The computer’s override warning buzz woke him again. The ship was much closer, just over the horizon, low, coming in on a landing pattern… and it was red-flagged. Pirate! he thought muzzily. It’s a pirate. It can’t be… but the computer, not fooled, and not having been stopped by the override sequence he was too drunk to key in, turned on full alarms, all over the building and the city. And the speech synthesiser, in a warm, friendly, calm female voice, said, “Attention. Attention. Vessel approaching has been identified as dangerous. Attention. Attention…”
But by then it was far too late.
Sassinak and Cans had eaten the last of the overbrowned cookies, and were well into the kind of long-after-midnight conversation they preferred. Lunzie grunted and tossed on her pallet; Januk sprawled bonelessly on his, looking, as Cans said, like something tossed up from the sea. “Little kids aren’t human,” said Sass, winding a strand of dark hair around her finger. “They’re all alien, shapechangers like those Wefts you read about, and then turn human at -” She thought a moment. “Eleven or so.”
“Eleven! You were eleven last year; I was. I was human…”
“Ha.” Sass grinned, and watched Cans. “I wasn’t human. I was special. Different -”
“You’ve always been different.” Cans rolled away from Sass’s slap. “Don’t hit me; you know it. You like it. You would be alien if you could.”
“I would be off this planet if I could,” said Sass, serious for a moment. “Eight more years before I can even apply - aggh!”
“To do what?”
“Anything. No, not anything. Something -” her hands waved, describing arcs and whorls of excitement, adventure, marvels in the vast and mysterious distance of time and space.
“Umm. I’ll take biotech training and a lifetime spent figuring out how to insert genes for correctly handed proteins in our native fishlife.” Caris wrinkled her nose. “You’re not going to leave, Sass. This is the frontier. This is where the excitement is. Right here.”
“Eatingfish? Eating lifeforms?”
Caris shrugged. “I’m not devout. Those fins in the ocean aren’t sentient, we know that much, and they could give us cheap, easy protein. Personally, I’m tired of gruel and beans, and since we have to fiddle with their genes, too, why not fishlife?”
Sassinak gave her a long look. True, lots of the frontier settlers weren’t devout, and didn’t find anything but a burdensome rule in the FSP strictures about eating meat. But she herself - she shivered a little, thinking of a finny wriggling in her throat. Something wailed, in the distance, and she shivered again. Then the houselights brightened and dimmed abruptly.
“Storm?” asked Caris. The lights blinked, now quickly, now slow. From the terminal in the other room came an odd sort of voice, something Sass had never heard before.
“Attention. Attention…”
The girls stared at each other, shocked for an endless instant into complete stillness. Then Caris leaped for the door, and Sass caught her arm.
“Wait - help me get Lunzie and Januk!”
The younger children were hard to wake, and cranky once roused. Januk demanded “mybig jar” and Lunzie couldn’t find her shoes. Sass, mind racing, dared to use the combination her father had once shown her, and opened her parents’ sealed closet.
“What are youdoing?” asked Caris, now by the door again with the other two. Her eyes widened as Sass pulled down the zipped cases: the military-issue projectile weapons issued to each adult colonist, and the lumpy, awkward part of a larger weapon which should - if they had time - mate with those from adjoining apartments to make something more effective.
Lunzie could just carry one of the long, narrow cases; Sass had to use both arms on the big one, and Caris took the other narrow one, along with Januk’s hand. “We should stop at my place,” Caris said, but when they got outside, they could see the red and blue lines crossing the sky. A white flare, at a distance. “That was the Spaceport offices,” said Caris, still calm.
Other shapes moved in the darkness, converging on the Block Recreation Center; Sass recognized two class-mates, both carrying weapons, and one trailing a string of smaller children. They made it to the Block Recreation Center just as adults came boiling out, most unsteady on their feet, and all cursing.
“Sassinak! Bless you - you remembered!” Her father, suddenly looking larger and more dangerous than she had thought for the last year or so, grabbed Lunzie’s load and stripped off the green cover. Sass had seen such weapons in class videos; now she watched him strip and load it, hardly aware that her mother had taken the weapon Caris carried. Someone she didn’t know yelled for a “PC-8base, dammit!” and Sass’s father said, without even looking at her, “Go, Sassy! That’s your load!” She carried it across the huge single room of the Center to the cluster of adults assembling some larger weapons, and they snatched it, stripped off the cover, set it down near the door, and began attaching other pieces. An older woman grabbed her arm and demanded, “Class?”
“Six.”
“You’ve had aid class?” When Sass nodded, the woman said “Good - then get over here.”Here was on the far side of the Center, out of sight of her family, but with a crowd of middle school children, all busily laying out an infirmary area, just like in the teaching tapes.
The Center stank of whiskey fumes, of smoke, of too many bodies, of fear. Children’s shrill voices rose above the adults’ talking; babies wailed or shrieked. Sass wondered if the ship was down, that pirate ship. How many pirates would there be? What kinds of weapons would they have? What did pirates want, and what did they do? Maybe - for an instant she almost believed this thought - maybe it was just a drill, more realistic than the quarterly drills she’d grown up with, but not real. Perhaps a Fleet ship had chosen to frighten them, just to encourage more frequent practice with the weapons, and the first thing they’d see was a Fleet officer.
She felt more than heard the first concussive explosion, and that hope died. Whoever was out there was hostile. Everything the tapes had said or she’d overheard the adults say about pirates ran through her mind. Colonies disappeared, on some worlds, or survived gutted of needed equipment and supplies, with half their population gone to slavers. Ships taken even during FTL travel, when according to theory no one could say where they were.
Waiting there, unarmed, she realized that the thrice-weekly class in self-defense was going to do her no good at all. If the pirates had bigger guns, if they had weapons better than projectiles, she was going to die… or be captured.