Free Cobra Slave-eARC by Timothy Zahn Page A

bowl.
    Suppressing a sigh, Merrick returned to his own meal. There was enough variant in the slaves’ hair color that his own light brown didn’t stand out too noticeably. But even in the two weeks he’d been aboard he’d noticed a definite cultural bias among the slaves toward the pure blonds like Anya and Dyre.
    How that figured into the culture he didn’t yet know. But it was definitely something he needed to nail down before he and Anya reached her village.
    “Mommy? I’m still hungry.”
    Merrick looked up again. The girl’s bowl had been scraped clean, but the look of hunger was still in her eyes. He shifted his attention to her father in time to see his lips compress as he replaced her empty bowl with his nearly empty one.
    Merrick looked down at his own meager meal. Between the run-in with Dyre and his forced move down the table, he hadn’t made much headway. Ignoring his growling stomach and trying the encouraging smile again, he slid his bowl toward the girl.
    She looked up, her eyes brightening. But before she could say anything her father reached across the table and firmly pushed the bowl back toward Merrick. “Thank you,” he said, his voice stiff. “But she is ours to feed. Not yours.”
    But she’s just a child, and she’s hungry. Ruthlessly, Merrick forced back the words. He was a mute, and he had to stay a mute.
    There was the sound of footsteps far above. Merrick looked up, blinking against a trickle of falling dust, to see a pair of Trofts walking along the catwalk grid three meters above his head. From the heavy tool belts and the grime on their leotards, it was a fair bet they’d just come from some repair work in the engine room and were on their way back to the living areas for their own evening meal.
    Unlike the slaves, they would probably get plenty to eat.
    He looked back at Gina. She was working on her father’s bowl, carefully scraping every bit of food from it as she had her own. There were two other human children aboard the ship, the products of marriages through the years of their parents’ captivity.
    Adult slaves were bad enough. Child slaves made Merrick’s skin crawl.
    He looked up again as the two Trofts reached the end of the catwalk, keying his optical enhancers for telescopic as one of the aliens punched in the five-digit code that opened the heavy door at the end. A minute later they were through, closing the door behind them.
    Merrick nodded to himself. That was the fifth time over three days that he’d watched Trofts open that door. All of them had used the same code, with no system of personalization or daily rotation.
    And to be fair, the simple approach should have been all that was needed. The slaves were way down here, with locked doors in one direction and height and a metal grid in the other. There was no reason for the Trofts to expect any trouble.
    Glowering at his bowl, Merrick returned to his meal. For whatever reason of pride or culture, Gina’s parents wouldn’t accept food, even for their daughter, from a dark-haired stranger.
    Like hell they wouldn’t.
    #
    The slave quarters consisted of a pair of long, relatively narrow spaces set on either side of the engine core, tall open areas which Merrick guessed normally did double duty as access corridors and convection heat-flow regulators. During the day, the two spaces were connected around the core’s aft end, with the slaves free to travel back and forth. At night, after the table and benches had been stowed, the slaves were separated, with the men bedding down in one side and the women and children in the other.
    Merrick had never figured out the purpose of that separation, since the crowded conditions and complete lack of privacy would dampen all but the most serious ardor anyway. His best guess was that it was meant as a punishment, like the just-barely insufficient food being ladled out at each meal. The Drims had been kicked off Qasama, and possibly the Cobra Worlds as well, and someone aboard