Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

“Where’s Nancy?” Pel asked.

Amy turned and glanced about, worried. “I don’t know,” she said. “Wasn’t she with you?”

“No,” Pel said. “She stayed with Alella.”

Raven and Stoddard emerged from the corridor behind Pel, their swords gone, a blaster leveled at their backs. Beyond them Pel could see more of the original passengers, and farther back Captain Cahn and two of his crewmen.

“All right,” one of the grey-clad men ordered, “through there. Let’s go.” He pointed toward the airlock.

“What about my wife?” Pel called.

“Don’t worry about it,” another man ordered him. “Just move.”

Pel started to say something, and the man shoved a blaster under his nose with one hand, pointing to the airlock with the other. “Move,” he said.

Pel moved.

The corridors of the pirate ship-if that’s what it actually was-were gray-painted metal and resembled the inside of a submarine Pel had once toured. This vessel was far more what he had always expected a spaceship to look like than Emerald Princess had been.

He had little time to study it, though; he was hurried to a large, bare chamber, where he and some of the others were locked in, without any further explanation.

For a moment after the heavy steel door slammed shut Pel stared at it, expecting something more to happen. When nothing did, he turned to consider his surroundings.

A row of stained, bare mattresses lay along one of the long walls; at the far end were two small bathrooms, the doors standing open. There were no other furnishings, no windows, no other doors. In the room with him were Amy and Susan; the navigator of Emerald Princess ; two passengers, one a young man, one a middle-aged woman; and of course, Rachel.

“What happened?” Amy asked. “Who are those people? Where are we?”

“Pirates, right?” Pel asked, looking at the navigator.

He nodded. “Pirates,” he said. “From one of the rebel worlds out on the fringe, I suppose. Though I don’t know why they picked on the Princess ; I’d think there were juicier targets out there.”

“And those juicier targets are probably better-guarded,” the young man said knowingly. “The Princess was small enough that we weren’t worried about pirates, and we didn’t have any defenses. Made us a sitting duck.”

The navigator’s expression made it plain that he wasn’t impressed with this logic. “There’s a good reason we weren’t worried,” he said. “A gravity gun’s an expensive thing to operate, and bringing in a ship in mid-flight isn’t any picnic; the Princess shouldn’t have been worth the trouble.”

“Well, how much trouble was it, really?” the young man argued. “The ship itself-she’s a nice little boat, and they’ve got her for next to nothing, really. And the passengers-we had money and jewels along, some of us, and they can probably collect ransoms on most of us…”

“No, they can’t,” the navigator interrupted. “How the hell could they collect any ransoms? If they tell anyone where they are, so someone can make the payment, the Empire’ll hunt them down and wipe them out.”

“Well, there’s still the ship…”

“I suppose,” the navigator admitted. “But it still seems strange. The ship isn’t anything all that special.”

Amy, Pel, and Susan exchanged glances.

“Do you think it might have had anything to do with us?” Amy asked.

“I don’t know,” Pel said. “Could Shadow have tracked us somehow?”

“Why would it bother?” Amy asked.

“Does it need reasons?” Susan said. “It tried to kill us once, back in that forest; it could just be trying to finish what it started.”

“In that case,” Pel argued, “why didn’t it already kill us? I mean, why didn’t these pirates just shoot everybody?” A thought struck him, and he added, “And even if they aren’t working for Shadow, if it was the ship they wanted, why didn’t they shoot us?”

That question made everyone uneasy; Amy cast a glance at the mattresses.

“Those stains don’t all look like blood,” she said uncertainly.

Pel followed her gaze. “No,” he agreed. “They don’t. I think if they were just going to kill us, they’d already have done it.”

“They killed some,” the navigator said.

The others all turned to face him.

“They did?” Amy asked.

“Yeah,” the navigator said. “There was some fighting. One of the spacemen, that man Jim Peabody, he pulled a gun and picked off two pirates, and they blew his head off, in the starboard crew compartment. And when they found someone hiding in one of the storage lockers they dragged her out and beat her, and…” He glanced at Rachel, who was drowsing but not fully asleep, and then finished, “And worse, and I’m pretty sure they killed her when they were done.”

“Her?” Pel asked, suddenly nauseated, his ears starting to ring. He had seen Prossie alive and unhurt, and some of the original female passengers, and Amy and Susan were here with him. Nancy was missing, though. “Her?”

It didn’t have to be Nancy, he told himself. There were some missing females among the ship’s original passengers, too, weren’t there?

“A woman,” the navigator said. “One of your group. I saw part of it and got a look at her, when they were done, but I don’t know her name.”

Elani was still unaccounted for-but hiding in a storage locker?

“Nancy,” Pel said, gasping. “My wife.”

There was a long moment of silence as Pel’s strangled words sank in.

“Oh, God, Pel,” Amy said, “I’m sorry.”

“Mommy?” Rachel asked, waking. “Where’s Mommy?”

* * * *

Raven considered his surroundings with interested distaste.

It would seem that the luxury of the other ship was not a universal trait of sky-ships in the Empire’s world. This sorry vessel-assuming that this was indeed the interior of another ship-was just as drab as the Governor’s installation in Town, perhaps even moreso.

Well, he had endured hardship before, and would undoubtedly do so again, in his battle against Shadow.

All that troubled him was that he still had no notion of who had captured him, or why. Pirates, the others taken with him said-but pirates in whose pay? Freebooters or privateers?

* * * *

Amy watched miserably as Pel tried to comfort his sobbing daughter. She wished she could help, but she hadn’t been able to do any more than provide a used tissue out of her purse. No one had actually told the child directly that her mother was dead, but none of them had denied it, either.

This was perhaps the worst moment yet in the long string of dislocations and horrors that she had been living through ever since that damned spaceship fell out of the sky on her back yard. Monsters bursting up out of the ground, being stranded in an alien desert, all the other things had been frightening and uncomfortable, but nothing that equaled the feeling of sick helplessness she felt right now.

“Why didn’t they just shoot us?” she muttered.

The young male passenger heard her, and cast a sideways glance at Pel before muttering in reply, “I’ve heard some rumors.”

Startled, Amy turned to look at him. “What rumors?” she asked.

“Well, they are just rumors,” he said, “but you heard the crewman there mention the rebel planets. There are some nasty rumors about them.”

“What rumors?”

“Supposedly-and I don’t know, it’s just what I’ve heard, but supposedly they’ve revived the slave trade.”

Amy stared at him. For a long moment his words failed to connect with anything. Slave trade? What was that? What did it have to do with anything? What did it have to do with her ?