Darkship Renegades (33 page)

“I see,” I said. It was an automatic response. I was raised in no religion in particular. Daddy Dearest saw his god every morning in the shaving mirror. But the Usaians were one of the forbidden religions, one whose members faced varying but always strict penalties on most of the Earth. I knew very little about their beliefs, except that they believed in a war goddess and a benevolent god-father, and that they believed their god’s will could be divined by the will of the people.

The other things they believed were even less rational. Like…that all men were born equal and endowed with rights by their creator. Or that those rights included life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

They also believed—or at least I’d heard so—that their benevolent god, who had been the founder of the embodiment of their ideals when they’d been a nation taking up a significant portion of North America, would come back to lead them back to a newly founded Usa. Their prayers—I’d heard—often finished with a plea for the return of the George, which was how they referred to the mythical George Washington. I knew because I’d seen it, that they often wore jewelry and clothes embossed with the image of a cherry tree, which was said to be sacred to the George. In their abodes they often tacked a piece of cloth imprinted with stars and stripes.

I knew the real historical George Washington from Eden texts, but I wasn’t sure how he meshed with Usaian theology.

Now Nat pulled back at his sleeve, to reveal a broad silver bracelet with the image of a cherry tree with an ax leaning against it, and said, “As for Lucius, he saved my life, and we are…” He shrugged. “But for now, I think I can tell you that half of my co-religionaires think he’s the George.”

“And is he?”

Nat looked amused and shrugged. “I don’t know. If he is, the great architect has a hell of a sense of humor. For now all you need to know—unless you want to stay and fight for the freedom of the people of the Earth—is that both Simon and I trust him to help bring down the Good Men. After that…I’ll have to see. But to even have half a chance of bringing down the Good Men”—he gave me a rueful smile—“or even to be allowed to live in peace ourselves, we need your help getting to Circum and taking it over.”

“What? All three of you?”

“Four. I understand Zen is helping. Also, how much resistance do you expect a bunch of scientists and harvesters to put up?”

At that moment we reached the compound, and Kit organized us to carry supplies to the air-to-space. All the while, he and Doc were discussing what had been in the gems that Jarl stored here, gems my husband had, apparently, looked at this morning and interpreted in the light of the knowledge he had retained from Jarl.

He was explaining that while powerpods could be seeded and we should do so, it would take a very long time and enormous amounts of organic material to do so. And while Eden could mine some of it from nearby asteroids and the Thules could ship enough water, in time—it would take very long to grow enough to support Eden on limited feeding and watering.

Transplanting a branch, on the other hand, would work much better, but it meant that we’d still have a generation of growth before the powerpods could supply Eden and the colonies.

Doc nodded sagely after a while. “I never thought it would be an immediate solution. But just knowing it will be available changes the game. Of course, we still need to get the Castaneda cabal out of power and to resume power runs.”

Kit grinned. “I guess Athena and I had best not bioengineer our children as Cats and Navs. The work we’ve done now will render them unemployed.”

But Doc only gave him a jaundiced look. “I don’t think that’s possible, Christopher. I think we can grow our own powerpods, but as long as Earth has an excess of powerpods, relatively unguarded or even only slightly guarded, they will be one of our sources of energy. It is good to have diverse sources.”

Kit looked like he would argue, but then shrugged and headed for the air-to space carrying the final load of provisions. In addition to what we would need for the trip to Eden, we were carrying enough food to sustain Zen and me while we worked on the ship to take us to Eden.

And then Kit made a last trip for his violin.

I DIDN’T SEE NOTHING

They dropped us around the unused side of Circum, Zen and I. There had been a tense moment as the air-to-space pulled into the airlock space, and the door opened and Doc said, “Zen and Thena, good luck. We’ll let you know how we fare,” where Zen had put her hands on her hips and looked at Simon, who looked sheepish and had opened his mouth as though to apologize.

But he never got a word out, because Lucius intervened. He sounded authoritative, but also somewhat amused as he said, “Zen. Your expertise is needed to see to the ship transformation. Everyone here is more expendable than you or Thena.”

“Kit isn’t,” I said, putting my hands on my hips in turn. “Kit isn’t expendable. He has to get back to Eden. If for nothing else, because he has the knowledge he got…Because he understands Jarl’s writings.”

This got me a very curious look from Zen and an even more curious one from Simon, but it was Kit who spoke. “Now, Thena, they need my ability to move fast. I undertake to promise you I won’t get killed.”

“Oh, right,” I said, dismissively. “Because you’re so good at that.”

This brought a burble of laugh to the back of his throat, followed by, “Well…yes. I’m still breathing. So far, so good.”

I really wished we were in the exercise room aboard the
Cathouse
, where I could kick him in the ankles for that comment. “So far, so good only because I help.”

“I know. Cunning of me, isn’t it?”

You can’t argue with certain men. Fine, you can argue with most men. What you can’t do is make most of those see reason, no matter how hard you try.

“In what time, and how did Kit get briefed on what they’re going to do and elect to go with them?” I asked. “We’ve been with them the whole time. How could they do that? And what is the reasoning behind it? Men have another quarter pound of flesh in a curious place, therefore they’re better suited to take Circum Terra, while the little women remain quiet and well behaved?”

Zen was frowning. She had been frowning the whole time, and glaring too. Now she turned that glare on me, and it was amazing how much her eyes looked like Kit’s even though his were bioed to act like Cat eyes. “I don’t think it’s gender. They want to preserve the people with mechanical ability, which will be needed for the ship and also—and Kit will be useful in any fight. They’re simply not equipped for his level of speed here, so if we need to make a demonstration of force…You must admit it will be better than allowing Nat to let loose with that damned ship-killer.”

You also can’t reason with women, I decided. Just when you’re furious and want a little cozy confirmation for your fury they will go and become all stupidly rational on you. I muttered this followed by, “Humans. The whole breed!”

And Zen laughed suddenly. “Yeah, all of us.”

I thought of Jarl and suddenly choked on words I could never fully say and an understanding I could never fully explain. “It’s still better than thinking you’re not human. Or that you should be perfect.”

Zen seemed to catch something in my expression because she said, “I’m sorry. Was it that bad? Jarl?”

I nodded, then shook my head, then shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s…I’m coming to terms with the fact that I can hate someone but still love him a little at the same time.”

She gave me a curious head-tilted look. “You should meet my adoptive—Now, let’s look at these ships and see what we can do, shall we? I think turning an air-to-space into an Eden ship is going to be near impossible.”

“Uh? Why? They’re well-insulated and spacious and—”

“Yes,” Zen said, “and that’s the problem. They’re much heavier than they need to be, with all that insulation weighing them down. And, let’s face it, unless we mean to go down through the atmosphere into Earth, it is thoroughly unnecessary. Second, while they have a little space for drinks, they don’t have any water aboard, or water-recycling facilities. And third, they don’t have a large enough space for a cargo hold to keep the clipping of the powertrees in vacuum and stable, with enough insulation around it to keep the compartment radiation-free.”

“Oh. Then what are we supposed to do?”

“One solution,” she said, “the one we can be sure of, is to take one of the largest of the harvesters and retrofit it, using some stuff an from air-to-space-to-space. But we can’t get to the harvester until we have…Until they take over Circum.”

“Do you mean they just dropped us off here so that they would not risk us in the fighting?”

“Pretty much,” she said, and grinned and looked ridiculously happy. Much, much happier than she had on the trip out. As soon as I got her aboard the Eden ship, she was going to sit down and give me every detail of what had happened to her on Earth. Perhaps Simon had been wrong and Mr. Sex-on-two-legs Lucius was interested in women after all.

But she wasn’t exactly telling me the truth. Or at least not the whole truth, because she went on, “The problem with that solution is that it will take months to retrofit, and we’ll have to scrub vast portions of it to make it habitable, because previously they’ve been used to store powerpods. I’d prefer not to do that, and Doc says in this portion of Circum there should be some…well…they were habitats. Kind of like campers in space, used by workmen while building the
Je Reviens
. They’ll have bathrooms and water- and air-recycling systems. What they don’t have is a real propulsion or steering system and certainly not one that uses antigrav the way ours does, since at the time antigrav was a very new technology on Earth. He says they used it on the
Je Reviens
, but they weren’t sure enough of it to apply it in finer scale.”

“And installing those would be much quicker than installing everything else.”

“Exactly,” Zen said. “Particularly since we had so much practice in the
Hopper
, assembling and reassembling the steering system.”

“I could do it in my sleep,” I said with feeling. And I meant it, which was good, because I practically would need to.

Have you ever read the diary of some soldier in some great war, say the war between the land states and the seacities? I don’t mean the diaries that have been handed over to some narrator who pretties them up and makes them relevant, making sure to introduce the right number of references to famous people, places and events. I’m talking about the day-to-day accounts of foot soldiers involved in wars.

I had, because there were a fair number in my father’s now lost library, and eventually I read practically everything. And I’d found that the general tenor of these diaries was just an endless description of long marches and hardships, of sore feet, of insufficient bathing facilities, incompetent officers and commanders, of daily humiliations and discomforts. Even the action these people had seen often managed to come across as an incidental footnote to the real job of enduring a long slog in uncomfortable conditions. You’d get a description of a great battle, but it turned out the foot soldier had only seen a corner of it and was particularly concerned with the fact that his ship had broken down, that the toilet in the troop transport had been clogged, or that—if you went to older wars—his horse had been shot from under him.

The next day felt like that to me. Zen and I found the accommodations workers had used while building the
Je Reviens
. To begin with they were an odd shape, sort of a rounded V. Second, while they had all the recycling facilities still in place and the dimatough that encased them had not sprung any leaks, each was the barest of quarters. Most of it was taken up with cooking facilities clearly designed to accommodate a full-time cook and assistants, who had fed and looked after a hundred or so men, or with the bunks for a hundred or so men. Spacious, each was. Commodious…well, they weren’t much better than the
Hopper
had been when we got it.

Zen had named our chosen one, perhaps accidentally, by looking at it a moment then saying, “How appropriate, it’s a
Boomerang
. It always comes back.”

And I’d been embarrassed, since as an Earth woman I should have known more about boomerangs than Edenites did. But instead, I’d said, waspishly, “Only if you throw them right.”

To which she’d grinned and said, “Then let’s make sure we do.”

But then all humor had turned into a long slog, first as we planned how to retrofit the ship—something at which I was surprised to find I was more adept than Zen, being better able to visualize how the compartments should be laid out and used.

And then we’d started taking apart one of the air-to-spaces—though not the one we’d used—for parts. The antigrav would need to be rigged out of one of the units that gave Circum its artificial gravity. Which meant we had to wait until we had access to those.

The first I knew of how the fight had gone was Simon coming back. He had two burners, one in each hand, and a cut across his forehead that had bled copiously over most of his face. That he hadn’t seemed to notice the blood, much less attempted to clean it, told me how very serious the situation was.

“Zen,” he said.

And Zen, who had been on her knees, attaching screens to the future control room, had dropped everything and turned, looking anxious. “Yes? What happened?”

“What? Nothing much. We’re almost in control. There was…some resistance, but Nat has subdued it.” When she looked significantly at his burners, he said, “Better safe than sorry, right. Come on.”

She stood up. “Come where?”

“With me. We need you to rig the device.”

“What device?” I said, in turn.

“A communicator. And…stuff…” Simon said, barely sparing me a glance. “Nothing that concerns you.”

“Right. But I still need to assem—”

“We’ll send you Kit,” Zen said. “With the stuff for antigrav.”

Yeah, I could say that Kit didn’t have that kind of expertise. But Kit did okay at assembling things, and he wasn’t totally stupid around a screwdriver. And of course he could think three-dimensionally. I wasn’t about to say I didn’t want him around.

He came in moments later, bearing—as promised—an artificial gravity unit. Actually two, still in packages, ready to be used on the ship.

“What is going on?” I asked, after a quick kiss. “What on Earth do they need Zen for?”

He smiled. I was glad to see that though he looked somewhat rumpled, he, at least, wasn’t bleeding anywhere I could see. “Oh, I gather she’s been helping the rebellion by creating communication devices and circumventing the ones the Good Men block or create.”

“Oh.”

“And they needed her. But I’m here. Don’t tell me you don’t want me around.”

“I’d never say that,” I said. “Did they take all of Circum?”

“They’re still fighting,” Kit said. “Mind you, they knew they had ready-made allies. Or at least Nat did. Turns out a lot of the harvester pilots are secret Usaians. Also, a few of the scientists.”

Still, I noted that Kit, though he helped me, seemed to also be protecting me. Keeping a continuous eye out for any intruder. I didn’t know if that was just his innate paranoia, or if there was real danger.

I didn’t know, that is, until Kit suddenly left my side, moving Cat-speed. I barely had time to drop the parts I’d been assembling and turn around.

My eye still couldn’t follow his movements. But I did see the man in an Earth-fashion suit get hit on the head with the butt of a burner, and then carefully tied. Or rather, I saw him fall, and I saw him all tied up, and I could sort of remember Kit doing that. Of course, it’s entirely possible that my mind had made up the intervening states.

I started breathing again. “You didn’t kill him,” I said.

“What? No. He is doing what he thought was his duty, keeping Circum in the hands of the people who appointed him. They can later convince him or not allow him to come back here.” He shrugged. “I helped them take Circum because it’s convenient for us too, but in the end, it’s not any of our business. We’re not going to stay behind to help rebuild the Earth. They are. The decision on these sort of things is theirs. Eden is our business.”

“But Jarl would just have killed him.”

Kit frowned a little. “Yeah. You know, he didn’t think he was human.”

“I gathered.”

“No, you don’t understand. He really didn’t think he was human. They pounded that into him. It wasn’t rational, it couldn’t be fought and…ate him, inside.”

I didn’t tell him I’d seen enough of that in that room, while the computer peripherals interfered with the nanocytes. If Kit didn’t remember it, I’d be the last person to remind him.

After a while Zen came back, her cheeks glowing, and looking really excited. Doc came back with her, and Doc and Kit set about installing the creature comforts in the
Boomerang
.

Most of it had to be done from materials at hand, which meant there was no real bed we could install—not unless we were interested in moldy workmen pallets. But we could and did assemble something from two chaises that would allow Kit and me to sleep together.

But when they started outfitting a room for Zen, she shook her head. “No. I’m not going.”

I saw consternation in Doc’s face, but less of it in Kit’s and Doc was puzzled. “Zen,” Doc said, “you have to come back home.”

“No,” Zen said. “I don’t. I like Earth. I like the open space and the fact I’m not an oddity. I like the fact that I can pick a mate from an endless number and not just from among Cats. I like the fact that I can be myself, and not Navigator Zenobia Sienna. I regret that I won’t be helping you with taking Eden back, but I totally trust you to. And I’m sure you’ll manage it.” She’d smiled, revealing dimples I didn’t know she had. “Besides, look at how much food and water you’ll save.”

And that was that. Doc tried and Kit tried, less convincingly, to talk her into going with us.

I didn’t try. I’m not stupid. You can’t convince humans to do anything when their hearts and souls are dead set against it, and Zen had made her choice. I suspected she and her adopted family didn’t get along and—from her history—that Eden had always felt small and confining to her. Kit loved Eden, but she wasn’t Kit any more than I was Milton Alexander Sinistra. Made or born, genetically engineered to be similar or not, the environment and our own choices molded us as much as our genes. Each of us was unique. And Zen had been looking, I think, for a way to run away. Earth was a spectacular way to do that.