Darkship Renegades

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  I’d become too much of an Edenite to talk someone out of what they’d decided they wanted to do with their lives.

  THE FIRE OF THE GODS

  It took us two days to finish the Boomerang, and at the last, Zen was the only mechanic working on it, as well as directing Doc and Kit, who were lending manpower, and Simon, who came in for stretches of time before vanishing to “make sure Nat doesn’t kill the wrong people.”

  I didn’t want to know how many right people Nat had killed. Though somehow I suspected it was more a figure of speech. Nat seemed oddly mellowed, for given values of mellowing and given values of Nat, at that.

  The last day I spent in calculations. You think it is easy to aim a ship with barely enough steering at an asteroid on a variable orbit? Oh, let me tell you something. Normally, Eden used computers that were designed for nothing else, once a Nav had entered coordinates from a predetermined set.

  Normally, Kit could make that sort of calculation. His freakish ability with direction and math—freakish for a Cat, bioengineered into a Nav—had allowed him to travel alone between his first wife’s death and finding me, a castaway, in the powertrees.

  But without anything more than a computer that amounted to a jumped-up calculator—all we had available—things became more difficult. Oh, there were scientific computers, too, but none of them were preprogrammed to compute routes. It took me twenty-four hours, and most of the time all Kit could do was frown over my shoulder at the calculations and sigh. Once, he corrected one of my assumptions and said, “Jarl. He studied that, for the Je Reviens. Your route is slightly askew.”

  I felt stung, but thanked him. Slightly askew in space could translate into millions of miles away from where you were supposed to be. The Boomerang, even without Zen, only had provisions and power for the voyage to Eden. Any more and we’d need another power converter, which would add to the mass and require more power, and next thing you knew we’d be flying something the size of Eden all by itself.

  Normally a navigator had to make adjustments as he flew. And while I was good at my job, I hadn’t, after all, been trained for it. I supposed Kit was now better than normal navigators.

  We said goodbye to the people staying on Earth, or rather on Circum, before leaving. Zen hugged me, Simon hugged me and kissed both my cheeks. “Goodbye, Thena. You take my metronome with you.” I believed that like I believed…no, wait, I didn’t believe it at all.

  Then Lucius engulfed my hand in his huge paw and wished me, “Speedy travel and a good landing.” Whatever that meant. And then Nat hugged me, which almost made me pass out. No, not because it was that thrilling an experience, but because it was surprising. I didn’t think Nat even liked being touched, except by Max. But he hugged me, then patted me on the shoulder. “You know,” he said, as he retrieved one of his eternal cigarettes from his belt pouch and lit it, “it’s not going to be easy. People in power, or even on the way to getting power, will fight to keep it.”

  “I know,” I said, still baffled to be the recipient of a hug from Nat.

  “Well, then. Success, courage and glory; for all I’ve learned, courage is often just hiding your fear, and glory is a fickle bitch.”

  And I decided that Nat was completely insane, but I liked him.

  We took off from Circum without incident, though Doc, who was piloting, insisted on evasive maneuvers, in case someone from Circum saw us leaving and was one of the people who’d escaped, and somehow got hold of a ship-killing laser.

  “Unlikely,” I said. “There are no ship-killing lasers on Circum. Other than Nat’s.”

  “Yes, but there are lasers for scientific applications that could be retrofitted,” he said.

  But we made it to the powertrees without any problems. By that point, Doc had left to shower and change out of the steel-wool suit, and Kit was the one at the controls. It was just as well, since snipping and harvesting a branch of the powertrees wasn’t that much different from harvesting a powerpod. And Kit had been doing that for years.

  Still, I held my breath, as we navigated into the vast, convoluted briarlike growth of powerpod plants.

  They were called a powertree ring. I understood that once upon a time, when Jarl had designed them, they were rather like a vast ring, a crown of thorns, if you will. Their circular shape with an open middle made it easy to access the powerpods and harvest them.

  But in the turmoils Earth’s harvesting had become erratic. Powerpods could reseed when they exploded near an area of the powertrees that they could attach to. Beyond that, under the pressures of growing need for energy, Earth had pumped more and more organic waste up its space elevator. The wild over-fertilization had made the trees grow even faster.

  Now it looked like nothing so much as a raspberry massif that has been allowed to grow wildly and take up more and more space, while the branches entangle and twist around each other. In this riot of branches, powerpods grew willy-nilly.

  Most of Earth’s harvesters went around the outside of the powertrees, sometimes penetrating into the outer layer.

  But Eden’s Cats and Navs were designed to navigate the inner recesses of the powertrees. And did. Our ship, the Cathouse—small, black, unreflective—often went tumbling around the inner recesses of the powertree massif, while it was in its dark phase, so no Earth harvester could find us.

  The Boomerang couldn’t go very far. Poor misbegotten thing was not only too large, its shape made it unwieldy.

  Fortunately it was in the hands of a master. Or of an Eden Cat, which came to the same. He edged into it sideways, twisting this way and that. The process was kind of like putting a coat hanger through a spider web without breaking a single strand.

  “Couldn’t we take one of the branches from the outside?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “We need one at the right stage of growth and with a powerpod cyst just forming.”

  I directed him, slowly, from my memory of the powertrees, thinking of where the right growth would be, as I calculated the route through the powertrees. “One left, three right, sharp left now.”

  And then he’d found it and, because this ship didn’t have an automatic pilot, Kit made me take the controls and “hold in place” while he worked with the collection assemblage Zen and I had built.

  This meant I was holding my breath on two counts. First, because it’s not easy to maintain a ship in place in vacuum, particularly not near two relatively large masses: the powertrees and Circum. And because I wasn’t trained for this.

  I would have grumbled about it, but I was too busy holding my breath, not sure the collection assemblage would work. Eden’s normal powerpod collecting device was a pincerlike instrument that held the powerpod and pulled it aboard. To that, Zen and I had added a scythelike implement that was supposed to cut the stem of a little branch of a powertree. Little because the powertrees were so hard that even a dimatough scythe had trouble cutting through them.

  As Kit stowed the branch in storage, I realized I was lightheaded from holding my breath, and started breathing normally. Kit put it carefully into the vacuum compartment, cut-side through a membrane and into a “vase” filled with a special serum that Doc had concocted according to Kit’s instructions, retrieved partly from his memory and partly from Jarl’s gems.

  I gave him the instructions for navigating out of the powertree massif, and once under way, for resuming our route to Eden. This time he did not correct me.

  “Won’t planting it near Eden give away our position?” I asked.

  “We couldn’t plant it near Eden,” Kit said. “Eden doesn’t have enough mass to generate gravity that will keep it in place near it. It would be sad to plant powertrees and then lose them in the vastness of space. We’ll plant it on a larger asteroid, one large enough to keep it nearby. Preferably, one large enough to have ice and soil from which it can derive some of its nourishment, until we can arrange to feed it.”

  I lifted an eyebrow at him. “And how will that benefit Eden?”

 
“A shorter trip to harvest,” he said, “and it won’t be near Earth and guarded. I do have some locations in mind. Jarl had scouted them out, prior to sending off the Je Reviens.”

  I imagined that little branch in our hold one day growing into a tangled massif, like the existing powertrees, harvested by future generations. “It’s a little like stealing fire from the gods,” I said.

  “It’s exactly like stealing fire from the gods,” Kit said, as he took us out of the powertrees. “That is Jarl’s tragedy, you know. He was Prometheus, who stole the fire of the gods and tried to give it to humanity. Humanity always resents Prometheus figures, because if they knew the fire could be got, they’d have got it themselves, and besides, who do you think you are, bringing them this fire-thing they didn’t ask for?”

  I frowned at Kit. “I don’t know how much…I don’t know if Jarl had been changed by the Hampson’s so that he wasn’t truly himself by the time I knew him. I know parts of him weren’t, because he was having trouble with impulse control, but I never thought of Prometheus deciding he’d rule over all of humanity and lead them to true bliss.”

  Kit tilted his head a little, as he looked at my instructions for how to adjust our route. “Perhaps not,” he said. “Perhaps…but what you have to remember is that Jarl didn’t think he was human—he’d been trained to think so. He loved humanity—truly loved us, I think. He wanted very much to be human. But he felt he could never be that, or never a normal one, so there was some hatred mixed with the love. And when they rejected his inventions and his gifts to them—”

  “They didn’t reject the powertrees,” I protested.

  “They did in the sense of their being a resource that made energy so abundant it was essentially free, or very cheap, at least. As the powertrees came on line, the various governments of the Earth set about making them controlled and restricted.”

  “He was the government then.”

  “Not alone. I think, if it helps, Thena, that he was disappointed with all humans, including Mules, even if he didn’t think they were human. He tried so hard to give them good things, and they always twisted or misunderstood them. In fact, they rejected him, over and over again. Of course by then he thought the only way to make them understand was for him to take absolute control, more absolute than ever before.”

  “But he was wrong,” I said.

  “Of course he was. But having acquired the fire of the gods, having tried his damnedest to make humanity happy and fulfilled and…utopian, he could never understand why they rejected it. The original Prometheus got off lightly,” he said. “Jarl got much worse than getting his liver eaten by eagles eternally.”

  The fact that he spoke so lightly made me sure that other than a few memories nothing remained in him of Jarl. And I was glad that Kit didn’t see what I did, as I turned to go inside the ship and take a shower.

  Doc must have come in when we were talking. He was leaning against the doorway into the control room, and his face seemed to have collapsed in on itself. Worse, there were tears down his cheeks. I turned hastily and became very busy brushing at the area near the controls, and looking under it for nothing I could think of. Kit was busy entering coordinates and paid no attention.

  And Doc’s tears were ultimately the best epitaph that Jarl could have. They’d been friends when they were children and the world was young, and Jarl would be remembered fondly. Ultimately, it’s all any mortal can hope for.

  THE SILENCE OF THE SPHERES

  “This is Christopher Bartolomeu Ingemar Denovo Klaavil Sinistra,” Kit said, “piloting the Boomerang, returning from Earth on a mission for Eden. Come in, Eden.”

  I had no idea why Kit had decided to add every last name he’d ever been entitled to. Yes, his original at-conception last name was Ingemar—because his would-be mother had taken Jarl’s name, a rare but not unheard-of arrangement for Eden. The only reason I could imagine for Kit using all the names was to cloak himself in the absolute authority of Eden. He was a legitimate citizen sent out on an errand.

  It didn’t avail him. There was no answer. Eden, ahead of us, managed to look very potatolike and yet enigmatic, its surface seemingly virgin of any entry point into its populated interior.

  “Christopher Bartolomeu Ingemar Denovo Klaavil Sinistra,” Kit said, through gritted teeth, “piloting the Boomerang, requesting permission to land in Eden.”

  No answer. “We can’t stay in space,” Doc said. “We can’t. We do not have enough supplies to make it back to Circum and…”

  Kit shook his head. “We’re not going to stay in space. I thought this might happen though.”

  “But…what happened in Eden?” I asked. “Are they…dead?”

  “No,” Kit said. “They are playing possum.” And then added, “An Earth animal that I understand to be a near relative of the weasel or perhaps a bird.”

  “Playing possum,” the doctor said, “refers to the possum’s main method of self-defense, which consists of pretending it is dead. I imagine in the time since we left, Castaneda has consolidated his power, and that no Dock Operator will admit we exist. At any rate, Christopher, I’d make damn sure to stay out of defensive-fire range, because you know…lasers do go off accidentally and all.”

  “So, we’re going to stay out of reach till we starve?”

  “No,” Kit said. “I expected this, as did Jarl, and he…I have some idea what to do.”

  And then he went to a box stored with the food. It must have been carried in when I wasn’t looking. Inside was a communicator and a bunch of pieces. “I know Kath’s communicator range and frequency,” he said, “and I shall try to get her personal com ring.”

  And then my husband had set about rearranging that Earth-vintage comlink. It shouldn’t have made me uncomfortable but it did. Even if there was no Jarl left in him, I hated the thought that he knew things he couldn’t have known except through Jarl. Like the expression “playing possum.” I knew it was something Jarl had left behind.

  When the com was assembled, he dialed Kath and we heard it buzz. Kit spoke as soon as the buzzing stopped, “Kath! Listen, Kath—” And then Kath’s voice echoed through the compartment like victory bells. “Kit! Kit! You’re alive.”

  It took a good while for her to quiet down enough to listen to what he was trying to tell her, and when she did, there was a long silence. “I see,” she said. “Yes, the landing area is all Castaneda’s people. Kit, can I call you back at this frequency? We have to try something. I’m going to ask Eber.”

  “But if Castaneda controls the land—”

  “Wait. I will call back.”

  I’d expected, and I’m sure the men did too, that she’d call back immediately or close to it.

  Instead, hours passed. We waited around the com, while Kit made occasional adjustments to trajectory, to avoid us coming within range of Eden’s defense guns. Periodically, desultorily, he called out to Eden, in the forlorn hope that they’d open to us. We had a meal, and then we waited again.

  I’d just said, “Well, we can always land and try to blast through one of the landing openings. I know you say it’s impossible, but—” when the com crackled to life.

  “Kit?” It was Kath’s voice.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re going to have to do what we say, and it’s going to sound loony. Can you program that thing on autopilot?”

  “No. It’s not that sophisticated.”

  “Um…Can you set it on a course where it will fly away?”

  “Yes. But there’s a good chance it will hit something.”

  “Do you have something aboard you care not to lose, other than your lives?”

  “Yes. My violin and a dozen data gems. We had a cutting of the powertree but we planted it near—”

  “You did? Good. But you can give us the coordinates later. For now, what you need to do is get your violin and those gems ready to abandon ship, and then stand by with the ship ready to be set on a trajectory…any trajectory, though I suppose it would be
good to make it look like you’re going back to Earth.”

  “From here? Hard to tell,” Kit said.

  “Yeah. So…any trajectory. Eber and I will come and get you. Direct us to a door on the inner side of the V your ship forms. If there is a door there.”

  “There is,” Kit said. “A cargo airlock.”

  It puzzled me what they intended to do, until I saw what looked like a family flyer—a large family flyer—come out a side of Eden where there shouldn’t have been an air lock. It flew in an odd, erratic way. Later I would find that, after long study and some hacking of the surveillance system around Eden, Eber had designed various paths to go into and out of Eden which explored minute faults in the system. At the time I just thought they were having issues maneuvering as they came up behind the Boomerang.

  Kit directed them, and I opened the cargo door remotely, then closed it, then filled the compartment with air—and then Kath, Eber, and Waldron were there, coming into the control room at a trot. For a moment urgency and rationality had to give away to emotion and rejoicing at seeing each other again.

  When we calmed down and Kath had been told that Zen was left on Earth—and nodded with the greatest equanimity, as though this were perfectly normal—we were led back to their flyer. Waldron was left behind to make adjustments to the course at the last minute. He was wearing his space suit, I noted, with the helmet off.

  He had the helmet on when he came running into the airlock, after we had bled the air out.

  Kit had the time to say, “Kath, you can’t take off while the Boomerang is pushing off, be—”

  And then Kath had done it, erupting out of the cargo hold so fast that she beat the accelerating motion of the Boomerang and managed to dive under it and then…towards an area of Eden where—where I knew there were no docks.

  It was all so fast, I barely caught my breath, as we plunged into a hole that closed after us.