Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) (28 page)

Let There Be Light

To say the next half hour was confused is not unakin to saying that the ocean is a little wet.

We did come down from our roost and, after a brief conference, Brisbois told Basil to pick up his burner and to let his people rearm themselves. After that, we separated into groups of two and three to go search the hallways and the rooms off them.

I cannot prove that Brisbois assigned Simon and myself the safest, most boring hallway in the entire compound. I don’t even know how he could have found out that it was the safest hallway. After all, if he’d known that, then he’d know who was in every place and he wouldn’t have needed to send patrols out, which they needed to do because the normal monitoring system had been tampered with and none of the sensors were working or couldn’t be trusted.

If you get the impression that things aren’t very clear in my memory, you are right. I was tired and coming down from a period of high stress, so words and sentences reached me, out of whole conversations, and I remembered only the impression of them.

Thus I retained the impression their surveillance system had broken, and so they sent us out, by twos and threes, and they sent me with Simon, who did the thing in style.

We walked down the hallway as silently as we could, listening at every door and kicking open the doors from the side, in the best virtus detective style, before peeking in, after which he searched the room, while I stayed in the hallway, in case someone charged out of another of the rooms, and then we traded, in case I could find something he had missed.

There must have been twenty bedrooms off that hallway, and I was starting to think that they were all unoccupied, until we got to the end, where there had obviously been a fight, and two young men lay dead on the floor, in pools of blood, each with a burner still in his hand.

And then we returned to the common area, and were pulled into a room where things were being discussed, or explained. Or both. At first I wasn’t very sure what was happening.

As I said, I was tired and confused.

The group consisted of myself and Simon and Basil, LaForce and Mailys, and some other people who’d come in with Jonathan LaForce and Mailys, but whom I didn’t know. The strangers were very quiet. Mailys told me she’d left Corin with Jonathan LaForce’s family, having convinced him to stay in order to keep them safe. She smiled when she said that, obviously very proud of having found the right way to talk Corin into not running any unnecessary risks.

I remember that, but nothing else said to me or around me left any impression.

However, little by little, after some young man in a relatively clean uniform had brought me three cups of coffee in quick succession, I stopped shivering and began feeling somewhat warmer and started paying attention to those around me.

Maybe it wasn’t as much time as I thought. Brisbois and Simon both looked at me with concern, but they thought I couldn’t see it, I think, so I pretended I didn’t, for the sake of keeping the peace.

Basil looked tired, and he too was sipping coffee. He looked older than Brisbois, so he was a survivor from the regime of Simon’s father. Which made me wonder if he was fully loyal. He frowned at me as if from a long distance, and unless I am completely wrong, at some point he asked me, “Jarl Ingemar?”

I don’t know what the rest of the question was, because that part was either never heard or not rightly understood. I answered what I thought he was asking. “Has been dead,” I said, “for over twenty years. He and Doctor Bartolomeu Dias created male and female clones of themselves. For—” I thought about the confused tangle of motives I knew about and the ones I could infer, and then remembered Doc Bartolomeu, who might be the closest thing I had had to a relative, or at least to a relative who cared for me. In the arid landscape of my childhood, he’d been a kindly if curmudgeonly presence, always ready with jokes or advice, with encouragement and derision. He hadn’t treated me like a child of the gods. I suppose, to him, I wasn’t, just the closest thing to a daughter of an old friend.

So I thought of him and the less than charitable ideas I’d had about why Kit and I and possibly others—though Doc denied going through with creating his own male and female clones—had been created. And then I kept that part to myself and said, “For company, and I suppose for a new experience in their old age. Raising children. Only Jarl died before I was born.”

“Oh,” he said, and looked at me, a long evaluating look.

If I hadn’t known that Athena Sinistra, like me the clone of a Mule, had been created so that her father’s brain could be transplanted to her head, I’d have been offended. As it was, I merely shrugged it off and returned his scrutiny with an open stare.

He shook his head. “You understand finding your DNA…Well…We…Brisbois tells me you were born and raised in a colony not populated by Mules. He says you can’t reveal its placement, or your origin, and I’m certainly not going to force the issue. I don’t have an interest in it. Even if you came from the world of darkship thieves. I know that Good Man Sinistra had an entire project of catching the darkship thieves, but there is no real damage from them. More power pods are created than can be harvested in time. It’s possible the thieves are doing us a favor, by diminishing the chances that the pods will explode and reseed, making the power trees even harder to harvest. So, if your planet of origin is some harmless colony of the normal people who left with the Mules and were abandoned behind, we don’t mind.

“On the other hand, it is hard not to imagine that the Mules who named their ship
Je Reviens
had something planned.”

“Whatever they had planned,” this was Simon, crisply. He disliked the term “Mule” as intensely as the original Mules had. He referred to them as they’d referred to themselves, as
biorulers
or
biolords.
“Their plans went wrong almost from the beginning, since they did not plan on leaving half of their number behind. So, I think we can stop wondering what they meant. And Jarl is dead. He won’t be coming back.”

I felt a twinge of discomfort, since Jarl had more or less tried to come back from the grave by taking over Kit, and Simon knew it too, but neither of us spoke of that.

Basil sighed. “Well, that’s it. And we know who you are and what you are, of course, Monsieur St. Cyr.”

Simon smiled, his lips quirking upwards on the right. It wasn’t a nice smile. “I know who I am, also,” he said.

Brisbois made a sound that might have been
“merde”
under his breath.

“What I want to know,” Jonathan LaForce said. “Has very little to do with who St. Cyr or Madame Sienna is and everything to do with how in holy hell you got into this mess here.” He looked at Basil, his eyes conveying barely restrained fury. “This was a safe place. Known only by me. There are others of these places even I don’t know of. Brisbois—” He looked at Alexis. “Set these up because he thought the carefully planned transition in the revolution might go wrong. They were supposed to be safe!” LaForce’s fist was huge, and it banged on the table hard. “We were supposed to be safe here and able to work a counterattack. So, we come back to this?”

Basil held the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger for a count of two minutes, his eyes closed, his head slightly inclined. When he looked back up, he looked…bereft. Like a man who had a plan and had done his best to make it work, only to find that he was on the wrong track the whole time. “I still had to staff these shelters with people. Our people.”

I looked up, suddenly, as things added up behind my eyes. “You mean that everyone here was modified? And how many more people were modified? You said there were other shelters.”

Basil looked up. He opened his mouth, then snapped it shut, then sighed. “Tens of thousands, at least. That we know and can trace, and can be traced, in my lifetime, maybe a little older, twenty thousand or so. We have…four thousand in various hidden shelters, here and in the continental territories, mostly in Europe.” He took a deep breath, and looked at what must have been my utterly shocked face. “Not all first generation. Not even close. Some are the result of mating between enhanced people whose enhancements breed true.”

I felt like this was insane. Was everyone modified? Then at the last minute I remembered the difference between Earth and Eden. In Eden having twenty thousand intentionally enhanced people might represent all of the population. In fact, it almost did, though a lot of people didn’t tamper with their children’s fundamental makeup out of religious respect or other considerations. But bioengineering was widely available and got widely employed. Expensive modifications like the ones that created navigators and pilots and a few other highly specialized communities were rare and kept within a certain number of families, normally. But minor modifications, for looks or computational ability, often got bought on a retail basis by prospective parents worried about how their children would turn out. The thing was—

I paused. The thing was that in Eden, where modifications were out in the open and openly bought, the modifications were not inheritable. They couldn’t be because, if they were, then the companies would shortly not have anything to sell. And it turned out the majority of people were prejudiced towards their kids being maybe only a little better than themselves.

But on Earth, where modifications were underground, secretive, and run by an over-authoritarian elite, then of course the modifications would be inheritable, and often imposed from above, so that everyone who could be born with enhancements represented a cheap buy for the Good Men. No. That couldn’t be true. Given that sort of setup, how could the Good Men be sure they controlled everyone who was modified for their benefit, or at least that they controlled them so they didn’t turn against the Good Men?

Then I remembered that the Good Men had a slight quirk absent from the makeup of both Eden and most of the human population on Earth. Because of who they were—the original high IQ Mules, raised to be servants of the bureaucracy but taking power over the bureaucracy itself and blossoming into the biolords—and the way they were brought up, in strict crèches, by people who were afraid of them, they had virtually no loyalty to humanity in general, and very little loyalty to enhanced people.

It wasn’t so much that they didn’t consider themselves human or thought of humans as objects. They thought of everyone, themselves included, as objects. Humans were just things you played with. Numbers, ciphers. They didn’t even think of themselves as relevant or important. Their upbringing had stripped them of that.

Normal people, no matter what the logical necessity of the move, wouldn’t be able to have clones of themselves made and raise them as their own children, no matter how detached the raising, and then have them killed in order to steal their bodies. Normal human beings, no matter how maimed or wounded—human beings who thought of themselves as human beings or even as significant in any way beyond a purpose—wouldn’t be able to do that to a child they’d seen grow up.

I realized, with a sort of inner shake, that I would not be able to do it. Even if I had hated the young person I’d raised, I would not be able to kill him or her in order to keep myself alive and in power.

But the only thing the Good Men had, the only thing that they lived by and held to, the only thing they wanted, was to preserve their own lives. There was no higher principle. Any they’d been given had failed to take hold. If they’d been given any principles beyond “obey constituted authority”—and I don’t think there had been much—they’d learned better, when they’d realized how thoroughly they’d been manipulated and designed as a sort of superior slave, despite being more capable than those around them.

The poor creatures had been thrown into the world as a sort of maimed solipsistic paranoids. They not only didn’t consider anyone else real, they didn’t consider themselves particularly real or special either. They had only wanted to survive.

A bit of that feeling had resulted in my creation and Kit’s, by two who were arguably the best of the Mules. And even if they had repented the impulse that might have led to our destruction ultimately, the impulse had been there.