The Pharaoh Contract

Chapter 22

Ruiz sat for a few moments beside the merchant’s corpse. All his attention was focused on the corridor that led away from the blast doors. Was it a good enough trap?

In his favor was the general ineptitude shown by Preall’s men, and the fact that the tunnel ended out in the jungle, at a distance from the pens. Perhaps Ruiz had only to contend with the security forces resident at the launch ring; perhaps Preall had not yet been able to supply reinforcements. It was possible that Preall’s major forces were still back in the pens, fumbling through the intricate maze that led to the wall.

Or were even now traveling through the tunnel toward him. The thought galvanized Ruiz into movement. That he had not considered the possibility before frightened him; he just wasn’t concentrating.

Ruiz wheeled the Terratonic about and set the brakes. He ran the thrusters up, until the little boat trembled. He killed the running lights, locked the pilot to the guidance strip, overrode the safety monitor, and hit the touchbar that opened the air lock. A final question occurred to Ruiz: Were the frozen clones in the hold equipped with their customary weapons? He went to see.

He shut down the stasis trays. As he had hoped, the Dwellers carried their little leaf-shaped daggers in their forearms, in toughened sheaths of living flesh. But the Dwellers were like so many brittle sculptures, held in the field that damped the molecular energy in their bodies, and it would take too long to thaw them. He cast about the hold for something hard and heavy, and found a chunky creeper-cleaner nuzzling for dirt in one corner.

The arms of the Dwellers shattered readily under its weight, but Ruiz’s cheek was grazed by a shard of frozen flesh, cutting him slightly.

Soon two daggers lay loose in a jumble of glassy red fragments. Ruiz picked them up in a fold of his cap. They smoked and grew furry with hoarfrost. He dropped them, still wrapped in the cap, into his boot.

In a moment, Ruiz stood beneath the belly of the boat, under the maze of conduits and servo lines exposed by the open lock.

Ruiz tried to look two ways at once: at the corridor, from whence an unpleasant surprise might at any moment leap, and at the darkened depths of the tunnel. Far away down the tunnel he seemed to see a tiny white light, like the light another boat’s running lights might make at that distance.

He reached up and tugged violently at the brake servo line, which resisted only for a moment and then tore away in a shower of sparks. Ruiz threw himself to the side, and the rear casters of the boat passed over the spot where he’d been standing an instant before.

By the time he picked himself up, the twin blue glows of the Terratonic’s thrusters were already far down the tunnel.

Marmo watched the screen. The unknown was standing at the tunnel end, watching the departing spaceboat with a disquieting look of satisfaction on his hard handsome face. Marmo turned to Corean with a whine of tiny servos. “I begin to see the source of your fascination,” he told Corean, who watched with an expression disturbingly similar to the unknown’s.

“Oh?”

“Yes. You are a pair.”

Corean refused the distraction, saying nothing.

“Have you rehearsed what you will say to Preall when he comes to you, complaining that one of yours destroyed a substantial portion of his security force, killed a customer, and blew up his tunnel?” Marmo’s voice betrayed no more than a polite interest.

“How will he guess? Preall knows my stock. Have I ever before traded in assassins?”

“Ah,” Marmo said, returning his attention to the screen. The unknown was running toward the corridor now, long springing strides.

“What about the security men the Moc killed at the ring? I doubt that Preall will accept that their wounds were made by anything human. I remind you, Corean, you’re notoriously the only leaseholder of the Blacktear Pens who commands the services of a Moc.”

“Marmo, you’re tediously and repetitiously concerned with Preall’s happiness. I am not,” Corean said. Her tone quivered at the edge of ugliness. Marmo felt an involuntary cringe creeping along his circuits, and said no more for a while.

The two of them watched in silence.

Eventually Marmo summoned enough courage to continue the conversation.

“Perhaps you would indulge my curiosity,” he said. “Since we’ve begun this risky maneuver, I haven’t really understood why.”

Corean kept her eyes on the screen. “I explained all that, Marmo, before we started. I told you then, I wanted to learn as much as I could about the man, before we took the risk of freezing him. Otherwise I’d have done it in the pen.”

“Ah, yes. For what reason did you wish to learn about him? It seems to me that our response would be much the same, no matter who he turns out to be. If he’s a tourist, kill him. If he’s free-lance, kill him. If he’s League, kill him carefully. If we’d just killed him carefully at the beginning, that would have covered all the possibilities, and we might have saved ourselves much uncertainty.”

“Marmo, you’re too logical. I know that’s what I pay you for… but have you no curiosity?”

Marmo made no further appeals to logic. For some reason, Corean was unwilling to admit that she wanted the unknown for a toy — though this was abundantly clear in the flush of her cheeks, in the sparkle of her eyes, and in the eager stance of her body.

Ruiz stepped into the corridor. The initial section was empty, as it had appeared from the Terratonic’s cockpit. The walls were featureless gray meltstone, finished smooth as glass, with lume strips installed at knee height and head height. The greenish light revealed that the corridor ran straight for about a hundred meters, then angled abruptly to the left. Whatever reception had been prepared, it waited around that turn.

Ruiz moved forward swiftly, making little sound. He covered the distance in seconds, conscious of the destruction that might fill the tunnel at any instant. At the turn, he eased carefully up and listened, straining for some clue to what lay beyond.

He heard nothing. Making up his mind, he took out the nerve lash, and rolled around the corner. As he did, a shock wave arrived at the end of the tunnel. It buffeted him as he tried to regain his feet in the still-empty corridor, and then the sound of the explosion reached him. Ruiz rolled helplessly, until he fetched up at another bend, jolting into the wall with enough force to knock the breath from him.

He didn’t notice the tiny fitful buzz of the disabled spy bead that lay a short distance down the corridor.

Marmo stabbed at the touchplate of his spyscreens, but the screens stayed blank.

Corean looked at him. “When will we see him again, Marmo?”

“When he enters the bunker, so I would suppose.”

Corean gave Marmo another look, lambent with appraisal, and Marmo was suddenly reminded of his place. “Yes, certainly,” Marmo said hurriedly. “I have an additional spy bead there.”

“Can we move it to the foyer?”

“Not until he opens the door.” Marmo was carefully diffident. “But after all, what can he do in the foyer, except go into the bunker?”

Ruiz got to his feet, wincing. Apparently no enemies would attack him from the tunnel. He looked along the featureless corridor and saw that it ended in a broad foyer. At the far side of the foyer Ruiz saw a series of side-by-side closed doors. A strip sign over the doors flashed: launch control bunker. He approached gingerly. Anything might be lurking in the ends of the foyer to either side, out of sight.

When he reached the foyer, he cautiously extended the lash past the edge, wiggling it enticingly. When nothing pounced, he followed. To one side the foyer ended in blank meltstone. But on the other side, a steep ramp rose to a surface door. Ruiz moved silently past the closed foyer doors and up the ramp, but when he got to the surface door, his heart sank. The thick metal door had been spot-welded to the frame. A warm draft of air slid in under the door, air filled with the green scent of freedom. He leaned against the door for a long moment, thinking pointless wishful thoughts.

Evidently he was being herded into the bunker. Ruiz wondered what sort of surprise he could contrive for whoever waited within. He returned to the linked doors of the bunker, this time giving each a careful examination. When they were all open, the foyer wall would become a broad portico. Each was operated by a separate touchbar. To the left of the first door, a control cluster opened and closed all the doors simultaneously.

Ruiz examined the cluster carefully. He fished out one of the daggers, now warm enough to touch without loss of skin. With great care, he inserted the tip of the dagger into the almost invisible top seam of the cluster. He chipped delicately at the seam, until the cover separated. He managed to catch the cover before it hit the floor.

He assumed that the bunker could be locked from within, but obviously someone wanted him inside. Else why all this? So the doors would open. The only tactical edge he could dredge up at this point would be to surprise them by opening some of the doors prematurely. If nothing else, it might confuse their field-of-fire assignments for an instant and give him a chance to get among them. He thought for a moment, then took the dagger in the insulating fold of his cap again, and traced the contacts for the two rightmost doors. He hesitated for a moment, thinking that his options had been narrowed with disturbing skill. But then he dismissed the notion. Why would Preall, whoever he was, be interested in Ruiz, who had no interest in Preall? And who else could have arranged this?

Then he put the dagger across the contacts.

Sparks flew, and Ruiz jerked the dagger away. At the other end of the foyer the two doors slammed up, shaking the wall as they hit their stops. Ruiz instantly jammed the dagger into the contact that operated the first door, pounding it in with the heel of his hand. He launched himself at the bottom of the door, and it responded just as he reached it. He rolled under the rising edge.

He saw a sight that should have frozen him with amazement, long enough for the Moc to freeze him with the ice gun it carried strapped to its exoskeleton. The Moc was braced against the thrust of the gun, firing a blinding burst through the first two doors Ruiz had opened. Motes of frozen gas glittered in the path of the ice gun, and then the air rushed in to fill the void with a thunderous crack.

But Ruiz’s momentum and expensive reflexes carried him behind a massive bank of launch monitors. He registered the impression that he was alone in the bunker with the Moc, just as the Moc’s second volley crashed into the monitor bank, causing an ear-splitting shattering of delicate components. Ruiz scurried for cover, but what hope was there? The Moc was so much faster and stronger, and Ruiz was armed with a ludicrously inadequate dagger. And he heard the rumble of the doors closing, locking him in with the Moc. Any physical contest between unamplified human and Moc was a ridiculous mismatch.

The Moc was a flicker of movement among the monitors, and the next volley missed Ruiz by inches, shattering an expanse of crystal that looked out at Preall’s launch ring. Ruiz had no time for reflection; all his capabilities were devoted to the task of avoiding the Moc. At some deeper level, however, Ruiz realized that this was the same Moc that had accompanied Corean, and Ruiz felt an ashamed amazement, that he had been so easily duped, so easily led to this hopeless confrontation by the beautiful slaver. And to what purpose?

The insectoid warrior was slightly hampered by the bulk of the ice gun, or it already would have been over.

But it soon would be over, no matter what Ruiz might do. He flipped, dodged the next blast, rolled frantically under a desk, only to confront the Moc in the next aisle. He whipped the nerve lash into the Moc’s mandibles, but though Corean’s bondwarrior vibrated and roared, the lash diverted the Moc only for the instant that Ruiz needed to roll back under the desk. Behind him, Ruiz heard a snap as the Moc bore down on the lash with its terrible jaws — and then the earsplitting crack of the ice gun again.

Corean stood, gripping the edges of the screen, as if it were a grave she was being pulled into. “Oh no, oh no,” she said, “what went wrong?”

Only instants had elapsed since Ruiz had entered the bunker and the Moc had fired in the wrong direction. Corean’s face was livid with rage and panic. “What happened?”

She was further enraged when she noticed that, despite the destruction of her safe world by this bizarre bad luck, Marmo was laughing loudly. She turned to him, murder in her eyes. He saw, and stopped abruptly. “Corean,” he said. “He’s not dead. If he carried the death net, he’d be dead.”

And so it seemed.

The ice gun had touched him lightly on the last shot, and now Ruiz wriggled desperately through a portion of the bunker where the consoles were so crowded that the Moc could not follow him directly, but could only bound over, firing down from the top of the arc. The warrior was remarkably accurate in that awkward moment, but Ruiz was devious, faking one way and rolling the other.

It was, however, almost over. The Moc got closer with each blast, and Ruiz’s cold muscles were responding more slowly. He felt the tug of the death net in the roots of his mind, as it prepared to send his obituary across the galaxy. In Dilvermoon, the gnomes of the League sat at their tachyon filters, waiting for his small field of data.

Oddly, the thought that filled his mind in that moment of extremity was of Nisa, the lost phoenix, the manner in which the sun had dappled her naked skin in the bathhouse, like the stroke of soft golden paws, the sun patting her body delicately.

Ruiz automatically diverted some of his failing store of energy to fighting the onslaught of the death net, and that slowed him even further. His vision was beginning to go gray.

“Wait.” The voice was the soft perfect voice of Corean. And miraculously, the Moc stopped.

Ruiz was in a dream world of fading contrasts, slipping away from life in the ocean of his mind. It took long dreadful moments for him to understand that the Moc was no longer pursuing him with the ice gun, that helpless capture was no longer imminent — and longer still before the death net stabilized and sank its anchors again. Ruiz lay as if already dead, drained of all purpose and much of his core body heat.

But his ears functioned for another few seconds, and he heard with drifting astonishment Corean’s instructions to the Moc. “Watch him, detain him here if he attempts to leave. Do not injure him. I’ll be there shortly.”

In the airboat, Marmo fumed. “What can you be thinking of, Corean? Granted, the man is not a League agent — he carries no death net. But you’ve said it yourself, over and over, he’s dangerous.”

For a minute, Corean did not bother to reply. She was concentrating on steering the boat through the occasional high-altitude snapfields that spiked the sky over the Blacktear Pens. But when they cleared the perimeter wall and were racing above the purple jungle, she set the pilot and turned to the cyborg, her brows drawn together in irritation.

“This discussion is overdue. In the first place, we’re in a dangerous business. He could be very useful to us. I shouldn’t have to remind you that we can make him utterly harmless.”

“But,” Marmo objected, “our next scheduled slot at the Enclave isn’t for almost a month. Would you leave a two-step viper loose in your bedroom for a month, knowing that you could pull his fangs thereafter?”

“I don’t plan to keep him in my bedroom.”

“Are you sure?” Marmo had rotated away, as if intent on observing the jungle’s canopy.

Corean was briefly charmed. The old pirate had never before shown any sign of resenting the diversity of Corean’s sexual amusements. Did Marmo now wish to share her bed? The possibility was difficult to credit. Corean doubted that such an erotic conjunction was even possible; her usually facile imagination failed her, and she smiled.

“I don’t want him yet,” she said, as if it were the truth. “I plan to restore him to the company of the phoenix. Flomel claims we can use him to gain her cooperation.”

“Ah,” Marmo said noncommittally.

“And, we’ll brainpeel him first, just to be sure.”

“That would be wise.”

They landed beside Preall’s launch ring, across the tarmac from the shattered ports of the control bunker. Corean walked swiftly, threading her way through the tattered lumps of carrion that had been Preall’s ring crew, before the Moc had annihilated them. Marmo floated silently behind, a pulse gun attached to his metal arm. As they approached the bunker, a hatch levered open, and she could see the Moc waiting inside, motionless.

Inside, the devastation wrought by the ice gun was impressive. The observation ports lay in crystalline drifts, knee-deep under every empty casement. The banks of monitoring instrumentation were heavily damaged. The ice gun was designed to capture living protoplasm without damage, but the less flexible innards of the machines were everywhere ruptured. At first she couldn’t see the unknown, and she felt a pang of disappointment. Was he crushed beneath that tier of collapsed flux gauges? But then she saw him, wedged partly under an intact plastic chassis.

“Is it safe?” she asked the Moc. The bondwarrior made a sign of assent. Corean picked her way through the debris, to the spot where the unknown lay. She knelt over him, a bit shocked by his appearance. It was difficult to reconcile this gray-faced, dull-eyed creature — who watched her with no hotter emotion than mild curiosity — with the demon who’d killed and destroyed with such fiery efficiency just minutes before. She reached out a tentative hand to his face. It was like touching chilled metal. Her eyes widened. He had been grazed by the ice gun at some point in the struggle. That the man had continued to resist, to resist a Moc, after that… it was in the nature of a minor miracle, and Corean felt a touch of awe.

She stood quickly. “Bring the autogurn from the boat. We’ve come near to killing him, after all.”

In the boat, Ruiz’s perceptions slowly returned to normal, under the stimulation of the autogurn’s heated cover and the perfusor cuff that cycled restoratives into his bloodstream. Shapes assumed meaning and color, and gradually he heard voices and caught Corean’s subtle perfume.

“In one respect, at least, this has worked out well.” Ruiz identified the mechanical inflections of the cyborged pirate.

“And what is that, Marmo? I’m eager to learn of your approval, since in every other respect you’ve found fault with my plans.”

Ruiz took delight in the sound of Corean’s voice; it caressed the ear, as her face pleasured the eye.

“It’s this, then. Preall will never believe that it was you who visited such destruction on him. It was too extreme for any but an act of vengeance or madness. I’ll see to the repair of the snapfields immediately, and there will be no evidence to tie us to it.”

“Good.”

With returning warmth came a comfortable lassitude. Ruiz resolved sleepily to think about recent events at a later time, when his mind would be clearer.

He slipped slowly into a healing oblivion.