Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  I didn’t tell him there was nothing “of course” about it. There are times one shouldn’t disillusion the young. Instead, I asked him what the various dials did. Then I removed the cover of the machine and started poking around the insides and asking questions.

  At this point, a dark young woman stepped forward to tell me the functions of various internal parts, until her knowledge ran out. She actually only knew enough to know how to fix the machine when it broke, not how to change it or make it do different things. That was fine. What she’d told me was enough for me to know what to do.

  I sent her for tools, then asked the group in general for some parts I hadn’t seen. Someone saluted me and said he would ask the quartermaster. Someone else left to ask Basil for the key to some supply area or other. In what seemed like moments, I had my screwdrivers, my wrenches, my flow meters and half a dozen things whose Earth names I was unsure about, since they were different in my culture, and, having been invented separately, had their own names.

  I was crawling around in the bowels of the machine, winding my way to replacing parts, and changing others’ positions, when LaForce asked, “Can you really change it so it can catch the Good Men’s communications? How would you even know what they are?”

  “Because they were…because there were channels for joint force communications in the array in Circum Terra.”

  “But wouldn’t the Patrician have known those too?” he asked. “Why didn’t he—”

  If I was going to have to answer for what Simon did and failed to do, we were going to have some serious problems. And besides, he wasn’t a mechanic. “He wasn’t the one changing the apparatus,” I said. “I don’t think he even knew enough to ask me what I’d done.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Mostly terrorizing the scientists and bureaucrats of Circum Terra so they’d leave us alone,” I said. I crawled out from under the machine and realized that LaForce had been joined by Brisbois.

  “How is Simon?” I asked.

  “Having fun,” he said, and there was just a hint of sourness to his expression. “I think he’s setting us up to be attacked by these moles in the next six hours or so. But he managed to convince them to come in through a specific door.”

  “Six hours?”

  “Most of the places are in the continents,” he said. “And you, do you think you can alter that communications apparatus to do what you want?”

  “I have,” I said.

  “You have?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why aren’t we trying to listen to—”

  “There are rather a lot of people here, aren’t there, Brisbois?” I said. “Shouldn’t you call whomever you want to listen in? Trusted people only?”

  He cursed under his breath. “Merde,” and something else I didn’t recognize. Then he bellowed for everyone but Jonathan LaForce and I to get out.

  I smiled at him and told him he and Jonathan could listen to whatever the communications were. I wasn’t likely to understand most of them anyway. I was going in search of food, since I’d had so much coffee that I was buzzing. I turned to the dark young woman and asked her where I could get a bite to eat and moments later found myself in a cafeteria, being served crusty white bread and a meaty hot soup by a servo mechanism.

  The young people stayed with me, whether star-struck at being close to someone who was a friend of the Patrician or simply curious about someone who, rumor said, had come from another world, I didn’t know. At any rate, none of them managed to get up the courage to ask me anything substantial.

  They asked me if I was military and I told them no. Then one of the girls asked if I had children and I told her no. And then somehow they were talking about themselves, their aspirations, their hopes for Liberte.

  Their hopes for Liberte, despite their being nominally the Patrician’s army, mostly seemed to involve a freer life, without having to ask permission to change domicile or get a job, or the other petty restrictions of the Good Men’s rule, which had led to their vaunted three hundred years of stability, in reality three hundred years of stagnation.

  After a while I got worried about what exactly they’d heard. It seemed to me I could hear far-off sounds of strife, though even with my enhanced hearing I wasn’t sure I wasn’t imagining it. I excused myself politely from the young people, who all stood and saluted me, in answer to what rule I couldn’t tell. In fact, I suspected saluting civilians was against the rules. Fortunately, I had no intention of telling on them.

  Two of them wandered back with me to the communications room where I’d rigged the receiver.

  There were more people there now, two young people twisting dials to different frequencies. I’d expected this and left notes on which frequencies might carry relevant payload.

  Listening to whatever was coming through the receiver, on headphones, Mailys Bonheur looked very small and young. Scared, I thought, and was shocked, because Mailys had never looked scared, not even when we’d seen that poor man being killed by inches in the market. She’d looked horrified seeing the holo cast of the modern day guillotine, but I wouldn’t say she’d looked scared then either. She’d helped me dispose of the corpses of people she’d almost certainly known and respected, without a flinch.

  But now she looked scared, her fingers holding the pen with which she took notes so hard I expected it to snap at any moment.

  Alexis Brisbois stood glowering nearby, his shoulders against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest. He had the look of a man who’d rather be anywhere else. He also had the look of a man who’d seen his death. I realized from where he was, he could see Mailys and the paper she was writing on.

  The young people who’d insisted on walking me to the room took a look in, turned around and left. I didn’t blame them. I would have left too, given the choice. I could tell they were shaken because they didn’t even salute.

  Brisbois looked up as I entered and frowned at me, as though I were a particularly unruly cat dragging a much-chewed mouse in. Then he compressed his lips and sighed. “Madame Sienna,” he said, and inclined his head slightly.

  “How bad is it?” I asked, at the same time someone opened the door behind me, and said, “Yes, how bad is it, Brisbois? And what is it that you’re all doing without letting me know?”

  I turned around and I could have slugged Simon for his paranoia, if it weren’t for the fact that paranoia was the logical result of being raised as he’d been and living as he had, not to mention the shock to the system of the revolution and finding his henchman had plotted these hideouts behind his back and without his knowledge.

  “I decided this, Simon,” I said, my voice trying for brisk but coming out wooden. “I thought we couldn’t do much unless we knew more about the enemy’s intentions. Both the internal and the external enemies. So I rigged this, which seems to have been Basil’s private communication device and his way of monitoring his employees’ communications, to listen in on both Madame and the Good Men.”

  Simon’s expression of amused teasing, really a cover for insecurity, vanished as though wiped out. Instead he gave me an evaluating look, long and hard, and then asked, “How did you know their frequen—” He waved a hand. “Never mind. The gadget in Circum Terra.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The gadget.” It had been more than a gadget—a linkage of them, all devilishly complicated—but I suspected trying to tell Simon this would only cause him to say that wasn’t important. Which would be right.

  “And what we found,” Alexis said, moving off from the wall, giving the impression of a lumbering mountain shaking itself upright, “is something I don’t know how to get around. And Madame Sienna can stop taking the full blame for this, too, Simon. I fully approved of and encouraged her exploit.”

  Simon’s eyebrows rose. The slightly amused look returned and the corner of his lip twitched upward. “No use defending her, Alexis. It’s not as though I could punish her. Or you. I’m not sure how much power I have in these, my nominal co
mmand centers.”

  Alexis made the sound commonly transcribed as pfui, but his expression didn’t change. “I don’t think,” he said, “you are that stupid. You know very well all of these people would follow you, if you required it. They respect me, but they were raised to revere you. They might at times have had their doubts about you, but I’ve seen you command their obedience with a look.” He glared at Simon as though he’d given him offense. “Which is why, my friend, we’re going to need you.”

  Simon’s smirk vanished and his expression became alert. He looked from Brisbois to Mailys and seemed, for the first time, to realize what their expressions meant and that they didn’t look in full command of themselves. His gaze swept over me, and returned to Alexis again. “How bad is it?”

  Mailys swept off her headphones and swallowed. “It means this,” she said. “That the Good Men have deployed a massive coalition from all the territories they control.” She hesitated. “Not overwhelming, mind, but massive, the kind of coalition that could easily overwhelm not just Liberte but also Shangri-la and the territories, without pausing to pick up the corpses.” She sighed. “Even if we had our former force, we couldn’t have defeated them in straight combat because they are better equipped and battle-hardened. And they have troops that have been fighting for the last few years.”

  “Yeah, against the Olympus coalition,” Simon said.

  “You’ll have to ask them for help,” Alexis and I said at the same time.

  Simon waved to us. “Undoubtedly,” he said. “But can we win even with them?”

  Alexis pursed his lips. He removed the note pad from in front of Mailys and looked at it. “How…interesting,” he said, then he looked at Alexis. “I suggest we ask Olympus to help as soon as possible. If they won’t help, it’s best to know right away.”

  “So we know how best to die?” Alexis said.

  Simon ignored him, and looked up at me. “Ma petite, can you harden this communication device so no one can spy on us, as we spy on them?”

  “No,” I said, honestly. “I mean, someone with my abilities on the other side will still be able to spy on us, but—”

  “But not a mere mortal? C’est bien, ma petite.”

  “I don’t see how even Olympus can break us out of this,” Brisbois said. “And I don’t see how you can convince them. Zen thinks if we make them see that if they don’t help us, they’ll face an enlarged enemy, it will convince them, but I doubt it. After all, they can’t count on us in either case. Not in the situation we’re in right now.” And then, as though dragging himself back from a long distance. “And how was your little deception?”

  Simon shook his head. “They’re on their way, of course. At that, you might know more than I do?”

  Mailys made a sound and Simon looked at her. “Yes, ma petite?” Which he’d apparently decided to call every female.

  Mailys shook her head. “Monsieur, it isn’t that your deception didn’t work.”

  “But—”

  “But someone overheard your conversation at the other end, and they have called Madame, who also intends to attack…here.”

  “Epatante,” Simon said and smiled. I had the impression his smile was brittle and glassy, a thing that might crack and fail at any moment. “It never rains, but it pours. Mailys, go and tell Monsieur Basil about our…ah…expected guests. And you.” He smiled at another young woman standing by the buttons. “Do put me in touch with Olympus as soon as possible.”

  The young woman snapped a salute, turned bright red, and started moving dials. I said “Wait.”

  Simon looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think you want to call some sort of general exchange in the Good Man’s palace in Olympus, do you?”

  Simon twisted his mouth. “Indeed not, ma petite. I hear there is a lot of…ah, bureaucracy going on in Olympus right now…and other people might not be as understanding. A moment,” he told the woman at the controls. Then he rattled off a complex set of letters and numbers that I recognized as the sort of private code that people gave their friends and close acquaintances.

  Having gathered that there was no love lost between them, I found myself flabbergasted when the image of Lucius Keeva materialized, large and startled, in front of the apparatus. He was wearing a robe and held a towel in his right hand. His wet hair was plastered to his head, looking two shades darker than its normal golden-blond. Behind him was the bed with its improbable stuffed giraffe.

  As he focused on who had called him, he pulled back the hand with which he must have pushed a receiving button on a com, and he blinked stupidly. “Simon?”

  Simon nodded. “Himself.”

  “But they said…”

  “That I was dead? Don’t let it worry you,” Simon said, and launched into a rapid-fire description of what had happened and our situation. Well, those parts of our situation that pertained to the Good Men. Somewhere in the middle of it, Lucius dropped his towel, cinched the robe around himself and looked like he’d very much like to let loose with a string of inspired profanity. He didn’t. When Simon stopped, Lucius rubbed the middle of his forehead. “And what do you expect me to do in this, St. Cyr?”

  It seemed to me we were about to see a repeat of my interview with the former Good Man Keeva.

  “I expect you,” Simon said, “to lend what aid you can.” He spoke very gently, almost sweetly, as though what he was saying was a matter of sweet sanity and nothing more. “Because if you don’t, it’s not just Liberte that will be taken over. It is also the territories, and I think you would not enjoy having hostiles so close to your territories.”

  “Not my—” Lucius started, reflexively, but then changed, seemingly midsentence. “Look, right now there’s fighting going on there, and we’re doing what we can to keep it from spilling across the border. The volunteers have deployed.”

  “Meaning farm boys armed with burners?” Simon asked. “Imagine how much fun it will be for them when the awesome might of the Good Men descends upon them with armored vehicles.”

  “They won’t. I mean, we can deploy forces to fight off the planned invasion there. I don’t think you understand, Simon, the kind of force needed to fight off the takeover of both of your seacities and the territories in both continents.”

  “I have some idea,” Simon said. “Think of all the people who will be summarily executed, if the Good Men take over.”

  “Think of the people your own people have executed, St. Cyr. Or at least think of the people who have been executed by their own co-citizens in the last few days. I’m not absolutely sure the best thing to do to your damned seacities isn’t putting it all to fire and the burner.”

  I said, “No,” and took a step forward before I knew what I was doing. I could only think of everyone in the seacity who had been on our side. I didn’t know what LaForce had done with his wife and children and the little Tieri, but I was sure that be they ever so well-hidden and secure, if they were still on the seacity they would be killed. As would be a lot of other innocents.

  Surely, the seacity seemed to have gone mad, but from all I’d seen, most people—those who weren’t allied with Madame and those who were not on any lists of improved people—were just hiding, keeping quiet, hoping the storm would pass them by. I suspected Madame’s followers were no more than maybe ten percent of the people, and to them had attached the normal number of psychopaths and evildoers that exist in every population.

  That left a large number that had done nothing worse than be too scared to fight.

  If the Good Men descended upon Liberte and Shangri-la, in the kind of numbers they had assembled, probably more than a hundred thousand armored, equipped, trained soldiers, the place would be scoured of life, and then either left as ruins and a warning, or rebuilt to suit their new master.

  It was blindingly obvious to me that, while most of the time when a seacity was taken over, it was only the cadres and the high officers who got killed, in this case, after the sort of rebellion that had taken p
lace here, it would be everyone. The Good Men, most of whom were more paranoid than Simon, would not allow anyone who had seen the rule of one of their own overturned to live.

  Like slave owners of some old civilization, who killed every slave in a house where a slave had killed the master, they’d destroy the population of Liberte. It would be no more than a legend, howling down the centuries, scaring children.

  “No,” I said to the blond giant who looked startled and stared at me, as though noticing me for the first time. “You can’t just ignore it. Most of the people are not guilty of anything except being normal and scared. You can’t just let them die. You—the armies of Olympus—must lend us aid.”

  “Dear Lady,” he said, and his voice was very calm, with a sad kind of intonation. “What good will it do to send our troops to die along with you?”

  I was right, and it was a repetition of what I’d experienced when I’d first seen him, and I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t endure it. I wanted to reach through and shake the real man through the hologram. “You must realize,” I said, my voice sounding colder and more distant than I’d ever heard it, “that if you don’t help those on your side while you can, even against great odds, when the monster comes for you, there will be no one to save you.”

  “But if I kill myself before there is any need, and in response to nothing more than nominal allies, what good will it do me? I mean, let’s suppose I send the troops of Olympus to help you, St. Cyr, which is not exactly how it works, since I have no legislation over the general troops of the seacity and can’t in fact do anything like that. Let’s suppose I send them to rescue you, and we lose so many battalions that we’re not able to defend ourselves? Then the monster eats us now, Madame Sienna, and what good will that do me, my seacity or the Usaian cause? Suppose that we do that and lose all our forces. Then what? And that’s supposing I can send troops. It will be hard, since right now the legitimate government of the seacity is in flux, and it seems to us that the Sans Culottes St. Cyr encouraged are set on destroying the isle and possibly every other place they can reach.”