The Pharoah Contract

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.