Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  I didn’t know what the boxes meant, except I assumed they contained pieces of the sacred flag of the Usaians, the barred, star-spangled piece of cloth that was said to have once flown over their long-lost homeland.

  But they meant something for Nat all right. His eyes widened and he grew considerably paler. The words “It just became real for him” crossed my mind, but even I wasn’t sure, precisely, what they meant.

  He stood and inclined his head, and put his fingers up, pinching each side of the bridge of his nose, as though trying to calm thoughts going through his head in tumult. I got the impression that if he’d spoken then, if he’d spoken immediately, we’d have gotten shouted at.

  Instead, he took a deep, long, audible breath. He said something under his breath. It wasn’t merde. Or at least it didn’t sound like merde, but I think it meant the same.

  Then he looked up, though his hand remained poised for his head to drop into it at any minute. “We have a problem,” he said. “And that is why I came ahead to try to find a solution to it, before the Good Men are upon us, and before our problem is effectively without solution.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, what precisely do you expect the army of Olympus, arguably a Usaian army, which is why I’m here at all, to do for you?”

  There was a long silence, and then Mailys spoke, her voice thin and that of a very little girl. “Fight for us.”

  Nat looked at her, and nodded once, but I had the impression the movement of his head was in no way an agreement with what she’d said. “Granted,” he said, “I and my comrades will fight, bleed and die for fellow Usaians, and for the cause of liberty around the world. But you don’t understand my meaning. General Herrera of the Olympus forces is engaged in battle right now. We have been engaged in battle, or in preparation for battle, or in various conflagrations against the armies of the Good Men for over a year.” He let his hand fall, and faced us fully. “We’ve done bleeding and dying enough, but if you think we are enough to stop the Good Men taking over this seacity or overrunning it, or even bombing it from above till it’s a cracked shell on the floor of the ocean—” These words elicited a small sound of protest from Simon, which in turn got him a cold look from Nat’s dark eyes. “You are out of your ever-loving minds. I learned in religious education that the heart of a pure Usaian, infused with the faith and the words of the Founders, was capable of defeating ten of the Good Men’s slave troops. Even if that were true—and I’ll tell you right now I’ve seen no superiority of that kind, our hearts stop like others when we’re shot—this still leaves a good two troops of the Good Men for each we kill or more. They have millions they can draft.

  “We’ve managed to survive by running what is largely a terror action; by hiding and striking from cover, by running a guerilla war against the Good Men and their transports, their goods and their facilities. And we’ve become painful enough for them not to try too hard to kill us; for them to avoid us and try not to disturb us. We haven’t become painful enough for them to engage in all-out war against us. We have five seacities with us, and the only significant territorial areas are those of Olympus, and they are, as far as the Good Men know, backwoods, inhabited by ignorant farmers whom they could wipe out anytime. In fact, they’ve carried out a couple of punitive raids on our towns, which were a minor effort to us but which—” He swallowed. “I was on the receiving end of one of those and let me tell you, it might have been child’s play to them, but it almost ended the Olympus army, early on.”

  “You’re saying that there is no hope,” Jonathan said. “And that we should surrender now? Then why do you fight? Why do you wear that uniform, if all you do is just play at being soldiers, while the Good Men ignore you, save for random slaps at your inadequate forces?”

  “I didn’t say we had no hope,” Nat said. He put both hands on the table and leaned forward slightly, looking at each of us in turn. I noticed the men who’d come in with him were paying close attention. Surely they’d heard this before?

  “I didn’t say that we could do nothing, as Usaians in the long game. No, no, no. We have hope and we will win this, but it won’t be a sudden action, a short, thrusting invasion, a happy moment when the people of the world will realize they prefer liberty and hew to our cause. That’s not how real life works, though it makes for a beautiful picture in the sensies.” His lips quirked. “Those of you who are fighting men know that. And you know it’s a matter of years.”

  “We don’t have years,” Alexis Brisbois said. I’d never heard a human being sound as cold, as desolate. “That was my idea when I established this secret center and others like it. The idea that we could lie low and over ten years or so work, return the Good Man to power, and then start again to freedom, another way, but the problem we have is twofold. First, the Good Man has been outed as an artifact, a Mule, and suspicions of course fell on a lot of us who work for him. And second, the Good Men are attacking. I don’t know if they intend to use all their forces. I doubt it. But the numbers we got are more than enough to destroy us. Yes, we could still stay, those of us in the Good Men forces who are in these centers. We could stay quietly behind, let the Good Men repopulate the isle, and then set about converting the new population.” He pursed his lips. “In fifty years or so, we would have a perfect opportunity. Maybe a hundred.”

  Nat cackled. “I like your sense of humor, Brisbois. You are funny.”

  “Not funny at all,” Jonathan said. “My friends are out there, and my family.”

  “I’d gathered,” Nat said drily. “Which is why I’m not taking Brisbois seriously. But let me tell you this, it would be better if we had a finite number, a carefully delineated population. Because I don’t know how to save the population of the island. I understood you’ve gotten those more closely connected with the Good Man’s household into some sort of shelter?”

  Jonathan sighed and shrugged. “Most of them, but I doubt all. And besides, pardon me, sir,” the “sir” was military courtesy, as he’d looked at the insignia on Nat’s chest. “I know that you’re here because the Olympus army is sworn to defend Usaians.”

  There was a waggle of the hand from Nat. “‘Sworn’ and ‘defend’ are both debatable. We try to protect Usaians when it doesn’t put our cause in danger. But I’d hoped very much we could do a lift of people endangered, that you were in the tens at most. And if you aren’t, I’m hoping most of you, the vast majority of you, can be put somewhere safe. Then we can let the Good Men overrun the island. Because that would be the best thing we could do. We could then lead a small and targeted operation to get our people out of here, and let everyone go to hell otherwise. Let the Good Men have this hunk of rock and dimatough.”

  “No,” it was Brisbois, and he stood up and shouted. “No. Martyrs’ blood, man. There are innocents out there. They’ve been dying and we’ve been unable to defend them, but now—And yes, any number of them, probably a significant number are Usaian. And you propose to just let them die.”

  Nat made a sound normally managed by clicking one’s tongue on the roof of one’s mouth. “No. You don’t understand me.” He stood his full height, staring at Brisbois in the eye, even though he was of a much smaller build. “I don’t want to leave these people to die. But you should understand. I know you’ve worked for the Good Man, in the secret service of all places, and you must have learned to make the best of a very bad thing, and you must have learned to live with the decisions that don’t conform to your conscience but that are, nonetheless, the only ones you can take. We can’t lift everyone from the seacity. And we don’t have enough people to defend this place. We just don’t. We can bring our army in—well, a substantial portion of it—and we are willing. I left orders with my subordinates, and they’re probably already embarking.

  “Usaians run to the sound of guns, to rescue innocents. This much we know, this much we were taught. But, Alexander Hamilton Brisbois, we have neither the numbers nor the weapons to survive this. We will just die. And while it can be honorable to die fo
r what one believes in—” His lips quirked. “I’ve lost three siblings to the cause. I beg you to believe they’re honored. But that doesn’t bring them back. Each of them died saving others. And if we could, even remotely, save all those innocents, I’d be the first to say I’d risk all, and die in the attempt. But it’s not. You have not a chance of withstanding the forces marshalling against you. Jonathan showed me the papers you got. It is enough to destroy you and us, twice over. You are, you see, a much greater nuisance than the Usaians. I’ve killed a Good Man. And we’ve overturned the regime. But none of us, not one of us, had the unmitigated stupidity to kill the Good Man and broadcast it all over the world, as Rose Parr did.”

  Brisbois gasped.

  “And having done that,” Nat said. “I think she expected the Good Men to be afraid of her. Instead of which, even if the Good Man she thought she’d killed is still alive, they will obliterate her and the seacity and everything you stand for. You—” He slapped his palm on the table. “Have.” Slap. “No.” Slap. “Chance.”

  “But we can’t—” Simon said.

  “No, you can’t. You can’t save yourself,” Nat said. “You would achieve the same thing by poisoning your whole population as you would by—” He stopped. He stopped, because Mailys had raised her hand, which made her look very young and exactly like a well-behaved school girl. The look on Nat’s face was the purest confusion. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Sir,” she said. “I am Mailys—Margaret Catherine Moore Bonheur, sir. I am Monsieur Brisbois’…” She took a deep breath. “Not his daughter, but as close to his daughter as someone can be who was made in a lab.” She cast a look at Brisbois as she said this. His face was perfectly impassive, as though he’d not been mentioned. I wondered what she meant by that and suddenly a lot of things fell into place, such as why Brisbois had gone to a lot of trouble to try to keep Mailys safe, even though she was obviously made and raised to fight. “And I don’t think he’s considering everything possible.”

  “Everything possible…how?” Brisbois said, closely echoed by Nat.

  “Sir…” she said. She closed her eyes, then opened them again. She looked vaguely sick. “I am seventeen. I was made when my father was engaged in revolutionary activities. Not mine…or—When I started being taught about our religion, when I started…When Doctor Dufort told me my special relationship to my…to Monsieur Brisbois, I wanted to learn about him. I researched the death, or at least the severe wounding, of the last Good Man. I understand he died by hands unknown, after years of lingering.” She looked towards Simon and I wondered how much she actually knew about the way the Good Man had died. Then she returned her attention to Nat Remy. “But the first thing he did, when he killed the Good Man, or when he caused the Good Man to…to crash, was to put a bomb, a shaped charge, which blew a wide hole on the side of the Good Man’s flyer at a certain time. This caused the flyer to lose altitude and crash, but not…but would not have made the Good Man unrecognizable, so that…so that it could not be denied.”

  Nat Remy’s eyebrows were drawn together and high over his nose. “I don’t have the pleasure—” He started.

  “No,” she said. “Hear me out. I know there are no charges strong enough to blow the ships of the Good Men apart. They’re big armored transports, each carrying hundreds of thousands of men, but what I was thinking—” Remy’s eyebrows climbed so much they were at risk of being lost in his hairline. Mailys seemed all too aware of his skepticism and she forged ahead, in a kind of desperate rush, “But I was thinking that there are engine vent ports and things of that kind, and that shaped charges put there would give you a chance to throw poisonous gas-releasing charges inside. You see, sir, it’s what you said about…about poisoning the island. Why not poison them?”

  She stopped and looked up at him. He opened his mouth, snapped it shut. Brisbois reached towards Mailys’s hands and patted them, comfortingly, I thought, or perhaps just consolingly.

  “I know you’re going to say it’s rubbish,” Simon said. “But I think it will work.”

  “I’m not going to say it’s rubbish,” Nat said. “Insufficient for full victory, yes. They will not send troop transports only, though I will grant you most of those they’ll send are troop transports. They will also send flyers and some of those will be bombers.” He looked towards Simon. “Is there an air raid alarm on this isle, perhaps from the trade wars of Good Men?”

  Simon looked surprised, then nodded.

  “And can you rally your troops enough to fight those who don’t come in transports? I presume you have ship busters for anti-aerial?”

  Simon nodded, though I suspected he had no clue if they had ship busters. Unless he’d informed himself while I’d been otherwise occupied. He very well might have.

  “And you can deploy forces in some semblance of order, since they’re sworn to you, personally. And we can help with that. Yes. The transports will take most of the people we’d have to fight, but more importantly, the same technique could remove the amphibious assault vehicles that would shell the island from the sea, to soften it for the attack.” He looked animated. “It’s one chance in a hundred, but I’ve fought in worse odds.” He bit his lower lip, a quick nervous gesture. “The problems I have are twofold. One is you’re going to need a hell of a lot of explosives. And the second is that…The second is that it will be almost a suicide mission. There is a chance we can save those who go out, but I wouldn’t count on more than an off chance. Hell, it’s an off chance for us to win this battle at all. But it’s even more of an off chance for us to win the battle and for none of our saboteurs to get shot. How many people can you get willing to go on that sort of mission, one from which they won’t return?”

  “I’ll do it,” LaForce said, standing up.

  “And I,” Simon said, standing also.

  Brisbois sighed. “LaForce, you have young children. I’m sorry, but while every position in this is risky, you cannot be allowed to be foolish. And you, Simon, I thought I’d told you it wasn’t your job to make grand gestures. You’ll be needed here to issue commands, to put heart into the troops, since most of them probably don’t have that pure heart of Usaians that allows them to kill ten of the enemy.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. You’re needed. Jonathan is needed. Mailys is too young, and by the marginal claim I have as her genetic relative, I’m going to dictate that she can’t do it.” There was a sound from Mailys, but I hadn’t seen any signs that she intended to volunteer. “But I have outlived my usefulness a thousand times over and should have died at least a hundred times over. For the sake of preserving my miserable life, I took a post that required me to be the enforcer for a tyrant.” There was a noise like a tongue-click from Simon. Brisbois didn’t even glance at him. “My only hope of being born into the world of freedom to which all good Usaians go when they die, is to die a martyr. Very well, I’m willing to do it. I’m willing to go further. I know where explosives are, in quantity sufficient for this. Shaped charges even.”

  “A terrorist cache?” Simon asked.

  A smile played on Brisbois’s lips, though his eyes remained stone hard. “You could say that, Simon. Sometimes your enemies needed to be put out of the way in more…subtle ways.”

  “Mine?”

  “Yes, in the palace. We had experts…Never mind. In the quarters, in the garden. I can lead you to them, but it might be a lively fight,” he told Nat.

  “Lively fights are what we do,” Nat said. “Although it might be a good idea to don dark broomer suits again.”

  “Rather.”

  “How…heavy are these? How large?”

  Brisbois looked at the men around the table, the men who’d come in with Nat. “Twenty people or so ought to be enough to carry a hundred of the charges. You can easily take five apiece. They are…extendable,” he said. “Elastic. But they start in disks about this size,” he showed the bottom of his coffee mug. “And they fit in casings of five, carefully shielded so none detonates. W
ould you?”

  Nat nodded. “The forces of Olympus will lend our help to this expedition. Command us as you will. How likely are we to meet with fighting?”

  “Highly. The palace is occupied by the forces of Madame, who is doubtless feeling worried her boy-toy didn’t return. If her patrols catch us, there will be fighting,” he said. “But your men are trained, and hers are merely terrorists. As long as we move fast…”

  “Understood,” Nat said. “But the problem remains of enough mad broomers ready to risk their lives. We have you, but the heart of a Usaian or not, you won’t be enough.”

  “No, but I volunteer also,” I said, standing up. And to Brisbois’s alarmed look and Simon’s protest, I said, “I too have no children, no natural position in this world, and no duties I cannot avoid by dying. If I die no one will care. The last person to whom I was essential died before I arrived on Earth.”

  Simon said something like “Not true,” but I knew Simon now; I had his measure. He was in love with the idea of being in love, romancing the idea of romance. He might think he needed me, but almost anyone else would do—any unattainable woman, the more unattainable the better. It was not, after all, common for the Good Man of Liberte seacity to find women he couldn’t have, by persuasion or by overwhelming wealth. That was all. He needed an unattainable someone who refused him, and I’d fulfilled that purpose.

  He didn’t know the main part of my unavailability during the six months I’d spent with him wasn’t even that I wasn’t attracted to him. It had rather been the frozen shock of recovering from Len’s death and the remorse of having failed Len, the fear this would happen again in another relationship.