That should have meant nothing—her grandmother didn’t look a day over sixteen—but as fractured shale dislodged by her slogs crackled down the slope, they turned and stared at her with youthful shock. They had none of the smug poise of ancient souls newly young.
What Serendipity saw instead, and felt keenly herself, was fear.
Serendipity’s gut churned as she saw the boys were armed—projectile automatics, maybe gyrostabilized, no immediate threat to one with a force field, but troubling all the same—but still she approached, watching their eyes widen at her four legs dancing over the rubble.
“Hai-ee,” she said, suddenly embarrassed she’d not said hello to the Andiathar boy now riding on her back. The spacer children gathered around them, the beautiful boys curious, the equally beautiful girls strangely subdued—except for the snake-helmed girl. She had ignored Serendipity, fallen to her knees, and was staring up at the ship . . . wailing.
Serendipity cleared her throat. “We saw your ship go down and came to—”
“Help!” cried a voice from the ship’s upper reaches, where two boys, one older than the others, wrestled with a litter upon which a broken girl lay. Blood seeped out of her bandages—and the boys, struggling in the gravity, were about to drop her.
“Oh, dear Lord,” Serendipity said, unslinging her farstaff. She could fly up with her farstaff, and . . . well, the gravity here was light enough that maybe between her farstaff and Aegis she could help them float the girl down. “Hang on,” she said. “I’m . . . I’m coming!”
But before she’d rerigged her staff to take extra weight, the Andiathar boy moved.
With the grace possessed only by his species, the elf-monkey child leapt up through the wreckage, hopping from point to point, turquoise hair bouncing as he sprang up and up, his tail flickering out behind him as he landed atop the frame where they struggled with the litter—
The elder boy whirled, screamed—and fired a blaster into the refugee boy’s chest.
Serendipity felt her nostrils flare, her eyes widen as the boy seemed to hang there, frozen in space with a golden flower erupting from his chest. Then he fell through the wreckage like a sack of potatoes, seemingly hitting every pole and protrusion on his way down.
Serendipity screamed and ran forward to the crumpled form, whose cloak was already stained yellow with blood. She started to scoop him up, but her metaconscience warned her off; so she pulled out her medical blade and swept it over him. There was no doubt: dead, dead, dead.
“This . . . this can’t have happened,” Serendipity said, staring at the blade in her hand. Reflexively she holstered it, then scooped up the still form in her arms. Above her were screams and a crash, but she ignored them, cradling the alien child. “You brave boy.”
The elder boy landed beside her in a crunch of boots and jangle of tools, and she looked up into wiry brown hair peeking out of a lion helmet, light brown skin flushed with exertion, and dark eyes swimming in white pools of fear—fear that rapidly turned to shame.
“He’s dead. He’s dead!” Serendipity said. “I didn’t even know his name.”
The elder boy fell to his knees, mouth falling open. Two others stepped up behind him—one an orange-haired slip of a boy that looked almost as elfin as the Andiathar refugee; the other, a big, brown-skinned bruiser who stepped forward with a look of grim satisfaction.
“Why did you do that?” Serendipity cried, cradling the refugee boy in her arms, feeling warm yellow blood seep through her fingers, wincing at the ugly singed scent of burnt flesh rising from his ruined chest. “We were trying to help!”
“I’m sorry,” the boy said, blaster slipping from his shaking hand. “I’m so sorry—”
“And that,” the big bruiser said, taking the blaster, “is the end of that experiment.”
—————
They took Serendipity’s farstaff and Aegis. They emptied her saddlebags and took her force rod. They didn’t get everything—they mistook her shield brooch and force bracelet for jewelry—but they might as well have: they’d bound her hands and left her no weapons.
Then they pressed her into service helping the victims out of the crash.
The first thing Serendipity noticed was how weak all the spacer children were. The boys were more muscled than the girls, but even they were mostly thin as sticks. Halfway Point’s gravity, light by even Earth standards, was wearing on them. They probably spent most of their days in zero- or half-gee. Serendipity had triple their strength, not even counting her size.
Like her force bracelet . . . a hidden advantage.
So she grunted and strained at the litter they’d made her drag behind her, pretending it was hard to lift. The boys were remarkably contemptuous of the girls, and hadn’t really noticed that her odd shape gave her far more muscle mass despite her height.
They could still swarm her. When it came time to escape, she would have to explode.
The boys were armed, but the girls had empty holsters. The boys and girls acted as if they hadn’t seen each other in a while, but the girls were being treated like prisoners. It was serious: a pair of obvious siblings met with happy surprise—but the boy didn’t free his sister.
The killer, Leonid, was in charge . . . but the baton was passing to the bruiser, Toren. He had all the muscle that most of his companions lacked, and a brutal personality to go with it. Night came too soon when the sun dove behind the gas giant, and while lion-helmed Leonid moped on a rock, the bear-totemed Toren organized a makeshift camp and campfire with a mixture of slaps and curses.
Admittedly, they were under the stress of a shipwreck disaster, and Serendipity had seen the spacers only for a minute before the shooting, but even so, it seemed like the real tension had begun when the Andiathar boy died. The girl they tried to save died, too, when Leonid went for his blaster and lost his grip on her litter. Now everyone walked around as if punched in the gut, and two bodies lay in shrouds not three meters from her.
A trilling sound called softly from the edge of the clearing. She looked: Tianyu.
“Definitely looks like you could use some help,” Tianyu signaled silently.
Serendipity glanced around, then signaled back: “Definitively, but be careful.”
The minifox darted from rubble to rock until he had snuck up behind her. Then Tianyu began gnawing at the zip ties that bound her hands. She heard one snap, then another, as the tough plastic fell to Tianyu’s coppery thact teeth. Her wrists loosened a bit, and she tried to twist free, but one longer strap still held them. After trying to get at it, Tianyu switched his attention to the cord tying her wrists to the stake—then froze as a heavy tread approached them.
Broken rock crunched beneath Toren’s boots as he squatted before Serendipity. She swallowed, stories of Frontier intolerance towards genetic constructs ringing in her pointed ears. It would have been hard to find two people at the crash site who were more different.
He was an unmodified human, walking on two legs; she was a centaur, walking on four. He was a Frontiersman, his battered spacesuit patched from years of use; she was a Dresanian, and her stylish finery had already autoshed the mud she’d picked up helping the survivors.
Almost alone among the spacer children in the camp, Toren still wore his armored outer suit. Its bubble dome folded back to a wedge, exposing an inner comm helmet made fierce with faux bear fur and teeth artfully sewn into it. His flinty brown eyes glinted at her beneath the fangs of the savage helm, and armored fingers brushed a dagger of hair on his chin.
“You, Dresanian,” Toren said. Serendipity eyed him sidelong, silent. “What’s your story?”
“I’m a human Variant,” she said cautiously, wondering how he would take it. The Frontiersmen had fled Earth after the Genetics Wars, disgusted that the leaders of Earth had called in the alien Dresan-Murran Alliance to save Earth’s biospher
e. Her metaconscience gave a fifty-fifty chance of them treating her like a monster—either because she was a human Variant, or for her Dresanian heritage. “A genetic construct that—”
“I got that,” he said, striking her upside the head. “I meant, how’d you end up out here?”
Serendipity winced: the blow had surprised her. Toren was a lot stronger than the others.
“I was exploring,” she said. “It . . . it seemed like a nice world—”
“Then where’s your ship?” Toren asked.
“You took it,” Serendipity said, nodding her head at a pallet of equipment they’d made her carry—on which rested her saddlebags and farstaff. “That staff there.”
Toren twisted round on the balls of his feet. “That thing?”
“Yes.”
“Huh,” he said, head tilting as he studied it. “How many can it carry?”
“Three of me, five of you,” Serendipity said. Then she bit her lip. “Well . . . from here, me plus one. Halfway Point’s far from any inhabited world, any charted one at any rate. I needed the booster just to get to a decent bounce point, and even then, you’d need your spacesuits.”
“So where’s your suit?” Toren asked.
“You took it,” Serendipity said, jutting her chin at him. “That gold disc—”
Toren grabbed a fistful of her bolero and lifted her upper body off the ground.
“You think this is funny, you stupid girl?” Toren growled. Serendipity’s eyes went wide as the cord tying her wrists to the stake broke. “You Dresanians chased us off our world, then chase us out here, dancing around us and laughing! I’ve had enough of you!”
—————
Leonid sat heavily on a point of rock, eyes tracing upward through the evidence of his failures. Two bodies wrapped in shrouds. Their would-be rescuer, bound beside the campfire; the girls, bound in a huddle, while the boys sulked or avoided the increasingly erratic Toren.
And beyond them all, the spray of devastation around their downed starship.
Leonid felt physically sick. He’d been so paranoid about the Dresanians he’d shot one trying to help. He’d been so soft on Andromeda he’d let her run the ship into the ground. Well, maybe that part was her fault—but ultimately this disaster was his responsibility.
He had to accept that. He was the Captain. Time to start acting like one.
Some of the boys had pulled out tonesticks and were strumming; others were preparing meals; all looked confused about what to do about the girls. Sirius was shouting—knowing him, probably good sense badly delivered—and Toren was strong-arming their rescuer: typical.
Leonid stood. You couldn’t lead by moping.
“Enough, Toren,” he called. Toren looked over at him, and the Dresanian half-horse girl, the centauress, twisted free and stood on her four weird legs. Toren snarled and grabbed her elbow, but Leonid barked: “I said that’s enough. Untie her. In fact, untie all the girls.”
Everyone looked at him as he strode up to the campfire. No one moved.
“You heard me,” Leonid said, scowling at the others. Of all the people in the camp, it was Sirius who had stopped what he was doing and looked at Leonid; the rest seemed to be trying to avoid his gaze. “We need to make camp and they need to help.”
“After all they did,” Toren said, the centauress still in his grip, “you’re just going to—”
“The ship is down,” Leonid said flatly, stepping up to Toren. The centauress, Serendipity she called herself, flinched away. Of course. He’d killed her friend. Damnit. One problem at a time, though: getting Toren under control. “We have to move on. That fight’s over.”
“You’re dead wrong about that,” Toren said—and punched him, hard.
Light flashed in Leonid’s eyes, and he fell, jaw sore and throbbing.
“You want to lead?” Toren said, settling into a boxing pose. “Then take me down.”
Leonid stared. He reached for his pistol, but Toren shook his head, touching the blaster. Then he raised his fists again. This was insane: Toren had the blaster, a gun and even a knife and yet wanted to duke it out. Leonid hadn’t beaten him since he’d turned twelve. But he had to try.
The fight was over almost as soon as it began. No sooner than he’d gotten to his feet, a huge flying fist knocked him off them again. Leonid rolled up to a crouch and held his own for all of ten seconds before Toren dismantled his defenses and knocked him back to the dirt.
But then the centauress intervened, kicking at Toren with a black-booted foreleg.
“Hey!” she said. She wasn’t as tall as Toren, and her lower body was no bigger than a very large dog or a very small pony. But when she rammed Toren with her shoulder, her mass nearly knocked him of his feet. “You can’t solve this by dueling like a bunch of savages!”
Toren snarled and seized her by her elegant lace half-jacket, lifting her front legs off the ground. Leonid’s eyes widened as muscles bulged in Toren’s arm: he knew Toren worked out in the centrifuge but until that moment he hadn’t realized how much of a monster he’d become. Leonid tried to scramble to his feet, but Toren, looking over the struggling centauress’s shoulder, smiled viciously and shoved her down atop him. Her mass knocked Leonid’s wind out.
“Who thought you up, you ridiculous thing?” Toren said to the girl, squatting to pick at her finery—her booted hooves, the tapestry wraps on her horse body, her fiery mane of hair. His hands touched some weird dark quills at her temples. “And what the hell are these?”
He ripped one off, and she squealed. Leonid, still gasping, clenched his fists.
“Attached!” she said, struggling to get off Leonid. “You ass!”
Toren snarled, his hand clenching, crushing the quill—then his eyes widened in fear at the spray of her red human blood on his armored glove. He jerked back, stood—and kicked her in the gut. Serendipity jerked, cheek scraping the shale as she curled into a ball, gasping.
“Leave her alone!” Leonid wheezed. “She’s done nothing to you—”
“Shut up!” Toren shouted. “You’re not in charge anymore!”
“I’m the Captain,” Leonid shouted back, trying to get Serendipity off him.
“You were Captain until you crashed our ship,” Toren said, and Leonid’s gut churned. Toren walked closer to the fire, seized Andromeda, and hauled her to her feet, half knocking off her quezcoatl helm. “Which happened because you were soft on your girlfriend!”
Leonid was speechless. It tore him up to see Andromeda in pain—but even that feeling just confirmed what Toren was saying, what Leonid had already been thinking. Maybe Toren was right: maybe Leonid didn’t deserve to be Captain.
Fortunately for Andromeda, though, she had another defender.
“Don’t you touch her!” shouted Artemyst.
Toren laughed, but she uncoiled like a suddenly released spring and landed a blow on his chin, popping his head back. Unexpectedly, Serendipity laughed; clearly she didn’t see how serious this was. Toren tilted his head, felt his jaw, and chuckled.
“I remember when you could throw a punch, Artemyst,” he said, dropping Andromeda. Artemyst screamed and leapt on him, swinging, but he deflected the blows easily with one hand. “But you spent too long in zero-gee. Now . . . you just hit like a girl.”
He backhanded her, knocking her to the ground, but Artemyst snarled, sprung back to her feet, and dove back on him. Leonid had always thought Artemyst and Andromeda had become an item after Andromeda split the ship; seeing how she fought for her, now he was sure.
“This is another shipwreck,” the centauress said, trying to rise. “We’ve got to—”
“Don’t interfere,” Leonid said, putting a hand out to restrain her. God, she was muscled, but still, she froze beneath his hand; Serendipity really must hate him for killing the boy. Leonid
understood; he did too, especially seeing one of the girls fight his battle for him. “This crash has been a long time in coming. We’ve got to let it play out. We’ve got to lance the poison.”
—————
Leonid watched Artemyst hit the dirt. Toren reached down, seizing Artemyst’s head. Done, but not out, she screamed as he tore her bird-helm off and raised it in the air to the cheers of the boys. Then he threw her down by the two bodies that lay in shrouds, far from the fire.
“You cut us off! You called us hullrats! You called yourselves skybirds!” Toren said to the knot of girls. “But you are not skybirds. You are not Amazons. You’re not even people! You’re just the mutineers who wrecked our ship! We should have cycled the lot of you!”
The girls quailed, and Toren turned away, the hulking shape of their wrecked starship looming behind him. Leonid was shocked to see that he was fighting back tears. Toren’s jaw clenched, he choked up—then he saw Leonid looking, cursed, and turned back.
“But we can’t just toss you out an airlock, or into the recycler. It’s done, along with our ship, our home,” Toren said, pointing up at Independence. “We were supposed to travel forever, finding new worlds for Man and seeding them with colonies. Thanks to you, this is our last stop. We have to start over here—and you mutineers have all of our wombs.”
“Oh, God,” said Andromeda, eyes as wide as those on her feathered snake helm. Sirius, who had first gone to help Andromeda, and then Artemyst when Toren had thrown her down, stood up, glaring at Toren, clenching his fists.
“Once we treated men and women as equals,” Toren said. “But you didn’t want that. Then we tried letting the girls be in charge. We all know how that worked out. Now it’s the boys’ turn to rule—and the girls’ turn to serve. And you will serve the boys.”
The boys cheered and leered. The girls squirmed, but they were still bound. This was far worse than he thought. Now Leonid tried to get up to stop it, but Serendipity’s weight pinned him down. She flinched when he moved. Rock shifted beneath her hooves, and Toren looked down at them.
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