Free The Warlock Wandering by Christopher Stasheff

personality?" Chomoi nodded. "And if I didn't live, what difference did it make? But I didn't even get that far. They slammed me into the floater, to go to the re-form center—but we never even lifted. There was a courier there, with a document. Seems the whole time I'd been in front of the judge, SecSec had been going to the Secretary -General, convincing him that secret police were military personnel—so they didn't bother re-forming; they just loaded me into a convict barge, and shipped us all out to Wolmar." Her mouth tightened. "It wasn't a pleasant trip. It lasted two weeks, and only three of us convicts were women. The rest of the soldiers tried to take turns on us." She glared at Rod. "But three is just enough to guard each other's backs. After we killed a couple, they held off. They tried to get the ship's brass to tie us down, but they told us they just steered the damn thing and made it go; we convicts were each other's problems." She shivered. "We had to take turns sleeping, but we got here intact."
    "And here?" Gwen's eyes were huge.
    Chomoi shrugged. "It's a little easier now. Oh, the other two—when they found out how much they could make, once the convicts were getting paychecks again—they set up shop. They own their own houses now, and each of them is richer than any man on the planet."
    Gwen was pale now, and her hand trembled as she lifted her glass, then put it down. "Yet thou didst not—how didst thou say it..."
    "Go into business." Chomoi nodded, eyes glittering. "But I had to fight 'em off every day, at first—two or three in any twenty-four hours, till I got a reputation. Now it's just two or three a week. The ones who survive out here are smart, though—they back off when it starts getting dangerous, so I've never had to kill one."
    "Yet do they not come at thee in company?"^Gwen whispered.
    "That's why I was sitting back there." Chomoi jerked her head toward a table in a back comer. "I can see the 60 Christopher Stasheff
    door, and the whole room, but nobody can come at me from behind. They haven't tried, though." She took a sip of her ale, but grimaced as though it were bitter. "Gotta say that much for male chauvinism—when there're so few of us, each one is pretty precious. Any one of them might come at me by himself, but he doesn't want any of his mates to see him trying."
    "They'd string him up by his toes," Yorick said quietly.
    "Probably for target practice." Chomoi shrugged. "Better him than me."
    She lifted her mug for a long swallow, then slammed it down. "So, there you have it. I can't walk through this burg without getting razzed, so anybody who's getting hassled, I'm on their side. Especially women." She nodded to Gwen.
    "And I think I can trust your man, because he's with you—
    so why would he want me?" Her mouth twisted in selfcontempt. "Oh, don't give me that sympathetic look! I know I'm a hot enough item." She turned and glowered at Rod.
    "Maybe too hot. I want to get off this planet, so badly that I can't think of anything else—and you folks haven't been here before, which means you haven't been sentenced; so you might get to leave. You might be able to spring me." Rod frowned. "I thought this was a military prison. Shacklar's just the warden. How can he have the authority to let you go?"
    "He can do anything he wants—now," Chomoi said, with a mirthless smile. "PEST cut us off four years ago—
    right after I got here, in fact. They claimed trade to the outlying planets was a losing proposition—real losing, trillions of therms' worth. And a prison planet was all loss—
    it was much cheaper to kill the criminals. So they just stopped trade. The next freighter in brought us the news." Rod frowned. "How come there was a 'next' freighter?
    I thought they stopped trade."
    "We had a little trade going on our own, with some of the other outlying planets—but we had no more supplies

THE WARLOCK WANDERING 61
    coming in from Terra, no new machinery or spare parts. The good