Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

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Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) Page 5

by Sarah A. Hoyt


  The young man sneered at me, and made a comment—fast and in archaic French—at Alexis, who looked startled then said, “Eh,” and shrugged. “She is a pretty one, but not that kind of girl.”

  I thought he’d seen enough of me to think I looked too pretty. We’d aroused suspicion. From the other side, far away on the left, was the sound of a burner zapping, and then an explosion and screams. Our inspector barely lifted his head. “Stupid,” he said. “But they will try to escape, those improved ones.”

  I realized my heart was pounding. Pounding so fast I was afraid he’d hear it.

  He looked at us again. “Where in Shangri-la does your mother live?”

  Where do our decisions come from?

  I’d never even been in a firefight before. I had fought duels—most people in Eden do, growing up—but they had been bare hands or, on one memorable occasion, daggers. I won’t say I’d never thought of killing someone. I had. When I thought my life was in danger. But I’d never actually pulled the trigger. Except the once, with Len. But that had been different.

  Now, there was no time to think—no time to run through the consequences of my actions. I saw the young man reach for a com at his belt, and I moved with the super speed that had been originally engineered into the man whose genes I carried. I took out the burner, set it on cutting beam, leaned past Alexis. I ran the beam clear through our questioner’s heart before he could react. I punched the takeoff button on the flyer on the way to leaning back in my seat.

  I still don’t know why we weren’t shot out of the air. Unless it were because we were up in the air and flying fast by the time the young man in the liberty cap even fell. Plus, I’d used the cutting feature, not the fire one, so they might not even know he was dead, until they got close enough to him to see the blood. And by then we were well away, up in the air.

  My last view of Liberte seacity as we took off was a smoldering ruin where the wedding cake-topper palace had been. It looked charred and black, like the skeleton of an ancient beast rising out of the dimatough base of the seacity.

  We were slammed against the seat by the force of the takeoff. Burner rays spent themselves in our wake. Alexis got pushed back in his seat with a wide-eyed look in his eyes.

  I felt like I had an elephant on my chest. But being stronger than normal people has its uses. I reached over and pressed the leveling button. Then I brought up the map, blindly, and punched remembered coordinates in. Olympus. As Alexis had said, Simon had friends there. Simon and I had helped them when they needed, and now was their turn. And I would see they followed through, if need be.

  Alexis took a deep breath. He looked at me. I had shot a man in front of him, with very little provocation. I expected horror in his eyes, but there was only a sort of wondering look. “They will follow us,” he said.

  “It will take them time to get in flyers and find us,” I said. “And they might not want to leave the seacity. By now word of what is going on out there must be on the coms. They’ll fear reprisals.”

  Alexis took a large handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. “Reprisals from whom?”

  Again, where do our certainties and our actions come from? I hadn’t thought before I shot, but now I knew why I’d shot, and also why we hadn’t been killed yet. And I knew where the danger would come from for those running riot in Liberte. “Everyone, I should think,” I said. “Including the old Good Men, or do you think they’ll welcome a repeat of the Turmoils?”

  Alexis nodded. “Why did you shoot him?” He didn’t ask me how I’d known the coordinates to set a course for Olympus, nor did he change it. Instead, he checked my settings, and made minor alterations. I realized he was changing it so we didn’t pass over areas currently controlled by the Good Man regime, and mostly kept us over Usaian-controlled areas. The question about the shooting was asked in a curious tone, too. I thought that most people—not that I understood much about most people, of course—would be shocked, or worried, or perhaps outraged at my killing someone. Instead, his question was wondering…like the question someone would ask in a classroom. Interested, not immediately pressing.

  “He was suspicious,” I said. “And he was reaching for the com at his waist. He’d have called Shangri-la, and probably given the alarm before he did. We’d have been surrounded and watched while he called to confirm our story. I figured if I killed him before he gave alarm…”

  He raised an eyebrow, gave me another sidelong glance, and then was quiet. After a while, flying over the ocean, he said, “Was this the first person you killed?”

  I shook my head, not wanting to explain about Len. I suppose it wasn’t that hard to explain. We’d got attacked while trying to harvest powerpods in Earth’s orbit, and he’d got a full shot of radiation. We didn’t have anything aboard to cure radiation poisoning, not that extensive. So I’d given him the coup de grace, and limped back to Eden. But there were complications to the events.

  Later I’d learned that, in the same situation, Kit—whom I suppose I could call my brother, the man made from the same genes that had created me—had instead taken his radiation-poisoned wife to Earth, and got her treated.

  I knew the situations were not the same. Athena Hera Sinistra, Kit’s wife, was, like me, the female clone of a Mule. But her “father” was the Good Man of Syracuse on Earth, and his willingness to do anything to cure her had made her treatment a foregone conclusion. Even then, escaping afterwards had been almost impossible. Len and I had no one on Earth. Even getting someone’s attention would have taken longer than that, and chances were we’d both have gotten killed out of hand. And I might have been captured and tortured for the location of Eden. But what if? What if instead of killing him, I’d refused to concede? What if I’d done the crazy thing and flown to Earth? Would he still be alive today? I closed my eyes.

  “Uh,” my companion said.

  I opened my eyes. “And you?” I said. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  He lifted his hand to his square face, and smoothed it down over the myriad little wrinkles as though of frowns past. He looked very tired. “Dozens of people.”

  Which I suppose made sense, right? He’d been head of security. It would involve neutralizing threats to the Good Man, right?

  So why did his answer make me feel uneasy? Surely I hadn’t taken him for an innocent lamb? What use would an innocent lamb be to me right now?

  It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Alexis, for given values of trusting him. Simon had flung me into his arms with instructions to keep me safe. And he had. So far. And I didn’t think he was going to break his oath to Simon. Not really. And Simon might be slippery, but he did like me, and had been kind to me.

  But Alexis had killed dozens of people. Really?

  At any rate, soon I’d be in Olympus seacity and safe.

  And the Rock Cried Out

  “I don’t think I can help you,” Lucius Keeva said. He was a large man and built with slab upon slab of muscle. It would have been easier if he were angry at me, or if he’d seemed emotional. Instead, he looked stern, controlled. In his sky-blue uniform, he gave the impression of being no more than the conveyance of the will of Olympus seacity and, at least if we believed what the locals believed, of its inhabitants.

  We’d arrived to Olympus at sunrise, and identified ourselves to the questioning of the guards as we approached the Good Man’s palace. Or what had been the Good Man’s palace.

  At first I’d thought that the change in Olympus, now fully in control of the Usaian movement, was the same it had been in Liberte seacity. The Good Man had proclaimed himself something else, and everything remained the same.

  But it wasn’t like that. I hadn’t seen Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva since our raid on Circum Terra six months ago. Back then I was very new to Earth—had just arrived there with a party from Eden. Just the sheer size of Earth, the ability to travel anywhere, to hide, to disappear, had overwhelmed me. Earth had been a kaleidoscope of images and sounds. More people than I’d ev
er seen in my life; more people than I’d ever known existed anywhere had crowded around me. And yet, I’d seen areas that were forgotten, lost—places with no humans at all.

  When my friends had gone back to Eden, I’d taken my opportunity to run away from home in style, to stay behind in a whole world where no one knew me, where no one would expect anything of me.

  Is there such a state for anyone human?

  I’d lingered with someone who was kind to me and who protected me from the strangeness of Earth and made me feel welcome. A whole world, many times larger than anything I knew—than anything I could even imagine, had proven too daunting.

  Back when I’d last seen Lucius Keeva, he’d looked stern and remote and frightening. He still looked frightening. A very tall man, with long dark-blond hair, it was rumored he’d spent fourteen years in prison, in solitary confinement.

  I wasn’t sure that was true. I thought no one could survive that and remain functional, let alone sane enough to be one of the leaders of the Usaian revolution. But there was something different about him now from when I’d last seen him: a confidence, perhaps, a…but no, it wasn’t swagger. A man who is six seven and built like an assault vehicle doesn’t need to swagger. It is an alien art to someone that size.

  Perhaps it was that he was no longer the Good Man, though I was having trouble pinpointing exactly what he was.

  When we landed in what had been the Good Man’s palace, the people had seemed puzzled as to whom I was asking for, when I asked to speak to the Good Man. At first I thought the difficulty was my pink and plastic-looking finery, or perhaps Alexis standing like a sullen statue behind me.

  But when I said “Lucius Keeva,” the two—well, I thought they were guards—very young men in sky-blue uniforms looked at each other.

  “The lieutenant colonel, Ichabod,” one of them—the blond one, the other one being dark-haired and olive-skinned—said. They seemed almost identical in everything else, particularly youth and very upright posture.

  “Oh,” Olive-skin said. And when I’d given my name, he’d said, “I’ll be right back,” and, leaving his friend with us, had walked fast into the house. I didn’t know whether to consider that leaving us alone with one guard was a bad thing. The guard hadn’t even taken out his burner. I wondered if Olympus was really lax about its security. Then I started suspecting that there was more to it than that, that there were other levels of security between us and the Good Man. But why were they calling him lieutenant colonel?

  A few moments later, Ichabod returned, and the two guards escorted us down a cool corridor, into the depths of the house. I’d been right about one thing: the place was filled with men in uniform, all of them armed, saluting each other around every corner. Mostly our escorts saluted other people. But since I didn’t know the insignia on people’s shoulders and chests, the distinctions evaded me.

  Up a staircase, till we stood at the door to an office. Not a private office, but a huge room, filled with desks and activity. This one had at least fifteen desks, most of them manned by very young people. As we stood in the doorway, Lucius Keeva rose from behind one of the desks, which was piled high with paper and walked towards us. “Ms. Sienna,” he said, and to what must have been my startled expression, with a politeness that didn’t soften him in the slightest, “I beg your pardon. Am I forgetting a rank? Do you have one?”

  I shook my head. I’d been Miss and Mrs, and Navigator Sienna, and I had no idea what I was now, but Ms. would do as well as anything. “Lieutenant colonel?” I said.

  This brought a shadow of a smile to the man’s tired face. “Oh. That’s mostly a courtesy title. I pilot a desk. The military titles should be reserved for the people in the field, but I guess they needed to call me something.” He gave me a quick look, up and down. It wasn’t that sort of look. I happened to know Lucius Keeva’s interest in women was academic. It was an open secret and not just in Olympus that he and one of the Usaian leaders, Nathaniel Remy, were a couple. But his look clearly registered my incongruous attire, yet when he looked back up it was to say, “Call me Luce. We fought side by side; that warrants treatment of equals. And how may I help you?”

  I can’t describe it. I’d expected…I wasn’t absolutely certain what I’d expected. I hadn’t got the impression that he and Simon were friends precisely. In fact, Simon had told me that he had been in the same broomer group as Lucius’s late brother, Max, but they’d never been that close. Friendly, sure, but not friends.

  But Lucius had said we’d fought side-by-side. And so had he and Simon. I had been sure I could get help from him…help in rescuing Simon.

  Then I found myself face to face with Keeva and couldn’t help acknowledging he was no longer the Good Man, no longer an autarch, but a man caught in the machinery of an organization he couldn’t control and I couldn’t understand. And something in his reserved, guarded expression made me feel I was up against something inflexible and hard. My heart sank.

  “Simon,” I said, not expecting anything. “I need help for Simon. Simon was captured.”

  Luce nodded. “We heard news…I was afraid you were both dead. It was a relief to see you here,” he said, then looking behind me. “And—”

  “This is Alexis. Alexis Brisbois. He is—was the head of Simon’s security.”

  “Secret police,” Alexis offered, and also offered his hand. There was a momentary but visible hesitation before Lucius shook it.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “The attack on the palace was a shock, of course. Simon had invited me to the ball, but I couldn’t get away, and besides—” He frowned fleetingly. “It was considered too risky. My value to the cause might be largely ornamental, but it has value.” He sighed. “I’m sorry, the damned house is mostly taken up with the operations of the Daughters of Liberty.” And to our blank look, “The propaganda arm of my—The propaganda arm of our revolution.” And then, though I hadn’t asked, “It’s not a gender thing. The Sons of Liberty are the active troops.”

  He shook his head. “I have a private area, for my use. Please come with me. You’ll want a bath.” The impersonal evaluating look raked me up and down again, and said that if it were him wearing that kind of finery, he’d want a bath.

  The idea of Lucius Keeva in a plastic dress, with badly dyed hair, made me want to giggle. Perhaps it was a stress thing. When you’ve been running for your life, emotions seem to become compacted, close together and you can flip from intense grief, or intense fear, to sudden laughter, then back again. It took a great effort for me to suppress it and by the time I had it under control, he was leading us along another set of hallways. He stuck his finger in a genlock, which sprang open. What we entered could have passed for an upscale apartment in a modern building, a white carpeted area furnished with the sort of understated simplicity that screams wealth.

  Lucius gestured at a hallway at the back of the living room. “At the end of that there is a bedroom, and a fresher. I’ll have clothing brought to you. Sorry, I no longer have staff. Everyone either left, or is working for the revolution. But someone should be able to unearth a comfortable outfit your size somewhere. Martha Remy, if no one else.” He punched a com button in a nearby console and spoke so quickly and so tersely that I didn’t understand much, except that he was speaking to someone with whom he was comfortable and asking for clothes, and also that that appraising glance had got my size to a nicety. There was an equally terse answer from the other end. “Will do.”

  He turned to me and smiled. “There will be clothes for you in the bedroom when you’re done with the fresher.” He turned to Alexis. “You’ll have to wait your turn, Brisbois.” And, advancing towards an impressively stocked drinks table, he said, “What do you drink?”

  Which, I thought, was just like men, sending me off to wash, while they drank and, doubtless, Lucius Keeva got an accurate report of the revolution and the mess in Liberte from Alexis Brisbois.

  I was in the spacious, and certainly luxurious, fresher and scrubbing th
e outrageous makeup off my face when it occurred to me that I’d been positively itching to get out of this; that Alexis was probably better equipped to explain the military situation to Keeva, and that they were not being slighting but gallant, giving me first shot at getting out of what were clearly uncomfortable as well as awful-looking clothes.

  Still, I washed as fast as I could, and rushed out, to find that indeed there were clothes waiting for me: a black pair of pants and a gray tunic in roughly my size. Lifting them, I found underwear underneath, and pulled that on first, in a hurry. Then I ran my fingers through my wet hair and rushed out, barefoot.

  The men had sat down across from each other with glasses of something amber in their hands. They both rose as I came in. “Ms. Sienna,” Lucius said. “May I offer you something to drink?”

  “Whatever you’re having,” I said.

  He lifted his eyebrows, but I wasn’t quite up to the variety of drinks on Earth. I knew that some of them weren’t considered ladylike—whatever that might be—but I had yet to taste one I couldn’t drink. None of these people had, after all, been raised on the particularly noxious drink my countrymen made from fermented bugs.

  He handed me a glass of amber liquid that smelled alcoholic and peaty. I took a short sip, determined this was a drink to take slowly, and did so. “What did Alexis tell you?” I asked.

  “Everything,” Alexis said. “Everything I know.”

 

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