“On your feet, babe.” Quale snapped his fingers, pointed across the room. “Jamber, Karrel, get the rest of them over there, against the wall. Pels, we could use some slavewire.” He frowned at the Huvved, lifted his stunner. “You can walk or I can drag you.”
The Huvved glared at him, didn’t speak, didn’t move.
“Your choice.” Quale thumbed the sensor, waited until the Huvved collapsed, then climbed onto the chair, got a handful of braids and jerked, then he jumped down, stripped the beautiful robe off and straightened up holding it. He looked it over. “Nice,” he said. “Hanifa, local work?”
Elmas Ofka’s eyes were bright with hostility quickly veiled. “Shopping? Is this the proper time, Yabass?”
“We take our profits when they come, Hanifa.” He tossed the robe over the arm of the kingseat. “If you have many weavers who can produce work like this, you’ve got a treasure here. I give you that bit of information as lagniappe, it’s worth what it’s worth.” He stooped, grabbed a handful of hair and dragged the Huvved across the room.
Aslan watched, amused at her own reaction to this and at the disapproval on Churri’s face; the poet wanted drama, not two traders arguing mildly over markets and somebody’s weaving skill. It wasn’t the sort of thing that made great legends. Good thing Mama isn’t here yet, this could degenerate into a bidding war, not the shooting kind. She glanced at Xalloor, caught her laughing at them all; she grinned back, then started a tour of the bodies and the wounded. There were very few dead; Quale and Pels had stunned more than half before the guns and darters got busy. She looked round, indignant; nothing was being done about the wounded. She met Xalloor’s eyes, mimed winding a bandage about her head. The dancer nodded and grabbed hold of Pels as he went trotting past, a coil of slavewire in one hand. “You know something about this…” She waved her hand in a quick expressive circle. “Where’d Lan and me find ourselves some medpacs?”
Pels wrinkled his black nose. “Try the panels by the door, they’re stores of some kind. Hey, Quale, you got the pick?” Quale dug into his belt pouch, tossed the rod to him, then went back to what he was doing. “Here, run the blunt end over anything that looks like a lock.”
While Aslan and Xalloor poured on antisep and slapped bandages on whatever happened to be bleeding, Jamber Fausse’s fighters were snipping sections of slavewire and packaging up the stunned, the intact and the not too badly wounded, and trading jokes as they hauled their prisoners across to the wall and stacked them like firewood. Elmas Ofka glittered with triumph, stalking back and forth across short distances with the feral impatience of a hunting cat. Quale moved over to the comstation. “Pels, it’s time to call Mama.”
Adelaar’s face appeared in one of the smaller screens. Quale set his hand on the Rau’s shoulder. “We’ve got the Bridge. You can turn loose the tap.”
“Give me three minutes to shut down here, then open the shuttle bay.”
“Consider it done.”
6
Parnalee reached the hatch just behind the Sleeper squad, about ten minutes after they left the lock. He slid it back with slow care, jiggling it when it stuck half open, no way he could get his shoulders through that. Cursing the Huvved who never fixed anything that didn’t contribute to their comfort, he slammed it with a fist, jerked at it until it creaked open, listened and stepped over the sill and faded into the shadows of the sleeping sector, following the faint noises the Hordar made. The corridors here were dim, silent and blessedly free of the dust that was such a nuisance in the unused parts. He loped along on legs not so long as his torso was, the short thick legs that his father found so ugly, a deformity, ghosting through the corridors until he neared the area where the faxmaps the woman gave Elmas Ofka said they’d find the sleeping cells assigned to the Tassalgan guards. The Tassalgans’ dormspace was set off some distance from the others, the scutwork crew had their section, techs didn’t want to associate with either and stayed some distance from them. The pilots, the navigators and engineers kept to themselves. Duty was divided into three shifts, one group would be sleeping, another group playing while the third was standing watch; two-thirds of any section would be empty on any of the shifts, so the squads had to cover a lot of territory; the plan was they broke into three units and went hunting for occupied cells, the ones whose crystal markers were shining like backlit topaz.
Parnalee stopped before the first of these doors, the crystal glimmer painting stark shadows in the lines and hollows of his face. He eased open the door.
Four of the Hordar fighters were bunched together in the middle of the sleeping cell, hugging and backslapping, yeasty with triumph. Without giving them time to notice him, he sprayed darts into them, smiled his own triumph as they crumpled without a sound, dead before they hit the floor; isya darts were fast and fatal. He backed out, ran footsilent and swift to the next cell.
Jirsy Indiz looked round, waved her stunner at him, her sealpup face split with silent laughter. He darted her with a soft grunt of pleasure; the second woman whipped around, he darted her and took out the two others who were bending over the footlockers, going through the sleepers’ possessions. Almost as much as the Huvved, Elmas Ofka threatened something very basic in him; when he killed her isya he got a jolt to the groin more satisfying than any copulation he could remember; killing the second woman produced a less intense satisfaction, perhaps because he was sated by the first. A preview, he thought, don’t sleep too securely, Aslan you pustulant cow traitor.
He dropped his empty darter beside Jirsy, took hers and finished the killing. He would have lingered to gloat, but there were five left and he had to get them before they knew what was happening.
The last unit was already leaving the third cell by the time he reached it, Geres Duvvar leading them, Karrel Goza’s cousin, easygoing, good-humored and unambitious. Parnalee despised him. “There’s trouble ahead,” he gasped when he reached them, “the Hanifa sent me to warn you. Four, five com techs sneaking off from their duty posts, they’ve got some whores and a couple of servants to keep the beer coming. Not drunk yet. Too bad. That’d make things easier.”
The Hordar milled about, muttering, but they weren’t suspicious of him; they knew that Elmas Ofka trusted him. A herd of bonebrained yunk calves.
“How far and how do we get there?” Geres muttered; at least he knew enough to avoid whispering, whispers carried too far.
“There’s a gym of sorts a short way off, they’re in that. Look, the place has two doors; one of them’s already open a crack, I looked in to be sure the Brain wasn’t having a paranoid seizure. Getting there’s easy, enough. There’s a Y-fork ahead. I’ll take three of you down the left fork, I’ve got the doorcode, I’ll work it for you. You wait there while I come back for the other two and we head down the right fork for the door that’s already open. Five minutes should do it. You wait five, get the door open and we’ll have them in a pincer before they know what’s happening.” He gave them a half smile, a shrug. He was Elmas Ofka’s watchhound, doing the work he was hired for. “So. What do you think?”