Shadowplay: Book One of the Starcrown Chronicles

by Jon Gerrard

  * * *

  By the time I finally finished with everything it was well past sunset. I of course had done all of the work while Lout simply watched. He interrupted constantly to ask questions about everything I was doing and often had me explain each step in detail. He was obviously trying to learn as much as he could from me since he seemed to know very little about horse care himself.

  Lout didn’t like me asking a lot of questions but I did manage to learn that Rabine had only recently developed his interest in horses. Piecing together bits and pieces of things Lout said, I guessed that Rabine saw horses as a way for him to enter high society. Riding was an expensive hobby. Only the very wealthy could afford to pursue it seriously. Rabine obviously had wealth. But even with all of his money he was still an outsider to the elite social circles.

  The work had been back breaking. Finally however, each of the horses had been washed, brushed, fed, watered and transferred to their assigned stalls. The entire floor had been swept and hosed down. I had even washed each of the already clean windows, both inside and out. After all of that was done each of the tools I’d used had been cleaned and returned to their proper places. Only when there was nothing else Lout could possible make me do did he release me for the day.

  I didn’t know how many hours I had been working, but I was dead on my feet when I finally staggered out into the yard. My entire body ached and I wanted nothing more than to sleep for the next two days. Lout directed me toward the broken down building across the yard, which was of course the slave quarters. It had rained for most of the afternoon and the ground was slippery with mud. Although the rain had stopped some time earlier, water still dripped from the edges of the sagging roof and there was a huge puddle in front of the steps. Lout laughed as he shoved me toward the door, causing me to stumble into water up to my ankles. He boasted that he didn’t live with the common slaves. Mr. Rabine had given him his own, private house. His ‘house’ turned out to be a small shack just past the regular slave quarters that I hadn’t even noticed before. It was nothing grand, but it was in better condition than the general slave quarters and there was no pond in front of its door. As he headed toward his shack, Lout told me to get a lot of rest. He wasn’t going to be as easy on me tomorrow.

  As run down as it was, the slave quarters was home for the foreseeable future. At least it was a place to lay my head. Slogging through the puddle, I climbed the creaking stairs and went in.

  While Rabine had spared no expense for his horses, the opposite was true of the slave quarters. The building was little more than a barracks. Rows of dilapidated bunk beds lined the walls. Several spaces had makeshift curtains strung on ropes to screen off individual areas as private. Battered, mismatched furniture, much of it obviously homemade, was scattered about. There was an underlying smell of human sweat, but nothing nearly as vile as the stench aboard the pirate ship.

  Everyone from the ship seemed to be here, both men and women, including a lot of others that I had never seen before. Rabine must have already had quite a few slaves before he bought us from the pirates. Most people were sitting in casual groups talking, although a few had turned in for the night. Down on the left was a small kitchen area. The sudden rumbling in my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten all day.

  “Pell!”

  Alex was hurrying toward me followed closely by Chris, Bobby and Lucky. From her expression I could tell that she was relieved to see me.

  What I wasn’t expecting was the slap in the face.

  “Have you lost your mind?” she yelled at me.

  Before I could come up with anything to say she grabbed me by the front of my clothes and slammed me back against the nearest bunk bed.

  “Don’t you ever do anything like that again!” she snarled. “You almost got yourself sent to those mines! What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking that I won’t live as a slave,” I said, trying to put as much righteous indignation as I could into my voice.

  Her grip tightened as she brought her face nose to nose with mine. “No! What you were doing was giving up!”

  I forced myself to meet her eyes. “It’s my life.” It sounded lame even to me.

  “That is the stupidest, most selfish...! We’re alive, and as long as we can draw breath there’s a chance! Don’t let your pride get in the way!” Others had started to gather around us. I saw Mark, Ricky and Doc hovering nearby, self-consciously watching our exchange.

  I felt the strength go out of me. My shoulders slumped and I dropped my gaze. “You’re right,” I admitted. “I couldn’t see any way out and I ... I didn’t care anymore.”

  She slowly released me. “You’re not the only one here,” she said in a more controlled tone. “You’ve got more than just yourself to think about.”

  “That’s right,” said Lucky as he pushed his way forward and clapped me on the shoulder. “We were worried sick about you, buddy. When you didn’t come back with the rest of us we figured Rabine had you strung up by your thumbs somewhere.”

  “Not quite, but almost as bad.” I looked around, noting how everyone seemed pretty well settled in. “How long have the rest of you been here?”

  “Several hours now, since before sundown,” Lucky said. “Where were you all this time, anyway?”

  “Lout had me working in the stable. He made me do everything except scrub the floor with a toothbrush.”

  “That guy’s a real charmer, all right.”

  “So what did Rabine have the rest of you doing all day?” I asked.

  “You won’t believe it, Pell,” Bobby jumped in. “This entire place is one giant cocaine farm! We spent the whole day picking coca leaves, truckloads of them. The fields go on forever!”

  “All right, that’s enough for now,” Momma Mary’s voice said from behind me. “You all can finish talking later. The poor boy’s been worked hard all day and hasn’t even had a chance to catch his breath.” Mary grabbed me by the arm and started guiding me toward the kitchen. “You all give him some time to rest up a bit and eat, you hear?”

  I let her lead me to a battered table as the others followed. In a moment a steaming bowl of stew was set before me.

  “I know it’s not much, but there wasn’t much to work with,” Mary apologized. “I’ll see if I can’t whip up something a little better tomorrow.” She had apparently established herself as our cook.

  I lifted a heaping spoonful to my mouth.

  “It’s delicious!” I said around a mouthful of stew. It was the best meal I had had since ... I didn’t know when.

  Mary beamed. “There’s more if you want, honey.”

  She moved away to finish tidying up and the others sat down around me. As I looked around into the faces of my friends I felt a warmth inside me that had nothing to do with the steaming food I was eating. We had known each other for barely a week but these people truly were my friends. I realized then that something had changed inside me. I did want to live after all.

  “So tell me what you’ve found out,” I said, shoveling another spoonful of stew into my mouth. “If we’re going to get out of here we need to know what we’re up against.” I caught Alex’s eye. The barest trace of a smile touched her lips and she gave me a slight nod.

  They took turns filling me in on what they had learned so far. What Bobby had told me was essentially correct. Fernando Rabine was a drug lord, one of the largest and most powerful on the planet. The rumor was that he had murdered his way to the top, eliminating anyone who stood in his way—competitors and government officials alike. We were on a planet somewhere in the Argent cluster, a nation to the galactic south of Gilead. Argent was relatively small, made up of only half a dozen star systems, and fairly poor. But it was the number one exporter of cocaine in the known galaxy.

  Although slavery was not technically legal here, the local officials had either been bribed to look the other way or were simply too
scared of the Drug Lord to interfere. The tropical conditions that dominated the planet made it ideal for growing coca plants and Rabine had one of the largest plantations anywhere. His property spread for thousands of acres into the mountains and he needed a large number of slaves to pick the leaves by hand without damaging the plants the way harvesting machines would. Altogether there were a little more than a hundred and fifty slaves on the plantation. Most worked in the fields, although Rabine had a few who worked in his house, and another group who worked in the processing lab. The lab was the secure building directly across the compound from the slave quarters. It was where the raw leaves were processed into his product. Doc Jacobs and about a dozen others worked there. Apparently Rabine wanted Doc more for his knowledge of pharmacology than for his medical abilities.

  “What about security?” I asked as Momma ladled more stew into my bowl. “Can we just walk off into the forest if no one is looking?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” Chris said. He glanced uncomfortably across the room at Ian and lowered his voice. “Rabine gave us a little demonstration while you were still unconscious.”

  As soon as the trucks dropped everyone off in the compound, Rabine gathered all the new slaves together. He picked Ian to help with his demonstration, using the big man as a lab rat. He tossed a small stick into the forest just beyond the tree line and told him to get it. Ian was still a meter from the tree line when his collar suddenly activated and he fell to the ground screaming as an alarm siren sounded. Rabine left him there for almost a full minute before telling a couple of his guards to drag him back. As soon as he was pulled away from the trees his collar deactivated. Only then did Rabine point out the transmitter poles spaced around the compound. The invisible ‘fence’ was programmed for a setting that would cause pain but would keep the slave conscious. Slaves could only leave the grounds if Rabine or one of the guards shut down a section of the perimeter fence.

  “After that there really wasn’t anything else he needed to say,” Chris finished. “Point made. Then he had a couple of the guards take us out to one of the fields and we spent the rest of the afternoon picking coca leaves.”

  “How many guards?” I asked. Now that my stomach was full my brain was beginning to work.

  “We never saw more than a few at a time,” Alex said. “Altogether I counted eight different faces, but there are probably more.”

  “Weapons?”

  “These guards weren’t carrying anything other than collar remotes.”

  “Clever,” I said. “That way there’s nothing one of us could take and use against them. Wait a minute. You said these guards weren’t carrying anything else.”

  “At the landing field I noticed that Rabine’s driver was wearing a blaster pistol. There were also two other men standing back by his limo carrying pulse rifles. But I haven’t seen any of them since we’ve been in the compound.”

  “Personal bodyguards,” I said. “We probably won’t see them unless Rabine’s around.”

  “Yeah, well, they don’t need weapons as long as we’re wearing these damned things,” Bobby said, tugging at his collar.

  “One problem at a time,” I said. “It seems to me that the collars are only a problem if Rabine has a way to activate them. If we can slip away without being noticed we might be able to get out of the range of those remotes. Then these collars are nothing more than uncomfortable necklaces.”

  “You sound like you have a plan,” Lucky said.

  I shook my head. “No. But I do have a few ideas.”

  We stayed up late into the night discussing possibilities. Altogether there were nine of us who banded together that first evening. Alex, Lucky and I formed the core of the group, along with Chris, Mark, Bobby and Momma. Doc and Ian wandered over to join us after a time, completing our group. By the time we went to bed we still didn’t have a plan, but we had something that was just as good. We were united and we were committed. We were going to find a way out of here. It would take time. We would have to be patient. Meanwhile, we would watch and listen, and learn as much as we could.

  Eventually, we would be free.