“Pilots don’t mingle,” Fersi warned her, when she would have sought more interaction with the ship’s crew. “Captain’s due respect, but the rest of ‘em are no more spacers than rock is a miner. They’d do the same work groundside: fight or clean or cook or run machinery or whatever. Pilots are the old guild, the first spacers; you’re lucky they trained you to that.”
History, from the point of view of the pilots, was nothing like she’d learned back on Myriad. No grand pattern of human exploration, meetings with alien races, the formation of alliances and then the Federation of Sentient Planets. Instead, she heard a litany of names that ran back to Old Terra, stories with all the details worn away by time. Lindberg, the Red Baron, Bader, Gunn - names from before spaceflight, they said, all warriors of the sky in some ancient battle, from which none returned. Heinlein and Clarke and Glenn and Aldridge, from the early days in space… all the way up to Ankwir, who had just opened a new route halfway across the galaxy, cutting the flux margin below.001.
If she had not missed Abe so much, she might almost have been happy. Ship food that the others complained about she found ample and delicious. She had plenty to learn, and teachers eager to instruct. The pilots had long ago told each other their timeworn stories. But long before she forgot Abe and the slave depot, the raid came.
She was asleep in her webbing when the alarm sounded. The ship trembled around her; beneath her bare feet the deck had the odd uncertain feel that came with transition from one major drive to another.
“Sass! Get in here!” That was Krewe, loud enough to be heard over the racket of the alarm. Sass staggered a little, working her way around to her usual seat. Fersi was already there, intent on the screen. Krewe saw her and pointed to the number two position. “It’s not gonna do any good, but we might as well try…”
Sass flicked the screen to life, and tried to make sense of the display. Something had snatched them out of FTL space, and dumped them into a blank between solar systems. And something with considerably more mass was far too close behind.
“Fleet heavy cruiser,” said Krewe shortly. “Picked us up awhile back, and set a trap-”
“What?” Sass had had no idea that anything could find, let alone capture, a ship in FTL.
He shrugged, hands busy on his board. “Fleet has some new tricks, I guess. And we’re about out. Here -” He tossed a strip of embossed plastic over to her. “Stick that in your board, there on the side, when I say.”
Sass looked at it curiously: about a finger long, and half that wide, it looked like no data storage device she’d seen. She found the slot it would fit, and waited. Suddenly the captain’s voice came over the intercom.
“Krewe - got anything for me? They’re demanding to board -”
“Maybe. Hang on.” Krewe nodded at Sass, and slid an identical strip into the slot of his board. Sass did the same, as did Fersi. The ship seemed to lurch, as if it had tripped over something, and the lights dimmed. Abruptly Sass realised that she was being pressed into the back of her seat - and as abruptly, the pressure shifted to one side, then the other. Then something made a horrendous noise, all the lights went out, and in the sudden cold dark she heard Krewe cursing steadily.
She woke in a clean bunk in a brightly lit compartment full of quiet bustle. Almost at once she missed a familiar pressure on her neck, and lifted her hand. The slave collar was gone. She glanced around warily.
“Ah… you’re awake.” A man in a clean white uniform, sleeves striped to the elbow with black and gold, came to her. “And I’ll bet you wonder where you are, and what happened, and - do you know what language I’m speaking?”
Sass nodded, too amazed to speak. Fleet. It had to be Fleet. She tried to remember what Abe had told her about stripes on the sleeves; these were wing-shaped, which meant something different from the straight ones.
“Good, then.” The man nodded. “You were a slave, right? Taken in the past few years, I daresay, from your age -”
“How do you know my -”
He grinned. He had a nice grin, warm and friendly. ‘Teeth, among other things. General development.” At this point Sass realised that she had on something clean and soft, a single garment that was certainly not the patched tunic and pants she’d worn on the other ship. “Now - do you remember where you came from?”
“My… my home?” When he nodded, she said, “Myriad.” At his blank look, she gave the standard designation she’d been taught in school, so long ago. He nodded again, and she went on to tell him what had happened to the colony.
“And then?” She told of the original transport, the training she’d received as a slave, and then her work on the ship. He sighed. “I suppose you haven’t the faintest idea where that depot planet is, do you?”
“No. I-” Her eyes fixed suddenly on the insignia he wore on his left breast. It meant something. It meant… Abe’s face came to her suddenly, very earnest, speaking swiftly and in an odd broken rhythm, something she had never quite remembered, but didn’t worry about because some-day- And now was some-day, and she found herself reciting whatever he had said, just as quickly and accurately. The man stared at her.
“You -! You’re too young; you couldn’t -!” But now that it was back out, she knew… knew what knowledge Abe had planted in her (and in how many others, she suddenly wondered, who had been sold away?), hoping that someday, somehow she might catch sight of that insignia (and how had he kept his, hidden it from his owners?) and have the memory wakened. She knew where that planet was, and the FTL course, and the code words that would get a Fleet vessel past the outer sentinel satellites… all the tidbits of knowledge that Abe had gleaned in years of slavery, while he pretended obedience.
Her information set off a whirlwind of activity. She herself was bundled into a litter and carried along spotless gleaming corridors, to be set down at last, with utmost gentleness, in a cabin bunk. A luxurious cabin, its tile floor gentled with a brilliant geometric carpet, several comfortable-looking chairs grouped around a low round table. She heard bells in the distance, the scurry of many feet… and then the door to the cabin closed, and she heard nothing but the faint hiss of air from the ventilators.
In that silence, she fell asleep again, to be wakened by a gentle cough. This time, the white uniform was decorated with gold stripes on the sleeves, straight ones that went all the way around.Rings, she thought vaguely. Four of them. And six little somethings on the shoulders, little silvery blobs. “Stars are tops,” Abe had said, “Stars are admirals. Butanything on the shoulders means officer.”
“The Medical Officer says you’re well enough,” said the person with all that gold and silver. “Can you tell me more about what you remember?” He was tall, thin, grey-haired, and Sass might have been frightened into silence if he hadn’t smiled at her, a fatherly sort of smile.
She nodded, and repeated it all again, this time in a more normal tone.
“And who told you this?” he asked.
“Abe. He… he was Fleet, he said.”
“He must be.” The man nodded. “Well, now. The question is, what do we do with you?”
“This - this is a Fleet ship, isn’t it?”
The man nodded again. “TheBaghir, a heavy cruiser. Let me brief you a little. The ship you were on - know anything about it?” Sass shook her head. “No - they just stuck you in the pilothouse, I’ll bet, and put you to work. Well, it was an independent cargo carrier. Doubles as a slave ship some runs; this time it had maybe twenty young, prime tech-trained slaves and a load of entertainment cubes - if you call that kind of thing entertainment.” He didn’t explain further, and Sass didn’t ask.