Darkship Renegades

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Kit’s temple was not only wet. It seemed to be pouring out blood. My fingers, feeling gingerly, found the edge of a hole on his temple. And blood was pouring out. I could feel it on my bare knees as it pooled on the floor. I refused to believe that was blood, but it felt like blood, warm and viscous.

  I put my whole hand down in the puddle by Kit’s head, then I brought it up to smell. Blood. It was blood. It was Kit’s blood.

  Both my hands grabbed at his shoulders and shook him, before I could get control of them. My voice rose high in a sort of wail, as I screamed, “Wake up Kit, wake up. Oh no, oh, no, oh, no. This can’t be happening. This isn’t happening.”

  Less than a couple of minutes ago—I was sure of it—we’d been headed out of the Energy Board complex, ready to go to dinner, ready to lift off tomorrow. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t happening. If I closed my eyes…If I wished really hard…we’d still be there, still walking down the hallway. We’d be going home. We were going home. Kit had saved me from near death, and this wasn’t going to separate us now. What a stupid way to die when we’d braved Earth and Daddy Dearest.

  What a stupid way for him to go when he’d got me back from the brink of death by radiation, when I’d been revived despite having been as nearly cooked from inside out as a human being could be and still live.

  From a long, long way away, as if from someone else’s head, a thought leaked into my panic. Head wounds bled like the devil, and Kit needed emergency first aid right away. He wasn’t dead. I must make sure he didn’t die.

  I pulled back at my hair, frantically, trying to remove it from my eyes, so I could see the bracelet on my wrist which had a dialer built in. Since an attack on us last year, when I didn’t have a communications device in sight, I always made sure to wear at least two. But I couldn’t see to dial.

  My hair being pulled back made no difference, of course. I wasn’t a Cat who could see in the dark. And Kit couldn’t dial, and Zen…I didn’t even have any idea where Zen was. In the dark around me, there was no sound, not even breathing.

  I twisted the dialer by feel, blindly. At least Doc’s number was easy. It was his personal number, which meant he would have it on whatever receptor he carried. He was supposed to be at the Denovos, he was—

  “Hello?” As Doc Bartolomeu’s voice answered, loud in the still darkness, I realized I would give my position away by speaking, but it didn’t matter. I’d already shouted.

  “Doc, Doc, please. This is Thena. Kit was hit. He’s bleeding to death. We’re—”

  “I know where you are,” he said. “I’m coming.”

  “How…how?”

  “Zen told me,” he said. “I’m just outside the complex. Don’t worry.”

  BETWEEN WORLDS

  I had nothing to do but worry. Telling people not to worry while they’re in a situation like this was sort of like telling people to stop breathing. It couldn’t be done.

  I felt the blood spilling from Kit’s temple. I knew—had heard—that head wounds bled a lot. The heart pumped a lot of blood up there, of course. It was where the brain was.

  I thought of how Kit hadn’t reacted, hadn’t responded to me even in my mind. He had done it before when he was dying of a chest wound. But now he wasn’t. His brain…

  No. I wouldn’t think about it. Just wouldn’t. Eden was far more advanced than Earth in all types of genetic engineering and genetics. It came from not forbidding all tampering with human genes for the last three hundred years—as Earth had after the turmoils.

  They could repair types of damage that were fatal on Earth, and I was only starting to suspect—a year after coming to Eden—that people lived far longer here, too. They would be able to heal Kit. He was still alive. He’d survive.

  I’d try to do whatever could be done. I crawled around till my knees were under Kit’s head, raising it. Raising a wound was always better, right? I tore a piece off my dress and folded it into a kind of pad, and pushed it hard against his temple. Pressure helped reduce bleeding, right?

  Then I thought of his thigh, because it didn’t matter where the blood was flowing from, right? He could die of exsanguination either way. I tore another piece of the dress with my free hand. It was hard to fold it with a single hand, but it could sort of be done. It wasn’t like anyone was going to grade me on my folding. I pushed the rough pad of cloth against his thigh and pressed, pressed as hard as I could.

  I don’t think I thought of anything. I could barely breathe. All my mind could form coherently was the certainty that Kit couldn’t die. I heard my own heartbeat pound with a force that seemed to make my body quiver, and I willed Kit’s to beat in unison. It seemed to me that I could feel it, too, echoing just behind mine.

  It seemed to me the blood flow diminished and I hoped it was the pressure and not that Kit was dying, and it seemed like no time at all and eternity, all at once, and then there was a wavering light, and then, closer, the doctor, running, with a lantern affixed to his head, in the way that miners used to wear lamps on their foreheads in old period holos.

  He ran much better than any man his age should be able to, his movements contrasting with his wrinkled face and his gnomic appearance.

  He fell to his knees next to Kit and his breathing was labored and loud. I don’t think he even looked at me, as his hand went first to right over Kit’s heart, then he sat back on his heels, and reached into his black bag which he’d dropped by his side, and got out the lens implement, and looked through it, then tossed it aside, letting it clatter to the floor of the tunnel and reached into his bag again.

  He had to pry my hands away from both Kit’s temple and Kit’s thigh, and he used something that looked like tiny squares of dimatough, which stuck to the skin, on top of the wound. It looked like he was taping Kit’s skin together. The bleeding stopped immediately, and the doctor used an injector on the side of Kit’s neck. There was a response from Kit then, a sort of deep sigh, and for a moment I thought he had died, but he continued breathing.

  Doc Bartolomeu looked up at me then. “Are you hurt?”

  “I…don’t think so.”

  He got the examining instrument from the floor. His hand was stained red, from the puddle there. And there was blood on the side of the instrument, but the doctor didn’t pay any attention, as he put it to his eye and looked through it. “No,” he said, with finality. “You’re fine.”

  I nodded and said, “Kit…He…bled a lot.”

  “He won’t die from the bleeding,” Doc Bartolomeu said. “I’ve given him something to speed up blood production. He might be a little anemic, but he’ll be fine. I need to get him to my flyer soon, though. Ah. There they are.”

  As though on cue, just then, there were more lights coming down the hallway, the sound of running footsteps. For a moment I thought it was our attackers returning, then recognized Zen, ahead of them, followed by…yes. Jean and Bruno. They had a little antigrav platform between them, and were maneuvering it at about hip high.

  Jean turned about as pale as spilt milk when he saw us, but the voice in which he asked Doc, “Okay to move him?” was perfectly calm.

  “Yes. We need to get him to my place fast,” he said.

  Jean and Bruno managed it, though Kit was taller than either of them, and I suspected weighed more than either of them too. They managed it quickly and without seeming to strain, lifting him one at the shoulders and one at the knees and at the same time somehow maneuvering the platform under him.

  Zen gathered up tools the doctor had let fall in the blood pool on the floor, and put them in a bag, then inside his big black bag, which she picked up to follow him.

  Bruno turned back and said, “Thena?”

  I tried to get up. There was no reason I shouldn’t have been able to get up. “Are you?” Bruno asked.

  “No, she’s not,” the doctor said, and in his tone of voice there was just the barest hint that I was being a weakling, and weak for no reason.

  I managed to get to my feet,
but my legs buckled under me, and I heard my teeth chatter, and realized I was shaking, and then I was furious at myself, and felt like I was a weakling and malingering for no reason. Kit was ill. Kit was struggling between life and death, and I was being an idiot and having issues standing up.

  “Can you handle it?” Bruno asked, and it was obvious he was talking about the antigrav platform and of course they could, since Zen and Jean were keeping it level and moving, the lights on their foreheads disappearing in the gloom of the hallway.

  Then he said “Easy, easy” to me, and took off his coat, and put it around my shoulders. I wanted to tell him I was sure that though I felt cold, I couldn’t really be cold, but I couldn’t talk and if I tried it, my chattering teeth were going to chop my tongue in half. He put his hand around my waist and led me after the others down the hallway. “It’s reaction,” he told me. “It’s just reaction.”

  It wasn’t till we were outside, and sitting on the back of what I thought was Doc’s mobile treatment center flyer, that I looked down at myself and realized I was covered in blood everywhere I could see. Kit’s blood.

  And then I vomited.

  UNDERWORLD

  Kit looked grey again.

  Doc’s living space and his treatment facility were one and the same, and going to him for help was much like going into the home of a gnome in a medieval story.

  It started at the low door, which was set into what looked like a hill side, and was in fact a very small hill taking up most of the plot he owned. It was covered in low-growing herbs, clover among other things. And the door was almost perfectly round, inset in the side of the hill, made of oak or a good facsimile. A huge iron ring knocker was the only way to call those inside. Not needed this time, as the door opened ahead of us, presumably reacting to some signal from the doctor. Then we were inside, and going past the doctor’s long living room, with the walls covered in bookcases, and past the fireplace with large chairs one on each side of it.

  And then past the kitchen which despite its modern cooker looked like an ancient kitchen, from the water pump—which poured warm or cold water at a signal—to the cooker which was hidden behind a holo of a cooking fire with a tripod pot over it.

  After that opened an area that looked like—and probably was—a private relaxing area. A sofa had a book on top of one of the arms, as though the doctor had been interrupted by our call while reading, though that wasn’t possible because he’d never have got to the complex in time. And there was a low table, with a dirty cup on it.

  They set Kit on the sofa, looking even paler amid the garish floral pattern of the upholstery. He’d been treated on that sofa before and bled all over it, and I was sure so had other people, but it didn’t show. I suspected the sofa, like most other things in this place was an impostor, a biological construct that drank up the blood spilled and remained sterile. The idea of that made me shudder.

  But that was just a way to avoid thinking of how ill Kit looked, lying there, pale, and drawn and still.

  Kit? I said, mentally, but there was no answer. And it was like everyone else had forgotten I even existed, not that it mattered. I wanted them to give Kit all their attention. Bruno had come in the door supporting me and dropped me in one of the chairs next to the fireplace in the living room. Not that I’d stayed there. Now my legs were steady under me, and I could walk.

  So I’d come into the back room and leaned against the wall, as close to Kit as I could get, because I couldn’t get close enough. Jean and Doc mostly were working on him. Or Doc was, and giving short orders to Jean to clamp this, and use that. I guessed that either Jean had some training, or he was really good at following half-barked orders. Or both. And the doctor’s house might look like a cozy cottage, but it was obviously a sophisticated medical intervention center, as well equipped as any Earth hospital.

  Bruno and Zen stood a little farther away, handing things to the main combatants. And I—a stranger so new to Eden that I didn’t even know the limits of their biotechnology—could do nothing but hamper those who were trying to save Kit’s life. I stayed at the periphery, looking on, feeling superfluous and useless, and trying not to think.

  Trying not to think I’d gone crawling off, with my burner, looking for trouble, instead of staying and trying to cover Kit, trying to protect him. Trying not to think that he’d been the main target; he’d always been the main target. Trying not to think of where Zen had gone, when she had disappeared all that time.

  But most of all, I was trying not to think of why Kit wasn’t answering my mental touch. He should be able to. I should be able to feel him even if he were in a coma. I’d done so before.

  The doctor took measurements and readings, swore softly, did something to the side of Kit’s head that involved two tiny needles attached to what looked like a crystal egg, and started putting stickers on Kit’s chest. I knew that type of sticker—it was a sensing device that sent info to a computer. Then Doc put something like a transparent helmet connected to other machines on Kit’s head and swore some more, then looked up and saw my expression.

  “He’s not going to die,” he told me, gruffly. “I know how awful it looks, but despite the blood loss, it’s not nearly as bad as it seems. It’s more…” He shrugged. “The brain damage is no more than he would have suffered if he’d had a small stroke. People survive those every day. Their brain reroutes and they go on. Some people don’t even notice them. Their speech slurs a little, for a short time, and that’s that.

  “I’m going to guess it was not the shot your attackers wanted to make. He was probably moving too fast for them. Possibly he was trying to reach you. But the wound is enough to damage his coordination and his capacity to pilot…and judging from where it is, possibly his speech. Not life threatening, mind.” Doc bit his lower lip, as though in worry. “He’ll slur his words a bit, and his movements might not be as precise as they should be. But for a Cat…”

  For a Cat, whose ability to pilot was all-important and built-in, whose speed and coordination were biological gifts he had had since birth, losing those would be like dying. I felt my legs go weak again. “You mean, Kit will never be able to pilot again?”

  Doctor Bartolomeu looked at me for a moment as though he’d forgotten who I was, or perhaps as though he didn’t understand a word I’d said. “No, no. Of course that’s not what I mean. There are ways of recovering, including some very specialized neurosurgery combined with intensive therapy. Our problem is time. None of those methods will allow him to leave with us tomorrow and I can’t take everything required for that level of surgery aboard the Hopper.”

  “We can’t leave him behind,” I said, louder than I intended, as I stared at the still-unconscious Kit and felt my throat closing in panic. “I think they were after him all along.”

  “Yes. That much is obvious,” the doctor said. “No. We can’t.” Doc looked completely lost and, for a moment, like a little boy on the verge of tears, which was quite a feat when one considered that at the same time he looked hundreds of years old. And was. “Perhaps that’s what they wanted. To have us leave without Christopher, which would leave him at their mercy, and would mean we didn’t have with us the person they think can interpret Jarl’s writings.” He frowned. “But even if we just delay we’ll be giving them an opportunity to make good on the attempt to kill him. Any time we remain on Eden gives them another chance to kill Christopher or sabotage the ship. We can’t do that. It’s obvious Castaneda wants him out of the way, though I can’t even start to imagine why…unless…” He shook his head as he looked at Kit. “No.”

  Suddenly, his face seemed to crumple further, his wrinkles multiplying. It was horrifying, like something out of a scary legend, like watching a hundred years fall on a man in minutes. “Oh, damn it, Christopher,” he said, under his breath. “Of all the things I didn’t want to have to do.”

  “What?” I asked, because this sounded bad. It sounded very bad.

  He paused, looking like he was trying to talk
himself into something. “Yes. I’m very much afraid we will have to take drastic measures. And I don’t like to do it.” He looked up at me, his eyes bleak amid their nest of wrinkles.

  THE MAGIC POTION

  “Normally I wouldn’t use this,” Doc Bartolomeu said. Now I was the one closest to him. Jean had stayed in the other room, monitoring the machines hooked up to Kit. Bruno and Zen were probably there still. I hadn’t paid attention. I’d followed the doctor back to his kitchen area, which I knew from before also served as a laboratory.

  He had opened a cabinet that looked impossibly deep, and from within it pulled a few vials, muttering to himself as he shook them. After a while, he lifted one of them, frowned at the contents, read the label on it, which was covered in strange symbols that weren’t even letters as far as I could tell.

  “Is it a poison or something?” I knew that sometimes, for therapeutic reasons, people administered things to patients that would kill them under other circumstances. That was close to the full extent of my medical knowledge.

  The doctor turned, still holding the vial in between his fingers, his expression for a moment completely blank, then focusing on me, as though he’d just noticed me. He shrugged. “No. Poisons are part and parcel of any doctor’s job…this.” He shrugged and suddenly smiled, a genuine smile. “I am old-fashioned, I think. Very old-fashioned, as this technology has existed since before we left Earth. This vial contains nanocytes of a specialized sort. They’re repair nanocytes for brain damage.” He reached under the counter for one of the bulbous round containers used for administering medicine. He fitted it with an inhaler tip, moving with all the care normally reserved for high explosives.

  “What is that?” I asked. “I mean, why…why are you…”