Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  We ended up taking ship busters back too, strapped on our backs, two apiece. Nat Remy said he needed them. I thought it was more a personal thing.

  But we made it back to the compound without incident. Which is when the dangerous part began.

  Beyond the Singing Flame

  It started almost calmly and it was the sort of adventure that Simon would have loved, if he’d been allowed to go with us. There was the flight over the dark sea to the approaching transports. And that’s where the danger came.

  You see, we were dressed in dark colors, and we were flying so close to the dark water that periodically my boots touched it. This was necessary so any motion, any reflection, would get lost in the motion and reflection of the restless sea waters.

  But the ships had sentinels. And the sentinels were neither asleep nor blind. And the ships probably had other methods of detection that I knew nothing about.

  Nat Remy, who did know about them said that they would have trouble picking us up close to the water. But it wasn’t impossible, he said, just difficult. It was, he said, a matter of staying alive as long as we could. We ended up with fifty men and women and each of us had five charges. Some would use all five, and some might be killed before they set one. The important thing was to immobilize and destroy as many ships as possible.

  And there were a lot of them.

  The troop transports, immense and dark, looked like towers on the surface of the water, moving across it silently. And the amphibious vehicles were like turtles, low-slung, shining black-blue under the moonlight.

  Coming closer.

  I understood for the first time what Nat Remy had said when he said that we now had a chance. Just a chance. There would be air support too, and this force was more than anything Simon could command.

  We’d left him back at the center, terse and military, giving orders and disposing his troops. The last thing he’d told me was that he was conscious that people would die today for no other reason than their fealty to him. Perhaps Simon was growing up. Or perhaps he was playing at being grown up.

  My mission was to take out the amphibious vehicles. Mine and that of the ten smaller men and women. I didn’t know how many were women, because we’d all been wearing the dark suits. And besides, it didn’t matter. We were instruments for a mission right now, and what we all were was people who had nothing left to lose but our lives.

  I’ve never believed in an afterlife. No, that is not true. I’ve never believed or disbelieved in an afterlife. I allow for its existence. Everything is possible. And if there was an afterlife, maybe I’d see Len again. If there was an afterlife, maybe he could see me now, in which case I wasn’t about to disappoint him by showing how scared I was as I detached from the group and flew, my legs submerged, to the port that had been shown to me in diagram in the compound.

  I found it and put the shaped charge on it, pushed the detonator. It made a small hole, where the dimatough was weak and punctured by tiny vent holes.

  The hole was enough. I pushed one of gas bombs in and flew on, so close to the water that I hoped I was invisible. I wondered where Brisbois was and how he was doing. He was too large to try for the amphibians, and only the greater shadow of the troop transports might give him cover, but still he wasn’t exactly what I thought of when I thought of subtlety and stealth.

  I disabled one amphibian, two, and hoped the gas was working, as we had no way of knowing. The ships would go on under what propulsion they were under. The only difference would be, if our plan worked, all that would land ashore would be a ship full of corpses.

  On the fifth ship, I didn’t find the vent hole where I expected. It was clear there were two models of ship. And no one had told me about this one. I looked, frantically, feeling along the carapace, trying to find another vent hole, trying to reach for my mechanical intuition to guess where it could be. But there is no engineering reason to put that in a specific place, certainly not in a vehicle I knew nothing about.

  I was feeling around when a porthole opened, and someone looked out.

  I shoved the shaped charge into the porthole, and probably in the mouth the man had opened to scream. I pressed the detonator by touch, and then I shoved the poison gas grenade in.

  And the world exploded.

  Or rather, it looked like the world exploded. Something, somewhere, inside that ship had been highly explosive and my shaped charge set it off.

  I found myself hurled backwards through the dark night, into the water, and down, down, down, down, in the cold and the dark.

  The Light from Infinity

  I came up through the cold dark, in what I hoped was the direction of the surface. This was difficult because my eyes were playing me tricks. It seemed to me there were shimmering lights from every direction, and I was swimming towards the brighter portion of the dark waters. Which might be a mistake, because hadn’t it been dark when I’d been thrown?

  We didn’t have the oxygen tanks often worn on the brooms. We didn’t have them because we weren’t going a long distance, and we weren’t going to a high altitude. Also, we didn’t have them because having an explosive strapped on your back, slowing you down and making you less safe, was no way to accomplish our mission.

  My chest hurt. My heart felt as though it would burst and I was cold as hell as I swam through inky black towards a light that might only be in my head.

  I surfaced when I’d just decided I was going the wrong way. I gulped oxygen, greedily, twice, before realizing that I smelled smoke, and burning flesh and something that smelled like burning oil, but was probably the inside accoutrements of the amphibious vehicle. No. The amphibious vehicles. There were pieces floating everywhere, as well as what I suspected were pieces of people. None were close to me and I didn’t investigate.

  There were also fires. Some of the transports, and some of the amphibians, were on fire. Hisses from above caused me to look up, and I saw large, slim flyers zip by overhead. Their purpose became clear as I heard explosions from the seacity. The aerial support.

  Which is when I realized I’d lost my broom.

  I was adrift, in a cold sea filled with dead men and flotsam, and I had no way to get back to the seacity.

  “Zen!”

  It was Brisbois. On broomback, flying close. He lowered himself till his legs were in the water. “Can you get on? Are you wounded? Everyone returned but you and you—”

  He looked surprised. I had been swimming around to get on the broom, and saw his face freeze in utter shock, before I saw a bloom of blood on his chest, bursting through the fibers of his dark suit.

  I remembered a sound which wasn’t quite a sound, a movement. My back brain had decided which of the presumed dead men wasn’t quite dead. My hand drew Brisbois’s burner and fired where I knew the enemy was. His shot aimed at me went wide. I felt it graze by my hood, but the shooter was dead by then.

  And so was Brisbois. Or at least I thought so. He’d let go the broom, which had flown on, at water level, lost to us. And he was underwater, plunging down, arms wide.

  I grabbed him by the back of the suit, thanking my creators for my enhanced strength. I dragged him and myself towards one of the larger floating pieces of amphibious vehicle. There was no one on it, living or dead. I climbed on and pulled Brisbois onto this makeshift raft. He was almost surely dead. One couldn’t be alive with that kind of wound in the chest.

  But some part of me refused to give up, and I found myself breathing into his mouth and pushing on his chest, not even sure that pushing on his chest wouldn’t make it worse. I didn’t have enough light to see if the beam had hit him in the heart or just close to it. I didn’t have enough medical knowledge to bring him back. I didn’t even have the med kit that had proved so useless when Len had gotten radiation poisoning.

  I felt the movement beneath my pushing hands. His eyes opened. His hand came up and grabbed mine. “I’m not,” he said, panting a little. “Stopping breathing. Stop that. Though you can kiss me again.”

>   I blinked at him, and snorted something between relieved laughter and choking. “I wasn’t kissing you.”

  He closed his eyes. “They always say that.” The blood pouring from his chest had soaked all the front of his suit. My hands were red and sticky with it. Surely he couldn’t have so much blood in him that he could survive this.

  “Alexis,” I said, unwilling to let him go, unwilling to let him slide from me into that great unknown where he might or might not exist, might or might not see me. “Alexis, don’t die.”

  He laughed. There was blood at his lips, shining wetly. “Don’t cry, Zen,” he said, softly. “Don’t cry, ma petite.” And said like that, it was a completely different endearment from either Simon’s mannered courting or from the same words as he’d spit them at Madame. “I couldn’t bear it if I made you sad. And why should you care for me? Why should you care for Alexis Brisbois?”

  “I think you know very well,” I said. And my voice sounded unaccountably angry. “I think you know very well, Monsieur Brisbois, that I have been in love with you since—”

  “Since?”

  “Since you kissed me in the market that night.”

  He blinked at me. It seemed to me as though his eyes were unfocused and dull already. “That long? I thought you didn’t know it.”

  “I didn’t. I just realized it. And you?”

  “And I?” he said, and laugh-coughed, and blood sprayed out. “I have been in love with you since you were first welcomed by…by Simon. Before you knew…before you saw me.”

  It seemed stupid to me. He must have fallen in love with me for my looks, because he knew nothing else of me. But men were stupid and would fall in love with the most stupid things for the most stupid reasons, and Brisbois had a proven history of being stupid about women and love. “You have lousy taste in women.”

  “I know,” he said. And he closed his eyes and was so silent, I thought he was dead, but I was afraid of calling him and getting no response, and knowing.

  “Take care of him,” he said, in almost a whisper.

  “Who?”

  “Simon.”

  “I’m not marrying him.”

  “No. But, take care of him. And Mailys.”

  “Is she really your daughter?” I asked, because while he was talking, I thought, it would be hard for him to slip away. I willed someone to come and find us. I looked at Brisbois’s hands to see if he had his com ring, but he was wearing gloves. I started working off one of the gloves, while he said, “Oh yes. Natural. That was when Rose and I married, though it wasn’t…legal.” A pause, and I managed to get his glove off fully. “She doesn’t know.”

  He did have his com ring on and I started twisting it.

  “Alexis. Alexis.”

  He didn’t answer. I twirled the ring frantically. I yelled “Mayday, Mayday.”

  I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to save us now. But I couldn’t let Alexis Brisbois die without trying to save him.

  Not because he was my responsibility. He wasn’t. Len had been mine, willingly given. He’d been mine to save, and I’d given him death instead.

  But Alexis Brisbois was my equal, a free agent, as fast, as strong, as smart, and as enhanced as I, or close as made no difference. I owed him nothing.

  I just couldn’t bear the thought of his dying. I realized it felt like I would lose a piece of myself. Is this what love felt like? What it was supposed to feel like?

  “Mayday, mayday,” I screamed into the comring. I realized I was crying as tears dripped on my bloodsoaked hands, leaving little clear imprints. “Mayday, this is Zen Sienna and Alexis Brisbois and we need rescue.”

  No one answered. I was floating on a piece of a broken ship, on a cold sea, with a dying man. Above me deadly fast and silent attack flyers zoomed. And to my right, Liberte seacity was going up in flames.

  My world was crashing in pieces around me, and nothing mattered but this one man. “Don’t go, Alexis,” I whispered. “Not yet.”

  Misfit

  “We shall have a state funeral, of course,” Simon said. He was directing the cleanup of his palace, which was indeed charred and half-destroyed between Rose Parr’s depredations and the bombardment.

  Mephistopheles, Simon’s big black tomcat, wound around his legs, behaving as though he’d never disappeared and there had been no upheaval at all around here. Where he’d been during the fighting no one knew, but he showed up slick and well-fed, and acting as though the fuss Simon made over his reappearance were an overreaction.

  We had, against all hope, against all reason, won. Not that it was a permanent victory or a cost-free one. Too many people had died in the fight the night before. And the seacity was a mess. Simon’s loyal troops were going street by street and house by house, partly to catch any invaders and partly to catch revolutionaries, but mostly to offer help.

  And Simon was in the most intact room in his house: the ballroom. He wore an impeccable, and gaudy, silk outfit and he looked strangely happy. Next to him were Royce and Martha Remy and Lucius Keeva.

  They’d had a long discussion with Simon on the problems of the situation. Martha and Lucius were, after all, experts in psychological warfare, and they had talked him into not acting the fool for a change.

  But he was strangely animated, and said, “But I am allowed one last piece of display, right? Having died a hero, one deserves a great funeral, right? There will be a corpse on display, at least if a corpse can be procured, and we will have corteges and…It’s a pity they no longer have a tradition of having games in honor of the dead man, isn’t it? I’d like a hecatomb, too, something showy, though I suppose sacrificing a hundred flyers wouldn’t be as much display as sacrificing horses, and I like horses. I don’t want them killed.”

  “Simon,” I said impatiently.

  And Martha, who was more patient than I, said, “You destroyed more than a hundred last week. Have that for a hecatomb.”

  Simon pursed his lips. “I suppose,” he said. Then he turned to me, and suddenly the world spun on its tail. I was in the ballroom, now devoid of couples and dancing and music, and Simon St. Cyr, ruler of a vast domain, was about to propose.

  If spaceship mechanics had no place in a fairy tale, how much less fighting women with various wounds hastily patched up and barely healed. Unlike others, I’d not rated regen, but I had bled.

  I’d bought my citizenship in this world. I’d paid for it in blood. I’d paid for it in tears, in horror and in heartbreak. I’d paid for it in the dark of night, when I’d screamed myself hoarse into a ring that might be giving my position away to the enemy.

  I was not going to pay for bed and board, or repay Simon’s admittedly great kindness, with my body nor my life. I’d promised Alexis I’d look after Simon, but I’d also told him I would not marry Simon.

  “No,” I said. “Before you ask, the answer is no.”

  “But,” Simon opened his hands. “Enfin, Zen, you are cruel. Here I am making a great sacrifice, for the good of Liberte seacity, for the good of the world, and you won’t even give me a little palliative to sweeten it up.” His eyes shone with mischief that gave the lie to his plaintive words. I realized with a shock that he was teasing me. No one had ever teased me. Not like that. It felt unexpectedly good. It felt like belonging and having friends.

  Most of my life, I hadn’t known who I was. Or rather, I was who my parents told me I was, because I was faster, smarter, stronger and that alone defined me. Even knowing Kit and Athena had given me no one like myself to compare myself to, because Kit was younger than I and Athena was a stranger in our world. But now I’d met many who were as fast, as smart, as strong as myself.

  And in finding people like me, I’d found where I was different, where I was myself. I was Zen Sienna and I didn’t have to look outward to define myself. I could be at ease and have friends.

  I smiled at Simon, then leaned down and brushed his cheek with my lips. “I appreciate your sacrifice,” I said. “I do. And I shall be a sister t
o you.”

  His eyebrow rose. “A sister?”

  “I think Alexis was always your big brother, in a way.”

  “Ah. Alexis. Yes. He—”

  “Sir.” This was Royce, sounding put out. “Truly we can’t delay. If we’re going to do this properly, I need time. And this is not a job I think we can rush.”

  “Ah, no,” Simon said. His eyes glinted with pure enjoyment. “I have to have a quite different face in order to be the war hero to preside over my own funeral.”

  Lucius said, “Sorry. I know you wanted to ah…pan for gold, but this truly is the only solution.”

  Over the last few hours they’d hammered it together. Simon could not rule as Simon. People knew he was, after all, a Mule. And in a seacity whose culture wanted everyone to be equal and not just equal before the law, there weren’t enough secret Usaians to allow him to continue ruling. But there also weren’t enough Usaians to govern themselves. The scarred, broken, scared city needed a savior.

  It is the sad habit of humans in time of extreme stress to look for the mythical man on a white horse, and if we didn’t provide Liberte with one, one would arise.

  But Olympus wanted its alliance, and the person who rose must be someone who hadn’t rebelled against Simon, or at least wasn’t known to have done so.

  The Good Men would punish that. But if it was someone who had been loyal to Simon there would be no affront to the Good Men, and Liberte, having proven a tough nut to crack, would be allowed to go on, like Olympus was allowed to go on.

  And so it had been agreed that like the Mules of old, Simon would take the place of himself and pretend to be a normal, unenhanced human. His features would be altered by Alard. If any of Simon’s alternate bodies remained, a viewing would be contrived, and certainly a grand funeral for the dead Simon St. Cyr.

  Simon kissed my hand, turned around and left with Royce Alard and Lucius Keeva, saying, “I still haven’t decided what to call myself. Do you think Joseph Martin is too big a giveaway?”