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The expression applied to the starship's kinergeic projectibles, 15 all told, and nothing more. Although an arsenal of small-arms was hoarded in the captain's quarters, none of the officers was about to encourage any pressed crewbeing to better himself in a facility with personal quickblades until it was sure he would become one of their number.
Zakh descended the ladderwell to the lowest level of the vessel. Although he owed his attention to a different errand, as he was ready to perform it, he reviewed what he knew about the starship's weaponry. The first officer had certain expectations of him, after all. Over the course of the Thousand Years' War, the armaments of starsailing ships had passed through many generations of improvement. The first, Zakh knew from his studies at home, had consisted of rockets laden with the atomic explosives of humankind had carried from the dim mists of antiquity. However, like the pistol he had restored and used to gratifying effect on Genrich, atomic weapons were by now so obsolete they had been all but forgotten by practical-minded beings, thanks to the phenomenon of "fratricide," in which a flux of subatomic particles prevented a nearby chain reaction, which fortuitous capability was inherent in the 2nd generation of shipboard defenses, particle beam weapons.
Zakh reached the well's bottom and broke his ruminations to open the hatch. Among his multitude of duties as the newest ship's boy, a task that both fascinated and disgusted him, was a gaggle of chores that, at intervals, brought him into contact with Zilvagabond's "cargo."
Under a mandate issued by a long-dead Romanovan Premier who purposed preventing isolation of---and ensuring adequate service to---the imperium-conglomerate's millions of colonial starports, spreighformers (excepting as disassembled cargo in transport to specific destinations) were forbidden aboard any Cosmopolitan vessel, truncating its potential range and duration and necessitating frequent stops for refitting and replenishment. As other premiers, of other imperia-conglomerate, came to appreciate the merchantilist wisdom of the prohibition, i t was extended to all starships plying the galactic Deep. With spreighformers in use everywhere else, colonies and capitals required, sought, and fought over raw materials to feed the protean devices. Ores and other minerals continued tradable cargo, for spreighformers could not fabricate elements. Rare or heretofore unheard-of-items, for which no duplicating programs yet existed, were also valued. Exotic organics, too complex for economical synthesis, had been a specialty of Zakh's ring-circled Genrich. One more commodity existed which, not suited to multiplication in spreighformers, had become a staple of interstellar traffic: slaves.
Closing the hatch behind him, Zakh dogged it shut. Where had his thoughts been? Yes: known of old with a sailor's familiarity as "peebies," particle beam weapons were employed, before the invention of the purge-field, aboard starships, and, capable of rendering atomics inoperable, to defend fortifications. With the advent of purge-physics, the tactical and strategic usefulness of peebies was reduced to negligibility, owing to the nature of the inertia-nullifying fields surrounding vessels. It must have been astonishing, he thought, the first time it happened. Employed by ground installations against an inertialess marauder, peebies wafted her away, unharmed, like a dry leaf upon the wind. Worse, an inertialess starship attempting to employ peebies was whisked off under impulse of her own weapons. (It was an indication of Zakh's growth and mind state that he already calculated ways to make surprise use of this phenomenon in battle.) For a time, "tactics" had consisted of no more than waiting for an enemy to drop his shields in order to blade---"shoot," the word was---hoping to beat him to the punch.
This time, Zakh's nose distracted him. Whoever last had duty here had done a thorough job----of doing nothing! Noxious odors assaulted him, and he was hard put to control his stomach. Although the expression "crewbeing" circulated aboard every ship, and it was not unusual for captains to fill their compliments with members of half a hundred sapient species, that of the Zilvagabond, and every other vessel plying her trade, was human in its entirety, this, too, by edict of the Cosmopolity, promulgated for the best of reasons. It was her cargo that was human!
Human slavery was by no means rare within a culture which otherwise declared itself civilized, mostly referred to by less discomfiting names---polite usage it was felt, constituting the one discernable difference between civilization and barbarism. Zilvagabond's unwilling passengers, upon the other hand, were non-human captives, labeled slaves without a qualm (when they were not called livestock), and, as such, inheritors of indescribable misery, subject to eventual fates which nobody, not even their self-styled proprietors, could predict accurately.
This watch it was Zakh's task to provide what comfort was now and again afforded the unfortunate creatures pent upon the liftdeck and elsewhere. Zakh had not been surprised to learn that the Zilvagabond trafficked in little besides slavery. Her black holds reeked with the stench of it, echoed with the terror and agony of its victims. Maybe, after all, worse fates than death existed; worse fates, indeed, than many often held to be worse than death.
Slavery was one such fate. Somehow it made Zakh feel dirtier than the huddled, miserable beings he attempted to care for. Strange in manner and appearance though they were to the unsophisticated boy, their intelligence was undeniable. On this account he deemed them worth of a happier destiny. In many ways, he reflected during introspective moments of increasing rarity, he had been worse affected by exposure to the practice than by any of the other depravities he'd witnessed, which had befallen him, or with which he---unwilling at the start---had become familiar with to a point of awful intimacy, his first day aboard the starship, or any time afterward.
Each of Zilvagabond's several levels was partitioned---with the same purge-field-reinforced mesh the remainder of the ship was fabricated from---into wedge-shaped compartments extending from the mastfoot to the hull. Some of these afforded room for what inanimate stowage she carried, equipment, and supplies. A bigger number housed crewbeings. The majority had been given over to her most profitable landing. Each wedge holding living cargo was separated from its neighbors by a double wall of mesh, forming a narrow corridor accessible from an annular walkspace circumferential to the ladderwell.
Into this space Zakh now emerged, attempting for another few seconds to ignore the awful noises, the unbearable odors, the hideous sights which, in essence, had brought him here. He opened a utility compartment and unrolled a length of hose. Intended for fire control, it was already fastened to a valve inside the compartment. He had only to make sure the nozzle was closed before he turned the wall-mounted handle, felt the hose stiffen with pressure, and, his thoughts defensively centered upon the next watch and the anticipated drill, plodded outboard with it until he reached the hull.
Time had had its way with peebies, just as with atomic rockets. In due course purge-field weapons were invented, and, by the time of Zakh's tenure aboard the Zilvagabond,, all of the more ancient weaponry was centuries obsolete. More important, in view of what was to come, it had faded from human memory.
So efficient were purge-fields (he detected an analogy to what he'd learned of modern flesh and fabric from Terrible Yvan's shocking experiment) they could project the ship they rigidified even from atomic explosion. It was ironic that purge-physics could also initiate such explosions by squeezing fissionables into a collapsing field. This was generally known, but save one application, regarded as a useless parlor -trick, albeit on a spectacular scale. Crewbeings belowdecks believed that a "Doomsday" bomb constructed on the principle was secreted in the officers' quarters of every Romanovan starship, and could, as a last resort, be set off in case of mutiny. Be this as it may, it had occurred to Zakh's facile intelligence that such a device might make an effective secret weapon. The principle was forgotten or dismissed, offering those who remembered, and could arrive at a method of applying it, the element of surprise. In most minds, only projectibles prevailed against starships. Zakh had learned to take nothing for granted.
Within appallingly crowded pens to either side of him, Zakh was recognized. The captives, alien as they seemed (some measure, he understood, of how alien he must seem to them), had come to see that, unlike other keepers, this one took no delight in cruelty. Those healthy enough moved forward against the press of their sicklier fellows to the mesh which limited their freedom, taking advantage of the service he was about to perform. Zakh opened the nozzle, directing a blast of water into one of the pens. Characteristic of him---this, too, the pens' inhabitants appreciated---he aimed the potentially hazardous torrent at a snubbing-post, presently vacant, reserved for the restraint of combative specimens. This humane precaution broke the stream's force, allowing the captives to shower in its gentler reflection.
Two nonhuman races were represented on this voyage. As a security measure, the idea being to reduce communication among them and any resistance that might engender, they had been divided and the much-different species alternated about the circumference of the deck. Zakh was scornful. He had witnessed the creatures singing to one another without regard to species and believed they had already worked out a rough pidgin among themselves.
In the pen to the left, facing the mast, resided the compact creatures whom the crew, somewhat redundantly, referred to as "rollballs." Zakh had no idea what it was proper to call them, nor where they came from. They, in all likelihood from a primitive civilization, were in no position to tell him, even had he possessed mastery of whatever they used for language. The new cargo steward's manifest, which Zakh had perused in the course of his lessons, stated their system coordinates---meaningless to him, astrological neophyte that he remained---their quantity at loading-time (they had already suffered an attrition exceeding forty percent, although they were still jammed together so that, had they been human beings and one among them fainted or died, he would not have been able to fall), and a taxonomical number.
This rate of attrition brought to mind a tale told by another of the ship's boys. During a long, stormy watch before the Zilvagabond's arrival at Genrich, with the first officer occupied shiphandlinlg and the captain reputedly ailing, several slaves---not rollballs but the others, and only the cleanest, healthiest-looking specimens---had been dragged out of a pen and slaughtered for food. Casting about for a precedent by which certain limits customarily imposed on his authority might be exceeded, the captain had recalled a time during his own apprenticeship when some kind of insectile vermin were found nibbling at the inanimate cargo. The individual held responsible had refused the ordained punishment, eating the pests in place of the foodstuffs they had consumed, and was instead trussed up and the vermin inserted into various of his bodily orifices until he died. Of what, Zakh was not sure, and the yarn-spinner had not ventured an opinion.
By the captain's order, the culprits in the latter instance were punished not for murder, but for theft of ship's property, a more serious offense, by having their ears and noses cut off, loss of these being unlikely to affect their performance as laborers and being compelled to watch as their flesh was pulped into the feed given the slaves. At that, Zakh's informant had been bland, it might have been worse. The guilty parties might have lost certain other appendages of no use to ship or captain. It might have been their fellow crewbeings who wound up, knowingly or not, consuming what they had been deprived of, rather than alien slaves.
The biggest of these came no higher than the boy's waist. In form, he thought, it was as if someone had upholstered a high-chair in purple leather, having placed another like it, up-ended, atop the first. From between the padded, upthrust "legs" of the upper "stool" arose a fat, furry, golden worm-thing, boasting four huge, protruding eyes spaced at equal distances from each other. These disturbed Zakh with their human appearance and their color, a penetrating and appealing blue. No additional sensory appendage nor, indeed, any other orifice or protuberance adorned the knobbish head (assuming it was what it appeared to be), nor was a mouth visible anywhere. Zakh's watchmate had informed him those individual fibers of the golden fur were thought to be organs of smell or hearing. As he had learned to do with all other sailors' opinions, Zakh had reserved judgment.
Uncounted measure-long transparent tendrils, half the diameter of Zakh's smallest finger, arose about the base of the worm-part, as well as from underneath the three lower "legs." These were weak but mobile, as he had learned by approaching---at his messmate's invitation, which proved to be an ugly practical joke---too close during his first watch assigned to this duty. Two or three tendrils had torn loose during his panic-stricken struggle or free himself, but the creature who had seized him (or caressed him, how could he tell?) had shown no sign of pain. In the end, Zakh had concluded that the appendages were expendable, regenerating with wear or breakage. As for his messmate, Zakh had broken one of his appendages---his nose---presumably less capable of regeneration and likely to heal crooked.
Grinning at the memory, Zakh let his thoughts turn back to matters of consequence. In addition to the nine projectibles upon the gundeck, the commanddeck boasted three vertical bow chasers of middling power, aimed parallel with her mast, the vessel's starsails tuned transparent to their energies. Here upon the liftdeck, three similar stern chasers were aimed aft against a pursuer. Thus was Zilvagabond protected about her perimeter, aft, and along her direction of travel. It cost something, from what the tachyon sails collected, to employ 15 projectibles, for they were the most power-greedy mechanisms aboard. As with intersecting purge-fields of two approaching vessels, their residual kinergics---a kind of recoil---imposed considerable strain upon the starship's fabric. A stout, new ship could thrust with every projectible at the same time (although this was seldom done), but older, weaker vessels might rattle themselves apart by doing so.
As Zakh washed the pen, being careful not to strike the aliens with the direct stream, he saw several who had assumed a different shape, retracted their inner bodies an d rolled their outer legs until they resembled two-lobed balls a measure through. Before an uncordial parting, Zakh's informant had claimed rollballers came from a planet too hot, too cold, or bathed in too much radiation, to which had evolved a natural barrier. They were valued because they could enter a dangerous facility---ancestral reactors, which new construction upon the capital planet seemed always to be digging up---extend short-lived tendrils through seams in their armor, and perform tasks in an environment which would kill other sentients. Zakh stayed skeptical of such claims, but they made sense. An unmistakable metallic sheen characterized their purple skins and a sharp odor of heated iron. Could it be that they absorbed shielding substances from their nutriment, depositing them in their circumference. He'd never been cautioned, by Mr. Putin, not some ignorant gossip, never to ingest their feed, nor allow it to linger on his own personal skin.
The rollballs' bit and touch were also rumored to be poisonous. Other than one moment's terror, he had suffered no ill effect from the latter. He was curious to know what they would bite him with. They seemed to absorb the foul-smelling mash he fed them through their tendrils and possessed no mouths to speak of. Or with. If they communicated, it was by means of their tendrils, though he theorized that they displayed emotion with their big, sad eyes; the texture of their golden fur; and the expedient---whenever they seemed threatened or despondent, which (due to their unhappy situation) was often---of rolling into the ball-shape which gave their name, and, with greater and greater frequency, of dying in this reality-rejecting posture.
Having done what he could, Zakh directed his attention to the right-hand pen. If rollballs were odd and incomprehensible, their companions in misery, creatures in the crew dubbed "flatzniks," might have seemed ridiculous in differing circumstances. Zakh was unsure, had he stumbled across them on their own planet, that he would have recognized them as people, although they had not been intelligent beings, they would never have found themselves imprisoned within the stifling holds of the Zilvgabond. Neither her officers nor crewbeings would stoop to hauling domesticated animals about the galaxy, a resort which they one and all---without any logic, considering their principal occupation---felt was beneath them. Intelligence being the chief prerequisite to slavery, that institution was, Zakh felt, if not the ultimate depravity, then by all means the lowest, most pitiable (and, to both parties alike, degrading) variety of parasitism conceivable.
Perhaps the captain knew where flatzniks came from. Nobody else did, nor how many times this consignment had changed hands. The manifest offered nothing more illuminating than a repetitive string of N/A barcode symbols. Maybe the captain even knew what flatzniks were good for, whether they possessed some special aptitude as was alleged of rollballs. Was it possible they had been captured on some speculative basis, in the hope that they would someday, somewhere, prove valuable?
Stretched full length upon the deckmesh, as they never were unless ill or already dead, the average flatznik spanned half again Zakh's height, half a measure wide, and no more than two lines' thickness. Both ends were rounded, one folded to support the creature's erect stance, the other sporting eyes at the height of Zakh's own, but---unlike those of the rollballs--without the faintest resemblance to anything every thought of as human. Each seemed to consist of no more than a bright red spot two lines in diameter with a bright red circle around it. Overall, the flatzniks were a pale, milky white. Zakh thought, sometimes, that he could see through them. Horizontal rows of short lines or grooves marched down their bodies like uncrossed tally marks. When clean and healthy, they emitted a neutral, not unpleasant smell, and flowed along the deck effortlessly, like garden snails, although they left no slimy track. They had no visible appendages and communicated (or did they?) by means of a soft hooting and a low, complicated, atonal whistling that prickled the hair at the nape of Zakh's neck.
They, too, recognized Zakh. Each time he came, they slithered to the partition to greet him, as if they understood that nothing in his power could alter their miserable circumstances---did they know he was powerless to alter his own? ----yet appreciated his attentions, nonetheless. He had never touched one of the things, and was never to know, until much later, how, in their own way, they had touched him. As far as the boy was concerned, he was finished with an onerous task and now at liberty to ascend to the gundeck, where, in his view, something interesting was about to happen.
General Quarters shrilled while Zakh was in the ladderwell.
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