The clatter of a heavy pan falling answered the woman.
“It just tried to sand the shoe off my foot,” someone said.
“Those are ugly shoes, anyway,” another kitchen worker commented.
“Ha ha.”
The woman inside the room grumbled something and returned to the control box. Jamie resisted the urge to fidget, though she did mentally will the woman to go out into the kitchen and check for herself, thus leaving that computer online but unattended for a couple of minutes.
“I’m getting Sasha,” the woman finally grumbled and walked out.
Jamie lifted her head. The robots were still giving the kitchen people trouble. “Best chance I’ll get,” she breathed and climbed down. The door had remained open, and she slid it shut, hoping nobody out there would think anything of it. She darted for the control box. The holodisplay remained active, and Jamie swiped a finger through the program, hoping it responded to her.
“Yes,” she whispered when the display changed.
She tapped on the penthouse map, hunting for robots she could use to search. There weren’t many on that floor, but she activated a cleaning robot stationed in a wall cubby next to what looked like a bedroom or perhaps an office. Unfortunately, there weren’t camera feeds that she could check out, not on any program she could see in the settings. The robot had a small camera, however. It would have to be her eyes. She ordered it out of its cubby, hoping nobody would think anything of it, if the robot ambled out to sweep the floor at an unscheduled hour.
Jamie winced at new sounds coming from the kitchen. Someone cried a triumphant, “Got it!” and she didn’t know how much longer she would have. That Sasha person might walk in at any moment, or someone might try to shove the robots back into this room.
The legs of a handmade ebony desk and richly upholstered chair came into view through the robot’s display. A light was on somewhere to the side, casting long shadows across the wooden floorboards. It took a moment for Jamie to identify a large brown suede box with elaborate gold stitching as a trash bin.
This wasn’t a tall robot—its “eyes” weren’t quite high enough to see the top of the desk. Just as well. Maybe the unit would be less likely to be noticed. Jamie turned it to polish mode, guessing that would be the quietest setting, and ordered it to turn a circle so she could see if anyone was in the room. Despite the light being on, the office was empty. Jamie directed the robot to an open door and into a wide hallway. Countless rooms opened up to either side, with the hint of larger rooms on either end and more halls beyond that. The robot rolled toward the next door. Actually, it inched along, determined to polish the floors, not simply traverse them. Its top speed was a quarter of a mile an hour.
“This going to take forever,” Jamie grumbled.
The din had settled down in the kitchen, and she feared she didn’t have forever.
“…coming,” a voice floated through the door.
Jamie punched in a few orders to direct the robot along a circuit that would take it through the next few rooms, but there wasn’t time to program in a message for Sergei if it happened to locate him. An, “I said I’ll take care of it,” sounded only a few feet from the door. She was out of time.
Jamie swiped a hand through the display to close the program, then sprinted for the shelves. She climbed up, wincing when she kicked a paint container. It wobbled precariously, but she dared not stop to make sure it didn’t fall. The door was sliding open. She lunged for the top shelf, drawing her knees in and yanking the drop cloth over her body again. She didn’t get herself completely covered, but someone was walking in, and she dared not fidget further. Her shelving unit was already trembling suspiciously, thanks to her hasty assent.
But the stocky, toolbox-carrying woman who stalked in was too busy looking at the far wall to notice. Before the cloth fell over her face, Jamie glimpsed the holodisplay and realized why. It was all she could do to keep from groaning. She must have been pulling away as she had swiped a finger through the program, ordering it to close. She had missed. The cleaning robot’s camera was still displaying the suite. It was now polishing the floor of a library full of books and reading chairs.
“What the hell?” the woman muttered, then raised her voice. “You said the problem was just with those kitchen robots?”
“That we know about, yeah,” someone said from the doorway.
Well aware that her butt and one of her shoes hadn’t made it under the drop cloth, Jamie held very still, hoping neither person would look up at her shelf.
“That’s the queen’s suite, isn’t it?” another voice asked from the doorway.
“How would I know?” the woman with the tools asked. “It’s not like she invites me up there.”
“Maybe we’ll catch her naked,” a man snickered.
“Ugh, who would want to? She’s like a hundred.”
“She’s not that old. She’s still sexy too.”
“A dozen surgeries will do that for you.”
“I don’t know why that robot is cleaning at this time of day, but I’m going to stop it,” the tool woman said.
“Wait, look.”
The robot had drifted out into the hallway again, then, per Jamie’s programming, turned into a massive bedroom with wrought iron fixtures and dark blue and maroon walls. The decor wasn’t what caught Jamie’s eye. Two men were holding someone against the wall, buckling the person into… were those shackles? A queasy sense of certainty moved into her stomach even before she could fully see the prisoner.
One man squatted down, and the victim came into view. He dangled by the wrists, his bare feet several inches off the floor. The squatting man grabbed one of those feet and locked the ankle into another shackle, then shifted to do the other leg. The victim hung limply through all of this, his chin to his chest. All of his clothing had been removed as had the facial disguise that should have been there. Even if it had still been in place, Jamie would have recognized Sergei by the scars on his torso alone.
A woman in a fur robe stepped into view, only her legs and part of her back visible from the robot’s point of view. She carried something in one hand, a metal truncheon with several buttons on the side. Jamie didn’t know what it was, but couldn’t imagine it was anything good. The woman—Laframboise?—stepped out of the view, and the clack of heels drifted over the robot’s audio pickup, then stopped.
The men turned toward the robot. “Poor bastard,” one of them muttered.
“Better him than me,” the other growled.
The men walked toward the door, and one frowned down at the robot. He stopped, moving to the side of it and out of view. Jamie wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved when the display winked out. The last thing she heard was the sound of those heels clacking back into the room.
Chapter 16
Sergei kept his eyes closed as consciousness returned to him. His first thought was to be relieved that he was waking up and that someone hadn’t shot him. His second was to be concerned that his wrists and ankles were bound with cold steel, and he was hanging against a wall. His third thought was to wonder what the hell was in his mouth, jammed back against the inside of his cheek. Then he remembered and allowed himself to feel a slight surge of triumph. They hadn’t searched his mouth, and the scalpel was still there. He wasn’t yet sure how that could help him, since he couldn’t get his hands free to pull it out, nor was that extremely strong glue likely to yield, even after sitting in his saliva for however long he had been knocked out. He would have to hope that he could change the situation somehow, find a way to free a hand. But for the moment, he needed to figure out where he was and whom he was dealing with. He was aware that he was naked, but the air didn’t have the chilly feel of some subterranean dungeon. Not that a subterranean dungeon was a possibility on a city floating in the clouds. A dank basement, perhaps.
Soft clacks sounded. Sergei didn’t lift his head. He didn’t need to. He could identify a woman in heels, or perhaps they were boots t
ipped with some metal or lacquer. Either way, he could tell the owner wasn’t heavy enough to be a man. The scent of some musky perfume hung in the air. Did that mean that Laframboise herself had locked him up?
The heels came closer, then stopped in front of him. Inspecting her prize, was she?
The smokers’ warning floated into his mind, that most men didn’t apply for jobs here. With reason. Sergei supposed he was about to find out that reason. Anything was better than being shot, and even if he was about to be tortured, he might find his opportunity to escape, especially if Laframboise had dismissed her servants and was alone.
That was what the logical part of his brain told him. But this setup made him nervous. It was too familiar, and he feared Laframboise would become a specter out of his past. Oh, his “counselor” hadn’t used anything so antiquated as chains to hold him—between the controller and her concoction of various drugs, she hadn’t needed to chain him to render him helpless—but she had enjoyed inflicting pain.
Sergei told himself he could handle whatever Laframboise dealt him. He had survived two serious torture sessions in his career, and he had killed the people who had dared yank out his fingernails in addition to using everything from fists to high-tech tools to inflict pain upon him. But those tormenters had been men. He worried that Laframboise’s gender would affect him more than it should, that he would, once again, be the boy-playing-at-being-a-man that he had been back during those first couple of years in the Fleet, that his mind would fling itself into the bottom of a dark well from which he couldn’t claw his way out. Or even worse, he would betray Jamie and Mandrake, spilling every secret simply because Laframboise asked.
Stop it, he growled inwardly. No need to give himself away to her before she even spoke to or touched him.
As if Laframboise had been reading his thoughts and waiting for the right moment, a cool, soft hand wrapped around his penis.
Sergei kept his chin down and his eyes closed, forcing himself not to react, though he groaned on the inside. The men had never started their torture there—funny how a man would kill another man without a thought but never consider castrating him. The fact that she chose to start there set a tone he didn’t like.
“Nice size,” she said, still gripping him. Something cool and metallic came to rest on his abdomen. “Though we’ll have to firm it up a bit, eh? I’ve only had one man come out of the sedative stiff. He was amazing.” The metal—some kind of bar or baton?—traced the muscles of his stomach. “I hope you won’t disappoint.”
Sergei couldn’t imagine what use she might find for his penis while he was in this position, but he supposed she had something in mind. The counselor had always made him lie on his back on a bed—or, when planet-side, on the ground—and had ridden him like that, but not until she had fully aroused herself by tormenting him. Maybe that was something they taught in counselor school, and this woman had similar plans in mind.
The metal heated against his skin, and Sergei got a sense of how his torture might be delivered.
“Who are you, anyway?” Laframboise asked. “I know you’re awake, by the way. You might as well talk to me. Not that talking is necessary, I suppose.” She stroked his penis, almost lovingly, though the heat coming from that baton was growing to a painful level. Intense throbs hummed from its tip and into him, the strange and unpleasant sensations undulating through his body like ripples across the surface of a pond. Ripples he suspected would only become more intense. He took deep breaths, trying to still that sensation of encroaching panic in the back of his mind.
“I was expecting Viktor Mandrake, I must confess,” Laframboise went on. “I must kill him—I owe Felgard that—but Mandrake is quite handsome in his pictures, isn’t he? I was looking forward to enjoying him first. Alas, the handsome men don’t come to me willingly anymore.”
Sergei lifted his head, less out of curiosity as to what she looked like and more because he needed to assess his situation more thoroughly, to see if there was any hope for reaching some tool to free his hands—at least one hand. Also, the pain pulsing through him, while controllable so far, was making his breaths quicken as he struggled to manage it. As she had said, there was no use pretending he was unconscious. Even if the vibrations from that baton were growing so intense that they were rattling his teeth, so that he would have preferred to be unconscious.
“Ah, there’s my pretty boy,” Laframboise crowed, still rubbing him. “You’re a handsome one, too, aren’t you? Younger than Mandrake. Were you there when he killed Felgard?” Her hand tightened around him.
To his chagrin, her ministrations were making him hard. Ridiculous, given the pain the rest of his body was in, but he had never been able to stay soft for the counselor, either. It was as if some secret treacherous part of him found the pain arousing and was eager to respond to it.
Laframboise smiled, her full lips painted a lush red. She wasn’t young—as Jamie had reasoned earlier, the woman had to be in her sixties, at least, to have made it to her rank—but she must have had plastic surgeries done, because there weren’t any crow’s feet at the corners of her sharp green eyes or any creases around her mouth. She wore a tiger fur robe, the front open to reveal that other parts of her body had likely been enhanced and augmented over the years, as well. Those were not the breasts of a sixty-year-old woman.
“Nice, aren’t they?” she purred, clearly following his gaze.
“I…” He almost said that he had seen better recently, but it would be wiser to cooperate—or at least not openly fight—until he figured out a plan. She might be more lax if he wasn’t openly defiant. Besides, if he spoke with the scalpel still wedged into the corner of his mouth, he risked her figuring out he had something in there. He nudged it with his tongue, wondering if he could work that glue loose—or rip off the flesh of the inside of his cheek if he had to. Whatever it took to make it so he could spit out the scalpel. Not that he had figured out how to catch it if he did. He might be able to cut the iron shackles with it—provided they weren’t as reinforced as that damned flap—if he could get it into his grip.
“Big talker, aren’t you?” Laframboise stroked his penis, rubbing her thumb across the tip, sending a sensation of arousal through him that was somehow only intensified by the pain. “It’s all right. You can tell me if you were there. I won’t punish you too much.” She smiled. “I know Mandrake is the captain and that he’s the one sleeping with those women, doing their bidding, the weak-willed simpleton.”
Not all of the women.
Struggling to keep his mind off the pain—and off Jamie and any thought of talking about his comrades—Sergei tried to see the rest of the suite. A bed bigger than his entire cabin on the Albatross floated in the center of the room, a control panel with all manner of settings visible at the top of it. He wondered if shackles came out of it, as well. No, he didn’t want to know.
A table on the other side of the room was set with platters of snack food, as well as a decanter of wine. A squat robot sat powered down near the table, as if awaiting an opportunity to serve its mistress. Though it looked more like a floor-cleaning robot than a servitor. Odd that it was sitting there. Sergei wished he could send a message through it to Jamie, to let her know that he could use a little help. But what if she had been captured too? It might be up to him to rescue them both.
His gaze returned to the wine. Alcohol. Would it be enough to loosen the bond of the glue? Jamie had surely meant something like paint thinner when she had mentioned alcohol, but maybe if he could swish a mouthful around for a while…
“If you’re not going to regal me with stories of Mandrake, I suppose we can get to the rest of the night.” Laframboise thumbed a button on the baton.
Sergei gasped as the pulses of heat shifted to something akin to a lightning strike. Bolts of current scorched through his veins, and his entire body stiffened in response, his back arching away from the wall.
“Oh, that’s very nice.” Laframboise leaned forward and bit one of hi
s nipples.
The pain was laughable in comparison to what the baton was inflicting on him, but he still wanted to strike her for her audacity. Maybe shove that metal stick into some hole of hers and turn it on.
But all he could do with those bolts of energy tearing through him was buck and try to twist away from the baton. He tried to jerk a knee up, to knock it away, but the shackles didn’t give him the leeway. As she bit at him, he felt a flush of irritation at the fact that his body responded to her. She chuckled, as if she had known it would all the time, biting him harder as she kept the baton pressed against his abdomen. Unfortunately, whatever energy poured into him didn’t conduct into her the way electricity would, and somehow, she kept the torture implement from brushing her own skin. Lots of practice, no doubt.
Sergei yanked his chin down, trying to crack her in the head, but she had that measurement down. His nose brushed her hair, but that was it.
Finally, the baton left his skin, and she backed away a step.
After being tense for so long, his muscles could have melted out of the shackles at the cessation of pain. Too bad his wrist bones ensured his hands remained secured. His relief was short-lived, for she was merely selecting another button on that torture stick.
He stared at it through blurry eyes. What next? Thoughts of using it on her sprang into his mind again, though he feared he wouldn’t be able to, that even if he was released, he would cower on the floor and let her continue brutalizing him. Already, he could feel his mind hiccuping whenever he tried to think, to come up with a plan for escape. His brain wanted to shrink to the back of his skull to hide from her.
No, he had a plan. What had it been? The wine. Alcohol. Yes.
“Cruel of you,” he rasped, “not to share a glass of wine with me before…”
“Phase Two?” she suggested.
“Uh. Sure.”
“I don’t know. Alcoholic beverages can cause erectile dysfunction.” She gave his erectness a frank look. He wished he could make it dysfunction so she would lose interest. No, that might not be a good idea. She might simply have him killed after that.
The Assassin's Salvation (Mandrake Company) Page 25