by S. L. Viehl
drag.”
“I will be sick,” Galena said, pressing thin fingers to her mouth.
“Fine. Go puke.” I folded my arms behind my head. “I can wait.”
She made an exasperated gesture and gingerly picked up the hand-laser again. “Very well. But do you
not want something for pain?”
I smiled. Poor kid, she had no idea who she was bunking with. “No, thanks. Go ahead, I promise I won’t
cry.”
It took her a few minutes to gather her nerve, but Galena did a nice job on the gash. When she was
done, she rushed off to the adjoining lavatory and spent a few minutes in there before emerging, her
wingblades moving in an agitated fashion.
“Everything come up okay?”
She gave me a look of mild dislike. “Nothing hurts you, does it, ClanSister?” Without waiting for a reply,
she left the room.
I waited until I was sure no one else was coming in, then pulled the pillow from under my head and
covered my face with it. I pressed one hand to the throbbing agony in my chest that had nothing to do
with the gashes. Getting kicked off Joren had hurt more than I’d thought.
So I broke my promise to Galena, and cried.
I must have slept for half a rotation, because when I got up the room was dark, and Danea and Galena
were occupying two of the other platforms. I slipped out of our room and found three of the boys were
doing the same thing. How I didn’t know, considering the volume of Osrea’s snoring nearly shook the
wall panels off their stud supports.
Everyone was accounted for, except Renor.
Since I didn’t think my crystalline ClanBrother was chatting with Uzlac, I went on a silent reconnaissance
mission. It took hunting through three decks before I finally located him in front of one of the data storage
units, staring at the display.
Whatever he was looking at was strange. A vista of some alien world with a black sky and icy, barren
mountains. It didn’t look like anything could live there.
“I believe this may be the homeworld of my sire,” Renor said, making me yelp. “Slaves are bought and
put to work, mining beneath the surface.”
“Looks cold.”
“Surviving on the surface requires special envirosuits or a silicon derma, like mine.” He deactivated the
screen and turned around, allowing the hood to slip from his head. “You are recovered from your
injuries, Jory?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I leaned against a wall panel and tucked my hands in my tunic pockets. “What are you
doing up? Can’t sleep?”
“I do not sleep.” Renor’s features didn’t lend themselves to much animation, but I thought I saw humor
glinting in his cat-slit eyes. “Another of my sire’s legacies. Apparently his kind don’t require rest intervals.”
“You must have been a pain in the ass as a baby,” I said. “Seen our captain?”
“The Ramothorran is, like the others, asleep.” Renor rose and gestured toward a corridor. “Walk with
me?”
I walked with him. We went from the lower deck up to the helm, where Uzlac had left the ship on
autodrone.
“You haven’t had much to say about our plans, Ren.” I gave him a sideways glance.
“True.”
“You don’t say much at all.”
He studied the navigational array for a moment. “Conversation is difficult for me.”
I leaned over his shoulder and checked out the ship’s current heading. “There’s no reason to be shy.
You’re among family now.” Sort of.
“I am not shy; I have had no practice. Danea taught me to speak but a year ago.” He made a brief hand
gesture, as awkwardly as I might have. “Before that, I did not know how.”
I stared at him. “What about your family? Didn’t they talk to you?”
“No.” He pressed a few buttons and the programmed flight coordinates appeared on the display. “The
Xado kept me sequestered, Jory.”
“You mean imprisoned?” He nodded, and the interior lights made his crystalline skin sparkle. “How
long?”
“Twenty-four years, two cycles, six weeks, three days, seventeen hours, and thirty-one minutes.”
I sat down fast. “Why?” Then, in a tight voice, “Because of the way you look?”
“As a young child, I was unwilling to follow their instructions. Contact with my derma causes wounds.
Other… reasons. The Xado decided that I would cause no harm if I lived in meditative isolation from the
HouseClan.” His cheek glittered as it tightened. “They were correct. I caused no harm.”
Meditative isolation. They’d locked him up all his life, and called it that. I wanted to go back to Joren
and kill someone, anyone, named Xado. “How did you meet Sparky?”
The facets around his mouth crinkled into what had to be his version of a smile. “Danea found me during
a visit to my HouseClan pavilion. It was she who… freed me from the chamber, and helped me to
escape the Xado.” He studied the display. “Jory, I believe these computations are in error.”
I was still thinking about Renor spending his entire life in a cell, never learning how to talk because there
was no one to teach him. “Huh?”
One glittering finger pointed to a series of numerals. “This will not take the ship to Reytalon. I believe
Uzlac means to bypass that system and take us elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere as in where, exactly?”
“A moment, I must verify the ship’s position.” He took another reading and studied it. “The fifth planet in
this system. It is identified as Garnot.”
The Garnot scandal had exploded only a few months ago, but the League had notified every member
world that the alleged artists’ colony was actually a slaver depot. Even I had heard about it. I sprang to
my feet. “Where are the steering controls on this thing?”
Renor shook his head. “I do not know how to override these commands. We will need to obtain them
from the captain.”
“No override.” Uzlac appeared in front of us, a wicked-looking pulse rifle in his hands. “We go Garnot.”
“Oh, you’ll get there, one piece at a time.” I would have tackled him, but an unexpected cold grip
stopped me. “Let go of me, Renor.”
“He will kill you.”
“Don’t want to.” Uzlac grinned. “But will.”
Renor pushed me behind him and advanced on the Ramothorran. “I would not advise you to try, Captain
Uzlac.”
At the same time, Kol and Nalek showed up. I heard claws emerge, and a low, guttural sound. I don’t
know why, but I was pretty sure the sounds came from Kol.
Uzlac swung around and jerked the rifle. “Over there. With them.”
Before he could do anything stupid, Nalek tugged Kol over to where we stood. Renor gave them an
oddly exasperated look.
“Jory.” Nalek scratched the ridges on the side of his dark neck. “Why is the Ramothorran pointing a
weapon at us?”
“Because we just found out this deceitful sack of waste isn’t taking us to Reytalon,” I said, and spat on
the deck. “He’s programmed the ship to go to Garnot.”
Kol swore in Jorenian. “I knew this would become a farce.”
Nalek looked puzzled. “What is on Garnot?”
“A bunch of flesh peddlers who until recently have been passing themselves off as an open artist colony,
to get fresh slaves,” I said. “We’ll have to take over the ship.” I showed the Ramothorran s
ome teeth.
“When we do, I get first shot at him.”
“No shot.” Uzlac showed me all the gaps in his grin. “No Reytalon. Garnot.” He made another gesture
with the rifle. “You go quarters now.”
On the forced march back to our deck, I got close enough to volley one last promise at Uzlac. “I’m going
to rip your belly open, you miserable scum-sucker, and make your insides into a necklace for you.”
“You make me big credits,” he said, and chuckled as we filed into our quarters.
The girls and Osrea were waiting for us.
“We can’t be there by now,” Danea said, then went silent as she met Renor’s gaze. “No. No.”
They had some kind of telepathy going, I realized. “Yep.” I looked at the others. “Go ahead and yell at
me; I’m the one who hired him.”
Kol picked up something heavy and threw it across the room. It crashed into one of the sleeping
platforms and totaled it.
Osrea looked interested in doing the same, if a little perplexed as to why. “Why would we yell at you,
Jory?”
“For getting us into this mess.” I sat down and rested my chin in my hands.
“The Ramothorran is not transporting us to Reytalon,” I heard Renor say. “He is taking us to Garnot.”
Kol threw something else. More crashing sounds.
Osrea still didn’t get it. He’d spent too many years in his hole. “Why does he take us to Garnot?”
“It is a slaver depot world, Jory says,” Nalek said. “We will be sold there.”
Galena collapsed on a sleeping platform and started crying with little squeaks and gasps.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“The traveler who seeks only the path’s end has yet to find the beginning.”
—Tarek Varena, ClanJoren
Uzlac must have planned his little double-cross far in advance, because our room controls were
inoperable and all power that would have normally routed to them had been cut off. I found this out when
I tried to manually open the door panel.
“Damn it.” I slammed the access hatch shut and banged my head into the wall a few times for good
measure. “I can’t override anything. We’re stuck in here.”
“So we do nothing?” Danea walked up to me, her yellow hair bristling. No, not bristling, writhing. “How
convenient for you, Terran. Perhaps you have arranged that we remain ‘stuck in here.’ “
“What are you? Compulsively neurotic?” She was really starting to get on my nerves. “I didn’t even want
you guys to come with me, remember?”
Danea’s purple lips thinned. I could feel static waves rolling from her now. No wonder her hair was
acting like a nest of snakes. “How are we to know you are not the Ramothorran’s cohort in this? That
you did not seize the opportunity when we decided to come with you?”
“Me and a Ramothorran? Please.” I waved a hand under my nose. “Credit me with better taste. And a
working sense of smell.”
“Do you know what slavers will do? Especially with the females?” Osrea came at me. If he’d had hair, it
would have been standing on end. Instead, his black serpentine tongue stabbed the air in front of my
face. “Did you make an agreement with that Houseless scum to sell us, Jory?”
Suspicion bloomed on every face around the room. Here I’d thought I’d won at least partial trust from
them. Stupid me.
“Do you think I’d get even marginal credits for your big mouth?” Because it hurt, I took pleasure in hitting
back. “Look at you. All of you. Mongrel crossbreeds with no education, no training, no value
whatsoever, even to your own people. So what are you good for? What could I get for selling you?”
I paced around each one of them, making a pretense of evaluating them.
“With your handy limbs, Snake Boy, you’d go to a processing plant of some kind. Spend the rest of your
life chained to a line platform, sorting components.” I looked at Nalek. “Large and Dark Green here
would be snatched up by a mine manager, and never see the stars again. Kol, too, unless some aristo’s
wife craved a big bed toy. Renor, well, the scientists would probably want to chip away at his hide for a
few decades, or a jeweler would prop him in a display window. Danea and Galena would end up on
their backs, servicing whoever wanted something a bit exotic.”
“And you?” Osrea was just about snarling. “What brothel owner would want you?”
“Unless they cut out my tongue and my teeth, none,” I said, and laughed. “I’m much more valuable on the
open market—after all, I’m a pro runback with a famous name. Where I come from, people worship me
like a goddess. They’d play me in some arena game. Laser-mark. Blast rallies. Tyro-shockball.”
“So you would play games, while we are abused and worked to death.” Danea made a disgusted sound.
“Why does this not astonish me?”
“You’d probably survive for a few years, Sparky. If they cut out your tongue. I wouldn’t last half as
long.” I jerked up the leg of my trousers and unfastened the thermal wrap around my knee. Time for
everyone to grow up. “Not with this.”
Nalek came over and bent down, peering at the mass of twisted scars around the silvery joint grips.
Gingerly he touched one bracket. “It is cybertech. The kind the League uses to build drones.”
“Give the Jorenian a cigar.” I tugged the thermal closed and dropped my trouser leg.
“Why would they do this to you?”
“After all the fractures I received playing shockball, there wasn’t enough bone and muscle left to hold my
leg together.”
“You should have stopped playing,” Galena said in a soft, mournful little voice.
That I should have.
“But she did not.” Danea had the least amount of sympathy for me, judging by her expression. “She went
on playing that ridiculous game, injuring herself, year after year—”
“Eight months.”
She took a step back. “What say you?”
“That’s how long I played before I had to get the bootleg ‘botleg. Twenty-two fractures in eight months.
Nobody likes rookies in shockball, so they slam them in every game. If you’re already injured, they go
for whatever’s bandaged. If I hadn’t gotten the replacement, I’d have been a cripple for life.” I let that sink
in for a minute. Suddenly everyone got interested in the wall panels. “You’re right, you know. It was a
stupid game, and I kept playing it voluntarily. But at least I had enough spine to try. You guys would end
up crying for your ClanMommy after one quarter.”
Jorenians hate it when you call them cowards. I could tell how they felt by watching them. Danea wanted
to fry me. Osrea wanted to pound me. The others—except for Renor—looked like they were
contemplating variations on those themes.
Only Renor sat off to one side, concentrating intently on one of the bare walls.
Then something rather amazing happened. Kol stepped in front of me and shielded me with his bulk.
“Sajora did not betray us to the Ramothorran.”
“What say you, Kol?” That was Nalek, and even he sounded pretty upset. “What proof have you?”
“She had no reason to do so,” was all Kol said.
It gave me a nice warm feeling, him standing up to defend me, but I was used to handling stuff on my
own. I prodded his back with one finger. “I’ll fight my own battles, thank you. Step aside.”
He didn’t. Kol swung around and bent until our noses n
early touched. One of his hands encircled my
throat and pressed against the flat scar beneath it. He appeared ready to throttle me, so what he said next
really startled me. “You are my ClanSister. I defend my kin.”
I was still digesting that when he turned his head and repeated the same to the others. Slowly everyone
backed off, including Danea.
“Thanks.” I covered his hand with mine. “You can let go now.”
He leaned forward instead and placed his mouth next to my ear. That rain-and-pine smell of his tickled
my nose. “If I learn you have betrayed us, I will make you my first kill.”
Always nice to be someone’s first something. I swallowed against a dry throat and nodded. Only then
did he let go.
No one wanted to chat after that, so I spent my time trying to figure a way to get out of the room and go