“Understood, sir,” Barrington said, trying without success to read what was going on behind Santores’s eyes. “I presume, then, that you’ve found another option?”
For a moment Santores’s eyes held Barrington’s. Then, to Barrington’s surprise, the commodore’s gaze drifted away. “You know, it’s really quite interesting,” he said meditatively. “I’ve been reading up on Cobra Worlds history, and it’s remarkable how often the Moreau family has ended up at or near the flashpoint of some critical moment.”
“It’s been the same with my branch of the family,” Barrington murmured, a shiver running up his back. “Am I to understand that they’re about to be the flashpoint again?”
“We’re three ships against an entire planet, Captain,” Santores reminded him. “Several planets, actually. We can’t bring Lorne Broom in for a week of interrogation against the wishes of a hostile government. We need for the government in question to voluntarily cede us that authority, or to make a flex-wrapped case to that government as to why we need to invoke martial law. And to bring that about—” His lips compressed. “Things may get a bit unpleasant.”
Barrington took a careful breath. “That’s the real reason I’m going to Hoibe’ryi’sarai, isn’t it? You don’t really care about Jody Broom and her recorder. You just want me out of the way so that I can’t object to what’s about to happen.”
“It’s for your own good, Captain,” Santores said. “Both for your career, and for your standing with your patron.”
“And if I refuse to be shunted to the side so that Lij Tulu has free rein to play with his MindsEye toy?”
“Walk carefully, Captain Moreau,” Santores warned, his voice and words suddenly gone formal. “The consequences of disobeying a direct order is something even your patron would be unable to remedy.”
“I don’t disobey, sir,” Barrington said, matching his tone. “I merely appeal the order in the strongest terms possible.”
“And that appeal is denied,” Santores said. “Never forget, Captain, that you’re not the only one with a patron. Mine also demands certain results. And he will have them.”
And whoever Santores’s patron was, he was probably higher on the political food chain than Barrington’s was. “Then I’ll content myself with pointing out that martial law is a twin-ended torch,” he said. “If we end up at war with these people, we might as well have stayed home.”
“I’m aware of that, Captain,” Santores said. “But whatever happens, at least you’ll be clear of any repercussions. That should keep you out of trouble with your patron.”
“My patron is not so easily beguiled,” Barrington warned. “And as long as we’re talking about trouble, remember that sending me into Troft space just to get me out of your way will reduce your fighting force here by a full third. That’s not a good position for any commander to be in.”
“If our ships’ weaponry is needed, we’ll have already lost,” Santores said heavily. “The decision has been made, Captain. My order stands.”
“Yes, sir.” Barrington straightened to full attention. “With your permission, Commodore, I’ll return to the Dorian and prepare for our departure.”
“Very good, Captain,” Santores said, just as formally. “And content yourself with the fact that things seldom turn out as badly as one anticipates.”
A minute later, Barrington was again striding down the corridor, his heart aching with anger and frustration and dread. Santores was right, of course. Things were seldom as bad as expected. Sometimes, they were better.
Sometimes, they were much, much worse.
CHAPTER FOUR
Merrick Broom had been through a war. He’d seen destruction and violence on a scale he’d never imagined. He’d seen men and women killed and maimed, soldiers and civilians alike. He’d been injured himself, badly, and in some ways was still not fully recovered. Even if a full healing somehow managed to happen, he knew there were physical and emotional scars that would be with him for the rest of his life.
Given all that, life aboard a Troft slave ship turned out to be almost like a vacation.
Not a perfect vacation, of course. Not the kind he’d gone on with his family when he was a boy, relaxing and comfortable and carefree. For one thing, it was hot and cramped down here at the lowest part of the ship. There was also the engines’ low and pervasive rumbling, which had just enough random variation in it that his brain could never quite learn to ignore it. The food, sleeping, and sanitary facilities were wildly inadequate for the sixty men and women who eventually ended up being crowded into the narrow spaces.
And as for his fellow travelers—
“Hey!” a deep voice growled from behind him. “You—Merk. You’re in my spot.”
Reflexively, Merrick curled his hands into fingertip laser firing position. Consciously, he uncurled them again. It was Dyre, of course. It was always Dyre.
“Merk!”
Not turning around, Merrick lifted a hand in silent acknowledgment.
“Yeah, put your wobble hand down and get your squatter out of there,” Dyre growled. “You’re in my spot.”
Merrick lifted his eyes from his shallow bowl to the slender woman seated across the narrow table from him. Anya Winghunter was gazing back, her pale eyes locked on his, her bright blond hair almost glowing in its contrast with her slightly darkened skin. Her lips parted a couple of millimeters, but she didn’t speak.
But then, she didn’t have to. She and Merrick had already been over this territory a hundred times, and they both knew what he had to do.
Which wasn’t to say that either of them liked it.
“I said move.”
A dozen sarcastic retorts flashed into Merrick’s mind. Once again, he forced it all back. The men and women of Anya’s world spoke an odd dialect, and while he was mostly able to understand it, he had a long way to go before he could speak it without drawing unwelcome attention. Anya had suggested early on that their safest course would be to pretend he was mute, and he’d reluctantly gone along with her reasoning.
“Merk—”
“Give him a moment,” Anya interrupted, her voice and expression stern as she stared up over Merrick’s shoulder. “His hearing is not so good.”
“He’s in my spot,” Dyre repeated.
Merrick clamped down on his teeth as he stood up and started working one leg out from under the table, trying not to jostle either of the two men sitting beside him on the long bench. There were no assigned seats, of course. Not that Dyre would have cared if there were. Merrick and Anya had tried several different spots over the course of the past few meals, and Dyre had claimed every single one of Merrick’s choices as his.
“Come on. Come on.”
Neither of the men beside Merrick was giving him so much as a millimeter of extra space, either, which made it twice as awkward. Either they were afraid of Dyre, or else they agreed with his assessment that Merrick was the person to pick on during this trip. Maneuvering carefully, trying to avoid kicking anyone, Merrick got one leg over the bench and was finally able to turn around.
And since there wasn’t much room between the bench and the wall, he found himself looking up into Dyre Woodsplitter’s glowering face.
Dyre was a big man, a good fifteen centimeters taller than Merrick, with a broad-shouldered fighter’s physique that filled out even the extra-large version of the slaves’ standardized gray jumpsuit. His hair wasn’t quite as blond as Anya’s, but it wasn’t far behind. As far as Merrick had been able to tell from their brief interactions, the man’s emotions had just two settings: silent brooding and loud anger.
So far that anger hadn’t actually overflowed into physical violence. But it never seemed far from the edge. The big man had joined the transport ship a week after the slaves from the Qasama invasion force had been put aboard, and for whatever reason he’d taken an instant dislike to Merrick.
“I’m sure he apologizes,” Anya continued. “We will find another place.”
“Just him,” Dyre said, not taking his eyes off Merrick. “You can stay where you are.”
“I choose to go with him.”
“And I choose that you don’t.” Dyre jabbed a finger toward the far end of the table. “Go. Now.”
There was nothing to do but obey. Merrick turned and picked up his bowl, sending a questioning look at Anya as he did so. Her face was puckered, but she gave a small confirming nod in the direction Dyre had indicated. Merrick nodded back, and with bowl in hand he headed down the line of other diners. He’d never liked bullies, and it galled him like a festering sore to have to back down in front of this one.
But he had no choice. Standing up to Dyre would probably precipitate a fight, and exposing even a hint of his Cobra strength and reflexes could prove fatal, not only to Merrick but also to Anya and the other slaves. For now, he had to swallow his pride, keep a low profile, and wait until this voyage ended and they reached Anya’s village.
Where he would do something. He still didn’t know exactly what.
He found an empty place near the end of the table, across from a couple and their five-year-old daughter. He worked his way between the men on either side of the narrow gap—again, without any cooperation from them—and sat down. Trying to ignore the sudden conversational silence that had settled around him, he returned to his meal.
It wasn’t supposed to have been like this. When Commander Ukuthi, the Troft in charge of the Balin’ekha’spmi contingent on Qasama, had come to Merrick with this plan it had looked a lot more promising. Ukuthi had told him about Anya’s people, apparently the survivors of another lost human colony, whom the Drim’hco’plai demesne had found and enslaved. Many of those slaves were tasked with fighting each other for the amusement of their owners, Anya and Ukuthi had told him, while others worked as house or outwork slaves.
But when the Drims had suddenly announced that all the slaves they’d sold to other Troft demesnes were to be immediately returned, Ukuthi had suspected their demesne-lord was up to something sinister. Given the sometimes intense rivalry between the demesnes—and probably given the Balin demesne-lord’s reluctance to stick his own neck out on this one—Ukuthi had come to Merrick and asked him to join with the returning slaves and find out what the Drims were planning. Merrick had tentatively agreed, provided Ukuthi got him some disguised combat and survival gear and added a few combat-suited Qasamans to the infiltration team.
Only it hadn’t worked out that way. The battle that the Drim commander had expected to be the final blow against Qasaman resistance had been turned suddenly and violently against him, and in a fit of frustrated rage he’d ordered that Ukuthi’s two slaves—Merrick and Anya—be handed over to him immediately instead of waiting to join the rest of the group being collected from the other Balin slave owners. Ukuthi had tried to argue the point, but he’d had no choice but to give in.
Which had left Merrick and Anya unceremoniously dumped aboard this transport with no preparation, no planning, and no equipment
And no allies.
The oddest thing about the whole situation, to Merrick’s way of thinking, was that none of those setbacks seemed to matter to Anya. She had accepted Merrick’s unexpected lone-wolf status without comment or qualm, simply and calmly starting him on an intensive private training course on her culture, ethos, and the parameters of slavehood.
At times he wondered whether she truly understood the magnitude of the task Ukuthi had dropped in his lap. To figure out what the Drims were up to, they were first going to have to escape her village, then infiltrate whatever garrison the Drims had monitoring that batch of humans, and then probably find a way off-planet to wherever the main work on the project was being done.
Merrick had seen what the Qasamans could do. With half a dozen of them at his side, he was pretty sure they could have made a respectable showing of themselves.
But by himself?
“Daddy?” a soft voice murmured into his brooding.
He looked up. The girl was staring across the table at him, her face a mixture of fascination and fear. Merrick gave her an encouraging smile—
“Leave him be, Gina,” the girl’s mother admonished her, making no attempt to keep her voice low. “Just leave him be.”
“But his hair—”
“It’s a different tribe,” the girl’s father put in, his tone warning her to drop the subject.
“And he doesn’t talk,” her mother added.
The girl subsided. But her eyes remained on Merrick’s hair for another few seconds before she returned her attention to her bowl.
Suppressing a sigh, Merrick returned to his own meal. There was enough variant in the slaves’ hair color that his own light brown didn’t stand out too noticeably. But even in the two weeks he’d been aboard he’d noticed a definite cultural bias among the slaves toward the pure blonds like Anya and Dyre.
How that figured into the culture he didn’t yet know. But it was definitely something he needed to nail down before he and Anya reached her village.
“Mommy? I’m still hungry.”
Merrick looked up again. The girl’s bowl had been scraped clean, but the look of hunger was still in her eyes. He shifted his attention to her father in time to see his lips compress as he replaced her empty bowl with his nearly empty one.
Merrick looked down at his own meager meal. Between the run-in with Dyre and his forced move down the table, he hadn’t made much headway. Ignoring his growling stomach and trying the encouraging smile again, he slid his bowl toward the girl.
She looked up, her eyes brightening. But before she could say anything her father reached across the table and firmly pushed the bowl back toward Merrick. “Thank you,” he said, his voice stiff. “But she is ours to feed. Not yours.”
But she’s just a child, and she’s hungry. Ruthlessly, Merrick forced back the words. He was a mute, and he had to stay a mute.
There was the sound of footsteps far above. Merrick looked up, blinking against a trickle of falling dust, to see a pair of Trofts walking along the catwalk grid three meters above his head. From the heavy tool belts and the grime on their leotards, it was a fair bet they’d just come from some repair work in the engine room and were on their way back to the living areas for their own evening meal.
Unlike the slaves, they would probably get plenty to eat.
He looked back at Gina. She was working on her father’s bowl, carefully scraping every bit of food from it as she had her own. There were two other human children aboard the ship, the products of marriages through the years of their parents’ captivity.
Adult slaves were bad enough. Child slaves made Merrick’s skin crawl.
He looked up again as the two Trofts reached the end of the catwalk, keying his optical enhancers for telescopic as one of the aliens punched in the five-digit code that opened the heavy door at the end. A minute later they were through, closing the door behind them.
Merrick nodded to himself. That was the fifth time over three days that he’d watched Trofts open that door. All of them had used the same code, with no system of personalization or daily rotation.
And to be fair, the simple approach should have been all that was needed. The slaves were way down here, with locked doors in one direction and height and a metal grid in the other. There was no reason for the Trofts to expect any trouble.
Glowering at his bowl, Merrick returned to his meal. For whatever reason of pride or culture, Gina’s parents wouldn’t accept food, even for their daughter, from a dark-haired stranger.
Like hell they wouldn’t.
#
The slave quarters consisted of a pair of long, relatively narrow spaces set on either side of the engine core, tall open areas which Merrick guessed normally did double duty as access corridors and convection heat-flow regulators. During the day, the two spaces were connected around the core’s aft end, with the slaves free to travel back and forth. At night, after the table and benches had been stowed, the slaves were separated, with t
he men bedding down in one side and the women and children in the other.
Merrick had never figured out the purpose of that separation, since the crowded conditions and complete lack of privacy would dampen all but the most serious ardor anyway. His best guess was that it was meant as a punishment, like the just-barely insufficient food being ladled out at each meal. The Drims had been kicked off Qasama, and possibly the Cobra Worlds as well, and someone aboard was looking for a group of humans to take his frustrations out on. The slaves, being the only humans within his reach, had been elected.
Still, the forced separation did make for limited lights-out conversation and a quicker settling down to sleep. Tonight, that was going to work to Merrick’s advantage.
He waited half an hour after his auditory enhancers confirmed the last of the men had settled into the slow breathing pattern of deep sleep. Then, being careful not to disturb those on either side of him, he got up, rolled his sleeping pallet, and tucked it under his right arm. He set a target-lock on the catwalk to give his nanocomputer the range, bent his knees, and jumped. As the top of his leap brought him beneath the catwalk he slipped the fingers of his left hand through the grating, curling and locking the joints in place.
The grate, he’d seen earlier, was made up of meter-square sections secured with bolts at each corner. He lifted his legs and braced his feet against the wall, then unrolled the pallet and laid it across his chest and legs to absorb the droplets of molten metal he was about to create. With four quick shots from his fingertip laser, he cut through the four bolts on one of the sections. Easing the gridwork out of its frame, he lifted it up and over and set it down on the next section, then pushed his pallet though the opening and followed. He replaced the loose section, spot-welded it back in place with four shorter bursts from his lasers, and headed down the catwalk, his pallet again rolled and tucked under his arm.