Darkship Thieves

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Brooms tend to stall if you start them while falling. Even the best ones, which the one I was wearing at my belt sure as hell wasn't. And two floors is a low space to start, in freefall, even without a stall.

  On the other hand . . . Sometimes you just have to say what the hell.

  So I unhooked the broom from my belt. I wasn't going to use the one in the backpack till I tested it. I put it between my legs.

  And then I said, "What the hell!" and I jumped.

  Thirty-Nine

  I twisted as I fell, and I fell like a stone, which I expected. My finger pushing at the button of the broom didn't even get me a courtesy sputter.

  Which is why I'd jumped with my back to the sea. As I approached the ledge, I kicked out with my left leg. The goal was to barely touch the cliff, then pull back, before any drag broke my leg.

  I hit out and my leg hurt like hell, and I wondered if it would make any difference, even as I fell past the platform which was—literally—an inch in front of my face.

  Now my only worry was the water below. Of course, at the speed I was falling, the water below was as good as a concrete surface. I pushed the broom button frantically, then again.

  Nothing happened, nothing.

  The air rushing past me seemed very cold. I couldn't breathe. I sent Kit—forcefully—an I love you thought, even as my lips twisted in a wry smile, figuring that I would royally piss off Daddy by committing suicide.

  And the broom coughed, spluttered, and barely gave me time to press the reverse slide before it took me full tilt against the wall.

  I backed up just enough to turn it around, and, holding on with one hand, pulled my hood up with the other, because my naked scalp was starting to freeze. From the walls of Daddy's mansion, a boiling of brooms was pouring out.

  My face formed a smile that must have approached manic rictus. I whispered, "Playing tag. How sweet." Because here I was in my familiar territory.

  I'd escaped peacekeepers and rival broomer gangs for years. Daddy's goons couldn't possibly have that much experience. Not on brooms.

  If you ever find yourself being chased on a broom, there are several steps you can take. The first and best would be to outrun the others. I looked over my shoulder. Okay, so my pursuers were growing larger at an alarming pace. That meant . . . I couldn't outrun them. Right.

  The next best thing—at least if you are an experienced broomer—is to hit the most populated area you can as fast as you can.

  It had limitations in this particular case. Ah, yes, I know, theoretically all brooms were illegal and if caught within the seacity on a broom everyone should be treated alike.

  Theories are a beautiful thing, but they have this odd tendency to not translate into practice all that often. Particularly when the theories involved so-called public servants who knew which side of their bread was buttered.

  I was sure that Father's goons had transmitters which gave them some form of code for the traffic control towers, and which would stop them being detained or worse. And I didn't. In fact, if Daddy's goons didn't have a way to broadcast that I was a dangerous element, they were total and complete fools.

  Right. So . . . there were areas of town where that wouldn't do them any good at all. The main one being the area where my broomer lair was located. Which meant flying as fast as I could around the isle, past the area where I'd stolen this broom—which was good—and down to the deepest low level.

  Deep Under, as it was known, was on a part of town that had to have been slightly less expensive than the rest to begin with. Facing the sea was a structure like a huge dead metal spider, with all its legs up and half-bent. It had been, once upon a time at least, a dock-unloading robot. And this area had been the dock through which every product that Syracuse Seacity needed came, in the days before flying everything in was practical or economical.

  Flying past the spider was the very first test that any broomer had to face in Deep Under. First, because there were far more arms than natural spiders. Once, in an idle moment, while standing near the base, waiting for Simon, I'd counted five hundred arms, and I wasn't near halfway.

  The other obstacle was that the robot had been decommissioned at least two hundred years ago. Since then it had stood, metal parts and ceramite parts and dimatough parts forming the lifted arms, and pleading with the gods for a mercy that wouldn't come. Some of the metal parts rusted and fell apart—and did so at unpredictable times, so that flying through it, you could set off a storm of falling ceramite and dimatough as the vibrations of your passing disintegrated the metal that linked them. Even when they didn't fall apart they had a tendency to move with the vibrations of anything near.

  Was there a way to get through it? Well, yes. Myself and others who'd done it—on a dare or in a desperate situation—would tell you that it was done very, very carefully.

  For this my horrible borrowed broom might be an advantage. It was so low-powered that it didn't set off much vibration at all. The group following me, though, was at a distinct disadvantage.

  With them still far enough behind me that their vibrations were just starting to hit the spider and make all its arms twitch and wave, like the branches of a tree in a light breeze, I started flying between them. There were two theories about the safest way to do this. One was going high. By going high, amid the rotted claws and picks and bits of things up there that had once been used to unload ships, you escaped the risk of having heavy objects fall on you from a height. On the other hand, the slightest vibration could cause a still-halfway-sound arm to pivot and a claw to grab you or a pick to pin you.

  The other—and my normally preferred method—was to go as low as possible. Yes, you risked having something very heavy fall on you. My friend Fuse had never recovered from it. On the other hand, if you were alone and were very careful, the chances of setting off any movement or any disintegration were low.

  I wasn't alone, so I flew as near the top as possible, concentrating both on going fast as I could, and as carefully as though I were wending my way through the powertrees.

  This took all my attention plus some. I forgot about the people behind me—about everything but wending now under a claw, now above a scythe, now past a low-hanging basketlike thing.

  The only thing to say for it is that it was easier than traffic in Downtown Eden, though not by much, and that I wished very much that I could borrow Kit's mind to do it, even if he found my eyes and reflexes horribly inadequate.

  As the movement around me sped up, I realized that my pursuers must have caught up with me at the other end of it. A few screams and one short, sharp crunch told me at least one of my pursuers had died a horrible death.

  But I didn't dare turn or see how many of them remained until I exited on the other side and was a good ways down the street. And then I turned. Two.

  I reached to my belt for my burner and shot.

  Deep Under is dark, but not that dark. I could see well enough to shoot. And I could tell when I hit the first broom—the one closer to me—because it exploded in a lovely fireworks of light and parts.

  But when I turned to shoot the second he had disappeared. Damn. I swore under my breath, because I didn't like that. I didn't like that at all.

  However, there are always things you can't do anything about. The best thing for it is to know which those things are and to isolate them from those things you can, in fact, do something about.

  Right now what I could do something about was changing out of this ridiculous outfit—which was starting to get me odd looks from various broomers flying past me, since I was sure the colors weren't right for this zone—and then find my lair. Which I very much hoped was still the same place it had been for the last six years, since I'd started flying with them.

  I evaded curiosity—as much as possible—by flying down and landing.

  Now I know I said this was a broomer-friendly area of town, and this was true, because it had the spider on one end, and on the other end a desalination plant blocked it aft. To
enter into Deep Under, you could either fly through the spider, or come in on either side of the desalination plant, where there was about a one-person-width opening between it and the columns that supported the biggest park in town—the Hanging Gardens—above us.

  There were other entrances, mind you—sort of—in the alleys between the buildings at the end of each block. But those alleys were really narrow and often blocked by loading docks. Remember, this had started as a working part of town, composed of warehouses.

  What this left were eight blocks of large buildings and one main street, most of it in complete darkness or as near it as could be, until someone turned on a lamp—and all inaccessible to large flyers and to most conventional peacekeeping forces.

  So, of course there were illegal broomers there. And illegal coiners. And illegal just about everything else including—it was rumored—illegal bioengineers. There were generations of people born and raised in those warehouses. There was always a cloud of kids on the street, most of them wearing headbands with lights on the forehead. Everything that could possibly be done and that Daddy could possibly disapprove of took place here. There were even rumors that there was a group of fanatical Usaians plotting revolution in here. Probably wrong, although it was true that after their country fell apart, people who clung to their founding document as a religion, and who lived their lives according to it, seemed to have spread to every country in the world. Few of them were—mind you—actually descended from Usaians. Or at least, the geneticists said they weren't. But that didn't stop them being as fanatic about their individual rights as those who'd been born to it.

  Because most of them were skilled—particularly in technology—most countries and city-states tolerated them, provided they kept to themselves and didn't try to proselytize. They had at least one open-air enclave uplevel, but there were a few scattered about here too. I didn't think they were plotting active revolution, but one never knew.

  Daddy had been overheard to say that the whole area should be sealed and a poisonous gas grenade dropped. And there were stories that this had been done by at least one of my ancestors, but things had gone seriously wrong and this whole side of town had been contaminated.

  There were stories that the people in Deep Under had drilled secret holes and tunnels, both to escape and to make sure they took others with them if push came to shove.

  Which I suspected was all that stayed Daddy's hand.

  But the point is that there were people on the street for me to mingle with, and as long as I took care to stay away from the conspicuously guarded broomer lairs I'd be all right. The lairs here were more hard-core than the ones above, and I had no intention of tangling with them.

  I wended my way past lairs and little shops—of course there were little shops down here—food shops, clothing shops, electronic shops. I suspected some of the goods, displayed under spotlights, had been stolen from transports, but others were obviously simply the bottom of what people could purchase and might have been culled or thrown away up above—bruised apples, half-rotted oranges and diminutive bananas.

  Where two sellers' stands stood in front of an alley, I took a look between. At the other end, someone had built a house out of slabs of ceramite that were still so imperfectly joined it was obvious they'd once been part of a pavement. For the area it was a big house, and more importantly, it wasn't part of one of the warehouses and therefore probably belonged to one of the local rich men—a merchant or some other boss.

  I walked between the stands, with the look of someone who knows what she's doing.

  Once in the alley, I got close to the wall and started undressing. See, there is a way in which Deep Under is so much like Eden that it made me want to cry with sudden homesickness, and then wonder what was wrong with me that I was homesick for Eden. In Deep Under, unless you were clearly threatening someone, no one cared what you did, and that included undressing.

  The broomer colors I was wearing were a risk because they might make some broomer lair feel threatened. Naked wasn't threatening to anyone, though it might make a few males curious.

  I didn't intend to stay naked for very long. I dropped the suit, then reached in my backpack.

  Daddy and I are exactly the same size. He has a broader chest, but I have bigger breasts, so it all comes to the same. This was very useful because I would bet his suit fit.

  Of course the first thing I did was look it over for bugs. I wished I had Doc Bartolomeu's bug-sweeper to tell me if there was something hidden in the fibers. Since I didn't, though, I must make do with what I did have. I looked as closely as I could and didn't even detect an imperfection in the leather or a misweave in the inner lining. Good. I put the suit and boots on with a sense of relief. Wearing boots five sizes too large, with a bunch of paper squinched into the front and sides, is not exactly comfortable and with all the running and kicking I'd done, I was starting to get blisters.

  I sealed the boots to the suit under my knees, strapped the burner to the belt, and then the two brooms, side by side. I'd be damned if I was going to take off on the Egalitaire until I'd had a chance to give it a very thorough going-over. Even if it had a powerpack still in it, powerpacks got flaky after about ten years or so. Sixty years or so . . . wasn't worth risking.

  I transferred the contents of the backpack to my pockets—relieved this suit had pockets. In fact, this suit was perfect unrelieved black, which I knew wasn't anyone's colors, at least not in my zone. But it was close enough to the Brooms of Doom, which were black with red piping.

  There was one thing I must do, I thought, before going to my lair, and that was to get trading money. An anonymous gem, at least, with enough narcs in it to allow me to buy food and such if needed, because I didn't know what the lair had on hand.

  Most of us were the children of Good Men or of trained professionals in the Good Men's service. Not goons, but secretaries and lawyers, accountants and managers. The children of those who ran the machinery of state. This meant that while we called the working-class broomers play broomers because they had other occupations and other duties, we were very rarely full-time broomers. We couldn't be. We had state occasions and places where we had to show up with parents or attend on our own. And the only person in the lair who ever remembered the practical side of things was Simon, who was the nominal leader. Failing Simon, no one wanted to do anything but bum around on brooms, get stoned and jump in and out of others' beds. Not exactly in that order.

  So the lair would have food if this were one of the periods when Simon was more or less in residence. Otherwise it would be a wasteland of wasted broomers. And not a bite to eat.

  So, I took the box with the gold ring—if Daddy could take my ring, I could take his—and I looked for one of the places where I had sold jewelry before. Usually my own jewelry. It was a small hole-in-the-wall shop, and the owner might be one of those quasi-mythical Usaians, or at least he had a tattered bit of cloth showing stars and a few stripes hung on the wall behind the desk at which he sat, and I'd always heard that this was the representation of their male deity, just like the woman with the torch was their female goddess, who was said to change into an eagle in her incarnation as war divinity.

  I didn't care. I wasn't here to ask him about his questionable beliefs. He must have recognized me because, as he looked up at me from behind his holographic screen—unreadable from this side, but writhing and moving across his face like electronic stigmata—he smiled.

  Nodding, in greeting more than anything else, I set the gold ring on his dark dimatough desk. His eyebrows went up as he picked it up and weighed it in his hand. He brought out a scanner, attached to his computer, and pushed the ring against it. Figures scrolled on his screen and he looked at me. "Hot?"

  I almost said no. Before going to Eden, I would have said no. You see, I could get a lot more money for the ring if he thought he could sell it intact and as it was. On the other hand, if Daddy was looking for the ring—and I had a very strong feeling he would be—anyone caugh
t with it would die a horrible death. It wasn't only that by following the links Daddy might get to me—in fact, it wasn't that at all because I had to be out of here long before that—it was that looking at this man, with his sharp blue eyes, his wrinkled, tanned face, his receding hair, I couldn't imagine causing his death by lying to him. I sighed. "Yeah. At least . . . it wasn't exactly stolen, but someone will be looking for it. Better as gold value only."

  There was something, some internal shift behind his eyes, and I guessed that I'd passed some test. I didn't know what would have happened if I hadn't, but I know that when he paid me, he paid me far more than I had expected—a full sixty-five narcs, in the coin of Syracuse.

  He gave me the money coded into an anonymous gem and I tested it, then headed out the door, towards my lair, which was down two blocks, to the right on an alley and three floors up, to a rounded, arched entryway.

  Before I had flown up the full height, I knew something was wrong.

  Forty

  For one, it was hard to avoid the idea that something was wrong, when there were dark marks—as of a fire—around the entrance, and the bowels of the lair looked charred and deserted.

  Shock barely had time to register when a broomer flew into sight. He wore all black leathers with red piping, and I felt a sudden and overwhelming relief as I recognized the broad, ruddy features of my friend, Max Keeva. Max was the son of Good Man Keeva and we'd been friends before we were members of the same lair. Rumor had it that we'd clawed each other in our cradles.

  He made the broomer sign for down, and pointed at the deserted warehouse. I followed.

  We landed on a crunchy layer of burned debris. I wondered if I was walking on my other broomer lair associates, even as Max dismounted and turned. "Athena!" he said. "I'm glad we came here at the same time. I am so glad to meet you."