Free Cobra Slave-eARC by Timothy Zahn

his Cobra strength and reflexes could prove fatal, not only to Merrick but also to Anya and the other slaves. For now, he had to swallow his pride, keep a low profile, and wait until this voyage ended and they reached Anya’s village.
    Where he would do something. He still didn’t know exactly what.
    He found an empty place near the end of the table, across from a couple and their five-year-old daughter. He worked his way between the men on either side of the narrow gap—again, without any cooperation from them—and sat down. Trying to ignore the sudden conversational silence that had settled around him, he returned to his meal.
    It wasn’t supposed to have been like this. When Commander Ukuthi, the Troft in charge of the Balin’ekha’spmi contingent on Qasama, had come to Merrick with this plan it had looked a lot more promising. Ukuthi had told him about Anya’s people, apparently the survivors of another lost human colony, whom the Drim’hco’plai demesne had found and enslaved. Many of those slaves were tasked with fighting each other for the amusement of their owners, Anya and Ukuthi had told him, while others worked as house or outwork slaves.
    But when the Drims had suddenly announced that all the slaves they’d sold to other Troft demesnes were to be immediately returned, Ukuthi had suspected their demesne-lord was up to something sinister. Given the sometimes intense rivalry between the demesnes—and probably given the Balin demesne-lord’s reluctance to stick his own neck out on this one—Ukuthi had come to Merrick and asked him to join with the returning slaves and find out what the Drims were planning. Merrick had tentatively agreed, provided Ukuthi got him some disguised combat and survival gear and added a few combat-suited Qasamans to the infiltration team.
    Only it hadn’t worked out that way. The battle that the Drim commander had expected to be the final blow against Qasaman resistance had been turned suddenly and violently against him, and in a fit of frustrated rage he’d ordered that Ukuthi’s two slaves—Merrick and Anya—be handed over to him immediately instead of waiting to join the rest of the group being collected from the other Balin slave owners. Ukuthi had tried to argue the point, but he’d had no choice but to give in.
    Which had left Merrick and Anya unceremoniously dumped aboard this transport with no preparation, no planning, and no equipment
    And no allies.
    The oddest thing about the whole situation, to Merrick’s way of thinking, was that none of those setbacks seemed to matter to Anya. She had accepted Merrick’s unexpected lone-wolf status without comment or qualm, simply and calmly starting him on an intensive private training course on her culture, ethos, and the parameters of slavehood.
    At times he wondered whether she truly understood the magnitude of the task Ukuthi had dropped in his lap. To figure out what the Drims were up to, they were first going to have to escape her village, then infiltrate whatever garrison the Drims had monitoring that batch of humans, and then probably find a way off-planet to wherever the main work on the project was being done.
    Merrick had seen what the Qasamans could do. With half a dozen of them at his side, he was pretty sure they could have made a respectable showing of themselves.
    But by himself?
    “Daddy?” a soft voice murmured into his brooding.
    He looked up. The girl was staring across the table at him, her face a mixture of fascination and fear. Merrick gave her an encouraging smile—
    “Leave him be, Gina,” the girl’s mother admonished her, making no attempt to keep her voice low. “Just leave him be.”
    “But his hair—”
    “It’s a different tribe,” the girl’s father put in, his tone warning her to drop the subject.
    “And he doesn’t talk,” her mother added.
    The girl subsided. But her eyes remained on Merrick’s hair for another few seconds before she returned her attention to her