Darkship Renegades

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Not knowing if she meant she didn’t care for my threats, or if she wondered why I would do it, I explained. BECAUSE THAT BODY IS KIT’S. KIT IS IN IT TOO, AND IT’S THE ONLY BODY HE HAS. YOU WILL NOT KILL MY HUSBAND.

  Again, the charade with Zen frowning at the page as though it were written in some ancient and unknowable language, then she snatched paper and pencil from my hands. I LIKE KIT, TOO. I CAN’T TRUST JARL.

  NO. DON’T CARE. HE’S STILL IN THE SAME BODY WITH KIT. YOU WILL NOT KILL KIT.

  MAIM? This was scratched out and followed by. RIGHT. I PROMISE TO DO ONLY THE DAMAGE NEEDED TO STOP HIM DOING SOMETHING STUPID. NOW GO AWAY, YOU’RE MAKING ME NERVOUS.

  NO. YOU WILL NOT HURT KIT. ANYTHING THAT REQUIRES TREATMENT MIGHT KILL HIM. WE’RE NOT EQUIPPED TO STOP HEMORRHAGING.

  Zen sighed, as though I were totally unreasonable. I’LL TRY NOT TO DAMAGE HIM AT ALL WHILE STOPPING HIM. I WILL NOT LET HIM KILL ME, THOUGH, OR YOU, OR DOC.

  I DON’T THINK HE’LL KILL ANYONE.

  YOU DON’T KNOW.

  And alas, it was true, I didn’t. So all I could do was sit across from Zen and keep an eye on her, to make sure she didn’t hurt the body in which my husband seemed to be trapped with an amoral genius. Presently, it became obvious that Jarl was asleep. Which might or might not mean anything, since switchovers often seemed to take place while the body slept.

  Doc set the autopilot, and then he too colonized one of the long sofas and fell asleep. And Zen and I sat up right, hands in pockets, each, I was sure, clutching a burner.

  Now tell me how I managed to fall asleep? The only excuse I could find, ever, is that it had been a long three months, of too little sleep and too much worry, followed by what was for me a traumatic experience of clutching that rope and following it between the ship and Circum. I’d once read something somewhere about the spirit being willing but the body being weak.

  My body was weak. To be exact, my body was so weak that it couldn’t stay awake even when my love’s life depended on me. Some sentinel I would have made. The only thing I can say in my defense is that Zen, also, fell asleep. And she thought she was keeping vigil for her own life.

  I know because when I woke up, with alarms blaring in my ears, it was just a second or so before she woke. And she woke as I expected, withdrawing the burner from her pocket and pointing it. Was that her only answer to everything? Kit wasn’t like that at all. Did upbringing and female hormones make the difference in Zen, or had Kit chosen a more reasoned response to emergencies?

  Doc and Kit woke at the same time, or close to it, because they both jumped up at the same time. And the person who woke was Kit, because he screamed in my mind Thena? What?

  Which was when I listened to the words in the alarms. And realized that the screaming words were not coming from the ship, but from somewhere in the comlink. And that the reason they were nearly cacophonic is that they were not one alarm but at least ten, screaming at me madly and at full volume.

  I caught enough words in standard Glaish, violating air space, for instance, and identify yourself to figure out the pickle we were in. I just didn’t know for sure what to do about it.

  It’s always been my fixed policy, when not absolutely sure what to do, to do something anyway. Mostly because in most circumstances where you find yourself faced with life-and-death decisions, no decision at all is more likely to lead to death than a decision no matter how clumsy. Look at it this way: life-and-death situations are rare and desperate. You will find yourself in them only after a series of errors so catastrophically cogent with each other that they brought you to an unlikely spot. It’s far more normal to find yourself in a situation where both decisions are wrong or both right.

  Those rare life-or-death situations come about so seldom because it takes an extreme of ill luck and a chain of ill luck to bring them about. There is a good chance that any decision you make in that situation will be less bad than the position you’re in.

  It’s possible that it won’t be much better. It will only move you away from death a few inches, instead of a comfortable distance. But even that is better than where you were. Burner beams that miss you by inches are as good as burner beams that miss you by miles.

  So, first, I decided I didn’t need to be screamed at while trying to think. I plunged towards the control panel, found the one for incoming communications and lowered the voices to a dull roar. Only to find that the roar from my three companions panic had climbed, in turn, to very loud.

  “Be quiet,” I yelled. “All of you be quiet. One of you…Kit?”

  “Thena?”

  “Get in that pilot chair and do what I tell you.”

  “But—”

  “Shut up and do what I tell you.”

  I’m not normally the type of wife who orders her husband around. All right, maybe I am. But I’m not the type of wife who likes to think of herself as ordering her husband around. And I try to do it more subtly when I have to do it.

  So maybe it was the novelty of the situation, or the fact that he was ill, fighting a mind infection. Or perhaps it was the fact that when I yelled like that I did a remarkably good imitation of the old son of a bitch who’d called himself my father.

  His behind hit the chair, his hands flew to the controls. I could tell by the way he touched them, tentatively, before disengaging the autopilot, that he was familiarizing himself with the mechanism. His lips moved, soundlessly, as he looked beneath the console. The whole took no more than a couple of minutes, and he looked back at me and nodded.

  “Right,” I said. “Get ready to take navigation.” I touched the portion of the screen that showed communications, and turned the sound to visual waves on the screen: that is, I arranged it so that I could see from where the alarms were emanating and what areas they covered.

  What you have to understand is that Earth is not as paranoid as Eden. Not Earth as such. They’re not afraid of an invasion from space. They’re not afraid of someone from out of the world coming and attacking them. As far as they’re concerned, the only populations outside Earth are either in Circum or on the moon, and those are neither in a position nor in numbers sufficient to cause a problem to Earth, with her might and her armies. Perhaps a few of them, certainly a few of the Good Men at the top, know that there is a significant population in Eden. Maybe. Though they don’t know where Eden is. They’re still not really afraid of Eden. Annoyed by Eden, maybe, but not afraid.

  Earth, at last count—and all those counts are always flawed, but they give some indication of how many people are alive at any time—had four billion people. Okay, down from the peak of six billion, but not by far. And even though some of them might be aware that Eden had more advanced technology, barring a mythical superior alien with his inhuman intelligence and weapons, population still counts for a lot. Even the Mules, who might have considered themselves inhuman intelligences, at least according to their legend, were not enough of a threat should they return.

  So, there was no Earth defense, and no sensors sweeping the not-so-friendly skies on behalf of united Earth, for the good of humanity.

  What there was instead were directorates, principalities, city-states, satrapies, kingdoms, and oligarchies, all loosely assembled into the rational administrative regions, each overseen by one of the Good Men, fifty in all. Each of them deathly afraid of the others. Each of them afraid the others would send armies, or spies or something. Each of them sweeping the sky for threats.

  And by each of them, I don’t mean each of the Good Men. Oh, that too. Though it happened rarely, it had happened before and would probably happen again, that the Good Man of one seacity found no good reason why he shouldn’t assimilate another, nearby city as well. Or why someone commanding one half of a continent didn’t think he could do a better job if he could also lay claim to the other half. Good Men were nothing if not ambitious.

  But it was far more common at a level below that for portions of divisions to fight each other: for kingdom to swallow protectorate,
and oligarchy to overtake satrapy. It was even normal for a kingdom or nation to fight…itself. All at the level the local Good Man didn’t find serious enough to intervene.

  I don’t pretend to understand it. I’m just saying it happened. So, everywhere on Earth the scanning was ubiquitous, and the alarms we were listening to were the grown-up, large-territory equivalent of a few broomers flying the edge of their area and signaling to all incoming flyers, “Stay out of our zone.”

  The fact that we were getting at least six of them at the same time meant that we were not in any particular division yet. This was good, because the grown-up, large-territory equivalent of a few broomer guys beating the living daylights out of trespassers was an explosive or incendiary device, neatly placed amidships.

  And my main goal in life remained not to die.

  So I looked over Kit’s shoulder, at the areas covered by the alarms, and steered by them. Or rather away from them. My goal was to steer so that we avoided all the alarmed regions altogether and landed in an area without screening. An area no one claimed.

  Could it be done? Oh, sure. It was something I knew from those occasions when I had been forced to steal, say a flyer that wasn’t mine, or perhaps to violate someone’s airspace with my lone broom.

  Even on Earth, as populated as it was, and as covered in sensors and scanners, there were areas where no one would look for you.

  Which is what I was aiming for. I shouted instructions to Kit, in the sort of shorthand we were used to, from the Cathouse. “North, north, north, north. Click east. South. South, fast, damn it. Hard east.”

  We fell onto Earth and into the atmosphere without being shot out of the sky, which was a good thing. For a while it looked like, in my effort to avoid detection, we were going to land in one of the vast, unpopulated oceans. This would be a very bad thing. I could take the ocean, of course, and we could float for a while, trying to find some place that wouldn’t shoot us down on sight. Only I didn’t know if this gig, being as old as it was, allowed itself to be steered on water, or even if it was waterproof. And besides, I suspected as soon as we hit water the question would become academic. Why?

  Because I was the only one there who even had the slightest notion what an ocean was. Oh, fine, maybe Doc did too, but he hadn’t seen one in three hundred years, give or take.

  Kit and Zen? They would go utterly catatonic the minute they realized we were sitting on that much water. Kit had tried to play it cool when he’d been forcibly submerged in an ocean before, but I remembered the blank panic signal I’d got from his mind then. I did not want to court it again.

  So I steered away from oceans too, and eventually, after what seemed like eternity and turned out to be close to five hours, Kit brought us to rest on a desertic area in the heart of old Europe.

  I sat down for a while, before I opened the door and looked out. And then I wished I hadn’t. The problem with deserted areas is that they are so damn desolate.

  There was a ruin somewhere in the distance, and the rest of the landscape looked like someone had let loose with a neutron bomb. There wasn’t even a trace of green. Just yellow sands, brownish dirt, and a wind blowing through it all that brought grit with it to scour your face.

  Behind me, Kit looked, but it was Jarl’s voice that said, “Oh, I’ll be damned.”

  OLD HOME WEEK

  Doctor Bartolomeu came up behind Jarl, put a hand on his shoulder and looked out, as I retreated from the open door. What he said was less easily transcribed, and might have been a dead language. Jarl smiled, a brief, feral smile. “Isn’t it?” he said. “Our own old home.”

  Doc Bartolomeu cursed again, and this time I understood it, even if the act recommended was physically impossible. Correction: probably physically impossible. It was entirely likely that someone, somewhere, was anatomically freakish enough to do it.

  Jarl smiled and shook his head, then looked at me and must have caught the blank look in my eyes. He grabbed my shoulder. He held it loosely and gently enough that I didn’t feel the need to struggle as he pulled me forward and pointed out the door at the ruin, “See that? That was the center of a compound where we…ah. The…What did they call us, Bartolomeu? It’s been too long. The only thing that stuck was Mules. It stuck in the popular mind, and it stuck in our craws like an insult, and it just stuck. Once upon a time, when we had the ruling, during the war with the seacities, and after we called ourselves biolords. That never stuck. But before that, when they were raising us, raising us to be public servants, they called us something else. What was it?”

  “Oligoi,” Doc Bartolomeu said, in a tone that made it the equal, if not the worst of all the insults and curses he’d pronounced before. “The few. Apparently, not few enough.”

  “Ah. Yes. Oligoi. We were Oligoi, and brought here from all over the world to be raised and taught together with the others of our specialty. I think someone had read Brave New World and thought it was a manual. We were divided into Alphas and Betas, Deltas, and Gammas and…” He must have noticed that I was once more looking blank. “Brave New World? Twentieth century…Oh, I see. My…host informs me Earth has lost most of its literature and history. In the turmoils and after. Probably on purpose.” He shrugged. “Never mind. They divided us into classes according to the capabilities we’d been created with and branded us with the Greek alphabet and…”

  “I think branding us was the only thing they didn’t do,” Doc Bartolomeu said. “Do you mind horribly if we get out of here, Jarl?”

  “No,” Jarl said, but narrowed his eyes, looking out at the red and white barrenness upon which dirt that glimmered like glass shards blew. “No, but what happened here? There used to be a city there,” he pointed north, into the center of the desolate area. “Or rather an enclave of Mules. What we called Mules, then. Vast numbers of humans who had been created wholesale in laboratories and gestated by animals. They didn’t understand enough of biology then, to understand that maturation of a fetus requires exposure to maternal hormones—the proteins in mother’s blood that accompany pregnancy. Or they didn’t care. In Eden biowombs those are carefully introduced. At different stages of pregnancy, the hormones trigger the stages of maturation of the fetus. Animal hormones have different protein structures. The fetus didn’t mature properly because it didn’t get the right signals. In fact, most animal brains are nearly mature at birth, while human brains don’t finish maturing before age thirteen or so. They used sheep a lot, and the antibodies and mitochondrial DNA weren’t compatible. So they injected massive doses of immune suppressants, which also caused a certain amount of mental retardation and impaired functioning, but even after that became obvious, they continued making the poor brutish Mules. Had to, because working population was shrinking, as Europe became senescent. The rest of the world too, as the race and religion wars took their tolls. This compound was a compound of laborers. There were…two hundred thousand? A vast industrial complex with what amounted to slave labor. They revolted once…”

  “Jarl, come inside,” Doc said, forcefully, and pulled Jarl inside. I stumbled back with him, into the flyer, and Doc shut the door. He sat on one of the nearby chairs and said, “We must get out of here.”

  “I’m all for that,” Zen said. She’d been sitting in the driver’s seat, looking at the panel that showed where we were. “But if I understand how Thena steered us…”

  “We can’t get out of here,” I said. “Or not far, and not in this vehicle. This flyer doesn’t have the right transponder. It doesn’t have any transponder. And that makes it an illegal vehicle. And it’s too big to be capable of going under the radar, like a broom would, for instance. You, who commissioned these flyers,” I looked at Jarl. “I don’t suppose they’re equipped with brooms?”

  He shook his head. “No. Afraid not. They were supposed to go to the Je Reviens and dock.” He went and stood behind Zen. I was aware of Zen squaring her shoulders and looking like she’d like to grow eyes at the back of her head, but she didn’t turn. “So, we
’re…at the edge of an area that is without detectors for unauthorized vehicles.” He frowned, and it was odd how his expression looked different from Kit’s even though the features were the same. He lowered his eyebrows more, I decided, and his chin looked harder edged when he frowned that way. “Why is this area desolate. Bomb? Nuclear?”

  “No,” I said. “During the turmoils this area got infected with bacteria much like the ones that chased us from the Hopper.”

  Zen looked panicked. “Oh, no. Are we going to need to—”

  I shook my head. “No. Neutralized hundreds of years ago. If they hadn’t been, they’d have taken over the Earth.”

  “Ah.” Jarl said. “So, we need to find a way out of here or a way to retrofit the flyer, right?”

  I nodded. It seemed obvious. “I don’t think we can walk the hundreds of miles into civilization,” I said, “though that’s an option.”

  “Well…” he said. “I can’t offer other vehicles, but…there used to be a place around here with high communications capabilities that might still allow us to send a signal, if you trust one of your friends to help us.” He looked at Doc Bartolomeu, with something like defiance. “What do you think? I don’t know if the barriers would have held, but I remember that in my later, paranoid years, I had it insulated against everything, including biowarfare.”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about.”

  “Yes you do,” Jarl said. He turned away from the console his hands deep in his pockets, in a gesture that was so much like Kit that it made my heart clench. “It used to be a resort, when we were kids. The place where…” He paused. “And then I bought it, and made it my own private hiding place.”

  “Oh,” Doc said. “Your bolt-hole. You never allowed us to go there. At least not me.”