I didn't believe it for a minute. Kit mustn't have either, because he said, Don't you dare. I'll blow my brains out the moment you leave the Cathouse.
His words in my mind were so forceful there was no room to doubt him. Don't worry, I told Kit, as I made as if to go ahead of Daddy Dearest. My mouth was dry and I felt my mind dip into panic. I didn't trust the unholy son of a bitch, not further than I could throw him. And I had no intentions of throwing him. But there would be a moment, when he turned, to take me out of the room, that his burner wouldn't be on Kit.
I couldn't understand why Kit hadn't tried anything already—except that as I looked over my shoulder I realized, from the flickers on the screen, that we'd steered into the powertrees. Father had waited till we were there. Which meant I couldn't count on Kit.
Don't worry, I told Kit. I'll handle it.
"Move it, further," my father said. "I'm not following that close to you." And then, casually, he turned and raised his hand and brought the burner butt down on Kit's cheek, cutting a groove from which blood flowed, amid the calico beard.
Kit's eyes reflected on the screens, maddened by fear and anger.
Forty-Nine
It's just that Father miscalculated, because when he turned to get to Kit, he turned away from me for a moment. And he didn't have his burner pointed at Kit, either.
Long enough.
I threw myself through the air and grabbed at his burner. I tore his aim away from Kit, as his finger pressed the trigger. The beam hit at the ceiling.
And then I was fighting, roaring, mad with fear, insane with protective, jealous love, caring only for keeping my father away from Kit.
My father was stronger than I'd ever thought. Stronger and better trained. His nails gouged at my skin. His feet tripped me. His hands grabbed mine, immobilized me.
Even wounded, even old, even insane, he was more than a match for me.
This close in, I couldn't use my ballet moves. I could try, but they wouldn't work—I was too close to him.
Father switched his hold to my neck, tightened his hands around my throat and pushed me up against the wall of the Cathouse.
"You stupid bitch," he said. "What did you think you were going to do? So glad to find a boyfriend? So glad you can't think when you're around him." My father grinned at me, his face totally inhuman. "Did I ever tell you what my specialty was, in the days before the turmoils, daughter?"
I couldn't breathe and the world was growing dim before my eyes.
"I was an assassin, created to enforce Mule rule over the stupid humans. An assassin, Athena. Designed to kill men and Mules. That's where you got your fighting ability, dear. Your speed, your strength, your sense of direction and your mechanical ability. I was designed with them so I could carry out missions in hostile territory. Alone. And you got them accidentally, through my genes. But I'm the original, you're just the copy. But you are the copy and if your bio had managed to take you with him, he'd find that you turn out just like dear old dad . . . Isn't that funny?"
Nothing was funny. Sad. Shocking. Terrible. Not funny. The world was slipping away.
My hands were tearing at my own neck, trying to pry my father's fingers away.
And my senses were running away from me, dimming, disappearing.
As from a long distance off, I heard, "And now, when you pass out, we'll kill your boyfriend and we'll go back to the flyer before we hit anything."
Flailing, feeling my life ebb away like water among rocks, I was aware of Kit's foot—as though it were my foot—slowly sliding along the floor, towards the lever that turned off the internal gravity of the Cathouse—a function left over from its days as a training ship, when it was needed to train recruits in null-g, just in case.
We weren't mind-linked. But perhaps subconsciously my mind reached for his, in fear of death. I felt the lever beneath his boot, felt it slide and then click to.
And then the null-g kicked in, and my father and I floated to the ceiling, his hands still around my neck.
Fifty
But I had trained in null-g with Kit. We'd mock-fought each other in null-g, for exercise. Kit liked the freedom of null-g and he thought I needed to practice in it.
My father struggled to regain footing. I twisted his fingers away from my neck.
I understood now why the other Mules hadn't taken him to Eden with them. He was a killer. How much was I like him? Was I destined, infallibly, to become a copy of the murderous bastard?
I surely felt like killing. Like rending him to pieces. I felt as bloodthirsty as Nat. I wanted to kill him slowly and over weeks. I wanted to hear him scream.
Both of us had lost our burners in the melee, but I'd always been more at home with fists and feet.
I kicked at him, and I twisted and wrenched at him, and I used all my ballet moves, unfettered, all the more graceful for the null-g.
Given the advantage of null-g, I soon had him cornered against the bulkhead, and I had my hands around his scrawny neck. I would kill him now, I thought.
But there were his eyes looking at me, and in them I read utter terror and complete defeat. He was bleeding from the corner of his mouth and his forehead. Blood stained the shoulder of his tunic. His eyes were dull with pain.
And I thought he was a killer. Designed to kill. Was I that much like him that I could kill remorselessly? In cold blood? With my bare hands?
Kit kicked the gravity and we fell to the ground. I gathered myself up, painfully.
And Kit was standing by us, holding my father up. "We're in a corridor," he said. "We're safe for now. On automatic pilot."
"I can't kill him," I said, and half opened my hands. I looked at Kit and sighed. It would be more truthful to say I didn't want to kill him. I wanted to think of myself as different from him. Not made to kill.
"No one is asking you to." Kit shrugged. "He forced us onto the energy trees. You piloted through them before. He should be able to. We'll put him in the air-to-space he brought in. If he has the same capacity of movement you have, he can do it. And then, on Earth, we'll let him square it with your friend Simon. I doubt he'll have an easy match."
I agreed. Who'd have thought of Simon that way?
Kit dragged my father out to the bay. "You may get in that air-to-space and fly away," Kit said. "In two minutes we will open the outer door. If you don't fly away, you'll be spaced. Without the air-to-space."
He dropped my father into the bay and walked back and lowered the lever that slid the door closed.
My father seemed to wake up, as the door was halfway closed. He lurched at us.
"Three hundred years," he yelled. "You won't destroy it all now. Jarl betrayed me once. I won't have it again."
He grabbed at the two halves of the door and shoved hard. They still slid together, closer and closer. My father refused to give up. He kept pushing, even as the halves of the door squeezed him between them.
It all took no longer than a painfully drawn breath, but in my mind, replayed, it lasts forever—a slow agony of fear and struggle.
Kit fumbled for the lever to halt the closing, but he was just slightly slower than normal—tired and confused by being hit with the butt of the burner.
And I was exhausted. I tried to jump towards the door. Too late.
The two halves of the dimatough door clunked together.
Blood spurted everywhere—on my clothes, my face, my lips—warm and metallic.
I know I didn't pass out. Athena Hera Sinistra doesn't pass out. That's for the pampered, well-brought-up girls of Earth. Athena Sinistra was tougher than that. Athena Sinistra was a Mule.
But it must have been the earlier oxygen deprivation, and the adrenaline and all. I stared at the bloody mess caught between the doors and reality slid away from me as my vision darkened and I collapsed to the floor.
Fifty-ONE
I woke up with Kit curled around me.
Opening my eyes, I saw that we were in our room, aboard the Cathouse.
At first
I thought he was asleep, but then I felt his hand caressing my hairless head and heard him say, over and over again, "It's all right."
"Should you be here?" I asked, with sudden alarm. "The energy trees—"
"We got out of the ring hours ago," he said. He looked sheepish. "I harvested. Only five pods. I gave you a sedative, so I could pilot us out and clean up and . . . and catch some sleep. I feel like myself again, at last." He reached for me and pulled me close. There were bruises on his shoulder, bruises down his neck, but he didn't seem to be complaining.
"Isn't it weird?" I said, half dazed.
He raised his eyebrows at me. "What?"
"That we're both Mules. I mean—"
He shrugged. "I had suspected it before. The way Doc Bartolomeu kept talking about your ancestor. I think he did too. It was just that . . . it was too great a miracle for him to hope for, I guess."
"Do you think . . . there will be more . . . of me?"
"I don't know," he said, then smiled mischievously. "I'll let Doc dissect you and then—"
I put my finger on his lips. "No, seriously. I mean, if we have children . . ."
"We save a bundle because we don't need to have them created in tubes," he said. "Yes, I do realize that."
"Kit, do be serious," I said. "If we have children, with whom will they have children?"
Kit shrugged. "Isn't that entirely their problem? We'll try to have daughters, all right? And then we can send them on a ship, after the long-lost Mules. We'll make sure to include a note saying they can have babies with whomever they want."
"Kit, do be serious!" I said. "There is something you're not thinking of." My mind was full of the events of the last few hours, and I felt vaguely dizzy. "What if . . . Father was an assassin. They built me as close as possible to him, so I could accept his brain. What if I turn . . ."
"Into an assassin? Unlikely. Not very lucrative in Eden. I mean, okay, some people prefer to pay someone else, but it gets all messy with the blood geld." He saw my serious eyes and sighed. "Thena . . . I fell in love with you as you are. Fractured, maybe. Lost, perhaps. But I'm no prize either. I'll keep an eye on you. You keep an eye on me. I don't think either of us has an affinity for wanton killing, much less for doing it for pleasure. Look how you reacted to your father's death.
"He might have been an assassin, but it took more than genetics to make him one."
Fifty-Two
The alarms that told us we were approaching Eden rang ten weeks later, while we were in bed. Eden's orbit had taken it two weeks away from us while we were on Earth.
We got up, quickly, and dressed in our uniforms so that we were perfectly official as we got to Eden.
I sat in Kit's cabin, because there was a good chance we'd be shot out of the sky and I'd be damned if I was going to go in isolation.
Kit did the last approach, brought Eden onto the screen and flicked the comlink. Still not too sure these weren't our last few minutes of life, I took a deep breath to control my fear.
He reached for my hand and squeezed it, as he said, "Cat Christopher Bartolomeu Sinistra, piloting the Cathouse on behalf of the Energy Board. I request permission to land."
There was a silence from the other side, long enough for my heart to almost stop. I remembered what Eden had been like before. And yet, scared as I was of our reception, I couldn't help but smile, because I had found someone I belonged to.
If Eden didn't want us, we'd find our way elsewhere.
I was not alone anymore. I belonged.
A voice that I would say was the voice of the dock controller who'd first welcomed me to Eden, crackled over the link, "The Cathouse is more than six weeks late. It has been entered in the roll of losses. Cat Christopher Sinistra and Nav Athena Sinistra are dead."
"Not really," I told him, while my heart hammered wildly and I had to resist an urge to shout my joy. It was just bureaucracy. We could deal with that. "Only late."
"You cannot be late. You only had fuel for a four-month trip. Three weeks later you'd be out of reserves and dead. You—"
"We were down on Earth," I said and grinned, a grin he couldn't see but might just sense from the tone of my voice.
"What?" the controller asked.
"Nav Sinistra had radiation poisoning and we stopped on Earth for regen treatment," Kit said, in a slow, wary voice.
"You stopped on Earth for treatment?"
"Well, it wasn't that simple, but yes. I'll be glad to tell you the whole story after we land."
"You'd better, Cat. And you'd better make it convincing. This is most irregular."
"Controller," I said. After all we'd been through, the Controller's bullying tones were almost funny. "We must land. Kit's family is expecting us."
Another silence. "Navigator Sinistra, if you delayed your collection run for personal reasons, you have to know that the Energy Board will fine you for the delay in supply, and all the boards will want to interview you for potential breaches of security. Also—"
"I know, Controller." I batted my eyes at the console, not that it helped, but hey, sexiness can be felt across links, right? "Now, could you give us a dock number, please? Before I go crazy and just give my cat instructions to dash at Eden in the area of the landing control station. We Earthworms tend to be so temperamental."
Kit chuckled aloud over the comlink.
"Dock fifty-five, but I want you to know that I shall have armed hushers ready and that you will be examined for any evidence of undue influence and that—"
I flicked the comlink off.
Nothing says welcome home like a strip search.
THE END
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Darkship Thieves Page 37