Tanderon (13 page)

“I don’t know about you, but I had a busy morning,” he commented as he paid attention to getting the sock on right. “I decided it would be a good idea if I sent a few messages back to the Confederacy with your Federation’s agreement to the conferences. Your Council didn’t mine, so the first message I wrote was to Dameron, telling him I was fine. I also told him that if you show up back at the outpost without me, he’s to throw you in the brig until word comes about what to do with you. He won’t change your biological reading and he won’t change your face, so you might as well give up the idea of trying to get back there. It won’t do you any good.”

He looked up at me then to see what my reaction would be, but I wasn’t showing any reactions. If I ever made it back to Dameron’s base, the walls could be papered with messages for all I cared. There are lots of ways to get people to do things your way, and some of them aren’t even painful. Val continued to watch me for another minute, then started on his second sock in annoyance.

“I’ve never met a woman who could match your stubbornness,” he muttered, pulling at the sock. “You refuse to listen to anything anyone says to you as long as it doesn’t agree with your own ideas. Why won’t you give Ringer your word about not escaping?”

I smiled faintly at the question he’d demanded an answer to, but that was one I’d already answered a few days earlier. I’d always be a prisoner who would escape whenever possible and the identity of my captors made no difference at all. Val waited a shorter time than after his first comment, slid his feet into the loafers, then stood up.

“There’s a naval cruiser on its way to pick us up,” he said, very little patience left in his tone. “It should be here in the next few days, and it will take us directly to the training facilities. Give Ringer what he wants and then get dressed. There are places on this Station I’ve been waiting to share with you. Once we leave here, there may not be another opportunity.”

He stood staring at me with those dark eyes, waiting for me to do as he’d said. I was willing to bet that more than one woman had dropped her gaze under that particular stare, and maybe even a good number of men. I considered him in silence for a short time, then sent more blue-gray smoke in his direction.

“Just when is this cruiser due in?” I inquired with only a small amount of interest. If I had enough time, I might be able to work myself free before boarding time. He’d picked up the shirt he’d worn the day before, probably with the intention of adding it to the rest of his dirty clothes, but the shirt was obviously not meant to go where it belonged. When he heard my question, he crumpled the shirt and threw it away from him.

“Damn it, there’s just no talking to you!” he roared, his eyes blazing. “The only reason I mentioned that cruiser was to show you how little time there was left! Call Ringer in here and give him your word about not making any more trouble!”

He stood with his fists on his hips, his anger almost blazing high enough to set the fire dampers going. I looked at him the way he sometimes looked at me, with memory of the times there had been no clothing between us, smiled faintly, and then said, “No.”

The single word fed his anger just the way I thought it would, but he exercised immediate control, held it down, then nodded his head.

“All right,” he agreed in a growl. “If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way you can have it. Sit there chained until it’s time to leave. I have another date anyway.”

He turned away from me and went to a mirrored dresser to brush his hair, and I put out my cigarette, then studied his back. The mirror image of his eyes saw me watching him, and an amused smile covered his face.

“You look curious about my date,” he observed, “but you shouldn’t be. Don’t you remember Marcie?”

The name meant nothing to me, and his smile widened to a grin at my frown.

“Marcie is anxious to apologize for the way she slapped me,” he amplified, finally bringing me memory of the blonde who had been in the suite when I’d first gotten back. “She understands that my ‘niece’ is the sort of little girl who enjoys making trouble, and wasn’t pleased about having been conned. She said to tell you that if you two ever meet again, you can expect a second spanking.”

I snorted my opinion of the likelihood of that happening, angry that he’d told her what he’d done to me but not really surprised. Many men feel the need to show off in front of women they want to take to bed, and Val wasn’t likely to be an exception.

I pushed myself down off the pillows I’d been leaning on and stretched out on the bed, moving slowly on the wrinkled, silky linen, and then stared up at the ceiling.

“She looked like she ought to be fair to middling good at apologizing,” I commented, conjuring a picture of her against the ceiling that I could stare at.

“She’s very nearly an expert at apologizing,” Val said with a chuckle from where he stood. “Even when there’s nothing to apologize for. Federation women are proving to be very interesting.”

His amusement annoyed me, and I moved on the linen again.

“Enjoy yourself while you can,” I advised, keeping my eyes on the ceiling.

“Playmates like your Marcie may not mind men who go in for rape, but not all Federation women appreciate it. Like me, for instance.”

Suddenly he was there by the bed, staring down at me, and the amusement hadn’t left him.

“There isn’t a man in this universe who could rape you and you know it,” he said, laughing at me with his eyes. “I pity the poor jerk who ever tries it.” Then the amusement faded to a ghost of itself, and he bent forward to put his palms on the bed to either side of my arms. “I can call Marcie and reschedule our date,” he murmured, his eyes boring into me. “Tell me you want me to stay.”

His face was no more than two feet away from mine, and I would have sworn I could feel his body heat even from that distance. My insides stirred to life as I moved uncomfortably between his hands, and then I heard the sound of the chain around my ankle. Val was nothing like the conqueror Jensar but he was just like him, expecting his orders to be obeyed without question, used to having any woman he wanted. I’d been just short of saying what he’d told me to, and that made me mad.

“I wouldn’t think of keeping you from your interesting times, partner,” I answered, feeling more than ever like a woman chained in a man’s bed – and not liking it. “Just remember that I’ll be expecting the same courtesy from you.”

He didn’t say a word to that, didn’t make a single sound, but somehow his black eyes grew momentarily darker and I could feel a tension of sorts crackling out of the broad body so close above me. Then, before I could react to it, the feeling was gone and Val was straightening up again to nod slightly.

“Partners,” he murmured, almost to himself. “That’s right. We are partners, aren’t we? See you later, partner.”

He gave me a last, untranslatable look, then rounded the bed and left the room. I turned to my side to stare at the door he’d closed, the distance between me and that door seeming to grow immense and almost limitless. Time was running out on me faster than I’d anticipated, but I still had no way to cross that distance. I hugged myself and lay flat again, silently cursing myself for a damned fool.

How the hell did I expect to find a way out of there if I wasted time trying to figure out where Val was coming from? Why had he repeated the word partners so strangely, and why did he keep looking at me like that? I shook my head hard to dislodge the distractions, then forced myself to spend some time thinking about escape.

Dinner turned out to be a solitary affair that night, with Ringer as alone as I was.

After putting my tray on the bed he left the door to the next room open, giving me a view of him sitting at the table a robot waiter had brought. I uncovered the food on the tray dish by dish, then covered it all up again and turned my back on the sight of Ringer digging in. Captivity tends to put a dent in my interest in food, and even though I hadn’t had anything for lunch that day I wasn’t even faintly hungry. I lay on my side on the bed and listened to the small sounds of Ringer’s meal, wondering when that cruiser was due to dock.

In a short while I heard Ringer leaving his table, and then I heard the sound of the other bedroom door. I twisted around and listened hard for a few seconds, and sure enough, there was the very faint sound of his bathroom door closing. He was probably only going to wash up, so I didn’t have much time.

I turned the rest of the way toward the tray and lifted one of the plate covers, and what I’d seen earlier was still there. The plate held a shish-ka-bob on a laurite rod, and the central piece of meat was decorated with a tiny cutlass stuck right into the middle of it. Anywhere else that cutlass would have been tin or foil, but Xanadu Orbital Station didn’t believe in cheap decorations.

I put my fingers on it and pulled it out of the meat, holding to the fine steel it was made of. Its lines and hilt were authentic, its point and edge were sharp, and if I’d had time to test it, it probably would have balanced properly. I wrapped my fingers around it, moved closer to the end of the bed, and slid the chain around on my ankle.

I’d been assuming all along that the lock of the chain required a magnetic lock pick to open it, but that might not have been so. The least I could do was test the theory, and the cutlass was almost perfect for the testing. The thinness of its point worried me a little, but with no other alternative available it was use it or forget it. I knew what the general insides of the lock looked like – what was located where and what slid which way – so I slid the cutlass through the keyhole and began a delicate, gentle probing for the main slide link.

I found it right where it should be and recognized the feel of it, and then I heard the faint sound of Ringer’s bathroom door. He was only seconds away from coming back, but I couldn’t stop at that point. I tossed my head to get the hair back over my shoulders and out of my way, and paid attention to what the slide link was doing.

The cutlass point was tickling it into moving very slightly from side to side, but it wasn’t rotating the way it should have. I jabbed at it harder as I heard Ringer’s bedroom door opening, and the tiny steel cutlass sang between my fingers, vibrating dangerously close to the breaking point. The cutlass was missing that small amount of magnetism necessary to begin the rotation of the slide link, and I was wasting my time playing with it.

I eased it back out of the keyhole, reached over and stabbed it into the piece of meat it had come from, recovered the plate, and was just curled up on the bed again when Ringer appeared in the doorway. He paused very briefly to look at me, then continued into the room and stopped on the other side of the bed to take the covers off the plates on the tray.

“Pick one,” he said, his black eyes calm. “I don’t care which, just pick one.”

He stood there waiting, his fingers on his hips, and he wasn’t prepared to take no for an answer. I made a sound of disgust and looked at the tray, then reached toward the plate of shish-ka-bob. Before my hand could touch it he reached out and removed the tiny cutlass, then gestured me on again with a faint smile. I shrugged very slightly, as though I didn’t care what he did, then took the plate of chicken Spelahr and brought it closer to me.

Ringer waited until I’d eaten all of the chicken I could force down along with most of the pot of coffee, then he took the tray to his table and had a robot come and get it all. Once the robot was gone he came back into my bedroom with a deck of cards, sat down on the bed, and began to deal out hands for stab-in-the-back. I hadn’t played that game with Ringer since the time he’d gone out on assignment with me, about four years earlier. He didn’t say a word and neither did I, but we both picked up the cards he dealt out and settled down to the game.

It was late when Ringer finally put the cards away and unchained me so I could get ready for bed, but Val still hadn’t come back. At various times during the card game I’d caught Ringer staring at me oddly, his eyes on my hair, or my face, or my body, and once he’d even shaken his head and muttered something. I didn’t catch what he said, but he’d also glanced at the time and snorted in disgust, almost like a father whose daughter was out on her first real date.

I almost laughed ruefully to myself when it occurred to me that Ringer might be wondering when Val would get back. Val was hardly an innocent child out on his first date, and if he didn’t get back until station morning it wouldn’t be much of a crushing shock. Then Ringer glanced at me and cleared his throat, and I suddenly realized that he was keeping me company and lending moral support. After all, Val had left me for another woman…

I felt odd thinking that, but the oddness immediately changed to more than annoyance. In spite of the fact that Ringer should have known better he had fallen for the same softheadedness that Jane had gone in for, linking me up with Val as though we were more than simply partners. That was mostly Val’s fault, of course, for refusing to accept reality and then talking about his fantasies, but Ringer really should have known better. That was what was getting me so bent out of shape, and it was all I could do not to show how I felt.

When I was back in bed with the chain around my ankle again, Ringer waited until I’d turned the light off and then he left and shut the door behind him. I moved around in the bed linen to get comfortable, not feeling particularly tired, but it wasn’t long before I fell asleep.

I remember wandering through different dream scenes, most of them peopled by Ringer and Val. Then, after a timeless time of that, I woke to find my cheek against a broad, hairy chest, my arms around a wide, hard-muscled body, my flesh tingling to the touch of strong, demanding hands. I moved in faint protest, momentarily forgetting where I was and with whom, and two lips came to touch my face gently and soothingly.

“About time you woke up, woman,” Val’s voice came in a murmur, his hands warm against my skin. “It’s much too late to be wasting time.”

“What time is it?” I asked blurrily, trying to move away from him. There was something I had to do, but I couldn’t remember what.