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. “Spirit!” I cried, throwing myself flat 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. Surely 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.
CHAPTER 19
THE FINAL RAID
Spirit eyed me speculatively one day. “Hope, you’re getting too old.”
“Old?” What was she up to now?
“You’re thinking about starting a beard.”
Oh. “Men do, you know.” I ran my finger along my chin, but there really wasn’t anything there.
“What if the pirates come again, to slay the men?”
She had a point. If women were subject to rape, men were subject to murder. It was best to remain young. I fetched some depilatory from the diverse supplies that remained and went over my face, rendering it fully boyish again.
“That’s not enough,” she said. “All they want is girls.”
“To rape!” I exclaimed.
“You should be safe from that.”
Startled, and not entirely pleased for a reason I could not define, I had to agree. It might indeed be smart for me to learn to masquerade as a girl, just as it had been useful for Helse to masquerade as a boy. If pirates came and blazed away at males and spared the girls, this could give me my only chance to survive long enough to blaze back at them. We would all have lasers ready next time, of course; still, we had so often been betrayed by circumstance that we had to consider any possible advantage that might be available.
Spirit got to work happily. She had a marvelous ability to invest her whole attention in immediacies, bypassing the horrors that tormented my more reflective mind. She found a dress my size and made me change into it, while the other children offered enthusiastic suggestions. I even had to put on pantyhose to cover my hairy legs, and don girlish slippers. Naturally the brats fitted me with a padded brassiere to make my front look right, giggling fiendishly.
I had become the entertainment of the hour. They brushed out my hair, which had grown longer in the past month, and they tied a pretty red ribbon in it, and instructed me in girlish nuances of expression and stance. I was surprised by the amount the little girls knew about this sort of thing; evidently they took their sex roles seriously from an early age. I was not really enjoying any of this, but they found it hilarious. Still, it would be pointless for me ever to attempt such a masquerade before pirates unless I had it down pat, so I did work at it, trying to satisfy the piercing cynosure of the children. When they began to nod approval, I knew I was getting better.
Spirit insisted on making it more of an ordeal. She donned male clothing and postured before me in a gross parody of masculinity. Her ravaged face did help. “I am your brother!” she declaimed. “I am here to stop you from getting raped, unless you really want to be. Say ‘sir’ to me, sister!” The other kids laughed as if that were the humor of the century. Was this really the way the typical male came across to the opposite sex?
“Ship ahoy!” the lookout cried.
That would have to happen at the time I was ludicrously garbed! Just when we thought we were free of pirates, well off the ecliptic, another came!
I rushed for my space suit, not sparing time to change; every moment might count. Spirit did likewise—but of course she didn’t mind her garb the way I did mine. It was awful for me, cramming the damned dress into the legs of the suit. Spirit had it easy; male clothes are designed for space suits, or vice versa. In this respect it really is a male universe.
The other kids hesitated, then decided to go for their suits too. They were alive now only because they had been lucky enough to avoid the pirates and get their suits on in time; they didn’t want to gamble that way again. But that left us without any innocents to test the intruders. We all had laser pistols now, so the innocents could attack with much better effect, but still we all lacked confidence in that. So it was to be suits for all. A few children in a bubble—the suits would not be too surprising. Bubbles didn’t leak, but some people worried that they did. Then the innocents could simply slam their helmets on, if we had to go the vacuum route.
I stationed myself near the rear air lock, and Spirit joined me, while the others scrambled. We two were the fastest, because we had drilled specifically for this, many times; our suits were hung right by the air lock, supported so that we could almost literally dive into them feet first. We had everything tight except our helmets. My slippered feet tended to slip around in the big suit-feet, though, and I hated the way my skirt wadded up around my middle.
“You sure look cute, sister, in your suit and ribbon,” Spirit teased me.
I put my hand to my head to remove the damned thing, but my suit gauntlets were clumsy.
There was a crash. The entire bubble shook, almost knocking us off our feet. “They crashed into us!” I exclaimed, shaken in two senses.
There was another crash, worse than the first. “No—they’re shooting at us!” Spirit screamed. Then she jammed her helmet over her head.
I followed her example. The automatic seal operated and the suit’s air puffed on.
The third shot punctured the hull on the side of the bubble opposite us. The air sucked out with gale force. I couldn’t see the puncture, but knew its nature from the direction of the rush of air.
Spirit and I were drawn along with it, but we were farthest from the leak and were affected least. I grabbed the netting above the Commons as I flew by, and Spirit did the same. She had had prior experience with explosive decompression; I had not, since I had been out on the hull before.
The opening was small, for bubble-hulls are tough, designed to withstand pebble-meteorites and to self-seal to some extent. But of course space artillery is designed to penetrate exactly such hulls. The shell had formed a tube that let the air out; it took about thirty seconds, with diminishing intensity as the pressure dropped.
Spirit and I survived it—but I realized that the other children probably had not. They had required more time to suit up, and their reactions were less certain. They might have paused in surprise, listening to the collisions of the shells against our hull—and that would have been fatal. Once again we had been betrayed by the unexpected.
I looked at Spirit through our helmets. Why had the pirates done it? To hole a bubble—that was the deliberate murder of all within. No rape of women or kidnapping of children was possible.
Now the pirate ship docked against our air lock and the men used it, keeping their ship sealed. Suited men appeared and began checking around inside our wasted hulk. It seemed that all they wanted was salvage.
What should we do now? If the pirates saw us, they would surely kill us. But we couldn’t remain in the holed bubble long; it was now useless. We had no way to repair such a leak, assuming the pirates left us any food or life support equipment when they finished. We seemed to have a choice between a fast death and a slow one.
Spirit had the answer. She handed herself to a rent in the net and took hold of an armful of food containers. She meant to pretend to be a looter!
Would it work? It might. Our suits were standard, similar to those of the pirates; in the confusion of looting, we might manage to get aboard the ship. After that—well, first things first.
I took an armful of food packs, enough to cover my face panel somewhat, and followed Spirit down to the air lock. I really didn’t know whether this would work, but didn’t see any alternative.
We came to the lock, and the pirate there waved us on in. He closed the lock behind us, and we stepped into the pirate ship.
It took me a moment to realize what was strange. This was very like the bubble, in this section: just a chamber for access. We had explored a ship before, when we cleaned out the pirates with our vacuum, so this was reasonably familiar, but this present one was a larger and probably better ship. We floated through the chamber and down a short hall, toting our burdens. Then we came to something different.
The vacuumed ship had docked nose-on, so that its spin matched the bubble’s spin and the whole thing had been like one extended passage from our lock. Indeed, in t
he case of the Horse’s ship, our drive jet had fired right down its throat, the length of the ship. But this present ship had docked at the center, so its nose and tail sections were projecting to either side, and it was spinning around endwise to match the bubble’s rotation. It was always easier for a ship to match rotations, since it would have taken energy to stop the bubble’s spin, not worth it for a temporary connection. Here, it is best to make a set of diagrams:
I have drawn a center line to show the axis of rotation in each case. As should be clear, the two modes of docking lead to quite different dynamics within the ship. Actually, the rate of rotations does not have to match, as the airlocks have a built-in slip mechanism that allows opposite rotations of bubble and ship. But what would be the point? Certainly it was impossible for the ship to maintain a long-axis spin while connected to the bubble, so it had either to go to no spin, meaning null-gee, or to rotate end over end, as it was doing.
This seemed unnecessarily clumsy. My mind cast about for the rationale. Could it be that these particular pirates were accustomed to difficult maneuvers in space, and performed them routinely? That would imply a really professional crew, more like a military unit than a motley collection of malcontents. Their completely callous holing of our bubble implied the same. We were up against no-nonsense raiders this time—probably a ship that deserted from a planetary navy.
And there was the explanation for the maneuver: This ship had not docked at the nose because it couldn’t! It had a projectile cannon mounted in the nose instead of an air lock. No other pirate ship had fired at us, because such military hardware could not be mounted on ordinary space vessels; they had to be designed for it. A projectile cannon attached to the side of the hull of a spinning ship would be virtually useless, and would severely shake the ship when it fired; it had to be on the axis line, so it could be fired without affecting either the spin or the balance of the ship. Since boarding became so awkward, no chances were taken; the victim was rendered completely helpless before the approach was made. This was like a pirate with one arm, afraid the girl might resist and hurt him, so he shoots her just before he rapes her.