“Sounds like he’ll get some action tonight.” Mercer sniggered nastily. “That bitch’s been holding out on him for three days now, but the guys in the barracks are convinced he’ll close the deal real soon.”
The older man nodded. “A good thing too. He’s being a pain in the ass. Getting some should relax him. His regular girls can’t even keep him satisfied.”
Jak marveled that one of Hutchinson’s women had been giving him the runaround. She had no clue why he would put up with one of his breeders withholding sex. From what she knew of the Orthodoxans, that kind of behavior usually resulted in a woman being sent back to the breeding pens in the cities. Being a breeder at a compound like this would be no picnic, but being in a city’s breeding pen would be infinitely worse.
“Well, I’m crossing my fingers,” Mercer said. “Maybe when he’s done we’ll get a piece. She doesn’t know her place, she’s uppity as hell and way too damn tall, but that won’t matter when she’s on her back with her legs spread.”
The other man elbowed him. “Keep those hopes to yourself until you’re invited. The colonel has special plans for this one, or he wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of taking so much time with her.”
Mercer shrugged, pivoted on his heel and marched back off the way he’d come. The older man shook his head and went in the opposite direction. Jak waited for them to disappear from sight and slung her rifle across her back. She’d stowed her pack a couple of hours’ walk away. She might need to leave in a hurry and she hadn’t wanted to worry about it slowing her down if she had to run for it. She had enough rations on her to last her a day, and she hadn’t needed the stims yet. Those would be most helpful on her way back to the front. She had snatched some sleep as she needed it here and there on her trek in, but if she was being followed she wouldn’t be able to rely on doing that during the slog back.
She shimmied down the trunk. The numerous hand and footholds in the tree’s rough bark made for an easy scramble down to the ground. She was careful not to snag the ghillie suit on exposed branches or rougher patches of bark. Leaving chunks of the suit behind could expose her prematurely.
While she’d listened to two soldiers gossiping, night had fallen completely. She could make out the top of the wall by the glowing blue barbed wire. The sky to the northeast was barely tinged with the brilliant blue remains of sunset. She toggled on her ocular implant’s night vision capabilities and rummaged along the wall’s base. From her perch, she thought she’d seen a likely spot. Her hands came in contact with a pile of loose dirt. Carefully she scooped it away from the wall with her bare hands and exposed a section of duracrete below the surface. She reached into one of the ghillie suit’s capacious inner pockets and pulled out a small explosive charge and detonator. She molded the malleable charge into a half circle and placed it against the wall along the top of burrow she’d made. After covering the charge with the dirt she had dug out, she retreated behind her tree. Hopefully, those two yahoos were out of earshot. Gaining entry was usually the most risky part of the operation for her, more so now that she didn’t have her brother to watch her back. Jak hunkered down and pressed the button on the detonator.
A muffled thump hit her in the chest, followed moments later by the pitter-pat of dirt raining down onto the leaves under the tree. She froze for a couple of moments and engaged the auditory enhancement feature on her aural implant. When she didn’t hear any shouts of alarm or footsteps approaching at a run, she slid back out to inspect her handiwork.
Just below ground level there was now a hole in the wall, one a little wider than she was. She crouched, gathered as much of the loose dirt as she could and shoved it through the hole in front of her, then eeled her way through the narrow opening. She was able to clear it without losing chunks of her ghillie suit, though she did have to excavate a little bit on the other side. Fortunately, undergrowth obscured the hole she’d blown in the base there. Having the vegetation there was sloppy and if it wasn’t for the fact that it was making her job a lot easier, she would have been livid.
As soon as she reached the other side, she took the dirt she’d accumulated and pushed it loosely into the hole behind her. She hoped it would disguise the hole she had blown in the hard-packed ground. With a little luck, the soldiers wouldn’t know it was there unless one of them stepped in it.
Satisfied that she was unlikely to be discovered that way, she proceeded through the brush toward the back of the house. She moved at a painfully slow crawl, taking pains to ensure that her head, back and rump never broke the line of the plant matter through which she proceeded. Any definable shape silhouetted against the wall could potentially give her away. She crawled roughly parallel to the wall until she was situated directly behind the back of the house, a quarter of the way down the slope that led from the wall to the mansion’s back deck. She paused there long enough to unsling the rifle from her back. The deck was about three hundred meters from her current position to the house, an easy shot for her. Toggling off her own night vision, she switched on the scope’s IR feature and swept the area for enemy sentries. She counted eight of them arranged around the edifice’s flat roof. As she watched, one of the four closest to her craned his neck over the side of the roof and looked down at the deck then nodded to the other three. The four of them wandered to the opposite side of the roof and met up with their counterparts. To her surprise one of them broke out a bottle and they shared swigs of what she assumed was alcohol. She shook her head. She knew they were three days from the fighting and that the Orthodoxans were lazy as hell, but this was getting ridiculous.
She moved her scope down to see what the soldier had looked at before he and his compatriots abandoned their posts. The doors to the deck were wide open and light was streaming through them. Two figures stood against the deck’s railing. She dialed in the scope and zoomed in. The one on the right with the perfect hair and broad shoulders was obviously Hutchinson. He stood too close to the other figure, probably the offworld smuggler. Jak zoomed in further to get a look at the man she’d been sent to kill. As Hutchinson casually tried to put a hand over his guest’s, he shifted to the side and into full view.
Jak felt like she’d been kicked in the gut. The offworld smuggler was female and she was gorgeous. From the twist of her lips she also had no interest in Hutchinson’s advances.
What the hell was she supposed to do now? She didn’t want to kill the woman. She’d never killed a woman before. While she had no problems killing Orthodoxans, this was no Orthodoxan. They deserved what they got and she was more than happy to give them a bullet between the eyes. But a woman? Her finger hovered over the trigger, then withdrew for a moment before resting on it again. Her orders were clear: kill the offworld smuggler. But no one had told she was female. Cold sweat broke out on her forehead as she wrestled with her orders, caught squarely on the horns of her dilemma.
There was something about her, a look of disdain for her current company. Jak seized on that detail. Maybe she could turn this around. Her orders were to kill the tall, curvaceous smuggler, but there were other ways to take out an asset. She breathed slowly and carefully through her mental struggle. Her heart hammered so hard it felt like her entire body quivered in time with the beats. She needed to keep her heart rate down. Command and Intel, especially McCullock, wanted a dead merchant, but maybe she could salvage the situation without killing her. They didn’t know what the smuggler could offer them, but if it was good enough for the Orthodoxans, it could bring an advantage to the Devonites instead. The longer she argued with herself, the less she wanted to shoot the smuggler. She watched as the woman sidled away from Hutchinson once more. His face had started to harden. Jak knew that he wouldn’t let the woman’s use to him as a supplier keep him much longer from what he really wanted.
Her mind made up, Jak slung her rifle back over her shoulder and crawled down the slope toward the deck, her pace markedly quicker than the slow and careful stalk she’d taken to the top of the incline. The bright light
s that poured through the open door would cause night blindness on the part of anybody inside and she didn’t have to worry about the sentries on the roof. When she reached her destination, she pulled out the rifle once again and screwed a silencer to the end of the barrel. Her range was so short that the minor inaccuracy added to the shot by the silencer wouldn’t be a problem. She was less than fifteen meters away and this was a shot she could have made blindfolded. She assumed a prone position behind the stump of a stunted sapling and calmed her breathing and her heart rate. Hutchinson came into view in her sights and she centered the crosshairs in the middle of his forehead. She inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly, sticking the tip of her tongue out between her teeth and biting down gingerly. She squeezed the trigger.
Chapter Four
Torrin looked down her nose at the sentry in front of her. “Please thank the colonel for his kindness, but I’m afraid I won’t be wearing his gift.”
She had less than two hours before she would be forced to endure another dinner meeting with Hutchinson. He was unfailingly polite and gallant, a welcome reprieve from the suffocating attentions of Major Yonkman. However, he periodically moved into her space and tried to touch her. Never in a threatening manner but always there. She tried to make allowances for cultural differences. Many planets, especially ones with ample populations, had limited ideas of personal space. Her own preferences tended in the opposite direction. If she could touch someone with an outstretched hand, they were too close. Hutchinson’s mannerisms, while a little off-putting, weren’t nearly as bad as those of Yonkman and the others. They never looked her in the face, and if they addressed her at all, their remarks were usually made to her breasts.
The boy at her door couldn’t have been more than eighteen. It looked as though he’d barely started shaving, though it was hard to tell since his hair was a platinum blond so light it was almost white. His uniform was immaculately pressed; the boots shone with a mirror finish. His eyes were a pale blue almost as light as his hair and they bored into her with a frightening intensity that revealed a passion that verged on zealotry.
“The colonel would like you to wear this to your ‘planning’ dinner tonight,” he repeated, the quotes practically audible, holding up the hanger again. She supposed they all thought she was sleeping with him. Hutchinson had hinted around the idea but hadn’t pushed her on it. Apparently, he still hadn’t figured out he was barking up the wrong tree; the thought of having sex with a man was enough to turn her stomach.
She reached out, gingerly slid the proffered dress from the hanger and held it in front of her. While she had no doubt that she would indeed look stunning in it, she didn’t care for the dress. The fabric was clingy, and it would have dripped off every curve of her body. Wearing something in the native costume of the planet would put her at a disadvantage in their ongoing negotiations. Her clothing currently served as a reminder that she was different, that she could provide him with goods from offworld that nobody else could.
“Maybe the colonel is concerned that you’re starting to stink.” The little blond boy sneered as he spoke. He looked her up and down, then leaned ostentatiously away from her.
Torrin had been stuck in Hutchinson’s mansion for three days now. The longer she’d stuck around, the worse the locals’ behavior had become. She stepped closer to the soldier until she was practically on top of him. She raised her hand to tuck an errant strand of hair behind her ear, and he flinched. Clearly he’d heard about the damage she’d wrought on the soldier who’d accosted her in the sitting room. The colonel appeared to have responded to the incident quickly and sharply; she hadn’t seen the injured man since. Still, if she hadn’t broken his hand for attempting to do more than gawk at her, she was convinced the others wouldn’t be accepting her demurrals of their company now.
The other guard moved forward and shoved his rifle between her and the blond, not so incidentally bouncing the barrel off her ribs as he did so. He was older and while he didn’t have the same zealous light in his eyes that his companion did, his face was set in determined lines.
“You should go back in your room” he said flatly.
“Oh, I know. I’m just so safe with you here to protect me from those nasty Devonites,” Torrin gushed and sidled over toward the older soldier. She stopped right in front of him, just centimeters away. She towered over him also. He leaned away from her perceptibly.
“You need to get back in there,” he repeated, his voice heated.
“I’m going, I’m going.” She probably shouldn’t be torturing her guards, but it passed the time and their presence was ridiculous. She was well aware that they were there less for her protection and more for her captivity. After a brief mental struggle where she considered drawing her plasma pistol, she discarded the idea. Though the pistol was more advanced by far than their primitive weaponry, she would be no match for both of them as well as the guards at the end of the hall. Those two watched the confrontation with her guards through disapproving expressions.
Torrin lingered a moment longer to heighten the soldier’s discomfort, then swept back into her room, closing the door behind her. The bedroom was large and luxurious; no expense had been spared in its decoration or furnishing. Scrollwork and gilt decorated the wall, the ceilings and every available surface on the furniture. The furniture was very heavy and looked to have been made for a man’s taste with its dark, earthy tones. Windows lined one wall, and while she could open them, she’d given up on the idea of using them as an escape route. More of the now-ubiquitous sentries were posted under the windows and though she’d monitored their movements closely, she hadn’t yet discovered any weaknesses in their routes or timing.
The windows kept the room from becoming too suffocating, giving her a breathtaking view of tree-covered mountains topped by the stunning blue of the sky. Even the storms in this place were beautiful, she’d discovered; heavy blue-purple clouds piled on top of each other, up and up, until they covered the area in a dark avalanche of cumulonimbus clouds. The lightning’s white fire lit them up in shades of electric purple and blue which was fantastic during the day and at night was one of the most gorgeous scenes she’d ever seen on any planet. She shivered at the memory of the storm she’d watched over the mountains the previous night and rubbed her hands briskly over the goose bumps that rose on her arms.
Torrin tossed the dress onto the bed and, peeling off her clothing, she headed for the adjoining bathroom. It boasted a water shower, which had taken some getting used to. She was more accustomed to sonic showers, but there was a definite hedonistic appeal to having warm water running down her body. The soap added a delightful slipperiness to her skin, and she grinned as she contemplated additional uses for the slick substance.
She cranked the shower’s spray to a hair below its hottest setting and stepped in. The pulsing jet of water pounded some of the tension out of her muscles. Her back was especially stiff. She leaned forward and planted her palms against the far wall and simply stood there, for how long she didn’t know. Eventually, she turned and started in on the business of cleaning herself. She grimaced as she sluiced the water through her hair. The little blond sentry had a point, she admitted to herself. Things had gotten a little ripe. The only solution to that, however, was to change out of the jumpsuit she’d arrived in, and there was no way in hell she was about to do that. She would have to settle for cleaning herself as meticulously as possible.
A good thirty minutes later she emerged from the bathroom, thoroughly refreshed and wrapped herself in a capacious, fluffy towel. She busily toweled off her wet, now very tangled hair. The sonic showers didn’t do the number to her hair that these hydro showers did. She would need to comb her hair for at least ten minutes to return her tresses to some semblance of order. If she was lucky. The hated dress caught her eye where it lay on the bed and she scooped it up, crumpled it into a ball and tossed it into the nearest trash receptacle in one motion. Nodding with satisfaction, she turned and headed to the dresser, wh
ere she pulled out a comb and started in on the gargantuan task of untangling her hair. Her reflection stared back at her from the mirror. Once again, she had to smooth out her brow, undoing the furrow that kept appearing above the bridge of her nose. This place was going to give her wrinkles for sure.
After an hour spent recovering from her shower and lounging around the room coming up with ways to amuse herself, there was a peremptory knock at the door to her room. It was pushed open abruptly. The two sentries stood in the doorway, glaring at her.
“Colonel Hutchinson requests the presence of your company at dinner, ma’am,” said the older sentry. The blond didn’t say anything but smiled unpleasantly and turned, indicating with his arm that she should precede him.
“Of course,” Torrin replied. She paused on her way out of the room and picked up her plasma pistol off the dresser and started to belt it to her waist.
“You won’t need that, ma’am,” the older sentry said quickly.
“The colonel’s been very interested in it,” she drawled back at him. “It’s an example of the weaponry that can be provided for your forces.”
“The colonel has expressed his intent that this not be a working dinner. He would like to make dinner about pleasure, not work.”
“Well, I’ll just bring it along in case he wants to talk business.”
The sentry’s face hardened once more, and his blond companion gripped his rifle and raised its muzzle slightly, not quite pointing it at her. “I’m afraid I’m going to need to insist. The colonel was very clear. No weapons.”
“Fine.” Torrin placed the pistol back on top of the dresser and accompanied her guards out of the room, her mind racing. These dinners had always been held under the guise of discussing business, enabling her to steer the conversation back to that subject when Hutchinson had tried to engage in more personal topics. She wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to allow her to politely fend him off. Her palms started to sweat; she could feel the walls closing in. This wasn’t going to end well. She knew she could demolish the man physically, but if she did so his men would kill her. Unless they decided on a more complicated punishment. She was rapidly running out of options.
Depths of Blue Page 5