DarkShip Thieves (39 page)

However I will confess that a little past halfway through, as much as my arms hurt, as much as my fingernails bled, and as much as my whole body screamed that I couldn't go on with it, it took my whole will power to keep myself from just turning on the broom and flying up. But I remembered Kit, and held on

I tried to reach out to him twice, but got nothing but diffuse impressions and the certainty that he was keeping the more unpleasant facts of his situation out of my mind and that right then there were only unpleasant facts.

It seemed endless and hopeless, even when I reached the top. The top—because cliff and wall merged—was the top of the wall of our garden. And because I was very much afraid the top of the wall itself was alarmed—unlikely but possible—I had aimed my course veering slightly right a little at a time to where the branch of a tree—I thought the apple tree near the library—protruded just over the wall.

By the time I got there, and the branch was within reach, I extended my hand to it . . . and my hand slipped. So, instinctively, I slapped my right hand down on the wall.

The noise and light were instant and deafening.
Intruder in East Quadrant of Garden,
screamed at the top of someone's lungs and then recorded and magnified.

My hand reached for the broom to turn it on. And then my teeth ground together. No. If I left now, and they knew I was trying to get in, I could never come back.

They've done experiments with very young children. When scared, most of them run away. A few others freeze and cry in place. And then there are those like me—they run, headlong towards that which scared them.

In my considerable experience, it was the best strategy. Some writer of the twentieth century said that it was better to be a live lamb than a dead lion, but that it was always better and often easier to be a live lion.

I grabbed onto the top of the wall, ignoring the deafening noise and climbed on top. From where it was easy to step onto the branch of the apple tree and hold onto other branches.

The branches ended close enough to the library window—an oversight for which someone's head would undoubtedly roll, but that was daddy's lookout—that I could balance on the last portion where I could stand, and then launch myself towards the window. The window of the library was part of the oldest building of the house and not only glass, but glass that had gone all wavy and irregular with age. Since glass is a supercooled liquid—in fact silicon ice—it runs over the centuries. It just runs very slow. So after a few centuries the middle and above of any glass window will be the thinnest part.

The leathers should protect me from the worst of the glass, but I held my arms, crossed in front of my face, as I launched myself into the window feet-first, in a leap that would have won me all sorts of medals, had I been in a ballet competition.

My left foot hit first, shattering the glass, then I kicked with my right, as it hit, to enlarge the opening, because that would make cuts to my body and head less likely.

I fell on a heap onto a dusty oak floor, on top of a lot of shards of glass. I thought most of it had gone onto my burrowed boots, but I didn't have time to examine it. Instead, I took off running.

While the library—an old fashioned affair of the sort that was built in the twenty first century and never again used since gems replaced books as the main means of storing data—had been my favorite hiding place as a child, I didn't think it would work as an adult. Part of my safety as a child relied on the fact that no one knew I was there—or would think of it. So clambering to one of the top shelves and lying flat was a good way to hide.

But now everyone knew—or would know in seconds—where I'd come in. So I needed to take advantage of those seconds.

I took off running full tilt out of the library and managed to push aside a maid and a footman who, to be honest seemed to just be going about their business and probably didn't even know what hit them. They fell butt-first onto the polished marble floor, and I ran on.

Daddy Dearest's home was set by zones. In my happy-happy days here, I'd had my own zone, where I lived and kept my clothes and hid my broom, and where my valets and maids housed.

Then there was daddy's personal zone. And then there was this—his private business zone. The public business zone was located up front, and consisted of reception rooms and meeting rooms and other stuff to conduct the business of Syracuse. Uninteresting. And while there were some dresses in my personal clothing I'd kill to have Kit see me in, the all too high likelihood that I would
have
to kill to have Kit see me in them, took the fun out of it. As did the all too high likelihood that I would die trying to get at the fripperies.

No, having been discovered, the best thing to do was get about my business and be gone. And, of course, the best way to avoid capture was to go where they didn't expect me. Which, fortunately, was exactly where I wanted to go—Daddy Dearest's sanctum sanctorum. His business office.

So I took a sharp right in the marbled hallway and ran down a blood-red hallway accented with gilded columns. After my time in Eden, the decor of my home looked even stranger to me. I'd long ago come to the conclusion that it was proof of hereditary madness. Because it wasn't as though Daddy Dearest had remodeled and refurnished the entire house, and yet the oldest parts harmonized with the ones he'd expanded or decorated. They all had unified taste. Bad taste.

They were decorated, in fact, as if someone with the color sense of a Cat had acquired a vague veneer of classical architecture—the bordello kind—and decided to implement both tastes to the hilt. The Sinistra mansion looked like a very majestic bordello over whose walls and ceilings someone had bled massive quantities of arterial blood.

But I concentrated enough on running to ignore the walls and the columns, the statues of nude and improbably endowed marble fauns and even, as I gained daddy's office and stuck my hand against the palm lock of his office, the improbable fresco of dancing nude maidens and even more improbable nude youths frolicking about the walls, just above the gem storage units.

Instead I concentrated on Daddy Dearest's secretary and assistants, who had been doing whatever it is such people do, and who looked at me with horrified expressions, and grew visibly paler.

I gestured with my burner. "Out. Out now."

They edged towards the door. The male first—a middle aged man who had been daddy's secretary forever. I wondered if I'd ever known his name—which might have proven he had some sort of intelligence. The women edged behind him. Stringy and Bouncy were my names for them and I was fairly sure I'd never known their names. If you went with what Daddy Dearest called them, they were Pea Brain and Bloody Incompetent.

It's a good thing I know the signs of someone about to do something incredibly stupid. I saw it in Bouncy's eyes before she lunged for me, and I burned the floor just in front of her. A warning shot. Not that marble of the ceramite equivalent burns, exactly, but it stores heat and crackles and is altogether spectacular.

She jumped and squeed and the male secretary grabbed her arm and sort of pulled her behind him, as he continued backing towards the door and out of it. I realized they were going as slow as possible, hoping for reinforcements, and I burned the ground in front of their feet to hurry them up. "Move it, go. I'm not worth your lives. Trust me."

They went. Fast. I kicked the door shut in their wake. Then pulled one of the massive walnut desks in front of it. And then, for double security, burned the door opening mechanism from the inside. Very thoroughly. Which meant I would have to leave by one of the broad windows after I was done. And Daddy Dearest would have been a total fool if he'd not left orders that there would be a broom squadron waiting for me when I came out.

I didn't think daddy knew that my handprint could open his doors. If he knew he would have changed it. I was also fairly sure he'd never allowed my genprint to open doors as such—why would he, when they led to all his most private places? So it must be a glitch, one that he couldn't possibly know about, or he'd have blocked it. However, I was sure some of his more trusted bodyguards and bestest goons were authorized to open the door, and I really didn't want to be surprised in there.

Not that I was where I wanted to be yet. To most of the household this was Daddy's office, where they saw him, sitting behind the burled walnut desk with the seal of Syracuse on it. But once—I must have been three or four—when I was hiding behind one of the cabinets in his office, under the principle that there was no better place to hide than the last place they'd look, I'd seen Father saunter in, shoo his secretaries out, lock the door, and proceed to do a lot of odd things. The sort of odd things you see someone do in old spy holos. Push the frame of a mirror. Open and close the third drawer of a particular cabinet four time. Twirl the knob on a sculpted faun. And on command a door opened on the wall—a door so well disguised by the fresco, and closing with such a narrow fissure, you couldn't find it until it swung open.

As it did right now, after I completed the actions.

I entered Daddy's innermost sanctum, and closed that door, also, behind me.

This secret room must have gone back to all my ancestors, because it was like a packrat's refuge in there, with mementos, decorations and data gems dating all the way back to the twenty first century or perhaps before. I'd spent many happy hours in there, when I knew Daddy was safely away on his diplomatic trips. I'd gone through most of what must be termed junk on the shelves, reading ancient documents, prodding at old holos. The family—and I supposed I was proof of it—all ran to pretty much the same look. Short, dark haired, with unruly hair. People always marveled at how much I looked like daddy and at first I'd been offended, until I found a holo of him as a young man. Not quite pretty enough to be a girl, but close enough that the features, softened, made me—a not-masculine looking woman.

Well, all our ancestors had looked much the same when young, and there were holos of them with various dignitaries around the world. I hadn't activated them all, of course. It got boring after a while. Just enough to think that yeah, all Good Men Sinistras were sawed-off bastards, hewn from the same olive-colored block.

The thing was, in all my exploring of this office, before, I'd been very careful not to do anything that might leave a mark. After all it was important that Daddy not know anything here had been touched. So I'd edged around the junk—I'd planned to throw it all away when I inherited, until I remembered that I'd never be shown this office, my husband would—and played with it, but I'd never touched the desk in the center, where Daddy Dearest's backup cube sat. That desk had all locked drawers. Old fashioned locked. Really old fashioned. With keys.

Of course I could pick the locks, or, by preference and considering how in a hurry I was, smash them. But it would be hard to do so and not leave traces.

Right now I didn't care about leaving traces though. I started by turning on his cube. It came on—the holographic display glowing above the desk and the letters
input password
glowing midair. I glared at it as I tried to think. If I were Daddy, and thank all the gods in the various heavens I was not, what would I have used for a password?

Evil
seemed an unlikely choice, as did
Rattlesnake
, for meaner than—no matter how much they fit Daddy's profile. Like me he was left-handed, and I remembered once hearing one of his friends from when he was young calling him what I got called by my Broomer Lair
Lefty
. I tried
Lefty
but all I got was a red glare and
Incorrect
.

Right. I squinted at the glare and on impulse tried my mother's name
Elena
. The glare came again
Incorrect.
I ground my teeth. It figured he wouldn't even use her for a password. What had I been thinking?

I chewed on the corner of my lip, and tried to remember the name of Daddy's last doxy. But there were so many of them—actresses and porn starts, singers and painters—and they came on the scene so fast and vanished never to be heard from again so fast that it seemed scarcely likely he would use the name of one of them. Though it might give meaning to the idea you should change your password often.

Well, I seemed to be interesting to him, and perhaps even loved, insofar as something like Daddy could love an external object—which of course as far as he was concerned was part of the problem. He wanted me to be an object that could be molded and bent to his will—something that was impossible. And so he often preferred to crush me or attempt to, but the vehemence with which he went about it seemed to imply he at least gave a damn.

So I tried
Athena
but all I got back was the same damned red glowing denial, and, after a moment, another screen warning me that one more wrong password would trigger intrusion-prevention mechanisms and cause the whole system to erase.

Damn it. I didn't have time for this. But I didn't know what else to do, so I turned my attention to the locked drawers. Here, somewhere, in the junk—or perhaps documents or gems—that daddy considered too important to let an unlikely visitor to this sanctum see, might be a clue to the password.

There were two ways to go about opening these drawers. The intrusive way and the even more intrusive way. There was no way I could get in and retain intact both the locks and the fine old oak desk. Daddy Dearest would know I'd broken in, and there was no point trying to hide that.

Which meant, of course, that any information I obtained relating to where Kit might be held would have to be used as fast as possible. As soon as Daddy saw his violated desk, he would know that I knew where my husband was. And he would move to stop me.

But I didn't have the time to break into the desk in a way that would leave no traces and, as good as I was at mechanics, it would take me a while to figure out how many tracers, trackers and access alarms Father's computer had. He would have many, that I knew, even in this most secret of his data storage machines.