Fortune's Folly (Outer Bounds Book 2) Read online

  OUTER BOUNDS 2

  Fortune's

  Folly

  By

  Sara King

  Opposite Image: Rebel Propaganda Poster, by Lance MacCarty

  Story Copyright © 2016

  Sara King

  All Rights Reserved

  Images © 2016

  Sara King and/or Lance MacCarty

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER 1: A Meeting of the Minds

  CHAPTER 2: The Heist

  CHAPTER 3: Distress Call

  CHAPTER 4: To Sacrifice a Queen…

  CHAPTER 5: Warning One

  CHAPTER 6: A Final Confession

  CHAPTER 7: Alone in Silver City

  CHAPTER 8: Friendly Assessments

  CHAPTER 9: Dragonfly

  CHAPTER 10: Do You Wish to Open?

  CHAPTER 11: Encephalon

  CHAPTER 12: Survivor

  CHAPTER 13: B.A.B.E.

  CHAPTER 14: Ship with an Attitude

  CHAPTER 15: That Night in the Jungle…

  CHAPTER 16: The Uh-Oh Light

  CHAPTER 17: Journey into the Wide

  CHAPTER 18: FlameOn

  CHAPTER 19: Master Communicator

  CHAPTER 20: Two-Faced

  CHAPTER 21: Sibling Rivalry

  CHAPTER 22: The New Leadership

  CHAPTER 23: Twins

  CHAPTER 24: Charismatic People

  CHAPTER 25: Modern Medicine

  CHAPTER 26: Separation Anxiety

  CHAPTER 27: Quadrocity

  CHAPTER 28: Prisoner Rescue

  CHAPTER 29: Fight or Flight

  CHAPTER 30: The Burdens of Loneliness

  CHAPTER 31: Five Minutes, Thirty-Nine Seconds

  CHAPTER 32: Risk of Exposure

  CHAPTER 33: Inhuman

  CHAPTER 34: One Child at a Time

  CHAPTER 35: Anna’s ‘Upgrades’

  CHAPTER 36: Quad to the Rescue

  CHAPTER 37: The Importance of Jedi Wolverine

  CHAPTER 38: Quad and Anna Destroy the Universe

  CHAPTER 39: Prophets with Eidetic Memories

  CHAPTER 40: Homelessness

  CHAPTER 41: Anna’s First Assassination

  CHAPTER 42: The Abundance of Spring

  CHAPTER 43: Daytona’s Engine Repair

  CHAPTER 44: Improv

  CHAPTER 45: Stalemate

  CHAPTER 46: Alone with the Enemy

  CHAPTER 47: Children of Fortune

  About the Author

  About the Artist

  Outer Bounds Art and Swag

  SNEAK PEEK: Children of Fortune

  Other Titles by Sara King

  Dedication

  To my fans, who, with their generosity, saved this book from obscurity.

  To Robert and Kim, champions of my Muse, who picked me up, dusted me off, and showed me how to love writing again.

  And to Karen, who’s so good at what she does that I’m forced to wonder when I’ll receive her confession that she’s not precisely human…

  Author’s Note

  If you’ve read my stories before, you know that I don’t do technobabble. That said, in introducing the socially-awkward mechanical genius child Quad as a main character, I had to do some technobabble. Please feel free to skim, because no, you’re not supposed to remember it all. It’s Grade-A bullshit, but hopefully it’s amusing bullshit.

  “Those who sleep through the lessons of history are forced to retake the class.”

  Admiral Essa Dublin, Survivors’ Ship 7, ‘Lucky Seven,’ Final Human Migration

  CHAPTER 1: A Meeting of the Minds

  (a.k.a. Technobabble, Part 1)

  Two Weeks Before Independence, 3rd of May, 3006

  Yolk Factory 14

  Fortune, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds

  “Hi. My name’s Quad.”

  The small, strawberry-blonde girl using enough ultranet load for a small city looked up at Quad with a frown, so Quad reflexively dropped his eyes back to his feet. Anna Landborn had been seated alone at an abandoned cafeteria table of Yolk Factory 14, and it had seemed like as good a time as any to approach her. Everyone else, including her sister, was locked in the mines. Quad, who had already been watching Anna for two days outside the visible spectrum, had waited until Anna had blackmailed the kitchen chef into letting her hide in the chow tent before he had been able to find the courage to come out of hiding.

  “You think I give a floater’s crap what your name is, Chubby?” Anna demanded. When Quad didn’t look up at her, she squinted at him. “What’s wrong with you? You got a foot fetish or something?”

  Quad swallowed hard. His mom had repeatedly told him to meet people’s eyes or they would think something was wrong with him, but he simply couldn’t bring himself to look at most people. Some people were okay, but most people made him uncomfortable, so he just didn’t look.

  “I’m Quad,” Quad managed. Then, horrified, he realized he’d already told her that and scrambled to come up with something else. Don’t repeat yourself, his mother had drilled him. She’ll think you’ve got the Wide if you repeat yourself. “Um. Can I sit down?” He couldn’t lift his head to look at her, so he studied his shoes, instead. His neon green Jedi Wolverine sneakers were crusted with sand and slime from wandering down the Tear in search of her, and he was likewise dreading having to explain the mess to his mom in five minutes. Cheyenne was still mad at him for uploading Predator Apocalypso’s voiceprint to the mansion’s supercomputer to replace the snooty Eoirian interface, and she was always complaining he was going to bring back a planet-killing bacterium on one of his jumps that would end up killing all of the Core. Quad didn’t think that was very fair, because the extreme temperatures alone would easily kill—

  “No,” Anna said. “What accent is that? Trinoi?” She snorted. “So your parents are either stupid chumps who bought the Coalition colonization propaganda, or criminals they rounded up to feed through the Yolk mines.” Surveying him a moment, Anna went on, “My bet’s on stupid. Cobrani porkers rarely make it through the criminal system. Go back to suckling at your mother’s teat, piglet—no corn over here.” She went back to studying her r-player.

  Quad lifted his head slightly to watch the downloads she was making—the data streams were always different on different planets, their lines and colors varying by magnetic and solar influences, kind of like moving, weaving fingerprints. Fortune’s were prettier than most—a wash of blues and greens and purples that spun and expanded like fire as they wove outwards into the Void, most signals never again to be picked up by sentient life, human or otherwise.

  Anna had hijacked the main terminal, and was putting a horrendous load on the camp computer’s ultranet link under the guise of a non-existent admiral. Though the screen of her player was facing away from him, Quad could tell by the flow of data that she was gathering every book, publication, and vid on advanced weaponry that Humanity had published since the start of the Triton Wars. That made him perk up a little.

  “Interesting stuff,” Quad offered, as she perused one of Trachinelli’s so-called masterworks on chemical weaponry. He personally found the stuff by Trachinelli to be less inspired than the simple essays by the forgotten genius Yoseph Dotrine of the twenty-fourth century, whose brilliance was lost during the strife of the Migration, but Trachinelli was the more popularly-acclaimed scientist, and his work would therefore be the easiest for her to find.

  Anna snorted. “As if you’d have any clue, Philistine.”

  Quad wanted to tell her that talking about pre-Triton technology was more o
r less his favorite subject of all time, but his mom had insisted he keep his mouth shut about that in public, so he just continued to stare at his dirty Jedi Wolverine sneakers. Despite the special heat-resistant coatings he’d put on them, part of one sole had melted in his last jump. He stared at it unhappily. His mom had given them to him for his birthday, and Cheyenne kept complaining that he was always destroying his stuff. What was worse, Quad had only been given one official mission by the Sun Dogs so far, a mission that he was even then failing horribly, and he only had four and a half minutes left to talk. Figure out if she’s ready for the program, Cheyenne had said. Get in, get out. Don’t you dare start talking tech with the little gremlin.

  As Quad considered how, exactly, to get the super-intelligent—he was told, anyway—seven-year-old Fortuner talking about something other than tech, Anna Landborn loudly cleared her throat. When Quad looked up, she was squinting up at him with a frown.

  “Didn’t you hear me, you fat chocolate cupcake?” she asked. “You’re using up my oxygen.”

  “Sorry,” Quad said, stepping sideways to give her space. He had rehearsed this moment a hundred times with Cheyenne, but all his preparations had evaporated the moment he was faced with the monumental act of simple conversation. “Ask her about her hobbies,” Cheyenne had told him. “Ask about the Coalition. See if she can tell right from wrong. Try to get a bead on the little shit—figure out if she’s one of the broken ones. Her adopted father already said she was a bad egg, but David’s got a reputation for being a hardass, and Sirius doesn’t want to believe it.”

  How was someone supposed to cover such ephemeral topics as right and wrong in five minutes? Which was actually four minutes, now. His mother’s request was leaving his mouth dry, his hands sweaty. He couldn’t even ask her the time of day, much less execute a complete series of pointed questions that would allow him to make a concrete psychological analysis in under four minutes. And then he’d have to wait for her answers…

  Quad opened his mouth, but he couldn’t conceive of the right thing to say to make Anna give him what he needed to know in the time allotted. He hadn’t wanted to go to Fortune in the first place—he had been in the middle of giving Mordy a long-range warfare kit that matched the hundred-teraton stopping power of TimeMagus’s far-future robot assistant Asteroid Boy—and all he could think about was how much he hated talking to people, and how silent the empty tent was around them as he struggled to say something.

  Anna Landborn sighed and slapped her r-player down on the table. “Look. Twit. I’ve got a three thousand page dossier on modern weaponry to read in the next six hours, so if you could please go find some blocks to play with or something, you’d do us both a really big favor.”

  “I like tech,” Quad blurted, then winced as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

  Anna laughed, looking delighted. “Oh yeah?” She cocked her head at him, a wicked gleam beginning to form in her brown eyes. “How about those neo-setorial subcoprocessors creating Krauss-Gobenhauff nexus plasma on an endocamic level? Pretty ridiculous the way they waste all that energy on the Dotrine loop, eh?”

  Quad felt his mouth drop open as his heart started to spontaneously pound with joy. No one—not even Dotrine—had proposed that the energy loop created by his namesake apparatus was redundant, and could be theoretically circumvented by a proper Trudine reaction. He had seen it the moment he had taken a Maltothorinium power sphere apart, but Cheyenne had told him to go back to the skimmer when he’d started to try and tell the local baker about its inefficiency. Bakers didn’t care about nexus plasma, she had told him, which simply wasn’t true because every ship in the world ran on nexus plasma. When Quad had tried to argue that point, however, she’d had him write it all down and had given it to Sirius, but the old man had never commissioned a working model. Too impractical, not really useful, Kestrel had told him, and it had been summarily dropped.

  Not useful? A ship could theoretically save ninety-eight percent of its overall power core lifetime simply by applying a Trudine reaction. Further, the Trudine reaction would streamline the creation of nexus plasma and, with proper channeling, could quite possibly create a Whorug sphere that could allow a ship to jump space and time.

  …or drop them into one of an infinite number of alternate dimensions, which would be a slight issue, but at least the outrageous power inefficiencies would be countered.

  “Or,” Anna said, still grinning at him, “what about the glaring flaw in current communications networks? The Aashaanti had well-documented instant communications through the Drone-Bolagg effect, but even the idiots who named the process haven’t managed to figure out the Aashaanti never sent out communications signals in the form of radio waves or microwaves. They were operating on a psycho-reactive signal—same one the Shriekers are using. Funny no one else can see that but us two geniuses, huh?”

  Quad totally forgot to breathe, suddenly too overwhelmed to speak. He had seen the flaws in the proposed Drone-Bolagg effect the moment he had studied the top-secret experiments with salvaged Aashaanti tech. In a lab setting, they had managed to use human electricity—their first mistake—to power the Aashaanti transmitters into creating a supposedly instant transfer of information by the relocation of a radio wave, but the report’s finer details had been riddled with inexplicable lag and minor transcription errors, mainly because the Aashaanti transceivers were never meant to carry such a rudimentary load as a directional radio wave, but to transfer and amplify a higher frequency, permeatory psychic sphere created by the mental presence of an Aashaanti archon.

  Anna stood up and put her arm around Quad’s shoulder. “What’d you say your name was? Pod?”

  “Quad,” Quad whispered, his throat having constricted to leave him with barely a whisper. All he could see was Anna’s face, the raw intelligence staring back at him. Finally—finally—he had met someone he could talk to.

  Anna grinned. “Look. Quad. I’ve had the entire future of a planet resting on my shoulders pretty much since the day I was born. That’s six million people who are waiting for me to drag them out from under the yoke of this backwards, self-important behemoth that has been abusing their civil rights for the last forty years. That’s a really big burden, one that keeps me awake at night when all the adults around me are worrying which slut or man-whore they’re gonna fornicate with next, and whether or not they’re gonna contract a venereal disease because of it.”

  Quad could only stare. Everything he had rehearsed with his mother was gone, and only the glory that was Anna Landborn was left. For the first time, he felt like he could talk to another human being. He even wanted to talk, which was shocking him to total silence. He had never wanted to talk to a person. Not once. Even his conversations with Cheyenne had mainly been about his latest tech discovery or, more commonly, what he wanted for dinner. But here… Here, standing before him, was someone who could understand, someone who shared his burden.

  Anna petted his shoulder again. “So get this, Quad. You are what is politely called a raging imbecile. Me, on the other hand, I’m what’s called a savant. I’m destined to change the course of history. You…” She snorted, looking him up and down. “You’re probably destined to get fucked by a pedophilic Nephyr at Harvest and left in a ditch to die.”

  Quad just nodded. That’s all he could do—nod. It was wonderful—perfect, even—to find someone who actually spoke his language. He had a thousand things to say, all of them trying to burst forth at the same time, locking down his throat like Galtoria Falls trapped inside a garden hose.

  Anna smiled and nodded with him. “I’m not going to start using little words, so you should probably go back to playing with whatever cute wooden toys your parents carved you out of sticks before they died. Hell, even rocks would suffice. I hear if you pound a couple of them together, they make a funny sound. Real entertainment, there.”

  “I…” Quad whispered, his chest on fire with the desperate need to talk to her, to tell her of his own discoveri
es, but there were too many to pick just one. The mental clamor for attention had brought his entire chain of thought to a crashing halt, leaving him with his mouth hanging open, unable to do anything but stare.

  Anna patted him gently on the shoulder. “So, while I would love the company of your fat tarbaby face, there’s no way you could possibly keep up.”

  Quad swallowed hard and blinked. He was speechless not because he had nothing to say, but because, for the first time, he wanted to say it all. He wanted to outline every invention he’d ever had in passing thought, every nuance of technology as he saw it, every simple observation that had befuddled every other human he’d ever met—he just couldn’t figure out where to start.

  “So go,” Anna said, ushering him out of the tent with a smile, “or I’ll go tell the Director you’re a rebel spy I just caught accessing the camp ultranet to download treatises on modern weaponry.”

  Quad’s mind was racing, trying to find the best thing to talk about. There was so much, so very much…

  Anna’s eyes started to narrow, and Quad realized he was taking too long to decide.

  “Drone-Bolagg,” Quad blurted, finally picking one. “Yes,” he babbled. “Yes, oh yes.”

  She stared at him for much too long. “You get hit by a Shriek?” Anna demanded finally. Her brown eyes caught at his wrist. “And how the hell did you get hold of an Aashaanti bracelet? Don’t you know artifacts are worth big bucks on the black market? Why haven’t the guards taken it from you?”

  Quad, who was already upset by his own verbal clumsiness, nodded when he meant to shake his head, then realized her final words weren’t a yes-no question and let out a hysterical, nervous laugh as he tried to rewind and figure out how to respond, and how badly he’d screwed up.

  “Ugh.” Anna grabbed her r-player and got up from the table. “If he asks, tell the cook I was afraid the stupidity was contagious and went back to my hut.”