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Wyn staggered in the unfamiliar, blessed weight of Luna Base's one-seventh gravity. Not much; but it would suffice to anchor the vomit, assuming her fellow prisoners had anything left in their stomachs. From acceleration to zero-G, the trip to Luna Base had been a horror. Not just the stinks and the slime, but the closeness. She had never thought of herself as overly fastidious, had daily worked up a good sweat ru
And this was the dream of space that she'd heard a few old-time physicists lament? Still, there had been that one glimpse of the Earth from space. They've taken the dream and broken it. And it should have been ours, she thought. She had never before cared to think much of it before.
Plato, she knew, had written of space, as had the Neo-Platonists. Dream-visions, all of them. All out of fashion. In the last gasp of this century, intellectuals had made it a fashion to spurn the idea. Her too, though she had never considered herself as subscribing to fashions in thought. If you surrender control of something, someone will seize it, she told herself. Of all her sins of omission and commission, she feared that abandoning the dream of space, the control over the ships that flew through it, was one of the things that had brought her to Luna Base, a convict, rather than an eager student.
Unsteadily, she walked down the corridor of this new prison, painted the gray green of Luna's rock. An intercom crackled over the straining air vents, ordering groups to this side and that. She saw a crowd of men young enough to be her students herded in one direction. Then the order subsided. Indecisive, the crowd from the shuttle milled. A few sat on the now-filthy bundles they still carried with them.
Their faces as expressionless as if they wore bronze helms with only slits for eyes and nose, the CD Marines in blue and scarlet stood guard.
Enlisted men. Wyn had met officers at this di
The crowd waited so long that even the CD Marines began to shift from foot to foot. Finally, the intercom crackled to hasty life.
"ALL HAVEN-BOUND . . ." Static drowned out the rest of the message, but not the shouts that followed.
"Rest of you, down there! Step lively, now."
Trusties in gray coveralls emerged from side doors. They had sonic tinglers; not as bad as the stu
Was this the ship? No processing, no questions, no explanations: Had they just been herded on board?
She closed her hands to conceal the trembling in them. She had hoped that Dr. Ryan was wrong. Around her rose the cries and stinks of poorly tended children. It was like something out of the Trojan Women: herded onto the black ships, helpless and afraid.
"You come in with us, honey," came a voice. Wyn nearly wept for gratitude. Men, women, and children, thugs and citizens they might be, all lumped together. She had hoped, at least, that convicts would be separated from . . . from what? Law-abiding citizens? Wyn, she told herself, up here we're all convicts.
Then, the screaming started.
A girl, her mismatched skirt and jacket almost shredded, darted through the narrowing port, pursued by red-faced trusties. Unused to the gravity, she stumbled and fell, still screaming in two languages.
"They put him out! They threw him out the lock! Out there!" Her sobs doubled her over, and she gagged and retched.
Wyn started forward, but not before a shorter, much plumper woman grabbed the girl, raised her, and smacked her face sharply. "Quiet! You want to follow him? You want it all to be wasted?"
She gulped, drew breath for another scream, and the woman slapped her again. "Shut up! Or we'll all be in for it."
Wyn threaded through the crowd and knelt beside them. "What's wrong?"
"What's it to you?" The woman's eyes were ancient, suspicious, though her face bore the too-taut look of many plastic surgeries.
"We're not rats in a trap," she snapped back. "Was she . . ."
"Probably," said the older woman as she soothed the hysterical girl with the absent skill of too much practice. "Someone tried to protect her. They put him outside."
And when Wyn's face went blank, the other jerked her thumb. "Out the airlock."
Air bubbling, lungs bursting, blood freezing and boil-tag . . . Wyn fought to breathe and not to gag.
"Don't tell me you're go
She bent her head, murmuring over the girl . . . . "You're called Nina? Pretty. Come on, little girl, you gotta show us you got guts, you gotta make sure the Dastards don't get you, you can live through this, I've seen a hundred girls like you, and they all ended up rich and sassy . . . you'll see . . . ."
She glared at Wyn. "Do something!" she hissed.
Like what? She could see the men who had chased Nina into the hold, pushing this way and that. Only the crowds kept them from finding her this far.
Wyn rose and forced herself to draw a deep breath. "All right, you over there. Hide them!" Her coverall was stained. She needed a bath more than she had needed anything in her life, probably including air. And here she was, snapping orders.
Incongruously, people obeyed. "You-" she gestured with her chin at a compact man surrounded by his family . . . "See if you can't get the attention of the Marines."
His wife raised an immediate protest.
"Why . . ."
"Shut up!" snarled the woman who comforted Nina. "See what happened to her? It can happen to you family broads, too. Raped and your man breathing vacuum . . . All right, you men, turn your backs on the poor kid. She don't need to have men staring at her. Listen to the lady. She told you to get moving."
"Just do it," Wyn ordered. And when the man hesitated, "Please . . . if we don't hang together, they'll hang us separately. It could be your wife, your daughter . . ."
The man went. Wyn turned back to Nina. One filthy hand fumbled in a pocket and drew out a phial.
"Good stuff," approved her ally, recognizing the brand of trank. "Save it tor emergencies."
"What do you call this?"
"A real pain in the ass." She took the drug anyhow and fed it to her patient. "Now swallow, or I'll rub it down your throat like I would a dog," she threatened, but her hands were gentle.
Nina obeyed. Wyn wasn't surprised at that or when the strong sedative hit her like a sandbag at the base of the skull.
Wyn looked up at the people who stood between Nina and the men searching for her. "You have to stand up to them," she told them. "This time it's her. Next time, who's it going to be? You? You? The little boy over there?"
"You think you can take care of your own family?" the other woman asked to mutters of "puta" and other words Wyn didn't catch. "When they have stu
"We have to work together," Wyn repeated. "Make a start now. Even trusties have to sleep sometime, and they know it. And if there's a riot, they won't be trusties for long."
That drew feral grins from the men standing about. As if glad to turn their attention away from the girl now dozing on the deck, they formed a ring about her, their wives, their daughters, and the three women in the center.
A stir in the crowd a