Ambasadora (Book 1 of Ambasadora) Read online

  Where is Chen?

  She willed herself not to stare at the weapons strapped to the contractors’ thighs. One on each leg. Seven contractors, including the one holding onto her. Fourteen cenders, each capable of scorching her or hurling a sizzling shot right through her.

  Rainer guided Sara closer to the group. Her legs froze.

  “What’s happening? I don’t understand.” Her voice sounded small; she barely recognized it.

  “We’re going to ask you a few questions.”

  “About what?” She forced a little strength into her voice.

  “About this.” He thumbed the cuff just below her elbow.

  Her breath caught. The once purple filaments now burned white inside their black casing. What had Chen given her? A listening device? An explosive?

  She tried to jerk away, but Rainer held her fast. Racing through escape scenarios in her mind, she saw none that wouldn’t get her shot or killed.

  Her peripheral vision suddenly caught movement on her right.

  Chen?

  Hoping for an intervention she almost cried in relief. Chen could handle this. She was in over her head.

  The figure zipped past, not Chen, but a man surfing the air on a swivel board, rocking on his heels to turn the board where he wanted to go. Another followed. Then another. They were dressed in a motley assortment of workers’ pants, t-shirts, and leather. Their eye sockets reflected with silver lenses.

  Fraggers.

  Her muscles tightened in agitation. She wondered if the rumors were true about the anti-government techno-militants, that the v-mitter lenses they wore could allow them to see the real world like a virtual arena, giving the wearers sharper reflexes and more efficient kills.

  Fraggers were killers.

  Around her, the contractors drew their cenders, blasting at the incoming attackers. Rainer was already on his communicator. “All units to the rim.”

  He let go of her and directed her to a nearby boulder before adding his guns to the fight. She never hesitated. Thanks to Chen she would add running for her life to the list of things she’d never experienced before tonight.

  TWO

  “Stay alive. Stay alive.” Sara chanted the mantra during her dash across the scrubby ground. She needed to be able to think, to act fast, to find a way out of this. If she let one tear fall, it would unleash a mind-numbing torrent of sobbing; she’d save that luxury for when she and Chen were traveling back home.

  The boulder rose up to greet her. She ran faster, her ankles twisting in the strappy heels. Adrenaline shook through her limbs and she dove for cover. Sand clung to the perspiration on her cheek and arm where she’d landed. Scrambling on bare hands and exposed knees, Sara crawled further behind the boulder. Her back scraped against the sandy surface. She pressed her palms to her eyes. “Stay alive.”

  Even in her hiding place she couldn’t feel safe. Her mind flashed through a hundred stories she had heard about fragger brutality.

  She chanced a look around the boulder’s side.

  A handful of boarders flew out from the canyon’s depths. The snap of cender fire echoed off the rocks and far canyon walls. Hoping not to be noticed, she staggered for a tall stack of rocks further away. The sandstone grabbed at her silky dress, ripping patches away and shredding her skin. She fumbled with the straps on her shoes, then kicked them off.

  The fraggers unhitched from their boards and dropped onto a dozen more contractors unloading from an open-air desert transport that had arrived from the direction of the setting sun.

  The contractors charged on the outnumbered fraggers, their cenders releasing enough supercharged energy to power her ancestral home for a month. Each invisible round left a wake of static-charged air sparkling in the darkening evening. The heavy smell of ozone made her cough and wheeze. Flying sand, gritty and thick, coated her tongue. Her hair follicles expanded with the change in temperature and static heat in the air.

  Activity on the far side of the battle scene near the rim drew her attention. It was Chen, scaling the canyon wall with grapplers. He slipped up and over the rim nearby, unnoticed; the woman he’d left the event with was nowhere to be seen. Looking at readings on his palm screen brought his gaze up to the rocky outcrop where Sara huddled.

  Part of her wondered if he had known where she was because the bracelet had a tracker. Mostly she just felt relieved. She pushed away from the rock, but he quickly gestured for her to stay put.

  An intense light emanated from the battle arena, blocking her view of Chen. On the fringe of the light, she could discern three fraggers backed into a circle, directly in the center of the cender onslaught. The contractor weapons seemed to have no effect on them. The fraggers stood calmly with their hands thrust out in front of them, palms glowing. It looked to her like the fraggers were absorbing the energy from the cender bursts, turning it into orbs of intense light that they could manipulate and hold in their palms.

  She almost couldn’t look at their brilliance any more. Then, the fraggers threw the glowing orbs back at their attackers.

  Sara didn’t hear any screams.

  No explosions.

  Silence grew as the orbs expanded and engulfed the contractors. When the flash died down, six victims lay in a charred heap in front of the fraggers. The scent of burning hair and flesh fouled the air.

  Lights flooded the plateau. A small ship’s engines screamed to life from behind a high escarpment. Chen signaled Sara toward it. A boarder spotted the movement and pulled a vertical three-sixty to dive on him. Chen fired double cenders. When the fragger orbed the energy back at him, Chen slipped behind a sandstone arch extending from the escarpment.

  Sara ran to help, but came face to face with a pair of silver v-mitter lenses.

  A deboarded fragger thrust his triton knife at her throat, its three silvery blades already tinged with blood. Her left arm blocked it, but the knife glanced off the cuff on her forearm and sliced through the skin. The cuff flew to the stony ground several meters away.

  The fragger grabbed her by her neck and threw her to the ground. He dropped a knee into her stomach, forcing the air out of her body. Pain shot through her abdomen and erupted in her head. She felt like she would vomit. The man punched her, shattering her nose and spilling blood down her throat.

  The transport’s lights reflected in the fragger’s v-mitters. In desperation, Sara ripped the right one from his eye. He shrieked and rolled off her.

  She crawled away.

  Chen ran toward her. Another boarder closed in on him. With a well-timed shot to the board’s center, Chen forced the rider to dismount. Sara tried to scream for his attention, but choked on blood.

  Just before he reached her, Chen stopped to pick up the bracelet.

  Someone tackled Sara by the legs and threw her onto her back. She met the dead stare of the fragger. His functioning v-mitter taunted her, but the frenzied look in the bloody, exposed eye was terrifying. He straddled her, pinning her arms to the ground with his legs, then wrapped his hands around her throat. She thrashed, but he cut off her air, slowly, as if savoring her panic.

  She silently begged Chen to hurry.

  Blackness spotted her vision. The fight died inside of her.

  Suddenly the pressure released. Her assailant’s head snapped back, then the fragger pitched over onto her.

  She gasped and choked, struggling to push the heavy body aside. With the small amount of strength remaining inside of her, Sara rolled the dead weight off her. Lying on her side, sand sticking to the blood and tears streaking her face, she stared into the harsh landing lights ahead. She saw Chen pocket the bracelet and board the ship.

  He never looked back.

  The door closed. The lights dimmed, and the ship’s green hull shimmered in the ascent, before disappearing into the cloudless night.

  He left me.

  A shadowy outline eclipsed her starry view. She grabbed the fragger’s triton knife, but the dark figure leveled a cender. She knew it was the same cender
which had forced her away from the party and up the grav lift, the same cender which had brought down the fragger trying to kill her.

  She grasped the fragger’s knife in desperation, but the hair on her arms was already rising with the static discharge of Rainer’s weapon.

  THREE

  “You’ll be fine.”

  The words penetrated Sara’s semi-conscious state. Her vision remained dark, but she smelled sandalwood.

  “I dialed down my cender after killing the fragger.” The man’s husky timbre sounded familiar. Chen?

  No. Chen had abandoned her.

  The man speaking to her was the contractor from Palomin. Rainer.

  Black turned to shades of grey, sharpening into an outline of a person stooping over her. The desert sky peeked from behind the escarpment here on the rim. She almost expected to see the ghostly trail of afterburners from Chen’s ship.

  Rainer’s hands roved over her waist and belly, then moved to her breasts.

  “Stop it.” She grabbed his wrist weakly, but he shook it off.

  “What happened to your part of the data?” He slid his hands down to her thighs. “Your bracelet?”

  Sara’s vision focused on Rainer’s thick black brows and blue eyes.

  He slipped his hand between her legs.

  “I don’t understand.” Sara swatted at his hand. Her face felt crusty and her tongue lay thick in her mouth, the metallic bite of blood swam in the back of her nose and throat.

  “That’s what you said before. You want me to believe it’s just a coincidence that you’re attending a function this close to the Palomin Data Reserve wearing a bit siphoner disguised as a piece of jewelry?”

  Bit siphoner?

  Disbelief washed over her. Chen’s gift was intended to siphon data, not represent their bonding.

  Lights approached from the escarpment, their beams narrowing to reveal a blue ovoid ship. Upon landing, three contractors stepped out, sweeping the area with their weapons. Following them, Sovereign Simon Prollixer.

  Awareness clamped down on Sara as she struggled for full consciousness. She squeezed her fists and curled her toes. What had Chen done?

  “Have you recovered my property?” The Sovereign’s gaze passed over the fragger’s body then Sara’s.

  “The fraggers weren’t here for extraction,” Rainer said, his voice growing huskier in the settling smoke and dust.

  “How do you know? You a mind reader now, Rainer?” A female with pink and black hair spoke up.

  “Because the scans record the siphoning coming from multiple contacts inside…a full nine minutes before the attack,” Rainer said.

  “What about the woman?” the Sovereign asked.

  “She doesn’t have it. Neither did the woman in the silver dress we found dead on the valley floor. The runner took what he needed before leaving them both.”

  “Do you know who the man was?” The Sovereign’s small mouth barely moved.

  “Not yet.” Rainer looked down at Sara. “Probably a rogue. Only way he could know how to get by security in the first place.”

  “Was he working with the fraggers?”

  Rainer snapped his head up. “No contractor, not even a rogue, would do anything with that kind of halfcaste techno-militant trash.”

  “I don’t need the cultural lesson, nor your contemptible tone. What I need is my data.” The warning in Sovereign Prollixer’s gaze belied the stoicism in his voice. “Get her to a behavior modification cell. My life won’t be the only one forfeit if that data is not returned.”

  Sara fought to stay awake, to find a way to plead her case.

  “I don’t believe she’s strong enough to undergo interrogation. If she dies, you’ve lost the best lead we have and the runner won’t come back for a dead partner.” Rainer’s words brought her little hope.

  Chen wasn’t coming back. She saw it in his eyes when he picked up the bracelet.

  FOUR

  “You don’t have to do this.” Sara pleaded through her tears.

  Rainer held her arm once again, and she believed that as long as she could touch him, she could persuade him not to hurt her. Maybe it was only her mind’s way of keeping her sanity, but she felt protected by him. She didn’t dare look at the others following behind them or at the Sovereign walking out in front as the group returned to the hippodrome’s balcony. Relief set in when she saw the door to the passing celebration. Maybe it would be all right after all. Then they walked past the entrance and headed into a service stairway.

  “Please don’t.” Sara put her hand over Rainer’s and squeezed.

  “We’re just going to sit down and talk a bit,” Rainer said without looking at her.

  The small party reached a freight elevator halfway down the grey hallway. Rainer motioned Sara inside and followed her in.

  The Sovereign spoke up. “Contractor Varden, if you wouldn’t mind returning to my nephew’s celebration.”

  “Don’t I have more immediate concerns?”

  “No. Contractor Renault will be handling this matter.”

  The pink-haired female slid past Rainer into the elevator and tipped the corner of her mouth in a gloating smile. She slid her hand around Sara’s arm, emphasizing her new found ownership.

  “Faya’s interrogation record is less than stellar.”

  In response, Contractor Renault—Faya—dug her fingers in between the muscles of Sara’s bicep, pinching nerves and practically bringing Sara to her knees in pain. She cried out in shock, but kept her gaze pinned on Rainer.

  “Please help me.”

  He stared at her, then at Faya, his expression turning from sympathy to alarm.

  “On your way, Contractor Varden.”

  The Sovereign stepped inside the elevator and closed the door. Faya held Sara tight, but Sara barely felt the woman’s fingers digging into her any more. The numbness of her unabated vulnerability replaced the panic. She floated outside of her body now, as if somehow watching through her own eyes from above the group.

  But once the elevator stopped, Sara was all too aware of her fear. She clawed to stay inside, but Faya’s strength and years of combatant training easily overpowered her. Faya grabbed a fistful of Sara’s hair and dragged her down the hallway to the room Sovereign Prollixer had referred to as a behavior modification cell.

  Inside, two of the other contractors bound her hands to a chain hanging from the ceiling. Her screams allowed her to hear only parts of what Faya said to her: “You’ll really get into the drugs. Well, not at first.” The woman laughed, then attached a doser patch to Sara’s neck. A tiny pinprick followed. “Before you know it, you’ll be begging me for more.”

  A hot sensation split through the muscles of her neck.

  Faya held up manacles lined with hundreds of contouring blades. “Ever seen blade cuffs? They’re low tech, I know, but I’m more hands-on.” She winked and ripped the gown the rest of the way from Sara’s body.

  Sara cried out in fear and shame, but the screams only echoed in her own head as the fog of Faya’s drugs burned through her system. She was dimly aware of her feet being chained to the floor.

  Faya approached, the blade cuffs dangling from her fingers. She smelled like strawberries. “The spring action keeps them snug as they slide along your skin. They can travel unencumbered all the way from thigh to ankle.”

  “I’ll tell you everything about Chen.”

  “Yeah, you will. But let’s have some fun first.” Faya clamped a manacle to the top of Sara’s thigh.

  FIVE

  “It’s not real. None of it’s real.” For the entire six weeks of Sara’s imprisonment, she tried to convince herself of just that.

  Sara dragged herself across the entryway by her elbows. Blood oozed from hundreds of cuts on her legs, a miasma of red streaks on the geometric design of the olive tiles. She would rest here at the Sovereign’s apartment within the reserve until he decided it was time to return her to Faya’s dank cell.

  This guest suite was lik
e a gilded cage. Only here the torture wasn’t needles or shockers, but knowing that even if she escaped the windowless room, she’d never make it out of Palomin Canyon alive. Not that she had the strength to even try it. Maybe when the Sovereign first imprisoned her here—twenty, forty days ago? She had lost track.

  Was this how the citizens on the worldships felt for all those millennia? Trapped and hopeless? Sick and dying? She’d thought about them during these hateful days spent in the remnants of their old ship. She never cared about those ancient days, never understood, but her present circumstances mirrored those of the Lowers back then. The Lower Caste had been shut away from the rest of society for being unclean, damaged.

  Thinking that even those people managed through their horrors sometimes gave Sara resolve. Sometimes.

  The cold tiles stuck to her skin as she crawled the short distance to the bathroom. Her teary vision morphed the intricate white archway at its entrance into a hazy apparition. The normally straight and regal columns bent at irregular angles as though melting.

  She stopped to wipe her nose on her arm. A pair of disembodied silver eyes appeared in the archway.

  It’s just the dosing. Another hallucination.

  The eyes flew at her. She ducked her head and screamed. They hovered there, within touching distance. Just like the fragger v-mitters, but they had wide black pupils in their centers. She buried her face to hide her tears from them.

  “Get away from me.”

  She should have expected to see some residual images. Faya had finished her latest modification session only an hour ago. And this time she had stepped up the hallucinogenic dosers.

  The eyes aren’t real. There aren’t any fraggers here.

  Sara never told Faya about her fear of the techno-militants or what really happened at Palomin. She never would, no matter how many torture sessions she had to endure. But Faya didn’t need to know what inspired Sara’s terror, only which drugs would make it manifest.