Elizabeth Lynn - The Sardonyx Net

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The Sardonyx Net

by Elizabeth A. Lynn

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Science Fiction

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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original

purchaser. Duplication or distribution of this work by email, floppy disk,

network, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international

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The assistance of the following people is gratefully acknowledged: Dr.

Jane Robinson, Dr. Seelye Martin, Sonni Efron, Lyndall MacCowan, Martha McCabe,

Fran Krauss, Ellen Jacobs, Robert W. Shurtleff, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gordon R.

Dickson, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, David G. Hartwell, and Yvon Chouinard.

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For Marta, who read it first, and

for Debbie, who read it twice.

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"_History is not romantic_."

-- Nakamura Kenji, _History of Chabad_

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*Chapter One*

Dana Ikoro, smuggler, stood facing Monk the drug courier across the floor

of the starship _Treasure_. He was furious.

Monk had ebony skin and a sleek, shaven skull. She wore silver leggings

and ruby earrings, and between her breasts dangled a shiny gold medallion,

sister to the one Dana Ikoro wore around his neck. She was well known on the

dorazine circuit. She was two meters tall and Dana had to look up to her.

It was not a position he liked. He clenched his fists in his pocket and

swore under his breath in Pellish. Monk gazed at him, eyelids drooping evilly,

ostentatiously bored. He repeated what she had just told him. "The drugs have

already gone?"

She nodded, slouching. "That's right."

He could see she enjoyed his discomfort, and it enraged him. "You want to

tell me how you managed to lose three thousand unit doses of dorazine?"

She shrugged. "I follow instructions. Instructions said, Wait for a ship

carrying this code, hitting these coordinates, at this time. I pick up the stuff

from the robo, Jump here, wait. Twenty minutes ago, _Lamia_ Jumps in, matches

codes with me. I know _Lamia_. I know Tori Lamonica. We've done business before.

Codes match, we transfer. Twenty minutes later, you Jump through with the

identical code, the dorazine's gone. That's not my fault." She gazed over his

head as she talked.

Jacked, Dana thought. Damn it, Lamonica jacked me!

He'd never been jacked before. Dorazine was prime cargo. Damn and blast

it, he'd never _carried_ dorazine before! He'd had to buy equipment: the Drug

spoiled at temperatures under 6 degrees and over 14 degrees Celsius. The special

cooling unit had cost him five hundred credits, but he'd expected to realize at

least three thousand upon sale of the drug on Chabad. He was not only out his

own money, but he'd been made a fool of, and in the smugglers' canon, ridicule

presaged poverty. He might never get a second chance to run the drug.

It did not make him feel any better to know that he'd been taken by an

expert. Tori Lamonica boasted of her skill in jacking cargoes in every sector,

planet, and Port of the Living Worlds. He controlled his anger with an effort.

This was Monk's ship; he could hardly tear it to bits as he wanted to -- and

Monk didn't care if he went bust as vacuum.

"Great," he said. "That was my cargo. Now what do I do? Got any

suggestions?"

She smiled, showing perfect teeth. "Jack someone else."

Dana bristled. "That's not my style. I'm no thief."

The tall woman yawned. "I wouldn't call Tori Lamonica a thief -- not to

her face, anyway. Who suckered you into this business?"

The question was rhetorical and insulting but Dana decided to answer it

anyway; he might learn something. "I've been running comine," he said. "I

thought I might make more credits working for The Pharmacy."

"Sure," said Monk. "If you don't land in a cell." She took two steps to

the pilot's chair, sat in it, touched a button negligently. The screens came on.

"Don't know why Tori wants your cargo, anyway. Dorazine's not safe."

"What?"

"You haven't heard?" Monk tilted her head to one side. Even her eyebrows

were shaved. "That new top drug cop, A-Rae. He's snake-mean about the dorazine

trade. Obsessed. The cops have left off haunting drop points -- not that it ever

did them any good. They're clustered down in Sardonyx Sector off Chabad, picking

runners up when they try to land, playing leapfrog along the spaceways."

"I hadn't heard about that," Dana admitted.

"The regulars are looking for other work," said Monk. She chuckled, and

stretched her legs halfway across the starship's floor. "The Pharmacy's _real_

unhappy."

All the regulars except Lamonica, Dana thought. He glanced at the

starship's vision screen. It showed the darkness of spacetime normal, mitigated

by the pulsing light from a nearby Cepheid. The yellow star had no planets, and

that made it a convenient place for a drop point. There were hundreds of such

points scattered through the eight Federation sectors.

"Lamonica's going to Chabad," Dana said. It was not quite a question.

Hypers did not ask each other about other Hypers.

Monk yawned again. "She's got nowhere else to go. She's carrying

dorazine." Her tone was weary -- an expert, explaining something to a slightly

stupid novice. Dana's temper flared. He turned and strode to the lock which

connected Monk's ship with his own. He slithered through it, graceful as all

Hypers were, balancing without thought as the floor rippled under his feet.

Palming the hatchway plate, he waited for the door to open, then grabbed the bar

and swung within his starship's curving walls. The door slid shut. He checked

the seal...."Disengage," he said over the audio link.

_Zipper_ jogged as the other ship sucked back the lock tube. Dana watched

in his screen as _Treasure_ Jumped, going from silver-gray to blue, to green, to

orange, to blazing red.... After the ship vanished into the Hype, the rainbow

emissions lingered in normal space.

The Cepheid pulsed, half a light-year away. Dana swore at it in Pellish.

The day he'd been accosted in Liathera's, the Hyper bar on Nexus, he'd thought

the luck was at last turning to smile his way. Now it seemed as if she were only

playing with him.... He'd probably never get a chance to run dorazine again. Now

he could go back to the gamblers' runs -- running nightshade for the Verdians --

picking up two hundred credits here, five hundred credits there, always watching

his back for the Hype cops. Damn! He'd lived like that for six standard months,

loathing every insecure minute of it. It was a cheap, chancy way to survive.

Or -- he loathed the thought -- he could sell his ship, and work for some

damn corporate fleet, no longer Starcaptain but a simple pilot, taking the

orders of some fish-brained, planetbound administrator.

He'd be damned and pickled before he'd live like that. Fingering the

medallion round his neck, he wondered which of Liathera's regular customers had

overheard his conversation with The Pharmacy's agent. It might have been anybody

with good ears, catching a word here, a code there, waiting until the deal was

set, then trotting off to sell the information to Tori Lamonica. He'd never

know. He wondered how much she'd paid for the information. Savagely, he hoped it

had been a lot.

Now he had nothing: no money -- well, very damn little, just enough to

survive -- no dorazine to sell, not even the name of a contact in Sardonyx

Sector. He blanked the vision screen to help himself think, and sat in the

navigator's chair. It creaked. Everything on _Zipper_ creaked or whined or

rattled, except the Drive. But she was _his_, his ship, his home, his ticket to

the Hype. No one who was not a Hyper could quite understand what it felt like to

have your own ship. He'd picked her out of the Nexus yards, with Russell

O'Neill's help.... He wondered if, by some lucky chance, Russell might be

working Sardonyx Sector. Russell the Pirate; Russell the thief. Russell might

know someone on Chabad.

But Russell did not run drugs. Indeed, the redhead had warned him sharply

that if he was planning to turn drug courier, he should stay well away from

Sardonyx Sector.

"I won't argue morals," Russell had said. "But consider some facts -- the

Yago Family owns the Net, and the Net runs on dorazine. So, when you transport

dorazine to Chabad, you can figure that most of it is destined for the Net. But

it's as illegal to transport dorazine to Sardonyx Sector as it is in any other

sector of the Federation, and if the Hype cops catch you with it anywhere in the

sector, they'll try you and convict you and toss you into prison, and from

prison you'll go to the Net, where they'll shoot you full of dorazine and turn

you into a slave on Chabad, and serve you right. You want to run drugs, that's

your business, not mine. You make your own ethical choices. But you'd better get

some more experience on the circuits, Dana, before you try to run dorazine."

Dana grinned, remembering.... That conversation, like many others during

the six months he'd been pilot on the _Morgana_, had ended up in bed. He'd never

made love with a man before, but he learned soon enough that it was hard to say

no to Russell. The loving had been fun. But he'd kept the lecture in mind over

the last eight months. For the first two of them, he had even looked for legal

work. Russell, had he heard of _that_, would have surely laughed. Finding

nothing that sparked his interest, Dana had turned to the drug trade. Gamblers'

runs had seemed exciting, at first, but the excitement quickly palled. And then,

in Liathera's, the agent said, "You've got quite a reputation. Aren't you

getting a bit tired of gamblers' runs?"

Dana admitted that he was.

"You're young, tough. Maybe you'd like to pick up some bigger credits?"

"Sure."

"Want to work with The Pharmacy? You'd need some supply money -- nothing

much, maybe eight hundred credits -- and a contact in Sector Sardonyx. But

you've got that, I'm sure."

"Sure," Dana said again.

He'd lied. He didn't know one single soul on Chabad. But the agent hadn't

known he'd lied, and why should he? With a cooler full of dorazine, Dana had

figured, he'd find a dealer after two hours on Chabad. The agent's instructions

were simple. They liked two-courier runs in the dorazine trade. Dana, as the

second runner, would be responsible for making pickup and paying the transfer

fee. He would then proceed from the drop point through the Hype to just off

Chabad. He would land _Zipper_ illegally, fly his bubblecraft to Abanat, the

planet's only city, and meet -- find, Dana had thought -- a dealer.

Half an hour ahead of him, with his dorazine in _Lamia_'s cooler and six

years of experience in Sardonyx Sector, Tori Lamonica was thinking about him,

and laughing.

He scowled at _Zipper_'s walls. Then he punched instructions to the

ship's computer, putting the starship at half-gee gravity. Shedding his clothes,

he jumped for the monkey bars. The smooth metal bars, each a meter long and half

a meter out from the wall, ran up one curving wall at intervals, like ladder

rungs, over _Zipper_'s ceiling and back down in a regular track to the other

"side" of the continuous wall. Hand over hand, Dana pulled himself along until

his shoulder muscles ached and his ivory-yellow skin felt oiled. He dropped

lightly down, breathing hard. Climbing the bars was good exercise, and they were

remarkably useful when the ship went into null-grav. Better than magnets in

free-fall.

Now -- what to do? He could return to Nexus. He was not _entirely_

without funds, and in a cache in the wall he had a small stash of comine which

it would not be hard for him to sell. Or -- he grinned -- he could go on to

Chabad and try to run a doublejack on Tori Lamonica. He'd have to be crazy to

attempt it, inexperienced as he was and without a single contact in Abanat. The

only thing that might make it work was that Lamonica would not be expecting

it....

And why not? His grin widened. He could try it. He'd never been to

Chabad; he might as well see it. It could be fun. He pulled his jumpsuit back

on. The comine, still wrapped, sat snugly in its hole in a wall panel. Grabbing

it, Dana palmed the inner door of the lock, pushed the bagged powder through,

closed the door, and punched the button which released the outer lock door. He

turned on the vision screen to watch the comine go: transparent bags bursting,

comine floating, granule by granule, into vacuum, wreathing the ship. With no

drugs onboard, he should have no trouble landing on Chabad's moon and passing

the inspection which he knew they would subject him to in Port. Clean as a cop

or a tourist, he would ride a shuttleship to Abanat, well ahead of Tori Lamonica

taking the tortuous overland route from her concealed ship in her bubblecraft.

When she arrived in Abanat, looking for her dealer, he, Dana, would be waiting

for her.

He wondered if he should jettison the dorazine cooler. Its very presence

on the ship would tell a cop what he had really come to Chabad for. But, damn

it, he'd paid five hundred credits for it, and besides, he would need it if --

when -- the doublejack worked. They would suspect him, but they might do that

anyway, and so what if they did? Intent to commit a crime was not by itself

criminal.

He touched a button on the computer console. Clear music lilted through

the ship, obliterating the hum of machinery. It was old music. It had been

written by a man named Stratta during that strange and joyful time after the

Verdian ships touched on Terra. Dana had heard it on a street corner in Nexus.

He had practically had to shake the composer's name out of the startled street

artist. He had never paid much attention to music before, but this music was --

different: clear as a theorem, stirring and haunting. He carried with him in

_Zipper_ a collection -- perhaps the best collection that existed -- of

Stratta's pieces, on musictapes. They perfectly complemented his solitude.

He told the computer to find him the fastest course to Chabad. It blinked

figures at him. The course took three standard days: two in the Hype, a Jump

from this into another hyperspace current, another half a day in hyperspace,

half a day through spacetime normal to Chabad's only moon. He told the ship to

use the course. He settled into the pilot's chair; the Drive came on. Spacetime

normal went away. Dana cleared the vision screen; from rainbow it darkened into

the brutal, mind-capturing blackness of the Hype. At an unimaginable distance,

red dust glittered, the dust of dying stars, or of stars not yet born.

Ikoro smiled as the music wove its melody around him. His young, rather

stern face relaxed. His dark eyes lost their angry gleam. Lamonica had a start

on him, but it would take her at least a day to fly from the wilds of Chabad to

Abanat. He tapped his fingers to the complex, familiar tune. Even if the Hype

cops boarded him, which they might not do, since he had only a minor reputation,

even if they did, they would have only a shred of evidence on which to hold him.

"To Domna Rhani Yago, from..."

Rhani Yago sat in the alcove of her bedroom, sifting through her mail.

The hot, bright light of Chabad's sun drove through the panes of glass,

reflecting sharply off the papers and lightening the color of the deep blue

walls. A few elegantly calligraphed missives dignified the day's scattering of

computer-printed reports. The topmost letter was from the manager of the Yago-

owned kerit farm in Sovka. Respectfully hysterical, he informed her that kits

from the last four litters of Prime Strain kerits had been found dead in their

cages, apparently from massive internal hemorrhage. He enclosed the post-mortem

analyses from the Sovka laboratory. Rhani examined them: translated from their

jargon, they said: "_Sorry, we don't know what this is_."

The next letter was from Sherrix Esbah, Family Yago's principal drug

dealer in Abanat. Apologizing, Sherrix stated firmly that she could not possibly

supply her usual quarterly shipment of dorazine. The drug runners were bringing

in comine, nightshade, tabac, zimweed, but the pressure was on in Sector

Sardonyx, and no one was carrying dorazine.

The next letter was grimy. Rhani opened it with care, read the ugly

threat within, and put it away. Beneath it was her house steward's report. She

laid that aside too, for later. She had no doubt that it would be accurate; Cara

Morro had run the Yago estate for twelve years, since before the death of

Rhani's mother Isobel, and her reports were unfailingly accurate. The last

letter lay sealed. It bore the Dur crest: a stone axe, raised to strike. "_From

Ferris Dur_," read the superscription, "_to Domna Rhani Yago_." Rhani touched

the beautifully textured paper with her fingertips. Paper was one of the few

things that could be manufactured out of the tough, orange, thumbsized grass of

Chabad. A month ago the lettering would have read, "_From Domna Samantha Dur_."

But Domna Sam was dead. Half of Abanat, it had seemed, had joined the twilight

procession that had taken her coffin to its grave. It would be hard for Ferris

to succeed her. He was waiting out the forty days of respect before he took the

title Domni. Family Dur was the First Family of Chabad and they never let you

forget it; everything they did or said or owned had style. At least, it had been

so when Domna Sam was alive.

Rhani broke the seal on the letter. She read it in growing puzzlement.

"...Demand to speak to you on business of import to Chabad ... reply without

fail ... hope this will be convenient for you..." Such phrases did not belong in

a letter from the head of one Family to another. This was how she might write to

the manager of the kerit farm. She controlled her annoyance and laid this

communication, too, aside. She turned in her chair to look at Binkie, her

secretary. "Do I have to go on?"

"You might want to look at the PIN reports."

PIN stood for Public Information and News, Chabad's wonderfully redundant

news system. It catered mostly to the tourists. Rhani glanced at the headlines.

"WHAT TO DO AND SEE AT THE AUCTION." "Feh," she said disdainfully. "THE LIFE-

CYCLE OF A KERIT." "They only print what we give them." She touched the

threatening letter. "There have been more of these lately than usual, haven't

there? Some steps should be taken to find their source."

"I'll see to it."

"Tell Cara I'll see her here this afternoon. And one last thing. Send a

communigram to my brother."

Binkie's training held, his face and voice did not change, but his long

pale hands fisted at his sides. "What message?"

"Send a precis of these letters. Let me see it first. Include the report

from Sovka, the letter from Sherrix, and the one from Ferris Dur. And you'd

better include the threat. The Net should be off Enchanter. Send a message

capsule with a 'For-Your-Eyes-Only' seal. The whole sector doesn't need to know

our business, so leave the Yago crest off the capsule, and omit the place of

origin. Zed will know."

"As you wish, Rhani-ka." He took the letters from her, and went to the

compscreen to draft the precis. Rhani gazed out her window. The familiar image

of the breedery in Sovka -- white buildings, orange grass broken by the bleak

wire fencing of the kerit runs -- superimposed itself upon the even more

familiar green. The death of eighteen Prime Strain kerits was going to hurt the

breeding program. The manager sounded badly flustered. At least he had been able

to keep the news of the deaths from leaking out to PIN. He had been her mother's

appointment to the position; Rhani had been planning to suggest to him that he

should retire.

And something was wrong with Ferris Dur, if he thought he could order her

to meet him, as if she were his employee or his slave, and not in fact his

equal, and head herself of the Third Family of Chabad. She remembered him

vaguely from the last few months when Domna Sam had been so sick, giving orders

to the house slaves; he had struck her then as an arrogant, impatient man. She

wondered what he thought was so important that she would drop her work to see

him, and why he didn't simply tell her what it was. Eventually he would.

The veins in the polished marble of her desk gleamed in the sunlight.

That was something else Chabad produced: stone. But there were few quarries on

the planet: workers and machines could not endure the glare of Chabad's sun, and

the breakdown rate for both was ridiculously high. Rhani traced the patterns

with one finger. The marble was lovely and cool. The drying up of the drug

supply worried her badly, and she hoped it would not go on long. It had never

happened this severely before.

Chabad had to have dorazine. It was the glue that held the slave system

together; without it, the men and women who did most of the labor on Chabad

would grow sullen and angry, resentful of their penitential status; they would

plan and scheme and ultimately rebel. Without dorazine, Chabad would need an

army to keep them at their jobs; with dorazine, all it needed was the drug. It

often struck her, the irony of the Federation statutes that made transport of

dorazine to the sector illegal. The law was a sop thrown to those who felt that

slavery (unlike prisons, brain-wipe, forced therapy, etc.) was immoral, and yet

the moralists could not see that dorazine was the one element that made slavery

endurable for most of the slaves, that kept them docile and sane, most of the

time. It was the moralists who had created The Pharmacy and the drug runners,

not Chabad.

Rhani contemplated, for a few moments, making the formal request of the

Federation of Living Worlds that the sale of dorazine to Chabad be made legal.

Legalization would slash the black market price. It might even force The

Pharmacy, whoever and wherever it was, to sell her the dorazine formula. For

five years, Sherrix -- and Domino four years before her -- had sent a message

through the drug network to The Pharmacy: "_Name a price. Family Yago will

buy_." They had never answered; Rhani did not even know if the offer had reached

them. There _was_ precedent for a Yago to approach the Federation. But she shook

her head; only for an emergency would she consider bringing Chabad to the

attention of the Federation. It was easier for them all to buy the

euphoric/tranquilizer on the illegal market than to subject Chabad to the

presence of and problems created by outsiders.

Pushing back her chair, she walked the few steps to the glass doors that

led onto the terrace garden. She slid the doors open and walked out onto the

balcony. Amri knelt there, watering the fragile dawn plants that nestled in the

brickwork. Seeing Rhani, she stopped work. Rhani smiled at her and gestured at

the pale blue blossoms. They looked random, stuck in the cracks of brick. She

remembered Timithos digging around the bricks with a trowel, setting each tiny

plant into a crack by hand. Nothing green grew accidentally on Chabad. "Go on,

Amri," she said. Amri picked up the watering can.

The lawns lay below the balcony, green and lush, pretending to be a

countryside. The estate was eighty years old. It had been built by Orrin Yago,

Rhani's grandmother. Rhani dimly remembered Orrin: an old, bent woman with

silver hair who leaned on a black cane. Beyond the estate wall lay orange hills.

West of the Yago estate by ninety-seven kilometers lay Abanat, Chabad's capital

and only city, set like a bright jewel by the shore of a warm and sluggish sea.

North of Abanat lay Sovka; south of it, Gemit, site of the Dur mines. White-and-

black roofs and bits of green marked where the colonists of Chabad lived.

Elsewhere on land it was hot, red-brown, and dry. Nobody lived there now.

Once someone had. Rhani leaned on the balcony wall, looking over the

green of the estate to Chabad's terra-cotta hills. She knew her planet's history

rather better than the tourists who swarmed the streets of Abanat. At the end of

the twentieth century, Old Earth reckoning, the Verdian ships had landed on that

planet, bringing the hyperdrive equations and access to the galaxy to the human

race. Repossessed of a frontier, humans set out with great energy to colonize

the stars. They founded New Terra, and New Terrain, and Enchanter and Ley and

Galahad and Summer and colonies on planets all over the Milky Way. The center of

their universe became Nexus Compcenter, where the starship fleet was based. A

colony might be no more than several thousand people. Some were less. They

survived, fighting heat and cold and disease and famine and the venalities of

humankind.

In most colonies, criminals, however the colony defined them, were either

killed or ostracized. In one sector of space, the colonies -- who were light-

years away from each other in spacetime normal but a few days' flight from each

other in Hype time -- decided to create a prison planet, on which criminals

could be dumped to work out their salvation or damnation apart from those they

had harmed.

They chose an uncolonized, largely lifeless world circling an AO dwarf

star, and named it Chabad. Its seas were salty and warm, its land masses regular

and dry and covered with orange plants whose stalks were thick as an average

human thumb. It had no birds, no bears or seals or tigers or horses or trees, no

maize growing wild. It had beetles and snakes and clawed vicious, furry

predators named _kerits_. The colonies in Sardonyx Sector sent their criminals

there, with tents and tools and packets of seed.

Most died. More arrived every year, to burrow and thirst and mostly die.

At the end of the first century after the opening of space, a group of investors

came to Chabad from Nexus. There were four of them: one of them was Lisa Yago,

Rhani's great-great-grandmother. They mined and tested and scanned. They

discovered huge cores of silver and gold. They developed techniques to breed the

truculent kerits for their incredibly beautiful fur. They realized that Chabad's

inhospitableness itself could be exploited, and they built Abanat on the

seashore. They watered it with towed icebergs from Chabad's small poles. They

turned it into paradise, a feast of color and light and music, and beyond

paradise lay the barren rusty hills of Chabad.

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 communique 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."

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======================TheSardonyxNetbyElizabethA.Lynn======================Copyright(c)1981byElizabethA.Lynne-readswww.ereads.comScienceFiction---------------------------------NOTICE:Thisworkiscopyrighted.Itislicensedonlyforusebytheoriginalpurchaser.Duplicationordistributionofthisworkbyemail,floppy...

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