by Ros Baxter
After that, it was hard to see as his buttocks moved against her, but her spiralling moans told an eloquent tale. Clearly whoever had sent the video also felt it had done its job, because the picture blacked and a short message took its place on the screen:
Don’t come back. I will show it to him if you do.
Fuck.
Reetor narrowly missed colliding with a slurry of asteroid shards as the screen went blank. He punched buttons furiously, trying to ascertain the origin of the file, but it had been cleverly disguised. Clearly someone from The Bunker, but who? There were so few of them. Maybe a couple of hundred lived there permanently; a thousand in total on different missions from time to time. A thousand refugees from a race of homeless refugees.
Could it have come from her husband? He dismissed the thought. Head games weren’t Y’s style. He would have incinerated Reetor on sight if he had seen that vidfile.
And it couldn’t be X; she had told him to survive and return. The woman was contrary, but he doubted she would mix her messages about something this important.
Who hated him enough to want him out of the picture for good? He sighed. The list was potentially endless. He knew many of the Backlash feared that Reetor’s high profile would eventually lead the Enforcers to The Bunker.
He would probably never know who had sent the file. The whole thing made him feel suddenly, terribly alone. Even more alone than he already felt out in deep space, leaving the peculiar safety of Tyver for an uncertain assignation on Hydra.
After seeing the file, he knew he couldn’t return. As ludicrous as it was, The Bunker had been the first place in Reetor’s twenty years he had ever been able to remember feeling a degree of safety. Where could he go next? He knew there were other outposts of The Backlash; he had found his way to Tyver via one of them. But would they take him in? He shook his head to banish the thought.
The mission first; worry about the future later. He focused on the starcharts in front of him, going over the circuitous route for the thousandth time.
Was there enough stealth in it to avoid detection by The Enforcers?
He hoped so. He could really use a break today.
***
Later, Reetor tried to work out why he hadn’t felt the jolt of her arrival, the slick shudder as the beam engaged. He was sure it wasn’t just the after-burn head-fuckery of that damned file; more likely the tricky path he had been picking through the asteroid belts at the lip of Sector Seven. No doubt she had planned her entry to coincide with that moment.
The first he knew, a white-hot blade sizzled near his right ear, burning his short hair where it curled just above it. Her voice was very soft and deep for a woman; so different from X’s high, commanding lilt. ‘You do know not to move, right?’
‘Yes.’ He knew, alright. In fact, he knew so well he was worried to even utter the word lest the slight vibration of it in his mouth caused the thing to graze his face. Avengers knew more about weaponry and the races that wielded them than anyone else on New Earth. Almost anyone, he corrected himself, thinking about The Bunker.
A hand ran gentle fingers over his scalp. ‘I like your hair,’ the disembodied voice crooned as Reetor tried to stay as still as possible at the mercy of the petrification blade. He had tended his foster-mother’s body. He knew what they could do.
‘Thanks,’ he said carefully, again terrified to speak but knowing he needed some intelligence about what he was dealing with.
Someone had beamed onto his pod.
Someone was holding the most terrifying weapon in the universe close to his brain.
But he wasn’t dead yet. And someone seemed intent on chatting about his hair.
He could think his way out of this; he had to.
He closed his eyes and thought about what another woman had said: Kyntura, his old Magister, and the soldier he was en route to meet. She had liked his brain, relished it, when others in the Avengers had doubted it would benefit him.
The best warriors are smart, she had said. It’s another weapon; use it.
‘Sure would be nice to see your hair.’
‘You’ll love it,’ she countered, her voice playful, but with a dark edge that sent a chill skittering down his spine. ‘The Temerites think I’m magic.’ She paused, testing his hair under her fingers again. ‘That’s why they didn’t kill me.’ She paused again, swapping hands neatly as she transferred the blade to the delicate skin just above his other ear. ‘Although I often wish they had.’
Reetor’s mind raced. The Temerites had killed his foster mother. They were slavers. Had they taken this one? Is that why she used their weapons?
‘They buddies of yours?’
‘Buddies?’ He heard the frown he couldn’t see while sitting carefully erect in his seat.
She didn’t know the term? Where had she been living, under a rock?
‘Friends,’ he supplied, keeping his voice as neutral as possible.
She snorted a little. ‘Ha. More like family.’
Reetor slowly calmed his breath the way his Magister had taught him, slowing down his physiology so he could operate strategically, rather than from the fear that threatened to cloud his judgement and dull his senses. ‘Holidays must be a real blast,’ he said, shifting very slightly to try to catch a glimpse of her reflection in the perspete of his control panel.
‘I was raised there,’ she went on, her free hand touching his hair this time, before moving down to rest on the back of his neck. Her hand was very warm, and there was something ludicrously comforting about her touch. ‘But not by them. On a slave farm.’
Goosepimples broke out on Reetor’s flesh. He had heard of it, but the stories had never been confirmed. The Gargarions had taken some of the children when they had invaded the Earth, and sold them to those races that harvested intelligence for various purposes. ‘Did they let you out for good behaviour?’
She laughed, a deep, pleasing sound, waving the deadly blade near his cheek. ‘The intelligence didn’t tell me you liked to make jokes,’ she said, sounding far away.
I feel about as funny as an ice vampire massacre right now, Reetor thought.
‘What did it tell you?’ Keep the bitch talking.
She made a noise as if she was considering his question. ‘Deserter. Big. Bright guy. Rich kill. Richer for a return.’
Aha. ‘You’re a bounty hunter?’
She was quiet for a moment. ‘I’m whatever I need to be.’
Reetor took three long breaths, waiting for her cue. He had no options. He could not move, not with that blade at his brain. His only option was to wait and ready himself, assuming, hoping he would have a moment. If she had been going to kill him she would have done it already. Clean, efficient. He heard the hardness in her voice. He remembered what she’d said. Richer for a return.
‘So how are we going to do this?’ He tried to sound casual. It was hard, with a petrification blade at your skull.
‘It’s tricky,’ she mused, going back to patting his hair.
He caught the briefest glimpse of her reflection in the perspete as she shifted positions. Tall, long hair. Unusual. It had been a long, long time since he had seen a woman with long hair.
‘They want you alive, of course.’ She sighed. ‘But to bind you I need to move you. And that, of course, is when you’ll make your move. And I know you will, because anyone would try, of course, when the alternative is the Enforcers. Via the Temerites.’ She sighed again, and sounded very young as she did. ‘I’m the first to admit my family aren’t very nice.’
He tried to guess her age from her way of speaking and the quality of her voice, but it was hard. She spoke English as though she had learned it from a tome.
‘It’s a conundrum,’ he agreed. There was something about her that told him there was no point making bullshit assurances. But there was also a confidence to her; he wondered if he could leverage it. ‘I guess it comes down to whether you back yourself?’
‘Back myself?’ He almost smiled as he
heard the puzzlement in that proper voice. But it was hard, with the blade still sizzling near the delicate skin above his ear.
‘I mean, who do you think would win in a contest? You or me?’
‘Ah,’ she said, patting him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Exactly.’ She paused. ‘Well, I’d “back” me, of course, but then these things are, by their very nature, unpredictable. It would be safer to kill you here in your seat.’
‘But less lucrative,’ he quickly reminded her.
‘There is that,’ she agreed. He heard her drag in a breath, and as she did she seemed to resolve something. ‘Okay, Reetor. This is how we’re going to do it.’
Reetor tensed, his brain on high alert. This was the moment he needed to focus.
‘You are going to stand, slowly, from your seat. I am not going to be able to keep the blade at your skull. You’re too tall, of course. So I’m going to move it to here.’ She touched his back where his kidneys resided. ‘Apparently it’s very painful if the petrification starts there.’
Reetor imagined petrification was no picnic wherever it began. ‘Check,’ he said.
‘Don’t move yet,’ she ordered. ‘I’m not done.’
‘Sorry, Miss —’ An insight crashed into his brain. ‘What should I call you?’
‘What do you mean?’ That deep voice was suddenly wary.
Good.
‘What’s your name?’
‘I don’t know.’
Perhaps he shouldn’t have pushed it, but that sixth sense was very insistent. ‘You “don’t know” like “none of my business”, or you “don’t know” like you don’t have one?’
‘Enough,’ she barked, slicing off one short curl with the blade and pausing while he watched the stone curl clatter onto the floor. Petrification, even of a stray piece of hair, had a way of really concentrating your mind. ‘I talk, you obey.’
‘Yes Ma’am,’ he agreed, unable to tear his eyes from the petrified curl lying grey and perfect on the white floor.
Don’t think about Jintu. Think of a way out of this instead.
‘So,’ she continued, as if she were catching up for a drink with him rather than giving him an unconventional haircut, ‘blade at your kidneys, you stand, yes?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed.
‘Like that, I will guide you to the back wall. Yes?’
‘Yes,’ he repeated.
‘Then you strip.’
‘Strip?’ Had he heard her right?
‘Naked,’ she confirmed.
‘Why?’ It wasn’t modesty but fear of vulnerability that yanked the question from his mouth.
‘Three reasons,’ she said, and he heard that coldness again.
What had happened to this girl? He tried to think it through, for understanding, not for empathy. The more you understood, the more intelligence you could marshall, the better your chances at survival. She was young — he was sure of that now, possibly even younger than he was. So she had been only one or two when the Earth was blown to bits.
Like him.
But unlike him, she had not grown up among her own. She had somehow been gifted or sold to the Temerites. Of all the things the people of New Earth had learned, cruising the universe homeless and desperate for eighteen years, it was that there were very few species that valued empathy and compassion. If this girl had grown up with the Temerites, on a slave farm no less, she would make a very dangerous captor. He didn’t know her story, but if he could survive long enough to hear it he suspected it might help him scheme a way out of this. So the first step was to survive.
‘Care to enlighten me?’
‘Yes,’ she confirmed. ‘First, I need to confirm your identity. The tattoo and naked body will do that.’
Okay. ‘And…?’
‘And I need you weaponless and vulnerable, obviously.’
Obviously. So what was the third thing?
The girl traced one fingernail down the back of his neck, and his skin, which should have shuddered in horror, responded to the light touch, shivering with pleasure.
‘I’ve never seen a naked man of Earth,’ she said lightly, as if she were discussing the ice storms on Tyver, or the market for contraband whiskey. ‘I want to.’ She stopped, gripping the delicate muscle between his shoulder and neck so hard a stab of pain lanced down his back. ‘And I think you would be an excellent specimen.’ She kicked his chair. ‘Now stand.’
Chapter Two: Rock and a Hard Place
Reetor felt it would seem churlish in the circumstances to tell her he didn’t like being made to feel like a piece of meat, especially given she was the one holding the petrification blade. So he stood carefully as she pressed the point of the blade delicately against his syntton shirt.
‘Slowly,’ she said in a deep purr. ‘Now move.’
He stepped sideways out of the console and turned inch by inch towards the back wall, still unable to see her. There was no point making his move while she had the blade against him. It would take the lightest press to slice through the syntton and turn him to stone in seconds. He worked hard on his breathing, keeping his busy, curious brain away from the task of imagining exactly how petrification felt — the rapid shift from flesh and blood to rock; the snap-crystallisation of cells and skin and bone.
Would it ache, or sting? Or burn? Did it spread out from the point of entry, or did the poison on the blade set off an instantaneous reaction?
Long ago, in the time before the Avengers found him and trapped him to become one of their own, he had dreamed of becoming a med. He would pore over biology tomes, fascinated by the endless possibilities of the human body, and study the catalogue New Earth Explorers were beginning to amass of the other creatures that shared the vast expanse of space.
He wished now he had read more about this most brutal weapon of Temer.
He shuffled towards the wall, determined to give the girl no cause to use the thing. He knew he would have to disarm her at some point, but to do it right he would need to study her first. When his nose almost touched the wall, he stopped.
‘Okay,’ she said, her voice slow and careful. ‘Now you will turn, hands behind your head. I will drop the blade so you can. But I will have my laser on you.’
Reetor could handle guns. It wasn’t a gun that had taken the only mother he had ever known.
He raised his hands to link them behind his head and turned with excruciating care. Once he had completed the manoeuvre, he raised his eyes to look at her.
Holy shit.
She was like an apparition, conjured from either your worst nightmare or the hottest dream you’d ever had. She stood only a head or so shorter than him, so she was well over six feet. As he had seen in the perspete, her hair was very long, worn braided Viking-style, off her face but loose around her shoulders. And it was the full, wild red of Vermillion, the Tyverian moon. No wonder the Temerites had thought it magic. Reetor had never seen its like.
The girl’s age was hard to judge. She was certainly no older than him, possibly younger, but the unusual nature of her dress and decorations made her tough to peg. Reetor’s eyes and brain whizzed and creaked as it tried to make sense of what it saw.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ She held his eyes as she asked the question, a small smile playing around her lips. ‘Do you think I’m beautiful?’
Did he? That wasn’t quite the adjective he would have used.
Stunning? Terrifying? Sexy as hell? The last came closer.
The girl had skin the colour of signet dust, so milky white it almost seemed to have a silver edge. Her lips were as red as her hair, and her eyes were vientamite green, and seemed to glow as fiercely as the precious energy rock. She had long, very dark eyelashes and thick eyebrows. One side of her face was pristine — the sweet, pouty loveliness breathtaking. The other was adorned with a tattoo of an enormous snake. He didn’t recognise the species, but he would hazard it was related to the ice vamps of Tyver, because it was marked up in frosty lines of black, white and silver. Its
forked tongue reached down towards her mouth, as if it wanted to kiss her. Reetor was pretty sure any number of men wouldn’t have blamed it. Any number of men who hadn’t been hijacked and held at bladepoint in order to barter them for galactic galleons, at least.
The snake slid down her long white neck, its body coiling voluptuously around one large breast. The girl wore tight pants that looked to be made from some kind of mottled animal hide, but was naked from the waist up. The snake partially hid one large breast; a small silver shield slung over one shoulder hid the other. He found himself annoyed at the shield’s positioning and reminded himself to get a grip.
This girl would kill him in a heartbeat; this wasn’t the time to be wishing he could get a better view of her tits. She might have sheathed her blade, but she had a big, black laser gun pointed right at his heart.
He wasn’t sure of the right answer. ‘I don’t know,’ he settled on finally. ‘Do you think you’re beautiful?’
She frowned, tilting her head fractionally to the side. ‘I don’t know either. I’ve never known a human well enough so that I could ask them.’
Reetor fought the surge of sympathy that welled in him. He needed to be strategic. ‘Yes, you’re beautiful,’ he acknowledged. ‘You’re also pretty scary.’ He motioned at the tattoo. ‘Posterei? I thought you grew up on Temer?’
‘The Posterei shopped at the slave farm,’ she said, her face neutral. ‘They taught me to fight.’
Wow, she really had known an unconventional childhood, even for a post-Earth baby. As he continued to take in and sift details of her, he noticed something else — a series of long, bumpy ridges under the tattoo, criss-crossed and ragged. Whip marks? Was that why she had opted for the tattoo? That chill shot through him again.
An unconventional childhood, and a painful one, no doubt.
How had a girl who could only have been one or two when the Apocalypse had gone down survived it all? And how had she learned English? And how had she escaped, and become a bounty hunter? Reetor was naturally curious but also understood enough to know he was in a hostage situation here, and he needed to bond with this girl. Because if he couldn’t disarm her, at some point he would need to convince her to let him go.
