Darkship Renegades (13 page)

PATCHES AND RAGS

It turned out we were right, unfortunately. The steering system had just failed. Oh, no, not just failed. That would be too easy and much too clean. The steering system had disintegrated into powder. As though it had never existed.

“It has to be one of the material-eating bacteria,” Zen said, as we were both hip-deep in the bowels of the ship, reconstructing the steering and navigation systems from scavenged parts and bits, and some of the spare parts we’d thought to bring along. Yes, we’d brought spare parts, but we never thought we’d need to rebuild an entire system.

“Bacteria that eat dimatough, ceramite, metal and biolinks?” I asked. “They’d eat us too.”

She made a face. “No. A complex of bacteria, I think. But how could anyone have given the infection to anything that came aboard this ship? We had everything that came in scanned, to make sure it was clean.”

I gave a bitter laugh before I realized what was so funny, and faced with Zen’s glare—not improved by the fact she had a dark grease smear on her nose—I had to explain. “Everything we brought in,” I said. “What didn’t we bring in?”

“Damn,” she said, and sounded so much like Kit when he cursed, that I wondered I’d never seen the resemblance before. Only, of course, they were different enough to throw anyone off, between male and female and one bioengineered as a Cat and one as a Nav. The changes to their basic genetics were wide enough. They probably only had as much in common as any brother and sister. “The Hull. The hull of the
Hopper
. It would be almost impenetrable even with bacterial infections because it’s made resistant. It’s not something a ship can afford to lose so it’s well designed. While bacteria would eat through it, it would be so slow they’d eat everything in the ship first.” She shook her head. “Of course, I’d never check. It was my ship. They infected my ship to trap me! And the technologies for designing materials-eating bacteria are all forbidden. I mean…”

“You mean Eden has no laws, but it’s a small enclosed space, and attempting to create these would be something that should set off alarms amid the entire population and make its creator very dead?”

She nodded fiercely, and then disappeared into the engine compartment with an armful of pieces. From the depths came clangings and bangings as she assembled things. We had, of course, sterilized the space and the pieces, first, as well as it was possible to do so aboard.

“I don’t think Castaneda is afraid of retribution. I think he has arranged for layers of protection around himself.”

“Yeah,” Zen said. “I suspect so too. But all that protection won’t be enough when I get back to Eden. I intend to see him die screaming.”

“You can kill him after I kill him,” I said magnanimously.

“There’s something wrong with that reasoning,” Zen said, from the depths of the compartment. “But I’m too tired to examine it. I’ll arm-wrestle you for first shot at him.” There was a long period of silence. “I think I have this on the way to being assembled. Let’s hope at least that we got all the infection. Can you figure out how to replace the stabilizer?”

“Sure,” I said, as I went in search of a part that would do and hoped this was the end of the infection.

“What burns me,” Zen said. “What purely burns me is that Castaneda wants to control the entire world—what we do and what we become.”

This seemed like an exaggerated claim and I muttered something about the Energy Board and the riches.

“No. Riches would be easy enough to embezzle from his current position, if that was what he wanted. But he wants to have some lever to make us obey.”

“But make us obey to do what?” I said. This was something that hadn’t been really clear to me. “I mean, my father got a mansion out of it, and he got, you know…He was safe,” I said with sudden insight. “I think they never felt fully safe, not, you know, after the riots.”

Zen shrugged. She gave me a darkling look from under russet eyelashes. “I don’t think so, Thena. I mean, I don’t think that’s all it is, when people want this sort of control. Perhaps, perhaps it is insecurity, but that’s too easy. I think they just want the power to tell everyone else what to do. There’s something broken and they see other people as things…as play toys. I don’t think he ever thought killing us was murder.” She slammed a piece home. “Just that, you know, we needed to be out of the way for his grand plan to go on.” I realized she was going to tighten the circuit wrong, because she was using her gestures as counterpoint to her speech. I nudged it aside, and gently pulled two bio circuits together, linking the new ceramite pieces. She nodded at what I’d done, as though approving it, then sighed. “It’s like Doc, you know, still not sure why Irena was revolted by his and Jarl’s plan. Honestly. They were doing the same thing, treating people as things.” Her features softened. “Though, to be honest, in their case it is perhaps more understandable, if not excusable. They were treated as things themselves, weren’t they.” She checked my work as I linked circuits ahead of her. I wasn’t sore. When your life depends on a machine, being checked is good. But I thought of Zen’s relationship with her adoptive family, out of nowhere. She never talked about them. She hadn’t immigrated with them. And, unlike Kit, I couldn’t see she had holos of them anywhere around. “There,” she said. “I hope we fixed it.”

Only we hadn’t. By a week later, when we had assembled the entire steering and navigation systems, it became clear we hadn’t, because the air-recycling systems disintegrated suddenly.

This was, of course, a far more urgent job. Without those systems we’d die quickly. We got them patched in time. Just. And then something else broke. Zen and I worked, shift on shift, sleeping maybe four hours before going back to fix and reassemble a neverending succession of systems. Doc worked with Kit, both calculating and correcting courses and trying to stop the infection in Kit’s mind.

I wasn’t sure how much progress he was making, or what was happening, because I rarely saw Kit, certainly not often enough to be sure of what was going on in his mind.

You see, I only went back to quarters when I was absolutely dead on my feet. And because Kit and Doc were doing not only the piloting, but also the navigation calculations—since Zen and I were busy elsewhere with repairs—plus doing whatever it was that Doc was doing to try to arrest the process by which Jarl was slowly taking over my husband’s mind, there was very little time for Kit and I to talk. We usually met only in bed, and only to sleep.

Sometimes Kit would clutch at me in the night, with the despair of a drowning child looking for reassurance. And sometimes…sometimes in the middle of the night I woke up with a stranger’s voice in my head asking,
Who are you?

THE MINOTAUR IN THE LABYRINTH

“We never intended to take the
Hopper
to Earth,” Zen said, for the third time. She looked very tired. She’d been the last one on repair duty. I’d just awakened and let the vibro shake me to awareness, then dragged on my coveralls.

While looking for Zen, who could have been repairing anything anywhere in the ship, I’d found her looking for me. She’d called a council.

This meant pulling the men away from piloting, which was a chancy thing, now that we were so near Earth. We were—in fact—within striking distance of Circum and the powertrees. But it was important, because we’d reached a point we couldn’t go on as we’d been.

We sat around the little table in the kitchen, all four of us in the places we’d chosen at the beginning of the trip. Zen and Doc sat across from Kit and me, or at least what I hoped was Kit and me. I didn’t know how far gone Kit was. Just before he’d sat down, I’d seen his eyes, and there was a look in them, an odd…not-quite-Kit look.

Kit was no shrinking violet. I think part of what had attracted me to him when we first met, back when I registered my attraction to him as extreme annoyance, was that he was fully confident, as sure of himself and his abilities as I was of mine. I’d never met anyone like that before, and I think that cemented my interest in him.

But what was in his gaze just then was more than that. It was almost a swagger. The confidence of someone not only in what he knows and knows he can do, but in what he is. It looked like how I imagined the eyes of Alexander the Great might have looked when he contemplated invading India.

It had made me recoil a little, and then, looking up again, it was Kit’s eyes, looking at me with concern and worry and just a little apologetic at having startled me. So I wasn’t sure. It was the weirdest feeling in the world sitting there, right next to my husband, and not being sure he was my husband. Not being sure he wasn’t a stranger, the almost mythical Jarl Ingemar. The creature who was killing my husband.

So I wasn’t giving my full attention to Zen, either. But the third time she said we couldn’t have gone to Earth in the
Hopper,
I sat up and noticed and said, “Of course not. Eden ships aren’t prepared for entry into the atmosphere. But we were provisioned for return,” I said. “They told us to provision both instruments and parts and…food and all, for the return trip, so they…”

Zen’s hiss of desperation told me she’d answered this before, as did the way she turned to me and lowered her eyebrows. “Listen, Thena, why the hell do you care what they thought?”

“The idea,” Doc Bartolomeu said, “was for us to set the
Hopper
in geosynchronous orbit. It would be a decaying orbit, of course—we don’t have the ability to do much more—but it wouldn’t decay that fast in two or three weeks, at most, and I hoped we wouldn’t take longer than that on Earth. Then we’d take the lifeboat to Earth proper, and return in it to the
Hopper
.”

“And I’m saying,” Zen said. “That the
Hopper
will not be in an orbit, decaying or otherwise for more than a couple of weeks, before it becomes so much cosmic dust. At this point, I’m telling you, Doctor Bartolomeu, the
hull
is decaying.”

I dragged my hands backward through my hair and thought lovingly of bug juice. No, my personality hadn’t changed at all. I still hated bug juice. But the coffee maker had, incongruously, been one of the first things infected with and devoured by the bacteria. And I needed caffeine. But I’d been dragged here, with no time to get any. My head was at that foggy stage that foretells a huge headache. “When did the hull start decaying? I thought you said it was imposs—”

“Not impossible. Very difficult. But these…loving organisms were apparently created to become more vicious as generations went on. Lucky, lucky us.”

“So we use the lifeboat,” Doc said, slowly. “I suppose we’ll have to find a ship to return to Eden, but…”

“The lifeboat is gone,” I said. “It has been cannibalized for parts to keep us going.”

“You what?” This was from Kit—or at least I presumed from Kit, in an outraged tone. “Didn’t you realize we would need it?”

“Chill it, Highness,” said Zen in mordant mode, and either Kit was not quite himself, or Zen believed so, since
Highness
was her nickname for what she called
Jarl Eruptions.
“We realized that without the parts from the lifeboat we’d not be able to keep breathing, which seemed kind of a priority for us at the time. But don’t fret,” she said condescendingly. “If it makes you feel better, those parts are infected too. More so, even if Thena and I should spend the next two days frantically rebuilding the lifeboat, at the end we’d have a well-organized pile of dust.”

I blinked. Even I hadn’t realized the situation was that dire.

“Oh, please. There has to be something you can do. Despair is a cover for incompetence,” Jarl said, and that time I was sure it was Jarl. My husband was not sweetness and light. Had never been. When cornered and pushed, he was quite capable of behaving like the sphincter of the universe, lashing out first and thinking last. But he would never have said those words. Ever. Kit was a kind man. What was more, he’d been raised in a society of equals. Those were the words of someone who had commanded long enough that he thought he could use his words as a whip upon his serfs and that this would, somehow, magically, bring forth a solution.

I turned a little and saw him open his mouth again, and Doc interrupted. “Not now. You’re not adding anything to this conversation, and you can’t whistle a solution out of thin air.” He paused. “Nor can I. I’ll confess I don’t see anything for us to do, except perhaps use those nice suicide pills from the—”

“Like fun,” I said. It came out of my mouth before I could stop it. “I’ll see Castaneda in the hell of my choice before I kill myself and disappear from his radar letting him do whatever the hell he wants with Eden.”

“Well, I’ll be damned if I know what else we can do.” That was definitely Jarl, too. Or I thought so. Kit would never have said he would be damned. It was not that Edenites were not religious—a lot of them were extremely pious. But the way their minds worked, the idea of being damned would seem odd, as opposed to the idea of damning yourself.

“You probably will be damned,” I said, in agreeable tones. “But that does not mean that we have to be as well. What I want you two to do is get us around Circum. Some of the bays at the back are unused or rarely used. Hover there, so we can go into Circum. From there, perhaps we can steal a ship to get to Earth.

“It won’t be that easy,” I said. I was coming awake despite myself, partly under the influence of the feeling of cold shock and horror of having Kit’s body, but not Kit, sitting beside me. Was Kit all gone? Was the battle lost? My heart hammered somewhere near my throat, but I damn well would not cry, not in front of…not in front of whatever remained of Kit. I’d read about split personalities. I’d read a lot about it, since we’d found out about this. Despite the insane work schedules, I’d found time to look through educational holos on split personalities. They had let us bring all kinds of informational holos aboard the
Hopper
, provided they didn’t give away anything about Eden. Psychology was one of the subjects most thoroughly covered.

Psychology, of course, had not come into its own until the twenty-second century, when we’d understood perfectly what the fine tuning of brain and chemicals could do. Anything else, from psychoanalysis to gen-psy had never been more than a faint effort to paste patches of faith over ignorance. Religion by any other name, and, like religion, it had sometimes effected miracle cures, but not with any level of reliability.

Multiple personalities were one of those things that even our psychology couldn’t fully explain. It was almost like it required a metaphysical belief in the soul.

Of course, most cases had a physical trigger, and most cases could almost be explained by the physical trigger. But the way the personalities divided the internal space, the access to the senses and modes of communication…I’d read that EEG recordings even revealed that multiple personalities were unique in how they activated the brain. It really was as if two different persons traded off control of mind and body. None of this made any sense in terms of simple physiological mechanics. Something more was needed.

Unexplained though it was, I understood that a secondary personality sometimes persisted, crouched, as it were, within the body, able to hear and see, but not to do anything about it, or at least not until something made the dominant personality hand off control. I didn’t know how this would play with the nessies’ refashioning of the brain, but even there I remembered that Doc had said something about some of the dosage spilled on the floor of the biowomb center where Jarl and his wife had died.

What if not quite enough had got there? What if the brain would never fully be refashioned? What if enough of Kit remained in there that he could hear me? I didn’t dare say anything to increase what must already be unbearable despair. If I conceded the fight lost, if I treated Jarl as a stranger, as though no part of him were Kit, would that contribute to whatever was left of Kit letting go? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.

“It won’t be easy to steal a ship from Circum even if there are vast areas that have been abandoned. I believe at some point Circum was a space station, or grew around a space station and into a center of powerpod collection.”

“Over the late twenty-first century,” Doc and Jarl said in remarkable unison.

“Good. Fine. But what that means is that there are vast abandoned portions. There might be many things in those areas, but one thing I can guarantee is that there will be no ships that we can take to Earth and besides—”

Doc cleared his throat, as though he would speak, but I gave him no time. “And besides,” I said, firmly. “If we are really infected with that sort of bacteria that will eat through everything it touches, getting more vicious as its generations multiply, should we do this? I know the rest of you will not be very fond of Earthworms and you have no reason to be. But I visited Circum before…” My voice swelled with tears suddenly, and I had to make an effort to control it. I swallowed hard. “Before Kit rescued me. I made friends with harvesters. They’re not the Good Men. They have no power of any sort that could hurt us. They don’t deserve to die as Circum fails. Worse than that,” I added. “If Circum disintegrates and takes with it all of Earth’s ability to collect powerpods—”

“Eden’s problems are solved?” Kit’s mouth said, and the annoying thing there is that I wasn’t utterly sure it wasn’t Kit this time. It was the sort of remark he would make to lighten the mood.

“The Earth will starve. They’re all depending on this energy. By the time they’ve retrofitted their technology to take new forms of energy, two-thirds of the Earth will be dead. Or more. And a generation might have passed, and most technology and know-how will be lost. I can’t have that on my conscience, any more than I can have failing Eden.”

“Are you suggesting we kill ourselves?” Zen asked, unbelievingly.

You know when you look down at an endless abyss and you feel the call to just let go, just let yourself fall? You know death lies there, waiting for you, but just at the moment it seems preferable to whatever else you’re facing, whatever else you know you need to do.

In this case, death, for all of us, would leave me without having to wonder who my husband was. Was I even married to him when his body was taken over by someone else? And if I weren’t what did it mean? Where had Kit gone? I realized with a shock that my feeling amounted to wanting my husband back and, failing that, taking my toys and going home. For a definition of home.

But I thought of Kath and her children. My death might end it for me—I’d never thought much about life afterwards, and didn’t want to think about it now. I’d be out of it. But Kit’s family wouldn’t. They’d have to live under the whims of a dictator. From what we’d already seen of Castaneda, ranging from energy rationing to trying to kill Kit, once he had power he could rival the worst monsters on Earth. Children would grow up being treated like things.

I knew, in retrospect, that’s what had twisted me, being raised as a replacement body for Father. But at least to the rest of the world and in my mind, I’d counted. I’d been human. But these kids would have nowhere to go.

“Thena, that’s not like you. You know better than anyone you have to fight. While you can fight, you fight. You know as long as you’re alive you have them surrounded.”

I turned, and looking at me from the green cat-shaped eyes, was my husband. No two ways about it. “Kit,” I said, in a flood or relief that he was still there. That he still existed and was coherent enough to take over, to talk. I stretched my hand on the table, to touch his hand, and he clasped my hand hard. “Don’t give up,” he said, his voice low. “I haven’t. Doc has…slowed it down. And I’m still here. I’m still fighting.”

“What…what does it feel like?” I had no experience of being under siege in my own brain.

“Like being in a labyrinth,” he said. “Stumbling around trying to figure out which memories and thoughts are mine and which aren’t. There’s memory and…and knowledge leak. Like when we were linked, Thena, when I was…dying…” His turn to pause and swallow. “But the best, perhaps the only thing we can do for me is get us all to Earth as fast as possible, so Doc can get Jarl’s notes and the access to machines, and figure out how to stop and reverse this. He…took an impression of my brain, before it was too…too far gone, so it should be possible to restore that, which means there might be a little voice at the back of my mind, but not…this.” He paused. “So we need to get to Earth,” his hand squeezed mine. “And we need to get to Earth fast.”

A pause again, and he continued, “There has been leaking of memories and information, and I know what the Doctor was about to say. There are vehicles in the abandoned areas. They were stored there for the last leg to the
Reviens
. They had intended to take a lot more people. Not just the Mules who stayed behind, but some of the…improved people, who got caught or trapped and killed before they could make it. About double the ones who did make it to the ship. There are fueled, abandoned vehicles no one knows about, hidden in the abandoned areas.” I started to open my mouth, but he cut me off. “You can’t say we can’t do it, Thena. You can’t say it. You can’t tell me I have to just let him…that I have to just die.”