Cyberella: Preyfinders Universe (27 page)

With a great crash, Mimi fell through the ceiling, bringing with her a rain of building fragments. She bounced high, landed, flattened one guard to mush then proceeded to play “catch me” with the others.

Panting, still choking from the agony, with her heart thundering in her ears as well as the screams of the guards, Ella looked away.

The wet thuds stopped after two more and she heard scampering. Ella dared to look with one eye. Mimi trotted up. Behind her were small bloody footprints. She stopped and leaped onto the coffin, landing on the edge and balancing.

“Hi,” Ella grated out. The pain was making her feel light-headed but she managed to undo the last strap. The patter of footsteps heralded the arrival of Plito. He’d removed the cuffs somehow. The guard must’ve had the keys.

“We need to get out of here, Ella.”

Helped by Plito, she half-climbed, half-fell from the autodoc bed and had to remain kneeling on the floor for a few seconds.

“Your arm!” Plito gasped. “It’s broken?”

“Yes. Yes. Come on.” She raised herself to her feet and stood there, swaying. The room was a bloody mess. Corpses lay everywhere.

Someone would be in to see what had happened soon, though from the sounds of shooting, someone else was doing nasty things to Verok’s people.

“There’s an attack?” Plito turned toward the noise.

“Seems like it. Luckily for us.”

“Clothes.
Frack.
You need some.” His ear tips and cheeks blushing red, he looked about.

Her nakedness was the least of their problems.

“Soon. First we leave. Do you know if we can get to his spaceship? I arrived in an orange one.”

“On the rooftop. There’s a landing area up there. If it’s there still?”

“Let’s hope so.”

He pointed. “Hovershaft is behind that gray door.”

They passed a pretty, carved table with a tall bottle of fluid atop it and something big floating inside. She recognized the contents in one startled glance.

Her foot, he’d kept it to show her? Ugh. Horrid man.

They were twenty yards from the door when a clatter and some shouts warned her Verok’s help had arrived. Getting shot in the back was not how she was going out.

“Give me the gun. You run.”

“Hey?”

Wincing at the jerk on her bad arm, she slipped away from him, plucking the gun from his fingers as she turned to face their pursuers.

“Ella?” one of them shouted.

Oh no.

Torgeir advanced in a line of his men. Guns out, they surveyed the room. It was Dresdek and three others.

“Ella! You’re alive!” Torgeir broke into a run.

She wasn’t going back with him. Couldn’t face him. This disease of hers wasn’t going away. She clearly had Bak-lal genetic alterations still bubbling in her flesh.

“Stop. I don’t want to see you. Please,” she sobbed. “Stop.”

“Ella?” He slowed. “What’s wrong?”

There was a way out. She knew how to control their cybernetics. The power in her gathered and abruptly it was
there
, awaiting her command. “Dresdek! And you and you. Disarm and restrain the others. Stop them following.”

Without knowing what she could do, the others were quickly overwhelmed.

She spun on her heel, though tears streamed down her face, and she staggered toward the hovershaft. She didn’t know how long her command would last.

The little pumpkin-orange ship was still parked on the roof. The hole in the roof, that went all the way down to the ballroom, told her Mimi had somehow hitched a ride on the ship. She’d probably been stuck to the outside. Piloting while naked was luckily unnecessary. She found a pair of sleeveless overalls in a locker.

This baby ship was pure gazillionaire territory. She could navigate a wormhole, with ease.

They had little time for messing about but Ella wiped away tears and leaned across the console to hug Plito with one arm.

She whispered in his ear, too choked up to speak louder. “You’ve got your legs.” Her smile was wobbly. “Good?”

“Yes.” He nodded and squeezed her uninjured arm. “Yes. Very, very good. The one good thing about today. But...you want to leave? Without anyone following? We need to go now. The acceleration will hurt you. You know that?”

“Of course. Do it.”

With her minimal training and that of Plito’s, since he’d hacked into the pilot program, they set a course for a wormhole and blasted off.

She faded in and out of consciousness. Fainting was to be expected with the G forces pressing on her arm.

The little medical alcove had strong painkillers with sedative side effects. It’d wear off before they hit the wormhole. She numbed herself with a dose. Being woozy-headed had benefits.

“Wake me up when everything is all better,” she mumbled.

“Sure I will, Ella. I’ll look up what we can do for your arm. I can’t contact Torgeir?”

“No. Never, ever, ever. I will never see that man again.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ever.” She shut her eyes and pretended she was asleep, and then she was...

When she woke, she found they were on the verge of accelerating into the wormhole entrance. Stray blue swirls from the warp engines flickered across the holoscreen, obscuring the stars with their pretty brilliance.

“Wait, Plito. Wait.”

“Sure.” He tapped a button. “Say when.”

She should go back. She knew why this was impossible. She didn’t believe in herself.

The hurt inside pulled her from one possibility to the other. By refusing to face Torgeir, she could preserve the perfection of his love for her.

Truth though. She breathed out and wondered if her ribs would crack from the pain of leaving. Truth... What she was, was an abomination.

If she went back and begged for forgiveness and he refused her, she’d be devastated.

She feared to fail.

Her reaction was insane, in some ways, and she knew that, but it was all she could face at this time when she was on the very wobbly edge of a precipice. Maybe later, another time, she’d do this – when she built her courage.

She gulped and put her finger in her mouth, bit down hard, until it hurt almost as much as her heart.

“Go,” she croaked. “Do it.”

Plito slapped the button. “Done.”

After Ella had flung the command, the fight had been short and inglorious. Even with their minds muddled, Dresdek and the others she’d suborned had been sensible. They’d distanced themselves before they’d drawn their weapons. They’d kept Torgeir and the rest of his men, who piled up behind him, in a standoff situation for long enough. No one wanted to shoot their fellow warriors and he’d commanded them not to, in spite of how frantic he was to catch Ella.

When he reached the rooftop, she was long gone.

Sensors on Zeus tracked her until she left the system. The little ship she’d stolen was twice as fast as he could attain with Zeus’s engines without blowing something up.

Torgeir slumped in the captain’s seat, staring blindly at the faint traces of her ship’s jump on the holoscreen. Warp jumps weren’t trackable unless you had military equipment. The traces would fade beyond military capability in a few hours.

“Why is she doing this, sir?” Dresdek sounded flustered for once. No wonder.

“I don’t know, yet. I’m going back to Riptide to clear up any legal problems to do with our raid on Verok’s ring. Maybe the boys will know more.” He sat forward. Dresdek had his hand over his mouth and was studying the screen. The man looked lost. “I need you to understand there was nothing you did that I blame you for. Wipe that idea from your mind. I’m getting her back. You’re helping me.”

“Okay.” Slowly Dresdek nodded. “Thank you. You need to excuse me from duties if we get close to her though. She can make me her puppet again. She did it once, easily.”

That was true, though the pain on Dresdek’s face made him wish it wasn’t so. “Agreed.”

That he had to consider she might again betray him, underlined how far his trust of Ella had fallen. He didn’t understand her actions and if he did, he doubted they’d be excusable by his standards of conduct. Maybe the two of them weren’t as in synch in their views of right and wrong as he’d thought? That was a sobering notion – that Ella might have a different idea of morality.

*****

After days of trying, Torgeir realized finding her was impossible with his resources. He appealed to some friends in Concer administration for help. In the meantime, to keep the ship running and his crew, he took up work again. At the end of that small combat, he found a Concer fleet vessel, the
Traskendor
, awaiting the Zeus, when she ascended to planetary orbit.

The command to attend a meeting on board the
Traskendor
was not one he could ignore. The purple security and red combat tags attached to the message made any of the Bak-lal related mopping-up messages look under-decorated.

The walk along the corridors of the
Traskendor
, Lealith-class arbitrator vessel was sobering. It could obliterate
Zeus
without straining its weaponry at all.

When he entered the interview room, the man awaiting him was the highest-ranking Concer officer he’d yet seen in the flesh. He had speckled gray, crew-cut hair and his face was lined by the atmospheres of a thousand battles on a thousand different planets. His uniform was weighed down by medals for valor. This was a hard, experienced soldier.

Torgeir nodded. “Sir?”

“Sit down, Lord Torgeir. This is an incognito meeting. You haven’t seen me and you don’t know my name.” His smile was brief enough to quash any hint of true happiness. “If you still want your almost-bondmate Ella to not be terminated as soon as we find her, you need to listen to me and you need to say yes at the end.”

A man didn’t panic at hearing a few words, but Torgeir came close after those. “What has she done?”

“Bad things. Concer has come to the conclusion that Ella is the most dangerous person in this universe and if you can’t help us catch her and tame her, we need to kill her. Sit.”

He found the back of the chair without looking and fumbled his way into sitting. What terrible things she had done? Would he want to save her? The love he felt for her was still in his heart but circumstances were burying it under grief and a strange dislocation between who she seemed to have been in the past and what she had become.

He’d thought he loved her but had he been loving an imaginary person?

“Go ahead, sir.”

*****

If Torgeir followed her, he never caught up.

Ella found it was easy getting through any planetary spaceport. Easy making money. Cyborgs, or those close to cyborg, were everywhere and she could coerce them into doing almost anything. She arranged for Plito’s return flight to Pelagia and journeyed onward, searching for a place to stop. Somewhere she could feel she at least belonged.

Every day, for months, she watched herself for signs of Bak-lal alterations but the removal of her foot seemed to have rendered her clean. When she figured that out, she lay back in her rented bed and laughed until her stomach hurt, then she cried into her rented pillow. It was so ironic, so tragic, and so typical of her stupid life.

The time to go back had never arrived. It had become ever more elusive, until imagining herself speaking to Torgeir again made her gut cramp. Going back simply wasn’t possible anymore. It had become a dream. She was cyborg. She had been a Bak-lal monstrosity of the worst kind. For all she knew, she’d killed hundreds of people. Why would anyone do anything except despise her, even Torgeir?

She went from planet to planet and found nothing to hold her, nothing but emptiness for her soul and heart. She’d be searching forever.

Late in life to discover something so fundamental, but now she knew – belonging meant having someone who would love her and who she could love in return.

She needed his hand in hers, his lips kissing hers, his arms around her while he told her she was his again. She’d thrown that away in one insane moment when she’d forgotten the love they’d had for each other. All her fault, not his, hers.

Maybe...he would have taken her back?

Instead of fleeing from him, she should have stood her ground and asked him if he could still love her, cyborg, Bak-lal, whatever she had become.

Then, if he’d killed her? At least she’d be done with this.

Whoever invented time should’ve made a rewind button for dumb-ass idiots like her.

Happiness was impossible without him. It had sifted through her fingers and blown away before she truly understood her loss.

Two and a half months since he’d seen her. Torgeir knew the exact number of days, same as he knew how it would feel when he found her. There would be great joy, as well as the release of an anger accumulated ever since the day she’d made his own men attack him, since the day she left him.

Her disembodied floating foot...he would never forget that. That reminder of her trauma made him rein back his distaste for what she’d done. She had her reasons.

She’d left him because she thought he wouldn’t love her anymore. He’d deduced that from her note and from what Plito had told him. She hadn’t trusted him enough to even stop to ask if that was true. That was the worst of it.

He was going to find her. The only woman he’d ever loved was not escaping him. He’d find her. What he’d do to her then? He wasn’t sure.

Most days, he regurgitated these same thoughts.

“Message.” Dresdek swiveled in his seat. “From Concer. They have leads. Tracked her to a planet. We need to get there before they kill her.”

*****

There was something clean and pure about being up in the clouds, surveying the land below. With the slightly lower-than-Earth gravity on
Heksepp
, Ella had found reaching the peak of this Opp Mountain fairly easy. Opp was the highest tooth in a long, jaw-like and monstrous mountain range. She could
breathe
up here. Well, she could with the help of her mask and oxygen.

She smiled sadly at her own joke and clasped her knees. The snow under her butt was leeching in cold despite her trekking clothes, but she wanted time to just look. The guide was letting her have this moment alone. Down below, in the sparse cities, there were too many people for her, too many cyborgs. Knowing she could control people made her feel dirty sometimes.