Sass nodded, gave him a smile he returned uneasily, and checked again on each person's assignment. If they had nothing to do now, they could be sure they knew what to do when things happened.
All at once a voice blared outside—a loudhailer, Sass realized, with the speakers distorting the Neo-Gaesh vowels. From this corner of the building, she could pick out only parts of it, but enough to finish off the last bit of her confidence.
". . . surrender . . . will blow . . . resistance . . . guns . . ."
The adults responded with a growl of defiance that covered the loudhailer's next statements. But Sass could hear something else, a clattering that sounded much like a crawler train, only different somehow. Then a hole appeared in the wall opposite her, as if someone had drawn it on paper and then ripped the center from the circle. She had never known that walls could be so fragile; she had felt so much safer inside. And now she realized that all together inside this building was the very last place anyone should be. Her shoulders felt hot, as if she'd stood in the summer sunlight too long, and she whirled to see the same kind of mark appearing on the wall behind her.
Later, when she had the training to analyze such situations, she knew that everything would have happened in seconds: from the breaching of the wall to the futile resistance of the adults, pitting third-rate projectile weapons against the pirates' stolen armament and much greater skill, to the final capture of the survivors, groggy from the gas grenades the pirates tossed in the building. But at the time, her mind seemed to race faster than time itself, so that she saw, as in a dream, her father swing his weapon to face the armored assault pod that burst through the wall itself. She saw a line of light touch his arm, and his weapon fell with the severed limb. Her mother caught him as he staggered, and they both charged. So did others. A swarm of adults tried to overwhelm the pod with sheer numbers, even as they died, but not before Sass saw what had halted it: her parents had thrown themselves into the tracks to jam them.
And it was not enough. If all the colonists had been there, maybe. But another assault pod followed the first, and another. Sass, screaming like the rest, charged at it, expecting every instant to be killed. Instead, the pods split open, and the troops rolled out, safe in their body armor from the blows and kicks the children could deliver. Then they tossed the gas grenades, and Sass could not breathe. Choking, she slid to the floor along with the rest.
* * *
She woke to a worse nightmare. Daylight, dusty and cold, came through the hole in the wall. She was nauseated and her head ached. When she tried to roll over and retch, something choked her, tightening around her throat. A thin collar around her neck, attached to another on either side by a thin cord of what looked like plastic. Sass gagged, terrified. Someone's boot appeared before her face, and bumped her, hard.
"Quit that."
Sassinak held utterly still. That voice had no softness in it, nothing but contempt, and she knew, without even looking up, what she would see. Around her, others stirred; she tried to see, without moving, who they were. Crumpled bodies, all sizes; some moved and some didn't. She heard boots clump on the floor, coming closer, and tried not to shiver.
"Ready?" asked someone.
"These're awake," said someone else. She thought that was the same voice that had told her to quit moving.
"Get'm up, clear this out, and start loading." One set of boots clumped off, the other reappeared in her vision, and a sharp nudge in the ribs made her gasp.
"You eight: get up." Sass tried to move, but found herself stiff and clumsy, and far more impeded by a collar and line than she would have thought. This sort of thing never bothered Carin Coldae, who had once captured a pirate ship by herself. The others in her eight had as much trouble; they staggered into each other, jerking each others' collars helplessly. The pirate, now that she was standing and could see clearly, simply stood there, face invisible behind the body armor's faceplate. She had no idea how big he really was—or even if it might be a woman.
Her gaze wandered. Across the Center, another link of eight struggled up; she saw another already moving under a pirate's direction. A thump in the ribs brought her head around.
"Pay attention! The eight of you are a link; your number is 15. If anyone gives an order for link 15, that's you, and you'd better be sharp about it. You—" the hard black nose of some weapon Sass couldn't name prodded her ribs, already sore. "You're the link leader. Your link gets into trouble, it's your fault. You get punished. Understand?"
Sass nodded. The weapon prodded harder. "You say 'Yessir' when you're asked something!"
She wanted to scream defiance, as Carin Coldae would have done, but heard herself saying "Yessir"—in Standard, no less—instead.
Down the line, the boy on the end said, "I'm thirsty." The weapon swung toward him, as the pirate said, "You're a slave now. You're not thirsty until I say you're thirsty." Then the pirate swung the weapon back at Sass, a blow she didn't realize was coming until it staggered her. "Your link's disobedient, 15. Your fault." He waited until she caught her breath, then went on with his instructions. Sass heard the smack of a blow, and a wail of pain, across the building, but didn't look around. "You carry the dead out. Pile 'em on the crawler train outside. You work fast enough, hard enough, you might get water later."
They worked fast enough and hard enough, Sass thought later. Her link of eight were all middle-school age, and they all knew her although only one of them was in her class. It was clear that they didn't want to get her into trouble. With her side making every breath painful, she didn't want trouble right then either. But dragging the dead bodies out, over the blood and mess on the floor . . . people she had known, but could recognize now only by the yellow skirt that Cefa always wore, the bronze medallion on Torry's wrist . . . that was worse than anything she'd imagined. Four or five links, by then, were working on the same thing. Later she realized that the pirates had killed the wounded: later yet she would learn that the same thing had happened all over The City, at other Centers.
When the building was clear of dead, her link and two others were loaded on the crawler train as well; pirates drove it, and sat on the piled corpses—as if they'd been pillows, she thought furiously—to guard the children riding behind. Sass knew they would kill them, wondered why they'd waited this long. The crawler train clanked and rumbled along, turning down the lane to the fisheries research station, where Caris had hoped to work. All its windows were broken, the door smashed in. Sass hadn't seen Caris all day, but she hadn't dared look around much, either. Nor had she seen Lunzie or Januk.
The crawler train rumbled to the end of the lane, near the pier. And there the children had to unload the bodies, drag them out on the pier, and throw them in the restless alien ocean. It was hard to maneuver on the pier; the links tended to tangle. The pirate guards hit anyone they could reach, forcing them to hurry, keep moving, keep working.
Sass had shut her mind off, as well as she could, and tried not to see the faces and bodies she handled. She had Lunzie's in her arms, and was halfway to the end of the pier, when she recognized it. A reflexive jerk, a scream tearing itself from her throat, and Lunzie's corpse slipped away, thumped on the edge of the pier, and splashed into the water. Sass stood rigid, unable to move. Something yanked on her collar; she paid it no heed. She heard someone cry out, say, "That was her sister!" and then blackness took her away.
* * *
The rest of her time on Myriad, those few days of desperate work and struggle, she always shoved down below conscious memory. She had been drugged, then worked to exhaustion, then drugged again. They had loaded the choicest of the ores, the rare gemstones which had paid the planet's assessment in the FSP Development Office, the richest of the transuranics. She was barely conscious of her link's concern, the care they tried to take of her, the gentle brush of a hand in the rare rest periods, the way they kept slack in her collar-lead. But the rest was black terror, grief, and rage. On the ship, after that, her link spent its allotted time in Conditioning, and the re
st in the tight and smelly confines of the slavehold. For them, no drugs or coldsleep to ease a long voyage: they had to learn what they were, the pirates informed them with cold superiority. They were cargo, saleable anywhere the FSP couldn't control. As with any cargo, they were divided into like kinds: age groups, sexes, trained specialists. As with any slaves, they soon learned ways to pass information among themselves. So Sass found that Caris was still alive, part of link 18. Januk had been left behind, alive but doomed, since no adults or older children remained to help those too young to travel. Most of The City's adults had died trying to defend it against the pirates; some survived, but none of the children knew how many.
Conditioning was almost welcome, to ease the boredom and misery of the slavehold. Sass knew—at least at first—that this was intentional. But as time passed, she and her link both had trouble remembering what free life had been like. Conditioning also meant a bath of sorts, because the pirate trainers couldn't stand the stench of the slavehold. For that alone it was welcome. The link stood, sat, reached, squatted, turned, all as one, on command. They learned assembly-line work, putting together meaningless combinations some other link had taken apart in a previous session. They learned Harish, a variant of Neo-Gaesh that some of the pirates spoke, and they were introduced to Chinese.
The end of the voyage came unannounced—for, as Sass now expected, slaves had no need for knowledge of the future. The landing was rough, bruisingly rough, but they had learned that complaint brought only more pain. Link by link the pirates—now unarmored—marched them off the ship, and along a wide gray street toward a line of buildings. Sass shivered; they'd been hosed down before leaving the ship, and the wind chilled her. The gravity was too light, as well. The planet smelled strange: dusty and sharp, nothing like Myriad's rich salt smell. She looked up, and realized that they were inside something—a dome? A dome big enough to cover a spaceport and a city?
All the city she could see, in the next months, was slavehold. Block after block of barracks, workshops, factories, five stories high and stretching in all directions. No trees, no grass, nothing living but the human slaves and human masters. Some were huge, far taller than Sass's parents had been, heavily muscled like the thugs that Carin Coldae had overcome in The Ice-World Dilemma.
They broke up the links, sending each slave to a testing facility to see what skills might be saleable. Then each was assigned to new links, for work or training or both, clipped and unclipped from one link after another as the masters desired. After all that had happened, Sass was surprised to find that she remembered her studies. As the problems scrolled onto the screen, she could think, immerse herself in the math or chemistry or biology. For days she spent a shift at the test center, and a shift at menial work in the barracks, sweeping floors that were too bare to need sweeping, and cleaning the communal toilets and kitchens. Then a shift at assembly work, which made no more sense to her than it ever had, and a bare six hours of sleep, into which she fell as into a well, eager to drown.
She had no way to keep track of the days, and no reason to. No way to find her old friends, or trace their movements. New friends she made easily, but the constant shifting from link to link made it hard for such friendships to grow. Then, long after her testing was finished, and she was working three full shifts a day, she was unclipped and taken to a building she'd not yet seen. Here, clipped into a long line of slaves, she heard the sibilant chant of an auctioneer and realized she was about to be sold.
By the time she reached the display stand, she had heard the spiel often enough to deaden her mind to the impact. Human female, Gilson stage II physical development, intellectual equivalent grade eight general, grade nine mathematics, height so much, massing so much, planet of origin, genetic stock of origin, native and acquired languages, specific skills ratings, all the rest. She expected the jolt of pain that revealed to the buyers how sensitive she was, how excitable, and managed to do no more than flinch. She had already learned that the buyers rarely looked for beauty—that was easy enough to breed, or surgically sculpt. But talents and skills were chancy, and combined with physical vigor, chancier yet. Hence the reason for taking slaves from relatively young colonies.
The bidding went on, in a currency she didn't know and couldn't guess the value of. Someone finally quit bidding, and someone else pressed a heavy thumb to the terminal ID screen, and someone else—another slave, this time, by the collar—led her away down empty corridors and finally clipped her lead to a ring by a doorway. Through all this Sass managed not to tremble visibly, or cry, although she could feel the screams tearing at her from inside.
"What's your name?" asked the other slave, now stacking boxes beside the door. Sass stared at him. He was much older, a stocky, graying man with scars seaming one arm, and a groove in his skull where no hair grew. He looked at her when she didn't answer, and smiled a gap-toothed smile. "It's all right—you can answer me if you want, or not."
"Sassinak!" She got it out all at once, fast and almost too loud. Her name! She had a name again.
"Easy," he said. "Sassinak, eh? Where from?"
"M-myriad." Her voice trembled, now, and tears sprang to her eyes.
"Speak Neo-Gaesh?" he asked, in that tongue. Sass nodded, too close to tears to speak.
"Take it easy," he said. "You can make it." She took a long breath, shuddering, and then another, more quietly. He nodded his approval. "You've got possibilities, girl. Sassinak. By your scores, you're more than smart. By your bearing, you've got guts to go with it. No tears, no screams. You did jump too much, though."
That criticism, coming on top of the kindness, was too much; her temper flared. "I didn't so much as say ouch!"
He nodded. "I know. But you jumped. You can do better." Still angry, she stared, as he grinned at her. "Sassinak from Myriad, listen to me. Untrained, you didn't let out a squeak . . . what do you think you could do with training?"
Despite herself, she was caught. "Training? You mean . . . ?"
But down the corridor came the sound of approaching voices. He shook his head at her, and stood passively beside the stacked cartons, at her side.
"What's your name?" she asked very quietly, and very quietly he answered:
"Abervest. They call me Abe." And then so low she could hardly hear it, "I'm Fleet."
Chapter Two
Fleet. Sassinak held to that thought through the journey that followed, crammed as she was into a cargo hauler's front locker with two other newly purchased slaves. She found out afterwards that that had not been punishment, but necessity; the hauler went out of the dome and across the barren, airless surface of the little planet that served as a slave depot. Outside the insulated, pressurized locker—or the control cab, where Abe drove in relative comfort—she would have died.
Their destination was another slave barracks, this one much smaller. Sassinak expected the same sort of routine as before, but instead she was assigned to a training facility. Six hours a day before a terminal, learning to use the math she already knew in mapping, navigation, geology. Learning to perfect her accent in Harish and learning to understand (but never speak) Chinese. Another shift in manual labor, working at whatever jobs needed doing, according to the shift supervisor. She had no regular duties, nothing she could depend on.
One of the most oppressive things was the simple feeling that she could not even see out. She had always been able to run outdoors and look at the sky, wander into the hills for an afternoon with friends. Now . . . now some blank ugliness stopped her gaze, as if by physical force, everywhere she looked. Most buildings had no windows: there was nothing outside to see but the wall of another prefab hulk nearby. Trudging the narrow streets from one assignment to another, she learned that looking up brought a quick scolding, or a blow. Besides, she couldn't see anything above but the grayish haze of the dome. She could not tell how large the moon or planet was, how far she'd been taken from the original landing site, even how many buildings formed the complex in which she was trained. Day
after day, nothing but the walls of these prefabs, indoors and out, always the same neutral gritty gray. She quit trying to look up, learned to contain herself within herself, and hated herself for making that adjustment.
But one shift a day, amazingly, was free. She could spend it in the language labs, working at the terminal, reading . . . or, as most often, with Abe.
Fleet, she soon learned, was his history and his dream. He had been Fleet, had enlisted as a boy just qualified, and worked his way rating by rating, sometimes slipping back when a good brawl intruded on common sense, but mostly rising steadily through the ranks as a good spacer could. Clever, but without the intellect that would have won him a place at the Academy; strong, but not brutal with it; brave without the brashness of the boy he had been, he had clenched himself around the virtues of the Service as a drowning man might cling to a limb hanging in the water. Slave he might be, in all ways, but yet he was Fleet.
"They're tough," he said to her, soon after they arrived. "Tough as anything but the slavers, and maybe even more. They'll break you if they can, but if they can't. . ." His voice trailed away, and she glanced over to see his eyes glistening. He blinked. "Fleet never forgets," he said. "Never. They may come late, they may come later, but they come. And if it's later, never mind. Your name's on the rolls, it'll be in Fleet's memory, forever."
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