Darkship Renegades (8 page)

It wouldn’t be difficult for anyone watching us to realize that we were talking to each other. And if we did that too much, they’d come to think we were hiding more than we were. In fact, they might think we knew far more than we did know.

So we walked along the dark corridor, all three sets of footsteps echoing over the high, vaulted ceilings and the vast, dusty emptiness.

Because only a patch, corridor-wide and maybe ten feet ahead of us, was lit, while the lights went off behind us, we were in a moving island of light in a sea of darkness, both light and darkness making the other seem more intense.

It is important you know this, because they couldn’t have found a more perfect setup.

Zen walked slightly ahead of us, her hands in her pockets, managing to look absurdly graceful and feminine in her baggy coveralls and flat heels.

Kit and I followed behind, holding hands, each lost in his own thoughts. I was thinking that my time in Eden, despite all the trouble, had been the happiest of my lifetime, and hoping I could come back. And hoping Eden would go back to being what it once was.

Which would depend on our succeeding and removing Castaneda’s would-be dictatorship from power.

It all happened much too fast. Well, much too fast for me. I’m not a Cat. Neither is Zen, of course, but she reacted first, stopping ahead of us and reaching into her pocket for…what?

Then Kit shouted “Thena!” And jumped on me, taking me down with him, covering me.

I’ve said before that Cats move very, very fast but this was something else. They always give the impression, to the untrained eye, of having teleported from one place to the other. You only know that’s not what happened, because—even though your eye can’t transmit the message to your brain fast enough while it is happening—you retain memories of its happening. You remember the Cat crossing the intervening space.

The minute Kit jumped on me and took me down with him, to the dusty dimatough floor, where my head hit, hard, I entered speeded-up mode, my heart beating madly, my senses sharpening.

When I was very little, and for the time I was on Earth, I didn’t know why or how I was different, I just knew I was. When in fear, I would go into what I used to call my “speeded-up state” in which my movements seemed to become too fast for even trained people to follow. It was this, and my general charming and yielding disposition, that had allowed me to survive a childhood beset with military academies, reformatories, and mental hospitals.

I wasn’t as fast as an Eden Cat, I knew that. I’d tried it out on Kit, and even after I knew how he was doing it, his speed still seemed to border on supernatural. But I was faster than normal people. Much faster.

I was suddenly aware of people beyond that illuminated square on which we stood. More than one person, moving around, as though…as though maneuvering for attack. I was aware of Zen—though I couldn’t see her—taking something from her pocket. And I was aware of a blue ray crossing the air and…hitting someone.

I knew it had hit because I could smell singed flesh and hair. Kit tightened his grip on me.

Stop,
I said.
Let me go, Kit.
I wriggled out of his grasp and onto the floor, feeling in the pockets of my dress for my burner. Ahead, more rays of light burned. I couldn’t see Zen at all, didn’t know where she was. Had she gone into the dark space? How, when it was rigged to respond to our heat or movement or sound? But if it was rigged to respond to that, why hadn’t it responded to our attackers?
I’m not a child. I can defend myself.

I’d found my burner. It was a little job, little more than the length of my right hand, and slightly thicker than my index finger.

Eden, in general, was a very safe place. Yeah, okay, so murder was legal, but there were far fewer murders here than anywhere on Earth with the same level of population. Probably because retribution—in the form of a demand for compensation or a blood feud—could come from anywhere at any moment. I thought the latest statistics counted something like a murder a year.

Most duels were carefully announced and arranged days in advance. It wasn’t as though anyone wanted to risk their being thought murderers.

So, why was I carrying a burner in my pocket at all? Even if it was a little and thin one?

Listen, if you had grown up as I had, you also wouldn’t be able to function without some form of self-defense weapon at hand.

With the burner out, I burned in the general direction the last ray of burner fire had come from, and then someone else shot, and someone else again, and I tried to burn where the light came from as it extinguished.

It was a stupid and futile endeavor. Do I need to spell it out? I was in bright light, while they were in darkness. And I was trying to pick them out. This was one of the most disastrous setups in the history of battle tactics since the Roman army had gone off chasing a herd of cows to which Hannibal’s generals had tied lanterns. I couldn’t win and they couldn’t lose.

Behind me there was a muffled sound, and then “Thena!” in Kit’s voice, echoed both mind and voice together.

“Kit,” I said, and tried to crawl back to where he was, only right at that moment all the lights cut out, and I wasn’t sure where he was.

The corridor echoed, huge and dark, and full of footsteps.

In fact, in the absolute darkness, I couldn’t tell if the footsteps were approaching or retreating. I couldn’t tell what was happening at all. I could only hear the footsteps and feel at the gritty floor with my bare hands, as I crawled back and forth, calling “Kit!”

He didn’t answer, which was bad enough, but there was worse. I couldn’t hear him breathe. And that was just wrong.

I’m not going to claim to have supernatural hearing, but as a Mule I did have slightly sharper senses than normal humans and I should have been able to hear him breathe.

Panicked, lost in what had to be just over twenty square feet of darkened hallway, I felt around, and crawled so fast I felt like I was dragging my knees on sandpaper. I hit something hard. It went skittering into the darkness and then hit something else—possibly, from the high, clanging ring of ceramite on dimatough, the wall of the tunnel.

Steps and the zap of firing weapons distracted me, and I concentrated on ignoring them. I could hear only the loud, pounding, insistent, beating of my heart. And then I tried to ignore that, half sitting up, my fists clenched on my thighs.

“Kit!”
Kit. KIT!
There was no response, but now I could hear it, the very, very faint breathing coming from nearby. I felt in the dark, in that direction, and found Kit’s hand. I knew it was Kit’s hand, not only because it felt like Kit’s hand, but because our wedding ring was on it. We had lost my ring on Earth, but Doc had replaced it, and we both wore broad gold rings with roses cut into the outside and the words
Je Reviens
engraved on the inside. That was archaic French for “I’ll return” and the name of the starship that had taken the Mules out of the solar system. Also, incidentally, not a bad motto for a marriage.

Kit’s hand felt warm and alive, which was good. By following his arm up with my hand, I reached his shoulder, then by degrees, his chest. It wasn’t wet or bloodied, or anything, which was good, and by laying my hand on his chest, I could feel his heartbeat, fast but regular, and then I was following his body up to his shoulder again, and shaking it. “Kit, Kit, Kit?”

There was no response. He didn’t move. My hands started, as if of their own accord, examining him.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. Something was terribly wrong. I felt up and down his body, taking note of a wet spot on his inner thigh just up from his knee. A large wet spot which wasn’t good, because it was around the area of the femoral artery and the feeling of the wetness was sticky like blood, and besides, I could smell blood, sharp and tangy and metallic.

But no one loses consciousness from being hit on the thigh. Unless…he’d lost consciousness from hitting his head when he’d fallen. No, wait. He’d been down already, having jumped on me to take me down and protect me. Idiot. When he was the one they wanted to get and he was at far greater risk. And yet, if he hadn’t done it, he wouldn’t have been Kit.

My hands had found the top of his boots and started up again, upwards, fast, feeling his chest, his sides, all the way up. On his arm there was another wet-sticky point, but it didn’t seem to be bleeding nearly as fast.

And then up, up, up his neck, with the pulse of life beating fast and decisive at its side, and up up…

I stopped. I stopped before I realized what I was feeling—it was impossible. It couldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen. Things like this didn’t happen to me. Not to Athena Hera Sinistra, only daughter of Good Man Milton Alexander Sinistra. Not to a Patrician of Earth. Some things had been worse for me, but I’d always been kept from utter catastrophe, which this was.

Kit’s temple was not only wet. It seemed to be pouring out blood. My fingers, feeling gingerly, found the edge of a hole on his temple. And blood was pouring out. I could feel it on my bare knees as it pooled on the floor. I refused to believe that was blood, but it felt like blood, warm and viscous.

I put my whole hand down in the puddle by Kit’s head, then I brought it up to smell. Blood. It was blood. It was Kit’s blood.

Both my hands grabbed at his shoulders and shook him, before I could get control of them. My voice rose high in a sort of wail, as I screamed, “Wake up Kit, wake up. Oh no, oh, no, oh, no. This can’t be happening. This isn’t happening.”

Less than a couple of minutes ago—I was sure of it—we’d been headed out of the Energy Board complex, ready to go to dinner, ready to lift off tomorrow. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t happening. If I closed my eyes…If I wished really hard…we’d still be there, still walking down the hallway. We’d be going home. We were going home. Kit had saved me from near death, and this wasn’t going to separate us now. What a stupid way to die when we’d braved Earth and Daddy Dearest.

What a stupid way for him to go when he’d got me back from the brink of death by radiation, when I’d been revived despite having been as nearly cooked from inside out as a human being could be and still live.

From a long, long way away, as if from someone else’s head, a thought leaked into my panic. Head wounds bled like the devil, and Kit needed emergency first aid right away. He wasn’t dead. I must make sure he didn’t die.

I pulled back at my hair, frantically, trying to remove it from my eyes, so I could see the bracelet on my wrist which had a dialer built in. Since an attack on us last year, when I didn’t have a communications device in sight, I always made sure to wear at least two. But I couldn’t see to dial.

My hair being pulled back made no difference, of course. I wasn’t a Cat who could see in the dark. And Kit couldn’t dial, and Zen…I didn’t even have any idea where Zen was. In the dark around me, there was no sound, not even breathing.

I twisted the dialer by feel, blindly. At least Doc’s number was easy. It was his personal number, which meant he would have it on whatever receptor he carried. He was supposed to be at the Denovos, he was—

“Hello?” As Doc Bartolomeu’s voice answered, loud in the still darkness, I realized I would give my position away by speaking, but it didn’t matter. I’d already shouted.

“Doc, Doc, please. This is Thena. Kit was hit. He’s bleeding to death. We’re—”

“I know where you are,” he said. “I’m coming.”

“How…how?”

“Zen told me,” he said. “I’m just outside the complex. Don’t worry.”

BETWEEN WORLDS

I had nothing to do but worry. Telling people not to worry while they’re in a situation like this was sort of like telling people to stop breathing. It couldn’t be done.

I felt the blood spilling from Kit’s temple. I knew—had heard—that head wounds bled a lot. The heart pumped a lot of blood up there, of course. It was where the brain was.

I thought of how Kit hadn’t reacted, hadn’t responded to me even in my mind. He had done it before when he was dying of a chest wound. But now he wasn’t. His brain…

No. I wouldn’t think about it. Just wouldn’t. Eden was far more advanced than Earth in all types of genetic engineering and genetics. It came from not forbidding all tampering with human genes for the last three hundred years—as Earth had after the turmoils.

They could repair types of damage that were fatal on Earth, and I was only starting to suspect—a year after coming to Eden—that people lived far longer here, too. They would be able to heal Kit. He was still alive. He’d survive.

I’d try to do whatever could be done. I crawled around till my knees were under Kit’s head, raising it. Raising a wound was always better, right? I tore a piece off my dress and folded it into a kind of pad, and pushed it hard against his temple. Pressure helped reduce bleeding, right?

Then I thought of his thigh, because it didn’t matter where the blood was flowing from, right? He could die of exsanguination either way. I tore another piece of the dress with my free hand. It was hard to fold it with a single hand, but it could sort of be done. It wasn’t like anyone was going to grade me on my folding. I pushed the rough pad of cloth against his thigh and pressed, pressed as hard as I could.

I don’t think I thought of anything. I could barely breathe. All my mind could form coherently was the certainty that Kit couldn’t die. I heard my own heartbeat pound with a force that seemed to make my body quiver, and I willed Kit’s to beat in unison. It seemed to me that I could feel it, too, echoing just behind mine.

It seemed to me the blood flow diminished and I hoped it was the pressure and not that Kit was dying, and it seemed like no time at all and eternity, all at once, and then there was a wavering light, and then, closer, the doctor, running, with a lantern affixed to his head, in the way that miners used to wear lamps on their foreheads in old period holos.

He ran much better than any man his age should be able to, his movements contrasting with his wrinkled face and his gnomic appearance.

He fell to his knees next to Kit and his breathing was labored and loud. I don’t think he even looked at me, as his hand went first to right over Kit’s heart, then he sat back on his heels, and reached into his black bag which he’d dropped by his side, and got out the lens implement, and looked through it, then tossed it aside, letting it clatter to the floor of the tunnel and reached into his bag again.

He had to pry my hands away from both Kit’s temple and Kit’s thigh, and he used something that looked like tiny squares of dimatough, which stuck to the skin, on top of the wound. It looked like he was taping Kit’s skin together. The bleeding stopped immediately, and the doctor used an injector on the side of Kit’s neck. There was a response from Kit then, a sort of deep sigh, and for a moment I thought he had died, but he continued breathing.

Doc Bartolomeu looked up at me then. “Are you hurt?”

“I…don’t think so.”

He got the examining instrument from the floor. His hand was stained red, from the puddle there. And there was blood on the side of the instrument, but the doctor didn’t pay any attention, as he put it to his eye and looked through it. “No,” he said, with finality. “You’re fine.”

I nodded and said, “Kit…He…bled a lot.”

“He won’t die from the bleeding,” Doc Bartolomeu said. “I’ve given him something to speed up blood production. He might be a little anemic, but he’ll be fine. I need to get him to my flyer soon, though. Ah. There they are.”

As though on cue, just then, there were more lights coming down the hallway, the sound of running footsteps. For a moment I thought it was our attackers returning, then recognized Zen, ahead of them, followed by…yes. Jean and Bruno. They had a little antigrav platform between them, and were maneuvering it at about hip high.

Jean turned about as pale as spilt milk when he saw us, but the voice in which he asked Doc, “Okay to move him?” was perfectly calm.

“Yes. We need to get him to my place fast,” he said.

Jean and Bruno managed it, though Kit was taller than either of them, and I suspected weighed more than either of them too. They managed it quickly and without seeming to strain, lifting him one at the shoulders and one at the knees and at the same time somehow maneuvering the platform under him.

Zen gathered up tools the doctor had let fall in the blood pool on the floor, and put them in a bag, then inside his big black bag, which she picked up to follow him.

Bruno turned back and said, “Thena?”

I tried to get up. There was no reason I shouldn’t have been able to get up. “Are you?” Bruno asked.

“No, she’s not,” the doctor said, and in his tone of voice there was just the barest hint that I was being a weakling, and weak for no reason.

I managed to get to my feet, but my legs buckled under me, and I heard my teeth chatter, and realized I was shaking, and then I was furious at myself, and felt like I was a weakling and malingering for no reason. Kit was ill. Kit was struggling between life and death, and I was being an idiot and having issues standing up.

“Can you handle it?” Bruno asked, and it was obvious he was talking about the antigrav platform and of course they could, since Zen and Jean were keeping it level and moving, the lights on their foreheads disappearing in the gloom of the hallway.

Then he said “Easy, easy” to me, and took off his coat, and put it around my shoulders. I wanted to tell him I was sure that though I felt cold, I couldn’t really be cold, but I couldn’t talk and if I tried it, my chattering teeth were going to chop my tongue in half. He put his hand around my waist and led me after the others down the hallway. “It’s reaction,” he told me. “It’s just reaction.”

It wasn’t till we were outside, and sitting on the back of what I thought was Doc’s mobile treatment center flyer, that I looked down at myself and realized I was covered in blood everywhere I could see. Kit’s blood.

And then I vomited.