Merrick held her gaze without flinching. "Yes," he said firmly, and meant it. He wasn't here to kill non-combat personnel.
Besides, between his sonics and his stunner he already had plenty of non-lethal weapons in his arsenal.
But either the doctor already knew that or simply didn't believe him. "No," the woman said. "You will heal as you are, until the Games"
"I'll do my best," Merrick said. It had still been worth a try. "What kind of games are we talking about, exactly?"
"The Games," the woman said, as if the word itself was definition enough.
The doctor put his scanner back in the bag and pulled out a hypo. "The doctor will now give you something to help you sleep," the woman continued. "It will also stimulate healing."
"How about if we just stimulate the healing and let me stay awake?" Merrick suggested. "I'm getting really tired of sleeping."
"Without the sleeping there cannot be the healing." Some of the severity seemed to slip from the woman's face. "Have no fear, Merrick Moreau Broom," she added in a marginally kinder tone. "We have all felt this medicine. It will not harm you."
"Thank you," Merrick said. His words struck him as slightly stupid sounding, but on the spur of the moment he couldn't come up with anything better. "I see you know my name," he said, wincing as the doctor slipped the hypo into his arm above the shackle and injected the contents. "May I ask yours?"
"My name is not for strangers to know," the woman said. "But among the common I am known as Anya Winghunter."
"Anya Winghunter," Merrick repeated, nodding his head. It sure sounded like a name to him. There must be some subtlety here that he was missing. "Will I see you again?"
"If the doctor so chooses," she said as the Troft returned the hypo to its place and closed the bag. "I come and go at his pleasure."
"Ah," Merrick said. Was the room starting to go foggy again? "You're his assistant?"
She shook her head. "I am his slave."
Merrick's last view before the room faded into darkness was that of Anya's face framed by her impossibly blond hair. His last thought before that darkness was what the hell?
* * *
When he again awoke, his nanocomputer indicated that he'd slept for another seven hours. His head was aching, possibly with dehydration, and his stomach was rumbling with the reminder that that he hadn't eaten since Milika, over three days ago.
It was another handful of seconds before he noticed that the shackles that had been on his arms and legs were gone.
He sat up carefully, mindful of his low blood sugar, wondering where the hook was for this particular gambit. But no lasers blazed at him, no antipersonnel explosives shattered the silence, and there were no hungry predators waiting on the floor beneath his table in hopes of a quick snack.
Maybe that would come later. For now, he could focus on his hunger, his imprisonment, and this new mystery of why his captors apparently no longer feared him enough to nail him to the bed.
And, swirling through all of it, the puzzle that was Anya Winghunter.
She wasn't Qasaman, not with that hair. He'd seen Qasamans with hair as light as a dark reddish brown, but the vast majority of the people he'd met here had black or very dark brown hair. The official records of the Cobra Worlds' other incursions onto Qasama backed up that assessment. She wasn't from the Worlds, either, not with that accent.
Had someone hauled her all the way across the Troft Assemblage from the Dominion of Man? Or had the Trofts found another lost human colony somewhere closer, another colony like Qasama itself?
And what the hell was this slave thing?
The Assemblage, he knew, was in fact little more than a loose confederation of three- to five-system demesnes, most of which were in continual low-level and mostly polite conflict with each other, whether for influence, real estate, or trade advantage. The various demesnes had different customs, different goals and viewpoints and, as the Troft doctor had shown a few hours ago, occasionally some interesting and nearly incomprehensible dialects.
But never had he heard any hint that some Troft demesne kept slaves. Especially human slaves.
Could it all be a lie? Had they taken some woman, from wherever, tricked her up to look exotic and vulnerable, and dropped her in front of him to try to mess with his emotions? The Trofts a hundred years ago had tried that gambit with Jonny Moreau, he remembered, sending a woman into his cell in hopes that her presence and helplessness would induce him to help her escape and thereby reveal his abilities under controlled conditions and close observation.
If that was the plan, they were going to be sorely disappointed. Now that Merrick was on to them, he knew better than to fall for the trick.
He had just about concluded that the only way he was going to get food was to pound on the door and demand it when the lock again gave its distinctive double click. Getting a grip on the edge of the bed, ready to move in any direction he might need to go, Merrick braced himself. The door swung open.
To reveal Anya standing in the doorway, a covered tray in her hands. "I was told to bring you food," she said.
"Finally," Merrick said, glancing at the slot in the bottom of the door. There was no reason why she couldn't just have taken off the tray's cover and slid it in to him. Unless there was some reason she thought she should deliver it personally. "Thank you."
But instead of coming in, the woman just stood there. Just waiting.
Merrick frowned. Was he supposed to go over there and take the tray from her? Were the Trofts hoping that luring him that close to an open door would tempt him into an escape attempt that they could watch?
And then, belatedly, he got it. Slave... "Come in," he invited. "Just put the tray down here on the bed."
Silently, she crossed the cell and set the tray down where he'd indicated. Merrick watched her face closely, but he could see no hint of resentment at having just been ordered around like a child. In fact, she seemed almost relieved that he hadn't left her standing there without telling her what to do. Maybe she really was a slave.
Was that what this invasion of Qasama and the Cobra Worlds was all about? Could all this death and destruction be because some group of Troft demesnes had developed a taste for human slaves and was looking to expand their stock?
If so, they'd badly miscalculated. Merrick had seen how hard the Qasamans fought to keep from being subjugated. They would fight even harder to keep from becoming slaves. Needless to say, so would the Cobra Worlds.
"Will there be anything more?" Anya asked, straightening up and looking emotionlessly at him.
"No, I think that will do it," Merrick said, forcing back a sudden flush of anger at whoever had done this to her. "Thank you."
A brief hint of something flickered across her face. Maybe she wasn't used to being thanked for her service. But she merely nodded, turned, and strode out of the room. "You want to stay and eat with me?" Merrick called impulsively after her.
She turned back, the same odd look briefly crossing her face. "I cannot," she said. "I must return to my master."
She was still facing him when some unseen warden swung the door shut in front of her.
For a few seconds Merrick frowned in puzzlement at the closed door. First a doctor's assistant, then a waitress. On the surface, it looked like whoever was pulling her strings was trying to create opportunities for the slave and the prisoner to interact.
But in that case, shouldn't the hidden puppet master have had her jump at Merrick's invitation to join him for a snack, thereby giving them even more time together? Either the Trofts were slow on the draw, or else Merrick was reading this whole thing completely wrong.
Which was, admittedly, the more likely scenario. Who really knew how Troft minds worked, anyway?
His stomach gave a long growl. "Right," Merrick muttered. "First things first." Turning to the tray, he lifted the cover and set it aside.
He wasn't really sure what he'd been expecting for his first meal as a Troft prisoner. But whatever that
unformed anticipation was, this definitely wasn't it. There were three items on the oval plate: an angled piece of bone-in meat that might have been part of some creature's leg or wing, a greenish-yellow vegetable paste with red and off-white specks floating in it, and a small, lumpy loaf of bread shaped rather like a seashell.
Most of Merrick's brief time on Qasama had been spent in Sollas, eating ration bars or light and quickly prepared wartime meals. But he'd also had a slightly more leisurely meal at the Sammon residence in Milika, which had given him a general idea of what Qasaman cuisine was like. More importantly, he'd passed among the mix of cooking aromas in both Milika and Sollas, which had offered his self-trained cook's nose a range of the locals' cooking spices and condiments.
The aromas rising from his tray smelled nothing like any of those spices. And it was for certain that he'd never seen or smelled anything remotely like this with even the most exotic Cobra Worlds fare.
Either the Trofts were putting way more effort into this operation than anyone had any business doing, or else Merrick had been right the first time about Anya being from some distant and unknown world.
And if the meal sitting in front of him was from that same world, and if it contained spices or bacteria that didn't work and play well with his digestive system, this could be a very unpleasant evening.
The survival unit at the Cobra Academy had included a step-by-step procedure for finding non-poisonous plants in unfamiliar territory. But given that the Trofts obviously thought he would be able to handle this meal—and since they could poison him any time they wanted—it didn't seem worth the effort to run the checklist.
The Trofts hadn't provided any flatware with the meal, perhaps forgetting that keeping potential weapons away from a Cobra was wasted effort. The first challenge, therefore, was figuring out how to eat the meal while still maintaining a modicum of etiquette. After some trial and error he settled on the technique of tearing off chunks of the meat, picnic style, and using pieces of bread to scoop up the vegetable paste.
The blend of tastes was good and definitely exotic, reminiscent of various dishes Merrick had tried elsewhere but with enough of a twist to underscore the meal's alien origin. The effect on his digestive system was somewhat less positive, and he spent the next couple of hours lying on his bed listening to rumbles from his stomach and wondering if perhaps he should have gone through the food-testing procedure after all.
But nothing came back up, and his system eventually settled down. Merrick stayed awake for another two hours, just to be sure, before finally and wearily settling down for the night.
He'd been asleep for three and a half hours when he woke to stealthy sounds and the touch of surreptitious fingers on his forearms and shins. Before he could activate his opticals, he felt something close around his left forearm and heard the snick of a locking mechanism. The Trofts had apparently decided to put his restraints back on.
Merrick felt a snarl rising in his throat. Like hell they were.
With a jerk, he sat upright, simultaneously snapping open his eyes. The Troft who had been gently working his right arm toward its restraint made a desperate grab for the limb, missed, and gave an agonized grunt as Merrick hit him with a hard backhand punch across the helmet. The two Trofts at Merrick's feet likewise made desperate attempts to grab his legs. One of them flew backward as Merrick kicked him, the other jumped back before he could be hit. The latter grabbed for a belted laser—
And collapsed to the floor as a burst from Merrick's sonic slammed into him. The backwash bounced off the wall and echoed across Merrick, and he had a brief battle of his own for equilibrium as he turned to the two guards flanking the open door. Both were in motion, grabbing at their weapons as they sidled away from each other in an attempt to avoid a quick one-two attack.
Merrick tried to twist the sonic in his torso toward them, but with his left arm pinioned he couldn't turn far enough in that direction. Instead, he activated the capacitor connected to his right fingertip laser, firing a quick laser burst to ionize the air between him and the first guard and then sending a low-level jolt of current along the pathway. The Troft toppled unconscious to the floor just as his weapon cleared its holster, and Merrick's second stun blast took down the second Troft before he could bring his laser up into firing position. As the second guard hit the floor Merrick turned back to the restraint on his left forearm and fired a full-power fingertip laser burst at the clamps, blasting them into sprays of half-molten metal. He twisted his arm free, swung his legs around, and leaped off the bed onto the floor.
And as he finally paused from his reflexive attack in order to take stock of his situation, the possibilities of the open door and the deserted corridor beyond it abruptly flooded in on him.
This was probably the best chance he would ever have to escape.
But even as he lunged toward the door he discovered that he'd already missed his window of opportunity. From three different doorways down the corridor a Troft soldier leaned out into view, his helmet turned toward Merrick, his laser coming up to aim.
Cursing under his breath, Merrick ducked to the side of the door, using his last half-second of view to flick a target lock onto each of the weapons trained at him. So much for an easy exit. Now, he'd have to do it the hard way. He leaned out, keying his fingertip lasers.
Only to discover that all three Trofts had disappeared.
He had just enough time to frown in confusion when three more aliens poked their heads and weapons through an entirely different set of doorways. Quickly, Merrick cancelled his original lock and targeted this new group of weapons.
Only to have the Trofts again duck back through their doorways before he could fire. As they vanished, they were replaced by another trio, this group including one of the original three soldiers.
And Merrick finally got it. The target-lock system enabled his nanocomputer to aim and fire sequentially with a speed and accuracy no human gunner could ever hope to achieve. But it presupposed that all the targets in the sequence were still within firing range. If any one of them was no longer visible or accessible, the lock would simply pause and wait for it to reappear.
Which meant that by popping new targets in and out at random, the Trofts had effectively eliminated that particular tool from Merrick's arsenal. If he wanted to take out those soldiers or their weapons, he was going to have to do it without his nanocomputer's help.
Only it was already too late for that, he realized with a sinking heart. Whatever momentum and initiative his surprise attack had gained for him was now gone, and his captors' countermove was already up and running. Trying to escape now would do nothing but get him and a whole bunch of Trofts killed.
[Merrick Moreau Broom, I would have words with him,] an amplified Troft voice called from somewhere down the corridor.
Merrick sighed. It was over, all right. [Merrick Moreau Broom, he hears you,] he called back.
[Your captivity, you cannot end it this way,] the disembodied voice said. [Your cell, you will remain in it. Punishment for your actions, it will be not be given to you.]
Merrick pursed his lips. He already knew that his attempt had failed. But maybe the Trofts didn't. In that case, maybe he could still wangle a concession or two out of them. [The restraints, I do not want them,] he called. [Your pledge to not impose them on me, I seek it.]
There was a short silence. [Your pledge to not attempt escape, I seek it in return.]
Merrick felt his stomach tighten around his alien meal. His life literally depended on him finding a way to eventually get out of here. There was no way he could give the Troft that kind of promise.
Unless he did so knowing full well that he was lying.
Only he couldn't. Not just because it was unethical, but because a lie like that could come back to haunt him in a big and devastating way. Unless he could guarantee that his next escape attempt was successful, breaking his word would not only bring harsh reprisals but would forever eliminate any chance of making future deals
with his captors.
He hunched his shoulders, feeling a brief ache from one of his still tender muscle groups. On the other hand, if he was clever, maybe he could have this both ways. [My pledge not to attempt escape until the Games, I give it,] he offered.
There was another pause. [Your pledge, I accept it,] the Troft said. [The restraints, until then they will not be used. Soldiers: the restraints, you will remove them from the prisoner's cell.]
Merrick eased an eye around the door jamb. Down the corridor, at least twenty armored Trofts had emerged from doorways, their lasers at the ready, while another smaller group of unarmed aliens marched in single file down the center of the hallway toward Merrick's cell. Merrick stepped away from the door, moving to the side of the room and placing his back against the wall. He kept his hands at his sides, but made sure his thumbs were resting on the fingertip laser triggers.
The caution proved unnecessary. In complete silence the Trofts unfastened the restraints from the bed and tucked them under their arms. Then they collected their injured and unconscious comrades, and the whole bunch retreated through the doorway.
And as the last Troft left the cell, Anya walked in. "What are you doing here?" Merrick asked, frowning.
"I brought you this," she said, holding out a small vial containing a light brown liquid. "It will aid in your healing process."
"Thanks, but the doctor already gave me stuff for that," Merrick reminded her.
"This will help more," she said. "Also, I have been sent to stay with you."
"Oh, no," Merrick said firmly, belatedly noticing the small bag slung over her shoulder and the bedroll bandoleered across her back. "No, no. This place is barely big enough—" He raised his voice. "This place is barely big enough for me," he shouted out into the corridor as he returned to the doorway. [This woman, she cannot—]
He broke off as the door slammed shut in his face.
For a moment he glared at the dull metal, wondering briefly how long it would take to slag the lock with his antiarmor laser. Unfortunately, there was no point in trying. If he wrecked this cell, they'd just find somewhere else to move him.