Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (29 page)

Anna’s facial muscles lost
tension and her musculature tightened on her frame.  “What?”

“He was found trying to kidnap a
Coalition operator.”

“The
Nephyrs
have him?”
Anna whispered.  It appeared as if, for once, Anna Landborn had completely
forgotten to regulate her own biorhythms.  Her breathing was fast, her
heart-rate elevated, her eye-dilation indicating total shock.  “You’re lying.”

“He’s being held in this very
station, as a matter of fact,” Doberman said.  “If you had been paying
attention to your ‘background noise’ like you were forcing me to do, you would
have seen him.”

Anna’s eyes flickered toward the
screens, which now showed a base football game and a Shrieker harvest,
respectively.  “You’re lying,” she said, angrier.

Doberman sighed and replayed his
recording of the operator’s speech for Anna, transmitting the feed to the main
screen.  When he finished, he created a still-frame and zoomed in on the
prisoner’s face.  “He is the one with the decorative dermal pigmentations, no?”

“We have to help him,” Anna
said.  Her eyes were riveted to the screen.  Doberman’s sensors picked up a
further increase in breathing speed, the result almost classifying as
hyperventilation.

Anna Landborn seems to be
having a strong emotional reaction for the first time since I gave her my
offer.
  Doberman assessed her condition a moment, then stored the
information for future retrieval and processing.

Anna’s eyes narrowed.  “Don’t you
dare
update your profile, you stupid robot.”

“Already done,” Doberman said. 
“And, calculating the chances of getting a large, highly-visible colonial out
of the base without compromising our own position, I unfortunately don’t think
it’s a wise course of action, Anna.”

“Well I
do,
” Anna said. 
“Where are they holding him?”

“Section One, H-Block.”

“The Nephyr compound.”

“Yes, Anna.”

Anna was biting her lip.  “We
need to get him out of there.”

“I’m sorry, Anna,” Doberman
said.  “I am not equipped to deal with Nephyrs.”

“I can
make
you equipped
to deal with Nephyrs,” she said. 

“Even though I trust your desire
to free this colonial, I do not trust your intentions afterwards.  In fact, it
very much fits your profile for you to decide to put a time-sensitive present
for me in my chest cavity while augmenting my other processes.  Therefore, I am
not yet willing to allow you to tinker with my internal workings.”

“I swear to you I won’t.”

“Perhaps another day, Anna.”

“Then let
me
deal with the
Nephyrs,” Anna cried.  “I got him out of there before.  I’ll do it again.”

“Unfortunately,” Doberman said,
“On this, I cannot allow our intervention.  The prisoner is too high-profile to
approach safely without a great amount of forethought.”

Anna’s body was making tiny,
involuntary tremors, and Doberman saw evidence of extraneous excretions from
her tear-ducts.  Before she could speak, he added, “It’s no use faking tears,
Anna.  I have no latent paternal instincts to manipulate.  I will not be taking
you into the Nephyr compound.”

Anna narrowed her tear-reddened
eyes at him.  “You stupid robot.  I’m not faking it.  Milar is my
friend.
”

Doberman carefully examined her
elevated biorhythms again, then said, “You’re getting very good at regulating
your physiological patterns, aren’t you?”

He was surprised when her
capillaries expanded and she screamed, “
I’m not faking it, you stupid robot!
”

Anna’s heartrate had jumped
dramatically, and her chest was expanding at three times the speed of her
unconscious rate.  It was another aspect to her behavior that Doberman found
incongruous to her profile.  Further, her reaction was much more violent than
he expected of a mere friend.  He searched his log for instances of her using
‘Milar’ or ‘Miles’ and was stunned to find she had, indeed, shown some sort of consistent
and genuine reverence for this colonist. 

…but that was completely not
within her profile.

And, while many of her comments
had been compliments on the colonist’s brainpower, more than thirty percent
were based off of his physical attributes. 

“A friend…” Doberman suggested,
watching her carefully, “Or an infatuation?”

Her face darkened to a shade of
purple.

“We will not be mounting a
rescue,” Doberman said, making another adjustment to her profile.  “Remember
your bargain, Anna.  Nothing that would seriously endanger us.  A Nephyr could
destroy me easily, and has the creative capacity of a human, so the likelihood
of our being discovered is very high.”

“What about indirect?” Anna
said.  “I could hack into the camp computer and deactivate the locks on the
doors, give Milar an escape window.”

“The Nephyrs have one of their
own watching him at all times,” Doberman said.  “Such a window would be
useless.”

Anna’s little fingers tightened
on the magnetic disc.  “Is there a Nephyr with him right now?”

Doberman checked with the camp
computer.  “His lifeline is within ten feet of a Nephyr lifeline.  I assume
they are both in the same room, so yes.”

“Fry the Nephyr’s lifeline,” Anna
said.

“No,” Doberman said.  “The camp
computer could trace the signal back to me and determine my chip number.  We
are not going to get involved in this.  The prisoner is high-visibility.  We
would risk exposing ourselves without more time to plan and prepare.”

“He’s
torturing
him!” Anna
snapped.

“Probably,” Doberman agreed.

“
Please,
Dobie,” Anna
said.  Her eyes were leaking again.

“No,” Doberman said.  “It’s too
dangerous to approach the prisoner in any way.  Finish working with your
apparatus or give it to me to destroy.  Then get some rest.  We’ll be leaving
for Eiorus in the morning.”

“I
hate
you,” she
screamed, slamming her tiny fist across the desk, scattering the parts in all
directions.

“That’s fine,” Dobie said. 
“Clean up your mess or I will.”

Anna’s eyes flickered back to the
photograph of the prisoner.  Eventually, her rhythms began to settle.  “Who is
that girl he’s looking at?”

“The United Space Coalition
operator that he kidnapped from her soldier.”

“What’s her
name?”
Anna
snarled at him.

“Captain Tatiana Eyre.  An
operator for the Eighth Pod, Fourteenth Squadron.”

Anna’s eyes narrowed.  “I thought
the bitch looked familiar.”

Chapter
28

A Doomed
Smuggler

Magali struggled in the slime,
trying to get her prybar seated in the hard little tendon at the base of a
purplish Shrieker nodule.  A few feet away, Joel worked beside her in silence. 
The other eggers were spread out, hunting nodules closer to the exit.  She and
Joel were the only two to have ventured this deep in the mines.  So deep, in
fact, that at first, Magali had thought Joel was trying to escape.

Then the smuggler had sat down
suddenly at a crossroads of chambers and begun prying nodules from the floor. 
He’d been filling his sack ever since.  Almost as if that was what he’d been
intending to do all along.  He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that
he’d briefly made Magali’s heart soar with hope that he was taking her out of
the mines.

Well,
Magali thought,
bitterly,
He did put the Shriekers out of business.
  She had to give him
some credit for that.

Joel’s method, though slap-dash,
had been more effective than any of the various chemicals the Director made
them lace into the Shrieker food supply each time Coalition scientists
concocted some new wonder-drug to make the aliens more docile, or, even more
ambitious, render them incapable of a Shriek. 

All had failed miserably,
sometimes killing their victims, or even bringing on a Shriek themselves.

Yet Joel’s simple cardboard trick
had been so effective that within twenty minutes, ninety-five percent of the
hatching chambers were completely clear.  Everyone had watched in awe as the
Shriekers had simply gathered around the big red cardboard displays the
smuggler had set up in the far corners of the mounds, effectively giving the
eggers free run of the rest of the mines.  Joel hadn’t even needed the two
little sacks of cayenne pepper, which he had stuffed in the bottom of his
harvest sack, instead.

Now Joel was kneeling beside her
in the slime, filling his own sack of Shrieker nodules like a good egger,
looking for all the world like he planned on dancing to the Nephyrs’ tune and
getting the Director as big of a bonus as possible. 

It didn’t make sense.  Joel had
no reason to help them. 
He should be getting as far away from here as he
can,
Magali thought, casting worried looks in his direction.  She would
never forget what they had done to Milar.  Laughing, grinning Milar, more
playful than his brother when they were children, had become a dark and
sinister psychopath after only three months in their hands.  And Milar had been
a recruit, destined for the front lines.  Who knew how long they planned to entertain
themselves with the smuggler.

He needs to get out of here,
Magali thought, watching Joel work.

After Anna and her team of
doctors had sewed his skin back on, Milar had stayed in his room for weeks,
letting no one inside except Patrick and Anna, the former because no one could
keep him out and the latter because no one was stupid enough to try.  The first
time Magali had seen Milar after his rescue from the Nephyr Academy, it had
been in a brief moment when she had been visiting Patrick unannounced, and had
accidentally caught him sitting in the kitchen, a haphazard sandwich in his
hand, another of Patrick’s cyborg sketches on the table in front of him.  Milar
had snatched up the sketch when he saw her, and the look he had given her had
made Magali freeze like a startled deer, the darkness in the place of her old
friend leaving her chilled.  Before she’d recovered enough to say something
polite, Milar had taken his sandwich to his room and slammed the door.

He never had told her what the
Nephyrs had done to him.  Magali hadn’t asked.  She’d been too afraid of what
he’d say.

Joel, you need to get out of
here.  Lose yourself in the caves.  Fall on a Shrieker.  Shoot yourself.
 
Anything was better than doing a round with the Nephyrs. 

But as time went on, Joel showed
no signs of slowing his harvest.  He worked methodically, every so often
glancing at the exits to the deep chamber they were in—so deep it wasn’t even
on the foremen’s maps.  The only light came from several chambers behind them,
which was why she suspected Joel had stopped in the first place.  To go further
would have been to go blind.

“What’s the difference between
here and some place closer to the exit?  Nodules are gonna be the same,
wherever you go.”

Joel’s eyes flickered toward her,
but he kept working.

He couldn’t understand her. 
Damn. 

Sighing, Magali dropped her
prybar and held out one hand, palm-side-up.  With her other hand, she made
little running motions with her fingers across the palm, then pointed at the
tunnel deeper into the mines.  “You gonna run or what?”

Joel shrugged and went back to
work.  Every twenty seconds, he glanced up at the tunnels deeper into the
mines.

“
Look,
” Magali said,
louder, now.  “I know someone who had a run-in with Nephyrs.  Believe me, you
don’t
want to get caught.  Whatever cash you think you can get from those nodules
isn’t worth it.  If you’ve got a way outta here, you should
go.
”  She
made little fleeing gestures again, and pointed at him insistently.

The smuggler gave her an
irritated look before he seated the claws of his prybar under another bright
red nodule, shoved downward, and began levering his weight down against it.

“If you
can’t
escape, you
should shoot yourself.  Really, you should.  Nephyrs have this thing with
skin.  They like to peel it off.”

Joel sighed deeply and looked at
her.

He doesn’t understand what I’m
saying,
Magali thought, miserable. 
All he understands is I’m making
noise, and Shriekers don’t like noise.
 

Magali picked up her own prybar
with tears in her eyes.  She wanted Anna back.  She’d never
been
on her
own before, at least not since Anna had turned five and started telling her
what to do.  It had been comforting, in a way.  Following Anna had been easy, a
habit that she had fallen into when the two of them realized that Anna’s brain
could do things that Magali’s couldn’t.  Anna was special, and Magali wasn’t. 

That she was alone now
felt…terrifying.

If Anna had been here, she
would’ve had some brilliant plan on how to get every single person out of the
mounds with a full harvest sack.  She would have been able to flabbergast the
Nephyrs and the Director with a synchronized, systematic, perfectly executed
scheme that left no man, woman, or child behind.  Not that Anna cared about
leaving the children behind, of course.  She simply would have done it to prove
to the Nephyrs she was smarter than them. 

Even with Joel’s cardboard traps,
moving the Shriekers out of the way meant nothing if the people harvesting the
nodules were too weak to effectively work the bar, like the kid in formation. 
Even Magali was having a hard time at it…she’d only gotten thirty or forty. 

Hours passed, and Joel made no
move to stop digging, only stopping to glance at the back of the caves every
twenty to thirty seconds. 

Shriekers,
Magali realized. 
If there were any back here, they would have collected around his neat little
cardboard traps.  Yet, as she worked, she saw what looked to be flashes of
light in the tunnels beyond.  She frowned and pointed.

Joel had a grim look on his
face.  He nodded and got to his feet.  In a smooth motion, Joel took the gun
from her sack, then dumped his sack into hers, almost filling it.  He cinched
the top shut, eyed the remainder, and then got to his feet, the broken ends of
his shackles jingling.  Gun in hand, he wadded up his own bag and threw it
against the wall.

Seeing the empty sack abandoned
in the slime, Magali knew that meant Joel didn’t have an escape route.  No
self-respecting smuggler like Joel would leave behind ripe nodules if he had a
way out.  He’d been helping her before he went off to die.  She bit her lip
against tears.

“So now you’re gonna go find a
Shrieker to fall on, is that it?”

Joel’s gaze flickered towards her,
then he moved toward the inner chambers where she had seen the flashes.

“Thank you,” she cried, at his
back.

The smuggler hissed and put a
finger to his lips, glaring back at her.  Then he disappeared beyond the edge
of the mine’s ceiling lights, the guards’ gun clutched in his good hand.

Magali picked up her nearly-full
sack, blinking back tears.  She turned to head back toward the entrance to the
mines.  Another hour or two somewhere else and she’d have enough nodules to
leave the mines.

Yet she found herself staring
down at her prybar, unable to summon the interest to finish filling her
collection sack.

What was the point?

Magali knew that the moment she
emerged from the mounds, the Director would throw her in eggers’ prison.  She’d
shown she had rebel training.  To
coalers
.  Maybe the woman wouldn’t go
so far as to execute her, but Magali could definitely see the Nephyr leaving
her in the stocks for a few days out of sheer pettiness.  She might even beat a
conspiracy confession out of her and extend her enlistment, make her a lifelong
egger, if the three guards didn’t get to her first.  Or she might just hand her
over to Colonel Steele and forget she ever had an egger by the name of Magali
Landborn.

So what was the point?

Somewhere deeper in the mounds,
Joel was going to kill himself.  Alone, and in the dark, after he’d helped her
fill her sack, and she was going to let him do it.

Magali jabbed her prybar at a
nodule, unable to see clearly through tears.  She felt a soft squish as the bar
impaled the nodule and unrefined Yolk began to seep out in a red-purple ooze,
the infant Shrieker inside pulsing like a bloody maggot.

Grimacing, Magali pulled her
prybar out and wiped it on her glove.  For a long time, she looked at the
purple-red slime on her fingertips, then down at the ruined nodule that was
still leaking its contents onto the transparent, bubbly slime of the cavern
floor.

It’s not right.
 

The smuggler wouldn’t be in this
situation if it weren’t for her.  From his first imprisonment, to his beatings
and eventual outing as Runaway Joel—all of it had spawned from Magali tackling
the head foreman and pounding her unconscious to save her sister.  If Magali
had taken the fall for that, she would have gotten a day or two in the stocks,
maybe a few lashes at most.

But Anna had wheedled Joel into
covering Magali’s ass, and now he was wandering off to kill himself. 
After
he had tried to help as many eggers as possible, herself included.

She had to do something.

Still staring at the red-purple
substance on her gloved fingertips, Magali again found herself wondering what
her sister would have done in that situation.

She wouldn’t care,
Magali
knew. 
She’d tell me to suck it up, and to let him go off and die alone. 
More nodules for us.

Magali narrowed her eyes and got
to her feet.  She wasn’t Anna.

* * *

Joel grimaced at the lone
Shrieker camped out in the middle of the chamber floor, cradling what was left
of a clutch of nodules.  The rest had been torn away by a black-market mowing
machine, which had left more than half of the nodules broken and oozing, the
tiny larvae inside writhing or dead. 

Joel felt irritation at that. 
Only a narrow-minded fool wasted nodules.

Piled along the edge of the cave
were clusters of dead Shriekers, drag-marks still puncturing the slime where
they had been pulled across the chamber and dumped there.

Beyond that, the beam of a
flashlight bounced across the adjacent cave.

Joel frowned at the pile of dead
Shriekers.  It was a novice’s trick, something to calm shredded nerves.  He
himself hadn’t killed any Shriekers for almost twenty years.  Anyone with any
experience would have realized that it would have been just as easy—and much
less dangerous—to give them a distraction.

Besides, only idiots killed the
goose that laid the golden eggs.  
Especially
if that goose was capable
of producing a psychic scream in its death throes that would leave anyone
within three hundred yards a drooling vegetable for the rest of their lives, if
they survived at all.  It just wasn’t smart.

But then, Martin had never been
smart.

Joel gingerly began to move
around the lone Shrieker.  He was already feeling the fuzzy beginning of a
Shrieker migraine.  Anger?  Loneliness, perhaps?  Did Shriekers even feel these
emotions?  The general consensus was that they were just stupid beasts, barely
above the level of a garden snail, but Joel wasn’t so sure.  In all his years
of smuggling, he’d developed a deep-rooted respect for the creatures, one that
had kept him alive more times than he cared to count.

The Shrieker tensed when Joel
neared it.

Despite his qualms, Joel
considered shooting it.  The Shriekers were already on high alert, and having
its babies and companions lying dead in the muck around it certainly wasn’t
going to make the creature more stable.  But, when it went back to examining
its ruined clutch, Joel decided if it had intended to Shriek, it would have
done so already, when Geo’s goon was slaughtering its companions. 

Easing the rest of the way around
the Shrieker, Joel found himself at the edge of the next cave, looking in at
Martin.

Geo’s goon was kneeling in the
Shrieker mucus, plucking usable nodules from the belly of the mowing machine,
tossing those that were broken or crushed into the slime behind him.  He’d
already filled four sacks, and was halfway through his fifth.

Joel cleared his throat.