Captive Surrender (16 page)

Everyone is being told to be on the watch for an Ellinod in the company of a red-haired human.

Maurra stared at the long strands she held in her hand. Normally she wore her hair in a braid or bound with max bands. The color never mattered to her before, but it mattered now. The first thing people tended to notice was a person’s species. The second was color—the color of their hide, their clothing…or their fur.

Screw it. If changing her hair color meant the difference between being identified or being overlooked, she would change it, since there was little Safan could do to change his appearance. “Short of cutting off his horns, and there’s no way I’d let that happen.” Considering how his horns directly affected his sex drive, removing them could be like having him castrated.

Most of the smaller markets in town were already closed for the evening, but there was always one place on every planet with a space port where ship crews could go to restock. Normally it would be located near the port for convenience, so she headed for the rear of the port’s main building.

The market was open, as she expected, and thankfully customers were sparse. Grabbing a hover sled, she began accumulating a nice mountain of items. Satisfied she had all the rations they’d need, she headed over to the display of personal hygiene items. Most of the things there were either foreign or unrecognizable to her. All except for the dye. She grabbed the first color that looked appealing and tossed it onto the sled. Her inner clock urged her to hurry. Her time was almost up.

Guiding the sled up to the checkout terminal, she waited for the scanners to tally up the cost, then stuck the card into the payment slot.

“Will that be all?” a metallic-sounding voice inquired.

“Yeah.”

“Can I help you with anything else?”

“Yeah. Can I get directions to pad 625?”

A flat image popped up onto the screen with the path from the market to the site highlighted. Just her luck that 625 was at the farthest end of the landing field. At least she had the sled to transport her purchase.

The scanner spat her card back to her and the gates opened to let her out. Maurra headed straight for the landing area where Safan said he would meet her.

Vias Daruggah had no moon, but the panorama of stars overhead more than made up for the lack, in her opinion. Of course, the occasional streetlight flooded all but the brightest stars. Still, Maurra kept glancing up at the swirl of color. A nearby nebula washed pinks and reds and purples near the horizon, giving the impression of a sunset. She had no idea how long the days were on this planet, but it didn’t matter. As soon as they had their fuel, supplies and cargo loaded, they were taking off. The sooner they finished the job, the sooner they could get back to tracking Vol Brod.

As she approached the pads, she noticed the port was nearly deserted.
What gives?
Normally space ports were the busiest areas on a planet.
Must be their slow time of night.

In the distance she could see the
Lorrmandi II
. On the pad next to it was a round, nearly spherical ship. There was no activity on the ground. She couldn’t see anything going on through the ship’s main viewscreen.
Maybe they’ve already got everything loaded.

Reaching underneath her breast, Maurra touched the communications link through her blouse with her thumb. “Lorri, this is your captain.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Has cargo been loaded?”

“There has been no cargo loaded,” the ship crisply responded.

Maurra came to an abrupt halt. The hover sled gently bumped into the back of her thighs. Instinctively, she sent out a mental search for Safan, and the image that came back to her turned her blood into ice water.

There was nothing. No sense of him, no emotional reply.

Absolutely zilch.

“Lorri, is the Ellinod aboard?”

“Negative.”

“Is the Ellinod nearby?”

“Undeterminable,” the ship said.

Of course the ship wouldn’t know where he is if he isn’t wearing a link
. She had forgotten she had be specific with her phrasing.

“Lorri, scan for life-forms. Locate the Ellinod.”

“Ellinod located.”

“Where is the Ellinod?”

“The Ellinod is 248.2 meters from the ship.”

Two hundred and… “How far away is the Ellinod from me?”

“The Ellinod is 190.8 meters from your location.”

Maurra turned around and scanned the area. Other than the main building…

“Lorri, how far away am I from the port’s main offices?”

“You are 188.1 meters from the port’s main offices.”

Why would Safan be at the main building and not with the ship?

He went to pay for gas. No. I’ve got the card. Is he waiting for me to join him and give him the card? But then he would have told me to meet him at the offices.

Or maybe there was some unfinished business he needed to tend to over there.

Or maybe the slug client needed him there.

Or maybe…

Fuck this. It was too quiet and too deserted. Something was wrong. She knew it as clearly as if it was a sign flashing in front of her.

Maurra brought her powers to the fore. Raising her hands over her head, she went in search of Safan, sending out a wide wave of psionic energy across the platforms and through the long, squatty building sitting at the edge of the landing field. She found him almost immediately, but again something wasn’t right. There was no reaction to her gentle probe. No response at all. Almost as if…

He doesn’t want me to come after him.

Why?

Because something…or someone is waiting for me to join him.

Widening her search, she opened up to receive any other signals and found them immediately. There were six others in the same vicinity as Safan—three unrecognizable aliens, two that felt vaguely like Triconians, and one humanoid.

No. She stiffened.
One human.

She and Safan had been duped. The slug client had been a ploy, setting them up. Leading them right into a trap.

And there was only one answer as to who was behind this whole elaborate setup. She knew who the one human was.

“Very well, Vol Brod,” she murmured with rising anger. “I’ll take your bet, and I raise you two lives. Now I call. Show me what you’ve got. Show me your hand, you conniving, suckface snot worm, because you have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

She began walking toward the port offices, her hands gripped into fists by her sides. The cerulean ball of energy bathed her forehead in light and made her surroundings glow as she quickly strode across the landing pads.

This time, there was no implant in her back to prevent her from using the full force of her abilities. If Tramer Vol Brod thought he had the upper hand, he was going to find out he was sorely mistaken.

And if he had harmed Safan in any way…

Every cell in her body was on high alert. Every particle of her power sat coiled, ready to be released. She was walking into a potentially explosive situation. Vol Brod would know she wasn’t constrained. Therefore he must have some sort of plan to keep her reined in.

Keep a calm and level head. Be a JoJo again. No emotions, just reason. No sudden moves, just stay calm and in control. Shield first and take in the situation before acting.

She’d faced similar situations in the past. Hell, nearly every criminal thought he had the perfect way to stop her. Practically every known weapon in the universe, and some that had just been invented, had been used against her. Only by keeping her wits about her had she survived the attacks.

Except this time would be different. This time Safan’s life could be at risk.

He was keeping himself closed off from her—to protect her. Except the one thing he couldn’t do was shelter his body’s reactions from her. That was how she knew he was in danger. Otherwise she would be getting a feeling of contentment or hunger or worry from him. Some emotion, any emotion. But to get such a blank void was as telling a message as any other.

Maybe he knows that. Maybe he knows that by shutting himself away, that he’s sending me a signal of some sort?

If they survived this—no. Wait.
After
they survived this meeting, they would sit down and formulate a specific code, so that if something like this should happen to them again in the future…

The impact of her admission settled inside her. Her future was his now. Together. The two of them were as one entity from now on. She knew it as much as he did. They had become inseparable, bound together not just because of the sex or the trauma of the kidnapping, but because something deeper and stronger had been forged. It was an emotion she had never felt with another being, human or otherwise, but it was there. And if she dug deep enough, she knew she would find it inside Safan too. That was why he had marked her. Even without admitting their feelings, they still understood each other perfectly.

As she approached the building, she could see most of the inside lights were out. That meant the people who were manning the port were probably being held hostage inside, along with Safan. Otherwise the place would be lit up brighter than daytime.

Like most space ports she was familiar with, the long, low building was partially sunk into the ground to protect it from crashes and the occasional engine backwash. There were no real windows other than the narrow wall slits used for confirming a visual ID. The single reinforced turret on top of the building was the main control tower.

A sudden thought made her call back to the ship. “Lorri, have you been refueled?”

“Affirmative, Captain.”

Thank the heavens for that.
It was probably why Safan had gone to the offices in the first place.

Pausing outside the doors, Maurra glanced over her shoulder at the
Lorrmandi II
and the ship parked next to it. She had mistakenly assumed the spheroid was their client’s craft. Common sense now told her it had to be either Vol Brod’s or the slug creature’s.

Go in as if nothing’s wrong.

Go in…clear.

Closing her eyes, she took several deep breaths. She could feel her orb dissolving, diminishing until it absorbed back into her mind. But it remained at ready, less than a heartbeat away from taking in everything and everyone around her.

Two one-hundredths of a second. I need less than two one-hundredths of a second.

She pasted a look of impatience across her face and hit the switch on the outer blast doors. They slid open with a hiss, revealing the secondary doors. She slapped the next switch to open them, revealing a building sitting in pitch black.

“Hey! What’s the matter? Having a power outage?” she yelled into the darkness. “Helloooo! Safan! Are you in here? I got the card if you need to pay for the fuel!”

All was silent. Another bad sign. Not to mention she was receiving some seriously bad vibes. They tasted like bile on her tongue.

“Where’s the fucking light console in this place?”

As if on cue, a single beam of light appeared in one of the doorways leading to another part of the building. She obediently followed it.

“Hellooo! Anybody here? Who’s supposed to be on duty tonight? Hey! Your lights aren’t working!”

The beam was odd. A weaving little ball that flittered and fluttered like a luminescent bubble through one door, through a room and through another door. Its golden-yellow glow seemed innocuous in a place like this.

She continued to follow it from one dark area to another, realizing it was leading her into the farthest part of the building. She drew nearer to where Safan was located, along with the other life-forms. The ball of light kept her eyes unaccustomed to the blackness, and it turned her into a perfect target.

Her instincts saved her.

As soon as she turned the corner into one of the rooms, her mind reacted, and before she could think, her psion shield encased her in pure mental energy as several guns went off simultaneously. The force of their rays sprayed over and around her without affecting her. When the attackers finally got the drift that their trap had failed, the lights suddenly came back on, and through the glare Maurra found herself glowering at the man who had caused her so much grief.

But it wasn’t the sight of Tramer Vol Brod that made her gasp in shock. Safan stood helplessly behind him, unable to move because he was encased in a highly charged cocoon that glittered as it slowly rotated around him. A pretty but wholly deadly Volpter’s Cage.

However, it was clear that the Ellinod hadn’t been very cooperative. Along the far wall lay at least half a dozen creatures, all with broken limbs, and all of them leaking bodily fluids. At least two of them appeared to be dead.

Vol Brod chuckled, drawing her attention back to him. “Another point for your side, JoJo. Oh, excuse me. I meant ex-JoJo. But even stripped of your designation, you’re a powerful enemy. Powerful and deadly. Speaking of stripped…” His eyes roamed over her body and her simple clothing. “That outfit does nothing for you. I much prefer seeing you naked.”

She clenched her jaw but remained silent. Vol Brod loved to boast almost as much as he loved to taunt. She was willing to see how far this drama would play out. Until then, she had to find the switch to the Volpter’s Cage.

She glanced over at the three creatures still standing with pulsar rifles held in their multiple arms. Ferni Ceserrites. A sentient, albeit relatively stupid, life-form. Vol Brod had found another money-hungry species to do his dirty bidding. She didn’t see the two alien entities she’d sensed earlier. Apparently they were the missing port employees. The fact that she had been able to locate them told her they were still alive.

She looked back at Safan. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” His voice was strained. He fought to remain absolutely still, but she could already see blood saturating his torn clothes and running down his arms where the lethal crystalline razors had sliced him.

“He’s fine for now, but that doesn’t mean he’ll remain that way,” Vol Brod sneered. He finally produced his left hand from where he had been keeping it behind his back. A little crystal sliver sat firmly grasped in his palm. The trigger. The detonator. “Are you familiar with a Volpter’s Cage?”

She shook her head, continuing to play the fool. The pale blue glow of her shield made it look as though the whole room was the same color. There was no way she was going to lower the only protection she had against the three Ferni Ceserrites, who were moving around, changing positions, circling her as they re-aimed their weapons. The earlier blasts had been white. That meant the rifles were set to kill. The instant she lowered her shield, they wouldn’t hesitate to fire again. Vol Brod wanted her dead.

“I’ve heard of them but I’ve never encountered one personally.”

The man’s grin broadened. “See this device in my hand? It controls the cage containing your lover. I can either set him free or I command it to implode. Which means he becomes nothing more than a pile of finely chopped chunks of stew meat.”

“Pretty ingenious, graghole.”
That’s right. Continue to compliment the idiot while he’s stupidly unaware of the mistake he’s made.
“I gotta hand it to you. All this time we thought we were tracking you down, when really you were following us, waiting for the moment you could catch us unawares.”

Vol Brod laughed. “You’re right. It
was
ingenious of me. Just as it was ingenious for me to think about purchasing this cage from my wonderful dealers over there.” He motioned toward the creatures guarding her. “When I heard on the news that the Ellinod had escaped from the mines and that he had been aided by a redheaded woman, it wasn’t hard to figure out what you had in mind. I knew I had to stop you. After all, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life having to keep looking over my shoulder. It would make me miserable.”

Gee. We would make
his
life miserable?

“There’s just one thing that I haven’t quite figured out, though.” She tilted her head to give him a puzzled stare. “Why are you going to all this trouble?”

He frowned “To stop you from coming after me. I thought I just made that part very clear.”

“True. True.” She nodded. “I meant, it’s just the three of us involved. What makes you think we’re out for revenge? For that matter, how do you think we’d be able to get any sort of revenge on you for what you did to us? After all, no one believes us. It’s your word against ours if you’re ever caught and brought in for questioning. We don’t have any proof you instigated this whole thing. No one knows it was you who had the Kronners kidnap me and the Ellinod, or that you held us captive in the Kronner ship. No one but the three of us know anything about it, because you destroyed all the evidence, including the vid equipment, and you made sure to murder all your accomplices when you blew up the Kronner ship.”

Vol Brod shrugged. “I had planned on doing that long before I had you two taken. I couldn’t afford to have them say anything, no matter how much I paid them.”

“To think, you went to all that trouble simply because I had you put away?”

He chuckled. “Oh, I was highly pissed at the time, let me tell you! There I was, at the brink of the most lucrative deal I’d ever made, and you busted me. You testified against me, and I got six years for it on K’ro Kriall.
Six years.
” His face suddenly darkened with anger. “I had six years to come up with the perfect scheme to get my revenge. Six years to make up for all the money I’d lost. Thanks to you and your lover, I have more creds now than I’ll ever be able to spend, even if I live to be a hundred and fifty!”

“But why me?” Safan gasped. The sharp blades were so close to him, every breath he took meant a bit of skin was filleted from his body. Blood puddled under his feet.

Vol Brod laughed again. “When I approached the Kronners with my deal, they begged to include you. It seems they’d had some run-ins with you in the past over some illegal cargo, or something like that. They noticed you the moment you entered that bar on Cura-Cura.” He looked at Maurra.

“So everything you had planned came together that night.”

“Actually, no. You see, I really had planned on having you fuck a Par Matta, but when I got a good look at the Ellinod’s package, I knew I’d found the perfect partner for you.”

Maurra placed her hands on her hips. Vol Brod’s plan had come together so well. She closed her eyes, refusing to think about how this nightmare could have been different if the Kronners hadn’t had a grudge against Safan and Vol Brod had found a Par Matta.

“All right. So I’m guessing your plan now is to dispatch me and Safan as quickly as possible so you can get back to spending the unholy amount of money you earned selling subscriptions so people could watch us fuck.”

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings. I thought I’d let you watch the Ellinod get diced into fine mulch. Then, after the rest of my crew get here with their weapons, we would see how long you could hold out before we manage to penetrate that shield of yours.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Maurra asked. “What if I try to stop you first by freezing your minds?”

Vol Brod threw back his head and laughed heartily. At the same time, he gave a gesture with his free hand, and three beams of white light struck her shield’s outer shell.

“Go ahead, psion! Go ahead and try! Everyone knows that psions can’t penetrate their own shields. The moment you drop yours to try and stop me, my agents will get you.”

She raised her arms until they were straight out in front of her. Her hands were cupped with the palms facing out. A sword of blue light connected her forehead to her fingers. Maurra narrowed her eyes at the man.

“Hey, graghole. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but that bit about not being able to penetrate a shield? That only applies to the regular JoJos. To the Joramansu. Guess you didn’t know I’m a Jurasu Roja, did you? Do you know what that means, you piece of grot shit?”

Before he could reply, she sent out a burst of concentrated psychic energy. The beam slid through her shield and struck Vol Brod squarely in the face. The man’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head, and his body dropped like a discarded coat. Maurra turned to look at the three aliens, who suddenly stopped firing and took off running out of the building.

She shut down her shield as the little blue orb on her forehead continued to whirl and dance. Walking over to where Vol Brod lay in a paralyzed heap on the floor, she reached out with the toe of her boot and nudged his cheek where it was lying against the floor, lifting his face until his eyes were directed at her.

“It means I was a level red JoJo,” she finished telling him. “Top one percent, you worthless piece of snot. Next time, do your homework a little more thoroughly.”