by John F. Carr
“What do you call this?”
“A real pain in the ass.” She took the drug anyhow and fed it to her patient, “Now swallow, or I’ll rub it down your throat like I would a dog,” she threatened, but her hands were gentle.
Nina obeyed. Wyn wasn’t surprised at that or when the strong sedative hit her like a sandbag at the base of the skull.
Wyn looked up at the people who stood between Nina and the men searching for her. “You have to stand up to them,” she told them. “This time it’s her. Next time, who’s it going to be? You? You? The little boy over there?”
“You think you can take care of your own family?” the other woman asked to mutters of “puta” and other words Wyn didn’t catch. “When they have stunners, and you have what? Good hearts? Better you should have brains.”
“We have to work together,” Wyn repeated. “Make a start now. Even trusties have to sleep sometime, and they know it. And if there’s a riot, they won’t be trusties for long.”
That drew feral grins from the men standing about. As if glad to turn their attention away from the girl now dozing on the deck, they formed a ring about her, their wives, their daughters, and the three women in the center.
A stir in the crowd announced the arrival of CD Marines, the bells of their weapons shining as they were pointed in Wyn’s direction. In their center marched a midshipman, barely old enough for his freshman year, but a man and an officer already.
“What’s going on here?”
The group opened up, looking at Wyn. I won’t speak from my knees like some wretched Hecuba! But already, she had learned wisdom: she held her hands away from her body and rose, carefully.
“This young woman was raped by two of your…two of the trusties,” Wyn said. “They followed her in here. She claims they, spaced someone…”
“My father!” wailed the girl, much to everyone’s surprise.
A fierce scuffle broke out too close to where they stood. “I’ll get you all, you bastards!” someone shouted thickly, as if he spoke through a mouthful of blood and teeth. The midshipman gestured, and two Marines fanned out. Shortly thereafter, the whine of a sonic stunner made her flinch.
A freshman would have blushed and looked down: not this young officer. He took names, numbers, what details he could extract from Nina, to whom he spoke with such detachment that the girl could reply without sobbing. Then he turned away.
“Sir!” Wyn called at his back. He pivoted and faced her, impatient, but polite about it.
“What will be done now?”
“I’ll have them in a pen before they’re an hour older,” he said. She could see the “Why am I bothering to answer her?” take shape on his face and pressed in with her next question fast.
“And the girl? She needs medical attention.”
He shook his head. “Ma’am”—the title slipped out—”this isn’t a passenger liner.”
She held her eyes and raised a brow. He had the grace to flush. Behind her came fearful murmurs, and she looked away. What if he checks my records? God only knows what sort of thing my brother’s put into my files.
Deliberately, she let her shoulders sag, lowered her head, just like most of the other women present. One of the crowd. Just another convict. Don’t notice me. Please.
His eyes went back, the interest, the respect extinguished. Then he was gone. The pen doors slammed shut.
“We made ourselves some enemies,” a man said. “We better stick together and watch out.”
There were nods all around. A few men patted each other’s shoulders, then turned, reassuringly to their families. The women murmured agreement.
“Hoo-boy, that does it!” announced…? Wyn looked in vain for a name on the woman’s coverall. She looks like a pro, Wyn thought.
“First time decent family types have done more than spit at me. Usually, they throw out the loners. This might not be so bad. Well, I always was up for new experiences.”
Wyn raised an eyebrow and gestured. The woman laughed extravagantly.
“Well, not this, exactly, honey. You political?”
Wyn nodded, mildly shocked. She had supposed that prisoners would consider it…well, ill-mannered to discuss how they came to be on board one of the BuReloc vessels.
“Lady, aren’t you? From back East.”
“Boston.” Her voice almost broke on the name. “I’m Winth—”
“Don’t have to give me your name. ‘Boston’ will do fine. Call me Ellie. You get in wrong with some political stiff?”
“My brother.”
“If it’s not money, it’s men. I’ve seen enough of both in my life.”
The pause drew out, and Wyn knew she was supposed to ask about the person she was talking to. She thought she could guess. The silence grew demanding.
“What about you?” Wyn asked.
The woman sat back on her heels and laughed. “Boston, honey, you wouldn’t believe it, but I’m a political too. Didn’t pay taxes on my…if you want to be nice, we can call it an escort service.” She wiped at her eyes. “Tax evasion! I’ve been pushing it, or watching my girls for twenty years, and they get me on lousy tax evasion.”
To her surprise, Wyn laughed too. At Ellie and at herself, all New England righteousness companionably chatting with a madam. Ellie watched her narrowly.
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “Even here, you’re a lady and I’m…well, what am I?”
“Brave, I’d say,” Wyn retorted. “Besides, it’s happened in the best of families.” Hadn’t one of the Philadelphia Biddles made a vulgar stir and dined out on it for years?
Again, Ellie laughed. “Boston, you kill me, you really do.”
“God, I hope not, Ellie,” Wyn found herself saying. “You’re the first person I’ve met since the world caved in on me who hasn’t bored or scared me to death.”
“Shake on it?” asked the ex-madam. “It’s not like I’m asking you to work for me, you know. I mean, you do know?”
Wyn laughed again and held out her hand for a brief handshake that Ellie broke off to warn Wyn about not showing off whatever it was she had in “that tacky green bag.”
Wyn never learned the name of the ship. Once it had been a CoDominium vessel—the Gdansk, she thought from seeing the name stenciled on a bulkhead. Now, decommissioned, turned over to BuReloc, it might as well be called the Botany Bay. Or, she thought, the ship of fools.
The days turned into a litany of grumbles. “Clean” became a myth; Wyn looked back even to visits to Welfare Islands as trips into a vanished Eden. Even the rickety bunks were scarce; the younger men traded shifts, so that the narrow beds, in stacks of four, were always in use. That provoked a rude snort from Ellie that Wyn ignored. A few people showed signs of gambling away bunk time: A meeting of the people in their bay stopped that and instituted a schedule of regular cleanings for their deck and for the inadequate refreshers that served them and, for all they knew, half the other convicts. After all, you couldn’t expect Marines to clean up after prisoners.
It was like, Ellie announced one day, perpetually having cramps and PMS—and you didn’t even dare scream or throw things. Not even Nina, who turned thin, silent, and jumpy. Every day Wyn expected her to burst out screaming so the Marines would come and remove her, but she never did.
She didn’t bleed either. In these close quarters, they’d have known if she had. Ellie’s question, too blunt to be embarrassing, brought the answer: the medics had worked on her before she left Earth. Wyn was profoundly relieved.
What the women did who had not inhibited their fertility, Wyn didn’t want to think of. She struggled against a claustrophobia that threatened to drive her frantic. Given no space and no activity and the bulky starches of convicts rations, she felt herself sagging. Even the isometrics she began to work at with almost a religious fervor brought her little relief.
Day after day, the ship sped toward Jupiter. Day upon day was a nightmare of heavy gravity, bearing down upon the rickety welded bunks until, one shi
p’s “night”, some buckled, trapping a family beneath them.
The bunks were cut away, and Wyn tried not to retch at the stink of burning flesh when someone was less careful about the cutting than he might have been. Then the people beneath them were taken away, too.
She never saw them again. And when she tried to ask a Marine, Ellie—whom Wyn had privately considered nerveless—flashed her a glance of such fear that she shut up. When a few men slipped out on work assignments about the ship and returned with steel pipe to reinforce the bunks, she helped them conceal it from the Marines.
From the one broadcast Wyn had watched years before while recovering from the flu, she knew that Alderson Jumps were instantaneous; transits from point to point were what occupied the days and weeks and months a ship actually spent going from one star to another. They had not yet left Earth’s system, and Haven was more than a year away. Wyn wondered how she would stay sane that long.
At the orbit of Jupiter, the ship paused. After a nightmarish interval in which the low spin gravity failed as the ship took on fuel from the immense scoopship tankers waiting nearby—as “near” was reckoned in space. She knew that they had reached the point of the Alderson Jump when the alarms howled. People had time to scream once before everything blurred and stayed blurred for a long time.
After a featureless eternity of first lying on the bunks or the bulkheads, then of sitting staring at scratched, dirty hands, Wyn forced herself to move.
“At least with a hangover you can throw up,” Ellie moaned.
There were people all about them who had not reached the sitting, staring or moaning stage. Some never would. Later that day, CoDo Marines herded trusties in to remove the bodies before people started to panic.
Thereafter, bunks were not at all scarce in Wyn’s bay.
The broadcast Wyn had seen on BuReloc showed men and women going earnestly about the business of rehabilitating themselves and making themselves fit colonists. She wondered who dreamed that one up.
She thought she could understand the convicts who suddenly began screaming and hurling themselves against the bulkheads. Certainly, she could understand the man whose wife died and who, next time the call came for work crews, went out and never came back. Either he’d run wild or—and Wyn hoped this—he’d seized the chance to enlist in the CD forces.
The filth, the uncertainty, the threats of violence, even the “days” and “nights” that passed, perceptible only by a diminution of the light from scarred panels mused her first into fury, then into a frenzy that she could not express. The woman in the bunk beside hers had foul breath; Wyn lay awake one night plotting how to suffocate her.
Ostensibly, a prison ship was just that—bare bones. In actuality, if you had money or valuables, you could buy almost anything…or anyone. Mindful of Dr. Ryan’s advice and Ellie’s street smarts, Wyn guarded what was in her book bag, doling it out to the men on work crews to trade for medicinals, even an occasional treasure of food or drink, anything that would make her life and the lives around her a little less bleak.
She tried to rough out articles she’d never write, even a chapter of the book she had started before her arrest. But she would forget critical words in the Greek texts she had known by heart since she was a girl and, overpowered by the confinement, the stink and the hopelessness, her arguments raveled and faded into apathy. She began to think she had enough tranks left, perhaps, to kill herself: better so, perhaps.
“You think you’re fooling me, Boston?” Ellie asked. “I’ve seen it when a girl gets like you. She’s thinking of cashing in. And you know what I tell her?”
Let the old whore babble, Wyn thought. Maybe it would tire her out and she’d let everyone alone.
“I tell her to live long enough to spit on the bastards’ graves, that’s what I tell her. And what I’m telling you. You’ve done good here. We got a kind of law in this bay, and we all know it’s you. If you check out, what’s that mean to everyone else?”
Wyn raised a heavy eyelid. “What makes you think I care?” she asked.
“Boston, you’re full of shit. ’Course you care. You got ‘good citizen’ all over you.”
Wyn glanced down at herself. She had gotten very thin in the past months; that happened when you gave away your rations most of the time. “What I have written all over me is dirt,” she snapped.
“Then clean up your act, will you? Thin as you are, how you going to survive the next Jump? And you got some graves to spit on, remember?”
“That’s a long way back,” Wyn objected.
“Then, you’re going to have to be in shape to make the trip.”
There was no way back. Wyn had known that in her bones from the time she had boarded. But Ellie’s mouth wobbled, and she—My God! She was even crying. No one had ever cried over Wyn before. And now that she thought of it, she realized how quiet it was around where she lay, as parents kept their children quiet around her, hoping she would make the turn away from despair and back to them.
Wyn sighed and levered herself up. It seemed about a light year to the head, where she traded a gold pen for the chance to take a brief, blessedly hot shower. Thanks to a man released from cleaning detail, she had ship’s chow from the CD galley and ate it with more appetite than she’d had for weeks. It gave her the strength to stomach ordinary rations the next day and all the days afterward. As soon as she could walk about the bay without staggering, she forced herself to do isometrics and to increase the time she spent exercising in the days that passed.
Another Jump, and she survived it. Now, she found herself restless, as she had in her first days on board. After prowling about the bay so often that people were heartily sick of it, she hacked her hair short and volunteered for cleanup duty.
It wasn’t as if women were exempt from “volunteering.” Usually, the Marines recruited female convicts for galley work or for cleanup in a place where they needed someone small, with a lower center of gravity. What else the women did in some cases was a matter of rumors—plus, what Wyn personally considered the fairy tales of Marines and even officers falling for a particularly pretty girl.
With her hair cut short, scrawny as she was, her face pallid from long confinement, Wyn didn’t think she was a sight to break the heart of some hapless CoDo officer, while midshipmen were a whole lot likelier to run the other way.
It was a relief to leave the bay, to thread through corridors and passageways she hadn’t seen, but that she marked in the too-keen scholar’s memory that even despair hadn’t taken from her. The bite of antiseptics came as a positive pleasure and so did the warmish water and watching the grimy bulkhead gleam beneath her scrubbing hands.
She grinned at the other woman and the men of her crew. As they scrubbed, they spread out, glad of the chance for at least the appearance of privacy. What a wonder it was not to have ten people crowded around you! Even the Marines seemed to have disappeared. No doubt they’d decided that a middle-aged woman was a damned unlikely candidate for running amok or storming the bridge.
She was kneeling on the deck, rubbing away at a particularly tough smudge when a kick from a boot sent her sprawling.
“Can’t believe my luck!” came a voice Wyn had last heard thickened by blood after he’d been punched.
She levered herself up from the deck, murder in her eye, and the boot kicked her flat again.
Where had she seen that face before? Above a coverall…smeared with blood. That was it. He’d been a trusty, one of the men who’d spaced Nina’s father and raped her.
Pretend you don’t recognize him. Lie your way out, she told herself.
“I said I’d get ya. Never thought I’d find you alone though, and on your knees. Good place for you.”
Wyn glanced down the hall. To think that a moment earlier, she’d been glad the Marines were nowhere in sight. She drew her breath for the loudest scream of her life, but the man pounced forward. A needle-thin knife flashed before her eyes as he grabbed her coverall with his other hand. The
wet, flimsy, fabric ripped, and Wyn gasped.
“Quiet, bitch! You’re coming with me.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
“Getting some of my own back. You cost me a soft berth. Now you owe me, gotta make it up to me.”
“That’s stupid. You were breaking the law,” she snapped. “What good does this do?”
“Good? Because I can. Like I could with the girl.”
Adrenaline washed through Wyn. “Look at the man,” she mocked. “Too bad they didn’t space you, too.”
He backhanded her and she spat blood at him as he dragged her down the corridor.
Wyn struggled, trying to stamp on his instep, trying to bite the hand that held her, to pull free so that she could scream and run, but always, there was the knife in front of her face. It wasn’t death she feared, nor being cut, it was her eyes! What if he blinded her! The fear made her tense her muscles so her bladder wouldn’t give way.
A port was coming up, and he shoved it open onto what was little more than a closet. Long enough, Wyn found, for her to fall full length onto the deck, and for him to fall upon her. He barely kicked the door closed.
His breath was foul. If he—God, if he even tried to kiss her, she was sure she’d vomit in his face; and then he’d kill her. She hoped. In the end, that was about all he didn’t try.
The strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must. She told herself in an attempt to achieve distance from the spasms and grunts on top of her, the pain as he thrust into her unprepared and wholly unwilling body. She would not be weak. She would refuse weakness. Her hands balled into fists and she struck his back, brought up her knees (regretting that for the leverage it gave him), then trying to buck him off her body.
He was on his knees in front of her face all too soon thereafter, his knife in one hand in case she had any ideas about biting him where it would do the most harm. When he pulled out, she spat at him.
He slapped her, then rolled her onto her belly. Beware of Greeks, some fragment of Wyn’s mind gibbered at her. This could do real damage, if he didn’t kill her when he was finished. He’d have to kill her; she had seen him, and he had to know she wouldn’t hesitate to report him. She heard something clang on the deck and felt her legs forced apart. Despite the horror, the metallic sound registered. He was using both of his hands. He had dropped the knife.