Auliss tugged him toward one of these, called The Little Friend.
Inside, the bar was dark but for the bluish glow of a holotank in one corner. The tables clustered around the tank, and a dozen or so humans gathered there, intent on the flickering images.
“Come,” Auliss said. “Let’s see what we can see.” She led him to a table, signaled a barmech, exchanged greetings with several of the others. It was soon apparent that she was a regular at The Little Friend.
The barmech provided them with drinks, a pale smoky brandy that Auliss recommended. Ruiz looked at the holotank, curious to see what Auliss found so entertaining.
The hot sunlight of Pharaoh glared on a dry wash, where three children, two girls and a boy, were playing some elaborate game. They seemed to be twelve or thirteen, just at the threshold of puberty.
The children stood a few meters apart from one another, in a roughly triangular pattern. At the feet of each was a pile of stones. The game seemed to involve guessing, bluffing, and physical agility. The children would engage in a vigorous dialogue, laughing and making faces, then at some unseen signal extend their hands, which would contain a varying number of stones. A shout would go up, and the children would dart for each other’s bases. Occasionally a collision occurred, which was cause for more laughter. The tank’s viewpoint shifted among the players, occasionally zooming in for a close-up of the boy, who had clean regular features, strong white teeth, and heavy-lashed sloe-shaped eyes.
All in all, an engaging scene, Ruiz thought, though, glancing at his fellow patrons, he wondered at the intense attention with which they watched the children.
“It’s the boy,” Auliss whispered. “He’s the one.”
What was she talking about? He started to ask her for a clarification, but the holotank switched modes. The scene of the playing children shrank down into the lower third of the tank, and a chubby smiling man, dressed as a Pharaohan, appeared in the top.
“Hello, hello,” he said. “Key your bids now.”
Ruiz felt his face grow stiff.
Auliss smiled eagerly at him. “I wish I could afford him, but he’ll go too high for me. I had to scrimp for a sixmonth before I could get Meraclain. And she’s getting a little old; she must be sixteen or seventeen by now. I’ll have to start saving again.” She seemed to sense his disapproval, though he struggled to keep it from showing on his face. “Oh, it’s perfectly legal, Ruiz. The League allots its surface agents a personal quota, as long as they don’t draw it from the traditional conjuror families, or any specially tagged specimens. Only the conjurors can be profitably exported outsystem, after all. It’s only fair compensation for the hardships of our life here, don’t you think? And it makes our tour here on the platform so much more civilized.”
Ruiz nodded, a bit jerkily. “I suppose.” His flesh crawled a bit where she clutched his arm. All around them the other patrons were entering bids on the keypads set into the top of the table, in a murmur of excited anticipation.
A moment later, a spotlight flashed on, to pick out a heavy-jowled sweating man, whose companions whooped and thumped him on the back. “Oh, he won the boy cheap,” said Auliss, looking quite vexed. But then she seemed to recover her good humor. “Well, perhaps I’ll do as well next time. I can hope.”
“Umm,” Ruiz said, noncommittally. “Is it expensive to keep two bondservants?”
She ducked her head, a bit embarrassed. “Well, yes, actually — what with paying the life-support fees and the luxury penalties. But if I can’t sell Meraclain to someone with different tastes, I’ll have her mindwiped and released back into her natural environment. I’m not the sort that would space an unwanted helot, after all.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Ruiz said dryly. He felt an overpowering desire to leave — to see the last of Auliss Moncipor. “Ah… it occurs to me that my instructions to the technician were insufficient… would you excuse me briefly?”
She nodded, and patted his arm absentmindedly, her attention already fixed on the holotank, which now displayed a scene of what Ruiz guessed to be a Pharaohan schoolyard. Scores of raggedly dressed children played on the hard-packed clay. The holocam swooped in to examine a small girl with delicate features and large violet eyes, who was speaking seriously to a crude doll.
Ruiz lurched forth from The Little Friend, stomach sour. He went directly down to the bay in which the Vigia rested, intent on leaving the platform as soon as possible.
He walked out onto the bay’s wide steel floor, to see a figure in technician’s overalls slide furtively from the Vigia’s dorsal drive tube. Instinctively, Ruiz hid behind a column of service plumbing, and observed.
The technician was a small slender man, who glanced about quickly and then drew a levitor pallet from the tube, upon which some rather large delicate object had been carried, judging from the loose straps and contoured blocks with which the pallet was equipped.
Ruiz’s carefully nurtured paranoia flared up brightly. He followed the technician, gliding from covert to covert, as the man left the bay. The man stopped at a storeroom and guided the pallet inside. Ruiz stepped into the storeroom, making no sound. The technician, intent on stowing the pallet in a wall rack, did not notice him.
Ruiz kicked shut the door and seized the technician’s arm. Pivoting, he slammed the technician into the wall, face first, hard enough to stun, but not hard enough to kill. The man bounced off the wall and fell on his back, face bloody. Ruiz knelt on his chest, patted him for weapons, found none.
“What did you do?” Ruiz asked, gently.
The man looked up through a red mask and tried to smile. He pushed bits of shattered teeth from his mouth. “Sir?”
“What did you do to my boat?”
“Maintenance, of course.”
Ruiz took hold of the man’s nose, which seemed broken, and gave it a vigorous twist. The man opened his mouth to shriek and Ruiz clamped his hand on the man’s windpipe. Just before the man’s eyes rolled up into his head, Ruiz released his grip. “No noise.”
The man nodded, no longer smiling.
“We’ll try again. What did you do to my boat? Don’t dissemble; when I’m finished with you, I’ll crawl up the tube and look, so you might as well tell me. While you’re at it, tell me who ordered you to do whatever you did.”
“Well, since you put it that way,” the man said, and died.
Ruiz remained atop the corpse for a moment, watching the eyes glaze. Odd, he thought. Surely he hadn’t banged the fellow into the wall that hard. A death net? But where would a conspirator find a Gench to do the work, here in this undeveloped system?
Ruiz took the technician’s tool belt and trotted back into the bay. At the vent, he discovered a tiny discolored pinhole where the technician had burned through the Vigia’s skin, disabling the sensor cable that serviced the tube. The Vigia would have been unable to report the invasion of her innards. He shinnied up the dorsal tube and found, emplaced into an injector nacelle, a rather large block of monocrystal explosive, enough to reduce the Vigia to a cloud of drifting molecules. He examined it with great care, found no booby traps or any evidence that it could be remotely detonated. Apparently the saboteur was relying on Ruiz to fire the tube on entry into Pharaoh’s atmosphere, which was a simple and foolproof plan. It would have succeeded nicely but for the attack of distaste Ruiz had suffered in The Little Friend.
Ruiz detached the block and shinnied down the tube. He carried the block into the storeroom and set it next to the corpse, then hotfooted it back to the Vigia, which he entered and buttoned up for departure.