Quest for the Well of Souls - Jack L. Chalker [61]
Mavra Chang erupted with every curse she had ever learned in her life. These were considerable in number, but all were issued in a long series of grunts and squeals that conveyed to the uninitiated only the emotion, not the sense, of her words.
Joshi let her rant and rave. He felt just as disgusted, but it was too damned hot to let off emotional steam. He simply stayed out of her way until she was through.
* * *
After she'd calmed down and was panting from heat and exertion, Mavra took stock of their situation. The cage was firmly bolted to the wooden floor but was out in the open; fine steel mesh surrounded them, floor and top as well as sides, and the only opening was the door on slightly worn but still durable steel hinges.
After a while she and Joshi tested the padlock, trying to ram it or butt it with head, rump, whatever they could. Their attempts shook the cage and made a lot of noise but accomplished little else except to give them both headaches and pains in the rear end.
"Face it," Joshi grunted. "We're stuck."
She knew he was right, but she refused to accept it. Not after all this time, not this close, not with the mountains that led into Gedemondas only a few dozen kilometers away. It couldn't end with her locked in a cage, finally to wind up as an experimental pork chop when it became clear to these people that there would be no breeding.
"Maybe we can work out a way to talk to them," Joshi suggested. "After all, we did it with those on the ship."
"With what?" she responded. "No pencil, no paper—and nobody here who could read what I wrote, anyway. Not even dirt to scratch out a symbol for them. But don't give up yet. Something will happen to give us a break." She tried to console him.
He wasn't convinced, and, truthfully, neither was she. The only trouble was, everything suggested they had pushed their luck once too far. Always in her colorful past when she'd gotten into hopeless situations something had miraculously happened to get her out. Even when she'd crashed on this world so many years ago by flying too low over a nontech hex, something had happened. She'd had Renard and Nikki Zinder with her, both sinking fast on sponge, their minds rotting before her eyes. Then, captured by Teliagin cyclopes who chewed on sheep and placed in a prison just as secure as their current cage—and with the same fate awaiting them—she'd been rescued by the Lata.
It had always been that way. Trapped on New Pompeii, she'd been given what she needed by the computer, Obie, to get her out—the complete schematics of the private little world in her head, still there somewhere. Obie also gave her the necessary codes to bypass Trelig's system of roving robot killer satellites.
All her life . . . When her native world had gone Com, that mysterious freighter captain smuggled her out, and Maki Chang took her to grow up in space. Kindly beggars had taken her in and helped her along when Maki was picked up. Gimball Nysongi took her out of the whorehouse in the spaceport dives of Kaliva and gave her a ship, the stars, skills, and a measure of happiness when all had seemed so hopeless. Then, even after Gimball was killed, and she'd continued on her grand thefts of the Com, there was always something whenever things became impossible, lucky breaks that kept her from ever being caught or convicted of anything. Always something.
She had again and again gotten away. She had come to expect it, waited for the improbable to happen, the nick-of-time hair's-breadth escape—even though, back in the darkest recesses of her mind, she knew that one day it wouldn't happen.
But this wasn't the day, she told herself, making herself believe it. She couldn't believe it.
However, she admitted ruefully, whatever was to save her would have to come from outside unless some better opportunity presented itself here. For now, she could only lie down and seek respite from the dry heat in sleep.
* * *
The sun was setting. In a few more minutes the long shadows would overtake the PGU as it steamed and lurched around the oasis-town and plunge the area