Outer Bounds: Fortune's Rising Read Online Free

structures in over eleven years, zoomtime.  Letting an operator
‘commune with nature’ was too dangerous.  Never mind that there were whispers
of an underground revolution stirring on Fortune—with her body pocked with
metal hookups, a single bug down the wrong node could kill her.
    Swallowing, Tatiana quickly checked
the ground around her to make sure she wasn’t sitting on an alien anthill.  She
would have given anything for some node-caps, but she’d left those back at the
station and the crash-kit didn’t include any.  After all, the soldiers’ vaults
were impenetrable, and operators weren’t supposed to leave their vaults until
they were safely docked at a military facility.  It said so right in the
contract.  “…Further, operators of Special Operations
Large-Demolitions-Integrated Elite Reconnaissance Systems will disembark only
at an approved Coalition hangar, or, alternatively, when their remains are
removed from their SOLDIERS by recovery personnel. ” 
    Jumping at a particularly loud
alien rumble in the shrubbery to her right, Tatiana desperately tried to
remember Major Wilcon’s presentation on alien fauna at orientation.  As an
operator on a colony like Fortune, Tatiana had been so sure that she would
never set foot outside the sanitized hallways of the military barracks that she
hadn’t paid attention as the good Major had droned on about his precious Three
P’s—poisons, predators, and psychic shock.  After all, operators didn’t
need to know that stuff.  The only way she could wind up skinny outside her
soldier was if she exited the vault of her own volition.
    …again.
    I am so dead.   Tatiana’s
misery ratcheted up another notch and she bit her lip as she stared at the open
vault of her machine.  The buoyancy gel had started to dry, leaving a
semi-opaque crust coating the internal workings of the operator’s egg.
    Tatiana knew they weren’t going
to overlook this.  Not this time.  Only ten thousand soldiers had been made,
each one worth a planet or two on the black market, and the line to get inside
one of them was longer than a flight back to the Inner Bounds.  She was replaceable. 
Not even a Third Commendation on Muchos Rios and a stat sheet to make an
admiral cry were going to change that. 
    Tatiana huddled in on herself,
trying to imagine a life without her soldier.  Though most would-be operators
would have gladly taken the eleven years as one of the Coalition’s best and
gracefully bowed out once the stress became too much, Tatiana knew she’d end up
being one of the wackos who ended up strangling her would-be successor with her
bathrobe, once they forced her to step down. 
    She tried to imagine running
cargo as a commercial pilot, or flying security for trade vessels, but after
being solidly at the very top, in the most coveted Spec-Ops spot in the
Coalition fleet, she knew going back to stick would drive her even more crazy
than being locked in a dark, sticky chamber, unable to suck enough stale air
into ragged lungs…
    Tatiana shuddered and tightened
her grip on her legs as she peered over her knees.  She knew she couldn’t stay
there forever, staring at her soldier like a dipshit, but the thought of
climbing back into the vault and reattaching the lines, tubes, and nodes left
her feeling sick. 
    Just the idea of closing the lid,
locking herself back into darkness, left her in despair.
    When she finally couldn’t take
the cold any longer, Tatiana crawled up to her soldier’s cargo pod and pulled
out the survival pack with clothes, food, water-filters, fire-making
supplies—and an emergency beacon.  She lifted a crisply-folded navy blue
jumpsuit from the bottom and, after much debate, shook it out and stuck her
sticky legs into it.  When she returned, the Coalition would know she had
exited her soldier, but, with nightfall approaching and the strange animal
sounds getting louder, she was willing to cross that bridge when she came to
it.
    Tatiana