Refugee (28 page)

Spirit eyed me speculatively one day. “Hope, you're getting too old.”

“Old?” What was she up to now?

“You're thinking about starting a beard.”

Oh. “Men do, you know.” I ran my finger along my chin, but there really wasn't anything there.

“What if the pirates come again, to slay the men?”

She had a point. If women were subject to rape, men were subject to murder. It was best to remain young. I fetched some depilatory from the diverse supplies that remained and went over my face, rendering it fully boyish again.

“That's not enough,” she said. “All they want is girls.”

“To rape!” I exclaimed.

“You should be safe from that,” she pointed out.

Startled, and not entirely pleased for a reason I could not define, I had to agree. It might indeed be smart for me to learn to masquerade as a girl, just as it had been useful for Helse to masquerade as a boy. If pirates came and blazed away at males and spared the girls, this could give me my only chance to survive long enough to blaze back at them. We would all have lasers ready next time, of course; still, we had so often been betrayed by circumstance that we had to consider any possible advantage that might be available.

Spirit got to work happily. She had a marvelous ability to invest her whole attention in immediacies, bypassing the horrors that tormented my more reflective mind. She found a dress my size and made me change into it, while the other children offered enthusiastic suggestions. I even had to put on pantyhose to cover my hairy legs, and girlish slippers. Naturally the brats fitted me with a padded brassiere to make my front look right, giggling fiendishly.

I had become the entertainment of the hour. They brushed out my hair, which had grown longer in the past month, and they tied a pretty red ribbon in it, and instructed me in girlish nuances of expression and stance. I was surprised by the amount the little girls knew about this sort of thing; evidently they took their sex roles seriously from an early age. I was not really enjoying any of this, but they found it hilarious. Still, it would be pointless for me ever to attempt such a masquerade before pirates unless I had it down pat, so I did work at it, trying to satisfy the piercing cynosure of the children. When they began to nod approval, I knew I was getting better.

Spirit insisted on making it more of an ordeal. She donned male clothing and postured before me in a gross parody of masculinity. Her ravaged face did help, here. “I am your brother!” she declaimed. “I am here to stop you from getting raped, unless you really want to be. Say 'sir' to me, sister!” The other kids laughed as if that were the humor of the century. Was this really the way the typical male came across to the opposite sex?

“Ship ahoy!” the lookout cried.

That would have to happen at the time I was ludicrously garbed! Just when we thought we were free of pirates, well off the ecliptic, another came!

I rushed for my space suit, not sparing time to change; every moment might count. Spirit did likewise—but of course she didn't mind her garb the way I did mine. It was awful for me, cramming the damned dress into the legs of the suit. Spirit had it easy; male clothes are designed for space suits, or vice versa. In this respect it really is a male universe.

The other kids hesitated, then decided to go for their suits too. They were alive now only because they had been lucky enough to avoid the pirates and get their suits on in time; they didn't want to gamble that way again. But that left us without any innocents to test the intruders. We all had laser pistols now, so the innocents could attack with much better effect, but still we all lacked confidence in that. So it was to be suits for all. A few children in a bubble—the suits would not be too surprising. Bubbles didn't leak, but some people worried that they did. Then the innocents could simply slam their helmets on, if we had to go the vacuum route.

I stationed myself near the rear air lock, and Spirit joined me, while the others scrambled. We two were the fastest, because we had drilled specifically for this, many times; our suits were hung right by the air lock, supported so that we could almost literally dive into them feet first. We had everything tight except our helmets. My slippered feet tended to slip around in the big suit-feet, though, and I hated the way my skirt wadded up around my middle.

“You sure look cute, sister, in your suit and ribbon,” Spirit teased me.

I put my hand to my head to remove the damned thing, but my suit gauntlets were clumsy.

There was a crash. The entire bubble shook, almost knocking us off our feet. “They crashed into us!” I exclaimed, shaken in two senses.

There was another crash, worse than the first. “No—they're shooting at us!” Spirit screamed. Then she jammed her helmet over her head.

I followed her example. The automatic seal operated and the suit's air puffed on.

The third shot punctured the hull on the side of the bubble opposite us. The air sucked out with gale force. I couldn't see the puncture, but knew its nature from the direction of the rush of air.

Spirit and I were drawn along with it—but we were farthest from the leak and were affected least. I grabbed the netting above the Commons as I flew by, and Spirit did the same. She had had prior experience with explosive decompression; I had not, since I had been out on the hull before.

The opening was small, for bubble-hulls are tough, designed to withstand pebble-meteorites and to self-seal to some extent. But of course space artillery is designed to penetrate exactly such hulls. The shell had formed a tube that let the air out; it took about thirty seconds, with diminishing intensity as the pressure dropped.

Spirit and I survived it—but I realized that the other children probably had not. They had required more time to suit up, and their reactions were less certain. They might have paused in surprise, listening to the collisions of the shells against our hull—and that would have been fatal. Once again we had been betrayed by the unexpected.

I looked at Spirit through our helmets. Why had the pirates done it? To hole a bubble—that was the deliberate murder of all within. No rape of women or kidnapping of children was possible.

Now the pirate ship docked against our air lock and the men used it, keeping their ship sealed. Suited men appeared and began checking around inside our wasted hulk. It seemed that all they wanted was salvage.

What should we do now? If the pirates saw us, they would surely kill us. But we couldn't remain in the holed bubble long; it was now useless. We had no way to repair such a leak, assuming the pirates left us any food or life support equipment when they finished. We seemed to have a choice between a fast death and a slow one.

Spirit had the answer. She handed herself to a rent in the net and took hold of an armful of food containers. She meant to pretend to be a looter!

Would it work? It might. Our suits were standard, similar to those of the pirates; in the confusion of looting, we might manage to get aboard the ship. After that—well, first things first.

I took an armful of food packs, enough to cover my face panel somewhat, and followed Spirit down to the air lock. I really didn't know whether this would work, but didn't see any alternative.

We came to the lock, and the pirate there waved us on in. He closed the lock behind us, and we stepped into the pirate ship.

It took me a moment to realize what was strange. This was very like the bubble, here: just a chamber for access. We had explored a ship before, when we cleaned out the pirates with our vacuum, so this was reasonably familiar, but this present one was a larger and probably better ship. We floated through the chamber and down a short hall, toting our burdens. Then we came to something different.

The vacuumed ship had docked nose-on, so that its spin matched the bubble's spin and the whole thing had been like one extended passage from our lock. Indeed, in the case of the Horse's ship, our drive jet had fired right down its throat, the length of the ship. But this present ship had docked at the center, so its nose and tail sections were projecting to either side, and it was spinning around endwise to match the bubble's rotation. It was always easier for a ship to match rotations, since it would have taken energy to stop the bubble's spin, not worth it for a temporary connection. Here, it is best to make a set of diagrams: I have drawn a center line to show the axis of rotation in each case. As should be clear, the two modes of docking lead to quite different dynamics within the ship. Actually, the rate of rotations does not have to match, as the airlocks have a built-in slip mechanism that allows opposite rotations of bubble and ship.

But what would be the point? Certainly it was impossible for the ship to maintain a long-axis spin while connected to the bubble, so it had either to go to no spin, meaning null-gee, or to rotate end over end, as it was doing.

This seemed unnecessarily clumsy. My mind cast about for the rationale. Could it be that these particular pirates were accustomed to difficult maneuvers in space, and performed them routinely? That would imply a really professional crew, more like a military unit than a motley collection of malcontents. Their completely callous holing of our bubble implied the same. We were up against no-nonsense raiders this time—probably a ship that deserted from a planetary navy.

And there was the explanation for the maneuver: This ship had not docked at the nose because it couldn't! It had a projectile cannon mounted in the nose instead of an air lock. No other pirate ship had fired at us, because such military hardware could not be mounted on ordinary space vessels; they had to be designed for it. A projectile cannon attached to the side of the hull of a spinning ship would be virtually useless, and would severely shake the ship when it fired; it had to be on the axis line, so it could be fired without affecting either the spin or the balance of the ship. Since boarding became so awkward, no chances were taken; the victim was rendered completely helpless before the approach was made. This was like a pirate with one arm, afraid the girl might resist and hurt him, so he shoots her just before he rapes her.

Why was it that each pirate vessel we encountered seemed worse than the last? Even the Horse had been worse the second time!

Now we were at an intersection. On either side a long passage extended down. That's right; we were floating at the null-gee axis, and the opposite directions were both down, because of that endwise rotation. We had to pick one or the other without delay, for a pirate was coming through the lock behind us. I saw an arrow pointing, decided that would be toward the residential section (for no good reason; male intuition is suspect), and jumped. Spirit followed.

Of course, we did not sail blithely down the center of the passage. That is not the nature of free fall, as our experience in the bubble had amply shown. We slid down one wall, and as the pressure of that wall increased our angular momentum—that is, the speed of our revolution around the axis—our centrifugal force increased, and we slid faster. The process fed on itself. So it was a bit like being on a giant slide, whose slant increased as it progressed, so that not only one's velocity but one's rate of increase of velocity quickened. Soon we were bumping along at an uncomfortable rate, and had to catch the inset rungs to break our falls. The packages sprang from our arms and went tumbling on down ahead.

A pirate emerged from a side hall—just in time to be pelted by the onrushing packages. He did not take it well. A laser pistol appeared in his hand, pointing with excellent accuracy at me as I clung to the descent ladder.

So we were caught. But that had been inevitable. So far, we survived.

I lifted back my helmet, surrendering for the moment. There was no point in getting shot, or in getting Spirit shot. Perhaps we could talk our way into something less unpromising.

“A woman!” he exclaimed in English.

I still had the red ribbon in my hair! I started to protest, but Spirit nudged me. “So what'd you expect my sister to be—a frog?” she demanded.

The pirate's lips quirked. It seemed he had some minor sense of humor. “You escaped from the derelict bubble?”

“Derelict?” Spirit demanded. “It wasn't a derelict! Not until you blasted a hole in it!”

“So it would seem.” The pistol still covered us. “Come in here and get out of those suits.”

We entered his chamber and climbed out of our suits. I had a problem with modesty, as my dress tended to snag above my waist; how did girls stand it? Of course my bloomer-panties protected the essentials. I lost a slipper in the suit and had to fish for it. I realized now why girls often seemed so inefficient; their costumes did it to them. But at length I stood, somewhat bedraggled, before the pirate.

Spirit, in masculine attire, was better off. I knew that only the seriousness of our situation prevented her from teasing me about my feminine ineptitude.

“How old are you?” the pirate asked. He was evidently an officer, as he wore some sort of insignia and seemed better spoken than the usual brutes. Probably he originated from Uranus, whose moon Titania was the home of the English-speaking people, and which moon had a longstanding Navy tradition.

Mainly, he was calmly self-assured.

“Fifteen,” I said. No point in concealing that fact.

“Twelve,” Spirit said.

He gazed at me appreciatively and appraisingly, and I became aware of one reason women can cringe under the cynosure of men. I wished I could be anywhere but here.

“You are young,” the pirate officer said. “But that perhaps makes you cleaner. You will serve one man per night, commencing this night. You will cooperate gladly—”

“No!” I cried, horrified with better reason than he could know.

“Otherwise your little brother will be flogged—by the man you do not please—and you will go without food or water till the next. I believe in time you will cooperate willingly enough.”

I was silent. These pirates certainly knew how to make a girl perform! All we could do now was stall for time.

The officer raised his voice to address the other pirates that were arriving now. “Take these two to the guest room. You will draw straws for order of satisfaction.”