War World X: Takeover (57 page)

His breath was foul. If he—God, if he even tried to kiss her, she was sure she’d vomit in his face; and then he’d kill her. She hoped. In the end, that was about all he didn’t try.

The strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.
She told herself in an attempt to achieve distance from the spasms and grunts on top of her, the pain as he thrust into her unprepared and wholly unwilling body. She would not be weak. She would refuse weakness. Her hands balled into fists and she struck his back, brought up her knees (regretting that for the leverage it gave him), then trying to buck him off her body.

He was on his knees in front of her face all too soon thereafter, his knife in one hand in case she had any ideas about biting him where it would do the most harm. When he pulled out, she spat at him.

He slapped her, then rolled her onto her belly.
Beware of Greeks
, some fragment of Wyn’s mind gibbered at her. This could do real damage, if he didn’t kill her when he was finished. He’d have to kill her; she had seen him, and he had to know she wouldn’t hesitate to report him. She heard something clang on the deck and felt her legs forced apart. Despite the horror, the metallic sound registered. He was using both of his hands. He had dropped the knife.

And there it was, about a meter away. It might as well have been a light year away unless she could grab it. A desperate plan, complete the instant she saw it, seized her mind and body. With what she hoped would sound like a hopeless moan, she collapsed onto one arm, and curled up into a ball, as if that pathetic maneuver could stop the painful invasion of her body.

But her left hand snaked out and seized the knife, bringing it beneath her toward her stronger hand, the right.

You want to die, you could fall on your sword right now
, her mind warned her. Ellie’s “spit on the bastard’s grave” rang in her head. She jerked with her shoulders and thrust her hips up, as if fighting the man off. When he hurled himself back onto her, though, she was ready with the knife. And a lifetime’s reading of the Iliad showed her exactly how to drive it into his chest below the sternum and twist it so the blood gouted out.

Again and again, she stabbed him. His blood splashed her, hot, though she thought she never would stop shaking.

If his buddy was around, she was dead meat; she knew she couldn’t force herself, to retrieve the knife. She retched herself dry, spat on his body and staggered out of the tiny room.

Please God, this was no time for the Marines to come charging up! Instead of the Marines, she got a scared midshipman whose voice squeaked on the “ma’am” he shouldn’t be calling a prisoner.

“In there,” she rasped from a throat bruised from the grip of the dead man. Whom she had killed. She doubled over with dry heaves. “He fell on his knife,” she willed the midshipman to believe.

The boy walked to the closet, opened it, then backed away. His eyes flicked over her half-naked and wholly bloodied body. No one could tell how much of the blood was hers.

“Terrible things, knives,” he agreed with a maturity that stunned her. He moved in to support her. Boy though he was, she recoiled.

She didn’t want to go to what passed for a Sick Bay on this sick, sick ship. No one ever returned from Sick Bay. She would get back to her bunk, and she would ask Nina how you lived with this.

“Just let me get back to…I have friends there, they’ll help me… No, no need to. I can walk on my own.”

When the worst of the shuddering had left her weak, but quite calm, she retraced the corridors to the prison bay that had the feel now of a refuge. Her legs wobbled, and her groin burned, and she blessed Dr. Ryan.

She was no distant goddess now, no lady, no scholar to be spoken to with respect and touched not at all. Just a female body. She hit the buzzer and leaned on the port.

It slid aside.

Ellie was not the first to see her, but she was the first to guess.

“Jesus
wept!
” she said and started forward.

Nina reached her first and flung her arms around her. Ellie joined her, taking her face in her hands to examine the swollen, split lips, before steering her expertly toward her bunk.

“Come on, honey… Baby, you fetch me my little bag, will you?” she told Nina. “You take this cloth, wet it good…”

Feet padded off fast. Wyn wanted to sag against Ellie’s reassuring, female bulk, wanted to hide her face. If she’d been more cautious.…

“Not your fault!” hissed the other woman. “It’s not.”

She guided Wyn through the ranks of cots. Men sat on many of them, but they turned their faces away as the women passed, granting them the respect of privacy.

She didn’t want to be tended and cleaned, but Ellie was quite inexorable. With antiseptic salve on her, face, antibiotics and painkillers in her system, and her groin bound up in soft cloth—Ellie must have traded for a diaper from one of the mothers—Wyn was put to bed and covered with the least smelly of the blankets they were issued.

“I spit on his grave,” Wyn whispered to her. “He had a knife and he dropped it.…”

“
Good
girl, Boston. You’re a champion.” Ellie hugged her. A tear splashed down her face and onto Wyn’s.

“Damn-it, you think I’d have seen it all by now. Here.…” She reached behind her. “Drink this.”

To Wyn’s surprise, it was whiskey. She pushed it away.… “What about the painkiller?” She hadn’t been raped and committed murder just to die because of an alcohol/drug problem, damn-it.

“This stuff doesn’t react with alcohol. Don’t worry about it. Just you get stinking drunk and we’ll take care of you.”

“Bring my bag,” she muttered. She still had jewels sewn into its seams. She had to pay Ellie back.

Ellie pushed her back down. “Y’know, Boston, you can be a real asshole sometimes. Shut up and drink.”

The whiskey burnt the cuts in her mouth, then seared as it went down. Field surgery used to use alcohol as a painkiller and cleaner, Wyn knew, and it was working now. After awhile, the lights dimmed. When she was certain no one was watching her, Wyn cried silently, her face buried in the shabby blanket. After awhile, she drifted.

A little after she woke, the ship Jumped. Her last thought before the Jump and the first one thereafter was that it was a shame that the ship couldn’t perish in the antiseptic heart of a star.

The cuts and aches faded. After awhile, so did the nightmares and what Wyn came to regard as a deplorable tendency to flinch from men’s voices. Boredom replaced weakness and fear. At one point, she even tried to teach Ellie Greek

“You’re outta your mind, Boston, you know that? Strike a deal with you. I don’t tell you about my business; you don’t teach me that stuff.”

Ellie’s business: clearly, she intended to resume it once they landed. “Hey, stands to reason this Haven they’re sending us to is no garden spot. They’ve got miners there; and where there’s miners, there’s girls. Now, I’m way too old to start turning tricks again, but I’m a damn good book-keeper…work my way in and work up to a share in the place.”

“Is that all you want?” Wyn must have been half stupefied by boredom or the question wouldn’t have popped out.

“What I want? I
want
to have enough credit so I don’t have to OD on pills and booze when I get too old to work and the food runs out. I want to be my own person. You need money for that, in your own name, under your own control.”

Wyn could see the wisdom in that. She only wished she were as certain of her future as Ellie.

What would await any of them on Haven? What awaited her? She knew convicts worked and worked hard. They were charged for their passage. They were charged for their life support. They were charged for the wretched coveralls they wore and the food, even when they didn’t get full rations. Charged at rates, she suspected, she wouldn’t pay for luxury travel.

It might be possible to repay all that by some form of indenture ranging from apprenticeship to slavery, depending on the employer/owner. And then you’d have to start all over to save the money for passage back to Earth.

No, that wasn’t even a possibility. She had known that from the start. Her exile was final.

If she were going to survive, better not regard it as exile, but as a new life. How would she manage?

A glance about the bay showed her fellow exiles in a new light. The strong ones—casual labor. The other politicals—maybe they could be used as clerks. The wives and daughters arrested with their men? Women’s work, the answer occurred to Wyn immediately. In a low-tech society, cooking and cleaning would no doubt be handed right back to them. Even the children: she recollected that even in the Plymouth Colony that had become her home state, indentures started young.

It looked as if she was about to suffer from her own ancestors’ management tactics. She wondered if she were up to it; she’d lived off Baker wealth, Baker fame and Baker connections her whole life and counted herself lucky. At the same time, she knew, she had inherited the Baker conscience—
a double portion, since my brother clearly didn’t get any.
And that conscience had a bad way of surfacing at inconvenient times to reproach her or, as it had this time, get her kicked off-world.

So now you get the chance to prove yourself
,
Wyn. Just what is it you think you can do?
An interesting question, wasn’t it? What kind of trade could a displaced aristocrat with a talent for languages take up in middle age?

Anyone on Haven need a butler? A nanny? Sure, she could teach. But with “political” written large on her dossier, would they trust her within five parsecs of a school? What
had
her brother paid to have written into her files?

She feared she would soon learn.

A few more Jumps and gravity shifts, and the intervening weeks and months passed. Atrocious as their rations had been, they became shorter. They began to sleep more, waking to eat and invent new versions of old curses on the purser, who pocketed the cost of their food. They shed the unhealthy bloat that comes of eating too much starch, became thin, then gaunt as they stinted themselves still further to make sure that the children, at least, had enough.

Haven would be too rough a world for children stunted by malnutrition, she had told one woman, the mother of three, and the word had spread.

One last Jump. One last interval of sitting in a daze. The variable gravity wobbled sickeningly, then steadied at a level that made her ache in every joint. To Wyn’s surprise, gossip helped her identify this as mercy.

Then, one ship’s “night,” while the prisoners were groggy and disoriented, crew and CD Marines burst into the bay and ordered them out.
Now.
On the double, if not faster.

“My God, just smell them! Like pigs, these convicts,” muttered one Marine. The ensign overseeing the transfer didn’t silence him.

Wyn scarcely had time to grab her precious bag before she and the rest were herded to landers. She staggered a little in the unaccustomed G, then sucked in her breath as if someone had kneed her in the belly as the lander broke away from the ship in which she had spent more than a year of her life and whatever illusions she had brought on board. Zero-G brought her empty stomach flip-flopping perilously close to her mouth, and then Haven s own gravitation and the lander’s braking rockets took hold: she was heavy, heavier than she had ever been; and her vision blurred. It wasn’t fair; she was going to burst, and she hadn’t survived the trip just to explode in reentry because the pilot poured on the G’s. There were no hatches; she wouldn’t even see the sky in which she would die.

From the lander’s cockpit came a steady drone of affirmatives and static: “Beginning final burn…mark…Splash Island coming up on the horizon…”

My God, were they going to land in
water
? Wyn forced herself not to scream, to unstrap herself and claw at the nearest bulkhead: not to be trapped, not to sink in this steel trap, plunging further and further till it burst asunder, and her lungs…

She wanted to scream a protest, but “uuuhhhhh!” was all that came out, more breath than pain.

And then they were down.

In the water.

On whatever Haven this world might be.