The Pharaoh Contract

Chapter 1

In the dim red light of the Beaster Level, pleasure seekers pressed against Ruiz Aw, a sea of wild eyes, wet mouths, sweat-slick bodies. He moved cautiously through the clamor and stink. Confusion protected him. In this grinding jostle, who would notice Ruiz Aw, who would report him to his employers?

The thought of discovery sent a shudder through him, raised goose bumps on his skin. The Art League’s inquisitors would ask, “Ruiz Aw, tell us. Just what were you doing on Dilvermoon? What mischief brought you to the hold of Nacker the Teach, notorious bootleg minddiver?” And, “Ruiz Aw, how did you happen to be there so soon after receiving your net? Tell us, Ruiz Aw.” Ruiz could conceive of no explanation that would satisfy those grim personages.

He imagined he could feel the death net behind his eyes, tangled around his mind, squeezing.

They can’t be everywhere, Ruiz told himself. And: It’s too late to back out. The thought echoed: Too late, too late, too late.

But no one pointed, no one shouted his name. The tightness in his shoulders eased slightly as he approached the freekill sectors. Once in that concealing dimness, away from the robot monitors that crawled the ceilings of the tourist areas, he would feel safer. There, where blood might legally be spilled, he could cope.

He paused at the radiant point of a half-dozen corridors, where a large domed hall provided space for the herds to congregate.

In the half-light of the overhead glowstrips, the hall seethed. Beasters walked, staggered, crawled, swaggered, hopped. Every near-variant of humanity was represented. Everywhere pointed ears quivered, teeth glinted, fur grew luxuriantly in gardens of human flesh. Gleaming selenium scarabs — the personaskeins, the devices that filled each beaster’s brain with the chosen beast — clung to the base of each skull. No other adornment was permitted on the Level, no garment that might conceal a weapon.

Ruiz watched the passing faces with sidelong glances, concealing his curiosity, fascinated by the animal lusts and fears and rages that twisted the human features. His own personaskein, set at legal minimum, showed him the shadow-shapes that lived within the beasters, ghostly colorless outlines that swirled about the human shapes. That tall, rawboned old man with the carefully coifed mane of white hair, for example: What had moved him to abandon his executive desk for the uncertainties of the Beaster Level, to play the noble stag? And what of that well-kept young woman? She was skillfully painted with fashionable body toners, she wore her thick orange hair in a love knot, and her sharp little fingernails were buffed into crimson perfection. She wore the persona of a great serpent; she stood waiting in the shadows and in her eyes was a slow careful hunger.

Nearing the far side of the open space, Ruiz observed a pack of wolfheads lounging against the bulkhead, a dozen men and women with wide yellow eyes, facial hair in grizzled tufts, and furry bodies as hard and narrow as slats.

As Ruiz approached, the pack leader stepped forward, eyes glowing with interest.

Ruiz suppressed annoyance. The wolfhead smiled, revealing long canines and a thick red tongue.

Ruiz masked his face with indifference, though his gait stiffened almost imperceptibly. He passed under the biolume sign that flashed pangalac law ends here into the darker corridor beyond. Ruiz felt movement behind him as the pack gathered.

Leroe called the brethren together, making the snuffling sound of inquiry.

“Meat goes into the killing grounds,” he said, and growled, a soft sound, full of pleasant anticipation.

“Dangerous?” asked Camilla, his mate, second in the pack. “It moved with great confidence; it smelled of much purpose and little fear.”

Leroe snarled, and Camilla edged back, wary of his strength. “Perhaps the meat is too stupid to be afraid,” Leroe said. “It is only one, soft with humanity. Can we fail to feed?”

All around him the pack expressed agreement. Red tongues licked black lips; eager whines echoed in the corridor.

Leroe fell silent for a long moment, reviewing his impressions of the meat. His man-mind was not so deeply submerged under the personaskein that he forgot Camilla’s intelligence, greater than his own. So he considered further, as carefully as hunger and bloodlust allowed.

The meat was a tall man, heavy shouldered, coppery skinned, with short black hair. Muscle flowed smoothly on that rangy frame. The meat had ignored Leroe as he passed, but Leroe thought he had detected a glint of challenge in the meat’s hard eyes.

And the tall man’s skein was set very low, so that he projected only a suggestion of inhumanity, some sort of predatory creature. But he lacked the face, the face that all beasters wore, a gelmask twitching and shuddering in a storm of animal impulses.

Leroe decided. The meat might struggle, the meat might flee, but the pack was strong and swift, and the meat was only one man, unaugmented in ferocity. How dangerous could he be?

“We hunt.” Leroe pulled his lips back into an eager happy snarl, and the pack howled with delight.

Leroe turned and loped into the dimness, following the scent. Behind him the pack scampered.

Ruiz heard the pack, faint in the distance, and he accelerated into a striding run. The wolfheads would never catch him, but he worried that they might attract other predators. So he ran, keeping to the darkest side of the corridors, wasting just a little of his breath on curses for Nacker. The minddiver lived deep in the freekill sector of the Beaster Level, where none but the most fanatic of beasters and a few suicidal or fatally ignorant tourists might be encountered. But at least the hold was far from prying eyes, and so, for the most part, Ruiz was satisfied with its location — except when he was forced to run like a deer to his destination, when he would much prefer to stroll in easy comfort.

At the end of one long dim hallway, Ruiz paused for a moment, to hear a quick patter of feet. Shadows flickered behind him. Startled by the pack’s speed, Ruiz picked up his own pace, lengthening his stride and pumping great gusts of air through his lungs. The pursuit dropped back, and Ruiz smiled.

Soon, he thought, soon he would arrive at the minddiver’s bulkhead — with plenty of time to go through the lengthy identification procedures that Nacker required.

At that moment, a throat-torn corpse flopped from a lightless niche directly into Ruiz’s path. Ruiz’s reflexes carried him soaring over the sudden obstacle. All might still have been well except for the blood that formed a slick just where Ruiz’s foot touched down. And even then, Ruiz might have gone down with minimal damage, had the tigerheart not come bounding forth after her kill, slamming into Ruiz before she noticed his presence.

Ruiz sprawled, flailing, his left leg twisting under him at an awkward angle. He felt the reinforced cartilage of his knee tear; an instant later the pain seared through him.

Ruiz rolled away, expecting to feel the tigerheart’s claws. But when he sprang up, he saw that she was intent on retrieving her meal. Her bloody teeth were locked in the nape of the corpse, and she growled deep in her throat, dragging her kill back into the darkness. She watched Ruiz with glittering eyes, her pale hair tangled about her broad flat face. The blood sheeting down the knotty contours of her body was black in the dim light.

Ruiz glided back, ignoring his injured knee. The tigerheart disappeared into her lair and the wet ripping sounds of feeding began. He whirled and ran on, afraid he would hear the sound of the wolfheads at his heels. His gait was no longer his normal skilled drive; now Ruiz ran with a hitch. A knife stabbed through his knee each time his left foot hit the steel deck of the corridor. The pain was bearable for now, but the injury limited his speed. He dared not push beyond a certain point; to do so might cause the total collapse of the joint. The breath no longer pumped effortlessly in Ruiz’s chest, and now his heart thundered and sweat streamed down his straining body. The scent of fear boiled from him. That rich odor would spur the pack on, he thought.

It wasn’t long before he heard the scrabble of clawed feet. With rolling eyes, he searched the empty corridors for waymarks. How much farther could it be to the minddiver’s hold? There! That splash of purple biolume, a graffito in the style of the Longhead Crocs. And there! That twisted post of black iron at the three-way juncture — he remembered that clearly from his last visit.

Ruiz pounded on, heartened. It could be no more than three hundred meters to Nacker’s bulkhead.

He began to believe that the situation would not deteriorate further. Once in the minddiver’s hold, Ruiz could avail himself of the best reconstructive equipment, and his strength could be restored in hours. Ruiz’s face tightened in a grin of exertion and optimism.

Then the pack swooped from a side passage a moment behind Ruiz, breaking into a spontaneous chorus of high-pitched yowls. It came to Ruiz, as he strained to pull away from the eager claws, that the pack had used a shortcut. And why not? Much prey probably came this way.

Before he reached the rotunda that housed Nacker’s ingress, Ruiz managed to gain a few paces on the pack. Still, he would have no time for the entry procedures, would have to fight, would have to find a good spot to get his back against a wall before his knee gave out completely. As the injury worsened and exhaustion made it harder to keep his attention focused, it became more difficult to control the pain. Now each step was a hot spike driven the length of his leg. Almost as distracting as the pain was the grating, slipping sensation in his knee as the cartilage slowly crumbled.

Ruiz burst into the rotunda, which was lit by ceiling strips of glaring blue lume. Ruiz noticed dark patches here and there on the floor, and little piles of gnawed bone. A dozen open corridors led away, but one former corridor, sealed with a blast door, led to the minddiver’s hold. Ruiz fled across the littered steel floor of the rotunda toward it, knees lifting high and breath sobbing in his lungs.

Behind him the pack broke out of the passage and sent up joyous cries.

In the face of this more immediate danger, Ruiz had forgotten his fears of League observation. Accordingly, as he approached the blast door, he bellowed, “It’s Ruiz Aw! Tell Nacker! It’s Ruiz Aw! Let me in!”

Not unexpectedly, there was no immediate response. As he reached the door, he limped to a stop and whirled to face the pack.

They didn’t pounce instantly; instead they spread out in a semicircle around him as he crouched with his back to Nacker’s doors.

The pack was evenly divided between men and women. Where the fur thinned enough to expose skin, no fat diffused the striations of flat wiry muscle. Reinforced fingernails were shaped into knives, and fangs grew to the maximum permitted length. The leader danced back and forth, making little mock rushes, smiling, his yellow eyes gleaming with good humor and anticipation. When he spoke, his voice bubbled from deep in his throat. “You run well, meat,” he said. “Still, your run is over.”

Ruiz spent no breath on replying. If they wasted enough time taunting him, he would regain his wind and Nacker might open up.

But the pack leader was eager. He sprang at Ruiz, claws outstretched, and at almost the same instant three others leaped in.

Ruiz stiffened his hands into blades and struck the leader, crunching his fingertips into the wolfhead’s flat nose, splashing bone splinters upward into the brain. The wolfhead’s flying body stiffened in spasm, and the yellow eyes went dull. With a slam of his left hand, Ruiz guided the corpse to his right, where it smashed two of the other wolfheads aside into the bulkhead.

That left one attacker on the other side. He managed to twist away slightly from her first slash, and her claws scored a triple line across his shoulder instead of laying open his throat, as she had intended. But Ruiz couldn’t avoid her teeth, and she bit into the heavy muscle on the right side of his chest. She brought her knees up, preparing to push away with the mouthful of Ruiz’s flesh that she had captured, and her weight threatened to overbalance Ruiz. For a moment he was sure he would fall beneath the pack.

But he got his good knee under him and pushed back against the wall. In the same movement he slammed both hands to her head, over her pointed ears, and was rewarded by the lovely pop of cracking bone. She shuddered and dropped away.

The undamaged wolfheads were scrambling to regain their feet, and Ruiz sidled a few steps along the wall. “Come,” Ruiz said in low tones, as ferocious as he could make them. “Come.” He bared his own teeth, which, though not as impressive as the wolfheads’ fangs, were still strong and white.

The wolves hesitated for a moment, unsure. Two of their most dangerous packmates had been destroyed, so quickly. But they were only imitation wolves. The personaskeins that moved them were crude simulations, all bloodlust and bravado; they lacked the native caution of real wolves. Ruiz watched the eyes kindle with renewed rage.

The wolfheads moved closer. One female bent over the corpse of the leader, stroking the tangled fur of his face. “Leroe, Leroe,” she said in a small whimpering voice. She closed the staring eyes and licked her bloody hand.

She turned her eyes on Ruiz. He managed a scornful laugh. Her face congested with rage, and she sprang at him. The rest of the pack was unprepared to follow instantly, so Ruiz was able to kill her with a blow to the throat. She writhed on the steel, expiring. “Nacker,” Ruiz called, watching the pack gather its courage again. “Nacker! I’ve got a death net, Nacker. Let me in before the League hears all about you.”

Abruptly the blast door levered in, and Ruiz tumbled into the security lock, landing on his back.

Before the pack could decide to follow him in, two of Nacker’s huge Dirm bondguards stepped into the opening, brandishing nerve lashes. The wolfheads retreated, snarling, and the door closed.

When Ruiz got to his feet, he saw Nacker sitting in his prosthetic floater, under a dome of clear crystal. The minddiver looked like a freak preserved in a bell jar, some unlikely hybrid of sea slug and human. In fact, Nacker was just a man with no muscle tone, or hair, or healthy straight bone. Ruiz had learned that there was no medical necessity for Nacker’s condition. Nacker suffered from phobias that included almost all natural functions; therefore, the minddiver avoided as much as possible all such things as eating, excreting, sweating, breathing.

A net of cranial studs wreathed Nacker’s head. Through these he communicated with the universe and did his work.

The synthesized voice with which he greeted Ruiz was always different from visit to visit. Now it was high and clear, an elf’s voice. “Ruiz Aw. You arrive in an undignified manner.” Nacker’s vaguely formed face was motionless as he spoke, and his eyes were unfocused.

Ruiz took resentful inventory of his hurts. Blood dripped down his chest from the lacerations there, and his knee was swollen to the size of a small pumpkin. “If you lived in a more civilized district, I’d have arrived in better style. And why did you take so long to open up?” Ruiz touched the back of his neck, deactivating the personaskein.

“If I lived where the League could easily reach me, they’d burn me out, as you well know, Ruiz. They think I’m almost as good as the Gencha. We know better, eh? And as to my tardiness, why, I moved as quickly as I could in safety. I’d never deliberately expose you to danger. Or at least danger you couldn’t handle. Anyway, it was most entertaining, watching you at your work.” A sweet laugh rang out.

Nacker’s motives were impossible to fathom, Ruiz thought. Nacker was rumored to be a vastly wealthy being, so it wasn’t just the money Ruiz paid that impelled Nacker to help him. The minddiver seemed to like Ruiz, but what of that? Or perhaps the minddiver hated the Art League and enjoyed tweaking the League’s nose. In any case, it was fortunate that Nacker was willing to perform his indispensable services for Ruiz. Six times before, Ruiz had visited the minddiver, and six times the work had been satisfactory. Nacker was reputed to be trustworthy; Ruiz’s extensive investigations had uncovered no instance in which Nacker had betrayed a client to the League.

“And so,” Nacker continued, “you carry the death net? You wish the standard arrangement? Good. Kaum will conduct you to the infirmary, and after, we’ll begin.” Nacker’s throne floated silently out of the lock.