Cobra Slave-eARC (8 page)

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 the 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.

Thirty seconds later, he was through the door and inside the Troft section of the ship.

For a moment he stood still, listening with full audios to the hum of the engines, fighting against the sudden urge to do something more meaningful than simply steal a little food. If he could slip through the darkness to the heart of the ship and take control—

Then all of them would be dead, because he hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to fly a Troft spaceship. Or even a human one, for that matter. For better or worse, he had no choice but to see this through the way Ukuthi had laid it out for him. He would find some extra food, and he would get back to the slave quarters, and that would be it for tonight.

He took another deep breath, focusing this time on the smell. The kitchen would be the best place to look, but he had no idea where it was, and he could detect no likely aromas that might lead him there.

But there were other possibilities. Taking a final sniff, wondering briefly if anyone had ever proposed adding olfactory enhancements to the Cobras’ repertoire, he started down the darkened corridor.

One turn later, he found what he was looking for: an open door with soft light spilling out. Notching up his hearing, he glided toward it.

It was, as he’d surmised, some kind of engineering monitor station. A lone Troft was sitting in front of a bank of monitors, his back to the door, his posture that of someone in a state of either complete relaxation or utter boredom.

Throwing a quick glance both ways down the corridor, Merrick stepped inside the room. He’d been in Tlossie merchant ships a couple of times, and had noticed that monitor stations usually included a small selection of snacks and drinks for the crewers on duty. If Drim protocol worked the same way…

It did. Just as he’d hoped, there was a small flat case fastened to the wall.

Only instead of being beside the door near Merrick, which was where it was on Tlossie ships, this one was fastened to the left-hand wall, well within the duty crewer’s peripheral vision.

Merrick scowled. This was going to be risky. But the option was to go back empty-handed and spend the rest of the trip watching Gina and the other children stay hungry. Bracing himself, moving as quietly as he could, he eased forward.

He closed to within a meter of the Troft. Then, lifting his right arm, he pointed his little finger at the back of the alien’s head and triggered his stunner. The low-power current arced across the empty space, and with gratifying swiftness the Troft slumped in his seat.

Merrick moved to the alien’s side, feeling his stomach tighten as he activated his opticals’ infrared. But the stunner had worked exactly as it was supposed to: the heat pattern in the Troft’s face showed that he was indeed unconscious. Leaning the chair back, Merrick adjusted the alien into a more comfortable position, the kind a tired and bored crewer might have settled into just before nodding off. With luck, that would be the conclusion the Troft would come to upon awakening, and would decide the better part of valor would be to keep his guilty conscience to himself.

With even more luck, he’d do all that waking and thinking before someone else wandered in and found him. Merrick had no idea how hard it was to wake a Troft from a stunner blast, and he wasn’t anxious to find out.

The snack case was half full of meal bars and bottled drinks. Merrick wasn’t familiar with this particular type of bar, but he knew from years of Cobra Worlds experience that human and Troft metabolisms were close enough that each group could eat any but the most exotic of the others’ food. He selected three of the bars and slipped them inside his jumpsuit, closed the case, and started to leave.

And paused. The Trofts mostly ignored the slaves except when it was time to feed them. But the overhead catwalks saw plenty of traffic. If one of the aliens spotted the children with the bars, there would be serious trouble.

Unless he could turn potential inquiries in the wrong direction.

It took a minute to find a small scratch pad and stylus tucked away in a drawer of the center monitor array. Quickly, he scribbled out a note in the best cattertalk script that he could manage.

The extra food, it is for the children. Hunger, it is not proper for the young to feel it. Secrecy, I beg you to keep it.

He folded the note and stuffed it into his jumpsuit beside the meal bars. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant diversion, he knew. But with all the slaves theoretically locked away it would give any investigation someplace else to start.

Assuming that at least some of the slaves in there could read cattertalk. If not, Anya would have to translate for them. Hopefully before someone started excitedly waving the bars around and drawing unwelcome attention.

He’d had some concerns that the doors into the slave areas would have a different access code than the one at the end of the catwalk, which would have forced him to get back into his sleeping room the same way he’d left it. But just as the Trofts had seen no need to rotate their codes, they also apparently didn’t want their engineering staff having to remember different numbers for the various doors in their sector. The code he’d used upstairs unlocked the door, and a moment later he was inside the women’s sleeping area.

As Merrick had instructed, Anya had taken the position nearest the door tonight. She was sound asleep as he tiptoed over to her, and stayed that way as he tucked the meal bars and the note under the edge of her pallet. He slipped out again, closing the door behind him, and walked around the bulk of the engine core to the men’s side.

A moment later, less than five minutes after he’d left, he was back inside.

It took another minute of careful maneuvering to make his way between the closely-spaced pallets. But finally he reached his spot and unrolled his own pallet. Lying down, relieved that it was all over, he closed his eyes, keyed off his opticals, and settled down to sleep. Almost as an afterthought, he boosted his hearing for a moment, listening to the soft sounds of breathing around him.

And froze. Amid the murmured sea of slow breathing was a single, distinctly faster rhythm.

Someone else in here was also awake.

He held his breath, trying to pinpoint the other’s location. But between the background engine hum and the rest of the breathing around him, he couldn’t even pick out a general direction.

But if he sat up and used his infrareds, he should be able to identify the other by his stronger facial blood flow.

Except that if he did that, the other might spot him, too.

Or had he already seen Merrick’s stealthy return? If he had, and if he’d already identified him, Merrick would have nothing to lose.