Darkship Thieves

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  I did some very fast calculations in my head. Like this: They might have orders to burn me, but I doubted they had orders to burn me lethally, which would kind of wreck all of Daddy Dearest's efforts to get me functional again.

  Oh, I could well believe that having evaded capture in the powertrees and come back not only married to someone Earth would consider grossly bioed but also severely radiation-burned had earned me new rules. And not pleasant ones. But there was no way that Father was going to dispose of the future of all Sinistras by taking me down.

  At his age, it was highly unlikely he would sire any other Sinistras. In fact, it was unlikely, period. Mother had been the fifth of his wives and the only one to give him a child. If I didn't look so much like the old bastard and if Mother—from my memories—hadn't been such a sweet, compliant woman, I'd flatter myself that she had improved the line.

  But she hadn't and therefore Daddy wasn't going to risk his little daughter. Not to the point of killing. Which didn't mean that he hadn't ordered the goons to burn off a hand or a foot.

  I had no intention of risking that, particularly since I had to get out of here and get my husband as soon as possible. Getting myself into intensive care would only leave Kit at Daddy's tender mercies for another week or two. No. Wasn't going to happen.

  My whole calculation cannot have taken more than ten seconds, but the goons were growing impatient. "Well, Patrician," the one in the center—was that Narran?—said. "What is it going to be? Are you going to put that burner down nice and slow like a good little girl, or am I going to burn your burner-holding hand off?"

  He aimed. At that point, even if Kit hadn't existed, the goon would have been on my list to kill or maim. No one can speak to me in that patronizing tone of voice and live, unharmed, to tell the tale. All right, perhaps Kit. But he'd better make it up to me really fast, after that.

  I could, of course, just aim at the idiot and burn him before he could burn me. But then there were all his acolytes and one was sure to get me before I shot him. Right. Still had the bed nearby. Yeah, yeah, yeah, standard hospital bed, of sculpted ceramite and for all of ceramite's various, helpful qualities, it can't burn worth shit. But it had a mattress and a blanket and you know what? I'd come across this type of institutional mattress and cover before. Oh, they might be fire retardant, but turn a burner on them, and, baby, do they burn.

  So I jumped behind the bed at the same time that I aimed my burner full power at the mattress. The fire resistance lasted all of a second, maybe a second and a half, and up it all went in a sheet of flame, hot enough to make me feel like my eyelashes and eyebrows were singeing. None of which mattered, because since I was close enough for that, I was also close enough to notice that the bed was on little floaters to allow it to be moved.

  I aimed a kick at the ceramite frame, making contact for as short a space of time as I could because the material would be getting hot and I was, after all, barefoot.

  The kick worked beyond my wildest dreams, sending the bed—now filled with an inferno of flaming bedding—sailing across the room at the goons, who broke ranks and ran their several ways. Allowing me to pick Narran off, then three more of them.

  There is an art to hitting men wearing dimatough armor. You absolutely have to hit them at the line between the neck and the head part of the armor. Even then, you're unlikely to kill them, because the hinge is protected. But if you hold it long enough, you heat up the entire face and head plate, and the subject tends to collapse unconscious.

  Of the two innocents, the nurse was huddled behind her chair and from the sound of crying and hastily muttered words, she was either praying or exorcising me. I doubted either would work. Neither had worked before. The gods wanted nothing to do with me, and if there were demons around I was it. I didn't think it was possible to exorcize an actual demon. The guard remained lying down in the pool of green goo.

  Was it possible the fall had killed him or knocked him unconscious? Sure it was. It's also possible to survive a hundred-foot fall unharmed. It's just not likely. Those suits aren't only near-unbreakable, they're also padded inside to minimize trauma from falls. The innocent was staying down because the innocent had some brains and preferred to live to become, someday, less innocent.

  On the other hand Daddy's goons were reassembling, and one actually took a potshot at me, right through the haze of flames, risking hitting a vital spot and Daddy's full displeasure.

  And then my luck kicked in. This is where I have to explain that I used to believe when it came to luck I had none. I had revised this somewhat since meeting Kit. Even if I must run into a darkship, there were so many others my lifepod might have hit. It had to be luck.

  Well, this was luck too, or rather that form of luck that I should have anticipated, but didn't even think about, until a deafening shriek sounded. I was not sure what the shriek was, but I did note that Daddy's goons started and jumped, which gave me a chance to move, super fast, past them, running on my bare feet, holding the burner.

  Okay—super fast was not so fast, because I almost fell in the pool of green goo, myself, but that was fine, because before I got to the goons, stuff started falling from the ceiling—thick, foamy, shocking pink stuff.

  Fire retardant! I thought, even as—blinded by the stuff that clung to my skin—I ran past equally blinded goons and—thanks to a great spatial memory—out the door into the hallway, where pink goo was also falling. Behind me I could hear the hesitant, but approaching sound of footsteps from Daddy's goons. Which meant that they were living up to their outrageously high price tag and trying to keep up with me.

  I was in an institutional hallway completely devoid of all attempts at decoration. What I could see through the gently falling flakes of pink foam was greyish, polished dimatough. Doors each way, lined up so that each of them faced the blank space between doors on the other side. Then at each end, windows.

  Right. If you're ever in a hallway like that, there are two possibilities. At the doors at the end, there will be a stairway leading up and a stairway leading down. All right, there are also two other possibilities. That the stairway will lead only up or only down. But in this case, that was unlikely. My father knew me—clearly not as well as I knew myself, but pretty close. And knowing me, he had to be aware that keeping me at ground level was a mug's game. If one of those windows at the end of the hallway—let alone the windows in my bedroom—were at a level from which I could jump to the ground, I would. And never mind if the windows were unbreakable and unopenable. There simply was no clear dimatough in the world. And any other type of clear material, including ceramite, could be melted by a burner, not to mention a hundred other incendiary contraptions.

  Putting me at the top floor was almost as much of a mug's game because—though it looked rather unlikely, just now—Father couldn't discount the possibility that I could get hold of a communicator, call my lair and have them sweep me off from that perfect landing pad—the roof. I had, after all, done it before.

  So I was probably on a middle floor and the floors above and below were filled with guards. If Daddy knew what he was doing, which he usually did, that meant going either way was stupid. And now the steps behind me had fallen into stride. So . . . that left me . . .

  Ducking into some corner—not possible, as the hallway was as straight as the road to hell—and letting the goons go past me. Truly, that only worked in twenty-first-century comedies, even if I could have pushed into one of the doors around here.

  Turning around and picking them off one by one—yeah, because I would have time to do that while running backwards. And Daddy's handpicked guards would just let me pick them off and not call someone on the com to ambush me from the other side.

  Right.

  What were the chances that the other rooms on this floor were filled?

  Low, unless they were filled with guards—and I didn't think even Daddy was that paranoid since he'd only given me ten guards, not a hundred. Daddy wouldn't want me to have ready-made ho
stages. I had used those to get what I wanted, before.

  I aimed for one of the doors on my left and ahead of me and held the burner there. It erupted into flames almost immediately. Good old wood. Sometimes you had to love retro trends. Wasn't it great someone or other had done studies proving real wood actually killed germs and was therefore better for hospitals? Very nice.

  Still not breaking stride, I ran through the burning door, holding my breath and hoping that it wasn't something like a linen closet and that I wasn't just managing to burn myself to death.

  Luck held. It wasn't a linen closet, but a room exactly like mine, only empty. And the flames didn't do anything to me. I didn't expect them to, since I was covered in a nice coating of soothing pink, fire-extinguishing foam.

  So I hardly broke my stride as I reached for the bed and peeled off both sheets, grabbed what looked like an old fashioned IV stand and threw it at the window.

  The window broke, which just goes to show you. I would have expected it to be unbreakable, but long experience taught me to always try the simpler solution first. And besides it only took a second.

  I set fire to the mattress with the burner, which gave me a chance to take a look out the window.

  I was only on the third floor, which should have been good news, but I'm no more stupid than Daddy Dearest is. I could climb down to the green lawn and the peaceful-seeming parking lot below. But by the time I finished climbing, there would be two dimatough-clad guards down there, ready to hold me fast. In fact, even as I tied the knot on the sheet, to make the two sheets into one, I was fairly sure one of Daddy's goons was already calling backup.

  It is a good thing that I've never been one for an obvious or trite frame of mind. And it was even better that with the two sheets tied together, and secured to the foot of the still-burning bed, well below the flames—ceramite was a mite hot, but not enough to burn the sheets—I could swing like that ape-man guy in the twenty-second-century jungle series and get atop the wall that ran six feet away and at about the same height as this window. I was fairly sure there were no such congenial arrangements near my room. Which, again, is an advantage of my not having a conventional frame of mind.

  The other advantage of this is that I'd already thought on the need for some distractions. My burner was still at almost full power and I put it on the long-distance, high-power mode with a flick of the thumb.

  I hit the two nearest flyers, for the smoke, then two as far off as I could, to cause confusion, and then a couple, random, in the middle. I was in fast mode, and the laser on very high power, so none of this took more than a few seconds. It takes much longer to explain than to do. All the flyers went up almost immediately. Because I know how to fix flyers. And that means I also know where to hit them to make them go boom. Two exploded, two started to smoke heavily and the other two—further off—broke out in smoldering fire. It's hard to aim that well at that distance, so it would have to do.

  Fortunately the pieces of the exploding flyers fell on other flyers, started other fires and added to the general chaos and mayhem.

  I had no holster for the burner and like hell was I about to leave it behind. So I put the butt between my teeth, grabbed the end of the sheet and jumped through the window in wassname-of-the-apes style. I did not, however, do the trademarked cry, partly because people were starting to appear down there, as the affected flyers started to scream in alarm. And there was just enough smoke for them to be sure where I'd gone.

  I swung to the wall, grabbed onto the rough-poured ceramite top, and shoved the sheet back, so it would seem to have gone straight down and hopefully convince my pursuers that I'd gone somewhere into the parking lot. I wish I had. Stealing a flyer seemed like heaven right about now.

  Particularly since the wall didn't lead to freedom—not that I really expected it to—but to a sort of enclosed yard, surrounded by yet higher and, judging from the sheen of circuitry on the top of the ceramite, more-than-likely-alarmed walls.

  Right. I let myself drop down into the enclosed space, while thinking that if it could be said that I had traded a roofed prison for an open-air one, at least this one was remarkably goon-free. Oh, it wouldn't be for long, but sometimes you take what you can get.

  I got hold of the burner, and held it in the two-hand mode as I did a circuit of the little enclosed yard. Why have an enclosed yard like this surrounded by alarmed walls, on the side of an otherwise enclosed, guarded facility? Well, when the facility was a hospital there could be only one reason: to comply with regulations.

  I found the effluvium pipe for hazardous bio-waste right where I expected it—where the yard widened a bit to allow a biohazard robot ship to land. It was a black pipe, thicker around than I was wide and capped off with one of those nipple ends that was only supposed to be opened by the matching end of the biohazard ship.

  And right on target—though this was not surprising because I knew these ships made collections on a fairly close schedule, to prevent any great accumulation of what could, should it overflow, be a danger to all—I saw a ship with the biohazard symbol painted on its side do that daft dance that robot ships do as they land, sensing their homing unit.

  I looked back at the pipe and wished—wished with all my might—for my nice, impermeable spacesuit back in the closet of the Cathouse, with its lovely, lovely helmet and oxygen tanks. Then I looked up at the ship.

  Fine. I'd done worse. And besides, it wasn't like I had a lot of choice, and I'd rather travel as bio-waste than be bio-waste. And I'd much, much rather travel as bio-waste than have Kit be bio-waste.

  I turned the burner onto the nipple end of the pipe, causing fluid and things better not investigated to flow from it. There probably was an alarm somewhere, but I'd bet you there was a delay on showing the leak, and the ship was going to be coupled with this outlet in seconds, thereby probably neutralizing the alarm.

  I took a deep breath and climbed, backwards, inside the pipe.

  There was time for just another breath, before the ship coupled with the outlet and started vacuuming. I tumbled head over heels, in mostly liquid mess to float in yet more liquid mess, my lungs bursting for a breath, my heart trying to speed up into panic.

  I forced myself to think. First, so far so good. Though very few of the biohazard ships had this, it was all too possible this one might have been equipped with blades or a thresher. So I'd been lucky once already. Now to be lucky twice. Which way was up?

  I'd once read a book that advised, should you ever be caught in an avalanche, you should pee yourself to track which way the pee flowed and thereby discover which way was up.

  Charming though the idea was, I didn't think it would work so well in liquid.

  Instead, I concentrated on where the hum of the motors was coming from. The left and beneath me. So there was a good chance—or at least a decent one—that the upper part of this container was upward, in the direction of my head.

  I swam that way praying with all my might that the container wouldn't be filled to the top, and just about crying when I felt my head poke through into the air. I knew it was only logical. They didn't overfill these because they were afraid they would overflow. But when you're in the soup—and in this case greyish green soup that smelled gaggingly of chemicals—you really don't take anything for granted.

  I rubbed my slimy hand across my slimy eyes, which shouldn't work to clear them, but did, and opened them, while taking big lungfuls of very caustic-smelling air.

  There was a good chance that floating for very long in whatever the hell this was would cause me to be as thoroughly burned as I'd been in the Cathouse. Which was why I had no intention of doing so. Instead, I waited while the robot ship did its idiotic take-off dance, then waited as it gained speed. I wanted it well away from these facilities, because what I had to do next would doubtlessly make me visible.

  First I located the vent hole. It was where I expected it, in the center of the hollow sphere that formed the shell. Yes, all of these had a vent hole. Thin
k on it. Otherwise, depending on what they were carrying, they might very well build up pressure and blow up. Which actually had happened once or twice—according to the news—when the vent hole had become closed.

  The vent hole had a prime-quality filter, but that didn't matter, because I had a burner and burners—praise be to whoever was responsible, at this rate, probably Kit's biological dad—were a solid-state, hermetically-sealed piece of gadgetry.

  So as soon as I estimated I was safe, I swam to right underneath the vent, aimed the burner at it, and blazed. I actually held my breath, fearing that whatever was in here was explosive. Which was probably silly, since bio anything usually doesn't blow up. Well, sometimes, but not too often.

  This time it didn't blow up, the filter just caught fire and then its housing melted. They fell into the biohazard with a plop. I'd worry about coming in contact with whatever the filter was made of, but if I hadn't come into contact with anything lethal by now, there was a very good chance I might be living a charmed life. So instead of worrying about that, I stretched to reach the edge of the hole and to pull myself up.

  Fortunately these robot ships never went very high or very fast. In fact, they tended to travel as much as possible over uninhabited zones and fly low and slow, where they couldn't come in contact with piloted craft, or otherwise interfere with the traffic lanes. This was because, of course, the experimentation with robot-driven flyers hadn't been a rousing success, even if they always followed the rules.

  Fortunately—as I expected—I'd been held in Daddy's territory: Syracuse Seacity, an artificial island off the coast of the North American protectorate.

  Founded as tax havens in the mid-twenty-first century—as soon as tech became available to grow artificial islands out of what looked and felt very much like lava, but was actually a man made and biological compound closer to coral, only exponentially faster growing—they had soon become independent republics, and then after that principalities, of sorts. Inhabited initially by a disproportionally skilled and educated population, they'd also become immensely wealthy. It was where Glaish had developed, first as a patois, then as a language.