Omega Games (28 page)

“Likely I hit something with my palm during the fall.” “Then why is it shaped like the crystal you touched?” he asked. I had no answer. “It could not have penetrated my glove so quickly. The Lok-teel cleansed it away

almost immediately.” I frowned. “What happened to it?”

“I thought it attached itself to my arm. When I was falling, I felt something trying to crawl into my collar seal.” Reever pulled his wet tunic over his head and turned from side to side. “It’s not attached to me.” I checked the remains of our suits and my discarded garments, but the helpful little mold was not hiding

among them. “It must still be in the bottom of the crater.” I frowned. “Do you recall hitting the bottom, Duncan?” “No.” He looked at the door and jumped off the exam table, pushing me behind him. A group of armed raiders came into the room. “I never knew Terrans to be so hard to kill,” Posbret said, stepping to the front and looking around the

room. His smile widened as he fixed his gaze on Tya’s back. The pleasure in his soft brown eyes made

them shine. “Or Mercy to tell the truth. One learns new things all the time.” Reever moved, only to stop as one of the raiders flanked us and pressed a rifle against the back of my head.

“Interfere,” the Gnilltak said pleasantly, “and I blow her brains out.” Posbret crossed the room and grabbed Tya by the back of her tunic, wrenching her around. “Have you

Tya doubled over, wrapping her limbs around her belly. Before she could straighten, the raider leader clouted her over the back of her neck, and sent her crashing to the floor.

“Stop it,” I shouted.

“Not this time, Terran.” Posbret stepped over Tya, turning and kicking her in the side. I heard bones snap and surged forward, only to be jerked back by my hair. The fist tangled in it belonged to the raider whose spleen I had repaired.

“You can’t help her,” my former patient warned. “He will kill you, too.”

“I’m not going to kill her. Immediately.” Posbret walked around Tya, taunting her with every kick. “No fight in you now, is there? I always knew your kind were cowards.”

Tya did not rise, and made no move to defend herself. The only sounds she made were grunts that came from her throat every time Posbret’s boot slammed into some part of her body.

Why wouldn’t she defend herself?

“Come, try to take my pelt, lizard,” the raider leader demanded. “I would see you try before I grind you into dust beneath my heels.”

Raiders scattered as Drefan’s massive battle drone pushed into the room, its halo shooting a focused purple pulse toward Posbret. The raider tried to raise a weapon, but the stun burst sent him to his knees beside Tya.

The drednoc lumbered over, picked up the raider leader by the collar, and addressed the rest of the men. “You are ordered to leave the premises. Comply at once or you will be shot.”

There was no arguing or negotiating with a machine, and the raiders knew it. They began backing out of the room.

Posbret lifted his head and spat on Tya. “It is fitting, I suppose, that he owns you. A beast to serve a monster. Enjoy your last hours, Hsktskt, for I will be back for you. And when next we meet, I will bathe in your blood as I skin you alive.”

I sent Reever to find Drefan and, with the help of Keel and some staff drones it summoned, moved Tya from the floor to an exam table.

“I thought Drefan had reinforced security,” I said as I used a cloth to wipe the blood from Tya’s muzzle. “How did they get in here again so easily?”

“There are different ways into the domes,” the Chakacat said. “Some of them are below the surface. Mercy knows those tunnels better than anyone on the colony.”

I pushed aside my anger with Mercy and focused on Tya. Posbret had battered the Hsktskt female, whose body had already been weakened by starvation and dehydration. Wherever his boot had landed, her flesh had split. A quick scan revealed several massive contusions, but none of the broken bones I had expected.

“The implant,” Tya muttered through teeth stained with her own blood.

“It is nothing,” Tya said before I could answer. From the way she was behaving, I had to assume that Keel and Drefan didn’t know about the implant. “It is a routine procedure,” I lied.

Keel looked troubled. “She will recover soon?”

“Why?” I infused the Hsktskt with a local anesthetic and began suturing up a deep gash. “Will Drefan punish her if she is not able to fight Reever?” “Drefan doesn’t abuse his people.” “But she’s not a person, is she? She’s a slave.” I saw the distress in Keel’s eyes and realized I was

taking out my temper on the wrong person. “If she has time to rest and eat, she should heal in a few days. If we can keep the raiders, Mercy, and the rest of the colony from assaulting her, that is,” I tacked on. Keel helped apply cold packs to the worst of the impact injuries while I dealt with the muscle tears. “Drefan is nowhere to be found,” Reever told me as he walked in. “How is she?” One of Tya’s swollen eyes opened to a slit. “Well enough to fight you, Terran.” “You are not fighting anyone,” I told her as I bandaged the sutured cut and moved on to the next.

Tya’s eye blinked. “You do not own me.” “I do until you heal.” I applied another infusion of painkiller to deaden the next wound and adjusted the beam on the suture laser. I leaned down and whispered, “Do not tempt me to put another implant inside you.”

The Hsktskt female muttered something and closed her eyes.

“Posbret must have heard about the Hsktskt female from Mercy,” my husband said to Keel. “I had assumed that she and Drefan were friends.” “It’s more complicated than that.” The Chakacat braced its paws against the table and looked down.

“Mercy bought Drefan after he lost his legs and arm in the mines.” I almost dropped my suture laser. “She wished him to serve in her brothel?” “They knew each other long before his enslavement, ” Keel said, and began to say more, then fell silent. “I pulled some interesting facts from the database last night,” my husband said. “It seems that Drefan

owned StarCore.” The Chakacat hissed in a breath. “Those files are locked.” “They were,” my husband said, “until last night.” “Drefan owned the arutanium mines,” I said, to be sure. “Here, on Trellus.”

“They only owned them and collected the profits, ” Keel said in a defensive tone. “The Drefan family never left the homeworld or saw any of the mines.”

“If that is the case,” I said, “then who ran them?” “Alien overseers,” my husband told me. “When Drefan took over the mining company, he decided to offer to pay his overseers profit shares instead of the flat fees his parents and their parents had always paid them.”

Keel shook its head. “You don’t understand. He thought it would motivate them to be more productive. He wanted them to care about the business. The shares were only meant to be an incentive.”

Reever appeared unmoved. “It worked.” I looked from the Chakacat to my husband. “I cannot follow your meaning when you speak in circles and innuendo like this.”

“Tell her,” my husband said.

“To increase and secure their profit shares, the overseers began using slave labor in the mines.” Keel gave me a pleading look. “It was not Drefan’s fault. They never informed him of their actions.” “Drefan should have known,” Reever said harshly. “It was his business. His responsibility. The atrocities

the overseers committed were to protect his profit.” “Drefan never knew,” Keel insisted. “He is not capable of such cruelty.” I noticed how intently Tya was listening. “How was Mercy involved in this?” “Mercy discovered what the overseers were doing to the slaves in the StarCore mines here,” Keel told

me. “She had the mines shut down by reporting the use of slave labor to the quadrant authorities. They extradited Drefan from Terra and detained him while all of his mining ventures were subjected to inspection.”

“Obviously they found the slaves,” I guessed, “and set them free.” “Unfortunately, that was not the case. In an attempt to cover their crimes, the overseers killed most of the slaves before the quadrant investigators arrived,” Keel said. “A few escaped into the far reaches of the

tunnels and survived. As for the rest, the overseers pitched the bodies into the slag furnaces in order to destroy them, but they forgot about the records of sales from various slavers to StarCore.” “Quadrant seized the records,” Reever said, “and used them to identify those who had been murdered. ” “What did they do to Drefan?” I asked. “At the time Drefan could afford the best legal representation, and he did cooperate with quadrant, ”

Keel said. “He was stripped of all assets, exiled from Terra for life, and sentenced to ten years on a League penal colony.” “That doesn’t explain how he ended up working in the mines,” I said.

“Drefan was abducted from League custody just after the trial,” Reever said. “It seems quadrant authorities did not have him under adequate safeguard. Everyone assumed he had arranged his own escape.”

“He was sold to slavers and put to work in an arutanium mine on a non-League world,” Keel said. “He was kept below the surface for five years.”

Keel told us how Drefan had been crippled, saving some other miners from falling ore, only to lose his own limbs. Rendered useless to his owner, Drefan was sold for a pittance at a public auction.

“That was when Mercy bought him.”

Keel nodded. “She freed him, nursed him back to health, and had him fitted with prosthetics. She also lent him the credits he needed to set up Gamers. But Mercy has never forgiven him for what happened to the StarCore slaves. Neither has Posbret. He was one of the few survivors who escaped execution at the hands of Drefan’s overseers.”

Tya got up from the exam table and pushed past me, trudging out of the room. Keel followed, but Reever caught my arm as I went to go after them.

“Let the Chakacat look after her. You are exhausted. ”

I was, and the terrible story Keel had told us made me feel out of sorts. Until now I had admired James Drefan for surviving a terrible accident and flourishing despite his disabilities. Now a part of me thought he might deserve them.

“Do you think Drefan was ignorant of what was happening to the slaves in his mines?” I asked my husband.

“If he did not know,” Reever said, “he found out firsthand.”

Despite the disturbing ordeals and revelations of the day, I was exhausted, and sleep came easily to me that night. As soon as Reever pressed my head to his shoulder, I closed my eyes and let myself dissolve into blissful unconsciousness.

When the dream came, I resisted it. My weary soul desperately needed peace, and for a time I struggled to remain in the nameless, shapeless darkness.

Until she came, and held out her bloody hands, and looked upon me with her face of smooth gray skin. The lady of sorrows, some of the oldest Iisleg called her. Regret made flesh.

Come, Jarn.
Her voice caressed my ears.
Come and walk with me.

I could not deny her.

We crossed the ice, walking as the skela did, testing each snow bridge with our notched staffs to be sure they would hold our weight. The sky wallowed in its winds, consumed and consuming them, painting itself with the colors of the light split by prisms of frost. On the horizon, ptar glided, restlessly searching for a careless hunter.

Under my outfurs, my dimsilk robes felt stiff. The weight of my field pack dragged at my shoulders, tugging at muscles knotted with fatigue. I had been born on this world, and I had left it, gladly, to find a better place for myself and my child among the ensleg. But where the vral walked, there I would go. I had worn her face. I knew her heart.

On her blank face I saw shadows form a likeness of a young Iisleg child. Enafa, the novice skela who had been killed simply for touching me. The shadows changed and became my daughter, her sweet lips forming her name for me.

Mama. Mama.

I have tried to be worthy of their sacrifice,
I told the vral.
I have done the work. I have served the Iisleg and the ensleg. I have never asked for forgiveness.

So it is with me,
the vral said, raising her weapons.

I thought she meant to attack me, until a glowing purple shadow stretched over my head and fell between us. I tried to turn, to look upon the machine thing that had come to kill, but the vral’s robes wrapped around me and flung me into the sky. There I floated above them, a prisoner of the wind and the dream, helpless, made to watch, made to do nothing as their blades clashed and their bodies strained.