Ambasadora (Book 1 of Ambasadora) (3 page)

She grasped the fragger’s knife
in desperation, but the hair on her arms was already rising with the static
discharge of Rainer’s weapon.

“You’ll be fine.”

The words penetrated Sara’s
semi-conscious state. Her vision remained dark, but she smelled sandalwood.

“I dialed down my cender
after killing the fragger.” The man’s husky timbre sounded familiar. Chen?

No. Chen had abandoned her.

The man speaking to her was the
contractor from Palomin. Rainer.

Black turned to shades of grey,
sharpening into an outline of a person stooping over her. The desert sky peeked
from behind the escarpment here on the rim. She almost expected to see the
ghostly trail of afterburners from Chen’s ship.

Rainer’s hands roved over her
waist and belly, then moved to her breasts.

“Stop it.” She grabbed
his wrist weakly, but he shook it off.

“What happened to your part
of the data?” He slid his hands down to her thighs. “Your
bracelet?”

Sara’s vision focused on Rainer’s
thick black brows and blue eyes.

He slipped his hand between her
legs.

“I don’t understand.”
Sara swatted at his hand. Her face felt crusty and her tongue lay thick in her
mouth, the metallic bite of blood swam in the back of her nose and throat.

“That’s what you said
before. You want me to believe it’s just a coincidence that you’re attending a
function this close to the Palomin Data Reserve wearing a bit siphoner
disguised as a piece of jewelry?”

Bit siphoner?

Disbelief washed over her. Chen’s
gift
was intended to siphon data, not represent their bonding.

Lights approached from the
escarpment, their beams narrowing to reveal a blue ovoid ship. Upon landing,
three contractors stepped out, sweeping the area with their weapons. Following
them, Sovereign Simon Prollixer.

Awareness clamped down on Sara as
she struggled for full consciousness. She squeezed her fists and curled her
toes. What had Chen done?

“Have you recovered my
property?” The Sovereign’s gaze passed over the fragger’s body then
Sara’s.

“The fraggers weren’t here
for extraction,” Rainer said, his voice growing huskier in the settling
smoke and dust.

“How do you know? You a mind
reader now, Rainer?” A female with pink and black hair spoke up.

“Because the scans record
the siphoning coming from multiple contacts
inside
…a full nine minutes
before the attack,” Rainer said.

“What about the woman?”
the Sovereign asked.

“She doesn’t have it.
Neither did the woman in the silver dress we found dead on the valley floor. The
runner took what he needed before leaving them both.”

“Do you know who the man
was?” The Sovereign’s small mouth barely moved.

“Not yet.” Rainer
looked down at Sara. “Probably a rogue. Only way he could know how to get
by security in the first place.”

“Was he working with the
fraggers?”

Rainer snapped his head up.
“No contractor, not even a rogue, would do
anything
with that kind
of halfcaste techno-militant trash.”

“I don’t need the cultural
lesson, nor your contemptible tone. What I need is my data.” The warning
in Sovereign Prollixer’s gaze belied the stoicism in his voice. “Get her
to a behavior modification cell. My life won’t be the only one forfeit if that
data is not returned.”

Sara fought to stay awake, to
find a way to plead her case.

“I don’t believe she’s
strong enough to undergo interrogation. If she dies, you’ve lost the best lead
we have and the runner won’t come back for a dead partner.” Rainer’s words
brought her little hope.

Chen wasn’t coming back. She saw
it in his eyes when he picked up the bracelet.

“You don’t have to do
this.” Sara pleaded through her tears.

Rainer held her arm once again,
and she believed that as long as she could touch him, she could persuade him
not to hurt her. Maybe it was only her mind’s way of keeping her sanity, but
she felt protected by him. She didn’t dare look at the others following behind
them or at the Sovereign walking out in front as the group returned to the
hippodrome’s balcony. Relief set in when she saw the door to the passing
celebration. Maybe it would be all right after all. Then they walked past the
entrance and headed into a service stairway.

“Please don’t.” Sara
put her hand over Rainer’s and squeezed.

“We’re just going to sit
down and talk a bit,” Rainer said without looking at her.

The small party reached a freight
elevator halfway down the grey hallway. Rainer motioned Sara inside and
followed her in.

The Sovereign spoke up.
“Contractor Varden, if you wouldn’t mind returning to my nephew’s
celebration.”

“Don’t I have more immediate
concerns?”

“No. Contractor Renault will
be handling this matter.”

The pink-haired female slid past
Rainer into the elevator and tipped the corner of her mouth in a gloating
smile. She slid her hand around Sara’s arm, emphasizing her new found
ownership.

“Faya’s interrogation record
is less than stellar.”

In response, Contractor Renault—Faya—dug
her fingers in between the muscles of Sara’s bicep, pinching nerves and
practically bringing Sara to her knees in pain. She cried out in shock, but
kept her gaze pinned on Rainer.

“Please help me.”

He stared at her, then at Faya,
his expression turning from sympathy to alarm.

“On your way, Contractor
Varden.”

The Sovereign stepped inside the
elevator and closed the door. Faya held Sara tight, but Sara barely felt the
woman’s fingers digging into her any more. The numbness of her unabated
vulnerability replaced the panic. She floated outside of her body now, as if
somehow watching through her own eyes from above the group.

But once the elevator stopped,
Sara was all too aware of her fear. She clawed to stay inside, but Faya’s
strength and years of combatant training easily overpowered her. Faya grabbed
a fistful of Sara’s hair and dragged her down the hallway to the room Sovereign
Prollixer had referred to as a behavior modification cell.

Inside, two of the other
contractors bound her hands to a chain hanging from the ceiling. Her screams
allowed her to hear only parts of what Faya said to her: “You’ll really
get into the drugs. Well, not at first.” The woman laughed, then attached
a doser patch to Sara’s neck. A tiny pinprick followed. “Before you know
it, you’ll be begging me for more.”

A hot sensation split through the
muscles of her neck.

Faya held up manacles lined with
hundreds of contouring blades. “Ever seen blade cuffs? They’re low tech, I
know, but I’m more hands-on.” She winked and ripped the gown the rest of
the way from Sara’s body.

Sara cried out in fear and shame,
but the screams only echoed in her own head as the fog of Faya’s drugs burned
through her system. She was dimly aware of her feet being chained to the floor.

Faya approached, the blade cuffs
dangling from her fingers. She smelled like strawberries. “The spring
action keeps them snug as they slide along your skin. They can travel
unencumbered all the way from thigh to ankle.”

“I’ll tell you everything
about Chen.”

“Yeah, you will. But let’s
have some fun first.” Faya clamped a manacle to the top of Sara’s thigh.

“It’s not real. None of it’s
real.” For the entire six weeks of Sara’s imprisonment, she tried to
convince herself of just that.

Sara dragged herself across the
entryway by her elbows. Blood oozed from hundreds of cuts on her legs, a miasma
of red streaks on the geometric design of the olive tiles. She would rest here
at the Sovereign’s apartment within the reserve until he decided it was time to
return her to Faya’s dank cell.

This guest suite was like a
gilded cage. Only here the torture wasn’t needles or shockers, but knowing that
even if she escaped the windowless room, she’d never make it out of Palomin
Canyon alive. Not that she had the strength to even try it. Maybe when the
Sovereign first imprisoned her here—twenty, forty days ago? She had lost track.

Was this how the citizens on the
worldships felt for all those millennia? Trapped and hopeless? Sick and dying?
She’d thought about them during these hateful days spent in the remnants of
their old ship. She never cared about those ancient days, never understood, but
her present circumstances mirrored those of the Lowers back then. The Lower
Caste had been shut away from the rest of society for being unclean, damaged.

Thinking that even those people
managed through their horrors sometimes gave Sara resolve. Sometimes.

The cold tiles stuck to her skin
as she crawled the short distance to the bathroom. Her teary vision morphed the
intricate white archway at its entrance into a hazy apparition. The normally
straight and regal columns bent at irregular angles as though melting.

She stopped to wipe her nose on
her arm. A pair of disembodied silver eyes appeared in the archway.

It’s just the dosing
.
Another hallucination.

The eyes flew at her. She ducked
her head and screamed. They hovered there, within touching distance. Just like
the fragger v-mitters, but they had wide black pupils in their centers. She
buried her face to hide her tears from them.

“Get away from me.”

She should have expected to see
some residual images. Faya had finished her latest modification session only an
hour ago. And this time she had stepped up the hallucinogenic dosers.

The eyes aren’t real. There
aren’t any fraggers here
.

Sara never told Faya about her fear
of the techno-militants or what really happened at Palomin. She never would, no
matter how many torture sessions she had to endure. But Faya didn’t need to
know what inspired Sara’s terror, only which drugs would make it manifest.

Her hatred of Faya gave Sara a
moment’s courage. She clawed at the fresh cuts on her legs, begging that the
horrendous sensation of splitting skin destroy the horrid images. Pain had
become her only tether to reality these past weeks. Another secret she had kept
from Faya. The more intense the pain, the less the dosers worked.

Sara looked up to stare at one
silver v-mitter, now featureless and dead, its mate, the bloodied eye of the
fragger she had fought outside these walls.

“You’re not real.” Sara
slammed a fist against the tiles. Why wasn’t the pain working this time? Had
Faya finally dosed her so much that the visions would never go away?

Angry and frightened, Sara
continued her crawl toward the bathroom. The raw eye stayed just ahead of her,
rolling around as though still in a socket. Sara ignored it and counted tiles,
anything to force her focus elsewhere.

Inside the bathroom, the eyeball
plopped onto the back of her hand and stared at her. Screaming, she flung it
off.

The stench of charred flesh
wafted from where the eye had rested. There were no signs of burns, but the
acrid smell overwhelmed her. She heaved and pulled herself up to the toilet.
Bluish mucus and bile burned her esophagus and mouth as it came back up from
her stomach. The taste reminded her of cleaning chemicals. The throat-searing
pain overloaded her senses. The eyeball rolled around on the tiles a few times,
then vanished.

Now that her mind cleared, the
pain in her legs grew in proportion. She smiled weakly at the trade-off.

With mustered strength, she propped
herself up and grabbed a thick towel from the washstand. The towel caught on
the rim of an empty water glass and sent it tumbling to the floor, shattering
it into tiny pieces. Dark red streaks soaked through the towel’s pale green
fabric as she pressed it against her legs. The contact of even the softest
fibers sent needles of reassuring pain through her.

Blade cuffs.
What sick mind
came up with that idea?

Faya favored the devices over the
shockers, which had stopped Sara’s heart once, and dental torture, though there
weren’t many molars on her right side left to pull. Faya was at least kind
enough to rub anti-microbial salts into the cuts and empty sockets and rinse
them with chlorate, to keep down the infection.

Can’t have you dying on me yet
,
Faya had whispered against her cheek.

Sara could still smell the
pungent chlorate here in the sterile bathroom, mixed with Faya’s strawberry
scent.

But, the worst part was the
nightmares—they stayed after the split skin and contusions healed.

Sara thought of the one thing
that would stop her slide into insanity. She thought of
him
. He would come
to her soon. He always did.

Trying not to move her lacerated
legs, she grasped the side of the huge bathing tub and dragged herself into a
sitting position. Her naked back absorbed the coolness of the tub’s side. She
closed her eyes and panted.

“I see Faya went for the
blade cuffs again.”

Her eyes flew open and her heart
jumped. He was here. Rainer was finally here.

Glass crunched under his boots as
he approached. “At least she stayed away from your face this time.”
He nudged her head up to look at her scars.

His skin had tanned since a few
days ago, or was it yesterday? Or last week? The bronzing complemented his
sculpted face and dark hair. She was deathly pale and her face now bore no
resemblance to the woman she used to be. Faya had succeeded in her humiliation.

Rainer reached past Sara and
turned on the water for the tub. Its rushing noise brought comfort, static to
fill her mind. When he bent down beside her, she smelled the subtle woodiness
of his scentbots. Breathing deeply, she allowed his scent to calm her.

“I’m giving you the stims
first because it’s going to be painful when you hit that water.” Rainer
pressed a doser patch into Sara’s neck before she could protest.