But being hugger-muggered and carried away aboard a pirate ship at the same time as one discovers that one’s employer might have discovered one’s treachery is sufficiently stressful to rattle anyone’s equanimity; and by the time the guards came for me, my metaneurocytes were all but growing legs and crawling out of my nostrils from a toxic mixture of boredom and fear.
At first when they came for me, I thought it was just another meal call. They’d taken to rattling the frame around the door membrane to get my attention, then sliding a squeeze bag of pureed nutrient broth inside—boring, bland, tasteless stuff, but at least it kept me running. This time the membrane peeled all the way back. “You come!” barked one of the guards—the one I’d begun thinking of as Dogface 2 in the privacy of my head. (Jagged teeth, pointed muzzle, smelled musty, had all the poise and etiquette of a cement wall.) “Count boss person want you interview job opportunity now!”
I let go of the floor (to which I had been clinging by my toes, using the hooks provided for that purpose). I had already concluded that in the short term, resistance would be not only futile but stupid: Not only would my abductors be expecting it, but my life was now as wholly dependent on their goodwill as it had ever been on Sondra’s, at least until some opportunity for escape made itself available. And escape from a spacegoing vehicle under acceleration was a questionable proposition at the best of times. My position was precarious, but they had made it clear that as long as I was useful to them, I would be preserved. So I allowed myself to be directed into the hive of villainy, through the tubes and fistulae and stomachs of their biomorphic home (the better to heal from damage inflicted in combat, I gathered) and thence to the big bat’s office.
“Ah, Ms. Alizond.” He was hunched over a broad desk, yet another grid of soothing numbers scrolling across its surface, green and red flickering commodity prices fluctuating in real time as the pirate vehicle soaked in the incoming market stream. “Make yourself comfortable.” He gestured distractedly at a low-gee hammock on the other side of the desk. “Has Garsh been feeding you adequately?”
“Feeding me—” I stifled an inappropriate laugh. “What?”
He stared at me, his giant dark pupils unreadable. “Ms. Alizond. That was a serious question. Please answer it as such.”
“I—” I closed my mouth, hesitated a moment. “I’ve been kidnapped and stuck in an oubliette and subjected to unspeakable indignities and you want to know if your minions have been feeding me adequately? Pardon me, but if you don’t already know the answer to that question, shouldn’t someone else be occupying this office?”
Rudi—that was indeed his name—hissed breath through his nostrils: I interpreted this as a sign of mild exasperation. “You misunderstand. We are not used to accommodating your phenotype. I would rather not starve you to death by accident simply through neglecting some essential micronutrient! Are we feeding you correctly? Yes or no?”
“Uh.” I drifted backward into the hammock. “I think so. Not getting any uncontrollable urges to eat strange things. At least, not yet. But you could have left me with the chapel; they had a balanced—”
“Ms. Alizond. If I had left you among those scheming criminal sacerdotes, you would almost certainly be dead by now!” he snapped irritably. “I saved your life, confound it! Not that I expect gratitude, oh no, but there is another side to the balance sheet, and your lack of interest in it is—” He stopped himself in midrant, with a visible effort.
I kept my face still. “You saved me? What from, and why? Surely you’re not declaring yourself to be an altruist?”
“Hardly. Although in my not-inconsiderable experience, a reputation for fair dealing will stand one well when entering future business dealings.” The pirate leader emitted another leaky-duct hiss. “I have a deep and abiding interest in your missing relative, Ms. Alizond, whom I would dearly love to meet—if she is still alive. It is a matter of some embarrassment to this institution that one of my subordinates sold her a rather substantial insurance policy without performing adequate due diligence first, to ensure that she was not, for example, about to be assassinated—so it should be perfectly obvious to you that I would like you to lead me to her. But you don’t appear to understand what a lucky escape you’ve had! Or why it is absolutely in your best interests to help me.”
“Really?” This was not turning out to be remotely like any of the conversations I had imagined holding with him during my captivity. “You expect me to help you?”
“Yes.” A long, prehensile tongue squeezed from one corner of Rudi’s muzzle and swept around to the other side, smoothing whiskers as it went. “Here are the facts of the matter, Ms. Alizond: Your arrival asking questions after your missing sib Ana was noted from the outset by various local parties. The chapel you took passage on—did you really think they needed you as an unskilled ship-hand? Or that the original leader of the mission, Lady Cybelle, was confined to that sarcophagus by accident? Or that your oh-so-friendly deacon, Ser Dennett, survived the incident aboard the chapel that damaged or killed every other officer aboard the vehicle merely by happenstance? Or that they had lost all their Fragiles but still had the capability to produce cultured liverwurst by the tankload?” He yawned, revealing neatly polished rows of very sharp teeth: “There had been a mutiny, Ms. Alizond. The cause of the mutiny was a falling-out among thieves: At question was not the issue of whether it was worth abducting you but whether to do so by stealth or by violence, and what to do with you once they had you. I don’t think much of Dennett, but I will concede that he is a devious little bonebag. It’s your good fortune that we got you away from them before he finished reprogramming Cybelle, or a little encounter with a remote debugger interface would be the least of your worries.”
I realized with some dismay that everything he said confirmed my own worst fears. Either he was reading my mind by some mechanism more subtle than a slave chip or the situation I had inadvertently become enmeshed in was indeed dire.
“But you”—I swallowed—“your guards shoved me in a room with Cybelle and Dennett! I mean, before—”
“Yes, well, every once in a while someone fucks up.” Rudi grunted. “In this case, it was the boarding party. Whom I do not employ for their brains, bless ’em. Luckily for you, Dennett is basically a coward. He lacked the determination to act on the spur of the moment, and I got you out of there as soon as I learned about the mistake.”
“What have you done with them?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“What do you think I’ve done with them—made them walk the plank?” He hissed again, but this time I sensed amusement in the mannerism: “I let them go before we undocked. They may have a hard time reconnecting their high-gain comms antenna, but the chapel is otherwise undamaged. Including the undeclared cargo Dennett had filled the number three midships carbon-cycle buffer tank with, now that it is so regrettably surplus to requirements due to the absence of Fragile passengers.”
“Cargo? Dennett was a smuggler? But why, I mean, you let him go—”
“What? You think I’ve got room for an extra three thousand tons of high-purity molten indium in the paint locker? No, if he wants to waste energy hauling that stuff around, let him.” Rudi grinned, tongue lolling. “What do you expect me to do?”