In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (25 page)

The scientist opened an access panel on the other
side of the tower and began working again, my signal to slip back over the edge
and wait. My mind raced as I floated high above the deck, trying to understand
why a snakehead and a bunch of human mercs were working together. No, not
working together. The Ories weren’t helping the Mataron, they were
guarding
him! He was Trask’s technical expert, the one Anya had mentioned on Novo
Pantanal, the one she’d never been allowed to meet.

He was why they’d killed the cargo hold’s sensors,
so we wouldn’t know a snakehead was aboard. Did that make this tower Mataron-tech?
If so, it was unlike anything I’d seen them produce and I’d seen as much
snakehead gear as anyone alive. Even more strange was the idea that a Mataron
would cooperate with humans. They were xenophobes who instinctively despised
anyone not of their race – particularly humans. They were members of the Forum
out of necessity, because they feared the consequences of not joining, not from
any desire to partner with other species. The Tau Cetins had said the Matarons
had been cozying up to them. Now I wondered if that had been a ruse to lull the
TCs while the snakeheads plotted a punitive strike against us?

When the reptilian scientist closed the second panel
and padded off alongside the tower, I pushed down toward the hyperconductors,
then glided silently back to the emergency access hatch. Once in the corridor, I
resealed the hatch and headed back up to the bridge. To my surprise Jase was
gone. All four screens were hissing static and Domar Trask and his two blonde bookends
were studying the flight consoles with puzzled looks.

When Trask saw me, he aimed his JAG-40 my way. “One
of my men is missing. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“No,” I said, but Izin might. “What was he doing?”

“Routine ship search.” Trask nodded to the static
filled view screens. “Why are they down?”

Jase must have sabotaged them when he saw Trask
coming. “They were working when I left. What did you touch?”

My listener detected footsteps approaching in the
corridor outside, but with no line of sight, my sniffer couldn’t identify who
it was.

Trask gave me a suspicious look. “Why’d you go into
Acheron Station?”

“I’ve never been to a Drake base before,” I said
as a man stepped into the hatchway behind me letting my sniffer get its first
look and begin pattern matching.

“Curious enough to carry stun grenades,” Trask
said suspiciously.

“Would you rather I gunned down a bunch of drunks
with bad fashion sense?”

“You attract a lot of attention for a smuggler.”
He glanced at the screens thoughtfully. “If that’s all you are.”

My sniffer got a match and flashed a warning, but
it was already too late. I’d made a fatal error coming back to the bridge. I’d
only done it because I thought Jase was waiting for me and I couldn’t leave without
him. My mistake for being soft.

“You done wit’ him?” a basso voice demanded behind
me.

Trask considered his options and nodded. “Yeah,
done.”

From the bridge hatchway, Gwandoya let me have it
with a brain scrambler on full power. I never saw his face, his stun gun or
even the deck as it raced to meet my face.

* * * *

The scrambler’s effect lifted slowly as heavy
footsteps, slamming hatches and tortured screams haunted me like a nightmare.
When I opened my eyes, I discovered I lay in a dark cell illuminated by a grimy
slit window set high in an ovoid hatch. Occasionally shadows obscured the
window as guards and their prisoners passed outside while the screams continued
unabated. As my eyes focused, I realized the filthy cell lacked furniture or
water and had only a small drainage hole in one corner decorated with feces.

The stark metallic clunk of a locking bolt sliding
back rang through the cell, then the door swung in on rusty hinges and two men entered.
The shorter one wore a gun holstered at his hip, carried a pain baton in one
hand and a slender no-doze stimrod in the other. He jabbed me in the shoulder
with the rod, ignoring the fact I was already conscious, forcing me fully
awake.

The taller one leaned forward, studying me with hate
filled eyes. “Sirius Kade! I been waiting for you!” Gwandoya declared in his distinctive
Afro-east accent. He rubbed the melted flesh on the side of his face. “You did
this to me. You cost me my ship. Now Gwandoya take payment in full.”

I pushed myself into a sitting position, back
against the cold metal wall. “I’ll give you ten credits for the ship, but the
face was an improvement.”

“Silence slave!” the gravel voiced jailer shouted,
jabbing me with the pain baton, forcing my body to convulse uncontrollably.
When he pulled the baton back, he asked, “Do you want him matched or
unmatched?”

“Unmatched,” Gwandoya said. “Fight him every day,
but he no die. Not yet.”

“I won’t be able to stop them killing him, not if
they’re fighting for their freedom. Once he’s down, they’ll finish him.”

“If he die, they die.”

“He’ll need patch ups. That’ll cost money.”

“Do what you have to. Gwandoya leave Acheron in ten
days. I kill him then.”

“Ten days in the pit?” the jailer said doubtfully.
“There won’t be much left of him.”

“There better be,” Gwandoya said menacingly, “or
you will take his place.”

The jailer grunted uncomfortably, then threw a
metal anklet at my feet. “Put that on, slave.”

There was a tiny flashing green light on one side and
a miniature power pack on the other. It was a tracking device with a stunner that
would paralyze me if I tried to escape the Drake dungeon. I left it where it
was.

“He doesn’t know where he is,” the jailer said.
“Thinks he still has a life. We’ll break him of that.”

“No. Let him resist,” Gwandoya said. “It will make
his time in the arena more entertaining.”

The jailer shrugged indifferently. “I’ve seen his
kind before. They never last.”

“Feed him well. Give him strength to resist.”

“Do you want anything special in the arena?”

“Corrosives.”

“If they throw acid in his eyes,” the jailer said
apprehensively, “he won’t be able to keep fighting.”

“If they blind him, take out their eyes. Burn him,
burn his skin, but not his eyes!” Gwandoya said, rubbing his hideous plasma
burn absently.

“I’ll warn them,” the jailer said uncertainly.

“Have they found his crew?”

“Not yet.”

“They die in front of him.” Gwandoya studied me,
savoring what was to come. “You will beg for death before Gwandoya is done with
you, Kade.”

“Don’t count on it,” I said. If they let me keep
my strength and it was anything like a fair fight, he’d be the one doing the
begging.

Gwandoya grunted. “Who will he fight first?”

“The big Tanosian’s ready. I had him slated to
kill three spacers we couldn’t ransom, or there’s Girok.”

“The Tanosian will do.”

“He’s good with an acid whip.”

Gwandoya tried smiling, but his melted face made it
look like a grimace. “You were a fool for coming here, Kade,” he said, then
walked out with the jailer close behind.

The metal hatch slammed shut, plunging the cell
into near darkness again. My eyes settled on the slave anklet’s feeble green
indicator light blinking monotonously beside me as the no-doze coursing through
my body revived me, negating any need for bionetic tricks to recover my
strength. After several hours, the locking bolt slid back and the cell door
creaked open.

I expected the jailer, come to throw me into the
arena for my first beating, but instead a dark silhouette stepped into the cell.
He had an athletic physique, wore light weight black body armor and had a pistol
holstered at his right hip. In his left hand was a straight bladed charge knife
dripping with blood and still sparking with tiny electrical flashes. He flicked
blood from the knife, switched the weapon off with his thumb, then slid it into
a scabbard at his left hip.

Leaving the cell door ajar, my visitor advanced a
few paces, studying me in silence. There was something strangely familiar about
him, his movements, his bearing, but my sniffer couldn’t find a match and it
was too dark to see his face.

“Quite a mess you’ve got yourself in, little
brother.”

His hushed words came like a thunderclap from the
darkness. It was a voice I hadn’t heard in more than twenty years, a voice I
never thought I’d hear again. For a moment, I was too shocked to speak.

“Don’t tell me they’ve cut your tongue out already!”
he said.

“Canopus?” I wheezed, surprised at the hoarseness
of my own voice.

“I haven’t used that name in a long time,” he said
slowly. “I hear you still call yourself Sirius, but then you always were his
favorite.”

It had been our father’s idea. He’d called me
Sirius, my brother Canopus, after the two brightest stars in Earth’s sky. How
else would a navigator, who’d crossed every light year of Mapped Space, name
his sons? Only later, when my brother and father began to fight, did the fact
Canopus was the second brightest star begin to anger my brother. He came to
believe in our father’s eyes, it meant he was second best.

“Canopus is brighter,” I said. “Its true
brightness is hidden by distance.”

“Hmph! A navigator’s explanation,” he said
bitterly, “but then you always were the better pilot.”

“You won the fights.”

“I was two years older and I cheated.”

He’d always used his size against me and fought
dirty, although this was the first time he’d ever admitted it. “What are you
doing here?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

“I brought a ship in here–”

“No!” he snapped. “I know all about the Merak
Star! What I don’t understand is what you’re doing
here
!”

He knew? How could he know?

For a moment I considered telling him the truth,
that I was an EIS deep cover agent and there was a Mataron scientist aboard the
Merak Star
, then I caught myself. If he already knew everything, then maybe
he knew about the snakehead, which made him the enemy. I remembered how hard he
could be, how calculating, certain if he were the enemy, he was far more
dangerous than Gwandoya or Trask. We might have grown up together on the old
Freya
,
plodding from one dead-end outpost to another, both suffering under the harsh
discipline of a father who cared more about his ship than his sons, but that
had been a lifetime ago. He might have been my brother back then, but now we
were strangers.

“I didn’t plan on coming here,” I said. “A Drake
navigator, a woman, she forced me–”

“Yes, Anya Krol,” he said, cutting me off. “I know
how you got here.” He took a few more steps into the prison cell. “What really
happened to Nazari?”

“He fried his brain with stims.”

“What type of stims?”

It had been a long time since I’d read between the
lines with my brother. He wasn’t asking for information – he already knew the
answer. He wanted confirmation I was telling the truth. I tried to remember
what kind of stimhaler Nazari had been using. All I could recall was that it
had been dark red in color. That narrowed it down to three choices.

“Crimson Sky,” I guessed, suspecting Nazari’s
tastes leaned more toward psychedelic dream states than sensory or sexual enhancement.
“I had to clean up the mess.”

My brother showed no sign as to whether I’d
guessed right. We’d had our disagreements, but I’d rarely lied to him.
Deception was a skill I learned much later. “So you’re working for the
Consortium now?”

“Not if I can help it. I’ve had some bad luck. I
needed money. This job came up, so I took it. They said nothing about going
into the Acheron.”

“And Gwandoya?”

“He jumped me a year ago,” I replied. “We were
competitors. It didn’t end well for him.”

“So, you gave him that face.”

“You know Gwandoya?”

“We sit at the same table. He thinks that makes us
equals. He’s mistaken.”

His tone told me there would be a reckoning
between them one day, no doubt when Gwandoya least expected it. I relaxed a
little. If I crossed my brother, that was one thing, but I knew he wouldn’t let
Gwandoya murder me. That was personal.

“He doesn’t know we’re brothers?” I asked.

“He’d have tried to kill me by now if he did, as
revenge against you.”

“How’d you know I was here?”

“I saw you,” he said simply.

“On the station?”

“Before that.”

Before Acheron Station? I searched my memory, wondering
where he could have seen me. “I don’t understand.”

“When you were on Hardfall.”

“You were on Hardfall?” Was he working with
Governor Metzler?

“At Loport,” he added.

There was only one way he could have seen me
there. “You were on the Cyclops!”

“I knew it was you as soon as you set foot on the
Merak Star’s cargo ramp, when you met Anya and Trask.”

“What were you doing on the Cyclops?”

There was a clatter of metal on metal as my P-50 skated
across deck plates to my feet. “You’ll need this.”

I retrieved my gun, holstering it as I climbed
unsteadily to my feet. “Canopus, what were you doing on the Cyclops?”

“You always were slow, little brother. Still are,
even after all these years.”

I realized there was only one way he could know
about the
Merak Star
, the alien-tech smuggling, the gun running and about
my meeting with Anya and Trask on Hardfall.

“You’re Rix!”

“You don’t think those dimwitted Drakes could have
put this together, do you?”

He stepped closer, letting the feeble light from
the entrance catch his face, revealing a curved black metal skull plate that enclosed
the top of his head and wrapped down over where his eyes should have been to
his nose. Instead of human eyes, a large optronic sensor was mounted in the
center of his metal enclosed forehead. Other sensor nodes were evident around
the skull plate, although their purpose was disguised.