Anne McCaffrey& Elizabeth Moon - Planet Pirates - 1 Sasslnak
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Sassinak
McCaffrey, Anne & Moon, Elizabeth © 1990
Scanned September 2002 v1.00
Sassinak was twelve when the raiders came. Old enough to be used,
young enough to be broken — or so they thought. But they reckoned
without the girl's will, forged into a steely resolve to avenge herself on the
pirates who had killed her parents and friends.
When the chance comes to escape, Sassinak grabs it, thanks to the help
of a captured Fleet crewman. Returned to the Federation of Sentient
Planets, she initiates her revenge by joining Fleet as a raw recruit,
surprising everyone by her rapid rise to senior rank. And then her
vengeance begins in earnest.
Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Moon have woven a story worthy of
Robert A. Heinlein in its tough- mindedness, reminiscent of Larry Niven
and David Brin ' in its description of human and alien races coming
together both as friends and enemies.
ALSO FROM ANNE McCAFFREY IN ORBIT
THE DEATH OF SLEEP: Volume Two of THE PLANET PIRATES
First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Orbit Books
First paperback edition published in 1991 by Orbit Books
Reprinted 1992
Copyright © 1990 by Bill Fawcett & Associates
The right of Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Moon to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to
real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 1 85723 092 2
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
BPCC Hazells Ltd
Member of BPCC Ltd
Orbit Books
A Division of
Little, Brown and Company (UK) Limited
165 Great Dover Street
London SE1 4YA
ANNE McCAFFREY and ELIZABETH MOON
SASSINAK
Volume One of THE PLANET PIRATES
Contents
Book One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Book Two
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Book Three
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Book Four
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
By the time anyone noticed that the carrier was overdue, no one cared.
Celebrations had started two local days before, when the last crawler
train came in from Zeebin. Sassinak, along with the rest of her middle
school, had met that train, helped offload the canisters of personal-grade
cargo, and then wandered through the crowded streets.
Last year she'd been too young - barely - for such freedom. Even now,
she flinched a little from the noise and confusion. The City tripled in
population for the week or so of celebration when the ore carriers came
in. Every farmer, miner, crawler-train tech or engineer - everyone who
possibly could, and some who shouldn't have - came to The City. It
almost seemed to deserve the name, with crowds bustling between the
rows of one-story prefab buildings that served the young colony as
housing, storage, and manufacturing space. Sassinak could pretend she
was on the outskirts of a real city, and the taller dome and blockhouse of
the original settlement, could, with imagination, stand for the great
soaring buildings she hoped one day to visit, on the worlds she'd heard
about in school.
She caught sight of a school patch ahead of her, and recognized Caris's
new (and slightly ridiculous) hairdo. Shoving between two meandering
miners, who seemed disposed to slow down at every doorway, Sassinak
grabbed her friend's elbow. Caris whirled.
"Don't you -! Oh, Sass, you idiot. I thought you were -"
"A drunken miner. Sure." Arm in arm with Caris, Sassinak felt safer - and
slightly more adult. She gave Caris a sidelong look, and Caris smirked
back. They broke into a hip-swaying parody of the lead holovid's "Carin
Coldae - Adventurer Extraordinary" and sang a snatch of the theme
song. Someone hooted, behind them, and they broke into a run. Across
the street, a familiar voice yelled "There go the skeleton twins" and they
ran faster.
"Sinder," Caris said a block or so later, when they'd slowed down, "is a
planetary snarp."
"Planetary nothing. Stellar snarp." Sassinak glowered at her friend. They
were both long and lanky, and they'd heard as much of Sinder's skeleton
twin joke as anyone could rightly stand
"Interstellar." Caris always had to have the last word, Sassinak thought. It
might not be right, but it was last.
"We're not going to think about Sinder." Sassinak wormed her fingers
through the tangle of things in her jacket pocket and pulled out her credit
ring. "We've got money to spend ..."
"And you're my friend!" Caris laughed and shoved her gently toward the
nearest food booth.
By the next day, the streets were too rowdy for youngsters, Sassinak's
parents insisted. She tried to argue that she was no longer a youngster,
but got nowhere. She was sure it had something to do with her mother's
need for a babysitter, and the adult-only party in the block recreation
center. Caris came over, which made it slightly better. Caris got along
better with six-year-old Lunzie than Sass did, and that meant Sass could
read stories to "the baby": Januk, now just over three. If Januk hadn't
managed to spill three-months' worth of sugar ration while they were
trying to make cookies from scratch, it might have been a fairly good day
after all. Cans scooped most of the sugar back into the canister, but
Sass was afraid her mother would notice the brown specks in it.
"It's just spice," Caris said firmly.
"Yes, but -" Sassinak wrinkled her nose. "What's that? Oh . . . dear." The
cookies were not quite burnt, but she was sure they wouldn't make up for
the spilled sugar. No hope that Lunzie wouldn't mention it, either - she
was at that age, Sass thought, when having finally figured out the
difference between telling a story and telling the truth, she wanted to let
everyone know. Lunzie prefaced most talebearing with a loud "I'm telling
the truth, now: I really am" which Sass found unbearable. It didn't help to
be told that she herself had once, at about age five, scolded the Block
Coordinator for using a polite euphemism at the table. "The right word is
'castrated'," was what everyone said she'd said. Sass didn't believe it.
She would never, in her entire life, no matter how early, have said
something like that right out loud at the table. Now she cleaned up the
cook-corner, saving what grains of sugar looked fairly clean, and
wondered when she could insist that Lunzie and Januk go to bed.
"Eight days." The captain grinned at the pilot. "Eight days should be
enough. For most of it anyway. Aren't we lucky that the carrier's late."
They both laughed; it was an old joke for them, and a mystery for
everyone else, how they could turn up handily when other ships were
"late."
"We don't want to leave witnesses."
"No. But we may want to leave evidence ... of a sort." The captain
grinned, and the pilot nodded. Evidence implicating someone else. "Now
- if those fools down there aren't drunk out of their wits, anticipating the
carrier's arrival, I'm a shifter. We should be able to fake the contact,
unless they speak some outlandish gabble. Let's see ..." He scrolled
through the directory information and shook his head. "No problem. Neo-
Gaesh, and that's Orlen's birthtongue."
"He's from here?"
"No, the colonists here are from Innish-Ire, and Orlen's from Innish Outer
Station. Same difference; same language and dialect. New colony - they
won't have diverged that much."
"But the kids - they'll speak Standard?"
"FSP rules: they have to, by age eight. All colonies provided with tapes
and cubes for the creches. We shouldn't have any problem."
Orlen, summoned to the bridge, muttered a string of things the captain
hoped were Neo-Gaesh, and opened communications with the planet's
main spaceport. For all the captain could tell, the mishmash of syllables
coming back was exactly the same, only longer. Hardly a language at all,
he thought, smug in his own heritage of properly crisp and tonal Chinese.
He spoke Standard as well, and two other related tongues.
"They say they can't match our ID to the files," Orlen said, this time in
Standard, interrupting that chain of thought.
"Tell 'em they're drunk and incompetent," said the captain.
"I did. I told them they had the wrong cube in the lock, an out-of-date
directory entry, and no more intelligence than a cabbage, and they've
gone to try again. But they won't turn on the grid until we match."
The pilot cleared his throat, not quite an interruption, and the captain
looked at him. "We could jam our code into their computer ..." he offered.
"Not here. Colony's too new; they've got the internal checks. No, we're
going down, but keep talking, Orlen. If we can hold them off just a bit too
long, we won't have to worry about their serious defenses. Such as they
are."
In the assault capsules, the troops waited. Motley armor, stolen from a
dozen different captured ships and minor bases, mixed weaponry of all
manufactures, they lacked only the romance once associated with the
concept of pirate. These were muggers, gangsters, two steps down from
mercenaries and well aware of the price of failure. The Federation of
Sentient Planets would not torture, rarely executed . . . but the thought of
being whited, mindcleaned, and turned into obedient and useful workers
. . . that was torture enough. So they had discipline, of a sort, and loyalty,
of a sort, and were obedient, within limits to those who ruled the ship or
hired it. On some worlds they passed as Free Trader's Guards.
Orlen's accusations had not been far wrong. When the last crawler train
came in, everyone relaxed until the ore carriers arrived. The Spaceport
Senior Technician was supposed to stay alert, on watch, but with the
new outer beacon to signal and take care of first contact, why bother? It
had been a long, long year, 460 days, and what harm in a little nip of
something to warm the heart? One nip led to another. When the inner
beacon, unanswered, tripped the relays that set every light in the control
rooms blinking in disorienting random patterns, his first thought was that
he'd simply missed the outer beacon signal. He'd finally found the
combination of control buttons that turned the lights on steady, and
shushed the excited (and none too sober) little crowd that had come in to
see what happened. And having a friendly voice speaking Neo-Gaesh on
the other end of the comm link only added to the confusion, He'd tried to
say he could speak Standard well enough (not sure if he'd been too
drunk to answer a hail in Standard earlier), but it came out tangled. And
so on, and so on, and it was only stubborness that kept him from turning
on the grid when the ship's ID scan didn't match the record books.
Damned sobersides space-men, out there in the stars with nothing to do
but sneak up on honest men trying to have a little fun - why should he do
them a favor? Let 'em match their own ship up, or come in without the
grid beacons on, if that's the game they wanted to play. He put the
computer on a search loop, and took another little nip.
The computer's override warning buzz woke him again. The ship was
much closer, just over the horizon, low, coming in on a landing pattern . .
. and it was red-flagged. Pirate! he thought muzzily. It's a pirate. It can't
be ... but the computer, not fooled, and not having been stopped by the
override sequence he was too drunk to key in, turned on full alarms, all
over the building and the city. And the speech synthesiser, in a warm,
friendly, calm female voice, said, "Attention. Attention. Vessel
approaching has been identified as dangerous. Attention. Attention ..."
But by then it was far too late.
Sassinak and Cans had eaten the last of the overbrowned cookies, and
were well into the kind of long-after-midnight conversation they preferred.
Lunzie grunted and tossed on her pallet; Januk sprawled bonelessly on
his, looking, as Cans said, like something tossed up from the sea. "Little
kids aren't human," said Sass, winding a strand of dark hair around her
finger. "They're all alien, shapechangers like those Wefts you read about,
and then turn human at -" She thought a moment. "Eleven or so."
"Eleven! You were eleven last year; I was. I was human ..."
"Ha." Sass grinned, and watched Cans. "I wasn't human. I was special.
Different -"
"You've always been different." Cans rolled away from Sass's slap.
"Don't hit me; you know it. You like it. You would be alien if you could."
"I would be off this planet if I could," said Sass, serious for a moment.
"Eight more years before I can even apply - aggh!"
"To do what?"
"Anything. No, not anything. Something -" her hands waved, describing
arcs and whorls of excitement, adventure, marvels in the vast and
mysterious distance of time and space.
"Umm. I'll take biotech training and a lifetime spent figuring out how to
insert genes for correctly handed proteins in our native fishlife." Caris
wrinkled her nose. "You're not going to leave, Sass. This is the frontier.
This is where the excitement is. Right here."
"Eating fish? Eating lifeforms?"
Caris shrugged. "I'm not devout. Those fins in the ocean aren't sentient,
we know that much, and they could give us cheap, easy protein.
Personally, I'm tired of gruel and beans, and since we have to fiddle with
their genes, too, why not fishlife?"
Sassinak gave her a long look. True, lots of the frontier settlers weren't
devout, and didn't find anything but a burdensome rule in the FSP
strictures about eating meat. But she herself - she shivered a little,
thinking of a finny wriggling in her throat. Something wailed, in the
distance, and she shivered again. Then the houselights brightened and
dimmed abruptly.
"Storm?" asked Caris. The lights blinked, now quickly, now slow. From
the terminal in the other room came an odd sort of voice, something
Sass had never heard before.
"Attention. Attention ..."
The girls stared at each other, shocked for an endless instant into
complete stillness. Then Caris leaped for the door, and Sass caught her
arm.
"Wait - help me get Lunzie and Januk!"
The younger children were hard to wake, and cranky once roused. Januk
demanded "my big jar" and Lunzie couldn't find her shoes. Sass, mind
racing, dared to use the combination her father had once shown her, and
opened her parents' sealed closet.
"What are you doing?" asked Caris, now by the door again with the other
two. Her eyes widened as Sass pulled down the zipped cases: the
military-issue projectile weapons issued to each adult colonist, and the
lumpy, awkward part of a larger weapon which should - if they had time -
mate with those from adjoining apartments to make something more
effective.
Lunzie could just carry one of the long, narrow cases; Sass had to use
both arms on the big one, and Caris took the other narrow one, along
with Januk's hand. "We should stop at my place," Caris said, but when
they got outside, they could see the red and blue lines crossing the sky.
A white flare, at a distance. "That was the Spaceport offices," said Caris,
still calm.
Other shapes moved in the darkness, converging on the Block
Recreation Center; Sass recognized two class-mates, both carrying
weapons, and one trailing a string of smaller children. They made it to
the Block Recreation Center just as adults came boiling out, most
unsteady on their feet, and all cursing.
"Sassinak! Bless you - you remembered!" Her father, suddenly looking
larger and more dangerous than she had thought for the last year or so,
grabbed Lunzie's load and stripped off the green cover. Sass had seen
such weapons in class videos; now she watched him strip and load it,
hardly aware that her mother had taken the weapon Caris carried.
Someone she didn't know yelled for a "PC-8 base, dammit!" and Sass's
father said, without even looking at her, "Go, Sassy! That's your load!"
She carried it across the huge single room of the Center to the cluster of
adults assembling some larger weapons, and they snatched it, stripped
off the cover, set it down near the door, and began attaching other
pieces. An older woman grabbed her arm and demanded, "Class?"
"Six."
"You've had aid class?" When Sass nodded, the woman said "Good -
then get over here." Here was on the far side of the Center, out of sight
of her family, but with a crowd of middle school children, all busily laying
out an infirmary area, just like in the teaching tapes.
The Center stank of whiskey fumes, of smoke, of too many bodies, of
fear. Children's shrill voices rose above the adults' talking; babies wailed
or shrieked. Sass wondered if the ship was down, that pirate ship. How
many pirates would there be? What kinds of weapons would they have?
What did pirates want, and what did they do? Maybe - for an instant she
almost believed this thought - maybe it was just a drill, more realistic than
the quarterly drills she'd grown up with, but not real. Perhaps a Fleet ship
had chosen to frighten them, just to encourage more frequent practice
with the weapons, and the first thing they'd see was a Fleet officer.
She felt more than heard the first concussive explosion, and that hope
died. Whoever was out there was hostile. Everything the tapes had said
or she'd overheard the adults say about pirates ran through her mind.
Colonies disappeared, on some worlds, or survived gutted of needed
equipment and supplies, with half their population gone to slavers. Ships
taken even during FTL travel, when according to theory no one could say
where they were.
Waiting there, unarmed, she realized that the thrice-weekly class in self-
defense was going to do her no good at all. If the pirates had bigger
guns, if they had weapons better than projectiles, she was going to die ...
or be captured.
"Sass." Cans touched her arm; she reached out and gave Caris a quick
hug. Around her, the others of her class had gathered in a tight knot.
Even in this, Sassinak recognized the familiar. Since she'd started
school, the others had looked to her in a crisis. When Berry fell off the
crawler train, when Seh Garvis went crazy and attacked the class with an
orecutter, everyone expected Sass to know what to do, and do it. Bossy,
her mother had called her, more than once, and her father had agreed,
but added that bossy plus tact could be very useful indeed. Tact, she
thought. But what could she say now?
"Who's our triage?" she asked Sinder. He stood back, well away from
Sass's friends.
"Gath" He pointed to a youth who had been cleared for off-planet training
- medical school, everyone expected. He'd been senior school medic all
four years. "I'm low-code this time."
Sass nodded, gave him a smile he returned uneasily, and checked again
on each person's assignment. If they had nothing to do now, they could
be sure they knew what to do when things happened.
All at once a voice blared outside - a loudhailer, Sass realized, with the
speakers distorting the Neo-Gaesh vowels. From this corner of the
building, she could pick out only parts of it, but enough to finish off the
last bit of her confidence.
"... surrender . . . will blow . . . resistance . . . guns ..."
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SassinakMcCaffrey,Anne&Moon,Elizabeth©1990ScannedSeptember2002v1.00Sassinakwastwelvewhentheraiderscame.Oldenoughtobeused,youngenoughtobebroken—orsotheythought.Buttheyreckonedwithoutthegirl'swill,forgedintoasteelyresolvetoavengeherselfonthepirateswhohadkilledherparentsandfriends.Whenthechancecomestoe...
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