A Pair of Dice: Tragan

ACT I: ROCK

Tragan was furious.

It showed in the tension of his manacled fists, and the set of his shoulders in the loose prison tunic. The furious hiss of his breath in his nostrils as he stood in the dock was another sign. But most of all, his anger showed in his face.

His face rippled like boiling porridge, bladders pulsing and colouring his face purple, red, almost black. The long hairs on his warty cheeks thrashed like whips. Anyone who knew Naglons would have kept well out of biting range at the sight of his convulsing features.

The judge finally wheezed, "This preliminary review hearing is closed. Guard, please remove the prisoner."

Tragan took one of his rare opportunities to have his say. "Your Honour, I must protest, it has been-"

The guard came up to his elbow and said, "Time to go now."

Tragan ignored him. "- over a year that I have been held in confinement! I have had no legal counsel, no contact with my embassy, I have not even been told when the trial will take place!"

The Judge actually noticed Tragan for a change, but only to say, "Guard, please remove Mr. Tragan."

Tragan fumed as he was led out. He knew, knew absolutely, that someone was arranging for his trial to be postponed. But who? The new Prime Minister? The Parakon Corporation President?

He could still claim one scrap of dignity before returning to his tiny cell. "I need to relieve myself," he announced, coming to a stop in front of the lavatories. As usual, the guard said nothing: he simply followed Tragan inside, escorted him into a booth – and then locked it from the outside. He was trapped, until he knocked and asked to be let out: sometimes the guards would let him work himself into a frenzy, kicking and screaming, before they would let him out.

And Tragan did need to relieve himself, although not of his bodily wastes. Pacing in a tight circle in the booth, he swore to himself, "I swear I'll see you all gutted and dead! I'll torture you to madness! You, Onya, the President, that guard, that girl in the hallway, all of you! See your raw organs in the dirt! Flay your children alive in front of your eyes! I'll rend you apart with my own hands and feed you to guard beasts! You can't do this to me!" His mind seemed to froth higher and higher, piling improbable agonies one upon the other.

With no warning the booth door opened – which it was not supposed to do. Standing there was a man, humanoid, about Tragan's height and wearing an outfit similar to his except for the tunic.

"Tragan. Take off your tunic," ordered the stranger.

"What? Who are you?" snapped Tragan.

The stranger whispered, "Trade you this mask for your tunic," as he reached up to his hairline and peeled off his face.

The stranger's real face was Naglon: mauve and hairy and warty – and somewhat resembling Tragan's own. Enough to fool these fools, he thought, as he stripped off his tunic and exchanged it for the mask.

"Fair trade," he whispered.

The other stepped into the booth, and pulled the door shut; in the lavatory, Tragan was left facing a short figure in a green robe. A woman, who quickly relocked the booth door, touched a finger to her lips in the universal gesture for silence, and took Tragan's arm, urging him towards the full-length mirror at the rear. She touched it, and the mirror became a door, and they went through.

On the other side was a larger, more luxurious stall; the woman pushed back her hood and closed the mirror door.

"Where are we?" whispered Tragan.

"Woman's private booth. I'm Pilot Avva Omet-J, and I'm here to help you escape."

She smiled at him, and the purple strips of wattles down her cheeks flexed with the motion. "You're very asymmetrical, you know."

Tragan's colour pores enlarged and puffed in the equivalent of a blush; he looked considerably more purple for a moment. Some races prized symmetry as a measure of attractiveness; apparently she went the other way. "Nobody's called me that since I was a boy."

"Really? A pity. Well, that Naglon who just took your place had a grudge, or a debt, to someone named Mudspit in your cellblock, and was willing to trade places to get inside. I don't know if he plans to help Mudspit escape or to assassinate him, but he's sure to make a mess that should cover your trail."

"Who are you working for?" asked Tragan.

"My employer is in the way of a – venture capitalist type. Instead of investing in businesses, she invests in people. People who, for example, served as executives in companies like the Parakon Corporation, but had only minimal funds seized when they were arrested. Implying that the funds were – elsewhere. And could be accessed. Are you following me so far?"

"Indeed. You expect me to pay my own ransom, then."

"We prefer to call it a 'liberation fee,' but yes. If you can't pay, you can be let go, owing my employer – a favour. It's a roll of the dice, but you can always go back through the mirror. Maybe in ten years you'll finally find out who your lawyer is-"

"No! I can pay. I can pay - very well. Get me out of here, off this planet, and your employer's investment will be multiplied many times over."

Avva smiled again. "Excellent. Get your mask on and we'll leave." As he smoothed it over his features, feeling it cling as the best masks do, she handed him a pair of gloves to cover his hands, and a cloak. "Now pant."

"Pant?"

"Breathe heavily, like you've been exerting yourself."

He did so, walking arm in arm with Avva as she stepped to the front and handed the attendant a tip. The attendant winked. "When you gotta come, you gotta come, eh?"

"Love knows no limits," Avva replied, caressing Tragan's arm with her fingers. And then they were outside.

* * *

He was out! At least, out from the immediate attention of the guards of Justice House, and if he could just find a door that was not guarded … or if his mysterious rescuer could. They mingled with the various clerks and witnesses, following the motion of the crowd almost at random. "Walk casually, we need to get into the next section before we can leave," she instructed.

He looked at her out of the corner of her eye; except for the wattles she looked like any other standard humanoid, and smelled a bit worse than most of them.

"I'm sorry, but I don't believe I recognise your species?" he asked, pausing and regarding a very bad painting of some great Judge of the past. The arm under his stiffened.

"I'm Sast, we are an artificial species," she said; and then her arm clamped down, else he would have withdrawn his. "Keep still you fool! We need to get through here without being noticed."

Tragan kept still by a distinct effort. Artificial species were – rare, considered rather odd, infamously prone to being wiped out by disease or gene drift, and generally relegated to the lowest levels of society. To find one here actually holding his arm was a shock.

She turned him away from the painting and they started walking again, while she lectured him under her breath. "There's no shame in being born into an artificial species, just because your genes were picked at random over millions of years, and mine were chosen by design over five, doesn't mean that we will not both be around in another million years – or billion, for that matter."

Tragan replied, "Give that speech often?

"Far too often. Look, are you going to fight me every step of the way? Because if so, I can just walk away and leave you here. See if you can make your own way out, maybe you still have Parakon contacts who can help you, maybe you don't."

With a fine show of hauteur, Tragan said, "Since we've come this far, I admit I'm curious to see if you can get me out. Get us both out rather, I doubt your presence is authorised here."

She muttered, "If snootiness was a shovel, you've had dug yourself out by now."

Tragan kept walking, and kept his arm in hers. A bit of role-playing was an acceptable payment for getting out of here. After he was out, he could see if the rest of the payment could not be - escaped as well.

In the next section, which had considerably fewer people, Avva set a faster pace as though making up for lost time. She led Tragan at a trot through a service door, down several dingy passageways and a set of stairs that was out-and-out noisome, and then outside.

The sounds of traffic hit him like a blow, but it was so good to be outside, to feel the fresh air! He lifted his head high, breathing deeply again.

They were at the rear of the building; the traffic noises echoed between it and the high concrete wall that rose up (he tilted his head back) very far up. The Justice House must be built flush against the spaceport; this concrete slab was the base where the massive electronic fields guided ships in for landing.

"Have you done any low gravity climbing?" asked Avva, arranging an X-shaped harness around her body so that she could slip a peculiar flat device against her middle.

"No, well, once in ER –" Tragan flinched as she swept another hood and cloak over his shoulders, and started buckling straps around him as well, "look, what are we doing?"

"We're climbing that wall."

Tragan froze, and then answered, not mildly, "Are you insane! It must be a thousand lengths straight up!"

"No, it's just over six hundred lengths, and there's a definite four degree tilt inwards. Besides, I climbed down it just now; climbing up should be easy for a big strong Naglon like you."

She clipped another flat device to him, and turned it on: it emitted a low surging hiss that reminded him of the ocean for some reason. "This is a gravity plane, it lets the wearer bend and inhibit gravity. When we get up against that wall, the plane will make the vertical feel like down, and also make you weigh a twentieth of your present mass. So you'll feel like you are crawling along a flat floor in low gravity, follow me so far?"

"Who's the manufacturer?"

"No time for details! What you have to remember is, it only works close to a surface – you understand? You have to keep flat and push yourself along with your fingertips; you'll be light so it should be easy so long as you don't go too fast. You must keep your chest as close to the wall as you can, because if you drift away or go to your hands and knees you'll fall."

"What happens if I fall?"

"You die, I come down and collect the gravity plane from your corpse, and then sell you. Perhaps to a tanner. That hide would make a very elegant seat cover."

Tragan winced, and stepped to the wall; when he was almost touching it, he felt the plane react, and he was suddenly face down on a flat surface, feeling like he was floating underwater, weightless. He reached up and placed both hands on the concrete; pressing them flat, he lifted himself off the ground, then back.

"Can you feel it?" said Avva.

"Yes, when I look around-" he stopped, overcome by the feeling that the Justice House was looming not behind, but above him; was about to come smashing down on his head!

A set of sharp knuckles rapped his wrist. "Don't look around, you'll get vertigo! Reach up and go, then. Go slowly, keep your body as flat to the wall as you can."

He looked at the Pilot and noticed that their cloaks were spread out around them, now the same colour as the concrete they clung to, masking them from view.

"Up we go, then. We've got plenty of time to get to the top."

He pushed off with his toes from what had been the ground, and they began to climb. Slowly, the concrete rolled past under his face as he moved upward. It was easy at first, but the strain started to creep up on his chest and shoulders as they climbed higher and higher, hearing the ground traffic noises recede even as the air traffic grew louder. It was a terribly unnatural posture, and the temptation to put his knees on the ‘ground' and crawl faster was hard to resist. He was constantly aware of having to keep the gravity plane the correct distance from the wall. Looking up, he could see the top edge creeping closer – maybe. It was still very far away.

Avva was moving smoothly, her fingertips barely touching the concrete, her toes turned outwards and shoving along as well, but he noticed her wattles turning darker, almost black. With exertion?

He found himself almost reflexively pulling at the wall faster, faster. His fingers weren't getting quite as good a grip now, but he had to get off this wall! He had to escape!

Behind him he heard, "Slow down, Tragan, you're starting to drift. Let me catch up to you."

Tragan kept on pulling grimly, rising himself up off the wall to get the strain off his shoulders, let his chest muscles take over-

"Tragan, stop! Right now! Go flat!"

Tragan tried to stop, and found himself drifting forward; finally succeeding in frightening himself, he put both hands flat and caught himself.

His rescuer continued to lecture him as she caught up. "If you panic up here you'll die! Now calm down! Lie down flat."

He did, closing his eyes, letting his inner ear convince him that he was not clinging multiple stories above the street, held flat to a sheer wall by nothing but a device no larger than his hand. The band of ache seemed to relax as he did.

"This will never work! Anyone can see me!" he snarled.

"These cloaks match the wall pretty closely, and there's no windows on the back of Justice House. Now look, you're letting your feet drift up behind you, away from the wall. The gravity plane's field of effect is like a flat surface all around you, and if your feet drift out of the plane, off of that surface, you'll be dragged into the planet's regular gravity field and off the wall. You will die unless you are slow and careful!"

Tragan complained, "My toes drag on the wall."

"Let them drag, it'll remind you to keep them on the wall."

He twisted around, raising his head, and noticed that Avva's heels did not protrude from the cloak at all; apparently her feet could rotate flat to the wall. "Your feet - hm. My feet can't do that."

Avva twitched her eyebrows at him in some undecipherable gesture, and said only "Blame your Creator. Ready to go?"

"No, but I'll go anyway," he said, and dug in with his fingertips, and up they both went.

He had his second wind, and waited until it had almost run out before asking, "How far?"

His escort replied, "We're almost there, right, here's the rim markers. OK, this is where most people die."

Tragan jumped – and found himself floating a bit above the wall; he had to scrabble with his fingers to regain purchase. "What?"

"Let me rephrase that; this is where most people who are going to make a lethal mistake make it."

"That's better. What mistake?"

Avva clung to the wall with two feet and one hand, and gestured with her free arm as she talked. "The top of the spaceport field is shaped like a cup, and we're on the edge of the rim on the outside. But if we went straight up and over the edge, headfirst-"

Tragan interrupted. "Our heads would extend out of the gravity plane field, and we'd fall."

She smiled. "Quick study. So, what we need to do is, go over with your body parallel to the rim. Get an arm and a leg over, hold on, get your torso over, and then once the gravity plane is established on the other side, we can go down the inside."

Tragan nodded and said, "I understand."

She manoeuvred on the wall, tugging at his elbow to turn him, until they were both facing each other, parallel to the rim (and the street below, which Tragan resolutely did not look at). "OK now, turn to face me, start moving up sideways – moving up – I've got the rim, do you?"

"Yes." His right arm and leg had it, as did her left arm and leg.

"Over and-" but her words were cut short by a blast of wind that ruffled her cloak and pushed her back; it was the ruffling that warned Tragan. He shouted "Watch it!" and had just enough time to grab her wrist on the far side of the wall and shove it downwards, following it with his body, until they were both clinging to the wall, safely on the inside of the spaceport, arms all muddled together but gravity planes safely pressed to the wall, like two disorderly lizards.

Avva extracted her head from under his neck, rubbed her nose on her shoulder – it looked abraded – and said only, "Thank you very much. That crosswind wasn't blowing on the way down."

Tragan wasn't interested in her nose. "And now where?"

"That large red ship over there."

Tragan eyed it: a large cargo ship, probably multi-system hauling, and minimal crew. Plenty of places for two stowaways to hide. "Where do we go in?"

"We don't, we're riding up on the outside."

Tragan felt the hairs on his cheeks begin to creep under the mask, and the faint feeling he'd ignored before, that he might have fallen into the hands of a madwoman, rose stronger in him. "What do you mean, the outside?"

"See that yellow blister pod on the hull, that looks like a spare engine?"

He did, and it looked very small and flimsy compared to the massive bulk of the red ship. "You surely aren't suggesting that we are smuggling ourselves off this planet inside a spaceship engine!"

She told him in a cheery tone, "That's not a spare engine, that's my ship, the Righteous Flea. It's fastened to the hull, and we're just going to hitch a ride off planet and into hyper."

Tragan looked at her, and blinked. With a calm he did not feel, he asked, "Is it still too late to go back to the Justice House?"

"Not at all. Just give me back the gravity plane and then step over the edge, you'll be right there in a minute."

Tragan's hypothetical answer – probably obscene – was cut off by the blast of air from an unmanned cargo carrier that drove along the rim, centimetres from their bodies by the wall, and then turned and dove under one of the waiting spaceships.

Since he couldn't get back into his cell, he decided to try logic. "Look, before that ship goes into hyper, they're going to scan the weight ratio. The mass of two stowaways and a ship – wait –"

This time Avva smiled; her teeth were white and rather crooked on one side. "So, is that a machine on your chest for distorting gravity, or are you just happy to see me?"

Tragan touched the fingers of one hand to the hissing box on his chest, supporting himself unthinkingly on the other elbow and hand. "The gravity plane effect … it works to fool a mass sensor as well?"

"Yes. We're going to float up unnoticed with that ship, and then once it's in hyper and the sensors are locked down, the Flea detaches and we go on our way. Nobody combing the spaceship records will see any strange ships taking off, or any overweight ones either."

Tragan's mind quickly picked at the plan, looking for weak spots. "Won't anyone on that red ship notice that they're missing a spare engine?"

"Because they've never had a spare engine, I doubt that they'll miss it. The internal sensors don't show that it's there, the camera that would scan that part of the hull happened to have a little accident, and nobody walks around outside on the landing field because," and the thunder of another passing vehicle made her pause, "of the large automated cargo movers that keep zipping past our noses. Like that one. But the movers won't notice anything that's low enough to the ground. So, we are going to glide low over to the red ship. Go to the nearest ground level stabiliser, straight in to the hull, up the hull to the yellow blister pod, and in the green door. Got it?

Tragan felt like he'd been hit over the head with a large soft club, but still managed to get out, "May I ask what would we have done if we had gotten up here and the ship had already gone?" Saving face.

The Pilot raised her scuffed nose a fraction in the air and declared, "That ship is awaiting a specific delivery, which is being held up until I signal."

He looked at the distance between them and the base of the red ship. It looked distressingly far, and those cargo carriers were moving very fast – "How fast can we go using these gravity planes?"

"Fast enough to knock your brains out against the wall on the far side, if you're not careful. But we can hopefully do it in one swoop. Here, brace your feet against the wall, reach forward as far as you can…get ready, you're going to push off, stay flat, now!"

And they flew! They soared, chests skimming the pavement, fingertips shoving them along. And this time when Tragan went a little too fast, got a little too high, the gravity pushed him down and back to where the gravity plane could work again. It was wonderful! He imagined hunting using this device, actually being on the level of the prey…

A cargo mover came towards them and they both jinked to the left with their fingers, but Avva was going faster and her jink carried her into the path of another cargo carrier. There was a thud and a fluttering of cloth.

Tragan kept going, and found himself at the ground stabiliser of the red ship. He looked around, trying to see grey cloth fluttering against the pavement.

He whispered to himself, "Damn! Where is she. Did it?"

And again, "Where is she?"

He looked up at the yellow pod so far overhead – a ship he had no idea of how to fly, or even how to enter. "Now what?"

The answer was cloth flapping in his ear and an arm around his shoulders; Avva was close to him, too close, and he flinched.

Breezily she said, "Sorry, got dragged, had to come around the long way. Now up, and fast!"

And up they went.

* * *

The gravity plane didn't seem to work as well on a spaceship hull, the hum of it wavered, but it let them loft up to the ‘spare engine' and its green door that Avva opened and then closed behind them.

Inside it was pitch black; Tragan stood, and found himself being dragged forward. Avva's voice came out of the dark. "Now we wait. Come here." He felt her fingers brushing over his chest, and deliberately backed up a pace, hearing the crunch of carpet pile under his shoes.

He hissed, "What? What are you doing? Can't we have some light?"

"No, we're in passive mode, they might detect it. I'm setting your gravity plane to maximum null, try not to move around too fast or you'll go flying."

Her fingers found his chest again and moved on the gravity plane. When she took him by the shoulders and laid him down on his back, he found himself drifting, with only the shaggy carpet under his wrists and heels to give him any direction.

His fingers touched the hissing mystery on its harness. He hated not knowing how to handle things around him. "How do I adjust-"

Again the woman interrupted him. "You don't. If you turned the controls the wrong way, the plane would squash you flat. It's at its optimal setting now. So we just wait."

Tragan drummed his heels on the floor. "But we could be here for hours in the dark, waiting for the ship to lift!"

Her voice was ironic out of the dark. "Or you could be spending hours in your cell in Justice House. Not as dark, but probably just as boring."

Tragan tried to relax; it was easy actually, just the brush of the back of his hands could keep him floating. He decided it was time to orient himself a little bit better.

"What is the name of your employer, this ‘she' you mentioned?"

Avva's voice had a lilt in it. "That would be telling. Let's say that I am an employee of the O Corporation."

"Never heard of it."

"Good."

Cheeky girl. Tragan decided to try another path of questioning.

"Do you know why my trial was eternally being postponed?"

"I don't know exactly, but I can guess. The new Prime Minister, Katyan Glessey-"

Tragan spat, and felt his own breath loft himself downward. "That miserable spy!"

"Spy?"

Tragan continued, his voice full of loathing, "Yes, she used to be the President's caretaker Onya, working her way into his confidences, before she turned around and stabbed us all in the back! Stabbed me in the back!"

Ignoring his heat, Avva went on. "Anyway, she and the President have been digging up lots of dirt that the Parakon Corporation did, spreading it out in the bright light of media attention, and then recycling it for fertiliser – so to speak. My guess is, you were being held in reserve; if something came up that was too hot to show the media, they would announce the trial of the sinister Vice Chairman Tragan. And if you were never needed …"

Her voice trailed off, and he prompted, "Well?"

"They would have just locked you away, perpetually about to be charged and put on trial, but never quite all the way through the legal process. Until you died of old age."

Tragan blinked in the dark. "I'm not that old, you know. I could live another hundred Parakon years easily."

Avva was suddenly closer; he could feel her breath blowing past his face as she spoke. "And you could live it all in a cage. Be grateful to my employer, Tragan. Be generous when she asks you how much you think your freedom is worth."

A rumbling of engines interrupted their dialogue; it was eerie to hear it and not feel any reaction of movement, of pressure or added weight, in your own body.

Rather redundantly, he asked, "Are we off?"

"Yes, lifting off now! Work your fingers well into the carpet and hold on; otherwise you'll start sliding around."

Tragan sniffed and declared, "Some people have proper chairs for sitting in."

"Some people don't have a steady stream of passengers with varying anatomies. How would I carry chairs for all of them? The carpet's clean, anything that can grip can grip it, and wet passengers stick to it."

Tragan's fingers tried to flinch from the carpet imagining what wet horrors might have oozed into it; he kept his hands flat. The engine noise peaked, then slowly thundered away into silence as they left atmosphere and entered the soundless vacuum.

Tragan sighed to himself. "And now the wait for hyper. More tedium."

"A ship this size will go straight out, and fast. It won't be long. Sorry we can't play any music, but I could hum if you like. Or do you know any games?

Tragan's ears perked up – literally, not that anyone could tell in the dark of course. "Like, say, Pinch the Pilot?" Reaching for the sound of rustling cloth beside him, he suited action to words, and got a painful blow to the shoulder in return.

"Ouch!"

Avva snapped, "How about Pummel the Passenger for a game? No, I meant like Threm chess, or Kra canodlwo, or-"

"I don't know any of those games."

She sighed, and there was the rustle of a sleeve in the dark. "Too bad. But we must wait until this ship jumps into hyper, before we power up. Too late to leave now, Tragan."

"Very well," he replied. And inside his heart, he added another black mark against her name for that ‘too bad'. Tragan's heart had a lot of room for black marks.

Tragan grumped some more, but Avva was impossible to budge, and kept them both floating in the dark until the indescribable riffling of the hyper jump rippled through them.

When the light finally came on, Tragan looked at the carpet and winced. He shoved himself up as though scalded, and looked down at the most revolting woven stew of contrasting blues, browns and oranges he had ever seen.

"What a hideous carpet!"

"Invigoratingly ghastly, I prefer to call it. But it hides stains very well," said Avva, stripping off her cloak and taking his as well, and turning off and unbuckling the gravity plane while she was at it. She took him by the arm again and led him to one of the doors that led off of the large square room whose only feature was that – carpet thing. She opened it and gestured him inside. "Your quarters for the trip."

Inside, she pointed out the features quickly. "No live news feed until we've detached, but the cache should be fresh. New clothes, pressure bath."

"A Naglon bath!" Tragan exclaimed. The irregularities of his skin required special cleaning that he had been unable to coax from the feeble prison showers.

"We aim to please. I need to go decouple the Flea, stow away these gravity planes for charging, and check the planetary news myself. Feel free to wash up and such, dinner's served as soon as I'm hungry."

He completely ignored her exit, stripping off his clothes, mask and gloves and piling them on the floor. "A decent pressure bath, oh it's been months."

He turned on the computer terminal, set the microphone for high and settled into the bath; turning the control for maximum steam, he let it wash over him. He breathed it in, savouring the weight and heat in his lungs, and then shouted, "Computer! Search for articles, keyword Parakon Corporation, period last standard year begin!"

The steam started to work its way around every bump and bubble of his hide, hanging in a fine stream of droplets on each hair; he sighed in pleasure, considering this part of his ‘liberation fee' to be well earned.

The computer started to reply, but he could barely hear it. "Four hundred twenty nine-"

"Computer, double volume and repeat!"

Now he could hear it. "Four hundred twenty nine articles found. Read articles?"

Tragan quickly answered, "Cancel. Top eight most frequently indexed keywords in those articles, read aloud!"

The machine's monotone answer was, "Scandal, failure, leadership, transition, rapine plant life, war, Freeth, Katyan Glessey."

Tragan slitted his eyes in thought. Transition, scandal, and Katyan Glessey. Not promising. Not at all. He squeezed the muscles of his back, feeling them relax from the strain of climbing the wall, feeling the filth and ooze of his prison life drip out of his pores. He had another question for the computer.

"Computer, scan for articles, keyword Parakon Corporation, secondary keyword Tragan, period last standard year begin!"

"Five articles found."

He shook his head, as though not hearing correctly. Turning off the steam and taking a towel, a wonderful thick rubbery Naglon towel, not one of those horrid cloth things that got all tangled on him, he came out of the bath and stood in front of the computer, drying himself off and wincing at the stains his skin left on the towel. God, he was filthy! It would take multiple baths to get him clean.

He asked the computer, rhetorically, "Five? Only five?" But the computer did not answer, of course.

He slipped into the clean clothes that were laid out for him on the bed, and sadly fingered the loose fit of the shoulders. He'd lost muscle mass in his cell, with no room for a proper workout program; have to get back in shape. Whip himself back into shape. Set a plan, set a goal.

He addressed the computer carefully, pronouncing the alien names slowly so that it would make no mistakes. "Computer, scan for news, period last standard year, names Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, Sarah Jane Smith, The Doctor, begin."

The computer answered at the top of its metal lungs, "No matching-"

He'd forgotten to turn it down. "Stop! Halve volume and repeat!"

The computer repeated at a more normal volume, "No matching articles found. Partial matches found for The Doctor, read articles?"

He said to the computer, "Cancel." And then to himself, sitting down on the bed, "But they are out there, and I will find them. I remember what they did. To me! I do believe I would be able to snatch them all in one swoop. And then, the games could begin. Special games. Games for two, for three, for four even. And very special games, just for you and me – Sarah Jane."

He smiled, although to a Naglon, a smile was just what you did to bare your teeth for the strike. "And in the games I play, I always win."

After that pleasant thought, he had the computer assemble a quick news summary of the past year and read it to him while he stretched and twisted, tested his strength and his reflexes, trying to see what he had lost.

The computer was saying, "stocks rose overall in the agricultural sector, while the discovery of large quantities of erom ore in the Tepp sector caused a surge in" when the voice of the Pilot – he'd almost forgotten she was here – sounded through the door.

"Food! Shake a frongle and come get it!" she shouted.

Tragan gasped, and opened the door to sharply address her, "Pilot Avva, let me make something clear to you. I was a very powerful person before, and I intend to be again. We may have been thrust together by necessity, certainly we would never have met under normal circumstances, but I demand to be treated with respect. You will not use that gutter language in my presence!"

Avva raised her brows, and answered only, "As you wish, Mr. Tragan," gesturing with open palms to the table that had risen out of the floor in the centre room.

"Better," he opined.

She held his seat out for him, and said, "Your seat, sir." He took it, and she walked around the table and took hers.

The stew was hot and there was plenty of it. Across from him, Avva smiled to watch him devour his meal, and ate from her own dish of pale grains. She said, "You seem to have worked up a healthy appetite."

He looked at her, spoon hovering over his bowl, and asked, "Do you know what would be served in the Justice House cellblock today?"

"No, sir."

"Green mush. Tomorrow would be blue pulp. The day after that, green mush. And the day after that, blue pulp. And the day after that…"

She rolled her hand in the air. "Green mush?"

"Yellow goop."

She nodded her head, as though to agree he was well out of prison, and addressed her own meal. After a bit, he looked up and decided to try and figure out where she had learned her surprisingly vulgar vocabulary.

"That – word you used – was in, well, a very low Naglon dialect. I can't imagine where you heard it."

"I used to work in Naglon space, I must have picked up some bad language there."

"You did?" Tragan blinked. "Most races tend to steer clear of our worlds."

Avva snorted. "The way most races steer clear of artificials? I don't subscribe to the popular opinion that all Naglons are inherently vicious; it's nothing but racism of the worst sort. All members of a race are different."

"What about the clone races? Sontarans?" Tragan was enjoying this.

She paused, considered. "Well, they're a special case. But in general you can't assume that just because so-and-so is of a specific race that he, she or it has to be like the other members of that race. Look at yourself."

Swallowing, Tragan could only answer, "Um?"

"You wouldn't have been Vice Chairman of the Parakon Corporation if you were dropping your work every five minutes to flog the secretaries, now would you?"

"That's very perceptive of you."

She went on. "If you look at the news articles, certainly your name is coupled with some rather extreme actions of the Corporation, but wasn't it that such actions were assigned to you just because you were a Naglon? Because it was assumed you would happily leap in and start hacking and slashing?"

"I never thought of it that way," said Tragan. Actually he had been more than happy to hack and slash, but let the girl delude herself.

"Here," Avva said, extending a folder of printed records to him. "I forgot to compile this and put it in your cabin. Your confiscated assets – better to know in advance what they did clean out," she said, and stared into her bowl, stirring it with her utensil.

Tragan opened the folder with one hand and started to read. His spoon reached for his bowl – and then dropped, clattering on the table. He breathed in sharply, and then again.

Avva kept looking down, and when she finally rolled up her eyes to regard Tragan, she saw him frozen, staring with stricken eyes at the folder's contents.

"Is everything all right?" she asked.

"I can't finish that." Tragan pushed his bowl away from him.

"Do you want-" but Avva was cut off.

"No, I don't want it, I just want to be alone. Leave me alone!" he snapped, and went back into his quarters with the folder.

Avva finished her own meal, then parsimoniously poured Tragan's uneaten stew back into the pan and dropped it into a stasis drawer, which powered on with a ‘bloop' noise at her command. At another command, the table folded itself away and slid down into the floor, and the carpet resealed itself.

Inside his room, Tragan read the contents of the folder again and again, and then lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling with dry eyes.

* * *

He finally emerged hours later, to find no sign of the Pilot. The table was back under the floor apparently. Not wanting to go hunting and pecking among the unmarked doors, he said, "Pilot?" and a door slid open. Avva's voice said, "I'm in my quarters, sir. Straight across."

He entered, and stood in the centre of what must be her private quarters. It was smaller than his, with just a bed and a worktable, the washing facility little more than a niche; at the table, Avva was doing something complicated involving a sheet of paper and several brushes. She looked at him, and said nothing.

He looked around deliberately, and said, "Your room is even smaller than mine."

She said, her voice tinged with sarcasm, "I only use it when I have passengers. Sir."

"I've owned houses with closets that were larger than this - Flea."

She tilted her head, and only replied, "How nice for you."

He strolled about the two paces he could, examining the hodgepodge of décor on the walls. "Hmm, I suppose you've never had a proper decorator in here either."

"Which explains my carpet, of course."

But he was stopped, stopped dead in fact, by one item encased in a heavy steel and glassteel case. "This scroll, it's signed Gallmian."

Avva said agreeably, "So it is."

Tragan looked at her just a little bit too wide-eyed, then back at the scroll. "But it's a reproduction of course."

She casually said, "It is an original Gallmian, actually. I've collected Gallmian calligraphy for the last decade or so."

Tragan's cheek hair crept again. "It must be worth …you could sell it for an estate on Moro III!"

She shrugged. "But where would I put an estate like that in the Righteous Flea?"

Tragan put his hands behind his back, and paused to collect himself. He'd felt himself sliding from the upper ground in front of this girl, and he wanted that high ground back! But – appearance was everything. "I wanted to apologise for my – deserting the table like that. It was very poor manners."

"You had bad news to consider. Losing a pet is always painful." Avva blinked, and started to wipe her brushes and put them away, her hands moving over them while she still looked at Tragan.

Tragan slumped. "I always hoped that somebody would purchase them, someone who would appreciate them. But instead they just, just terminated the lot of them. My beasts, my beautiful savages, locked into cages and gassed! I chose them from so many planets, raised them from the egg some of them. Trained them, worked them, cared for them when they were sick – and they got thrown away like so much trash! No, thrown away with the trash!

"Well, except for those two guard animals who got loose and ate-"

"I don't care who they ate, at least they died fighting! And when I find the butchers who took them down!" Tragan glared at her.

"They were your responsibility, and you could not follow through for them." Avva touched her hands together, fingertip to fingertip, in a curiously ritual way. "I understand."

"You couldn't possibly," retorted Tragan. How could she understand the thrill of working with a beast, stalking and hunting with it as a part of you, an extension of your will?

"No? Well sir, for your own safety and comfort, I'd like to give you a tour of the Flea, show you what is where. Then we can agree to disagree and stay out of each other's pelt until we rendezvous with my employer."

"And when will that be?"

"We drop out of hyper within the next four hours, then I'm going to muddy the trail a bit in normal space, mingle on some of the more heavily travelled space lanes. Then back into hyper and – say, ten days in all, subjective."

Tragan calculated distances in his head. "Hm. Your employer is closer to Parakon space than I thought. I expect you are required to keep a polite distance."

Avva's mouth pursed. "The Sast are a race designed for space, sir, and the O Corporation is also space based. A corporation that is remarkably free of those little prejudices that sometimes blind other races."

They stared at each other, each with the expression of someone who has bitten something very, very sour.

Tragan said, "I think we'd better have that tour now."

Avva agreed. "Before we strangle each other."

First she led him to – no surprise – the control room. "Navigation and main control. Standard space distress beacon is here."

Tragan retorted, "I would hardly want to alert the authorities to my whereabouts, even in an emergency."

She replied, "Ah well, in that case you would hold down this button first, then press that control twice. That will engage the autopilot that will take the ship to its home base. And not set off the standard space distress beacon."

"I thought an emergency autopilot that didn't engage the distress signal was illegal."

"Oh, it is. Going to report me?"

"Hardly."

In a by-the-way tone, she added, "And if you do have to use this, I'd recommend getting into a spacesuit during the trip. The Flea doesn't land very well under autopilot, and it might spring a leak."

Tragan pictured the tiny Flea happily hurtling itself into the ground with him inside, and shivered inside. "I'll keep that in mind."

The next room was "Storage and supplies – in my case, mostly media storage. Movies, news, plays, opera, sensuals, sports, vinnio, the lot. And a vidscreen."

He eyed the vidscreen with disapproval. "That could be considerably larger."

Aha, a point scored: the girl sounded defensive as she replied, "It's optimal for the space and weight limitations of the Flea, thank you. Someday they'll come up with a truly universal method of data storage, but until then, well, I have to put up with all this extra wasted mass just to store all the different mediums for translation."

"Couldn't you just put the data into computer file format?"

She stared at him. "And give up the original cover art? That panel beside the screen is L'Index, tell it what you're looking for and it will find it. Then just drop whatever box lights up into this bin, the translation system will do the rest."

Tragan rubbed his fingers together absent-mindedly. "Really? I'm rather out of touch with the current entertainment, perhaps I could get caught back up – with your permission."

She gave a tiny bow of her head, and said, "Be my guest. Because you are, after all, my guest."

Avva stepped to the door as Tragan seated himself, but he called and she stopped.

"Oh Pilot, before you go. I was looking in the news archives and couldn't find any mention of when the gravity plane was released on the market. Is it new? Or marketed under a different name perhaps?"

She smiled and said, "No, it's a device created by the O Corporation. It's not on the open market."

The door closed and Tragan sat frozen. He whispered to himself, "Not on the open market, and invented by some underground organisation that nobody's ever heard of. What would it be worth, I wonder? A gravity controller that can fit in one hand. A mass sensor distorter as well. Get it reverse-engineered, sell it to the highest bidder, and I could have all the power that money can buy!"

He lost himself in that dream for a moment, and then returned. Right here and now, it really had been a very long time since he had felt any sort of pleasure except for his own bitter fantasies, and so …

He touched L'Index, and the screen glowed blue and spoke. "Keywords?"

"Pain."

The computer replied, trying to narrow down his choices. "Pain - emotional, pain - mental, pai-"

"Pain - physical."

"Subcategories: sports, current events, historical -"

"Subcategory - erotica," said Tragan, letting the word drip from his lips.

"Multiple titles found. Read titles?"

"Yes!" said Tragan, starting to tremble a bit in his seat.

"A Moment's Longing: Memories of -"

"No. Next title."

"B's Bug Porn Number 2 through 49, inclusive."

"Hmm, no. Next title."

"Bezze and the Master: The Flensing."

"Stop! Indicate title location."

Tragan turned and looked at the wall of boxes; one of them was flashing a red light. He pulled it from the shelf and placed it in the translation bin, then settled himself in front of the screen on the couch.

L'Index spoke again. "Program loading. Loading complete. This program is available with the following enhancements: Translation into Naglon?"

"Unnecessary," breathed Tragan.

"Experienced Reality?"

"What?" Tragan sat bolt upright. "You have … the headset, where is the headset?"

"Is it on top of the couch?" L'Index apparently did not have a camera, but surely something as important as the headset it should track!

"No. Where is it?!"

"Is it behind the couch?"

There it was! Oh, delicious. Tragan put on the headset and settled in front of the screen, and said, "Commence program."

That dratted L'Index again offered its advice. "This program has two ER tracks. Would you prefer to Experience Bezze or the Master?"

"This time … I believe I will be the Master."

The headset crackled, and Tragan felt himself melting, becoming another person, a man with a whip in his hand and a bare expanse of flesh in front of him, smooth and unmarked, begging to be defiled. The program began with lashings and screams that were met with a deep satisfied sigh of relief from Tragan's lips.

"Ahhhhhhh."