The Pharoah Contract

“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.