Anne McCaffrey& Elizabeth Moon - Planet Pirates - 1 Sasslnak

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Sassinak

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

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.

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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Anne McCaffrey& Elizabeth Moon - Planet Pirates - 1 Sasslnak

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