Darkship Renegades

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  In my mind flashed a holo on Doc’s shelves, the image of three young men in summer clothes standing on a beach, the two shorter ones—Doctor Bartolomeu and Father—leaning on the taller one in the middle: Jarl Ingemar.

  Thena? What is it? What is it? He let me take over. Asked me to take over. Said you were rigid. In shock. You’re safe, love. The arms clutching around me were less desperate and more comforting. You’re with me.

  My…Good Man Sinistra and Jarl! Were they…were they? My mind spun around the affection in Jarl’s mental voice, the idea that someone ever had loved the despicable piece of work I’d known as Daddy Dearest. The idea that they might have been more than casual friends, perhaps more than good friends, seemed impossible, bizarre. And yet, there had been the affection and despair in Jarl’s voice.

  What? Kit’s voice, disbelieving. Uh. I don’t think so; not unless he controls his mind sharing far more than I can! Pause. It is none of my business. Or yours, Thena. It’s long ago and it was their lives.

  But he…he sounded like he liked…loved…Father, like…like he never stopped mourning leaving him behind. Like…like it was a loss.

  I think he did love him, Kit said, slowly. They were so alone, all of them. All these boys, isolated, confined, having no one they could trust but each other. Treated as things, as inhuman. Thena, the things I get from his memory…I hope when Doc reverses it, it will be erased, because they’re not memories I want to live with. I used to feel sorry for myself, but now…I think Jarl loved your…loved Sinistra and Doc, like brothers. He felt like an older brother, perhaps, because he was more mature than they were, and larger. I think he tried to protect them and keep them safe. And I think he feels guilty, horribly guilty, that he failed them.

  I almost said that he hadn’t failed them. He had, after all, built the Je Reviens, or at least designed it and caused it to be built, and he had got Doc Bartolomeu to Eden, where I thought—no, I knew—the Doctor had been happy, despite everything. But he’d left Father behind.

  He had to. Father—as I knew him, as I’d seen him act, would not have been safe for an interstellar trip with his kind. Much less would he have been safe for living in Eden, surrounded by humans. Father had been created and, I suspected, trained for killing, inventively and without remorse. I had reason to suspect that at some point he’d taken up doing it for pleasure, and though Doc had never said it, I suspected that had been before the Je Reviens.

  Father had a complex social life, mostly consisting of being seen publicly and associated with a neverending supply of professional hetairas, dancers, startlets. Less publicly, there had been other things. When I was very young I’d once stumbled onto a locked room.

  One of the things that Father had never known about me was that our DNA was close enough for me to open the genlocks he’d locked. He’d never known it, because I’d taken great care not to be caught doing it, and not to be caught where I wasn’t supposed to be.

  Most of the time, the rooms and compartments I unlocked using this ability contained nothing more interesting than papers or valuables and sometimes, on occasion, strange and marvelous artifacts, collected over the course of a very long life. I’d spent an entire afternoon playing with rare seashells when I was about ten.

  But that one time, I’d opened a secret room, and it had almost cured me of my snooping habits. Because Father was in the room I entered. There was someone else too. I think it was a woman. By that point, it was hard to tell. I knew it was human and had once had blond hair, then mostly covered in blood.

  I remember the blood, its tang sharp, and I remember the screams—the sort of gasping, high, almost insane screams produced by a throat that can no longer command sound.

  Fortunately Father had been absorbed in his work, totally enthralled and concentrating only on it. I had run away fast. Very fast. I’d closed the door behind me. I’d thrown up into a rose bush outside the side entrance. And I’d never again gone to that side of the house. And years later, when I’d found the collection of souvenirs—bits of skin and hair and bone and one single gold tooth—in my Father’s desk drawer, I’d tried to forget it. But I still remembered it sometimes in my nightmares.

  I suspected Jarl knew of this, was aware of what Father was. At least, Doc Bartolomeu had given me enough reason to suspect that. Which meant that Jarl had done the right thing. You can’t pen a wolf with the sheep and expect the results to be good.

  But I had heard the emotion in Jarl’s voice. He’d loved my father. What type of love didn’t matter, but it was real, whatever it was. He’d loved my father, which meant some part of my father must have been lovable in his eyes. I couldn’t imagine it, but then when I’d met Father it had been three hundred years later and after the bitter disappointment of seeing his two closest friends leaving Earth, without him, forever. Worse, his two closest friends, the people whom he had trusted, had left him behind in the middle of turmoils and revolt aimed at exterminating his kind. They’d left him to die.

  Perhaps Father, despite his unspeakable compulsion, had something good and loveable in him before that. After that, though, there was nothing but the creature I’d come to know. But what?

  Do you have a need to know? Kit asked, hesitantly, while he held me.

  No, I said, truthfully. No. I’d prefer not to know. My…my mother used to say that when you die all debts are paid. My…Daddy Dearest is dead. Let his debts be paid. It’s none of my business. I just…

  Yes? Very gentle, very soft, and weirdly I couldn’t tell if it was Kit or Jarl.

  I just realized that…that you never know. That you can never know everything about someone and that…Oh, hell, Kit, I’m not sorry I killed him. As I knew him, he was a despicable bastard, and he died in the process of trying to kill you. And me. But…

  But?

  Was he ever redeemable? Could he have been…well…not good as such, but like me?

  Kit gurgled with laughter at that and said, indulgently, Thena, you are good.

  No. But…I’m not bad. Or not…Could he have been like me? Could I have been like him, given the same upbringing? Could I be like him, still, if things…if things go very wrong?

  There was a long pause, while Kit thought. Genes aren’t destiny. I’ve told you that before. No, you’re not your father. No, you could never be your father. If things had gone differently…you’d still be you. I’m not Jarl. Zen is not me. You’re not your father.

  But I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t sure he was right. In that momentary panic of Jarl’s I’d caught a glimpse of a version of Daddy Dearest for whom someone could mourn for hundreds of years. If someone who had even a vague spark of that in him, could become Daddy Dearest, why couldn’t I? We had the same genes, and heavens and hells, I’d not been raised with much more love than Daddy Dearest had. Until I’d met Kit and his family, I’d had little experience of normal family and normal love.

  Perhaps Kit was intrinsically different from Jarl, because Kit had been raised by a happy and caring family. But I hadn’t. My childhood might have been less horrific than that of the original Mules, but it had not been what anyone would call normal or affectionate.

  What would it take for my mind to let slip its internal moorings and for me to become capable of caring only for myself and my own needs and desires, and able to look at everyone and everything like things to be disposed of?

  I didn’t think it would take much. I’d been halfway there when I’d come across Kit. I hadn’t changed inside, to tell the truth, until he’d given himself up to Earth to save me. For all he’d known he was giving himself up to death, but he’d done it. For me. There is a love so intense even the emotionally maimed will respond to it. Losing him would put me back in that cold place he’d pulled me from. It would take me back to the path to becoming Daddy Dearest.

  I squeezed his hand hard as Doc’s voice sounded behind us. “Let’s go in,” he said. “I think I know the way to where the air-to-spaces were stored.”

  He looked around the comp
artment we were in, and to which I’d given no more than a cursory glance. It was a vast, warehouselike space, filled with boxes and bags, most of them covered in thick dust. Soft lights shone from an indeterminate source, and I had a vague idea they’d come on as we entered.

  “It hasn’t changed at all in three hundred years,” Doctor Bartolomeu said, his voice distant. “I wonder how many of those supplies are still good.”

  “Supplies?” Zen asked.

  “For the trip. We ended up only taking about half of them, which was all right, because we only took about half of the people. But we had bags and boxes and compartments of frozen and canned supplies, and anything from tools to animal embryos. Ready to colonize a new world…” He paused. “I wonder if the ones who went on ever found that world; ever colonized. Ah, well, I guess we will never know for sure.”

  FALLING TO EARTH

  EXTERMINATOR

  The air-to-spaces were there, under magnetic covers, in a vast compartment that might have been a garage. “Strange,” Doc said. “You’d think someone would have noticed them in all these centuries.”

  I shrugged. We’d removed the helmets, and the heavy air bottles. The air in these compartments was perfectly acceptable, if stale. “I don’t think so,” I said. “There are…rumors about things in these compartments, the older ones. Some of them are even probably true.” I realized they all looked at me, and continued. “Look, this is a very old construction, built around an even older core. I think when it was built, at least judging by the documents I’ve read, it was an international endeavor, used by many nations, shared in peace. Or as much in peace as ever existed in those days. But the peace didn’t last and neither did the accord.”

  I looked around at the vast, cavernous space. “At one time or another, it or parts of it has been used as anything from a military encampment to scientific station. But over time many of the areas have also got sealed, because everyone who knew what was in them had died. Or in yours and your friends’ case, had left. When you’re talking about military equipment and/or scientific materials, you never know how dangerous they’ve become since they were abandoned. I know the permanent orders for Circum show sectors to avoid at all costs. This is one of them. There are rumors of lizard beings and worse, roaming around these areas. There are rumors of self-willed computers causing death and mayhem. No one wants to risk their lives. Though there are also rumors of scientists who go crazy and drop out and go to hiding here, now and then. But they only add to the danger.”

  “So this has effectively become no-man’s-land?” Doc said, and as he spoke, pulled the cover off an air-to space, showing a gleaming blue vehicle, the finish as clean and perfect as it must have been on the day it left the manufacturing plant. “But why would they keep air and pressure in it?”

  “Why not?” Zen said. “It’s recycled.”

  “And at any rate,” I said. “If they don’t know what’s here, how can they know what effect cutting air or pressure would have? You know as well as I do, and I know mostly through association with my friend Fuse, mind, that some explosives are triggered by lowering pressure, and some biological weapons are triggered by lack of oxygen. Why would they risk that? If it’s not exploding now, why risk it?”

  As we spoke, Kit—or Jarl—had unsnapped the belts that held him to me and moved on, ahead of us, looking at every corner, pulling this cover and that off an air-to-space.

  I looked to see where he was, preparing to call him, and—while looking at him—caught movement out the corner of my eye. I turned, and had the impression of a man. He must have been about fifty or perhaps sixty, thin, with long white air, staring at us, openmouthed.

  A blue flash cut the air from Kit’s direction, and the man gave a sort of odd little sigh. A bloom of blood appeared on his chest. He gurgled, looked surprised and fell in a heap.

  “Kit!” I said. He’d killed a man. He’d killed a man without question and without thinking. I’d once seen him go out of his way not to shoot a man who was trying to kill him. Oh, not that he was hesitant about defending himself, at least not normally. But the man was the brother of his late wife, and the only child of grieving parents. Kit had refused to inflict more pain on people already suffering.

  Every time I’d seen Kit react violently, it had been against someone who was a clear and present threat to him. The only time I’d seen him kill was when he didn’t have time to modulate his shot, to pull his punch.

  He hadn’t even reacted with lethal force when I’d tried to garrote him after he’d rescued me. “Kit!”

  “What?” and though the voice had the same intonation and timbre, I knew it was Jarl speaking. “We didn’t need this additional complication.”

  Zen had gone over and was examining the little man’s corpse. He was dressed in what looked like a very old one-piece. “He wasn’t armed,” she said, looking up.

  “I know,” Jarl said. “I could tell that. But he could have given the alarm.”

  “He was probably a hermit here. More scared of us than we of him. I don’t think he had been near people in years, much less would give alarm.”

  Kit’s body walked over, and Jarl stood over his victim looking down dispassionately. “Yeah, okay,” he finally conceded. “It probably was a waste of burner juice, but it’s not like he could have been useful to us in any way, right?” He looked at Zen and me, and finally at Doctor Bartolomeu. “Right?”

  The doctor’s gaze was pensive, the sort of expression someone shows while trying to solve a particularly difficult math problem. But when he spoke, his voice was perfectly cool and polite. “Let’s find a recycler for the body. This air-to-space is in perfect condition and shows a full charge. I’ll pilot down. I’ll have to do it by memory. Because we never intended to return to Earth, there are no maps of Earth in the vehicle. But I think my memory is still good enough. And, no, thank you, Kit…er…Jarl…we won’t need that high a level of coordination to maneuver into Earth space. It’s a big globe. We shouldn’t have trouble finding a place to land.”

  EMPTY NEST

  We had trouble finding a place to land. Part of this—no, perhaps all of it—was my fault.

  I don’t claim to be the world’s most brilliant person. I have good visual and spacial memory, sure, but unlike what Doc had said of Jarl, I couldn’t claim to never have forgotten a book I’d read or a code I’d memorized. In fact, I’d freely admit to having forgotten lots and lots of things. And if excited or happy, sad or disturbed, I could forget my own head. Not when scared, though. When scared I became a machine who knew and memorized everything.

  Why then, in the name of all that’s sweet, had I forgotten the network of alarms and sweeps, of linked triggers and aimed sensors that covered the entire surface of the Earth? How could I not even have made an attempt at disabling whatever transponder was in this vehicle? What was wrong with me?

  I can’t tell you for sure, except that seeing Kit shoot someone down in cold blood, even though I knew in my heart of hearts that it wasn’t Kit—even though I had no reason to expect sanity of Jarl—had made me forget everything.

  The air-to-space was large, larger than Daddy Dearest’s which had been a straight four seater. This one was more like a luxury flyer on Earth—or to put it in other words, it looked like a small living room, outfitted with comfortable sofas, a couple of tables, a few cabinets. The only difference between it and, say, the living room in a decent if not spectacular hotel suite was that all the furniture was affixed to the floor, though some of it could be moved via switches.

  When we got in, Doc had taken the one chair in front of a screen that was, clearly, the pilot’s chair. Kit belted his violin carefully into a chair, then flopped nervelessly onto a sofa. No. Jarl. I’d never seen Kit lie down like that, without the least vestige of control, not even of a controlled fall. And he would never do it in public. Used to being watched, in part because of his family’s tragic history and in part because his adopted family was important in the tiny world in which t
hey lived, he could never seem to forget that he must keep up a public face at all times.

  Zen sat across from him, with her hands in her pockets, her face grim. I had the impression that she was holding a burner in one of those pockets, and stood ready to fire through it if Jarl made any odd moves. What could I do? I was not married to Jarl, but I was married to Kit. It was an uncomfortable fact that they were shoved into the same body just then. And it was the only body both of them had. It was physically impossible to kill one of them without killing the other. I set about looking in the drawers of the cabinets for something I could use to communicate with Zen.

  Yeah, she too had Mule Telepathy. Yeah, she too should have been able to mind-talk me. But I have a theory about that. Unless it’s trained and expected from childhood, it won’t happen. I’d never mind-talked to any of my broomers lair, though more than half of them were Mules and therefore, presumably, had mind-talk abilities in potentia. For all I was concerned, Doc’s mind was perfectly silent. It was a miracle or perhaps an artifact of how tightly wound both Kit and I had been when we’d met that we had happened to listen to each other. I didn’t care to find myself in that kind of situation with Zen. Well, not more than inevitable, and hopefully not in the next hour or so. And I needed to warn her. Because I wasn’t Jarl. I didn’t kill—without warning—people who weren’t directly threatening me.

  So I looked, until I found a pad. Not like the pads in Eden. No electronic. Just a paper pad, yellowed with age, with an equally aged pencil next to it. I sat down on the sofa next to Zen and printed quickly and clearly, IF YOU SHOOT HIM, I’LL HAVE TO KILL YOU.

  She looked at the pad, when I waved it front of her eyes, and frowned at the print, an intent frown, as though trying to decipher foreign writing. It had just occurred to me that she had never, probably in her entire life, read anything even vaguely resembling paper. I wondered if she was puzzled by the concept. Then she grabbed the paper out of my hands, and the pencil with it, and wrote, with remarkable spareness. SO?