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Three sleep cycles ago, one of the older kids told Kamen his parents were on the ship, on a deck below us. He may have done it to cause us trouble—if a group causes a problem, they are publicly punished—or he may have done it merely to upset Kamen. He's big for his age, but he is weak and whines a lot. The kids from other groups, especially the older ones, pick on him.
I don't think he told Kamen because he wanted to be nice.
Now Kamen is obsessed with finding his mom and dad. He thinks they don't know he is on the ship and if he gets to them, they will be a family again. I don't believe it. If it is true, I wish it could be for Anthy and me, but I know it can't; I saw our Mama and Papa lying in the yard. I saw the wet, dark ground beneath them.
I hear the older kids talk while they clean the showers. They say the decks below us are slave pens. I don't understand it, but I know it's not good. I know the older kids slip around the ship using the maintenance tunnels behind the walls. They laugh about having to move quickly to keep from freezing.
Now Kamen is missing. I have looked for him everywhere...
***
"WAKE UP, ZANT." LIGHT blazed overhead and something heavy thumped down on my shins.
I sat up and squinted. The male half of my recent security escort, who had dumped me in this hole carved into the bedrock, stood at the foot of my cot.
The cell was barely large enough to hold a narrow bed and my awaypack. There was a hole in the door for food to drop through and a hole in the floor for my waste to drop down. I suspected the cell was located somewhere far away from the Tabi embassy, in a place where no one would find me if the security team conveniently chose to forget my existence.
If they expected to see me break down in frustration and fear, or to plot my next move in EA espionage after they had locked me in, they were doomed to disappointment. Exhaustion had claimed me almost immediately. Judging from the number of food bars and water bottles someone had shoved through the door slot, more than a day had passed.
"Get dressed," he ordered.
Plates of body armor enhanced his black leather security uniform today.
Tactical body armor. What the hell?
"Get dressed," he repeated.
"Yeah, yeah." I rolled to my feet and reached for my awaysuit.
"No." He pointed at the black bundle he'd pitched on the cot. I could see curved pads of stiff, synthetic material in it.
Tabisee and Human anatomy are similar, but we are not interchangeable shapes. "Look, uh..."
"Meeroush," he said. "My partner is Shoff. Get moving!"
Giving me their names meant he had no worries about me sharing the information with anyone. Smug bastard planetsider. I hated when someone underestimated me—even when the odds were so obviously piled against me.
I managed to suck up my wounded pride with a defiant thought: if they took me out of this cell, I could escape.
"I don't think this armor will fi—"
"No talk," he snapped. "Get dressed."
I tugged the black uniform over my shipskins and started attaching the plates. I'd seen Tabisee armor before. Saura's was spotlessly shiny. This stuff, like his, was dull. I ran a finger over a pad. It felt as if someone had sanded the finish off with an abrasive. Lacquer darkened anything on it that would gleam, but all the joints were well oiled and flexible.
It looked as if someone liked to sneak around in other people's shadows.
"The knee joints won't line up," I told him.
"Deal with it."
As predicted, the molded forms fit me badly. We did not have the same amount of muscle in the same places. My lower legs, being longer and thinner, let the shin guards twist, while the padding inside the knee covers restricted the bend in my legs. The finger joints in the gloves fit wrongly on my hands. Overall, the legs and shoulders hung loose, while the buttocks and lower abdomen clamped tight.
I was trying to twist everything into a more comfortable fit when Meeroush grasped my arm. I barely had time to snatch up my awaypack as he pulled me out the door into the hall.
Two Tabi waited in the corridor; the other half of the security detail, now tagged as Shoff and Captain Mathet Waa Silvec.
I nodded at him. "You checked my story."
"The Ritto have indirectly confirmed they picked you out of the debris at Idwal Station. However," he added when I opened my mouth, "they have no record of a second lifeform recovered with you."
"That's wrong," I said. "She was on their ship. I saw her." Why would the Ritto-ssa deny rescuing her?
He ignored my comment. "Get headgear on her."
"Down and dark." Meeroush slapped a helmet over my head. It, too, was Tabi.
It wobbled due to my lack of upright ears. I found the chinstrap and tried to limit the movement. "Where are we going?"
"Human." The captain had a way of saying the word that made it sound as if he addressed the lowest form of space spack. "This is a stealth op. Stay silent, keep up, and do what you're told."
What the hell? "Yes, ser," I said.
It appeared that was all the information he intended to share. Mathet and Shoff turned and started down the hall.
"Set audio channel to twenty-two." Meeroush's voice sounded muffled outside the headgear.
Visuals streamed at the right corner of the helmet's eye-dat field, but I had no idea how to set the audio channel. When I didn't respond, he reached over. The helmet rocked as he keyed a sequence on the left, external side of the headgear. The Tabisee equivalent of the number twenty-two came up in the feed and his voice bloomed inside the helmet.
"You carry your stuff." He pointed at my awaysuit pack.
"Testing suit audio," Shoff's voice said in a background feed.
"What's going on?" I asked him, taking advantage of the audio check to ask a question.
"A recovery operation,"
The speakers in the helmet were too high for my ears and chatter from a second channel bled in. I found the volume control and turned it up.
"Records show the Ritto-ssa put something in one of their storage facilities at the same time the Xix medical facility received you."
I drew a sharp breath. "What is it?"
"We don't know. The message came to us through a third party. With the risk of the Endar monitoring our activity, anything relating to you is dangerous to us."
True. There was no way the Tabi could know to inquire about an incident at Idwal unless an escaped, illegal Human named Zant told them.
"What about the kid?"
"That is not our concern." Meeroush shifted back to guarded responses.
I bit back frustration. They didn't want an association with one Human here on the Moneyworld much less two. Finding the kid was going to be up to me.
Getting out of the Tabi cell was the first step toward that. "Is this a space op?" I lifted my shoulder to indicate my awaysuit strap.
"No. There is always a chance the Sat Quar might raid our compound. We can't leave that thing for them to find."
"Sat Quar?"
"The name for Endar security on the Moneyworld."
"They can violate the sanctity of your embassy?" An embassy was...inviolate. Wasn't it?
He shrugged. "Who can we complain to?"
Did Humans, with their clamor to acquire a commercial presence on the Moneyworld, have any idea what they would encounter here, with the species who hated us in control of security? The place seemed more a police state than a bastion of intergalactic commerce.
"They have not taken such drastic action yet, but they want to discourage our alliance with Humans. They try to make things as uncomfortable for us as they can."
As in accessing their ships? Hunh. I walked in silence, unsure of the political situation on this world. I had no proof the place where they captured me was a Primacy warehouse. I didn't have any proof it wasn't, either.
"Hey, I'm sorry," I said, in case they were telling the truth. "I didn't set out to cause you a problem."
He shrugged. "It's only one of the newest in a long list of issues between Tabisee and Endar. You say you met with the High Jerak Seok?" he continued.
"Yeah. In all his ugly layers of leather."
"How many layers?" He sounded intrigued.
"Thirty, maybe more."
"They say the leathers are the skins of their vanquished enemies."
Considering the boney limbs of the Endar, I found that hard to accept. "That's a lot of dead Endar."
"Not nearly enough," Shoff hissed as we came to a stop beside her at the end of the corridor.
So, we shared the feed. Maybe looking for me to make a slip while Meeroush chatted me up?
"Enough talk," Mathet said as Shoff swiped a panel beside a set of doors.
I could hear faint background chatter from their operations base inside my helmet. The tone of the feed intensified as we stepped inside an elevator.
"Captain Mathet." I heard the Tabisee equivalent of "Endar" and "arriving."
"Proceed with your orders," he responded.
"What—?" I started to ask.
Shoff reached over and pressed on the side of my headgear hard enough to push my head sideways. The background feed went silent.
With the distraction of the extra feed gone, I took the time to check out my companions from behind my darkened face shield. They all had the well-muscled, flexible bodies of the physically active planet-bound. If they had half the speed and agility I'd seen in Saurubi, they would be awesome fighters. Which meant I should move my skinny spacer body out of the way quickly if we encountered conflict.
Fine by me.
The Tabisee stood motionless as the elevator dropped. I tried to mimic them, but the armor was pressing hard on a patch of my shipskins under my awaypack strap. I finally gave in and rolled my left shoulder to reposition it.
Three heads snapped to look at me.
"Sorry," I muttered.
The doors slid open on what appeared to be a laundry facility. A lone, black-clad Tabisee stood waiting for us. My three companions surged out of the lift, moved swiftly past a row of laundry carts into the mouth of a large storage cabinet, and out through the back of it into another elevator car. The lone Tabisee began heaving folded towels into the cabinet behind us as the back panel slid closed. Meanwhile, Shoff pressed a sequence of keys on the new control panel. Instead of the car dropping, its back section slid open to reveal a third chamber. We stepped in and Shoff directed her attention to another panel. This time we dropped.
Meeroush gave me a sidelong glance, and I nodded my admiration. A triple blind. Nice.
"Switch to closed com system," Mathet ordered. "I'll monitor feed for the south tier raid."
My head bobbed sideways again as someone made an external adjustment.
South tier raid? I looked over at Meeroush. "Are we meeting up with another team?"
"Distraction," he said shortly.
They had another operation running to draw attention away from our activity. It was not difficult to guess who they were trying to distract.
After an extended drop, the elevator opened on a long passage that was padded with soft material on the walls, floor, and ceiling. I recognized the setup. Someone had cut a tunnel in bedrock and lined the thing with sound-dampening materials to elude someone else's sensitive monitoring equipment. A single strand of lightwire, overhead, illuminated the way. I felt sure we passed through a similar passage on the way out of the warehouse. It appeared the Tabisee liked to go out walking, unobserved by their fellow Union members. What the heck kind of place was this Moneyworld?
Tugging at the hard, molded plates that clamped my buttocks, I followed Mathet and Shoff out of the lift while Meeroush brought up the rear.
"Keep moving." He gave me a light shove.
It was a long, silent walk to the tunnel end, where Shoff keyed a code into a panel mounted on the sound-dampening surface. A section of padded wall swung open on darkness. Following the others, I stepped from padding to a metal plate that vibrated through my footwear with the thrum of heavy machinery. Meeroush closed the opening behind us while Shoff pulled a lumi-stick and gave it a good shake. Light flooded from it to reveal the deck and handrails of a small platform. We moved down a short series of steps and past several huge, droning mechanical shapes, then ducked through a break in another stone wall, into a larger mechanical chamber. We walked past more droning machines for what must have been a kilometer.
At one point, we stepped over a strip of mossy plant growing along a seam in the floor.
Plants in this darkness? "Tough stuff," I said gesturing at it.
Meeroush grunted.
We climbed a short metal stairs to another platform. This time Mathet opened the door at the end and peered out. When no weapon fire took off his head or sliced away body parts, he motioned us forward and we stepped out into a long, narrow space backed on one side by a tall, featureless wall and on the other by a huge rack stuffed with boxes and containers.
The three Tabisee paused.
"The Endar have contacted the embassy. They are making inquiries on the raid," Mathet told my companions.
"Have they asked for you?" Shoff asked.
"They are demanding to speak with me. My presence at the south tier makes it difficult. We must finish this before they send a squad over there. Shoff, you have the location. Lead."
We moved quickly down the wall and out into the silent darkness of a massive warehouse. In the light of Shoff's lumi-stick I could see that an automated sweeper occasionally made a run over the floor, but a heavy layer of dust covered everything on the towering racks around us. This was not a living facility with flyways zooming overhead and cargo transferring in and out. It was a dry, ancient skeleton.
We followed a wide, central avenue with symbols painted on the ends of the racks we passed, but my translation software didn't throw anything up in the corner of my right eye.
"Are these trade goods?" I asked Meeroush. Business must be slow, judging from the amount of dust blanketing everything.
"Just accumulated stuff," he replied.
"From...?"
"The Ritto-ssa Trade Compound. They've been a presence here for a long time."
We were in a Ritto-ssa warehouse? My brain lit with cautious hope.
Shoff turned right between two of the towering racks. Several long strides in, she stopped beside a large crate that jutted out into the aisle and motioned us past it.
On the other side, in a gap beneath the shoulder-high rack, three small green points of light burned in the darkness. She moved forward and passed the lumi-stick over the side of the box to reveal a battered stencil. "Thief's Hand EADSCLCV 42101," Earth Alliance Deep Space Commercial Light Cargo Vessel, showed on the end plate of the suspended animation container shoved lengthways into the space.
"Holy sh—" It couldn't be. My knees would have buckled if the stiff Tabisee armor hadn't clamped my kneecaps so rigidly. "The Ritto-ssa got her out?"
Shoff and Meeroush caught the side of the SAC and dragged it out into the aisle. Unlike the rest of the stuff in this place, its surface showed clean and white.
"Open it, Human," Mathet ordered.
Well, that explained why they brought me along. They didn't know how to open the SAC. I grinned with joy inside the helmet as I shrugged the awaypack off my shoulder.
Saura was here! Safe. Alive.
Then reality thumped my brain. These Tabisee were not my allies. They just needed me to help them retrieve their precious astrogator. After that, I became a liability.
Instead of squatting in front of the SAC with my back to them, I settled on the lid, putting the control box between my legs and my companions in front of me.
The process was quick and simple. I keyed a sequence of numbers, flicked a latch, and lifted a protective cover to deactivate the container's life suspension process.
I looked up.
My escort had shifted their positions while I focused on the switch. Mathet stood several steps to my right, his back against the parallel rack, while Shoff and Meeroush had moved closer in front of me. With the big crate on my left and the racking at my back, they had me effectively penned in.
They wouldn't be thinking about putting me in the SAC and walking away with Saura, would they?
"What happens now?" Mathet asked. Even if they were ill-intentioned, they wouldn't do anything to endanger Saurubi.
Neither would I. "We wait until it turns steady white." I stood.
My instincts screamed for me to make a lunge for freedom—to charge out into the darkness while these three were focused on safely retrieving their fellow citizen from the SAC—but I had to know if Saura was inside the container. If she was safe.
Besides, they needed to get her out before they could put me inside.
Thinking I could move faster than the Tabisee was pure idiocy. I knew from experience that they were twice as fast as Humans; plus I had to cope with the pinching, clamping confines of the armor they'd stuffed me into. But, I swore to myself, if they did act against me they better make sure they put me down for good. Because if I survived, I would make sure everyone in the Whooex Union knew what had gone down here. This whole situation, from Mandragala forward, stank to the stars and there were limits to what I was willing to pay for someone else's games of intrigue.
The SAC beeped three times, and everyone looked at the lights as they turned a steady white.
I reached down and touched the locks along the front of the SAC. The containment field shut off with a soft hiss as air inside the SAC equalized with the air in the warehouse.
Heart pounding, I stood and rolled the opaque cover up and over.
Saurubi, dressed in her blue shipskins, lay inside. She hated the things because they squashed her fur against her wiry body, leaving the exposed fluff at her cuffs and neck poofed in an outrageously funny effect. She always wore them under her awaysuit, however. That told me she had not had time to strip and don her Tabi uniform of gold vest and red shorts, which she favored for deep sleep.
I looked for dirt or smudges of blood on her flesh that would indicate injury. Everything appeared clean. Then I checked the interior life readouts to make sure her heart rate and brain function showed normal levels.
Sensing there was no time or patience for an electrochemical stimulus to ease her transition out of hibernation, I pulled the monitor tabs off her neck and forehead and silently started to count.
At twenty-five, she gave a sharp gasp and opened her eyes.