Vicky Peterwald: Survivor (Vicky Peterwald Series Book 2) (27 page)

She shook her head. It could be to her east or west. They could have crossed it in the night. She could have been driven two, three, even four hundred miles inland during her drugged sleep. All she knew was that somewhere to the south was the Midland Sea, and the mountains were to her east. Her route lay south. How east or west she was stood as a question mark.

It would be nice to send out an “I’m here, come get me” signal before she started her walk. The question was, how subtle did she need to be.

“No, the question is: How do I do it?”

She returned to the corral. She thought she’d noticed some familiar rocks there. She found two that looked like flint. Try as she might, she could not get them to spark when she struck them together. Then she remembered. Sparks came not from flint on flint but from flint on steel.

She headed back to the truck. It had little to offer her, but she managed to work a few pieces of the rusted steel frame off the wreck.

With flint and steel, she headed for the barn. The place had seen better days. There was plenty of rotten punk, fortunately dry. There was also some straw that was less moldy than the rest.

It took her an hour, but she finally got a fire going. In a whole lot less time, the barn was fully involved, sending fire and gray smoke up to the heavens.

Vicky had heard somewhere about fire being used to make offerings to the gods. She hoped the Navy god was paying attention.

Of course, the stepmommy-bitch god might also be attentive to her prayers.

Vicky headed for the hills. Not the mountains east but the wooded hills to the west.

She was in the trees before the barn collapsed in upon itself. It was still smoking, though, and her hope for rescue rose with it up to the heavens.

B
EING
tender of foot, Vicky tried to stay to the softer ground. Sadly, even she could see that she was leaving a trail. That would be good if Mannie was racing to her rescue.

If the Empress’s murderers were ahead of Mannie, not so good.

Before too long, she came to a well-shaded stream; she waded into it and turned south. She stepped carefully to keep her balance, to avoid flipping rocks, and, very much to avoid doing a full flop in midstream. That would be a definite “hello” for those following her.

While she tried to stay invisible to overhead observation, she kept her ears peeled for the sound of helicopters. Her efforts to keep quiet didn’t seem to matter much. She appeared to have the place all to herself. Just herself and the four-legged types that lived here.

In the undergrowth, Vicky found a reddish green leaf and gobbled it up with gusto, if not the proper spices, praising the Pathfinder girls with enthusiasm and precision. In the last few hours, she’d gained a whole new understanding of hunger. She’d have to see that another fleet of emergency food relief got headed for Poznan. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to start a
survey of the local planets, either. If she sent out scouts, they might find places that were even hungrier.

Being a Grand Duchess was fun . . . when she wasn’t dodging her family’s traditional values and assassins. The Navy had been an education. What she was getting now was something more than an education.

This was experience.

And this experience would be with her the rest of her life.

“And I’m going to have a long life,” she told the sky, “unlike you, Annah. Unlike you, my grasping corpse.”

The water was cold, leaving Vicky’s teeth with a tendency to chatter. She balanced her passage south between time in the water leaving no trail and time walking carefully along the bank that very likely did leave a trail despite her best efforts. There were game trails through the woods. Paths the animals followed. They weren’t wide, and she was getting all kind of cuts from the brush and thorns along the trails, but she used the trails to let her move quickly.

Evening came, and she dined on more salad greens before pulling up several handfuls of grass from a meadow and spreading it under a bush to make an if not cozy, then at least warm enough, bower.

In the night, she heard a helicopter pass overhead. With no way to tell if it was friend or death, she chose to lie low and wait for the morning. She suspected tomorrow would be very challenging, if not interesting.

She was up at first light; her hunger woke her as much as the dawn.

As she headed south, she kept an eye out for more of that salad she’d had for supper, but she spotted none. She picked up a rounded pebble from the stream. If she spotted one of those floppy-eared things the boys had killed, she was game for giving it a try even if the thought of cutting into one still made her squeamish.

She saw nothing worth making a throw at.

Before too long, though, she started hearing the sounds of unmuffled vehicle engines rumbling through the woods to the north. She quickened her pace downstream, trying to move silently, tracklessly, away from the sound.

“If I were Mannie, I’d be in a helicopter using a loudspeaker to tell me I was safe,” Vicky muttered.

For now, she did not feel very safe.

The problem was that, other than fleeing, she couldn’t think of any way to make herself safe.

While she puzzled over that problem, she fled like a frightened deer, of which there were several keeping her company. Being a battleship Sailor, she’d gotten few courses on dirtside survival and paid even less attention to the ones she was obliged to sit through.

“Dumb little shit,” she chided herself. “In the future, I will not assume I know everything about my future.”

She considered some of the things she’d learned from the Pathfinder boy. She’d spotted the tough grass that he’d used to make twine, but she doubted that a bit of twine would trap the booted feet following her. With only her two hands, there was no way to dig some of the traps she’d seen in vids.

“There’s not much I know how to do with my own two hands and bare-ass naked,” she finally concluded.

What she did know was that she’d become predictable—again.

She’d been moving south along this same creek, now widened into a stream, for most of yesterday afternoon and all of this morning.

“It’s time to do something off my beaten path.”

The stream passed through a rocky section. There was a touch of white water and some solid rock on her right. When she found the chance, she climbed up onto the rock and headed uphill, into more rocks. Even taking as much care as she could to avoid breaking a twig or twisting a bush, she knew she was leaving wet tracks. Fortunately, the day was warming up. Given an hour or so, the tracks would be obliterated by the sun.

She climbed, moving from rock to rock. She did not climb very expertly. She dislodged a rock here and there. One landed on her toe as it bounced off down behind her. She muttered a curse and kept heading for higher ground.

She froze when she heard the motors get suddenly louder. Through the trees on the other side of the stream, she could
just make out three rigs. All were four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicles. Each carried two men in tandem.

The one in back of all three had a scoped rifle at the ready.

Vicky melted into the shadows of some trees beside a rocky outcrop and kept climbing. The top of the ridge wasn’t much farther. If she could make it over that, she’d have some pretty rough ground between them and her.

“Who knows, if I’m up here, and they’re down there, maybe I can throw rocks at them.” She made a face; Hank had always gotten the best of her in snowball fights.

She reached the ridgeline and rolled over it. A second later, a bullet whizzed by to the left of where she’d crossed.

She eyed the valley before her. It was rugged. It might be fun to hike with solid boots. Bare naked and barefoot, she winced at the thought. She headed off to her left, away from the stream, not dropping down, but staying to high and rocky ground.

Behind her, she could hear the roar of engines being pushed beyond their designed limits. She had figured the motor brigade would head downstream with the intent of doubling back, but from the sound of it, they were gunning their rigs right up the rocky outcropping.

Instead of having hours before they showed up, she might only have minutes.

Vicky hurried down the ridge, hoping to make it into the trees. She’d spotted a thicket. She might be able to squeeze herself in there. It would cost her scratches and blood, but she could go where they couldn’t.

At least, not with their ride.

She made it to the trees a scant minute before an ATV gunned over the rise.

She turned to see just how she might wiggle her way into the thicket, then froze.

The beating of rotors filled the rocky vale.

Four choppers slid in, two on this side of the ridgeline, the other two on the other side. They were the standard passenger helicopter ubiquitous to the Empire. These had armed sharpshooters riding their skids.

Vicky lost all hope. No way could she dodge them.

Then all three of the riflemen on the ATVs whipped their
rifles up, and the drivers pulled out machine pistols, all aiming for choppers.

Vicky took another look at the helicopters. Those were Marines riding the skids of one! Rangers on the other!

They shot first.

Vicky’s pursuers got a few shots off, mostly at random and at the sky as they died.

Another chopper flared in to where Vicky had gone to ground. Mannie leapt from it before the pilot settled it in place.

His shout of “Vicky! Vicky!” were the sweetest sounds she’d ever heard.

Later, when she told the story, she’d say she raced into his arms.

Scratched, bleeding, and barefoot, the truth is, a girl doesn’t race anywhere. What she did was make her way as carefully and quickly as the situation allowed.

“My God, Vicky, what did they do to you?” Mannie said when he got a good look at her. He had his shirt off in a moment. He did have a bit of a paunch, but Vicky only had eyes for the look on his face.

If ever she was to see what love looked like on a man’s face, she was seeing it now.

“They didn’t do anything to me,” Vicky said, folding herself into the offered shirt and the open arms. “I think they were waiting for me to die of thirst before claiming the body. I don’t know if they thought they could leave me dead somewhere else and write their own story about my death. Hard to tell. We’ll have to talk to those who were chasing me.”

She and Mannie turned toward the chopper. Commander Boch was rapidly covering the ground. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine enough. I want to talk to those who were chasing me.”

“You’ll need a séance for that,” he said.

“Dead?”

“Their desire to go down fighting was too obvious not to grant,” the commander said dryly.

“I wish we had some of those sleepy darts Kris Longknife’s troops have. Don’t we have any rounds of something with less than lethal intent in this Empire?”

“I don’t think so, ma’am. I’ll look into it if you wish.”

“I wish,” Vicky growled. “I really wanted to see how they took to a couple of days without water.”

“You are not a nice girl,” Mannie said.

“You shocked?”

“Nope. I was contemplating doing worse.”

“I think I like you,” Vicky said, resting a hand on his knee where he sat beside her in the chopper.

“Commander,” she said, changing her focus.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“I spent a miserable afternoon in a farmhouse farther up this stream. You should have no trouble finding it. It has a smoldering barn.”

“Yes, Your Grace. We know of it.”

“You spotted the fire.”

“Of course, Your Grace.”

“And you didn’t come to my rescue?” was loaded with shell and grapeshot.

“I asked them not to,” Mannie said.

“You what?”

“I thought you would want us to see who responded to the lure. They did, and we collected them. Sadly, dead, but we got them.”

Vicky considered this. “So you used me as bait.”

“As you would have used me, Your Gracious Grace,” Mannie said, looking her evenly in the eye.

“And the admiral agreed with this idea?”

“So long as we had you under observation and a rapid-response team ready to come to your aid as soon as we were sure we had them all, yes.”

“I can’t fault his tactics. Only next time you do that, please have someone drop me a meal, shoes, some bug spray, and a nice book to read,” Vicky said, dryly.

“If I could have, I would have dropped me,” Mannie said. “You have been most fetching.”

“I have been most naked. Did you like ogling my cut, splotched, and bare skin?”

“We watched you on infrared,” Mannie said. “If you’ve seen one body on infrared, you’ve seen them all.”

“You are a prude,” Vicky said, trying to adjust his shirt to
cover more of her scratched skin. “You are also distracting me,” Vicky said, then changed topics.

“Commander, there is very likely one or more tiny cameras hidden somewhere in that bedroom I was locked down in. You can ignore the recording of my naked struggle. No. You
will
ignore my struggle. However, I want those cameras taken apart and examined with the best we have. I want to know everything that the cameras tell us about the people who set it up.”

The commander spoke into his commlink. “It is being done as we speak, Your Grace.”

“Good, now I need a bath, a meal, and a good night’s sleep, not necessarily in that order.”

Vicky could almost hear the commander’s heels clicking as he sat at attention. “The Imperial Suite has been reserved for you at the Kiev Cosmopolitan, Your Grace. This helicopter can deposit you on the roof, just a short elevator ride down one floor to your rooms.”

“Take me there,” she ordered, then added, upon only a second’s reflection, “Is it safe?”

“Your Grace,” Mannie said, “I don’t think a planet could be made any safer for you than St. Petersburg is now. Your abduction was the lead story on every media account. Your face has been shown in every home.”

“On some planets, they’d print out a Peterwald face and use it for a dartboard,” Vicky said, dryly.

“Not here, Vicky,” Mannie said. “You know that big pink bear?”

“I dimly remember it,” she allowed.

“Well, another girl, a teen with dreams of a career in the news, caught that whole shooting thing on her phone,” Mannie told her. “Much of her footage was up close and personal before her older sister dragged her away. Still, she was walking backward, recording more as she left. So she caught the whole attack on film. All of her story, from pink fluffy bear to your disappearing in the smoke has been playing every fifteen minutes on every newscast on the planet. The people loved it, and they love you. It’s gotten a lot of them mad.”

Mannie paused to catch his breath. “It got us leads. We knew that two large black SUVs were seen speeding north from Kiev and took off into the backcountry. We couldn’t
track them. There seemed to be some sort of electronic spoofing involved. That’s another thing the admiral wants to find out more about. Anyway, we knew you were somewhere up there and had surveillance working the area when you gave us a most definite, what did you call it, Commander?”

“A hot datum,” the Navy officer provided.

“A very hot and smoking datum,” Vicky agreed.

“As the planet’s personal representative to you, Your Grace,” Mannie went on, “I wish to be the first to apologize for this attack. I also wish to assure you that if there is any whisper of such an attempt in the future, it will be scotched at its first breath. We do not have much trouble with our criminal underground here on St. Petersburg, but we have received assurances from the highest levels of that underground, or maybe it should be lowest levels,” Mannie clarified with a grin, “that no amount of money can be offered to any of their people to take a contract on you.”

“Has my stepmother finally found a place where her tentacles cannot reach?” Vicky marveled.