Flight of the Outcast (2 page)

   Slowly she fought her way back to consciousness and switched off the pulsebook replay with a flicker of thought. She could move her head, rolling it from side to side. Her mouth was bone dry, her tongue like a raspy block of wood.

   "Dad?" It came out as a frog-croak.

   Asteria focused on recovering from the lingering effects of the stasis beam. She lay in darkness. Her shoulders could move a little. She rocked. The room detected the movement, and the lights came on—the dim red emergency lights. Something was wrong.

   A painful tingling flooded into arms and legs, hands and feet. She managed to sit up. "Water," she gasped.

   A wall panel opened. She pushed herself up and staggered to it. Water flowed, and she stooped to lap it up. It was tepid, not cool as it should have been. Didn't matter. Tasted wonderful. Her tongue began to feel normal again. She cleared her throat and activated her wrist transceiver. "Dad?"

   No answer. "Andre? Talk to me!"

   Her cousin didn't respond. Maybe he had switched off his transceiver. He was almost the same age as she was, only three Standard months older, but he got away with things that Carlson would have punished her for. When she thought she could walk—even though the floor felt as if it were heaving slowly, like the deck of a ship on a rolling sea—Asteria made her way to the vault door, leaning on the wall along the way. "Open."

   Nothing happened.

   "Open!" Asteria commanded in a louder voice.

   The door remained locked. Groaning, Asteria reached for the access hatch. From inside she could open the door manually, but it was difficult. She tugged at the spoked wheel of the emergency release, her shoulders straining and sweat popping out on her forehead. The door creaked back, centimeter by centimeter.

   Acrid gray smoke streamed through the opening, bringing tears to Asteria's eyes and making her cough. She dropped to her hands and knees and looked out through the narrow space.

   Darkness. Asteria stood, leaned against the door with her shoulder until it closed again, and hoped the air system was still working well enough to clean up the smoke. She needed more light. She opened lockers, searching. She found the financial and legal documents her father had stored; she found holopics and recordings of her mother, who had died when Asteria was only four. In the third locker, she discovered a kind of belt, made of thin metallic plates. She had never seen it before. The plates were as large as her hands, shiny and curiously light, as if they had hardly any substance to them. Yet the belt felt tough and flexible. She experimentally looped it around her waist—it was much too large to fit her—and felt a flash of surprise as she touched the two ends together and they joined, and the belt tightened, not uncomfortably but snugly. She couldn't find the release, so she moved on.

   Finally, she opened a locker that held, among other things, a powerful flashlight. She retrieved it, went back to the door, and grunted as she manually opened it again. The smoke seemed less dense this time, but still, she dropped to her knees as she shone the light out the narrow opening she had made.

   Her breath came up short.

   The corridor ended abruptly a few meters ahead. It had caved in. She was trapped. Gray tendrils of smoke curled like lazy cobras on the ceiling of the shattered corridor. The air stank of burned circuits.

   Despite the smoke that stung her eyes, she could see a few shafts of sunlight near the ceiling. Maybe she could force her way out.

   She clambered up the chunks of fallen stone and metal, cutting her palm on something sharp. At the top, she shoved until some of the rubble fell away. The smoke streamed out, and hacking miserably, with tears running down her face, Asteria wormed through the opening she had made.

   
Oh my—

   A muted cry escaped her lips. The farmhouse was…gone. It looked as though it had been hit with a particle bomb. Nothing but charred wreckage remained. The corridor had led from the house entrance way down to four meters beneath the surface, then twenty-five meters away from the house. Now it was at the surface, on the edge of a shallow rubble-filled bowl. The north and south defensive towers had been reduced to broken stubs.

   "Dad?" Asteria said in a trembling voice. "Andre?"

   As though in answer, she heard a far-off growl. Dome 1, the only one with a ripe crop, had been blasted open. A ship climbed away from it on a pillar of fire.

   Asteria stood in shock. The Raider ship became a speck in the sky.

   "Father," she said softly. And then she cried aloud, "Father!"

   Yet even as she cried out, she knew he was no longer there to answer her.

A
steria was desperately clearing rubble from the smoking

      pile that had been the south defensive tower—searching for any sign of her family—when the battered hovercart roared up the steep road from Sanctal. Two men emerged. They wore the drab, dark gray coveralls of the lower-caste Bourse. She stood holding a stone as they walked toward her, their faces grim.

    "What happened?" one asked. "There was a distress call."

    "And you came," she said bitterly. "The two of you."

    The second man pointed at the shattered dome. "Raiders."

    "May Shayman, the god of protection, favor us," the first one said.

    Asteria felt like hitting him with the stone. "My father and my cousin—"

    "Please." The second man took the stone from her hand and said, "The Cybots will search for them better than we can. Come. We will take you to safety."

    Asteria shook her head. "I want to stay here."

    "Child," the first man said, "Gaiam, the god of family, tells us we must take in the young of—" His voice seemed to falter. "Of those who have met with accidents."

    "I don't believe in your gods," she snapped, and the two men exchanged a shocked look.

   "If your people are alive, the Cybots will find them," the second man told her.

   "They're not alive," Asteria said bleakly.

   The first man said, "If they are not, we will take care of you."

   She hated them.
Hated them. But at last, with nowhere t
o go, she let them take her to Sanctal. They sped back down toward the seacoast town, the smoldering farm vanishing over the rim of the plateau. The air grew warmer and smelled of the sea. They slowed as they entered the town, and people stared at her. The outsider. The orphan. The outcast. Asteria stared back defiantly, holding back her tears. She went where the men took her, answered the questions the Bourse magistrate put to her, and did not object when he turned her over to a woman who said she would take Asteria to a place where she could live until a decision might be reached concerning her future.

   Asteria did not object to any of this. But already she was thinking of her future. Of revenge.

   "I can't!" she'd snapped repeatedly. And she couldn't. The flexible belt had almost molded itself to her waist. It was loose enough for her to remove her clothes, but when she put on the Sanctal garb, she had to put it on over the belt, which now lay snugly against her skin. It didn't seem to have any kind of release. Asteria had never seen anything like it. She couldn't imagine what it was supposed to be—or do.

   After two days, the Cybots sent by the Bourse returned with the meager items they had found: the ID and communicator elements from both Carlson and Andre Locke's wrist transceivers. They had discovered these in the ruins of the defensive towers—along with enough bone fragments to identify the bodies of both Asteria's father and her cousin.

   Asteria told the sour-faced Bourse officials that the killers had been Raiders, renegades. That they should be pursued, caught, and punished. The Bourse never made a decision without debate; it was the core of their religious law, though they allowed no debate when it came to their beliefs. Hour after hour, they sat arguing about what they should do. In the end, they decided to apply for help to the planetary governor, whose offices were a thousand miles to the south, in the large settlement of Central. That took a day. And then Baron Kamedes, the ultimate authority on Theron, sent back word that the death of the Lockes was a local issue. The Bourse should handle everything.

   
All that debate for nothing,
Asteria thought bitterly as she sat in the solitary cell they had prepared for her in their holding center for orphans and strays.

   And so the Bourse did handle everything. Slowly. The day following the governor's decision was the Holy Day of Repentance, when Bourse settlers remained shut in rooms thinking of their sins. Nothing could be done. Then came the Day of Appeal, on which Bourse men and women flocked to the various temples of the gods and prayed for whatever they needed. Old men went to the Temple of Prosperity. Young men went to the Temple of Love. Women went to the Temple of Patience or the Temple of Endurance. Asteria sat alone in the little room they had provided and grew more and more frustrated.

   At last, long after the raid, the local council sat in conference to decide Asteria's fate. She was not allowed to speak, though the Bourse granted her an advocate—a lean, grim-faced man of thirty named Nels. Six elders, clad in black and looking as solemn as attendees at a funeral, sat on a high platform behind an imposing wooden table carved in figures of dour saints, and listened as the case director, a grizzled old man named Marren, laid out the facts.

   The head of the panel of elders summed up: "So this infidel girl is left without a family? And she is heir to the estate?"

   "That is the case, my masters," said old Marren.

   Asteria could see greed flickering in the elderly eyes. Sanctal was a place where people who believed in simplicity and devotion could live and pursue their vision of the holy life. But forty thousand hectares of land, with seven intact and functioning biodomes producing a rich crop of coffera…well, that was a solemn thought indeed. If the farm could continue, even with only seven domes working, it could produce enough income to appeal to a family.

   "She must be given to a husband," the elder at the far end of the table said, looking down at Asteria. "She looks to be sturdy enough. She must learn our ways and our beliefs and become one of us. She must learn to serve the Six Great Gods of the Bourse."

   "All glory to the gods," the others murmured ritualistically.

   "I don't want—" began Asteria hotly, but Nels shushed her.

   "My masters," he said, rising, "the girl is not yet sixteen Standard. In three years' time, she may be of age to be married, but now our laws forbid that."

   Marren shrugged. "Then she must be fostered into a family of believers," he said simply. "There she may be disciplined and schooled and brought to a knowledge of her place in serving the gods."

   Asteria again saw those flickers of interest. A foster family might have the inside track. And the income from the farm would be put in trust for the lucky husband, but some of it would go to the foster family. It would be profitable to be the guardian of a girl who would inherit a freehold of land.

   "That is a good point," the chairman of the council said. "It would be well for her to learn proper manners and behavior. She must learn that she cannot speak out of turn, for one thing. She seems a headstrong, willful girl, and we could not accept her into our fold unless she learned to curb that haughty spirit."

   "My master," said the elder to the chairman's left, a thin-faced old man with a fringe of white beard. "If you will permit, I think my eldest son, Kern, might take her in. He farms too, but not in the Uplands. He has a boy about her age—"

   A man on the other side of the chairman cut in, "With submission, my master, I believe that our family could provide the girl with a better grounding in our beliefs. We live in the town, sir, and not out in the country. 'Many eyes make good behavior,' so say the gods."

   "So say the gods," the group chanted, without missing a beat.

   The man continued. "In our family, we could always keep a close watch—"

   "Sirs," said Nels, standing beside Asteria. "Masters, please. This is a matter for a full council meeting. May we not defer this until the next session? Is it not enough today to decide that Asteria Locke is to become a ward of the Bourse, to be molded into a suitable wife and companion for a Bourse son, and to allot her a portion of the income from her father's farm for her temporary support?"

   "The young man has a good point," said the chairman. "'Haste spills the water,' as it is written."

   "As it is written," the group chanted.

   "Are all in agreement?" the chairman asked. "Then it is thus decreed: the girl will continue to live in the Hospitality Hall, and her food, clothing, and other necessities are to be paid for from the proceeds of the farm."

   Asteria leaped to her feet. "What about the Raiders?" she yelled.

   It was as if she were a ghost. No one even reacted to her. Nels pulled her back down into her chair, not harshly but firmly. He said, "My masters, the girl would like to know if any steps are being taken to punish the Raiders."