Stardogs (4 page)

This hidden building was two thousand miles north of that. Even for Prala 4 what happened here was socially unacceptable. It was just as well that even the summer-time hunters didn’t venture that far north.

In the warm observation room the white-coated Chief Psychologist looked through the double-glazed one-way glass at the sleeping child. She nodded in satisfaction. “We’ve got one.”

“I’ll bring her in then,” said her assistant. He stood a hulking 6’ 4” and his odor was thick and rank. It was he who administered the abuse. He enjoyed his work. He headed for the door.

She snorted. In this task you curbed all feelings. But she could not entirely curb her dislike for this… animal. “If you don’t take a trank-gun with you those dogs’ll kill you, you fool. She’s an emotional telepath, and she has bonded with them.”

The big man shrugged. “I’m not scared of dogs. But I don’t want ‘em hurting the merchandise.”

He successfully tranked the two dogs. Although the bigger male managed to snap the chain in his efforts to reach the man, the tranquilliser was fairly fast and powerful. However, what he was unprepared for was the child’s furious berserker attack on him. It was not desperation or fear. This man had attacked her friends, her loved ones. Hurt them. While she could, she would defend them with her life, while there was breath in her small body. The Chief Psychologist was obliged to send another two men out to rescue her thug and tranquillize the child too.

They brought the child whose name had once been Celine in. In to warmth and food. And hell. Pain. And remorseless, endless conditioning. Electroshock, and taped repetition. Over and over and over again.

“Those damned dogs are loose again.” The thug was scared of them now.

“That’s the third time this week. Can’t you confine them properly?” The hidden facility’s heavy door had been designed by the imperial labs to withstand armour-piercing weapons. It still vibrated with the furious impact of two 150 pound dogs flinging themselves remorselessly at it.

“They keep breaking their chains. Pulled the staple clean out of the wood last time.”

The chief psychologist pursed her grim little mouth. “Shoot them then. She’s drawing strength from their presence anyway.”

“But they’re expensive…”

“I said: shoot them. Do you dare question me?”

The child was shut deep inside that secure building. She couldn’t have heard a thing. Yet she screamed. A terrible, heartbroken tearing scream. The rare and valuble resource that the Emperor’s security chief had personally ordered them to find and train lay in fetal ball and wept.

“Get up. Get up off the floor and stop crying or I’ll send Hans in here.”

But Celine didn’t even seem to hear this dreadful threat. She wept on with racking, shuddering sobs. For days the chief psychologist was afraid she would die, and they would have to start all over again. But the regimen of conditioning and electroshock had continued. And somehow the shell of the child survived.

By the time the little girl was seven, she was ready. Celine was gone. The new name they gave her was Una. She was conditioned to respond to a complex sequence of hand-signals, to reply “Fudge” and then, if the number ‘662’ was given in response to this, to become a zombie-slave obeying the trigger-man to the death.

After this she was given to a very harsh pair of Imperial Security agents, who set up ‘home’ with their ‘daughter’ on another planet. The agent-minders put her carefully in the way of the League recruiters. It was a job. When they’d done it with this child, they went and did it again. Twenty-three times.

The League recruiters….

Liton Bergersson’s life story was typical of many of the riderfolk. Born on a tough outworld, he’d lost his father young. He could dimly remember the roundness of him. And the big hands throwing him up into the air. And the warmth of the laughter. Then his father, his rock, had been drowned in flash flood, while trying to rescue a friend. His pretty mother had remarried a very different kind of man. Allen Khama had been all spareness and angles. Not one of them was soft. Liton’s mother was his second wife. He had certain expectations of a wife and of the boy. When these were not fulfilled he had a bull-whip. Liton’s gentle mother had not flourished under this treatment. She died in childbirth less than a year later.

Allen Khama was a wealthy man. He found himself a third wife more in his own mold. She was never physically cruel to the boy, but her weapons of degradation and the erosion of his fragile ego were subtle and continuous. A slight child in the midst of robust half-brothers who reflected their new mother’s attitudes, he developed a stutter, and numbered the big Zebu cattle on the station as his only friends. In a way being found by the Wienan League recruiters had almost been a relief. He’d been eight at the time, a typical age for recruitment. Too young to realize that he ought to run and run fast.

He remembered the last bellowing of the big Zebu bulls still. He had been surgically deafened soon after that and then entered the solitary hell that was riderschool. These schools were in remote areas. But he still wondered about the citizens who walked past the barred windows. How did they justify ignoring these places? It wasn’t all bleakness however. There were books. And then there had been the glorious meeting with his Stardog. Lit was the first to admit he was besotted with Shahjah. The big beast was old, though. Starskipping was no longer a thing of ease or joy to her, but an effort. An effort she made happily for him. Something he was terrified of her doing.

It was no use him telling of his fears to the pampered League executioner that rode with them. The League cared only for the effective carrying of loads. So Liton was as obstructionist and stupid as he could be. It discouraged their use of Shahjah, to some extent.

Then there were the other riders. Communication between riders was actively made difficult. But the League was too mean to provide individual bathing facilities for the riders. So it was that Lit found himself lip reading a message from an older rider, on his first embarrassed naked encounter in the showers. It had shocked him rigid. It was not an indecent proposal. The man was offering to get a message to any kin, should he so desire. There had been no one in his case. The big Zebu’s he’d known and loved would have been slaughtered by now. But despite the League’s best effort to isolate the riders there
was
contact with outside. And a slow conspiracy to shake off the cruel hand of the League festered. But they had to be slow and careful. Otherwise the Stardogs would suffer.

It had been many years since that first contact in the cold showers. Lit was a star-browned fifty year-old man now. He himself had passed the contact on to several other scared newcomers. At the moment the compound was nearly empty. A few riders, and one newling. A thin, haunted looking girl called Una, with hazel eyes too big for her gaunt face. She was a symbol of the underlying problems that the League had with finding new riderfolk. Lit had been twenty when he came into service. She was seventeen. Older riders had told him that the riders used to begin work at twenty-five. The girl would be lifting out with one of them to go to the Stardog that waited for her. There’d be some nasty little League escort of course, and she would be anaesthetized. But at least they would be taking her from the awfulness of riderschool to meet the friend who would make it all bearable.

There is always something above you. God, or at least a space station

From the collected sayings of Saint Sugahata the reviled.

Life on frontiers tends to be rough, true. But each of the worlds on which the frontiers existed had a tiny enclave of high-technology civilization orbiting above them. The stations had been built in the hey-day of Colonial expansionism. Because the Stardogs and the barges they carried could not make planetary landings they provided an essential stepping stone between planets and space. Yet to maintain and sustain a self-contained environment supporting a few thousand people needed skilled personnel. The people up here saw the world differently from their land-based compatriots. Down there, if one had a strong back one could survive. Here, a sharp, trained mind was needed, because if you did something wrong it wouldn’t just be you who died.

Also, it would have taken a fool not to see that the well-being of the Stardogs and the future of the space stations was inextricably linked. Without the Stardogs man would take years to traverse even the shortest of stellar distances, and the stations would die. Besides, there was something beautiful and majestic about the beasts. By the year 2504 ISPCA membership on all of the 380 stations in the Empire was near universal.

That didn’t mean to say it sat easily with everyone. “I don’t want to go.” It was said sullenly, with all the unhappiness and confusion that the divorce was feeding to the fifteen year-old boy. “I’m too old for ISPCA Youth. It’s
boring
. Stupid games and endless ‘be kind to our furry friends’ crap.”

“I don’t want to hear you using language like that again, Juan! In front of Betty too. I’m ashamed of you!”

The slight fifteen year-old looked at his pretty blond twenty-three year old step-mother-to-be with resentment she didn’t deserve. She understood him, and even liked the boy better than his present behavior deserved. Also, she felt faintly guilty. Hal and she
did
use the two hour Youth sessions to catch up on some bottled-up passion. And unlike Juan Biacasta’s father, she wasn’t twenty-five years removed from the confusion of being a teenager. She attempted to jolly him out of his rebellion. “But you like furry creatures, Juan. Why, I bet you’ve got Ratty in your shirt right now.”

Juan blushed fierily, his olive skin darkening. She always did this to him, with her soft curves and soft voice. He’d had rather detailed fantasies about her, before he’d found out she was actually sleeping with his
father
. Now he was torn three ways, loyalty to his mother, jealousy of his father, and guilt at his own fantasies. “His name is Rat, not
Ratty.
”

He stormed off, ignoring his father’s demand that he come and apologize. He couldn’t go that far. One couldn’t in the 17 square yards of apartment. Of course, his father, as chief docking controller, was entitled to more, but with his political ambitions he wouldn’t take any more than the minimum. Juan’s own five square yard cubicle was supposedly soundproofed. But that didn’t mean that even through the headphones of his comp-unit he couldn’t hear his father’s angry voice.

Not even the drama he’d Hack-patched into (restricted access, no four to twenty-one) could hold his attention. His eyes drifted from the screen to the various hanging models suspended from the ceiling. The Denaari barge. The
Gloria Mundi
. An Imperial Chi fighter. A troop-lander. They should come down. None of his friends had kids’ stuff like this in their cubes any more. Somehow he never got around to it. The models stayed, symbols of happier times when his parents had kept the disintegration of their marriage from him. He clicked comp access off. Went out.