The Pharoah Contract

“I don’t know why I didn’t just let you be afraid,” he told the dead man, thinking of the ones who slept in the hold.

Chapter 22

Ruiz sat for a few moments beside the merchant’s corpse. All his attention was focused on the corridor that led away from the blast doors. Was it a good enough trap?

In his favor was the general ineptitude shown by Preall’s men, and the fact that the tunnel ended out in the jungle, at a distance from the pens. Perhaps Ruiz had only to contend with the security forces resident at the launch ring; perhaps Preall had not yet been able to supply reinforcements. It was possible that Preall’s major forces were still back in the pens, fumbling through the intricate maze that led to the wall.

Or were even now traveling through the tunnel toward him. The thought galvanized Ruiz into movement. That he had not considered the possibility before frightened him; he just wasn’t concentrating.

Ruiz wheeled the Terratonic about and set the brakes. He ran the thrusters up, until the little boat trembled. He killed the running lights, locked the pilot to the guidance strip, overrode the safety monitor, and hit the touchbar that opened the air lock. A final question occurred to Ruiz: Were the frozen clones in the hold equipped with their customary weapons? He went to see.

He shut down the stasis trays. As he had hoped, the Dwellers carried their little leaf-shaped daggers in their forearms, in toughened sheaths of living flesh. But the Dwellers were like so many brittle sculptures, held in the field that damped the molecular energy in their bodies, and it would take too long to thaw them. He cast about the hold for something hard and heavy, and found a chunky creeper-cleaner nuzzling for dirt in one corner.

The arms of the Dwellers shattered readily under its weight, but Ruiz’s cheek was grazed by a shard of frozen flesh, cutting him slightly.

Soon two daggers lay loose in a jumble of glassy red fragments. Ruiz picked them up in a fold of his cap. They smoked and grew furry with hoarfrost. He dropped them, still wrapped in the cap, into his boot.

In a moment, Ruiz stood beneath the belly of the boat, under the maze of conduits and servo lines exposed by the open lock.

Ruiz tried to look two ways at once: at the corridor, from whence an unpleasant surprise might at any moment leap, and at the darkened depths of the tunnel. Far away down the tunnel he seemed to see a tiny white light, like the light another boat’s running lights might make at that distance.

He reached up and tugged violently at the brake servo line, which resisted only for a moment and then tore away in a shower of sparks. Ruiz threw himself to the side, and the rear casters of the boat passed over the spot where he’d been standing an instant before.

By the time he picked himself up, the twin blue glows of the Terratonic’s thrusters were already far down the tunnel.

* * *

Marmo watched the screen. The unknown was standing at the tunnel end, watching the departing spaceboat with a disquieting look of satisfaction on his hard handsome face. Marmo turned to Corean with a whine of tiny servos. “I begin to see the source of your fascination,” he told Corean, who watched with an expression disturbingly similar to the unknown’s.

“Oh?”

“Yes. You are a pair.”

Corean refused the distraction, saying nothing.

“Have you rehearsed what you will say to Preall when he comes to you, complaining that one of yours destroyed a substantial portion of his security force, killed a customer, and blew up his tunnel?” Marmo’s voice betrayed no more than a polite interest.

“How will he guess? Preall knows my stock. Have I ever before traded in assassins?”

“Ah,” Marmo said, returning his attention to the screen. The unknown was running toward the corridor now, long springing strides.

“What about the security men the Moc killed at the ring? I doubt that Preall will accept that their wounds were made by anything human. I remind you, Corean, you’re notoriously the only leaseholder of the Blacktear Pens who commands the services of a Moc.”

“Marmo, you’re tediously and repetitiously concerned with Preall’s happiness. I am not,” Corean said. Her tone quivered at the edge of ugliness. Marmo felt an involuntary cringe creeping along his circuits, and said no more for a while.

The two of them watched in silence.

Eventually Marmo summoned enough courage to continue the conversation.

“Perhaps you would indulge my curiosity,” he said. “Since we’ve begun this risky maneuver, I haven’t really understood why.”

Corean kept her eyes on the screen. “I explained all that, Marmo, before we started. I told you then, I wanted to learn as much as I could about the man, before we took the risk of freezing him. Otherwise I’d have done it in the pen.”