There was a pause, as though he were listening to his interlocutor, and then, “I didn’t bring her. I followed her. It was Keeva and his plans. No, I’m sure of it. Yes, I know.”
Another pause. “I’ve tried, but short of drugging her and dragging her, I don’t know how I’d accomplish that.”
Another pause, this one long. “I see. The palace? Yes, that could work.”
I felt my hair stand up at the back of my neck, and wondered what could work and what was being planned for me. It was clear, whatever else was happening, that Alexis Brisbois was not on the up and up. Look: Simon, his supposed boss and the center of his loyalty, was in prison. He couldn’t be out here and speaking to Brisbois. But Brisbois had left the hotel room in the middle of the night to come and confer with someone in secret.
That they were talking about me was obvious. That my being here discomfited them was also obvious. I wasn’t sure why that might be, except, of course, that Brisbois knew I was enhanced and might be afraid I’d figure out what he was doing.
Brisbois was talking again. “Yes,” he said. “It would be best for the execution of the Good Man to happen as soon as possible and as publicly as possible.”
I was so shocked by these words that it took me a moment to focus. It was all I could do not to run from cover, and not to shoot Alexis Brisbois. But even as my mind processed that the “execution of the Good Man” had to refer to Simon—while there were a lot of people killed, it was hard to think of a single one that could be dignified with the name “execution,” particularly a planned one. Attack, maybe, or assault. But execution had to be Simon. Which meant not only that Alexis Brisbois had never been as loyal as I thought, but that he’d been playing a double game all along. Which meant…
“Yes, I think she’s behind this too,” Brisbois said, clearly answering something. “I’ll do my best to neutralize her.”
I took a deep breath. And I’d do my best to stay not-neutralized. With that thought, I reached for my burner.
I was drawing a bead in the middle of Alexis’s back, when the world exploded. I have no way of explaining it, except that way. Suddenly the area was full of sound, light, flying debris, and I was jumping backwards, out of instinct more than thought, huddling against the gate while debris pelted me. First seen in that explosion of light, was Brisbois, looking startled, shocked, and someone talking to him—a male in a dark brown suit, with a liberty cap on his head. Something about him was familiar, but in that sudden startling glimpse, there was no way of knowing for sure who it was.
And then Brisbois stumbled over me, catching at the gate to hold himself, dealing me a kick in the ribs by accident, and said, “You!”
His hand grabbed at my back between my shoulders, hauling me up, even as I heard the sound of his punching the code into the gate pad, then pushed at the automatically opening gate, forcing it open, scraping me against the gate at both sides, the opening was so small for me. How could he have fit through it, when he was much larger?
And then he pushed my back against the wall, pushed himself close to me, and bent to kiss me. His mouth sealed over mine, as I pushed ineffectually at his shoulders. His mouth tasted of wine and something sweet, and he put his arms around me, immobilizing me, turning his body just so that I could not knee him in the groin.
I struggled to free myself, but he was holding me in such a way that even my scrabbling would be invisible to anyone walking by. He was so large and had engulfed me so completely that only a trained observer would notice my reluctance. And he must be enhanced for strength because my fighting wasn’t accomplishing anything, though it didn’t stop my trying.
The glow of the explosion moved away, and the commotion caused by the people sleeping in the market rushing out, and then he pulled away and let me go.
I wiped at my mouth, glaring up at him. “What was that in the name of?” I asked, my voice close to a growl, even though it was little more than a furious whisper.
“What are you doing here?”
“I followed you!” I said.
He frowned. “Did you hear—” Then, as though realizing I wasn’t likely to tell him the truth. “Oh, never mind. What in hell possessed you?”
“Me? What possessed you? And who were you talking to, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, planning Simon’s execution?”
“Simon—What? The Good Man is not—” He gave every appearance of biting his tongue. “You just put yourself at risk for no reason. Let’s get out of here.”
“You kissed me!” I said.
“A wonderful way to hide our faces without seeming to,” he said and started pulling me along the closed stalls, seemingly without direction, but in a way that betrayed its being intentional. I tried to pull my hand from his. He held it tight.
“Your face,” I said. “Because mine—”
“Well done,” he said, and dragged me through what seemed like a little tunnel cut in a poured ceramite wall. We came up against a small gate. It was chained shut. He grabbed the chain and twisted. Then he pushed me out the gate and onto the road.
I was about to ask why that way, but instead looked the other way, towards the entrance we’d used before. There were men in liberty caps in front of it.
Brisbois muttered something that might very well have been “merde,” but he had been talking to a man in a liberty cap, himself.
I couldn’t trust him. I’d been willing to go along with his trying to protect me, to an extent, while I thought he was being blindly loyal to Simon and trying to keep me safe, stupid though the idea was. But now I wasn’t even sure he was loyal, or trying to keep me safe.
I let him lead me by the hand down a narrow lane, until I realized he was taking me back to the hotel. And then, the first time he relaxed his grasp on my hand, I pulled my hand away and ran madly into the night, taking blind turns until I was sure I’d lost him.
The last thing I heard him say, somewhere behind me, was “merde.”
Driving Blind
I ran until I could run no more. Out of breath, lost, I leaned against a wall and took stock of my surroundings.
I’d somehow run myself out of the cheaper neighborhoods, and into one of the more expensive areas. Not quite to the palace, but an area where Simon’s clerks and accountants would have lived, together with clerks and accountants for other businesses, with middle class shop owners and managers of various enterprises.
It had been a pleasant neighborhood, each house set well within a garden, and from the smells in the air, distinct beneath the smells of fire and blood, there were scents of orange and of various exotic flowers.
I had a vague memory, without a precise date, of coming to a neighborhood like this, perhaps this very same neighborhood, with Simon, to visit his old nanny. The house, accounting for the fact that houses on Earth were above ground and in Eden tended to be underground, was as comfortable as anything I’d grown up with. And there had been gardeners at work in the grounds of various neighbors.
If the fury of the revolutionaries, or the looters, if there was a difference at this point, had burned itself out in the cheaper neighborhoods it carried on here, with vigor.
While I leaned against the wall, I heard the sounds of the same song I’d heard in the palace, and then a series of blows, as of a blade against wood.
Nearby a house was aflame, completely engulfed, with the fire licking at the roof, and casting an uncomfortable heat all the way past the walled garden to where I stood across the opposite side of the street.
From the other side of that house came the sounds of something hitting wood, and from the house to the side nearest me came screams and the zap of burners, the curious smell the burner rays left in the air.
I didn’t want to move. I’d run so far, and I was in a place I didn’t understand, surrounded by people with hostile intent. What I wanted to do, arguably what I should do, was to stay still and shut up, and save myself first, then find Simon and save him, and find out from him what to do to quell this or at the ver
y least to get him to safety.
But I remembered Martha telling me that whatever Simon had tried to do had escaped his control. And then I thought that there were innocents being hurt, innocents dying, through no fault of their own, but because they’d been caught in a peculiar time and place. If I’d been armed in the ballroom, during the ball, I could have stopped the nonsense right then, and then Simon might have been able to hold onto power; to figure out what to do next, and this would never have happened.
I didn’t get the option of staying still; of doing nothing.
With a groan, I pushed off the wall and ran towards the sound of burners zapping.
The gate to the garden had been torn open, and a group of young men in liberty caps were making a semicircle around the entrance of the house, zapping at anything that moved, or seemed to move inside.
The defenders were not totally helpless. One or more people in there had burners. It wasn’t easy to figure out if it was one or more, because whenever a burner ray came out of a side of the house, all the attackers would turn on it, and the burner would go silent. The first time this happened, I thought the attackers had hit the defender. They thought so too. The song they were singing raised up and became more mocking.
But they didn’t advance towards the house. They were, I realized, just past the maximum range where a low-power burner could hit them. The defenders—who presently shot out of another window, drawing the attackers’ fire—only had the sort of little burner that is sold for personal defense. Good for about six feet but not more, the sort of weapon that is fine for every day, but not much use in this situation. Probably a lady’s burner, since those tended to have limited range in order to be small and portable, capable of being hid in a handbag or a pocket.
The attackers, on the other hand, were using long-range burners.
Which put the defenders at a distinct disadvantage. While the attackers were cowardly enough to stay out of range, not risking even a minor burn, they could draw the fire of the defenders. The defenders had to know the only thing keeping them safe was the remaining charge in their burners. But those burners always had a low level of charge, and the attackers knew that too.
They were keeping safe, drawing fire, until no more burner-rays came from inside the house, and then they would take over and…I wasn’t sure what they’d do, not the details, but there was the house next door burning, and there was the song they were singing, about bringing the high down low and raising themselves up to make justice over the unjust.
This would not end well.
There was only one thing I could do. I did it. I had a burner in each pocket, and I pulled them both out, and shot as fast as I could. One, two, three four, starting with the ones in the middle, who were nearer me and therefore could respond with better accuracy.
I had the advantages of surprise and speed but, as Alexis Brisbois had so clearly told me, you can’t fight a mob.
They had the advantage of numbers. I’d managed to take six of them out, with deadly accuracy, when I had to duck returning fire, because one of the attackers had turned around and was firing at me. I fired back and got him, but then one of them said, in a loud voice, “Hold up or the next one goes through your heart.”
I looked and realized his burner was, in fact, pointed at my heart in such a way that, should he press the trigger, I would be dead.
“Drop the burners,” he said.
I did, with an inward groan, as I tried to calculate my chances of running away. I would have to run away. At least I’d given the people inside some respite, and perhaps now they could fight back. There was, of course, a chance I’d get shot running away, but I didn’t think so, even though—I noted—there were now three burners trained on me. The other two defenders were going through the pockets of their fallen comrades, removing valuables and weapons. I wondered if this was done in the spirit of not wasting anything, or if it was that sort of group.
My chances of escaping totally unscathed from three burners were good. Not perfect. Nothing in life is perfect, but good.
I shifted my weight to my other foot, ready to start running any moment. And then I saw him. I saw him out the corner of my eye, and was momentarily startled out of my calculations because the young man looked like Len. The resemblance—a lanky build, pale hair, catlike movements—was almost exact in this half-light, by the reflected fire of the blaze next door. And while my mind knew Len was dead, my back brain clearly didn’t.
Before I could stop, I had reacted, with a look in his direction, a movement. One of the guys with a burner on me turned. Before he could aim, I’d got the third burner from my pocket, and was shooting him, and then his friend to the right. The one to the left I couldn’t get to in time, but the young man had taken him out with a shot of his totally inadequate burner. Only now the two who had been searching the corpses were going for their weapons. I nailed one in time, but the other got me. I felt the burner singe through my shoulder, shouted “merde,” which is either a testimony to the wonderfulness of the implant, or a learned reflex, and then not-Len had shot the bastard, and left me gasping, grabbing my shoulder, while a sticky substance ran down my sleeve.
The man approached, curious but wary, his burner still in hand. As he should be, since he had no idea if I was a friend or yet another would-be looter.
His eyes widened as he got closer, and he said, “Uh. Hello. I didn’t realize you were—I didn’t expect a woman.”
“Do you want me to drop my burner?” I asked through clenched teeth and not just because my shoulder was hurting with that peculiar kind of burn a wound has when your body is trying to figure out how to react to the injury. The other part of it was that he still looked like Len. Oh, not exactly. He was younger and his shoulders were narrower, and his nose was perfectly straight, while Len’s had been broken early on in his pilot training due to his forgetting to close his safety belt and taking a header into the control panel. It had healed slightly crooked, which made him look less than blandly sweet, which this young man did look. Save for the glint in his gray eyes, which was very much as Len’s had been.
I got the odd impression that this young man was enjoying the turmoil. Oh, not enjoying, perhaps. He looked like a well-brought-up young man, which he would be, if he was an inhabitant of this area of town. I doubted he enjoyed the knowledge his neighbors were dying or his family in danger, but he was…alive? Interested? Exerting a perhaps natural bloody mindedness kept under wraps until now?
He looked me up and down, and sighed. “Depends. Why are you so heavily armed, ’demoiselle, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“The streets aren’t safe.”
This surprised a chuckle out of him. He chuckled like Len, too, and could have been Len’s younger brother. He looked over my shoulder at the street, then said, “I say you pick up the burners you dropped earlier, and then help me…collect these gentlemen’s burners, so that my family has something to defend itself with.” He glanced at my shoulder. “Unless your shoulder is so bad that you must have my father’s attention instantly?”
“Your father?”
“Doctor Dufort. Didn’t you know? We’ve been helping people. That’s why they targeted us, I think,” he said, as he divested the nearest corpse of weapons.
I didn’t answer because I was momentarily without the breath to answer. In Eden, due to old and odd custom, men took their wives’ names upon marriage, but Len’s unmarried name had been Dufort. Had some of the family stayed behind? If so, there was a definite family resemblance.
If we’d been on Earth, I’d have been Madame Dufort. I didn’t know why Eden did it other way around. It might well have been a whim of the early colonists. He’d been called Len Sienna. But on Earth—
“I didn’t know anything about you,” I said. “Only that you were under attack and seemed to be outgunned.”
He gave me a curious look, his eyes slightly narrowed, then said, “Come on in. My father will see to your wound.”
A few mi
nutes later, I was sitting in a chair, getting my arm bandaged. The man doing the bandaging looked…all right, not quite like Len’s grandfather, but close enough that you could tell there was a family resemblance. He’d put something on my arm to stop it hurting, and was now bandaging it. “Not quite bad enough for regen anyway, but it should close in twenty-four hours,” he said.
He and his son, Corin, and his wife had welcomed me in, and the doctor had thanked me in profuse, confused words, in the tone of a man not sure about this woman who had come out of nowhere to defend them. “You see,” he said, while he was bandaging my arm. “I thought we knew each other…All of us, in this small seacity, in the…the ones who were loyal to the Good Man. And…well, we didn’t expect you.”
By which he meant that he didn’t know me as belonging to their small circle, and therefore he was dubious of my motives and my loyalty. What could I tell him, precisely? What could I tell him to reassure him?
It wasn’t, I thought, that he suspected everyone who hadn’t been in the direct pay of the Good Man of being against him and against all those who served him. It couldn’t be. He wasn’t a fool. But the truth was that there must be a certain trust among a certain class of people here. It would be much like in my native world, where the pilots and navigators of long-distance darkships were usually married to each other. In fact, you either married your alternate, or you traveled alone, which was a dangerous practice, since if you became disabled, the whole ship would be lost.
There was a trust, a connection, between the families of pilots and navigators that simply didn’t extend outside it. It was as though they formed a separate class of people, of families who generally interacted with each other. Because the price of bioengineering your children as pilots or navigators was very high, entrance into the group was slow, though steady, and probably the only thing that stopped them from having three eyes and sixteen fingers, and so the families stayed in touch through the generations and trusted each other more than anyone else.
Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) Page 11