Calypso Slaves - Ghost Story

"So how do we get to be fourth class?" Cassie asked.

"They don't tell us for sure even after we're promoted, but from the pattern I've picked up, just be good, work hard, and don't get caught breaking any rules," jumpsuit said.

"Any idea what gets you promoted from fourth to third?" Cassie asked.

"I think it's just more of the same, but only real guards' pets get promoted past fourth," jumpsuit said, "and I think there might be more to it than just obedience, because some real bootlickers never get bumped up, and anyway if higher class was supposed to be a carrot you'd think they'd tell us."

"What do you know about higher classes? Anything?" Cassie asked.

"I know Engineering is a second class post, and Administrative is probably at least that high, 'cause the Engineering department gets to make real decisions that affect the whole ship. I know the other departments are Medical, Communication, Navigation, Military, and Command. I don't know which classes get which jobs and I'm pretty positive that even first class slaves can't be Military or Command."

"What kind of slaves show up around here? Any common denominators, any kinds of slaves you'd expect to see but never do?" Cassie asked.

Jumpsuit shrugged. "Most people don't like to talk about their past," she said. "Not any men, but that's not weird. Monosex slave colonies don't have to deal with pregnancies."

"Do you know if anyone's, I dunno, common? Pickpocket, drug dealer, the kind of person you'd expect to see on the slave market?" Cassie asked.

"I'm a dealer," jumpsuit said, "half the gangers joined up outside, and if they had anything unusual under their belt we'd all never hear the end of it. Most of 'em don't brag, so can't be anything special."

"You are a drug dealer? Presently?" Lily asked.

"Was," jumpsuit said.

"You sure?" Lily asked.

"You didn't pay for that kind of information, newbie," jumpsuit said.

The buzzer was sounding and the workers were filing back into the workshop. "Thanks for your help," Cassie said.

"You ever find you need something from the Engineering Deck, ask one of the mechanics to send a message to Case," jumpsuit said, pointing to herself with a thumb, "you lick good enough for small favors."

"Thanks, I will," Lily said with a smile. But as she and Cassie walked away, she whispered "only small favors? What's it take to get a big one, the tongue of Aphrodite?"

Cassie and Lily still hadn't eaten, so they returned to their cell for lunch. Tanirt had left and Giovanna hadn't come back, but Andraste was still lying facedown on the bed, unmoving. Seeing as how she could neither run nor adequately defend herself, Cassie didn't think she'd do much different in her position.

"Hey, there was lunch. Did you catch it?" Cassie asked.

"Fuck off, I'm sleeping," Andraste said, her voice muffled by the pillow.

"Okay, but you can have some of mine if you missed it," Cassie said, "I'll just leave you a piece."

Andraste turned to face Cassie, now. "Do you not get jet lag, freak?"

"Uh...I know that Sacrum and Toluca are in the same time zone," Cassie said.

This was apparently not the answer Andraste was looking for, judging by how she'd leapt from her bed (with surprising grace, given her shackles) and directly towards Cassie.

Cassie spun out of the way and with no hands to catch herself, Andraste crashed face first on the floor. Cassie's mind bounced back and forth between running away and trying to pin Andraste with her knee for a half-second, and then Andraste began to pull herself upright and Cassie settled on the second. She was really just imitating what she'd seen on the vids (Majestic Thirteen was pretty cordial so far as arresting officers go), and she nearly lost her mooring as Andraste bucked underneath her, but then Lily placed a foot on Andraste's neck to keep her in place. "Stop it!" Lily said, "they've got cameras, you're going to get all of us in trouble!"

"Bring it the fuck on!" Andraste said, still wriggling under her.

"What the Hell is wrong with you?" Cassie asked, but sure enough a guard was already rushing into the cell, stun baton drawn. Cassie and Lily backed away from him, Lily raised her hands and Cassie followed suit. "I didn't start it," Cassie said, "please don't hurt me, I wasn't trying to make trouble."

Andraste got to her knees and snapped her teeth towards the guard. He smacked her across the face with his stun baton. She dropped to the ground, and the guard dragged her up by an arm, Andraste limp, her legs struggling to get her on her feet through the paralyzing pulse of electricity, blood dribbling from her nose. "You two wait here," he said, pulling Andraste away, her feet dragging on the floor. Cassie winced in sympathetic pain for the burn that would cause on Andraste's bare skin, but it didn't take her long to figure out why leaving someone that crazy on their feet is a bad idea.

Cassie sat down on a bed. Lily sat down on another. "Are we going to be punished?" Lily asked.

"We shouldn't be," Cassie said, "we didn't do anything, she just attacked me for no reason. Maniac!"

The two of them sat in silence for a few minutes more, before the guard came back. "Come with me," he said.

"Yes, sir," Lily said, glanced to Cassie, and then got up to follow him. Cassie hadn't noticed before now, but there were small rings spaced fairly evenly along the walls, about eighteen inches above head height. Producing a set of shackles, the guard gestured to Lily, who swallowed and stepped forward, offering her hands out for them. The guard cuffed one of her hands, threaded the shackles through the ring, and then cuffed the other, the chain short enough to hitch her hands above her head.

The guard pulled a tightly coiled bullwhip from his belt, and stepped in close to Lily. "Slaves will not fight on this ship, understood?" he said.

"Please, sir, I was trying to stop the fight," Lily said.

"This isn't a trial, we don't want to hear you play lawyer, slave," the guard said, "you will not fight with other slaves, understood?"

Lily closed her eyes and bowed her head. "Yes, sir," she said.

"She really didn't do anything," Cassie said, "she barely even touched Andraste. Please..." the guard had stepped back now, to put Lily's back in striking distance. "Punish me for both of us," Cassie said, "please, sir, Lily wasn't in that fight, she was just next to it. I was the one actually in it. I'll take both punishments, no one can say you were lenient."

"Cassie, you don't have to," Lily said, but the guard only took a moment to think about it before unchaining her.

He tugged Cassie towards the hitch and she stepped forward so he could cuff her into it. "Slaves will not fight on this ship, understood?" he said again. Almost the same as before. It was a script.

"Yes, sir," Cassie said, swallowed, and closed her eyes tight. The whip bit into her back a moment later, pain arced through her entire body. She couldn't feel any trickle across her skin, but she was sure she must be bleeding.

"Punished slaves count their blows," the guard said.

"Yes, sir," Cassie said. The whip cut into her again.

"One, sir," she said.

"That's two, slave. This one's three," the guard said.

The whip dug into Cassie's bare back again. "Three, sir," she whimpered. And then "four" and "five," and she was wondering just what she'd got herself into, how many were left, even starting to wonder if it was too late to back out and let Lily take half. It'd be cruel to give her false hope like that, but Cassie wasn't sure how much of this she could take.

But the guard was already undoing Cassie's shackles. She leaned one hand on the wall for support, her breath shaking slightly from pain, her knees weak. The guard grabbed her arm to keep her upright. Cassie clung to one of his armored plates. She had very mixed feelings about this man right now, but physically speaking he was stable. "You're an autodidactic chemist," the guard said, "do you know how to use this?"

Cassie's stunned mind got a confused response halfway to her mouth when Lily said "yes, sir." The guard handed Lily a tube of something, and Cassie wasn't sure what it was. She was mostly trying to get her focus to stop swimming. She said she'd get through this. And this was not going to be the last time she would be whipped. So she needed to get through it.

"Get her to her bed," the guard said, leading Cassie from holding onto him to holding onto Lily. Lily's skin was soft and warm and she seemed about as stable, and Cassie felt a lot better about burying her face in Lily's shoulder.

"Yes, sir," Lily said, and by now the strength had mostly returned to Cassie's knees. The impact was over, and even if the stinging was getting worse, it wasn't the sort of pain that made her weaker. Just one that ate at the edges of her mind constantly. How long was it going to be before that healed? Maybe Cassie could walk on her own (maybe), but she still appreciated Lily's arm threaded around her waist, underneath the raw whip marks that covered her shoulders and back.

When they reached the cell, Lily laid Cassie stomach down on one of the beds and began applying some kind of ointment to the marks. At first it stung horribly and Cassie moaned with pain, but then cold relief began to spread. By the time Lily was done, Cassie's back was a dull, thudding pain instead of a sharp sting.

Cassie was sobbing a little bit. Lily was stroking the side of her face gently now, following her hair down to the bottom of her cheek and then back up again. Cassie's mind cast around for someone to blame. Someone whose fault this injustice was. "That crazy bitch," she said.  "I wanted to help her. Why would she do that? I hope they throw her out an airlock!" Every second that last sentence hung in the air felt more poisonous. "That's not true," Cassie said. "I don't want her to die." Truth be told, Cassie didn't even want her to suffer. What she wanted was for Andraste to apologize. Cassie was pretty sure she had better odds of being struck by lightning. In space.

"I understand," Lily said, "and thank you, Cassie. I'll find a way to make this up to you."

"You don't have to," Cassie said, "you didn't deserve to be punished in the first place. Besides, you've been doing me favors all day."

"Not like this I haven't," Lily said, "I'll find a way to repay you, Cassie. I promise."

"Thanks," Cassie said, "thanks for being my friend, Lily."

Lily smiled wide. "Sure thing. Oh, and we still haven't had lunch," she reached over to grab the larger piece of the meal bar. Cassie had dropped it when she dodged Andraste's tackle, but fortunately it wound up on the bed. Lily's smaller piece wound up on the floor, and for half a moment Cassie considered protesting her taking that portion again, but she couldn't find the strength to push the thoughts out her mouth. Cassie could now confidently say that she'd earned this two-thirds of a nutrient bar that hadn't fallen on the riot-blackened floor. Luncheon of champions. She ripped off a bit of the thick, leathery stuff. It sure felt like it was packed absurdly dense with something, but it tasted like that something was cardboard and sadness. She was going to give this place a scathing Yelp review when she got out.

Tanirt wandered back in soon afterwards.

"Where've you been?" Cassie asked Tanirt.

"Walking," Tanirt said.

"Find anything interesting?" Cassie asked.

"No," Tanirt said.

This must be what it's like to have a teenager.

When Giovanna came back, hours later, she was a bit more talkative. "What've you been up to?" Cassie asked.

"Making friends and influencing people," Giovanna said.

"Learn anything useful?" Cassie asked.

"Maybe I have," Giovanna said.

"Me and Lily certainly did," Cassie said, "we should compare notes."

"I'm guessing if you learned it, I probably picked up on it, too," Giovanna said.

Cassie turned over in her head a couple of times the conundrum of how to demonstrate the value of the information she knew without revealing it. "Look," she said, "we're both trying to learn more about this place. Instead of trying to put a price tag on goods we can't describe without giving away, how about we just agree to share information? We're cellmates, we may as well get along."

"A deal without an expiration date is never worth it," Giovanna said.

"How about just today, then," Cassie said, "can we at least agree to swap the information we learned today without trying to haggle over mystery boxes?"

Giovanna considered for a few seconds. "Yeah, alright," she said, "so the screws up here try to maintain control by controlling access to the basic animal needs, food, comfort, and sex, right? That means food, drugs, and sex are the commodities of the black market. The market's run by the Marked, a gang who have these crazy spike tattoos all over their faces. They run most of the ag and med decks, so they have access to the fresh food supply and the drugs. And they've found some way to get through the maintenance shafts without letting the system know, so they can go anywhere they like on the whole damn ship so long as they stay out of sight."

"The slaves on the ship are divided up by class," Cassie said, "different classes qualify for different jobs and different standards of living. How you advance from one class to another is a huge secret, for some reason. People seem pretty certain that getting to fourth class is just a matter of being cooperative, but past that it's anyone's guess. People get promoted up to third and above sometimes, but no one really knows how. Even really obedient slaves stay stuck at fourth class, other times they're promoted. I think there's some kind of second criteria, but I don't know what it is." Cassie wondered if all slave ships were this mysterious.

"Makes sense," Giovanna said, "there's a cell block on the staff deck, but no one I've talked to has heard of anyone who's actually been kept there. Those top decks are hard to sneak around 'cause you're not allowed to even be on those decks, so the Marked haven't been able to get a good look, but they said from what they can tell when dodging cameras, the cell block up there looks like a ghost town. A really nice ghost town."

"Maybe there's no slaves who meet the criteria," Cassie said. "So, you do AI, right? Cyber stuff? And you've probably noticed that these collars go inside our bodies at exactly the right position to plug into our spines? Do you think these things might be neurohackers?"

"Yeah, thought of that," Giovanna said, "asked around. If the riots are anything to go by, they aren't doing a bang up job of rewriting personality traits. And I've spoken with people who've been here a couple of years, their memories don't sound very helpful for whatever asshole runs this place. Plus, if they were neurohacking you'd expect someone to drop dead from a missing close-paren in exactly the wrong place often enough for there to be stories, and there aren't."

"Well, that's a comfort," Cassie said, fingering the spot where the collar drove into her neck. "Seems to me like that leaves two main explanations, killswitch or just making sure the tracker can't ever come off."

"Trackers can be built into a nanite injection. And if that's too much hassle, then a surgically attached collar probably would be too. It's a real weird budget that allows for spinal surgery but draws the line at buying nanites," Giovanna said.

"Have you heard of anyone actually getting fried by the killswitch?" Cassie asked. "I mean, there's been full-on riots lately, ones that apparently threatened the ship."

"Not enough, 'cause no one got fried during them," Giovanna said, "or if they did, no one noticed it was the collar that killed them. Weren't a whole lot of fatalities in the riots to begin with, and most of the slaves that did get killed were vented into space. Official story is that they breached an exterior wall with some improvised explosives, rumor is the screws opened up the airlock to thin out the numbers." Giovanna shrugs. "Maybe the killswitch is a last resort thing, fry us all if they're ever forced to jettison the command deck. We are worth like two hundred thousand each."

The guards dragged Andraste back into the cell just before lockdown. She'd missed dinner. Cassie wasn't sure if they'd fed her. Even if she hadn't ravenously wolfed down her dinner bar, which seemed a lot more palatable than the lunch bar and still left her hungry (though perhaps not quite hungry enough to tear into another one of those things), she sure as Hell wouldn't be offering hers to Andraste again.

Cassie also wasn't sure exactly what condition her back was in, since the toilet and sink didn't come with a mirror. Lily told her that there were definitely some welts but it looked okay. Andraste did not look okay. There were welts, and some of them had been sliced open. Other injuries looked more like her skin was ripped open. Cassie's fears about bleeding were, it turned out, ultimately an overreaction. Her skin never broke, although Lily told her it looked quite painfully red. Andraste's skin had definitely been broken, though all the injuries were quite shallow. The drying blood mixed with the latticework of red cut into her back. Her front didn't look much better, with a few red stripes across her stomach and her breasts completely covered in tortured red skin. She could barely stand, and she winced and sucked in a sharp breath when she lay down on her bed to sleep.

Come morning, they were officially on the clock. Light flooded into the cell at wakeup, and she pulled herself out of bed, wincing with pain as she twisted her back in just the wrong way to agitate the healing whip marks. The shower turned on, Giovanna grabbed the shampoo from the sink and began washing herself, Cassie pulled herself to the sink and began brushing her teeth, wondering how she was gonna play the day's work. Try to impress the leadership and hope for speedy promotion? Quiet rebellion by way of intentional sloppy work? Would she even have enough spare energy and focus to commit to a strategy? She didn't know exactly what job on which assembly line they would give her, but none of them looked easy.

After shuffling through breakfast, she was led to a machine that made chains by one of the other slaves. Cassie guessed they probably tried to avoid importing anything besides slaves, given the remote location. Her specific job was on something called a breakdown mill. The mill was a pair of vaguely-drill shaped spinning wheels, each curve of the drill from left to right slightly larger than the last. In the negative space between where the curves met wasl a gap that grew smaller from left to right. Cassie would feed an iron rod through, another slave on the opposite end fed it through the next gap over, then Cassie returned it, until it had reached the proper size for whatever specific type of chain they were making. While the rod was on the other slave's side, Cassie would step to the next mill over, grab the rod from the slave who'd fed it through, and immediately feed it back, so that when the other slave was working the rod, she was at the next mill over, working another one.

Cassie traded off every ten minutes or so between producing a rod that's about a millimeter thick to one that's a bit smaller, using the farthest ends of the breakdown mill. Since the other slave had to wait for Cassie to grab her end before they let go, and Cassie had to wait for them to grab hers, she knew how much faster or slower she was going compared to the other slaves (the two who worked on the same mills as Cassie, anyway). This also meant, since a slave waiting on Cassie wasn't working, an issue that will propagate down the line and slow down the entire production, the entire assembly line was constantly being patrolled by one of the two guards, regularly lashing out with their riding crop to maintain pace.