Mantis rising, p.11
Mantis Rising, page 11
Before she left, Oleon said, “MC, Ema told me she sleeps here. She said it’s comforting. She said you don’t use her for sex. Could I sleep in here, too? For tonight, at least. This is all so weird. I’d rather spend the night with people I’m starting to believe really care for me.”
After they left, MC stared at herself in the reflective wall, wondering, What have you done, Mary?
Chapter 20
Help!
She let both of the girls sleep in her cabin that night. She had plans for getting rid of both of them, although Koveen wasn’t the right place. MC was inconceivably wealthy. She could afford to put Ema through her school of choice once the girl had decided where she wanted to go. Oleon would be leaving once they reached a safe port, assuming they ever reached a safe port. She might have to bankroll her as well.
Once they were all naked and in bed, Oleon tried to kiss her. MC didn’t shove her away. When Oleon pushed herself back, MC turned on the lights and sat up in bed, looking down at the two of them. Oleon volunteered, “Ema showed me how women give other women pleasure. Some of that I can still do, MC, even with this thing glued to me.”
MC shook her head. “You both need to realize that any attachments you form have to be temporary. Someday, Ema will be leaving to study to be a veterinarian. And you, Oleon, need a safe place to live.” She paused. “When Ema was showing you things, did you use the penis?”
Oleon nodded, “The third time, yes. You were right. It felt good, although I’ll be ready to have it removed when it’s time. We discovered that if Ema bites at the base, it gets stiff, but if she bites nearer to the front end, she gets a mouth full of piss. That’s a slang word she taught me. I thought having a mouth full of piss was disgusting but she said she’s had to put up with worse.”
MC nodded. “Yes, there are worse things.”
Ema asked, “Am I in trouble, MC?”
MC again shook her head. “No.” She sighed. “I’m going to tell both of you one of my secrets. I don’t have to, but Ema has been sleeping with me for weeks and tonight, Oleon was trying to kiss me. If you share this with anyone else, I will kick you off my ship. If we’re in space, I will not offer you a spacesuit. Should I continue?”
They both nodded, looking appropriately solemn. “A little over a year ago, my father forced me to execute a woman I was madly in love with. If I hadn’t, he would have tortured her, tortured me, and in the end, we both would have died anyway. Her name was Celeste. She was sixteen.”
Oleon gasped, “Oh! I’m so sorry, MC.”
“I am, too. I was trained to be a killer — a professional assassin. I killed him that same night. I would have executed Crawford if he hadn’t apologized for his disrespect. I am going to kill Gabon within the next day. He’s leaving the crew and plans to sell information that Oleon is on board. That isn’t something that I’m going to allow to happen.”
Ema finally broke the silence that followed. “Your father isn’t here, MC.” Then both of them tackled her, wrapping her in their arms. She let it happen, despite feeling that she was taking advantage of one emotionally damaged teen and one who had been emotionally repressed her entire life.
“Captain, I think Doctor Crawford is in trouble! I think we’re both in trouble.”
Why doesn’t that surprise me? MC thought. “What’s the problem, Oleon?”
“I don’t know. I think we’re being followed. Doctor Crawford thinks I’m imagining it. He threatened to take my comm from me.”
“Tell him I won’t let him back on my ship if he tries anything foolish like that.”
Oleon said. “OK. Oh, and it smells kind of funny out here.”
“Spaceports always smell funny. For that matter, alien worlds do, too. It depends on what you’re used to. Where are you currently?”
“We finished at the drug company. Doctor Crawford wants to check out a medical equipment place. We’re kind of headed back to the ship in a kind of roundabout way.”
“Good. Thank you for calling me. I’m going to comm Crawford. Then I’m going to come find you.”
“Crawford, why are you ignoring Oleon’s concerns?”
“Why, hello to you, too, Captain. She’s a silly sixteen-year-old girl pretending to be a ten-year-old boy. You did a good job with her. She looks the part. I am paying attention and I don’t see anything to worry about.”
“Doctor, it’s not that I don’t believe you, but I’m coming to you now. What’s your current location and where are you headed?”
“It’s not necessary, Captain. We’re headed for Alicon Medical Equipment on Ninth Avenue. We’re currently about four blocks north of there, traveling on foot.”
“On my way. Stay alert, Doctor.”
MC took off at a run. Not fast enough to call undue attention to herself — enhanced humans were rare, but not unheard of. Her enhancements fell into the unheard of category. She thought it was odd that she was putting more credence in the possibly imagined danger perceived by a teenager rather than that of the mature male who accompanied her. Maybe it was just because she liked Oleon and didn’t like Crawford? She found that to be a disconcerting thought. She plotted her course to come up behind her charges and see what she could see.
She was almost there when Crawford commed, “Captain, Oleon might have been correct. We do seem to be being followed. You might want to hurry.”
“I’m right behind you, Doc. I see them. I’m exceedingly curious to know why you’re being followed. Oleon’s disguise is perfect — yours should be good enough. You’re coming up on an alley. Turn into it. Then I want you to stand with your back to Oleon and look annoyed. Oleon, I’m sorry honey, I want you to unbutton your pants and urinate on the wall in the alley. Remember to shake it when you’re done. I’m hoping that if they’re after you and not Crawford, that will make them rethink why they’re following you. Princesses don’t urinate on walls in alleys.”
She heard Crawford snort. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Oleon giggled at MC’s last comment. If peeing on a wall in a public alley kept her safe, she would do it. She had wanted to leave the ship. She had agreed to the disguise.
Chapter 21
Betrayal
This near the spaceport, the tallest buildings only reached three stories high. Those were the exceptions. Most were single story warehouses. Some had a second floor with offices or possibly low rent apartments.
As soon as Crawford and Oleon turned down the alley, MC took a running leap directly at the wall of the nearest building. Her claws extruded. She caught herself, using her momentum to easily scale the wall to the roof. Her strength and the talons integral to her fingers made it easy. She ran at close to her top speed across the five rooftops separating the building she had climbed and the alley.
Over the comm, she heard Crawford say, “Can I help you gentlemen? We could use a little privacy here. The boy had to take a whiz.”
She heard one of the men say, “Sorry.” By then, she was looking down on them. She watched as the two turned and headed back toward the mouth of the alley. They were now too far away from her people for their voices to be picked up by the comm gear. She focused on her enhanced hearing. “…looked real to me.”
The other man said, “He said they tricked her out to look like a boy, although, yeah, it looked real to me too. We should just grab her, or him, and sort it out at the office.” They turned and headed back toward Crawford and Oleon. Then they pulled out guns and stunned both of them.
MC could have jumped from the roof and handled both men — probably before they had knocked out her people. If either had wielded a phase pistol — or for that matter, anything other than a stunner — she would have. Instead, she decided to let them take Oleon. She wondered what would have happened if they had tried to stun Beza. They had left it in Oleon’s cabin on the ship. Teaching it to morph into a little boy hadn’t worked. Oh, it had managed to look humanoid, but more like a mutated cross between a human and an Egritian. Oleon promised she’d keep working with it.
A third person, a woman, was already entering the alley with a wheelchair. They wouldn’t be traveling quickly pushing the chair. If they got into a vehicle, she’d figure something out. Worst case, she could track Oleon via her comm.
When Ferguson had bought the units he had opted for a top of the line model. The tiny things fit invisibly inside a person’s ear canal. Normally off, you wiggled your finger in your ear to activate them. Then you just talked. He had purchased one command unit, a wrist panel that MC was now wearing. With that she could track any or all of her people. It also allowed her to eavesdrop by turning on an inactive comm unit. Ferguson was the only one other than MC who knew about those features. She intended to keep it that way for the foreseeable future.
For now, the three kidnappers were just sedately strolling along the sidewalk, the woman pushing the chair ahead of them. Using her comm, MC sent, “Lancome, I need you at my location. It’s alley F off Ninth Avenue. Doctor Crawford has been stunned. Grab Hamy and carry him back to the ship. Oleon has been kidnapped. I’m following her.”
“Hamy isn’t on the ship, sir. He left to run an errand. I thought you knew.”
“Take Roge, then. I want you both armed and looking for trouble.”
As she followed along the rooftops, MC got to thinking about what one of the kidnappers had said. He said they tricked her out to look like a boy. Even the most perfect disguise in the galaxy didn’t work if information about who was wearing it had been leaked. She wondered who “He” was. She doubted very much it was Crawford. He seemed disturbingly loyal to Oleon. The same argument applied to the priest. She didn’t think it could be Ferguson either. He seemed to be loyal to her. Besides, he knew about the special features of the comm gear. It was possible, just barely, that Roge had come up with some way to get a message off the ship without her knowledge. It couldn’t be Gabon. Not only had he never left the ship, he had been dead since last night — heart attack, poor man. Ferguson had already located and removed the tracker Gabon had planted.
That left only Hamy. Everybody liked Hamy. She didn’t like thinking it was him, but according to Lancome, he wasn’t on the ship like he was supposed to be. Ema would be frantic if MC executed her brother. Lancome might be upset, too. They seemed to have a thing going.
Within twenty-five minutes, the three kidnappers and their wheelchair were out of the warehouse district and into an area with taller, fancier building. Some were all glass and steel — that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for her to climb without the suction pads she hadn’t brought with her. On some occasions, she was surprised her palms didn’t have suction pads on them like a squid’s. Not that, in all honesty, she would want such things.
At that point, she jumped down to street level to continue her pursuit. She thought they must be near their destination — the effects of the stunner would be wearing off soon. Lancome had already commed to let her know they had found Crawford, filthy and grouchy, but uninjured, and taken him back to the ship. One less thing for her to worry about.
The group she was pursuing turned into a courtyard. Most of the trees were bare of leaves due to the time of year. Only one building had a main entrance facing on the courtyard. They headed for it. MC waited until they went through the door before following. Lancome’s voice came over her comm, “Hamy just got back, Captain. He said his errand went well. I didn’t question him about it.”
“Thanks, Sergeant. That was the correct action to take.” Not take? Whatever. “Thank you. Has our cargo been offloaded yet?”
“Working on it as we speak, Captain.”
“One more thing, Sergeant — don’t mention the attack on Crawford and Oleon to Hamy. They’re still running errands for me and I’m out shopping.”
“Understood, Captain. You think he sold us out?”
“Yeah, Lancome. I’m sorry, but yeah, I do.”
As she walked into the lobby of the building, she heard, over Oleon’s comm, the woman asking, “Do you think the boss is here yet?” Oleon’s device was picking up nearby voices.
One of the male voices replied, “Probably. I noticed one of our autogyros touching down on the roof just before we got to the courtyard. Let’s get her up to the office.”
From the building’s lobby, MC watched as Oleon was rolled into a turbo-lift. Then she waited until the indicator panel showed it stopping on the seventh floor of the eight-story building. She entered through a door to one side and raced up the stairwell. That was significantly faster than taking the lift would have been.
She stepped out into a well-appointed reception area. A young man looked up from a wooden reception desk that was so polished it practically glowed. “Can I help you?”
MC looked around with a confused expression on her face. “Is this a medical center?”
“No. We’re an import/export business.”
“Is there a medical center near here?”
“The nearest medical center is a ten-minute drive from here. Why?”
“Something happened to my brother and my uncle. My uncle is OK, now. He thinks there must have been noxious gas in the alley, but anyway, someone said she saw my brother being brought this way in a wheelchair. I chased after them but they were too fast for me to keep up. They had to have come in here. I was in time to see that the lift had stopped on this floor. Where else could they be?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, lady.”
MC pulled a tube of lip color from her bag. Lifting it to the level of her face, she pressed down on the top and sent a stream of knockout gas directly into the man’s face. He slumped forward onto the desk. She jumped over the desk, pulled him off it, and stuffed him into the knee well. He would sleep for the next hour or two, depending on how much he had inhaled. When he woke, memories of the last two hours of his life would be absent. He wouldn’t have any memory of her at all. He’d probably wonder how he got under the desk.
From where she stood, MC counted eight closed doors. Fortunately, she didn’t have to kick any of them in to find Oleon. The tracks in the carpet left by the wheels of the chair were still plainly visible, although she doubted anyone else would be able to see them. She had never regretted the advantages conferred by her artificial eyes.
MC had already heard most of the conversation taking place in the room Oleon had been taken to while she was dealing with the man at the front desk. A man’s voice had said, “Are you sure you got the right kid? He looks like a boy to me.”
A second male had said, “I don’t know, sir. We saw him pissing in an alley. The older man he was with almost matched the description of the doctor as far as height and body type went. He didn’t look exactly like his image on the sheet, but an expert with makeup could have pulled it off. We followed them from a pharmaceutical company’s offices which is where we expected to intercept them. To my mind, at least, that suggested that he’s a doctor.”
MC was waiting in the hall outside of the door by the time the first man said, “Take down the boy’s pants.”
A moment later, a woman’s voice said, “It looks real to me. Should I see if it comes off?”
The man said, “Give it a tug.”
The woman giggled. “Now he’s got an erection. Cute little thing. It seems real, sir.”
“Then we do this the hard way. Swab his cheek. I brought a DNA analyzer with me. It’s slow. It will be at least an hour before we know. You may as well put his pants back on and make yourselves comfortable.”
Chapter 22
Coping
MC didn’t wait an hour for the results. She knew Oleon was female. She rapped smartly on the door and then walked into the office. A big man, or at least an overweight man, sat behind a large desk. Two other men sat in chairs at a small conference table. They were the two men from the alley. The only woman was bent over Oleon, doing up the buttons on the kid’s pants. Oleon seemed to be stirring, swatting ineffectually at the woman.
MC walked closer to the desk before saying, “Hello. I want to know why you kidnapped my little brother.”
The man behind the desk said, “You must be the captain that we were warned about.” To the men at the table, he said, “Cover her with your weapons. Don’t stun her yet.”
MC grinned. On very rare occasions, such as this one, she wished her enhancements — just for the shock value — had included extrudable fangs. “Yes, I am probably the captain Hamy warned you about. Let me rephrase my original question. Why did you think you could get away with kidnapping my brother?”
