"I tell her to live long enough to spit on the bastards' graves, that's what I tell her. And what I'm telling you. You've done good here. We got a kind of law in this bay, and we all mow it's you. If you check out, what's that mean to everyone else?"
Wyn raised a heavy eyelid. "What makes you think I care?" she asked.
"Boston, you're full of shit. 'Course you care. You got 'good citizen' all over you."
Wyn glanced down at herself. She had gotten very thin in the past months; that happened when you gave away your rations most of the time. "What I have written all over me is dirt," she snapped.
"Then clean up your act, will you? Thin as you are, how you going to survive the next Jump? And you got some graves to spit on, remember?"
"That's a long way back," Wyn objected.
"Then you're going to have to be in shape to make the trip."
There was no way back; Wyn had known that in her bones from the time she had boarded. But Ellie's mouth wobbled, and she . . . my God, she was even crying. No one had ever cried over Wyn before. And now that she thought of ft. she realized how quiet it was around where she lay, as parents kept their children quiet around her, hoping she would make the turn away from despair and back to them.
Wyn sighed and levered herself up. It seemed about a light year to the head, where she traded a gold pen for the chance to take a brief, blessedly hot shower. Thanks to a man released from cleaning detail, she had ship's chow from the CD galley and ate it with more appetite than she'd had for weeks. It gave her the strength to stomach ordinary rations the next day and all the days afterward. As soon as she could walk about the bay without staggering, she forced herself to do isometrics and to increase the time she spent exercising in the days that passed.
Another Jump, and she survived it. Now, she found herself restless, as she had in her first days on board. After prowling about the bay so often that people were heartily sick of it, she hacked her hair short and volunteered for cleanup duty.
It wasn't as if women were exempt from "volunteering." Usually, the Marines recruited female convicts for galley work or for cleanup in a place where they needed someone small, with a lower center of gravity. What else the women did in some cases was a matter of rumors-plus what Wyn personally considered the fairy tales of Marines and even officers falling for a particularly pretty girl.
With her hair cut short, scrawny as she was, her face pallid from long confinement, Wyn didn't think she was a sight to break the heart of some hapless CoDo officer, while midshipmen were a whole lot likelier to run the other way.
It was a relief to leave the bay, to thread through corridors and passageways she hadn't seen, but that she marked in the too-keen scholar's memory that even despair hadn't taken from her. The bite of antiseptics came as a positive pleasure, and so did the warmish water and watching the grimy bulkhead gleam beneath her scrubbing hands.
She grinned at the other woman and the men of her crew. As they scrubbed, they spread out, glad of the chance for at least the appearance of privacy. What a wonder it was not to have ten people crowded around you! Even the CD Marines seemed to have disappeared. No doubt they'd decided that a middle-aged woman was a damned unlikely candidate for running amok or storming the bridge.
She was kneeling on the deck, rubbing away at a particularly tough smudge when a kick from a boot sent her sprawling.
"Can't believe my luck!" came a voice Wyn had last heard thickened by blood after he'd been punched.
She levered herself up from the deck, murder in her eye, and the boot kicked her flat again.
Where had she seen that face before? Above a gray coverall . . . smeared with blood. That was right. He had been a trusty, one of the men who'd spaced Nina's father and raped her.
Pretend you don't recognize him. Lie your way out, she told herself.
"I said I'd get ya. Never thought I'd find you alone, though, and on your knees. Good place for you."
Wyn glanced down the hall. To think that a moment earlier, she'd been glad the Marines were nowhere in sight. She drew her breath for the loudest scream of her life, but the man pounced forward. A needle-thin knife flashed before her eyes as he grabbed her coverall with his other hand. The wet, flimsy fabric ripped, and Wyn gasped.
"Quiet, bitch! You're coming with me."
"What do you think you're doing?" she demanded.
"Getting some of my own back. You cost me a soft berth. Now you owe me, gotta make it up to me."
"That's stupid. You were breaking the law," she snapped. "What good does this do?"
"Good? Because I can. Like I could with the girl."
Adrenaline washed through Wyn. "Look at the man," she hissed. "Too bad they didn't space you too."
He backhanded her and she spat blood at him as he dragged her down the corridor.
Wyn struggled, trying to stamp on his instep, trying to bite the hand that held her, to pull free so that she could scream and run, but always, there was the knife in front of her face. It wasn't death she feared, nor being cut . . . it was her eyes! What if he blinded her! The fear made her tense her muscles so her bladder wouldn't give way.
A port was coming up, and he shoved it open onto what was little more than a closet. Long enough, Wyn found, for her to fall full length onto the deck, and for him to fall upon her. He barely kicked the door closed.
His breath was foul. If he-God, if he even tried to kiss her, she was sure she'd vomit in his face; and then he'd kill her. She hoped. In the end, that was about all he didn't try.
The strong do what they will The weak suffer what they must. She told herself in an attempt to achieve distance from the spasms and grunts on top of her, the pain as he thrust into her unprepared and wholly unwilling body. She would not be weak. She would refuse weakness. Her hands balled into fists and she struck his back, brought up her knees (regretting that for the leverage it gave him), then trying to buck him off her body.
He was on his knees in front of her face all too soon thereafter, his knife in one hand in case she had any ideas about biting him where it would do the most harm. When he pulled out, she spat at him.
He slapped her, then rolled her onto her belly. Beware of Greeks, some fragment of Wyn's mind gibbered at her. This could do real damage, if he didn't kill her when he was finished. He'd have to kill her; she had seen him, and he had to know she wouldn't hesitate to report him. She heard something clang on the deck and felt her legs forced apart. Despite the horror, the metallic sound registered. He was using both of his hands. He had dropped the knife.
And there it was, about a meter away. It might as well have been a light year away unless she could grab it. A desperate plan, complete the instant she saw it, seized her mind and body. With what she hoped would sound like a hopeless moan, she collapsed onto one arm, and curled up into a ball, as if that pathetic maneuver could stop the painful invasion of her body.
But her left hand snaked out and seized the knife, bringing it beneath her toward her stronger hand, the right.
You want to die, you could fall on your sword right now, her mind warned her. Ellie's "spit on the bastard's grave" rang in her head. She jerked with her shoulders and thrust her hips up, as if fighting the man off. When he hurled himself back onto her, though, she was ready with the knife. And a lifetime's reading of the Iliad showed her exactly how to drive it into his chest below the sternum and twist it upward so the blood gouted out. Again and again, she stabbed him. His blood splashed her, hot, though she thought she never would stop shaking.
If his buddy was around, she was dead meat; she knew she couldn't force herself to retrieve the knife. She retched herself dry, spat on his body and staggered out of the tiny room.
Please God, this was no time for the Marines to come charging up! Instead of the Marines, she got a scared midshipman whose voice squeaked on the "ma'am" he shouldn't be calling a prisoner.
"In there," she rasped from a throat bruised from the grip of the dead man. Whom she had killed. She doubled over with dry heaves. "He fell on his knife," she willed the midshipman to believe.
The boy walked to the closet, opened it, then backed away. His eyes flicked over her half-naked and wholly bloodied body. No one could tell how much of the blood was hers.
"Terrible things, knives," he agreed with a maturity that stunned her. He moved in to support her. Boy though he was, she recoiled.
She didn't want to go to what passed for a Sick Bay on this sick, sick ship. No one ever returned from Sick Bay. She would get back to her bunk, and she would ask Nina how you lived with this.
"Just let me get back to . . . I have friends there, they'll help me . . . No, no need to. I can walk on my own."
When the worst of the shuddering had left her weak, but quite calm, she retraced the corridors to the prison bay that had the feel now of a refuge. Her legs wobbled, and her groin burned, and she blessed Dr. Ryan.
She was no distant goddess now, no lady, no scholar to be spoken to with respect and touched not at all. Just a female body. She hit the buzzer and leaned on the port.
It slid aside.
Ellie was not the first to see her, but she was the first to guess.
"Jesus wept!" she said and started forward.