by TylerRose.
“I meant it when I said you will always have a home in my House, Zitara.”
“I know you did.”
One last kiss, and a finger traced the Tihi bird barrette in her hair. She went in and the shuttle lifted off in a minute. Mankell watched until it disappeared.
“G’Ven is waiting for you in your suite, Father,” Kellina said.
He went without a word, expecting to discuss G’Ven’s moving to the village later in the day. Instead, he found a red cloth draped over a square on a sofa. G’Ven gestured to it and Mankell reached for a corner.
Pulling the shimmering cloth off, he saw first the familiar wall of the room sometimes used for private House events. Her. Nude, on her side on his fur rug, reading his Mondragoon, her hand on his goblet, the carving he’d given her in her hair as it was a moment ago.
A silent declaration that a part of her would always be his.
“Hang it in my room opposite my bed,” he said, and went down to his grav-bike.
He needed to go for a long ride, alone. Then he would start going through his favorites, one per night until he no longer saw the pale beauty behind his eyelids.
Chapter Fifteen
Pisod with herthe two days of travel until they reached Voran III, she slept well. Congressional Security was on the ship to escort her the rest of the way, and Pisod wasn’t allowed to be one of them. They were not prepared to take him all the way to the Congress since he wasn’t a Congressional employee.
“Why not let me teleport back to the Congress?” Tyler asked. “Save everyone the money.”
“Because there is now a permanent rule against teleporting to and from the station, in order to prevent assassination attempts. All arrivals must be done via spacecraft,” she was informed by an armed guard. “Unexpected arrivals end up directly in a security cell.”
“I wouldn’t be unexpected, would I?” she challenged.
“I have my orders.”
“Which means it’s a rule directly against me. They don’t want me to arrive so quickly. Are we actually going back to the Congress? Why not just dump me on some fuckin’ planet?”
“Stop, Tyler,” Pisod intervened. “They will have no problem putting you into a telepathically impervious cell if you push them too much.”
“It’s bullshit,” she seethed at him.
“I know. But it’s bullshit you can’t do anything about. If you ever need help, you can appear next to me. Wherever I am.”
She nodded. He kissed her cheek and stepped onto the teleporter. No sooner was he gone than the ship was speeding on its way toward Alpha quadrant. She quickly decided she didn’t like traveling on space ships. At least not alone. She did not like this sensation of vulnerability. Knowing outside was death by extreme cold and lack of oxygen.
The Captain tried to be friendly, but he didn’t like shuttling diplomats. She knew no one on board. The atmosphere was stale, the recycling unit giving an odor she didn’t like. Close and encapsulated, with only three rooms she was permitted to be in, trapping the mental voices of those around her. There was nothing good about this trip.
She shut herself in her small, dingy room rather than sit among the men, and continued reading the Mondragoon. Well, tried to read. She was too preoccupied thinking of Mankell. He’d let his guard down in increments until finally he had allowed himself to be his full self. That last night had been something she’d remember the rest of her life.
Not sensing any deceit from the crew, or any ill-intent, she still kept a gun on her thigh while reading. Nails’ favorite automatic, brought to herself from wherever it had been on Earth. It had survived the invasion even if he hadn’t. Stainless steel, heavy, firing 9mm bullets, with fifteen bullets in the cartridge. He’d taught her to use it, how to handle the kickback, how to kill a man with a single bullet to the chest.
Changed into night clothes, lying facing the door, she spent the better part of two hours not falling asleep.
And then she woke up.
Heavy, like when Solomon had that mental chain thing on her and she couldn’t fight him off. Opening her eyes was an effort, and she was not in her cabin on the space ship. A bed, comfortable enough, but she was nude. Her wrists were cuffed together and leashed to the corner of the bed. Trying to move her legs, she found them heavily cuffed and tethered as well, but with some slack to the line
She’d been abducted in her sleep, probably drugged. No one on board the transport vessel had had any guilty thoughts. An attack on the ship itself to take her? There was nothing of value on board that she knew of, so not a raid to loot for profit.
“You’re awake. Good.”
Solomon. From the foot of the bed. He came around to squat and look at her, moving an errant lock of hair out of the way.
“Did you have fun on K’Tran? They fuck pretty good, don’t they?”
Beyond furious but unable to form words to speak, she spat in his face. He slapped her hard enough her head bounced off the bed and the left side of her face went numb. He sat and pulled up her knees to kick with both feet, pushing him off. He stood rather than fall, and came back to catch her by the ankle cuffs. He punched her in the thigh until she stopped kicking, then flipped her over violently. In a second he was over her to thrust hard into her already overused anus.
“If that’s how you want to be, we can be that way, you little cunt,” he snarled at her.
Holding her down by the hair and the shoulder with his full weight, he raped her in the full sense of the word. He let go her shoulder to start punching her in the thigh, the side, the back. Not hard enough to break ribs, but hard enough to force her breath out of her. Hard enough she would have pain for days and bruises for a week at least. Hard enough to know she hated being punched.
Hard enough to know she was going to kill him with her bare hands the first opportunity she got.
One more jab of his hips and that long groan of ejaculation.
“Ohhhhyeeeaaah! You’re as good a fuck as I remembered.”
The heaviness increased. She felt herself fall unconscious. When next she woke, she felt the bruising from every punch, all down her right side, and stripes of pain radiating out over her entire back. He was sitting in a chair a few feet away, watching her. Waiting. He moved to the side of the bed and traced a painful line across her back to her lower ribs.
“I’ll give these slices a couple days to heal and we’ll play a new game. So long as you behave, I’ll let the mental chain up enough that you can walk on your own to a toilet rather than relying on teleport removal from your bladder. If you behave, you can sit up and eat. If not, you won’t eat until the next time I give you a chance to behave. Since you’ve not had a meal in two days, I’m sure you’re hungry.”
The heaviness in her head lifted enough for her to take a breath of relief.
“If you’re good, you will have it easy while you’re here.”
He left and she was alone. She turned to look, seeing this was a different room. Small, with a window that showed her the black of space. With effort, she got to her feet. Bed, window, chair, toilet and sink in a corner, this room was more like a security cell. None of her belongings were here. Hopefully they were still on the other ship and the other ship would make its trip to the Congress.
Did Julian already know she was missing? Did the ship’s Captain try to check on her? Or would he leave her alone and she wouldn’t be noticed as missing until the ship landed inside the Congress and she didn’t disembark?
She sighed it away. Nothing to do about any of that. She wasn’t going to count on anyone to find her and save her.
Turning to see her side in the mirror by the sink, she saw fist size bruises from shoulder blade down in a line over her ribs, buttocks and right thigh. Large, deep bruises, dark blue and purple, still forming. And thin lines of slices that radiated out from a small spot next to her spine. Shiny, straight lines, closed with a shiny coating of surgical gel used in place of stitches. She remembered reading about it in something Ju
lian had given her.
No marks on her face, the one smack not enough to mark her.
Looking into her own eyes, she wondered if this was what her mother had felt after a beating.
Hate might lead to the Dark side, according to Yoda, but this was the very real world. Hate would help her to survive and escape him. It would keep her sharp and on the alert for an opportunity. She spent a long time alone, probably those couple days to allow the stripes to heal enough. The bruises filled in that time.
He’d done nothing that would kill her, nothing that would break a bone. It wasn’t about killing her. It was about possessing her, playing with her, having her. For now, at least.
There was no band on her arm like he’d put on her on Crecorday. She found nothing but he said the chain was on her. Maybe whatever he’d put into her back was it? Whatever it was, she felt the dampening effect. A mental heaviness that made thought difficult.
At her very first opportunity, he was going to die.
The door opened and a gun tip entered first, a guard directly behind.
“You are to come with me now or I am to shoot you in the leg and bring you anyway.”
She went. He was just a guard with probably no say in anything he was made to do. She didn’t know enough about the ship and couldn’t take information from his mind. Up the corridor and through a door and there was the room she’d been in earlier.
“You are to lie on that table.”
Like a massage table.
She did and her wrists and ankles were put into soft fabric restraint cuffs. He stepped back out of her sight and she lay there for a while before the door opened and Solomon came in to have a look at her.
“Out.”
Twinges at first. Uncomfortable but tolerable. Then jabs and stabs that had her wincing in pain. They radiated outward from the center of her back. Within a few minutes, he was grinning with delight while she arched her back and screamed in pain. Only for a few seconds at a time. A pause to let her catch her breath and another jolt lasting several seconds.
He forced her knees apart to taste her puss. She tried to knock him in the head with a knee and he reached up to give a breast a hard smack that knocked the breath out of her with both the force and the stinging sparkles of pain. He took a rope from under the pillow on the bed and cut it into two. He tied her knees tightly to the table. She could not stop him from tasting again, or doing anything he wanted to her.
If he wanted to hear her scream, she screamed. The sound was forced out of her by pain. Weak from exertion, limbs jellified, as high on endorphins as she’d ever been, her ankles were together. Then her wrists and she was carried over his shoulder to his bed. She had no more strength left to fight back with.
“I like this game,” he said, retying her ankles to the foot of the bed. “We’re going to play it a lot.”
He tied her arms to a rope at the head of the bed and stripped.
“I think you like the game too,” he said, penetrating a puss full of her own lubricant. “Good.”
“Fuck yourself,” she managed to say.
“Bad words get you a tighter chain,” he said, and adjusted the little box on the bed next to her.
She could no longer speak or move, her head doubly full of mud from the machine.
Chapter Sixteen
Tyler woke naked in her room on the Congressional station, a walking bruise on both sides and having no idea how long she’d been held prisoner. With no light of day or dark of night on the space ship, she’d had no way to determine spans of time.
How she got here was as much a mystery. One minute she’d been awake and screaming and the next she was waking here. The ship had to have gotten close enough to put her in her room. They had to know which room was hers in order to put her in it. Someone on the station was still helping Solomon.
The device was turned off. She could think clearly. Looking around, she saw the painting was there, still wrapped and leaning against her suitcases. Successfully teleporting off the bed to her dresser proved her abilities were not inhibited anymore.
“You have a note from Alen regarding the location of a gravesite,” Nimrod said.
“Show me,” she replied, sitting to pull pants and shirt on.
The message flashed up on the wall. He was in Woodlawn cemetery, the exact location flashing a red outline. Near the rear, near the back corner.
“Thank you.”
The wall went blank. As she was finishing dressing, putting on socks, the doorbell rang. Julian.
“Nimrod, open the door.”
She remained where she was on the edge of the bed, emotionally numb as he came barging in demanding to know where she’d been.
“The shuttle arrived a week and a half ago without you on it. We’ve been worried sick.”
“You have been sooo worried,” she said dully. “Well, yippee.”
“What happened, Tyler?” he asked, seeing she wasn’t quite right. In fact, she was markedly changed.
“I have to go to Earth for a while.”
She teleported, not caring about the new rule against it, arriving at Woodlawn Cemetery, at the plot that said Kevin Neiland. No birthdate. Just the death date of February 18, 1993.
HERO
who saved many lives
on the worst day
of Earth’s life.
She sat on her left hip and leaned against the cold stone and cried. Cried for the pains in her body, what she’d endured, cried for needing him and missing him so badly that every cell in her body hurt. That same lump of pain returned to that same spot in her chest. No words. She had no need of them.
Looking down from his perch at the top of the stone, Hades wept for her as well. He could not make himself known. He could not touch her. He couldn’t leave Earth to watch over her yet, or he’d have stopped her abduction. Once he had finally atoned for his many ancient errors, he would be allowed to travel the stars.
Julian arrived some feet away and walked up, made hard eye contact with him. Hades flew off to collect some souls.
[I’m sorry, babygirl.]
She heard it, looked around to see Julian crouched at the foot of the grave.
“We have to go back and have you checked out,” he said quietly. “The security scan when you ‘ported out says you have an explosive on you.”
“I know.”
She pulled up the back of the t-shirt and he saw the fresh but healed scars of the strands of Solomon’s torture device, and the bruises. He launched himself forward to pull her shirt up more and get a better look.
“What the hell is this?” he asked, tracing a pink line.
“An implanted mental chain that emits physical pain whenever he is in range and presses the button. He likes that button a great deal. In the center is a small explosive charge. If more than one strand is broken, it explodes. If someone tries to teleport it out of my body, it explodes. It has enough of a charge to blow my torso apart.”
“Holy fuckballs. Tyler?! What did that animal do to you?” he demanded, pulling up the other side of her shirt to see more, worse, bruises.
“What does it look like he did?”
He picked her up without another word and teleported directly to the station infirmary, to an empty examination room. He left her lying on the bed and poked his head out the door to call for Dr. Dheez.
“She was abducted. Appears to have been beaten numerous times. There’s this device in her back. She says it’s a kind of mental chain. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Step back. Let me take a look,” the doctor said, running his hands through the sterile blower.
He helped her sit up and take her shirt off, noticed the breaths and winces of pain.
“Your ribs mostly?” he asked quietly, having already seen the bruising.
She nodded.
“Okay, lie on your side if you have to but I need you to lie down so I can get a full scan.
He removed her shoes and the stretch pants for her, covered her wi
th a scan blanket for modesty and to keep her from being chilled. The lines of the machine passed over her in four directions at once, finished its cycle in thirty seconds. He took one look at the screen and injected her with something to make her fall asleep.
“How bad is it?” Julian asked.
“Two cracked ribs in the front left, three in the back left. All these dark spots are impact bruises. Healing. The newest is about three days old.”
Not a dozen bruises. Not two dozen. At least a hundred impact sites along her sides and down the outsides of her legs.
“She was pummeled repeatedly. Likely with a fist,” Dr. Dheez said. “Repeated trauma to the vagina and anus, organic matter inside both. Bruising on her cervix. That takes effort. She was sexually assaulted a number of times over those same days. There is still live semen in her.”
He pointed to a readout. “Deek’Traiian. So the final assault occurred immediately before she was returned to her room. There is a strange elevation in carbon monoxide in her cells. Likely rendered her unconscious.”
“In order to be kidnapped. Teleport onto the ship, grab her, teleport out. Can be done in less than half a minute,” Julian said more to himself.
“More recent. This is likely the knock-out for getting her back here. Then there’s the thing in her back. They are tubules filled with Mycyntal. Segmented tubes.”
Dr. Dheez enlarged the picture and pointed to the indentations indicating the ends of each inch long segment.
“Try to pull it out through a central point and the segments may break. If the segments break, the Mycyntal hits blood and blows. Try to teleport it out and the circuit in the center blows.”
“Hug her too tightly and the thing blows?” Julian questioned.
“Possible but unlikely. It’s about direct manipulation of the piece, from what I can see, to prevent it from being removed by nonprofessionals. Normal movement does not have any effect.”
“Any idea who made this thing?”
“I would not know,” Dr. Dheez admitted. “It’s not like it has a serial number or a label.”