Revenge of the Damned (28 page)

When the body was discovered and reported two days later, Tanz Sullamora expressed appropriate shock. He announced that he would, out of pocket, have his shipping security patrols widen their assignments beyond the yards themselves. That terrible incident had no doubt occurred because Volmer, a respected hands-on newsperson, was conducting his own investigation of the corruption sapping the war effort. Sullamora even posted a reward for the apprehension of the lethal muggers who had killed his friend.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

T
he four Tahn officers glowered at St. Clair. Even in the glitter of their full-dress uniforms they were looming, ominous. Without even checking rank tabs, she knew from the cut of their tunics and the gleaming custom willyguns strapped to their waists that they were higher-ups. They almost filled the small anteroom with their presence, and St. Clair had to wrestle with the urge to bolt. Their faces were set in the automatic brutish threat mode that high Tahn officials wore to get their way.

Instead of running, St. Clair greeted them with her priciest smile.

"Gentlebeings," she said. "Check your guns and credit at the door." And with that, she waved them into the main lounge of the K'ton Klub, the most exclusive and successful gambling hell in the Chaboya District of Heath.

And it's mine, all mine, St. Clair gloated as she watched the smooth, muscular hunk she had hired as her head host go into his little bowing and scraping act that eliminated all the sting from what the Tahn officers would have to go through to enter her members-only club. In a matter of seconds their rank would be verified, ability to pay checked, and weapons and cloaks tagged and locked away. Then they would be putting their fingerprints to a membership contract that would put the K'ton Klub first in line of debtors if there was any hint of financial difficulties. All that was accomplished with smiles and jokes guaranteed to crack even the thick varnish of gloom that the Tahn seemed to prefer in public.

Moments later, the door leading to the ground-floor casino hushed open and the four laughing Tahn officers were plunging into the boisterous throng of marks anxious to eat, drink, and gamble their souls away to St. Clair, because the next day they might find themselves volunteered as targets for an Imperial cruiser.

There was a tinkling of old-fashioned mechanical bells, announcing more customers. St. Clair motioned for her host to take over. From that time of night on, the customers would mostly consist of regulars that St. Clair would not have to sus out.

St. Clair followed the Tahn into the casino. It was time to check out the action. Not that she had to go too far to check—the joint was jumping. By the time the night was over, St. Clair figured, she would have another record take in the till.

The K'ton Klub was one of many multistoried casinos that made up the Chaboya District's gambling strip. But there were two, no, three, big differences between her club and the others: (1) The percentages were honest. (2) The percentages were honest. (3) The percentages were honest. From long experience, St. Clair knew that the rake-in from the house's built-in edge was more than enough profit for any fool. Every time her competitors skinned a mark, they lost that same mark permanently to St. Clair.

It was dishonesty in fact that had brought the K'ton Klub into her hands. The previous owner, like most of the other casino operators in the district, had been unable to swim against the new economic tide created by the war. As shortages tightened the supply and power screws, the casinos, instead of finding new ways to keep the customers happy, racked up the gambling machines' percentages until it was nearly impossible to win, then pulled in their heads, cutting back hours until many of them finally just shut their doors and walked away.

If St. Clair had been looking at the situation purely from a business point of view, instead of trying to find a nice comfortable way of hiding out in plain view until she and L'n were rescued, she still would have sized up the situation the same.

War brought shortages, true. But looked at another way, the shortages meant that the price of things simply went up. More importantly, the sin business always boomed during war. That was an economic curve on a chart that St. Clair had memorized before she had any curves of her own.

St. Clair had plucked the club off the tree within weeks after she and L'n had made their escape.

They had spent very little time in the actual escape itself. St. Clair had abandoned her plan to be a rich-bitch tuber hunter as soon as she had decided that L'n's only chance of survival was as her escape partner. She would have to trust to luck and play the situation by ear. There was no forged ID card that might fit the number of situations St. Clair and L'n might meet—So she did not carry any.

Bluff would be her calling card.

As soon as they had exited the tunnel, she headed for the nearest gravtrain station. Acting imperious as all hell, she had browbeaten the ticket clerk into selling her an unauthorized first-class seat on a train heading directly into the center of town.

"Travel permit? Ration card? My good man, I explained to you that I lost them, didn't I? I suppose you expect me to grovel in my carelessness, now, don't you? Very well, then. If that gives you satisfaction, I am now groveling! See me grovel?" She put her hands together as if in prayer and gave him a slight bow. "There! I hope that makes you happy! Now sell me the damned tickets!"

Her nongroveling grovel act scared the holy bejesus out of the clerk. From her clothes, she was obviously richer than hell. Either that or joygirl to a Tahn officer whose rank he did not even want to guess at. He sold her the tickets, not even asking why she needed two of them. He supposed it had something to do with the strange pink little furry creature accompanying her. Maybe rich types always bought seats for their pets.

St. Clair and L'n were just taking deep, shuddering breaths of relief as the gravtrain's generators wound up to a high keen, when they heard the station speakers crackle into life. There was a series of sharp, barked orders. The keen died down to a low hum. Then they heard heavy footsteps. St. Clair swore she would not look up as she heard someone in obvious authority grilling the passenger just in front of her. She felt L'n quiver in fear. Absently she ran her fingers through L'n's smooth fur, trying to calm her, but it was hopeless.

Authority Figure shouted. Passenger wailed. L'n choked back a low moan. And St. Clair found herself looking up against her will—straight into the eyes of a black-uniformed Tahn thug.

She would never forget those eyes. They were the color of a bottom-feeding fish. They took her in. Then L'n. Then her again. Fish Eyes dropped the papers into the passenger's lap and walked straight back toward her. St. Clair forced out what she hoped was an in-character haughty smile. She prepared to reach into her jumper suit pockets and fumble for nonexistent papers.

The man stopped in front of her. He leaned forward. Then, surprise of all surprises, he grinned, exposing a horrible row of black and yellow stumps.

"Chook-um, chook-um," he said. "Chook-um, chook-um." And he began stroking and tickling L'n!

"I say! What a great pet! What is it? Some kind of cat? I love cats! The wife and I must own thirty or forty of the little buggers. Ha! I should say they own us."

And all the while he kept stroking and tickling L'n. St. Clair burbled something between a laugh and a sob, thinking all the while, Purr, clot, you purr, to L'n.

"Yes," she said. "A cat. A type of one, anyway. Very rare breed…"

At that moment L'n started purring, saving her life and St. Clair's in what was probably the only actual case of interspecies telepathy ever to occur in the Empire's history.

And once she started purring, she never stopped. She purred through the entire conversation. St. Clair lied. Fish Eyes bought. And a little while later, he waved her down when she tried to look for the papers that were not there and exited a happy Tahn with a great story to tell his nice Tahn wife.

"You can stop purring now," St. Clair finally whispered to L'n.

"Not on your life," L'n whispered back. "The kid plans to keep purring for at least the next fifty-sixty years. And you will, too, if you know what's good for you."

And St. Clair realized that L'n did not understand that she had been mistaken for a pet. Oh, well. She would wait awhile before she let her furry friend in on it. But, oh, God, was there going to be an explosion when she found out.

Later, after St. Clair had explained and then scraped her friend off the ceiling of the compartment, she just had to ask it. "Did you know how to purr before?"

"No," L'n had said. "I've never even
heard
of a cat, either!"

"Then how…"

L'n gave a shrug of a furry pink shoulder. "I don't know. I just reached down inside and… purred, dammit! Now, will you shut up about it, before I show you what I can do with teeth?"

It was the turning point in the life of the once-shy being called L'n. And there would be no going back.

As soon as they reached the center of the city, St. Clair instinctively gravitated toward Chaboya. In any area where sin was largely ignored and corruption was waist deep, cops tended to ignore most of the evildoers and their victims. The crackdowns usually came against well-known types who had not coughed up enough to stay in business. Credits changed hands, and then it was back to business as usual.

St. Clair found a dive for them to hole up in and then hit the streets. For the first day or two she fooled around with a few penny-ante shell games just to get warmed up and increase her stash of credits. Then she hit the casinos. Unnoticed, she filtered through them one by one, dropping a little here, picking up a little there, always keeping a low profile. She found what she was looking for at the K'ton Klub. From the thin crowds and the peeling plas walls, she knew it was close to folding. She played small-time dice machines for a while, watching the crowds.

She identified the owner right off. He was an older, handsome man who tended to dress a bit too flashily. She noticed that he spent little time on the floor, appearing only when another obviously high-stakes flash gambler occasionally showed up.

He would personally greet him, then they would disappear upstairs to what St. Clair just
knew
was a big-time game. It was time to strike. She invested a healthy chunk of her stake for the flashiest, sexiest outfit she could find, then reentered the club, looking for all the world like a bored professional anxious to find some action.

The owner spotted her right off. A little flirting followed, and teasing remarks were exchanged. Mild sexual innuendo was used on each side to check out the gambler in the other. An invitation was offered.

A little later she found herself being ushered into the owner's office. As soon as she entered the room, she knew she was home. In the center of the table was the pot. And it did not consist of the funny money the Tahn laughingly called credits. Instead, there were rare gems and exotic heavy mineral baubles. And there were also stacks of parchmentlike papers that could only be Imperial bonds and real estate deeds.

One week of around-the-clock playing later, she was bowing the owner out of his own office, holding
his
deed to the club. All the objects that made up the pot were also hers. She expected a bit of a strong-arm bluff from the man. And she was prepared for it—St. Clair had a minipistol hidden in the voluminous sleeve of her blouse. Oddly enough, the man did not seem to mind all that much. He said he had been thinking it was time to move on, and the cards that they all worshiped had confirmed that.

There was one other deed on the table that proved to be of far greater value than was obvious at first glance. It was for the seemingly worthless cargo of a freighter—a museum ship stranded by the war in midtour.

As soon as she and L'n had cracked the rusted hold and entered, St. Clair had smelled money. Inside was a traveling exhibit of ancient Earth-style casinos: mechanical gambling machines, crap tables, bingo machines, roulette wheels, decks of
real
paper playing cards. And vidbooks after stacks of vid-books on how the old folks had lost their money thousands of years before.

St. Clair stripped the K'ton Klub down to the ground floor, then installed the machines. The lure of honest percentages and old-fashioned gambling drew customers like beasts to carrion. The marks were sure they could not be cheated because there was little electronics involved. Things that went
crank-crank, whirr
were considered far more trustworthy and ruled by the laws of a kind nature than were computers that talked to one, fooled with one, and toyed with reality livie-style, all the while gulping away at one's credits.

From the very beginning, St. Clair decided that the place would be as exclusive as possible. Instead of garish, lighted signs outside, she had only a small glowing plaque on the front door reading "The K'ton Klub. Members only."

St. Clair congratulated herself as she slinked through the more drably dressed customers who made up the crowds on the ground floor. She noted the things that were going right and, just as importantly, what was going wrong—if anything. The room was ringed with the one-armed bandits she had salvaged off the museum ship. On this floor they were one of the biggest money-makers, second only to the dice tables and followed by chuck-a-luck and the marathon bingo games that featured a pot that grew each day until no simpleminded blue-collar type mark could resist laying his credits down.

To keep a bit of class and social strata awe going, the center of the room was occupied by a raised, roped-off platform where there was always a high-stakes whist game going. To encourage a constant supply of whist players, St. Clair charged only a minimum fee per chair and took no house percentage at all.

Sexily uniformed servers constantly moved through the crowd, offering cocktails, narcotics, and snacks. In peacetime it would all have been free, but now the marks were so grateful that there was anything available at all that they gladly paid. There were two ways a customer could go from there. A mark could either exit to the street—after passing through a brothel where joyboys and joygirls hustled whatever credits remained—or he or she could climb the stairs to the next casino, where the price soared along with the class of the clientele.