"Oh, I am so sorry, Chu Li!" Chow Dai cried. "Why did you not tell me when you knew?"

"Sooner or later I was going to tell you," he replied honestly. "I-I just cared for you, Chow Dai. I am a man in a woman's body. I feel as a man feels, as I felt before they did this to me. You have your scars, and you were pleased that I looked past them, but how could a normal woman look past this?"

Sabatini had let the touching scene go on. He was somewhat fascinated himself by all this, particularly when the name Song Ching had been mentioned. The reason they had all been forced through an extra and complete security check was that Song Ching, the daughter of the chief administrator of the China District, had been reported vanished from a maximum security area. He knew the powers those butchers had. They were perfectly capable of turning a worthless kid into a duplicate of this girl and maybe turning this girl into something else, somebody she'd disposed of and then replaced, or maybe even somebody outside China.

Her story held together. For a moment he thought she might be the real Song Ching, although why anybody'd pull strings to be sent to Melchior was beyond understanding, but the fact that she'd passed the security exit test as a boy named Chu Li made her story ironclad. Briefly he considered not turning her over at Melchior but bringing her back and passing her off as the real one, which would save a lot of asses and earn him some real powerful friends, but by this time they'd run security checks up the rear and the plot would be easily exposed- which would only send him back to Melchior-this time in chains and one-way.

The captain looked her over. "Well, kid, they did a really great job. No scars, no nothing. Perfect. I think you got to get used to being a girl no matter what your head says. They threw away all the old parts, anyway. I think maybe you ought to learn what it's like to be a girl these days Uh uh! Careful! You can't do anything but sit."

Chu Li had attempted to lunge forward in anger at the captain's words, but it had been fruitless.

"Now you sit and listen," he continued. "You're property and you got a great body and you are being sent to hell. They're going to love you on Melchior. A slightly incomplete job but an expert one, just up their fields of interest.

They'll study you, pick your brain and chemistry apart, then they'll have what they want. Then they'll complete the job and make you somebody's present. Since you look like this Song Ching, they won't want you anywhere where her father would notice, but they'll find a bunch on Melchior in a region where chief administrators never even look and stick you there, all right, only you won't be interested in machines or escape anymore. It won't hurt anything to start now, and it might put me in a good enough mood to forget this little incident."

"I will, never dishonor myself so!" Chu Li spat. "Perhaps they can make me as you say, but then I will not know my shame. I will fight you even if I fail!"

"Chu Li! You must not!" both sisters said at once. "Look at our bodies! And it was to no avail! The price is great enough without adding more!"

"You do not know what it is like," Chow Dai continued alone. "You cannot. But can't you see, under that smile of his he is one of them! No different from the ones who did this to us?"

"Listen to her," the captain urged. "She's right, you know. I can be quite-creative, within my charter."

"Never!" Chu Li exclaimed. "To me it would be a perversion as well as an assault! What does it matter to me if you do things to this body? It would be better for me if you did make it less beautiful!"

"You've got a point," the captain admitted. He thought for a moment, then said something in his language into the headset. They waited, not knowing what was going to happen, and he seemed both relaxed and patient. Finally the rear center door opened, and an emergency medical unit appeared.

"Now, I don't want all the bother of keeping you shackled or caged all the time, not if I can help it," he told them, again sounding casual and almost friendly.

"There are many ways around it, but I'm still in a bad mood, having been awakened and all that. It seems to me the heart of this-incident-are our two locksmiths here. I can't see that doing a little more to them here is going to change anything on Melchior, either. Seems to me that if you don't have any thumbs or index fingers, you won't be stealing things and picking locks anymore, will you?"

"No!" Deng Ho cried out. "They have suffered enough, you monster! You cannot do this!"

"He won't do it," Chu Li responded. "He has to deliver his cargo undamaged."

"Oh, of course I will," the captain assured them. "They don't mind a few things like that. They understand. See, you of all people should know that those types can grow back things like missing fingers and the like if they feel the need.

Look at what they grew out of you!"

Chu Li's spirits sank as he realized the truth of that, even if they hadn't really grown anything on him. The two girls' faces were masks of terror. "All right, you serpent. What do you want of me? To ravish my body? Is that the price?"

"At the start, yes. Now I want more. I want cooperation. Enthusiasm. It will be a long trip yet. I want a servant. Someone who will do exactly what I say without needing restraints. If I don't cut their fingers, I must leave their hands where they are. Makes it inconvenient for them to eat, so they must be fed. I want a mistress who will do my bidding without even thinking about it."

He drew the little pistol. "Hesitate, argue, or fail to please me in any way for the next month and you'll feel this." He fired at the torso.

Chu Li had never felt such pain, and he cried out.

"Betray me, fail to do my will, or act or even speak with them about acting in any way against me and it will cost your girl friend's sister her thumbs. Twice and your girl friend loses hers. As for the fat boy on the chair, if he gets out of line in any way or is involved in anything at all I don't like, I'll bring this little thing out, and then I'll be the only whole male on this ship.

Understand?"

The Chow sisters looked pleadingly at Chu Li. "All right," he said. "I will do whatever you say."

There was a nearly immediate jolt from the little gun that again produced agony.

"From now on, your name, the only name you will answer to, even to your friends here, is Slave. And you will call me Master or Honorable Captain. My slave here will refer to herself as a she at all times, and so will you all-only the feminine will be used when referring to or speaking to her. I want her to get a basic truth through her head once and for all.

"Additionally, all of you will bow in my presence, and you, Slave, will kneel to me, head bowed, anticipating my desires. To prevent more thefts, all of you will go naked until we arrive at Melchior, and as extra insurance our two sisters will continue to have their hands bound behind their backs-unless the slave, here, fouls up and they lose sufficient fingers to be a threat no longer. What do you think of that, Slave?"

"Whatever you command, Honorable Master," Chu Li responded, teeth clenched but head bowed.

Sabatini went over to him. "I know what you're thinking, but I plan to change that. You see, you've lost everything. Everything but your honor and your dignity. I will strip those from you. You're the only one of this bunch who really has any. That's why you are the leader. Before the end of this voyage, you will break."

He sighed and dismissed the medical robot, then went back to his cabin for a moment. He emerged soon with a set of U-shaped devices, then unlocked all chains from Chu Li and commanded her to lie flat on the floor in a particularly embarrassing position. The four restraints descended to hold down her arms and legs. Then he began removing his own clothing and weapons.

He made the rest watch in anguished silence as he first performed the ultimate indignities upon their companion. He was deliberately brutal about it, but he clearly was enjoying himself.

Sabatini kept his slave apart from the others in a small, dark closet barely four meters square and only a meter and a half high. The only light came from a small grill right at the top of her box. She could not see out, and the vibrating compartments at the rear of the cage masked any noise or movement outside. She would be there for long, horrible periods, then suddenly taken out and checked over to see how she reacted. Sometimes he didn't like the slightest thing and shoved her back. She was allowed to see her friends only in his presence, and then she had to speak to them servilely and in a very loud voice.

Infractions were met with deprivation of food, water, and bathroom stops.

Clearly he wasn't neglecting the other three. Deng Ho seemed lost most of the time in a world of his own, while the two girls were vacant, listless, and resigned.

He no longer restrained her when mounting sexual attacks, but he was even rougher and more brutal and demanding. Early on, he'd left his shock pistol on a table near his bed in the cabin where he had her, and she had gotten it and fired it at him, over and over. He had just laughed. He had removed the little charger and deliberately left it there. He then actually handed her his knife and invited attack, but she lost the knife and her footing before she made the fist real move. Then he had worked her over with just his hands, leaving painful bruises that did not show on her skin, and raped her, before tossing her back in her hole to be wakened every hour or so for an extremely long period but denied food, water, and bathroom.

His treatment so brutalized her that when he finally let her out, she was so sincerely servile, so letter perfect, he let her sleep. Her behavior after that remained so perfect that he began easing up, slowly but progressively. He cleaned the closet and disinfected it. He let her shower. He gave her good food.

A few more very minor slips brought renewed punishment, but they were the last gasps of resistance. She found it increasingly difficult to think of anything but the ship, her duties, her behavior, pleasing him. After a bit longer, the only thing that mattered to her was pleasing him. He continued to leave weapons and other things of interest to the old Chu Li around, and if she saw them at all, she did not even think of picking them up or using them.

She began to hope that she would be so useful, so obedient, so perfect that he would not think of turning her over at Melchior but would retain her on the ship. He obliquely encouraged this idea, then released her forever from her closet and allowed her to rejoin the others. She was not, however, to have any private conversations with any of them.

The other three had been faring only a little better, with routine deprivation and punishments by Sabatini's pistol. It was what he had done with, and to, the one they'd known as Chu Li that was the telling blow. If the strong, educated one could be broken so completely without even any technological aids, then there was no hope.

When they were twenty-three days out, although they'd lost all track of time, Deng Ho committed suicide.

It had not been easy, but it had certainly been well planned. He did it in the bathroom by wrapping his waist chain excess around his neck and then somehow getting it caught up in the toilet-flushing mechanism. It must have been an agonizingly slow strangulation, yet he had resisted all impulses to stop it and had not cried out, even at the last.

The act shocked all three of the remaining prisoners, and it really irritated Sabatini. He had spent so much time on Chu Li that he'd really neglected to keep close watch on the others, and particularly on the quiet chubby boy who had never really given him any trouble. He actually felt a little sorry for the kid, but he was more upset that perhaps this was only the first. He doubted that Chu Li would try it; she was too anxious to keep in good with him in the pathetic hope that he'd keep her aboard-if he could, he would, but they'd never allow it.

Instead, he now had a black mark, and he needed a good line to get out of it.

He decided that a burial would be a nice gesture. He had no desire to build up any more resentment. And so, after speaking some words, he'd taken the body to the port center air lock, where the other three could watch, and placed it respectfully inside. He was even indulgent to their reactions. "You may say farewell and whatever prayers you wish for him," he told them.

"If you please, Honorable Captain," Chow Mai said, somewhat more animated than she'd been in a long time. "Where will he go now?"

"Normally, you would enter the air lock in a pressure suit and then pump all the air out before going into space. I'm keeping the air inside, and I'll pump the pressure way up. Then, when the outer door opens, he will be launched into space by the escaping air. He will drift in space forever."

Chow Mai, who had always liked the boy, had a few tears for him. "That is good,"

she responded, almost to herself. "He will become one with the stars, a constellation in the heavens."

The two girls both said prayers and farewells, but Chu Li stood back, silent.

She had found the body of the boy and had seen the grotesque face and distorted, popped eyes. It was a haunting grotesquerie worse than anything yet experienced in this horror odyssey.

The two sisters stepped back, and Sabatini made certain that the body was arranged in the air lock.

Something snapped in Chu Li's brain. The compassion of the innocent Chu Li who had been killed; the haughty pride of Song Ching, reduced and violated; the relative innocence of the two sisters, punished all out of proportion to their crimes; the cruel, calculating Sabatini who personified the system's least common denominator; the quiet innocence and inner despair of Deng Ho, who chose to die a slow, agonizing death rather than see or accept any more...

"No," she whispered under her breath. Sabatini didn't hear it, but the two sisters did, and they looked at each other, then at her, not quite knowing what was about to happen but ready to assist. Chu Li moved up behind the captain silently. He was a good fifteen centimeters taller than she and far stronger, but she knew that this was the moment. Risk it now, and perhaps lose, or be a slave forever and deservedly so.

With one motion she jumped, grabbing the headphones from the captain's head and striking his face with the little microphone. As he was still turning in shock and surprise, she gave him a push forward with all her adrenaline-pumped might.

He staggered, but a hand caught the side of the air lock door.

The two sisters, hands still tied behind their backs, ran at him and butted him in the midsection with their heads. He grunted and fell backward into the air lock, almost on top of Deng Ho's body. He recovered quickly. "Why you little bitches! I'll-" he bellowed, but Chu Li had already begun to swing the door shut on him. When he saw what was happening, he rushed against the door, and all three girls lent their bodies to pushing it closed. It was fury versus desperation, and desperation won. The door shut with a hiss, and Chu Li, while still pressing against it, managed to turn the wheel that locked it.

"I don't care what you do-put your feet in it if you have to-but don't let him turn it back from that side!" she shouted to the sisters, then ran to the panel.

Sabatini was lazy; she knew he would have preprogrammed the sequence, but she had to find the right control and throw it. The sisters were having a hard time holding the wheel by backing against it and gripping it with their hands as best they could, but the safety lights kept flashing yellow, green, yellow, green.

There were only five buttons, and she pressed each of them in turn, but nothing happened. She knew the sisters were weakening and that he would soon get that door open. She kept pushing the buttons in desperation, one after the other, hoping to catch the right button at the right point. It had to work. It just had to.

The red light suddenly came on, and a bell sounded. Sabatini stopped for a moment, and through the small glass window they could see his expression of desperation. He pounded, swore, then renewed his attack on the lock, but now Chu Li was on the wheel. The whole procedure took perhaps forty seconds, yet it seemed like years.

Since it was a pressurized burial, the outer door opened pretty quickly.

Deng Ho's body moved right out, but Sabatini grabbed hold of the wheel. His body was horizontal, his hands gripped the wheel, his face was pressed in fear against the viewing port, but the air was exhausted in an instant, and the artificial gravity plunged him back down.

Chow Dai, exhausted, slumped to the floor, followed quickly by her sister. "Do you think-you can close- that outside door?" she managed to ask.

"Not yet. Not for many minutes," Chu Li responded. "I do not know if someone can live in space with no air, but I do know that no one can hold his breath for more than five minutes. We will give it ten." She sank down, also exhausted. Her arms and shoulder muscles ached, and she felt as if she'd sprained both wrists.

Still, it had been worth it. That one moment of stark terror on Sabatini's face was payment for much inflicted misery, brutality, and indignity. Deng Ho's gesture had not been in vain.

Chow Dai crawled over and gave Chu Li a kiss. "Welcome back," she said.

"Not for long, but I do not regret it. We have killed him, and the ship will know it. The gas should come at any moment."

Chow Dai looked disappointed. "I had forgotten about that. I suppose that was why he was so confident. Foreign devils have no idea of what honor is. Still, it would have been nice to have won completely."

Chow Mai listened, thinking. "It would seem to me that if this gas was coming, it would have come by now. Either it is not going to come or he is not dead."

Chu Li felt a new shot of energy and stood up. "You are right." She looked through the air lock window and saw the interior, still lighted. She could not see the area right by the door, but there was no sign of anyone or anything in the air lock, and the outer door was definitely open, the alarm bell still ringing. There was certainly no air in there, and she knew that space had to be very cold, yet there was something nagging at her brain, troubling her.

Gravity. They had weight here, even if they felt lighter than back home. The whole section had gravity, including the air lock. Sabatini clearly had not been sucked out with the air, although it had been close. Why was there now no body slumped down, hands frozen to the wheel in a death grip?

The ship had been elaborately and illegally modified, and there were all sorts of compartments and gadgets built into the walls. Might there not also be some sort of emergency compartment in the air lock? She couldn't see how a body could stand a vacuum, even for a few moments, but what if it could? There was better than two meters of air lock. Something had to be inside those thick walls.

"We must find something to jam this door. Before we close the outer door, which will automatically flood the compartment with air, we must jam the wheel so it cannot be opened from the outside. He might be alive in some rescue compartment there. We must examine as much of the ship as we can to make sure such a one cannot otherwise reenter the ship."

If he was in there someplace, he'd be in a small, probably dark compartment much like a closet, with some sort of breathing device but little in the way of food and water for more than a day and certainly no bathroom. The only way to make certain, though, was to risk keeping the outer door open, jam the inner, and somehow make contact with the ship's pilot.

She reached down and picked up his headset. She had not brought honor, glory, or dignity to herself by serving him, but she had always been observant. Now she thought she could imitate his odd, animal-like growls that commanded some of the locks. The headset had been bent out of shape, but it did not appear damaged.

She put it on, although it was too large for her head, and spoke one of the commands in his language that she knew overrode the electronics room lock.

The door opened, and to her surprise she heard a growling, unintelligible response in the earphones. For a moment it startled her, and she wondered if there were others aboard in areas they had never seen, but then she realized that it was the computer pilot.

She had spotted something in the electronics room long ago that was the first priority, and that was a complete electronics and mechanical tool set. It was almost too heavy for her, but she got it out and open, and the Chow sisters were able to tell her which tool to use. Shortly the girls' hands were free, although the cuffs themselves remained as oversized bracelets. One of the waist chains they wrapped through the spokes of the air lock wheel, then secured it with a small hand-held welder to the base of the nearest chair.

They were all tired and aching but far too excited to sleep. Chu Li checked the schematic of the ship's passenger level on the monitor. "If I read this correctly, then the whole level is pressurized-has air, that is, that is fit for us-except this area all the way in the rear. Those double lines front and back are air locks, but if this color is air, then they are not active. Shall we go see?"

She opened the center door with a command in that strange language, and a bell sounded distantly-but nothing else happened. She was almost relieved to hear the response coming from the earpiece; it confirmed her belief that it was the computer responding and not anyone else.

They went along a narrow corridor, then Chu Li stopped. "This was my home for those long times," she told them gravely, pointing to a lower storage closet.

"After just one week in there, you would sell body, soul, and honor to anyone who would keep you from going back."

As Sabatini had warned them, animal cages filled the huge storage area, all designed for just about anything that could be imagined and some that were beyond imagining. The cages were empty this trip and apparently newly cleaned and reinforced. Beyond them were a large number of sealed containers, all labeled in a language or code none of them could understand, fitted together into vast clumps for useful storage. The path between was so narrow, they had to go single file.

The compartment narrowed until they emerged at an air lock. As she had expected, the light was green. When they opened it, the noise of great motors was almost deafening, but Chu Li finally got the courage to enter and walked the short distance to the far door. Peering through the window, she gasped, then continued to stare, fascinated. "Come! Look!" she called. Nervously, the two sisters joined her.

Before them was a second enormous cargo room. Larger than the first and filled with containers, it was spinning around at a dizzying pace.

"Why does the room spin?" Chow Mai asked Chu Li.

She thought for a moment. "I'm not sure. I seem to remember from very long ago-her memories-something about this. Ah! I think I know, but there is only

one.

way to know for sure. Do you notice how light you feel?"

Only then did they notice how little gravity they felt here.

"I do not think the room spins at all," she told them. "I believe that it is we who are spinning. You must trust me on this, for it is far too complex to explain, but spinning is how many spaceships make gravity in space."

"We are not spinning!" the sisters responded in unison. "That room is!"

"There is only one way to find out, and if I am wrong it is a dangerous one. It is to go in there. See that net stretched there? I think you jump and grab on to that and then use the handholds to go on."

"No. It is too dangerous," Chow Dai responded. "What does it matter who is spinning? There is nothing in there that we can use."