Almost absently, Ruiz dropped the staff and began to pull away the vines. They were crumbling into black slime, but the portions rooted in her body were still solid enough to come out in one piece. They made a terrible little sucking sound as they pulled free, but Ruiz noted that the wounds themselves were rather small. There was no great quantity of blood.
He arranged her so that she looked more comfortable, and closed her eyes. He was still not capable of real thought, but it seemed to him that there was more that he could do. Along with that feeling came anxiety, an anxiety that Ruiz somehow related to time. It seemed that there was something that he must do soon, if he was to do it at all. Ruiz chased the thought through the darkened depths of his mind, but it was as elusive as an eel. Finally his eye fell on his staff where it lay beside the bier. The anxiety stabbed deeper. He picked it up, handling the polished wood as if touching it for the first time. His hands made a curious twisting motion, without his prompting, and the staff separated.
Several items fell out of the hollow in the head of the staff, and Ruiz bent to sort idly through them, dropping the staff again as his attention wandered.
Then, obeying some impulse that made only dim sense, he picked out the medical limpet and an ampoule of general-purpose replicant gel.
The buzzing in his head grew louder, and his movements even less certain. Finally, with a frown of ferocious concentration, he laid the medical limpet against the waxy flesh of the woman’s neck, near the site of the worst damage. Read-outs flared crimson, and tendrils shot from the limpet to curl protectively around her skull. A long moment later, other tendrils emerged, to quest into the other wounds made by the stiletto vine.
He broke open the ampoule and smoothed the gray gel gently over the torn flesh. The gel had a sweet smell that mixed unpleasantly with the stench of the rotting blossoms. There was enough gel to coat the disfigured hand as well, so he unwrapped the ribbon and forced himself to do it. He watched, shuddering with weakness, until the gel was absorbed, and then he noticed that the limpet’s angry flash had faded toward amber. The woman’s chest began a shallow rise and fall, and her skin was less gray.
Blood roared in his ears, and his vision darkened. He used the last of his strength to gather the scattered contents of the staff, replacing them in the secret compartment; then he snapped the staff back together. His legs gradually refused to support him and he collapsed to the stage. A moment later the staff rolled from his hand, and he slept with the rest of the cargo.
Ruiz Aw woke first. Had it been otherwise, had some unmodified primitive thrown off the stunfield first, Ruiz would have been astonished.
His naked body rested against warm metal and plastic; above was a glare of light that hurt his crusted eyes. The air smelled of disinfectant and urine. The subliminal moan of the drives was gone from his bones, and that inspired his first fully formed thought. We’re here, he decided, wherever here might be.
Chapter 15
Corean admired her droneship as it sat cooling in the center of the landing ring. The Sinverguenza was a good little ship; it boasted an autonomous brain, the revenant of a famous Bansh Pilot of several centuries past. It was fast for its size, its systems were thoroughly redundant, and its graceful hull was plated with a lovely pale violet armor.
The ship seemed to be in good condition after its passage down from the orbiting security platforms. The life support indicators showed a full cargo, every coffin in use. The stock would have to be weeded; it always needed to be weeded.
But everything was fine, she was sure. She disliked any joggle in the smooth pleasant flow of her life. Others might seek the life of a slaver for adventure, for the delights of domination, or for even darker reasons.
Not Corean. She was a slaver because it was the most profitable trade open to someone of her background. Wealth insulated her from the terrors of her youth — the dimly remembered time when she could only dream of sufficient food, comfortable shelter, and sanctuary from the press gangs that had roamed Dobravit’s steel warrens, where long ago she had been nothing more than an uncontracted snuffer.
And, of course, her wealth could buy her such wonderful toys: her face, her Moc bondwarrior, the services of beautiful helots. And she had other avenues of pleasure. She valued the sensual delights of a fine meal; she owned several master chefs. She was a connoisseur of the nonlethal chemical pleasures, rich wines from a hundred planets, the infinite varieties of smoke, the rare and subtle psychoactives gathered in the raving jungles of Posset. Her deepest pleasures were taken in her bedroom, and here again her profession served her. She was content with her apartments here on Sook, burrowed deep into the safe bedrock. Her neighbors and fellow slavers were no threat; the Pung who owned and operated the pens kept order. Though her operation was one of the smaller ones in the compound, her facilities were adequate to her purposes.
It pleased her that her good little ship was back safely, with a fat cargo, a cargo that she could exchange for yet another increment of safety.
She stood and stretched. In the screens, a half-dozen Pung guards were cautiously approaching the cooling hull, alert for any sign of trouble, though trouble was unlikely. Trouble was for the incompetent or the unlucky, and she was neither. “Come, Marmo, time to count,” she said.
Marmo rose from his station in the corner of the command center and hovered on his floater. Her aide functioned with the aid of numerous antique prostheses, though it made him look like a poorly designed droid, bizarrely patched here and there with human flesh. He offended Corean’s eyes, but he was not only a valuable adjunct, he was the closest thing to a friend that she permitted herself, so she did not insist that he alter his eccentric appearance to a more pleasing one.
As they left the command center, her Moc bondwarrior paced behind, silent but for the scrape of its claws against the steel deck.
Even the muscles of his eyes refused to function at first, but gradually they recovered, and Ruiz Aw was able to bring his surroundings into focus.
He lay naked in a deep metal trough that was unnervingly reminiscent of a morgue tray. A broad band of monoplast fit snugly across his chest. The sides rose above his line of sight, so that he could see nothing but the metal of the ceiling, set with bright glowstrips and uncomfortably close. A net of unbreakable monoline covered the trough. The interior was inlaid with cleansing jets and sensors.
The only sound was the faint hum of ventilators.
He concentrated on recovering the use of his body. Gradually it began to respond — a twitch here, a tremble there. Ruiz had time to begin thinking. He listed the positive aspects of his situation: He was not dead, he was not in an interrogation cell, he was on the way to finding out who the poachers were. When he considered the negatives, he was momentarily depressed by the length of that list. The stunfield… that was the backbreaker; his expensive cerebral shunts had not saved him from being caught. A ghost memory tugged at him for a moment — had he managed to do something before succumbing? No, no, he decided, the stunfield had been much too good, ferreting out the strand of his consciousness where it hid.
Why, then, did he feel that twinge of anxiety? It was reminiscent of a feeling that he’d had after his rare but notable binges, the suspicion that he’d done something memorably foolish — something that he couldn’t remember, but that others certainly would.
He started to flex his muscles, as inconspicuously as possible, trying to move blood and feeling back into them. Prudence demanded that Ruiz be ready if a course of action offered itself.