Darkship Thieves

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Kit gave me a sideways look, as though surprised I asked. "No. This was a training ship, before being retired," he said. "That is the student's seat. Which means you should be able to see everything."

  It wasn't like that, of course. Well, it couldn't be. He was working without his lenses and with his screens at comfortable cat lighting. If I looked carefully I could just discern movement in the dark blue depths.

  "You said the alarms went—" I wanted to ask how it worked. But I wasn't sure how much he would tell me.

  He looked at me again, that half look, and smiled a little, the sort of smile that in our discussions or mock fights told me that he'd seen through my attempt to ask, and it amused him. "The orbit of Eden is so irregular," he said. "The founders chose an asteroid with a highly irregular orbit because it's easier to keep hidden. No propulsion. They also set a proximity alarm. It will only be activated in the ship when we get close enough to maneuver into the landing area. And it is activated in Eden at the same time, so they can prepare for our arrival." He paused, while his fingers danced on the keyboard.

  It was like watching a trained pianist play soulful, intense music, in precise, fast movements, all the while staring in front of him at . . . something.

  The something, in this case, was the shadows in the screen. I frowned at them, trying to discern something resembling a planet out there in the dark.

  I know I said I didn't want to go to space, and that was true. I'd read enough and taken enough virtus to know that Circum Terra was all regimented, scientific rooms, with the creature comforts thrown in as an afterthought. I knew that the few colonists on the Moon lived in confined, miserable quarters, little better than those in my father's space cruiser. Worse, probably, for comfort even if larger.

  Earth had much more room for me to get away from Father. Even in Syracuse Seacity, I could disappear into my broomer lair, and not be found for quite a while.

  So why should I want to go to space? Why should I want to trade my life for the arduous one of a scientist?

  But now I was here, and whatever that world was in front of me, it was likely I'd have to remain there until I could find a way to make it back to Earth. In fact, most people would say it was impossible for me to make it to Earth ever again, given that I would be in a world that had become legendary through not being discovered for centuries. But that was underestimating me. I'd always found my way back, from boarding school and mountain fastness, and I failed to see why this should be any different.

  Still Eden—whatever it was—the place of the bitten apple and the serpent, would be my home for a while, and of course I was curious about it. Yet watching Kit Klaavil click through what seemed to be memorized sequences, while he looked at shifting shadows in the screen, was as puzzling as watching foreign language words flick across the screen of an unknown system.

  After a while he seemed to realize my problem. He looked over at me, and must have read the glazed expression in my eyes. "I'm sorry," he said politely. Then, "Here." He flicked a switch and the screens remained deep and dark and blue, but now I could make out a shape in them.

  The shape was potato. A large potato, mind you, but still unmistakably potatoish, floating in darker blue. It was more oblong than wide, and not a sphere or a cylinder, or anything else that could be identified. All that was missing, I thought, were some sprouts growing out of the eyes.

  "It looks like a potato, I know," my host said. "We call it the Primeval Potato."

  He seemed to think he'd made a joke, so I smiled politely and asked, "How long will it take us to land?" I didn't see anything that we could land on, on that surface. No cities, no lights. Nothing. I started wondering if my ELFed host, addled from reliving too many hours of children's birthday parties and family sing-alongs, had gone completely insane and was in fact going to land us in a bare rock in the middle of nowhere, in space. Would he also require that we saunter out without spacesuits and helmets? Perhaps this was what darkship thieves did when they found themselves discovered? Perhaps it was their elaborate way to commit suicide.

  "We don't land," he said. "They pull us in."

  "Oh."

  "Well, you know, we have defenses, in case . . . Earth comes looking for us."

  "Earth thinks you are legends," I said. "Earth thinks you don't exist."

  He gave me a considering look. "At least according to you, yes." And before I could react to the implication that I was either lying or had no idea what I was talking about, he continued. "But my people don't know that. My people can't be sure of that. We have holos and virtus of the riots and the disorders. We remember the hunting down of anyone who was biologically modified. I was exposed to the materials as part of my education."

  "I was too," I said, irked.

  "You were?" he said, looking surprised. "Good for you. And did you get to do virtus hunting down of the dirty bios and ripping them limb from limb?"

  "It was only holos," I said, stung by the sudden anger in his voice, which seemed to have come from nowhere, and which I knew I'd done nothing to cause.

  I would be damned if I was going to tell him that the holos I'd seen had disgusted me and caused me to wonder if it wouldn't have been better to allow bio-modified people to live, than to indulge in that kind of orgiastic blood-letting. In the messes of the riots people had been killed who were innocent. They just happened to be naturally beautiful or intelligent or something. And I'd started to wonder if the bios weren't innocent too. Oh, sure, the bio-lords, the Mules themselves and their closest associates might have committed horrible atrocities. But was everyone guilty? Or just them? How many of the bioed people had simply been entering data into some system? And could they help the way they looked or the way they had been born? They'd been created by their parents or their state for specific posts. That they should be killed for it seemed horrible.

  But I'd rather bite my tongue in two than admit that to the bio-improved man who shot me a glaring, sideways glance. "That must have been very disappointing for you. I must be sure to line up some virtus so you can experience it. I'm afraid you can only do so from the victim's side, but you'll doubtless enjoy it anyway."

  I was stung now. I had forgotten, in the time I'd shared his ship—in the time he'd been polite to me, except for that tendency to lecture which might very well be inborn in the Y chromosome; in the time I was sure he'd curtailed his food so that there would be enough for me; in the time when he'd talked to me about music and history—the fury that he'd inspired in me when I first met him.

  Okay, so part of it had been the fact that he looked so different, so alien. But the other part had been that anger as if I'd done something to upset him. When all I'd been doing was escaping. He had no reason to meet me with drawn weapon. No reason to force me ahead of him at gunpoint. And absolutely no reason to tie me to a chair.

  And he had no reason to talk to me as if I'd shot his favorite dog. Whatever those virtus of being chased as a freakish bio through the streets of a long-vanished Earth had done to him, it was not my fault. I had been born centuries after that. Even if some of my ancestors had been involved in the chasing—and I doubted it, as Father was fond of reminding me, people like us hired others to do that—I had not been. I curled my lip at him, remembering how surprised he'd looked with that belt around his neck. "I don't know what you think—"

  "Identify yourself." The voice boomed all over the cabin, seemingly from everywhere at once, the sort of voice that leaves your ears ringing and makes you wonder exactly what kind of a giant can have spoken. It had the same accent as Kit Klaavil's.

  Kit said "Light," and something that sounded like a word in an ancient language under his breath, then aloud said, "Cat Christopher Bartolomeu Klaavil, piloting the Cathouse for the Energy Board."

  There was a silence on the other side, filled with crackling and the sort of rustles one hears on the other side of a com link while the other person gets up or shifts about.

  "The responder must be broken," Kit said to me, in
a tone of explanation. "Normally it identifies on approach."

  "Cat Klaavil?" the voice boomed again.

  "Would you mind giving us your ID number?"

  Kit rattled off a long string of letters and numbers. Crackling again. He was now frowning at the console, as if something either in the screen or in the keys were deeply offensive.

  "Tell us the date on which you left?" the voice asked.

  Kit rattled off a universal date three months back, only to be asked another string of questions, including his address. His frown deepened.

  At the end of it, as the crackling silence filled the cabin, he cleared his throat. "This is Cat Christopher Bartolomeu Klaavil, piloting the Cathouse on behalf of the Energy Board. I have a full load of powerpods. Is there a problem?" No one answered and he repeated louder. "Is there a problem?"

  "Our sensors show another living . . . being aboard your ship? We believe about fifty kilos?"

  I wanted to protest that fifty kilos. At what I'd been eating—or not. I was never fond of fish—aboard the Cathouse, I'd probably lost at least two of those.

  "About that," Klaavil said, which goes to show the only parts of my anatomy he ever noticed were the rounded ones.

  There was a silence from the other side, this time without crackles. I felt as if the silence itself held its breath, trying to determine what Kit Klaavil meant. When the booming voice came back, there was a vibrato of uncertainty behind the booming. "You have another person aboard? Identify him."

  "She," he said, and followed it with a pregnant pause, "is Patrician Athena Hera Sinistra of the Seacity of Syracuse on Earth."

  "Pat—" Well. At least my title made someone choke, though perhaps not in a good way. "Where did you capture the Patrician?"

  Capture. I almost snorted.

  "Patrician Sinistra was fleeing through the powertree ring. I rendered assistance." A steely kind of casualness had crept into Klaavil's voice. It was a tone that should have been impossible, except that it was exactly how it sounded. He wanted to—and did—sound offhand, but at the same time it was clear he was wielding that casualness as a weapon. He knew that picking me up was, if not a crime, a serious disruption of routine. There was no possible way he could have failed to know it. But he was too stubborn to admit that he'd done anything at all out of the ordinary.

  "You rendered . . ." the voice boomed away into speechlessness, which went very badly with whatever was being used to amplify it. "You can't have rendered assistance to a Patrician of Earth! And what was she fleeing from?"

  He looked at me, as if for a cue. I'd told him the whole story in the last month, but he seemed to be deciding exactly what he should tell them. Or perhaps, I thought, taking the measure of the man, or perhaps thinking up the most outrageous response possible.

  "Mutineers," he finally said.

  "Mutineers?"

  "Mutineers took over her father's space cruiser, waylaid the Good Man Milton Sinistra and pursued his daughter, after she escaped in a lifepod, intending to make Circum. I found her in the powertree ring, and I rendered assistance."

  This time the silence was absolute. It was an unnatural silence, without even the traces of breathing or of clothing rustling, or of anything at all that might indicate a person on the other side. I wondered if they had turned the sound off completely. Had they gone away and decided to ignore us?

  The silence extended, becoming, of itself, an answer. Kit at first sat expectantly, leaning towards the sound receptor on the console. But after a while he sat back, frowning at the screen, and then at the keyboard, and then at the screen again. He looked up at the domed dimatough ceiling, as if he expected the voice to be cowering up there, somewhere, possibly scared of his glare.

  Then, in an undertone, sounding like he was putting an end to a long drawn-out conversation, he said, "Right." He paused. His fingers drummed on the console. "Right. "

  He leaned forward, once more alert, full of purpose and pressed a red dot on the console. "Eden Base," he said. "Please give me docking coordinates, so you can bring me in."

  He let go the red dot, which must have been some sort of emergency communication device, because immediately after his words, there was frantic crackling, and the sound of someone breathing fast, as if he'd run a long distance. "Cat Klaavil," the voice said, sounding monstrously amplified, but far less sure of itself. It was as if the voice were a kid dressed in daddy's shoes and stepping on stilts, trying to appear bigger and utterly failing. "We regret to inform you that we cannot bring you in."

  "No?" Kit sound terribly calm. I wondered what he intended to do? Were we to live off space and virtus of family gatherings?

  "We don't have a procedure to deal with this issue. I . . . in two hundred and fifty years of recorded landings, this has never happened."

  "I see," Klaavil said. He still sounded very calm. He took a deep and deliberate breath, which I was sure was as much to be heard on the other side as to steel himself. Something like a light of battle came into his eyes, and he said, "I am Christopher Bartolomeu Klaavil, flying the Cathouse on behalf of the Energy Board of Eden." He ignored an attempt at interruption, what sounded suspiciously like a voice about to tell him they knew that. "I have collected six ripe powerpods, which are right now in my cargo hold. I am now requesting landing coordinates so I can be brought safely into Eden—"

  "We explained we cannot—"

  "Should I fail to get landing coordinates, considering I have no other alternative for landing, I will have to fling my ship at Eden, in the hopes of somehow hitting near the entrance of a landing bay. Of course, I have no idea where that might be located. I'll have to do it visually, and you know how deceptive it can be. I could accidentally miss and end up crashing through into . . . oh, the half-g gardens? With a full and explosive load."

  "Uh. Oh. Uh. Don't . . . don't do anything. We . . . we will give you coordinates shortly."

  "Certainly," Klaavil said magnanimously. "I'm not an unreasonable man. You have a full three minutes. I'm setting my timer."

  He looked at me and, rather deliberately, winked. The effect was only mildly disrupted by the fact that inner, nictitating eyelids blinked the other way first. I was speechless. The same haughtiness and high-handedness was not all that bad, I thought, provided he was on your side. Of course, the question with Kit Klaavil was which side he was on and exactly why. I wondered if he, himself, knew.

  It didn't take three minutes. Or two. Or much more than one. A voice crackled over the com, "Please come in at twenty-two A by twenty-four D."

  It made no sense at all to me, but not only did it obviously make sense to Kit Klaavil—his hands moved purposely on the keyboard, playing their inaudible symphony of directions—but he raised his eyebrows as he did so. I thought that whatever the move the other side had made surprised him, and I wondered how exactly. He didn't seem upset, more curious.

  The ship swayed gently this way and that, and I settled in for what I expected to be interminable hours. After all, to land Daddy's space cruiser in Circum, which was considerably smaller than the Primeval Potato, took the best part of a week. It would take at least hours here, even accounting for coordinates and however improved their steering mechanism might be.

  Only the potato exploded. At least it looked to me as if it exploded, though as I blinked, I realized it was shooting something like a sleeve towards us. The sleeve covered the screen, giving the impression that we were being swallowed whole.

  We flew down what felt like a tunnel, though I had no other indication than the view screen and Kit was too busy doing whatever he did on his console to answer my questions.

  After a long while it felt like we came to rest on something. Kit, carefully, slid his foot along the lever that I now knew turned off artificial gravity. I braced for my body to be only held on the seat by the belts, but nothing happened. Kit nodded. "Eden artificial gravity field," he said. "It encompasses us." As he spoke, he unbuckled himself and stood up, then gave me an uncertain look. "Would
you rather . . . uh . . . put on the dress you had when you came into the Cathouse?"

  "I-it was a slip!" I protested.

  "I don't think anyone in Eden would know that," he said. Then shrugged. "As long as you don't think you're ill dressed or . . ."

  I shrugged in turn. I might as well be seen in a hand-me down, glimmering grey pants-and-tunic suit which if anything ended up molding my curves rather too well, as in a hastily mended slip. If my captor's handling of the situation was any indication, my arrival here already wasn't a rousing success.

  "I'm sorry," he told me, as we walked along a corridor which I assumed must lead to an exit, "about the confusion up there." He pointed vaguely upwards, which I assumed to mean the exterior of the asteroid, because, at least as I understood it, we were not on the asteroid but inside it. At least that accounted for the fact that I hadn't seen any cities or constructions on the outside. And it made perfect sense. It was not only a way to hide their presence from any stray Earth telescopes turned this way but also probably the most efficient way of colonizing an asteroid. Provided they contrived a way to bring sunlight within—and I was sure they had one—the interior area could be much larger than the exterior because the world could be colonized in layers. "They truly would sit there and dither forever because there was no precedent . . ."

  I was amused and for once completely in sympathy with him. "I've met the type." In correctional facilities, hospitals, rehabilitation programs. "I call them the mark-the-right-answer-or-die tribe."

  He gave me a fleeting smile, "I guess bureaucrats are the same everywhere."

  As he said this, we'd come to the end of the hallway and were facing the sort of irised door that blocked airlocks. Kit pressed a button and it swirled slowly open. Then the membrane behind it followed suit.

  We crossed ten steps, faced another door. Kit touched another button. The door swirled open, a staircase extruded from the ship.