Darkship Thieves

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Kit!

  There was no answer, and I thought they had killed him. But if they had killed him, that meant that they had kept him alive all this time just to communicate with me. Preposterous. No. Kit was alive. That scream was the result of whatever they were doing to him.

  Why would they be doing anything to him?

  Because he was a darkship thief. They had technologies Earth could only dream of. And besides, Kit knew where they were located, where they could be plundered or exterminated.

  Oh, I'd grown up with the full myth of the benevolent government of the Good Men, who cared for their people and sought only their happiness.

  Unfortunately for the mythmakers, I'd also grown up with my father. It was impossible to see my father at close quarters for most of my life and not to know—know with absolute, gut-born certainty—there were only two things Father and most of the Good Men cared about: power and their personal well-being.

  Of course they would torture Kit to find out what he knew, and where the people were who knew more. And of course they would pay. It was me against the Good Men of Earth, their armies, their faithful retainers, the massed legions of those they governed.

  Poor bastards, they didn't stand a chance. I had them surrounded by my sheer anger and determination. And they wouldn't believe it until it was too late.

  I worked steadily, pulling my hand fractionally out, then a little more, and then yet a little more. I knew as well as anyone can that in the situation I'd found myself in, escape was impossible. Of course, this had never stopped me before, and before this I didn't even have Kit to fight for.

  If Kit was alive—and I was sure from his voice in my head that he was—then it was my duty to find him, rescue him, and get his shiny white-knight behind back home to Eden. It wasn't some high flung duty, really. Mothers do it for their ducklings and dogs for their masters all the time. It was rather that most basic of all instincts: help those who have helped you. That I loved him only added icing to the cake.

  I don't know how long I took working my hand in and out. Really, I wished I wasn't blindfolded because it didn't allow me to know if there were people in the room, and if there were, were they looking at me? So I kept a sharp ear out and stopped as soon as someone rustled near the bed.

  Twice, someone touched me, without seeming to realize that I was working to free myself. Once there was the touch of a measuring instrument of some kind against my earlobe. I'd frozen in fear that it was an injector and that I was about to be given a sedative. But it was just a brief touch followed by a beep, that told me they were reading blood pressure, blood sugar, or perhaps degree of doneness for all I knew.

  The second time was more helpful as someone flung a coverlet over my naked body. I hadn't been cold before, but the coverlet provided additional cover for my activities. I could pull on my hand more vigorously and bunch my fingers into that almost-dislocating position that made my hand into a thin, sharp wedge—then pull again.

  I'd like to say my hand came free in no time at all, but I actually had no idea how long it took me. It seemed like a very long time, because I was measuring minutes in degrees of freedom. Pull, pull, pull. When my hand was finally held only by the middle of my fingers, I forced harder, and expected alarms to shout. They didn't. I moved my hand, slowly, under the coverlet, to be at my side.

  To my left, the heavy man stepped, stepped, stepped, away from me, paused at that far end, then stepped back. There was no noise from the right, and either the lady who had been there had left, or she'd sat down and taken up a reader or a game player or one of those things nurses always seem to have on hand for when they're watching an unconscious patient. My ears are good but not that good. Catching the slight touch on a play pad was quite beyond me.

  So . . . there was only one thing to do, and it had to be done agonizingly slowly, so as not to raise the alarm. I moved my hand, fractional inch by fractional inch, under the coverlet, towards my face, and then felt my face very slowly. The tube going down my throat felt like a standard flexible feeding tube. One advantage of having half-killed yourself in broom accidents before is that you know these things.

  The thing over my eyes, on the other hand, didn't feel like the standard blindfold, but more like swim goggles—only clearly opaque. I wondered why there were there, but I had no doubt that I had to remove them enough to see—but not so much that anyone glancing at me would see what I'd done.

  It is the tragedy of my life that, having been born to do things suddenly and in a big heated rush, I am forever consigned to doing them slowly, carefully and by almost imperceptible degrees.

  There was no choice though. I slowly, slowly, slowly slid the mask upwards. Slowly, slowly, slowly, until a sliver of light showed through the bottom of it.

  Bright, stabbing light. My body stiffened. I stopped a spasm through an effort of will. Fortunately the tube in my mouth prevented the gasp from escaping. Light. Bright, bright light.

  Light. Burning light. It was Kit's mind, touching mine, the sort of mind touch we had had in the last few minutes in the Cathouse. Blinding light. His eyes hurt as if someone had put a hot poker through them, and his stomach clenched. He too was tied down, somehow, and I knew without knowing how that there were two guards in dimatough, with burners, pointing lasers at him. I heard his speaking voice as he would hear it, from within his aching head. He spoke in that matter-of-fact way he did when he was not giving an inch and would see whoever it was in hell before admitting they could hurt him. "If you don't turn the lights down soon, I will be blind and useless," he said. "And I won't be able to do whatever it is you want me to do, even if you convince me."

  The voice that answered him was Father's and it dewed my body with cold sweat. I remembered him in the ambush in the collector bay. He had been in on this from the beginning. "Agree to look at Jarl's plans and tell us what we're missing, or we will burn your eyes. And regen them. And burn them again. Until you realize you are not in control. You are not home. Here, you do what we want, or you hope we kill you."

  Kit. He didn't answer. I didn't think he could. Gradually the touch of his mind—pain and confusion and overarching wounded pride and worry for me—receded.

  I fought against my own rage, which urged me to hurry up. Instead, I forced the rage into the channels normally taken up by strength, forced it to tame and go slow. I needed rage to do the part of strength, because strength I had not. I'd realized that when I tried to move my hand, when I tried to lift the blindfold. The force behind my actions was maybe a quarter of what I would have expected. As for the bright light, shining under my blindfold, I refused to believe they had me under high beams or—as it felt like—the light of a thousand suns.

  It must be, I thought, that my eyes were made extra sensitive to light by being covered for however long it had been. I closed my eyes, opened them, closed them, opened them again. Each time the light seemed less stabbingly bright.

  Of course, I remembered my eyes had been burned out. What if they hadn't been regenned properly? Fortunately the panic lasted less than a heartbeat, because I opened my eyes, and I could see.

  What I could see were just bulky figures that could have been humans or objects. One out against a greater source of light, one quite near me. No, two quite near me, on either side of the bed. Guards? And then one a little further away, lower than the rest but bulkier.

  I blinked again and slowly my vision cleared and the bulks resolved themselves into clearly visible objects and people, even if each was surrounded by a faint halo of light, as appears on things when you've squeezed your eyes really tight, then opened them.

  I was in a large room, brightly lit by the light from two windows. It wasn't a standard hospital room in that no effort had been made to have it feel homey or comfortable, or even soothing. It was just a stark white room, with lots of white space, one of the walls taken up with blinking monitors and buttons, a bed—for all I knew a floating platform—on which I lay.

  The things to my side wer
e not guards—which was good. I'd not have had much leeway with guards that close—but large, polished medical machines. From one of them extruded the tube that went down my throat. It made a not-quite-humming noise, of the kind that can only be picked up by human ears when the human is thinking about it.

  On the other side was a machine that looked much the same, but which extended myriad wires like tentacles towards my body. I'd not paid any attention to those smaller feelings before, having concentrated on the fact that I was naked and strapped down, but now, as I followed those wires to the small shapes under the coverlet, I realized there were sensors on me. Probably, judging from the monitors on the machine, they were heart rate and breathing sensors.

  That was a problem, because almost anything I'd have to do to free myself would alter those readings. In fact, those would have altered already, if I hadn't taken it so painstakingly slowly and been so maddeningly patient.

  I would have liked to take it slowly and patiently now, but the thing was that glimpse from Kit disquieted me. I didn't know what Father knew about Jarl or why he would be trying to get Kit to interpret any writings left by Jarl.

  All right. So Jarl was the genius—even for a Mule—who had gifted us with the powertrees, a puzzle no one since then had managed to solve. Perhaps that was what Father wanted, or perhaps the secret of the legendary FTL stellar ship that Jarl had also invented. Granted, Kit was Jarl's clone, so perhaps he could solve it—though this took a twentieth century view of cloning, the naive belief that a clone was the same as the original and not merely a younger twin sibling. Still, I could see where they thought that Kit might have the natural talent to interpret Jarl's writings. The question is—even if Father had access to images and writings about history that I did not, how had he recognized Kit for what he was?

  The people of Eden clearly hadn't. Oh, granted, they'd last known Jarl as an old man, probably looking much like Doc Bartolomeu. And granted, they thought that Kit had been bioed to resemble his mother's husband.

  But, Heaven and Earth! All my father had were old holos, probably grainy and out of synch as the twenty-first-century images tended to be. So, how could he tell that Kit resembled Jarl enough to be his clone, and not merely someone from the same stock? Wouldn't the eyes and the hair have thrown him off?

  It didn't matter, of course. Father had found out that Kit was a clone. Something that was as forbidden on Earth as all other experimentation. Even without the additional crimes of being an ELF and a Mule, my beloved was proscribed.

  I probably should be grateful that Father had realized who Kit was. I had no doubt that trying to get the key to Jarl's secrets was all that was keeping Kit alive right now. Of course, it wouldn't keep him alive and comfortable. And so I should get him as soon as possible. And then I was going to rip Father's head off his shoulders. And I was going to make him eat it.

  First to get out of here. If slow and painstaking wouldn't work—or not without driving me nuts—I needed the quick and easy solution. The two other bulks in the room—one near the window—and one further away from me, to my right—were human. Or at least the one by the window was a large man in full dimatough armor. The other one was a middle-aged woman in a reclining chair.

  The woman looked asleep and the man had his back to me, looking out the window. Right. That meant that Father Dearest didn't expect me to wake up yet.

  It was obvious. Had he thought I was near the time when I would regain consciousness, he'd have been very careful to have two or three of his goons on guard, and at least one nurse or medtech who'd had to tangle with me before.

  Granted, those people were hard to find—in the sense that once having seen me in full-blown berserker mode, most sane people refused to come near me again, much less guard me. But then, sane people did quite astonishingly crazy things for enough money, and Father had a lot of money.

  And there was no way that he would have left me in the charge of two people, one of whom could decide to sleep and the other one—judging from the armor, definitely trained at guarding or peacekeeping, because dimatough doesn't come cheap—could decide to turn his back on me.

  Good heavens. I almost felt guilty for the lesson in paranoia I was about to drum into these innocents' heads.

  Almost but not quite. Sometimes people simply have to learn lessons. It's for their own good. And if they survive, they're better people.

  I chewed at the corner of my lip. Right. These beds usually had a release somewhere, that, if pressed, made the binds retract. It was usually a single button, which made it easier for nurses having to clean the patient or turn him or whatever.

  It was usually at the edge of the bed, on the underside—just. It could be at the head or at the foot of the bed. If it was at the foot, I was shit out of luck. But mostly it wasn't at the foot. It was usually near the head because if a nurse were alone, it was easier for her to control a semiconscious patient by holding his shoulders down, than by holding onto his ankles, when he could still have rolled over and fallen, or at least hit his head.

  So . . . just under the top. I quested with my hand. Nothing on the right side. I pushed my fingers up and behind my head so I could feel underneath that edge. Nothing. Then bending my elbow at a painful angle, I searched as far as I could along the left side of the top of the bed. And felt a small bump. I pushed it with a will.

  For a second nothing happened. Then the binds started retracting. With a whirr. The guard spun around.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. The electrodes attached to various points of my body and the tube down my throat kept me as still as the shackles had done.

  I reached up with my newly freed hands and tore at the tape around my mouth keeping the tube in. In the process, I sat up. Alarms sounded.

  The nurse stood up. The guard walked towards me. I reached up and tore the tube from my mouth. It was down my throat. As it tore up, it seemed to bring most of my throat with it. I tasted blood. The nurse screamed, "No, no, no."

  I swept my hand down my body, throwing electrodes all around.

  The tube glugged a greenish mess to the floor. I realized I was in my hyper-fast mode because everything else seemed slow motion, and the guard wasn't walking, he was running. But not fast enough for me. And he was a newbie. His burner remained holstered.

  Little girl like that. Ah!

  I rushed him, pushed him back, grabbed the burner from its holster. Thanks heavens it was a Cinders10. I'd used those so often before—having stolen them from guards, peacekeepers and proctors—that I flicked the safety off by instinct as I backed up. I tried to speak. What I wanted to say was, "Stay still, go to the corner. Let me out and nobody gets hurt."

  Unfortunately the damage to my throat was not illusory. It felt like my whole throat was raw, and my voice came out in incoherent grunts and rasps. The nurse slammed her hand against something and sirens sounded, loud. In the past I'd have burned her where she stood but . . . well, to begin with the alarm had already been sounded. And what if she had a family to go home to? What if they'd worry about her? What if her death would destroy them? They'd never done anything to me.

  I'd never thought these things before, and I realized they were a weakness now. I also suspected that things were about to get far more interesting than could be solved by burning the two innocents in my room.

  The nurse approached, "Calm down, Patrician Sinistra. You're just confused. Nothing is wrong. We're here to care for you."

  Like hell nothing was wrong. If nothing were wrong, my father wouldn't have taken my husband away from me. If he cared, even the modicum he was supposed to have cared for me, the little bit of duty and obligation that he'd pretended—he'd have Kit hidden somewhere until I woke, and then would send him on a ship back to Eden.

  Separate us? Sure he would. After all, I was the hope and descendant of his line, and for him to have a successor I must marry someone from a Good Man's family. But hurt Kit? Kill Kit? If he cared for me, he wouldn't even have contemplated it. Hell, if he were sane he wouldn
't have contemplated it. Unlike the innocents here, he knew what I was.

  I burned the floor ahead of the nurse, to stop her getting nearer. She stopped and wailed, "But you're naked." Which indeed I was. I guessed I'd caught some of the Eden attitude that being dressed or naked was my business alone, because I flat-out didn't care.

  The guard was reaching for me—slightly hampered by the bed being in the way—and from down the hallway came the sound of footsteps in unison. I'd guess more guards, only it was probably Daddy's goons.

  Father wasn't stupid. He was what he was, but stupid wasn't it. And though he might have been fairly confident—must have taken one hell of a doctor to make him fairly confident—that I wouldn't wake so soon and might have relaxed his guard, he'd always been the sort of belt-and-suspenders type of man who would keep backups just behind the next door. And the backups—only to be called in case of need—would be the best he could command.

  At the same time, the innocent in the dimatough armor was trying to get at me. I grabbed the nearest thing that looked like a non-lethal weapon. The tube that had been down my throat and which was merrily spewing green liquid onto the floor. I grabbed the end, spared a glance at the machine and punched hard at the button that I thought would increase the flow. It worked beyond my wildest dreams, spewing green goo in a wide arc in front of me. This made the innocent slip and allowed me to drop it and turn, burner in hand, to meet the ten or so armored goons, who came in at double-time march. And with drawn burners. Hello. This was new. Normally they had orders not to fire on me, no matter what I did.

  "Patrician Sinistra," the lead goon said, and though I didn't recognize his voice, I recognized his tone. It was that not-really-believing-you'll-listen-to-me tone those in Daddy's employ who'd had to deal with me before were wont to use. "Put down your burner. Put it down. We have orders to burn you if you do not obey."