Vicky Peterwald: Survivor (Vicky Peterwald Series Book 2)

by Mike Shepherd

  “Who knows, if I’m up here, and they’re down there, maybe I can throw rocks at them.” She made a face; Hank had always gotten the best of her in snowball fights.

  She reached the ridgeline and rolled over it. A second later, a bullet whizzed by to the left of where she’d crossed.

  She eyed the valley before her. It was rugged. It might be fun to hike with solid boots. Bare naked and barefoot, she winced at the thought. She headed off to her left, away from the stream, not dropping down, but staying to high and rocky ground.

  Behind her, she could hear the roar of engines being pushed beyond their designed limits. She had figured the motor brigade would head downstream with the intent of doubling back, but from the sound of it, they were gunning their rigs right up the rocky outcropping.

  Instead of having hours before they showed up, she might only have minutes.

  Vicky hurried down the ridge, hoping to make it into the trees. She’d spotted a thicket. She might be able to squeeze herself in there. It would cost her scratches and blood, but she could go where they couldn’t.

  At least, not with their ride.

  She made it to the trees a scant minute before an ATV gunned over the rise.

  She turned to see just how she might wiggle her way into the thicket, then froze.

  The beating of rotors filled the rocky vale.

  Four choppers slid in, two on this side of the ridgeline, the other two on the other side. They were the standard passenger helicopter ubiquitous to the Empire. These had armed sharpshooters riding their skids.

  Vicky lost all hope. No way could she dodge them.

  Then all three of the riflemen on the ATVs whipped their rifles up, and the drivers pulled out machine pistols, all aiming for choppers.

  Vicky took another look at the helicopters. Those were Marines riding the skids of one! Rangers on the other!

  They shot first.

  Vicky’s pursuers got a few shots off, mostly at random and at the sky as they died.

  Another chopper flared in to where Vicky had gone to ground. Mannie leapt from it before the pilot settled it in place.

  His shout of “Vicky! Vicky!” were the sweetest sounds she’d ever heard.

  Later, when she told the story, she’d say she raced into his arms.

  Scratched, bleeding, and barefoot, the truth is, a girl doesn’t race anywhere. What she did was make her way as carefully and quickly as the situation allowed.

  “My God, Vicky, what did they do to you?” Mannie said when he got a good look at her. He had his shirt off in a moment. He did have a bit of a paunch, but Vicky only had eyes for the look on his face.

  If ever she was to see what love looked like on a man’s face, she was seeing it now.

  “They didn’t do anything to me,” Vicky said, folding herself into the offered shirt and the open arms. “I think they were waiting for me to die of thirst before claiming the body. I don’t know if they thought they could leave me dead somewhere else and write their own story about my death. Hard to tell. We’ll have to talk to those who were chasing me.”

  She and Mannie turned toward the chopper. Commander Boch was rapidly covering the ground. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine enough. I want to talk to those who were chasing me.”

  “You’ll need a séance for that,” he said.

  “Dead?”

  “Their desire to go down fighting was too obvious not to grant,” the commander said dryly.

  “I wish we had some of those sleepy darts Kris Longknife’s troops have. Don’t we have any rounds of something with less than lethal intent in this Empire?”

  “I don’t think so, ma’am. I’ll look into it if you wish.”

  “I wish,” Vicky growled. “I really wanted to see how they took to a couple of days without water.”

  “You are not a nice girl,” Mannie said.

  “You shocked?”

  “Nope. I was contemplating doing worse.”

  “I think I like you,” Vicky said, resting a hand on his knee where he sat beside her in the chopper.

  “Commander,” she said, changing her focus.

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “I spent a miserable afternoon in a farmhouse farther up this stream. You should have no trouble finding it. It has a smoldering barn.”

  “Yes, Your Grace. We know of it.”

  “You spotted the fire.”

  “Of course, Your Grace.”

  “And you didn’t come to my rescue?” was loaded with shell and grapeshot.

  “I asked them not to,” Mannie said.

  “You what?”

  “I thought you would want us to see who responded to the lure. They did, and we collected them. Sadly, dead, but we got them.”

  Vicky considered this. “So you used me as bait.”

  “As you would have used me, Your Gracious Grace,” Mannie said, looking her evenly in the eye.

  “And the admiral agreed with this idea?”

  “So long as we had you under observation and a rapid-response team ready to come to your aid as soon as we were sure we had them all, yes.”

  “I can’t fault his tactics. Only next time you do that, please have someone drop me a meal, shoes, some bug spray, and a nice book to read,” Vicky said, dryly.

  “If I could have, I would have dropped me,” Mannie said. “You have been most fetching.”

  “I have been most naked. Did you like ogling my cut, splotched, and bare skin?”

  “We watched you on infrared,” Mannie said. “If you’ve seen one body on infrared, you’ve seen them all.”

  “You are a prude,” Vicky said, trying to adjust his shirt to cover more of her scratched skin. “You are also distracting me,” Vicky said, then changed topics.

  “Commander, there is very likely one or more tiny cameras hidden somewhere in that bedroom I was locked down in. You can ignore the recording of my naked struggle. No. You will ignore my struggle. However, I want those cameras taken apart and examined with the best we have. I want to know everything that the cameras tell us about the people who set it up.”

  The commander spoke into his commlink. “It is being done as we speak, Your Grace.”

  “Good, now I need a bath, a meal, and a good night’s sleep, not necessarily in that order.”

  Vicky could almost hear the commander’s heels clicking as he sat at attention. “The Imperial Suite has been reserved for you at the Kiev Cosmopolitan, Your Grace. This helicopter can deposit you on the roof, just a short elevator ride down one floor to your rooms.”

  “Take me there,” she ordered, then added, upon only a second’s reflection, “Is it safe?”

  “Your Grace,” Mannie said, “I don’t think a planet could be made any safer for you than St. Petersburg is now. Your abduction was the lead story on every media account. Your face has been shown in every home.”

  “On some planets, they’d print out a Peterwald face and use it for a dartboard,” Vicky said, dryly.

  “Not here, Vicky,” Mannie said. “You know that big pink bear?”

  “I dimly remember it,” she allowed.

  “Well, another girl, a teen with dreams of a career in the news, caught that whole shooting thing on her phone,” Mannie told her. “Much of her footage was up close and personal before her older sister dragged her away. Still, she was walking backward, recording more as she left. So she caught the whole attack on film. All of her story, from pink fluffy bear to your disappearing in the smoke has been playing every fifteen minutes on every newscast on the planet. The people loved it, and they love you. It’s gotten a lot of them mad.”

  Mannie paused to catch his breath. “It got us leads. We knew that two large black SUVs were seen speeding north from Kiev and took off into the backcountry. We couldn’t track them. There seemed to be
some sort of electronic spoofing involved. That’s another thing the admiral wants to find out more about. Anyway, we knew you were somewhere up there and had surveillance working the area when you gave us a most definite, what did you call it, Commander?”

  “A hot datum,” the Navy officer provided.

  “A very hot and smoking datum,” Vicky agreed.

  “As the planet’s personal representative to you, Your Grace,” Mannie went on, “I wish to be the first to apologize for this attack. I also wish to assure you that if there is any whisper of such an attempt in the future, it will be scotched at its first breath. We do not have much trouble with our criminal underground here on St. Petersburg, but we have received assurances from the highest levels of that underground, or maybe it should be lowest levels,” Mannie clarified with a grin, “that no amount of money can be offered to any of their people to take a contract on you.”

  “Has my stepmother finally found a place where her tentacles cannot reach?” Vicky marveled.

  “We certainly think so,” Mannie assured Vicky.

  The helicopter did indeed land atop the Cosmopolitan, and it was just a one-floor drop to her rooms.

  Kit and Kat were already there, making sure the room was secure, laying out towels for her bath and checking out the doctor who had been waiting to examine Vicky.

  Before Vicky could do anything, though, she had to lift Kit and Kat off their knees at her feet.

  “We cannot express our embarrassment at our failure,” Kat said.

  “We should have been prepared for a gas attack,” Kit added.

  “No. It was not your fault,” Vicky said, raising them back to their feet. “I made the mistake of being predictable. Kiev was the only city I hadn’t covered. I always hit the harvest festivals, and I stayed too long at the carnival. It was as much my fault as anyone’s.”

  “If I may interrupt these penitents,” Mannie said, interrupting, “Vicky, you had never gone down a carnie line like that. The people who actually did the takedown had used others to track you during the day. We never had a chance to see their faces in the crowd twice. There was no warning at all.”

  He shrugged. “They were good. From what I’m told from our examination of the bodies, none of the actual kidnappers were from here.”

  That gave Vicky pause. “There’s so little traffic, how’d the Empress manage to ship her assassins in?”

  “Little traffic is not zero traffic. We are looking into things and should know more by tomorrow. Now, if all is forgiven, can the doctor debug, delouse, and descratch the Grand Duchess?”

  “Can you, indeed, descratch me?”

  “No,” the female doctor said, “but I can at least make you feel better. Now, who gets to stay for my examination?”

  Vicky shooed Mannie out. No doubt by now he had seen all of her that there was to see, but familiarity bred contempt, and she wanted his memories to be of her vivaciously naked, not bitten, splotched, and scratched.

  The doctor checked Vicky out thoroughly. When Vicky tried to refuse the rape kit, the doctor balked. “Were you unconscious for a part of your abduction?”

  Vicky allowed that she had been.

  “Then we check everything,” the doctor snapped.

  As it turned out, Vicky was right, she had not been raped. Considering what she did to her last rapist, no wonder Stepmommy was now giving more definite instructions on that matter.

  Before the doctor finished, Kit and Kat were running Vicky’s bathwater. That turned out to be providential. When Kit began to add oils and herbs, the doctor again put her foot down.

  “Plain water until these scratches and bug bites heal. You will put these ointments on her cuts, abrasions, and the bleeding bug bites. I suggest you get her some silk pajamas to cover the ointment, or she’s going to smear it all over her bed.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Vicky said.

  From the looks she was getting from the two seductive assassins, they were already thinking up ways to include Mannie in their discreet play so as not to smear her medicated wounds.

  The doctor must have mistaken the two for Vicky’s nurses because she showed them how to dress her wounds and handed off Vicky’s medications. “Her temperature is slightly elevated. Make sure she takes these on the prescribed schedule. Water. No milk.”

  “We will make sure she does,” the two said as one.

  They ordered in the prescribed silk pajamas while Vicky wallowed in the tub. It felt so good to get clean. She had the girls scrub her down twice and didn’t complain when some of her sores bled. Or when some of their scrubbing got more than personal.

  Dried off, the two of them insisted on sharing the duty of “greasing her,” as Vicky put it.

  Mannie passed the pajamas through the bathroom door and informed them that dinner was waiting.

  Dinner was by candlelight. It was also delicious. Kiev was famous for its fisheries, and Vicky found herself enjoying every different kind of shrimp that had been imported from old Earth and adapted well to the clear waters off the coast. There were also steamed oysters. Mannie would have passed on the offer, but Vicky insisted they were delicious.

  Kit’s and Kat’s eyes gleamed with expectation.

  As soon as dinner was removed, Mannie made to remove himself as well, but Vicky held lightly to his elbow. “It has been rough. I would very much like not to sleep alone. If you could just hold me?”

  “I believe that can be arranged,” he said, softly.

  Vicky shooed an incredulous Kit and Kat out to sleep in the sitting room and took Mannie to her bed.

  He held her very close until she dozed off.

  He was still holding her when she came awake in the night, screaming.

  And he held her close, soothing her like a child, until she could again lose herself in troubled sleep.

  CHAPTER 62

  BREAKFAST was again served in the room. It came earlier than Vicky wanted, but it was accompanied by a fresh uniform. This time dinner dress blues. Somehow, in the search for her, her Order of St. Christopher, Star Leaper, had turned up as well as her computer.

  “A minor member of the troop that snatched you snagged the medal and your computer. He had no idea what they would be worth, but he figured to make a little extra on the side.”

  Mannie shook his head and laughed. For this, it was unusually harsh. “The first pawnbroker he showed it to called us before the guy was out of his store. He didn’t know much about the computer, but he’d seen the medallion on you in the news vids. We had the fool, and your computer and Order in hand, likely before they had you tied down to that bed.”

  “A lot of people were looking out for me?” Vicky said with amazement, tasting the words as much as saying them. She suspected it had been a long time since anyone looked out for a Peterwald. Likely well before the pope got himself an army.

  “Since you’ve woken me at this absurd hour and are plying me with coffee, I deduce, even in my befogged brain, that something is going on today.”

  “Yes,” Mannie said, with more enthusiasm than this hour deserved. “You are scheduled to meet with the Kiev City Council. They want to personally apologize for what happened to you in their city.”

  “That shouldn’t take so very long,” Vicky said, taking a sip of her coffee. Today it was dark and bitter. She liked it that way on certain occasions.

  Like today, the first day of her life to be spent plotting the downfall of an Empress.

  The first day of many.

  Stupid woman to not just want me dead but the entire Empire on its knees before her.

  Not going to happen.

  “I’m afraid it won’t be that simple,” Mannie said, interrupting Vicky’s reflections. “They’ve reserved the city auditorium for the meeting. It holds five thousand, and I understand there’s talk of moving it to the city stadium, so they can fit in
another fifteen thousand.”

  “They want twenty thousand people to watch them apologize!”

  “No, twenty thousand people want to personally make their apologies to you.”

  Vicky found herself wondering if she’d traded one form of torture for another. “Will it involve shaking all twenty thousand hands?” she asked, raising a limp, bitten, scraped, and thorn-slashed paw.

  “I think their applause will do,” Mannie said.

  Upon second reflection, Vicky decided today was bound to be better than the last one. She’d have clothes to wear and, no question about it, Mannie at her elbow.

  Breakfast was cut short, so Kit and Kat could put Vicky through an abbreviated shower before greasing her down with the prescribed ointments and sliding her into her dress blues.

  The drive to the stadium was blessedly short. However, the short walk from the car to the stage door on her scratched and blistered feet was barely endurable. Vicky was discovering that she needed a lot more rest before all the aches and strains would leave her alone.

  She was still unprepared for what met her.

  The applause as Vicky was ushered to center stage was thunderous. Vicky took it all in with unprepared eyes and found herself weeping like a beauty-pageant winner.

  Fortunately for her, she got to sit down while Kiev’s mayor opened the proceedings. He made his apology brief. There was no doubt it was from the heart; tears streamed down his cheeks as he spoke.

  Then it was Vicky’s turn to accept the expression of regret. The applause this time as Mannie helped her up to the microphone rolled over her and would not quit.

  Vicky stood there, wiping away tears and smiling, then wiping away more tears and smiling some more. Flowers fell at her feet. Not only bouquets of roses but small offerings of garden flowers and wildflowers, many brought up to the stage by little girls who attempted curtsies that would never make it at court but were surpassingly cute.

  Vicky felt the applause hammer at her heart. She let it in. Never had she felt such feelings of approval. Such value. Such love.

  “Thank you,” she said, and found she’d only managed to whisper it into the mic.