“Sass.” Cans touched her arm; she reached out and gave Caris a quick hug. Around her, the others of her class had gathered in a tight knot. Even in this, Sassinak recognized the familiar. Since she’d started school, the others had looked to her in a crisis. When Berry fell off the crawler train, when Seh Garvis went crazy and attacked the class with an orecutter, everyone expected Sass to know what to do, and do it. Bossy, her mother had called her, more than once, and her father had agreed, but added that bossy plus tact could be very useful indeed.Tact, she thought. But what could she say now?
“Who’s our triage?” she asked Sinder. He stood back, well away from Sass’s friends.
“Gath” He pointed to a youth who had been cleared for off-planet training - medical school, everyone expected. He’d been senior school medic all four years. “I’m low-code this time.”
Sass nodded, gave him a smile he returned uneasily, and checked again on each person’s assignment. If they had nothing to do now, they could be sure they knew what to do when things happened.
All at once a voice blared outside - a loudhailer, Sass realized, with the speakers distorting the Neo-Gaesh vowels. From this corner of the building, she could pick out only parts of it, but enough to finish off the last bit of her confidence.
“… surrender… will blow… resistance… guns…”
The adults responded with a growl of defiance that covered the loudhailer’s next statements. But Sass could hear something else, a clattering that sounded much like a crawler train, only different somehow. Then a hole appeared in the wall opposite her, as if someone had drawn it on paper and then ripped the center from the circle. She had never known that walls could be so fragile; she had felt so much safer inside. And now she realized that all together inside this building was the very last place anyone should be. Her shoulders felt hot, as if she’d stood in the summer sunlight too long, and she whirled to see the same kind of mark appearing on the wall behind her.
Later, when she had the training to analyse such situations, she knew that everything would have happened in seconds: from the breaching of the wall to the futile resistance of the adults, pitting third-rate projectile weapons against the pirates’ stolen armament and much greater skill, to the final capture of the survivors, groggy from the gas grenades the pirates tossed in the building. But at the time, her mind seemed to race faster than time itself, so that she saw, as in a dream, her father swing his weapon to face the armored assault pod that burst through the wall itself. She saw a line of light touch his arm, and his weapon fell with the severed limb. Her mother caught him as he staggered, and they both charged. So did others. A swarm of adults tried to overwhelm the pod with sheer numbers, even as they died, but not before Sass saw what had halted it: her parents had thrown themselves into the tracks to jam them.
And it was not enough. If all the colonists had been there, maybe. But another assault pod followed the first, and another. Sass, screaming like the rest, charged at it, expecting every instant to be killed. Instead, the pods split open, and the troops rolled out, safe in their body armor from the blows and kicks the children could deliver. Then they tossed the gas grenades, and Sass could not breathe. Choking, she slid to the floor along with the rest.
She woke to a worse nightmare. Daylight, dusty and cold, came through the hole in the wall. She was nauseated and her head ached. When she tried to roll over and retch, something choked her, tightening around her throat. A thin collar around her neck, attached to another on either side by a thin cord of what looked like plastic. Sass gagged, terrified. Someone’s boot appeared before her face, and bumped her, hard.
“Quit that.”
Sassinak held utterly still. That voice had no softness in it, nothing but contempt, and she knew, without even looking up, what she would see. Around her, others stirred; she tried to see, without moving, who they were. Crumpled bodies, all sizes; some moved and some didn’t. She heard boots clump on the floor, coming closer, and tried not to shiver.
“Ready?” asked someone.
“These’re awake,” said someone else. She thought that was the same voice that had told her to quit moving.
“Get’m up, clear this out, and start loading.” One set of boots clumped off, the other reappeared in her vision, and a sharp nudge in the ribs made her gasp.
“You eight: get up.” Sass tried to move, but found herself stiff and clumsy, and far more impeded by a collar and line than she would have thought. This sort of thing never bothered Carin Coldae, who had once captured a pirate ship by herself. The others in her eight had as much trouble; they staggered into each other, jerking each others’ collars helplessly. The pirate, now that she was standing and could see clearly, simply stood there, face invisible behind the body armor’s faceplate. She had no idea how big he really was - or even if it might be a woman.
Her gaze wandered. Across the Center, another link of eight struggled up; she saw another already moving under a pirate’s direction. A thump in the ribs brought her head around…
“Pay attention! The eight of you are a link; your number is 15. If anyone gives an order for link 15, that’s you, and you’d better be sharp about it. You -” the hard black nose of some weapon Sass couldn’t name prodded her ribs, already sore. “You’re the link leader. Your link gets into trouble, it’s your fault. You get punished. Understand?”
Sass nodded. The weapon prodded harder. “You say ‘Yessir’ when you’re asked something!”
She wanted to scream defiance, as Carin Coldae would have done, but heard herself saying “Yessir” - in Standard, no less - instead.
Down the line, the boy on the end said, “I’m thirsty.” The weapon swung toward him, as the pirate said, “You’re a slave now. You’re not thirsty until I say you’re thirsty.” Then the pirate swung the weapon back at Sass, a blow she didn’t realize was coming until it staggered her. “Your link’s disobedient, 15. Your fault.” He waited until she caught her breath, then went on with his instructions. Sass heard the smack of a blow, and a wail of pain, across the building, but didn’t look around. “You carry the dead out. Pile ‘em on the crawler train outside. You work fast enough, hard enough, you might get water later.”
They worked fast enough and hard enough, Sass thought later. Her link of eight were all middle-school age, and they all knew her although only one of them was in her class. It was clear that they didn’t want to get her into trouble. With her side making every breath painful, she didn’t want trouble right then either. But dragging the dead bodies out, over the blood and mess on the floor… people she had known, but could recognize now only by the yellow skirt that Cefa always wore, the bronze medallion on Torry’s wrist… that was worse than anything she’d imagined. Four or five links, by then, were working on the same thing. Later she realized that the pirates had killed the wounded: later yet she would learn that the same thing had happened all over The City, at other Centers.
When the building was clear of dead, her link and two others were loaded on the crawler train as well; pirates drove it, and sat on the piled corpses - as if they’d been pillows, she thought furiously - to guard the children riding behind. Sass knew they would kill them, wondered why they’d waited this long. The crawler train clanked and rumbled along, turning down the lane to the fisheries research station where Caris had hoped to work. All its windows were broken, the door smashed in. Sass hadn’t seen Caris all day, but she hadn’t dared look around much, either. Nor had she seen Lunzie or Januk.
The crawler train rumbled to the end of the lane, near the pier. And there the children had to unload the bodies, drag them out on the pier, and throw them in the restless alien ocean. It was hard to maneuver on the pier; the links tended to tangle. The pirate guards hit anyone they could reach, forcing them to hurry, keep moving, keep working.