Rescue Two made its way in and out of all the holds, while Shrike boosted the freighter gently on its way, then returned before Solis ordered the grapples retracted.
"Captain—what were they looking for?" Esmay asked.
"Just practicing," Solis said.
She looked at him; finally he grinned at her.
"All right. You might as well know. Sector's concerned about possible shortages in the munitions inventory. We think some stuff's being diverted from Fleet to civilian use. So the admiral says to check every ship that asks us for a boost. It is good practice, including the use of the warhead detection equipment."
"What's missing?" asked Esmay.
Solis spread his hands. "I've been told I don't need to know, but since they specified the equipment we were to use looking for it, I'd say someone's misplaced some of the more effective nukes."
"Ouch."
"Exactly. If our stuff's being transshipped on civilian freighters, it could be going anywhere. To anyone. Probably not the Benignity—they have their own munitions industry, and plenty in stock. But any of the lesser hostile powers, or domestic malcontents . . ."
"Or simply pirates," Esmay said.
"Yes. Anyone who wants a big bang."
Chapter Six
Elias Madero, owned by the Boros Consortium, followed a five-angled route that had proved lucrative for decades. Olives and wine from Bezaire, jewels mined on Oddlink, livestock embryos from Gullam, commercial-grade organics from Podj, entertainment cubes from Corian, which had FTL traffic from deeper insystem, and the largest population in the area. She was a container hauler, picking up at each port the hold-shaped containers that had been filling since her last visit there. Her crew, most of them permanent, often had no idea what was in the containers. The captain did, presumably, and also the Boros agents at each port. But the containers had no accessible hatches—one advantage of container ships was supposed to be the impossibility of petty pilfering by crews—so they had no idea that the container in Hold 5 which was supposed to be filled with 5832 cube players was actually full of arms stolen from a Fleet stockpile. The other containers in Hold 5, which should have had entertainment cubes to be played in the cube players, contained more illicit weaponry, including thirty-four Whitsoc 43b11 warheads, their controlling electronics, and the arming keys.
Boros' agent at Bezaire would not have been happy to find the contents of that container, since she had a contract to supply the cube players and the entertainment cubes supposedly filling the rest of Hold 5.
Elias Madero came out of FTL flight, retranslating to normal space, to traverse the real-space distance between two jump points in the same system, colloquially known as Twobits. This shortcut had been marked "questionable" on standard charts for years, because the presence of two jump points in the same system was believed, on theoretical grounds, to lead to spatial instability of the jump points. If the insertion point shifted, an inbound ship might find itself emerging too close to a large mass, with no time to maneuver clear. But the nearest greenlined route meant three more jump point calculations, and added eleven days to the Corian-Bezaire passage. Since jump point temporal coordinates were fuzzy anyway, many commercial haulers used shortcuts to ensure that they met contractual delivery dates . . . while filing flight plans that were all greenlined.
This crew had made the traverse before, many times, without incident. The jump points had not shifted in the past fifty years, while the possibility that they might kept the system uncrowded.
On this trip, system insertion went as smoothly as usual, and the Elias transferred to insystem drive without a hitch.
"That's done, then," Captain Lund said to his navigator, clapping a hand on the man's shoulder. "Four days, and we'll be out of here again. I'm going to bed." Custom and regulation both required that a captain be on the bridge during jump point insertions; Lund had been up three shifts running because of a minor engineering problem.
His navigation officer, a transfer from Sorias Madero, a sister ship, nodded. "I have the course laid, sir. By my calculations, ninety-seven point two hours."
"Very good."
Captain Lund, balding and stocky, waited until he was in his cabin to take off his jacket and kick off his shoes. He hung the jacket up neatly, set his shoes side by side, laid his trousers, neatly folded, over the back of his chair, with his shirt over them. This was his last cycle . . . when he reached Corian again, he would retire at last. Helen . . . his grandchildren . . . the neat little house set high on a slope above the valley . . . he drifted into sleep, a smile on his face.
The sharp yelp of the emergency alarm woke him. He touched the comunit above his bunk.
"Captain here—what is it?"
"Raiders, sir."
He sat up, ducking automatically from the overhanging cabinets. "I'm on my way."
Raiders? What kind of raiders would hang around a route where almost no ships went? No ships, really—he'd never found any indication that others used this two-jump transit.
Had they been tailed through FTL? He'd heard rumors that Fleet was developing some kind of scan that worked in FTL. The Benignity? Certainly not Aethar's World, and they were across Familias space anyway.
From the bridge, the situation was clear. Two of them, their weapons systems lighting up the scan board with red threats. On the com screen, a hard-faced man in a uniform he didn't recognize was speaking in accented Standard—an accent he hadn't heard before, with the words pulled out twice as long.
"You surrender your ship, and we'll let the crew off in your lifeboats—"
Captain Lund almost choked. What good would lifeboats be, in a lifeless system that no one visited because of the paired jump points?
"Wheah's yoah captain? I wanna talk to him."
Lund stepped up to the comunit, and nodded to his exec, who stepped back.
"This is Captain Lund. Who are you and what do you think you're doing?"
"Takin' yoah ship, sir." The man favored him with a tight grin that did not look at all friendly. "In the name of sacred liberty, and the Nutex Militia. We apologize for any . . . ah . . . inconvenience."
"You're pirates!" Lund said. "You have no right—"
"Them's harsh words, sir. We don't like disrespect for our beliefs, sir. Let me put it this way—we have the weapons to blow your ship away, and we're offerin' you a chance to save your crews' lives. Some of 'em, anyway. If you surrender your ship, and allow us to board without resistance, we will swear not to kill any of your legal crew."
Lund felt that he had waked into a nightmare, and his mind refused to work at its normal speed. "Legal crew?"
"Waal . . . yes. We're aware, you see, that you work for a corporation with obscene and unnatural views about moral issues. In our books, there's things that just ain't natural and normal, let alone right, and if you have people like that on board, then they'll have to face justice."
Lund glanced around; the faces on the bridge were tense and pale. He thumbed the com control to prevent his words going out in transmission. "Do any of you have the slightest idea who these crazies are? Or what they mean about natural and unnatural?"
The junior scan tech, Innis Seqalin, nodded. "I've heard a little about the Nutex Militia . . . for one thing, they think it's wrong for women to be spacers, and for another, they don't tolerate anything but what they call normal sex."
Lund felt his stomach churn. If they didn't allow women in space, what kind of sex did they think was normal? And why not allow women in space? "Is it . . . something religious?"
"Yes, sir. At least, they say it is."
Lund felt even sicker. Religious nuts . . . he had gone to space to get away from them back on his home world. If these were the same sort . . . he had too many crew at risk.
"I'm warnin' ya," the pirate officer said. "Answer, or we'll blow your holds . . ."
"All right," Lund said, as much to gain time as anything. "I'll send my people to the lifeboats—"
"We'll see a cre
w list," the man said, smiling unpleasantly. "Right now, afore you can doctor it up. If a lifeboat separates before we've approved the list, we'll blow it."
Lund's mind raced into high gear. The crew list did not mention gender—and certainly not sexual preferences—so if he could just keep the medical records out of their hands . . .
"And the medical records," the man said, "in case you got some of them so-called modern women that don't have good women's names."
He could refuse, but then what? According to scan, he was facing weapons easily capable of blowing his ship. But they wouldn't want to blow his ship . . . they would want the cargo, and perhaps the ship itself, intact.
"Personnel and medical records aren't networked," he said, thanking whatever gods were around, including those he didn't believe in, for the fact that this was standard, and known to be standard.
"Ten minutes," the pirate said, and clicked off.
Ten minutes. What doctoring could he do in ten minutes? And why hadn't he denied the presence of women right away, so that he might have had a chance to pass them off as men? But the ship's tiny medical staff had been listening, and Hansen gave him a call.
"I'm changing the genders, and stripping out all reference to gender-specific medications . . . six minutes for that. What else do you think?"
"Seqalin says they have some weird beliefs about sexual practice—but I don't know which."
"Umm. If they go to space in single-gender ships, maybe they have obligatory homosexuality in space? I could code everyone as male/male preference."
"Yeah, but if we're wrong . . . I don't know."
"And what about the children?"
Elias Madero, like most commercial ships, carried some of its crews' children aboard. Children had been found well worth the extra work and worry, in terms of keeping a crew entertained and cooperative. Right now there were six, four under school age and two taking a work-study tour as junior apprentices.
"We put the kids in the core, where the scans are least likely to find them. Sedate the littles. If they just rob the ship and go on . . . the older ones can come back out and send a message. Got to clear out the nursery, though . . ."
"Do it," Lund said. "But don't code gender preference. Just leave it." How was he going to hide the women? And what would happen to them if they were found?
Hazel Takeris, age sixteen, had found her first working trip to be as dull as her father had warned—but she wouldn't have missed it for anything, certainly not another five terms at the Space Dependents Middle School on Oddlink Main Station. So she had willingly performed the routine chores allotted to the apprentices, reminding herself—when enthusiasm for washing dishes or scrubbing the deck flagged—that she could have been listening to Professor Hallas discourse on the history of a planet that lay—to Hazel's mind—in the dim past of human history. A long way away, and very far back, and who really cared which millenium had produced which oddly named king or scientist.
When the alarm came, she was doing inventory of the galley stores, as ordered by the cook. She heard nothing of the ensuing discussion, because Cookie had told her to get back to work, and be sure her count was right. Thirty-eight three-kilo sacks of wheat flour. Six half-kilo boxes of sodium chloride salt, and four of a 50/50 mix of potassium and sodium chlorides. Eight—
"Haze—drop that and listen up." Cookie's face was an odd shade, the rich tan paled and splotchy. "Get four emergency ration kits, and go to Core 32. Hop it!"
"What—?" But apprentices didn't ask questions, not when a crew member looked like that. Hazel grabbed four emergency kits, and as she went past Cookie dumped two more on top of them. She scurried as fast as she could through the corridors, turned into the drop to the Core, and met her dad, who was even paler than Cookie.
"Haze—gimme two of those—now go to 32. We're going to lock you in. I put your suit in there already. Put it on, and wait. Be sure you wait long enough."
She had grown up a spacer's child; she could figure it out. "Raiders," she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
"Yeah. Go on, now. You and Stinky will be awake; we've sedated the littles, and they'll be in Core 57 and 62. Oh—and remember, it's the Nutex Militia."
Hazel fell down the drop, landing easily, feet first, on the pad. Thirty-two was clockwise four; she had known the geography of this ship from early childhood. Thirty-two's hatch was open; she slid in, dumped her rations, pulled the hatch shut, and locked it from inside. Her suit stood slumped in one corner, along with a stack of extra oxygen tanks. She got herself into it, her fingers shaking, fumbling at the catches and seals.
She started to report herself secure, on suit com, and then didn't—what if the raiders were already aboard? No one had told her when to expect boarding; no one had told her when to come out. Wait long enough? How long was that? How was she supposed to know?
In her suit, she could not quite lie down in the compartment, but she propped herself corner-to-corner, so that if she fell asleep, she would not fall and make a noise. She had the helmet open to ambient air—no sense in wasting suit air yet, and the helmet would snap shut automatically at any drop in pressure. She looked at her suit chrono, and marked the time. Wait long enough. She wished she knew how long.
She wished she and Stinky had been in the same compartment so they could talk. As the two apprentices, they had formed a natural alliance. Besides that, they liked each other's parents, and had spent the voyage trying to maneuver her father and his mother into some kind of arrangement. So far the adults had been resistant, but she and Stinky hadn't given up hope. Surely everyone felt the same urge to partner that she and Stinky felt . . . that's how adults came together to have children, after all.
Locked in the empty compartment, it finally occurred to Hazel that the straightforward solution would have been for her and Stinky to partner, and leave the parents alone . . . but she wasn't ready to partner anyone. Not yet. Later . . . she allowed herself a few delicious minutes of imagining what it would be like if Stinky were in the same compartment, without the pressure suits or the adult supervision. She had thoughts like that, even though she had chosen to take the treatment to delay puberty; she might look only ten or eleven, but she was sixteen for true.
She pulled her mind away from that to the littles, locked away in other compartments. Sedated, her dad had said. How long would the sedation last? Brandalyn was always first up in the morning, bouncing around . . . would she come out of sedation first? Had they put her in the same compartment as her sister? Surely they'd thought of that. Stassi was quieter, and very attached to her big sister. The other two littles, Paolo and Dris, were cousins.
She looked at the chrono. Only fifteen minutes had passed. That couldn't be long enough. The raiders might not have boarded yet. She might have to wait hours.
Her suit transmitted nonspecific vibrations that she could not identify—except that they were different from those she knew so well after all these months aboard. One hour, two, three. How long did raiders stay aboard a ship to plunder it? Docked at a regular cargo station, the automated handlers could unload a hold in seven hours and twelve minutes—if nothing went wrong. Would the raiders try to unload an entire hold? All the holds? Would they have the right equipment? How long would it take them?
It would be easier to steal the whole ship; she felt cold as she thought of it. If they did, if they took the entire ship . . . then what would happen to her? To Stinky? To the littles?
She heard noises—nearby noises. It must be the raiders, because no one had unlocked her compartment yet. Shuffling, thumping—then a shriek that stiffened her. Brandy, that would be; they had all joked that she had a scream that would slice steel plates. The child screamed again. Hazel clambered up, clumsy in the suit, and tried to unlock the hatch. She had to stop them—she had to protect the child. She had the lock undone when the hatch was yanked out of her grip, and two big men grabbed her, one for each arm, and pulled her out of the compartment. She could see Brandy kicking and screa
ming in the grip of another, who was trying to gag her with a length of cloth. Stassi was crying, more quietly, in the grip of another; the two little boys clung to Stinky, who looked as scared as she felt.
"A girl," one of the men said. "The perverts." Brandy's scream choked off; the man holding her had managed to tie the gag. "You take her," he said, shoving Brandy into Hazel's arms. "And bring her along."
She held Brandy to her, trying to comfort the child, who was sobbing into the gag. Stassi clung to one leg and Paolo to the other. Stinky carried Dris. The raiders pushed her along, back up toward the bridge.
The first thing she saw, coming into the bridge, was her dad's body in a pool of blood. She almost dropped Brandy, but the child clung to her, legs and arms fastened tight. There were other bodies, all people she knew—Baris the navigator, and Sig the cargo chief, and—and Stinky's mother, gagged and bound, but glaring furiously. All the women of the crew, she noted, were lying there in a row, bound and gagged. Captain Lund faced the bridge access, bound to his command seat. And all the armed men wearing the same uniform as the ones who had captured her.
The leader turned to Captain Lund. "You lied to us, captain. That wasn't very smart." He drawled the words out, an accent that Hazel had never heard before.
"I . . . wanted to save the children."
"God saves the children, by giving them to those who will bring them up in righteousness." The leader smiled, a smile that made Hazel feel cold inside.
Captain Lund looked at Hazel, then at Stinky. "I'm sorry," he said. The leader slammed his weapon into Captain Lund's head.
"You don't talk, old man. Nobody talks to our children but our family. And you're going to be really sorry that you lied . . ." He turned to his men. "Get goin' now . . . let's check these heathen sluts out, see if any of 'em's worth botherin' with."
Hazel lay in the compartment that had been the spare passenger cabin, trying to hug all the littles at once. Dris was still dozing, and she didn't know if that was the sedative or the lump on his head. Paolo whimpered softly; Stassi had her whole hand in her mouth, sucking furiously. Brandy was out cold, snoring through the gag. Hazel wanted to take it out, but she was afraid of the man with the weapon who stood by the hatch. She was afraid of everything. She had to pretend not to be, because the littles needed her; she was the one person they knew, the one person who could make them feel safe, if anything could after what they'd been through. How could you make someone feel safe if you didn't feel safe yourself?
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