War World X: Takeover

by John F. Carr

  And there it was, about a meter away. It might as well have been a light year away unless she could grab it. A desperate plan, complete the instant she saw it, seized her mind and body. With what she hoped would sound like a hopeless moan, she collapsed onto one arm, and curled up into a ball, as if that pathetic maneuver could stop the painful invasion of her body.

  But her left hand snaked out and seized the knife, bringing it beneath her toward her stronger hand, the right.

  You want to die, you could fall on your sword right now, her mind warned her. Ellie’s “spit on the bastard’s grave” rang in her head. She jerked with her shoulders and thrust her hips up, as if fighting the man off. When he hurled himself back onto her, though, she was ready with the knife. And a lifetime’s reading of the Iliad showed her exactly how to drive it into his chest below the sternum and twist it so the blood gouted out.

  Again and again, she stabbed him. His blood splashed her, hot, though she thought she never would stop shaking.

  If his buddy was around, she was dead meat; she knew she couldn’t force herself, to retrieve the knife. She retched herself dry, spat on his body and staggered out of the tiny room.

  Please God, this was no time for the Marines to come charging up! Instead of the Marines, she got a scared midshipman whose voice squeaked on the “ma’am” he shouldn’t be calling a prisoner.

  “In there,” she rasped from a throat bruised from the grip of the dead man. Whom she had killed. She doubled over with dry heaves. “He fell on his knife,” she willed the midshipman to believe.

  The boy walked to the closet, opened it, then backed away. His eyes flicked over her half-naked and wholly bloodied body. No one could tell how much of the blood was hers.

  “Terrible things, knives,” he agreed with a maturity that stunned her. He moved in to support her. Boy though he was, she recoiled.

  She didn’t want to go to what passed for a Sick Bay on this sick, sick ship. No one ever returned from Sick Bay. She would get back to her bunk, and she would ask Nina how you lived with this.

  “Just let me get back to…I have friends there, they’ll help me… No, no need to. I can walk on my own.”

  When the worst of the shuddering had left her weak, but quite calm, she retraced the corridors to the prison bay that had the feel now of a refuge. Her legs wobbled, and her groin burned, and she blessed Dr. Ryan.

  She was no distant goddess now, no lady, no scholar to be spoken to with respect and touched not at all. Just a female body. She hit the buzzer and leaned on the port.

  It slid aside.

  Ellie was not the first to see her, but she was the first to guess.

  “Jesus wept!” she said and started forward.

  Nina reached her first and flung her arms around her. Ellie joined her, taking her face in her hands to examine the swollen, split lips, before steering her expertly toward her bunk.

  “Come on, honey… Baby, you fetch me my little bag, will you?” she told Nina. “You take this cloth, wet it good…”

  Feet padded off fast. Wyn wanted to sag against Ellie’s reassuring, female bulk, wanted to hide her face. If she’d been more cautious.…

  “Not your fault!” hissed the other woman. “It’s not.”

  She guided Wyn through the ranks of cots. Men sat on many of them, but they turned their faces away as the women passed, granting them the respect of privacy.

  She didn’t want to be tended and cleaned, but Ellie was quite inexorable. With antiseptic salve on her, face, antibiotics and painkillers in her system, and her groin bound up in soft cloth—Ellie must have traded for a diaper from one of the mothers—Wyn was put to bed and covered with the least smelly of the blankets they were issued.

  “I spit on his grave,” Wyn whispered to her. “He had a knife and he dropped it.…”

  “Good girl, Boston. You’re a champion.” Ellie hugged her. A tear splashed down her face and onto Wyn’s.

  “Damn-it, you think I’d have seen it all by now. Here.…” She reached behind her. “Drink this.”

  To Wyn’s surprise, it was whiskey. She pushed it away.… “What about the painkiller?” She hadn’t been raped and committed murder just to die because of an alcohol/drug problem, damn-it.

  “This stuff doesn’t react with alcohol. Don’t worry about it. Just you get stinking drunk and we’ll take care of you.”

  “Bring my bag,” she muttered. She still had jewels sewn into its seams. She had to pay Ellie back.

  Ellie pushed her back down. “Y’know, Boston, you can be a real asshole sometimes. Shut up and drink.”

  The whiskey burnt the cuts in her mouth, then seared as it went down. Field surgery used to use alcohol as a painkiller and cleaner, Wyn knew, and it was working now. After awhile, the lights dimmed. When she was certain no one was watching her, Wyn cried silently, her face buried in the shabby blanket. After awhile, she drifted.

  A little after she woke, the ship Jumped. Her last thought before the Jump and the first one thereafter was that it was a shame that the ship couldn’t perish in the antiseptic heart of a star.

  The cuts and aches faded. After awhile, so did the nightmares and what Wyn came to regard as a deplorable tendency to flinch from men’s voices. Boredom replaced weakness and fear. At one point, she even tried to teach Ellie Greek

  “You’re outta your mind, Boston, you know that? Strike a deal with you. I don’t tell you about my business; you don’t teach me that stuff.”

  Ellie’s business: clearly, she intended to resume it once they landed. “Hey, stands to reason this Haven they’re sending us to is no garden spot. They’ve got miners there; and where there’s miners, there’s girls. Now, I’m way too old to start turning tricks again, but I’m a damn good book-keeper…work my way in and work up to a share in the place.”

  “Is that all you want?” Wyn must have been half stupefied by boredom or the question wouldn’t have popped out.

  “What I want? I want to have enough credit so I don’t have to OD on pills and booze when I get too old to work and the food runs out. I want to be my own person. You need money for that, in your own name, under your own control.”

  Wyn could see the wisdom in that. She only wished she were as certain of her future as Ellie.

  What would await any of them on Haven? What awaited her? She knew convicts worked and worked hard. They were charged for their passage. They were charged for their life support. They were charged for the wretched coveralls they wore and the food, even when they didn’t get full rations. Charged at rates, she suspected, she wouldn’t pay for luxury travel.

  It might be possible to repay all that by some form of indenture ranging from apprenticeship to slavery, depending on the employer/owner. And then you’d have to start all over to save the money for passage back to Earth.

  No, that wasn’t even a possibility. She had known that from the start. Her exile was final.

  If she were going to survive, better not regard it as exile, but as a new life. How would she manage?

  A glance about the bay showed her fellow exiles in a new light. The strong ones—casual labor. The other politicals—maybe they could be used as clerks. The wives and daughters arrested with their men? Women’s work, the answer occurred to Wyn immediately. In a low-tech society, cooking and cleaning would no doubt be handed right back to them. Even the children: she recollected that even in the Plymouth Colony that had become her home state, indentures started young.

  It looked as if she was about to suffer from her own ancestors’ management tactics. She wondered if she were up to it; she’d lived off Baker wealth, Baker fame and Baker connections her whole life and counted herself lucky. At the same time, she knew, she had inherited the Baker conscience—a double portion, since my brother clearly didn’t get any. And that conscience had a bad way of surfacing at inconvenient times to reproach her or, as it had this time, get her kicked off-world.

  So now you get the chance to prove yourself, Wyn. Just what is it you think
you can do? An interesting question, wasn’t it? What kind of trade could a displaced aristocrat with a talent for languages take up in middle age?

  Anyone on Haven need a butler? A nanny? Sure, she could teach. But with “political” written large on her dossier, would they trust her within five parsecs of a school? What had her brother paid to have written into her files?

  She feared she would soon learn.

  A few more Jumps and gravity shifts, and the intervening weeks and months passed. Atrocious as their rations had been, they became shorter. They began to sleep more, waking to eat and invent new versions of old curses on the purser, who pocketed the cost of their food. They shed the unhealthy bloat that comes of eating too much starch, became thin, then gaunt as they stinted themselves still further to make sure that the children, at least, had enough.

  Haven would be too rough a world for children stunted by malnutrition, she had told one woman, the mother of three, and the word had spread.

  One last Jump. One last interval of sitting in a daze. The variable gravity wobbled sickeningly, then steadied at a level that made her ache in every joint. To Wyn’s surprise, gossip helped her identify this as mercy.

  Then, one ship’s “night,” while the prisoners were groggy and disoriented, crew and CD Marines burst into the bay and ordered them out. Now. On the double, if not faster.

  “My God, just smell them! Like pigs, these convicts,” muttered one Marine. The ensign overseeing the transfer didn’t silence him.

  Wyn scarcely had time to grab her precious bag before she and the rest were herded to landers. She staggered a little in the unaccustomed G, then sucked in her breath as if someone had kneed her in the belly as the lander broke away from the ship in which she had spent more than a year of her life and whatever illusions she had brought on board. Zero-G brought her empty stomach flip-flopping perilously close to her mouth, and then Haven s own gravitation and the lander’s braking rockets took hold: she was heavy, heavier than she had ever been; and her vision blurred. It wasn’t fair; she was going to burst, and she hadn’t survived the trip just to explode in reentry because the pilot poured on the G’s. There were no hatches; she wouldn’t even see the sky in which she would die.

  From the lander’s cockpit came a steady drone of affirmatives and static: “Beginning final burn…mark…Splash Island coming up on the horizon…”

  My God, were they going to land in water? Wyn forced herself not to scream, to unstrap herself and claw at the nearest bulkhead: not to be trapped, not to sink in this steel trap, plunging further and further till it burst asunder, and her lungs…

  She wanted to scream a protest, but “uuuhhhhh!” was all that came out, more breath than pain.

  And then they were down.

  In the water.

  On whatever Haven this world might be.

  The stench of steam and overheated metal rose about the port. Clutching a bag that felt heavier than any suitcase she had ever packed in her life, Wyn tottered toward the port. A blackened metal ladder led down from it to boats that bobbed in the black water far too much below. Even as the ship floated, she could feel Haven’s gravity, heavier than the ship’s. It felt heavier than that of lost Earth, though she knew otherwise.

  Her feet trembled on the rungs of the ladder; the boats crew steadied her as if they hated touching anyone as filthy as she was. Could they smell it through the steam and the traces of this new world?

  It took forever for the launch to fill. The thin crying of hungry children rose in the alien air.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  To her surprise, she was answered. “Splash Island,” replied a man with a twisted arm. He grinned and pointed across the dark, dark water. Lights gleamed from translucent sheds on that Island.

  “There’s Splash Island. Pro-ces-sing…” he sounded the long word out. “Over there”—a sweep of his arm—”you got Docktown. And beyond it, The City. Castell City.”

  A combustion engine roared into fetid life, then backfired so loudly that at least two people screamed and the launch jolted dangerously. The ferryman laughed, exposing broken teeth.

  “You don’ wanna fall in. Believe me. We can’t fight what’s in there, and I ain’t goin’ back for ya. Keep your arms inside the launch.”

  I haven’t a coin for the ferryman, Wyn thought. In the next instant, she realized she was wrong. The coin shone in the night sky, dominating it, more crimson than copper, baleful as the eye of a cat. Another shone upward, reflected in the opaque water.

  Ship’s rumor called Haven’s bloated primary the Cat’s Eye. Funny: on Earth, it had always been the dog who had been sacred to Ares. Cat’s Eye and its reflection glared at each other. It was a world of War, Wyn realized at that moment; and this Charon, this convict who’d served out his life here, ferried her across the water to start a new life.

  Haven’s gravity took her as she climbed out of the launch, and she stumbled to her knees. Her hands scrabbled, then filled with mud. Dear Earth, I do salute thee with my hands, the mournful pentameter from Richard II rang in her thoughts. Wrong again. Haven’s ground was dirt, soil: it never would be earth.

  “Why are we so heavy?” wailed a child. Its cries were quickly hushed as if it knew Haven were no planet for weeping.

  And yet, with the Eye above and the reflection below and the lights of Docktown and Castell City shimmering over the water, it was beautiful.

  Moving like invalids their first day out of bed, the convicts shuffled toward the Processing Center.

  “God, I am too damn old, for this,” Ellie moaned. “Feel like I got lead boots on. All over me. Or maybe that’s just crud.”

  “Men on one side…women on the other…all right, move!” came the order. “Kids with the women.”

  Men and women clutched each other, dismayed. They had all been together for so long that separation came as a threat. Down long, shabby corridors they were herded. Wyn noticed that the women guards hustling her and her friends along were unarmed. The corridors opened into a room that smelled, blessedly, of clean steam and water, dripping from nozzles set into the ceiling.

  “All right, everyone strip. And scrub good!”

  The soap they found in squeeze bottles nearly took off their outer layer of skin, and Wyn had never felt anything as good. Steam billowed about them, mercifully hiding their bodies. But at that moment, she wouldn’t have minded if they hadn’t separated the men and the women.

  Tugging a fresh coverall (for which she’d no doubt be billed, too) over damp skin, Wyn caught sight of herself in one of the cracked, water-beaded mirrors still clinging to the walls.

  “Look like a New England schoolmarm,” she muttered to herself. In fact, she reminded herself of the frayed sepia photos of her Great Phoebe, who helped found a girl’s school in India, then went on to China to fight against footbinding.

  She wasn’t as much slim as lean now, starved down into endurance. And at some point during the journey into exile, her eyes had traded a scholar’s abstraction for a veteran’s wariness.

  “Not bad,” Ellie shook her head. “Don’t know why you act like you’re ready for an old-age home.”

  “You’re not recruiting me for your line of work, are you?”

  Both women laughed, a little raggedly. After decontamination would come Processing, and then Assignment. But what contamination had her brother put in her file? They wouldn’t let her anywhere near students, would they? She might be lucky to find herself hauling scrap in a mine until she collapsed.

  Medical processing rid her of fears she’d contracted some disease from the man who raped her. Her arms were sore from immunizations when she was Processed—identification, classification interview, and a battery of tests. She identified them as out-of-date aptitude and personality evaluations, plus an ancient IQ test. Practically meaningless; and yet whatever future she might have could ride on them. Her palms began to sweat, and she pondered each answer as carefully as the girl next to her.

 
For deportees to survive on Haven, matters were simple. Someone had to buy their contracts for work in town, in the mines, on farms, or wherever: almost anything was better than going it alone. The only other options were farming—usually with inadequate supplies and equipment and in Haven’s outback—or to become one of the walking dead who loitered around Docktown seeking casual work or a quick deal.

  Further down the hall, Ellie squirmed in her chair. Wyn knew the woman was thinking, I’m too old to go back to school.

  As the tests ended and they were returned to holding pens, Nina turned to her. “Boston, what are we going to do?”

  “We have to wait to be assigned,” Wyn said. She just wanted to sit down and rub her temples. How many years had it been since a test had psyched her out?

  Nina came close to her, dark eyes wide with terror. “I heard…there’s mines here. A place called Hell’s-A-Comin’ and I’m afraid, Boston. Where there’s mines, they need girls, and…” The big eyes overflowed.

  Wyn put her hands on the girl’s shoulders. She glanced about helplessly. Ellie was nowhere in sight. What would Ellie say to this girl? She could practically hear her, “Boston, no way I could make a working girl out of this one.”

  So many lives had been broken. Against that, what did the life of one girl matter? Plenty: Nina had been Wyn’s shipmate and she looked to Wyn for help. Wisdom from the Welfare Projects blurted from her mouth.

  “We’re probably being watched,” she whispered. “Mess your hair. Slouch. Act anti-social.”

  “Anti-social?” Oh God, now she had to give examples.

  “Drool or pick your nose or do something that’s a real turnoff. Damn-it, don’t laugh! And, Nina, you want to do me a real big favor? When you start this little act, turn your back on me, okay? I don’t want to watch.”