Darkship Renegades (32 page)

AND VERY LONESOME HEROS

I woke up in an empty bed. The window was open and sun streamed in, warming my back. There was a smell of flowers in the air, and the birds were singing. But I glared at the pillow with the indentation of Kit’s head and got up.

I’d fallen asleep wearing his suit, but it looked better than what I’d worn before. A step into the bathroom reassured me. The clothes Kit had worn the day before were in a pile not three steps from the vibro machine, which was exactly what my husband always did with his dirty clothes.

I washed my face and cleaned my teeth. The window in the bathroom too was wide open, letting in a breeze.

As I turned towards the bedroom again, I heard a sound of steps and glass clinking. I was almost a hundred percent sure that this would be Kit, but note I said almost. I went to the corner where I’d hidden the burners in their holster and I strapped them on.

Then I edged around the door to the bedroom, until I could see Kit. He had a tray in his hand, with what looked like real plates and glasses and silverware and a platter of something.

As I edged out of the bathroom and into view—somewhat reassured, but still wary—he looked up and smiled at me. “I found the butler’s pantry and some real eating utensils. They were surprisingly clean. I’m afraid the food is just a couple of the ready-to-eat breakfasts, but I’m hoping their being served in style will make them taste better.”

It did taste better, though I doubted it was the plates. I think it was the open windows, the breeze coming in, and the certainty that Kit was back.

He talked as he ate, in between bites. “Doc and Zen and a few of your friends are on their way here.”

I stopped chewing on scrambled eggs. “Here?”

“Yeah. I don’t fully understand their reasons, but Doc and Zen vouch for them, so I’ll have to assume there are reasons. I mean, Doc and Zen need to come, anyway, so we can get back to Circum.” He chewed at his lip. A bad habit of his when he was in deep thought. “The fact remains that we have to figure out a ship to go to Eden in. You and Zen will have to retrofit one of these air-to-spaces I think, for greater power and…some amenities. Like bathrooms. We could use someone to guard our back up there, of course, while you do that. One thing is a quick in and out during the night-period of Circum. Another and quite different sitting around and possibly stealing parts and tools. I suppose it could be that all they’re coming along for is to guard us while we arrange to leave. But somehow that’s not the impression I got.”

He’d got the right impression. After we were done eating, and while Kit was doing a very thorough search of Jarl’s belongings to see if there was anything that might help us—as he told me, as he finished the search who else would be Jarl’s heir but Kit?—the com from outside signaled that someone was at the door waiting to be let in.

There were three of them, not counting Doc and Zen. And one was a stranger, though perhaps it would be an exaggeration to say that he was a complete stranger.

We’ll begin with the fact that they were all dressed in one-piece black suits with an odd sheen. I knew these, if Kit didn’t. There was such a thing as full head to toe dimatough armor, shining and hard, with view plate and scales that covered the whole body, giving the impression of alien beings. Dimatough armor was near-impenetrable by any means, including targeted laser. You could set a fire underneath the man and cook him in his own shell, but you could not get through the armor.

This meant, of course, that they were very safe—at least if you could avoid having a fire built under you—but they were also heavy, cumbersome and made the wearer clumsy. To outfit an entire army in them would be the equivalent of putting an entire army in tanks. Sure, the enemy would need some highly targeted explosives to circumvent that. On the other hand, your maneuverability and your ability to intercept insurgents and attackers who might run through smaller spaces was zero.

So, most armies on Earth had struck a compromise. These black suits were woven through with dimatough thread, the way cloth had been made of glass thread in the past, though I understood the process of extruding the thread was somewhat more difficult. They were worn by infantry, commandos, and guerillas.

Looking at Doc, who wore the military outfit with the sheepish expression of a gnome who knows he’s out of place, I hoped these five idiots had the good sense to wear a cotton singlet and tights under it. I’d worn the thing before. I know how it’s advertised. Impenetrable as dimatough, soft as wool. It’s not true. Unless they meant wool from sheep bioed to be covered with steel wool.

And fine, I didn’t know if they were all idiots, but I knew that Simon, who winked broadly at me, and Nat, who had a large size burner—what we called a ship-killer—on his back, with a bandolier strap crossing his chest, and who gave me just the edge of a smile around one of his eternal cigarettes, were very specialized type of idiots. The type that requires an extremely high IQ and above-normal competency. I suspected Zen and Doc fit that category too. And as for the stranger…

The stranger gave me a turn in my stomach, the sort of funny flip-flop you feel when the eyes see something the mind simply cannot process. Because he looked like Max. Max, aged about twenty years, with wrinkles on the edge of his eyes, but Max nonetheless. He had Max’s features and Max’s golden-blond hair, his broad shoulders and rather beefy build; not fat, but not exactly spare, either. And he was tall, as Max had been, and moved with the same incongruous grace.

The resemblance was striking enough to make me stop breathing for a minute, but it stopped with those externals. Yeah, his eyes were dark blue, so dark they looked black unless you paid attention, just like Max’s eyes had been. But the unholy glint in them was not Max’s.

Don’t get me wrong. Max was my friend, and I would mourn his miserable, unneeded death the rest of my life. He did not deserve what happened to him, and he was in no way stupid or too trusting.

But he was, at the time of his death, nineteen, blond, good-looking and pampered. His father—to call him that—had never pursued the regime of terror my father or others had engaged in. Perhaps this was because Max engaged in a lot less open rebellion. Or perhaps it was because he had a different approach—spying on and guarding, as opposed to terrifying, the current custodian of his future body into behaving. Max had been a broomer, as the rest of us had, but he never seemed to care much for the greater high jinks of broomer life. Not for him robbing drug transports, or even using drugs or engaging in indiscriminate sex.

Max had been Nat’s lover since the two of them had discovered sex, I think, and if they ever, separately or jointly, took anyone else to bed, I’d never heard even the barest rumor of it. Now, while absence of proof is not proof of abstinence, if you knew broomers and their lifestyle as I did, you’d know that there would be absolutely no chance an indiscretion wouldn’t come to my ears.

But they were both smart enough to realize it shouldn’t come to the ears of Good Man Dante Keeva. Sometimes I thought the only reason they were both broomers was so they could be openly together without worrying.

Still, even with the secrecy, Max had never known strife, nor even disappointment in love. He was an open, innocent and rather self-assured member of the upper class of Earth, the class I’d been raised in.

This creature whose body resembled Max’s point by point was a very different proposition. The blond hair that Max wore at most two inches long was now middle-of-the-back long and roughly pulled back into a pony tail. His face might have the same features as Max’s and he must use beard inhibitor cream as religiously as Max did. But across the bridge of the stranger’s nose, from the bottom of his left eye, and trending towards the right edge of his mouth was a scar. It was obviously an old scar and just obviously he’d done what he could to minimize it. But it showed as a livid thin pink line. I had no idea what had caused it. A blade following that trajectory would have bounced off the bridge of his nose, and a laser beam would have sliced through the bridge of his nose. His dark, dark blue eyes looked barely controlled and feral.

And while he might have been in solitary confinement for fifteen years, the cell had to have been large enough to allow him to exercise, because in that particular suit there was no doubt that he was muscle layered on muscle from his shoulders to the heavy boots that started just below his knees.

I caught myself thinking
sex on two legs
and blushed, both of which were stupid thoughts because if he was like Max, his interest in women would be at best academic. And I was entitled to think whatever I wanted of him. But it didn’t help that I was aware of Nat looking at me with a sardonic and appreciative gleam in his eye, even as I examined the stranger.

Just as I felt the blush heat my cheeks, the stranger put a huge hand forward, and engulfed the one that I put forward without noticing what I was doing. “Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva,” he said, with a grin that was partly disarming and partly as feral as the glint in his eyes. “I hear you were one of my little brother’s friends, and one of his avengers. Thank you.”

Nat mumbled something that sounded like, “Yeah, Thena is a right one.”

And then Kit was being similarly greeted by the stranger, who answered Kit’s grave “Good Man Keeva” with “Call me Lucius.”

We took them down the garden path to the compound.

“I don’t understand why you insisted on coming with Zen and Doc,” I told Simon, but meaning to include Lucius and Nat. “Is it so you can guard us while we retrofit a ship to take us to Eden?”

“Partly,” Nat said, then lit a cigarette from the end of the one he’d just finished.

Simon and Zen traded a look, and Simon sighed. “You could say,” he said, “that our interests coincide with yours, in that we…have business in Circum.”

“Business?” Kit said.

This time it was Doc who answered. “I’m given to understand that there is a great deal of problems with…the rebellion on Earth. The rebels—on whose side I understand your friends are—have access to communications, but not to the level they can get if they take over Circum. You see, most communication satellites can be controlled from Circum. There are also devices to disable peer-to-peer electronic communications somewhere in Circum—safe, they think, from mutiny and tampering.”

“That’s part of it,” Lucius rumbled. “There’s also the powerpods. If you control energy—as your friends from Eden having been telling us—you control the life of an industrial society.”

“Of course, we just want to control it so we can set it free,” Nat said, but it was too late for me not to feel a twinge of uneasiness.

“Are you sure about this rebellion of yours?” I said, falling back to talk with Nat. The others discussed technical aspects of the trip; Kit explained he’d need help taking some of the stored rations to the air-to-space, since we’d need to eat while traveling to Eden, and our rations were gone with everything else. “I’ll remind you that more people have taken power to free others and then—”

He grinned and gave me a sideways look, and I got a truly disquieting feeling that this Nat was almost as different from the Nat I knew as Lucius was from Max.

Nat had always been tightly wound. He came from one of the families that hereditarily served the Good Men. I understood his father was the general manager of Keeva properties, i.e. the person who did all the day-to-day work of directing Keeva farming, manufacturing, and investment operations. He probably also gave instructions to the housekeeper and set menus. At least most general managers did all that, sometimes at a remove, by directing an underling to do it.

Nat was the oldest of seven children and had been trained to follow in his father’s footsteps. For most of the time I’d known him, he could easily have passed for the perfect man for that job—a devoted and detail-inclined accountant, with a penchant for following through on everything. He was tall but slim, and though the suit he now wore revealed he was a lot more muscular than I’d have expected, his normal clothes just made him look neat and unremarkable. With emphasis on neat. His hair was pale blond, straight, cut so that every strand fell in place. It was never disarranged. His broomer suit managed to look pressed and neat, even right after our lair had engaged in a mid-air territory-dispute.

In fact, he’d been entirely unremarkable but for three clues which had managed to give away to me, and probably half the world, that Nat was in fact tightly wound. And like all tightly wound springs, he had a lot of kinetic energy just waiting to be released. I’d never been sure where that energy came from, but it revealed itself in the resentful gleam in his almost-black eyes, the always-too-controlled movements, and his chain-smoking, a habit that was fashionable among certain broomers, but certainly not most of them.

Now he looked…different. The movements were no longer tightly controlled. They were instead sudden, almost jerky. But the greatest difference was in his eyes, which had gone from resentfully sardonic to amusedly sardonic. He turned those on me now and took a deep puff of his cigarette, before exhaling. “Oh, Thena. Do we expect the revolution to last forever? No. We don’t. It never does, does it?”

I blinked at him. “But—No. But what I mean is, if you’re going to use power to hold the world hostage…I mean…”

He inhaled and then exhaled. “What do you think the Good Men do with the powerpods now? The easy path to power in any society is to control energy supplies.” He frowned a little. “We’ll have to come up with a way to make that not a monopoly, and perhaps start other forms of energy collection too. I’ll have to talk to Lucius about it and get it on the agenda.”

“You trust him that much?”

“Uh,” he said. Then paused. “Well, yes, and no. I trust him, because he has a deep dislike of authority, even his own. Perhaps particularly his own. I know, all humans are corruptible by power, but I’m not sure Lucius is human.” He grinned, and I realized it was a real grin, not the sort of grin that I’d seen from him before. “But I’m not trusting in Lucius alone. Yeah, he sparked the rebellion, but it has been taken up by the vast underground that has been around for three hundred or more years. And I’ve been a member of that underground a long time.” He opened his hands in a gesture of good faith which would have been—probably—more impressive if he’d not been holding a cigarette between the index and ring fingers of his right hand. “You see, I was born into a family of secret Usaians. I’ve been a member of the Sons of Liberty since I was sixteen.”