Chapter 18 — PIRATE TREASURE

Space, 3-27-'15—We traveled another period, settling into routine. It wasn't that we mourned our lost ones less, but that there was nothing to do but go on and to keep ourselves busy, so as to keep the nightmares away. Even if we hadn't been out in blank space, away from the Jupiter ecliptic, in peril for our lives if we miscalculated the vectors of the enormous reaches of space, we would have had to keep ourselves active until the specters faded. There were few pirates out here, for this was off the travel lane; we almost missed them! But we had set up another refuse tank for quick-vacuum, just in case.

However, we were not left long to our own devices. Yet another ship overhauled us. Our luck had changed, and we wished it hadn't; this almost certainly meant more trouble.

We set up as before, except that we cut our crew of "innocents" to two, so the other six could have a better chance to survive the decompression. We didn't like taking losses, but had to play out our play, if only to lull the pirates so our trap could spring. We knew we had a defense that worked, and we didn't want to compromise it.

The ship docked, the lock opened, and the first pirate entered. I could not see around the curve of the Commons, since I was stationed right at the rear lock and our doughnut-hole chamber was well restocked with supplies, obscuring my line of sight, but I heard them. Spirit was halfway around, able to see both locks.

Spirit blew the whistle.

The two children attacked; I heard the scuffle.

"Hey, what—?" I demanded, amazed. There had not been time to ascertain the intentions of the intruders.

"It's the Horse!" Spirit hissed. "Move, Hope!"

The Horse! I stood frozen, remembering the rape of my sister Faith. I had sworn to kill that man!

The men caught the children before suffering more than scratches, and disarmed them. Two children could not attack five or six men with the same effect possible for thirty children attacking the same number. We should have realized that. The sounds penetrated my consciousness as if from a distance. The Horse, come to our bubble again!

"Do it!" Spirit snapped, and closed her helmet.

That finally jogged me out of my stasis. I closed my own helmet and jumped into the air lock. Already the pirates were coming around the Commons, and Spirit was backing toward the drive-control panel, almost tripping over the old, small drive unit parked beside it.

I closed the lock, decompressed it, opened the outer panel, and swung out, ready to cross when the drive cut off. We would lose two, this time; the innocents, who would not be able to get to their suits. They had known the risk, and it had to be done. I waited—but the drive did not cut off.

At last I realized that the pirates had caught Spirit before she could use the panel. I had no way to cross the ring of fire that was the drive. With the old, small columnar drive there would have been no problem. Or we could simply have cut off the new one when the pirates docked. So many little things we could have done—but it was now too late. We could not spring our trap.

Then I remembered something else, and that made me feel worse yet. We had weapons now—lasers and the taffy gun. Why hadn't we thought to use them? One kid behind that gun, shooting taffy at the pirates—we had never needed to go the vacuum route at all! What had possessed us to overlook that?

Grief and shock, that was what. We had had the sense to fetch the weapons, but then had lapsed into our suffering, and had never done the hard intellectual work of devising a new strategy of defense. What a colossal error! Even Spirit had missed it.

There was nothing to do but go back inside. Bad luck and poor planning had foiled our grand play. Maybe I could get to the taffy gun yet, however.

It galled me that it should be the Horse who had us at his mercy a second time. The one who had initiated our descent into horror. Objectively I knew he was not the worst of pirates; he was a rapist and robber and opportunist, but not a wanton killer. But he was a symbol in my mind, and he had to be destroyed. For the sake of my sister Faith.

Now, I realized, I might see him rape my sister Spirit. Unless I found a way to get at one of our power weapons so as to take him out.

I reentered the main bubble. The Horse was there, his laser pistol pointed at my midriff. He was garbed exactly as I remembered him: black shirt, yellow pantaloons, bright-red sash, and broad buccaneer hat—all of it worn and dirty. He stank the same too; no wonder they called him the Horse!

We were all captive, exactly as before. All our savage experience seemed to have changed nothing. They bound us and set us in a line against the wall of the Commons, near one of the operative heads. The two innocents were somewhat battered, but the others weren't hurt. Spirit and I had been removed from our space suits; no hope of escaping to the hull now! But maybe some chance would come to get to a weapon.

I shifted my wrists. Two pirates had bound us with lengths of rope about the crossed wrists and crossed ankles. They had a light touch, and had made the knots only tight enough to hold us effectively, not enough to interfere with the circulation in our extremities. They obviously knew what they were doing. I didn't recognize either of them—but of course we had seen so many pirates since our first encounter that they tended to fuzz in my memory. But for what it was worth, I didn't think these particular two had raped Faith, while I thought the two standing with the Horse had done so. That provided me with a set of priorities; whom to attack first, when I had the opportunity.

The interrogation began: Where were all our other people? How did we get the pirate weapons and supplies? Where were we going, since we were now spiraling away from Jupiter and out of the ecliptic? The Horse knew there was something strange about us, and he sought to turn it to his advantage. I realized that he was basically a scavenger, seeking whatever other pirates had missed.

We did not answer him. We all remembered his prior visit. We owed him nothing.

"Then we shall do it the harder way," the Horse said. "I'm not much for torture and killing, but I do like to turn a profit and I don't like being balked." He looked us over. "You," he said, pointing to me. "You're the oldest, and as I recall, you had a fine piece of a sister you've managed to hide somewhere. You will answer my questions."

I remained silent. It was the only way I could get back at him, at the moment.

He pointed at Spirit. "Strip her," he said.

The two pirates beside him went over and hauled my little sister out, untied her, and ripped off her clothing, though she struggled and tried to bite and scratch. Then they held her upright and naked before us.

The Horse studied her. "Not quite old enough," he said with evident regret. "Another year and she'll be fine, but I don't get my kicks from children. Anyway, that won't make this kid talk; it didn't before. We'll have to go the other way." He drew his knife.

I broke out in clammy sweat. I had somehow been braced for rape, much as I detested the notion, but this was worse. He was going to torture Spirit!

The Horse faced me. "This is your sister, by the look of her. Put her in your clothes and she could be your little brother. I don't want to have to hurt her, but I will if you don't talk. I ask you once: Will you tell me everything I want to know?"

"He won't!" Spirit exclaimed.

Guided by her, I remained silent. Maybe the pirate was bluffing, trying to scare me into talking.

The Horse sighed. "Okay, we'll start with a finger." He grabbed Spirit's left hand and wrestled with it until he had hold of her smallest finger, while the two other pirates held her legs and other arm, preventing her from struggling effectively. It struck me how similar this process was to rape.

Then, without ceremony, he brought the knife up and sliced into the base of her finger, near the knuckle.

Spirit screamed with ear-deadening intensity, and wrenched with all her strength, but the pirate hung on and kept carving. Blood spattered out. I rolled over, trying to break my bonds, and the children on either side of me started crying. They had been toughened to the wounds of combat, but this was different. I could not get free; I landed on my side, my head on the deck.

Something landed before my nose. I stared crosseyed at it. It was about five centimeters long and tattered at one end.

It was Spirit's little finger.

I looked up, my eyes hazed by tears of shock and fury. I saw and heard Spirit sobbing, her hand covered with her own blood.

"I ask you again," the Horse said, grinning. "Are you ready to talk?"

Now I knew he wasn't bluffing. He would keep cutting off parts of Spirit until she died. Then he would start on another child.

What did it matter, what he knew of the adventures of our bubble? We had no secrets worth dying for.

But I tried one more thing. "Kife," I said.

Suddenly I had the complete attention of all the pirates. "So you're into that, are you?" the Horse asked, licking his lips. "All right, show me the mark and I'll turn you loose."

"I have no mark," I said. I hadn't thought to mark myself, and probably that wouldn't have been convincing since it wouldn't have been a tattoo. A lie would get me nowhere, and I really didn't have much taste for lies anyway. Lies were for pirates and scions.

The Horse squinted at me cannily. "Not everyone knows this, but I do: There's always a mark. That's to stop impostors from making claims. If you can't show me the mark, you've got no claim. And even with the mark, you can't protect anyone else. You're the only one exempt. So show it, and I'll put you in that lifeboat you're towing and send you off, and I'll interrogate someone else here."

The trouble with the Horse was that he was canny. My bluff had failed. I couldn't save Spirit anyway. "Let my sister go, and I'll tell you everything." I said, capitulating.

"I won't let her go, but I'll let her be," the Horse said. He gestured to the pirates holding Spirit, and they let go her arms and stooped to bind her ankles. Crying brokenly, preoccupied with her mutilated hand, she did not try to escape, and of course it wouldn't have done any good if she had. She tried to put her fist in her mouth, but the blood was still flowing, and she only smeared it on her cheek.

Oh, Spirit! Better had they raped you!

One of the pirates who had tied us went over and gave her a bandanna, and she wadded it against the stump. All the fight had gone from her. They put a blanket over her and let her sit down, and she huddled in it. The pain was evidently diminishing—but never again would she have that finger.

I swore again, to myself, to kill the Horse, who had savaged both my sisters—but until I had the chance to do that, I would have to cooperate. I could not watch Spirit be tortured any more.

I talked. I told the pirates everything, summarizing our entire misadventure in the bubble. The Horse was especially interested in the QYV aspect. "And the body of the courier is frozen on the hull?" he asked.

"Yes," I agreed shortly.

"So you were the one who killed her, not a pirate."

"Yes."

"Which means you will have to settle with Kife."

I hadn't thought of that. "I suppose so," I said, resenting the very fact of agreement with him. If I ever encountered Kife, however, I knew it would not be amicable.

The Horse smiled. "I will make sure you go free, then. I wouldn't care to be the one to deprive Kife of his vengeance. He's an ugly one." He pondered. "Still, I understand those couriers carry some really good stuff. We'd better take a look at it."

"No!" one of the other pirates exclaimed. "It's death to mess with—"

"With a dead courier?" the Horse asked. "Whose body will be lost in space, tied to a drifting bubble? I think even Kife knows where to cut his losses. He'll deal with her killer and let it go at that."

"I don't know," the other pirate said.

"That's why I'm the leader here," the Horse said. "I'll take the responsibility. I'll never have another chance to see exactly what a courier carries."

It occurred to me that if the Horse let me go and Kife caught up with me, Kife would learn from me of the Horse's part in this. Then the Horse would be marked for vengeance too. I had killed Helse to save the bubble; the Horse would be interfering with the privileged material itself. Surely the Horse realized this. Therefore he probably intended to kill me and the other children, once he had all the information we could provide, so we couldn't implicate him. If Kife tracked the bubble, without any living witnesses, he would discover that the great majority of the refugees, including Helse, had died in prior encounters with pirates; there would be no evidence that the Horse had ever intercepted the bubble a second time. He could probably get away with it.

It all depended on our being dead. I had to kill him—to save us all. But still I had no way.

Under the Horse's direction, two pirates suited up and scrounged on the hull for Helse's body. It took them some time, for there were many bodies there and they had to inspect each one naked for the mark. I had told them Helse was female, but evidently they weren't sure of me, so checked males too, just in case. Actually, it was probably hard to tell until the corpses were pretty well stripped, anyway.

They found her and brought her inside the bubble. I had never looked at Helse after her death; now I had to. This, I think, is the most visceral grievance I have against the Horse: I had known Helse was dead, intellectually, but some part of my romantic mind had remained hopeful that she might live. Now no part of my mind could doubt any longer. My last faintly fond illusion had been banished. The utter bleakness of reality took its chill hold on my soul, I looked, terribly compelled. It was appalling. They had cut away her wedding dress and brought her in naked. She was not pretty at all in this state; she was frozen like a statue, her eyeballs and tongue protruding grotesquely, her body bloated by the decompression that had occurred before it froze. I would not have recognized her at all, if I had not known it was her. But it was; the aspects of familiarity loomed larger as I slowly perceived them. Her brown hair, her breasts, the QYV mark at her thigh—oh, Helse, the woman I had loved!

They tried to cut her open, but she was like rock. They had to thaw her—and that was the worst thing of all. We had thawed the bodies of our men for food—but the adult women had handled that, concealing it from the children as much as possible, and I had not cared to watch. But I understood that they had selectively heated only those portions they intended to carve, leaving the main part of each body intact. A leg, for example, could be heated and even cooked to a certain extent while on the bone, and when it was soft enough to carve, the edible flesh was stripped and the still-frozen remainder of the body was taken back out to the hull. Helse, in contrast, was being thawed entire. This was a much slower and uglier process, for they did not use fire for fear of destroying what it was they sought: the container anchored to her intestine.

In fact, it took several days, as I reckon it, for the body to thaw to their satisfaction, for the ice in the central body cavity melted very slowly. For all that time we had to wait and watch, tied and guarded by the pirates. They released us periodically to eat and drink, one at a time, and to use the head, but watched us so closely that we never had a chance to escape.

Even poor Spirit, a shadow of her former vitality, was permitted to rummage for bandaging material and replacement clothing only under the eye of a pirate. She searched inefficiently, unlike her normal manner, and found nothing suitable, and finally had to settle for soft underclothing from her own belongings. She fastened these garments clumsily against the stump of her finger and anchored them to her hand with elastic so that it looked as if her whole hand had been amputated. She refused to take any pirate pain-killer, for that was marked H. My heart went out to her in her misery and agony, but I was helpless. She was so pale I knew the loss of blood had hurt her. I couldn't even talk to her, couldn't comfort her. My little sister, was dying, in her sad way, before my eyes. The strength I had perceived in her was gone; defeat and pain had robbed her of it. Even the two halfway decent pirates seemed sorry for her.

We slept at irregular intervals while the ice melted, though we felt the chill of it as the air in the vicinity lost its heat in the contact with the deep, deep freeze of space. There was nothing else for us to do. My mind ran over every possible plan to escape, but all foundered in the face of the reality of being both bound and watched. I wondered why they were taking the trouble to keep us alive for this period, and could only conclude it was for further questioning in case some new mystery arose in connection with the courier's body. The Horse was a thinker, in his fashion; he did not discard things before he was quite finished with them, including lives. That made him more dangerous than the more directly brutal pirates. Once the capsule was recovered and opened, our lives would be surplus. So the thawing of Helse was in fact a countdown on our own lives, and when the chill, of her body had dissipated, the chill of our bodies would commence.

When I slept, I dreamed, and it was not fun. I seemed to march through an inchoate crowd of faceless people, all walking toward the brink of a yellow sulfur cliff, all stepping over it and falling to their doom. Only I could perceive the oncoming disaster, and I tried to talk to them, to urge them to stop and turn about, but they did not seem to hear me. I discovered that they were roped together and I was roped with them, my hands bound together; I was being carried over the cliff too.

I woke sweating in the cold. I was indeed roped, along with the others, and we faced the slowly warming body, and smelled its faint but growing aroma. We were approaching that cliff of doom, and the dream was no fantasy, but a rendering of reality. My dreams or visions had a disturbing propensity that way. I looked covertly at the pirate guarding us, but he was alert; no chance there.

I slept again, huddling into myself, and thought I woke to find the guard sleeping, and nudged myself over to him and managed to get my fingers on his knife. He woke then, and opened his mouth to scream, but I had the knife, and my bonds unraveled before its blade, and I brought it up and stabbed him in the face and saw the blood geysering out of his nose, splashing across my hands, which looked oddly like Spirit's hands, and I woke, and it was only sweat on my hands, and the guard remained alert.

Next time I dreamed I slipped my bonds and made a noose of the rope, flung it about the head and neck of the guard, and garroted him mercilessly, watching his eyes and tongue bulge out of his head, and it felt good, it gave me a feeling of power to do that to him—but I woke, and it was the head of my beloved Helse my gaze was fixed on, not the garroted pirate. Still she thawed...

I dwelt on that for a while, compulsively. Helse was dead and my heart with her, and now her body was becoming more of a horror to me than her death itself had been. She had at least died quickly, and probably not suffered much; decompression in space, horrible as it may look, is about as clean a demise as a person could seek. I understand consciousness is lost in the first second, so the rest is never felt. Now she was being restored in a fashion, and her restoration would destroy us all. I felt anger, frustration, guilt and grief for her death, but had to some extent confined these emotions before they ravaged me beyond recovery. I knew that any breakdown on my part could lead to death for all of us, so had not had the luxury of prolonged grieving. But as I watched her body slowly soften, it all came back with appalling and gruesome force.

All that we had suffered in the bubble—was it worth it? Could it ever be worth it? Or would it have been better if we all had died? In that case, the Horse would be doing us a favor when he killed us, ironically.

I drifted to sleep again and dreamed of my family alive, as they were at the beginning of this travail, and I was explaining to my father how I wanted to marry Helse, but he was perplexed because he thought she was a boy. "No, she is a girl," I said, not even wondering how it was he did not know, when he had known before and had told my mother, and I drew off her clothing so he could see. But what was revealed was not the sweet soft shapely flesh of the living woman, but the cold hard horror of the corpse, and I stared in shock—and was awake again, my eyes fixed on the reality. Waking was no escape from nightmare!

Where had it all gone wrong? How could I have avoided the unmitigated horror of this outcome? I knew the answer: I should have avoided contact with the scion in Maraud. That had been the start of the whole terrible chain of events. Had I only drawn my sister Faith aside, hidden her from view—yet this scion had come looking for us, having seen Faith before. How could I have prevented that? I simply was not competent to deal with the problem I had faced.

Incompetence. There was the root of it. Had I had competence, I would have found a way to alleviate the situation. Had I had more experience, or had a more knowledgeable person been there to guide me—

But now I realized that if I had somehow dissuaded the scion without offending him, so that the crisis had never occurred, it would have solved only part of the problem. We, the Hubris family, would have survived, never having to take the bubble off-planet—but all the other refugees would have proceeded as before. Helse would have been aboard, and had to seek another roommate, and perhaps had trouble from the outset, and the pirates still would have raided and raped and murdered, and the Jupiter Patrol still would have rejected the refugees. The end would have been the same: death for all on the bubble, including Helse, one way or another. And I would never have met her and loved her, and she never would have loved me. A fantasy that saved my family without saving Helse was no good. It was not the scion I had to settle with, it was the pirates.

I slept again, and dreamed of the end of this dread sequence; the thawing was complete, and the fell pirate Horse reached his gross dirty hairy hand up between Helse's spread thighs into her soft body, raping her with his hand, for raping was his business, and rammed his gross fist around and around inside there while she struggled against the pirates holding her arms and legs, and at last with a gloating gasp of satisfaction pulled out what was inside her. It was large and green and shaped like a baby, the baby I had planted in her, but no, it was not mine, it was Kife's, he had raped her first, putting in her the seed of her destruction, putting his brand on her tender body. I had a vengeance to make against QYV, could I but survive to pursue it. This whole pirate trade, using and abusing innocent people—

Now the capsule, as the Horse held it up to the light in lustful victory, was small, its proper size; in my dream I was not concerned about such superficial changes of reality. The pirate's small eyes gleamed as he viewed the prize, the ultimate pirate treasure, the burden of the courier. What did that container contain? And I was curious too, and guilty for that curiosity, for by experiencing it I seemed to be supporting the death of my beloved, even as my bodily reaction at the time of the rape of Faith had seemed to support that act. Even in my private mind, where I could conjecture freely, I could not find an answer to my guilt. How much better to have Helse alive and leave the mystery intact! I had no right to want to see the content of that capsule! Yet I did.

The Horse broke it open and an object fell out, a blob of something, soft like mud, green mud. It fell on the body and spread out across the flesh like taffy. The Horse, fearing to lose it, tried to pick it up, but it broke apart and part of it adhered to his fingers.

He stared at his hand, watching his fingers dissolve, and I realized that the green blob was a living thing, some kind of alien being that fed on human flesh and now was consuming both the corpse and the pirate. It had been quiescent until freed from the confining capsule; now there would be no stopping it. It would gorge until they were both gone, the dead woman and the living man, and then it would start on the rest of us. Already a pseudopod of it was extending across the deck toward me.

I woke in a new sweat, and nothing had changed. The body still thawed, the odor of it slowly intensifying, the dread cold still reaching out to touch me, and the pirate guard still watched. The Horse and one of the other pirates had returned to their ship, no doubt preferring to rest well away from the grim scene there. Spirit slept fitfully to one side, sometimes moaning faintly, the bloodstained undergarment enclosing her hand. She looked so wasted and frail! Would this slow horror never end?

The sequence was interminable, but in two, perhaps three days, perhaps more—I really don't know how long it took that body to thaw completely, everything is conjecture—it ended. As we watched dully, knowing the end was coming in more than one sense, that the reprieve Helse had provided us by taking as much time as she could to thaw was over, the Horse returned from the spaceship. He inspected the now limp and discoloring corpse, nodded approvingly, and took out his knife. He cut carefully into Helse's abdomen, as if performing surgery. The cutting was largely bloodless, and I could not see all of it—indeed, I did not want to see any of it, but couldn't control my eyes—but I saw enough. They had set her on a table, raised a meter or so, so the Horse wouldn't have to squat down awkwardly. The curve of the floor of the Commons lifted me somewhat, but still I had no clear line of sight to the incision.

He laid her open like the carcass of an animal, severing skin and muscle and linings to get at the intestines. This was just as bad as my dream! Then he drew out the guts of her in dark lengths, intact, squeezing and peering until he found the position of the capsule. He made an incision in the intestine at that point and cut free the prize. It was not as messy an operation as my horrified imagination had hinted, but was more horrible in other respects. Maybe this was because my dream had portrayed it as a kind of rape, while this was surgical. My abhorrence of rape had been muted somewhat by the education Helse herself had provided me, but my reaction against the onslaught of the knife remained unabated, for I had seen my father killed by the sword and the finger of my sister cut off. But mainly it was the actual cutting of the flesh of my beloved. Had she been alive it might have been an operation. We tolerate much more profound violations of our bodies in the name of medicine than we do in the name of pleasure.

The pirates crowded close, intent on the capsule as the Horse proudly held it up. It was about two centimeters long and half a centimeter in diameter. Not impressive, physically—but its content could be invaluable.

The child next to me nudged me. Slowly I turned my head, interrupting my own morbid fascination with the proceedings. Spirit was looking at me, seeming much more alert and alive than before, and when my gaze met hers, her eyes flicked down to her bandaged hand. I looked there—and saw she had a tiny blade, hardly more than a sliver from some razor blade the women used to remove hair from their legs when they were allergic to depilatories.

When she saw that I had seen, she hid the knifelet. I realized that she had cut her bonds during the recent distraction of the pirates. She must have picked up the blade while foraging for bandaging material and hidden it in the gore from her finger. No wonder she had had so much trouble finding what she needed in the way of bandaging—it had been this she was really looking for. The pirates, thinking her completely broken, had not considered her any real threat, so had not watched her as closely as they had the rest of us. Even in her shock and pain right after the loss of her finger, my cunning little sister had been alert for some way to free herself and us. No wonder she had fooled the pirates; she had even fooled me! Now Spirit was ready for action, and she knew it had to be soon.

The children between us fidgeted as if uncomfortable. Then the one beside me presented the tiny blade, shoving it toward me with his bound hands. The children between Spirit and me had not taken time to free themselves; they knew I needed to be freed first. They had the discipline of desperation. We would have only one chance, and we had to make it good.

I moved slowly, using the blade to saw through the rope about my feet. Then I realized this was foolish; the hands had to be first. I nudged my companion, and he moved his bound hands to mine, and I sawed at his rope. The blade was sharp, for these items are fashioned in the factory bubbles of Jupiter to last almost forever, and my leverage was good. The strands parted, and in a moment his hands were free. Then he took the blade and severed my rope. My hands, too, were free. While I had dreamed vainly of such an escape, Spirit had taken practical action to make it possible. But I could not move my hands freely, lest the pirates see. I arranged the rope so it looked tied, and moved as slowly as before.

Meanwhile the pirate awe of the QYV treasure abated enough to get practical. "We have it, but we have a problem," the Horse said. "We don't know what's in it. Could be a diamond—or could be an ampoule of Quintessent H, worth two million—or could be a deadly virus Kife means to use to wipe out a major bubble. Do we gamble, or don't we?"

"Where'd she come from?" a pirate asked, glancing at Helse's body. "Do they have virus labs there?"

"Callisto, the boy says," the Horse replied. "No advanced technology there. No precious minerals either."

"But she could have been a second-stage courier. It could have started anywhere. Maraud is a center for bootleg re-transfer. The Jupiter Patrol is watching for drugs on the regular ships from the inner worlds, but pays no attention to refugees. So it figures Kife would use one of them for something really important."

"But Jupe's bouncing refugees now," the Horse pointed out. "Why use a courier who can't get through?"

The other pirate shrugged. "I don't know. He must've figured she would get through, for some reason, and it fouled up. She would have been pretty enough, alive."

Pretty enough. Yes, that figured. Faith might have gotten through, and Helse too, if some male Jupe officer spotted them. Regulations could be bent or ignored for that sort of thing. Yet I wasn't sure. I had seen no evidence of corruption in the Jupiter Patrol, and it had been a woman who turned us away. So the mystery of Kife's strategy remained.

I freed the hands of the girl on my other side and passed the blade on. Covertly, we all worked on our foot-ropes, though the pirates were now so engrossed in their debate over the capsule that they were paying no attention at all to us.

But I knew it would take more than our bare hands and one tiny blade to overcome these rough pirates. We had no real weapons, and the men were so much larger and stronger than we were they could have overcome us barehanded. There were weapons farther around the Commons, but we would be caught long before we could reach them, assuming the pirates had left them in place. What could we do to save ourselves?

I worked it out as my feet came free: Someone would have to distract the pirates while someone else reached the weapons. We had no chance to plan this out before we would have to act, so I had to hope our minds ran in similar channels. I could make the best use of the weapons, but I was farthest from them; Spirit was closest.

I looked again at Spirit, making a little signal with a finger. She should go for the weapons. She nodded.

"To hell with that," the Horse exclaimed, settling the pirates' dispute. "We could debate it for years and never decide. I'm going to open it." And, while the other pirates shrank back apprehensively, he twisted the two halves of the capsule.

It burst apart and an object fell out, giving me a shock of déjà vu relating to my recent dream. The pirates shied away as if afraid the thing would explode, but it bounced harmlessly on the deck. The Horse stooped to pick it up.

When should we make our move? Now, while the pirates were distracted? Or should we wait till we had no choice. I decided that sooner was best. But we did have to give the remaining children time to get free. The more of us who burst loose at once, the better.

"A key!" the Horse said, disappointed. "A stupid little plastic key!"

"A key to what?" one of the others asked, edging back toward it.

"How should I know? Maybe to a safe that got shipped by some other route and has a booby trap to blow it up if any key but this is used on it. Probably a magnetic pattern imprinted in it, no way to fake it. But we don't have that safe!"

"Then what good is this to us?"

"No good at all!" The Horse threw down the key in a fury. "We sure ain't going to Kife with it! Three damn days gone—for this! For nothing!"

Spirit got up and started walking toward the weapons.

For a moment the pirates did not even notice. Spirit walked exactly as if she were going to the head. She had marvelous composure. All the time I had thought she was broken, she had been planning this!

Then the Horse spied her and caught on. "She's loose!" He started for her. "Who forgot to tie—"

I launched myself toward him.

We didn't have a chance, of course. There were eight of us and five pirates in the bubble at the moment—but each of them was a match for two of us unarmed, and there were more in the pirate ship that would come at the sound of the commotion. But we were desperate; we had nothing left to lose.

I plowed into the Horse, who wasn't looking at me. My impact spun him around. In a moment he recovered, grabbed me, and threw me aside. Scowling, he drew his laser pistol.

Why hadn't I grabbed for that pistol first? I might have gotten it, if I had concentrated on that alone! I had bungled my only chance! Now, as if it were in slow motion, I saw the ongoing panorama of the action. The Horse, drawing his weapon. The other pirates, turning to face the rushing children. One of the bad ones reaching for Spirit at the fringe of the group. But no, he wasn't catching her, he was clapping his hands to his face! She had flicked him in the eye with her finger-whip!

Then the Horse realized what was happening and brought his pistol around to bear on Spirit instead of me. I tried to roll into his feet, to jar his aim, but was too slow. But Spirit fooled him by leaping up into the storage compartment, neatly curving through the hole in the net and disappearing among the packages of food up there. His shot burned a package but missed her. It was that curvature of the jump that had thrown him off; we were used to it, but he wasn't.

Unfortunately, we had no weapons stored up there. Spirit was safe for the moment, but we had lost the war because the Horse was striding toward the cache of weapons.

I scrambled to my feet. Maybe I could still get to a weapon first, if I dived for it. But I knew this was unlikely.

I was passing Helse's body on the table. I reacted almost without thinking. I picked up the corpse, entrails and all, lifting it readily in the partial gravity, and heaved it at the Horse. It was strange, touching Helse's dead flesh, which was not soft but rather stiff, but I knew she would approve of being allowed to participate in the fight this way.

The body struck the Horse. He spun around, firing his laser into it, not at first realizing what it was. Then he realized, and his face snarled with disgust. A length of intestine had strewn itself across his arm, and he brushed if away and backed off.

Meanwhile I was making progress toward the weapons, thanks to Helse's intercession. My dead love had given me a better chance.

"Down!" Spirit cried from the far side of the Commons. She had sailed right through the center compartment and out the other side! "Flat!"

I didn't know what she had in mind, since there were no weapons over there, but knew better than to ignore the warning. I spread myself flat against the deck, hoping this was not all a bluff.

"Someone shoot that brat," the Horse cried. Then he turned and aimed his laser at me. I could hardly move to avoid it, since I was lying down.

There was a horrendous roar, an ear-hurting sound, and a blast of hot air. Fire exploded in the baggage-storage section and the netting disintegrated. Burning packages rained down, curving in their fashion as they fell. The pirates, amazed, tried to dodge them.

Had Spirit detonated a bomb among the packages? But there was no bomb!

A pirate near the air lock screamed. I looked—and saw him bathed in fire. His hair and clothing were puffing into bright ash, and his body was blackening. He spun to the side, his skin flayed from his body.

A jet of flame shot through the center of the bubble and down through the air lock, directly into the pirate space ship. There were screams as it fried unseen pirates there.

A laser? That would have to be a laser cannon, the kind mounted on a Jupiter Navy battleship. We had nothing like that on board!

Then it cut off, after only a few seconds, leaving us bathed in heat and gasping for air. The metal of the air lock glowed red where the jet had touched it, and the odor of burnt flesh was strong. The pirates were standing motionless, staring, and I think some were temporarily blind. Those of us on the deck were better off, being farther from the flame.

Now I realized what it was. Spirit had ignited the small rocket drive! She must have braced it against the rear lock and aimed it down toward the front lock, searing through everything between. It was a little, weak jet when used to move the mass of the full bubble, externally—but here inside it seemed devastatingly powerful. She probably had it set on the lowest level of thrust; otherwise she would not have been able to hold it at all. But even that level, which from outside might seem to be a pallid jet of half a dozen meters, was enough to incinerate what remained in the storage compartment and to char what did not. The ferocity of its passage heated the air explosively, and the jet showed in air to extend the full sixteen-meter breadth of the bubble and beyond. It had been perhaps a five-second burst—and the bubble was in a shambles.

"Get their weapons!" Spirit called. I scrambled up—but the Horse reacted as quickly, swinging his pistol about again. "Spirit!" I cried, throwing myself flat again and trusting the other children to follow my lead.

The jet of fire came again. It wobbled, and part of it struck the side of the air lock near the pirate. Fire refracted, forming a curving sheet of flame and sparks that caught the standing pirates glancingly.

It cut off a second time. "I'll burn you all, if you don't get those pirates!" Spirit called.

But this time the pirates had been harder hit. The Horse was staggering, having been brushed in the face by the flame, and I got his pistol without resistance. It took a third blast from the rocket before we had complete control, but we did have it.

When I reached Spirit, I discovered the price she had paid for her valiant move. She had been very close to the rocket, and the thing was no toy. She had held it in place by hand, her extremities shielded by bandage-clothing, but her hands were burned and her hair singed. She had closed her eyes tightly, protecting them, but her cheeks were blistered. When she saw me coming and knew we had won, she fainted.

Poor, heroic little girl! I scavenged for balm for her skin and tried to get her comfortable, then tended to the other pressing business.

We didn't push our luck. We sent the two least obnoxious pirates—the ones who had tied our bonds loose rather than cut off the circulation of our hands and feet, and who had let us use the head with reasonable frequency—out the cooling lock with instructions to close it behind them and separate the pirate ship from the bubble. Then we dealt with the Horse and the two remaining pirates.

I had sworn to kill the Horse, and now was my chance, but I found I was unable to do it directly. I was not, when it came to the test, a calculating murderer; I killed only in the throes of desperation. Yet when I looked at Spirit's stump of a finger and at Helse's mutilated body, and remembered Faith, I suffered a helpless secondary rage. We could not simply let these criminals go!

Spirit had recovered consciousness by this time. She was in pain from her new injuries and unsteady on her feet, but her eyes bore on the Horse with singular malignancy. Faith was her sister too, and Spirit had suffered even more directly and recently from the villainy of the Horse. Spirit was no forgiving cherub. Wordlessly she held out one burned hand for the laser pistol.

I gave it to her, not knowing what she would do, but aware that she had more guts to do it than I did. I saw that it hurt her just to hold the weapon, but she gritted her teeth and took it in her left hand, the one with the lost finger, though she was right-handed, and she aimed it and steadied it and fired—into the crotch of the Horse.

He screamed and jumped, but the damage was done. Spirit had castrated him with the laser.

Then we forced the three into the trailing lifeboat, after hauling it up to mate with the freed front lock. We had not killed the Horse—but blind and burned, he might not live long anyway, jammed into the lifeboat with his two cutthroat companions and set adrift in space. Certainly he would suffer to a certain extent the way we had. Certainly he would never rape another refugee girl. Maybe his pirate ship would search out the boat and pick him up; maybe it wouldn't bother. His fate was now in the hands of his associates, as perhaps it deserved to be. His blood was not, technically, on my hands. That perhaps is my ultimate confession of weakness.

We had not actually lost any children this time, but half our supplies had been destroyed and we all had emotional and physical scars. Several children had bad burns from the rocket, and I feared Spirit's face would never be pretty, for there would be blister scars on it when it healed. But we survived, and we had a little portion of our vengeance!

We bagged Helse's remains and returned her to the hull. I saved the mysterious plastic key, hiding it on my person, my last memento of Helse. That and the HELSE HUBRIS tag.

We cleaned up the rest in the usual manner; it did give us something to do. We settled down to traveling our route and tending our injuries. Spirit, tough little creature that she was, started recovering right away, but I refused to let her do any real work until her skin scabbed over and started healing. She was, I still believe, the toughest one among us, and she had earned her rest.