The Pharoah Contract

The man was as still as a statue for six heartbeats; then he turned to go, and Ruiz prepared to release the breath he’d been holding.

At that moment Lord Balliste chose to rise and fire a burst from his ceremonial punchgun. The burst smashed the leg of the emancipator. The impact whirled the man about, and he lost his grip on his weapon. He slid down the wall.

The Lord laughed and pointed the punchgun with a flourish.

Ruiz made his decision.

He stood up and slipped the sonic knife into the Lord’s long skull, just in front of the ear. The punchgun clattered to the floor. Ruiz tugged up, and the knife snarled out of the top of the Lord’s head, spraying liquefied brains, a fine mist that haloed the Lord for a moment before the body folded over.

In the next instant, two more emancipators rolled under the tapestry, ready to fire. “Wait!” the injured man said sharply, and they did, a restraint that Ruiz found remarkable, under the circumstances. But both weapons and two cold pairs of eyes were trained on him, as Ruiz switched off his knife and laid it carefully aside. He crossed his empty hands over his head and stood still.

The injured man looked down at his shredded leg, then back at Ruiz. “You’ll need a new job,” he said. “If we can stop the bleeding, maybe I’ll have one for you.”

* * *

Nacker felt a ghost shiver go through his probe-self. Each time Ruiz Aw had come to him, Nacker had touched this memory, and each time Nacker found it disturbing. There was nothing wrong with the decision Ruiz had made; it was the only one that had offered him any chance of life. No, Ruiz could not be faulted on either ethical or practical grounds for his betrayal of the slave-Lord. It was rather the speed with which Ruiz had switched allegiance that chilled. Nacker understood, not for the first time, that Ruiz might react with as much swift lethality should he and Nacker ever find themselves at cross purposes.

Nacker supposed it was from the emancipators that Ruiz had acquired the tools of his trade: intimidation, torture, murder. Evidently the emancipators had been good teachers, but Nacker was sure that Ruiz had been an especially apt pupil. Nacker remembered the economical grace with which Ruiz had destroyed the wolfheads, the odd light in Ruiz’s eyes.

These thoughts disturbed Nacker’s concentration, so he put them from him. He waited again, until a whole cluster of touchstone memories drew into range. Nacker energized them in rapid order, no longer aware of content, but only chronology.

The last memory Nacker touched was a small thing, nickering among the deepest currents, swift and elusive. It appeared to Nacker that Ruiz had left the memory unprotected, as if Ruiz hoped for its demise. But the memory was too strong, too active, too crucial to the man that Ruiz had become. Nacker’s curiosity was aroused.

* * *

Ruiz waited to die. His thoughts were sluggish and poorly formed; he was sinking into the unresponsive clay of his failing body. So the blaze of Line’s sun no longer burned him as fiercely as it had three days before, when the Lineans had strapped him to the needle tree. The pain was no longer urgent, as the tree’s thorns slowly quested deeper and deeper into his body. Occasionally a thorn would penetrate some sensitive organ, and Ruiz would thrash briefly until his small strength was exhausted, but he had stopped screaming.

The part of him that still lived traveled among memories.

…Ruiz, arriving on Line in a nighttime drop. He fell from the skies in the company of two hundred other emancipators, all of them full of confidence and righteous anger. He remembered that younger self with as much amazement as scorn. He could hardly imagine how he could have seen the universe in such simple terms: Slavery was evil. Eradicate it.

…The horrendous callousness of the Lineans, devolved alien cetaceans who bred humans in small isolated communities for various specialized markets. The alien breeders committed unspeakable acts against any of their slaves who by word or deed or omission supported the rebellion. Images nickered through Ruiz’s darkening mind: hideous death, torture; all the colors of horror, red of blood, black of burned meat, the pale clotted flesh of corpses. How much was his fault, the fault of his unforgivable naïveté? Ruiz tried to shake his head, but the thorns held him fast.

…The despair Ruiz had felt when, after months of bitter fighting in which thousands of innocents had perished, he had discovered that his company of emancipators had been hired by the Art League, the vast multisystem conglomerate that for several millennia had controlled the majority of legitimate slavery in the pangalac worlds. He had gone to his commanding officer, fall of betrayed rage. “Why?” he had asked.