“The captain wants to see you. Let’s go.”
His pulse began a frantic thumping in his veins, and he swallowed against a throat suddenly gone dry. He was stiff and slow with pain, battered and broken and bruised all over. He couldn’t raise his arms to protect his head, or move fast enough to protect anything else. One good shot to the ribs and they would cave on him, puncturing his lungs and drowning him in his own blood. Another round in the ring with Vort and he was a dead man.
He played for time. “Aw, perai, boys. I just took a shower.”
One of them laughed. “Don’t worry. If the boss was gonna kill you, he’d-a done it before we hit Paradon orbit.”
He followed the guards out of the cell, and did his best to keep up as they hustled him out of his holding area in the darkened cargo bay, through the ship toward the bridge. “Paradon? What happened to Madras?”
“Above my pay grade,” the answer came. “Shut up and walk.”
Sam did as he was told, moving down the increasingly busy corridors to the lift. On the bridge deck they turned right and stopped in front of a cabin where his own would have been aboard the Shadowhawk—Vort’s command room. This one was bigger, appointed like a conference room, with a fair-sized round table in the middle and Vort’s large desk at one end.
His captor wasn’t alone at the table. Waiting with him was a Ninoctin in the flowing colors of his traditional planetary dress, strapped across the chest with enough weaponry to blast Vort and half his bridge crew into the next galaxy. If Vort thought the single guard with the lase rifle he had trained on the Ninoctin would be enough to control this character when he decided to go off, the fighter was sadly mistaken. On the other hand, the denizens of Paradon never gave up their weapons, even in a negotiation. Which, Sam supposed, explained the standoff.
The guards came to a halt with Sam at the end of the table opposite the two men. Vort smirked at him and threw back a shot of something that smelled wonderful—real whiskey?—before he turned to speak to the Ninoctin.
“This, my lord Teliath, is Captain Samuel Armstrong Murphy, formerly of the M.S. Shadowhawk. You may have heard of him.”
Teliath’s long face could not have looked less impressed. “This is the pirate captain that strikes such fear into the hearts of the Minertsan fleet? I don’t believe it.” He waved a hand in Sam’s direction. “I’ve been told he is as tall as a Ninoct’, as big as an asteroid, as strong as a pteryx! You show me this shrunken human, beaten like a child?”
“Hey!” Sam stepped forward, but his guards held him back. I’ll show you shrunken, you overgrown honto!
Vort laughed in dismissal. “Well, it’s true he’s been beaten. He and I played a little in the sparring ring a couple of days ago.”
“Yeah, and who got the better of that one, Vort? How are the boys today, huh? You still walking with a limp?” The guard on his right smacked him in the head, hard enough to send him to his knees. His vision blacked for a moment, but he fought to stay conscious. This was important.
“As you can see, his mouth is still in working order, even if his judgment is not,” Vort was saying. “There’s been no brain damage, however. I’m sure he still remembers all the route and contact information that makes him so valuable to ConSys Intel. His bounty is currently offered at 50,000 credits, more than enough to erase my debt to you, my lord.”
“You’re proposing I take this petty thief in exchange for all that you owe me?” The Ninoctin frowned. “As I recall your ship repairs and your gambling debts totaled more than 35,000 credits—and there is the interest to consider. To claim this bounty I would have to deal with Confederated Systems authorities myself, which puts me at some risk.”
Teliath appeared to be thinking, so Vort stayed quiet. Sam could see no advantage to himself either way, so he said nothing.
The Ninoctin tented his long fingers in front of his face. “Of course, if this is truly Captain Murphy—which I doubt—then I might get more for him from the Grays. He’s just torn a big hole in their prize battle cruiser, the Tifan, and delayed their plan to blow up the weapons factory on LinHo. They’d probably pay big credits to get hold of him.”
The blood roared in Sam’s ears, drowning out Vort’s protests. Sonofabitch! Did he just say “blow up the weapons factory”?
Sam shook his head to clear it. “How do you know?”
Vort lunged across the table. “Shut the fuck up! You’re nothing but meat here, Murphy.”
The Ninoctin considered him. “Know?”
“About the factory on LinHo. How do you know the Grays plan to blow it?”
“So you are Captain Murphy!” Teliath bared yellow teeth in a semblance of a grin.
“Tell me!”
“Shut him up!” At Vort’s order, the guard on Sam’s left punched him in the jaw, a blow that blinded him with pain and flooded his mouth with blood. Above the ringing in his head, he heard Vort plead, “My lord, do we have a deal or not?”
Teliath rose from his seat, a move that Sam could barely see through a haze of pain. “I didn’t like that lizard captain of the Tifan, or his high-ass Thrane spies either, though they paid well enough for their repairs.” Sam looked up from his knees to see the Ninoctin standing over him. “I wouldn’t give you over to them, Captain, no matter what the price. I know what the Grays do with their captives. I think you’ll hold your own with this one, yes?”
He turned to Vort. “No, we don’t have a deal, Captain Vort. I don’t trust ConSys. I’m not sure I trust you.” His hands hovered near his holsters. “I’m leaving now. You still owe me 35,000 credits plus interest, due in the next twentydays. And if I don’t return to my nest unharmed, my cohort will take it out of your hide.”
“My lord!” Vort was on his feet, his hands spread in protest, but the Ninoctin had already swept through the hatch. His furious gaze landed on Sam. “This is your doing, you mulaak bastard!” He rounded the table, fist clenched, and raised his arm to deliver what would surely have been a killing blow.
Sam put everything he had into his voice. “You don’t want to do that, old friend.” When Vort hesitated a nanosecond, he went on. “You’re going to need my bounty to pay Teliath what you owe him. Last I knew I was wanted alive.”
The mountain of a man loomed over him, his muscled arm still upraised. “I don’t have to kill you to make myself feel better. You’ll live. You just won’t feel like talking for a long, long time.”
Sam had two thoughts before the beating began: So much for impressing ConSys with how well he’d been treated. And he had to survive this and get back to the ’hawk; he had to get Rayna out of the Kinz factory before the Thranes blew it to hell.
Then that arm came down, and there was no more thinking at all.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“We have a contact to make here.” Rayna kept her voice low and her face blank as she and Lainie shuffled their way through the mess hall line toward the servers. “Keep your eyes open.”
There was no other conversation among the prisoners in the line with them. The mindwipe left its victims without the impulse to communicate, without the normal human desire for interaction. These beings bereft of emotion stumbled through their truncated lives looking forward only to food and sleep and avoidance of pain. They paid no attention to Rayna and Lainie or to anything else around them, unless a guard came down the line, in which case they cowered in primitive fear.
Rayna noted the few exceptions to this rule, however. The ones who watched with wary eyes despite carefully composed expressions. The ones who pushed aggressively to the head of the line to get their food. These were the prisoners who were resistant to the mindwipe, both those she had come to save and those she would be forced to fight for control of her territory.
The intel Rescue had on Kinz was largely either outdated or wrong. Once you were on the inside, security at the factory was looser than many places she’d been. Rayna wasn’t sure whether this was a recent development tied to the lack of workers, or due to
something else. But the aggressive resistants didn’t bother to hide their awareness, or the fact that they ruled as they liked. She watched as they openly took food from the others, attacked them or bullied them. The guards stepped in only when a beating threatened to damage a victim to the point where she wouldn’t be able to work.
She’d have to fight somebody, probably tonight.
“Things are likely to get rough later.” Rayna nodded at a table where a smirking woman had just stolen a bowl of food. “Stay out of it.”
Lainie managed to look offended without changing her expression. “What? I got you if shit flows our way.”
“You could get hurt.”
“You’ve never seen me fight.” Lainie’s lip quirked.
Rayna thought of the advantages of having it known they were partners. There were drawbacks, too, but if the kid could throw a punch . . .
She sighed. “Try to stay out of it.”
They reached the food at last, and Rayna’s stomach clenched in gratitude. The women behind the line were serving nothing but the usual gray institutional stew and something like bread, but her nose and stomach acknowledged it as the nourishment it purported to be. As she reached for her plate, the woman handing it across touched her hand. Rayna looked up to see the server was missing a tooth.
“Mind you don’t spill your plate, now,” the woman said. Underneath the plate was something long and thin wrapped in a cloth.
“Brilly?” She mouthed the syllables, unwilling to say the woman’s name out loud.
The woman nodded and waved her on without another word.
Lainie glanced at Rayna, but didn’t speak. The kid was smarter than she seemed sometimes.
They found a spot at the end of a long table in one corner of the vast dim room, away from others, and Rayna slipped the package inside her jumpsuit. It lay there, hard and unyielding, against her ribs. She’d have to find a way to conceal it on her body, where she could get to it when she needed it.
“Was that what I think it was?” Lainie nodded at her midsection.
“It wasn’t hot sauce.” Rayna shoveled food into her mouth and swallowed quickly. “Though, come to think of it, I could use some of that.” She pointed at Lainie’s plate. “Don’t waste time.”
The girl didn’t need to be told twice. She was a child of the streets—food of any kind was a precious resource.
They were nearly done when trouble found them. Rayna watched a hulking woman and two smaller followers get up from their seats a table over and come in their direction. The shiv she carried inside her jumpsuit was still wrapped in a towel, and in any case would probably be overkill. This was just a test.
“Here they come,” Lainie said. “You gonna use that?” She mopped up the last of her food as she spoke.
“Not this time.” Rayna finished her stew and looked up. “Oh, too bad, ladies. We’d share, but it’s all gone.”
The leader of the crew scowled at her. “Oh, yeah? Then I’ll just have to take it out of your black shalssiti ass, bitch.” She grabbed Rayna by the lapels and lifted her to her feet in preparation for a haymaker that would have sent her halfway across the room. But as Rayna felt her feet hit the floor she sank her weight and dropped onto her back, pulling the other woman over her head. The big woman flipped and landed hard on the floor. Before she could recover, Rayna was on her, straddling her chest and punching her in the face over and over. When it was clear the woman was unconscious, Rayna stopped and got to her feet, prepared to meet the leader’s two sides.
But Lainie was already taking care of that. One lay moaning on the floor, while the other was looking nervously from Lainie to Rayna to the guard that had just noticed the commotion from the other end of the room. By unspoken agreement, the three left standing scattered to melt into the crowd of eerily silent prisoners surrounding the scene. The guard let them go and bent to deal with the injured bodies left behind.
A whistle blew to line the prisoners up for their return to the barracks. Rayna saw no challenge from her attacker’s remaining sidekick, but she had no illusions that she’d established her position with this one fight. Several of the other resistants were watching her and Lainie with suspicion now, wondering what their next move would be. The tests would get harder, and she’d no longer be able to win by virtue of surprise. Rayna took a deep breath, and rolled out her neck to make herself relax.
“You okay?” Lainie’s harsh whisper came from behind her in line.
“Fine,” she growled. “Just watch your back from now on.”
In the barracks the cots were stacked three deep in a room as cold and bare, as shadowy and forbidding as an ancient tomb. A strip of bluish lightcell ran along the base of each wall and down the center of the floor, concealing more than it revealed. Rayna shuffled to a halt just steps inside the room, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the gloom.
A guard shoved her in the back. “Move along! Find an empty bunk and get your ass in it!”
She grabbed Lainie by the hand. “Come on—all the way down!” They pushed past others in the line and dashed to the end of the line of bunks, where they found two bottom cots side by side.
Rayna felt along the thin mattress and discovered someone had stolen the blankets. She reached up to take the one from the bunk above hers—along with the pillow—and looked over to see that Lainie had done the same. She’d just begun to think this had been too easy when a shadow fell across the bunk.
“This is my place.” The owner of the voice wasn’t overly tall, but as a Barelian she had to weigh 100 kilos. She wouldn’t have many vulnerable spots either. It would be a punishing fight—one that Rayna might lose.
“Take the one on the other side of my friend and I’ll give you my blanket.”
The Barelian’s eyes glittered in the dim glow from the lightcell. The creatures hated the cold. She glanced at the still-empty bunk on Lainie’s right and grunted. Then she snatched the blanket from Rayna’s hand and stalked away. The unfortunate soul who arrived at the chosen cot at the same time as the Barelian was shoved to the floor as the woman claimed the space. That prisoner climbed to the upper bunk.
Rayna scrambled to the third tier to find another blanket and made it back to the lower bunk just in time to fend off another weak attempt to claim it from a wasted skeleton of a woman with the blank look of a wiped mind.
“Not here,” Rayna told her. “Try there.” She pointed to the other side, where there might be some blankets.
Eventually even the stripped mattresses above her head were filled, and the workers succumbed to their exhaustion and despair. The guards retreated beyond the doors, and the barracks settled down for the night. Rayna hunkered down under her blanket and drew the two items from inside her jumpsuit that would be key to her survival in this hellhole.
She set the shiv aside and pressed the corner of the data card to activate it. The first page showed a simple two-dimensional schematic of the entire facility giving her the layout of the place. She zoomed in on the details of hallways and exits, storage areas and mechanical rooms, blind corridors and dead ends. Other pages gave her guard stations and comm connections, power junctions and weapons lockers and medical supplies. The next-to-last page showed the entrances to the hidden passages to the outside. This one she stared at the longest, making sure she understood where the sites fit in the map that now existed in detail in her mind. When she’d stored things away to her satisfaction she hit the corner to run through the three-dimensional test on the final page. The test walked her through the facility as she touched a wall here, a door there, to open and identify the resources she’d just memorized. She racked up a perfect score the second time through.
Rayna started to hit the opposite corner to destroy the card when Lainie grabbed her by the arm. “Let me see.”
“I thought you said you knew the place.”
“I’m guessing there are a few details I missed.” She held out a hand. “It won’t hurt for you to have some backup. Gimme.”
&
nbsp; Rayna handed it over. “Upper right corner turns the pages.”
Lainie hunched over the card, her face lit softly by the screen, her eyes bright with excitement. “They’ve changed a few things since I was here. But I knew that was a way out!” She turned the card and pointed. “That corridor leads down below the factory floor. I knew it! I got my ass kicked but good one time for going that way—and not by the guards.”
Rayna huffed out a laugh. “You always were too smart for your own good, that what you’re saying?”
“If I’d been smart I wouldn’t have been here in the first place.”
“That wasn’t your fault, Lainie. You were a kid. Your parents should have taken care of you.”
“Parents were in short supply where I came from.” The words were like shards struck from the edge of a stone knife. She tossed the data card back in Rayna’s lap and curled up under her blanket.
Rayna recognized the end of a conversation. It was better that way; she wasn’t much for sharing either. She turned her attention to the shiv, careful as she pulled the blade from its thin protective sleeve in the dark. This was no machine-fashioned tool, with a shiny, new cutting edge and a smooth grip that molded to your hand. The six-centimeter blade was black and non-reflective. And sharp! It nicked her twice as she handled it. It was set in a rough, flat, wooden handle wrapped with a few strips of leather. This was a professional-grade piece created to look home-made. Smiling in satisfaction, Rayna slid the blade back into its sheath and set about finding a way to strap the thing to the inside of her forearm.
“I suppose you had the perfect childhood.” Lainie’s voice in the dark held both resentment and longing.
“No. But it was good enough.” Rayna waited. When the girl said nothing else, she went back to considering her problem. The tight undershirt she wore was the only thing suitable for tearing into strips to hold the shiv. She would lose half of one of the long sleeves—and warmth she could ill afford to miss—but just slipping the sheath up her sleeve wouldn’t do; it was too heavy.
Fools Rush In (The Interstellar Rescue Series Book 3) Page 21
