Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “And it will vanish from my mind?”

  A quick smile. “Like Cinderella’s dress, which is why this isn’t used for long-term learning, for things people need. Well, it’s not really used by anyone but the Usaian forces just now, but to the extent it could be used by everyone, after the revolution triumphs, and when science will be set free, it still can’t be used for long-term learning. The brain returns to its normal state.”

  “So…How long do I have?”

  He shrugged. “A month. Two. Who knows? Each brain is different. So…expediency and speed, highly recommended, yes?”

  I nodded doubtfully, while he led me to a chair, sat me down on it, and put something that looked like a knit silver hat on me. Then he turned on an apparatus.

  I can’t describe what followed, any more than I can describe the contents of a dream after waking. It partook that same nature of a dream, or at least of what one remembers of a dream once one awakes. Images and faces and sounds seemed to come out of somewhere, suddenly, with no preparation. Things happened. Most of them not physical things. Not things I could describe. At one point, there was a feeling of falling.

  And then—he was removing the helmet. I stood up. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a stranger before turning around to look and realizing it was a mirror. The stranger in the mirror turned, too, and stared at me with brown eyes.

  “Not bad, is it?” Royce Allard said, a hint of pride in his voice. “You will do. You will pass.”

  “Certainly I will pass,” I said. And then I realized I’d said it with an accent like Simon’s. And that Allard had spoken in a language that included at least two French words, and one whose provenance I couldn’t identify.

  I blinked at him, and he chuckled. “It will do,” he said. “It is better than I thought I could do without a staff. And now, we should get you something to wear and your equipment, because if you leave soon, you should be able to approach Liberte in the dark of night. This will not help you against military defenses, but it’s not the military you should be afraid of.”

  “The Sans Culottes are the military, aren’t they?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Some of them. Some of them are trained and might rise to that description, but most of them, really, are just…a barely trained rabble. Certainly not well equipped. But even so, I think your greatest danger, in Liberte proper, is from people rendered hysterical by fear.”

  “Fear of what?” I asked.

  We were standing in the middle of his laboratorylike beauty parlor. I stood in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, and saw him reflected in the glass behind me. Taller than I. Probably around forty years old, with his reddish brown hair starting to recede and at this point in time doing nothing more than giving the impression he had an abnormally tall forehead. His clever-monkey eyes looked at me in the mirror. “I was a Sans Culottes once, you know. Then there was…a moment, an experience.” He seemed to be weighing what and how much to tell me. His eyes narrowed. “I was raised as a Sans Culottes, you understand. Just like Martha,” he gestured towards her, and I realized she was still there. She’d been so quiet through the whole procedure that I’d forgotten her, or as near it as it was possible. “Just like Martha was raised Usaian. You don’t question it. I had training, and times of practicing for the revolution. And then, one day, while out with a group of young partisans like me, they found out something…different about me. The results were not pleasant. I was brought before the authorities on the principle that I was not equal. I did not wish to be equal. I was not trying to submerge myself to the whole, to be a good member of the unit. At the time, I had a friend who was Usaian, from one of the devout families. I…ah…converted, and eventually moved to Olympus to carry on my daylight occupation as a clothing designer.”

  Beyond his hesitations, I could feel the lacunae in what he told, but I was momentarily diverted from wondering by the idea that someone who looked like he should carry stones for a living had made a living designing dresses—presumably—for fashionable women.

  “That is the culture of the Sans Culottes,” he said. “And there are a lot of them in all French-speaking territories. They want to be equal. Really equal. Which is a good thing to aim for if you can, I suppose, but it means that sometimes you can’t be equal. Like Simon can’t be equal. And now that it’s been revealed that there are people among them who can’t be made equal, they will be afraid. Afraid, more than anything,” he said, “of the brittleness of their beliefs. The Good Men ruled for centuries, you see, on the understanding that they were superior. Denying that and destroying that belief was part of what the Sans Culottes were about. But then, when it’s revealed they really are superior, superior at a physical and mental level…Well! What is to stop people from binding themselves in subjection to these people once more; from wanting to be taken care of?”

  “But,” I said. “Just because you’re faster or stronger, or even smarter, it doesn’t mean you make a better ruler.” I thought back to the man from whose genes I’d been built. By all accounts, he was faster, stronger and smarter, not just than the normal run of humanity, but than his own kind. “The way the early Mules ruled was no recommendation.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But you’re talking reality.” His eyes looked grave in the mirror. “That’s not what we’re dealing in, you understand. My entire work, the daylight one, and the hidden one, requires me to be aware of what people think and believe that is not openly mentioned or openly spoken of. Humanity will undoubtedly always believe that someone very smart—smarter than they think they can hope to be, someone born endowed with gifts they can’t have, can only have one of two purposes towards them: to protect them or to harm them. And they in turn just want such people to go away. Those who are liberty-inclined because they fear that other people will submit to the superior men and the other people because, having endured the tyrannical rule of those people, they’re afraid of being subjected to it again, and being too weak to throw it off once more. The only way they can feel free is to kill those people; to make them stop existing and as if they’d never existed.”

  “But I am one of those people,” I said.

  His eyes went very serious. He’d been talking to me, somewhat in the way an adult speaks with a child, with the same assumption of amusement in his eyes and voice. But now his eyes went very serious, and he looked at me with a mix of something that might be worry or perhaps pity. “I know,” he said.

  Against the Fall of Night

  They’d equipped me, as well as they could. I had a suit that was adequate, and, for broomback wear, a padded broomer suit, much, much better than what Alexis had procured for us. Which was good, because I had to fly long distance across the ocean on a broom of the tiny sort, that could be clipped on a belt, and had no saddle or other comforts.

  The clothes were all treated in such a way that they would dry very quickly if wet, would repel dirt, would not weigh me down unduly.

  They tried to prepare me for all sorts of eventualities. My boots were equally supple and likely to stay dry, and infinitely more sturdy than the palace slippers I’d been wearing.

  They also gave me a first aid kit that fit in an envelope, a special pouch to carry my currency under my clothes in such a way that I could not be pickpocketed and weapons. A couple of good knives, two burners that, like the suits, would take anything short of being set on fire, and I wasn’t sure about that.

  And then Martha had seen me off, to an area from which I could take off without being noticed. She’d grabbed my arm again—it was a habit—and looked up at me and said, “I wish I could go with you,” she said. “I’d feel more confident that you would survive this, if I could. But Luce would have my hide.”

  “How much does he really know of all this?” I asked.

  She smiled a little. “Nothing, of course. He’s supposed to know nothing. He can’t be involved. But if I weren’t here, it would be noticed, and he would have to know something. He’d never forgive me.”r />
  “I see,” I said, though I didn’t. It seemed to me there were more games being played than I was prepared to even understand, much less participate in. One advantage of having been raised as something apart from normal humans was that I’d never been involved in the sort of politics human friendships seemed to demand. Even in the small group of bioengineered pilots and navigators of the darkships, I’d stayed aloof from power plays, from guilt-inducement, from demands on me. The downside was that I’d also never experienced friendship. Love, surely, with Len, but Len was different.

  Martha sighed. “It’s very difficult,” she said. “It’s almost impossible to balance the demands of our debt and our relationship to Simon, and the demands to our people and to those who have pledged themselves to our side of the revolution. We can’t put those fighting on our side in unnecessary danger. But then neither can we let Simon simply die.” She looked up at me, her intent and intense look reminding me of her twin, whom most people were scared of. “So we must count on you. You’re all we have. It’s a long shot, but perhaps you can do it. Perhaps you can bring Simon back alive.”

  “I will try,” I said, feeling more doubtful of it than I had before.

  She nodded, and clasped my arm for a moment. “Good luck.”

  And then I’d flown off. I could remember the way. It is one of the things that was enhanced in me, beyond my genetic origins. Navigators, in Eden, were endowed with a sense of direction and a feeling for repairing machinery—not knowledge of it, precisely, possibly because, as Royce said, no one had figured out how to do that, and more likely, because technology could change in the twenty or thirty years a navigator operated, and if you created people for a certain technology, they wouldn’t be able to adapt. Instead, we were given the natural talents that would make it easy for us to understand and repair machinery, with very little preparation: a look at it, a tale about how it worked.

  So I knew my way to Liberte. And I’d been given some of the intelligence that Olympus had: a notion of what was going on; an idea of what and whom to avoid. It wasn’t very reliable because, as Martha had told me, it would change from moment to moment. I was to avoid someone named Dechausse, someone referred to as Madame, and I was to stay away from certain areas.

  What was going on was, in a word, chaos. It was not clear whether anyone had seized leadership of the mob yet. It was unlikely from what they knew that anyone had. The mob—or rather mobs, several of them, running rampant through the city—didn’t seem to be pursuing any unified objective or even to have any unified ideology, beyond ridding the world of anyone who might possibly be genetically enhanced.

  My first mission was to avoid anyone who might be preventing outsiders coming in. This wasn’t exactly as difficult as might be believed. Most people at the moment couldn’t be paid enough to come into Liberte seacity. Even the few stories I’d heard in the public cast at Olympus, while eating a hasty dinner, had spoken of people killed, heads on stakes, general mayhem and torture, with the psychopaths that exist everywhere and everywhen in control of the situation and running the show.

  Liberte was worried about people coming in, taking over, and stopping their revolution. They neither worried about nor organized against a single individual on a broom. What they feared was armies. The armies of the Good Men; the forces from other seacities; organized fighting men.

  I might be organized, but I was a single woman, and no one would be on the lookout for me. At least, not unless I triggered their feeling that I was in some way enhanced.

  So I had to land without being seen. I had to move about the seacity without arousing suspicion. And then I had to find where Simon was kept, and somehow to free him and leave the seacity with him. This involved finding out who was in control, to the extent that there was some control.

  Look, I said it was chaos and it was, and the way most people were experiencing the revolution would be clashing crowds of people fighting back and forth and looting. It was the disorganization of a society that had lived for centuries under a repressive order and which had now been allowed to slip its bonds.

  Without an overarching authority, without their guardians which had always prevented them from doing anything illegal or even rude, the people were doing what they very well pleased and came into their heads. Or a small number of them were, and the others were locked in their houses, possibly praying the confusion would pass them by.

  But from what Martha had told me, there had to be others who were organized and someone in control of them. Probably someone left over from the old Sans Culottes hierarchy. There had to be someone in control because Simon had been taken and was held, something that would be impossible in mere chaos.

  If the unorganized mob had captured him, he’d have been beheaded. Or if he escaped that fate, he’d also have escaped altogether. For him to be a prisoner, there had to be an organized enough force to keep him, an organized enough force to have a leader.

  Who that leader was, and what that force looked like, or how many men strong, we didn’t know and couldn’t know. Not until I got to Liberte and looked around.

  They’d told me he was kept in a prison beneath the palace, where apparently the Good Men—or, since they’d all been one man, whose brain periodically got transplanted to younger clones, perhaps it’s more appropriate to say the Good Man, St. Cyr—had kept secret prisoners for centuries. It was near impregnable and probably very well guarded. The Good Man was an asset not to let go lightly and the people in charge were smart enough to remain both invisible and in control.

  They probably expected an attack on the prison and were prepared to defend it.

  No one had given me instructions on how to breach that prison. No one had given me instructions on how to free Simon. I suspected they didn’t know how. At any rate, I didn’t know how either. My general plan was to find my way there, to free him, and then—somehow—to find my way out again.

  Details were vague because the circumstances would change. Really change, I guessed, depending on what I found on the ground.

  My first view of the seacity made me afraid of what I would find. As we’d flown off, the palace had looked charred, but now it looked like the whole seacity was on fire. Fires glowed all over, like orange wounds in the dark blue-green of the seacity. Not bonfires, but blazes that engulfed buildings.

  Closer in, I could hear sounds of singing and shouts, and screams, explosions, and the roaring of the fires. The whole place seemed to be awake and restless, animated by something between a party and a massacre.

  I should have landed in one of the areas at the edge of the seacity, possibly in the lower levels, the sort of semi-peopled, darkened area like the beach from which Martha had opened the tunnel into Keeva’s room. I should.

  I’d had it in my mind to do just that: land somewhere away from human habitation and from any roaming murderous crowds.

  And then I realized my subconscious had made a different decision. I flew closer to the center, looking for a place near the palace to land, a place that was relatively deserted. This forced me to hover over the heads of the crowd, just far enough away that I didn’t risk—too much—being seen. From the air what this revolution looked like was a looting party. I saw more people carrying as much as their arms allowed than people unburdened by possessions, or people actively hurting someone else.

  But then it occurred to me to wonder if I was looking at looters or refugees. If the homes of the better-off citizens of Liberte had been broken into as the palace had, and they had time to escape, would they not leave, carrying what they could?

  For whichever motive, the night was full of people running here and there, talking in whispers, carrying possessions in arms—as well as singing revolutionary songs, and attacking anyone who looked bioimproved.

  The air over the seacity was relatively calm, possibly because of the habit of burning down anyone who tried to take off.

  I got the impression of other brooms, one headed away from me, and one towards me, but they
were too far away for me to even be sure of the impression, much less definite about who they were and where they were, and what they looked like.

  And then I spotted a space. It was behind a burned structure, and it looked like whoever had been involved in the drama of destroying it had long gone. If there had been inhabitants of the place, who’d taken off in a hurry, they were far away. And whoever had set fire to it had long ago left, too, of necessity.

  All that was left was a vast ruin, with a soaring front wall, made of dimatough, looking like a wing beating at the sky. There was a smell of burned building, which is not like the smell of burned anything else, containing, as it usually does, the scent of materials not meant to be burned. It felt acrid and unpleasant to the nose, and something crunched underfoot as I landed.

  I clipped the broom—one of the little cylindrical models, with no saddle, and painful enough to ride across the ocean—to my belt, and crunched my way, cautiously, around the outside of the burnt walls. The palace was above me, and I had two choices to get there. One was to go through the roads, and perhaps come across parties of people. Royce Allard had—he thought, and I hoped—made me unremarkable in a crowd, but it still might not be the brightest thing in the world, as an unescorted woman, to meet a party of people animated by looting and inspired by a sense of righteous envy of those better off.

  Yeah, I am faster, stronger, smarter. One of the things you learn early on, when you’re endowed with all of those attributes, but are also a woman, is not to lead those not as fast or as smart or as strong into temptation. You don’t present yourself as a likely and easy target, because that will just cause them to attack you and get hurt.