Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (3 page)

“On that score, my apologies. But the ’port is only five minutes away. I’ll come with you and we can conclude business there, and then I’ll be away.”

Harper made to stand, but Rasnic reached across the table and laid a meaty hand on his shoulder. “Stay put. Finish your Finest. I’ll be back before you know it, and anyway I have to collect some paperwork on the way. And the ten thousand – I don’t carry that amount around with me, of course.”

“It’s no trouble, I assure you.” Harper had no desire to spend a minute more in the bar than was absolutely necessary.

But again Rasnic pressed down with his weightlifter’s hand, halting Harper’s ascent.

“Stay, I say, and I’ll be back. Finish the Finest, it’s on my tab, and be grateful.”

“In that case I will notify my ship to allow you to enter the hold.”

Rasnic pushed himself to his feet and staggered towards the exit. Harper thought of the ten thousand, and the holiday he would spend on the atoll. He’d brought the engine for less than two thousand units a month ago... If only all his transactions were this profitable.

He reached under his hat and deactivated the ferronnière, and the mind-noise that swelled in his head was no more. The sudden silence was a balm.

He activated his wrist-com and seconds later got through to
Judi
. “There have been developments,” he said, and reported his meeting with Rasnic. “The merchant is on his way. Open the hold and monitor him while he inspects the engine.”

“You suspect the motives of this Krier Rasnic?”

“I’m not sure. But it’s best to proceed with extreme caution.”

“Understood,”
Judi
said, and cut the connection.

Harper lifted his flagon and took a sip. He decided that the brew was a taste one could come to acquire – and the singer on the stage was a sight to please the finest sensibility.

She was giving voice to another soulful lament, and Harper fell to wondering if he’d heard Krier Rasnic correctly. The woman was promised, and was good as meat? Given what he knew of this planet and its natives, Harper feared the worst.

The woman finished her song to a patter of polite applause. Harper raised his hands, clapped in appreciation, and hoped to catch her eye again. She murmured something to the audience, which he didn’t catch, and the band filed off for what he guessed would be a short intermission.

The woman stepped from the stage and, to Harper’s surprise, made her way across the room towards where he was sitting.

He took another, longer swallow of ale, realised that he’d consumed half the flagon, and watched the woman as she paused before him and gave a shy half-smile.

He considered activating his ferronnière again, but elected not to. He would wait until she had declared her interest, and only then would he consider reading her to learn whether her words matched her intent.

“If I might be seated, sir,” she murmured, indicating the bench just vacated by Rasnic.

“Please, be my guest.”

He watched her lower herself to the seat with sinuous grace, and he revised his estimate of her age. He had judged her to be ten years his junior – but realised now that he was mistaken. She was much younger than twenty. He had taken her stage presence, her elegance, as denoting maturity, but seated timidly before him, eyes downcast, she could not have been more than sixteen standard years old.

He took another swig of ale. Unaccustomed to alcohol, he felt light-headed and tipsy.

“I take it you’re not local,” he said.

Her eyes lifted quickly to regard him. “You are observant,” she said with playful sarcasm. “Ajantans are as white as canal whelks.” She laid a hand on the table-top beside his. Next to his coppery skin, hers was almost black. “My parents came to Ajanta a dozen years ago, when I was a child, and I
hate
it here,” she said with venom.

“Then why don’t you leave?”

“If actions were as easy as words! You are an off-worlder. You don’t understand Ajanta and its ways.”

“The man I met here tonight, one Krier Rasnic, he told me that you were... promised. What did he mean by that?”

She regarded him, and said at last, “My parents died five years ago, succumbing to the dhoor. As off-worlders, they did not have the locals’ resistance to the drug.”

“Then why did they take it?” he asked, realising as he did so that it was probably a silly question. Her expression confirmed this.

“It was not a choice they could make, sir. Everyone on Ajanta takes dhoor, in one form or another. It’s in the water, in the very air we breathe. It makes us... compliant.”

“Compliant... to the Ajantans?”

Her eyes downcast, she went on, “My parents were poor refugees from Kallasta. They had funds to take them only so far, and it was bad luck indeed that they fetched up here. And bad luck again that in their penury they found themselves beholden to an Ajantan hive-master. They were given board and lodging in return for their... services.”

Harper murmured, “I’m sorry.”

The girl looked up and said bravely, “And when they finally succumbed to dhoor, they still had not paid off their debt. And so I became, in effect, a chattel of the Ajantan hive-master.”

She is promised
... Krier Rasnic had said.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, “I’m sorry,” again, but stopped himself just in time.

“The Ajantan hive owns me. I am their property, by all the laws of the planet.”

He could not meet her eyes. His senses swam with the effect of the ale and her tragic story. He found himself saying, “You sing beautifully.”

She gave a quick laugh, more of a snort. “It is my only relief, sir. I sing in Kallastanian, and fortunately the Ajantans do not understand a word. I sing of my plight, my fate, the evil of the green men, the stupor of the humans here. The fools who come to listen to me applaud and throw me coins, but little do they know that I am mocking them.”

She is promised
, Rasnic had said,
and she’s as good as meat already...

“Once,” she went on, “a stranger came to the bar, an off-worlder. He understood Kallastanian, understood my songs and my plight. I begged him to take me away from here...”

“But?”

“But he was too fearful of Ajantan reprisals. The natives are a bellicose lot, and very possessive. They do not take lightly to having their goods stolen. Also, he claimed that it would be impossible to get me through customs.”

“He was probably right.”

“At the time, yes,” she said, “but not so now.”

“And why is that?”

“Because,” she said, “I have obtained the necessary data, a new identity, bought at great cost from a star trader whose valour stretched only so far as to furnish me with the pin. He refused adamantly to take me off-world, citing the wrath of the green men.”

“You find yourself in an intolerable position,” Harper said.

“I am promised to the hive, but there is another term for my kind: Living Meat. Within the year – which is short here on Ajanta – the green men will take me to their subterranean lair and... use me.”

He laid a quick hand on hers to stop her words.

“Within the year,” he murmured. Six standard months...

She smiled sadly. “So do you comprehend my plight, sir? Do you understand my need to be away from here?”

He stared at her. A thought had occurred to him. Krier Rasnic’s sudden going, the girl’s approach and sad story... Might they be in collusion, working not only to rob him of his ship and all it contained, but to sell his body to the green men too?

As she stared at the table top, idly tracing patterns in the condensation with a graceful forefinger, Harper slid his hand under his tricorne and scratched his head, at the same time activating his ferronnière.

The content of her mind leapt at him and he reeled back in his seat, stunned. He quickly deactivated the ferronnière and slumped, breathing with relief.

“Sir?” the girl enquired, touching his hand.

“The drink,” he said. “I’m not used to such strong ale.”

“Be wary of drinking too much, sir. If you were to stagger from here and fall into the canal, you would end up as a meal for the bellyfish, or worse.”

He stared at her, pained by the emotional tsunami of her young mind; her fear at her fate, her hatred of the green men – and her desperate hope.

Her name was Zeela Antarivo, and she was barely eighteen and would not live to see her next birthday, and she yearned to live, to see the stars, to be away from this putrid world.

At the far end of the room the musicians were returning to the stage. One of them called out to Zeela, and she stared at Harper with a look of desperation.

She made to rise. “I am sorry if I have disturbed your evening, sir. I will trouble you no more.”

He grabbed her wrist, halting her departure. “I will be finished with my business here before midnight. When I leave, follow me back to the ’port. Do you have possessions?”

Her eyes were wide, filled with desperate hope. “Nothing that I couldn’t live without, sir.”

“But you have your identity pin?”

“With me all the time!”

“Then follow me to the ’port. We will meet outside and pass through customs together.”

“I... I don’t know what to say.”

“Say nothing. Go, Zeela, complete your final session on Ajanta and I’ll see you at the ’port.”

Her eyes widened still further as he said her name, and then she turned quickly and hurried to the stage.

Was it Harper’s imagination, or did the songs she sang for the next half hour seem less melancholy than those he’d heard earlier? Certainly she smiled from time to time, and when her glance lighted on him her eyes seemed to glow with gratitude.

He drained his ale and wondered whether it was the drink that had encouraged his decision to save the girl. Undoubtedly he felt inebriated, but he hoped he would have acted as he had without the Dutch courage of alcohol.

He was so intent on Zeela that he failed to notice the approach of Krier Rasnic until the merchant clapped him on the shoulder. “And just in time, I see,” Rasnic cried, slamming down a further two flagons and sliding onto the bench opposite Harper.

“All in order?” he asked.

Rasnic took a long pull on his ale, belched, and declared, “A fine engine, ’Arper, and no doubting that. And you have a wily woman aboard the ship, though she wasn’t showing herself.”

Harper tried not to smile. “Wily?”

“The sweet-tongued bitch wouldn’t let me take the engine from the hold... and me just wanting to warehouse it at the ’port!”

“You have the papers, and the money?”

“Now curb your impatience, young sir. First we drink to the deal, in the age old Ajantan tradition. No agreements can be sealed without the consumption of Finest!”

Reluctantly Harper raised his flagon and drank. The ale slipped down, not at all unpleasantly, and he found himself in good cheer. Soon he would be eight thousand units richer and the saviour of a beautiful girl...

His mother, he thought, would be proud.

Rasnic pulled a scroll of crumpled parchment from his jacket and slapped it down before Harper. The merchant provided a stylus, too, and Harper found himself appending his signature to a dozen official forms, smiling at the novelty of this old-fashioned custom.

Five minutes later, with all the forms completed, Rasnic drew a bulging wallet from an inside pocket and slapped down a wad of notes on the tabletop.

Harper said, “Local scrip? You have no Reach currency?”

“The agreement was ten thousand units, ’Arper, and no mention of what scrip!” Rasnic growled.

Sighing, Harper made a great show of counting through the notes. He would get the currency changed before he left the planet, no doubt at a punitive rate of exchange.

“And now drink up,” Rasnic cried, “and I’ll stand another round!”

Harper regarded the dregs of his flagon. The idea of downing the last muddy inch of ale did not appeal, still less of drinking another full measure. He was beginning to feel ill, and when he looked around the room – attempting to focus on Zeela, a tiny distant figure on the stage – the images swirled like the tesserae in a kaleidoscope.

He spluttered a protest and attempted to stand up. His legs were suddenly imbued with the property of over-cooked spaghetti. He sat back down quickly and the motion forced bile into his throat.

Rasnic’s vast face, hideous with its population of warts, swirled grinning before him.

“I think I should be going,” Harper managed, swaying in his seat.

Rasnic reached a massive hand across the table and cupped Harper’s cheek with mock solemnity. “Taken against Ajanta’s Finest, have we?” he chuckled. “Or perhaps it was the dhoor?”

Harper groaned, tried to protest, then slumped head first across the table, unconscious.

CHAPTER TWO

H
E WOKE TO
darkness.

No – not absolute darkness. He lay on his back and stared up at a light, the distended, glowing abdomen of a tethered insect. He tried to move, and groaned in pain. His head throbbed, either from the ale or the dhoor, and he seemed to be paralysed into the bargain.

He managed to move his head back and forth, enough to take in his surroundings. He was aboard a barge puttering along a canal. They had left the city in their wake and dark jungle loomed on either side. The illuminated insect, tied to the barge’s gunwale, cast an eerie glow across the vessel and its cargo. The only sound was the rhythmic popping of the boat’s engine.

He was in a cage, a rectangular construction made from what looked like bamboo bars, and he was not alone. He was packed tight between two other prisoners, and made out perhaps twenty further unconscious humans piled across the deck. They had evidently been tossed on top of each other with scant concern for their welfare. He was fortunate indeed that he was not buried at the bottom of the pile. He tried to squirm into a more comfortable position, and in doing so felt a body beneath him. The man swore softly, like someone disturbed in their sleep.

Harper felt a stab of panic. He cursed himself for a fool, and Rasnic for a bloody, conscienceless murderer. Not that he would gain anything by blaming the merchant. He should have suspected something when he discovered that Rasnic was shielded, and left the inn then – or refused all offers of ale, at least.