Supremacy's Bounty, page 31
part #2 of Dueling Planets Series
Tarack’s jaw tensed. “Don’t worry your fragile head about verification. Abhay will handle that.”
“Abhay will be my contact on Ceto?”
Tarack smiled in a predatory way Jan didn’t like. “Abhay will be your partner, Mister Sabato, and he will remain with you at all times.” She leaned over the table. “Did you honestly believe I would dump you on Ceto, with only your word that you’d find the Widow and my disk, and expect you to do anything but crawl beneath a rock?”
That wouldn’t have been Jan’s first choice. “I had assumed whatever nanos were in that purple liquid would allow you to track my whereabouts.”
“Oh,” Tarack said, as she pushed back in her chair. “He thinks we injected him with tracking nanos.” She chuckled in a way that was just a smidge maniacal. “That’s adorable!”
Abhay didn’t smile when Tarack did, which worried Jan. Abhay should have chuckled. Thugs were supposed to chuckle when their employers chuckled.
“The nanos inside you aren’t just trackers, Sabato.” Tarack looked more delighted than anyone should look when saying those words. “They’re so, so much more than that.”
“Oh?” Jan raised one eyebrow and resisted the urge to catapult himself over the table and try for the bridge.
Tarack glanced at her bodyguard. “Show him, Abhay.” An edge crept into her tone. “He needs to understand why he’s going to be so loyal to me.”
“Ah,” Jan said, as his spine prickled, “you don’t actually need—”
Agony erupted inside Jan’s suddenly paralyzed body. He couldn’t scream, couldn’t gasp, couldn’t even twitch. A symphony of exploding planets erupted as shards shredded his lungs, his heart, his mind. That hell ended without warning and flung his upper body onto the table. He puked up bile that splattered his cheek and drifted off to the left.
Tarack recoiled and unstrapped herself. “Oh, dammit all.” She pushed off. “Clean this up before you leave, Abhay.” She caught herself on a yellow ceiling grip. “Fucking gutter-born.”
For his part, Jan squeezed the table in both hands and tried not to lose bowel or bladder control. He’d just been given the first pair of clean underwear he’d had in a months. He really wanted to enjoy clean underwear for a bit longer.
Tarack snapped her boots back onto the flooring and stomped through the open doorway. She stopped outside. “In case it wasn’t clear, what you just experienced lasted about five seconds.”
Truly? Jan had thought it lasted much longer.
“That’s the pain you’ll experience until you die of dehydration,” Tarack said, “if Abhay doesn’t reset the nanos that have now imbedded themselves in your bones once every 25 hours.”
Ah, Jan thought, an echo of that agony imbedding itself deep into his brain. So he had torture nanos imbedded in his bones now. That was ... bad.
“If you kill Abhay,” Tarack continued, “or you let him be killed by some gutter-born on your little Ceto adventure, enjoy a hundred hours of agony before you finally choke on your tongue. Also, if you disobey us for any reason, we can send you to Hell with our thoughts. So be nice.”
“Unnecessary,” Jan managed, glaring from the table as floated in residual agony. “Truly, hideously unnecessary.”
“Whatever.” Tarack huffed and turned away. “Don’t come back without my disk, Sabato.” The door hissed shut behind her.
The room fell into silence, and Abhay didn’t move. Abhay didn’t have an expression right now, which was disconcerted given he could send Jan into a paroxysm of agony with one wireless signal from his PBA. Jan did not enjoy paroxysms of agony.
Jan didn’t move. He didn’t dare speak until he was sure Abhay wasn’t going to activate the torture nanos again. He wondered if he should go toss himself out the airlock right now.
Abhay shifted uncomfortably, then glanced to the open door. “So.” He looked back at Jan. “Shall we be off?”
To be continued some time in 2021...
T Eric Bakutis, Supremacy's Bounty
