“Allow me.” Before she could react he was before her and had taken one of her hands in his, and now, was massaging her wrists.
Her eyebrows sprang upward. “Hey, I’m fine. I got this.”
“No. It’s my obligation since I caused the injury.”
Put like that, in that sensual male voice that threatened to turn her mind to jelly, if not her knees, she could only stand there and suffer being massaged.
“May I ask how many of your people have been allowed loose in the ’verse with large sums of money and no supervision?”
“I don’t know. Let loose? No supervision? I’m an adult. I can take care of myself.”
He eyed her steadily. Gold and gray eyes, she noticed. They’d altered or perhaps it was the lighting?
“Of course. You’ve only been captured, almost sold as a slave, and handed over most of your money to me.”
“It also happened to my companions. They were lucky not to be from Earth, is all. Does that mean you’re giving my money back?”
“No.” He smiled and let go of her hands. “I need it for my ship and crew fund. I’ve not heard of others from your planet coming out here, to space – apart from those who bondmated with Preyfinders. Or that one who mated with Dassenze, the Ascend, godlike one. What is special about you?”
Oh crap. She’d fallen into that one. “I don’t know.”
It was a truth, of sorts. She didn’t know what she’d been or done. Only that the Bak-lal had caught her and had done something to her. She may have been the only one they’d managed to reverse engineer. She guessed that someone up high had commanded she be compensated. Perhaps they felt sorry for her.
“No?” He dared to reach toward her and place his hand under her chin.
She dodged away from his grasp. “No. I really don’t.”
That was the bad thing. Yet she was terrified to find out why and what had happened, also. The unknown was a leering monster that wanted to pull her into darkness and smother her. Her dreams never survived awakening but she had them. They made her wake sweating, with a fading sense of something out there, creeping over the ceiling, in the shadows where she couldn’t see them.
A rustling and a blob of rust-red scampering across the cracked ground behind Torgeir made her gasp and jump back. “What’s that?”
He turned and laughed. “Mimi! Come here, girl.” He patted his knee. “How’d you find me?”
This was a pet of some sort? It wobbled, slid, and stepped over to the warrior then nuzzled around his feet making snuffling noises. The thing was like a small, very round bear with tiny ears like twin lumps and black eyes that gleamed as it studied her from its position beside Torgeir’s boot.
It snuffled some more, then squeaked softly. Its ears twitched.
A second later it leapt, well, it bounced, into her arms.
“Don’t catch it!”
His shout was too late. She’d caught it with both arms and the thing merely shifted about with a funny shimmy of its behind area then sucked on her forearm here and there.
She giggled. “It tickles.”
Torgeir stared and shook his head. “She likes you. I’ve never seen that happen.”
“Is your name Mimi?” she asked it. Mimi ignored her, licked her arm this time with a raspy tongue then dropped to the ground. The thump when she hit the earth was ridiculously loud and the ground seemed to vibrate.
When she waddled away, she left a crater, inches deep.
“What the fuck?”
“That is why you don’t catch Mimi, unless she likes you.”
“What is she?”
“She’s memo-morphic metal. A MeMoMe for short. I got lazy the day she friended me. I was only thirteen. Called her Mimi.”
“Wow. Memo-morphic metal? Fancy species title.”
“Yes.” He angled his head. “They kill by dropping on prey. Hide on cliffs, cave ceilings. They can alter their weight. Nobody knows how they do it but they do. No one has figured out how they can be alive even. They’re a Sicar anomaly. I have no idea why your arms weren’t torn off.”
Crap. Ella blinked and watched the little thing disappear among the rocks. “I know what she is!” She whispered her revelation, “It’s a bloody drop bear. Oh. My. God.”
“It. She. Is deadly. Remember. Don’t catch her.”
“I won’t.”
After that, they ate and drank quickly then she mounted the qualarfa. This time she tried riding behind him, with her arms about his waist. Staying on was nearly impossible, due to the saddle design and the gait of the creature. She soon gave up and sat before him, with his arms around her. Now that she knew he was honest, to a degree, the position made her feel safe, weirdly safe.
They stopped at a vehicle and stable depot a few miles outside Besk and exchanged the beast for a ride in a taxi of sorts. The gleaming yellow halftrack vehicle ground over the last few miles to the city. When the road changed from tamped-down rock to a gray facsimile of concrete, the taxi somehow transformed into a wheeled vehicle.
There were houses, streetlights, shops, people. More cars and trucks humming past. As she’d come to terms with months ago, these were not always alien futuristic tech in appearance so much as rusty and ramshackle with multiple dents.
Ella grinned. She could finally relax. She was free.
“Now you smile?” Torgeir asked, turning in the seat to watch her.
His long hair was partly free from the clip and draped past his ears. The weapons belt he still wore, that nasty long knife and his pistol, along with his rough but practical shirt and pants, even that hint of chest showing...she felt off balance. Hell, it was the whole package, just him, he stirred her, sexually.
Her smile faded.
Torgeir was blatantly too dangerous to think of bedding and she dismissed the thought.
“I do.”
“Why now?”
Beyond him, framed in the window, the sky had that flare of pink, orange and violet that marked the sunsets of Sicar.
“Because,” she murmured distractedly as some eight-legged mammoth ambled by, dwarfing them at the traffic stop.
Where was her database when she needed to know something? That wasn’t a native, surely? She frowned. The road they were turning into had a sign at the end of it. Though partially blocked by the mammoth, she could read it. Auction House.
“Because?”
Shit. How well did she know him?
Not well at all. There wasn’t really much choice. Another few minutes and they’d be there.
She wrenched at and shoulder-bashed the door and rolled out. A robotic mini-rickshaw missed her head by a smidgen then she was rising, standing, by the side of the footpath.
His stern face behind the smudged plas-g glass made her stomach clench.
She walked backward, putting more and more people between him and her. If he was going to let her go, this was just earlier than he’d planned. She hadn’t done anything wrong. He wasn’t following. Sinking farther into the crowd, she did a single hand wave to him. Bye, bye. The taxi surged off.
Luckily, she was no longer in the land of the horse and cart. Her lack of paper or plas-g ID was not a true lack. A brainprint was all she needed and her head was definitely intact. She jogged along until she found a red taxi with a curious fan of metal pipes decorating the roof like a peacock – from a rival company, she hoped. Ella tapped on the driver’s window and slid inside.
The bright ding and red flash from his dashboard meant a brain scan had been done. Her credit was good for this and for a long while yet. She’d work at it and build her funds again. Maybe trading wasn’t for her but it’d do until she figured out something better.
“Where to?” His blue hat stayed frontwards. The man didn’t even turn. Good. He wouldn’t remember her. Though Torgeir would know where she was going, she might be able to get there first.
“Spaceport. Please. Fast as fast.”
He grunted.
“As you wish.”
Her brows rose. Did they have The Princess Bride here?
To her mild embarrassment, their route entailed going down the street Torgeir’s taxi had taken and making a right, just before the auction house. Oh well. Better to be safe than sorry.
She shut her eyes once sure her taxi was going in the right direction. Her eye sockets were raw with sunburn, despite the screening agent Torgeir had given her to use, and every muscle in her body was suffering post horse-ride annihilation. God, she hurt.
The rest of the trip was silent apart from the outside traffic noises and the driver hollering and spitting out his window when various other cars or creatures ventured too close.
At the spaceport, she walked in to find Torgeir smack bang in the middle of the entrance foyer. He nodded dismissively and turned away.
A bald man walked up and embraced her ex-captor. “Torgeir!”
“Dresdek! Screwed all the girls here yet?”
“Not quite.”
Bemused and blocked from going forward by a whole caravan of families dressed in tourist gear, she found herself watching the men.
Dresdek was taller by a half a head than Torgeir, which made him well over six five, she guessed. Like Torgeir and much of Sicar’s population, he was armed, though with a pistol at each hip. More surprising, though, was what she’d heard over the clink of his fancy hide and metal boots hitting the floor – the subtle whir of enhanced joints or muscles.
Not all did that. Not her. He must be very old.
A glimpse of his nape confirmed it. The black, scarred stamp said it all – DC for Declared Cyborg. This was a man who’d gone past the twenty-five percent allowable neurocyber, cybernetic, and artificial content.
She squeezed in at twenty-one percent, they’d told her. The doctors had made every effort to keep her below the threshold and human.
There but for the grace of...fate go I.
What had really stunned her though was not just a DC being here. The city of Besk was unlike the territories and more in tune with general tolerance, as in, we’ll leave you be until something about you dirty borgs bothers us. No, it was that a Sicar lord could be friends with one. She’d bet her last dollar...unit, whatever, that his friend, Kalfa, knew nothing of this.
It was none of her business, though.
She pressed forward into a gap that had appeared in the crowd, leaving them to their dirty jokes and back thumping.
This day had been a whirlwind. She searched the top levels for the right entry to the Finatar, franchised trader ship of Spiriton Trader Corp. Clutching a new plas-g ID she’d obtained at a dispenser, she trudged up the broken escalator. Sparks flew from where a repair bot was attempting to do its job. It’d been there when she’d left, a day ago.
Each step took concentration. Fatigue was kicking in with a vengeance.
When she reached the airlock, she had to put her palm to the warm, slightly vibrating hull. Made it back intact. Ella smiled. The battered, gray and blue, splotched exterior of the Finatar wasn’t top of the line by any standards, but she was home.
After a spate of welcomes, and some hugs and thumps, which she grinned through, she went to a short and sweet debriefing by Captain Lyet, a man who seemed a likely descendant of Blackbeard the pirate, and not only for his beard. The man had larceny imprinted on his soul.
That done, she made her way to the small bunk room she shared with three others. A hot, needle shower made her feel clean but sleepier. Though desperate to lie down, she was also hungry. Someone had sandpapered her eyes, she decided, as she drank some of the hot shacao that resembled thick, spicy chocolate. She dressed in the light gray shorts and tee she used for PJ’s, and snuggled under the sheets.
Home, this was home now. Safe.
One yawn and her eyelids were closing. She sank swiftly into sleep.
Some sound awoke her. The room was dark – even the emergency light that was mandatory on spaceships was out. Something stung the biceps of the arm she had draped atop the sheet.
“Hey,” she mumbled, pulling away her arm. Her bunkmates were on duty, weren’t they?
“It’s in.”
Her mind seemed to squash down, flat, her eyes wouldn’t open, and she struggled to figure out who had said that, who was in the room with her. She tumbled into blackness with one last stray thought: this isn’t right.
Chapter 4
A drink at the Purple Drakon was a priority. The place gave seedy a bad name but it was cheap.
Torgeir studied the patrons milling past the booth they sat in. This small front bar area was packed tonight with a mix of locals, offplanet tourists, and business people. The latter meaning bandits and regular honest traders. Weapons had all been checked in by the bouncer. Nothing to fear if you got yourself plastered to the pit of Tormrakki and back.
“We’re good. No one’s after us, I hope. Relax. Drink.” Dresdek chugged down a gulp of his own amber fluid.
“Sure.” He swallowed some then trailed a finger though the dew trickling down the cold side of his square glass. The chunk of grapple floating in his drink looked lonely so he fished it out and ate it.
“Did you get done what needed doing?” Dresdek’s quirk of brow said it all. He thought it was a secret. Not any more.
“The Om? Yes. Gave it to Kalfa.”
“You did?” he squeaked out the last word.
Torgeir smiled. “I did. Came across a captured girl. A pretty little outsider from Earth. Kalfa got word someone would pay for her so I bought her myself using some of her own money and the Om. Plus.” He inclined his head. “I made some on top of that.”
“And where’d she go? This slave?”
“I let her go.”
“Since when was that something you do? You’re taking this new life thing terribly seriously.”
“Technically, she ran away before I could.”
“Uh-huh. Bad manners. If you’d hung onto her a mite longer we could’ve used her in a better way.”
He fixed Dresdek with a pointed look. “We?”
The cyborg sat back, grinning. “Like that, huh? And yet you let her run.”
He relived the anger that’d stirred up. “She was a mite ungrateful. I saw Ella at the spaceport too. Not even a word of thanks.”
“She has a name? Frack. You sure you don’t want to go retrieve her or something?”
“No.” He snorted at Dresdek’s enthusiasm. “She needs someone to teach her manners though – doubting my word and being ungrateful.”
“Hmmm. I can see I need to get you a woman before we leave here. Where are we going anyway? What planet? I’m assuming we still can’t afford a whole ship?”
“No. We can’t.” He took a swallow. “We’re about at the level of affording a cargo bay and some engine parts.
Dresdek tsked. “Not that I’m complaining but you can try that one out in deep space all by yourself. So we’re hitching a ride somewhere?”
He had a favor or two he could pull in here, but wherever they went to had to be their base. It needed to be a system, a planet, with great potential. And not here. Here was either a dead end or, if he left the city, a death sentence.
His comm unit buzzed and he clicked it on. A message from Kalfa waited on the blue screen. The old ways were observed less than some thought. All the lords privately kept a communicator for emergencies.
The girl you took, the captain of a ship called the Finatar asked who wanted to buy her. Said you’d let her go. Ha! Knew you were getting soft.
Though I didn’t tell him the buyer, many will know this. This captain told me she has returned to his ship. When I offered to say this to the woman, directly, he severed the link. To me, this is suspicious. You seemed to like her, so I gift you with this information. Do as you will with it.
I think the captain wants to sell her too. The buyer is offplanet. They found out I gave you her and cursed me. I told them to come to me so I can put their hea
d on a stake.
Good hunting, Torgeir.
Well, well. Kalfa had thought he liked her. He had, in a distant way. Because he’d known he was going to set her free, he’d restrained his curiosity and his libido. The other information was disturbing.
The seat huffed out air as he leaned back. “Kalfa thinks her shipmates, or at least her captain...” He frowned. Onboard a ship, in space, that meant the same thing really. They’d do what the captain told them to. “Means to sell her.”
“Supposition.” Dresdek shrugged when Torgeir glanced up.
“That’s a long word for you.”
“Frack you too. Bad luck for her if it’s true, but it could be all wrong.”
“Yes.” Or not. “It’s the Finatar. Anything?”
“Let me see.” While he ran through his database, Dresdek’s eyes rolled up slightly. The grimace when he came down spoke volumes.
“Bad?”
“Wanted in a few systems to answer charges of piracy, plus there’s one charge of enslaving free citizens. None proven. Nothing the law would do with those charges here on Sicar but, if the price is right, sounds like the captain would do anything, sell anybody.”
The price on Ella was very right. He hated the idea that he’d freed her only for someone else to go and grab her and sell her. He popped up the comm screen again and started tapping. “Those favors? I’m calling them in.”
“Awww. Really? We need those.”
“Shhh. I have a plan.”
“Does it involve carnage, filthy dirty sex, and us getting a ship?”
“Maybe. Some of those. Can’t tell which.” He grinned at Dresdek. “It’ll be fun.”
Dresdek wrapped both hands over the top of his head and groaned. “Baby kak. Piles and piles of baby kak.”
“Knew you’d love it.”
“One last thing, Torgeir. Her ship’s just taken off. Whatever favors these are, they’d better be good ones.”
They were. Half an hour later, after much frantic messaging, he’d bagged a ride on a police cruiser that was departing soon.
Cyberella: Preyfinders Universe Page 3