Cobra Outlaw - eARC (19 page)

But that wouldn’t explain the gray building.

Merrick chewed at his lip. Clearly, he’d gotten about all he was going to get from out here. If he wanted to know what was going on in Svipall, he was going to have to go in.

He lowered his eyes to the field stretched outside the fence. Gangari had a similar field surrounding it, mostly planted with the bersark plant that was the source of the bersarkis drug used in the Games. This field, too, was made up of the same plants.

But the Gangari field had also included a pathway composed of slightly different plants, some variant that looked like bersark but didn’t carry the same dangerous poison. It was reasonable to assume that the residents of Svipall had done the same.

More importantly from Merrick’s point of view, the two plants looked different under infrared. Activating that part of his opticals, hoping that the trick would still work in the rapidly fading light, he peered at the field.

The good news was that the field was indeed composed of both plants. The bad news was that if a path had ever existed, it was long gone. All that remained were scattered patches of the safe plant, with the connections between them overgrown by the bersark.

Merrick smiled tightly. Whether by design or accident, the neglect of the pathway had pretty much eliminated any chance that someone could enter the village from this direction. That meant the Trofts had no need to guard against any such intruders.

Unless the intruder happened to be a Cobra.

The first safe patch four meters away and a meter square. Merrick made it easily, landing dead center. The next was both farther and smaller, five meters inward and half the size of the first. He made that one as well. Slowly, carefully, he zigzagged his way across the field until he ended up in one final safe zone barely a meter from the fence.

Given the inherent dangers of a bersark field, it was unlikely that anyone in Svipall would make a break for it in this direction, from which it followed that the Trofts probably hadn’t bothered equipping the fence with either sensors or dangerous levels of current. Just the same, Merrick took a couple of extra minutes to study the mesh before concluding that it was in fact safe. Waiting until there was a break in the traffic beyond the row of houses, he made one final jump, rolling over the top of the fence and landing on the strip of grass beyond.

Again he waited, crouched low, his audios at full power as he listened tensely for any sign that his entrance had been spotted. Again, nothing. Taking a deep breath, noting the same exotic mixture of cooking aromas he remembered from Gangari, he straightened up and slipped along the side of the nearest house. He waited near the front until his audios indicated that there was no one walking nearby, and with only a little trepidation stepped past into the main part of the village.

Like Gangari, Svipall’s houses were small but neat, with carvings and other decorative features on their walls and the edges of their roofs. They were packed fairly tightly together, with the limited open land around them mostly being used for food gardens. He wondered briefly why the passage he’d just walked through wasn’t likewise being utilized, and it was only as he looked back that he realized with some embarrassment that he’d just walked carelessly through a triple row of what looked to be some kind of root vegetable.

Hopefully, he hadn’t damaged any of the plants. If he had, it was too late now.

He peered down the narrow and meandering street that wound between the gardens. Between the houses to his left, he could see a bit of the distant gray building. None of the Trofts that had passed by this spot earlier were visible.

Still, that was the direction they’d gone. If he was going to find out what they were up to, he’d better get after them.

“An evening of hope to you.”

Startled, Merrick turned. An old woman was sitting on a small porch attached to the house to his right, working silently on a piece of cloth with some kind of knitting needles. “And to you,” he replied, hoping that was the proper response. It wasn’t a greeting he’d heard anyone on Muninn use before.

Apparently, it wasn’t. “What hope do
I
need?” the woman asked, peering oddly at him through the gathering gloom. “
You’re
the one young enough to be taken.” Her eyes narrowed. “What am I saying? You’ve already been brought in for the Games, haven’t you?”

Merrick winced. Great—she’d pegged him as a stranger. Just great. “I was brought in, yes,” he improvised. “As to hope, all people need that, do they not?”

She made a strange sort of grunting noise in the back of her throat. “Hope is no longer with us,” she said with a sigh. “Death and madness will continue until none but the masters remain to tally.”

Merrick felt a shiver run up his back. There was a futility in her voice that he’d never heard in Anya or even the other slaves on their transport ship. It was as if the woman had completely given up.

Maybe she had. Anya had been a slave for Commander Ukuthi, who had apparently treated her well enough that he’d trusted her to go on this mission with him. The other slaves on the transport had likewise been with foreign masters. Maybe a lifetime on Muninn had simply beaten this woman down to the point where there was nothing left but to wait for death.

Or maybe it was something about Svipall specifically. Something the Trofts were doing here.

Something involving that gray building.

“Perhaps hope will return,” Merrick said. “I must leave now. May your evening be pleasant, and your night restful.”

If it wasn’t a standard farewell, it apparently wasn’t ridiculous enough to spark unwanted curiosity. The old woman merely nodded and returned to her knitting, the infrared pattern of her face showing no extra surge of emotion that might indicate suspicion. Turning, Merrick headed off down the path between the houses toward the gray building.

No one was visible. That bothered him, especially considering that there’d been a fair amount of foot traffic going back and forth only a few minutes ago. He tried notching up his audios to try to get some clue as to where everyone was, but the sounds of his own footsteps was drowning out any noise anyone might be making, and he didn’t want to risk drawing attention by suddenly stopping to listen. He reached the end of the staggered row of houses and eased his eye around the corner.

Part of the mystery, at least, was now solved. Between the houses and the gray building was a wide open area, into which a large crowd had gathered. It was hard to tell for sure from his angle, but it looked like they had formed themselves into a circle, several people deep, with an open area in the center.

It looked like a sports rally, or some other kind of preparation for a game. For
the
Games? Probably.

Only unlike any other game or sport Merrick had ever attended, the crowd here wasn’t cheering or chanting or even talking among themselves. They were utterly silent, as if it were a wake or funeral instead of a game.

Maybe be was.
Death and madness
, the old woman had said.

Merrick had seen some of the madness in Gangari, when Henson Hillclimber had refereed combat between a pair of preteen boys. The fight had gone on way longer than it should have, thanks to the bersarkis drug that Hillclimber had administered to the fighters.

But even with that drug-induced frenzy, that Game had ended in only unconsciousness. Did the Games in Svipall operate under more lethal rules?

And then, without warning, the whole open area lit up.

Reflexively, Merrick ducked back behind the edge of the building. But there was no outcry or other evidence that he’d been spotted and targeted.

He stayed pressed against the side of the house for another few seconds. Then, gathering himself, he eased back to the corner and again looked around it.

Sure enough, the lights weren’t part of an intruder alarm. They were, instead, coming from a set of four pole-mounted floodlights that he hadn’t noticed and which had turned the center of the open field into daylight brightness.

And now, with the spectators’ faces much easier to see, Merrick realized that the old woman’s hopelessness wasn’t an isolated case. Every face he could see had the same resignation deeply etched into it.

Slowly, he scanned the faces, looking for one that might still have a spark of life in it. If he could find someone—anyone—who hadn’t given up, maybe he could approach him and find out what the Trofts were doing in that big building.

And then, abruptly, he caught his breath. Standing on the edge of the crowd, their faces in profile but readily identifiable, were three of the slaves from their transport ship: Leif and Katla Streamjumper and their young daughter Gina. Three of the group that had accompanied him and Anya on their two-day walk to Gangari after the transport dropped them off on Muninn.

Gangari was where he and Anya had left them. So what were they doing in Svipall?

Best-case scenario was that the Trofts had taken the handful of people who could identify the fugitives on sight and scattered them around to some of the nearby villages. Worst-case scenario was that the Trofts had already guessed that Merrick would be showing up at Svipall.

There would probably come a time when Merrick would need to reveal himself and confront the Trofts. But that time wasn’t not tonight. Not if he could help it.

The fading daylight had turned nearly to dark by the time Merrick returned to the spot where he’d jumped the fence. It was dark enough, in fact, that he quickly discovered that his infrared trick for distinguishing the plants from each other no longer worked.

Luckily, with a boost from his opticals’ light-amp setting, he found that the spots where he’d landed on the way in were easily identifiable from the bent and broken plants. Launching himself over the fence, he hit the first safe area, regained his balance, and jumped for the second.

He was two jumps from the end of the field and the safety of the forest when a large aircar abruptly shot into view over the trees to the north.

Merrick dropped into a crouch, cursing his lack of vigilance. He’d been so focused on getting across the field that he hadn’t kept his audios keyed for unexpected company. If that aircar was hunting him, he was in serious trouble.

But the Trofts inside seemed to have other plans for the evening. Instead of continuing toward him, the aircar came to a halt just outside the reflected glow from the Games area, which was by now about two hundred meters away from him. There it settled into a low hover, as if its occupants had merely come to watch the show.

Perhaps they had. A sports arena term he’d read once flicked to mind:
owner’s box
.

Merrick apparently hadn’t been spotted. His primary job now was to keep it that way.

If he stayed where he was, waiting for the Games to start and the aircar’s occupants to be more distracted, he might have a better chance of hopping out of here undetected. On the other hand, the longer he crouched in the middle of an open field, the greater the chance that someone up there might do a random IR scan. Merrick eyed the aircar, feeling sweat gathering under his collar, trying to decide which option posed the smaller risk.

Only then did it suddenly dawn on him that while his neck was indeed sweating, his heartbeat was also increasing, his vision felt a little odd, and there was a new and disturbingly sour scent in the air.

He looked down. He’d landed in the middle of the safe zone…but when the aircar’s sudden appearance had sent him into a crouch he’d reflexively put out a hand for balance.

And that hand had landed squarely on top of one of the bersark plants.

His first impulse was to jerk back from contact with the broken stem and leaves. A second later he realized that if the poison was a contact variety it was far too late. If it was instead airborne and not contact…but it was too late for that, too. One way or the other, he’d been exposed, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Except get the hell out of here before whatever was going to happen happened.

But there was still the aircar hovering over Svipall. And it was getting louder. It must have seen him and—

He frowned. The aircar hadn’t moved. Yet it was louder. Had it somehow revved up its grav lifts without rising any higher?

No, that wasn’t it. Because the insects were also louder. So were the scratchy scurrying sounds of small animals in the forest beyond the bersark field, and the flapping of birds flying nearby.

He must have somehow notched up his audios. But a quick check showed that he hadn’t. His hearing had suddenly just gotten better.

He looked back at the aircar. As his hearing had improved, he realized with mild interest, so had his sight. Even through the glare of the floodlights he could now make out the symbols on the vehicle’s side, the cattertalk script marking it as the property of the Drim’hco’plai demesne.

The demesne that had enslaved Muninn for generations…and suddenly Merrick felt a righteous anger boil up inside him. How
dare
they do this to his fellow humans? He straightened to his feet, bent his knees for a mighty leap that would send him soaring across the sky to the aircar—

He staggered as a sudden wave of vertigo swept over him, knocking him off his feet and threatening to slam him face-first in the bersark. He caught himself in time, gripping the plants as he tried to stop the violent spinning in his head. The spinning slowed, and he started to stand up again.

And cursed as a bird slammed into his shoulder, again knocking him off balance. He winced at the impact, though a small, functioning part of his brain noted with some surprise that a collision that would definitely leave a bruise wasn’t hurting. He got back to his feet again and glanced around, looking for his assailant.

It wasn’t just a single bird. It was a whole flock of them: dark, streamlined shapes—ten, fifteen, maybe more—all of them curving around and swooping out of the sky.

Heading straight toward him.

The damn things were
attacking
.

And suddenly, something within him snapped.

He could target them, he knew: lock his opticals sequentially on the birds and blast them to feathers and charred meat. But that would be too easy. Too quick. The birds wanted him? Fine. He would make sure they learned pain before they died.