Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  No. Keeping secrecy was not a matter of paranoia. And yet…

  My fingers played with some spilled salt on the table, as Jonathan LaForce looked at me and said, “Well, Madame? Who are you, where do you come from, and why should we trust you? I know you look somewhat like the Patrician’s special guest, and you might even be her, with some appearance modifications, but that doesn’t stop the possibility that you might also be a traitor. It wouldn’t be the first time that a Patrician took a bed partner who killed him or betrayed him.”

  “I was not the Patrician’s bed partner,” I said, and realized I’d started with the most irrelevant part of my answer. “My name is Zenobia Sienna, though if my world had followed the same marriage naming rules as most of Earth, I’d be Zenobia Dufort.”

  Corin let a small sound escape and I looked towards him. “My husband’s unmarried name—men change their name in my homeland—was Dufort and he looked somewhat like you, though older…Of course older. Not so much when we married, but—” But when he’d died. I couldn’t say it.

  Corin shook his head. “Was he from the continents? We’re the only Duforts in…”

  “You know about the Je Reviens?” I asked. “The big, said-to-be-interstellar ship, in which the Mules left with their few remaining servants.”

  “Pah,” LaForce said. “That legend. Every historian agrees it’s a myth, designed to allay the collective guilt for killing the rulers and a lot of innocents.”

  “Every historian is wrong then,” I tilted my head sideways, trying to delay the inevitable, and at the same time trying to force out words that my better judgment was dubious of my pronouncing. “The Mules did leave on the Je Reviens. A hundred and some Mules, led by Jarl Ingemar. They took with them as many of their servants as they could gather on short notice. I understand the time of departure was put forward, and that meant that some of the people who would otherwise have been on board were left behind. Many died. That weighs heavily on the minds of those in Eden. We hold a remembrance day every year.”

  “Eden?”

  “It’s…a—a colony in the solar system. Forgive me. I can’t say more.”

  Corin’s eyes opened wide. “The darkships. The darkship thieves. They aren’t a myth?”

  “No,” I said. “My husband was a pilot. I was his navigator. Both of us were bioed for our functions. He was hit with radiation from an exploded powerpod when the tractor beams from Circum Terra seized our ship. He got too high a dose of radiation. My only hope of saving him was to surrender, and I suspected if I did they’d not expend the needed effort to cure him. The only thing surrendering would do was to get me captured and interrogated by every means at Earth’s disposal. So I shot him and took the ship back home alone.” My voice became expressionless as it usually did when I was talking of Len’s death. It was easier to recite it as a learned lesson than to see, to remember—

  “And yet you’re back again?” LaForce said.

  “We needed to come back, myself and…and some other people to…to find something needed at home, and we did. I chose to stay behind.”

  “Why?” Corin asked.

  “Unless you were involved with the Patrician,” LaForce said.

  I shook my head. “It’s hard to explain. Let’s say the pressure at home was great towards my remarrying and would have grown greater still with time. My skills and my biological enhancements, in my culture, are used as part of a married couple, and I…had no intention of remarrying. I couldn’t imagine falling in love or even getting attached to someone else that way again, and then not being able to save him. But there were other reasons.”

  “So you’re saying you’re descended from the servants of the Good Men who left in the Je Reviens?” Corin asked. “It was family legend that a great-uncle had gone, but we always wondered if he’d just gotten killed, only—” He stopped.

  “The Duforts are an old family in Eden, my homeland.”

  “But,” Corin said, and stopped and cleared his throat. “But, you see, when we say you’re one of us, we don’t mean descended from enhanced people. While Madame considers everyone like that an abomination, too, given the promiscuous way enhancements were used in the later twenty-first century, I’d say practically everyone is descended from them, no? The pure human beings she imagines don’t exist, do they? But that’s not what we meant. We meant we, the people here, the three of us, and Tieri too; they more than I, maybe, were genetically enhanced, on a personal…first generation level.”

  I could read the hurt in his words, see the expectation of recoil and disgust in his eyes, and all I could do was sigh and say, “No. I didn’t mean that. My late husband was just descended from enhanced people. Other…other people on Eden too, but I am the…The easy way to say this would be to say I’m a female clone of Jarl Ingemar, the leading Mule on the Je Reviens. That’s not true of course. I’m the modified version of what Jarl Ingemar would be, were he female, and our genetics are close enough to fool the less discriminating genlocks, but it’s not exactly like being a clone. More like being his sister.”

  Corin nodded. “Like Athena Hera Sinistra. She was said to be one such. A fertile Mule. One who could…reproduce with any of the male Mules, the…the Good Men, now. And we know who Jarl Ingemar is. He’s living in this colony then, with the other Mules?” His eyes were narrow and I didn’t know why.

  It didn’t seem to be something that needed to be kept secret, nor did I attempt it. “No,” I said. “The Mules left in the Je Reviens, after dropping us, dropping their servants off. All except Jarl Ingemar and Bartolomeu Dias, who stayed behind with the merely enhanced people. Doctor Dias is still alive, but…but Jarl Ingemar is now dead.”

  His eyes were still narrowed at me. “So you’re one of them, a…a Mule?”

  I shook my head. “Not exactly. I’m not quite sure why I was made, but it had more to do with making two old men happy—I mean the Mules who stayed behind in Eden—than with being a perfect ruler. I was not taught anything needed to take charge. I’m just Zen Sienna, a navigator of darkships, and since Earth has no need for those, I suppose I’m an unemployed navigator of darkships, now. Someone…I’m just one of the Patrician’s friends. He was very kind to me, a stranger on Earth, and I cannot let him die.”

  Jonathan LaForce sighed. “How do we know that? That you’re a private individual who wishes to be of help to the Good Man?”

  “Because I told you?” I asked, bewildered.

  He shook his head slightly. “You could be…a scout? An advance force for the Mules, when they left in the Je Reviens.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Some advance force,” I said. “It’s just me. I spent six months as guest of the Good Man, doing nothing but enjoying his hospitality.”

  “But…perhaps you were lying low? Waiting to get your bearings? So the Mules could take over the world?” It was Corin, and he looked like he was convincing himself of the possibility as he spoke.

  Mailys cackled. “You have listened to Madame,” she said, in a tone of great appreciation.

  “Shut up, you,” he said. “I’ve not. I don’t think all modified people are evil, though she certainly is. I was keeping an eye on her, that’s all. But the idea that the Mules who are now the Good Men, and who are superior to creatures on Earth, might want to take over, to—to reduce us to slave populations or worse, is not really that far-fetched. Throughout history, more fit populations have replaced less fit ones. The Mules are better able to survive than we are. If they could reproduce, they could overtake the Earth.”

  “That is exactly the same reasoning Madame uses to say everyone who is enhanced in any way should be killed,” Mailys said.

  “It is not at all—”

  Jonathan LaForce and I traded a look that said, children, and he bellowed, “Quiet.” He looked back at me. He smiled a little. “So you’re not here on collective objectives. I’ll believe that. But why are you here, then?”

  I shrugged. “To escape Eden where enough people knew or
suspected, or would eventually find out, I was the clone of Jarl Ingemar. If you know of the man, you know the expectations that come with it. But I’m not Jarl. I’m Zen. All I want to do is live a small, private, quiet life.” I was silent about my suspicions as to why and how my brother, Kit, and I had been created, and also on how being Jarl’s clone had almost gotten Kit killed. Call me a coward. I wasn’t willing to be killed just because I was the female version of someone who’d died when I was too young to remember him, and with whom I’d never had more than the contact every one of my generation did: a man in a historical study, a hologram in historical recreations.

  “And for this peaceful retreat you chose Liberte, balancing on the edge of a revolution?” He grinned mirthlessly. “Well done, indeed.”

  “Alors,” Mailys said, softly. “She couldn’t have known we were on the verge of a revolution. We, ourselves, didn’t know it. We thought the Patrician could bring us in for a soft landing. He would have, too, if Madame hadn’t been undermining his influence with the Sans Culottes for years, and if he had the type of power he thought he had.”

  LaForce snorted. “Brisbois told him of the danger. He told him several times.”

  “Yes, but Brisbois has a gift for rubbing people the wrong way,” Corin said.

  “Yourself included, I suspect.”

  Corin laughed. “A few times. Though he respects Father, and I’m probably indebted to him for getting Mother and Father out of trouble and so…”

  Something dropped at the back of my head and suddenly I knew, with absolute certainty what I was looking at. “You were all made by Doctor Dufort!” I said. “I mean.” I looked at Corin. “Of course, you are his son, but that’s not what I meant. He made you—enhanced you—in a lab.”

  Corin hissed out air between his teeth and looked at me, as though shocked. “But of course, I told you. The locals call him Doctor Moreau.”

  “Doctor…?”

  “Oh, it was the jeering nickname for Doctor Dufort,” LaForce said, derisively. “Employed by Madame’s followers. After an old legend of a doctor who created monstrous creatures, half human, half animal. It’s not like that, of course, but yes. He created us and the Bonnaires and…and most of the Good Man’s servants. He or his father before him.”

  “But,” I said, slowly. “Most of the servants of the Good Men are hereditary families. That means their children are natural, no? The parents might be enhanced but the children are naturally born, like Tieri.”

  Mailys sighed, and Jonathan shook his head. “Yes and no,” he said. “That is, we all have parents, yes, but you see, when some of us were enhanced, even though it wasn’t as…as it was with…with Brisbois, we still were given characteristics that…that made us ideal for the Good Man’s service.”

  “But you’re his son!” I protested looking at Corin.

  “And expected to follow his legacy,” Corin said. “Yes. Like my father, and his father before him, I was expected to be a genius at my occupation, to be able to run the laboratory all on my own, to be able to keep up with all the new breakthroughs and to keep things going. And no, I’m not trained yet. Not significantly. But what father who can do it would refrain from making his son a little faster, a little smarter, and a little more able to resist illness? Mind you, ma’am, most of it is done by viruses introduced to the mother at crucial periods of gestation.”

  “That’s how we do it too,” I said. “With navigation skills and with the special eyes that allow our pilots to see in the dark. It’s just very expensive, because it requires careful watching.”

  He nodded. “Yes, but…there’s also people who are assembled, molecule by molecule and protein by protein in the lab. It starts with human genetics, but each one is selected individually. They’re not Mules. Or at least I suppose they aren’t, because the Mules took entire teams of dedicated people, and each of them worked only on this their whole lives. Of course, that was over four hundred years ago, and we’ve learned some new things, but we’ve also lost much in the way of knowledge and technology. So I don’t know if those people are Mules. They are technically like the Mules—the Patricians—in that they are created to be able to reproduce and to be as fast, as smart, as capable as they can be created.”

  “Brisbois?” I said, trying to absorb this. I thought of those rough features, the prominent brow, the way he could keep up with me when I was running, the way he’d dragged me out of that ballroom unscathed.

  “And Madame,” Mailys said, in a resigned tone.

  “But why?” my voice came out almost whining.

  “Because all the secret service of Monsieur…of the Patrician…the Good Man were created especially,” LaForce said. “His…his father…his…the Good Man before him, he didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t enhanced in the same way he was. He thought there was a natural enmity between what we’ll call Mules and what we’ll call, for lack of a better term, normal humans, which we still count as, even if enhanced. So he wanted his very own bodyguards, his secret service, the people close to him to be like him.”

  “Then they’re not Mules,” I said. “Because those were all male.”

  Corin shrugged. “I’m not exactly fully trained, Madame, but I know that it’s safer to create males and females and impair the reproductive abilities of both, than to create males only and count on them not being able to make females of their kind.” He looked me up and down. “I believe your existence shows those hopes were misguided.”

  “But it took centuries,” I said, then thought better of it. “Or at least I think so. It’s what I was told, and what—” I stopped.

  “Yes,” Mailys said. “From what I understand, we’re not done that way. Oh, I should…I mean I was raised by foster parents, because the doctor didn’t want me to be known as one of his, but I am like Brisbois and Madame. I am still too young but I was training to be…I was Brisbois’s trainee. To replace him. His…” She blushed dark. “His adopted daughter, you might say.”

  I looked at Jonathan. “And you? You were in his office? You were wearing the uniform of the Good Man, you—”

  “I am common as muck,” he said. “Oh, enhanced, sure, but not so enhanced that I was considered a danger to the human race if I reproduced. And my wife is not, that I know, any more enhanced than anyone else.”

  He sighed and tapped his fingers on the table. “You see, you’re dealing with two Good Men and two very different sets of policies. The Good Man before the current Good Man didn’t trust anyone in his guard who wasn’t enhanced the same way he was. He was, you could say, the counterpart of Madame, who proclaims to all and sundry the wonders of natural humans, those who have not had their genes tampered with. He thought the only trustworthy people were those as enhanced as he was. Only he found that wasn’t precisely true. I’m not exactly sure what happened or when, but…but Brisbois and Madame turned on him. Perhaps he took Madame into his bed.” He shrugged and looked at my appalled expression. “I don’t know, understand. I’m just speculating. At the time I was just a very young man and training to be in the defense forces, not…not in the palace guard as such. I just know something must have happened, because Brisbois made an attempt against the Patrician and it came out he was working with the Sans Culottes and so was Madame and Jean Dechausse, perforce, and then—” He shrugged. “Their attempt against the Good Man failed and they were all imprisoned. The Good Man condemned them to death. And then—” He expelled air between his teeth in a long and expressive hiss. Most of what it expressed was his frustration, though I wasn’t sure with what. “And then someone made an attempt against the late Good Man. Some people say it was his son, and this is possible, but we don’t know for sure. What we know is that, whatever happened, it caused the Good Man to be brain damaged, unable to exercise his power of government, and his son succeeded him. He then went into death row and saved Brisbois, making him head of his security force. But unlike the previous Good Man, Simon St. Cyr didn’t want…” He said a word I didn’t understand, clicked his t
ongue and said, “Men without a mother in his security force. He thought, and perhaps…well, he thought that those who had been created in a lab, gestated by a surrogate and brought up by foster parents who were hired to raise them, were not the most stable of people. I don’t intend to dispute it, though some people say none of us are very stable, and neither are most natural born people.

  “At any rate, he picked enhanced but not as powerful as possible guards. And he set them to work under Brisbois. Mailys was, I think, the only one created like Brisbois in the force, and that was because she was considered Brisbois’s daughter. But the rest of us…the rest of us were just enhanced, not made. Still we were a fraternity of sorts. Each of us knew the others, and each of us knew we weren’t quite like other people, and that meant we trusted each other more.”

  “So that was the list you were talking about,” I said. “Everyone in the guard.”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “Everyone enhanced. All of the creations of Doctor More—” He looked at Corin. “Of Doctor Dufort. We all went to him for treatment when needed, because he had files and he knew about all of us, including the secrets of how we were made and exactly what each of us was capable of.” He opened his hands. “Even people like the Bonnaires, who were clerks in the Good Man’s administration.”

  He stopped then, because Tieri had come from the playroom, cuddling the kitten. “I heard noises outside,” she said.

  We traded a look, and Jonathan got up. He picked Tieri up and deposited her unceremoniously, kitten and all, on Corin’s lap, before he slid down the hallway. I didn’t care if I or Mailys were more enhanced than he was, Monsieur LaForce did a pretty good imitation of a cat who didn’t wish to be seen, moving down the hallway soundlessly, knitting with the shadows.

  The rest of us were left sitting at the kitchen table. Corin, absently, petted the kitten, but even Tieri had ceased speaking. It was as though all of us were straining to hear some noise. I thought of how Corin had survived the attack on his parents’ house, and knew he would be listening for warnings that we were in for a second attack. And the rest of us? I didn’t know what Mailys had survived, or what attacks she’d experienced, but I knew that my life had taken too many unexpected turns lately for me to be sanguine in the face of a potential threat. So I watched and waited, listening for a sound of disaster: an explosion, the sound of a breaking window.