He let go of my face and turned back to his own food, the thrill of anger still sharp in his mind. I poked at the regim, then ate it mechanically. The dish was as bad as I’d thought it would be, but its taste really didn’t matter. It would have been horrible no matter what it tasted like.
I shifted around on the carpeting again, uncomfortable and unhappy, resisting the urge to turn and stare at the barbarian in tight-upped resentment. What was supposed to be so special about being a man and talking about men’s things? I bad every right to say anything I cared to to Garth, even if the barbarian didn’t like it. Garth acknowledged my position as Prime even if Tammad refused to, and that gave me the right. Tammad wasn’t concerned about excluding me from so-called men’s discussions; he was afraid I would alienate Garth and negate his attempts to make use of the Kabra. I didn’t know how he intended using Garth, but Tammad wasn’t one to waste whatever talent came past him. Ever since the swordfight in the park, Garth had become an important part of the barbarian’s plans. Just how important and exactly what those plans were remained to be seen.
After getting poked in the ribs and frowned at a couple of times for picking at my food, I decided I might as well get it over with and began swallowing as fast as possible to avoid tasting the stuff. I was almost all finished when the captain of the transport and two of his men showed up, but the three men weren’t alone. They each had a woman in tow by the arm, a piece of well-worn luggage held in their free hands, their scowls showing how disapproving they were, especially at the grins the women were wearing. The three females wore cheap, gaudy day-suits, cheaper jewelry, and the wrong sort of makeup. Their faces looked as though they belonged on a stage, and I soon found I wasn’t far wrong. The captain dragged his captive in front of Tammad, then shook her slightly as though showing evidence of guilt.
“Look what we found on the cargo deck,” he growled, obviously expecting the barbarian to understand what was going on. “Turn your back for more than a minute, and your ship is suddenly swarming with trippers.”
“Trippers?” Tammad echoed, examining the woman in detail with his eyes. She had very blond hair, as did the other two, but also had the brown eyes that they did. They weren’t natural blonds, not the way Tammad and his l’lendaa were, but the barbarian didn’t seem to know that. His mind hummed faintly as his eyes moved over the suit-hugged curves of her body, and the captain finally realized his meaning wasn’t getting through.
“Trippers are travelers who either can’t or won’t pay their way off the planet they’re on,” the captain explained, looking the woman over with less interest than Tammad had shown. “They hide on a private ship until the ship is on its way, then come forward demanding their rights under the distressed travelers’ law—the one that says all travelers on your vessel have to be taken care of whether they can pay for the trip or not. The law wasn’t meant to protect people like these three, but they don’t mind taking advantage of it. It gets them where they want to go without costing them anything, and being women, they can’t be forced to work out their fare. It would put them in ‘too compromising’ a position.”
“I see.” Tammad nodded, not missing the way the three women were laughing at the captain’s anger. His mind hummed again, but in a different key, and he added, “Perhaps they should have been told that this vessel concerns itself with Rimilian law, not that of the Amalgamation.”
The captain and his men suddenly grew wide, happy grins, and the women, noticing the abrupt change, found their own amusement deflating. The one in front of Tammad glanced back at her friends, then gave her attention to the captain again.
“We don’t care whose law you’re working under,” she told the captain with brash belligerence. “It’s too late to turn back to Alderan, so you’ve got to take us with you. And if you try not feeding us or getting too fast with the handwork, we’ll report you as soon as we set foot on your planet of destination. As a matter of fact, we just might report you anyway—if you don’t get smart real fast and come up with some sweet, pretty apologies for rousting us around. How about it, girls? Should we yell compromise?”
The other two laughed and agreed with enthusiasm, really enjoying the needling they were doing. Not one of them was worried about what would happen—as if they’d done the same thing many times before without anything unpleasant developing. I put my plate back on the small table without bothering about the rest of the regim. The barbarian wasn’t likely to notice, and I didn’t want to miss whatever was going to happen.
“Apologies, huh?” the captain snorted, his mind full of glee and satisfaction. “If we don’t treat you like something special, we get reported, do we? Well, go ahead and start reporting. The authority you’ll be talking to is sitting right there.”
He pointed to Tammad, and the woman stared at the barbarian thoughtfully. She still wasn’t worried, especially when she caught the way she was being inspected.
“Well, well,” she drawled, deliberately standing straighter and sticking her chest out. “So you’re the authority we’ll be complaining to. How about it, handsome? Are you going to be listening to his side of the story—or ours?”
The woman was being deliberately provocative, trading on the promise of her body for favoritism over the captain. I could see she considered the barbarian attractive, but I could also see she had no intentions of delivering on the promise she was making.
“You speak of a story,” the barbarian mused, leaning his broad body back on his cushions to stare up at the woman. “What is this story you wish me to hear?”
“It’s simple but tragic,” the woman sighed, trying to project honest heartache. The emotion was as false as her hair color, and everyone but Tammad seemed to know it. “My friends and I are an exotic dance team, working as many worlds as possible in order to pick up enough Earning Pluses to pay for an operation for a fourth friend of ours. She used to dance with us until—the accident. Without the operation, the doctors say she’ll never walk again.”
The woman paused to put her hand briefly to her face, supposedly in a spasm of grief, in reality to cut off a laugh at her own corny story. The captain groaned and tried to interrupt, undoubtedly thinking Tammad was buying every word, then groaned again when the barbarian gestured him to silence.
“I try not to think about that too much,” the woman said, gazing sadly at her victim. “Thinking about it is too painful. Well, at any rate, there we were, trying to earn ETA for our friend, when this—this—ruffian you call a captain comes over to us with some of his friends. He says he has a special job of dancing for us that will bring us more than what we need, but we have to go with him. My friends and I would do anything to help out our other friend so we do go with him—but once we get here we find out he’s lying. Not only is there no special job, but the transport takes off! Then be and his friends come down to where they left us, and tell us that if we don’t start being nice to them, they’ll turn us in as trippers! Well, my friends and I don’t do things like that, so we refuse—and the next thing we know, we’re being dragged in front of you. Now, we’re just girls so we can’t fight them, but you—is a big, strong man like you going to let them treat us like that?”
Tammad continued to stare at her as she batted her eyelashes at him, his expression thoughtful but unaccusing. She had picked up on his backwoods accent and was trying to take him for everything he had, without once considering whether or not the try would be safe. It came to me suddenly that she had never dealt with a barbarian before, and didn’t know she was dealing with one now. I stirred where I sat, half tempted to warn her, half tempted to let her find out the hard way, but the decision about what to do really wasn’t mine to make. The woman and her friends had voluntarily walked into a trap for innocents, and without their knowing it, the trap had already closed on their legs.