Darkship Thieves

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  "With a navigator," he said. "And not the Cathouse, but a proper ship."

  "Why the Cathouse?"

  "They won't rent me one of the better ships," he said. "Flying alone is a high risk, and they just won't do it. And then . . ." He shrugged. "I can't collect as much because I have no nav. I can sort of do the turn of a nav, but it takes very long, and I can only collect while the powertrees are on the dark side. Otherwise the harvesters from Circum will be out. And they'll see me."

  "Oh." I'd never asked, though all of it were things I could have realized, of course, if I'd thought about it. "You could stay two nights?"

  "Would have to get away so far during the day and use so much fuel to go back it would make the rest of the collection less profitable till it enters diminishing returns. But mostly . . . it's high risk. They teach us never to go back, not two nights in a row. If someone has spotted us, it makes the chances of our getting caught that much higher. They could be keeping an eye on us . . ."

  I wanted to tell him that Eden was paranoid, that as a collective society they were more paranoid than even I managed. But again, I didn't want to upset him on the eve of his going off to space. This being-nice-and-polite thing was probably going to kill me. All the anger and casual irritation I was used to giving vent to, would just grow up inside me and suffocate me.

  Instead of speaking, I pulled him politely to one of the fake marble tables, where we'd sat before. I noted—though I'd stopped noticing—that, as every time I was with Kit, we moved within a space of solitude. It wasn't anything so blatant as people scampering to get away from us, with horror stamped on their features. It was more like they contrived not to be in the space around us, or the place where we were supposed to go.

  The effect of it was that we moved in our own private bubble. It sometimes made me wonder what would happen if we should both undress and dance on top of tables. But I had a strong suspicion no one would really see us. Kit didn't seem to notice the space of solitude, nor the way people's glances slid off him. I wondered if this was true. I had learned the concoction Doctor Bartolomeu made him drink the night I tried to steal the ship was something that helped his stomach. Which appeared to be what hurt when Kit was very busy not showing either anger or pain.

  Though as I pulled him to the table and sat down on one of the chairs, more or less forcing him to sit down across from me, he looked neither angry nor upset, just vaguely amused as if I were a kitten or a child who had just done something particularly clever.

  "You're going out tomorrow, and I wanted you to know . . ." I took a deep breath. "I wanted you to know I meant it."

  The vaguely pleased expression vanished under a wave of utter bewilderment. "You meant . . ."

  "That I will not do anything to get you in trouble. That I will not cause you problems by the time you come back. That I will not—"

  He laughed. A short laughter, like a hastily bit-off chuckle. "I know that."

  "You do?" How in living hell could he know that, when I wasn't even sure? I was just determined to make a lot of effort.

  "Yeah," he said. "I'm more worried about what you'll do to yourself. I'd take you with me in the Cathouse, only . . ." His voice died down.

  Only he wasn't sure he could trust me not to garrotte him and steal the ship to take down to Earth. The problem here was that I couldn't tell him I wouldn't. I was fairly sure I wouldn't, but I had nothing to go on, no past actions to use to bolster my belief. I could tell him I wouldn't till I was blue in the face. It was convincing me that was the tricky part.

  "Well," he said, speaking like someone who has gathered his thoughts for very long and is now ready to speak. Suddenly I felt as if his entire silence, this evening, had been designed to gather his mind to tell me something. I had no idea what. "I said I'm more worried about your doing something stupid to hurt you than me, and I am. I want you to try very hard not to get in arguments, not to get in duels, and not to get married to the first idiot who asks you."

  I snorted. "There aren't idiots big enough. On Earth or on Eden."

  He gave me a crooked smile. "You'd think that, but people are very dumb about whom they marry. Don't. You don't know enough of Eden. Ask my father before you fight any duels or enter any contracts, please. And do try not to kill anyone."

  "I wouldn't," I said gravely. "I said I wouldn't cause you more expense, remember. And I gather if I killed someone I'd leave you stuck for the blood geld."

  "Almost certainly," Kit said. "Unless it's a lawful duel and of course you don't know how to set that up. So, ask my father."

  "Uh . . . am I to continue living . . . uh . . . to stay in your house while you're gone?"

  He looked startled. "Do you wish to go elsewhere? Did we . . . have we offended you?"

  Offended me? I used their water, I got their son in trouble, I took up space and they offended me? "I don't pay rent," I said. "Your father won't let me. And people . . . people will assume . . ."

  I couldn't tell him people would assume we were a couple. If he didn't know it, I was fairly sure I could not explain.

  "People will be people, as Doc Bartolomeu says." He frowned. "If you do get into some trouble you can't tell my father about, would you go talk to him? I have no idea why—he says most people are only tolerable well boiled and with a lot of salt—but he likes you, and he should be able to help you if you're in real trouble."

  Weirdly, I didn't doubt that the doctor liked me. Yes, he snapped at me and glowered every chance he got, but I could tell he liked Kit, and he treated him much the same way. I got the impression that for the gnome-man it was the lack of rude conversation that would mean you were held at a distance.

  Kit reached across the table. For just a second I thought he was going to cup my face in his hand, but what he did, instead, was pull my hair back. "You have this tendency to make an explosion out of a tap on a powerpod, because you're too proud to ask people how to operate the collector."

  I raised my eyebrows at him. "There hasn't been anyone to ask . . ."

  "Yeah. I know that," he said. And the tone in which he said it made me wonder what, exactly, he'd got from my mind when we'd been linked. "But there is now, and you must learn to ask."

  And with that he got up. This time he held my hand and pulled me, all the way back to his flyer, where he handed me into the passenger seat, as if he were afraid I would, otherwise, not know exactly where to go. He waited till I buckled myself in, too, before he closed the door and went around to take the pilot's seat.

  "You can drive my flyer while I'm gone," he said. "If you wish."

  I had about as much wish to drive his flyer as I had to grow a pair of fins. But it occurred to me that without Kit there I might have to. I couldn't exactly ask his father to pick me up at the Center every day. Yes, I still had my job. I'd checked.

  The funny thing was that with Kit being my legal guardian, everything I did wrong went against him, not me. I'd tried to explain I didn't deserve my job, the day before, and got handed my tools and sent to bay fifteen to inspect a ship. And I got told not to talk nonsense. My bosses said that Klaavil should have told me what the problem was. Klaavil's fault, not mine. And I got looked at oddly, as if I were suspected of harboring feelings for this particular Klaavil.

  I'd read that in the Middle Ages princes and those considered too holy to be touched were given whipping boys who were beat every time they made a mistake. When I'd read it, I'd thought it was the most stupid thing I'd ever heard. Now I was not so sure. I suspected it could be a very effective punishment.

  And if I still had my job, then I must get to it somehow. Of course, I'd never asked Kit to pick me up and drop me off either, but he'd done it without being asked.

  "You can drive in very early in the morning and back home before traffic picks up," he said, as though reading my mind.

  I nodded. I would have said I'd buy my own flyer, but Kit was paying all this money for my mistake and I was damned if I would let him do it alone. I'd been collecting
all my pay, and I was going to hand as much as I could over to him to help pay the stupid debt down. My contribution might be so small as to be ridiculous and it probably really wouldn't pay it down any faster, but at least it would allow me to sleep at night.

  We drove back home mostly in silence, except as he helped me down from the flyer—yes, helped me down, as though I were small and frail—and he said this little set piece about a lovely evening that could have come straight from two-dimensional twentieth century movies.

  I followed him into the house and to my room, but that night, when I heard the violin music wind out of his room, I got up—in my repaired silk slip—and went to his quarters.

  He'd been playing with his eyes closed, but he opened them as soon as I entered, though I swear I didn't make any noise, being barefoot, in the grasslike carpet.

  The violin came down gently and the hand holding the bow came down too, slowly. "Thena. Is anything wrong?"

  I shook my head. The violin glowed mellow-gold. "I just . . . How long will you be gone?"

  Like someone waking from a sleep, he put the violin away in its case, then the case away in his closet. He turned to his bed, where there was a small case open. He'd told me that normally you didn't pack for a voyage. Not as such. The reason his wife's spacesuit was in the Cathouse, even though they'd flown an entirely different ship, was that it was the cleaning and fitting staff's job to clean everything the couple had in the ship—and move it to another if they were changing ships. I didn't ask what had happened to Kit's wife's clothes. I suspected anything might have—from her having spaced them before herself, to their having been carefully packed at Kit's orders and given to her family. The suit was not with the normal clothing, so it would have stayed.

  But Kit's clothes in the Cathouse would be vibroed and put away. And all his other effects. The only things cats and navs packed were little travel cases, no bigger than would last a weekend if they had everything in it. Reading gems. Music gems. Virtus gems—I saw Kit drop a string of the amber-colored ones into the case and wondered what was in them. Granted, as small as recording equipment was, one couldn't really be sure when virtus collection was happening. Particularly since he'd be collecting it through his own senses, so the collector might be under his clothes. But I didn't remember us having any parties with butterflies and kittens. Waldron's wedding probably, though I was at a loss how it could take up so many gems. However, Kit was addicted to family occasions as virtus recreations, so that had to be it.

  "Probably about three months according to their calculations," he said. "But Anne and Kath should be back soon enough, and they will keep you company till I return." He looked up and seemed amused at my expression, which I was fairly sure reflected all the uncertainty in the world. "Oh, don't worry. You have your job and my family aren't ogres. It won't be that terrible."

  He was, of course, completely wrong.

  Twenty-Six

  The trouble started two weeks after he left, though at first I didn't know it was trouble—or that it was trouble for me, at least.

  At first all I noticed was that people were giving me a wide berth and that I moved around in a bubble of solitude and silence almost as impenetrable as Kit's had been. All my workmates said nothing at all to me, unless it was strictly required by the job. Even Darla wouldn't come by with her gossip, her news and her mostly well-intentioned babble. Which was why, of course, I missed all the news, and failed to understand what was on people's minds.

  I assumed that they must be equating me with Kit because he was paying for my debt and hadn't renounced his responsibility over me despite my rather cataclysmic faux pas. Then I gritted my teeth and told myself that all was well and fine. I'd be a model citizen just to spite them all. Besides, I'd promised Kit to behave.

  At work I performed my duties. I even volunteered for extra hours. At Kit's house, I mostly ate as little as I could—since they wouldn't let me pay—and then went to bed.

  Which is why I heard nothing about the disappeared ships until I got in late one night—so late no one should have been up—and found Kit's father in the common room they used as dining and living room, in front of the holo, staring at the news with an expression so dismal I couldn't just walk past him.

  I was so tired that I could barely think straight—I'd worked two shifts, doing my best to make sure that the money I had to give Kit counted, and also making sure I didn't think. Or not too much. When you're too tired to stay awake more than a minute after hitting the mattress, you're in no state to wonder what you're going to do the rest of your life as a stranger in a strange world.

  But Kit's father looked worried and, for all he looked nothing like Kit—something that made perfect sense if they actually had no genetic background in common—he had the same gestures. In this case, he'd shoved both hands down into the pockets of his pants managing to convey the same little-boy sullenness that Kit conveyed with the gesture. Though in both cases I was sure that was not what it meant. In Kit it was a sign of worry and defensiveness.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  He turned to look at me, as if surprised I was there. No. As if surprised I existed. Which was perhaps not unreasonable considering I'd done my best to stay out of his sight for two weeks now.

  "Ah . . ." he said. "It's the ships that have been disappearing. Anne has been missing for . . . for weeks. She should have been back weeks ago. A week is normal, but . . ."

  "Missing?" I said. I didn't think of Anne at all. I thought of Kit, out there alone. The cat who travels alone, Doc Bartolomeu had called him.

  "Everyone seems to be delayed, pretty much," he said. He sounded miserable. "But every day people return, and there are stories." He looked at me, frowning. "At this point I don't know what stories are true, and which are . . . Well . . . people under stress . . ." He frowned just like Kit too. "But the ships can't all be having serious failures and delays, one after the other."

  I looked at the holo. It had a list of ships under Ships Returned: Ru and Rob Knox flying the Voshells Mill; Tom and Kate Golding's the Hairball. John and Syl Wagner had brought their ship, the Drool, back home safely and Christine and Jody Runnalls had brought back their ship, the Quilly Bomber, all unscathed, including their toddler, Tripp. Beneath it was a list of ships self-destroyed to avoid capture, presumed dead: Sabrina and Jonathan Iffland flying the Jena, Kevin and Dona Molinaro in the Catseye, Brent and Mary Roeder, in Fowl Reciprocity, Kateri and William Travis in the Indiscretion. And beneath that, again, a list of ships still missing and now more than two weeks late. I skimmed it. Chris French, flying the Beaver—I wondered if like Kit he flew alone and why—Mark and Julia Verre, flying the Revoir, Sean and Hugh Kinsell flying the Madonna and there, at the very bottom, Bruno and Anne Denovo, flying the Fireball.

  I tried not to think of the name of their ship as a bad omen and instead said, "Ships self-destroyed?"

  "The ships that return . . ." Kit's father said. "You see, the ones that return say that they've seen other ships . . ." He took a deep breath. It was as if this idea was so outside his experience and perhaps his imagination that he didn't know how to express it. "My . . . when my great-great-grandparents came here," he said, "they lived in fear the Earth would capture our cats and navs when we sent them back for the energy." He gave a little mirthless laughter. "We didn't have a choice, you see, it's not like . . . We had the technology for the powertrees. Sort of. I mean, at least the one Mule that stayed behind with us was their architect and he knew how to create them. But we didn't have the manpower and more importantly, we didn't have the natural resources." He shrugged. "We presumed as we expanded outside this world, we'd find . . ." He shrugged again. "Most people were never interested in expanding, though. They wanted to settle and raise families. They're . . . we're . . . just people."

  "Yes, but ships self-destructing?"

  He sighed. "We had to go back to Earth orbit to harvest the pods, because our whole machinery was designed for it. Besides, there really weren't m
any other ways to find that much energy. And we needed the energy to make Eden livable. So we took the risk. But we expected them to lie in wait for us. Wherever they were, they had to know we needed to come back. We expected them to lie in wait to capture us. The ships were—and still are—built with all sorts of safety features, starting with the fact that they're darkships, able to hide in the dark of the powertree night. Then there's evaders and of course the cat's ELFing plays into fast evasion. But each ship is also equipped with a final self-destruct button that will make the inside of it a burnt-out, hollowed hull. If you are captured and can't escape in any other way, then you must self-destruct." He took his hands from his pockets and looked at them as if they were alien artifacts and he was not quite sure where they'd come from. "For three hundred years no cat and no nav needed this feature. We . . . all trained in it. But the legions of Earthwo—Earthers hunting us never materialized. We realized, from what you told us, that we'd become a legend of sorts."

  He took a deep, wavering breath. "Until now."

  "They—" My legs had gone very weak and I sat down heavily on the soft grass. "They are hunting for darkship thieves." It wasn't quite a question, though I wanted it to be a question, and one that caused Kit's father to laugh. But he didn't. He nodded, once.

  "They're using . . . well, probably some form of detection mechanism. Our engines make not imperceptible noise, of course, and they give out a power signature, but . . . They never looked before, but now they are, and they're lying in waiting and they're . . ."

  "Firing on ships?" I asked, hoping against hope that was true, because if that were true, then it wouldn't be so bad. It would just mean they'd lost patience with the energy thefts and they'd decided to put a stop to them. Though of course firing on anything in the powertrees was dangerous and they had said that the ships were self-destructing.

  Kit's father was chewing on the corner of his lower lip, something Kit also did. "No. They're pulling them with tractor rays. Trying to get them to Circum Terra." He made a little gesture with his hand, as if he were trying to dispel bad thoughts. "So far all those observed being captured have behaved with great sense of duty and have self-destructed. But it's disrupting the power runs. People are going back again. Some of the ones that returned went back three times and came back with half cargo. And the others . . . managed to evade the ray but sustained damage and had to repair it. I'm hoping that's all that happened to Anne."