The Pharoah Contract

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.