Free Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War by Jerry Pournelle

to talk much. But I think it was about forty-eight hours after leaving Terra, when the ship had gone into secondary drive and was leaving the Solar System altogether, that the man with the iron collar came down to us.
    He entered with an escort of armed and wary Gorzuni who kept their rifles lifted. We looked up with dull eyes at the short stocky figure. His voice was almost lost in the booming vastness of the hold.
    "I'm here to classify you. Come up one at a time and tell me your name and training, if any. I warn you that the penalty for claiming training you haven't got is torture, and you'll be tested if you do make such claims."
    We shuffled past. A Gorzuni, the drunken doctor, had a tattoo needle set up and scribbled a number on the palm of each man. This went into the human's notebook, together with name, age, and profession. Those without technical skills, by far the majority, were shoved roughly back. The fifty or so who claimed valuable education went over into a corner.
    The needle burned my palm and I sucked the breath between my teeth. The impersonal voice was dim in my ears: "Name?"
    "John Henry Reeves, age twenty-five, lieutenant in the Commonwealth navy and nuclear engineer before the wars." I snapped the answers out, my throat harsh and a bitter taste in my mouth. The taste of defeat.
    "Hmmm." I grew aware that the pale chill eyes were resting on me with an odd regard. Suddenly the man's thick lips twisted in a smile. It was a strangely charming smile, it lit his whole dark face with a brief radiance of merriment. "Oh, yes, I remember you, Lieutenant Reeves. You called me, I believe, a filthy bastard."
    "I did," I almost snarled. My hand throbbed and stung, I was unwashed and naked and sick with my own helplessness.
    "You may be right at that," he nodded. "But I'm in bad need of a couple of assistants. This ship is a wreck. She may never make Gorzun without someone to nurse the engines. Care to help me?"
    "No," I said.
    "Be reasonable. By refusing you only get yourself locked in the special cell we're keeping for trained slaves. It'll be a long voyage, the monotony will do more to break your spirit than any number of lashings. As my assistant you'll have proper quarters and a chance to move around and use your hands."
    I stood thinking. "Did you say you needed two assistants?" I asked.
    "Yes. Two who can do something with this ruin of a ship."
    "I'll be one," I said, "if I can name the other."
    He scowled. "Getting pretty big for the britches you don't have, aren't you?"
    "Take it or leave it," I shrugged. "But this person is a hell of a good technician."
    "Well, nominate him, then, and I'll see."
    "It's a her. My fiancée, Kathryn O'Donnell."
    "No." He shook his dark curly head. "No woman."
    "No man, then." I grinned at him without mirth.
    Anger flamed coldly in his eyes. "I can't have a woman around my neck like another millstone."
    "She'll carry her own weight and more. She was a j.g. in my own ship, and she fought right there beside me till the end."
    The temper was gone without leaving a ripple. Not a stir of expression in the strong, ugly, olive-skinned face that looked up at me. His voice was as flat. "Why didn't you say so before? All right, then, Lieutenant. But the gods help you if you aren't both as advertised!"
     
    It was hard to believe it about clothes—the difference they made after being just another penned and naked animal. And a meal of stew and coffee, however ill prepared, scrounged at the galley after the warriors had messed, surged in veins and bellies which had grown used to swilling from a pig trough.
    I realized bleakly that the man in the iron collar was right. Not many humans could have remained free of soul on the long, heart-cracking voyage to Gorzun. Add the eternal weariness of double weight, the chill dark grimness of our destination planet, utter remoteness from home, blank hopelessness, perhaps a touch of the whip and branding iron, and men became tamed animals trudging