DarkShip Thieves (35 page)

I blinked again and slowly my vision cleared and the bulks resolved themselves into clearly visible objects and people, even if each was surrounded by a faint hallo of light, as appears on things when you've squeezed your eyes really tight, then opened them.

I was in a large room, brightly lit by the light from two windows. It wasn't a standard hospital room in that no effort had been made to have it feel homey or comfortable, or even soothing. It was just a stark white room, with lots of white space, one of the walls taken up with blinking monitors and buttons, a bed—or for all I knew a floating platform—on which I lay.

The things to my side were not guards—which was good. I'd not have had much leeway with guards that close—but large, polished medical machines. From one of them the tube extruded that went down my throat. It made a not-quite humming noise, of the kind that can only be picked up by human ears when the human is thinking about it and trying.

On the other side a machine that looked much the same, but which extended myriad wires like tentacles towards my body. I'd not paid any attention to those smaller feels before, having concentrated on the fact that I was naked and strapped down, but now, as I followed those wires to the small shapes under the coverlet, I realized there were sensors on me. Probably, judging from the monitors on the machine, they were heart rate and breathing sensors.

That was a problem, because almost anything I'd have to do to free myself would alter those readings. In fact, it would have altered already, if I hadn't taken it so painstakingly slow and so maddeningly patiently.

I would have liked to take it slow and patiently now, but the thing was that glimpse from Kit disquieted me. I didn't know what Father knew about Jarl or why he would be trying to get Kit to interpret any writings left by Jarl.

All right. So Jarl was the genius—even for a Mule—who had gifted us with the powertrees, a puzzle no one since then had managed to solve. Perhaps that was what Father wanted, or perhaps the secret of the—was it faster than light? In the legends it was—stellar ship that Jarl had also invented. Granted, Kit was Jarl's clone, so perhaps he could solve it—though this took a twentieth century view of cloning, the naive belief that a clone was the same as the original and not merely a younger twin sibling. Still, I could see where they thought that Kit might have the natural talent to interpret Jarl's writings. The question is—even if Father had access to images and writings about history that I did not, how had he recognized Kit for what he was?

The people of Eden clearly hadn't. Oh, granted, they'd last known Jarl as an old man, probably looking much like Doc Bartolomeu. And granted, they thought that Kit had been bioed to resemble his mother's husband.

But, Heaven and Earth! All my father had were old holos, probably grainy and out of synch as the twenty first images tended to be. So, how could he tell that Kit resembled Jarl enough to be his clone, and not merely someone from the same stock? Wouldn't the eyes and the hair have thrown him off?

It didn't matter, of course. Father had found out that Kit was a clone. Something that was as forbidden on Earth as all other experimentation. Even without the additional crimes of being an ELF and a Mule, my beloved was proscribed.

I probably should be grateful that Father had realized who Kit was. I had no doubt that trying to get the key to Jarl's secrets was all that was keeping Kit alive right now. Of course, it wouldn't keep him alive
and
comfortable. And so I should get him as soon as possible. And then I was going to rip Father's head off his shoulders. And I was going to make him
eat
it.

First to get out of here. If slow and painstaking wouldn't work—or not without driving me nuts—I needed the quick and easy solution. The two other bulks in the room—one near the window—and one further away from me, to my right—were human. Or at least the one by the window was a large man in full dimatough armor. The other one was a middle-aged woman in a reclining chair.

The woman looked asleep and the man had his back to me, looking out the window. Right. That meant that Father Dearest didn't expect me to wake up yet.

It was obvious. Had he thought I was near the time when I would regain consciousness, he'd have been very careful to have two or three of his goons on guard, and at least one nurse or medtech who'd had to tangle with me before.

Granted, those people were hard to find—in the sense that once having seen me in full flown berserker mode, most sane people refused to come near me again, much less guard me. But then, sane people did quite astonishingly crazy things for enough money, and Father had a lot of money.

And there was no way—none—that he would have left me in charge of two people, one of whom would decide to sleep and the other one—judging from the armor, definitely trained at guarding or peacekeeping, because dimatough doesn't come cheap—would decide to turn his back on me.

Good heavens. I almost felt guilty for the lesson in paranoia I was about to drum into these innocents' heads.

Almost but not quite. Sometimes people simply have to learn lessons. It's for their own good. And if they survive, they're better people.

I chewed at the corner of my lip. Right. These beds usually had a release somewhere, that, if pressed, made the binds retract. It was usually a single button, which made it easier for nurses having to clean the patient or turn him or whatever.

It was usually at the edge of the bed, on the underside—just. It could be at the head or at the feet. If it was at the feet, I was shit out of luck. But mostly they weren't at the foot. They were usually near the head because if a nurse were alone, it was easier for her to control a semi-conscious patient by holding his shoulders down, than by holding onto his ankles, when he could still have rolled half-over and fallen, or at least hit his head.

So . . . just under the top. I quested with my hand. Nothing on the right side. I pushed my fingers up and behind my head so I could feel underneath that edge. Nothing. Then bending my elbow at a painful angle, I searched as far as I could along the left side of the top of the bed. And felt a small bump. I pushed it with a will.

For a second nothing happened. Then the binds started retracting. With a whirr. The guard spun around.

Shit. Shit. Shit. The electrodes attaching to various points of my body and the tube down my throat kept me as still as the shackles had done.

I reached up with my newly freed hands and tore at the tape around my mouth keeping the tube in. In the process, I sat up. Alarms sounded.

The nurse stood up. The guard walked towards me. I reached up and tore the tube from my mouth. It was down my throat. As it tore up, it seemed to bring most of my throat with it. I tasted blood. The nurse screamed, "No, no, no."

I swept my hand down my body, throwing electrodes all around.

The tube glugged a greenish mess to the floor. I realized I was in my hyper fast mode because everything else seemed slow motion, and the guard wasn't walking, he was running. But not fast enough for me. And he was a newby. His burner remained holstered.

Little girl like that. Ah!

I rushed him, pushed him back, grabbed the burner from its holster. Thanks heavens it was a Cinders10. I'd used those so often before—having stolen them from guards, peace keepers and proctors—that I flicked the safety off by instinct as I backed off. I tried to speak. What I wanted to say was "Stay still, go to the corner. Let me out and nobody gets hurt."

Unfortunately the damage to my throat was not illusory. I felt like my whole throat was raw, and my voice came out in incoherent grunts and rasps. The nurse slammed her hand against something and sirens sounded, loud. In the past I'd have burned her where she stood but . . . well, to begin with the alarm had already been sounded. And, what if she had a family to go home to? What if they'd worry about her? What if her death would destroy them? They'd never done anything to me.

I'd never thought these things before, and I realized they were a weakness now. I also suspected that things were about to get far more interesting than could be solved by burning the two innocents in my room.

The nurse approached, "Calm down, Patrician Sinistra. You're just confused. Nothing is wrong. We're here to care for you."

Like hell nothing was wrong. If nothing were wrong, my father wouldn't have taken my husband away from me. If he cared, even the modicum he was supposed to have cared for me—the little bit of duty and obligation that he'd pretended, he'd have Kit hidden somewhere until I woke, and then would send him on a ship back to Eden.

Separate us? Sure he would. After all I was the hope and descendants of his line, and for him to have a successor I must marry someone from a Good Man's family. But hurt Kit? Kill Kit? If he cared for me, he wouldn't even have contemplated it. Hell, if he were sane he wouldn't have contemplated it. Unlike the innocents here, he knew what I was.

I burned the floor ahead of the nurse, to stop her getting nearer. She stopped and wailed, "But you're naked." Which indeed I was. I guessed I'd caught some of the Eden attitude that being dressed or naked was my business alone, because I flat out didn't care.

The guard was reaching for me—slightly hampered by the bed being in the way—and from down the hallway came the sound of footsteps in unison. I'd guess more guards, only it was probably Daddy's goons.

Father wasn't stupid. He was what he was, but stupid wasn't it. And though he might have been fairly confident—must have taken one hell of a doctor to make him fairly confident—that I wouldn't wake so soon and might have relaxed his guard, he'd always been the sort of belt-and suspenders type of man who would keep backups just behind the next door. And the backups—only to be called in case of need—would be the best he could command.

At the same time, the innocent in the dimatough armor was trying to get at me. I grabbed the nearest thing that looked like a non-lethal weapon. The tube that had been down my throat and which was merrily spewing green liquid onto the floor. I grabbed the end, spared a glance at the machine and punched hard at the button that I thought would increase the flow. It worked beyond my wildest dreams, spewing green goo in a wide arc in front of me. This made the innocent slip and allowed me to drop it and turn, burner in hand, to meet the ten or so armored goons, who came in at double time march. And with drawn burners. Hello. This was new. Normally they had orders not to fire on me, no matter what I did.

"Patrician Sinistra," the lead goon said, and though I didn't recognize his voice, I recognized his tone. It was that
not really believing you'll listen to me
tone those in daddy's employ who'd had to deal with me before were wont to use. "Put down your burner. Put it down. We have orders to burn you if you do not obey."

I did some very fast calculations in my head. Like this: They might have orders to burn me, but I doubted they had orders to burn me lethally, which would kind of wreck all of Daddy Dearest's effort to get me functional again.

Oh, I could well believe that having evaded capture in the powertrees and come back not only married to someone Earth would consider grossly bioed but also severely radiation-burned had earned me new rules. And not pleasant ones. But there was no way that Father was going to dispose of the future of all Sinistras by taking me down.

At his age, it was highly unlikely he would sire any other Sinistras. In fact, it was unlikely, period. Mother had been the fifth of his wives and the only one to give him a child. If I didn't look so much like the old bastard and if Mother—from my memories—hadn't been such a sweet, compliant woman, I'd flatter myself that she had improved the line.

But she hadn't and therefore daddy wasn't going to risk his little daughter. Not to the point of killing. Which didn't mean that he hadn't ordered the goons to burn off a hand or a foot.

I had no intention of risking that, particularly since I had to get out of here and get my husband as soon as possible. Getting myself into intensive care would only leave Kit at Daddy's tender mercies for another week or two. No. Wasn't going to happen.

My whole calculation cannot have taken more than ten seconds, but the goons were growing impatient. "Well, Patrician," the one of them in the center—was that Narran?—said. "What is it going to be? Are you going to put that burner down nice and slow like a good little girl, or am I going to burn your burner-holding hand off?"

He aimed. At that point, even if Kit hadn't existed, the goon would have been on my list to kill or maim. No one can speak to me in that patronizing tone of voice and live, unharmed, to tell the tale. All right, perhaps Kit. But he'd better make it up to me really fast, after that.

I could, of course, just aim at the idiot and burn him before he could burn me. But then there were all his acolytes and one was sure to get me before I shot him. Right. Still had the bed, nearby. Yeah, yeah, yeah, standard hospital bed, of sculpted ceramite and for all of ceramite's various, helpful qualities, it can't burn worth shit. But it had a mattress and a blanket and you know what? I'd come across this type of institutional mattress and cover before. Oh, they might be fire retardant, but turn a burner on them, and, baby, do they burn.

So I jumped behind the bed at the same time that I aimed my burner full power at the mattress. The fire resistence lasted all of a second, maybe a second and a half, and up it all went in a sheet of flame, hot enough to make me feel like my eyelashes and eyebrows were singeing. None of which mattered, because since I was close enough for that, I was also close enough to notice that the bed was on little floaters to allow it to be moved.

I aimed a kick at the ceramite frame, making contact for as short a space of time as I could because the material would be getting hot and I was, after all, barefoot.

The kick worked beyond my wildest dreams, sending the bed—now filled with an inferno of flaming bedding—sailing across the room at the goons, who broke ranks and ran their several ways. Allowing me to pick Narran off, then three more of them.