The Pharaoh Contract

Chapter 15

Corean admired her droneship as it sat cooling in the center of the landing ring. The Sinverguenza was a good little ship; it boasted an autonomous brain, the revenant of a famous Bansh Pilot of several centuries past. It was fast for its size, its systems were thoroughly redundant, and its graceful hull was plated with a lovely pale violet armor.

The ship seemed to be in good condition after its passage down from the orbiting security platforms. The life support indicators showed a full cargo, every coffin in use. The stock would have to be weeded; it always needed to be weeded.

But everything was fine, she was sure. She disliked any joggle in the smooth pleasant flow of her life. Others might seek the life of a slaver for adventure, for the delights of domination, or for even darker reasons.

Not Corean. She was a slaver because it was the most profitable trade open to someone of her background. Wealth insulated her from the terrors of her youth — the dimly remembered time when she could only dream of sufficient food, comfortable shelter, and sanctuary from the press gangs that had roamed Dobravit’s steel warrens, where long ago she had been nothing more than an uncontracted snuffer.

And, of course, her wealth could buy her such wonderful toys: her face, her Moc bondwarrior, the services of beautiful helots. And she had other avenues of pleasure. She valued the sensual delights of a fine meal; she owned several master chefs. She was a connoisseur of the nonlethal chemical pleasures, rich wines from a hundred planets, the infinite varieties of smoke, the rare and subtle psychoactives gathered in the raving jungles of Posset. Her deepest pleasures were taken in her bedroom, and here again her profession served her. She was content with her apartments here on Sook, burrowed deep into the safe bedrock. Her neighbors and fellow slavers were no threat; the Pung who owned and operated the pens kept order. Though her operation was one of the smaller ones in the compound, her facilities were adequate to her purposes.

It pleased her that her good little ship was back safely, with a fat cargo, a cargo that she could exchange for yet another increment of safety.

She stood and stretched. In the screens, a half-dozen Pung guards were cautiously approaching the cooling hull, alert for any sign of trouble, though trouble was unlikely. Trouble was for the incompetent or the unlucky, and she was neither. “Come, Marmo, time to count,” she said.

Marmo rose from his station in the corner of the command center and hovered on his floater. Her aide functioned with the aid of numerous antique prostheses, though it made him look like a poorly designed droid, bizarrely patched here and there with human flesh. He offended Corean’s eyes, but he was not only a valuable adjunct, he was the closest thing to a friend that she permitted herself, so she did not insist that he alter his eccentric appearance to a more pleasing one.

As they left the command center, her Moc bondwarrior paced behind, silent but for the scrape of its claws against the steel deck.

Even the muscles of his eyes refused to function at first, but gradually they recovered, and Ruiz Aw was able to bring his surroundings into focus.

He lay naked in a deep metal trough that was unnervingly reminiscent of a morgue tray. A broad band of monoplast fit snugly across his chest. The sides rose above his line of sight, so that he could see nothing but the metal of the ceiling, set with bright glowstrips and uncomfortably close. A net of unbreakable monoline covered the trough. The interior was inlaid with cleansing jets and sensors.

The only sound was the faint hum of ventilators.

He concentrated on recovering the use of his body. Gradually it began to respond — a twitch here, a tremble there. Ruiz had time to begin thinking. He listed the positive aspects of his situation: He was not dead, he was not in an interrogation cell, he was on the way to finding out who the poachers were. When he considered the negatives, he was momentarily depressed by the length of that list. The stunfield… that was the backbreaker; his expensive cerebral shunts had not saved him from being caught. A ghost memory tugged at him for a moment — had he managed to do something before succumbing? No, no, he decided, the stunfield had been much too good, ferreting out the strand of his consciousness where it hid.

Why, then, did he feel that twinge of anxiety? It was reminiscent of a feeling that he’d had after his rare but notable binges, the suspicion that he’d done something memorably foolish — something that he couldn’t remember, but that others certainly would.

He started to flex his muscles, as inconspicuously as possible, trying to move blood and feeling back into them. Prudence demanded that Ruiz be ready if a course of action offered itself.

Ruiz heard the first feeble groans and whimpers from the rest of the cargo rising into the air on both sides of his trough. He decided it was safe to move, and he found he could do it. He rubbed the dried discharge from his eyes, and concentrated on remaining calm. His fellow slaves were making no effort to do so. Ruiz heard a chorus of fear all about him, as the others discovered their alien surroundings, wailing, shrieking, cursing, praying. As their muscles recovered from the stunfield, the sounds of thumping and flailing from the metal troughs became deafening. Their new surroundings didn’t correspond in even the slightest detail to the Pharaohan version of the Elysian Fields, where they all had expected to wake after the success of the phoenix play. Would the gods trap them first in unresponsive bodies, then in steel coffins? Would heaven smell like piss and vomit?

As time passed, the curses began to outweigh the prayers, at least in volume.

Ruiz began to join in, not wishing to seem unnaturally calm, in case the cargo hold was under observation. His natural inclination was to curse, but he prayed instead, hoping to present a docile affect. He writhed about in as panicky a manner as he could manage without risking injury to his long-inactive muscles.

He became so involved in his performance that he almost missed the first touch of the trank gas. But when he noticed, he began to pray with less fervor, and gradually feigned quiescence, though the gas was too unsophisticated to defeat his conditioning. Still, the gas imbued him with a certain artificial optimism, and he had to make an effort to retain a realistic degree of gloominess.

Soon the hold was quiet again.

With a slight lurch and the whine of servos, Ruiz’s pan began to move. It slid slowly forward, then began to tilt. In moments Ruiz was standing upright, leaning forward against the slight elasticity of the monoline net. He could now see that his pan was part of a transport rack made up of a half-dozen similar containers. Across the corridor were tiers of identical racks, still horizontal.

Some of the other captives in his rack had also sagged against the net and were making happy faces at Ruiz. He mugged back at them and awaited developments.

Somewhere a hatch cracked, and Ruiz sensed the pressure increase, as a thicker richer air flooded in. He heard the footsteps a moment before the inspection party entered the hold.

There were three: a human woman, who seemed to be in charge, a human man, and a Mocrassar bondwarrior. The sight of the Moc extinguished any immediate hope of escape. Its size was unusual, even by Moc standards: the enameled designs on its grasping limbs spoke of great age and high lineage. The immense insectoid wore a soiled Elizabethan doublet, modified to fit its six-limbed body. Ruiz could tell that the crusted fabric had once been fine. The Moc’s midlimb manipulators were fitted with built-in energy tubes. It stank like a barrel of drowned cockroaches.

The man was a much-cyborged specimen, his legless torso mated to a floater console, one arm replaced by a multipurpose weapons mount — now equipped with a nerve lash. His skull was a metal carapace; only below the level of his nose did his face remain flesh. A segmented metal collar replaced his neck. He was a holodrama picture of a pirate, too colorfully authentic to be quite believable. Still, he twitched the nerve lash in a practiced manner.

But after the first moment it was the woman who captured all of Ruiz’s attention. She was tall; she possessed the unremarkable perfection of form available to any pangalac with the means — slender, with small high breasts and long smooth muscles. Where the simple white shipsuit exposed her skin, it was the rich color of old ivory, with an almost iridescent polish. Her hair hung down her back in a businesslike braid, heavy as a black snake. It was her face that made her unforgettable. Ruiz recognized the hand of Arlaian the Younger, that master lineamentor, whose works commanded vast fees. The eyes were a simple blue, the brows dark and slightly tilted, the lips full, colored a natural coral. But from these unpretentious components, Arlaian had formed one of his great masterpieces. It was a face that spoke of power, above all else, power untempered by any soft emotion, power that was its own justification. It was a face that demanded worship, and Ruiz felt a sudden surge of sensation in his loins, a reaction that he swiftly damped. In his present state of undress, such a reaction would be a fatal giveaway, evidence that he was relatively immune to the gas. At the thought of what might then happen, Ruiz had to exert himself to prevent his testicles from trying to withdraw into his body.

Ruiz’s trough was near the far end of the rack, so he had time to observe the trio as they moved along the rack slowly, discussing the other specimens.

She had a voice like a bell, sweet and high and precise. She spoke the pangalac trade language, with a trace of Dobravit accent. “Marmo,” she said, addressing the cyborged pirate, “you’ll have to spend some time on your grabfield algorithm. The bubble is snatching too many by-standers. It’s a serious loose end; the League catchboats are never so sloppy. We don’t want to give rise to any new religious movements, do we? Pretty soon the peasants will be crowding the stages, hoping to be taken to paradise, and we’ll have a destructive overload. Besides, why collect trash?” She stopped before a pan containing a peasant with the facial tattoos and the heavy muscles of a journeyman stonecutter. “This one, for example. See his tattoos? Of what use is he to me? Ours is a high-ticket trade. This one isn’t even worth processing.” The peasant lolled his face against the netting, smiling vacantly and making pawing gestures at her.

She studied him dispassionately. She flipped a safety cover off a switch and pressed. The interior of the pan flared white. A moment later the ashes trickled through the floor grating and were gone.

“I’ll give it my full attention, Corean, soon as we have these safely in the pens,” the pirate replied, in a rich booming bass. She gave him a glance, then reached to a pressplate on his console. When he spoke again his voice was markedly smaller. “The Bansh brain refuses to do the culling — you know how intractable it can be, in certain respects — so that I must run the algorithm on the auxiliary systems. Another difficulty is that if we make the bubble too small we run the risk of losing some portion of the troupe or its equipment.”

“Do your best, then,” she said, moving on.

Marmo rubbed his mouth with the back of his one flesh hand. “Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps I can develop a utility that recognizes tattoo patterns. We have a fairly extensive data base to work with. That way the culling could be done before the bubble closes.”

She nodded.

Before they reached Ruiz’s pan, two more of the captives had been burned, and Ruiz found it hard to maintain his guise of innocent idiocy. He could smell the woman’s perfume, a sweet edge cutting through the odor of burned flesh, the various stinks of the hold, and the overpowering musk of the Moc. In a sudden perceptual inversion, that flowery scent seemed to epitomize death, or at least death of the pointless and unexpected sort. Although he knew there was nothing he could do, his hindbrain howled and gibbered for escape. When she stopped before him, he was almost paralyzed with fear. He struggled to show nothing more than a dazed and affable curiosity. He saw a flicker of distaste cross that magnificent face, and then some other, less definable emotion — but she didn’t reach for the destruct switch.

“Another cull,” said Marmo. “A snake oil peddler, by his marks. Probably brainburned and diseased.” And Marmo flipped open the switch cover.

Corean struck Marmo’s hand away with an effortless flick. It happened so quickly that Ruiz had no time to react.

After a very long moment, she turned away, saying, “Mark this one for my personal coffle. Perhaps we’ll make a comfort boy out of him; he has an interesting look to him. Salable, or I’m no judge of stock. Anything to cover the overhead, eh?” She reached through the net and marked his shoulder with a spot of blue dye, evidently an identifying mark.

Relief shuddered through Ruiz. Still alive, still alive…. He was in no immediate danger from the death net; it would not trigger until he had been positively identified as a League agent by his captors. He’d be allowed to go on collecting information for as long as it was safe.

His relief lasted until the inspecting party reached the far end of the hold. He sensed a sudden crackling tension in the hold and he heard the woman Corean curse, a short burst of invective in the gutter argot of Dobravit. Ruiz rolled his head around on the net, so he could see.

She reverted to pangalac. “What the hell is that?” she hissed, pointing into the pan at the end of the rack.

Ruiz could see a single knee pressed against the net, an unusually smooth and pretty knee. For some reason the sight resurrected in Ruiz that anxiety he had felt on awakening.

“It’s a medical limpet, I think,” the pirate said, in uncertain tones.

“I can see that! What’s it doing on my ship? It’s pangalac! What’s it doing wrapped around the neck of some Pharaohan slut?”

Ruiz was abruptly certain he had made a massive mistake somewhere during the journey. He struggled to remember, but the trank gas interfered with his thinking just enough that the memory eluded him. What had he done?

The pirate made no answer to Corean’s perhaps rhetorical question. “So,” she snapped, “query the ship, you idiot.”

“At once,” said Marmo. He fumbled with a touchboard that flipped up on his floater console. When he looked up he said, “The ship is unhelpful, Corean. When it sent motiles to separate the Bidderum cargo from its gear, the woman was as you see. Her life functions were much more marginal then, however, and the ship decided to allow the limpet to remain with her.”

“Is it lying, Marmo?”

The pirate shrugged. “Well… I can’t say. The Bansh was a great womanizer, by its own account, and the woman’s appealing. The Bansh is so old and so well armored into itself that I would consider it capable of such a lie. Perhaps it attached the limpet… but I don’t know where it would have gotten such a thing.”

Corean turned cold eyes on the cyborg. “This is an ambiguity that I will not tolerate. Find out, Marmo.”

Corean slapped a touchplate at the side of the pan and the net withdrew. She reached in. Her hand came back into view carrying the limpet, writhing, its tendrils tipped with red. Ruiz’s heart squeezed, for reasons he didn’t understand. The pretty knee quivered, then relaxed.

“You’ll make it your job to get to the bottom of this, Marmo. And we’ll have to stop burning the culls; we’d better keep them until we know who put the thing on her. Meanwhile, keep her with the others. She’s handsome, for a Pharaohan; we’ll find an appropriate use for her.” Corean threw the limpet to the deck, crushed it under her heel.

The limpet expired with a brief mournful buzz.

Ruiz looked away before his interest could be noticed.

The rack began to move. As it slid out of the droneship onto a donut-wheeled transporter, he saw the next rack tipping out for inspection.

Outside, Corean fixed Marmo with malevolent eyes. “It’s the pretty snake oil man. He has a dangerous face.”

“I’ll kill him immediately,” said Marmo in subdued tones.

“Idiot! What if he’s a League agent? What if he carries the death net?”

“We’ll freeze him down and put him on a long-hauler.”

“No. We need to know more. Watch him. Maybe he’ll show us what he is.”

The landing ring was heavily hardened, so that Ruiz Aw could see nothing but concrete and steel, lit by glaring blue spotlights. The roof was a furled iris of black metal. Standing about the ship were dozens of small gray humaniform aliens, members of a species not immediately familiar to Ruiz Aw. They were squat and powerfully muscled, with loose warty skin, and a crest of faded magenta quills atop their broad flat heads. They wore ragged uniforms of great former splendor and carried themselves with careful dignity. Ruiz searched his memory. Pung? The name seemed right, but he could recall no details.

They released him from the transport rack after carefully leashing him with a nerve collar. They marked his palm with a temporary stock number and conducted him to an elevator, which dropped deep into the depths of the compound, to a solitary cell carved from the bedrock. Instead of bars, a crystal plate hummed and snapped in the doorway, a constant edgy sound. Repellent waveforms made it difficult to approach the door, and Ruiz knew that touching the crystal would bring excruciating pain. It was a simple secure setup, and Ruiz’s professional approval was aroused, to his personal irritation. The only furnishings were a bed of softstone, a nutrition tap, and a drain in one corner. They gave him no clothing, but the temperature in the cell had been set to the human comfort range.

As the effects of the trank gas wore off, Ruiz finally remembered his actions immediately after the snatch. He was overcome by panic, which he allowed to rage unchecked for a therapeutic interval. How, he asked himself, how could he have been so foolish and impulsive as to revive the phoenix? How?

Eventually, he reasserted control. Nothing connected him to the phoenix. The rest of his pangalac technology, like all League covert gear, had been designed to resist analysis, to reject fingerprints, and to gene-scramble telltale tissue. Presumably it was working, or he would already be identified as the interloper. Even if he were to be identified as a pangalac, his case wasn’t hopeless; his shield persona, that of a minor free-lance slaver, would survive any but the most skillful brainpeel.

If his captors knew who and what he was, then he was already dead. But it served no useful purpose to consider that particular possibility, so he must put it from his mind and act as though he had a fair chance of survival. True, he was without his usual resources, but certainly his case might be worse. After an hour had passed, he grew bored and then curious about the other prisoners.

He stood as close to the doorway as comfort allowed, looking across the bright corridor to the opposite cell. At random intervals the other cell’s closure field fell briefly into phase with his own, and he could see his fellow prisoner, the senior of the conjurors who had performed at Bidderum. The conjuror’s hard black eyes fixed on Ruiz’s with an expression so malevolent that Ruiz stepped back, then away, out of sight.

More hours passed. Ruiz roamed the confines of his cell, using the few amenities, always conscious of the possibility of observation. With that in mind, he acted the terrified primitive — but one capable of restraining his hysteria. Ruiz was not anxious to be labeled a nonteachable. He’d been too impressed with Corean’s casual culling of her slaves.

Ruiz could find no memory of a slaver named Corean — not surprising, in spite of the large amounts of credit that Ruiz had spent on datasoaking. There were, after all, countless slavers among the pangalac worlds. But not many could afford a face like hers, and Ruiz surmised that it was an unregistered work of the great lineamentor who had carved it. That in itself was an indication of the wealth and power of Corean; vast amounts of both would be required to coerce an artist of that stature to work anonymously. It was a somewhat intimidating thing to muse on.

When two of the gray Pung guards came for him, he was feigning sleep on the softstone bunk. He heard the snap and rattle of the charged doorplate die away, then the sigh of pneumatics as the door whisked up.

Ruiz heard the cautious plop of the guards’ large discoid feet as they entered the cell, and he smelled the faint fish-oil scent of their bodies.

“Sleeping like a sprat,” one muttered in the pangalac trade language.

“As you must have been when you put him in here,” the other said in a sharper tone. “The bitch gave definite instructions: blue mark in solitary cells, the rest in the Old Trari Tree paddock. You keep pluckheading around like this, she’ll have your quills.”

Ruiz heard a hiss and rattle; he assumed it signaled offense. Ruiz opened one eye slightly and saw the first guard swelling his throat sac. “Pluckhead, am I?” it shrilled. “My quills are thoroughly attached. See? The blue mark is on him, as I told you. The bitch simply changed her mind. And anyway, there’s no harm this way. As long as the special stock stays in cells, no harm. Now, if I’d gotten it the other way around, as you did last Windday, then I’d be concerned. Have you forgotten the episode?”

“How was I to know the muckling little widge was a cannibal?”

Further acrimony was prevented by Ruiz, who appeared to awaken. “Demons!” he shrieked in Pharaohan; then he leaped into the corner, where he pressed himself trembling against the stone.

The guards rolled their protruding eyeballs at each other. The larger one shook out a net and bared its teeth in what was intended to be a reassuring manner. “Come along quietly, gangly norp,” it said, motioning toward the doorway.

Ruiz observed that energies snapped and whispered along the strands of the net. Not wishing to be stunned, he peeled himself off the wall, gathered his dignity, and left the cell, mugging fearfully.

They moved through what seemed miles of subterranean corridors, before coming out into the daylight. The walls were still high, the way narrow, closed over with buzzing snapfields, but Ruiz turned up his face to be bathed in the sun. From a hundred clues — the hot light, the pull of gravity, the richness of the air, the smell of salt, the fragrance of the unseen vegetation — Ruiz knew with reasonable certainty that he was on Sook, a notorious refuge for pirates and slavers and an assortment of other monsters. He felt a thrill of expectation and fear.

If he could somehow escape and launch a message torpedo to the League’s Dilvermoon headquarters, his job would be finished and the mission-imperative that drove him would dissolve, taking the death net with it.

But it was far more likely, he thought, that the net would instead take him to his death.