Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising (44 page)

Despite herself, Tatiana had to
grin in reluctant admiration. 
Nice ship.

She spun it in an arc, hitting
twenty thousand feet in seconds, barely feeling a single G as the ship’s
inertial dampeners kicked into gear.

Really
nice.

She leveled out and hit the
power, outdistancing the Bouncers that followed her as if they were standing
still.

I could get used to this,
she thought, spinning and going high, then backtracking and dropping down on
them from above.  She put holes in their engines before they’d even completed a
half-turn.

Really
used to it.

Tatiana screamed her delight as
she weaved between the fiery debris of the Bouncer ships, clipping the trees
with no more than a meter to spare.  “This is
great!”
she shrieked. 
She’d never been in anything so intense.  It had engines built for a ship three
times the size, and was utterly responsive to her every twitch. 

Experimenting, Tatiana weaved
over the treeline, following the contours of the earth, unhindered by the ship
computer’s normal calculations and trajectory corrections.  The ship moved with
the grace of a soldier, yet without the sensory deprivation.  She saw the land
rushing under the windshield, could almost feel the wind whipping across its
hull. 

It’s so much better than a
soldier,
she thought, spinning out over the other Bouncers, taunting them. 
She was so thrilled it was a pressure rising up in her chest, until she was
laughing uncontrollably.

“Like flying a magic carpet,” she
giggled.  She brought down four more Bouncers, dancing around them and filling
them with holes as easily as if the four larger ships had been sitting still. 
She flipped on her microphone and said, “Milar, this thing is
awesome!”
 

Instead of responding, Jeanne
said, “Aanaho, Miles, we can’t find Wideman.  He wasn’t on any of the ships!”

“Then where is he?” Milar cried. 
“Tell me where he is, Jeanne!”

“You think I’m fucking God?”

“I’m going in after him!”

“With
that
ship?!” Jeanne
cried.  “That’ll get you
killed,
Miles!”

Milar did not respond.

Tatiana frowned, imagining the
Liberty
taking on a Pod of soldiers.  It would not be pretty.  “Miles,” she told the
microphone, “Stay where you are.  Let me clear a path first.” 

Milar ignored her.

Tatiana moved her attention to
the three operators that were only now leaping off the tarmac in pursuit.  The
six remainders were moving into the town. 

She winced at the idea of the
soldiers reaching the town, but gave priority to the three coming at her
head-on.  Out of anything in the Coalition fleet, soldiers had the best
weaponry, and one mistake would leave her a bleeding corpse in the midst of a
fiery wreck.

That was a sobering thought.

Can’t let them get a bead on
me,
she thought, flipping low and wide, then twisting to do a hard
ninety-degree climb.  The ship responded perfectly.  She could almost sense its
frustration, its willingness to do more.

Good ship,
she thought
again.  “Milar, you’re not doing anything stupid, are you?”  She twisted
around, found the operators beginning to take the turn upwards after her—unlike
the Bouncers, they were capable of the more excruciating Gs—and quickly hurtled
past them with enough sonic force to make her teeth chatter.  As they were
trying to work their way back, she put on speed, arced back up, and came up
above and behind them, right on their tails.  She turned all three into little
balls of flame before they realized they were no longer following her.

Tatiana whispered an apology as
they went down in pieces.  It had been her deepest fear as an operator—going
down with her ship.  The Coalition Air Force did everything in its power to
preserve the high-tech hardware of a coalition operator.  That meant the entire
pilot’s chamber was essentially an indestructible black box.

And, if the rest of the ship was
destroyed, that meant it was an indestructible black box without power.  Thus,
for most of her career, Tatiana had been plagued with nightmares of being
trapped in her safe little bubble of goo as the machinery died around her. 

From the few other operators who
would talk about it, it was a common sentiment.

Realizing Milar hadn’t responded,
Tatiana frowned and scanned her viewfinder for
Liberty.

Nothing but Bouncers, the smaller
dots of operators, and the erratic blip of Jeanne’s ultra-fast
Belle
.

“Milar?” she asked, her voice
catching.  “You there?”

No response.  As she passed
overhead, Tatiana’s eyes fell on the wreckage in the jungle, the ship that had
exploded above her as she sat on the tarmac.  A sick welling of dread began to
form in her chest.  “Jeanne, what happened to Milar?”

Jeanne didn’t respond. 

The operators were wrecking the
town, obliterating everything.  Right behind them, the Nephyrs were combing
through the wreckage, dragging survivors out of the rubble and lining them up
on their knees, hands behind their heads.

“Jeanne!” Tatiana snapped, flying
low and firing on the closest operators before pulling out of their weapons’
range.  She felt the five remaining launch behind her.  Just skimming the
treeline, Tatiana spun a wide arc and caught the operators from behind.  She
blindsided one with a rapid pulse, then curved low and wide as the four
remainders went after her.  They were faster and more agile than the Bouncers,
so she had to struggle to stay behind them.  Not wanting to make them nervous,
she didn’t bother with trying to make a lock.  She just held back and waited
until three of the four were clustered together in a tight curve before
peppering them with energy rounds.

The fourth operator was harder, obviously
more experienced.  Even with his smaller engines, he was doing a good job of
staying out of her sights. 

Hold still, you slippery
bastard.

The operator refused to let her
get a lock.  He kept going straight, darting in and out of the trees, keeping
low enough that even Tatiana was having trouble keeping him in view.  After
several frustrated attempts, all she succeeded in doing was setting vast swaths
of the forest afire.  The operator, meanwhile, was setting a direct course for
Rath.

He’s leading me away,
she
realized suddenly.  Her blood went cold.  She immediately spun up, turned, and
raced back to the town with every ounce of speed her engines could muster.

Oh my God,
she thought,
staring at the destruction. 
Oh my God.

A single Nephyr remained in the
village.  He was walking down the line of prisoners, a gun in his hand.  She
saw the Nephyr come up behind a woman, put a gun to her head.  Through the
magnified image of the viewfinder, Tatiana vaguely recognized her as one of the
faces that had worked on her node and collarbone when she had drifted in and
out of consciousness after her crash.  A doctor. 

She saw the doctor jerk and flop
forward into the dirt.  The Nephyr moved down the line.  Put his gun to another
head.

No,
Tatiana thought. 

A second colonist collapsed.  A
man.

No!
  Tatiana passed
overhead.  She couldn’t shoot at him.  Not unless she wanted to risk hitting
the colonists if the shots bounced off the energy field of his skin. 

But she had to stop him.  She had
to.

The Nephyr, pausing only long
enough to recognize the sonic boom of her passing, moved on to the next person.

Tatiana swept over and back, then
dropped for another swoop at the town.  Tatiana twisted her ship at an angle
and flew through the center of town, preceding her own soundwaves by three
times their speed as her left wing all but scraped the village’s central road.

She hit the Nephyr dead-on with
her wingtip, ripping him off the ground.  Immediately, she dragged her nose up
and put on speed.  She could feel the drag his body created against the wing as
she soared into the atmosphere and compensated with more power, praying the
ship had enough structural integrity to hold together.

“You the cleanly sort?” she
growled, flipping on her wing-cam.  “Because you’re about to learn how to
vacuum.”  She broke through the stratosphere, then passed the mesosphere,
picking up speed.  She was halfway through the thermosphere when the Nephyr
caught fire and broke apart.

Damn
, she thought.  Her
eyes were filling with tears, but she wiped them away.  She dropped the ship
back to the tattered tarmac and sat there, listening.

The skies were empty.  The
Coalition was dead or gone.  Gingerly, Tatiana flipped open her com.  “Milar?”

Silence.

She remembered the obliterated
ship, smoking in the forest.  Had it been
Liberty?
  A growing dread was
screaming at her that it had been.

Then, a gruff,
“Get back in
the sky, girl.  More might be on the way.”

Sucking in a breath, Tatiana
flipped on the microphone.  Thinking of the pieces of devastated wreckage she
had seen in the jungle, she said, “Jeanne, what happened to Milar?”

There was a long pause.  Then,
reluctantly,
“He went down.
”

Oh no.

Unable to stop herself, Tatiana
powered down the ship and ran out the back.  Behind her, she heard Jeanne shout,
“What the Hell are you doing?!  Get back in the air, girl!”
  Then
Tatiana had opened the hatch and jogged into the sunlight, all of her senses on
alert, adrenaline kicking fiery arcs through her chest.  In the town below the
landing strip, she heard the shrieking scream of a raid siren.  She ran for the
woods, her nose scrunching at the smell of burning metal and polymers.

It wasn’t
Liberty, Tatiana
told herself,
It wasn’t Milar.  Please God let it not be Milar.
  She
reached the edge of the tarmac aiming for the crash site she could see
billowing smoke in the forest beyond.  She pushed her way through the alien
brush, desperate to know, now.  Five minutes of grunting and panting later, she
found it.

Coughing at the smoke, she
stopped on the ridge carved by the nose of the ship and stared down at the
wreckage, trying to compare it to the colonial utility that the twins had been
flying.

Nose, engines, and size were all
wrong.

It was a Bouncer ship.  She felt
her relief as a living thing, rushing through her core.

Tatiana spun and jogged back
toward her own ship.  She’d have a better chance spotting him from the air.

When she reached the edge of the
forest, she came to a stumbling halt. 

The TAG was gone.

An instant later, she felt
something cold and hard touch the middle of her spine.

From over her left shoulder, she
heard, “You move, traitor, and I won’t wait for after your trial to start
ripping off skin.”

Chapter
39

The
Last Fifty Feet

The last fifty feet were the
worst.

Magali had spent her first night
huddled in a hollow, hugging her knees as the wind blew hot air through the
Snake.  Even with the scattered rests she had taken on the way down, Magali’s
arms ached and trembled.  It was all her blistered fingers could do just to
stay in the shape of hooks.  Her legs were slowly giving way under her. 

Her bloody toes slipped on the
stone, taking off more skin, leaving her once more dangling by her hands.

Magali looked down tiredly.  In a
tired pang of desperation, she considered letting go.

It’s just fifty feet,
she
thought. 
I can drop fifty feet.

Then, a darker part of her said,
You
can’t kill anyone with a broken leg, Magali.

Somehow, she dragged her feet
back to the rock and slowly lowered herself another foot.  She hadn’t found a
place to rest since the sun had hit the top of its arc.  It was almost
nightfall, now.  Two days of climbing.  The night in the hollow had sapped her
body’s warmth and left a runny nose and a fever in its place.  Her limbs were
almost unresponsive, now.  She would often find herself clinging to the rock,
daydreaming, with no idea how long she had been in the same position.  During
those daydreams, Wideman would appear clinging to the rock nearby and talk to
her.

Was it a daydream, or something
worse?

Then she thought,
How could it
be a daydream?  I
hate
Wideman.
  People daydreamed about stuff they
loved.  They fantasized about brawny men in secluded waterfalls, not some
creepy old dude with greasy white hair and bug-eyes.

Her exhausted, feverish brain was
doing circles in the sky above her, feeling completely detached from the limbs
that struggled against the cliff-face. 

Forty feet. 

I’m not gonna make it.
 
She felt her sweaty fingers loosening, despite her every attempt to control
them.  She was so warm….  Her eyes kept wanting to shut.

“You’ve gotta kill them, Mag.” 
Wideman was back, hugging the rock a foot from her face, his eyes fixed on her
with his creepy, psychotic stare.  “You’ve gotta kill them all for what they
did.”

Magali squeezed her eyes shut and
slammed her forehead into the reddish stone to get rid of the image.  When she
looked back, Wideman was gone.

Gingerly, she lowered herself
another foot.  Her hand slid down the crevice she had put it into, skinning the
already-too-sensitive flesh of her fingerpads.  Some part of her was
recognizing that she was going to fall, but it felt like she was watching her
thoughts from a distance.

She closed her eyes, feeling the
trembling in every muscle, unable to get them to work.  It seemed so ironic. 
After a four thousand foot climb, she was going to fall to her death at the
last forty feet.  She already felt her fingers losing their hold on the rock
face.

“Magali.”  This time, Wideman’s
schizophrenic eyes were half an inch from her own.  “Remember Benny?  Remember
what they did to Benny, Magali?”

Magali squeezed her eyes shut and
hit the side of her skull against the cliff.

When she looked again, she was
startled to realize Wideman was exactly where she left him, his skinny form
clinging to the rock, vegetable particles stuck to his fingers and hair. 
Trembling, she whispered, “I hate you.”

Wideman grinned, his psychotic
eyes unmoving.  “I know.”

And then he was gone.

“I hate you,” Magali said again,
louder this time.  She dropped her forehead to the stone.  “I hate you so much. 
You ruined my
life!
”  Everything, from her first moments in Deaddrunk
,to her sister’s intervention with Patrick, to pulling the trigger on Martin,
all of it was due to Wideman.  Her whole life had revolved around him and his
stupid little vegetables. 

“I hate you,” she said again. 
Her limbs were shaking with anger, now.  “You’re just a stupid, crazy old man.”

She heard Wideman laughing at
her.

Magali tightened her fingers
against the rock and wept.  For thirty years, he had commanded every part of
her life.  The entire village of Deaddrunk had formed every daily activity
around him, dancing to his every whim, writing down even his most
incomprehensible gibberish.  Even now, even after she had thought she had
finally gotten free of Deaddrunk, even after she had traded her freedom for the
life of a doomed egger, he was still there, still directing her life, still
nudging her the way he wanted her to go, still controlling her future.

Yet Magali recognized the irony. 
After years of avoiding guns, avoiding Milar’s rebellion, avoiding anything
that could possibly make her deserve Wideman’s hated title of ‘Killer’, now she
wanted
to kill those men.  She wanted to do it more than she wanted to
breathe.  It wasn’t just some passing feeling, something that she could put out
of her mind.  It was a driving, ever-present passion to see them die. 

Even as she thought about putting
them in her sights and pulling the trigger, she felt no regret.  She wanted to
see the bullets enter their brains, wanted to see the startled little look on
their glittering faces before they fell, the thrashing of their confused bodies
afterwards.  She wanted to see them die.

She forced her blistered fingers
into another crevice.  She lowered herself another foot, powered by the thought
of finding Colonel Steele in her crosshairs.  The others, she just wanted to
kill.  Steele, she wanted to hurt.

Her toes found a tiny lip and she
lowered herself a few more feet down the wall of rock.

She would kill him last.

The other Nephyrs would die, but
she would save Steele for last.  She would hunt him like the animal that he
was.

She was standing on the crunchy
stone dirt at the bottom of the Snake for several minutes before she recognized
the fact.  Magali blinked, then reluctantly let go of the stone in front of
her.  She fell back onto her heels, the first time she’d used them all day. 
The crumbly red-orange dirt dug into the soles of her feet, sticking to the
blood and weeping blisters of her toes.  She stared down at it,
uncomprehending.

I made it.
 

She wondered if she was
hallucinating again.  Magali looked up.

The top of the cliff seemed to
swim above her, swirling with the deep blue sky, blotting out the sun.  Magali
quickly returned her attention to her feet, fighting vertigo.  Without having
anything to eat for almost four days, it was all she could do to keep
standing.  All she’d had to drink was a few handfuls of the brackish water
dribbling from a crack in the stone that afternoon.  She glanced at the Snake,
wondered if she could stomach its venom.

Magali stood there, unable to
make her feet move, feeling light-headed.  She listened to the rush of liquid
in the channel behind her, the watercourse that had carved its long, ribbony
path across the globe.  The highly acidic water had a greenish hue, its surface
almost placid as it continued to eat its way through the face of Fortune.

I made it,
she thought
again, this time registering shock, as well.  She looked up again, startled. 
When she had first put her foot over the edge, she had hoped, but she had never
once thought she’d actually make it.  It all seemed dreamlike, now, something
that had happened to somebody else.

Did I really do that?
 
Even with her throbbing toes, her scabbed and bleeding fingers, she had trouble
believing.

A humming in the distance brought
her attention back to the task at hand.  Somewhere down the Snake, she heard
the increasing roar of an engine echoing against the canyon walls, approaching
fast.  Magali stumbled backwards automatically, pressing her shoulder blades
into the cliff. 
No,
she panicked. 
Oh no.

The
gun.

It had to be near Benny.  But
where was Benny?  In her grueling climb, she had sought handholds and footholds
wherever she could find them, paying little attention to her position in
relation to the ground.  In fact, she had tried her best to
avoid
looking down.  Now, Magali found herself in strange surroundings, with no
points of reference to match up where she was with where she had been.  Had she
gone north or south in her climb, and how far? 

The approaching ship spurring her
into motion, she hurriedly moved from the wall and started searching the rocky
red earth, climbing boulders to get a better view.  She found Ben a few dozen
yards away, his tiny body twisted, limbs askew, his head facing the ground. 
Saying a mental prayer for him, Magali began searching for the gun.  She looked
into crevices and frantically pushed aside Fortune pin-scrub, barely feeling
the biting sting the leaves left on her skin.  Nothing.

What if they took it?
she
suddenly thought, freezing in place.  What if, after Steele had dropped it, the
Nephyrs had retrieved the gun when they had gone down to grab his companions? 
What if it bounced against the canyon wall and fell into the Snake?  What if
the canyon’s gusting wind had blown it a hundred feet off course?

The engine was getting closer,
coming from the direction of the Yolk camp. 

No!
a part of her
screamed.  She would
not
be caught helpless again.  Never again.  It
came on a powerful inner surge, one that left her limbs tingling with the
strength of her rage.

Almost as if her own stubborn
will had conjured it, she saw a flash amidst the boulders to the north.  She
jogged up the Snake, eyes pinned to the spot, terrified she would lose track of
it.

She found the gun lodged between
two boulders, intact.  Seeing it, beaten but not broken, Magali let out a sob
of relief.

The engine was almost upon her
when she ran back to Ben’s body and sprawled out between the boulders beside
it, her hand and the gun hidden under a pin-scrub bush.  Moments later, the
ship rounded the last bend in the river and the engines were an overpowering
roar bearing down on her.  Magali heard the vessel slow directly overhead and
clenched the gun tighter. 
Stay still,
she told herself. 
Don’t
move.  They’ll pass.

But they didn’t pass.  She heard
the metal clang and the whirring grind as the landing gear extended, then the
shift in tone as the engines prepared for landing.  Magali lay still, though
her heart was hammering, now.  It was all she could do not to sit up to make
sure one of the metal legs wasn’t about to crush her.

Magali heard the metal pads
crunch in the stony pebbles a dozen feet away, then the whine as a ship door
opened and a ramp extended.

Just stay calm,
she
thought. 
They probably just want to make sure you’re dead.  Just wait it
out, Mag.  Don’t shoot unless you have to.  You can’t kill them all.  Not yet.
 
Still, her fingers were numb from gripping the gun too tightly.

She heard light cyborg footsteps
travel down the ramp, so quiet they were almost imperceptible.  Then the crunch
of gravel as they approached, slow and wary.

They stopped a few feet off. 
Magali imagined the Nephyr dragging a gun from his cargo belt and shooting her
between the eyes.  Her heart-rate began to increase its tempo the longer the
newcomer stood there, watching her.  Was it Colonel Steele?  Would he want to
take her body in to be identified and condemned?

Magali concentrated on her
breathing.  She focused on keeping her chest movements as shallow as possible,
despite the way her blood was thrumming through her veins.  A Nephyr could read
her heartbeat. 

If it was a Nephyr there, he
would know she was still alive.