DarkShip Thieves (8 page)

"Oh." And I supposed that was an explanation to the glaring colors everywhere, but I wasn't about to ask. "Where . . . We're not in the power tree ring."

"No."

"Earth orbit?" I asked hopefully.

He actually cackled. A short, dry cackle. "No."

"I . . . what are you . . . Where are you taking me?"

There was an hesitation. The generous lips tightened, and a wrinkle formed on his forehead. It made him, somehow, look more human. Also upset. "I only have one place to take you. Home with me."

The unsaid words
but I don't have to like it
hung in the air between us. I didn't ask for it to be made explicit. He didn't try to tell me, either. Just looked at me with the expression of someone who is not quite sure how to avoid the wall his broom is heading towards.

"How long will it take us to get there?" I said. I felt oddly vulnerable. I was locked in this ship with a person who had no reason to like me. I assumed it was better than being in Circum Terra, or perhaps back in daddy's ship, with whatever the goons wanted to do to me? I had a strong feeling if they'd gotten their way I'd no longer be consuming oxygen.

He shook his head, and didn't say anything, and I realized he thought I was trying to get information about the darkship's base. Which I was. Of course I was, but not as a spy. If I was going to this place, it seemed logical that I ask where it was, what it was and . . .

"It's not that I don't want to answer," he said. "Though I would like to say, even if the setup I rescued you from was elaborate, it wasn't impossible. It's quite likely that the people of Earth, wanting at long last to trace us, would have set up just this elaborate trap with tasty bait for the one Cat without a Nav, the one cat who travels alone, the outcast one. It would make me think more highly of Earthwo—of your people's policing efforts, but it would not be impossible.

He raised his eyebrows at me, as if thinking through the implications of such an unlikely trap. "But in that case, I suspect they would have put a tracer on you, rather than get you to ask me where my home was.

"My equipment could not detect a bug, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Just that the bug is well hidden, or perhaps of a type I can't detect. Of course, if that's the case, whether I tell you or not, is largely inconsequential. But the thing is that I truly don't know. Our . . . home is on a variable orbit. I have alarms and detectors and an idea of in which direction to head. We'll reach it when we reach it."

His reasoning was almost as paranoid as mine when faced with Father's plans, or Father's when faced with the universe at large. And the variable orbit made sense. I had a vague idea that when the Mules had first left, while the space travel capacity they had endowed Earth with still endured, and before the last spasms of the riots had destroyed it, they had swept the solar system for a trace of the Mules.

Of course, these couldn't be the Mules. Not as such. The Mules had no women, and my captor had blondie and the family group which either had women or some spectacularly odd looking males. Not that this would be unlikely. One heard stories even from Circum Terra, where females were scarce. Year after year, much less century after century, with few or no women led to creative arrangements and given bio-engineering—"How old are you?"

His eyes widened. Whatever he'd been expecting, that question wasn't it. "Twenty two," he said, in the bewildered tone of someone who can't be bothered making up a lie.

Oh. So no Mules, because unless they reckoned years different—"Years?"

He grinned this time. A genuinely amused grin. "Millennia. What do you think?"

"I don't know," I said, slowly. It hadn't mattered. Not so much. Not while I thought we were going to part ways and never see each other again. But thoughts of the things the Mules were alleged to have done, the people they were said to have killed—hundreds of people, thousands, millions, for reasons that only the Mules could understand. And the things that had been done to the Earth under their watch. All of it made my hair stand on end at the thought of being in this ship with one of them for who knew how long. What would he think of me? What would he care for a mere human. "Are you a Mule?"

The smile vanished, the mouth tightened. The odd looking eyes—which were becoming readable the more I looked at him—turned guarded. "What do you care? Does prejudice against bioing still hold on Earth?"

"No," I said, because prejudice is a charged word. At any rate, I was truthful. There was no prejudice as such. Bioing was a death-bringing crime. For those perpetrating it and the results. "But I want to know."

He shrugged. "I'm twenty two Earth years old. Does that answer your question, or do you need my universal birth date, too?"

No reason to get rude, but I wasn't going to argue. I just nodded. It answered my question well enough. If he was twenty two, he could not have been alive when the Mules left the Earth and therefore he could not possibly be one of
them
.

"I've set the cooker to prepare some food," he said. "Since you didn't seem to have eaten in quite a while."

Quite a while. Depending on how long I'd been asleep it could be almost twenty four hours. At any rate, I'd never heard of Morpheus knocking anyone out for less than twelve hours.

I got up, and found myself swaying on my feet, not so much dizzy as unsure of my footing. It was like when Father had taken me on a cruise in the Mediterranean, years ago. The ship had been large enough that the floor felt as if it were stationary. But I hadn't felt it as stationary, rather as bobbing and bouncing.

Now there was the same unsteadiness to the ground under me, that my back brain knew about, even though my feet couldn't quite feel it.

"Easy," my captor said, sounding much like that voice in my head. "We're underway. It's a different drive, and for someone whose brain is sensitive enough to feel artificial gravity, it would be disorienting." He extended a hand towards me, as though to help me.

"You're making fun of me," I said, almost wailing in fury and waving way his hand.

His eyes widened again. "What? No. You're clearly sensitive to artificial gravity. A lot of navigators are. It comes with the built-in sense of direction."

"Oh." I gave me a close look, to make sure it wasn't some joke I just didn't get. But he wasn't laughing. He was extending his hand, still. "Come on. You'll be unsteady until I you get your space legs."

I allowed him to grasp my wrist. If this was a seduction ploy, he really wasn't very good at it. Like his inability to tie up women properly, it was oddly reassuring. Actually, he didn't even hold my wrist. just clasped it when it looked like I was about to fall, and the rest of the time let me try to progress on my own. I remembered the way, sort of. I'd come through here, trying to figure out what sort of creature held me captive. Now I looked at him and found him looking at me.

"You wouldn't be feeling the need to garrotte me, would you?" he asked.

The question was half coy and half teasing, and my first reaction was that I would, of course, not tell him if I had any such intention. But the next reaction was to think it through. Could I attack him, turn the ship around, get to Earth?

Perhaps. No. Almost certainly. The ship was not that difficult, I thought. Well, all right. There were all the implements for collections and all the various navigation systems, and I'm sure they took some learning. But I also had no doubt I could learn them. The system had yet to be created that I couldn't back engineer and figure out. On the other hand, I remembered the gages in the control room. There was no way—absolutely no way—that I could learn it on the fly, without weeks of practice. And there were other considerations. Such as the fact that, if I took this ship to Earth, Earth defense systems in whatever continent I landed in, were likely to think I was an enemy and shoot before asking questions.

But beyond all that, I couldn't be so crass as to hit my captor on the head and then head off.

But why had he come and got me? Obviously the mind link had sent him feelings of my surprise. He knew I'd been hit with Morpheus. And doubtless he'd come in the nick of time. I had no idea what Daddy's goons intended to do to me, but I was fairly sure it wasn't pleasant. But why had he come? He hadn't told me.

And, I realized as we entered the kitchen and he gestured for me to sit at the table, he wasn't about to tell me. Instead, he fiddled with the cooker, peering in screens and making half-mutters as one absorbed in a task.

After a while, he set a cup of broth in front of me. It tasted odd. Very odd. It was like . . . chicken broth, with an odd hint of fish. "Fish?" I asked.

He looked surprised. "Most of the protein in Ed—At home is fish. Not much space for cows." He smiled as he got himself a bowl of the broth, then handed me a spoon and took one for himself from some receptacle beside the cooker. "If you don't like it, I can program other flavors."

But the broth, strange flavor and all, calmed my hunger pangs, and did a sort of flat bread filled with what appeared to be a nut paste. He ate also while staring at me. When I was almost done, he said, "I have moved my clothes to one of the storage rooms," he said, quietly. "You may have my room."

Well, I thought, that figured. It was probably the most secure place in the ship. I wouldn't put it past him to have put some sort of alarm on the door too. "And where will you sleep?" I asked, wondering if after all this was some form of backwards seduction—if he intended to share the bed with me.

He shrugged. "Probably the virtus. It's where I sleep most nights." He sipped his broth. "That or the exercise room. I'll show you where that is, later. I don't know how long the trip will take, but it will take more than a few days, and probably more than a month. I don't want you to feel uncomfortable."

It was, of course, much too late for that.

"Aim higher," my captor said, mercilessly, as he grabbed my ankle, halfway through my jump, and caused me to fall on my back, with a nerve-jarring thud. "There are more than one vulnerable zones on a male."

Fortunately for my hard head, considering the number of times he did this any given day, we were in the exercise room and I had a heavily padded mat beneath me.

"Had enough?" he asked, stepping back as I rose, trying to get my bearings.

"I still don't understand how you can move that fast," I said.

"It's part of the elfing," he said. "To maneuver in tight spaces. More to the point is how you can move that fast. Almost as fast as I do."

"Oh," I said. "I always have."

He raised his eyebrows at me. "I wonder," he said. "If one of ours, a nav, went missing on Earth . . ."

I picked up a small towel from the pile on the complicated exercise machine next to the padded area on which we stood. I didn't need it. Oh, the exercise had been violent, but the ambient temperature was low and I was not sweating, at least not as such. However, making a show of wiping my forehead provided me with time to think. "What do you mean one of yours? A nav?"

"An ELF," he said.

"Bio improved?" I asked. "The navigators? They're ELFed?"

"Oh, of course," he said.

"Of course?"

"Well," he shrugged. "The ELFing is less costly than for a Cat, so more likely to happen if a family is strapped for cash, but . . ."

"But they too are improved?"

He'd explained to me that the designation for his function had started out as
pilot
but had over the centuries changed to
Cat
because people couldn't overlook the eyes.

"Oh yes."

"But . . . no eyes, no . . ."

"No. For sense of direction. Ability with mechanics, and the . . . "

"Speed?"

"Not normally." He frowned. "Cats are. But I can see a Nav passing on Earth, never a cat. Which is part of what confuses me about your speed. But Navigators usually have very good visual memory and even better spacial reasoning. It allows them to remember cul de sacs if their pilot gets blinded. In that way they're invaluable backup. On person, alone in a ship is dangerous. A pair with the same abilities—they'd both be incapacitated at the same time. So the navigator is a . . . redundant system to the cat, with some . . . modifications."

"I see," I said. "But how could I have inherited my abilities from my parents? Even if my parents were . . . a nav or something?" I couldn't imagine how it could possibly be, since Patrician lines were fairly well guarded and certified. I couldn't imagine how Father, with his line of ancestors that had all been Patricians of Syracuse Seacity stretching back to the twenty first century might have been replaced. True I'd never seen him in a fight, and I'd never seen him fix anything, so there was no telling whether he had mechanical ability or super speed. And mother . . . I knew next to nothing about mother, only that she must have been sane, because she left about when I was six. And no sane woman could have endured any longer with Father. "And what would super speed have to do with it? You said that's not a nav thing. And anyway, didn't you say that the . . . ELFING costs money and needs to be introduced via a virus in gestation?"

He shrugged and frowned, the expression of a man deep in thought. "Yeah," he said at last. "It doesn't make a lot of sense, but there have been cases—rare—where ELFing passes on a generation. Or some characteristics of ELFing. And particularly your ability to mind-talk with me, since the Cat and Nav telepathy is of a specific type, and normally has to be trained between a couple, makes me think that—"

I jumped, suddenly, in a perfect leap, which is difficult when you start from a standing position, but which was good enough for me to hit first his left knee, then as I fell, the right.

His eyes widened, then he grimaced and went down on his knees. I smiled. I hadn't hit him hard enough to break his kneecaps—not only was that nearly impossible from a stand, so that if I had truly been in a fight with him, I'd have needed to now hit him, quickly, with something heavy, like one of the barbells that went with the exercise machine, but also I had no intention of permanently maiming him and then having to spend I didn't know how long in there with him, before we got to his home where, unless I were very wrong, I was going to need his indulgence and good will.