Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) (16 page)
Read Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) Online
Authors: Sarah A. Hoyt
I thought that she had that part covered, and also that if I were putting an opening mechanism for a secret door somewhere, I wouldn’t put it on the door itself. So I started looking around, at the walls at right angles to it. Nothing caught my carefully scanning eyes. I turned to the ceiling, which was covered in an elaborate decorative pattern of small plaster roses. I scanned more carefully along the two feet or so of the ceiling. One of the roses seemed somewhat lopsided. I reached up to it and felt it. Yes—there was some sort of mechanism there. Again, the temperature was different from those of the plaster roses about it. And the difference, visually as well as temperature, was probably something that no normal human being could sense. I felt carefully along the leaf that was slightly fatter than the others and tried for the
give
to see if it moved at all. It did, wiggling in my hand. I felt one way up and then down the other, looking for a way to slide it.
I met with more resistance as I pushed it left than right, so I let it slide right.
There was a sound like two slabs of dimatough rubbing on each other, and suddenly we were looking into a small, spare room. In the middle of it stood a little blond girl, clutching a kitten and crying.
She shrieked when the door slid up, then said, “Corin!” and ran to him. He took her and the kitten struggling in her grasp in his arms, and stood up.
And I remembered the decapitated bodies in the kitchen, and said “Corin, take Tieri upstairs. Make sure she’s all right.” I met his eyes and tried to convey the idea that under no circumstances should the child be allowed in the kitchen. Mercifully, he seemed to get it. “Yes, Tieri—let’s go up to your room and get you more practical clothes. We might have to run. And who is this kitten? Have I met him?”
As their voices went away, I turned to Mailys. “Can you help? Is there some way we can dispose of the bodies and make this house secure?”
She looked at me for a long moment, her eyes wide and doubtful, and I thought she was going to tell me I’d lost my mind, but then she shrugged, and started towards the back. “There is usually a small backyard, perhaps large enough for a grave, if we can find something to dig with.”
There was a small backyard, peaceful in the moonlight. It was as though the intruders had come in through the front door and perpetrated their outrages in the house, without ever coming back here.
A neat little lawn filled most of the back, surrounded by roses, which bloomed with a heady fragrance in the warm air, and there was a pond gurgling in a corner of the garden. And there was a shed, in which we found various implements which left me staring at them in bewilderment.
Look, I understand shovels and picks. We had them in Eden too. But the various mechanical devices left me staring. It is obvious that on Eden and on Earth even mechanics have taken completely different routes to accomplish the same purpose.
I think it is because on Earth they had room for bigger machinery. For instance, I’d not seen a big excavator until I’d come to Earth. On Eden, the task of digging, even such a huge hole as needed for a housing compound for a large family was achieved by having many tiny robots dig in coordination, according to preprogrammed parameters.
On Earth they had backhoes and excavators. And in the shed at the back of the townhouse’s garden, we found versions of those backhoes and excavators, automated and controlled by remote. Though all the landscape looked mature to me, clearly someone had done some serious planting and Earth-moving around here.
Mailys looked at the machinery with pursed lips, and tried out the remotes, then turned to me. “If you help me bring the bodies out, I’ll take care of disposal while you clean the floor and secure the front door.”
“Do you think we’ll be safe here even if I secure the front door?” I asked. There was something to her pinched expression I couldn’t quite read.
She nodded.
“But if people are going around looting—”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that. There is a list…” she pursed her lips.
I felt like the hair was trying to stand up at the back of my neck. There was a something she wasn’t saying.
Something in my expression must have given my thoughts away because she sighed. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose sooner or later we will have to talk. But right now I don’t want to get in an argument with Monsieur Dufort in front of the child. And it will happen if I’m the one inside, securing the house.”
Which, having been privileged to watch some of their arguments, made perfect sense to me. I could well imagine what the little girl would make of the things they might say.
So I helped Mailys carry the two corpses outside. She did her share of the lifting, which connected with her other abilities. I was right. I knew it. Biological improvement had continued, or perhaps lines of biologically improved people had been cloned on into the present, perhaps. But what did this have to do with the situation we found ourselves in?
I set about finding cleaners, cleaning the pools of blood from the floor, and disposing of the used cleaning rags down an incinerator. If I hadn’t seen real middle-class families before, when Simon and I had visited his nanny, this would all be alien to me. I had the feeling I was somehow caught in a tangle amid people who knew each other and who had old scores and old paybacks running through the fabric of the revolution, but I wasn’t absolutely sure how. And I realized that what I didn’t know could kill me. Having cleaned the kitchen, I searched the house for something with which to mend the door.
“What are you looking for?” Corin asked.
“Something to fix or replace the front door,” I said.
He looked at me as though I’d grown a second head. I rounded on him. “We can’t go running around a city, one in a state of disorder and rampaging murder, in the light of day. We most especially cannot while toting a five-year-old and a kitten!”
He opened his mouth, closed it with a snap. “If Brisbois—”
“If you’re going to say that if Brisbois had only waited, you’ll have to explain to me what sense that makes, when he couldn’t possibly have known this family would need him.”
“He knew some…some families would need him,” he said. “But I suppose,” he added, reluctantly, “that he couldn’t be expected to know everyone who would need him in particular, or to make a single trip to rescue every one of them…” He hesitated. “If it’s even his objective to rescue every one of them. Which I don’t know.”
I grew impatient. I’d never known Len at this age. Or rather, I’d known Len at this age, by virtue of our studying in the same general area and in complementary professions. He’d trained as a navigator and I as a pilot. But that wasn’t the same as being involved in a relationship, or even spending time dodging death together. When it came to that, I’d definitely not been in that close a contact with him.
Which meant that I was not ready for someone who looked that much like Len to act as a late adolescent male. I’d never had much interest in the breed, frankly, and this one was no exception. “I’m not analyzing what Brisbois might or might not be doing,” I told him. “I was taught to take care of my own problems, and as much of other people’s as fell within my circle. Right now our problem is to stay safe and keep Tieri safe and, secondarily, to establish a plan of action to…to rescue the Good Man, which is what I came here to do, whether you and Mailys help me or not.”
My mission, imposed on me by Brisbois before he sacrificed himself, was to protect “the children,” and since I assumed these two were the children, I was going to follow through.
Corin’s face worked. I expected him to deliver himself of some blistering diatribe, but instead, his expression became controlled and dignified. He seemed suddenly much older. “What can I do?”
“Do you have any idea how to repair the door?”
He frowned. “I’ll look. There are ways to mend ceramite.”
“It would be better if it still looks broken,” I said. “So any looters think—”
A tight smile. “I don’t think I could make it look whole if I tried,” he said and walked off into a room at the back of the house. He came back in moments, with something resembling a gun, but more like a hand-held hair-dryer, with a sack of some sort attached to the grip. I followed him to the front door where, amid what sounded like French curses but no French curses I knew, he set about joining the broken panels of the door with what looked to be newly extruded, still hot, ceramite.
“Tieri?” I asked him, as I pitched in, holding one of the pieces so he could drip ceramite along the break. He somehow managed to get a bit on his finger, yelped, and sucked at his finger, as I made use of my extra speed to grab the implement midair and keep it from dripping ceramite on his legs.
He pulled his finger from his mouth, examining critically a bubble forming on it. “Thanks for catching it,” he said. “How about you fix it and I hold up the pieces? I swear, I need to have three arms for this job.”
“I don’t have three arms,” I said.
“No,” he said, and frowned a little. “But I think you are enhanced beyond…normal human, aren’t you?”
I shrugged, and he seemed about to say something, or ask something. His eyes examined me intently, as if I were some sort of puzzle. But all he said was, “I put Tieri in a bubble bath with toys, and then put her in bed. She was almost asleep. She—” He sighed. “She cried for hours in the safe room. Her father got her in the safe room and got it locked, but I think, though that’s not what she told me, that he had some idea of protecting the house. I don’t know what happened, exactly. But she heard screams. She was very scared.”
“What have you told her about her parents?” I asked.
“That they had to go away a little while,” he said. “And asked me to look after her. That is not unusual enough to make her suspicious. I used to look after her all the time when her parents went to shows or had to go out.”
“Who were they?”
“Family friends.”
“Obviously. Besides that.”
“Francois was the Good Man’s junior trainee accountant,” he said, as though reluctantly.
I frowned. I was still sure this was a targeted attack. It bore all the hallmarks of that, just like the attack on the Duforts had. But why? The doctor of the Good Man might potentially be worth it, but not the junior accountant, surely?
I thought back to the argument between Mailys and Corin, the references to enhanced people and, just now, Corin saying I was surely enhanced. Mailys had intimated he opposed enhanced people. I frowned intently as I fixed the door. We repaired it enough to lock it, and then, after trading a look which meant neither of us was absolutely sure this would be enough, we pushed a tall, heavy display case in front of it, completely blocking the entrance. Even if they—whoever they were—broke through the door, they’d have to break through the display case as well to get to us. Which was good, because I felt like death warmed over after the disasters of the day, and I suspected Mailys and Corin would need to sleep, as well.
When we got done, Mailys was waiting at the inner door to the hall. “I’ve made food,” she said, and added, “Well, not made. Warmed, but…I thought—”
I nodded. Corin said, “I’ll check on Tieri.”
He came back moments later. “She’s asleep with the kitten. I found the kitten’s litter box and moved it to her room. Francois?” he said. “Adelie?”
Mailys made a face and it took me a moment to realize she looked like she was going to cry. “We buried them. In the yard.” She bit her lips. “The—oh, damn.”
Corin looked like he was waging a mighty internal battle, but all that came out was, “I liked them.”
At that an unholy light danced in Mailys’s eyes, and she said, “I’m glad to know you can make exceptions, Monsieur Dufort.”
“You don’t know anything about me, or what I feel and think,” he said. “How can you think—”
“Shh,” I said, gesturing with my hand towards the upper floor where the child slept. “We are going to need to discuss plans and to weigh things openly, and we can’t do that if she’s awake.”
They both nodded.
“First, we need to know what is happening,” I said. “Out there.”
Mailys found a comlink receiver. It was in a sort of living room, with broad, comfortable seats. We carried our bowls of soup and sat down to watch.
When Corin tuned it to the official newscast, we realized it was much worse than we thought.
Where Evil Dwells
“To make all equal. To banish from Liberte the fetters of inequality! That is what this revolution is about. The ci-devant Good Man, St. Cyr, he is admittedly a biological creation, a non-natural creature who has for many years behaved as though superior to people created by nature and designed—” The woman screaming in the comcast, in what had been the official channel used by Simon for his announcements, was short, curvy, older than I, and had blond hair in a bun at the back of her head. Her blue eyes shone with intense excitement. And she wore what can only be described as a modified military uniform: a red vaguely military-looking tunic, white pants, and a liberty cap. Only the front of her rather ample chest was covered in medals.
I blinked at the medals, shining in the sun. How could she have won any military decorations?
From what I’d overheard, Liberte was rather traditional in its military forces and preferred all-male troops. There had been no big engagement in which the troops of Liberte had taken part. If anything, the engagement that might happen against the remaining forces of the Good Men still in power would take place between the completely untried troops of Liberte and the seasoned troops of the Good Men. So, where had the medals come from?
Then I noticed the man standing behind her, wearing a matching uniform. He wasn’t wearing a liberty cap, and the sun glinted off his scalp, revealed by his thinning hair in front. He looked familiar.
“I see Dechausse survived,” Mailys said.
“Like cockroaches,” Corin said. “Jean Dechausse is hard to kill. I wonder if Brisbois survived as well?”
Mailys made a sound. I wasn’t sure what it meant, and it occurred to me not for the first time to wonder how attached she was to Brisbois and in what way.
“Who is she?” I asked. “And how can she have those many medals? Are they military medals?”
“They are medals,” Mailys said, in a low growl. “Likely she awarded them all to herself this morning before breakfast. Madame is like that.”
“Madame?”
“Do you really not know her?” Corin asked, as though this were hard to believe.
“I’ve never seen her,” I said, staring at the cast, and thinking of course, I might very well have seen her, around the palace. One didn’t pay any attention to people who were there in an official capacity: gardeners, cleaners, or even secretaries. I’d likely seen the poor people who’d died in this house as well, or at least there was a chance I’d seen them. But when you’re living in a house the size of Simon’s, with the number of retainers and hangers on around us at all times, it’s hard to remember everyone who isn’t one of the residents. “Who is she?”
“Madame Rose Parr,” Mailys said. “She’s the head of Egalite, a suborganization of the Sans Culottes which is devoted to eliminating all unfair advantages of wealth, power or even inherited characteristics, in the new republic. For years, she’s given speeches at secret meetings, excoriating biological enhancement and denouncing the existence of biologically enhanced people.”
“But I thought there were no…I mean, other than the descendants of biologically enhanced people, there are no enhanced people, are there? Or at least—She can’t oppose what everyone knows has been forbidden for centuries.”
I had the impression Corin and Mailys, being seated on either side of me, had traded a look behind my back. “Oh, can’t she?” Mailys said. “People resent others they know are better than they are, no matter at what, and it’s easy to tell yourself there must still be enhancements going on.”
I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t the time. But I remembered that both these children could keep up with me when I ran, and I suspected that they were both enhanced. Inheritance, or…? I remembered the underground area of the doctor’s home, the bodies in vats.…
There was nothing necessarily incriminating in this. People had been known to grow replacement parts in Eden, which was why the life expectancy was somewhere north of two hundred years. But on Earth all that type of biological cloning and work was forbidden, because it was an easy step from that to creating enhanced individuals, as had been done in the late twenty-first century. And Earth was determined to prevent the ascension to power of more biolords, or Mules as the common people called them.
But the doctor had grown body parts. And it was a small step from that to growing individuals.
I remembered Brisbois calling the doctor “father.” It was possible, of course, that the good doctor had had a checkered past that involved the siring of children by some giantess, but I doubted it. It was more possible that he had adopted Brisbois.
But all in all, the fact that Brisbois knew of that underground passage and had made it a point of coming back for the doctor and his wife made me wonder.
“She is Brisbois’s wife,” Corin said.
“Ex-wife,” Mailys snapped. “She divorced him when he was in prison.”
I remembered him kissing me. I thought of his tirades against women. Well. If your wife will divorce you when you’re on death row, it’s bound to embitter you a little. At least a little.
I wondered if he was enhanced and if it was hatred for him that had made her anti-enhanced people.
She was still screaming on the com, and I noticed that she was repeating herself. The audience didn’t seem to care. They applauded wildly.
I changed positions to another sofa which allowed me to half recline. It was uncomfortable compared to the sofas in Eden which were bio-based and adapted in temperature and shape when you lay on them. But I was almost used to these lacks in Earth. Almost. So that it only bothered me when I was drifting off to sleep.
I half awoke, disturbed by some noise. Corin was gone from the room. I hoped he was checking on Tieri. At any rate, I trusted him enough, whatever Mailys might say of him, that his absence didn’t surprise or scare me. Mailys was asleep on the other sofa. The com was still on. It showed streets filled with a dancing populace. The old, cruel song of the palace was being sung. Some people carried heads on pikes.
I noticed the voice-announcer was calling it “the glorious people’s” something or other. The word was obscure and my nano implants did not decipher it. Celebration? Dance? Exultation?
Corin rushed into the room, opened a drawer. I awoke completely and said, “What is wrong?”
He shook his head and whispered back, “I’m getting a game to play with Tieri. I’m trying to keep her away from—” He looked at the picture on the com. Then at me. “I’ll come down to check if something is happening that needs us to get out of here.”
“Any word?” I asked.
“From?”
“Your father? Brisbois?”
He shook his head. “I’ll be back.” And rushed back out.
I had the impression of walking in an odd, gray dream, where shapes were meaningless, and everything had nightmare proportions. I fell asleep and momentarily I was back in my ship, with Len, in Earth orbit. He sat the pilot chair, and I stood behind him. He said, “You must be able to save me this time,” and before I could react to it, he turned around and it wasn’t him at all but Simon.
I woke up with a strangled protest in my throat and my eyes prickling as though I needed to cry. I hadn’t cried when I killed my husband. There was no time to feel sorry for myself or for him. It had taken all my ability to limp our ship home to Eden, and by the time I’d arrived I was so tired and so numb that I’d not even cried at his cremation and memorial service, in the garden of his parents’ house. His mother had invited me to live with them. But of course I couldn’t accept. What would the point of that be? I’d always be no more than a memento of Len.
For months, they’d watched me, I suspect in hopes of grandchildren. Len had known our union would not be fruitful. I was too enhanced to breed with normal humans. But he’d never told his parents.
I couldn’t endure their hopes; I couldn’t endure their disappointment. I couldn’t endure seeing Len’s nephews and nieces grow, each with a little bit of him in gesture and word, in look and movement. I couldn’t stand it.
And so I’d turned to my work, and I’d answered gladly the call to go off-world for a good cause. I’d run away from home.
Only to find myself in a perilous situation, with a young man who looked an awful lot like Len, and with another man depending on me. I wondered if Simon was alive; if he knew I’d do my best to save him. He’d sent me away to keep me safe, but did he count on me to come back?
I realized I’d been holding my hands so tightly closed that my fingernails bit into my palms.
I relaxed, taking deep breaths, and became aware that Mailys was awake, sitting up, and staring in frozen horror at the link. Half-glimpsed, behind her, stood Corin, also giving an impression of not noticing anything around him.
I turned to the comlink and it took me a moment to understand what I was watching, because…because I’d never seen anything like it on Eden, nor could I imagine it ever happening on Eden outside of my wildest nightmares.
The scene was a little plaza to the side of the palace. The city had been built with self-conscious, generally “French” architecture, and this plaza looked it, surrounded by tall, stone-built houses with vaguely classical architecture. The houses were probably dimatough, as were the “cobbles” underfoot and the statue of blindfolded Justice in the middle. Whoever built it had seen Paris before the bombing that leveled it, and had set to consciously imitate it.
I’d walked in that plaza before, when all the buildings around it had been filled with shoppers, inspecting clothes and jewelry in the shops, having breakfast at the small cafes whose chairs spilled to the sidewalk, and strolling around the statue.
Now the statue made a strange background—twice as large as life, her eyes blindfolded, a scale in her hand—against which a motley group of people assembled.
Someone had built a platform. It was square and seemed to have been made of imperfectly smoothed black ceramite or perhaps dimatough, except dimatough seemed too expensive for the purpose.
The purpose was…Proof that the Sans Culottes had in fact read their history and had decided to pay it homage. The contraption puzzled me for a moment, consisting of two large poles with what seemed like a bar of light running across the top.
Then a man I recognized as the Jean Dechausse that Brisbois had tried to kill, and whom he might have emulated himself in the process, announced, “Monsieur Professeur de la Fontaine, et Madame de la Fontaine!”
Two people were pushed forward. They weren’t bound and, in fact, were holding hands. The husband was making an ineffective effort at pushing his wife behind himself, but there were five or six burly men in liberty caps surrounding them, and at least two had hands on their shoulders.
The couple was forced forward, forced to kneel, heads down.
The bar of light descended from the top and…their heads rolled. The crowd shouted
“Ça ira!”
and the song about setting the world on fire erupted again. I stared, not believing it, as the two bodies, still bleeding and twitching, were pushed from the platform, the heads grabbed by young women waiting at the base of the platform, who held them aloft with screams of glee.
“Et Monsieur Jean-Michel Amonette.”
A dark-haired man with a well-trimmed beard, wearing the uniform of Simon’s clerks, was pushed forward, forced to his knees, and the blade fell.
Glee and screams of
“Ça ira!”
I realized I was sitting immobile, rigid, thinking this couldn’t be true. This had to stop.
The people dancing on the screen looked not like humans but like blood-drunk demons who had lost every shred of humanity.
“Madame Pascal!” A blond woman in a dress that looked like something she had worn for the ball Simon had given, the ball interrupted by the revolution.
Her impeccably coiffed head had barely been gripped when the announcement went up, Dechausse sounding like a valet at a society party,
“Etienne Robert D’Blogg.” Kneel, slice.
“Ça ira!”
“Monsieur at Madame Landry.” They were also in party clothes and must have been among the notables of Liberte. Kneel, slice.
Monsieur Joseph Capdepon, Francois Fleming, Verite Romaine, Jason Delong, Elisabeth Piedligere, Etienne Louis, Monsieur et Madame Vert, Madame Clithero, Monsieur Laurence Michel, Monsieur Marc Algeres.