Keeping a firm grip on Jan’s arm, Milo continued towards him. “Ho, Benny, all in a day’s work, eh?” he called cheerfully.
The overseer said quickly, “Her line snapped. Nothing I could do, was there?”
“Oh, I think you did enough, Benny,” said Milo in the same cheerful tone. He let go of Jan and went over to the loop that Jan’s line had been attached to. He squatted down and examined the short length of line that remained. Then he looked at Benny.
“I say it snapped,” growled Benny. “You want to say different, Milo?”
Milo got to his feet and walked towards him. “I agree, Benny. It snapped. Problem is, the amazon dropped her mop over the side. I think it might be a good idea if you went down and fetched it.”
The colour went from Benny’s face. He took a step backwards, reaching for his pain stick at the same time. “You keep away from me, Milo!” he bellowed, fear breaking through into his voice.
Milo stopped and raised his hands. “It’s all right, Benny. I’m not going to touch you.”
“You threatened me! I heard you! You know the penalty for that!” Benny was pointing the pain stick at Milo.
“Me? Threaten you?” asked Milo, sounding astonished. “The very idea is absurd. I was merely suggesting you attempt to recover a missing tool. I know how fussy Guild Master Bannion is about such wastage. After all, I imagine he’s going to be more than a little annoyed that he almost lost his new slave on her first day.”
Benny lowered the pain stick. “I’ll tell him her line snapped. He’ll believe me.”
“Of course he will,” Milo assured him, smiling.
Milo entered the cubicle and sat down in the wicker chair. He looked at Jan, who was lying on the bed, and gave her a smile of self-satisfaction. “I saw Bannion. Told him what happened. He’s not happy.”
“He believed you?” she asked, surprised. “I would have thought he’d have accepted Benny’s version.”
“He did—officially. He can’t be seen to take a slave’s side against the word of one of his overseers. Be bad for discipline. But he knows those lines don’t just snap and he’s been losing too many slaves that way. It’s become a common method among the slaves of settling scores and Bannion is pissed about it. The last thing he needs is an overseer getting into the act as well. He’s not happy that Benny tried to kill a valuable slave—you—just to get even with me: So our friend Benny is in for a hard time.”
“Good,” she said, with feeling.
“Oh, and something else to cheer you up. Buncher died during the day, so I’ve just heard. Coughed up a few pints of blood and keeled over.” Milo put his hands behind his head and leaned back. His expression was serene. “That friendly little hug I gave him must have put a splinter of rib into one of his lungs.”
Jan stared at him.
That night, after the lights had dimmed and they had gone to bed, Jan lay awake on the mattress and wondered what to do about Milo. She owed him her life. If he hadn’t somehow caught the end of her line—and she still couldn’t understand how he had managed to reach it in time—she would now be lying dead back in that town, her body nothing but pulped flesh and bones. Not only had he saved her but he had enabled her to persevere with her plan to destroy the Sky Lord. If she had died all chance of Minervan vengeance on the destroyer of her town, family and friends would have died with her.
And that put her in an awkward dilemma. Because she now owed him so much she felt an obligation to give him the only thing she had that he wanted—her body. Several times she’d been on the verge of waking him and telling him her decision but she hadn’t gone through with it. The thought of having sex with him scared her. Her only previous experience of making love to a man had been her one time with Simon. It had been strange and interesting, if not particularly pleasurable, but not painful or distressing in any way. However she had known Simon well and had been in control of the situation. He had, after all, been a Minervan male. Making love to an ‘unchanged’ man like Milo might be very different. The thought of him inside, possibly hurting her, and she not having the power to do anything about it, frightened her.
But the other thing was that she was scared of Milo himself. He may have saved her life but there was something about him that disturbed her profoundly. She remembered the accusations that both the slaves and Benny had made against him—that he was a sorcerer. It was easy to believe. She glanced over at his apparently sleeping form. He just wasn’t big or muscular enough to have done the things she had witnessed him do. The way he’d halted her fall … the way he had actually crushed Buncher to death, finally, by a simple squeeze round his shoulders.
Jan shuddered and turned away. No, she would not offer him her body despite her debt to him. She would have to find some other way of repaying it in the time left before she achieved her goal of setting Lord Pangloth alight.
Chapter Thirteen
It had taken all of her resources of willpower to go out on to the hull again the following day and trust her life to that thin line, even though Milo had assured her that the new overseer—Benny had been absent—was unlikely to repeat Benny’s mistake. As she’d cleaned the sun-gatherers, her fear had threatened several times to overwhelm her and become pure panic. She’d wanted to close her eyes and just cling to the hull, crying, but she forced herself to keep working. She had to remain part of a glass-walking squad—she couldn’t afford the luxury of a complete breakdown. She had to become totally familiar with the environment of the upper hull, and especially that limbo land between its two skins. It was vital to the plan she had begun to formulate as to how she would plant the incendiary.
By the second day it wasn’t so bad out on the hull even though Benny had reappeared. He was subdued, his face puffy, and he walked stiffly. Whatever punishment had been inflicted on him by Bannion had, for the time being at least, tamed him.
On the fourth day after the incident Jan was feeling confident and excited as she stepped into one of the glass cages with the others. She had finalized her plan of action. If all went well, tonight would be the night. …
The particular glass cage they were riding didn’t travel up through the centre of one of the gas cells like the first one. Instead it operated in an area between two of the cells. “We’re travelling up through one of the transverse frames,” explained Milo, pointing at the passing hexagonal patterns of spidery metal-work. “They form the basic skeleton of the Sky Lord. There’s a transverse frame between every two gas cells. The elevator was moved here because the cells on either side are full of hydrogen. The Guild of Engineers feared that there was a chance the elevator mechanism might produce the odd spark if it was left in the cell.”
The news that they were surrounded by hydrogen both disturbed and cheered Jan. It boded well for her plan, she told herself. She deliberately wouldn’t think beyond the moment of setting the bomb and activating it. At the back of her mind was some unformed idea of getting out on to the hull and running as far away from the point of ignition as possible, but after that it was all a blank. She knew that her chances of survival were negligible.
Jan had learnt a lot about the Sky Lord during the previous few days. One important fact was that nearly two thirds of the huge gas cells were filled with the inflammable hydrogen now. Helen had been right. Milo confirmed that whenever helium was lost, either by accident or natural leakage, it was irreplaceable, whereas hydrogen could be manufactured from water. Milo also told her about the origin of the Sky Lords; his account bore only a marginal similarity to the Minervan stories of those long ago events. Jan was beginning to realize, with extreme reluctance, that the Minervan version of history had many gaps in it, while Milo’s appeared to form a seamless whole. She didn’t want to believe him but was becoming increasingly fascinated by what he had to say.