“Where are we going?”
He smiled. “Up. Your clothes have to come off. I’m not to damage you but I can be rough. Choose. You strip, or we do it.”
His face suddenly clicked. This was the fruit man, minus some changes.
Her face must have given her away.
“Remember me?”
She refused to talk. Enemies all around her, just this one seemed more personal. Letting him handle her was repugnant. She undressed, refusing to look at them or acknowledge their presence. When she pulled off her panties, the last piece to go, she stood there with every item in her hand, and waited, pretending this was normal, and hating them all.
“Thank you,” the fruit man added. “Now lie on the table. And give me those.”
Nonchalantly, she handed her clothes to him and climbed up to lie flat on her back on the table. The machine began to scan her. When she looked down her body, seeing herself naked, her breasts, her helplessness made panic churn through her. Her plan, she should go over it. But there was so much that might happen. Everything that was coming next would be an unknown except her and Plito.
If they found anything with the scan, she had other things they wouldn’t find. She was certain, almost. Someone hissed and she flinched. They’d found the obvious.
As she turned her head, the man in black stepped up and touched her neck with metal.
A liquid, brain-slamming, gut-twisting shock rippled to her bones and her head swam somewhere far away.
Chapter 30
As they headed for the final approach to the wormhole, the message chimed into the comm window on his control-room holoscreen.
Ella, slave to Torgeir Rakkel, registered departing Riptide via Pelagia spaceport.
He stared, barely able to comprehend. His slave code had triggered an alert? The only explanation – someone had her.
“Terminate approach,” he snapped. “We’re turning back.”
A quick analysis of departures had her ship as one of two possibilities. The government ship was very unlikely. The other one...
He sat back. That explained a lot. The attempted abductions, the sophisticated poisoning. Ella was an Earth girl. It fitted the rumors about the man. How brazen.
No matter how rich and powerful he was, the man had picked the wrong adversary.
He would get her back even he had to wrestle a Bak-lal factory queen.
“Prepare for battle. We’re going to be armoring up when we get where we’re going.”
Dresdek hadn’t questioned his decision at all, but now he asked, “Where is that, sir?”
“You want an address? The Verok megastructure, center of the Meek Crusade. The castle is our target.”
He was losing a lot of money doing this but money was worthless if he didn’t have Ella.
*****
Reboot.
Time ticked by. Slowly.
Someone laughed.
She opened her eyes to the sight of a ceiling with chandeliers then frowned for ages while attempting to sort out where that had come from.
The pumpkin orange ship? Clearly she wasn’t on it anymore. She lay on soft padding and above her was a curved, transparent lid. A coffin? At least it was mostly open. She tried to sit up and discovered the restraining straps fastened across her body, then turned her head and saw him: a white-haired man, with perfectly close-cropped hair, a square jaw, and a white-and-gold suit that looked appropriate for a ballroom. He sat on a golden throne. His cologne hit her like an axe, from five yards distance, and his face seemed familiar.
She checked her other side. The rest of this space...enormous. The chandeliered ceiling was two stories high. The throne sat at the end of a long, stone-floored vista. And there were guards, posted along the sides, at even spacing, like dominoes or chess pieces. Far more than she’d imagined having to deal with. Never mind.
Well, okay. Crap. She had no idea what to do. The man had ten men in here. At least that many.
“Hello.” He hopped off the throne and strolled to her, his boots clicking on the hard floor. “Welcome to my castle. I am Verok, Miss Ella.”
This was Verok? The gazillionaire zealot up in space with the crusade? She gulped. This was who wanted her? She rolled up her eyes and did a fast check on her systems, searching for all the new engineering, the little weapons. They were gone, neutralized.
His scanners were good.
“Where is Plito?”
“You’ll see him after your surgery.”
“My what?” The word surgery raised her hackles at the same time as she tasted the metallic acidity of bile. How sick was this alien megalomaniac?
“I hope you don’t mind that we removed all the dangerous perks you added to your cybernetics. Ingenious some of it.”
She enunciated the next words well. “You. Are a bastard.”
“Shhh.” He arrived at her raised coffin bed. “Soon we’ll have you as our princess.”
Verok reached in, his hand moving slowly, as if afraid she’d be frightened. He had no clue as to what she was about to do. Plan B. She sent her nanogeers scurrying, unblocking, shifting paths. Time, she only needed time. Sweat trickled down her brow.
He stroked her forehead and she let him, despite wanting to spit. Whatever they’d given her before was making her feel tired.
His princess? How dare he.
“We know all about your foot and we are going to do a little surgery. Soon you will be perfect, ready to be bondmated to us.
Us? We? Of course. He was using the royal we. The man was scary, crazy bonkers. Cutting off her foot if done by a surgeon was bad enough. She couldn’t look away.
Growling would’ve been a great reply but, fumbling, she found speech. “You cannot. I am bondmated already.”
“Not quite. I have a chemical to reverse that. We’ll give you a few days, keep you well-controlled until then. After that...” He smiled that sickly smile, his perfect, white teeth gleaming as brightly as his gold brocade collar. “You’ll find you do not wish to disobey me.”
“I will never be your princess. Just saying that makes me feel ill.”
He took one step back. “Go to sleep. We’re removing that diseased foot.”
The straps were breakable. Though her eyelids were lowering, she let panic seep in. But not enough. Not enough panic at all.
The bed on which she lay seemed to close in on her; the lid above quaked as if about to shut. She struggled weakly, tugging at the straps on her chest and arms, her waist and legs. Nothing gave.
“The autodoc I have is quite wonderful. You won’t feel anything, at all, Ella. Shhh. Sleep.”
The lid was lowering. She watched it swing down, unable to do more than swallow. Her skin prickled with dull fear. The lid sealed to the base with a clunk.
All by herself, inside this thing... She should be screaming.
His muffled words came to her: “Goodnight, my sweet princess.”
Should be screaming...
The princess tag was getting old.
Scream...
She wrenched her eyes open only to have them flutter down again.
Would it be gas? That taser thing aga –
Blackness.
*****
When she awoke her anger fired up instantly, like she’d kept it burning while asleep. Her eyes were shut but her leg, her foot, she could feel the difference. She was cyber down there now, from just above the ankle and downward. He’d cut off her fucking foot.
The loss was appalling, sending cracks of panic through her heart that actually hurt. Tears leaked from under her lids, spilling down the sides of her face and trickling to her hairline.
The panic spread silently, screwing into her mind, closing her throat, spiraling her pulse beat upward into the stratosphere. She let it come. There were men out there watching her. Verok too. They had guns. No way out. Enemies. Outnumbered. Plito needed her.
Body surveillance kicked in. Her nanoge
ers were ready.
She was a hairsbreadth from dissolving into a chaotic mess.
She forced open her eyes. No lid anymore. Thank god.
Verok stood a foot, at most, from the coffin-like bed and she was still naked. Kneeling beyond, on the floor, was Plito, his hands cuffed at his front. He had legs. Legs! They’d attached the legs. God. She blinked. The bravery shining in his eyes, and his vulnerable youth, escalated her panic to the last possible level before...
Meltdown.
Deadness and darkness overcame her.
Deadtime.
“You see. We’ve fixed your friend. If you behave, he can keep them. You look well,” said Verok, leaning in as if for a kiss. “Such a pretty –”
A throm sound like something big travelling overhead, made him look up. It dwindled as if passing the building
She took the opportunity to survey the room. Same chandelier. Same room. Same straps holding her down.
The uniformed men along the periphery also looked upward. A distant overhead crash kept them craning their heads back. Perfect.
No one in here was as cyber as her. If they had been she could’ve controlled them. That she could have done that seemed as obvious and natural as blinking. It simply was. Except for Plito. They’d forgotten him, thinking he was just a boy. Logic said they’d never let him leave here, not after he’d seen Verok.
She erupted upward, tearing through the arm straps. Her left arm wasn’t as reinforced by metal and it snapped below the shoulder. She ignored the pain. Her right arm ripped loose the strap at the base, somewhere below, and only her artificial skin suffered. She lunged for Verok, her fingers in a cone shape, and crushed most of the ribs on his left chest. Her metal fingers penetrated all the way to his heart, where she blithely ripped loose an artery or two.
Her hand emerged bloodied. Verok crumpled soundlessly, his face taut with shock. Dead in seconds, gushing blood by the bucketload, she calculated, unless someone stuck him in the autodoc she currently occupied.
Ten men. She began at the right with Plito’s guard and shot them one by one, center of the forehead. Her arm held eighteen rounds of her improvised cry-steel flechettes. Working within her cybernetics, her nanogeers had closed the final pathway to create the weapon as she’d slept.
Good little nanogeers.
The last four men scattered and she only got one of them.
Deadtime petered out.
The pain from her left arm roared in. The guards were screaming and drawing weapons. Weeping now, partly in shock, she plucked at the other straps with her intact right hand. Got one undone. She needed a gun. Though cuffed, Plito ducked and grabbed a pistol from his dead guard. Too late. Too late.
Verok sucked in a last gurgled breath and fell silent. The guards, thinking her the worst threat, trained their guns on her. One round blasted into her soon-to-be coffin, rocking it.
With a great crash, Mimi fell through the ceiling, bringing with her a rain of building fragments. She bounced high, landed, flattened one guard to mush then proceeded to play “catch me” with the others.
Panting, still choking from the agony, with her heart thundering in her ears as well as the screams of the guards, Ella looked away.
The wet thuds stopped after two more and she heard scampering. Ella dared to look with one eye. Mimi trotted up. Behind her were small bloody footprints. She stopped and leaped onto the coffin, landing on the edge and balancing.
“Hi,” Ella grated out. The pain was making her feel light-headed but she managed to undo the last strap. The patter of footsteps heralded the arrival of Plito. He’d removed the cuffs somehow. The guard must’ve had the keys.
“We need to get out of here, Ella.”
Helped by Plito, she half-climbed, half-fell from the autodoc bed and had to remain kneeling on the floor for a few seconds.
“Your arm!” Plito gasped. “It’s broken?”
“Yes. Yes. Come on.” She raised herself to her feet and stood there, swaying. The room was a bloody mess. Corpses lay everywhere.
Someone would be in to see what had happened soon, though from the sounds of shooting, someone else was doing nasty things to Verok’s people.
“There’s an attack?” Plito turned toward the noise.
“Seems like it. Luckily for us.”
“Clothes. Frack. You need some.” His ear tips and cheeks blushing red, he looked about.
Her nakedness was the least of their problems.
“Soon. First we leave. Do you know if we can get to his spaceship? I arrived in an orange one.”
“On the rooftop. There’s a landing area up there. If it’s there still?”
“Let’s hope so.”
He pointed. “Hovershaft is behind that gray door.”
They passed a pretty, carved table with a tall bottle of fluid atop it and something big floating inside. She recognized the contents in one startled glance.
Her foot, he’d kept it to show her? Ugh. Horrid man.
They were twenty yards from the door when a clatter and some shouts warned her Verok’s help had arrived. Getting shot in the back was not how she was going out.
“Give me the gun. You run.”
“Hey?”
Wincing at the jerk on her bad arm, she slipped away from him, plucking the gun from his fingers as she turned to face their pursuers.
“Ella?” one of them shouted.
Oh no.
Torgeir advanced in a line of his men. Guns out, they surveyed the room. It was Dresdek and three others.
“Ella! You’re alive!” Torgeir broke into a run.
She wasn’t going back with him. Couldn’t face him. This disease of hers wasn’t going away. She clearly had Bak-lal genetic alterations still bubbling in her flesh.
“Stop. I don’t want to see you. Please,” she sobbed. “Stop.”
“Ella?” He slowed. “What’s wrong?”
There was a way out. She knew how to control their cybernetics. The power in her gathered and abruptly it was there, awaiting her command. “Dresdek! And you and you. Disarm and restrain the others. Stop them following.”
Without knowing what she could do, the others were quickly overwhelmed.
She spun on her heel, though tears streamed down her face, and she staggered toward the hovershaft. She didn’t know how long her command would last.
The little pumpkin-orange ship was still parked on the roof. The hole in the roof, that went all the way down to the ballroom, told her Mimi had somehow hitched a ride on the ship. She’d probably been stuck to the outside. Piloting while naked was luckily unnecessary. She found a pair of sleeveless overalls in a locker.
This baby ship was pure gazillionaire territory. She could navigate a wormhole, with ease.
They had little time for messing about but Ella wiped away tears and leaned across the console to hug Plito with one arm.
She whispered in his ear, too choked up to speak louder. “You’ve got your legs.” Her smile was wobbly. “Good?”
“Yes.” He nodded and squeezed her uninjured arm. “Yes. Very, very good. The one good thing about today. But...you want to leave? Without anyone following? We need to go now. The acceleration will hurt you. You know that?”
“Of course. Do it.”
With her minimal training and that of Plito’s, since he’d hacked into the pilot program, they set a course for a wormhole and blasted off.
She faded in and out of consciousness. Fainting was to be expected with the G forces pressing on her arm.
The little medical alcove had strong painkillers with sedative side effects. It’d wear off before they hit the wormhole. She numbed herself with a dose. Being woozy-headed had benefits.
“Wake me up when everything is all better,” she mumbled.
“Sure I will, Ella. I’ll look up what we can do for your arm. I can’t contact Torgeir?”
“No. Never, ever, ever. I will never see that man again.�
�
“Uh-huh.”
“Ever.” She shut her eyes and pretended she was asleep, and then she was...
When she woke, she found they were on the verge of accelerating into the wormhole entrance. Stray blue swirls from the warp engines flickered across the holoscreen, obscuring the stars with their pretty brilliance.
“Wait, Plito. Wait.”
“Sure.” He tapped a button. “Say when.”
She should go back. She knew why this was impossible. She didn’t believe in herself.
The hurt inside pulled her from one possibility to the other. By refusing to face Torgeir, she could preserve the perfection of his love for her.
Truth though. She breathed out and wondered if her ribs would crack from the pain of leaving. Truth... What she was, was an abomination.
If she went back and begged for forgiveness and he refused her, she’d be devastated.
She feared to fail.
Her reaction was insane, in some ways, and she knew that, but it was all she could face at this time when she was on the very wobbly edge of a precipice. Maybe later, another time, she’d do this – when she built her courage.
She gulped and put her finger in her mouth, bit down hard, until it hurt almost as much as her heart.
“Go,” she croaked. “Do it.”
Plito slapped the button. “Done.”
Chapter 31
After Ella had flung the command, the fight had been short and inglorious. Even with their minds muddled, Dresdek and the others she’d suborned had been sensible. They’d distanced themselves before they’d drawn their weapons. They’d kept Torgeir and the rest of his men, who piled up behind him, in a standoff situation for long enough. No one wanted to shoot their fellow warriors and he’d commanded them not to, in spite of how frantic he was to catch Ella.
When he reached the rooftop, she was long gone.
Sensors on Zeus tracked her until she left the system. The little ship she’d stolen was twice as fast as he could attain with Zeus’s engines without blowing something up.
Torgeir slumped in the captain’s seat, staring blindly at the faint traces of her ship’s jump on the holoscreen. Warp jumps weren’t trackable unless you had military equipment. The traces would fade beyond military capability in a few hours.
Cyberella: Preyfinders Universe Page 21
