“In six months’ time, I will.” By then, he would have convinced her to be his. He was a patient man, when he wanted to be. “In six months, you’ll be mine.”
“What? You never said you’d wait until the end.”
“You never asked.”
“In six months, I will leave.”
“We will see.” He stepped forward and walked around her as he spoke. “Already, I have ideas as to what I can do to you, without fucking you. You didn’t rule out the insertion of other things into you. I plan to have you begging for more, as well as begging me to stop.”
That she swallowed subtly then blushed, satisfied him all the way down to his toes.
He realized then that he’d missed something. Dresdek had been right. She should have wanted to smash something over his head for implanting his code in her. Her anger had been there but relatively minor compared to, say, threatening to kill him. The one explanation? The bondmating was affecting her. The signs were there. She was resisting but her culture might have nothing like bondmating so that was understandable.
This would work. It had to.
Chapter 10
Avoiding Torgeir made for a lonely, boring day. Ella sat on the deck in the kitchen, wrinkling her nose and poking the open panel on the chef-o-mat with her finger. The amount of corrosion on the AI boards was appalling. Cracks in the protective clear layers had let in moisture, she figured. Now all the thing would make was a meal with some smoked meat like bacon, eggs, and custard or chocolate fish. Death by space vacuum was looking tempting.
Mimi sniffed where her finger rested. Her nose was stubby yet wriggly and her fine metallic fur wriggled at the same time as her nose.
“Hey! It’s already got problems. Shoo.”
The critter seemed to have decided she was worth following and had emerged from her hiding place. Most of the time Mimi had four tiny legs and with her sitting on her backside as she was, she resembled a pet dog...well, one that’d OD’d on food, expanded to big balloon size, and turned into rust-red metal.
Ella stood, dusting off the bits of decayed plas-g that’d fallen out of the panel. As she straightened, Mimi leaned in and slurped her long silver tongue all over the AI boards, leaving trails of silvery slobber that evaporated as Ella gaped at it.
“Oh fuck. What have you done? When did you acquire a tongue?”
Mimi grinned in a wide-set, Cheshire cat way only a piece of living rock could manage. A malevolent smile, some might think. Which might be exactly right, considering she’d once squashed a man’s head flat as a pancake.
“Wish I knew what was going on in your mind.” Assuming Mimi had a mind.
Tomorrow they landed, thank god. Torgeir could maybe find new parts. Chocolate fish for a day was bearable.
She laid her palm on the boards. Touching cybernetics, AI chips, it helped her somehow to appreciate the damage – as if knowledge seeped in through her skin. Before, she’d felt the wrongness but now, even when she peered closer, there was only shiny new metal and rightness. Would it still function like a chef?
“Hmmm.” She looked at Mimi, then went to the controls and ordered a roast meal with the red sauce that had seemed edible in the past.
When it arrived in front of her, steaming, with all the correct ingredients, as far as she could tell, she raised her eyebrows. Interesting.
*****
The approach to Riptide was a whole new experience for Ella. Captain Lyet, bastard Captain Lyet, had never allowed her on the bridge on landings or take-offs. This time she was strapped into the navigator’s seat. Which worried her.
Seemed like the long holoscreen that stretched across the room had a habit of flickering too. She clutched the arm rests. They must know what they were doing. Both Torgeir and Dresdek were tapping away at buttons on the virtual control board. The planet on the holoscreen looked close enough to suck them in – a revolving gray-fogged globe with glimpses of green-gray land and blue sea showing in the gaps.
Even though being this close to Torgeir bothered her, she’d rather be here than by herself.
“Who is navigating if I’m sitting here?”
Torgeir half-turned. “Dresdek. We’re doing multiple roles. Sit. Watch.”
Miffed but seeing the sense in that, she listened.
“They’re wanting to send us up a guide,” Dresdek said.
“That’ll cost us heaps. No.”
“We have limited insurance. We’re doing so many...” He glanced at her as if wondering how much he should say. “If we damage anything, they will suck every last unit out of you in compensation.” As he spoke he was tapping things, glowing squares, pulsing circles. Hopefully, he was steering and not playing a video game.
“I know. We can’t afford a guide. We go slow. We stick to the plan.”
“Yes, lord.” More tapping and some words she couldn’t hear properly. “They’ve given us clearance, grudgingly. One minute. Then we hit the flight path.”
Blinking red lines appeared on the holoscreen, drawing a cone-shaped path diving down to the surface of Riptide.
“Good.” Torgeir said over his shoulder to her, “This isn’t some tourist spot. Riptide is one of the poorest, most over-populated and under-financed planets in the ’verse. The war depleted a lot of planets, made them resource poor.”
Wow. She’d looked it up but that must be in the fine print. The planet had sounded...industrious, old. The government was via a hegemonic monarchy, whatever that was, and some of the cityscapes had made her feel claustrophobic. “Remind me why I’m following you down there?”
He grinned, and it reminded her of that sense of humor of his that made all his bad points fade away, temporarily anyway. “Because you’re on the same ship as me. Because no one else would let us even attempt to land this heap, with only two crew, without levying a hundred charges on our tail. I’m not rich, Ella, haven’t been for years. This place here.” He pointed at the screen. “It’s where I start to make a new life. The Finatar, if we land her okay, will be a great beginning. ”
“Oh. Me too. A new beginning.” She firmed her mouth, staring at the revolving planet.
The night side glowed with a million lights but their red blinking path led them down to the daylight side. “We’re headed for the light.”
“Mm-hm.”
That had to be a sign.
“Keep your eyes open. It’ll be pretty as well as a little hair-raising. The port we’re going to is antiquated but it’s near one of the districts where we should be able to get accommodation and afford to live.”
“We?”
“Yes.”
Persistent, insufferable man. “So you’re about to risk our lives landing at some sort of garbage dump port so we can live in the slums?”
“You summed that up well.”
“He has a big cock though,” Dresdek muttered.
Ohmigod.
Torgeir grinned again. “Why do I take you anywhere?”
“My good taste? Here we go. Ten, nine, eight...”
The screen seemed not to show the heat radiating off the ship’s shields. The screen flickered now and then, but stayed mostly clear as they flew into the upper atmosphere and through the clouds. When an alarm blurted on, ringing through the small room, Dresdek slapped at a few more buttons and it stopped.
“Small loss of surface. Lost a panel over the hole.”
“Still intact, though?”
“We’ve one more layer. It should hold. I pray.”
Ella’s eyes popped wide. Should? She’d never heard Dresdek pray about anything.
They dived lower, flattened out over a sparkling ocean, screamed over fleets of ships and a floating suburbia, then over land, between some towering metropolis, and headed straight toward what seemed a monstrous pyramid topped with the head and shoulders of a gigantic sky-eating bird.
How big was that thing?
At the last second they veered and slowed, tipping sli
ghtly upward over a motley landscape of rusty, ramshackle, and sometimes gleaming spaceships. The Finatar landed, shuddering as some new power was unleashed; the ship shook so much that she seemed torn between landing and exploding.
Ella tried not to look scared but her teeth were gritted tight in a lockjaw of terror and her heartbeat was growing louder in her ears with every moment.
Calm. Be calm.
The last bump and shudder tapered to a whine. A whiff of smoke spread into the bridge and another alarm blared until Torgeir whacked some button with his palm.
“We’re fine. Fire’s out. Remind me to replace that, Dresdek.”
He coughed. “I will. Don’t fancy being barbequed in outer space.” He put his hands to his forehead and dragged them down his face. “We’re alive?”
“Yup.” Torgeir unstrapped and smacked Dresdek on the arm. “Let’s go get breakfast.”
*****
Breakfast was easy, since they ate it on the ship, but by lunchtime, after clearing the equivalent of customs here, they’d trekked all over the nearby area.
“How big is this city?” she asked, turning in a small circle on account of the mill of people around them.
“It’s not a city. It’s planetwide. It keeps going. Apart from the seas, almost every inch is covered by buildings. This here.” Torgeir vaguely waved at their surrounds and the towering stone and metal buildings. “Used to be the city of Pelagia. I think it’s now called Pelagia district?”
Dresdek nodded. “It is. Our next chance is up there. Hundred and eighty-third tier. Cheap. And we can get a big place.”
“Fuck,” she whispered.
Up there was like climbing to the heavens. She’d been in tall buildings, skyscrapers, but this was the bird-headed pyramid structure. The outside was gray stone and each tier seemed taller than an average office story. Though this wasn’t simply a pyramid, she realized, now that she was up close. There were other triangular metal pieces, jutting out, that added to the artistic impression this thing made on the viewer. It looked made for cutting and rending the sky – a violent yet majestic structure.
She shaded her eyes. Birds flew in vast flocks up near the head, which featured an open beak with dark triangular teeth. Whatever this had been in the past it was now a place where people lived. Curtains and towels, struts with washing, jugs and bottles and odd pieces of tech decorated every tier. Signs and perhaps graffiti were hung and daubed here and there. People leaned out of the tiers and talked. They yelled, cried, laughed. People swarmed over the tiers and slid down them at high speed in some impossible way. They landed at the bottom and walked onward.
From the noise and the litter alone you could tell people lived here.
“How many?” she asked, hitching her back pack into a more comfortable position. They were all carrying essential clothes as well as a small amount of food. Getting things ferried from the Finatar would happen once they found a place to stay. Whatever repair work they meant to do on the ship would make living there hazardous.
“They say, fifteen thousand. Come.” Dresdek approached an open entrance framed by stone lintels.
Torgeir seemed as fascinated as she was by the bird pyramid.
“Does it have a name? What was it built for?” she asked.
He casually reached for then took her hand. The warmth was enough of a pleasant shock that after straining for a few seconds to pull her hand from his, she stopped trying and walked with him.
He’d barely seemed to notice her little struggle.
“A name? Yes. Horuk is the name that’s stuck, at least for this generation.”
“Horuk.” It seemed a good name. A sharp name.
She marveled at the intensity of awareness touching him brought her. Every tiny brush of his fingers on hers was highlighted in sensation. She wanted to simply close her eyes and feel. Was he right? Was there some link between them? She’d looked up bondmating. Many cultures believed in it. Still, it seemed wrong and akin to a forced marriage.
She’d never been one to believe in something just because others did.
The way he’d stuck that code into her body had been so utterly wrong. She’d never forgive that. The more she thought on it, the closer it was to rape. He was infuriating, domineering, and a whole lot of other words that translated as asshole in her dictionary but she was stuck with him, trapped in his experiment – a sexual experiment, of some sort.
The scary thing? She wasn’t sure as to how she’d react.
Her only ways out were to run away and hope no one could find her, to wait out this six months, or to get rid of this code he’d implanted and thumb her nose at him. If she could do that last one, she would tell him to suck it, to sit and spin, to stick his bondmating where the sun don’t shine.
Those thoughts had her fuming again, until he squeezed her hand in his big fist and her insides went all gooey and her chest tightened. Damn traitorous gooey insides.
“As for why Horuk was built?” he went on, as they weaved past a small crowd of chanting, pink-robed teenagers with cat ears on their heads. “They say it was used to store a vast library that held this planet’s knowledge. They say priests used to split the hearts of ill doers in sacrifices. They say it was always a tenement where the poor came to pretend they were worth more because of the grandness of their residence.” He smiled and squeezed her hand. “Any of those could be true.”
She couldn’t look away from him. History was meat and bone to her. The past fed the present. “I want all those to be true.”
“Even the bad ones?”
“Yes. They make Horuk real.”
Torgeir laughed. “Then it is so. They are all true. It’s possible they are all true. Riptide is only the latest name for this planet. It’s had five others and has been civilized for millennia. Riptide is only the name it gained from gathering all the flotsam and jetsam of this latest awful war.”
Ahh. “Awful? You’re a warrior but you dislike war?”
“Most soldiers do. The smart ones do. There is nothing nice about war.”
A yellow-haired boy slid down the tiers, swooping past a few yards away, while sitting on some sort of board. He rode around in two swift circles and waved to them. “Welcome to Horuk!”
Ella waved back.
Most of his legs were gone and only slithery cybernetic connectors remained at the bottom. They somehow clutched the hovering cart he rode.
“That is why I hate war,” Torgeir whispered.
“He’s not a soldier, surely?”
“He’s still a casualty. Many of the cyborgs here can barely afford to live, let alone to replace their cybernetics.”
When they entered the darker space of the foyer, Dresdek skidded over and dangled a yellow chip before them on a chain. “Got it! Off her.” An old woman with a scarf on her head and a foot long prehensile metal finger looked up and nodded. “Being a lord still has value. Come. I will show you.”
Torgeir waited for him to move ahead then leaned down. “Your first week, starts now. Keep holding my hand. I like that, feeling you.”
She shut her eyes and let him lead her blindly for a few feet. Of all the things she noticed, it was her pussy squeezing in. Thank god he had no clue.
He kissed her ear and she stumbled. He caught her. “One of the things you get to know, when bondmated, is when your partner is aroused.
Kill me now. But she summoned a glare. Torgeir only laughed.
“Come, Ella. One week from now, you can do as you please. For now, you’re mine.”
The ecstatic shiver that travelled to her very bones mortified her.
Chapter 11
One thing to be said in Torgeir and Dresdek’s favor – they were organized. The sheer number of people and the strangeness of this place daunted her. Anyone sensible should be panicking and yet they carried on as if this were normal. The one hundred and eighty-third tier took twenty minutes to reach. They trekked up creaky elevators, stairs, and
one hoverflow shaft that zipped them straight up fifty stories in a few seconds. The drop under her feet made her gut swirl.
She stepped off and had to take a moment to gather herself, no doubt looking pale. A giant of a black man grinned as he brushed past. “Don’t worry. It doesn’t fail often and even then you’re dead almost before you figure it’s stopped working.”
“Gee, thanks.” She swept back her plait and went to follow Torgeir.
“Hehe. No worries.” He stepped into the downflow side and plummeted from sight.
The corridors were clear-coated stone – made to be cleaned easier, she guessed. The doors to their place, or rather Torgeir and Dresdek’s place, were double and made of some honey-colored wood, or a copy of it. Even the handles looked posh and were black steel in the shape of bird claws. Inside, when the doors swung open, was vast and sparsely furnished. There were doors off to left and right and ahead was a broad opening to the sky.
“What have we got here?” Torgeir asked, stepping in and unslinging his pack.
Dresdek shut the door, and strode in, tossing the key chip on a low table. “We have a bathroom, but all water has to be brought from community taps at the end of the hall. Power is fine.” He waved his hand over a sensor and lights flicked on. “Bedrooms, two of them, with the bathroom, to the left. Living room ahead, kitchens to the right.”
“Plural? Kitchens?”
“Yes. I don’t know why. Maybe it used to be an eating place?” Dresdek shrugged. “I was happy to get this. We paid for the furniture. Have to find more food. The furniture will be enough if we don’t have parties.”
As if they would. Well, she wouldn’t. She didn’t really know the two men that well.
Wary, she walked toward the opening. The only doors sealing this four-yard-wide gash from the outside weather folded in from the side and were flimsy-looking clear plas-g. A stone roof projected outward and covered the terrace. She leaned out over the drop, putting her palms on the warm downslope of gritty stone. Their balcony edge was also the roof of the terrace below. Every roof on every tier below was the same so that the pyramid flowed like a slope all the way to the seething markets below. She couldn’t see her neighbors below and those above couldn’t see her, unless she stuck her head out, like she was doing.
Cyberella: Preyfinders Universe Page 7