He tried a few hard jabs to test out Vort’s blocks. The man was like a brick wall. Vort answered with a flurry of his own, but it was slow; Sam was able to throw up his forearms and move out of the way of blows. He stepped in with a left hook and was met with a block that nearly took his arm out of the socket. But Vort’s chin was open! He switched feet and brought up the uppercut, then stepped back and kicked as hard as he could toward the man’s balls. Eat this, you sonofabitch!
The old man wasn’t going down that easy. He caught Sam’s foot mid-kick and started to twist. Sam was forced to push off or lose the ankle; he flipped and landed hard face down on the mat. He had just enough time to get to his back and swing his legs around before Vort reached him. He scissored one leg in front of Vort’s knees, one leg behind, and took him down, then he rolled until he had the man face down in a leg lock.
He punched Vort’s head and ears and the back of his neck over and over, but it seemed to do no good; the fighter kept bucking and growling like a maddened bear. The man had a good 30 kilos on him, and eventually that and the servos began to tell. Sam lost his hold and was forced to scramble to his feet and away from a bloodied and enraged opponent.
“I was just going to fuck you up, Sam Murphy.” Vort spat blood onto the mat. “You should have just taken your beating like a good boy. Now I have to fucking kill you, you mulaak cocksucker.”
The goons on the side didn’t laugh. In fact, Sam thought they looked a little alarmed. Vort stalked across the mat and opened a barrage of kicks—straight, then roundhouse, then a spinning hook that Sam couldn’t move fast enough to avoid. Vort’s heel caught him square in the ribs. Portal’s fucking balls! He backed up, doubled over, trying to protect his side where the ribs were probably broken, but Vort was coming at him, so he got his hands up. The fighter knocked his blocks aside and hit him once, twice, three times in the face and, perai, didn’t that wake you the fuck up!
He went to his knees, knowing it was death, but his legs just wouldn’t hold him. He heard voices in the distance trying to call Vort off, something about the bounty. Yeah, you fucker, they won’t pay for a dead body.
Looked like Drew Vort had decided that bounty credit just wasn’t worth it. The honto was standing over him now like the Angel of fucking Death come to take him to Portal’s Hell. But sometimes targets of opportunity present themselves, even from so humble a position as the floor. Sam saw one and took it, driving his fist through the protection between Vort’s legs to smash into his balls. The man fell to the mat with a thud, clutching his damaged goods. Sam struggled to his feet, pulled back a wobbly leg and kicked him in the head.
Then a wave of black crashed over Sam’s head and left him unconscious.
“Are you fucking crazy?” Waiting outside the office with the other slaves, Rayna had moved casually through the line until she reached Lainie. Now she stared into the distance and barely made a sound, but she knew the girl had heard the question. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Lainie didn’t look at her, but she flushed red with embarrassment and anger. “This wasn’t exactly my plan, okay? I was just trying to figure out what was going on with you and got scooped up.”
There were no guards near them, and the slaves beside them were so sunk in despair they weren’t listening, so Rayna let her have it. “For chrissake, Lainie! I told you this was none of your business.” Guilt burned deep in Rayna’s chest. “These people are so low on workers right now they’re scouring the streets.”
“Yeah. So I found out. But better than being sold out by your friends. Fucking Murphy. I never would have thought.”
“No!” Rayna turned and hissed at the girl, “No, Lainie, it wasn’t like that!” She wanted to say more, but this wasn’t the place. The guards were coming down the line now, getting them to their feet, ready to move.
Rayna did her job, even as her gut roiled with worry for the young girl she was responsible for dragging into this mess. She counted the guards—one per five workers, all tall, long-faced Ninoctins. The guards wore armor and carried fully charged whipsticks in their hands. They carried their stun guns in holsters across their chests, where the weapons would be harder for a prisoner to snatch, and kept nothing on their backs or belts. When she was done with the guards, Rayna lifted her eyes to note the placement of buildings in the yard; the distances between buildings, between buildings and the outer wall.
The laborers were moving now, and Rayna shuffled off after the man in front of her. She kept her eyes on his back, knowing the guards would be quick to spot any overt curiosity among the workers in the organized line. He was a young man, with broad shoulders and an easy walk that communicated athleticism. He was wearing a dark green ship’s jumpsuit, one stripe on the sleeve. A merchant fleet officer, on his way up in command until he had one drink too many in the wrong bar on the wrong damn piece-of-shit rock in black space. Rayna’s fists clenched at her sides. After processing, the workers would be segregated, male and female. Unless she was specifically assigned to rescue this lost spacer, she would never know what had happened to him.
Just before the line entered a building on the far side of the quad, she saw a shadow loom in the corner of her eye. A split-second later, the electrified tip of a whipstick hit her thigh and fire erupted along every nerve in her right leg. She stumbled and would have fallen if the guard who’d whipped her hadn’t jerked her up by the arm
“Clumsy vlitz! Stay in line!” Then his lips were at her ear. “I’m Neko. I’m here to help.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry!” She managed to stumble again, involving Lainie in the effort to steady her on her feet. She nodded minutely in the girl’s direction. “My friend.” She looked in the Ninoctin’s eyes. “Please.”
He shoved both of them back in line, hard. Then he pointed the stick at them in warning—and nodded once.
As the line approached the entrance to the building, the people at its head began to falter and the guards were forced to use the whipsticks to keep them moving. No one wanted to go through that door, one that read “PROCESSING” in big, red letters in both Galactic Standard and Ninoctin. Some of them might have been slaves before, but it was certain all of them had heard the stories of the mindwipe the Minertsans used on their slave labor. The technique removed all memory, higher emotion and sense of identity, leaving its victim docile and open to manipulation. It was, in effect, a closed-skull lobotomy.
No one had seen any of the little gray-skinned, black-eyed Minertsans during intake. But everyone knew who owned the Kinz factory. Processing would follow protocol. And the closer they got to PROCESSING, the more people were panicking.
The guards closed in and narrowed the line, pushing the struggling workers toward the entrance, where more guards waited to grab and propel them toward the cubicles where the procedure took place.
In the press of bodies, Rayna turned and grabbed Lainie’s hand. “Keep your eyes on Neko and do whatever he says.”
At the entrance it was a battle, people fighting for their lives as the guards dragged them away. Rayna saw the young ship’s officer kick and punch his way through two guards and make a short run for it before he was brought down by whipsticks to the back of the neck. Guards on each arm hauled him off to an empty cubicle, where a technician strapped him to a table and swept a curtain closed on his life as he had known it.
Still gripping Lainie’s hand, her heart pounding, Rayna hung back at the entrance, waiting for Neko’s intervention. Others were pushed in front of them from the wailing crowd at the entrance and were dragged away by the guards. The two guards who’d handled the officer turned and headed in her direction.
“Where the fuck is he?” Lainie hissed, her body tense.
“There!”
He was striding toward them from the last cubicle in the row, his face a dark storm of determination. “You! Come with me, you mewling worms!”
They pretended to cower long enough for him to reach them. He grabbed each of them by the arm and pulled
them nearly off their feet back to where he’d come from.
“The processor in Cubicle Ten has just had a ‘malfunction.’” He spoke just loud enough for Rayna to hear. “The tech has gone for help. We have maybe sixty seconds. Go in, wait thirty seconds, go out the other side and do what they tell you. Make it look good.” They arrived at the closed curtain outside the cubicle. “You first.” He shoved Rayna inside. An exam table and tie-down straps took up most of the space in the square. The mindwipe equipment was no more than a comp interface and the electrodes that attached to the forehead. Rayna stuck them on above her eyebrows to ensure she’d have the tell-tale circles on her skin when she emerged.
On the other side of the curtain she heard Lainie putting up a sham fight as a cover for Neko’s instructions. Then she heard, “Time!” and ripped off the electrodes. She slipped through the curtain, careful not to show there was no tech behind her in the cubicle.
On the other side, the chaos that had existed pre-processing had been transformed into an eerie calm. Workers stood without moving, staring blankly at the floor or into the middle distance. Guards—not so many, now, perhaps one for every ten workers—positioned the newly wiped laborers into two lines, men and women, where they simply waited for further instruction. Rayna let a guard lead her to her place and, once there, scanned the men’s line for her merchant marine. He was there, a bruise forming over one eye, and no sign of discontent or self-awareness on his face. She wanted to weep.
Lainie came out and was led to the line. Rayna was careful not to make eye contact with her. No one in the line looked at her companions or her surroundings. No one spoke. No one cried. They simply waited. And after what seemed like an eternity, the silent lines were led away.
In the vast, noisy loading bay, Rayna and Lainie stood at the end of a slow-moving conveyor track. As each sealed plasform crate came off the track, the women each gripped two of the handholds molded into the corners and carried the heavy box four steps to stack it with the others on an auto-mule that would carry the load to a storage area. The crates came off the line at a steady, unbroken pace, forcing the pair to keep up without a break in the rhythm. There was no time for rest or hesitation. There could be no mistakes.
To Rayna’s left was a red button that would stop the conveyor in an emergency—if a crate was dropped, for example, or a worker collapsed. The guard that had explained its use had said to push it meant a severe beating and no food for a day, no matter what the cause. Message: don’t drop a crate, don’t collapse, never push the button.
It was no wonder so many workers died in the loading bays, or at night in their bunks after a shift on the conveyors. Rayna wasn’t planning to be one of them, though her back and arms were already aching and her legs felt like two bags of dominium slag. She wouldn’t allow Lainie to be lost either, though to give the kid credit, she was holding her own.
“What’s in these freakin’ things anyway, rocks?” The one advantage of the loading bay was that the noise allowed for unobtrusive conversation, as long as the guards weren’t looking. Lainie took frequent use of the advantage.
“In these?” Rayna took a quick glance around for guards, saw none nearby. “I’d say laze rifles, judging by the size of the crate.”
They swung the crate onto the stack and returned to the line for another. “Yeah, well, I don’t know why they’re using slaves to move all this junk,” Lainie complained. “You’d think robot loaders would be more efficient.”
Rayna inclined her head toward the far side of the loading bay where a pair of tall robotic arms lifted much bigger containers off another set of conveyors. “They use them for the bigger stuff—the torpedoes and the ion cannon parts. Robots are expensive, you know. And delicate. Slaves are cheap.”
“They have to feed us.”
Rayna grunted in wry amusement as she hooked her cramping fingers under another handhold. “Not much they don’t.”
“You two!” The guard appeared from out of nowhere, a sparking whipstick at the ready. “Cut the chatter! Every one of these crates better be loaded by end of shift—” he raised the stick —“or do you need some of this to hurry you along?”
The two women lowered their eyes and sped up their work, hauling the crates in silence until the guard moved on. Rayna’s back and arms were on fire, her head swimming with fatigue.
Lainie broke the silence. “That bastard Murphy. I’d like to cut his balls off and watch him bleed to death.”
“Stop it, Lainie.” Rayna couldn’t let the girl go on thinking that way about Sam, even if it meant revealing more of her own business than she might have wanted. “Murphy didn’t sell me out; I asked him to help me. The Pataran was my contact on LinHo, my way inside Kinz. We had to make it look like a legitimate hand-off, and Sa—the captain—played along. Believe me, it wasn’t his idea.”
“What?” The girl stared at her over the top of the crate as they dropped it in place. “You let me think—”
“Let you think? When exactly did I have time to explain?” Rayna blew out a breath in exasperation. “You jumped to your own damn conclusions. Which, by the way, you wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t been following me in the first fucking place!”
“I wouldn’t have been following you in the first fucking place if you’d told me what you were doing! I tried to warn you, but you wouldn’t listen. Nobody ever listens!” The girl’s expression went as dark as starless space.
The teenager’s lament, Rayna thought, but she didn’t say so. Instead she grabbed her end of the next crate and waited for Lainie to grip hers.
“This is my job, Lainie. I couldn’t avoid it, even if I wanted to. And I couldn’t talk about it. To anyone.”
Lainie’s blue eyes met hers. “I can help.”
“You can help by keeping your head down. I’ll get you out of here as soon as I can.”
“No!” The girl shook her head. “I can help, Ray. I’m trying to tell you—I’ve been here before.”
Rayna almost dropped her end of the crate. She forced herself to keep moving, to show no expression. They stacked the box with the others and went back for another.
Only then did she speak. “What do you mean? When?”
“I was a kid, living on the street in a city on Kotri. Slavers scooped up a bunch of us and brought us here to do the fine assembly work. It was an experiment. Turns out adults were better at it after all, so they sold us within a circuit. Not long after, Cap found me in the market on Barelius.”
Rayna stared at the girl, who was struggling to lift her end of the next crate. “Tonight, after lights out, you’re going to tell me everything you know.”
Before Lainie could respond, a shrill whistle blew to signal the end of their shift. Rayna stopped and nearly dropped to her knees where she stood, suddenly unable to take another step. Lainie swayed across from her, and Rayna reached out to steady her.
“Come on. We get food now. And sleep.”
“Thank the gods.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Neko, the guard who’d helped them through processing, blocked their path. “You left a crate at the end of the line.”
“Stick it up your ass,” Lainie muttered as she turned.
“You say something, vlitz?” He towered over her, huge and muscled, whipstick at the ready. Rayna tensed, the adrenaline shooting into her bloodstream. Perai, the kid was going to get them both killed.
Neko frowned down at the teenager. “For mulaak’s sake, don’t overplay it, girl.” Then, louder. “Just stand over there. Your betters need to speak.”
Lainie shot her companion a wary look and backed up to the conveyer line, watching. The big man turned and considered Rayna.
He flicked a glance in Lainie’s direction. “We need to lose the kid.”
“No, she’s okay. She’s a shipmate. She followed me and got grabbed.”
The guard grunted. “So you feel responsible or some shit?”
“Something like that. But she might be useful. S
he’s been here before, says she knows the place.”
“Nobody gets out of here unless we help them. I don’t remember her.” Neko looked up and became aware they were attracting attention. He raised his voice. “I said you’ll move those crates before you leave here. Now, get to it.” The whipstick crackled near her shoulder.
She cried out and shied away as if the prod had hit its mark. Then she and Lainie picked up the last crate left on the line and struggled to haul it to the mule.
Neko shadowed them while Rayna panted out her argument. “She was only a kid, here for a circuit. A failed production experiment.”
The guard thought about it. “Right. A while back.” He watched them stack the crate, then pushed them toward the exit. The next shift was coming in. No one was concerned with two slaves under guard on their way out.
“Okay.” Neko followed Rayna closely across the vast factory floor and spoke so only she could hear. “Just be sure the kid keeps her mouth shut. She talks too much. You’re supposed to be wiped, remember?” As they wove a path through a cordon of waiting empty mules, he reached inside his uniform for a one-read datacard. “Memorize this, then toss it in the nearest recycler. It’s a map of the prison and the exit routes we use for getting people out—including you—if things go retrograde.”
He grabbed her arm and pushed to hide the transfer of the datacard. Rayna stuffed the thing down the front of her prison jumpsuit in the midst of a stumble. She recovered her feet and looked back to reassure Lainie, who was trailing them with an expression of mixed confusion and resentment on her face.
“Have you seen two Thranes come in with the new workers?” she asked Neko. “A man and a woman?”
“No Thranes. Hardly anyone in the last twentydays except the ones that came in with you.”
“They’ll be undercover with a new batch of slaves. Soon. We need to take them out of play as soon as they get here.”
Fools Rush In (The Interstellar Rescue Series Book 3) Page 19