“What’s your name?” she asked very quietly, and very quietly he answered:
“Abervest. They call me Abe.” And then so low she could hardly hear it, “I’m Fleet.”
Chapter Two
Fleet. Sassinak held to that thought through the journey that followed, crammed as she was into a cargo hauler’s front locker with two other newly purchased slaves. She found out afterwards that that had not been punishment, but necessity; the hauler went out of the dome and across the barren, airless surface of the little planet that served as a slave depot. Outside the insulated, pressurised locker - or the control cab, where Abe drove in relative comfort - she would have died.
Their destination was another slave barracks, this one much smaller. Sassinak expected the same sort of routine as before, but instead she was assigned to a training facility. Six hours a day before a terminal, learning to use the math she already knew in mapping, navigation, geology. Learning to perfect her accent in Harish and learning to understand (but never speak) Chinese. Another shift in manual labour, working at whatever jobs needed doing, according to the shift supervisor. She had no regular duties, nothing she could depend on.
One of the most oppressive things was the simple feeling that she could not even see out. She had always been able to run outdoors and look at the sky, wander into the hills for an afternoon with friends. Now… now some blank ugliness stopped her gaze, as if by physical force, everywhere she looked. Most buildings had no windows: there was nothing outside to see but the wall of another prefab hulk nearby. Trudging the narrow streets from one assignment to another, she learned that looking up brought a quick scolding, or a blow. Besides, she couldn’t see anything above but the greyish haze of the dome. She could not tell how large the moon or planet was, how far she’d been taken from the original landing site, even how many buildings formed the complex in which she was trained. Day after day, nothing but the walls of these prefabs, indoors and out, always the same neutral gritty grey. She quit trying to look up, learned to contain herself within herself, and hated herself for making that adjustment.
But one shift a day, amazingly, was free. She could spend it in the language labs, working at the terminal, reading… or, as most often, with Abe.
Fleet, she soon learned, was his history and his dream. He had been Fleet, had enlisted as a boy just qualified, and worked his way rating by rating, sometimes slipping back when a good brawl intruded on common sense, but mostly rising steadily through the ranks as a good spacer could. Clever, but without the intellect that would have won him a place at the Academy; strong, but not brutal with it; brave without the brashness of the boy he had been, he had clenched himself around the virtues of the Service as a drowning man might cling to a limb hanging in the water. Slave he might be, in all ways, but yet he was Fleet.
“They’re tough,” he said to her, soon after they arrived. “Tough as anything but the slavers, and maybe even more. They’ll break you if they can, but if they can’t…” His voice trailed away, and she glanced over to see his eyes glistening. He blinked. “Fleet never forgets,” he said. “Never. They may come late, they may come later, but they come. And if it’s later, never mind. Your name’s on the rolls, it’ll be in Fleet’s memory, forever.”
Over the months that followed, Sassinak began to think of Fleet as something other than the capricious and arrogant arm of power her parents had told her about. Solid, Abe said. Dependable. The same on one ship as on any; the ranks the same, the ratings the same, the specialties the same, barring the difference in a ship’s size or weaponry.
He would not say how long he had been a slave, or what had happened, but his faith in the Fleet, in the Fleet’s long arm and longer memory, sank into her mind, bit by bit. Her supervisors varied: some quick to anger, some lax. Abe smiled, and pointed out that good commanders were consistent, and good services had good commanders. When she came to their meetings bruised and sore from an undeserved punishment, he told her to remember that: some day she would have power, and she could do better.
She could do better even then, he said one evening, reminding her of their first meeting. “You’re ready now,” he said. “I’ve something to show you.”
“What?”
“Physical discipline, something you do for yourself. It’ll make it easier on you when things get tough, here or anywhere. You don’t have to feel the pain, or the hunger -”
“I can’t do that!”
“Nonsense. You worked six hours straight at the terminal today - didn’t even break for the noon meal. You were hungry, but you weren’t thinking about it. You can learn not to think about it unless you want to.”
Sass grinned at him. “I can’t do calculus all the time!”
“No, you can’t. But you can reach that same core of yourself, no matter what you think of. Now sit straight, and breathe from down here -” He poked her belly.
It was both harder and easier than she’d expected. Easier to slip into a trancelike state of concentration on something - a technique she’d learned at home, she thought, studying while Lunzie and Januk played. Harder to withdraw from the world without that specific focus.
“It’s in you,” Abe insisted. “Down inside yourself, that’s where you focus. If it’s something outside, math or whatever, they can tear it away. But not what’s inside.” Sass spent one frustrating session after another feeling around inside her head for something - anything - that felt like what Abe described. “It’s not in your head,” he kept insisting. “Reach deeper. It’s way down.” She began to think of it as a center of gravity, and Abe nodded when she told him. “That’s closer - use that, if it helps.”
When she had that part learned, the next was harder. A simple trance wasn’t enough, because all she could do was endure passively. She would need, Abe explained, to be able to exert all her strength at will, even the reserves most people never touched. For a long time she made no progress at all, would gladly have quit, but Abe wouldn’t let her.
“You’re learning too much in your tech classes,” he said soberly. “You’re almost an apprentice pilot now - and that’s very saleable.” Sass stared at him, shocked. She had never thought she might be sold again - sent somewhere else, away from Abe. She had almost begun to feel safe. Abe touched her arm gently. “You see, Sass, why you need this, and need it now. You aren’t safe: none of us is. I could be sold tomorrow - would have been before now, if I weren’t so useful in several tech specialties. They may keep you until you’re a fully qualified pilot, but likely not. There’s a good market for young pilot apprentices, in the irregular trade.” She knew he meant pirates, and shuddered at the thought of being back on a pirate ship. “Besides,” he went on, “there’s something more you need to know, that I can’t tell you until you can do this right. So get back to work.”
When she finally achieved something he called adequate, it wasn’t much more than her normal strength, and she exhausted it quickly. But Abe nodded his approval, and had her practice almost daily. Along with that practice came the other information he’d promised.
‘There’s a kind of network,” he said, “of pirate victims. Remembering where they came from, who did it, who lived, and how the others died. We keep thinking that if we can ever put it all together, everything we know, we’ll find out who’s behind all this piracy. It’s not just independents - although I heard that the ship that took Myriad was an independent, or on the outs with its sponsor. There’s evidence of some kind of conspiracy at FSP itself. I don’t know what, or I’d kill myself to get that to Fleet somehow, but I know there’s evidence. And I couldn’t put you in touch with them until you could shield your reactions.”