Free Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising by Sara King Page A

straight.” 
The Director shifted in her seat, pure rage tightly controlled under a cold
façade.  “Instead of organizing escape attempts, you have switched to pummeling
senior foremen.”
    “I had to keep her quiet—” he
repeated, for the hundredth time that day.
    She slammed a leaden fist down
onto the table to cut him off, crushing a divot into the sheet metal.  “ Don’t tell me you did it to keep her quiet,” the Director snarled.  “You’re one-ninety-five
and you pounded the shit out of her.”
    “I’m one-ninety-five what?” Joel
asked, intentionally misunderstanding the Standard in meters.  “ Pounds ? 
No way.  I only weigh a hundred fifty-five.  Regular scarecrow.  Who told you
that?”  It went over much better, he had long ago learned in his first
smuggling runs, if, when masquerading as a colonist, a ‘colonist’ did not
understand the metric weights and measures of the Coalition.
    The Director gave him a long,
irritated look, then said, “You’re six-foot-four and you pounded the shit out
of her.  A little extreme, wouldn’t you say?”
    “I’m a real lightweight,” Joel
said, putting as much charm into his grin as he could manage.  His eyes drifted
to the Nephyr’s fist where it had sunk about a half inch into the desk’s
surface and he tried not to think about what it would have done to his face. 
Desperately doing his best to hide his ancient Inner Bounds accent, he
continued, “Not enough meat on my bones to give her more than a love-tap.”  He
flexed a scrawny bicep.  “See?”
    The Director’s scowl deepened. 
“A love tap?  You gave her a concussion, you prick.”
    This wasn’t going as he had
planned.  Just walk in, dump the broad, walk out, maybe grab a doughnut in the
lobby on his way back to the mounds…  But no, the Director had seen him walk
in, and all time had seemed to stop when she ordered him to put Gayle down and
step away from the body.  Like he was a criminal or something.
    Well, he was a criminal, but not that type of criminal.  It was a little insulting.
    But it got a hell of a lot
scarier when she had ordered that blasted AI that never left her side to arrest
him and throw him in an interrogation room.  Joel had kicked the thing in its
fleshy face, but the machine had simply told him to calm down, that resisting
was futile, all that garbage.
    Now, faced with the Director in
all her glittering Nephyr fury, it was all Joel could do to keep the panic off
his face.  The way she was acting, Gayle had been more than just a friend.  A
lover, maybe?  And now the Director had laid the blame squarely upon his
shoulders.  Joel got the nagging suspicion that the vicious little doll-faced
creep had set him up.
    “I had to do something.  She was
going to start another Shriek,” he offered meekly.
    “By pounding her in the face?  And
she weighs what?  One-twenty?  One- ten?   What the hell were you
thinking?”
    “She was being too loud,” Joel
muttered.
    “Oh really?  Where are your
witnesses?” the Camp Director demanded.  Her green eyes burned like hot
emeralds.
    “Magali and Anna Landborn,” Joel
said, for the fourth time.  It had been the robot—now hovering over the
Director’s left shoulder—who had provided their last names.  Upon first hearing
them, Joel had felt like he’d been punched.  Their father, Nelson Landborn, had
been Joel’s Yolk contact on Fortune, in the days when he had tried to bypass
the middleman and get it straight from the colonists.  Geo had gotten wind of
it and the next time Joel had come through his depot, he had left naked, bloody,
and barely able to drag himself onto his ship and lock the door. 
    Somewhere in those three days of
beatings, he had let Nelson Landborn’s name slip.  The guy had been carted off
of Fortune that very night and never seen again.  Joel hoped to God that the little
Anna kid hadn’t known that when she convinced him to stroll into the lion’s
den, but he was