In Enemy Territory - Shannon West Page 0,35

the yard anyway?”

“Pirates,” he replied without hesitation.

That night, the message from Egam arrived, and Rasc and Setin made their notes on it and sent it back. And so it began.

Over the next two weeks, slowly, insidiously, Rasc made his moves, knowing he was being watched. It didn’t take long to notice that with so many different factions, the various gangs were fractured, and that kept their power minimal. None could gain any real ascendancy over the others. But that had to change if Larz’s plan for Rasc to take over the yard was going to work. Personally, Rasc still had his doubts.

In the meantime, they had managed to find their contact on the outside when a Gatifreyan server in the line at the dining hall passed Rasc a note, hidden inside his fritta roll, which was a kind of flat bread that was folded over with yellow cheese in the middle. Not bad, if he didn’t overly question the gamey quality of the cheese. He had bitten into the thing and almost choked on the little piece of paper the server had placed inside it. The note instructed him in Earthan that this server was his contact, and any requests for contraband would need to go through them, as well as any messages to the outside.

The server’s name, as Rasc later found out by asking around, was Gerta-sek, and they were a dry, humorless person who never joked with the men or showed any friendliness. Maybe that was simply a cover. Rasc had no idea why a Gatifreyan was willing to risk so much for Tygerians, but he didn’t question it either—sometimes at night he lay in his bunk and wondered if that was an oversight he would come to regret later. But by that time there were so many, he’d almost lost count.

More notes passed back and forth between them, with Rasc asking for drugs, cash, and communicators. Rasc had no idea how he was even going to get the contraband until two days later when Setin arrived back in the cell and waited for lights out to pull off his robes and reveal a huge stash of goods hidden within the folds of his robe. He said he’d found the contraband items in his gleemar, which was a big cloth bag the prisoners used to pick up trash in the yard. That had become Setin’s job at the prison, and it was a perfect way for him to smuggle in goods.

How Gerta-sek managed to get the contraband in the bag, Rasc never asked. But the shipments began to arrive after that with some regularity in the next few days, always just appearing in Setin’s bag.

Rasc and Setin had been welcomed into Egam’s gang by this time, and Rasc set out to make himself a very valuable asset. With all the contraband, it wasn’t hard to do. His power lay in brains and not just his brawn, so along with the contraband sent to him by the Tygerians, he also created a burning need for the particular contraband that only they, the slavers, could control.

Setin had found a Leerian in the group who had a Gatifreyan mate on the outside. This mate came to visit him often, bringing him a small amount of a kind of Gatifreyan smoke the inmate had long used called si’karr, the rolled leaves of the si’karra plant that grew exclusively on Gatifrey and its moons. Rasc and Setin both remembered it from when they lived on Gatifrey, and it was a highly addictive kind of crazy weed that when smoked, produced hallucinations and a short-lived euphoria that made whoever smoked it crave more and more.

Through careful negotiations with the Leerian, he learned the mate had a big supply of si’karr already at their home on Gatifrey and could get as much as was needed and bring it to the Leerian at the prison. Once Rasc had thus established his supply chain, he set out to create a need for that product.

By judiciously giving out small samples of the goods, in just days Rasc created a market for the substance. The prisoners came clamoring back for more and more, ready and willing to trade other contraband to obtain it. Before long, it had become part of the prison currency, and Rasc used it to procure necessities for his group, like extra blankets and extra food, along with “luxuries,” like stuffing for the pancake thin mattresses and other kinds of drugs and contraband, not to mention