“Understandable.”
Type Ones lived at the forward end, in individual compartments that ranged from comfortable to downright luxurious. The ship could accommodate sixteen; ten bodies and two survivors had turned up, and either there weren’t any more, they’d fallen out, or the rest were hiding out aft. All those found wore kathir suits, or something exactly equivalent, with the controls on flexible panels just above the wrist instead of belt buckles. They fell into two subgroups: six, including both survivors, were tall, lanky, and dark-haired, and wouldn’t have looked out of place at Peters’s family reunion; the remainder were heavy set and blonde, of middle height. Peters felt a pang. They looked like they might be related to Todd. They were exclusively male.
They were also, so far as Doc Steward could tell, as human as any of the sailors. The doctor didn’t have any gene sampling equipment bar a simple crossmatcher for determining drug compatibility, but that said the aliens could have taken anything in his pharmacopæa with predictable results, and there were no external differences even as great as those between Tollison (for instance) and the short, slender, dark Souvannaphong.
All the Type Ones they’d found so far had been removed, the deaders to the same freezer where the human—Navy—casualties rested for later, closer, examination, the survivors to the infirmary, where Tollison, Everett, and two other sailors of roughly the same bulk waited patiently for them to wake up. It had taken a bit to get them out of their suits, but they’d persisted, eventually finding a combination of button-presses analogous to the emergency open sequence of the Grallt ones and serving the same purpose. The medics said the suits were made of similar material to their own, but thinner and seeming tougher; Peters had confirmed that by examining one of the dead ones.
Another deader was handed out to Phan Duong and Lawson, and Vogt stuck his head out. “That’s it for the midships section,” he called out. He looked more than a little green around the gills.
“Good,” said Warnocki. He made a note on his computer. “Thirty-nine dead, three survivors: forty-two. Bunks for fifty, right?”
“Forty-eight, Chief.” Vogt glanced over at Heelinig and Peters. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? Six eights.”
“Yeah, I guess. So six unaccounted for?”
Vogt grimaced. “Yeah. There’s a godawful big hole on the starboard side, two of the compartments are open to the outside there. They probably got blown out.”
“Probably so.” Warnocki finished his notes and looked up. “Any progress aft?”
“I haven’t heard anything from back there in a while, Chief. Want me to check?”
“Yeah, do that. But be careful.”
“Aye, aye.”
Aft was where it really got strange. Right aft was a section that was weirdly arranged—or wasn’t; certainly it was weird for a spaceship, though most of them had encountered similar, or at least equivalent, setups in the past. A hundred and twenty-eight bunks—two squares—occupied two rooms, each holding sixty-four in four tiers, four high and four long. About half, all top bunks, were unmade, apparently unused, but seventy were or had been occupied. Between the two rooms was a group of cubicles on two decks, each holding a comfortable bed and little else. The only access to the whole section came through there, a hatch with a strong lock.
All seventy of the occupants were female: thirty-nine humans of the same two types as the males, thirty-one Grallt of about the same mix as were aboard Llapaaloapalla. Sixty had survived the battle, thirty-two humans and twenty-eight Grallt. All of them were young, and all of them were pretty.
They were, without exception, frightened out of their minds. It wasn’t possible to communicate with the human girls at all; they spoke no Grallt, and even considering English was ludicrous. The Grallt girls spoke their own language, but in halting baby-talk with little or no vocabulary and less grammar. Se’en, Dee, and a short squad of others were back there, trying to let the girls know they were safe and could come out. Sending men, human or Grallt, to try to talk to them was worse than useless. If a male of either species entered their section they scrambled for their bunks and lay there, cowering and uncommunicative.
That wouldn’t do at all. Llapaaloapalla was still “dead in space”, drifting between stars far from its ports of departure or destination. They were, in a few words, in bad trouble.
“You say this has never happened before that you know of?” Peters asked.
Heelinig shook her head. “No, I’ve never heard of anything like this happening.” She looked up at the ferassi ship. “Ships have been attacked by the ferassi; I’ve never had the experience, but I’ve been told about it. It would start out just as this did, but the ship would heave to, and the Grallt men would come aboard and start picking out what they wanted. They would ransack the ship, but mostly they would take food, valuable things, and—”
“And girls,” Peters finished when the pause extended itself.
“Yes. Nobody ever found out what happened to them. I suppose we know now.”
“Slaves.” Peters had learned the word from reading historical romances. He’d never expected to need to use it.
“So it would seem.” Heelinig was grim. “But for the moment that’s secondary. If it were up to Preligotis, or me, we’d dump that hulk right here, bodies, survivors, girls, and all, and get our butts to Jivver, and never never never breathe a word about this to anybody anywhere.”
“You really think it’s that bad? There’s lots of interesting stuff on board.”
“Peteris, you simply have no idea.” Most of the Grallt did that now, added a schwa between the “r” and the “s” of his name. “We have to trade with these people, or at least with their Grallt flunkies.” She pursed her mouth and blew in exasperation. “Ssth. They are the only source of zifthkakik, and until we found you people they were the only source of breakbeams. I still can’t quite believe they couldn’t disable your breakbeams.”
“Apparently what they can disable is the control system. They didn’t disable your zifthkakik, or the ones on the planes.”
Heelinig nodded. “That would kill everybody. It would make robbing us easier, but if they want slaves it isn’t practical. They brought us down from High Phase, but that would be a function of the control system, as you say.”
“And you anticipate—”
“Ssth. Picture the scene,” she suggested, gesturing forward. “We breeze in to Jivver system, take up orbit, and send you people down for your holidays. There are almost four squares of you, and how many can keep secrets? You start bragging and showing off souvenirs… Jivver is a nexus, there’s almost always two or three other ships there, and one of them is almost bound to be ferassi, a ferassi trade ship I mean.”
“Yes, I think I see what you’re getting at.”
“Ssth. They ask to come aboard, and how can we refuse them? We have to trade, after all; we need zifthkakik for the rest of our round. They see this.” She thumped the side of the ship. “They discover that we have killed two and eight of them, and taken two captive. This has never happened before, even in the stories. Which means—”
“Which means either it really never has happened before, or the ones who did it got rather thoroughly suppressed.” Peters stretched his mouth in a rictus that wasn’t in any way reflective of amusement. “I lean toward the second possibility, myself. I have heard some hints, on Zenth—” he remembered Keezer’s sneer “—and elsewhere, that the ferassi aren’t completely unknown.”
“Yes, I’ve heard similar hints.” She looked around. “We simply cannot do this, Peteris.”