Hazel bobbed her head again. The men left, leaving the strange woman alone. Hazel hitched herself across the deck, being careful not to uncover her legs, and retrieved the food sack. She held out a tube of paste concentrate. The woman put her hand in front of her mouth and turned away. Hazel went back to the littles, who were staring at the woman with wide eyes.
"Who she?" asked Brandy, barely breathing the words.
"Shhh," Hazel said.
"No clothes," breathed Stassi.
"Shh." She handed the littles their dolls, and started them on the dancing game she'd devised.
Every word Brun had said to Esmay seemed etched on her skin in acid. Simply a matter of practice, she'd said. Just think of pistons and cylinders, she'd said. Easy . . .
In the silence, in her mind, she apologized again and again, screaming the words she could not say. How could she have been so wrong? So stupid? So arrogant? How could she have thought the universe was set up for her convenience?
Her body ached, raw and sore from waking to sleeping again. They had all used her, over and over, for days . . . how many days she didn't know. Through one cycle, at least, for she had bled heavily. They didn't touch her then, and would not even enter the compartment. Not until she was "clean" again . . . and then it started all over.
When her breasts swelled up, sore to the touch, she winced away from one of them. He stopped. "Slut . . ." he said warningly. Then he prodded her breasts, and moved away. She lay slack, uncaring. If it wasn't hurting right now, that was enough. Another one came . . . the one, she now recognized, who was some kind of medic. He felt her breasts, took her temperature, and sampled her blood. A few minutes later, he grinned.
"You're breeding. Good."
Good? That she was carrying the child of one of these disgusting monsters? He seemed to read her feelings in her face.
"You won't be able to do anything unnatural. If you try, we'll confine you alone. Understand?"
She glared at him, and he slapped her. "You're just pregnant, not injured. You will answer appropriately when I ask you a question. Understand?" Against her will, she nodded. "Get dressed now."
Under his gaze, she fumbled back into the ugly tubelike dress the girl had made for her and tied the tapes that held it closed. She threw the square of cloth that covered her arms around her shoulders. They hadn't figured out yet how to put sleeves in the dress.
"Come along," he said to her, and led her back to the compartment where the girl and the little ones waited. The girl looked at her, then looked away. Brun wasn't sure how old the girl was; she looked very young, perhaps eleven or twelve, but if she'd had an implant to retard puberty, she might be as old as eighteen. If only they could talk—even write notes back and forth . . . But there were no writing materials in the cabin, and the girl refused to talk, looking away when Brun tried to mouth words at her.
Day followed day, unbearable in their sameness. Brun watched the young girl try to quiet and entertain the two little ones, feed them, keep the compartment clean. She was always gentle with the younger girls, always busy in her care for them. The girl accepted Brun's help, but seemed afraid of her. When the girl held out food she had been ordered to give Brun, she looked down or away.
Brun had no way of telling time, except by her body's growth. When she felt the first vague movement that could not be ignored, she burst into tears. After a while, she felt someone patting her head gently, and looked through tear-stuck lashes to see one of the babies—the one the girl called Stassi. The child put her head near Brun's.
"Don' cry," she said very softly. "Don' cry."
"Stassi, no!" That was the older girl, pulling the child away. Brun felt as if she'd been stabbed in a new way. Did the girl think she would hurt the child? Was she to have no one to comfort her? She struggled to hold back the sobs, but couldn't.
To get her mind off herself, she tried to pay more attention to the others, especially the older girl. The girl could not be one of them—not originally. She sewed clumsily, with no real knowledge of how to fit cloth to human shapes. When the men dropped off garments to be mended, Brun could see that they had been made originally with great skill . . . with hand sewing, like the most expensive "folk" imports, the stitches subtly imperfect. Surely a girl of their people would know, by that age, how to do it right. She glanced at the girl, whose brown hair hung down like a curtain to either side of her face. She didn't even know the girl's name . . . the men always called her Girlie, and the little ones Baby.
If the girl weren't one of theirs, where had she come from? No clues now . . . the pullover that formed the top of her dress might have come from anywhere, one of the millions sold in a midprice shop at any spaceport. Spaceport? Had she been snatched off a space station? Or a ship? By the color of her skin and hair—by her features—she could have come from any of a hundred planets, off any of a thousand ships. And yet—she was herself, an individual, just as Brun was. She had a past; she had hoped for a future. Ordinary . . . but very real. Brun found herself imagining a family for the girl, a home . . . wondering if the little ones were her sisters or just other captured children. How did the girl stand it?
Tears choked her again; she clenched her hands to her swelling belly. The girl flashed her a quick look, wary. Then, for the first time, she reached out a hand, and patted Brun's. That did it. Brun cried harder, rocking back and forth.
Some days after boosting the trader on its way,
Shrike
nosed into the spindown military docking collar at Overhold, the larger of the two orbital stations serving Bezaire, as gently as a spider landing on a tree. Esmay carried out the docking sequence under Solis's watchful eye; it was her first docking. Everything went smoothly; Solis nodded as the status lights flicked to green, and then spoke to the Stationmaster. "R.S.S.
Shrike
docked; permission to unseal?"
"Permission to unseal. All personnel leaving ship must be ID'd at the security desk opposite the docking bay."
"Understood, Stationmaster. We anticipate a brief visit, and no station liberty. My quartermaster will be coming out to arrange for some supplies."
"Right,
Shrike
. You do have a hardcopy packet in the tank."
"Thank you, sir." Solis grimaced as he flicked off the screen. "Idiot civilians . . . says that right out on the station com, where anyone with a halfway decent datasuck could get it." He turned to Esmay. "Lieutenant, you'll take the bridge while I'm on station picking up our mail. I anticipate being gone less than an hour. If I'm delayed, I'll call you."
"Sir." Esmay toggled the internal com. "Security escort to the access for the captain, on the double."
"And . . . I think we'll do a practice scan, as well. Nobody's checked Overhold since Hearne was by, and there's no reason to trust her data. You can set that up while I'm gone."
Nothing showed up on the scan by the time Solis returned, and he sent Esmay off to other routine duties. Half a shift later, Chief Arbuthnot came back from the station in a state of annoyance and reported to the cook while Esmay was in the galley inspecting the sink traps.
"They don't have any Arpetan marmalade in, and we need it for the captain's birthday dinner. I always get it here; it's better quality than out of stores at HQ. They say they don't expect any until the Boros circuit ship comes in. You know how fond he is of Arpetan marmalade, especially the green gingered."
"Odd. Wasn't that ship supposed to be in already?" The cook glanced up at a schedule on the bulkhead. "We usually get here a week or so after her."
"Yes, but she's not. They don't sound very worried, though."
Esmay reported that conversation, minus the specifics of a treat for the captain's birthday, to Captain Solis.
"They don't seem concerned . . . interesting. I think perhaps we'll have a word with the Boros shipping agent here."
The Boros agent, a flat-faced woman of middle age, shrugged off Captain Solis's concern.
"You know yourself, Captain, that ships are not always on time. Captain Lund is getting on a bit—this was to be his last circuit—but we are confident in his honesty."
"It's not his honesty I'm questioning, but his luck. What was his percentage of late arrivals?"
"Lund? He's better than ninety-three percent on time, and in the last five years one hundred percent on time."
"Which you define as . . ."
"Within twenty-four hours, dock to dock."
"On all segments?"
"Well . . . let me check." The woman called up a file and peered at it. "Yes, sir. In fact, on the segment ending here, he's often twelve to twenty-four hours early."
"When would you have reported an overdue ship, if we hadn't asked?"
"Company policy is to wait three days . . . seventy-two hours . . . for any run, and add another day for each scheduled ten days. For
Elias Madero
, on this segment, that would come to ten days altogether. And from day before yesterday, when she was due, that's . . . seven days from now."
Captain Solis said nothing on the way back to the ship, but called Esmay into his office as soon as they arrived.
"You see the problem . . . scheduled transit time is seventy-two days, from Corian to Bezaire, dock to dock . . . most of that time spent on insystem drive. If you consider beacon-to-beacon time, she should have been off-scan only sixteen days."
"What's the scan data from Corian?"
"Normal exit from system. The approved course was like this—" Solis pointed it out on the charts. "That makes the scheduled transit fairly tight . . . if the company really schedules things that tight, then it makes sense to allow some overage. But I'd expect someone on this route to be over the alloted time at least thirty percent of the time. And the
Elias Madero
wasn't. Does that tell you anything?"
"They've been using a shortcut," Esmay said promptly. "They'd have to."
"Right. Now we have to figure out where."
"Someone at Boros should know," Esmay said.
"Yes—but if it's an illegal transit, unmapped or something, they may not want to tell us. Tell me, Lieutenant, who would you recommend for a little quiet questioning?"
The crew list ran through Esmay's mind, unmarked by any helpful notes on deviousness; she hadn't been with them long enough to find out. She fell back on tradition. "I would ask Chief Arbuthnot, sir."
"Good answer. Tell him we need someone who would be confused with a shady character, someone who can get answers out of a rock by persuasion."
Chief Arbuthnot knew exactly what Esmay wanted and promised to send "young Darin" out at once. The answer that finally came back several days later was expected, but not overly helpful.
"A double-jump system," Solis said, when he had taken the data and dismissed the pasty-faced Darin. "Hmm. Let's see if we can get confirmation out of someone at Boros. They probably ran into a shifting jump point."
"Why would someone retiring risk that?" Esmay wondered aloud.
"He probably thought it was stable. Some of those systems are stable for decades, but that doesn't mean they're safe."
Something tickled Esmay's mind. "If . . . they were carrying contraband . . . then the time gained in a shortcut would give them time to offload it. Or if someone knew they had contraband, it'd make a fine spot for an ambush."
"Well . . ." Solis raked a hand through his hair. "We'd better go take a look and see . . . I have to hope it's not a shifting jump point . . ."
By this time, the local Boros agent was quite willing to list the
Elias Madero
as missing. Even so, it took Solis another two days to locate someone higher in the Boros administration who could confirm not only the existence, but the location of the shortcut.
"There's an off odor about this whole thing," he said to Esmay. "Normally I'd expect reluctance to admit to using a dangerous route, but there's something more. Or less . . . I'm not sure. Now—how would you plot a course to this place?"
It was not, Esmay discovered, a simple matter. The shortest route would have been to reverse what the trader's course would have been, but Fleet charts did not list any insertion data for the outbound jump point.
"Besides," Solis said, "if we go in that way, we'll cross any trail they made. We need to come in the way they did."
"But that'll take much longer."
Solis shrugged, a gesture which did nothing to mitigate the tension of his expression. "Whatever happened has already happened. My guess is that it happened days before we got to Bezaire. So what matters now is to find out what happened, in as much detail as possible. That means approaching the system with all due caution."
All due caution meant spending twenty-three days jumping from Bezaire to Podj to Corian, and from there to the shortcut jump points. Esmay set up each course segment, and each time Solis approved.