Darkship Renegades (6 page)

THE POISON AND THE DAGGER

I didn’t have to like it, which was a good thing, because I didn’t.

It wasn’t even the rigged examination at the center and the feeling that everyone knew something I didn’t know and seemed to understand how to spring Kit from this trap better than I did. It wasn’t the trip to Earth being imposed on us from above, to look for something that might or might not exist any longer. It wasn’t even that Zenobia was foisted on us, or that she was a total stranger, destined to spend six months in space with us and Doc.

No, the problem was that I knew there were
other
things going on, beyond the reach of my ears and that no one was going to tell me about them. I was a stranger in Eden, had lived there for far less than a year, if one took into account my trips out with Kit.

Perhaps Kit’s family thought I would blow up if I knew all that was going on, but I didn’t think that was it. Not this time. At least Kit himself would know that if I hadn’t blown up yet, I wasn’t about to.

I’m not going to claim any great level of maturity, but it had been some time since I thought every problem could be solved by kicking it in the appropriate—Kit would say inappropriate—place. Sometimes you needed to kick it in a lot of different places. And sometimes strategy was needed. And sometimes I had to leave the strategy to others.

Only when I told Kit that, as we flew back home at last—in our own flyer that someone had fetched from the Energy Center—he shook his head, and his lips trembled upward. His eyes were oddly tender as he smiled.
Actually, Thena, I suspect there’s a lot of things we won’t have time to tell each other except in mind-talk. And that Doc and Zen won’t tell us because they can’t mind-talk us. Because most places will be bugged with cameras and sound pickups. Because the greatest authority in the world is out to get us.

I turned this over in my mind. Having the greatest authority in the world—okay one of the fifty greatest authorities in the world (no use catering to Daddy Dearest’s perception of himself particularly now that he was safely dead)—out to get me was pretty much how I’d lived my whole life.
And?

He gave me that look again, the look he gives when he thinks I’m completely unreasonable and also extremely funny.
Thena! And what do you think? They’ll have listening devices and they’ll have traps.
He gave me a sidelong glance, suddenly serious, as though evaluating how I’d respond.
Surely you realize the only reason we’re being allowed to go is that they think we’ll never come back.

I had been trying
not
to realize that.
I know our mission is damn close to hopeless,
I said, soberly, trying to sound as grown up as I knew how.
I saw some of the notes Jarl left behind, but they were in my father’s possession and my father is…dead. Whether the next person knew what they meant I don’t know. And I left behind at the broomer’s lair the gems I took from my father’s study. At any rate, the ones I saw were all on how to make me which I don’t think anyone on Eden needs. There was nothing about powertrees. As for the ones they showed you in Never-Never…who knows what happened after the break-in. I know prisoners escaped and the lower levels, where you were, were flooded. So I think the chances of us finding powertree—

No, Thena.
Kit sounded patient and faintly amused.
No. Don’t you see? It has nothing to do with how difficult the secret of growing powertrees is. We’ll give it our best and I’d give that endeavor a good fifty-fifty chance.

Not fifty-fifty chance of my understanding any of it.
He forestalled my protest.
As I said, I’m just a vacuum-ship-pusher. But the chance of us bringing it back, and having the trained people on Eden decode it. These people are terrified we’ll achieve it, of course, so they’d probably give us higher odds. And that’s why they’ll make sure something happens to us en route. So we never get to Earth, much less come back. And they can say we defected.

Something…
A monstrous idea formed in my mind.
Sabotage?
Sabotage was not a crime in Eden. But in a world as attached to the morality and rights of the individual, it seemed like they should be more moral. Like there would be a certain basic decency attaching to their decisions, like they wouldn’t simply kill us because it is convenient.

Oh, not because it is convenient, Thena. Only for the highest possible motives. They are highly moral people, don’t you see that?

I don’t know what my face showed looking back at him, but his lips twitched.
They are, nonetheless. At least in their own minds and whether you believe it or not. They’re doing this for the good of the people.

The good of the people!
I said.
That sounds like one of Daddy Dearest’s speeches. But Kit, it’s impossible that they think it’s for the good of the people. They can’t be that stupid and there are limits to self delusion. How could starving Eden of energy be for the good of anything, except maybe the Good Men of Earth?

Very easily,
Kit said.
If you can put yourself in a frame of mind where you see yourself as knowing what everyone should do for their own good. If that were true, then being able to control who gets energy and who doesn’t would mean being able to encourage certain elements of society and discourage others. You would in fact be able to design a society where only the best people had power and—

It was all too easy to put myself in that frame of mind. I’d heard my father and his friends talk long enough that it was almost second nature to slip into that mode of thinking. Even after a year in Eden, I still wasn’t sure they were wrong, for that matter. Dad and his cronies were corrupt, venal and, sometimes, evil, but they were not stupid. And so many people I met seemed too stupid to stand upright and talk at the same time. Like that man who’d got in an argument with Kath during the hearing.

I could, in a way, understand wanting to encourage the…good people and discourage the others. I could even sympathize with it. But I also remembered overhearing Daddy Dearest’s policy meetings—most of the time without his knowing I was nearby.
And the people that Daddy Dearest tried to encourage, half the time, were the people who were too stupid to live. They were easier to lead, you see—easier to convince of what Daddy wanted them to believe. I groaned.
The good people…
I said.
The Good Men.

Once more, my husband gave me an amused glance. He looked vaguely feral, unshaven, wearing clothes that appeared slept in, and like he had been starved for days. This last was probably not true. Eden had no reason to ration food, and wouldn’t risk starving Kit if there was a chance of Kath ever finding out.

An unholy light danced in his eyes.
Of course,
he said.
The good people always end up being the ones who do as they’re told. And the Good Men—by any other name—do the telling.

I suppose it could be argued those truly were the good people. Civilization could be said to consist of people willing to go along with others’ ideas. The domesticated version of humans. But this was not a philosophic debate. We were talking about real people, people I knew…my husband’s family, his friends, the place that had made him what he was. And I saw about as much chance of their going along to get along as of my growing an extra head. And—I set my jaw, remembering Castaneda—just on principle, I refused to go along.

So you’re telling me,
I said,
that they intend to sabotage our ship so we die in space? And you’re fine with that? You still wanted them to send us out into space? Aren’t there easier ways to commit suicide?

There would be, if I had any intention of letting them get away with it,
he said, and pushed his chin forward, setting his jaw. It reminded me of when he’d been near-fatally wounded and had climbed up the side of a ship, against what must have been unbearable pain, to prevent me committing suicide by Dock Control. Afterwards he’d stared at me with that sheer stubbornness in his eyes, even while a dark stain of blood spread on the side of his suit. Now the stubborn was back, as well as a definite streak of defiance.
We’re going to find all their traps and all their sabotage. We’re going to survive it. We’re going to go to Earth and come back with a way to replant powerpods. And then we’re going to make the little weasels
eat
it.

I wasn’t absolutely sure what he meant to have them eat: the way to make the powerpods grow? How? If in a data gem it wouldn’t be that hard to eat. Perhaps he meant the powerpods? Impossible. Those were man-sized and radioactive. It wasn’t really safe to ask, when Kit was in this mood. He’d probably come up with yet another cryptic utterance that would cost me sleep for days as I tried to figure the mechanics of it. So I just said, mildly,
What have weasels ever done to you?

Which got me a puzzled look and an
I don’t know. There are no weasels on Eden. Are they sort of like rabbits?

I avoided this side-rhetorical line. I’d long ago decided that my husband only introduced talk of Earth animals and his utter ignorance of them in order to make me laugh or distract me. I wasn’t in the mood to be distracted.
You really think we can do it?
I said
. Avoid all the traps laid out for us, escape all their plotting and manage to do what the most powerful people in the world are intent on stopping us doing?

He grinned.
We got here despite the Good Men.

Yes, but the Earth is larger…there’s more places to escape. Here…

Here we have Doc and Zen to help.

You trust them that much? And how will we communicate with them?

I trust them that much,
he said, and gave me a smile that said not to worry my pretty head about it.
We’ll manage it, Thena.

I didn’t like it. Look, my life had given me no reason at all to trust the judgment of others. In my experience, outside my own judgment and my own capacities, everyone was trying to pull one over on me.

But Kit was still smiling at me with that expression like the canary that ate the cat. Or in this case, perhaps, the Cat that thinks he can win over the bureaucrat. I glowered at him.
You are the most exasperating man. I don’t have the slightest idea why I love you.

The smile curved and became wicked, in a way that made my heart skip a beat.
No? Let me take a bath and I’ll remind you.

IN THE HOPPER

Over the next few days, there was precious little time for Kit and me to indulge in his specialized memory-enhancing techniques.

The very next day a call from the center sent Zenobia and myself down to inspect the ship they would allow us to use. The
Hopper
wasn’t so much a ship as a shell. What they told me was that the couple who had taken it out last had got badly radiation burned. Only one of them had survived the long trip home, and she had apparently decided to retire. The ship had been repossessed by the Energy Board and stripped almost to the hull to clean it. That hull had then been placed in a cavernous bay which was not used for anything else. And we were told where to find it.

Before becoming Kit’s navigator, I had worked as a mechanic for the Energy Board for many months. I had repaired and reconditioned ships. I’d never seen one as bare as this. It was perfectly round, as most darkships were, and it was painted in the same dark, unreflective paint as the
Cathouse
.

The resemblance stopped there. Part of this was good. The
Cathouse
was a ship of very old vintage, which had been designed as a training ship. It had been foisted on Kit, first, because he was a Cat flying missions alone, and therefore at higher risk of losing the ship. Also, alone, he’d only been able to bring in much lower harvests, which meant that he couldn’t afford to pay the fees for the rental of the better, more expensive ships.

Even when I’d joined him, they didn’t trust us. I was an Earthworm, with questionable training for the job. For one, I’d never learned mechanics, or studied it consciously. It was as though I had an instinct for it. The first time our brooms, back on Earth, had needed repair, I’d studied the manual and known how to do it, and it had been the same with Eden’s ships. I’d discovered, just before leaving Earth that this, like the ability to communicate telepathically, had been bioengineered into the man who called himself my father—and therefore presumably into me. But it wasn’t like the Eden navigator ability, and we couldn’t convince the board I was as good. So, we’d been stuck with the
Cathouse
. I didn’t mind it so much, but the fact that it had been designed as a training ship, instead of a harvesting ship, presented some liabilities. The nodes for various circuitry, for instance, were easier to access for trainee navigator/mechanics than those in the more modern ships. But what made them accessible was their being on the outside of the ship—protruding out of the skin like pimples. This meant that a mishap in the powertree ring could destroy one of the nodes.

Good Cats weren’t supposed to have mishaps of that nature, and the only one I knew of had happened while I was trying to strangle Kit during our star-crossed meeting. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t a greater risk.

This ship didn’t have that liability. It was just a large ball, perfectly smooth, completely black, unreflective. It was in fact a ball that projected the idea that it wasn’t there at all.

I walked around it slowly, while Zenobia walked purposely up to it and stuck her finger in the genlock. The door opened, which I supposed made perfect sense, as it would be keyed for us. The way the hatch doors opened on the darkships always made them look a little like they had an open mouth and were carnivorous. Normally this impression was dispelled by the exit area itself which was painted some cheerful color, and faced onto another inner lock, normally open whenever the outer door opened.

This one wasn’t painted any color, but the bare, unreflective black ceramite of the inside of darkships before they were finished. It looked like a dark mouth, or a vortex of ill omen, waiting to swallow us.

Zenobia climbed up the stairs that had extended when the door opened and into the airlock space. She touched the walls, gently, as if to reassure herself of their solidity and looked incredibly out of place, with her red hair and pale skin in that almost aggressively dark space. “I guess they stripped it to its barest shell before cleaning it, then reapplied the ceramite coating,” she said.

I had a feeling she was talking to herself and not to me. I said, “Maybe it was never finished,” and she whirled around, to look at me, her expression surprised.

“What? Oh. No.” She shrugged. “It used to be golden. Len said we really couldn’t afford much, but we could at least make the entrance look like going into a palace.” She stopped immediately, but she had said too much. I felt my heart sink somewhere to the vicinity of my shoes.

She was a navigator whose Cat had died. She’d limped home with her ship. Her ship. They’d given us her ship. I cleared my throat. “The
Hopper
was your ship?”

She nodded and cleared her throat, then pushed to open the membrane separating us from the inner areas.

I’ll say this for the Energy Board. They might be sending us to space in a coffin, but at least it was a completely stripped, scrubbed and
really clean
coffin. Nothing in it could possibly remind Zenobia of when she had shared with her late husband. Except it obviously did. From the bare entrance hall, she wandered the corridors, touching here and feeling there, looking like a child lost in a house she’d once known, looking for something that should be there but wasn’t.

I thought up some really interesting swear words, but didn’t say anything. Instead, I set about inspecting the interior in a completely different way.

The navigation computers had been removed. It didn’t worry me, or not too much. I—and I presumed Zenobia, who had been trained in the more normal way of Eden—could calculate a path to Earth. But some navigational computers would be needed, I thought, or one or the other of the pilots—either Kit or Doc Bartolomeu—would need to be on duty the whole time. And shift on/shift off with just two people would be exhausting.

Since Eden was on a highly eccentric orbit, it could be as much as four months or as little as two away from Earth. Usually the trip there and back took six months because what you lost on one leg, you made up on the other.

They’d told us to make lists of what we’d need, and they’d furnish it, and they’d given us weight and mass guidelines beyond which we couldn’t go. I’d started making a list on a disposable electronic memo pad when Zenobia came in to the inner area.

I was once more taken aback by her resemblance to Botticelli’s painting. Don’t misunderstand me. There was nothing exact to this resemblance. I’m sure if I had the painting handy, I’d find her features were all wrong, and I was sure her hair was darker red than the woman’s in the painting. But her green eyes had the same expression as that of Venus in the painting—the distant look of staring out at vistas invisible to mere mortals.

She was wearing a blue mechanic’s whole-body suit. Not that all mechanics in Eden wore one uniform, any more than anyone in Eden was fond of uniforms. Back when I worked as a full-time mechanic, there were people who came to work completely naked, as well as those who came to work in floor-length dresses more appropriate to an Earth ballroom. But the blue mechanic’s body-suit was the most common outfit, because it would fit over practically everything—except maybe the floor-length dresses—and it would protect the more expensive clothing. Also, it had deep and plentiful pockets, into which one could sink tools or parts and avoid walking back and forth to get them, or even wearing a cumbersome belt. The suits were so common for people engaged in manual labor, and so cheap, that they were sold at vending machines throughout the two docking complexes: the Energy Board’s and the Water Board’s.

There was no way that Zenobia should look graceful with her hands deep in the pockets of the oversized, bulky uniform, but she did. I had a fleeting thought about her having been friends with Kit since childhood, and a stab of unreasoning jealousy.

Had Kit had a crush on her? I knew he’d loved his first wife dearly, not just because he had told me, but because I knew. Once, our minds had become so intertwined that the normal barrier to the transmission of images and memories had failed; I’d got his memories of their affair.

Jean, Kit’s father, called Kit’s first marriage a boy and girl affair, a bad case of puppy love, because neither of the participants had known any better, or knew anything of how to make a relationship work, or even that relationships could work. Perhaps it was that. Kit’s love of his first wife had that rosy nimbus quality that edged all her memories with thoughts of how wonderful she’d been. But he’d told me when he’d proposed to me that he’d had other lovers before his marriage. He’d made it sound as if they hadn’t mattered at all and perhaps they hadn’t, but looking at Zenobia’s graceful walk, knowing that Kit never called her anything but “Zen”—surely an affectionate nickname—which Doc used also, I wondered if she’d been one of his crushes or even one of his lovers before marriage.

I’ve always been suspicious of women like that—naturally beautiful and effortlessly poised. Even when not doing something strenuous, I became sweaty and disheveled. The only time I looked graceful was when I used ballet moves to kick someone. The only way I’ve ever stunned a man with my mere presence was by adding a punch to his head.

So I might have been less than cordial as I glared at Zenobia, standing there, lost in her reverie. “Well?” I asked.

She shook a little, like someone awakened from a dream. Had she been in the past? Reliving her last trip in this ship? Or in the future, planning our trip and trying to anticipate all that could go wrong?

She looked vaguely guilty. Then she cleared her throat. “I’ve looked all over. There doesn’t seem to be anything here that shouldn’t be.”

I must have blinked at her, because she looked at the pad in my hands and, without giving me time to figure out what she’d do, grabbed for it so fast it might almost have been Cat speed. She read what I had on the screen under the words “parts to requisition.”

Then she typed quickly and handed me the pad back and resumed her sleep-like walking around the cabin, looking at this and touching that.

I wasn’t sure what I expected her to have typed. It could, I supposed, be anything from poetry to calculations. But when I looked down, I found out that the note was perfectly rational and clearly intended for me: DON’T LET US MAKE REQUISITIONS. IT GIVES THEM A CHANCE TO SLIP SOMETHING IN THAT COULD BLOW UP THE SHIP OR WORSE. AND LET’S MAKE SURE THIS BAY IS LOCKED AND THE LOCK CODED ONLY FOR ME, YOU, KIT AND DOC BARTOLOMEU.

I raised my eyebrows at her and she looked back at me and nodded in a way that somehow managed to ask if I was agreeable to the plan.

I was. And Zenobia had found a way to communicate that the Energy Board couldn’t bug, unless they not only had mikes all around but also fortuitously aimed cameras—or had covered the interior of the ship in them.

The disposable pad I’d picked up from the children’s learning room at the Denovo complex would be perfect for this. I’d picked it up because it was cheap and I didn’t need to worry about returning it. But the advantage of such a simple implement, produced by the hundreds of thousands every year was that it would be very difficult for the board to know which one would make its way to our hands, much less to hack it.

I despised the way we had to think of all these things. I despised being so paranoid. But as my upbringing had proven, sometimes you really were being persecuted. And I certainly remembered how to do it.