[greaterfrost]

The air was wet and mildewed, and the sound of collecting engine oil dripping against a poorly fitted bulkhead patch seemed to mark the time in an ominous drone of loss.  The disrepair in the air stuck to her skin, a base disappointment like the world had gone on without her and was ambivalent to her incurious involvement.

The ache of hours in restraints began to weigh on the taut muscling in her secured arms and legs; she was bound to housing in the ceiling in an old engineering bay.  Her wrists and ankles were bound separately and secured individually to different pulleys that extended to winches attached somewhere in the poor light.

She had been stripped naked and exposed to the rapid air movement in the vacuous room, probably the environmental control bypass wing, but she had no idea how she had gotten there.
   
The last thing she could recall was a bar-fight on Juno III Orbital Station, she hadn’t been involved in it, but she remembered the smell of Janis berries, a rare perfume used in the federation, and some independent, unaligned outposts, the fragrance was popular among Betazed and Trill to the mind of a killer it was one of the more potent tranquilizers if taken intravenously used to capture prey.   As her senses returned, she was sure she hadn’t been out long, so she was still on the station by all accounts; Her reflective eyes absorbed far more light than most; the longer they concentrated on something, the more detail they could make out of what was hidden in the distance.  

She relaxed her eyes, focusing on the winch secured to her right wrist; the line was made of a high tensile cable able to secure several hundred kilograms to a cargo plate but remain flexible enough to endure the stress of interstellar gravity shifts.  Patience and a broad level of experience identified she had been secured by someone who had experience stowing durable goods, so it wasn’t likely she was going anywhere.  Her whole body was suspended between the cabling, and each winch was attached to a rig that met in a quick-release coupling 60 centimeters behind her back; whomever was holding her wanted to make sure they could move her quickly if the need arose.  After some breathing and relaxation techniques, she made out an automated door eleven meters from her restraints, the light level in the room was nearly pitch, and most would only know there were cords attached to them. Still, she was anything but ordinary, and nothing would hold her indefinitely.

                As each of her arms or legs moved, the opposite arm or leg would relax or tense in equal response; she was used to a certain level of pain, a trait she had come to accept in her profession, as her strong right arms pulled against the quality of the cable she could feel the opposite stretch to pain in her muscled left thigh, but she could hear the coupling shift in space just before she dislocated her hip. She relaxed her arm as her leg shifted back into its socket; the rush of nerves and sensations lit light a match in her brain, telling her that her body couldn’t take much more of that kind of abuse.  She lived for this pain; however, near permanent harm gave her arousal no tender moment had ever thought to share.  She was getting ridiculously turned on; as her breath quickened, she pulled with her left wrist, pulling her right leg to its limit as she could feel the winch shift again against the cabling.  Another rush of pain and exhilaration moved through her like lightning.  She instinctively let out a moan of pleasure while her body wracked with the tension in her joints flared with so much primal warning of concern that even minor shifts in her position caused increasing stress levels all over her small frame.  

Mews of stifled cries and intentional distress over her lethally intentioned body tasked her mental acuity and limits of endurance while physical symptoms of her private reveling were beginning to show on her thighs and the sweat building on her brow, neck, and her hyper-sensitive ribs as they heaved and firmed about the exertions her attempt to free herself had encouraged.

Over five minutes, her body dripped with sweat, as the pain in her arms and legs made her delirious.  The quick-release coupling had been singing concerning each attempt she made to free herself. Finally, after she maintained a rhythm long enough, the collar slipped, and the cable rig unraveled, causing her to collapse hard to the cold deck of the room.

She heaved deeply in her mixed emotion; the pain of her joints was nearly crippling, the stunning cold of the bulkhead floor was shocking, and her arousal was still heavily triggered. She attempted to muffle her pleasured sighs and intense groaning as the shock sent her over the edge, against gritted teeth and tightly pursed lips, enjoying her release as the summation of her efforts met in success in so many ways.

Her arms reached out, still desperately aching and crying out in pain at her freedom; she turned to her back and lay splayed against the dirty and artic temperature of the floor. Every millimeter of her was in agony, but she was free, and her captor would soon feel every tantalizing fraction of her pain.  Her black as night skin shimmered with the sweat and grime reflecting the poor light, she was smiling, and her eyes were dancing with the delirium her experience was still riding over her.  The flashes of her writhing legs and arms, the rise and fall of her chest, and the scintillation of her eyes and teeth against the blue background of the room made her appear more animal than humanoid. As she wriggled her way free of the restraints, her anger and mental state made her primally aware of only her survival and her need to be satisfied.

The door opened with a hiss as a tall, fiendishly powerful villain stepped into the room; her attentions were already coiled in response; she dropped to a low crouch ignoring her pain, letting her eyes read and evaluate the method she would need to kill this man.
She jumped with intentionally sharpened claws outstretched from her thin but supple fingers.

                The man caught her by the throat mid-air; he glowered and hissed as he threw the poor girl back, allowing her nails to draw superficial injuries along his arms and shoulders.

“That’s enough, Worm!” He yelled as his voice's volume and timbre made the room shake from intimidation.

                She shrank back, preparing to jump at him again, but he startled her out of her animalistic rage.  Appearing now as a wounded animal to not encourage his wrath, it took a few moments for her to realize that she wasn’t dealing with a guard or a warden of some kind but her patron himself, Field Commander Jasen Kane.

                He was a total of two meters in height with long blond hair and a grip of steel; he wore his Terran sash and a notch on his abdomen for each man he had killed in personal combat; at over six hundred, the number continued across his arm and began moving down his left leg. Jasen had a plan for everything and a fallback to deal with his allies and enemies should they act out of turn.  He had taken his position and defended it dozens of times, each more spectacularly than the last. Jasen was a walking nightmare, and every encounter the girl had seen to test ended the same for his enemy: a brutal and slow death.  From poisons to tech diseases, betrayal by family, and even planned obsolescence, he knew your end before you agreed to work with him, and he had rarely been surprised.
  
“Xie Ye Ying!” He roared, stepping into the room. “You were given a single command… Stop this tech…” He looked down at his genetically perfect assassin. “Was I in some way unclear?” He looked back at one of his guards watching with great interest from the open room behind him, one of his lieutenants tossed him a prison uniform; Jasen dropped it at her feet as he moved to the door and pressed his palm into the reader as it activated the lights and shut off the cold air ventilation.

Ying moved to slide the uniform over her naked body, a bright orange jumpsuit with a Klingon pain garter sewn into the neck lining.  The band tightened to contact her skin inactivated, but a word or tap of his wrist computer could change that instantly.

Jasen was a master of manipulation; he treated even those he was proud of like they were disappointments to him, so they never saw him as an ally, only a brilliant despot so far more intelligent than anything they had come across; he was the personification of the earth god Thor. Still, he seemed to have the mindset of his blood brother Loki.

She moved to her feet, much shorter than Jasen, and looked straight ahead as the soldier she was exhaustively trained to be.

“I took my window and got my kill- “She tried to continue, but Jasen cut her off with a backhand that sent her sprawling against the deck.

“You killed one when you could have dealt with both issues simultaneously!” He growled before continuing. “I grew you to be the best hunter the galaxy has ever known, and you do something… human… something… any mortal can do?” He stood over her as she struggled to move to her feet.

“No, commander, I took the shot to frighten the Romulans and the secondary target.” She stood back in stoic attention as she reported.

Jasen had wanted her to destabilize the peace between the Romulans and the federation, and the best way to do that was to reintroduce the Tal’ Shiar and make them think the forty-year-old problem had found root again. She was thinking ahead, but Jasen didn’t want her to think he was proud of her.
“Fortunately for you,” he tapped a comm link on his wrist computer as one of the walls disappeared, and a screen materialized in its place, showing a telemetry read-out of her next target.  “The U.S.S. Drummond, a noble class battleship, happens to be nearby, the ship that is going to test his new torpedo.”  He looked down at her, standing 17 or so centimeters from her, as his musky smell and her weakened condition made her weak in other areas as well. 

“You’ll be taking the place of one of the vessel’s weapons officers, Lieutenant Commander Nina Hurtz” Her image showed up on the wall as Jasen expected Ying to commend it to memory. “You’ll meet her at her home in…” He looked at another padd that appeared over his left wrist while she was overcome with the scent of his battle-hardened sweat and anger towards her. “Yukon City…” He looked back to Ying. “She’s attending a wedding… make sure she attends it, and then take her place on the shuttle back to the Drummond; it’s in orbit around Vulcan for a routine security review.”

He grabbed her by the fabric of the prison suit and lifted her to meet his eyes. “If I find out he’s still alive or the torpedo fires, I’d find a way to ensure you’re not…” He warned.  “Not that I wouldn’t consider chasing you to hell for revenge.” His breath was intoxicating, she hated him and everything he stood for, but with the pain coursing through her and the punishment she was used to enduring, his aggression was essentially petting in her eyes.  He dropped her 30 cm; she lost her footing and struggled to regain it before returning to her stance.

“Prepare for this, and then Get off my ship…! If I see you before your job is done, it will be to find out exactly how much my creation can withstand in the pressures of cold space.” He turned without another word as the room door opened, dematerializing into an active transporter beam.

This might as well have been flirting; he very rarely took the personal time or physical space to deal with what he called a failure, he was exceptionally proud of his bred assassin, but she knew his bravado was far more important than what he could actually do. A blush of a ‘job well done’ feeling swept over her as she walked out onto the deck and used her rank as commander to order the guards to fetch her clothes, food, and medical supplies.  It was time to get to work.