DarkShip Thieves (20 page)

The cargo ships that flew to Thule were a lot like Earth flyers and I'd been flying those since I was ten.

I knew I could fly the cargo ship to Earth. I'd seen maps enough since I was here, and calculating where Eden was on its irregular but predictable orbit was a matter of memory and spacial reasoning, both of which were my strong points.

Oh, I knew Eden's fears of betrayal. And I wouldn't betray them. No. Not because of Eden. I didn't give a hang about Eden, in the end. With their fear of Earthworms, their strange non-law laws, their certainty of being in the right, they were no better than Earth and they might be worse. But I did care about Kit, who had saved my life. And for his family who had sheltered me for a month—even his father who seemed eternally concerned over whether I'd got enough calories and had quite enough water to bathe in.

I wouldn't do that to them. I wouldn't betray them in exchange for their kindness. But there were many places on Earth I could land undetected and burn the ship. Most of old Europe was depopulated. And from there I could find my way to a communication device and call for rescue. Once I was on Earth . . .

My body ached for the sun of Earth, for wind on my face, for the sight of the ocean.

I had intended to wait, but this wouldn't do. For all I knew, from what the doctor had said, that only married couples could communicate telepathically with each other, Kit would now feel obligated to marry me. As though I were some Victorian maiden and he'd compromised my honor. It sounded exactly like the stupid sort of thing the infuriating man would decide he must do. Like . . . Keep alive an idiot who was trying to murder him.

And he must not be allowed to marry me. No. There was misery. And then there was the sheer torture Kit Klaavil and I could inflict on each other. And no one deserved that. Not even Kit Klaavil, not even my—admittedly troublesome—self. Marrying me would be the shortest route he could take to his natural parents' end.

I threw the closet open again and picked out a black tunic and a black, fitted pair of pants. The gem that gave me access to my entire account, such as it was, went into my right hand pocket. The burner I had taken from Joseph Klaavil—and that no one had thought to ask me for—went into my left hand pocket.

A change of underwear or spare clothes seemed unnecessary. Any ship I could take would have a vibro unit. And I would be alone, so why bother changing clothes beyond vibroing?

There was a side entrance to the house by Kit's room. I took it, as I went silently out into the night to steal a collector ship.

I couldn't take one of the family flyers. Not that it was possible for me to do so without tampering with the genlock. Of course, if the genlock was like on Earth, you could bypass it completely, so I probably could do that. But it would take too long, it might set off an alarm—or two—and even if everything went as perfectly as I could hope for, it would be a really bad thing to for it to be discovered before I left. Without it, they might think I'd simply gone somewhere in the house and was taking in a virtus or swimming in the pool on the lower level. The thing was that without a careful search for me, they would never know I was gone. And they had no reason to do a search for me.

But I'd learned something, in the times Kit had been unable to pick me up. You could call a cab from various points in each neighborhood and from each public building. There were these little towers that looked remarkably like miniatures of the traffic control towers on Earth. You could punch your details in them, and where you wished to go and an automated flyer would come, which would drive you to your destination without your contributing anything to the flying.

The vehicles were safe, Kit said. And he should know, because he dodged any number of them while flying across town. On the other hand, at the time I was leaving the Denovo compound even most bars, certainly most restaurants and almost all public buildings were closed or staffed by a skeleton crew. Enough that I wasn't too afraid, even as the flyer came to center and dodged the inevitable late-night party goers and people returning from visits.

It parked me in front of the Energy Board Building and let me out, after I swept my gem through the reader, paying for the ride. I knew at night the building was unattended. I didn't know if it would let me in. The genlocks had been programmed for me, but that was during the day.

However, as I pressed my thumb to the gen-reading membrane on the side door—which I normally used when coming to work in the morning—it popped unlocked for me. So far so good. I slid to my locker, got my worksuit—a bright yellow and made of some material that eschewed stains. If someone caught me wandering around the complex and I were properly attired and carrying my tools, I could claim I had come to work early because some problem in one of ships under retrofitting bothered me. If all else failed, I could claim that I had been sleep walking. And the tools might come in handy in space. And I happened to know that Kit had paid for them.

The ship we'd gone over this afternoon hadn't been cleared from the dock—meaning that we still had access to its genlock. On the other hand, I knew, from having crawled all over it just this afternoon, there was nothing wrong with it.

To make it better and to assuage my aching conscience, the ship was not privately owned as most ships were—by the couple flying them. It was one of the few rental ships owned by the Board itself—like the cathouse. They were usually rented by couples starting out and saving to have their own ship built. I had no idea why Kit rented the Cathouse, though it probably had the lowest rental fees ever, but it was on the borderline of unsafe.

I considered stealing the Cathouse and, to be honest, if it had been where I could get it, I might have. But I also knew it was on a long contract with Kit, which meant his possessions were in it, and stealing his gems with family occasions seemed like the last of unkindest cuts.

As it was, I was sure that he would feel betrayed when he found me missing. Relieved too, I thought, but definitely betrayed. And I wished I could have left him a note. But I could not afford to have them discover it too soon.

So I would make do with this ship. It belonged to a young couple, Dawn and Sean Heigle and it was christened Howl At The Moon. They preferred to do Thule runs, normally the province of those too old to do pod runs. Who knew why? Probably because it demanded less concentration and they were honeymooners.

I climbed into it, through its extended ladder—unlike the cathouse, the door was a good bit off the ground—pushed my thumb into the lock. Then closed door. Above me was one of the ejection locks—it was there because someone was supposed to take Howl At The Moon out in the morning to test it, since we hadn't found any of the issues the couple flying it had complained about.

From the testing and the manuals, I knew the procedure for getting out. First you turned on the systems, which needed to warm up for about half an hour. I was in the Cat Cabin, because the navigator cabin, though it had screens, had no controls. Just the ability to dictate controls to the cats.

I turned the engines on, then started doing system checks, while I adjusted the screen to be able to see in it. It could be adjusted because repair people, obviously, weren't Cats. And mechanics had to be able to see.

While the engines warmed and the systems ran self-checks, I started mentally calculating my path out of here, via that opening right above me. Oh, lifting straight up sounded easy. But how fast would I be going? It had to be calculated to give the membrane time to open, but not so slow that you scraped your way out.

"Howl At The Moon, what is happening? Who is in there?"

The voice, deep and masculine, startled me.

Voice only of course they couldn't see that I was wearing my official worksuit and had my tools at my feet and everything, so that wasn't going to act as my shield of righteousness, was it?

In this type of situation, there were two things you could do. One of them was to tell the truth. The other was to tell a lie. And then the third which was my way. "I'm Athena Hera Sinistra," I said.

"The Earther?" the masculine voice said. "The mechanic? What are you doing in the Howl At The Moon?"

"Testing it."

"In the middle of the night?" the voice said, and then, after a pause. "You are not cleared to test it."

"I thought I'd solve some issues with it." I was checking the warming up status of the ship. Damn it. I wasn't going to be able to take off in under half an hour. "Nav Heigle said she had some unexplained issues with the air system."

It wasn't that the engines could not lift me off well before that, mind you, it was that none of the life support systems would be ready to go. And even I was a little leery of lifting off world without air, water or lights. Particularly since lifting off before they were ready could damage them.

"Truly, I'm just checking some things. I'll be out in a moment," I said. Which was true. I intended to be out of the world as soon as humanly possible. Of course, I sort of hoped he wouldn't take it that way.

The problem with this was that pumping up the air and water systems meant literally filling reserve tanks. Sucking things from pipes attached to the ship. Which meant they would show in the dials of whoever was monitoring this. I wondered who it was. It sounded like the same lovely man who had welcomed Kit and I to Eden.

"Why are you filling the life support systems?" he asked. "It is not safe for them to be filled while parked." And he threw the override switch.

Fortunately, while I am, often, many kinds of fool, I am not exactly trusting. I'd thought he might do this, so I had already taken the front panel off the relevant part of the Howl At The Moon, and was happily tweaking it, so that the override would have no effect.

"Stop," the functionary said. "Stop immediately. You are in contravention of the orders and regulations of the Energy Board."

Um. Soft soap and
I'm just testing
had probably lost its usefulness. Yeah, I'd only cursorily considered it, anyway. I knew sooner or later, they'd realize they were being robbed. I had twenty five minutes left.

I leapt across the control room to the controls and slammed my palm hard against the button that shut and sealed the door. This done, only the Heigles would be able to get in, and I doubted they could get them out of bed and here in time. Still, because I am not a trusting woman, I slammed an additional lock across the back of the door, manually. It made the genlock ineffective. Why it was there, I couldn't figure. Except that I was starting to think Edenites were more paranoid than I. They probably expected to be boarded while in one of the Thules, and they wanted to be able to lock from the inside in case someone defeated the genlock. Right. My being from Earth, the idea sounded lunatic to me. On the other hand, having seen how Kit first received me, I doubted it was as lunatic as it sounded. Kit didn't strike me as particularly paranoid—not about Earth, not after knowing me. If he had believed that his ship might be boarded in the energy trees, then doubtless all of them did. At any rate I was grateful for the locks, as I turned to survey the progress of the system warm-up.

"You locked the ship!" the voice squawked over the communicator.

I hadn't known they had a way to tell. And I didn't bother to answer. I didn't know what I could tell them that would calm them down in any way. Instead, I looked at the levers and studied the levels of various things. But staring at the gages wouldn't make them go any further, so I went down the hallway to the nav cabin, to see what could help me find my way to Earth.

The maps were programmed to be erased at the push of a button, at least on Earth runs. Were they programmed here too? Maps to Earth? Or just to the Thules? Well, I had seen maps while traveling here with Kit, the orbit of the asteroid that had been co-opted to create Eden was available in school programs which I'd been free to peruse for the last month. And the nav cabin contained some of the best calculators ever invented by mankind. In the Cathouse, they were consolidated into the Cat Cabin and I'd seen Kit use them.

But I had no time to worry about any of this and Kit was, for now, irrelevant to my plans, except that I must get away from Eden as soon as possible before I made his life worse. I was trying out the calculators to confirm that they were as simple to operate as I'd thought from watching Kit. Well, simple for anyone with an understanding of space mathematics.

Of course, it had never been part of my curriculum, but I'd studied it, nonetheless, when I'd gotten bored with everything else.

The speaker crackled and I sighed. More from the man in the control tower.

I started towards the Cat Cabin, determined to turn off the com, so they couldn't talk to me anymore. What was the point of talking. I was going to take off and that was that.

"Thena!"

It wasn't the man in the control tower, the anonymous stranger I'd been bucking. It was Kit, his voice strange. It sounded like he'd hicupped at the end of the word.

I didn't answer. Not obstinate. I couldn't speak. I couldn't find words or voice. What could I tell Kit? I'd hoped he didn't find out till it was too late. I hoped he wouldn't care.

"Thena!" More imperious, with a touch of fear, as if he thought I was dead—as though he thought I'd locked myself in someone's long distance ship to kill myself. A grand and ridiculous gesture, worthy of Earth's baroque period. Kit liked music. Did he like opera?

"I'm here," I said, speaking in a soft, trembling voice, towards the nowhere in particular that picked up sounds.

A heavy exhalation that I shouldn't be able to hear, and then something that ended with "blazing LIGHT," which was his way of swearing. And then, "What are you doing? They say you're stealing the ship. What did you do to make them think that?"

Before I could stop it, laughter gurgled up and out of me. "I am stealing the ship," I said. "As soon as I can make it take off."

A long silence extended after that, punctured, oddly, by sounds of heavy breathing, as if he were running. Was he hurting? Had he hurt himself again? I thought I knew what was happening. The traffic controller had patched through to Kit's home, had got him on the home com. I was linked through two coms. But why was he breathing as if he'd been running, unless he were in pain?