“Turn it on, but keep it low. Be ready to hide it again.”
The next time she came through the kitchen, all the grown women were clustered around it. This time the face on the screen was a woman in a decent dress—or at least a dress. Dark hair streaked silver—an older woman.
“She says the yellow-hair was a big man’s daughter.”
Oh, Mitch . . . ambition diggeth pits for the unwary . . .
“She says our men murdered people and stole things . . .”
“That’s a lie,” Prima said automatically. Then she gasped as the screen showed Mitch—sitting miserably at a table, not eating, with men she knew around him. Terry . . . John . . . and there was the Captain, Ranger Travis.
“—Rangers are either captive, or dead.” That was the voice from the machine, with its curious clipped way of speaking. The way Patience had spoken at first.
“Prima! Get out here!” That was Jed, bellowing as usual. Prima scurried away, resenting once again that part of Scripture which would give her to this man just because he was Mitch’s brother.
Mitch Pardue came to in the belly of the whale, a vast shadowy cold cavern as it seemed. He blinked, and the threatening curves around him resolved into something he recognized instantly as part of a spaceship. Not the shuttle, though, and not the space station he’d been on. He looked around cautiously. There on the deck nearby were a score of his fellows, most still slackly unconsious, one or two staring at him with expressions of fright.
Where were they? He pushed himself up, and only then gathered his wits sufficiently to realize that he was dressed in a skimpy shipsuit with no boots, with plastic shackles on his ankles. He felt his heart pounding before he identified the fright that shook him. He cleared his throat . . . and stiffened in outrage and terror. No. It could not be. He tried again, forming a soft word with his mouth, and no sound emerged.
He looked around frantically—on one side of him the bodies of his own crew, men he knew well, now more of them awake, and mouthing silent protests. On the other, another clump of men he knew—Pete Robertson’s bunch, he was sure—beginning to stir, to attempt speech, to show in their faces the panic and rage he felt in his own.
The troops that entered sometime later did not surprise him; he braced himself for torture or death. But after checking his shackles, they simply stood by the bulkhead, alert and dangerous, waiting for whatever would come.
He should rally his men and jump them. He knew that, as he knew every word of Scripture he’d been told to memorize. But lying there, mute and hobbled, he couldn’t figure out how. He turned his head again, and saw Terry watching him. Get ready he tried to mouth. Terry just stared at him blankly. He nodded, sharply; Terry shook his head.
The women had been able to lipspeak to each other; some of them had a hand language too. Men should be able—he tried again, this time looking past Terry to Bob. Bob mouthed something he couldn’t figure out in return, and looked scared. Mitch was plumb disgusted. Giving up this way, what were they? He rolled over to attempt something with Pete, but one of the guards had moved, and was making very clear gestures with his weapon. Mitch looked closer. Her weapon.
“Stop it,” she said. “No whispering, no mouthing.” She had a clear light voice that didn’t sound dangerous, but the weapon in her hands was rock-steady. And he didn’t doubt the others would get him if he tried anything with her. Down the row someone made a kiss sound, a long-drawn smooch. Mitch looked up into dark eyes like chips of obsidian and didn’t make a sound. Another of the soldiers walked up to the smoocher and deliberately kicked him in the balls. He could not scream, but the rasping agonized breath was loud enough.
Another group of soldiers arrived; Mitch found himself suspended between two in space armor, propelled down a corridor to a large head. “Use it,” said a voice from inside the helmet. Man’s or woman’s, he couldn’t tell, but he had urgent need. So did the others, alongside him. From there, they were taken to a compartment with a long table set with mealpacks.
He shouldn’t eat. He should starve himself, rather than eat with these infidels. He tried to signal his team, figure out a way to stop them, but four of them were already tearing open the mealpacks. He sat rigid, jaws clamped on his hunger, while the others ate. After a short time, two of them dragged him away to a small cubicle where he faced someone in a fancier uniform.
“You won’t eat?”
He shook his head.
“We’ll feed you, then.” And in the humiliating struggle that followed, strong arms held him down while he was force-fed some thick liquid.
“You do not have the option of suicide, or resistance,” the officer said coolly, when they dragged him back to the same cubicle. “You will cooperate with us, because you can do nothing else.” After that, they took him back to a different compartment, a small solitary cell.
Mitch had, once or twice in his young days, travelled under a fake identity on Familias-registry ships; he had seen a few of the big commercial orbital stations. But nothing he had seen was like the interior of an elite warship. He wanted to despise it; he wanted to sneer at the exaggerated courtesy, the grave ritual, the polish and precision . . . but without a voice he could do nothing but experience it, and in that experience realize how foolishly he had misjudged his opponents. He had called down God’s wrath on his people, and here was the instrument of that doom: sleek, shining, perfectly disciplined, and utterly deadly.
He wanted to defy them. He wanted to hate and defy and condemn and resist to his last breath, but he kept thinking of Prima and Secunda . . . of the smell of bread from the ovens, the bright flowers in the gardens, of the sound of children’s voices echoing through the halls, the slap of the boys’ sandals when they ran; the clump of the bigger boys learning to walk in boots, the soft patter of girls’ feet . . . the feel of their soft little arms around his neck, the smell of their hair. His wives. His children. Who would be someone else’s, who might be forced out to work in someone’s fields, who might be crying, unprotected, afraid, because of him—he woke sweating, his own eyes burning.
In the empty hours, staring at the blank walls, he saw deeper into himself than he ever had, or wanted to. God was punishing him for his ambitions. That was only right, if he had done wrong. But his family—why should they be punished? His appetite disappeared, this time from no rebellion but sadness . . . and his captors did not force him to eat, this time.
Someone knocked, then entered. A man—he was grateful for that, at least—but in a uniform he had not seen before.
“I’m a chaplain,” the man said. “My own beliefs are not yours, but I am assigned to help members of Fleet with matters of belief and conscience.” He paused, paged through a small booklet. “I think your nearest word for me would be pastor or preacher. You are being returned to Familias space for trial, and our laws require that anyone facing charges of such gravity must be granted spiritual consolation.”
What spiritual consolation could an unbeliever, a heathen, give him? Mitch turned his face to the bulkhead.
“We have only the smallest chance to get those children out alive,” Waltraude said. “I know you want nothing to do with this Ranger Bowie—but unless he tells his wife to give them up, she won’t. And he is the only one who can influence his brother, who has now inherited responsibility for his wives and children.”
“But it’s ridiculous! Why can’t we talk to her?” Admiral Serrano said.
“I see no reason to negotiate with him—he’s our prisoner; he’s going to get a good, quick, legal trial and the death sentence—”