Refugee (12 page)

Jupiter Orbit, 2-12-'15—We were hungry, but we were closing on the Jupiter ring system. In three more days we should be there.

Another ship overhauled us. My father looked worried. “Friend or enemy?” he asked.

“We can't take the chance,” Diego said. “We must assume we have few friends in space. We'll have to set an ambush.”

“But if they're friendly—we do need food.”

“I didn't mean we'd attack them unprovoked, señor. We just need to be armed and ready—and if they manifest as pirates, we'll jump them, and this time we won't let them go. If they're not pirates, we'll never show what we're ready for.”

My father nodded. “Sounds good to me. That means we'll have to act normal, with the women and children in evidence.”

“Yes. But at the same time we must be armed and ready. We know the penalty for failure!”

“We know,” my father agreed grimly. He hardly showed his reaction to the rape of his daughter, but I knew he had been deeply wounded. I think he maintained a firm presence because he was afraid my mother would collapse if he did not. I would have considered this mutual bracing in crisis to be a good object lesson in human nature had it not been my own family concerned. So my father carried on in a nearly normal manner, while my mother stayed mostly out of sight, and I think I understood them both and respected them for the way they handled it. Naturally I had to carry on too, so as not to weaken the family effort.

The ship closed and locked onto our main air lock. I wished there were some way to prevent this, but the designers of bubbles had not anticipated the problem of piracy in deep space. Any ship could attach to and board a bubble; all locks were interconnectable. Thus the best of intentions led to the worst of errors—as far as we were concerned.

The lock opened, being worked from the other side, and gaudily garbed, bearded men trooped in. They certainly looked like pirates!

My father went up to them. “We're glad you have come! We're trying to get to Jupiter, but we're short of food—”

The man hardly looked at him. “Bind the men. Line up the women—the young ones. We'll loot after we're sated—”

Diego needed no more. These pirates weren't even making any pretence at honest dealing! He drew a penknife and slashed at the nearest pirate, cutting his sword arm. The pirate screamed.

Our other men pounced, two to a pirate. In moments, almost bloodlessly, our forces had made the pirates captive. Our preparation had paid off handsomely!

Then something strange happened. There was a thin, keening sound, not exactly painful—but somehow I lost volition. I had been sitting with Spirit, who was now garbed as a boy, where we could keep an eye on both the pirates and cell 75, where Helse and Faith were. We were keeping both of them out of the action, just in case, though the rest of the bubble thought Helse was male. Now I watched the pirates turn on Diego and my father and throw them against the wall near the air lock—and somehow I didn't react.

García was near us. “Oh, no,” he muttered. “They've got a pacifier.”

A pacifier. I knew what that was, though I had never before experienced its effect personally. It was an electronic gadget that broadcast a semi-sonic wave that interfered with the human nervous system. It did not damage people or knock them out; it merely diluted their concentration or their will to action. It was like a soporific drug. Some rich men used these devices as sleeping medication, and they were supposed to be useful in prisons and mental institutions. And yes, I had heard of them being used illicitly to make women unresistive to rape. They were far too expensive for peasants to own; the pirates must have stolen one in the course of their routine marauding and kept it in reserve for just such an occasion as this.

Probably someone in their ship had orders to watch and turn it on when things went wrong for them—as had been the case here.

I cursed that instrument—but not vehemently, for vehemence was not possible while it functioned. I damned myself for my failure to overcome the ennui, but could do no more than that. I just sat there and watched my father get knocked about and bounced into the wall.

But Spirit had more resistance than I did. She had always been a spirited girl, true to her name, though she had been named long before the trait manifested. Somehow her neural chemistry differed; she was able to assert partial free will. She began to move toward the pirates.

“They will hurt you,” I warned without particular emphasis. I knew intellectually that we faced disaster, but I just couldn't get emotional about it. I was intellectually furious, but not emotionally. It was like watching a person in a drama do something stupid and identifying with that person, while being unable to influence his action.

“They won't notice me,” she replied. She didn't sound excited; the pacifier was working on her, but not quite as effectively as on me.

“Why doesn't it affect the pirates?” García asked, as though this were a matter of idle curiosity. Then he answered his own question: “The field can be disrupted by certain countercurrents. The pirates can have little generators on their bodies, giving them protection.” It was strange to be discussing this so calmly, while doing nothing about it.

Then a pirate messenger came through the lock and whispered to the leader. The leader looked alarmed. Then he set himself and started giving orders.

The pirates who were rounding up our unresisting men paused, then turned them loose. The leader raised his voice and addressed us all. “There is a Jupiter Ringuard patrol boat approaching. Now, we don't want any trouble with them. If they send an officer aboard, we want you all to convince him that we are traders, making a business deal with you. We're selling you food, and we're haggling over the price, but it's friendly.”

He paused, looking around. “Fetch me some children,” he ordered his henchmen.

The pirates ranged out in search of children. They took Spirit and me, and we went unresisting, though I saw Spirit grimace. It was uncertainty that restrained her rather than inability to act; she wasn't sure what would happen to the rest of us if she resisted.

They took Helse out of the cell, thinking her to be a boy my age, but left Faith, who looked disreputable at this time. One tiny silver lining for her, perhaps! They rousted out several smaller children. Soon eight of us were standing together before the air lock.

The pirate leader drew a great long dagger of a knife. He caught a six-year-old girl by the hair and yanked her head back, exposing her neck. He set the blade against her throat. “Now hear this!” he cried to us all. “I'll slit this throat myself, the moment anyone squawks. And my men will do the same to the others.” At his gesture, the other pirates drew their blades and menaced the rest of us.

“So you'd better convince that officer, folks,” the pirate leader concluded. "Unless you figure I'm bluffing.

Then you do what you want, and we'll do what we want, because there's a price on all our heads if they recognize us, and we won't have anything to lose. If that officer catches on, he'll be dead too. So you can just take your choice between the robbery we have in mind—and your children."

The worst of it was, he wasn't bluffing. It did not require my talent to fathom that. These men really were killers, worse than the first bunch; they had made no pretence of being anything other than pirates from the outset.

“Now we'll turn off the box,” the pirate leader concluded. “You will have volition—but we have your children.”

The pirate by the air lock turned off the box. Suddenly I had strength of will again. But there was a blade at my back, and I knew it would be worse than futile to bolt. We had no way to coordinate, to run together, and nowhere to go if we did run. We had all been disarmed—and half of us really were children. Despite all our preparations, we were helpless.

That bothered me, I think, almost as much as our predicament. The fact that we had been caught unprepared, after thinking we were ready. Now an officer of the law—Jupiter law—the very type of person we most wanted to meet—was coming, and we could do nothing.

Three pirates took the two smallest girls and a baby boy through the lock into their ship. The boy whimpered and his mother moved nervously, but he went along. These were the ultimate hostages: the most vulnerable of our number. I could have identified all their parents by their reactions, had I not already known. Until we had these children safely back, we were completely nullified.

I glanced at our martial-arts instructor and saw him standing with a grim expression. He knew better than anyone that the pirates' device of protection was too effective. All we could do was cooperate and hope for a favorable break.

The space officer arrived. He was wearing a conventional space suit emblazoned with the great red ball of the Jupiter Service. He was the representative of the foremost power in the Solar System—but in person he was a small, somewhat pudgy man, seemingly uncertain. He would have been nothing, if it weren't for the devastating guns of the Navy ship trained on both our vessels. How easy it would be to alert that ship, and maybe get us all blasted to pieces! But that would hardly be to our advantage. We had to gamble on the lesser evil of the pirates' mercy.

Lesser evil! There would be more than one woman raped this time, I was sure, and anything we had of value would be taken, and some of our men would be beaten. God, I hated this!

“What are you up to here?” the officer asked in English, the language of the dominant power on Jupiter.

There are, of course, four major languages used on Jupiter, but the speakers of the other three—French, Spanish, and Portuguese—did not maintain space patrols. That made English the most truly interplanetary one in Jupiter-space. Thus did economics translate into culture.

The pirate chief smiled ingratiatingly. “We are only traders, sir, peddling staples to these travelers.”

The officer turned to face our group. “True?”

“We are doing business,” my father said in halting English. This hurt me too. My father was lying, at the behest of our enemies, and I hated to see him thus demeaned. I have never liked lying, and I felt unclean for him. At the some time, I knew we had no choice. Even if Spirit and Helse and I were to bolt and escape our captors, as we might reasonably do if we acted in unison, we could not save the three smaller children, and their deaths would be on our hands. It was like a finger-bending hold that a bully puts on another child, to force him to tell the teacher the two are only playing. I hate that sort of thing, but the only practical answer I ever found to it was to avoid the situation. Once your finger is caught, it's too late for sensible solutions; you have to go along. So I understood the situation exactly—but a special kind of rage seethed in me. Pirates like this should be extirpated from the face of the universe!

The officer's brow wrinkled. I realized he did not understand my father's strongly accented English.

Quickly I spoke up, in better English. “My father says we are doing business,” I explained. And realized that now I shared the lie directly. Damn! How I hated every aspect of this!

“Drug business?” the Jupe officer demanded.

“No drugs,” my father assured him, honestly enough, in Spanish, and that negation needed no translation.

“See that you don't. We'll be watching you.” The officer turned abruptly and departed. It seemed his shuttle craft had latched on to the other port of the pirate ship, so he had to pass through that ship to leave us.

In a moment we felt the tremor of the shuttle craft disengaging and jetting away, back to its mother ship.

That test was over, but I did not feel much relieved.

“Now release our children,” my father said.

The pirate leader considered, and in that moment he reminded me uncomfortably of the way the Horse had pondered, after we had turned his men loose. “Ah yes, the children.” He turned his head and yelled into the ship. “You through with the brats?”

“Just about,” a voice called back.

Just about? I experienced a new chill. What were they doing with these children?

Then they brought the children back. The two little girls were naked and crying. A pirate carried the baby boy, who was also naked, but silent. The man stepped out and threw the boy to the floor.

A paroxysm of horror passed through our group. The boy's eyes were open and staring, and his chest was still. He was dead!

Now it was apparent that the little girls had been raped.

It seemed every man in our group launched himself at the pirates. But then the pacifier box came on again, and the charge became a shambles, its impetus gone. The broadcast interference was not psychological, it was physical; no amount of determination could overcome this paralysis of the voluntary functions.

The pirate leader drew his sword, smiling grimly. He seemed to be enjoying this. He had wanted us to see the children, and to react as we did, and to be cut down to helplessness again. “You made trouble for us. We don't like that.”

My father was closest to him. The pirate raised his sword in a two-handed grip and swung it savagely. I saw, as if it were in slow motion, the blade cut into my father's side. It sliced through clothing and rib cage and into the lung, and the blood poured out like the living thing it was.

I knew in that moment that we should have blown the whistle on the pirates when the Jupe officer was here. We had been held passive by a threat to hostages who were even then being savaged. We had had nothing to lose, had we but known it. We had been too trusting—and now were paying the hideous price.

Would the pirates really have dared to kill the Jupe officer? Now I doubted it, for it would have meant the end of the pirate ship, possible complete destruction by a military missile.

Now it was carnage. Ruthlessly the pirates hacked apart our men, who were unable to resist. They left none alive. Such was the enervation spawned by the devil-box that all we could do was moan in soft horror. We couldn't act!

They hurled the bleeding bodies into a pile, then sheathed the swords and came after the women. Some, unsatisfied with what they saw, started rechecking the cells. I saw someone open the panel of number 75, where Faith still hid. I remembered that Helse had taken the opportunity provided by the presence of the Jupe officer to return to that cell; no one had been paying attention to her, among the pirates, so she had gotten away with it. But that minor escape had accomplished nothing, for there was the pirate at the cell.