Aunty Sinead would never track down kids—unless it was to help them, of course—or use stunners on ladies like Mrs. Fogarty. And I’ll bet Mum never in her entire career in the Corps did anything like they’re doing.
Probably not. We don’t really know what she did, though, do we? Or much about her. I never read that journal she wrote for us, did you?
Nope. I was too mad at her for sending us offworld. I wish we had the journals now.
I’m going to read mine first thing when we get home, Murel vowed.
Me too. I wonder what she’d do in our place now, Ronan said. I’ll bet she’d have infiltrated the com center, neutralized the guards, and sent the message already. Or maybe taken over command.
I don’t think so, Ro, Murel replied. I think she’d probably be doing pretty much what we are. What worries me is what she’s doing at home now.
THE SNOW WAS so heavy that the invaders of Kilcoole could not see their hands in front of their faces. They put lanterns on their helmets, but the light bounced off the sheets of white and cast a glare even their goggles could not dispel.
The wind blew scarves from their necks and mittens from their hands, and knocked over the smaller men and women. Master Sergeant Missoni rescinded the order to burn the village for fear the wind would blow the fires out of control and injure his people. Instead they sank pitons into the buildings with cables attached, stringing the buildings together like beads. The lines served as they would in a gale at sea, something for the troops to hold on to in order to keep from being blown away as they plodded blindly from one shack to the next. Finally, Missoni called everyone off. The flitters were engineered for low temperatures but not for the gale-force winds, and besides, a driver couldn’t see to navigate. Even posting guards was useless until the wind died down and the snow lightened. They had no equipment of any kind that would let a mortal man or woman see a damn thing under the current conditions. Even with the best gear available, a guard was far more likely to die of exposure than to prevent, protect, or detect anything.
Since returning to the ship was also impossible, they bivouacked in the town meeting hall, a long one-story job with a lot of carvings on the walls and the support beams. Missoni guessed that the long fire pit down the middle was for feasts of some sort. The hospital was larger, but they’d discovered that it was deserted and cold, the many windows already thick with the same frost that iced the inner walls. The long building was more centrally located, sturdily constructed, and free of frost inside,
They built a fire and the smoke rose through a hole in the roof that sucked it out better than Missoni would have guessed. These people had acquired some technology in the last few years, it seemed. Not enough to keep the wind from blowing the smoke back down to choke them and keep a permanent haze between the tops of their hooded helmets and the ceiling, but it helped. The air on Petaybee was supposed to be pure and clean, so they hadn’t brought masks. Missoni used the tail of his muffler to filter out some of the smoke and the others followed suit.
They were an inhuman-looking bunch sitting there, smoke-reddened eyes glittering with tears as they watched the flames leap and dip, red, orange, yellow, white-blue, and some crackly green. The wind roared and shook the walls as if it would bring them down on top of the miserable collection of human beings. How the hell did people live here, and why would they even want to? Missoni wondered. He couldn’t imagine how even fur-bearing animals would live through a storm like this. Well, they lived in holes, didn’t they?
And that, he realized, had to be exactly what the people were doing. This whole place was supposed to be full of caves. People had gone into those caves and come out again thoroughly messed up. Maybe the reason some people stayed on this iceberg was that they had gone down there too and become even more messed up—enough that they actually thought Petaybee was fit for human habitation. Enough that they imagined they liked it.
“Okay,” he said through his helmet com. “What did you come up with on the data search?”
“Stacks and stacks of forms, sir, but when I brought them out, the wind snatched all but these last few out of my hands,” Private Murkowski said.
Ordinarily Missoni would have yelled at him, but under the circumstances he just grunted. “Parr?”
A soldier seated two down from Missoni withdrew a small case from his parka with a still-mittened hand and passed it to him. It held some chips that looked like they might work on the little computer Missoni carried in the breast pocket of his uniform blouse.
The mission had been aborted before the search was complete, but there were several handfuls of papers and a few more chips and drives. Mostly, Petaybean communications still seemed to be stuck in the hard-copy phase.
Missoni looked over the papers, not expecting to make much of them. He was right. Besides, even if he understood what was on them, there was a good chance he wasn’t supposed to know about it. He stacked them neatly beside him and laid a big rock from the fire pit on top of the pile. If they ran out of fuel before this storm blew over, the papers might come in handy.
Meanwhile he pulled the little unit from his pocket and popped in one of the chips from the container Parr had given him.
A woman with a clear concise voice said in a slightly embarrassed tone, “I do not often sing this but record it now at Sean’s insistence, for the sake of our children. He seems to think there will come a day when they’ll ask, ‘What did you do in the war, Ma?’ and this way I won’t have to sing it again in front of anyone. So here it goes. This is my song about what happened at Bremport Station.”
CHAPTER 5
THE TWINS AND Sky stayed under Marmion’s house until the grounds were searched, then cautiously, quietly, swam as far out as they could in the direction of the freight lift.
Very slowly they lifted their heads from the water to hear what was happening on land. The three flitters were still there; guards were posted near the mansion, but there was no evidence of anyone else nearby.
What do you think? Is it clear?
Without warning, Sky jumped out of the water and onto the bank, where he stood on his hind feet and shifted his torso and head back and forth, listening. Men who eat river seals are not here, he announced.
With that assurance, Ronan hoisted himself ashore and, propelled forward with flippers and claws, reached the cover of some shrubs where he could shake himself dry and change. When he was once more clad in his dry suit, he stood watch—squatted, actually—while Murel changed, too. Then, while Sky scampered across the fake landscape in his undulating run, the twins crawled to the freight lift, trying to stay out of range of the surveillance cameras. When the door opened, they all leaped inside and Ronan pushed the button for the com center level.
The door began to open as soon as they reached it. Before they could stop him, Sky bolted through to scout ahead.
He only had time to say “Hah!” before they heard a sizzle, then a man’s gruff voice: “Got the little bugger. What do you think? Is there enough of him to make a pair of boots?”
Before the door had fully opened, Murel forced her way out, shouting, “Hey, let him alone, you big bully!”
She just had time to see a short soldier holding a limp Sky aloft by the scruff of his neck when a hand whipped out and grabbed her neck, hauling her away from the lift. “Ow!” she said. “Cut it out. And let the otter alone!”
“Oh, is this yours?” the soldier asked in the same voice she’d heard from schoolyard bullies.
Behind her there was a scuffle, and Ronan was pulled from the lift as well.
The soldier holding her spoke into a handheld com. “This is the last of the children, sir.”
He listened to the reply, then clicked off the device.
“Lot of kids for a space installation,” Ronan’s captor remarked.
“There was a school here. The brass is interested in knowing what exactly these kids were taught.”
“How about the critter?” the soldier holding Sky asked. The ott
er wiggled in his grasp, apparently recovering from the stun shot.
“He’s their pet, apparently. Bring him along. He might be good to eat, or who knows, if these two know anything, they might get extra chatty if it means the animal keeps his skin on.”
Murel’s captor had relaxed his grip, and she twisted away, rushing at the man shaking Sky. Because he was holding the otter in one fist and his weapon in the other, his front was wide open. She butted him first in the belly and then, when he doubled up, in the nose with her own head. Before she heard the sizzle and felt a jolt of pain shoot through her, she saw the man drop Sky, who twisted in midair and was halfway down the corridor before he landed.
WHEN MUREL CAME to, she had a horrible headache and everything around her smelled strange. She sat up in a tiny room occupied by several other girls. Most of them were preschoolers, too young to have been in classes with her, but two—Chesney Janko and Lan Huy—were familiar from her time at Marmie’s school.
Lan Huy wept in a shockingly loud and heartbroken way that set the younger ones off. Between sobs, she made Murel understand that she had seen her father, one of Marmie’s chief engineers, stunned and dragged away before the soldiers grabbed her as well. Murel remembered that Lan Huy had grown up on Versailles Station. It was the only home she knew.
Chesney Janko was younger than either Murel or Lan Huy, but she tried to comfort the older girl, making soothing shushing sounds and patting her quivering shoulder.
Murel could scarcely hear herself think over the wailing of the younger girls, but she called to her brother anyway. Ro?
I’m here, sis. Me and about ten other guys.
She looked around the little room. Where are we? I don’t recognize this part of the station. While the two lived on Versailles Station, they had had an opportunity to explore most of it.
We’re not on the station, sis. What with you settin’ such a fine example, I decided one of us with a sore head would be enough. So I whined instead and begged them, whatever they did to us, not to send us to Gwinnet Incarceration Colony. They enjoyed telling me that was exactly where we’re going. Everyone from the station. At least if we’re there, we can find out what’s happening to Marmie.
Even if we’re not in a position to do anything about it, Murel said. What about Sky?
I don’t know. I didn’t realize otters could play possum so well, but he had that eedjit of a soldier fooled and got away. There’s plenty of places for him to hide till they leave.
Hah! came an otterly thought. Sky otters are fierce fighters. I used my strong claws and big sharp teeth to get away, then followed the otter-eating men who took river seals. Otters are good hiders, and there are hundreds of places for otters to hide here.
Oh, Sky, I’m glad you’re okay, but you should have escaped when you could. They might hurt you, Murel said.
You will not let them, Sky said with perfect confidence. You do not let wolves eat otters, or sharks or even other seals. River seals help their otter friends. Otters help river seals too.
I hope none of us will regret that decision later, but I must say, right now I feel better knowing you’re near, Murel said.
Me too, Ronan agreed. But don’t let them catch you again, no matter what.
Otters are very cunning, Sky assured them. And we have big sharp teeth.
To their surprise and relief, their captors did not question anyone during the journey, or even speak to them. They didn’t seem to care who anybody was, just so they were off the space station. The kids were fed Corps rations, the kind the soldiers ate in the field—all nutrition and no taste—and given water. Their cells had flush toilets with blue chemical stuff in them and they plugged up easily. The temperature was controlled, but the number of bodies in each room made it way too warm most of the time.
The girls had exhausted themselves crying, and gradually the noise simmered to a generalized whine of anxiety, discomfort, and boredom.
Nobody was mistreating them, but neither were they exerting any effort to make things easier for the young ones.
Needing some distraction herself, Murel decided to use the kind of tactics employed by Petaybean child minders and teachers of restless classes. “If my snow leopard friend was here,” she said, “she would eat all of those bad people and set us free.”
Huy’s lips curled into a small smile, Chesney laughed, and the little girls who had heard her looked mildly interested.
“Also,” Murel added, “she’d bring us all ice cream.”
“What’s that?” asked the smallest girl, the one the others called Daf.
“It’s sweet and smooth and cold and really yummy,” Murel told her. “It comes in lots of flavors. Where I live, we make it out of snow mixed with milk from our horses.”
By the time she explained what a horse was, what snow was, what a snow leopard was, and how that leopard would manage to bring ice cream and kill bad people as well, Huy and Chesney caught on and launched into telling the tallest tales they could imagine or remember about their own worlds. Huy might have been raised on a space station, but her father had told her stories his own parents and grandparents passed down to him from the ancient cultures and peoples who settled their world.
“We had a dragon in my father’s family, and if my ancestor knew what was happening to my father and me, he would come and carry us all away,” Huy said. “If we pass by close enough to my father’s world, I’ll call him.”
“You can’t yell that loud!” a six-year-old cynic told her.
“Don’t have to. He can read my thoughts. He would be very displeased with these people, and before he took us away, he would scorch them with his fiery breath.”
The people who brought their food didn’t scold or threaten them, but neither could they be persuaded to bring extra toilet paper or wash water. They didn’t molest the girls in any way, which was a relief. On the contrary, they seemed totally indifferent to them, as if children were some inferior species beneath their notice.
“We’re just hostages,” Huy said. “They’ll use us to make our parents do what they want them to. I hope they haven’t hurt my dad.”
“My brother says they’re taking us all to a prison colony. Maybe you’ll get to see your dad there.”
“Will they try to make our parents say that Madame is a criminal, Murel? What did she do to make them mad at her?”
That was a story Murel knew all too well, so she told them about the trip she, Ronan, and Ke-ola had taken to Halau, how meteor showers destroyed the homes of Ke-ola’s people, forcing them all underground, and how the soldiers would have just left them there with nothing if Marmion hadn’t launched a rescue mission.
“If it hadn’t been for Madame’s ship picking up the survivors, then going back to find other people still trapped, they’d have all died. The officer in charge must have got his ears laid back by his superiors. Somehow he convinced the company superiors that she had kidnapped the people of Halau and their sharks and sea turtles, and that’s what she’s charged with.”
“But that’s so lame!” Chesney said.
“Of course it is. And the people in charge will realize that when Marmie’s friends tell them what happened to her. The people who want to ruin her don’t want anybody to know she’s in trouble.” Murel explained about the magnetic field and volcanic activity on Petaybee making interplanetary communication impossible most of the time. She left out all the parts about she and Ronan being seals, and about Kushtaka’s people and their history. Who knew what might be done to the kids to make them or their parents talk? She took a deep breath and gulped as a few possibilities crossed her mind, then put those thoughts firmly away. Need to know, Mum would say. She’d tell them when and if they had a need to know.
Ronan agreed that was the best way to handle it, though in the stories the boys told, they tended to massacre the entire ship’s crew with their bare hands or, better yet, blow up the ship, once all the good people were safely ashore. Then they would storm the prison, and after
battles that involved fencing with some sort of laser-beamed or edged weapons, overcome the guards, free the prisoners—well, the good ones, at least—and of course, for a happy ending, blow up the prison. When he shared some of these tales of valor with her, Murel said she thought there was an excess of blowing things up.
We males like explosions, he told her. Especially when we’re mad and helpless to do anything about it.
Not as helpless as some people think, she replied staunchly. While she was glad Ro and the boys were keeping their spirits up, it hurt a bit to hear him referring to himself as one of “we males.” Their twin-ship had always been the main “we” in each of their lives—the selkie nature they shared with their father was the second-most important group to them. Family had come third. Now Ro seemed to think being male, a condition that excluded her, was also important. She had certainly not said “we girls” or “we females.” Although she was female and around the same age as the others, she felt—well, it wouldn’t be nice to say better than they were, but different from them. Very different. So far the people their own age who knew about their secret had been fine with it, but she was sure some of these girls would be unable to handle it.
To keep things interesting, she tried to tell the girls the boys’ stories, leaving out the explosions. She was a little surprised at the ferocity with which Huy and Chesney inserted their own torments for their captors. Chesney even knew something about setting explosions. When Murel told Ronan about that later, he agreed that it was something worth notice.
They relied on these nighttime conversations to push the boredom and fear away when everyone else finally quieted for sleep. They tried to remember and prompt each other’s memories of the navigation and piloting lessons they’d had aboard the Piaf. Galactic geography and periodic tables filled more of the quiet time, then puns, then songs and more songs from the potlatches and night chants.
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