Refugee (27 page)

I moved slowly, using the blade to saw through the rope about my feet. Then I realized this was foolish; the hands had to be first. I nudged my companion, and he moved his bound hands to mine, and I sawed at his rope. The blade was sharp, for these items are fashioned in the factory bubbles of Jupiter to last almost forever, and my leverage was good. The strands parted, and in a moment his hands were free.

Then he took the blade and severed my rope. My hands, too, were free. While I had dreamed vainly of such an escape, Spirit had taken practical action to make it possible. But I could not move my hands freely, lest the pirates see. I arranged the rope so it looked tied, and moved as slowly as before.

Meanwhile the pirate awe of the QYV treasure abated enough to get practical. “We have it, but we have a problem,” the Horse said. “We don't know what's in it. Could be a diamond—or could be an ampoule of Quintessent H, worth two million—or could be a deadly virus Kife means to use to wipe out a major bubble. Do we gamble, or don't we?”

“Where'd she come from?” a pirate asked, glancing at Helse's body. “Do they have virus labs there?”

“Callisto, the boy says,” the Horse replied. “No advanced technology there. No precious minerals either.”

“But she could have been a second-stage courier. It could have started anywhere. Maraud is a center for bootleg re-transfer. The Jupiter Patrol is watching for drugs on the regular ships from the inner worlds, but pays no attention to refugees. So it figures Kife would use one of them for something really important.”

“But Jupe's bouncing refugees now,” the Horse pointed out. “Why use a courier who can't get through?”

The other pirate shrugged. “I don't know. He must've figured she would get through, for some reason, and it fouled up. She would have been pretty enough, alive.”

Pretty enough. Yes, that figured. Faith might have gotten through, and Helse too, if some male Jupe officer spotted them. Regulations could be bent or ignored for that sort of thing. Yet I wasn't sure. I had seen no evidence of corruption in the Jupiter Patrol, and it had been a woman who turned us away. So the mystery of Kife's strategy remained.

I freed the hands of the girl on my other side and passed the blade on. Covertly, we all worked on our foot-ropes, though the pirates were now so engrossed in their debate over the capsule that they were paying no attention at all to us.

But I knew it would take more than our bare hands and one tiny blade to overcome these rough pirates.

We had no real weapons, and the men were so much larger and stronger than we were they could have overcome us barehanded. There were weapons farther around the Commons, but we would be caught long before we could reach them, assuming the pirates had left them in place. What could we do to save ourselves?

I worked it out as my feet came free: Someone would have to distract the pirates while someone else reached the weapons. We had no chance to plan this out before we would have to act, so I had to hope our minds ran in similar channels. I could make the best use of the weapons, but I was farthest from them; Spirit was closest.

I looked again at Spirit, making a little signal with a finger. She should go for the weapons. She nodded.

“To hell with that,” the Horse exclaimed, settling the pirates' dispute. “We could debate it for years and never decide. I'm going to open it.” And, while the other pirates shrank back apprehensively, he twisted the two halves of the capsule.

It burst apart and an object fell out, giving me a shock of déjà vu relating to my recent dream. The pirates shied away as if afraid the thing would explode, but it bounced harmlessly on the deck. The Horse stooped to pick it up.

When should we make our move? Now, while the pirates were distracted? Or should we wait till we had no choice. I decided that sooner was best. But we did have to give the remaining children time to get free. The more of us who burst loose at once, the better.

“A key!” the Horse said, disappointed. “A stupid little plastic key!”

“A key to what?” one of the others asked, edging back toward it.

"How should I know? Maybe to a safe that got shipped by some other route and has a booby trap to blow it up if any key but this is used on it. Probably a magnetic pattern imprinted in it, no way to fake it.

But we don't have that safe!"

“Then what good is this to us?”

“No good at all!” The Horse threw down the key in a fury. “We sure ain't going to Kife with it! Three damn days gone—for this! For nothing!”

Spirit got up and started walking toward the weapons.

For a moment the pirates did not even notice. Spirit walked exactly as if she were going to the head. She had marvelous composure. All the time I had thought she was broken, she had been planning this!

Then the Horse spied her and caught on. “She's loose!” He started for her. “Who forgot to tie—”

I launched myself toward him.

We didn't have a chance, of course. There were eight of us and five pirates in the bubble at the moment—but each of them was a match for two of us unarmed, and there were more in the pirate ship that would come at the sound of the commotion. But we were desperate; we had nothing left to lose.

I plowed into the Horse, who wasn't looking at me. My impact spun him around. In a moment he recovered, grabbed me, and threw me aside. Scowling, he drew his laser pistol.

Why hadn't I grabbed for that pistol first? I might have gotten it, if I had concentrated on that alone! I had bungled my only chance! Now, as if it were in slow motion, I saw the ongoing panorama of the action. The Horse, drawing his weapon. The other pirates, turning to face the rushing children. One of the bad ones reaching for Spirit at the fringe of the group. But no, he wasn't catching her, he was clapping his hands to his face! She had flicked him in the eye with her finger-whip!

Then the Horse realized what was happening and brought his pistol around to bear on Spirit instead of me. I tried to roll into his feet, to jar his aim, but was too slow. But Spirit fooled him by leaping up into the storage compartment, neatly curving through the hole in the net and disappearing among the packages of food up there. His shot burned a package but missed her. It was that curvature of the jump that had thrown him off; we were used to it, but he wasn't.

Unfortunately, we had no weapons stored up there. Spirit was safe for the moment, but we had lost the war because the Horse was striding toward the cache of weapons.

I scrambled to my feet. Maybe I could still get to a weapon first, if I dived for it. But I knew this was unlikely.

I was passing Helse's body on the table. I reacted almost without thinking. I picked up the corpse, entrails and all, lifting it readily in the partial gravity, and heaved it at the Horse. It was strange, touching Helse's dead flesh, which was not soft but rather stiff, but I knew she would approve of being allowed to participate in the fight this way.

The body struck the Horse. He spun around, firing his laser into it, not at first realizing what it was. Then he realized, and his face snarled with disgust. A length of intestine had strewn itself across his arm, and he brushed if away and backed off.

Meanwhile I was making progress toward the weapons, thanks to Helse's intercession. My dead love had given me a better chance.

“Down!” Spirit cried from the far side of the Commons. She had sailed right through the center compartment and out the other side! “Flat!”

I didn't know what she had in mind, since there were no weapons over there, but knew better than to ignore the warning. I spread myself flat against the deck, hoping this was not all a bluff.

“Someone shoot that brat,” the Horse cried. Then he turned and aimed his laser at me. I could hardly move to avoid it, since I was lying down.

There was a horrendous roar, an ear-hurting sound, and a blast of hot air. Fire exploded in the baggage-storage section and the netting disintegrated. Burning packages rained down, curving in their fashion as they fell. The pirates, amazed, tried to dodge them.

Had Spirit detonated a bomb among the packages? But there was no bomb!

A pirate near the air lock screamed. I looked—and saw him bathed in fire. His hair and clothing were puffing into bright ash, and his body was blackening. He spun to the side, his skin flayed from his body.

A jet of flame shot through the center of the bubble and down through the air lock, directly into the pirate space ship. There were screams as it fried unseen pirates there.

A laser? That would have to be a laser cannon, the kind mounted on a Jupiter Navy battleship. We had nothing like that on board!

Then it cut off, after only a few seconds, leaving us bathed in heat and gasping for air. The metal of the air lock glowed red where the jet had touched it, and the odor of burnt flesh was strong. The pirates were standing motionless, staring, and I think some were temporarily blind. Those of us on the deck were better off, being farther from the flame.

Now I realized what it was. Spirit had ignited the small rocket drive! She must have braced it against the rear lock and aimed it down toward the front lock, searing through everything between. It was a little, weak jet when used to move the mass of the full bubble, externally—but here inside it seemed devastatingly powerful. She probably had it set on the lowest level of thrust; otherwise she would not have been able to hold it at all. But even that level, which from outside might seem to be a pallid jet of half a dozen meters, was enough to incinerate what remained in the storage compartment and to char what did not. The ferocity of its passage heated the air explosively, and the jet showed in air to extend the full sixteen-meter breadth of the bubble and beyond. It had been perhaps a five-second burst—and the bubble was in a shambles.

“Get their weapons!” Spirit called. I scrambled up—but the Horse reacted as quickly, swinging his pistol about again. “Spirit!” I cried, throwing myself flat again and trusting the other children to follow my lead.

The jet of fire came again. It wobbled, and part of it struck the side of the air lock near the pirate. Fire refracted, forming a curving sheet of flame and sparks that caught the standing pirates glancingly.

It cut off a second time. “I'll burn you all, if you don't get those pirates!” Spirit called.

But this time the pirates had been harder hit. The Horse was staggering, having been brushed in the face by the flame, and I got his pistol without resistance. It took a third blast from the rocket before we had complete control, but we did have it.

When I reached Spirit, I discovered the price she had paid for her valiant move. She had been very close to the rocket, and the thing was no toy. She had held it in place by hand, her extremities shielded by bandage-clothing, but her hands were burned and her hair singed. She had closed her eyes tightly, protecting them, but her cheeks were blistered. When she saw me coming and knew we had won, she fainted.

Poor, heroic little girl! I scavenged for balm for her skin and tried to get her comfortable, then tended to the other pressing business.

We didn't push our luck. We sent the two least obnoxious pirates—the ones who had tied our bonds loose rather than cut off the circulation of our hands and feet, and who had let us use the head with reasonable frequency—out the cooling lock with instructions to close it behind them and separate the pirate ship from the bubble. Then we dealt with the Horse and the two remaining pirates.

I had sworn to kill the Horse, and now was my chance, but I found I was unable to do it directly. I was not, when it came to the test, a calculating murderer; I killed only in the throes of desperation. Yet when I looked at Spirit's stump of a finger and at Helse's mutilated body, and remembered Faith, I suffered a helpless secondary rage. We could not simply let these criminals go!

Spirit had recovered consciousness by this time. She was in pain from her new injuries and unsteady on her feet, but her eyes bore on the Horse with singular malignancy. Faith was her sister too, and Spirit had suffered even more directly and recently from the villainy of the Horse. Spirit was no forgiving cherub.

Wordlessly she held out one burned hand for the laser pistol.

I gave it to her, not knowing what she would do, but aware that she had more guts to do it than I did. I saw that it hurt her just to hold the weapon, but she gritted her teeth and took it in her left hand, the one with the lost finger, though she was right-handed, and she aimed it and steadied it and fired—into the crotch of the Horse.

He screamed and jumped, but the damage was done. Spirit had castrated him with the laser.

Then we forced the three into the trailing lifeboat, after hauling it up to mate with the freed front lock. We had not killed the Horse—but blind and burned, he might not live long anyway, jammed into the lifeboat with his two cutthroat companions and set adrift in space. Certainly he would suffer to a certain extent the way we had. Certainly he would never rape another refugee girl. Maybe his pirate ship would search out the boat and pick him up; maybe it wouldn't bother. His fate was now in the hands of his associates, as perhaps it deserved to be. His blood was not, technically, on my hands. That perhaps is my ultimate confession of weakness.

We had not actually lost any children this time, but half our supplies had been destroyed and we all had emotional and physical scars. Several children had bad burns from the rocket, and I feared Spirit's face would never be pretty, for there would be blister scars on it when it healed. But we survived, and we had a little portion of our vengeance!

We bagged Helse's remains and returned her to the hull. I saved the mysterious plastic key, hiding it on my person, my last memento of Helse. That and the HELSE HUBRIS tag.

We cleaned up the rest in the usual manner; it did give us something to do. We settled down to traveling our route and tending our injuries. Spirit, tough little creature that she was, started recovering right away, but I refused to let her do any real work until her skin scabbed over and started healing. She was, I still believe, the toughest one among us, and she had earned her rest.