Sassinak (3 page)

The end of the voyage came unannounced—for, as Sass 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. Sass 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 spaceport 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 grass, nothing living but the human slaves and human masters. Some were huge, far taller than Sass's parents had been, heavily muscled like the thugs that Carin Coldae had overcome in
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 assigned to new links, for work or training or both, clipped and unclipped from one link after another as the masters desired. After all that had happened, Sass 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 assembly 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, massing 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 Sass 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. Sass 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."

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

"Easy," he said. "Sassinak, eh? Where from?"

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

"Speak Neo-Gaesh?" he asked, in that tongue. Sass 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. Sassinak. 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."

That criticism, coming on top of the kindness, was too much; her temper flared. "I didn't so much as say ouch!"

He nodded. "I know. But you jumped. You can do better." Still angry, she stared, as he grinned at her. "Sassinak from Myriad, listen to me. Untrained, you didn't let out a squeak . . . what do you think you could do with training?"

Despite herself, she was caught. "Training? You mean . . . ?"

But down the corridor came the sound of approaching voices. He shook his head at her, and stood passively beside the stacked cartons, at her side.

"What's
your
name?" she asked very quietly, and very quietly he answered:

"Abervest. They call me Abe." And then so low she could hardly hear it, "I'm Fleet."

Fleet. Sassinak held to that thought through the journey that followed, crammed as she was into a cargo hauler's front locker with two other newly purchased slaves. She found out afterwards that that had not been punishment, but necessity; the hauler went out of the dome and across the barren, airless surface of the little planet that served as a slave depot. Outside the insulated, pressurized locker—or the control cab, where Abe drove in relative comfort—she would have died.

Their destination was another slave barracks, this one much smaller. Sassinak expected the same sort of routine as before, but instead she was assigned to a training facility. Six hours a day before a terminal, learning to use the math she already knew in mapping, navigation, geology. Learning to perfect her accent in Harish and learning to understand (but never speak) Chinese. Another shift in manual labor, working at whatever jobs needed doing, according to the shift supervisor. She had no regular duties, nothing she could depend on.

One of the most oppressive things was the simple feeling that she could not even
see
out. She had always been able to run outdoors and look at the sky, wander into the hills for an afternoon with friends. Now . . . now some blank ugliness stopped her gaze, as if by physical force, everywhere she looked. Most buildings had no windows: there was nothing outside to see but the wall of another prefab hulk nearby. Trudging the narrow streets from one assignment to another, she learned that looking up brought a quick scolding, or a blow. Besides, she couldn't see anything above but the grayish haze of the dome. She could not tell how large the moon or planet was, how far she'd been taken from the original landing site, even how many buildings formed the complex in which she was trained. Day after day, nothing but the walls of these prefabs, indoors and out, always the same neutral gritty gray. She quit trying to look up, learned to contain herself within herself, and hated herself for making that adjustment.

But one shift a day, amazingly, was free. She could spend it in the language labs, working at the terminal, reading . . . or, as most often, with Abe.

Fleet, she soon learned, was his history and his dream. He had been Fleet, had enlisted as a boy just qualified, and worked his way rating by rating, sometimes slipping back when a good brawl intruded on common sense, but mostly rising steadily through the ranks as a good spacer could. Clever, but without the intellect that would have won him a place at the Academy; strong, but not brutal with it; brave without the brashness of the boy he had been, he had clenched himself around the virtues of the Service as a drowning man might cling to a limb hanging in the water. Slave he might be, in all ways, but yet he was Fleet.

"They're tough," he said to her, soon after they arrived. "Tough as anything but the slavers, and maybe even more. They'll break you if they can, but if they can't. . ." His voice trailed away, and she glanced over to see his eyes glistening. He blinked. "Fleet never forgets," he said. "Never. They may come late, they may come later, but they come. And if it's later, never mind. Your name's on the rolls, it'll be in Fleet's memory, forever."

Over the months that followed, Sassinak began to think of Fleet as something other than the capricious and arrogant arm of power her parents had told her about. Solid, Abe said. Dependable. The same on one ship as on any; the ranks the same, the ratings the same, the specialties the same, barring the difference in a ship's size or weaponry.

He would not say how long he had been a slave, or what had happened, but his faith in the Fleet, in the Fleet's long arm and longer memory, sank into her mind, bit by bit. Her supervisors varied: some quick to anger, some lax. Abe smiled, and pointed out that good commanders were consistent, and good services had good commanders. When she came to their meetings bruised and sore from an undeserved punishment, he told her to remember that: someday she would have power, and she could do better.

She could do better even then, he said one evening, reminding her of their first meeting. "You're ready now," he said. "I've something to show you."

"What?"

"Physical discipline, something you do for yourself. It'll make it easier on you when things get tough, here or anywhere. You don't have to feel the pain, or the hunger—"

"I can't do that!"

"Nonsense. You worked six hours straight at the terminal today—didn't even break for the noonmeal. You were hungry, but you weren't thinking about it. You can learn not to think about it unless you want to."

Sass grinned at him. "I can't do calculus all the time!"

"No, you can't. But you can reach that same core of yourself, no matter what you think of. Now sit straight, and breathe from down here—" He poked her belly.

It was both harder and easier than she'd expected. Easier to slip into a trancelike state of concentration
on
something—a technique she'd learned at home, she thought, studying while Lunzie and Januk played. Harder to withdraw from the world without that specific focus.

"It's in
you
," Abe insisted. "Down inside yourself, that's where you focus. If it's something outside, math or whatever, they can tear it away. But not what's inside." Sass spent one frustrating session after another feeling around inside her head for something—anything—that felt like what Abe described. "It's not in your head," he kept insisting. "Reach deeper. It's way down." She began to think of it as a center of gravity, and Abe nodded when she told him. "That's closer—use that, if it helps."

When she had that part learned, the next was harder. A simple trance wasn't enough, because all she could do was endure passively. She would need, Abe explained, to be able to exert all her strength at will, even the reserves most people never touched. For a long time she made no progress at all, would gladly have quit, but Abe wouldn't let her.

"You're learning too much in your tech classes," he said soberly. "You're almost an apprentice pilot now—and that's very saleable." Sass stared at him, shocked. She had never thought she might be sold again—sent somewhere else, away from Abe. She had almost begun to feel safe. Abe touched her arm gently. "You see, Sass, why you need this, and need it now. You aren't safe: none of us is. I could be sold tomorrow—would have been before now, if I weren't so useful in several tech specialties. They may keep you until you're a fully qualified pilot, but likely not. There's a good market for young pilot apprentices, in the irregular trade." She knew he meant pirates, and shuddered at the thought of being back on a pirate ship. "Besides," he went on, "there's something more you need to know, that I can't tell you until you can do this right. So get back to work."

When she finally achieved something he called adequate, it wasn't much more than her normal strength, and she exhausted it quickly. But Abe nodded his approval, and had her practice almost daily. Along with that practice came the other information he'd promised.

"There's a kind of network," he said, "of pirate victims. Remembering where they came from, who did it, who lived, and how the others died. We keep thinking that if we can ever put it all together, everything we know, well find out who's behind all this piracy. It's not just independents—although I heard that the ship that took Myriad was an independent, or on the outs with its sponsor. There's evidence of some kind of conspiracy at FSP itself. I don't know what, or I'd kill myself to get that to Fleet somehow, but I know there's evidence. And I couldn't put you in touch with them until you could shield your reactions."

"But who—"

"They call themselves Samizdat—an old word, some language I never heard of, supposed to mean underground or something. Maybe it does, maybe not. That doesn't matter. But the name does, and your keeping it quiet does."

Study, work, practice with Abe. When she thought about it—which she did rarely—it was sort of a parody of the life she'd expected at home on Myriad. School, household chores, the tight companionship of her friends. But flunking a test at home had meant a scolding; here it meant a beating. Let Januk spill precious rationed food—her eyes filled, remembering the sugar that last night—and her mother would expostulate bitterly. But if she spilled a keg of seeds, hauling it to the growing frames, her supervisor would cuff her sharply, and probably dock her a meal. And instead of friends her own age, to gossip about schoolmates and families, to share the jokes and dreams, she had Abe. Time passed, time she could not measure save by the subtle changes in her own body: a little taller, she thought. A little wider of hip, more roundness, even though the slave diet kept her lean.

It finally occurred to her to wonder why they were allowed such freedom, when she realized that other slave friendships were broken up intentionally, by the supervisors. Abe grinned mischievously. "I'm valuable; I told you that. And they think I need a lovely young plaything now and then—"