Planet of Pain (29 page)

‘What history doesn't tell us,' Annamarie said, ‘is how many of the half million managed to endure, and so survive the experience. Quite a high proportion, I would imagine. We women have a higher pain tolerance than men, and considerable inner strength. You might say we are braver, though no doubt the men themselves would disagree.'

‘We certainly would,' Siggi muttered from the sidelines.

Annamarie released Bel's breast, whose shoulders sagged and she swayed, holding the chair arm to steady herself. Her face was very pale.

‘Are you brave, Bel?'

‘Not particularly, mistress,' Bel replied unsteadily.

‘No?' Annamarie held her right breast once more. ‘Well, we'll see.'

 

Jo lay on her bunk, eyes closed, trying to relax away her aches and pains. Bel was in the shower, trying to soak hers away. Stella was in the kitchen, dialling up food. A meal, she declared, was just the thing to perk them up after their ‘fun and games', as she put it. Jo had no appetite whatsoever, but Stella, for reasons best known to her, was insisting they all sit down together. Eli, unsurprisingly, had remained behind with Annamarie.

‘I've a confession to make,' Stella said, as they tucked into the food. ‘I haven't been entirely truthful with you.'

‘Here it comes,' Bel said, deadpan. ‘This is where she tells us she hates sex.'

Stella smiled. ‘Not about that. I'm not a cargo handler, and I'm not here by accident.'

‘What's happened to your voice?' Jo said.

‘Annamarie ain't been giving her no elocution lessons, for a goddam fact,' Bel muttered, in a passable imitation of Stella's usual manner of speech. ‘I figure we got us a goddam secret operative here.'

‘I'm not sure I used the word goddam quite as often as that,' Stella said, ‘but you're right about the rest. I'm Alliance military, special forces.'

Bel nodded, seemingly unsurprised; unlike Jo, who was totally and utterly dumbfounded.

‘How long have you known?' Stella asked Bel. ‘From white shift or before that, on
Eridani
?'

‘Not then. I started to get suspicious on Paradise, but Minassian clinched it. Is he special forces too?'

Stella shook her head. ‘He's just what he seems: a slaver captain. We use him sometimes. He gave us a lot of information about this ship… at a price, naturally. What was it about him that tipped you?'

‘Mostly the ease with which you got him to do things. Like agreeing to buy Jo, for instance. Exactly why did you want us along, by the way? And don't say it's because you like us.'

‘I like you a lot,' Stella said, ‘but it was purely business. A skilled pilot-navigator will be a big help when we take over the ship, and you wouldn't come without Jo so she had to come too.'

‘Wait… wait…' Jo said. ‘When we
what
?'

‘The Alliance badly needs the technology aboard this vessel,' Stella said seriously. ‘Once we get
Chrysalis
back the engineers will pull her apart. We'll gain years of research and development overnight.'

‘So we capture her,' Bel said flatly. ‘Just like that. The three of us.'

‘It's not as hard as it sounds,' Stella said. ‘There are no weapons aboard – Annamarie has a pathological fear of the things – so there's only Perry to worry about. The crew and techs will do as we say once we have the Kraffts. We'll lock the lot of them up in the hold, and the ship's ours.'

Bel looked unconvinced; or should that be not yet convinced, for Jo sensed a definite interest. As for Jo herself, she was still trying to come to terms with the fact Stella was special forces, and they were now caught up in some wild scheme to steal a starship.

‘Come on, we can do this,' Stella encouraged. ‘Hell, in the original plan I was doing it on my own.'

‘True,' Bel said. ‘So everything that happened was geared towards getting you aboard this ship. Allowing yourself to be captured in the first place; getting sent to Paradise so Minassian could buy you, and sell you to the Kraffts.'

Stella nodded, and Jo had one of her flashes of insight.

‘It was you!' she said. ‘
You
tipped
Eridani
that an escape was being planned. That's why you confessed so quickly: you
wanted
to be sent to Paradise.'

‘Sorry about that, guys,' Stella said with a rueful grin. ‘Nina's escape plot was too good an opportunity to miss. I “accidentally” let something slip to one of my clients, and you know the rest. I honestly didn't think the public flogging would be quite as bad as that. Still, we survived it, right? We survived Paradise, too; and here we are, exactly as planned but with three times the womanpower.'

‘Here we are,' Bel agreed, ‘and you say we only have Perry to worry about?'

That was when Jo realised Bel had decided to join this mad enterprise. Which meant, of course, that she had too. And heaven help the lot of them.

 

‘Why did you wait so long before making a move?' Jo asked, once the reality of the situation had sunk in. ‘We were weeks on Paradise – weeks of sheer hell, as I'm sure you remember – and even here you've waited a couple of days. Why didn't you tell us this the minute we came aboard? We could have jumped them then and saved ourselves a deal of pain and suffering.'

‘The answer's the same to both parts,' Stella said. ‘Timing. We couldn't just go whenever we liked, we had to wait for support. This ship never travels alone. Right now there are two corvettes running alongside. They'd disable us in seconds if we tried to make a dash for it.'

‘So what do we do?' Bel asked. ‘What's this support you say we're waiting for?'

‘A
Leopard
class light cruiser will jump in and rendezvous with us at nineteen hundred standard today,' Stella said. ‘She'll destroy or chase off the corvettes, ferry bridge crew over to
Chrysalis
, then cover our back till we jump out. That's what I've been waiting for. The timing of the rendezvous was arranged months ago, and I had no way to contact them to bring it forward.'

‘Okay,' Bel said, ‘let's cut to the specifics. How do we handle Perry?'

‘With this,' Stella said, opening her hand to reveal a palm-sized oval object with two brass prongs sticking out of the top. ‘It's a stunner. Don't let the size fool you: this thing can stop a rhinoceros.'

‘How did you manage to smuggle it
aboard?' Bel asked. ‘It's small, but not that small. Or did
Petra
's doc only pretend to tighten your orifices?'

Stella just grinned and shook her head, obviously unwilling to disclose all her secrets.

‘She didn't smuggle it aboard,' Jo said. ‘Minassian did. In a box of chocolates.'

Two flashes of insight in as many minutes. It couldn't last, of course.

‘So Helen's in on this too,' Bel said. ‘That explains how you know so much about this ship. It was her, wasn't it, not Minassian?'

‘There's no fooling you guys, I see,' Stella said ruefully. ‘Yes, she's our source. She'll unlock our door remotely when Siggi goes to the library this evening. She'll find some excuse to get Eli out of the lounge, so there'll just be Annamarie and Perry. Once we've taken him out the rest will be easy. It's simple and foolproof, just the way a plan should be.'

‘So what do we do?' Bel asked. ‘All rush him at the same time?'

Stella shook her head. ‘We need someone to distract him with feminine wiles. Flash her titties at him, something like that.'

Jo nodded and glanced automatically at Bel's breasts, but Bel was shaking her head slowly, a smile on her lips.

‘She doesn't even realise, does she?' Stella said, grinning.

‘Realise what?' Jo said, with a sinking feeling.

‘Haven't you seen the way he looks at you?' Bel asked.

‘Me?'

‘You,' Stella said. ‘The boy's in love, no doubt about it.'

Jo looked from one to the other, thinking it was a wind-up. But it wasn't. Perry, they assured her, was smitten. Which meant the job of distracting him with ‘feminine wiles' fell to Josephine O'Donnell, and no other. Heaven help them twice over.

 

 

 

 

It started out well enough. At the appointed time the door opened as if by magic. Jo took a deep breath, nodded to the other two, and set out on her mission.

‘Good luck,' Bel called after her.

‘Go get him, Tiger,' Stella said.

She didn't feel like a tiger. Her legs were wobbly and her stomach was fluttering as she made her way to the lounge. As she went in she saw Annamarie on the couch, drink in hand, with Perry in his usual position. Siggi, Helen and Eli were all absent. So far so good.

She walked towards Annamarie, who turned to her and frowned – obviously puzzled as to how she had got there, and why. Jo walked right past the couch without a word, only stopping when she got to the playroom doors. She opened them to get their undivided attention, but didn't go in, turning to face them instead. To her relief they had turned right round and were watching her, their backs to the all-important far door. Annamarie's expression had changed from puzzlement to anger and she opened her mouth to speak, but Jo beat her to it.

‘Perry,' she said, and was startled at how steady her voice was, ‘I want you to do something for me.' She saw Stella appear at the far door, with Bel just behind her, and shrugged her gown off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. ‘I want you to fuck me,' she said. ‘In the playroom, right now.'

Stella came across the room very fast, barefoot and totally silent. Silent to Jo, but not to Perry, for he whipped around, his hands shooting forward. As Annamarie screamed Stella ducked beneath Perry's arms and jabbed the stunner in his chest. She'd said it would stop a rhinoceros, but it failed to stop Perry. He staggered back and shook his head as though shaking off a blindfold, but didn't go down. Stella swore and tried to jab him again, but Perry slapped her arm, sending the stunner skittering across the floor.

Their simple, foolproof plan was in tatters.

Perry lunged, grabbed Stella's arms above the elbow and hurled her across the room. She crashed into the wall and slid to the floor, groaning. Bel had picked up the stunner, and she now advanced towards Perry holding the thing out in front of her.

‘Kill her, Perry!' Annamarie shrieked. ‘Kill her!'

Perry stepped forward; his huge hands opening and closing like mechanical grabs. Those hands could tear Bel limb from limb, Jo knew. Bel knew it too, for she stopped, teeth bared in a desperate grimace. Jo ran at Perry and jumped on his back, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms about his neck. He reached back over his shoulder and tried to grab hold of her and she ducked her head, burying her face against his neck. She squeezed his throat with all her might, thinking there had to be airways and arteries somewhere beneath that muscle, but it was like trying to crush a tree trunk.

He shook his shoulders and she began to slip around his torso. His ear was against her cheek and she bit it just as hard as she could. Perry let out a roar and grabbed for her again. Jo shook her head, savaging his ear, tasting blood. Then Stella was slamming roundhouse kicks into his midriff and groin. Perry staggered and Stella kicked him again in the groin. He went down finally, face first, with Jo just managing to get her legs free before they were crushed beneath his bulk. She held fast to his neck, aware that Bel was zapping him repeatedly with the stunner, feeling the jolts herself through skin contact, but still she hung on and continued to do so even after he'd gone limp.

‘It's okay, Tiger,' Stella said, ‘you can let go now. He's out cold.'

She pulled gently at Jo's arms, and Jo released him and stood up – just in time to see Annamarie try to bolt, and Bel catch her and zap her in turn. With immaculate timing Siggi picked that moment to appear, giving Bel the chance to make it three in a row, as Jo realised there was something in her mouth and spat out a chunk of bloody gristle.

‘What's that?' Stella asked.

Jo wiped her mouth, laying a bright red smear along the back of hand. ‘His ear,' she muttered. ‘Part of it, anyway.'

‘Christ,' Bel said faintly, joining them. ‘What happened to the timid young lieutenant I started out with?'

‘She grew up,' Jo said grimly.

Stella grinned and slapped her naked shoulder. ‘Come on, let's get this lot secured.'

They tied up their three captives with straps from the playroom, making doubly and trebly sure Perry couldn't get loose. They carried Annamarie to her couch but left the two men on the floor, the bodyguard being too heavy to lift, then just as they were finishing Helen came in with Eli in tow. To Jo's dismay Eli wailed and ran to the couch, throwing herself across Annamarie's thighs. Jo tried to draw her away, but Eli hissed and lashed out with her nails, her pretty face twisted in fury.