The Sardonyx Net (3 page)

The rich of Sardonyx Sector came to Abanat to play. Tourists on Chabad bought kerit pelts and handblown glass and tapestries and golden chains and silver rings, and slaves.
 

Rhani gazed at Amri, still watering the flowers. The young slave's eyes were focused and clear, pupils normal, and she had none of the symptoms of the dorazine addict about her. It was a point of pride with Family Yago that their house slaves were never kept on dorazine. The dorazine that the Yagos bought went to the kerit farm in Sovka, or to the Net. Most of it went to the Net. Rhani rubbed the top of the brick wall. It was powdery with dust. It had seemed a logical transition to the investors, to make the criminals who came to Chabad each year into slaves. Surely, it was easier to be a slave than a prisoner in a cell, or an exile condemned to swelter and starve in the shadeless valleys of Chabad's hills. She recalled the text of the threatening letter. It was the fourth in three months. “WE WILL KILL YOU, SLAVER. Signed, The Free Folk of Chabad.”
 

At least the Free Folk of Chabad are terse, she thought.
 

A dragoncat, its coat flame-red, long tail waving, came silently onto the terrace and poked its head under her hand to be stroked. It rubbed its shoulder against her thigh. She petted it absently. It went to sniff at Amri, who scratched its ears. It purred. Rhani smiled; she loved the graceful beasts. They had full freedom of the house and grounds. They were imports from Enchanter, whose labs had given them their fanciful name. They had sharp claws and great speed and were rather more intelligent than the great Earth cats whose genes they had been bred from. They fretted, sometimes, at the heat, and the sameness of the smells, at the lack of hunting, and especially at the walls that edged the greenery and kept them in, unable to run. But in the burning, waterless plains, they would only die.
 

She went back to the house, and touched the intercom. “Binkie.” It sounded through every room. Silent as one of the dragoncats, he came to the door. “Get me the files on the personnel at the kerit farm,” she said. “Someone has to be promoted to the cretin manager's place.”
 

He bent over the computer. “Yes, Rhani-ka.”
 

Sitting at the desk, she dug out a piece of paper and her favorite pen. She wrote to Sherrix in their private code, offering to pay double the quoted price for dorazine if that would unblock the market, although she did not think it would. Then she spread out her steward's accounts, and was soon absorbed in them. The rise and fall of her household, for an hour, was as important to her as the rise and fall of her financial hegemony. When Binkie brought the stack of printouts to her, she said, without lifting her head, “Leave them here.”
 

The fair-haired secretary/slave laid the files down on one corner of the big marble desk, and went away.
 

Zed Yago, commander of the Net, paced along the curving corridor of his kingdom toward his cabin. His eyes stung. He had been wakeful for nearly two shifts, supervising the transfer of slaves from the Enchanter prison ships to the Net cells, and he was very tired. The Net rotated in spacetime normal off Enchanter while the third shift checked out the systems before the final, long-awaited Jump to Chabad, to home.
 

Two crew members passed him; they were suitless, as he was, looking forward no doubt to well-deserved sleep. They murmured greetings, and he nodded back, friendly but aloof, for on the Yago Net he was king, master, overseer, senior medic, and controller. He touched the pouchpocket on his chest, feeling the slight stiffness of the scrap of microfiche. A message capsule had brought it through the Hype to Enchanter, and Enchanter had ‘grammed it to the great, graceful, silver torus.
 

In his cabin, Zed slid the microfiche into the viewer's slot. Words marched across the creamy background. Zed recognized his sister's secretary's style, and smiled.
 

But as he read the message, his smile vanished. When it ended, he tossed the plastic strip into the disposal, and brushed the switch of the communicator that put him in touch with the bridge.
 

“This is Zed.”
 

“Clear, Zed-ka.” That was deep-voiced Jo Leiakanawa, his second-in-command, the Net's chief navigator.
 

“Double-time the checkout. Get us home.”
 

“Yes, Zed-ka.” The communicator pinged once and was silent. Zed sat on the hard bunk. His hair was red-brown, like his sister's, and he wore it to the shoulders, and almost always tied. He stretched his legs out, staring without seeing at the bulkhead in front of him.
 

Three out of ten Chabadese months he lived in the Net, not luxuriously. The great craft consisted mainly of the Drive Core and two kinds of storage space: holds for food, water, and drugs; and cells in which people could stand, sit, and lie. They could not walk more than a few steps; where on the Net would slaves need to walk to? The crew cabins were little bigger than the slave cells. Each year the Net traveled to Sabado, Belle, Ley, and Enchanter, the other four worlds of Sardonyx Sector, to choose prisoners from their prisons to fill the Net cells. The sector worlds paid the Net for this service. The Net had particular standards: some criminals were too brutal to make useful slaves; others, too stupid. The Net medics, including Zed, spot-checked prisoners and reports before allowing the prisoners to be loaded. This, Enchanter, was the end of that circuit. Now the Net returned to Chabad, where the Auction would be held.
 

Non-Chabadese swarmed to the planet at this time, willing to live in Abanat and pay exorbitant residence taxes so that they might own one, two, a household of slaves. Wealthy Chabadese bought house slaves. The city bought maintenance slaves. Slaves came with their owner's credit disks in their hands to buy garden or factory or workshop slaves. Ex-slaves, now with skills and businesses to run, came to pick out slaves. Family Yago prospered. The worlds of Sardonyx Sector slowly refilled their prisons. Net crew members spent their credits in the Hyper bar in Abanat. In seven months a shuttleship would take them, broke and bored, from Abanat to Port on the moon, and they would ready the Net to Jump once more.
 

“Attention, third shift crew. Attention, third shift crew.” That was Jo's voice. Zed heard the sound of running feet outside his closed door. The crew would be angry at the new orders; they were tired of working hard. Zed shrugged. They would not show their irritation to him. Complaints would go to Jo; she handled the crew. She was good at it. Though he was its commander, Zed knew very well that he could not have run the Net without her. That knowledge did not trouble him at all.
 

For one swift, sybaritic moment, Zed permitted himself to think of Rhani standing in the moonlight on the green lawn of the Yago estate, or smiling under the Chabad sun, waiting for him. That vision had succored him for five years on Nexus, while he learned to be a pilot and then a medic; even now it eased his heart. With practiced discipline, he turned away from it to think of something else: the message, particularly that enigmatic communiqué from Ferris Dur. Till the building of the Net—begun by Orrin, finished by Isobel Yago—Family Dur had been richer than Family Yago. Now, without seeing the balance sheets, Zed guessed that Family Yago's profits exceeded Family Dur's, and had for ten years. Samantha Dur had not been a woman to see money flowing past without trying to tap it. She had made a formal offer to buy into the kerit farm. The offer had been refused. In the Chabad Council, her deputy had moved to raise the hefty fee the Yagos paid yearly for license to operate the Net. The Council defeated the bill. He wondered if, in pique and in senility, she had initiated a bit of sabotage at the kerit farm. Rhani would know better than he; she knew the old woman as well as anyone. But Zed knew that at ninety-three Samantha Dur had never learned to listen when someone else said, “No.”
 

Was Ferris Dur trying to follow those implacable footsteps? Zed tried to remember what the Dur heir looked like. Dark, he thought. They didn't meet more than once or twice within a year. Zed ignored the social whirl, preferring the solitude of the Yago estate to tourist-laden Abanat. He hated parties.
 

His wrist communicator let out a tone. “Yes, Jo,” he said.
 

“Zed-ka, the checkout is proceeding as ordered, no problems, but we have a medical query on Level 6, Block A, Cell 170, and I can't get response from Nivas.” Nivas Camilleri was the on-shift senior medic.
 

“She's probably asleep,” said Zed. “She worked two shifts, like everybody else. What's the situation?”
 

“Permission is asked to increase dorazine dosage.”
 

“I'll look.”
 

On Level 6, Block A, outside the door of Cell 170, a worried junior medic stood, peering through the door of one-directional glass, keys jangling in her hand. The occupant of the cell was a brown fat man. He was sitting on the bunk, huffing; there was a purpling bruise on his forehead. As Zed watched, he gathered himself up, hunched his shoulders, and threw himself into the bare wall, keeping his hands at his sides. His head and one shoulder hit the wall; he fell, gasping, to the floor. He crawled back to the bunk again and faced the wall. “Senior, don't you think—” said the junior medic.
 

“Yes,” said Zed. He brushed a hand over his head, freeing his hair from its tie so that it fell to his shoulders. Taking the key from the junior hand, he opened the cell door and went inside.
 

The fat man looked up. He had split open the bruise on his forehead. Blood trickled down the left side of his face. Zed glanced at the wall screen on which the prisoner's name, age, crime, planet of origin, planet of imprisonment, dorazine dose, and length of slave contract were noted. “What are you doing?” The man did not answer. Zed repeated it. “What are you doing, Bekka?”
 

Bekka's gaze fixed on him. His pupils were moderately dilated. “D-d-damaging the merchandise.”
 

“Why are you doing that?”
 

“You think I'm going to go and be a slave?” He staggered upright. “Get out of my way.”
 

He took a deep breath, preparing to launch himself forward again. Zed took a step and caught the man's left arm, fingers finding the nerve just above the elbow. Bekka's feet went out from under him at the unexpected pain. He landed hard, his face screwed into a grimace. “For a man who managed to embezzle credits from two fairly astute companies, you're not very bright,” Zed said. He put the pressure on. “Are you listening?”
 

“Ah—don't—yes!”
 

Zed let go. Bekka curled the fingers of his right hand around his left elbow. “You're an accountant and a programmer. A slave with talent can go far on Chabad. You're on a five-year contract. At the end of five years, you'll step into the streets of Abanat a free man, with credits enough to buy passage offplanet, a house, a business, even your own slaves. You'd be surprised at how many ex-slaves stay on Chabad when their contracts expire. Make trouble and you'll spend the next five years in a dorazine doze, grinning like a dog, with no sense of who or where you are. Behave, and you might get to keep your senses and do the work you like. You understand?”
 

“Yes,” said the rebel.
 

“Then stop acting the fool. Will you behave?” Zed touched the man's left arm again.
 

He jumped, and stammered, “Yes. Yes.”
 

“Good. Clean him up.” Zed left the cell to let the junior medic work. He was almost disappointed in how swiftly the man had capitulated, but not, he reflected, disappointed enough to have prolonged the incident. Bekka was not, physically or emotionally, an especially interesting type. The medic worked swiftly. When she finished, she came into the corridor, locking the door behind her. Bekka sat quietly in his cell, a gel bandage over the cut. “Tell the guards to check on him every two hours,” Zed said. “And increase his dorazine dosage for the next three days to one-point-five-five, until we get to Port.”
 

He went back to his cabin. The encounter with Bekka had made him sweat. He stripped, and stepped for a few minutes under the warm spray of the shower. A visitor to the room might have been surprised. It contained no ornaments, no pictures except a small holocube of Rhani Yago, no pillows or rugs, nothing to soften the utilitarian severity of walls and floor. In comparison, the technicians' quarters in the Net were hedonistic. But no one knowing Zed Yago would have been surprised. He was not that kind of a sensualist.
 

He lay down on the bunk. The ship's walls hummed softly. Zed Yago lived three months out of his year within that sound; he no longer heard it.
 

It changed. The equipment check was complete. In the Core of the Net, the Drive came on. The ship Jumped. Zed curled his knees almost to his chest, and closed his eyes.
 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

Coming into Port on Chabad's moon, the sky was thick with ships, if, Dana thought, you could pretend that an airless planetoid possessed a sky.
 

The ships were invisible but extremely audible. “Flight Tower calling
Seminole
...”
 

“
Seminole
here, Juno on the stick. Hello, Control. Will you tell Ramirez to please get his nose out of my ass!”
 

“Control to Ramirez, back off. Calling
Mirabelle
. Come in,
Mirabelle
.”
 

“
Mirabelle
here, Control. Ramirez on the stick. I'm backing off; two hours I've been backing off. My passengers are sick of staring at the shiny side of a rock.”