Fallen Star (3 page)

He looked back at her and his smile broadened to show his pointed teeth. “Your people call us slave-hunters.”

Fallon couldn’t draw breath.
He’s a slave-hunter?
But they were just an urban legend. A race that changed people into willing sex-slaves was just too fantastic to believe. They couldn’t be really
real
. Could they?

But then, Peter had just said, these guys were paid by the Imperium to take people -- and the people they took didn’t
want
to come back.

Chapter Two

Fallon winced as Sobehk’s hand tightened in her hair. Caught, cuffed, and kneeling on the filthy deck plates in a disused alley in the bowels of the station -- the whole situation sucked. Calling for help was a total waste of breath. Anyone that came would be more likely to slit both their throats just to steal her boots and his pretty armor.

“Considering that you’re a criminal, I guarantee you’re better off serving one of us than ending up in a penitentiary mining pit somewhere on the wrong side of space.” Sobehk pulled a long, viciously back-curved dagger from his tall over-the-knee boot.

Fallon saw the blade and didn’t think; she simply twisted as hard and as fast as her panicked body would move. Her hair came out in his hand, and she didn’t care. She threw herself forward, tucking her head to roll over her shoulder and right out of his reach. The idiot only had the one hand on her. Fuck the cuffs on her wrists; her feet were perfectly functional. In one smooth motion, she was up on her feet and running for the open end of the alley.

“Oh, no, you fucking don’t!” His heavy boots pounded the pavement behind her. “Not this time!” He was gaining on her.

She sucked air and pushed her legs as fast as they would move, but running with her arms pinned at her back was not going to get her far. She had to get the damn cuffs off, and fast. She spotted the yawning mouth of an open pipe right at the edge of the alley and dove in, headfirst.

She landed hard on her shoulder and grunted with the jarring impact. She rolled up onto her knees. The interior of the pipe was utter blackness. She closed her eyes and opened them to trigger her night vision augmentation. The pipe’s interior bloomed in a haze of green. It was filthy and just big enough to clear her head as long as she stayed on her knees.

She grimaced and started forward on her knees. She was already grimy; what was a little more dirt? But if the pipe narrowed too much, she’d be in big trouble fast without the use of her hands to get her through.

“How far do you think you’re going to get with force-cuffs on, you little idiot?” Sobehk’s voice echoed from the end of the pipe. Scrapes and thumps announced his entry into the pipe. “Damned feral human ...”

Fallon sucked in a sharp breath. He’d never followed her into a pipe before; why was he doing it now? She shoved deeper, her knees bruising on the trash clogging the bottom of the pipe. She had to find a place to get the damned cuffs off right now.

She turned at the first cross juncture and shoved forward, hoping like bloody fury that whatever used to be in this pipe wasn’t corrosive; she couldn’t afford a skin graft. She turned a few more corners and found herself staring at a sharp upward bend in the pipe. It might as well have been a dead end. Without her hands, she’d never be able to get up into it.

She was out of options.

Fallon looked back at the open pipe. She could hear the stubborn brute still cursing up a storm only two turns back.

“Don’t you dare fall down a hole and get yourself killed! I want to kick your skinny ass first!” Crashes and hollow bangs accompanied his passage as his armor struck against the pipe’s narrow confines.

If she was lucky, he’d take a wrong turn and get himself, and that armor of his, stuck in a pipe. But her luck had sucked all damned day.

She looked around for someplace to sit. The pipe-bend was just big enough for maybe three people to fit, and the opening over her head looked like an easy climb, if she had her hands. But if he found her in this corner before she got the cuffs off, she might as well be in a steel cage.

The cuffs had to come off right now.

She moved to the curving wall right under the pipe’s mouth and dropped down on her knees. Using the wall for leverage, she twisted. She had to get at the outside of her boot with her fingers, and they were at her back. Her legs shivered as she held them impossibly tight against her body while her fingers scrabbled along the outside of her boot. Her fingers found the correct pocket on her right calf and the tiny stylus-prod that she needed. She twisted around sharply to get the prod balanced on her thigh. Carefully, she bent down to get it in her mouth without knocking it off and into the filth on the bottom of the pipe. She sat back up with a sigh of relief, the stylus safe in the grip of her strong teeth.

She turned her head and angled the point very carefully past the rip in her shoulder seam and over the right place. She didn’t want to lose her grip on the small instrument. She closed her eyes and focused her attention. She had to stab the correct nerve bundle to short-circuit the signal in her arm’s augmentation, releasing the cuff on her wrist. It was deep in the ball joint of her shoulder, and it was not going to be easy to find. It was also going to hurt like screaming fury while she did it.

She jabbed the stylus in and pushed it deep into her shoulder. Agony screamed up and down her arm as blood slithered past the puncture. A moan slipped past her lips. Gripping the tool tightly in her teeth, she began to dig. Small whimpers escaped her throat. She felt a tiny buzz of current against her lips and her arm dropped. Her right arm was free!

With a gasp of pain and relief Fallon released the stylus, leaving it in her shoulder. She twisted sharply, flapping her dead arm. The nasty thing flew off her wrist. The metal cuff hit the metal pipe with a loud bang.

She flinched.
Of all the stupid things to do!
If Sobehk was anywhere nearby, that sound just gave away her location. She leaned over and pulled the stylus from her arm with her teeth. She had to get that other cuff off. A small charge ran up her dead arm and her augmentation came back online. She lifted her arm and wiggled her fingers, allowing herself a fleeting smile. Her arm was weak, but she could use it.
Thank the Maker for nano-technology -- self-healing robotics.

She grabbed the stylus with her free hand and stabbed it into her other shoulder. Pain seared through her. She moaned before she could stop herself.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Fallon looked over and stared straight into Sobehk’s ice blue eyes. Her blood froze.
Caught ...

His face fell slack with astonishment. “How in bloody Chaos did you get that cuff off?”

“Shit!” She grabbed the instrument with her free hand and ripped it from her shoulder while scrambling to her feet. Clamping the stylus in her teeth, she jumped up to grab the lip of the pipe above her with her one good arm.

He came lunging into the bend. “Not this time, you little beast!” He grabbed her around the waist and hauled her back down.

She dropped, hitting the bottom of pipe facedown on her elbow with a hollow bang. She gasped with the vicious ache and the instrument fell from her teeth. She reached for the fallen stylus and his fingers closed tight on her shoulders. Searing pain ripped though her. She screamed and writhed in agony under him.

Sobehk pulled his hands from her shoulders. “Blood? You’re bleeding? What in Chaos did you do to yourself?” He set his palm between her shoulders to hold her down and ripped open the shoulder seam of her suit. “Fuck, that’s a lot of blood. Were you
trying
to kill yourself, you stupid little feral?”

Fallon twisted under him and slammed the heel of her hand into his jaw.

He grunted and fell back onto his knees.

Lightning-quick, she was back on her feet and jumping for the pipe.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” He lunged up and hauled her back down.

She screamed obscenities and lashed out with her foot.

He grabbed her foot and pulled, dropping her hard onto her back and then following her down. “Stubborn little pain in my ass ...!” He straddled her, pinning her struggling body with his weight. “Hold still. I need to stop the bleeding.” He grabbed the shoulders of her suit and ripped it further open.

She bucked and howled under him, insane with pain and fear.

“Hold still!” He had to use both hands to keep her down. “Stop fighting me, you idiot! You’re bleeding out!”

Fallon couldn’t see anything beyond his bulk holding her down. She twisted and fought with everything in her, desperate for escape.

“Damn it, you are not bleeding to death on me!” He pressed one hand on her chest, raised his fist. “Stop right now or I’ll knock you cold!”

Terrified beyond reason and in too much pain to care, she shrieked and clawed for his eyes.

His fist came down hard.

And the world went very far away.

* * * * *

Fallon awoke lying on her stomach, bent over something relatively soft, with her arms pulled over her head. There was an ache in her jaw that simply would not go away and a bruise over her heart, too, but other than that, she felt pretty okay. She shifted to sit up and discovered that she couldn’t. In fact, she couldn’t move at all.
Huh?

She opened her eyes and brilliance speared her. She winced and closed them to switch over from her night vision. She opened her eyes again and discovered that she was looking at a familiar cross alley.

She couldn’t move because she was tied across the forward saddle of a two-man turbo-glider parked on its cycle tires. Both cuffs were on her wrists and bound together with fine cable lashed to a ring by the footboard. There was not one bit of give anywhere. Her ankles felt like they were similarly tied on the far side, but with her legs spread wide.

She was positioned as though waiting to be mounted.

What in fury ...?
Memory slammed through her. The force-cuffs, the pipe, Sobehk’s punch ...

She was strapped across Sobehk’s glider.

Fallon dropped her head.
Damn it, damn it, damn it ...
She was well and truly caught, only this time she was also set for travel. The question was, where did he plan to take her?

Fallon shifted on the glider’s saddle and felt a soft breeze on her naked back. Her suit had been split all the way down the back and spread open. She could feel the edges digging into the outside of her thighs, leaving her butt completely exposed all the way down and around almost to her navel.

The hair rose at the back of her neck. She really was waiting to be mounted.

“Awake?” His voice came from somewhere behind her.

That brutish bastard ...!
Fallon twisted her wrists and glared at the cable that bound her. She utterly loathed being helpless.

“I stopped the bleeding and bandaged both your shoulders from whatever it was you jammed into yourself.” Pavement crunched under his boots as he paced somewhere behind her. She felt the breeze of him moving between her spread thighs. “What in Chaos were you trying to accomplish?”

She blinked. He bandaged her? Why by fury would he do that?

“Answer me, you feral idiot!”

The sound of a sharp smack arrived only a bare moment before a scalding burn erupted across her ass. Fallon flinched in surprise.
He hit me?
She ground her teeth. What was a smack on the ass, when he’d punched her before? “Fuck you.”

“That’s better.” Sobehk snorted. “Now, spit it out -- what the fuck did you think you were doing?”

“I was trying to get the cuffs off.”

“Is that so? It looked a lot more like a suicide attempt to me.”

Fallon stared at the cuffs on both wrists. “It worked. I got one off.” Not that it did any good. It was back on.

“It could have killed you! The way you were bleeding back there, I was convinced you’d nicked an artery with that stunt.”

“So? What do you care?”

“Great Mother, you are so damned thick-headed! Do you
want
to die?”

Fallon dropped her head and scowled.

“Answer me, damn you!”

A sharp crack echoed in the alley.

Fallon’s left butt-cheek erupted with stinging heat. She sucked in a sharp breath and flinched. “No, I don’t want to die, you bastard!”

“Good! Because if you
ever
do something that stupid again, I’m going to make your ass regret it for a week straight!”

Fallon hunched her shoulders. He was shouting. “If you hadn’t put the cuffs on me, I wouldn’t have had to do it!”

“You would have preferred death to me?”

Fallon nibbled on her bottom lip. “I knew what I was doing ...”

“Right. Which is why you were bleeding all over the place.” His warm palms cupped the curves of her bare ass, rubbing the sting from his strike.

She cringed and shivered slightly, feeling utterly exposed and completely helpless under his hands. “So, now what?”

“I’m waiting for my thank-you, for saving your life.”

Her mouth popped open. A thank-you, when he caused it in the first place? Bloody Fate, the ego!

His fingers dug into her ass-cheeks in clear warning.

She closed her eyes tight. “Okay, all right ... Thank you.”

“Good. Don’t do it again.” His fingers released her ass, and he stroked her backside in a gentle caress. “I want you in one piece.”

She suddenly focused on his palm moving across her skin. Seditious warmth coiled in low, moist places. An image of what she must look like seared across her inner eye. Her body bent over the glider with her suit sliced open and peeled back, the rolled edges framing her butt with her muscular legs splayed wide. There was nothing to block his view of her most intimate flesh.

Her nipples rose to tight points against the leather of the saddle.

A second image entered her thoughts -- his brutally handsome body as it had looked in the bar, all raw muscle and arrogance. She could practically feel him towering behind her, staring at her, focused on her naked and exposed backside. Anything he wanted, he could take, and there was no way she could stop him.