The Iron Maiden Read online

  “Too bad,” the booth man said to Hope. “You almost got them all.”

  “Almost,” Hope agreed, and paid over another dollar.

  “You’re a pretty sharp player.”

  “Pretty sharp,” Hope agreed as the laser gun came back to life and the starry screen returned.

  Now there were several spectators, as it was evident that Spirit was indeed a good shot. They were silent, so as not to distract her, but paid close attention. This game was not simple in concept, but not easy to win.

  This time Spirit got all the meteors, until a group of four cruised by. She got three of them, but could not catch the fourth, and it scored on the dome.

  “Four!” a spectator said as the game ended. “Is that legit?”

  “Rare but legit,” the booth man said. “When one person plays more than once, the subsequent games get harder. So if you want to quit now—”

  Spirit looked pleadingly at Hope. “One more game,” he said, paying the dollar.

  The man took the dollar, but did not turn on the game right away. “Sir, I like your look,” he said to Hope. “You’re playing well. Let me give you and these following players a hint: you can see the bad ones coming. The clusters are brighter. So it’s best to clear out all the routine ones and orient on the clusters as early as you can. It’s still no easy score, but if you’re sharp enough, it’s possible.”

  “Thank you,” Hope said. He knew the booth man was playing to the crowd, hoping for many more players. In fact it wouldn’t bother him if Spirit won, because it would show that it could be done. But she had to earn it.

  The third game came on. This time Spirit didn’t wait for the meteors to come within easy range; she picked them off at a distance. She missed more, but had unlimited shots, and was able to get them with second shots, still farther away than before. The shower was almost over, and she had the field mostly cleared. Then a bright one showed, the last.

  “Oh, damn,” the booth man murmured. “That’s a boulder.”

  A boulder was a meteor too big to blast apart. It would have to be chipped down by several shots, and there would not be time to demolish it completely before it caught the dome.

  But Spirit knew this game, and knew the strategy for boulders. She caught it with a glancing shot, and a fragment separated from one side. The fragment went wide left, out of play, and the remainder of the boulder nudged slightly right. She caught it with another shot, on the same side, and nudged it right again. She was able to chip it five times before it got by her and flew on toward the dome.

  All of them watched as it went. It was only a few seconds, but seemed longer. Then the fragment struck the surface of the planet just beside the dome. A spray of rocks and dust went up, but the dome remained intact. She had won.

  A cheer went up from the audience. Spirit leaned back, feeling weak with relief. That had been close!

  “Good game, kid!” the booth man said. Then he corrected himself and addressed Hope. “I mean, sir. You nudged it just far enough to miss the dome. You won. What’s your prize?”

  “The finger whip,” Hope said.

  “Good choice.” The booth man handed over the little package. “May you have much joy of it.”

  They left the booth. Already others were clamoring to play, so Spirit’s effort had indeed been good for business. Hope handed her the package, and she quickly pocketed it. “Thanks,” she said, overflowing with gratefulness. This might have been a routine favor for him, but she had truly wanted the whip, and the favor loomed much larger on her screen than on his. “I’ll pay you back the money.”

  Thereafter she practiced diligently with the finger whip. It was tricky at first, and her middle finger got sore, but she was determined and well coordinated, and in due course became so proficient she could snap coins out of the air. When she tackled other finger whippers and won the junior championship of her schoolyard, she knew she was good enough. Never again would anyone sting her with one of these, because she was no longer a patsy. Thereafter she retired, in her fashion, never showing or using the whip unless there was need. But it was always with her.

  Similarly she masked her infatuation with her brother, but was unable to abolish it. Others complained endlessly about their siblings, so Spirit did too, but it was all pretense. She wished she could get him alone, maybe asleep, and be able to hug and kiss him without limit. Beyond that her mind balked, but the longing remained. She knew that he would never cooperate in such a thing; Hope was very morally minded. She felt guilty for her forbidden desire, but maybe she would outgrow it when she got her body and became attractive to boys.

  CHAPTER 2

  BUBBLE

  Things were smooth for about a year; then they complicated ferociously. She was walking home with Hope and Faith when Faith was accosted by a wealthy scion. The rich punk floated up on his gravity-shielded saucer and asked her for sex, proffering two dollars. It was insulting and gross, making Faith blush deeply, but he would not give over. Hope was plainly controlling his anger, but Spirit didn’t. She impulsively pushed the rim of the saucer with her foot and dumped the scion.

  This might have been a mistake, because it led to a fight between Hope and the scion. It seemed unequal, because the scion was older, larger, and better trained, but Hope used his ability to read people, and gave a good account of himself. Until the scion drew a laser pistol. Then Spirit acted, stinging his hand with the finger whip so that he dropped the weapon. That enabled Hope to win the fight, so that they got safely home. They hoped that would be the end of it.

  But the scion had his revenge by getting their family evicted. They had to flee Maraud and seek a refugee bubble on the airless surface of Callisto. The scion’s closed outside saucer came after them and tried to bomb their vehicle. If any of their suits got holed out here, they would be dead of decompression. Spirit had been nervous; now she was terrified. No finger whip would get them out of this.

  The situation was desperate. Hope was trying to use his captured laser against the saucer, and the saucer was trying to drop a bomb where it counted. So far neither had scored, but that could not last long.

  Then Spirit saw something, and had a notion. She jammed her helmet against Hope’s. “The ice caves!” she cried, so that the sound would carry into his helmet.

  They raced for the ice mine, where ice was quarried to be melted for water. The saucer paced them, still trying to catch them with a bomb. Hope managed to snag the saucer’s undercarriage with a rope, tying it to the pedal tractor. But it dropped another bomb, a bright orange cylinder. It was going to blow up their vehicle!

  Spirit leaped up and caught the bomb in her hands. It wasn’t big, just deadly. She hurled it to the side, where it exploded harmlessly. But her heart was thudding; this was way more danger than she liked.

  They hauled the saucer into the mine, but couldn’t bring it to ground. So Spirit grabbed an ice stone and threw it at the saucer. But this wasn’t enough. So she leaped onto the saucer itself, to smear its window with dirty ice. But when she got on the saucer, its onion-shaped null-gravity section made her light, and she almost floated right back off it. For a moment she floundered; then she caught hold of the ladder dents, and those finger-holds enabled her to anchor herself with one hand while she struggled to use her ice rock with the other. She squirmed across the surface of the saucer, then reached down across the front vision port and rubbed the rock across it. The port itself was invulnerable, but a bit of heat leaked out of the saucer, and then helped melt the ice just enough to make it smear its embedded dust across the port. That would soon foul the saucer’s vision, so that the man inside couldn’t see to do any more mischief.

  The scion inside caught on, and tried to fire his laser through the glass to get her. But Hope fired his own laser from the ground, and must have blinded the scion, because he didn’t fire at Spirit. She owed big brother another!

  She kept on smearing until Hope jumped on the saucer and pulled her off. She knew why. “We have to get away
before he radios for help!” she yelled against his helmet. Because naturally the authorities would choose to believe the scion, not the victims.

  They hid in the convolutions of the mine until the saucer and its allies went away, then started bounding on toward Kilroy Crater, where the refugee bubble was supposed to be. They made big long low-gee bounds, but it was too far; they would never get there in time.

  But then Spirit spied a utility floater traveling their way, and the family bought passage aboard it to the refugee bubble. So they got there after all, and got three rooms: one for the parents, one for Spirit and Faith, and Hope had to share a room with a strange boy.

  They thought they were safe at last, but it turned out to be disaster delayed. The bubble lifted, using its gee shield, then spun to generate trace gravity internally. They were on their slow way to Jupiter—until the crew decamped with the passage money. Then the men of the refugees took over and steered the bubble onward—but discovered there was not enough food. Spirit and Hope and his friend Helse counted the food packs, and found there were only half enough. They had to ration it.

  Then there was the first pirate raid. That was a horror, because the pirates tied up Hope and their father, then gang-raped Faith while all of them watched. Spirit was as shocked as the others; she had never seen sex at all, and this was worse than anything she might have imagined.

  After that they organized to fight pirate boarders. Spirit participated in a spot course on resisting a rapist, whose operative principles were that girls had knees and rapists had groins; girls had fingers and rapists had eyes; girls had teeth and rapists had noses. Spirit loved the little play, especially where she plucked out a fake eyeball, but she understood the message: pirates would rape women or girls or children, and the females had to be ready to stop them. They had to fight back effectively.

  Hope had a surprise for her. He told her that his friend Helse was not a boy but a girl masquerading as a boy. At first Spirit didn’t believe it, but Helse showed her breast-filled chest band. Then Hope left, and Helse told Spirit how to play the part of a boy. Helse was sixteen, and actually quite a pretty girl. She told Spirit something of her history, about how she was the plaything of an old man who liked really young girls, and how she had learned all the ways of sex, but finally had grown too old and had to go.

  “Too old for sex—at sixteen?” Spirit asked, amazed.

  Helse nodded. “That’s why I’m going to Jupiter. To find a new career.”

  Something else occurred to her. “You—my brother—sex?”

  “No,” Helse said gently. “At least, not yet. He is a very nice boy.”

  Spirit suppressed a surge of jealousy. “Not yet?”

  “Sex is an option, to be used when it has to be.”

  “Like with my sister Faith?”

  “No, Spirit, no! Rape is always wrong. But sometimes abstinence can be wrong, too. A girl just has to judge cases, and do what is right in the circumstance.”

  “I don’t understand!”

  Helse smiled. “Maybe that’s best. Now let’s see if we can make you into a boy, so that you never face the question.”

  But Spirit couldn’t let it go. “You mean like when the men are going to do it anyway, so she shouldn’t fight, so as not to get beat up as well as raped?”

  “That might be a case, yes, but there are others. I don’t blame you for being frightened of the prospect.”

  “I’m not frightened!” But she was.

  “Well, I am. That’s why I’m being a boy.”

  “You?” Spirit asked, astonished. “But you said you had all that sex!”

  “Yes. And I think I will never be able to love an older man, because of that. Maybe I can’t love any man. So I’ll be happy not to be touched again. But I’ve learned not to say ‘never.’“

  Spirit realized that she had been trying to misjudge Helse, because of the way Hope was taken with her. She was indeed playing the part of a boy, and had fooled all of them. If she was afraid of what might happen, she surely had reason. The specter of Faith’s rape gave warning to them all. “Okay,” she said. “Make me into a boy.”

  “First, you have to think of yourself as male. That starts with your name. Mine is ambiguous, so I can get away with it, but yours is too much like a girl. Who do you want to be?”

  Spirit considered. Six months ago she had had half a crush on a handsome older boy named Sancho. She had never given any hint, knowing the futility; what would a boy her brother’s age want with a girl of eleven, going-on-twelve? Even if there could have been anything between them, her parents would have squelched it immediately. But mostly it was that though the changes were occurring in her body, the pace seemed glacial, and she didn’t want to embarrass herself. Her breasts were not a quarter the mass of Faith’s breasts, and there was no flesh on her hips. As for her hair—some boys had more on their heads. She wanted to have the body complete before she tried to do anything with it. If only she could have been two years older! But maybe she could have just a little part of that fleeting dream. “Sancho,” she said.

  “Very well, Sancho. The first thing is how you dress. And how you walk. Men are narrow-hipped; they don’t flex much, so think narrow.”

  “I don’t have woman hips yet,” Spirit said. That was all too obvious.

  “But you’re on the way. Your legs are rounding out. You have girl-hips, and they could betray you. Watch the men; see how they walk, and copy that. Get some baggy shorts and bunch them up in front, and wear loose trousers over them. Same thing for your chest, in reverse. A T-shirt would ruin you; get some winding and strap yourself down so nothing can ever jiggle. Try to build up some strength in your arms too; men are more muscular, and it shows. And your hair—let’s see what we can do about that.”

  Helse’s knowledge was apparent; Spirit’s esteem for her was rising. She was privately pleased with the woman’s comments about her body; maybe there was a little flesh on her hips. She plunged into the lesson with a will, and within two days was becoming a reasonably proficient boy. It was all too easy to reverse her recent efforts to become a girl. She associated with some of the real boys her age, and they accepted her, understanding the threat she faced. The lesson of Faith’s public rape had been lost on none of them.

  She tried to approach Hope, to show off her expertise, but he repulsed her. Hurt, she tried to conceal her burgeoning tears; boys were not supposed to cry, and she had never been much for that anyway. It was just that she was especially vulnerable to Hope, so much wanting his approval. But she knew he had problems of his own, so she did him the favor of staying out of his way.

  It was Helse, oddly, who comforted her. “He’s all twisted up inside. He blames himself for being a man.”

  Oh. Maybe that made some sense. Spirit continued to work on her impersonation, and thought she had it down almost pat. Sancho was now easy to do.

  Just in time, for more pirates came. They made ready to rape and loot without even a pretense of decency. “Bind the men. Line up the women—the young ones first.” And Spirit was technically a young one.

  But this time the men of the bubble were ready. As soon as the pirates showed their foul hand, the men jumped them, two to a pirate, and quickly subdued them.

  Then there was a keening sound, and Spirit felt strangely passive. “Oh, no,” a man said. “A pacifier.”

  Spirit had never heard of that, but it wasn’t hard to figure it out: it generated a field that robbed the refugees of their volition. The Pirates had nullifiers, so were unaffected. They quickly reversed the case and made the bubble men captive. Spirit saw a box by the air lock, and realized that that was the pacifier. She found she could move a little, and she started inching toward it.

  “They will hurt you,” Hope said listlessly.

  “They won’t notice me.” But before she got there, there was an interruption: A Jupiter Ringuard patrol boat arrived to investigate. But the pirates took two six year old girls and a younger boy as hostages, threatening
to slit their throats if the refugees gave any signal. Then they turned off the pacifier, and the refugees had to pretend that all was well. What else could they do?

  And once the Jupiter patrol was gone, the pirates returned the children, naked and staring. The girls had been raped and the boy was dead.

  The men leaped for the pirates—and the pacifier came on. Spirit saw the pirate leader raise his sword and strike her father, killing him. It was only the beginning; soon all the refugee men had been slain. The pirates dragged the corpses into a pile, then went after the women. One took hold of Spirit’s mother and tore the clothing from her body. She was unable to resist effectively, because of the pacifier.

  Spirit focused all her energy on the pacifier box. No one was attending it now; all the pirates were too busy catching and raping the bubble women. She could move only slowly, but even a tortoise could make good progress when it had to. She reached the box, picked it up, and dropped it. Its internal works had to be delicate; it bounced on the deck, and then she felt the pacification field ending.