Darkship Renegades (16 page)

EMPTY NEST

We had trouble finding a place to land. Part of this—no, perhaps all of it—was my fault.

I don’t claim to be the world’s most brilliant person. I have good visual and spacial memory, sure, but unlike what Doc had said of Jarl, I couldn’t claim to never have forgotten a book I’d read or a code I’d memorized. In fact, I’d freely admit to having forgotten lots and lots of things. And if excited or happy, sad or disturbed, I could forget my own head. Not when scared, though. When scared I became a machine who knew and memorized everything.

Why then, in the name of all that’s sweet, had I forgotten the network of alarms and sweeps, of linked triggers and aimed sensors that covered the entire surface of the Earth? How could I not even have made an attempt at disabling whatever transponder was in this vehicle? What was wrong with me?

I can’t tell you for sure, except that seeing Kit shoot someone down in cold blood, even though I knew in my heart of hearts that it wasn’t Kit—even though I had no reason to expect sanity of Jarl—had made me forget everything.

The air-to-space was large, larger than Daddy Dearest’s which had been a straight four seater. This one was more like a luxury flyer on Earth—or to put it in other words, it looked like a small living room, outfitted with comfortable sofas, a couple of tables, a few cabinets. The only difference between it and, say, the living room in a decent if not spectacular hotel suite was that all the furniture was affixed to the floor, though some of it could be moved via switches.

When we got in, Doc had taken the one chair in front of a screen that was, clearly, the pilot’s chair. Kit belted his violin carefully into a chair, then flopped nervelessly onto a sofa. No. Jarl. I’d never seen Kit lie down like that, without the least vestige of control, not even of a controlled fall. And he would never do it in public. Used to being watched, in part because of his family’s tragic history and in part because his adopted family was important in the tiny world in which they lived, he could never seem to forget that he must keep up a public face at all times.

Zen sat across from him, with her hands in her pockets, her face grim. I had the impression that she was holding a burner in one of those pockets, and stood ready to fire through it if Jarl made any odd moves. What could I do? I was not married to Jarl, but I was married to Kit. It was an uncomfortable fact that they were shoved into the same body just then. And it was the only body both of them had. It was physically impossible to kill one of them without killing the other. I set about looking in the drawers of the cabinets for something I could use to communicate with Zen.

Yeah, she too had Mule Telepathy. Yeah, she too should have been able to mind-talk me. But I have a theory about that. Unless it’s trained and expected from childhood, it won’t happen. I’d never mind-talked to any of my broomers lair, though more than half of them were Mules and therefore, presumably, had mind-talk abilities in potentia. For all I was concerned, Doc’s mind was perfectly silent. It was a miracle or perhaps an artifact of how tightly wound both Kit and I had been when we’d met that we had happened to listen to each other. I didn’t care to find myself in that kind of situation with Zen. Well, not more than inevitable, and hopefully not in the next hour or so. And I needed to warn her. Because I wasn’t Jarl. I didn’t kill—without warning—people who weren’t directly threatening me.

So I looked, until I found a pad. Not like the pads in Eden. No electronic. Just a paper pad, yellowed with age, with an equally aged pencil next to it. I sat down on the sofa next to Zen and printed quickly and clearly, IF YOU SHOOT HIM, I’LL HAVE TO KILL YOU.

She looked at the pad, when I waved it front of her eyes, and frowned at the print, an intent frown, as though trying to decipher foreign writing. It had just occurred to me that she had never, probably in her entire life, read anything even vaguely resembling paper. I wondered if she was puzzled by the concept. Then she grabbed the paper out of my hands, and the pencil with it, and wrote, with remarkable spareness. SO?

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?