Darkship Thieves

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  The ship we'd gone over this afternoon hadn't been cleared from the dock—meaning that we still had access to its genlock. On the other hand, I knew, from having crawled all over it just this afternoon, there was nothing wrong with it.

  To make it better and to assuage my aching conscience, the ship was not privately owned—as most ships were—by the couple flying them. It was one of the few rental ships owned by the Energy Board itself—like the Cathouse. They were usually rented by couples starting out and saving to have their own ship built. I had no idea why Kit rented the Cathouse, though it probably had the lowest rental fees ever, but it was on the borderline of unsafe.

  I considered stealing the Cathouse and, to be honest, if it had been where I could get it, I might have. But I also knew it was on a long contract with Kit, which meant his possessions were in it, and stealing his gems with family occasions seemed like the last of unkindest cuts.

  As it was, I was sure that he would feel betrayed when he found me missing. Relieved too, I thought, but definitely betrayed. And I wished I could have left him a note. But I could not afford to have them discover it too soon.

  So I would make do with this ship. It belonged to a young couple, Dawn and Sean Heigle, and it was christened Howl At The Moon. They preferred to do Thule runs, normally the province of those too old to do pod runs. Who knew why? Probably because it demanded less concentration and they were honeymooners.

  I climbed into it, through its extended ladder—unlike the Cathouse, the door was a good bit off the ground—pushed my thumb into the lock. Then closed the door. Above me was one of the ejection locks—it was there because someone was supposed to take Howl At The Moon out in the morning to test it, since we hadn't found any of the issues the couple flying it had complained about.

  From the testing and the manuals, I knew the procedure for getting out. First you turned on the systems, which needed to warm up for about half an hour. I was in the cat cabin, because the navigator cabin, though it had screens, had no controls. Just the ability to dictate controls to the cats.

  I turned the engines on, then started doing system checks, while I adjusted the screen to be able to see in it. It could be adjusted because repair people, obviously, weren't cats. And mechanics had to be able to see.

  While the engines warmed and the systems ran self-checks, I started mentally calculating my path out of here, via that opening right above me. Oh, lifting straight up sounded easy. But how fast would I be going? It had to be calculated to give the membrane time to open, but not so slow that you scraped your way out.

  "Howl At The Moon, what is happening? Who is in there?"

  The voice, deep and masculine, startled me.

  Voice only, of course they couldn't see that I was wearing my official work suit and had my tools at my feet and everything, so that wasn't going to act as my shield of righteousness, was it?

  In this type of situation, there were two things you could do. One of them was to tell the truth. The other was to tell a lie. And then the third which was my way. "I'm Athena Hera Sinistra," I said.

  "The Earther?" the masculine voice said. "The mechanic? What are you doing in the Howl At The Moon?"

  "Testing it."

  "In the middle of the night?" the voice said, and then, after a pause. "You are not cleared to test it."

  "I thought I'd solve some issues with it." I was checking the warming-up status of the ship. Damn it. I wasn't going to be able to take off in under half an hour. "Nav Heigle said she had some unexplained issues with the air system."

  It wasn't that the engines could not lift me off well before that, mind you, it was that none of the life support systems would be ready to go. And even I was a little leery of lifting off world without air, water or lights. Particularly since lifting off before they were ready could damage them.

  "Truly, I'm just checking some things. I'll be out in a moment," I said. Which was true. I intended to be out of the world as soon as humanly possible. Of course, I sort of hoped he wouldn't take it that way.

  The problem with this was that pumping up the air and water systems meant literally filling reserve tanks. Sucking things from pipes attached to the ship. Which meant they would show in the dials of whoever was monitoring this. I wondered who it was. It sounded like the same lovely man who had welcomed Kit and me to Eden.

  "Why are you filling the life support systems?" he asked. "It is not safe for them to be filled while parked." And he threw the override switch.

  Fortunately, while I am, often, many kinds of fool, I am not exactly trusting. I'd thought he might do this, so I had already taken the front panel off the relevant part of the Howl At The Moon, and was happily tweaking it, so that the override would have no effect.

  "Stop," the functionary said. "Stop immediately. You are in contravention of the orders and regulations of the Energy Board."

  Um. Soft soap and I'm just testing had probably lost its usefulness. Yeah, I'd only cursorily considered it, anyway. I knew sooner or later, they'd realize they were being robbed. I had twenty-five minutes left.

  I leapt across the control room to the controls and slammed my palm hard against the button that shut and sealed the door. This done, only the Heigles would be able to get in, and I doubted they could get them out of bed and here in time. Still, because I am not a trusting woman, I slammed an additional lock across the back of the door, manually. It made the genlock ineffective. Why it was there, I couldn't figure. Except that I was starting to think Edenites were more paranoid than I. They probably expected to be boarded while in one of the Thules, and they wanted to be able to lock from the inside in case someone defeated the genlock. Right. My being from Earth, the idea sounded lunatic to me. On the other hand, having seen how Kit first received me, I doubted it was as lunatic as it sounded. Kit didn't strike me as particularly paranoid—not about Earth, not after knowing me. If he had believed that his ship might be boarded in the energy trees, then doubtless all of them did. At any rate I was grateful for the locks, as I turned to survey the progress of the system warm-up.

  "You locked the ship!" the voice squawked over the communicator.

  I hadn't known they had a way to tell. And I didn't bother to answer. I didn't know what I could tell them that would calm them down in any way. Instead, I looked at the levers and studied the levels of various things. But staring at the gauges wouldn't make them go any further, so I went down the hallway to the nav cabin, to see what could help me find my way to Earth.

  The maps were programmed to be erased at the push of a button, at least on Earth runs. Were they programmed here too? Maps to Earth? Or just to the Thules? Well, I had seen maps while traveling here with Kit, the orbit of the asteroid that had been co-opted to create Eden was available in school programs which I'd been free to peruse for the last month. And the nav cabin contained some of the best calculators ever invented by mankind. In the Cathouse, they were consolidated into the cat cabin and I'd seen Kit use them.

  But I had no time to worry about any of this and Kit was, for now, irrelevant to my plans, except that I must get away from Eden as soon as possible before I made his life worse. I was trying out the calculators to confirm that they were as simple to operate as I'd thought from watching Kit. Well, simple for anyone with an understanding of space mathematics.

  Of course, it had never been part of my curriculum, but I'd studied it, nonetheless, when I'd gotten bored with everything else.

  The speaker crackled and I sighed. More from the man in the control tower.

  I started towards the cat cabin, determined to turn off the com, so they couldn't talk to me anymore. What was the point of talking. I was going to take off and that was that.

  "Thena!"

  It wasn't the man in the control tower, the anonymous stranger I'd been bucking. It was Kit, his voice strange. It sounded like he'd hiccupped at the end of the word.

  I didn't answer. Not obstinate. I couldn't speak. I couldn't find words or voice. What could I tell Kit? I'd h
oped he didn't find out till it was too late. I hoped he wouldn't care.

  "Thena!" More imperious, with a touch of fear, as if he thought I was dead—as though he thought I'd locked myself in someone's long distance ship to kill myself. A grand and ridiculous gesture, worthy of Earth's baroque period. Kit liked music. Did he like opera?

  "I'm here," I said, speaking in a soft, trembling voice, towards the nowhere in particular that picked up sounds.

  A heavy exhalation that I shouldn't be able to hear, and then something that ended with "Blazing Light," which was his way of swearing. And then, "What are you doing? They say you're stealing the ship. What did you do to make them think that?"

  Before I could stop it, laughter gurgled up and out of me. "I am stealing the ship," I said. "As soon as I can make it take off."

  A long silence extended after that, punctured, oddly, by sounds of heavy breathing, as if he were running. Was he hurting? Had he hurt himself again? I thought I knew what was happening. The traffic controller had patched through to Kit's home, had got him on the home com. I was linked through two coms. But why was he breathing as if he'd been running, unless he were in pain?

  "You shouldn't have left the doctor so soon," I said.

  "What?" He sounded as if I were speaking a foreign language, and didn't follow the conversation. "You can't take off, Thena. Please unlock the door. Put the stairs down."

  "No."

  "You have to. What are you going to do?"

  "Go to Earth," I said. My reasoning, not clear but intense, in my room before I decided to come here, erupted out of me in semicoherent words, "I'll never have a place in Eden," I said. "I'm not . . . I'm not a cat, or a nav."

  "You're a mechanic!" he said. "What do you mean you have no place?"

  "I don't . . ." I almost said I didn't belong to anyone, but what kind of reasoning was that? I didn't belong to anyone on Earth, either, except to Father and I'd rather not belong to him. "I'll never be at home here."

  "Rubbish!" he said. More of the labored breathing and something that sounded like a gasp. Also a hiss, steady, intermittent. It sounded, I thought, like the torch I used in welding ceramite, while working. But it was not going steady. It was hiss, stop, hiss, stop, hiss. "You are home."

  "No. I could . . . If I lived here my whole life, I'd still not be home."

  Something like cursing, low, under his breath. A mutter, mutter, mutter that could not be fully understood. And then a sound like something hitting the door hard.

  "I don't want to betray Eden," I said in a rush. "I don't want to betray you. I'll go back and land in a deserted place. I'll destroy the ship. I'll—"

  "Nonsense," the word barely audible through labored breathing. "Athena Hera Sinistra, unlock this damn door."

  I didn't know why. I didn't know how, but I knew—knew with absolute certainty that he was outside that door, that he'd done something to bypass the genlock, that only the additional lock was keeping him out.

  I couldn't let him in. I had no idea how he could have gotten up to the door. With the stairs retracted—which they were by virtue of the ship being closed—the only way up was by rolling a cumbersome ladder up. Had Kit done that? The thought of Kit, as I'd last seen him, still recovering from that wound, climbing a ladder was not something I wanted to contemplate.

  What would possess him to do that? The foolish man must truly feel he had some duty to me.

  I rushed across the cabin to the board and glared at the indexes for readiness. It was almost—almost ready to go. Almost. I closed my eyes and made an executive decision. Simon always says sometimes you need to close your eyes and say what the hell. Of course normally he means this just before jumping off some sort of peak, headed for almost sure death. But this—but in the details—was the same.

  It was as if I'd been run off my feet and peacekeepers were on my tail, and ready to book me. I had to get out of Eden forever or allow Kit to condemn us both to sheer hell.

  "I will never betray you," I said, hoping he was still listening to the com, and I shoved both fingers on the starting buttons. Below me the engines hiccupped and choked, then hummed their starting song. Now, now, now, any second now, they'd kick to full life and take off.

  "Damned idiot." The words were clear, very clear. They were also roared. And followed by a hiss like a thousand torches cutting at the door.

  And then the door . . . well, it looked like it caved inward, followed by Kit tumbling into the control chamber. He was pale as death, so pale that it looked impossible for him to be standing. He wore the pants he'd been wearing before, and a rumpled tunic that looked like he'd rescued it unvibroed from his laundry pile. Which was probably exactly what he'd done.

  His hair was wild and uncombed, his teeth clenched tight together, visible through lips parted in a rictus that wasn't a smile. He had a five-o'clock calico shadow. He held a burner in his hand. It was cocked at full power.

  Twenty-Three

  A burner. Cocked to full burn. The words formed as I was sailing through the air, in best ballet form, my foot arched gracefully towards his burner hand.

  And my foot was caught in his hand and I was on my back on the floor. Again.

  Only this time, unlike our sparring in the Cathouse, he didn't stop to make pithy remarks. Instead, he had gone past me—cat-speed, I thought, the reason cats can't duel non-cats—and he was at the controls, pushing the cancel buttons. Beneath me, the engines spluttered and died down.

  I dove at his ankles, pulled. He fell with a sickening thud. He crashed as if he'd not had time to prepare—which was wrong. Cats always fall on their feet. No, wait. That was Earth cats. Kit was all homo sapiens.

  I looked at his face. He'd fallen on his back, and he was still, his eyes wide. I've killed him. But I had a suspicion that, just like vampires, Kit couldn't be killed by anything short of separating his head from his body and burying the two on different sides of a river. Hell, for him, different ends of a river.

  As if to prove me right, his chest rose once, deeply, then fell, he turned to look at me, his eyes wide open. Thena.

  He was in my mind. I pushed back, pushed him away from controlling my body, dragged myself to my knees, forced myself up to the controls, reached for the buttons.

  Thena, no. Damn you to all the hells of the ancients. What kind of man thought that at you in a soft, sweet way, as if he were gentling down a child.

  Whatever kind of man he was, he was on me. More or less literally, pinning me between himself and the controls and doing something, fast, fast to the keyboard. His fingers danced the entrechat on the keys, something beeped with a final sound.

  I turned on Kit, without pausing to think. I flailed against him, all teeth and nails. He'd turned off the ship, and now I was here forever. I was trapped in Eden for eternity. A stranger. Lost. I'd never see the ocean again, I'd never see the sky of Earth. I'd never glide, silent and sure above sleeping Syracuse Seacity. I'd never—

  Hush, hush, hush. His hands held my wrists. He held me clamped down just off the control panel on the surface that, in the Cathouse, he used to balance a reader or—sometimes—to put his feet on, while he shepherded the progression of the ship through its slow path to the powertrees and back again. I saw him there, as I'd seen him so many times onboard the Cathouse. In a month—or less—he'd be gone on his route. I'd never see him in the Cathouse again. Eventually the whole problem with the Klaavils would die down, and he would be married again. And I . . . I might get to detail their ship.

  Thena, this is not the time. I had no idea what he'd got from my mind, but he was holding me tight against the panel, his hands almost cutting circulation to my wrists, his body holding me immobile. Incongruously, his mental voice was full of tenderness and laughter. And I tried to twist out of his grasp and—

  The side of my work suit was soaked. Looking down, I realized there was a blood stain on me and Kit's dark tunic—though it barely showed it, being a silver-grey—was dark down the side.

  Kit, your w
ound, you—

  Not the time. His mental voice now sounded clipped, short.

  We must—

  "Cat Klaavil? Mistress Sinistra?"

  We sprang apart as if we'd been doing something indecent, which I suppose we had—mind-linked and pressed together—and turned to look at the man who'd come in. He was not the bureaucrat who had received us. This was a younger and more composed model, the vigorous and purposeful category, with dark hair and a nicely fitting uniform. From the steely spark in his eyes, he was the sort of man one expected to see in history holos framed over some caption like the general on the eve of the battle.

  Instead he was a second-class bureaucrat, manning a control tower at night. The chasm between his abilities and his actual post clearly galled him. He strode towards us with the look that—were we an enemy army—would have made us lay down our arms, and possibly weep for redemption.

  We weren't an enemy army. Kit let go of me and stood straight, squaring his shoulders. His cat eyes, now easily readable to me, reflected utter disdain for this intruder. "Yes?"

  "You are charged with crimes against the Energy Board—vandalism of property and attempted theft. We can get a judge on the case, or we can total a bill for the damages and send you the accounting. Do you have some doubt about your legal responsibility?"

  If Kit managed to look any more disdainful, the sheer force of his haughtiness would turn the functionary into a puddle on the floor. "None whatsoever," he said. "I will give you my account."

  The functionary's eyes sparked back. I knew that look. A wolf smelling a tasty sheep. "It is likely to come to around a million hydras."

  Kit's shoulders went yet more square. The side of his tunic was now dark, from the shoulder down. I wondered if the functionary didn't realize Kit was bleeding. I did. I could smell the sickening-sweet scent of blood. "If I do not have enough, you can indenture me for the remaining."