Cobra Slave-eARC by Timothy Zahn

alien’s head and triggered his stunner. The low-power current arced across the empty space, and with gratifying swiftness the Troft slumped in his seat.
    Merrick moved to the alien’s side, feeling his stomach tighten as he activated his opticals’ infrared. But the stunner had worked exactly as it was supposed to: the heat pattern in the Troft’s face showed that he was indeed unconscious. Leaning the chair back, Merrick adjusted the alien into a more comfortable position, the kind a tired and bored crewer might have settled into just before nodding off. With luck, that would be the conclusion the Troft would come to upon awakening, and would decide the better part of valor would be to keep his guilty conscience to himself.
    With even more luck, he’d do all that waking and thinking before someone else wandered in and found him. Merrick had no idea how hard it was to wake a Troft from a stunner blast, and he wasn’t anxious to find out.
    The snack case was half full of meal bars and bottled drinks. Merrick wasn’t familiar with this particular type of bar, but he knew from years of Cobra Worlds experience that human and Troft metabolisms were close enough that each group could eat any but the most exotic of the others’ food. He selected three of the bars and slipped them inside his jumpsuit, closed the case, and started to leave.
    And paused. The Trofts mostly ignored the slaves except when it was time to feed them. But the overhead catwalks saw plenty of traffic. If one of the aliens spotted the children with the bars, there would be serious trouble.
    Unless he could turn potential inquiries in the wrong direction.
    It took a minute to find a small scratch pad and stylus tucked away in a drawer of the center monitor array. Quickly, he scribbled out a note in the best cattertalk script that he could manage.
    The extra food, it is for the children. Hunger, it is not proper for the young to feel it. Secrecy, I beg you to keep it.
    He folded the note and stuffed it into his jumpsuit beside the meal bars. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant diversion, he knew. But with all the slaves theoretically locked away it would give any investigation someplace else to start.
    Assuming that at least some of the slaves in there could read cattertalk. If not, Anya would have to translate for them. Hopefully before someone started excitedly waving the bars around and drawing unwelcome attention.
    He’d had some concerns that the doors into the slave areas would have a different access code than the one at the end of the catwalk, which would have forced him to get back into his sleeping room the same way he’d left it. But just as the Trofts had seen no need to rotate their codes, they also apparently didn’t want their engineering staff having to remember different numbers for the various doors in their sector. The code he’d used upstairs unlocked the door, and a moment later he was inside the women’s sleeping area.
    As Merrick had instructed, Anya had taken the position nearest the door tonight. She was sound asleep as he tiptoed over to her, and stayed that way as he tucked the meal bars and the note under the edge of her pallet. He slipped out again, closing the door behind him, and walked around the bulk of the engine core to the men’s side.
    A moment later, less than five minutes after he’d left, he was back inside.
    It took another minute of careful maneuvering to make his way between the closely-spaced pallets. But finally he reached his spot and unrolled his own pallet. Lying down, relieved that it was all over, he closed his eyes, keyed off his opticals, and settled down to sleep. Almost as an afterthought, he boosted his hearing for a moment, listening to the soft sounds of breathing around him.
    And froze. Amid the murmured sea of slow breathing was a single, distinctly faster rhythm.
    Someone else in here was also awake.
    He held his breath, trying to pinpoint the other’s location. But between the background