“I don’t know. Food, maybe.”
“That’s disgusting!”
“Have you looked in a—”
“Oh, suck vacuum.” Out and back again; more banging noises over our heads. “Maybe they’re pets.”
“Shut up and load.” After that they stayed silent, except for the occasional grunt, as they moved in and out, gradually working their way toward the door. I fought an overwhelming urge to sneeze and wondered what we were bunking with.
At last they finished. I heard the door close, but the lights stayed on. As quickly as I could—not very—I wormed out from under the shelf. Meta was quicker; she stood up and screamed.
“Stop that!” I said irritably. Then I stood up and almost screamed, too.
Locked into magnetic holders every half-metre were transparent animal carriers filled with—monsters. Reptilian, multi-legged, they had four glittering golden eyes apiece on stalks atop long, narrow heads. Every eye locked on us when we moved—and every mouth opened, revealing gums the colour of a dead man’s face and long black fangs. And then the lights went out.
“Kit...” said Meta, voice quavering. “I’m going to scre—eee!”
“That’s me, that’s me,” I said, squeezing her arm.
“What are they?”
“Food—pets—I don’t know. You heard as much as I did.”
“Nobody could eat those. “ I felt her shudder.
“Well, they can’t get out. They’re nothing to worry about.”
“Why did the lights go out? What’s happening?”
“I think they must be getting ready to load this module. We’ve almost made it!”
“So what do we do?”
“Sit. Wait.”
“For what?”
“Lift-off.” I eased myself down onto the floor, and leaned back against the bulkhead. “Remember, once we’re in space it’s too expensive to break the flight plan to get rid of a stowaway. Whatever happens, at least we’ll be away from Fistfight City—and Qualls.”
I heard Meta sit beside me; I reached out for her and she flinched, then grabbed my hand and squeezed—hard. “That’s a little—ouch!—tight,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” Meta loosened her grip. “It’s just—I keep imagining those—those things getting out, and—” She shuddered again. “I hate snakes, and things like that.”
“I hate snakes and things like that, too,” I said grimly. “And the biggest snake I know is Qualls.”
Meta moved closer; I could feel her warmth. “Kit—”
“What?” I closed my eyes; it made the unrelenting blackness easier to bear.
“Will you—will you put your arm around me?”
My eyes flew open. “Uh—”
“I don’t mean, like that, I just... “ Her voice trailed off. “I just want to be sure you’re there.”
I put my arm around her shoulders. “Of course I’m here.”
She snuggled against me, her head on my chest. “Thank you,” she whispered.
After that we sat in the silent darkness, waiting for whatever would happen next. Not surprisingly, what happened next was we both fell asleep.
I surfaced slowly, like a man trying to swim in thick mud, from a disturbed dream involving running, fire and giant rats. I struggled to wakefulness and finally jerked upright with a gasp, waking Meta. “What’s wrong?” she cried.
“Bad dream, that’s all.” I wiped cold sweat from my forehead. “Go back to sleep.” But I knew I wouldn’t. That dream had come from flash. I knew it. I had broken the physical addiction—hadn’t I?—but the mental effects—would I ever be free of them? And if one dose could do this to me—what would have been left of me after two years on Hydra and a constant diet of the stuff?
Two years? In a time pocket, it would be more like thirty.
I thought of all the other kids Qualls had passed on to The Dealer over the years, and clenched my fists. He had a lot to answer for. A lot.
A bass rumble shook the floor. “Meta?” I whispered.
“What?” Her hand tightened in the folds of my shirt.
“They’ve activated the lifters. We’ve done it!”
“Does that mean we can get out of here soon?”
I laughed and squeezed her close. “Soon,” I said. “Very soon.”
The rumble suddenly rose in pitch and volume. I had a fleeting feeling of crushing weight before the gravsims overrode the acceleration—but then I frowned. Now I was too light. “Must be a freighter,” I muttered. “Their gravsims are out of whack. It can’t be a regular passenger ship...” I wished I’d thought to see what ships were in port. Maybe I could have figured out which one we were on—and where we were going. I thought about the creatures surrounding us in the dark, then wished I hadn’t. If we were going to their home world, I didn’t want to know.
I gave the ship half an hour to break orbit, to ensure the captain would have no inclination to return to Fistfight City. Then I woke Meta, who had dozed off again, and climbed stiffly to my feet. “We must have slept for hours,” I groaned, trying to work the kinks out of my back and legs. I stretched, accidentally touched the cold smooth surface of one of the animal containers, and snatched my hand back as though burned.
Glad Meta hadn’t been able to see me, I felt my way down the module toward the door. There had to be some way to open it from the inside... I fumbled around the door’s edges, and eventually something I touched clicked sharply, and the module’s blue interior lights came on. “That’s better,” I murmured, and pushed the next button over. The door slid open.
To my surprise, we weren’t in a dark hold, but hooked up to a corridor, filled with the same weird blue light as the module.
Meta winced. “That hurts!”
“This must be a real rustbucket,” I said. “Weak gravsims and bad lighting. I hope it holds together long enough to get us away.” I stepped out of the module and looked both ways. To the left the corridor ran about a dozen metres and ended in another door. To the right it ended in a T-intersection. “Well, let’s go face the music,” I told Meta, and strode down the corridor—no need to hide; now we wanted to be found—stepped into the intersection, looked left—and leaped back, crashing into Meta.
She opened her mouth and I grabbed her and put my hand over it. Heart pounding, I dragged her back to “our” module and slapped the button that closed the door behind us, then released her and fell back against the wall.
Meta stared at me. “Kit, what’s wrong?”
My knees gave out and I sank to the floor, watched eagerly by monsters. “The Dealer,” I whispered. “We’re on The Dealer’s ship!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Meta turned white. “It can’t be!”
“I saw him—right out there!” I pointed at the door.
“Are you sure?”
“I’d recognize him anywhere.” I shuddered. “He gave me flash.”
“But how can this be his ship? Nobody owns his own ship!”
That stopped me, because she was right: no individual was that wealthy. Only large corporations or governments could afford to run ships. And if The Dealer had his own ship, why had he been a passenger on The Bullet—and why had I been slated to go to Hydra on The Bullet?
I struggled to my feet. “This must be a Hydran passenger liner! Without me, Qualls’s contract with The Dealer fell through, so Qualls wouldn’t have any reason to go to Hydra—but The Dealer still had to get home. So he had to buy a ticket just like anyone else.” Which meant all we had to do was avoid The Dealer and find a crewperson—um, crewhydra.
But if this was a passenger ship, why was The Dealer in the cargo section? The answer seemed obvious—he had cargo down here he wanted to keep an eye on. I looked nervously at the caged beasts surrounding us, but if this module had been his destination, he would have already found us. So he must have gone somewhere else. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s take another look.”
“If you say so.” I led her out into the corridor again,
crept up to the T-intersection and looked both ways—no sign of The Dealer. I started toward the place where I had seen him. Meta held back. “Shouldn’t we go the other way?” she whispered.
“No,” I whispered back. “I want to see what his cargo is.”
“But what if he’s still there...” Her voice trailed off as we reached the spot where The Dealer had stood. It was a doorway to another module, identical to the entrance of ours, right down to the blinking green lights on the life-support control panel.
What could The Dealer be shipping that required life support?
I swore, and reached for the controls. Meta grabbed my wrist. “What are you doing?”
“Opening this thing up,” I snarled.
“But why—”
“Life-support module. There’s something alive in there.” I met her eyes. “Besides flash, what does The Dealer deal in?”
Meta’s hand fell away. “No!”
“I hope I’m wrong. Maybe he’s got a cat. But we’ve got to be sure—” But of course the controls were locked. I pounded on them uselessly, then stepped back. “We need a keychip—and I’ll bet The Dealer has the only one.” I glared at the controls. “There’s got to be a way!”
“Well, I’ve got a keychip, but since it’s for our house back on Carstair’s Folly, I doubt—”
A wild idea struck me. “Let me have it!”
Looking at me like I’d lost my mind, Meta pulled a neckchain from under her clothes. Hanging from it was a little golden rectangle with black shiny contact patches on each end. Meta touched it and it dropped off in her hand; she handed it to me. I eyed the keychip receptacle on the module. “Standard technology. If this works—” I dashed back down the corridor to our module. Filled with monsters though it was, it seemed almost like home. Meta’s keychip fit neatly into a receptacle in the interior controls; I pushed three buttons, the controls beeped, and the keychip popped back into my hand. “What did you do?” Meta asked.
“Programmed your keychip to open this module.” I gestured at the animals. “I don’t know what these things are, but I’ll bet they belong to The Dealer. They look like friends of his, don’t they?”
Meta blinked, then grinned. “I get it! If this module belongs to him, and we now have a keychip for it—”
“Then just maybe we have a keychip for that other module, too.” I flipped the chip like a coin. “Only one way to find out.”
Back we went to the other module. I plugged the keychip into the receptacle, pressed the “open” button—and without any fuss at all, the door slid aside.
Normal white light spilled around us. It was a relief to step out of the blue Hydran glare—until I saw what was in there.
The module was about the same size and shape as my old dressing room, which made it much larger than the one we had stowed away in. Odd-looking bits and pieces of electronic equipment filled most of it. It looked like a cross between a starship bridge and a recording studio, the latter resemblance heightened by the boy, my age or a little older, who stood in a broad circle of light at the far end of the module. He wore gold tights, but was naked from the waist up.
“Hello!” said Meta cheerfully, and started forward, but I stopped her. “Now what?” she demanded, turning on me.
“He’s not breathing.”
“What?” She turned back toward the boy. “Of course he’s—” Her voice broke off.
“See?”
“But that’s—impossible.”
“Is it?” I moved gingerly forward. Meta followed. The closer we got to the boy the more I became aware of an annoying hum in the air, a discordant sound that grated on my nerves. The air within the circle of light around the boy sparkled strangely.
We stopped just outside that circle. The hum made my bones itch. Meta gasped. “I know that face! That’s Paul Jerez!”
“Who?”
“He was Youth Champion in the Pleasure Planets’ Annual Open Dance Competition last year—then he vanished. There were all kinds of wild rumors...” She came a little closer. “It must be a statue—like a, a waxwork, or something.”
I said nothing. No statue could be so detailed. I could see the fine, dark hair on his arms and chest and a few flyaway strands sticking up from his head. His eyes, open and moist, glistened in the light, his lips were slightly parted, and a single bead of sweat clung to his left temple—and yet he didn’t breathe, didn’t swallow, didn’t blink. He must be in a time pocket, I thought. Almost involuntarily, I reached out to touch him. The sparkling circle of light retreated—
And then suddenly snapped back out to its original position, engulfing my hand—and stopping me cold. I couldn’t move my hand, couldn’t raise it, lower it, push it forward, twitch my fingers, clench my fist, or—most frightening of all—pull it free.
“What—” Meta started forward.
I pushed her back with my left arm. “Stay away!” I said between clenched teeth. “I’m stuck.”
“Stuck? On what?”
I didn’t answer. I was too busy silently cursing myself for a fool. Paul was in a time pocket, being held in stasis. For him, and now for my hand, time did not pass. That momentary shrinking of the field had probably been a safety feature—or maybe even, knowing The Dealer, a trap for anyone who might want to interfere: a trap that had caught me like a bug in amber.
Sweat formed on my forehead. I couldn’t feel my hand at all—it might have been lopped off. But I could see it, the air sparkling around it—and I could see the beat of my pulse in my wrist outside that sparkle, and I could certainly feel the pressure in my arm as my heart and arteries tried futilely to push blood into my hand, a throbbing building toward pain.
“Go get help,” I gasped to Meta. “Someone in the crew.”
“But you—”
“I’ll be fine—if you hurry.” I’m certainly not going anywhere, I thought grimly. “Take the keychip and go!”
Meta hesitated a moment longer, then dashed out into the corridor, turning to look back at me as she snatched the keychip out of the control panel. The door slid closed.
I pulled at my hand as hard as I could, to no effect, then heard the door open again behind me and breathed a sigh of relief. “Meta, I—” My voice choked off as I turned my head to look awkwardly over my shoulder.
“Mr. Nebula,” said The Dealer. “I see you have decided to accept our offer after all.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Suck vacuum, snakebrain,” I snarled.
“Mr. Nebula!” The Dealer entered, the door closing behind him. “Surely it is not appropriate, even among humans, to talk that way to one’s employer. Or the one individual on this ship who can provide—this.” A green wafer appeared on one tentacle-tip. My body’s immediate reaction shocked me—my heart raced, my mouth filled with saliva, I shivered. I beat you! I wanted to yell. I don’t need you any more! Maybe so—but I wanted it. Not so much I couldn’t fight it—maybe—but I wanted it.
I tried not to show it. “No joy, octoface. I beat the green monster.”
The Dealer moved closer, all four eyes fixed on me though their stalks curled and twisted, until his tentacle tip held the flash within centimetres of my mouth. “And you suffered for it, didn’t you?” his strange, sexless voice crooned. “Suffered and almost died. But you still want it, don’t you?” The flash was so close I could have stuck out my tongue and taken it, and I found myself gasping like a fish out of water, mouth opening and closing. But I didn’t take it. I held on, focused on the pounding pain in my arm, and turned my head away.
I suggested The Dealer do something for which he wasn’t physically equipped, and he imitated human laughter. “Very brave. But stupid. You’re mine, Andy Nebula. I have a signed contract for your services.”
“But you’ve never paid for me!”
“It’s hardly my fault you chose to—what’s the human expression?—ah, yes, to cut your agent out of the deal.”
“It’s enough to break that contract!”
“You’re in no position to take me to court.” Two of The Dealer’s eyes turned toward Paul. “Any more than he is.”
Agony filled my arm now. I pulled helplessly at my hand.
“Experiencing a little discomfort?” queried The Dealer.
“Damn you—”
He laughed again and scuttled over to the controls. The circle of sparkling air shrank by a few centimetres, freeing my hand. Immediately the pain in my arm subsided and my hand flushed red; but, oddly, it didn’t tingle. I flexed the fingers; no damage. Then I turned to look at The Dealer. “What about Paul?”
“He is doing quite well where he is.”
The door slid open. My heart leaped at the sight of Meta and a Hydra—and then fell when the Hydra, far from rushing to my rescue, shoved Meta to the floor, then closed the door. He must be one of the Hydras The Dealer had with him in Fistfight City, I thought sickly. He squealed/clicked at The Dealer, who pulled Meta roughly to her feet and held her off the floor while three of his eyes focused on her face. The fourth stayed firmly aimed at me. “That was very foolish of you, young lady. And futile. This ship is crewed by robots and captained by a computer. We have never shared the human phobia against putting ourselves in the tentacles of well-made machines. And while those machines are programmed to stop one Hydra from hurting another, they’re not programmed to recognize humans at all.” His tentacles tightened around Meta, who gasped. Her legs kicked futilely.
I lunged toward The Dealer, but the other Hydra moved with blinding speed to grab me. The Dealer held Meta a moment longer, then dropped her. “Interesting,” he said, as she frantically crawled away from him on her hands and knees. “A protective impulse toward the female. No doubt yet another evolutionary by-product of your absurd method of reproduction.”
“Are you all right?” I called to Meta.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry, Kit, I looked everywhere but—”
A robot ship...if The Dealer was telling the truth, and I had a sinking feeling he was, we were in deep, deep biowaste.
Interstellar Rock Star Page 11