Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) (26 page)
Read Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) Online
Authors: Sarah A. Hoyt
Adept’s Gambit
I woke with the sound of someone retching near me, and someone else, a male voice, speaking in soothing apologetic tones, too far away for me to distinguish the words.
Coming to full consciousness, I realized I was lying atop the covers on a bed, and that someone had undressed me. My immediate thought was that someone was going to die.
Where I was raised, nudity was simply another choice of wear. A small colony with almost no crime, it was the sort of place where people wore what they wanted or nothing at all. This might also have been an effect of having mostly bioimproved people or people who were descended from bioimproved people. Not only were the original settlers of Eden likely people who hadn’t fit very well into normal society and thus had gotten used to making their own rules, but probably most of them were better looking than average and had been raised with no rules of modesty.
At least, that was the explanation I’d formed, over time, for while in Eden being naked was not a big deal, on Earth it had all these under- and overtones of shame and sexual interest. I didn’t fully understand it. Perhaps it’s not possible to fully understand or feel such things unless one grew up with them, but I understood enough to tell someone had taken liberties. My clothes and boots had been removed, and I was wearing something diaphanous that felt like silk: a loose white robe, with delicate floral embroidery around the edge of the neck and the hem.
I realized the room had felt like it was spinning around and round when it stopped. Then I realized that the voices were coming from an adjacent room and that the voice speaking just then was definitely Simon’s, as it said, “You deserved it for giving me knock-out juice. What possessed you?”
“You needed to sleep,” Brisbois’s voice, sounding shaky. “You probably still do, you damn stubborn bastard.”
There was the sound of running water. I dragged myself upright and turned in the direction of the voices. Brisbois was rinsing his mouth at a sink. He looked grayish-pale. I assumed the sounds of vomiting I’d heard had come from him. Simon was watching him. Despite his teasing words, his eyes were observant, slightly concerned. “How in hell could I have known you were allergic to sleeping gas?” he asked. “And how the hell does anyone even know that? How often were you knocked out to know this?”
Brisbois rose from the vanity, wiping first his hands and then his mouth on a small hand towel that looked all the smaller for being used by an outsize person. “Many,” he said, and twisted his lips in what was half smile and half grimace. “Think about it. Think about my activities before…we met.”
“Oh,” Simon said, which is when he saw me. A smile broke on his face, as he gave me the once over. “Hello, Zen. Is there anything you don’t look beautiful in?”
I ignored that. I figured Simon flirted the same way he breathed and couldn’t help himself and not do one or the other more or less by reflex.
“Alexis is allergic to sleeping gas?” I asked, and then over Simon’s “Apparently,” I continued, “And we were proven to be ourselves. Which is good, because I was starting to doubt it.”
Brisbois gave me a wide grin. He said something that sounded like “Someone’s head is going to roll for this.”
I realized the two men were wearing something that looked much like the disposable work suits. “Certainly the head of whoever provided us clothes,” I said. “How come neither of you two are wearing translucent clothes?”
“Would you want us to be?” Simon asked, with a crooked smile and a narrowing of the eyes, while Brisbois said, “Clearly the gas has affected her mind. And I think there’s another explanation for the clothes, Madame Sienna. Mine and Simon’s were thoroughly ruined. The young woman who was here when we woke said something about yours being self-repairing given time, and so they’d just give you something to cover up while it was repairing itself.”
“Oh,” I said, absorbing that at least it seemed likely we’d all been undressed and dressed while unconscious, and that likely—quite likely from what Brisbois said—I’d been undressed by a female. So the courtesies were being observed, which was good. It had been my experience when people on Earth violated the nudity taboo without thought, things were very dark indeed.
Someone knocked at the door. The person who came in was small and slight, and had eyes of an indeterminate color between gray and blue. She was carrying—folded—my suit from Olympus. “We removed most of the water and it fixed itself,” she said, setting my suit down on the bed and smiling at Brisbois. “I see you are recovered, sir. The commanders are waiting for you in the Blue Room for a conference.”
She smiled and bowed slightly at us, and left. I retained the clear impression that as far as she was concerned, Brisbois was the important person here and that Simon and I barely rose to the level of interesting.
After she left, Brisbois said, “I’d best go to this Blue Room, wherever the hell that is.”
“We’ll find it together,” Simon said, his voice very even. “And, on the way, perhaps you can explain to me how you came to build secret shelters I wasn’t informed about, and exactly who has been paying for people to staff them. I think it will be a very interesting conversation.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Brisbois was curt and the sound of someone who was one more inconvenience away from screaming was back in his voice. “I didn’t know where this was either. That was the whole point. Had I known where it was, I would have brought the people I rescued to it instead of coordinating submarine rescues.”
“Am I crazy, or are you?” Simon asked. “You created an underground—well, under-ocean—secret base you knew nothing about?”
“Of course,” Brisbois said. “Several, actually. I wanted them to be completely secret and effective if everything else failed. I was an obvious target once I figured the Sans Culottes were in negotiations with another revolutionary group that was almost certainly what remained of the Just. I knew they’d take me out first. Or interrogate me. Or try to. You were another person they’d almost certainly detain and interrogate. It was important that you not know it existed, just as it was important that I not know where it was, precisely. Well, where they were. There are several of these, and only a few people know where each of them is, never the same people for more than one. And as for staffing it and paying for it, you have, of course. Remember, I was bitten by a secret organization before, and would have died if you hadn’t rescued me. This was done in furtherance of your plans, and in case they escaped your control.”
“As they have,” Simon said. “Damn you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Halfway through their conversation, I’d realized they were going to try to leave without me. And while I wasn’t sure I should be in on that conference, I was going to be. For one, I was not going to be left behind by two men who were determined to protect me from everything. And for another, if I was going to help with the stabilizing of Liberte, I had to know what was happening and what could be done. I knew they meant well, but I wasn’t their daughter, their sister, nor their anything. I had no reason to trust their judgement over mine.
I had to decide on my own what risks I would take and which were acceptable. But more importantly, I had to know. I’d made great mistakes because I hadn’t known of Simon’s plans. I’d risked Jonathan LaForce and Mailys and wasn’t even sure they were still alive. I was not going to continue fighting with both feet in a sack.
At a guess, leaving me behind was Simon’s idea, while Alexis felt that Simon and I—both—needed to be protected from every possible danger.
I undressed and started dressing quickly. When Simon said, “Damn you,” he chanced to look over at me, when I was in my underwear—well, in someone’s underwear since I’d woken in it—and getting ready to slip on the coveralls I’d worn to the seacity.
His jaw dropped and he jumped back, out of reach of Brisbois’s arm. “Don’t you dare,” he said. “Fool me once, and I’m willing to believe you had good intentions. Fool me twice, hit me with an injector again and I slip a dagger in your back while you sleep.”
Brisbois said, “What? I’m not trying to distract—” and turned. By then I was mostly dressed, and fastening the suit down the front. “I didn’t plan this,” he said, in earnest protest. “Maybe I should have, and have been ready to put you to sleep. Simon, please listen to me. It is better if you stay here, better if these people don’t see you face-to-face; better if they’re not too sure where you are or if you’re even alive. It’s almost impossible to run a secret organization, even a secret military outfit, without enemy penetration.”
“And? If we’re not going to use me, really use me, as an asset, why am I here and not panning for gold in the territories?”
“Panning for what? You know someone really should have kept you from reading crazy stuff in childhood.”
Simon frowned. “Never mind. The point is we’re either going to use me or we’re not. Your decision. If we’re not going to use me, can I get a submarine to take me to parts unknown? If we’re going to use me—if my presence is absolutely necessary to rescuing the people who rely on me, can we cut the crap and just go to this conference in the Blue Room or wherever?”
“Not without me,” I said, as I closed the last fastener.
They both looked at me, and Simon opened his mouth. But Brisbois spoke first. “No, Simon. It’s no use. First because if we are being serious, then we’re going to need all the help we can get. And second because I have a strong feeling it’s absolutely no use. Not when Madame Sienna has decided on something.”
Simon looked dubious, but then he nodded. “We go to the conference room then.” A slow grin twisted his lips as he squeezed my upper arm. “They’ll never know what hit them.”
Trapped in Shadowland
The three of us walked, barefoot, out of the room, and asked the first person we met—a young woman in green coveralls, who seemed to know Brisbois and recognize Simon, whom she graced with a small smile—where the Blue Room was.
The barefoot thing bothered me. Surely they could have brought us shoes, when they brought us clothes?
On the other hand, I felt more naked than that because, for the first time since the night of the party, I was without a burner. I half-hoped one of the men had a burner on him, but I suspected not, since we’d all been stripped and given our present clothes.
If I knew Simon, he had probably been a walking arsenal. I’d never known him when he wasn’t carrying enough weapons for a small army, much less when he was carrying none. And there, at the back my head was the question: why had they not returned our weapons? Or at least not returned mine?
They had, after all, made sure we were who we said we were. So they could trust us. But could we trust them?
I wanted to talk about it, to ask the two men if they had weapons, and if not, why not, but I didn’t dare. I felt the only thing worse than being scared that we were all unarmed was knowing for a fact that we were all unarmed.
The Blue Room was at the end of a long hallway without doors, where the walls looked like they’d been carved from rock and then coated in gold. I had a momentary pang of something not quite grief. When Len and I had leased our very first ship for harvesting pods from Earth orbit—all the ships belonged to the Energy Board, and the best we could do was lease from them, but most of the leases were semi-permanent, as long as the couple worked—we couldn’t afford much, but in this, our first home, we wanted to have something special. So we’d gilded the walls of the first room in the ship, partly because it was also the smallest room in the ship and we could afford it.
At the same time, the back of my neck was prickling, the hair trying to rise. That corridor with no doors seemed like a perfect way to corral us in such a way we couldn’t easily escape.
The door at the end was half open, and Brisbois opened it completely and stepped in. One thing I’ll say for the man. He had the gift of filling to capacity any room he entered.
When we arrived, the room contained only three men, who had been seated before we entered. It was a vast room and looked like it had been designed for large meetings. A long table and many chairs could have accommodated a couple dozen people. But once Brisbois stepped into it, and looked around as though inspecting it for stolen accoutrements, the room was filled to capacity.
Simon and I pushed in, on either side, and I suspected looked much like afterthoughts to Brisbois’s looming presence. The men who had been sitting looked discomfited too. The three of them were much of a size, and a look, that look saying “trained in fighting.” The middle one had jaws like a bulldog, and dark blond hair cut very short. The one on his left had a leaner, longer face and dark hair. The one on the right was slightly shorter than the other two. They all wore the white uniforms that had belonged to Simon’s house. And they looked…
I narrowed my eyes as the look found a place in my mind. They looked exactly like naughty children caught misbehaving. Like little boys caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Interesting. I wondered why. And I meant to find out.
They rose—slowly—as we came in. They looked at Simon with narrowed eyes, then at Brisbois evaluating, then at me.
The one in the middle spoke first. I noted that when he spoke he put his hand on his hip, and I suspected under his white uniform hid a holstered weapon. “We didn’t expect you, Commander Brisbois,” he said. “And we didn’t expect”—his eyes slid to Simon—“a lookalike.”
Oh. I dropped onto my left foot, ready to spring. That was how they were going to play it, was it? I suspected they were going to find it was not a good idea.
“He is not a lookalike, Baudin, and you know it. Don’t be a fool. You analyzed our genetics.”
Baudin looked confused. It was just a moment. Clearly in his cunning plan to—what, claim that Simon was an impostor?—he’d forgotten what they’d done to allow us in here. But he never admitted a mistake, just said, “And someone who appears to be, from her genetics, Jarl Ingemar, after a very sophisticated sex change operation.”
This got Brisbois to look at me, but only for a second. Like me, surely he could sense the movement in the room as he turned away, and then as he turned back to them. “She’s not Jarl Ingemar,” he said.
“That’s not what the little test told us. And people like
them
—” There was an unholy emphasis on the
them
, and eyes going to myself and Simon—“making themselves female bodies and having their brains transplanted into such bodies is not wholly unheard of. We have heard things…”
I sensed more than saw Simon move, and wondered exactly what he was doing. It was a tiny move. What could he do? It was just us, and armed men. Armed men who might very well be hostile.
The back of my mind was calculating: there were three of them. Likely they were all armed. How to take them out?
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Brisbois said. And then in the tone of someone whose mind had been following the same path ours had. “What exactly has been going on here? And what are you three up to? Precisely?”
If he expected embarrassment or abasement, he didn’t get it. The man on the left smiled, a smile that reminded me of pictures I’d seen of weasels. I’d never actually seen a weasel, Eden not having taken many animals, but this was very true to the pictures. “Well, we’ve been thinking.”
“I don’t think so,” Brisbois said. “If you’d been thinking, you wouldn’t be asking us stupid questions, Souci.”
Souci-the-weasel narrowed his eyes. “Oh, no,” he said. The smile was gone but the impression of a small rodent who thinks he has the upper hand remained. “We’ve been thinking about this whole thing. The way we see it, right? What went wrong the last time we purged the Mules from the world, is that the Mules,” he pointed at Simon, “like him, came back and took over again, the way they do. And then they polluted everything again, the way they do.” His mouth quirked. “Which is why we’ve been thinking and planning. Now, this whole thing about enhanced people being evil…” He shrugged. “The way I see it, Madame has a point. And doesn’t. At this point practically everyone is enhanced, so if we’re a little more enhanced than the others, who cares? It makes us more competent and better able to rule them, while still being human. Human, like he and—” he actually pointed a finger at me, and the finger was trembling—“she aren’t. I mean, if they’re allowed to go on, and you know, reproduce, they’ll just push us off this Earth, so we’ve been talking, and we think it’s better to—”
We never even traded a look. Where we were, it simply wasn’t possible. And though telepathy was bioengineered into bonded nav and pilot couples in Eden, you had to be bonded. Perhaps Simon had the same telepathy engineered into him. It was an open secret some of the old Mules did, and we were their clones, even if I was somewhat modified. But Simon and I didn’t have telepathy. And Brisbois and I surely didn’t.
Yet there was something to the tensing of their muscles—felt, more than seen—or perhaps to the way their smell changed or…I can’t explain it, except to say that I knew I wouldn’t be alone, as I decided this had gone far enough and leapt.
I assumed these people were bioengineered for speed and maybe intelligence, just like we were bioengineered. So, it seemed to me my only hope was surprise.
I flew out at the one who was speaking, feet first, hitting him in the middle of the solar plexus, then rolled to my feet past him. I turned to poke the eyes out of the one in the center, but he wasn’t there. He was attempting to attack Brisbois, who had just taken out the one on the right.
I pulled the gun off the guy I’d knocked to the ground—he wasn’t moving. And Brisbois got the gun off the man he’d subdued. As he did, the guy who’d been in the middle flew out at Brisbois, fists flying.
“Freeze!” that was Simon, standing in the middle of the room, holding a burner. “Freeze or I’ll shoot.”
We froze. The two of us and the man who was still standing of the triumvirate who would…what? Rule the seacity? We had to find out what was going on and exactly how many people in this secret base had gone over to the enemy side. And was it the enemy side, or merely a conspiracy of the loons in here?
But before all that, Simon said, “Zen, would you kindly disarm the large gentleman. Take his obvious weapon and bring it to me. And you, Alexis, would you search him. You’re probably better at that than Zen.”
I took the weapon I could see through the man’s clothes, and walked backwards, covering the still-conscious Baudin, till I handed the spare burner to Simon, who pocketed his much smaller burner, took the safety off the big guard’s burner, and said, “Now, let us talk like civilized people.”
Baudin stared. “We searched you,” he said. “All of you. You could not have had a concealed weapon.”
Simon shrugged. “Oookay. We can discuss that, or we can discuss what exactly you thought you were doing, with whom you thought you were working, and precisely how many people in this base are on your side.”
“All of them,” Baudin said. “We talked in democratic assembly and we’ve decided that you are not a true human and we should not be serving you. Particularly since you and she plan on reproducing and replacing all humans.”
“News to me,” Simon said. He gave me a sideways glance which I couldn’t quite read, one that was perhaps half-wishful and half-amused. “Even if we were planning on reproducing, I don’t think we’d get so busy as to replace the population of the Earth. And we’re not that different. Just a bit enhanced.”
“Very enhanced,” Baudin said. “Not like the rest of us. We’re simply the best of humans, and, being the best of humans, we are their natural rulers, to keep them from the pitfalls of folly that have marred their history. With us in control, there will neither be the heinous excesses of your kind, nor—”
“I don’t think he’s right,” I said.
“About their ruling?” Brisbois asked. He was finishing tying together the hands of the guy I’d hit. His own victim looked dead. “I’m sure he isn’t. He’s just a little would-be king, trying to knock off those above him and rule in their stead. He would be worse than any Mule, even the really bad ones like Simon’s father, begging pardon.”
“Begging pardon for what?” Simon said. “I say that about the old bastard myself.”
“No,” I said. “About everyone being with them, Brisbois,” I said. “If they were, why wouldn’t they simply have filled the chamber with water when we first came in? Or added something lethal to the air, after it was proven we’re who we say we are. And that man, the one who agreed to the genetic tests—Basil?—I don’t think he was intending on killing us. Why bother with the genetic tests?”
Brisbois looked at me, chewing on the corner of his lip.
“Also,” he said at last. “People would have arrested us or confined us in a room, not…Simon, keep an eye on this one? I’m going to reconnoiter.”
“I can do that,” I said.
“No,” Simon said. “You might hesitate in shooting someone ostensibly unarmed until it’s too late.”
“Madame Sienna?” Brisbois said. He whistled air between his teeth. “Brother, she shot a Revolutionary Guard without a second look, just because she thought he might check up on my nonexistent mother.”
Simon gave me an appraising look. “That true, Zen?” And then, “But I still think I shouldn’t be the one stay—”
“Simon,” Brisbois said. “I want both of you to stay. You’re too valuable as you are, and Madame Sienna will stay and guard you. I’m the most expendable of us. If I don’t come back…” He pulled a ring from his finger and handed it to me. It was one of the cheap com rings. “It dials Jonny LaForce to the right and Mailys to the left. If they answer, tell them it is you, and I suppose they can ask questions to establish that is true. Then tell them I followed through on what Jonathan recommended and what happened.
“And now I’m going to reconnoiter.”
“Wait, Alexis,” Simon said, urgently. “Why can’t we just shoot this bastard and all three of us go?”