Vicky Peterwald: Survivor (Vicky Peterwald Series Book 2) (24 page)

“Too slow, too slow,” Kit was saying well before Vicky handed her the cuffs.

“Let’s do that again.”

Vicky was faster the second time.

“So, ze Grand Duchess can learn. That iz good. Now, ze bed.”

“No.”

“One hand only,” Kat suggested.

“One hand,” Vicky allowed. So one hand was cuffed to Vicky and one to the left post of the large bed. When Vicky reached for the cuffed hand, the two assassins latched on to her other hand.

“No. No, no. You may not let us cuff you like they would, but you must get loose from what they would.”

Ugly memories of being naked and cuffed spread-eagle across a bed came back to her. She shivered in revulsion. She’d gotten out of the cuffs that night without key or hairpin. What were the chances she could use the same approach to the next situation like that?

Slim to none,
she told herself. She’d read the file on Kris Longknife. No doubt there was now a file on one Vicky Peterwald. What had worked for her once wasn’t likely to work a second time.

Besides, I still have nightmares about that time.

She likely could not go there again, and most definitely did not want to go to that place ever again.

“So, my experts in all things human and deadly, how do I get out of this?”

“It will never be easy,” Kit said. “It iz not intended for it to be easy for you. But here, put the hairpin in your mouth.”

Vicky did.

“Hide it well.”

Vicky hid it between her left lip and lower teeth.

Kit forced her mouth open and removed the pin not at all gently. “That iz not well done. Do it again.”

Now Vicky used her tongue to move it around in her mouth until it was between her right lip and her upper teeth.

“Go get it,” she told Kit.

The woman forced Vicky’s mouth open. “Nothing there,” she muttered. “Raise your tongue.”

Vicky stuck it out.

Kit grabbed it and none too gently pulled it out farther, then ran her fingers under the tongue. “Good. I did not see it when I pulled your mouth open. I did not see it under your tongue. I suspect it is hidden between your upper teeth and your lip, but I did not see it. If they are not too diligent, and most do not wish to risk the loss of a finger should you bite, you might get away with it.”

Kit moved back on the bed and nodded to her fellow assassin. “Do not let go of her hand. Now, Your Grace, can you use your teeth to work the lock?”

It took three tries. Twice, Vicky dropped the pin onto the bed and had to turn herself into a pretzel to retrieve it. Twice, the lock defeated her lips-and-tongue-guided pin. On the third try, she was rewarded by a soft click, and the cuffs fell onto the floor.

“You are slow, and lacking in any finesse, but you will not likely starve to death if cuffed to a bed and left on your own,” Kit concluded.

“We will sleep in the next room,” Kat said, collecting the cuffs from the floor. “Let us know if you need anything in the night.”

And with that, her two assassins by day, seductresses by night, padded out of her bedroom.

“Remind me to be more careful about pissing those two off,” Vicky muttered to herself as she tried to find a comfortable place in her bed. A comfortable
alone
place in her bed.

“Mannie, if I’ve misread you, and you turn out to not be the upstanding, respectable, salt-of-the-earth type I’m taking you
for, I am going to be so mad at you. You are going to get
so
familiar with those cuffs and all the things I and those half-pint-sized murderers can do to you.”

Still, as she drifted off to sleep, it was just Mannie and herself in the bed.

And it was so nice.

T
HAT
morning, the Gracious Grand Duchess Campaign got off to a great start. Once again, Vicky rode the drop shuttle in full, Her Grace, the Grand Duchess, Lieutenant Commander Victoria trappings of ribbons and gold on her gleaming dress whites that the warm autumn weather encouraged.

At noon, Mannie had her standing beside him digging the first shovelful of dirt . . . actually the first thirty-five shovelfuls of dirt . . . for a new business tower.

At three, she cut the ribbon to a very strange building. It seemed to be one floor, but that floor went up through twists and turns for a good five stories. Inside were over a hundred little boutique shops selling frippery of every description.

At six, there was the winner of a spelling bee to congratulate and all the participants to encourage. Vicky passed a few words with each of them and failed to spell any of the words they tossed her way. Several, however, wanted her to know how they’d helped raise money for the starving kids of Poznan.

Yes, Vicky was the caring, generous, and gracious Grand Duchess that they all wanted to see.

It took some getting used to. Not by the people; they loved
it. No, it was Vicky who needed time to get comfortable in these new shoes

It didn’t always work out for her own self-interest. She ended up getting quite hungry as lunch somehow got skipped, and dinner was a long time coming.

Vicky tried to image her stepmother, or even her dad putting up with any of this. She couldn’t.
Maybe I’m onto something here,
she reflected with a smile.

Three days of this around Sevastopol, and she was not tired of it yet.

Then her Marine guard officer pulled her aside just after she finished cutting the ribbon for a new wing of an expanded hospital. Mannie’s senior guard was at his elbow. “We interrupted a woman trying to pull a pistol on you,” he reported. “We took her down before she could get a shot off, at you or anyone else in the crowd.”

“Did the newsies spot it?” Mannie asked.

“I don’t think so, sir, but you might want to call in a few chits.”

Mannie nodded. “I’ll do that.”

“It was fun while it lasted.” Vicky sighed.

“Who says we’re done?” Mannie said with a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin.

“They’ve spotted your pattern.”

“So we expand our scope and break the pattern.”

The next day, Mannie met her for breakfast in the station wardroom and told her where she’d be going that day.

“You haven’t been to Moskva. It’s a ways east of Sevastopol on the Midland Sea. They’ve got a harvest festival going today, the first of the season. Care to hand out the blue ribbons to some cowboys?”

“Will I have to kiss them, too?” Vicky teased.

Mannie didn’t miss a beat. “They just might expect you to,” he said with his full-face grin.

“You going to break their arm if I do?”

“Maybe I’ll break your arm,” he said, but his eyes sparkled.

Vicky couldn’t remember when a man had cared about what she did or who she was. Plenty had cared about what she could get them. This tasted oh so different . . . and very nice.

“I don’t think you’d hurt me,” she said slyly.

“I doubt I could,” he agreed somberly, then brightened. “But I’m trying to be unpredictable here.”

The next day, he met her again at breakfast. “So, what are we going to do unpredictable today and where will we do it?” she asked.

“How about we hit the north side of the Midland Sea today. There’s St. Petersburg to the east and Kiev to the west.” He pulled a coin out of his pocket. “Heads we go east.”

He caught the coin in his hand and flipped it onto the back of the other one. “It’s heads.”

“Tell me about St. Petersburg,” Vicky said.

Before the breakdown, St. Petersburg had been the main industrial city of the planet. It had been hit hard when trade collapsed and had little other industry to fall back on. It could hardly feed itself. It had been a long, hard pull to recovery.

Mannie told her this as the shuttle dropped them into the wide bay that provided the shuttle-landing ground for St. Pete, as it was more often called. They’d just created a new farmers’ market, so Vicky got to cut a ribbon at ten. At noon, Vicky was at a huge industrial park where a large plant had been divided up into several light-industrial concerns.

“I’m not sure it’s safe for me to show my face around here just yet,” Mannie said. “Sevastopol managed to buy up much of the content of this building. Huge presses and tool and dies came our way a couple of years ago for not much more than the price of scrap.”

It turned out Mannie’s sins were not forgotten. He took a lot of ribbing, but it seemed good-natured.

Vicky spent her afternoon at an apprentice graduation ceremony before attending an ice-hockey play-off so she could award the winning cup. They were back on the shuttle after a late supper of chicken and rice done up in a spicy fashion that Vicky had never tasted before.

Vicky managed to talk Mannie into staying the night on the station. Unfortunately, the admiral heard about it and assigned quarters to the mayor and his party before they docked with the station. Vicky watched as the mayor’s security team and guards led him off to his room as if they had to protect him from her.

They weren’t far wrong on that one.

They didn’t flip a coin the next morning. There were several things going on in Kiev, and they hadn’t visited it yet. As the shuttle dropped from orbit, Vicky watched Kiev come into view. It was also a seaside city, stretching around a bay. Off to its east were high mountains. Flowing through its middle was a wide river. To its west was a forested plateau. Its sandy beaches were white enough to make Vicky blink and look away.

“I could live here,” she told Mannie. “Its weather is as warm and balmy as Anhalt on Greenfeld.”

“Then I can see how green slipped into the name,” Mannie said, looking at the verdant parks and tree-lined boulevards. “Still, I like our rugged hills and sun-kissed plains. They green up very nicely in the rainy season. Have you ever seen our rolling backcountry when it’s aflame with wildflowers?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll have to arrange it.”

“Just add it to my schedule.”

“In a random fashion, of course,” he added with a grin.

Today’s schedule included a high-school competition to see which school could answer the most questions the fastest. The poor young man who led the winning team turned beet red and stammered horribly as Vicky gave him the trophy and a peck on the cheek.

“But he was so vocal during the competition,” Vicky told Mannie as they left.

“I bet his competitors wished you’d been asking the questions.”

“Then one of the girls on the team would have likely beat him to the buzzer and gotten a buss on the cheek from you.”

“Not likely. I’m not the gracious Grand Duchess.”

An electronics-fabrication mill had just been completed. Although it was already online, Vicky cut a ribbon and officially opened it. She spent lunch talking with workers and designers who were putting together several of the upgrades going to the station yards. She thanked them; they seemed surprised that anyone from the Navy would ever do such a thing.

“Have we been taking too many people for granted?” Vicky asked Mannie, as they motored from the plant to a school honor assembly.

“You got a paycheck. What more do you want?” he growled softly. “I’ve known a lot of management types who had that kind of attitude. Not all businesspeople have the vision of those you’ve been meeting with.”

“Still, workers are people, too,” Vicky said.

“I’m glad you’ve discovered that. You may be the first Peterwald to ever entertain such an idea.”

“True,” she agreed.

The school had also been involved in raising money for Poznan. Going one better, they’d planted an empty field behind the school in Tridium grain and would be harvesting their second cutting this weekend. The next week, several classes would be devoted to baking their own biscuits for shipment to Poznan.

“We have a cookie press that imprints each cookie with
GIFT OF KIEV HIGH
,” an enthusiastic girl told Vicky.

And to think, the scumbags on Presov had thought they could fatten their own bank accounts by buying up these kids’ donations to other kids who were starving.

Vicky shook her head on that thought.

Later that afternoon, they visited a harvest fair. There were a lot of farms and ranches in the hills behind Kiev. In the past, Kiev fed St. Pete and got its consumer goods from there in return . . . at a high markup. Kiev was now meeting its own needs at a better price and selling its food where it could find markets. Kiev and Sevastopol had been the main sources of food for the trade fleet to Presov and Poznan.

The women from the farm towns up in the hills most certainly knew how to cook. Mannie finagled himself into a job as judge for the food tasting. Vicky had the honor of handing out the ribbons.

It seemed to work out well for all although how Mannie didn’t end up with a stomachache amazed Vicky.

There was one contest she did judge for herself.

Members of the local Pathfinder Escadrille had recently earned survival badges for living off the land. Vicky was invited to taste their efforts and award the ribbons. She found the whole situation interesting. Father had renamed the Pathfinders; now they were Imperial Youth. At least that was what they were back on Greenfeld.

Here, there had been no change. Apparently, rebellion came easy the farther you got from the palace.

Among the young women Pathfinders, Vicky found herself feasting on salads. Every one of them was better than any she’d tasted in fine restaurants on Greenfeld. The girls were quick to point out that they had to find their ingredients at the end of a mountain trail, well back into the hills.

“You all made quite tasty salads,” Vicky said, and had to struggle hard to find a reason not to award all of them blue ribbons.

She took their adult leader aside and explained her challenge. The young woman, only a few years older than her charges, produced a handful of blue ribbons and quickly got them stamped. Oh, and a silver pen was located, so Vicky could sign the back of each one.

The girls were giddy with delight. Vicky found herself just as giddy.
Why didn’t Daddy ever take me and Hank to one of these?

Sadly, she suspected she knew the reason. You made time for what was important, and neither his kids nor something like this ranked very high on his priority list.

The boy Pathfinders were a much easier, if a more squeamish decision for Vicky.

While the girls got to gather leaves, herbs, and spices, the boys were expected to bring home meat. Or in this case, a small thing with long ears. It wasn’t an Earth rabbit, but it was close.

Four of them had done their hunting with twine traps. They skinned what they caught with their certified Pathfinder knife and either cured, stewed, or dried it using equipment from their fathers’ hunting supplies.

Vicky tasted each and found them good.

Then she came to the last boy.

He looked quite scruffy, compared to the others in their best uniforms. His boots were well-worn and had likely never seen polish; his hair was a mess.

But his hands were busy.

He was making twine, using a sheaf of grass that lay on his table. He took time to show Vicky how to twist the grass together and make sure the ends were spaced so that they didn’t end all at
once. “That’s how you get long twine out of a lot of grass that isn’t very tall.”

“So,” Vicky said, “is that how you caught your bilbie?”

“Yep, I put some good seed grass out for it and it hopped right into it.”

“Show her how you skinned it,” the adult leader suggested.

Vicky tried not to flee at the thought of having to watch and listen as the young man killed and skinned her food, but she needn’t have panicked. The boy had brought several stones as well as a monitor that played the scene as he first struck two stones together to get sharp fragments flying off from the two of them. On the screen, he wore eye protectors.

“Here, ma’am, Grace, you can try your hand at it, too.”

The adult provided eye protectors all around before he was taken down by a wave of Marines, security agents, and diminutive assassins. The protectors took several steps back as Vicky tried her hand, knocking two rocks together. On the fourth try, she actually got a hunk loose from one of them. It was kind of large and very dull, but it was loose.

On her sixth try, the kid announced, “You got one, girl.”

“I think I do,” Vicky agreed. The chert was large, but sharp at one end.

The boy retrieved it from where it had flown, then showed Vicky how she could use it to cut the soft pelt from a bilbie. Vicky gave it a try, trying not to imagine what it would be like to do this to a living thing.

I doubt I could ever be this hungry.

The lad then showed her, again on the video, how he’d smoked strips of the raw flesh using a fire, stones, and a woven mat.

“That took a lot of work,” Vicky said.

“I guess it did, Grace, but my old man says if a man can’t catch and kill what he eats, he ain’t got no right to eat it.”

The other boys had no problems splitting up the lesser ribbons.

That was the last thing on Vicky’s to-do list that day. However, as they were leaving, she noticed a full roar coming from their left.

“What’s that?” Vicky asked.

“Haven’t you ever been to a carnival?” Mannie asked, incredulously.

“Never, I think. What’s a carnival?”

Mannie put his head together with her guards for a moment as Vicky eyed the source of the noise. There were brightly-lit-up rides and delightful smells. Oh, and plenty of laughter.

Mannie broke from the huddle to offer Vicky his arm. With her Marines trailing behind and a half dozen guards spreading out ahead, the two of them made their way into the bubble of delight and noise.

Vicky rode rides. Not the most interesting ones. Security put their foot down at the big wheel that took its riders up into the evening air. They also balked at any ride that involved whirling around at high gees.