“You’re going to clean it all up, Red, by yourself. And there’ll be plenty to clean—” Instead of a nudge, this was a hard shove, that sent her careening into one of the others, who pushed her back.
It took her hours to clean the floor to their satisfaction, with the single small rag they allowed. Meanwhile, Miranda struggled back and forth with the slop pails from the other cells, emptying them and scrubbing them clean. Her guards harrassed her verbally but didn’t make her spill any more. Yet. Cecelia knew more harrassment would come.
Just when she thought they were finished, the guards told them both to clean the guards’ latrine; they gave Miranda a little rag like hers and pushed them both into the latrine. It had two urinals, two stalls, four sinks, and a shower. That took another hour or so, because the guards swore they had missed a speck here in this corner or on top of that mirror or behind that pipe.
At the end of that first day, Cecelia hurt from her toes to the top of her head and all the way past her fingertips. Her knees were sore and her back hurt; her hands were red and raw; her bruises were darkening. Miranda looked tired too, her palms marked with the red lines of the bucket bails, but at least she hadn’t had to crawl around on her knees all day.
But they were alive, she reminded herself, and alive was better than dead. So far.
Supper was a meagre bowl of some unflavored gruel, sipped without utensils from a plastic bowl which had to be handed back. Someone from another cell was brought out to wash the bowls afterward.
Then the lights dimmed, and Chief Jones explained that they were allowed to sleep only during this shift—so four of the ten had to sleep on the deck, with barely room to stretch out.
“We rotate bunk and floor assignments,” she said. “You’re numbers nine and ten, so I’ve redone the rotations. Six nights out of ten, each person gets a bunk. Four nights, the floor. What we did was put numbers in a pile, and draw them out—what was left was yours. You’re four, Miranda, in the rotation, and Cecelia, you’re nine. We’re starting fresh, so that means Miranda has a bunk the next four days. Cecelia, you have the floor.”
“But she worked harder,” Miranda said. Chief Jones cocked an eye at Cecelia.
“That’s all right,” Cecelia said. “I’m tired enough to sleep on anything.”
“Good. Pipe down, everyone.”
Despite what she’d said, Cecelia found the floor hard and unforgiving, with a nasty cold draft. No matter what position she lay in, something hurt, mostly a fresh bruise. She slept, off and on, but it was nothing like a real rest.
She woke to a clangor that turned out to be the guards hammering on metal buckets.
“Rise and shine! Get off those bunks, you lazy bums!”
After some days of this, the guards abruptly handed them mops and sponges. “Use these—you’ve got more to clean than just this head, and the way you work, it’d take you a month with rags.” After they’d cleaned the guards’ latrine, they were taken out of the brig area and down the corridor. Cecelia glanced through doorways they passed and saw stacked bunks in rows. Crew housing? It must be. The guards kicked open a door into a huge tiled room . . . urinals on this wall, toilet stalls on that, rows of shower stalls, rows of sinks. “Start at that end, and don’t miss anything!” one ordered.
“And you’ll need these,” the other said. He unlocked a cabinet in which were toilet bowl brushes and jugs of chemicals labelled for their intended use.
Cecelia headed for the far end and dipped a brush in a toilet bowl; Miranda, without saying a word, went to the urinals. Aside from choosing a urinal she’d already cleaned to use, the guards didn’t harrass them that day. Cecelia scrubbed, polished, mopped, and cleaned, as if she’d been born a janitor. The guards lounged near the door, clearly bored.
Within a few days they were spending all day every day cleaning four latrines—the guards’, and three others on the crew deck. Cecelia was able to describe to Chief Jones, in detail, what equipment was being stored where: exactly what chemicals were in the equipment closets where they picked up and returned mops, brooms, sweep-vacs, brushes, and sponges, exactly how many people were usually around in each corridor and head (she’d finally taken to using the military term, when the Chief kept reminding her of it).
Day by day, she brought in more information, a snippet at a time . . . and day by day, their guards became more and more bored. To amuse themselves, they occasionally dirtied an area the women had cleaned and demanded that it be cleaned again, and as they’d decided the women feigned exhausted submission. That wasn’t much fun; the guards began sneaking off singly. They never actually left the women alone and unwatched, but they weren’t anywhere near as alert as before. Cecelia had time to think. And one sleep shift, she told Chief Jones what had occurred to her, the answer to a question that had puzzled her since her capture.
“I know what they want you alive for,” Cecelia said.
Chief Jones shrugged. “Prisoner exchange . . . ransom . . .”
“No. They want you for prey.”
Chief Jones stared at her, expressionless except for the slight widening of her eyes. “Prey.”
“When I was on Sirialis, when Admiral Lepescu was killed—when Heris Serrano shot him—that’s what he was doing. Hunting people. As sport.”
The Chief’s eyes narrowed and focussed far behind Cecelia’s face. “They want a hunt, do they?” Then she refocussed on Cecelia’s face, and her mouth widened slowly to a feral grin. “Fine. We’ll give them a hunt . . . we start now. Here.”
Cecelia had been prepared for shock, for anger, but not for this almost glee. “But—” she started but Jones shook her head.
“No. There is only one answer. It must not be their hunt, but ours.”
Chapter Eleven
Heris Serrano, having finally got her ship in order—or mostly in order—explained their mission.
“We’re looking for mutineers by watching jump points and looking for out-of-range ansible transmissions. We engage and destroy mutineers, change out the recognition codes on ansibles and system defenses. If we find minefields, we’ll clear them.”
“What if they leapfrog us?” Seabolt asked.
“They may, but if we work our way through the jump points in between, we should pick up their trail before that happens. That was the reason for rushing crews onto ships and getting them into space, to move into this area and interdict their movement. That still gives them a lot of space, but at least it protects our most vulnerable civilians.”
“Do you think they’d attack civilians, Captain?”
“I imagine they will, unless all they wanted was to run off and set up somewhere on their own. But so far no one’s reported direct commmunication with them. All we have is that one report from Vigor, which had the sense to run like a rabbit with the distress message when it realized there was trouble. By the time we come out of jump, I expect to hear more. If they were agents of a foreign power—”
“The Black Scratch,” someone muttered.
“The Benignity or any other,” Heris corrected. “I suppose someone might even have fallen in love with the lifestyle of a NewTex religious fanatic.” There was a chuckle from the younger officers. “My point is, it’s too early to form conclusions about what these mutineers are like, except dangerous. We know they took over the Copper Mountain orbital station and freed prisoners from the high-security brig. It’s our job to keep them penned up until someone figures out who they are and how to deal with them.”
“Captain, won’t this concentration leave border defense in jeopardy?”
“As I understand it, units are being pulled only from friendly borders. Nobody seriously thinks the Lone Star Confederation or the Guerni Republic or the Emerald Worlds want to invade us. There may be more smuggling than usual, but we can stand that.”