Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “Go. I can’t fight while you’re in danger. Go,” Simon said. “Alexis, take her.”

  He pushed me upward, and before I could resist, Alexis grabbed me around the waist. He was a large, muscular man. There was no hesitation, no pause. He nodded to Simon and loped along, dragging me with him, even as I scrabbled to free myself and protested, “No, you don’t understand. I’d rather fight. I can fight. I’m stronger than—”

  “Can’t do anything,” he said. “Can’t fight a mob.” He looked around. “Even my men can’t.”

  I wanted to say he was wrong but then I realized I didn’t even know where the threat was coming from or against whom to retaliate and the damn man was pulling me along too fast to let me get my footing, much less get my bearings.

  I ground my teeth, tried ineffectually to stop. “Give me a burner.”

  But he just pulled me along amid crowds of fighting people. Burners shot this way and that. Alexis seemed to have the supernatural ability to be where no one was, cutting through the crowd, very fast, avoiding the turmoil, ducking before a burner ray flashed through the air where we’d just been. Someone bumped me. Friend or foe, I didn’t know, and regretted only not having the time to steal their burner.

  I could no longer see Simon in the crowd. I smelled blood and fire. I stopped resisting Alexis’s pull. Impossible to fight when I didn’t know whom to fight. I might be able to shoot better than most people, but not when friend and foe rolled over, screaming and fighting. And as for hitting someone, I didn’t have time to identify the people I bumped into, much less to fight all of them. So many people. Fighting all around.

  The situation was out of control and I hated being out of control.

  Another two explosions below, getting closer. The nearest dimatough pane cracked, top to bottom. They weren’t supposed to crack. The crystal chandelier fell, bits of crystal flying in all directions.

  Alexis said, “Run,” and grabbed my hand and took off. I ran. Nothing else I could do in this. There was nothing to be gained in dying alongside those being killed.

  Dead women can’t fight, I thought. First, stay alive, then fight.

  Alexis ran into the melee, fast, his arm an iron band around my waist. People careened into me and shot at us. No shot landed. No blow either, beyond the feeling of being bruised and scraped.

  He dragged me through what seemed to be a concealed door, down a couple of staircases, and onto a dark terrace by the seaside, in the middle of Simon’s gardens.

  “Come on,” Alexis said, sounding desperate. He pulled at me. “Trust the Good—Trust the Protector. He says I should keep you safe. He knows what he’s doing, if we leave his hand free.” As he spoke, explosions sounded, coming ever closer. I could hear the barbarous song from the ballroom, faint, like a haunting echo, but drawing near. It seemed to me the sounds of fighting were more muted, which, considering the circumstances, was not a good thing.

  “But can Simon defend himself in this? And what about everyone else?” He was a dictator. He might be a murderer. But he had been kind to me. He might have loved me.

  “We were taken by surprise,” he said. He panted, and it was good to know our race had rendered him out of breath. “I don’t know who our attackers are. We have to escape and reconnoiter. If I could fight effectively, I’d fight. The Protector will take care of himself.” He pulled me down a dark path on the palace grounds and clattered down a set of staircases. His hand was too warm, rough, holding me as though it were the most important thing in the world that he take me along. “We’ll leave the Good Man a free hand. He knows what he’s doing. We’ll live to fight another day.”

  We ran across an expanse of lawn and down a brick path and up to a terrace where a row of flyers were parked. Simon’s official fleet for his servants, I thought, since the vehicles all looked alike.

  Alexis threw me into the passenger seat, got into the driver’s side, closed the doors from the control panel. We took off almost vertically.

  At once an explosion rocked us, then another.

  Alexis said, “Merde.” It was a popular word.

  “There’s more than the mob in the palace. Whoever these people are, they’re organized enough to control the skies. We can’t fly away.” He brought the flyer down, almost straight down, but into a grove of trees, well away from the palace. I was impressed. It took training to fly like that. “We won’t be allowed to escape by air. At least…not this easily. And whatever is going on is much bigger than the palace.”

  I leaned back on the seat, exhausted, feeling like I should go back and fight, but knowing it was quixotic and not very sane. There was only one of me, even if I felt I should be an army. I couldn’t believe how fast the ball had degenerated into a scene of death and mayhem. And I was starting to think even accepting Simon’s proposal would have been better than this. “Those people who came in. The intruders. Were they carrying heads on poles?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Alexis said.

  To Walk the Night

  “That’s—” I took a deep breath. I’d seen images like that from the Turmoils, three hundred years ago. But it was three hundred years ago. Surely it couldn’t happen now. We were more civilized, even on Earth, weren’t we? “Why would anyone do that?”

  “Intimidation,” Alexis said. He looked at me, as though trying to figure out just what I’d be prepared to accept. “They’re hoping that by being as barbaric as possible, they can get us to surrender before we think of fighting back.” He opened his side of the flyer and said, “Come, they might trace this. We must continue on foot, and fast.”

  I got out and found him there, waiting, reaching for my hand. “I know the way,” he said. “At least the way to get away from this.”

  I stopped. My hands grabbed at the stuff of my dress. “But we must fight back. They can’t be allowed—”

  “We will,” he said. “Or at least I will as soon as I know what’s happening. You, on the other hand, aren’t part of this and I promised the Good Man to keep you safe.”

  “It’s nonsense,” I said. “I’m stronger than you. I’m faster. I’m probably faster and stronger than Simon.” I saw his face cloud but couldn’t quite read the expression. “I’m supposed to protect others.” The last came out as a wail and even I couldn’t have known what I meant by it, except that since I remembered my foster parents had told me I should use my extraordinary strength and agility to protect others, rather than hurt them. They’d never told me what to do, I realized, when doing one required the other. They’d left me to navigate those waters on my own.

  He frowned at me. Then unceremoniously grabbed my forearm, pulled me along. “You’re not stronger than all the people at once. You’re not stronger than a mob.”

  He picked an odd path through the extensive gardens of the palace. I could feel roots and rocks under my feet. The ballroom slippers so perfect for dancing were not at all helpful in broken terrain. But I could hear sounds of people. Not peaceful sounds: shouting and screaming and occasional snatches of running and barbaric song; most definitely not peaceful sounds. If what my enhanced hearing could pick up was right, then the avenues of the garden, those paths that would be easier to walk, were full of the same people who had invaded the ballroom.

  Alexis was doing a good job of keeping us away from them, given that he didn’t have my abilities. He steered us down slippery lawns and amid tree groves. We didn’t want to fight, and he was wearing the white, gold-braid bedecked uniform of Simon’s personal guard. I was not only wearing a conspicuous ball gown, but my holo-image had been all over local casts, as the Patrician’s special guest.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I can fight. We don’t have to run away. I’m not…a normal human.”

  There was a sound suspiciously like a chuckle, as he took a sharp turn at a cypress grove. It was hard to be sure of the song, as there was a whistling wind blowing from the sea and it carried with it the faint echo of revolutionary lyrics. His next words were clear, though. “I
know,” he said.

  The words took my own breath away for a moment. The implications of them made me a little dizzy. “You know?” I asked, my voice sounding like I felt.

  He looked back and he was not smiling, which was good and might have saved his life. “The Good Man told me,” he said. “Come on. If you’re going to start screaming at me, I’d like to get further away from the palace first.”

  “I don’t want to scream,” I said, which was true. What I wanted was to understand.

  My origins weren’t so much a secret as they’d be unbelievable to ninety percent of the people on Earth old enough to understand them.

  My ancestors, or at least the ancestors of the people who’d founded Eden, the tiny and secretive colony of my birth, had left Earth three hundred years ago.

  They’d been bioimproved people created to serve the creatures who called themselves the biolords, but whom Earth history called Mules. The name came from their being all male and infertile with human females, thus designed so they couldn’t father a race that would supersede natural humanity.

  They’d been created not as rulers but as servants: efficient, all-capable servants who would help rulers administer the massive bureaucracies of the twenty-first century.

  They’d taken over. For over a hundred years, they’d ruled as lords of all. And, raised as slaves, insufficiently attached to the human race, their rule had been ruthless and implacable. When the revolt came, which they’d seen coming, about half of them had gathered all they could of their bioimproved servants and taken them away from the Earth, away from the massacres of the bioimproved by the normal, and to space in a ship called the Je Reviens.

  No one, not even in Eden, knew what had happened between the Mules and their servants abroad the Je Reviens. All we knew was that after less than a year of travel, it had been decided that the less-bioimproved people, the servants of the biolords, those who were still capable of reproducing with normal humanity and who were still more human than not, should be left in a hollowed-out asteroid, to found their own colony.

  The separation had been achieved with such haste that the colony had not been provided with its own means to collect energy. Instead, it had to send raiders to Earth orbit to collect pods from the powertrees, the biological solar collectors seeded by the Mules in the days of their rule.

  Those secretive collections were made in darkships. Dark, so as not to be noticeable against the massive, black trunks of the powertrees. The ships were also, even in comparison to transport flyers on Earth and on Eden, nearly blind and certainly stupid. Instead of improving them and risking their falling in enemy hands with all their information, Eden bioimproved their pilots and navigators, for agility and vision, and sense of direction and memory. I’d been the navigator and mechanic of such a ship for six years, half of a team with my late husband.

  If we were disabled or captured, pilot and navigator were to commit suicide rather than let Earth know for sure we existed or where Eden was. I shied away from that thought and thought instead that the system had worked, that this was why darkship thieves were as much of a myth on Earth as elves or mermaids.

  “You know I’m a darkship thief?” I asked.

  He actually stopped. He’d been walking ahead, regardless of my attempts to talk. “I know you’re like the Patrician,” he said. “One of the Mules. I know you’re as close as possible to a female clone of Jarl Ingemar.”

  And then I almost screamed. Jarl Ingemar was arguably the best of the Mules. Or possibly the worst, depending on whom you asked. His rule certainly had been more intrusive than others. You see, he was well-intentioned and brilliant. The powertrees, a lot of the bioimprovements to other humans, more innovations than could be listed were counted to his credit.

  If you could imagine Leonardo da Vinci created and raised in a wholly artificial environment and encouraged to think it was his lot to improve not just humanity’s living conditions but humanity itself, you’d be pretty close to Jarl Ingemar.

  He’d been the mind behind the conception and creation of the Je Reviens. He’d also been one of the two Mules who had chosen to stay behind with the almost normal servants of the Mules, to assist in the founding of Eden. And who, little by little, had encouraged people to forget he still lived, as he walled himself up in a fortress of solitude and isolation.

  Perhaps it was to combat this that his best friend, and the other Mule left behind, Bartolomeu Dias, had conceived the scheme of trying to create female and male clones of themselves. Perhaps the scheme had been darker and designed to give the long-lived but not immortal Mules a chance at living forever.

  Just before Jarl’s death, they’d created me and what I must for lack of a better word call my brother, Kit. All that I could forgive. I wasn’t sure I could forgive that they’d called me Zenobia, which means spirit of Zeus. Nor that I’d been given to a human couple to raise, a couple who’d always seemed bewildered by me. Bartolomeu Dias, even aged, might have made a better foster parent.

  None of this, though, explained why Simon would have told this man that I was made from Jarl’s genes, assembled in a lab by a complex process that defeated the ability to recombine Mule DNA and make female Mules.

  If few people on Earth would be able to believe I was a darkship thief, anyone who did believe I was Jarl’s clone was likely to try to kill me.

  “He…Why?”

  “He trusted me. Trusts me. With what he is, too, with being descended…no, created from the Mules who were left behind. He told me that the same Mule has been succeeding himself as the ruler of Liberte for centuries, having his brain transplanted to that of his putative son, so he could inherit from himself.”

  “Why did he tell you? When?”

  “Oh, years ago, when he hired me as head of his security,” Alexis said. “There were reasons. In the way I became his head of security, I mean. I can’t explain now. We need to get as far away from the palace as we can.”

  My tongue felt like cork in my mouth. I realized I had been gasping through an open mouth, and closed it with a snap, and swallowed. “You don’t care?”

  “I wouldn’t have believed him—about you—if I didn’t know that the Mules left behind had managed to create a female. I saw no reason they wouldn’t have created one on the darkship world, where I understand they’re more advanced.”

  “I mean, you don’t care that the Mules survived the Turmoils and eventually became the Good Men?”

  “What is there to care about?” he asked. “It happened.”

  “But…aren’t you afraid of Mules?” I’d read the history books on Earth. Though I suspected the Good Men, who were after all the same people, were just as ruthless as the Mules had been, the history books made the Mules much worse. “Don’t you want to stop them?”

  I swear his lips trembled upward. “Aren’t we?” he said. “Didn’t the Patrician declare the Glorious Revolution?” He seemed to suddenly remember how the Glorious Revolution had evolved. He shrugged. “I mean you no harm, at least. On the contrary. The Patrician said to get you to a safe place, and I intend to, even though it’s going to be harder than I’d imagined.”

  “I don’t need to be gotten to a safe place,” I said. “If you know what I am, you know I’m as strong as the Patrician, and as capable of defending myself.”

  He rolled his eyes. “And as full of yourself. Don’t either of you see virtue in planning? Are you in the habit of throwing yourself into danger with no thought?”

  I’d come to Earth with very little thought, except to escape bad memories and certain social obligations. I didn’t think I was full of myself. I certainly wasn’t like Simon. On the other hand, I’d been telling Alexis that I could fight a mob singlehanded. Which seemed foolhardy if not stupid. So I shut up and let him lead—stumbling and skulking through the palace grounds. At an outer building, almost at the edge of the grounds, he made me wait, and came back moments later wearing coveralls of the sort that manual laborers wore, and carrying what looked like a
green sheet, which he folded around me as a cloak, that covered me from head to the hem of my dress.

  After that, he led me out of the grounds to what looked like a ramshackle stairway which led us into a labyrinth of derelict alleys and thus, eventually, to a cheap rented room, in a not so good section of Liberte, the area that was the domain of servants and less reputable avocations. We had chosen the cheapest of automated motels and paid for it with an anonymous credgem.

  In the dingy rented room, Alexis ditched the coveralls to appear again in the splendor of white satin and gold braid. It went badly with his appearance. He was a middle-aged man, at least ten years older than my twenty-five, with short dark hair and a square face that only a mother could love, and which, indefinably, put one in mind of a bulldog. Seeing me look, he gave me a feral grin and said, “Alexis Brisbois, at your service, Madame Zenobia Sienna.”

  I didn’t know what to answer, so I didn’t. I dropped the sheet. He locked the door, then stood by it, with a burner in his hand, and his ear set against the dimatough panel.

  “Just making sure no one followed us,” he said. Though he’d ensured that the camera over the door was broken—not unusual in this type of lodgings, of course—he didn’t trust that someone might not be looking for us or might not have caught a glimpse of us by other means.

  While he went over the room, looking for hidden cameras and disabling a couple of gadgets that might or might not have visual-pickup capacity, I stood in front of the mirror that took up an entire wall—and I tried not to think exactly what it was meant to reflect, fully turned towards the bed as it was. But even thinking about that was better than thinking that I was in an enclosed space with no help anywhere near.

  I must go out. I didn’t want to hide in this ratty room forever, with or without Brisbois, and I thought his idea of getting me out of the seacity was cowardly as well as futile.