McCaffrey, Anne - Planet Pirates Trilogy Omnibus.pdf

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Planet Pirates Omnibus
Cover
ChapterOne
ChapterOne
BOOK ONE
ChapterOne
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 pre-
tend 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”: Ja-
nuk, 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 Lun-
zie 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 con-
tact, unless they speak some outlandish gabble. Let’s see ...” He scrolled through the direct-
ory 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, interrupt-
ing 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 Sen-
tient Planets would not torture, rarely executed . . . but the thought of being whited, mind-
cleaned, 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, every-
one 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 pat-
terns, 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 con-
fusion, 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 pal-
let; 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.

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