DarkShip Thieves (11 page)

"We explained we cannot—"

"Should I fail to get landing coordinates, considering I have no other alternative for landing, I will have to fling my ship at Eden, in the hopes of somehow hitting near the entrance of a landing bay. Of course, I have no idea where that might be located. I'll have to do it visually, and you know how deceptive it can be. I could accidentally miss and end up crashing through into . . . oh, the half-G gardens? With a full and explosive load."

"Uh. Oh. Uh. Don't . . . Don't do anything. We . . . We will give you coordinates shortly."

"Certainly," Klaavil said, magnanimously. "I'm not an unreasonable man. You have a full three minutes. I'm setting my timer."

He looked at me and, rather deliberately, winked. The effect was only mildly disrupted by the fact that inner, nictating eyelids blinked the other way first. I was speechless. The same haughtiness and high handedness was not all that bad, I thought, provided he was on your side. Of course, the question with Kit Klaavil was which side he was on and exactly why. I wondered if he, himself, knew.

It didn't take three minutes. Or two. Or much more than one. A voice crackled over the Com, "Please come in at twenty two A by twenty four D."

It made no sense at all to me, but not only did it obviously make sense to Kit Klaavil—his hands moved purposely on the keyboard, playing their inaudible symphony of directions—but he raised his eyebrows as he did so. I thought that whatever the move the other side had made surprised him, and I wondered how exactly. He didn't seem upset, more curious.

The ship swayed gently this way and that, and I settled in for what I expected to be interminable hours. After all, to land daddy's space cruiser in Circum, which was considerably smaller than the Primeval Potato took the best part of a week. It would take at least hours here, even accounting for coordinates and however improved their steering mechanism might be.

Only the potato exploded. At least it looked to me as if it exploded, though as I blinked, I realized it was shooting something like a sleeve towards us. The sleeve covered the screen, giving the impression that we were being swallowed whole.

We flew down what felt like a tunnel, though I had no other indication than the view screen and Kit was too busy doing whatever he did on his console to answer my questions.

After a long while it felt like we came to rest on something. Kit, carefully, slid his foot along the lever that I now knew turned off artificial gravity. I braced for my body to be only held on the seat by the belts, but nothing happened. Kit nodded. "Eden artificial gravity field," he said. "It encompasses us." As he spoke, he unbuckled himself and stood up, then gave me an uncertain look. "Would you rather . . . uh . . . put on the dress you had when you came into the Cathouse?"

"I . . . it was a slip!" I protested.

"I don't think anyone in Eden would know that," he said. Then shrugged. "As long as you don't think you're ill dressed or . . ."

I shrugged in turn. I might as well be seen in a hand-me down glimmering grey pants and tunic suit which if anything ended up molding my curves rather too well, as in a hastily mended slip. If my captor's handling of the situation was any indication, my arrival here
already
wasn't a rousing success.

"I'm sorry," he told me, as we walked along a corridor which I assumed must lead to an exit. "About the confusion up there," He pointed vaguely upwards, which I assumed to mean the exterior of the asteroid, because, at least as I understood it, we were not on the asteroid but inside it. At least that accounted for the fact that I hadn't seen any cities or constructions on the outside. And it made perfect sense. It was not only a way to hide their presence from any stray Earth telescopes turned this way but also probably the most efficient way of colonizing an asteroid. Provided they contrived a way to bring sunlight within—and I was sure they had one—the interior area could be much larger than the exterior because the world could be colonized in layers. "They truly would sit there and dither forever because there was no precedent . . ."

I was amused and for once completely in sympathy with him. "I've met the type." In correctional facilities, hospitals, rehabilitation programs. "I call them
the mark the right answer or die
tribe."

He gave me a fleeting smile, "I guess bureaucrats are the same everywhere."

As he said this, we'd come to the end of the hallway and were facing the sort of irised door that blocked airlocks. Kit pressed a button and it swirled slowly open. Then the membrane behind it followed suit.

We crossed ten steps, faced another door. Kit touched another button. The door swirled open, a staircase extruded from the ship.

And we found ourselves facing fifty men with burners pointed at us.

I surged forward, about to enter into my fast-mode. If I rushed them—and Kit was faster than I—I could get half the guns and he could easily get the other half.

No.
His voice in my head admitted of no dispute.

Do you want them to take us prisoner? What do you . . .

No. Let me handle it. My place. My people.

I didn't answer back, not with coherent words, more with the half-acknowledged hope that he knew what he was doing. What I got back from that was a mental half-laugh. His features showed no expression.

We stood at the door, side by side, looking out at the men holding guns pointed at us.
Men
was sort of a courtesy title, because I'd judge the oldest to be about nineteen, and the others much, much younger. I'd swear the one at the corner looking at me as though he expected me to grow a second head and holding his gun in trembling hands, couldn't be more than thirteen.

I looked from one end to the other, from blond, close- cropped heads to dark unruly long hair and realized that these boys looked like they'd been sampled from all over the world, though the overwhelming majority was caucasian-tanned looking. There were no truly dark skins and no pale blond hair. Which figured. I didn't know how many people had made it to Eden, but a small population would tend to homogenize. There didn't seem to be a standard hair length or a standard hair color. I saw, in a corner, a young man with wild calico hair, as bright as Kit's and open-wide brown cat eyes. They wore a uniform of sorts, a pale blue jacket and darker blue pants, but each of them seemed to have gone for his very own cut.

The only uniform thing about the way they all looked was their eyes. They all stared out at us with an expression of scared decision. The expression someone has who is scared to death of having to shoot.

Early on, when I was very little, after a failed attempt on his and his family's life, my father had told me the one thing to watch was not the gun nor the hands of the person holding the gun, but the eyes of the person holding it. The eyes would tell you if the person was bluffing. The eyes would tell you if the person was willing to shoot. And the eyes would tell you if the person was scared. That last was the one to fear, because the scared man would shoot as he flinched.

Kit must have come to the same conclusion because he said
Don't move unless I ask you to.

I didn't so much agree—I wasn't about to entrust my ability to fight completely to someone else—as send back wordless assent that I would not move for now. This seemed to be enough for him. He stood very still, both hands in full sight.

From the side, not getting between us and the guns, a man emerged. He was older than all the assembled boys, older than Kit. If these people aged like Earth, probably thirty years old, with a blockish build and a square face topped by receding dark hair. He wore the same colors as the boys and stood at the extreme left edge of my field of vision, closer to Kit, and said, "Cat Christopher Bartolomeu Klaavil?"

The voice seemed to call for a military response, but Kit looked slowly in his direction and said, "Yes?"

"You must be searched and debriefed before we can admit you to the common areas."

"Oh?" Kit said. "And my passenger?"

The man looked in my direction and he, too, looked like he expected me to have three heads and a complementary set of arms. I was sorry to be disappointing everyone. "We will deal with her afterwards," he said. Then towards Kit again, "First you, Cat Klaavil. Easy and slow. Hands in full view. At the first sign of cat-speed, the hushers have my instructions to shoot."

Kit gave a quick, dismissive look at the boys with guns and then, hands in full view, climbed down the two steps from the ship to stand two feet in front of the middle aged man who seemed to be running the show.

The man stepped aside, to let Kit pass him, and I realized he was holding a gun pointed at Kit. Right. So the fifty trembling teens could be left to point their guns at me, and to keep me under watch. Too bad.

Kit walked all the way to where the only furniture in the small room—a desk—stood against the wall. There he turned and stood, looking at the official with the quizzical expression I knew so well. He gave me that look when he expected me to do something particularly stupid.

The Officer frowned up at him. Being a good five inches shorter than Kit clearly put him at a disadvantage he did not enjoy. "Strip," he said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"Strip. We must check you for bugs. You've been to Earth. Who knows what might have happened there. They might have implanted a bug on you, or a controller of some sort."

"I was never to Earth. Never came near it," Kit said.

"Who knows if that is true? Would you tell us? Would you tell us if she—" He pointed back at me. "Had put a controller on you that could kill you or hurt you if you said the wrong word? How do we know there's not a bracelet or a clinger on you somewhere, controlling you. Strip."

Kit looked at the officer, then back at the boys with guns, then at me. I swear there was something akin to amusement in his gaze, though the primary look was of bewilderment. He pulled on the front of his jacket, unfastening it. It looked like it was buttoned, but clearly the buttons were decorative, and the two halves held together with stickfast. He tossed the jacket at his feet in what was also all too familiar. Not that I'd seen him undress before, but I'd seen his clothes piled just outside or just within the virtus and around the vibro, with complete disregard for housekeeping or the clothes.

Under the jacket he wore a simple tunic, so thin that it must have been designed as an undergarment. Through it his muscles—which I had only felt but never seen—were visible, delineating a powerful torso and a flat stomach that disappeared into the closure of the pants. He looked at the officer. The officer barked back. "I said strip."

Kit sighed again and pulled off his undertunic showing me first a back where the shoulder muscles stood out in relief, a testimony to the many hours he'd spent in the exercise room before and after I joined the Cathouse. I'd seen male backs before, of course—I mean casually not just those of my bed partners—the members of my broomers' lair for one. Male backs were prone to pimples and other such excrescences, but his had clear, even skin. As he turned around, at the officer's command, his front revealed more clear skin, more muscles, a dusting of reddish-gold hair and a nice belly button.

"Strip," the officer said.

Kit reached for the fastening to his pants, and pulled it, and let those fall, appearing in underwear of the sort I'd found in his drawers when I'd searched—male variety, designed for the sort of male who preferred his under things well girded and held firmly in place. Which of course, meant it was also rather revealing. I looked away. More the pity, despite the fascinating show, the young men with guns were still looking fixedly at me.

"Strip," the officer said.

Kit glared. "Further than this I present you with a fee scale," he said.

It took a moment for the official to absorb what Kit had said. When it did, he looked like he would like to spit, or perhaps slap Kit. He did neither. Instead, he stepped back and said, "Strip, or I order you shot. We must make sure you are not controlled by Earth, that they don't have a bug on you. The fate of Eden—"

"The fate of Eden is horrible, if you are an example of its protectors," Kit said, raising his voice just enough that though he was neither shouting nor sounding angry, he sounded intent and purposeful. It managed to stop the Official long enough for Kit to add, "What do you intend to do after I strip? Cavity search? And when that fails? If I had gone to Earth—which I didn't—or if Patrician Sinistra were a spy, which she almost certainly isn't, why would they be so stupid as to implant a bug on my skin or in my clothes? Why not inject it into me or—"

The Official jumped back and pointed a trembling gun at Kit. "You're telling me they injected a bug—"

"No," Kit said. His calm was all the more admirable in that the way the official was waving that gun around there was a good chance he'd fire it by accident. Of course the way it was trembling, shaking and moving, the chances of the ray actually hitting Kit were minimal. "I'm saying if they'd implanted anything in me they would probably have done it in a way your strip search would not discover. So unless you are interested in seeing me naked—in which case I should see what the going fee is—there is no reason for me to undress further."

The official looked like he was about to have an apoplexy, and he did what bureaucrats do in such situations. He turned to the pimply boys with guns and waved and said, "Fire."

Which was the most confusing command he could give boys who already looked none too steady. They glanced at him, and Kit, probably realizing that if they turned to burn Kit, they would burn the official too, in the process. Then they looked back at me. I was ready.

I had to be ready because one couldn't discount that they might simply decide to shoot me. So in the time they looked away, I pulled my shirt off. There were fifty wide-eyes staring at me.

One of them said, "Who? Shoot who?"

"Them. Both," the official said, and frowned at me. "She's an Earth agent."