“When you’re quite finished.”
Well, Barangail didn’t sound impressed. I wondered what had gotten into his britches, and tried to wipe the tears from my eyes so I could see him clearly... and then I remembered he hadn’t shown himself.
“Is it normal for you to conduct business from the other side of a closed door?” I asked.
“The bracelet,” he said, completely ignoring my question, as the image of a thick, gold bracelet, outlined in silver and studded with a single row of alternating red and blue gems floated in the invisible wall. “I want it back.”
“Sure,” I said, irritated by his theatrics and his absence.
I caught Mack’s eye, and raised an eyebrow to see if I should continue. He shrugged and nodded. It was a typical ‘Sure, why not’ kind of look, and I have to admit it surprised me. The man usually did his own set of negotiations.
Was he sure? I sent him a questioning look, and he nodded. He was sure. Well, alrighty, then.
“When did you have it last?”
I know, as a question calculated to piss off some masochistic lord with a he-man complex, that wasn’t bad. What can I say? I couldn’t resist. I could resist looking at Mack, though. I didn’t need to see his face to know he probably wanted to wring my neck. Barangail ignored the bait.
“It belonged to one of my concubines,” he said, and the full-length picture of a beautiful red-head, with aquiline features appeared beside the slowly spinning image of the bracelet.
Before either of us could respond to the image, Barangail continued.
“It was stolen from her chambers by one of the maids, and the woman fled before we realized it had gone.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“Somewhere in the caverns. One of the mine guards recognized her.”
“A lady’s maid in the mines? Didn’t that raise questions?”
“She told them she’d been assigned kitchen duties for displeasing her mistress,” Barangail said. “It’s a common punishment, and the task of taking meals to the mines isn’t popular.”
I wondered why, but Barangail answered the question before I could ask it.
“Sometimes we have incursions, and the guards aren’t enough.”
Incursions, huh? But Mack had had enough of staying quiet—and incursions were a job for muscle, which I, typically, was not.
“What kind of incursions?”
There was a moment’s pause, as though Barangail had to think of how much he was going to tell us. I looked over at Mack, and he looked back. Neither of us was very happy. Part of me tried to work out why we were even bothering to negotiate the contract, when our patron was so untrustworthy. Another part said it was because Mack was curious.
The arach were on this world for a reason, and we needed an excuse to be down here, too. The fact we didn’t have much of a choice about accepting Barangail’s contract paled to insignificance compared to that. Barangail’s answer brought me back to the cell.
“There’s a species of giant ant that infests the caverns,” he said. “Sometimes we can mine for months without running into their hunters, and sometimes a new nest starts up close enough to the mine for the ants to consider it prime hunting territory. They migrate underground, so we don’t usually get a warning.”
I frowned. That couldn’t be the only reason. Mack clearly agreed.
“Anything else?”
“Just the usual underground beasties. We have large arthropods, and insects pretty much all over the caverns. Of the usual carnivores and scavengers, we have the odd killena, wargrul and baskalie. We clear those out whenever we come across them.”
Neither Mack nor I wanted to admit we had no idea what the three predators were that he’d mentioned, and I found myself missing Case’s quick research capability, and trying to work out how I’d been so thoroughly patched out of the system. It wasn’t anything that I could see in the implant.
Mack, however, had realized we’d missed something in our distraction with incursions.
“What was she doing in the mines?”
Of course, Barangail missed the point.
“I told you. The guard thought she was serving meals.”
“No,” Mack said. “I mean: why did she go to the mines after she’d stolen the bracelet? Why not the city? You said the guard only thought she’d been sent there to serve meals. Presumably she hadn’t?”
And Barangail got it.
“No, of course she hadn’t. Up until the point where we’d found the bracelet missing, we hadn’t known she’d done anything worthy of punishment.”
Incursions or no, I still couldn’t see how a slightly dangerous journey to a serving kitchen in a mine could be considered a punishment for a maid. There was something else going on there. I made a note to chase it down, later, and forced myself to pay attention to what Barangail was saying.
“Our best guess is that she used the kitchen duty as an excuse to leave the mansion, and slipped away through the mines to join the other runaways.”
“Runaways?” Again, Mack let the question dangle.
“Runaways,” Barangail agreed. “Any planet with indentured servitude has them. As does any world with criminals who wish to avoid punishment. They try to hide underground, here, but we eventually smoke them out.”
Smoke them out, I thought. What an odd choice of words... but neither Mack nor I asked for clarification. There were more important things we needed to know.
“Are these runaways likely to be dangerous?”
Again, there was a pause, and I knew we weren’t going to get the truth.
“Some might have weapons,” was evasive, and “but most are unarmed and poorly equipped to survive, let alone anything else,” was almost certainly a lie.
I thought about the people who’d attacked us on the way to dinner.
“What about the ambush?” I asked, and didn’t need to add that our attackers had been well-armed, and pretty well-equipped.
This time the reply was too quick to be believed.
“Terrorists. Every world has them.”
The images in the separating wall alternated as they flashed.
“So,” Barangail asked. “Will you take the job?”
“Yes,” came as a chorus from both Mack and me, and
