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"What's going on here?"
The group opened up, looking at Wyn. I won't speak from my knees like some wretched Hecuba! But already, she had. learned wisdom: she held her hands away from her body and rose, carefully.
"This young woman was raped by two of your . . . two of the trusties," Wyn said. "They followed her in here. She claims they spaced someone . . . ."
"My father!" wailed the girl, much to everyone's surprise.
A fierce scuffle broke out too close to where they stood. "I'll get you all, you bastards!" someone shouted thickly, as if he spoke through a mouthful of blood and teeth. The midshipman gestured, and two Marines fa
A freshman would have blushed and looked down: not this young officer. He took names, numbers, what details he could extract from Nina, to whom he spoke with such detachment that the girl could reply without sobbing. Then he turned away.
"Sir!" Wyn called at his back. He pivoted and faced her, impatient, but polite about it.
"What will be done now?"
"I'll have them in a pen before they're an hour older," he said. She could see the "why am I bothering to answer her?" take shape on his face and pressed in with her next question fast.
"And the girl? She needs medical attention."
He shook his head. "Ma'am"-the title slipped out-"this isn't a passenger liner."
She held her eves and raised a brow. He had the grace to flush. Behind her came fearful murmurs, and she looked away. What if he checks my records? God only knows what sort of thing my brothers put into my files.
Deliberately, she let her shoulders sag, lowered her head, just like most of the other women present. One of the crowd. Just another convict. Don't notice me. Please.
His eyes went back, the interest, the respect extinguished. Then he was gone. The pen doors slammed shut.
"We made ourselves some enemies." a man said. "We better stick together and watch out."
There were nods all around. A few men patted each other's shoulders, then turned, reassuringly to their families. The women murmured agreement.
"Hoo-boy, that does it!" a
"First time decent family types have done more than spit at me. Usually, they throw out the loners. This might not be so bad. Well, I always was up for new experiences."
Wyn raised an eyebrow and gestured. The woman laughed extravagantly.
"Well, not this, exactly, honey. You political?"
Wyn nodded, mildly shocked. She had supposed that prisoners would consider it . . . well, ill-ma
"Lady, aren't you? From back East."
"Boston." Her voice almost broke on the name. "I'm Winth-"
"Don't have to give me your name. 'Boston' will do fine. Call me Ellie. You get in wrong with some political stiff?"
"My brother."
"If it's not money, it's men. I've seen enough of both in my life."
The pause drew out, and Wyn knew she was supposed to ask about the person she was talking to. She thought she could guess. The silence grew demanding.
"What about you?" Wyn asked.
The woman sat back on her heels and laughed. "Boston, honey, you wouldn't believe it, but I'm a political too. Didn't pay taxes on my . . . if you want to be nice, we can call it an escort service." She wiped at her eyes. "Tax evasion! I've been pushing it, or watching my girls for twenty years, and they get me on lousy tax evasion."
To her surprise, Wyn laughed too. At Ellie and at herself, all New England righteousness companionably chatting with a madam. Ellie watched her narrowly.
"Yeah, sure," she said. "Even here, you're a lady and I'm . . . well what am I?"
"Brave, I'd say," Wyn retorted. "Besides, it's happened in the best of families." Hadn't one of the Philadelphia Biddies made a vulgar stir and dined out on it for years?
Again, Ellie laughed. "Boston, you kill me, you really do."
"God, I hope not, Ellie," Wyn found herself saying. "You're the first person I've met since the world caved in on me who hasn't bored or scared me to death."
"Shake on it?" asked the ex-madam. "It's not like I'm asking you to work for me, you know. I mean, you do know?"
Wyn laughed again and held out her hand for a brief handshake that Ellie broke off to warn Wyn about not showing off whatever it was she had in "that tacky green bag."
Wyn never learned the name of the ship. Once it had been a CD vessel-the Gdansk, she thought from seeing the name stencilled on a bulkhead. Now, decommissioned, turned over to BuReloc, it might as well be called the Botany Bay. Or, she thought, the ship of fools.
The days turned into a litany of grumbles. "Clean" became a myth; Wyn looked back even to visits to Welfare Islands as trips into a vanished Eden. Even the rickety bunks were scarce; the younger men traded shifts, so that the narrow beds, in stacks of four, were always in use. That provoked a rude snort from Ellie that Wyn ignored. A few people showed signs of gambling away bunktime: A meeting of the people in their bay stopped that and instituted a schedule of regular cleanings for their deck and for the inadequate refreshers that served them and, for all they knew, half the other convicts. After all, you couldn't expect Marines to clean up after prisoners.
It was like, Ellie a
She didn't bleed either. In these close quarters, they'd have known if she had. Ellie's question, too blunt to be embarrassing, brought the answer: the medics had worked on her before she left Earth. Wyn was profoundly relieved.
What the women did who had not inhibited their fertility, Wyn didn't want to think of. Wyn struggled against a claustrophobia that threatened to drive her frantic. Given no space and no activity and the bulky starches of convicts' rations, she felt herself sagging. Even the isometrics she began to work at with almost a religious fervor brought her little relief.
Day after day, the ship sped toward Jupiter. Day upon day was a nightmare of heavy gravity, bearing down upon the rickety welded bunks until, one ship's "night," some buckled, trapping a family beneath them.
The bunks were cut away, and Wyn tried not to retch at the stink of burning flesh when someone was less careful about the cutting than he might have been. Then the people beneath them were taken away, too.
She never saw them again. And when she tried to ask a Marine, Ellie-whom Wyn had privately considered nerveless-flashed her a glance of such fear that she shut up. When a few men slipped out on work assignments about the ship and returned with steel pipes to reinforce the bunks, Wyn helped them conceal it from the Marines.
From the one 'cast Wyn had watched years before while recovering from the flu, she knew that Alderson Jumps were instantaneous; transits from point to point were what occupied the days and weeks and months a ship actually spent going from one star to another. They had not yet left Earth's system, and Haven was more than a year away. Wyn wondered how she would stay sane that long.
At the orbit of Jupiter, the ship paused. After a nightmarish interval in which the low spin gravity failed as the ship took on fuel from the immense scoopship tankers waiting nearby-as "near" was reckoned in space. She knew that they had reached the point of the Alderson Jump when the alarms howled. People had time to scream once before everything blurred and stayed blurred for a long time.