Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (38 page)

“
No!
”

“Are you ticklish?” Milar said. 
He moved one of his hands to her ribs.

Tatiana shrieked and started to
struggle.

“Careful,” Milar said, easily
stroking his fingers down her ribs as she panicked and clawed underneath him. 
“You’re going to bump some nodes out of place.  Just apologize, sweetie.  Say,
‘Milar, I’m sorry I locked you in a bubble of goo and wouldn’t open the hatch
when you wanted out.  I’m sorry I stomped on your nuts and made you think I was
going to spurt arterial blood all over if you twitched too hard even though the
damn line was strangling you and the air tube wasn’t giving you enough air. 
Milar, I’m sorry I made you strip down to your boxers and forced you to spend
two hours with your head crammed down against your chest and get goo down your
asscrack.  Milar, I’m sorry I never listen to instructions and that I probably
would’ve gotten myself killed if my lifeline hadn’t been a dud.  Oh, and Milar,
I’m sorry I just tried to blow off your hand.’”

“Stop,” she gasped.  “I’m sorry!”

“Only if you answer me one
question first,” he said, still stroking her ribs.

“
Anything,
” Tatiana
screamed.

“Which dragon,” he said.  “Red or
black?”

“I like them both!” she shrieked.

“Really,” he said, and she could
tell he was grinning.  “Why?”

“They’re pretty,” she wailed.

“You got a thing for dragons,
coaler?”  He was
still
tickling her.

“Yes,” she managed, gasping.  “I
do, I do.”

Milar flipped her over, grinning
as his golden brown eyes scanned hers.  Softly, he said, “What about the guy
wearing them?”

Tatiana’s breath caught in her
chest.  For a long time, all she could hear was the sound of her heart pounding
against her eardrums.  Then she nodded.

“Better speak up,” he warned,
reaching for her ribs again.

She narrowed her eyes.  “I think
you’re the biggest knucker I’ve ever—”

Milar closed the distance between
them with a kiss.  Instantly, Tatiana froze, feeling every objection flee in a
rush of surprise.  After a moment, she began to melt under him, and her hands
reached up to bury themselves in his hair of their own accord.

When Milar finally broke the
kiss, they were both breathless.  “Thank you for rescuing me, Princess,” Milar
said.  He leaned forward and touched his lips to her forehead.  “I appreciate
it.”

Tatiana bit her lip and said,
“Even if you got goo in your asscrack?”

Milar grimaced and pushed himself
into a seated position, straddling her.  He eyed her a minute, his golden-brown
eyes alive with amusement.  Finally, he chuckled and shook his head.  “Don’t
remind me.”  Standing, he offered a hand and helped pull her to her feet. 
“Come on.  I hear Patrick coming.”

Chapter
35

Cliffhanger

Magali sat in the cavern,
shivering as the wind tugged the heat from her bruised and naked skin.  Behind
her, the tunnel was sealed with piles of energy-fused rock.  She hadn’t moved
for over a day.  The Nephyrs had used her body, as promised.  Instead of
leaving the pistol for her to finish herself off when they were done, however,
Colonel Steele had dropped it over the edge.

“Oops,” he had said, watching it
fall.  Then he’d smiled.  “Oh well.  Anyone willing to kill a child to save
herself doesn’t deserve an easy death.”  He’d walked back to the cave entrance,
then paused.  “Oh, and that cute little pact we made don’t mean jack shit to
me.  The moment those eggers finish cleaning up after Harvest, they’re all
going to be executed as traitors to the Coalition.”  And then he’d left her
there.  Bruised, battered, and bleeding.

Throughout it all, Magali hadn’t
cried.  After what she had done, she didn’t deserve to cry.

But now, trapped, thinking of the
hundreds of lives that were going to be lost because of her actions, she cried.

You’re not trapped,
Wideman said.  He had talked her through the hours with the Nephyrs, distracted
her during the worst moments with songs and little lullabies that her mother
had used to sing to her as a child.

Magali looked back at the stones
blocking the exit, fused together with superheated energy charges, then back at
the cliff.  She supposed he was right.  She could jump.

She even got to her feet before
her instinctual terror of falling rammed her knees back into the stone beneath
her.

Coward,
she told herself.

You’re not trapped,
Wideman said again.  Then he giggled. 
Killer.

“Shut up!” Magali screamed,
grabbing at her head.  “Shut up, you asshole!”

Then, realizing she was screaming
at a figment of her imagination, Magali got up and strode to the edge of the
cliff before her mind could register what she was doing.  As soon as it did,
her feet froze on the stone and it was all she could do not to fall into a
crouch, gripping the red-orange rock beneath her in terror.

Staring at the wind-whipped
cliff, remembering Benny’s hands clutching at air as he fell, she said, “I’m a
monster and I deserve to die.”  And she knew, deep down, that they were the
truest words she had ever spoken.  Still, she couldn’t make herself take those
last two steps.

Looking over the edge, trying to
work up the courage to jump, she could see Benny’s body far below.  It was a
tiny pale dot against a red-orange background.  She had given Benny one of the
guards’ shirts to wear, but the Nephyrs had stripped him of it the same time
they removed the Coalition bodies from the base of the cliff.

Now Ben’s body was a lone, naked
dot upon the rocks below.

They didn’t even bother to
bury him,
Magali thought, anguished.  Sooner or later, the Fortune fauna
would find the boy’s thin body and tear it apart.  They’d had the chance to
take him back with the dead guards, give him a decent burial, but they’d left
him for the animals.  Like he wasn’t even human.

And Magali couldn’t do anything
about it.  She was responsible, yet she couldn’t do anything about it.  She
could either die of dehydration or jump, and neither of those ends would allow
her to pile rocks over the body in a funeral cairn.

He was just a kid.  He didn’t
do anything to you.  You could have at least buried him.
 

Though she hadn’t cried the
entire day she spent with the Nephyrs, Magali felt tears once more heat her
cheeks as she stared helplessly down at the body.

Wideman was right.  In that
moment, given the chance, she would kill every man, woman, and cyborg wearing
Coalition colors.  She would shoot them until she ran out of charges, and then
would go after them with a knife.  If only she had a
gun.
  She could
kill them with a gun.

Then go get it,
Wideman
told her.

Magali froze, staring down at the
twisting green band that was the bottom of the Snake.  It was so far away it
looked like she was gazing down upon a child’s model canyon.  Slowly, her eyes
moved to the rock-face beneath her.

It wasn’t particularly flat. 
There were jagged cracks, wind-eaten hollows, even places where she could walk
on narrow, slanting ledges.

Immediately, she squeezed her
eyes shut, her heart thundering in her ears. 
That’s a four thousand foot
drop.  No one climbs down a four-thousand-foot drop and lives.  It’s suicide.

Then everything seemed to fall
into focus.

Then I fall,
she thought. 
So what?  I am dead anyway.

She sat there, feeling the wind
tug at her skin, trying to think.

It’s four thousand feet,
her mind kept babbling at her. 
The gun wouldn’t survive a four thousand
foot drop.  Its lenses and chambers would shatter.

On a fancy gun, yes.  But the
same irritating three-second delay that had kept Magali from putting holes in
every single Nephyr who had stepped through the tunnels two days before
belonged to the same safeguarding system that kept the gun cushioned from every
hazard that could befall it in the dirt and grime of normal combat.  The
designers of the A1550-Y had been more interested in utility and durability
than maximum firepower.  It had been the backup weapon for standard infantry
troops for over a hundred years.

The grunts’ve spent a century
trying to break this thing,
her father would always say when he brought it
out. 
Anything you can imagine, those guys have done it.  Best they ever do
is break the sights off.
  He then showed her the welded line on his gun
where the sights had been snapped off long ago, then welded back into place. 
This
one got run over by a tank.

As Magali stared down at the
bottom of the Snake, she thought,
Yeah, but did they drop it from four
thousand feet?
  She considered climbing all the way down, her body
straining and trembling, only to find the gun a shattered husk.

Don’t you want to kill them?
Wideman’s voice asked her.

Feeling that ocean of acidic rage
eating at her stomach, Magali’s fingers tightened into fists.  She took the
last two steps and had put her hands on the lip of stone.  She sought out a
crevice, then put her leg over the edge.  The howling wind grabbed her and
tugged.  Her instinctual terror struck, then, trying to unfurl in her gut and
spread outward into her limbs.

Fuck off,
she told it. 
And started to climb.

Chapter
36

Tatiana
Flies Cargo

Patrick grimaced at the cyborg
standing beside his brother.  “You can’t be serious, Miles.”

Milar gave him a look that could
have detonated concrete.  “Serious about what, Patty?”

Patrick blushed, knowing that now
would be a good time to change the subject, but he couldn’t help himself.  He
jabbed a finger at the cyborg.  “She put you back in Nephyr hands.  Our face is
plastered on every single government wanted list there is because of her.  She
got the whole town of Deaddrunk strip-searched.  They confiscated Veera’s
ship
because of her.”

“She’s done with all that,” Milar
said.  He winked—
winked
—at the cyborg.  “Ain’t ya, squid?”

“What can the little runt do that
you or I can’t?” Patrick demanded.

“Have babies, for one,” the
cyborg said.

Patrick narrowed his eyes at
her.  She peered back, completely unaffected.  With a growl, Patrick said,
“Really?  I didn’t think the Coalition wanted baby cyborgs running around.”

“I signed the waiver,” the cyborg
said, her blue-violet eyes challenging.  “Took a few drugs.  It’s all there. 
Baby.”

“Maybe,” Patrick said, “But how
does a jumbled hunk of metal drop a kid without hurting itself?”

Milar stepped between them. 
“She’s coming, Patty.  Stop being a dickhead.”

“We never hurt her!” Patrick
snapped.  “We fixed her broken bones, and didn’t murder her twenty different
times when we should have.  And she turned you over to the Nephyrs and sang to
the Coalition investigators like you were Satan himself.  They put the
interviews on the news feed, Milar.  She said you
raped
her.”

Milar lifted a brow.  “So?”

Patrick sputtered.  “She lied.”

“I told her to lie,” Milar said. 
“She did exactly what she needed to do.”

Patrick frowned.  “You
told
her to say that you’d made her eat her own feces?”

Milar looked a bit shocked, then
turned to the cyborg.  “You
said
that?”

She blushed scarlet.  “Maybe.”

“That’s disgusting,” Milar said.

“You told me to make it bad,”
Tatiana said.

Milar continued to stare at her.

“We can’t go back to Deaddrunk,”
Patrick said.  “They’ve had a group of Nephyrs in the hills, watching that
place ever since they discovered the antique guns Landborn cached in the
mines.  Thank God they didn’t find the energy weapons.”

Milar winced.  “What about Dad?”

Patrick froze, his eyes
flickering back to Tatiana.  She was watching them much too closely. 

“Oh, come off it,” Milar said. 
“Sooner or later, she’s gonna know Wideman’s our Pop, if she hasn’t already
guessed.”  He glanced over at her and raised a questioning eyebrow.

The cyborg flushed and nodded.

“Just great!” Patrick cried. 
“Anything
else
you want to tell the coalers while you’re at it, Milar? 
You
know
she’ll just go right back and start singing the moment we take
our eyes off her.”

“Not gonna happen,” Milar said.

“Why?” Patrick demanded. 
“Because you rescued her?”

“
I
rescued
him,
”
the cyborg corrected.  She jabbed the tip of her finger into his brother’s
chest.  “
He
was running around like a headless chicken.”

“Yeah,” Milar said.  He grinned
at her.  Something passed between them, and the girl blushed.

Patrick was still staring. 
She
rescued
him?
  How could a four-foot-nine cyborg rescue his brother? 
With her particular brand of cyborg, the metal actually hindered the muscles’
normal movement, so she was a
weak
four-foot-nine cyborg.  Not only
that, but why?  Why would she bother?  She had been home free…

Patrick scowled at the cyborg. 
“How do you know it wasn’t a setup, Miles?  They could have let you escape
together so she could infiltrate the rebel cause.”

“She made her choice,” Milar
said.  “Just like Wideman said she would.”

Of course he would pull the
Wideman card.
  Patrick felt his mouth tighten.  “Fine.”  He glared at the
cyborg.  “Goddamn it.  Fine.”  He stuck out his hand.  “Patrick.”

The cyborg gave it a puzzled
look. 

“Since we never got a chance to
introduce ourselves properly,” he growled.  “My name is Patrick Whitecliff. 
The oaf you just dragged out of the Nephyr compound is my brother, Milar
Whitecliff.  He’s the one with the dragons.”

She looked up at him and
blushed.  Then, gingerly, like she expected him to rip her arm off, she reached
forward and put her hand in his.  “Tatiana Eyre,” she said.  He felt the metal
node digging into his palm as her small, smooth fingers tightened on his.  Her
hand was sticky, just as it had been the day they’d caught her outside her
soldier.

“Call me Pat,” Patrick said.

Milar snorted.  “Call him Patty. 
Everyone else does.”

“And I hate it,” Patrick growled,
squeezing the woman’s hand in warning.  “Call me Pat.”

“I had a sister named Patty.” 
She grinned up at him evilly, her odd, purplish eyes dancing.

Patrick had to smile, despite
himself.  “So how’d she save you, Miles?”

“Flew me out in the belly of her
goddamn soldier,” Milar said, shaking his head.  “Disgusting stuff dried
already.  I think my ass cheeks are going to be stuck together for the next ten
years.”

“It comes off in the shower,”
Tatiana said quickly.  “Just soap it up good.”

His brother gave the cyborg an
evil look.  “Maybe you could help me with that later.”

She turned red as a beet.  “Um.”

Watching the exchange, Patrick’s
mouth fell open.  His brother was…flirting?

“Oh, shut your trap, Pat,” Milar
said, giving him a meaningful look.  “It ain’t like I never had a naked girl in
the shower before.  The cyborg and me came to an understanding, that’s all.”

Patrick frowned, then glanced
from Milar to Tatiana.  Suddenly, it struck him. 
He doesn’t want her to
know he’s a virgin.

Patrick threw back his head and
laughed.

This time, it was Milar who
turned red as a beet.

Cackling, Patrick cried, “You
just don’t want her to know you’re—”

Milar stepped forward and punched
him in the shoulder, hard.  Patrick doubled over, unable to stop laughing.

“He’s what?” the cyborg asked. 
She frowned up at Milar.  “You’re what?”  Patrick could see what she was
thinking. 
…diseased?

That made him laugh harder, until
he was choking and gasping.

Milar shoved him over.  “You say
one more word, Patty,” Milar growled, squatting over him, “And next time people
see you, they won’t be able to tell you’re my brother.”

“Sorry,” Patrick choked from the
ground.  “Sorry.”  Then, seeing the baffled look the girl was giving his
brother, he started cackling again.

“Screw you,” Milar growled,
stepping around him and stomping up the ramp of the ship. 

The cyborg stayed behind, eying
Patrick like he was a strange new type of Shrieker.  “He’s what?” she asked,
once Milar’s heavy footsteps had disappeared inside the ship.

“He’s gonna be paying me a lot of
money,” Patrick said.  “Starting today.”

She frowned down at him.  “He
owes you money?”

“He will,” Patrick said.  “If he
wants me to keep my mouth shut.”

“Fuck you!” Milar shouted from
inside the ship.  Then Patrick heard the sounds of feet charging up the metal
stairs.

“Then he’s…”  Tatiana lowered her
voice to a whisper.  “…married?”

Married.
  Oh, that was
just too perfect.  Patrick threw back his head again and roared.

A few feet away, the ship’s
engines began to warm up.  The cyborg gave the ship a nervous look, then
glanced back at Patrick. 

“Better…go,” Patrick said,
gasping, gesturing toward the ship.  “I’ll be there in a minute.”  He rolled
onto his belly, chuckling into the dirt.

Tatiana gave him one last, wary
look, then jogged to the boarding ramp and disappeared inside.  Somehow,
Patrick found the strength to climb aboard the ship before Milar took off.  He
collapsed onto the deck, still laughing.  Tatiana and Milar had retreated to
the cockpit, leaving him alone to get his glee under control.

He was getting to his feet to
climb up to the cockpit when Milar flipped on the intercom and said, “Patrick,
you need to see this.”

The tone of his brother’s voice
put Patrick into an instinctive sprint.  He slapped open the hatch and stepped
inside.  Tatiana looked up at him from the pilot’s chair.  Milar was in the
copilot seat, watching a news feed.  He gave Patrick a look that stopped his
heart.

“What?” Patrick said.

“Yolk Factory 14,” Milar said,
gesturing to the screen.

It took Patrick a moment to tear
his eyes from his brother’s face and re-focus them on the news feed.  A
camp-wide Shriek had decimated the population of Yolk Factory 14.  Only three
hundred and thirty-two survivors.

Oh no.
  Patrick stepped
closer, his heart beginning to pound.

“Anna and Magali were in Factory
14, weren’t they?” Milar asked.

Patrick scanned the images of the
tired, wan-faced survivors as they filed out of the mounds.  He didn’t see the
tall brunette and her creepy little sister.

Magali.
  His chest hurt. 
He was finding it hard to breathe.  “They have a survivor list?” Patrick
whispered.

Milar glanced at Tatiana, then
reluctantly nodded.  He accessed the data, then leaned back for Patrick to scan
the lists.

Patrick read it three times.  “No
Landborns,” he whispered.

“Maybe they changed their names,”
Tatiana offered.

“We’ve been keeping track of them
every day since they were taken,” Milar said.  He lowered his voice and his
eyes caught Patrick with apology.  “They were always there.”

We didn’t rescue them in time,
Patrick thought.  His eyes flickered to Tatiana. 
We didn’t rescue them in
time because we were busy with the cyborg.

  “Now, hey,” Milar said,
starting to stand.  “It ain’t her fault, Pat.”

“The Hell it isn’t,” Patrick whispered. 
“We left Mag and Anna to die because we were busy playing her stupid games.” 
Then, because he couldn’t stay there any longer without putting his fist
through someone’s eye socket, he turned and left the cockpit. 

Milar found him later, sitting in
a corner on the lower deck.  “I’m sorry, Pat.”

Patrick didn’t look at his
brother.  “You said she’d be fine another two weeks.”  Patrick wiped tears from
his eyes.  He hadn’t realized he’d been crying. 

“We don’t know they’re dead,”
Milar said.

“I haven’t heard from Anna in
four days,” Patrick said.  “Ever since the day you were captured.”

“Think she knew?” Milar asked.

“She would have tried to set up a
rescue, if she had,” Patrick said.  He took a deep breath and let it out,
squeezing his fingers into a white-knuckled fist.   “Oh my God, I want to kill
them.”

Milar watched his hand, his face
contorted in understanding.  He nodded.  “I do too.”

“Then why do we keep waiting?”
Patrick snapped.  “I’m tired of waiting for Wideman’s damn Sign.  All we’ve
done is wait.  David’s gone.  Now Magali and Anna are gone.  Who’s next?  You? 
Jeanne?  We lose anyone else and there’s not gonna be a war.”

“Wideman never said they’d be
part of the resistance,” Milar reminded him.

Patrick almost hit his brother. 
Almost.  Softly, he said, “Magali and I were gonna run off together.  Build a
house.  Raise a family.”

Milar dropped his eyes to his
hands and started fidgeting with his knife.  For a long time, his brother said
nothing.  Patrick imagined he was dealing with the shock.  Then, Milar said, “I
know.”

Patrick flinched.  “You
knew?
” 
He had thought he had managed to keep it a secret.

“
Please
,” Milar snorted. 
“You’re my brother, Pat.  I can read you like a book.  I knew you were gonna
run off.  Saw it coming a mile away.  That’s why I told Anna.”

Patrick froze.  The calm child’s
face, the utter sincerity as she told him Magali wanted nothing to do with
him.  The letter, in Magali’s handwriting, confirming it.

“Pat?” Milar said, after a minute
had passed.

“You split us up,” Patrick
whispered.

Milar reddened, “You were gonna
give up
everything
we’ve worked for to chase a
girl.
  Hell yes,
we split you up.  And I’m glad happy we did.  The resistance wouldn’t be the
same without you, Pat.  Like you just said, we lose anybody else and we lose
the war.”

Patrick lunged at his brother,
knocking the knife aside and going for his throat.  “You asshole!” he snapped. 
“It was
my life!
”

Milar kicked him off and crawled
forward before he had a chance to stand.  He pinned his shoulders, glaring. 
“You’re gonna help me fight the coalers, Pat.  We made a pact.  You can chase
tail when the fighting’s over with.”

“What, just like you and your
little cyborg?”  Patrick snarled and threw him to the side. 

“That cyborg happens to be a
leader of the resistance!” Milar snapped, shoving him away and getting to his
feet.  “We need her help.”

“Oh bullshit!” Patrick snapped
back, standing.  “You didn’t stare at her picture all those years because she
was gonna put down a few coalers.  You did it because you wanted to get her
metal ass into bed.” 

This time, Milar’s eyes narrowed
and he lunged.  Patrick stopped him with a roundhouse, but instead of going
down, Milar caught his leg and jerked him off his feet.  Patrick hit the floor
hard with his back and head, making the metal grating clang as if it had been
hit by a two-by-four.  He blinked, seeing stars.