Sassinak (2 page)

"Wait—help me get Lunzie and Januk!"

The younger children were hard to wake, and cranky once roused. Januk demanded "my
big
jar" and Lunzie couldn't find her shoes. Sass, mind racing, dared to use the combination her father had once shown her, and opened her parents' sealed closet.

"What are you
doing
?" asked Caris, now by the door again with the other two. Her eyes widened as Sass pulled down the zipped cases: the military-issue projectile weapons issued to each adult colonist, and the lumpy, awkward part of a larger weapon which should—if they had time—mate with those from adjoining apartments to make something more effective.

Lunzie could just carry one of the long, narrow cases; Sass had to use both arms on the big one, and Caris took the other narrow one, along with Januk's hand. "We should stop at my place," Caris said, but when they got outside, they could see the red and blue lines crossing the sky. A white flare, at a distance. "That was the Spaceport offices," said Caris, still calm.

Other shapes moved in the darkness, converging on the Block Recreation Center; Sass recognized two classmates, both carrying weapons, and one trailing a string of smaller children. They made it to the Block Recreation Center just as adults came boiling out, most unsteady on their feet, and all cursing.

"Sassinak! Bless you—you remembered!" Her father, suddenly looking larger and more dangerous than she had thought for the last year or so, grabbed Lunzie's load and stripped off the green cover. Sass had seen such weapons in class videos; now she watched him strip and load it, hardly aware that her mother had taken the weapon Caris carried. Someone she didn't know yelled for a "PC-8
base
, dammit!" and Sass's father said, without even looking at her, "Go, Sassy! That's your load!" She carried it across the huge single room of the Center to the cluster of adults assembling some larger weapons, and they snatched it, stripped off the cover, set it down near the door, and began attaching other pieces. An older woman grabbed her arm and demanded, "Class?"

"Six."

"You've had aid class?" When Sass nodded, the woman said "Good—then get over here,"
Here
was on the far side of the Center, out of sight of her family, but with a crowd of middle school children, all busily laying out an infirmary area, just like in the teaching tapes.

The Center stank of whiskey fumes, of smoke, of too many bodies, of fear. Children's shrill voices rose above the adults' talking; babies wailed or shrieked. Sass wondered if the ship was down, that pirate ship. How many pirates would there be? What kinds of weapons would they have? What did pirates want, and what did they do? Maybe—for an instant she almost believed this thought—maybe it was just a drill, more realistic than the quarterly drills she'd grown up with, but not real. Perhaps a Fleet ship had chosen to frighten them, just to encourage more frequent practice with the weapons, and the first thing they'd see was a Fleet officer.

She felt more than heard the first concussive explosion, and that hope died. Whoever was out there was hostile. Everything the tapes had said or she'd overheard the adults say about pirates ran through her mind. Colonies disappeared, on some worlds, or survived gutted of needed equipment and supplies, with half their population gone to slavers. Ships taken even during FTL travel, when according to theory no one could say where they were.

Waiting there, unarmed, she realized that the thrice-weekly class in self-defense was going to do her no good at all. If the pirates had bigger guns, if they had weapons better than projectiles, she was going to die . . . or be captured.

"Sass." Caris touched her arm; she reached out and gave Caris a quick hug. Around her, the others of her class had gathered in a tight knot. Even in this, Sassinak recognized the familiar. Since she'd started school, the others had looked to her in a crisis. When Berry fell off the crawler train, when Seh Garvis went crazy and attacked the class with an orecutter, everyone expected Sass to know what to do, and do it. Bossy, her mother had called her, more than once, and her father had agreed, but added that bossy plus tact could be very useful indeed.
Tact
, she thought. But what could she say now?

"Who's our triage?" she asked Sinder. He stood back, well away from Sass's friends.

"Gath" He pointed to a youth who had been cleared for off-planet training—medical school, everyone expected. He'd been senior school medic all four years. "I'm low-code this time."

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 rest 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.