneath, he yanked open the two cabinet-like doors, exposing the wiring
underneath.  “See this?” he asked, pointing to what looked like a molten lump
of slag with industrial, multi-colored wires leaking out of it. 

But Tatiana had already
recognized it.  The communications unit.  An old land-rover model, probably
jury-rigged to fit in the ship because the owners were too poor to buy a
ship-grade device.  It was a sad little thing, and its useful distance only
about two hundred kilometers.

The nearest base was about two
thousand.

“I made the call to a Yolk
factory,” she amended, her face heating.

He slapped the cabinet shut,
openly grinning, now.  “You never made any calls, did you?”

“Of course I did,” she said,
though they both knew he had caught her. 

Milar lowered himself back down
beside her and leaned back against the wall as he watched her.  The knife
caught the light as he held it out between them.  He tisked.  “I told you not
to lie.” 

Tatiana froze, realizing it was
the same knife she had made him use to cut off his clothes.

He dangled it between his
fingers, smirking at her, obviously thinking the same thing. 
There’s nobody
to save you, sweetie,
his piss-brown eyes said.  “So where should we
start?”

“I made an earlier call,” Tatiana
said quickly.  “From my soldier.  While Patrick was looking at the inside.  I
had a com unit on the ground.  I told them everything.  They said they were
going to take both of you and everyone you knew back for correction.”

Milar stopped twirling the knife
and his gaze fixed on her darkly.  For a long moment, he said nothing.  Then he
pointed the knife at her, eyes narrowing.  “I said no lying.”

“I really did—” she began.

Milar moved more quickly than she
ever thought possible for someone of his size.  In an instant, he had dragged
her almost into his lap, the blade at her throat.  “You didn’t call anyone, did
you, sweetie?  You’re all alone out here.  Just you and me and that great big
grave you just carved yourself with the nose of my ship.”

Tatiana knew she was going to
die.

“Now,” Milar said softly, leaning
down until his face almost touched hers.  “Last chance, sweetie.  You call
anyone?”

“No,” she whispered, closing her
eyes.  Tears stung at the corners.  “I never got a chance to call anyone, you
stinking colonist crawler.” 

Milar tightened his grip and
Tatiana froze as the knife bit deeper.  She felt the cold metal at her throat,
could imagine what it would feel like when it sank into her skin, could already
feel the tug as it sliced through her flesh.  Knowing Milar, he’d probably take
his time.  Make her cry.  Watch her bleed.

Sick bastard.

It seemed like forever before
Milar spoke.  When he did, his voice had a sharper edge.  “You know what
happens next, right?  If everybody thinks you’re dead and nobody knows you’re
here, there’s nothing stopping me from burying your corpse in that nice big
furrow you made with my ship and going about my merry way.  Are you
sure
nobody knows?”

“How could they?!” Tatiana
snapped, lifting her head into his face.  “If you’re going to kill me, just do
it already.  Stop taunting me, you sick bastard.”

For what seemed like an eternity,
Milar merely frowned at her.  Then he straightened and released her.  Looking
off to the side, he began once more dangling the knife between his fingers. 
“Zip up.”

Tatiana scooted away from him. 
She frowned at him. 
Zip up?
  What?  Why hadn’t he killed her?  What was
his game?

“Your
jumpsuit,
squid.”

Tatiana glanced down at the
injured node in her chest and flushed a deep scarlet when she saw her breasts
were exposed.  She yanked her jumpsuit shut and zipped it up, a blush creeping
up her neck like wildfire. 

“Don’t worry,” Milar sneered,
“Bleeding, topless cyborgs aren’t my style.”

Once again, Tatiana was reminded
of the unsightly metal nodes protruding from her stomach, chest, sides, legs,
arms, spine, and skull.  Humiliated, she began inching backwards, toward the
stairs.  If she could get to the top of the staircase, she might be able to
make a run for it…

A big hand caught her ankle and
dragged her back within reach.  Milar was smirking at her again.  “
But
,
if you try to run, I just might reconsider letting you keep your jumpsuit.” 
His lips quirked in a smile and he tapped his exposed thigh with the knife
meaningfully.  “Considerin’.”  The knot and the belt still held his ruined
pants to his hips, but a ragged slit ran down one leg, exposing much of the
flesh underneath.

Tatiana swallowed, hard.

Male technicians working in the
soldiers’ staging area saw her naked all the time as they prepped her for
missions, but the thought of Milar seeing her naked was…unacceptable.

Then Milar’s face twisted into a
leer.  “Then again, I might reconsider it anyway.  I still owe ya one,
sweetie.” 

Tatiana’s blush deepened until
she felt like her entire face was on fire.  Her eyes fell to the knife in his
hand.  She suddenly didn’t feel too well.

“But,” Milar said, leaning back
against the wall and smirking, “We’ve got awhile.  I could always just think of
something more fitting.”