The Envoy (3 page)

‘It's a conundrum,' he agreed. There was something about her that told him there was no point making bullshit assurances. But there was also a confidence to her; he wondered if he could leverage it. ‘I guess it comes down to whether you back yourself?'

‘Back myself?' He almost smiled as he heard the puzzlement in that proper voice. But it was hard, with the blade still sizzling near the delicate skin above his ear.

‘I mean, who do you think would win in a contest? You or me?'

‘Ah,' she said, patting him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Exactly.' She paused. ‘Well, I'd “back” me, of course, but then these things are, by their very nature, unpredictable. It would be safer to kill you here in your seat.'

‘But less lucrative,' he quickly reminded her.

‘There is that,' she agreed. He heard her drag in a breath, and as she did she seemed to resolve something. ‘Okay, Reetor. This is how we're going to do it.'

Reetor tensed, his brain on high alert. This was the moment he needed to focus.

‘You are going to stand, slowly, from your seat. I am not going to be able to keep the blade at your skull. You're too tall, of course. So I'm going to move it to here.' She touched his back where his kidneys resided. ‘Apparently it's very painful if the petrification starts there.'

Reetor imagined petrification was no picnic wherever it began. ‘Check,' he said.

‘Don't move yet,' she ordered. ‘I'm not done.'

‘Sorry, Miss —' An insight crashed into his brain. ‘What should I call you?'

‘What do you mean?' That deep voice was suddenly wary.

Good.

‘What's your name?'

‘I don't know.'

Perhaps he shouldn't have pushed it, but that sixth sense was very insistent. ‘You “don't know” like “none of my business”, or you “don't know” like you don't have one?'

‘Enough,' she barked, slicing off one short curl with the blade and pausing while he watched the stone curl clatter onto the floor. Petrification, even of a stray piece of hair, had a way of really concentrating your mind. ‘I talk, you obey.'

‘Yes Ma'am,' he agreed, unable to tear his eyes from the petrified curl lying grey and perfect on the white floor.

Don't think about Jintu. Think of a way out of this instead.

‘So,' she continued, as if she were catching up for a drink with him rather than giving him an unconventional haircut, ‘blade at your kidneys, you stand, yes?'

‘Yes,' he agreed.

‘Like that, I will guide you to the back wall. Yes?'

‘Yes,' he repeated.

‘Then you strip.'

‘Strip?' Had he heard her right?

‘Naked,' she confirmed.

‘Why?' It wasn't modesty but fear of vulnerability that yanked the question from his mouth.

‘Three reasons,' she said, and he heard that coldness again.

What had happened to this girl? He tried to think it through, for understanding, not for empathy. The more you understood, the more intelligence you could marshall, the better your chances at survival. She was young — he was sure of that now, possibly even younger than he was. So she had been only one or two when the Earth was blown to bits.

Like him.

But unlike him, she had not grown up among her own. She had somehow been gifted or sold to the Temerites. Of all the things the people of New Earth had learned, cruising the universe homeless and desperate for eighteen years, it was that there were very few species that valued empathy and compassion. If this girl had grown up with the Temerites, on a slave farm no less, she would make a very dangerous captor. He didn't know her story, but if he could survive long enough to hear it he suspected it might help him scheme a way out of this. So the first step was to survive.

‘Care to enlighten me?'

‘Yes,' she confirmed. ‘First, I need to confirm your identity. The tattoo and naked body will do that.'

Okay. ‘And…?'

‘And I need you weaponless and vulnerable, obviously.'

Obviously. So what was the third thing?

The girl traced one fingernail down the back of his neck, and his skin, which should have shuddered in horror, responded to the light touch, shivering with pleasure.

‘I've never seen a naked man of Earth,' she said lightly, as if she were discussing the ice storms on Tyver, or the market for contraband whiskey. ‘I want to.' She stopped, gripping the delicate muscle between his shoulder and neck so hard a stab of pain lanced down his back. ‘And I think you would be an excellent specimen.' She kicked his chair. ‘Now stand.'

Reetor felt it would seem churlish in the circumstances to tell her he didn't like being made to feel like a piece of meat, especially given she was the one holding the petrification blade. So he stood carefully as she pressed the point of the blade delicately against his syntton shirt.

‘Slowly,' she said in a deep purr. ‘Now move.'

He stepped sideways out of the console and turned inch by inch towards the back wall, still unable to see her. There was no point making his move while she had the blade against him. It would take the lightest press to slice through the syntton and turn him to stone in seconds. He worked hard on his breathing, keeping his busy, curious brain away from the task of imagining exactly how petrification felt — the rapid shift from flesh and blood to rock; the snap-crystallisation of cells and skin and bone.

Would it ache, or sting? Or burn? Did it spread out from the point of entry, or did the poison on the blade set off an instantaneous reaction?

Long ago, in the time before the Avengers found him and trapped him to become one of their own, he had dreamed of becoming a med. He would pore over biology tomes, fascinated by the endless possibilities of the human body, and study the catalogue New Earth Explorers were beginning to amass of the other creatures that shared the vast expanse of space.

He wished now he had read more about this most brutal weapon of Temer.

He shuffled towards the wall, determined to give the girl no cause to use the thing. He knew he would have to disarm her at some point, but to do it right he would need to study her first. When his nose almost touched the wall, he stopped.

‘Okay,' she said, her voice slow and careful. ‘Now you will turn, hands behind your head. I will drop the blade so you can. But I will have my laser on you.'

Reetor could handle guns. It wasn't a gun that had taken the only mother he had ever known.

He raised his hands to link them behind his head and turned with excruciating care. Once he had completed the manoeuvre, he raised his eyes to look at her.

Holy shit.

She was like an apparition, conjured from either your worst nightmare or the hottest dream you'd ever had. She stood only a head or so shorter than him, so she was well over six feet. As he had seen in the perspete, her hair was very long, worn braided Viking-style, off her face but loose around her shoulders. And it was the full, wild red of Vermillion, the Tyverian moon. No wonder the Temerites had thought it magic. Reetor had never seen its like.

The girl's age was hard to judge. She was certainly no older than him, possibly younger, but the unusual nature of her dress and decorations made her tough to peg. Reetor's eyes and brain whizzed and creaked as it tried to make sense of what it saw.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?' She held his eyes as she asked the question, a small smile playing around her lips. ‘Do you think I'm beautiful?'

Did he? That wasn't quite the adjective he would have used.

Stunning? Terrifying? Sexy as hell? The last came closer.

The girl had skin the colour of signet dust, so milky white it almost seemed to have a silver edge. Her lips were as red as her hair, and her eyes were vientamite green, and seemed to glow as fiercely as the precious energy rock. She had long, very dark eyelashes and thick eyebrows. One side of her face was pristine — the sweet, pouty loveliness breathtaking. The other was adorned with a tattoo of an enormous snake. He didn't recognise the species, but he would hazard it was related to the ice vamps of Tyver, because it was marked up in frosty lines of black, white and silver. Its forked tongue reached down towards her mouth, as if it wanted to kiss her. Reetor was pretty sure any number of men wouldn't have blamed it. Any number of men who hadn't been hijacked and held at bladepoint in order to barter them for galactic galleons, at least.

The snake slid down her long white neck, its body coiling voluptuously around one large breast. The girl wore tight pants that looked to be made from some kind of mottled animal hide, but was naked from the waist up. The snake partially hid one large breast; a small silver shield slung over one shoulder hid the other. He found himself annoyed at the shield's positioning and reminded himself to get a grip.

This girl would kill him in a heartbeat; this wasn't the time to be wishing he could get a better view of her tits. She might have sheathed her blade, but she had a big, black laser gun pointed right at his heart.

He wasn't sure of the right answer. ‘I don't know,' he settled on finally. ‘Do you think you're beautiful?'

She frowned, tilting her head fractionally to the side. ‘I don't know either. I've never known a human well enough so that I could ask them.'

Reetor fought the surge of sympathy that welled in him. He needed to be strategic. ‘Yes, you're beautiful,' he acknowledged. ‘You're also pretty scary.' He motioned at the tattoo. ‘Posterei? I thought you grew up on Temer?'

‘The Posterei shopped at the slave farm,' she said, her face neutral. ‘They taught me to fight.'

Wow, she really had known an unconventional childhood, even for a post-Earth baby. As he continued to take in and sift details of her, he noticed something else — a series of long, bumpy ridges under the tattoo, criss-crossed and ragged. Whip marks? Was that why she had opted for the tattoo? That chill shot through him again.

An unconventional childhood, and a painful one, no doubt.

How had a girl who could only have been one or two when the Apocalypse had gone down survived it all? And how had she learned English? And how had she escaped, and become a bounty hunter? Reetor was naturally curious but also understood enough to know he was in a hostage situation here, and he needed to bond with this girl. Because if he couldn't disarm her, at some point he would need to convince her to let him go.

‘Enough with the socialising,' she commanded, making a little circle with the index finger of her spare hand. ‘Time to strip.'

Here goes nothing
, Reetor thought, leaning down to remove his hutanium boots.

He went slow, thinking about her words:
I've never seen a naked man of Earth
. Was he really going to do some kind of intergalactic strip show with this girl pointing that gun at him?

He aimed a grin at her. ‘Might help if I had a little music?'

She frowned, and lowered her weapon so it was pointing at the place he most did not want to see shot or turned to stone.

Guess she doesn't like jokes. Or maybe she just doesn't get them.

‘We're cool,' he assured her, sighing.
Might as well give her a good show.

If she loved his body, would she be more or less inclined to turn him to stone?

He unlatched one boot then the other, kicking them off cautiously so he didn't startle her. Her cat-eyed watchfulness was unnerving, but she seemed relaxed, gun held loosely in a grip that suggested she had used it many times. The last thing he wanted was to spook a girl who had grown up among the Temerites and learned her fighting skill from the Posterei.

Why did he never meet nice, friendly girls? Uncomplicated girls. First X, now this.

Next he worked on his jacket, throwing it to the floor between them before dragging the bottom hem of his shirt over his head. He tensed as he did so, not out of some vanity of wanting her to be impressed by his six-pack, but because covering his face when standing across from someone with a laser gun went against every instinct the Avengers had drilled into him. He yanked the thing over his head quickly.

When his head emerged again, she was studying him closely, her mouth half open, her eyes half closed. ‘Your body is well defined and your musculature is impressive,' she said, her voice coming off a little breathy.

Reetor tried to imagine X giving away flattery so easily.

‘It will be such a shame to hand you over to the Enforcers,' she continued, voice casual with the tiniest edge of disappointment.

Way to ruin the moment.

Was this the time to start the seed of a different option?

‘Who says you have to?'

She laughed. ‘The people who gave me these.' She ran her hands over the bumpy ridges under her tattoo, close to her full breast. Her words, combined with the way she touched herself sparked a disconcerting blend of empathy, rage and arousal in Reetor. ‘I know you saw the scars, before. I'd rather not have any more to add to my collection.'

‘Of course,' he agreed, slowly unzipping his pants. Under them he wore only a light black thong, cool and flexible, designed, like his clothing, for maximum movement. He paused for a moment to let her take him in as he stood there in only his underwear.

‘See?' He gestured to his body and turned a small circle. ‘No hidden weapons.'

She smirked at him as he turned back. ‘I'm not so sure about that,' she said, nodding towards his underwear.

Hmmm, maybe she does have a sense of humour after all.

‘I think we should check.' She motioned again to his underwear with her head. ‘I'd hate to be taken by surprise.'

Reetor couldn't help but smile. There was something about this girl, a unique strength that impressed and confused him. Impressed him because she appeared to be so self-made, so strong and quick and brave, even though she had grown up all on her own. It confused him because he liked it, which was pretty confusing when she was clearly relaxed about handing him over for torture and death.