Chapter 9 — MASSACRE

Jupiter Orbit, 2-12-'15—We were hungry, but we were closing on the Jupiter ring system. In three more days we should be there.

Another ship overhauled us. My father looked worried. "Friend or enemy?" he asked.

"We can't take the chance," Diego said. "We must assume we have few friends in space. We'll have to set an ambush."

"But if they're friendly—we do need food."

"I didn't mean we'd attack them unprovoked, señor. We just need to be armed and ready—and if they manifest as pirates, we'll jump them, and this time we won't let them go. If they're not pirates, we'll never show what we're ready for."

My father nodded. "Sounds good to me. That means we'll have to act normal, with the women and children in evidence."

"Yes. But at the same time we must be armed and ready. We know the penalty for failure!"

"We know," my father agreed grimly. He hardly showed his reaction to the rape of his daughter, but I knew he had been deeply wounded. I think he maintained a firm presence because he was afraid my mother would collapse if he did not. I would have considered this mutual bracing in crisis to be a good object lesson in human nature had it not been my own family concerned. So my father carried on in a nearly normal manner, while my mother stayed mostly out of sight, and I think I understood them both and respected them for the way they handled it. Naturally I had to carry on too, so as not to weaken the family effort.

The ship closed and locked onto our main air lock. I wished there were some way to prevent this, but the designers of bubbles had not anticipated the problem of piracy in deep space. Any ship could attach to and board a bubble; all locks were interconnectable. Thus the best of intentions led to the worst of errors—as far as we were concerned.

The lock opened, being worked from the other side, and gaudily garbed, bearded men trooped in. They certainly looked like pirates!

My father went up to them. "We're glad you have come! We're trying to get to Jupiter, but we're short of food—"

The man hardly looked at him. "Bind the men. Line up the women—the young ones. We'll loot after we're sated—"

Diego needed no more. These pirates weren't even making any pretence at honest dealing! He drew a penknife and slashed at the nearest pirate, cutting his sword arm. The pirate screamed.

Our other men pounced, two to a pirate. In moments, almost bloodlessly, our forces had made the pirates captive. Our preparation had paid off handsomely!

Then something strange happened. There was a thin, keening sound, not exactly painful—but somehow I lost volition. I had been sitting with Spirit, who was now garbed as a boy, where we could keep an eye on both the pirates and cell 75, where Helse and Faith were. We were keeping both of them out of the action, just in case, though the rest of the bubble thought Helse was male. Now I watched the pirates turn on Diego and my father and throw them against the wall near the air lock—and somehow I didn't react.

García was near us. "Oh, no," he muttered. "They've got a pacifier."

A pacifier. I knew what that was, though I had never before experienced its effect personally. It was an electronic gadget that broadcast a semi-sonic wave that interfered with the human nervous system. It did not damage people or knock them out; it merely diluted their concentration or their will to action. It was like a soporific drug. Some rich men used these devices as sleeping medication, and they were supposed to be useful in prisons and mental institutions. And yes, I had heard of them being used illicitly to make women unresistive to rape. They were far too expensive for peasants to own; the pirates must have stolen one in the course of their routine marauding and kept it in reserve for just such an occasion as this. Probably someone in their ship had orders to watch and turn it on when things went wrong for them—as had been the case here.

I cursed that instrument—but not vehemently, for vehemence was not possible while it functioned. I damned myself for my failure to overcome the ennui, but could do no more than that. I just sat there and watched my father get knocked about and bounced into the wall.

But Spirit had more resistance than I did. She had always been a spirited girl, true to her name, though she had been named long before the trait manifested. Somehow her neural chemistry differed; she was able to assert partial free will. She began to move toward the pirates.

"They will hurt you," I warned without particular emphasis. I knew intellectually that we faced disaster, but I just couldn't get emotional about it. I was intellectually furious, but not emotionally. It was like watching a person in a drama do something stupid and identifying with that person, while being unable to influence his action.

"They won't notice me," she replied. She didn't sound excited; the pacifier was working on her, but not quite as effectively as on me.

"Why doesn't it affect the pirates?" García asked, as though this were a matter of idle curiosity. Then he answered his own question: "The field can be disrupted by certain countercurrents. The pirates can have little generators on their bodies, giving them protection." It was strange to be discussing this so calmly, while doing nothing about it.

Then a pirate messenger came through the lock and whispered to the leader. The leader looked alarmed. Then he set himself and started giving orders.

The pirates who were rounding up our unresisting men paused, then turned them loose. The leader raised his voice and addressed us all. "There is a Jupiter Ringuard patrol boat approaching. Now, we don't want any trouble with them. If they send an officer aboard, we want you all to convince him that we are traders, making a business deal with you. We're selling you food, and we're haggling over the price, but it's friendly."

He paused, looking around. "Fetch me some children," he ordered his henchmen.

The pirates ranged out in search of children. They took Spirit and me, and we went unresisting, though I saw Spirit grimace. It was uncertainty that restrained her rather than inability to act; she wasn't sure what would happen to the rest of us if she resisted.

They took Helse out of the cell, thinking her to be a boy my age, but left Faith, who looked disreputable at this time. One tiny silver lining for her, perhaps! They rousted out several smaller children. Soon eight of us were standing together before the air lock.

The pirate leader drew a great long dagger of a knife. He caught a six-year-old girl by the hair and yanked her head back, exposing her neck. He set the blade against her throat. "Now hear this!" he cried to us all. "I'll slit this throat myself, the moment anyone squawks. And my men will do the same to the others." At his gesture, the other pirates drew their blades and menaced the rest of us.

"So you'd better convince that officer, folks," the pirate leader concluded. "Unless you figure I'm bluffing. Then you do what you want, and we'll do what we want, because there's a price on all our heads if they recognize us, and we won't have anything to lose. If that officer catches on, he'll be dead too. So you can just take your choice between the robbery we have in mind—and your children."

The worst of it was, he wasn't bluffing. It did not require my talent to fathom that. These men really were killers, worse than the first bunch; they had made no pretence of being anything other than pirates from the outset.

"Now we'll turn off the box," the pirate leader concluded. "You will have volition—but we have your children."

The pirate by the air lock turned off the box. Suddenly I had strength of will again. But there was a blade at my back, and I knew it would be worse than futile to bolt. We had no way to coordinate, to run together, and nowhere to go if we did run. We had all been disarmed—and half of us really were children. Despite all our preparations, we were helpless.

That bothered me, I think, almost as much as our predicament. The fact that we had been caught unprepared, after thinking we were ready. Now an officer of the law—Jupiter law—the very type of person we most wanted to meet—was coming, and we could do nothing.

Three pirates took the two smallest girls and a baby boy through the lock into their ship. The boy whimpered and his mother moved nervously, but he went along. These were the ultimate hostages: the most vulnerable of our number. I could have identified all their parents by their reactions, had I not already known. Until we had these children safely back, we were completely nullified.

I glanced at our martial-arts instructor and saw him standing with a grim expression. He knew better than anyone that the pirates' device of protection was too effective. All we could do was cooperate and hope for a favorable break.

The space officer arrived. He was wearing a conventional space suit emblazoned with the great red ball of the Jupiter Service. He was the representative of the foremost power in the Solar System—but in person he was a small, somewhat pudgy man, seemingly uncertain. He would have been nothing, if it weren't for the devastating guns of the Navy ship trained on both our vessels. How easy it would be to alert that ship, and maybe get us all blasted to pieces! But that would hardly be to our advantage. We had to gamble on the lesser evil of the pirates' mercy.

Lesser evil! There would be more than one woman raped this time, I was sure, and anything we had of value would be taken, and some of our men would be beaten. God, I hated this!

"What are you up to here?" the officer asked in English, the language of the dominant power on Jupiter. There are, of course, four major languages used on Jupiter, but the speakers of the other three—French, Spanish, and Portuguese—did not maintain space patrols. That made English the most truly interplanetary one in Jupiter-space. Thus did economics translate into culture.

The pirate chief smiled ingratiatingly. "We are only traders, sir, peddling staples to these travelers."

The officer turned to face our group. "True?"

"We are doing business," my father said in halting English. This hurt me too. My father was lying, at the behest of our enemies, and I hated to see him thus demeaned. I have never liked lying, and I felt unclean for him. At the some time, I knew we had no choice. Even if Spirit and Helse and I were to bolt and escape our captors, as we might reasonably do if we acted in unison, we could not save the three smaller children, and their deaths would be on our hands. It was like a finger-bending hold that a bully puts on another child, to force him to tell the teacher the two are only playing. I hate that sort of thing, but the only practical answer I ever found to it was to avoid the situation. Once your finger is caught, it's too late for sensible solutions; you have to go along. So I understood the situation exactly—but a special kind of rage seethed in me. Pirates like this should be extirpated from the face of the universe!

The officer's brow wrinkled. I realized he did not understand my father's strongly accented English. Quickly I spoke up, in better English. "My father says we are doing business," I explained. And realized that now I shared the lie directly. Damn! How I hated every aspect of this!

"Drug business?" the Jupe officer demanded.

"No drugs," my father assured him, honestly enough, in Spanish, and that negation needed no translation.

"See that you don't. We'll be watching you." The officer turned abruptly and departed. It seemed his shuttle craft had latched on to the other port of the pirate ship, so he had to pass through that ship to leave us.

In a moment we felt the tremor of the shuttle craft disengaging and jetting away, back to its mother ship. That test was over, but I did not feel much relieved.

"Now release our children," my father said.

The pirate leader considered, and in that moment he reminded me uncomfortably of the way the Horse had pondered, after we had turned his men loose. "Ah yes, the children." He turned his head and yelled into the ship. "You through with the brats?"

"Just about," a voice called back.

Just about? I experienced a new chill. What were they doing with these children?

Then they brought the children back. The two little girls were naked and crying. A pirate carried the baby boy, who was also naked, but silent. The man stepped out and threw the boy to the floor.

A paroxysm of horror passed through our group. The boy's eyes were open and staring, and his chest was still. He was dead!

Now it was apparent that the little girls had been raped.

It seemed every man in our group launched himself at the pirates. But then the pacifier box came on again, and the charge became a shambles, its impetus gone. The broadcast interference was not psychological, it was physical; no amount of determination could overcome this paralysis of the voluntary functions.

The pirate leader drew his sword, smiling grimly. He seemed to be enjoying this. He had wanted us to see the children, and to react as we did, and to be cut down to helplessness again. "You made trouble for us. We don't like that."

My father was closest to him. The pirate raised his sword in a two-handed grip and swung it savagely. I saw, as if it were in slow motion, the blade cut into my father's side. It sliced through clothing and rib cage and into the lung, and the blood poured out like the living thing it was.

I knew in that moment that we should have blown the whistle on the pirates when the Jupe officer was here. We had been held passive by a threat to hostages who were even then being savaged. We had had nothing to lose, had we but known it. We had been too trusting—and now were paying the hideous price.

Would the pirates really have dared to kill the Jupe officer? Now I doubted it, for it would have meant the end of the pirate ship, possible complete destruction by a military missile.

Now it was carnage. Ruthlessly the pirates hacked apart our men, who were unable to resist. They left none alive. Such was the enervation spawned by the devil-box that all we could do was moan in soft horror. We couldn't act!

They hurled the bleeding bodies into a pile, then sheathed the swords and came after the women. Some, unsatisfied with what they saw, started rechecking the cells. I saw someone open the panel of number 75, where Faith still hid. I remembered that Helse had taken the opportunity provided by the presence of the Jupe officer to return to that cell; no one had been paying attention to her, among the pirates, so she had gotten away with it. But that minor escape had accomplished nothing, for there was the pirate at the cell.

The man looked down, then paused as if struck. Then he closed the panel and went on. What had happened? The pacifier box prevented any attack against any pirate.

Meanwhile, another pirate took hold of my mother, bringing my attention back to closer events. The cell, well around the curve of the Commons, was difficult to see anyway. I had positioned myself to have it in view without being close enough to attract attention to it.

The pirate literally tore the clothing from my mother, while she tried feebly to pull away, crying. I felt a truly terrible rage—but still it did not translate to my body. My nerves might as well have been cut, so that my limbs would not respond. It was hard enough just to turn my head.

There was a crash. My head jumped around. Spirit, possessing more volition than the rest of us, and perhaps more common sense, had reached the unguarded box, picked it up, and smashed it. Suddenly we all were free.

I ran to help my mother, who was on her back, the pirate tearing at the shreds of her underclothing as he came down on top of her. Neither he nor she realized that we refugees had been freed to fight. I leaped to land on his back, my hands reaching around to his head, trying to pull him back though my weight bore down on him. I was so crazy with grief and rage and horror that I remembered none of the precepts we had been drilled in; I just put his head in a bear-hug and shoved with my feet.

Angrily he shook me off, half rising and reaching for his sword. He was so powerful I couldn't possibly hold him. I realized belatedly I should have grabbed a hammer or something and smashed him on the head. Now I was in trouble.

But the pirate grunted and collapsed. My mother had remembered one of the lessons and jerked up her knee the moment she had leverage, and scored on his crotch. The fight was mostly out of him.

There followed an amazingly savage conflict, as the other women and children recovered their volition and sought revenge for the brutality of the pirates. They clawed at faces and bit at hands and kicked at anything in reach. The pirates were burly men, accustomed to violence and bloodshed, but they had not before been betrayed by their pacifier box. They weren't used to having the victims fight back.

There were a dozen pirates in the bubble; five times that many women pounced on them, like vicious harpies. I saw one woman kneel on the head of a pirate while another drove an iron knitting needle into his ear as deep as it would go. It took only a moment for the man to stop jerking and screaming. I saw another trying to castrate a pirate with a sharp letter opener, an antique that had surely been saved as an heirloom, since letters had not needed such service for centuries. An immense and truly horrifying well of violence had been tapped, and I saw that we were in our deepest essence no better than our enemies.

Injured and bleeding, the surviving pirates beat a disorganized retreat and slammed the air lock closed. In moments their ship disengaged and fled.

We were left with our victory—and our grief. We had had sixty grown men in our complement; all had been slain in the pirates' orgy of killing, while we were helpless. Three pirates also lay dead in their blood, and the baby boy. The two raped little girls stood staring, not grasping any of this.

I went to my father, hoping somehow to discover him alive, but knowing better. I looked down through burning eyes at his corpse. How terrible his fall, how ignoble the deed! Nothing in my father's life or philosophy justified this dreadful termination. And I, by getting my family into the trouble that forced our exodus, had been the cause.

In a moment I felt someone at my side. It was Spirit. I clutched her to me, sharing my agony with her. We had never dreamed of desolation like this.

Now the women were scattered across the Commons, suffering their separate reactions. No trace of their violence of a moment ago remained. The departure of the pirates had excised the savagery in us. Some had found their husbands and were keening their grief, kneeling and bending their torsos forward and back, letting out part of their pain. Others were standing absolutely still and silent, just looking down. I realized that there is no set formula for the abatement of intolerable loss.

"We must do something," Spirit said.

I wrenched myself away from my horror, realizing she was correct. We had suffered an appalling disaster—but disorganization would only exacerbate our situation. We had to have a new leader who would see to whatever had to be done. But who, with no men remaining among us?

"Use your talent, Hope," Spirit told me.

She sounded so practical that I looked at her. Her eyes were staring out of her head like those of a little automaton, but she was right again. Her shock simply had not yet progressed to her vocal cords. How she would react when the full impact affected her I did not know. Some horrors, like some joys, seem to be too massive to grasp all at once.

I thought a moment, then recalled a woman of grandmotherly age, huge and ugly and competent. She was Concha Ortega, a dark-skinned widow who was traveling with her three grandchildren. Not one of those children ever misbehaved. None of them had been among those taken hostage by the pirates, which perhaps would enable her to be more objective than she might otherwise have been.

I saw my mother making her way toward us. She was an awful sight. Her hair was ragged, her clothing shredded, and there was a glazed look about her. "Take care of Mother," I murmured to Spirit, and departed. I knew my little sister would do what little could be done.

I made my way to Señora Ortega, who was hauling the body of a pirate toward the air lock. "Excuse me, Doña Concha," I said to her. "I am Hope Hubris, Major Hubris's son. You must be our new leader."

She viewed me contemplatively. "By what authority, Don Hope, do you appoint me to such office?" She was extremely imposing, with half-cropped gray hair, line-encased eyes, and much mass of body, and I felt like the stripling I was as that gaze fell on me.

"It's just that I know," I said. "All our men are gone, and you are the best woman. You understand discipline, you know what to do. You must lead, or we shall be leaderless, and perish in space."

She pondered briefly. "You are right, little man," she said. "It must be done. I have suffered no recent losses; I can put my mind to this problem."

"Thank you, Doña," I said, retreating.

Señora Ortega raised her voice, addressing the entire bubble. "We must provide proper burial for our dead," she announced. "We must show proper respect."

Proper respect—she had hit a note that resonated. Grief was piercing, but respect was vital. It was the dues paid the dead.

Under Señora Ortega's direction the bodies were moved to the vicinity of the rear air lock and laid out there in such style as was possible, considering the absence of facilities and the scantness of gravity in that region. The survivors closed the eyes of the men, washed the bodies with sponges from the heads, and reclothed them for burial. The signs of devastation were removed as much as possible, so that the men appeared to be sleeping.

There was a problem with the bodies of the three pirates. No one wished to do them honor! We hauled them to the front air lock and dumped them unceremoniously. We closed the lock and made ready to use the override control to open the outer port without first decompressing the lock. That would hurl the bodies into space unburied, unlamented.

"No," my mother said, looking up from my father's body.

"Speak, Charity Hubris," Señora Ortega said. "What would you do with this rubbish?"

"I would use it to greet the next pirates who come," my mother said, and there was a note in her voice that sent a chill through me.

There was a murmur of surprised agreement among the women. How confidently would a pirate enter if he discovered three of his kind, mutilated and dead, in the air lock of the bubble supposedly waiting to be fleeced?

"Excellent notion, Doña Charity," Señora Ortega agreed. I noticed how careful she was to employ the ceremonial address, providing respect to the living as well as to the dead. She was indeed the proper leader. "We shall save those bodies for such use. We shall post the warning of the skull on the stake." For in Earth's past, savage tribes had demarked their ranges by such means, plain warning to intruders.

Then she paused in thought. "Should we evacuate the air from that lock?"

Even the children knew the consequence of leaving bodies in air and warmth. There would come a horrendous stench.

Grimly, the women decided to leave the air in the lock.

That ugly business done, we returned to the rites for our gallant men. Normally death is a family affair in our culture—but not all the men had adult kin here in the bubble, while some families had made this trip without men, so everything was awkward, and it seemed best to handle it as a community effort. We arranged to have all the men suitably prepared, and we tore up one black gown donated for the purpose into strips for black armbands of mourning for all. Even though we were all Hispanic, there were differences in the details of our customs, so again we compromised on the single uniform service. There were suggestions of the Roman rite and the Gothic rite, with our scant and precious incense burned and the lips of some men anointed with oil. Dena Concha led us in singing the psalm De profundis: "Out of the depths have I cried to Thee, O Lord... I trust in the Lord, my soul waits for His word..." Oh, it moved me; I had to believe that the Lord would accept my father and treat him kindly. Then a few complimentary words were spoken for each dead man, and there was general praise for the group of them. Doña Concha did a good job; she had been through it with her own husband, who had died some years before, so understood the needs of the families though she had not herself been touched this time.

I fancy myself as being not superstitious or overly emotional, but that quiet, sincere service helped me tremendously. When she praised my father, calling him Don Major and describing in a few words his integrity and bravery in leading our group toward Jupiter, tears of sheer joy mixed with those of grief in my eyes, and the terrible burden of his loss eased significantly. It is truly bad to lose one's father, but it is best that he suffer a hero's demise. I'm sure the others felt the same as she spoke of their own men.

It was of course impossible to bury them in a sanctified cemetery or to place them in crypts with flowers or to kiss the earth as it was thrown into the coffins, and we elected not to use the few simple candles we possessed, not wishing to tax the air-recycling system with so much open flame. We decided to do the best we could: to bury them temporarily outside on the bubble. A select crew donned space suits and took the bodies one by one out the rear lock. We were not relegating them to space, but securing them to the outside of the bubble in plastic wraps and whatever else could be made to serve, so that they would be preserved by the cold and vacuum until the time they could be properly interred on planetary ground. We could not keep them inside the bubble, of course, and outside was as perfect a deep-freeze as exists. They would be preserved intact for Eternity, out there.

So it was done, and we sang the canticle Benedictus with the antiphon Ego sum resurrectio et vita, I am the resurrection and the life. The earth had, figuratively, been thrown into the graves, and the necessary formalities were over.

Señora Ortega explained gently that though we all should normally be permitted to retire to our justified grief, it was nonetheless necessary for us to keep the bubble functioning and on course; we would never be able to give our men proper burial if we did not survive ourselves. So she declared an end to formal grief, leaving only the armbands, as if a year had suddenly passed. She asked those of us who were able to function to join her in operating the bubble. This would not, she assured us, signify any lack of feeling or any affront to the dead, but rather our recognition of what had to be done in a most difficult situation. The way she expressed it, it was easy to agree. We had chosen well in this leader.

When a small crew of those women who had some grasp of the principles of gravity-shield navigation had been assembled, Señora Ortega dismissed the rest of us to our cells. "The best thing you can do right now is mourn your dead in privacy," she said. "Send them to heaven with your prayers. I know what you are feeling; my own grief is long behind me, and it occurred in better times than these you suffer now, but I remember." In this way she returned informally what she had denied formally: the timely expression of grief.

We went to our cells, but it was not a simple retirement. I realized abruptly that my mother should not be alone in her cell. I spoke to Faith, who had remained in her own cell throughout, thus missing much of the horror of the pirate encounter. It was not that she lacked feeling for our father, but that the full appreciation of his death added at this time to her existing state could have destroyed her. Yet I feared for the welfare of our mother too. "Please join her," I asked Faith. "You can understand and comfort her better than I could, for you are a woman."

Faith looked at me with a head-tilt of startlement, then swept back her hair and climbed to the next cell. She knew her own dismay had been preempted by a greater one.

But now Spirit was alone. I hesitated, knowing this was not right for her either.

Helse arrived. "Go with your sister, Hope," she said. "I am not bereaved, except to the extent I knew and respected those members of other families who died. I will try to help someone who needs it."

I felt a warm surge of gratitude toward her. "Thanks." I joined Spirit in her cell.

Spirit abruptly flung her arms about me, buried her face in my shoulder, and bawled. It was at that moment of letdown that the enormity of our tragedy struck me. Until then the continuing exigencies of our situation had caused me to hold much of the horror at bay, except when I thought specifically of my father.

Now it overwhelmed me too. I clung to my crying little sister and sobbed as vehemently as she.