Planet Pirates Omnibus

Planet Pirates Omnibus.

by Anne McCaffrey.

BOOK ONE.

Chapter One.

By the time anyone noticed that the carrier was overdue, no one cared. Celebrations had started two local days before, when the last crawler train came in from Zeebin. Sa.s.sinak, along with the rest of her middle school, had met that train, helped offload the canisters of personal-grade cargo, and then wandered through the crowded streets.

Last year she"d been too young - barely - for such freedom. Even now, she flinched a little from the noise and confusion. The City tripled in population for the week or so of celebration when the ore carriers came in. Every farmer, miner, crawler-train tech or engineer - everyone who possibly could, and some who shouldn"t have - came to The City. It almost seemed to deserve the name, with crowds bustling between the rows of one-story prefab buildings that served the young colony as housing, storage, and manufacturing s.p.a.ce. Sa.s.sinak could pretend she was on the outskirts of a real city, and the taller dome and blockhouse of the original settlement, could, with imagination, stand for the great soaring buildings she hoped one day to visit, on the worlds she"d heard about in school.

She caught sight of a school patch ahead of her, and recognized Caris"s new (and slightly ridiculous) hairdo. Shoving between two meandering miners, who seemed disposed to slow down at every doorway, Sa.s.sinak grabbed her friend"s elbow. Caris whirled.

"Don"t you -! Oh, Sa.s.s, you idiot. I thought you were -"

"A drunken miner. Sure." Arm in arm with Caris, Sa.s.sinak felt safer - and slightly more adult. She gave Caris a sidelong look, and Caris smirked back. They broke into a hip-swaying parody of the lead holovid"s "Carin Coldae - Adventurer Extraordinary" and sang a s.n.a.t.c.h of the theme song. Someone hooted, behind them, and they broke into a run. Across the street, a familiar voice yelled "There go the skeleton twins" and they ran faster.

"Sinder," Caris said a block or so later, when they"d slowed down, "is a planetary snarp."

"Planetary nothing. Stellar snarp." Sa.s.sinak glowered at her friend. They were both long and lanky, and they"d heard as much of Sinder"s skeleton twin joke as anyone could rightly stand "Interstellar." Caris always had to have the last word, Sa.s.sinak thought. It might not be right, but it was last.

"We"re not going to think about Sinder." Sa.s.sinak wormed her fingers through the tangle of things in her jacket pocket and pulled out her credit ring. "We"ve got money to spend ..."

"And you"re my friend!" Caris laughed and shoved her gently toward the nearest food booth.

By the next day, the streets were too rowdy for youngsters, Sa.s.sinak"s parents insisted. She tried to argue that she was no longer a youngster, but got nowhere. She was sure it had something to do with her mother"s need for a babysitter, and the adult-only party in the block recreation center. Caris came over, which made it slightly better. Caris got along better with six-year-old Lunzie than Sa.s.s did, and that meant Sa.s.s could read stories to "the baby": Januk, now just over three. If Januk hadn"t managed to spill three-months" worth of sugar ration while they were trying to make cookies from scratch, it might have been a fairly good day after all. Cans scooped most of the sugar back into the canister, but Sa.s.s was afraid her mother would notice the brown specks in it.

"It"s just spice," Caris said firmly.

"Yes, but -" Sa.s.sinak wrinkled her nose. "What"s that? Oh . . . dear." The cookies were not quite burnt, but she was sure they wouldn"t make up for the spilled sugar. No hope that Lunzie wouldn"t mention it, either - she was at that age, Sa.s.s thought, when having finally figured out the difference between telling a story and telling the truth, she wanted to let everyone know. Lunzie prefaced most talebearing with a loud "I"m telling the truth, now: I really am" which Sa.s.s found unbearable. It didn"t help to be told that she herself had once, at about age five, scolded the Block Coordinator for using a polite euphemism at the table. "The right word is "castrated"," was what everyone said she"d said. Sa.s.s didn"t believe it. She would never, in her entire life, no matter how early, have said something like that right out loud at the table. Now she cleaned up the cook-corner, saving what grains of sugar looked fairly clean, and wondered when she could insist that Lunzie and Januk go to bed.

"Eight days." The captain grinned at the pilot. "Eight days should be enough. For most of it anyway. Aren"t we lucky that the carrier"s late." They both laughed; it was an old joke for them, and a mystery for everyone else, how they could turn up handily when other ships were "late."

"We don"t want to leave witnesses."

"No. But we may want to leave evidence ... of a sort." The captain grinned, and the pilot nodded. Evidence implicating someone else. "Now - if those fools down there aren"t drunk out of their wits, antic.i.p.ating the carrier"s arrival, I"m a shifter. We should be able to fake the contact, unless they speak some outlandish gabble. Let"s see ..." He scrolled through the directory information and shook his head. "No problem. Neo-Gaesh, and that"s Orlen"s birthtongue."

"He"s from here?"

"No, the colonists here are from Innish-Ire, and Orlen"s from Innish Outer Station. Same difference; same language and dialect. New colony - they won"t have diverged that much."

"But the kids - they"ll speak Standard?"

"FSP rules: they have to, by age eight. All colonies provided with tapes and cubes for the creches. We shouldn"t have any problem."

Orlen, summoned to the bridge, muttered a string of things the captain hoped were Neo-Gaesh, and opened communications with the planet"s main s.p.a.ceport. For all the captain could tell, the mishmash of syllables coming back was exactly the same, only longer. Hardly a language at all, he thought, smug in his own heritage of properly crisp and tonal Chinese. He spoke Standard as well, and two other related tongues.

"They say they can"t match our ID to the files," Orlen said, this time in Standard, interrupting that chain of thought.

"Tell "em they"re drunk and incompetent," said the captain.

"I did. I told them they had the wrong cube in the lock, an out-of-date directory entry, and no more intelligence than a cabbage, and they"ve gone to try again. But they won"t turn on the grid until we match."

The pilot cleared his throat, not quite an interruption, and the captain looked at him. "We could jam our code into their computer ..." he offered.

"Not here. Colony"s too new; they"ve got the internal checks. No, we"re going down, but keep talking, Orlen. If we can hold them off just a bit too long, we won"t have to worry about their serious defenses. Such as they are."

In the a.s.sault capsules, the troops waited. Motley armor, stolen from a dozen different captured ships and minor bases, mixed weaponry of all manufactures, they lacked only the romance once a.s.sociated with the concept of pirate. These were muggers, gangsters, two steps down from mercenaries and well aware of the price of failure. The Federation of Sentient Planets would not torture, rarely executed . . . but the thought of being whited, mindcleaned, and turned into obedient and useful workers . . . that was torture enough. So they had discipline, of a sort, and loyalty, of a sort, and were obedient, within limits to those who ruled the ship or hired it. On some worlds they pa.s.sed as Free Trader"s Guards.

Orlen"s accusations had not been far wrong. When the last crawler train came in, everyone relaxed until the ore carriers arrived. The s.p.a.ceport Senior Technician was supposed to stay alert, on watch, but with the new outer beacon to signal and take care of first contact, why bother? It had been a long, long year, 460 days, and what harm in a little nip of something to warm the heart? One nip led to another. When the inner beacon, unanswered, tripped the relays that set every light in the control rooms blinking in disorienting random patterns, his first thought was that he"d simply missed the outer beacon signal. He"d finally found the combination of control b.u.t.tons that turned the lights on steady, and shushed the excited (and none too sober) little crowd that had come in to see what happened. And having a friendly voice speaking Neo-Gaesh on the other end of the comm link only added to the confusion, He"d tried to say he could speak Standard well enough (not sure if he"d been too drunk to answer a hail in Standard earlier), but it came out tangled. And so on, and so on, and it was only stubborness that kept him from turning on the grid when the ship"s ID scan didn"t match the record books. d.a.m.ned sobersides s.p.a.ce-men, out there in the stars with nothing to do but sneak up on honest men trying to have a little fun - why should he do them a favor? Let "em match their own ship up, or come in without the grid beacons on, if that"s the game they wanted to play. He put the computer on a search loop, and took another little nip.

The computer"s override warning buzz woke him again. The ship was much closer, just over the horizon, low, coming in on a landing pattern . . . and it was red-flagged. Pirate! he thought muzzily. It"s a pirate. It can"t be ... but the computer, not fooled, and not having been stopped by the override sequence he was too drunk to key in, turned on full alarms, all over the building and the city. And the speech synthesiser, in a warm, friendly, calm female voice, said, "Attention. Attention. Vessel approaching has been identified as dangerous. Attention. Attention ..."

But by then it was far too late.

Sa.s.sinak and Cans had eaten the last of the overbrowned cookies, and were well into the kind of long-after-midnight conversation they preferred. Lunzie grunted and tossed on her pallet; Januk sprawled bonelessly on his, looking, as Cans said, like something tossed up from the sea. "Little kids aren"t human," said Sa.s.s, winding a strand of dark hair around her finger. "They"re all alien, shapechangers like those Wefts you read about, and then turn human at -" She thought a moment. "Eleven or so."

"Eleven! You were eleven last year; I was. I was human ..."

"Ha." Sa.s.s grinned, and watched Cans. "I wasn"t human. I was special. Different -"

"You"ve always been different." Cans rolled away from Sa.s.s"s slap. "Don"t hit me; you know it. You like it. You would be alien if you could."

"I would be off this planet if I could," said Sa.s.s, serious for a moment. "Eight more years before I can even apply - aggh!"

"To do what?"

"Anything. No, not anything. Something -" her hands waved, describing arcs and whorls of excitement, adventure, marvels in the vast and mysterious distance of time and s.p.a.ce.

"Umm. I"ll take biotech training and a lifetime spent figuring out how to insert genes for correctly handed proteins in our native fishlife." Caris wrinkled her nose. "You"re not going to leave, Sa.s.s. This is the frontier. This is where the excitement is. Right here."

"Eating fish fish? Eating lifeforms?"

Caris shrugged. "I"m not devout. Those fins in the ocean aren"t sentient, we know that much, and they could give us cheap, easy protein. Personally, I"m tired of gruel and beans, and since we have to fiddle with their genes, too, why not fishlife?"

Sa.s.sinak gave her a long look. True, lots of the frontier settlers weren"t devout, and didn"t find anything but a burdensome rule in the FSP strictures about eating meat. But she herself - she shivered a little, thinking of a finny wriggling in her throat. Something wailed, in the distance, and she shivered again. Then the houselights brightened and dimmed abruptly.

"Storm?" asked Caris. The lights blinked, now quickly, now slow. From the terminal in the other room came an odd sort of voice, something Sa.s.s had never heard before.

"Attention. Attention ..."

The girls stared at each other, shocked for an endless instant into complete stillness. Then Caris leaped for the door, and Sa.s.s caught her arm.

"Wait - help me get Lunzie and Januk!"

The younger children were hard to wake, and cranky once roused. Januk demanded "my big big jar" and Lunzie couldn"t find her shoes. Sa.s.s, mind racing, dared to use the combination her father had once shown her, and opened her parents" sealed closet. jar" and Lunzie couldn"t find her shoes. Sa.s.s, mind racing, dared to use the combination her father had once shown her, and opened her parents" sealed closet.

"What are you doing doing?" asked Caris, now by the door again with the other two. Her eyes widened as Sa.s.s 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; Sa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ceport offices," said Caris, still calm.

Other shapes moved in the darkness, converging on the Block Recreation Center; Sa.s.s recognized two cla.s.s-mates, 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.

"Sa.s.sinak! 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. Sa.s.s had seen such weapons in cla.s.s 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 base, dammit!" and Sa.s.s"s father said, without even looking at her, "Go, Sa.s.sy! That"s your load!" She carried it across the huge single room of the Center to the cl.u.s.ter of adults a.s.sembling some larger weapons, and they s.n.a.t.c.hed it, stripped off the cover, set it down near the door, and began attaching other pieces. An older woman grabbed her arm and demanded, "Cla.s.s?"

"Six."

"You"ve had aid cla.s.s?" When Sa.s.s nodded, the woman said "Good - then get over here." 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. 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. Sa.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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.

"Sa.s.s." Cans touched her arm; she reached out and gave Caris a quick hug. Around her, the others of her cla.s.s had gathered in a tight knot. Even in this, Sa.s.sinak 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 cla.s.s with an orecutter, everyone expected Sa.s.s 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 Tact, she thought. But what could she say now?

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

Sa.s.s nodded, gave him a smile he returned uneasily, and checked again on each person"s a.s.signment. 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, Sa.s.s 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 Sa.s.s 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 a.n.a.lyse 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 a.s.sault 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 Sa.s.s 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 a.s.sault pod followed the first, and another. Sa.s.s, 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 Sa.s.s 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. Sa.s.s gagged, terrified. Someone"s boot appeared before her face, and b.u.mped her, hard.

"Quit that."

Sa.s.sinak 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." Sa.s.s 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 Sa.s.s 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?"

Sa.s.s 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 Sa.s.s, 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. Sa.s.s 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, Sa.s.s thought later. Her link of eight were all middle-school age, and they all knew her although only one of them was in her cla.s.s. 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. Sa.s.s 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. Sa.s.s 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. .h.i.t anyone they could reach, forcing them to hurry, keep moving, keep working.

Sa.s.s 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. Sa.s.s 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! 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 a.s.sessment 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, s.e.xes, trained specialists. As with any slaves, they soon learned ways to pa.s.s information among themselves. So Sa.s.s 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. Sa.s.s knew - at least at first - that this was intentional. But as time pa.s.sed, 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 a.s.sembly-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 Sa.s.s 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. Sa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ceport 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 gra.s.s, nothing living but the human slaves and human masters. Some were huge, far taller than Sa.s.s"s parents had been, heavily muscled like the thugs that Carin Coldae had overcome in The Ice-World Dilemma 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 a.s.signed to new links, for work or training or both, clipped and undipped from one link after another as the masters desired. After all that had happened, Sa.s.s 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 a.s.sembly 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, ma.s.sing 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 Sa.s.s 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. Sa.s.s 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."

"Sa.s.sinak!" She got it out all at once, fast and almost too loud. Her name! She had a name again.

"Easy," he said. "Sa.s.sinak, eh? Where from?"

"M-myriad." Her voice trembled, now, and tears sprang to her eyes.

"Speak Neo-Gaesh?" he asked, in that tongue. Sa.s.s 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. Sa.s.sinak. 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."