Darkship Renegades

BAEN BOOKS by SARAH A. HOYT

Draw One in the Dark

Gentleman Takes a Chance

Noah’s Boy
(forthcoming)

Darkship Thieves

Darkship Renegades

A Few Good Men
(forthcoming)

To purchase these and all other Baen Book titles in e-book format, please go to www.baen.com.

Darkship Renegades

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Sarah A. Hoyt

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-4516-3852-3

Cover art by David Mattingly

First printing, December 2012

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hoyt, Sarah A.

 
Darkship renegades / Sarah A. Hoyt.

      
p. cm.

 
ISBN 978-1-4516-3852-3 (trade pb)

 
1. Space colonies—Fiction. 2. Space warfare—Fiction.
 
I. Title.

 
PS3608.O96D35 2012

 
813’.6—dc23

                                                           
2012033436
 

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Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

Printed in the United States of America

To Robert Anson Hoyt, for the future.

Acknowledgments:

Thank you to Dr. Tedd Roberts for helping with research, and to Chris Muir for letting me play with his characters in the last bit of this book.

Also, thank you as always to Toni Weisskopf for letting me do Space Opera and to my team of beta readers. In particular I’d like to single out Francis Turner, Dayna Hart, Pam Uphoff, Amanda Green, and Kate Paulk—and always Dan Hoyt—but that does not diminish the contributions of the others who helped make this book what it is.

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

I was a princess from Earth and he was a rogue spaceman from a mythical world. He saved my life three times. I rescued him from a fate worse than death. We fell madly in love.

We married and lived happily ever after.

Ever after comes with an expiration date these days. We’d been married less than year when Kit got shot in the head.

It started with our return from Earth. No. Wait, what it really started with was my meeting Kit, in the powertrees which are biological solar collectors in Earth orbit. They were put up way back when bioengineered rulers governed the Earth. And ever since the turmoils sent the bioengineered rulers—you probably know them as Mules, so-called because, of course, they couldn’t reproduce—fleeing the Earth in a ship called
Je Reviens
, the powertrees have been haunted by legends of darkship thieves.

Which is all anyone ever thought the darkship thieves were. After all, even if the Mules really had left in an interstellar ship, and of course, there are doubts that the ship even existed, why would they come back to harvest powerpods from the powertrees—the biological solar energy collectors in Earth orbit? And why would no one else see them but powerpod collectors?

I found out the legend was less legendary than advertised when a mutiny aboard Daddy Dearest’s space cruiser sent me fleeing in a lifeboat into the powertrees. Which is where I met Kit, who rescued me and took me to his homeworld, Eden.

Eden is where all the bioed servants of the Mules stayed behind, instead of going to the stars with their masters. They had had enough of being ruled by Mules, which considering what the Mules did to the Earth I couldn’t really blame them for, but they also couldn’t live on Earth, since this was the time of the turmoils and anyone with even a hint of bioimprovement would get killed in a horrible way.

So, they’d stayed behind in Eden, which is an asteroid they hollowed inside. Its naturally erratic orbit hides it from Earth detection. But it still needs power. And for its power it depends on darkships, which are ships built to be non-reflective and pretty much undetectable, provided they harvest while the powertrees are in Earth shadow.

Each of the darkships is piloted by a Cat—no, they are wholly human, but they are bioengineered so their eyes resemble those of cats, and also so that they have very fast reflexes—and a Navigator, whose memory, mechanical skill, and sense of direction were bioenhanced to make him or her ideal to help steer darkships, which cannot have any of its data in a form Earth might capture if Earth forces capture a darkship.

Which, until recently, was very much an unfounded fear. No darkship had ever been captured…Then the Good Men of Earth realized that I must have been taken up by a darkship and started an all-out search for me.

At that point, I was Kit’s Navigator, and married to him, a combination that’s not mandatory but has grown to be expected. His catlike eyes, his reflexes, had ceased to seem alien. And when I was radiation-burned in an attempt to capture me, he chose to surrender to Earth to save me, instead of following procedure and killing both of us, and destroying the ship, leaving Earth nothing but a burned-out hull.

It had paid off for us; we’d come back out of Earth alive and I’d been healed of the radiation burn.

The problem was the return to Eden. I had no idea how Eden would react to news that not only had we failed to self-destruct, but we’d chosen to land on Earth and seek treatment. It was probably useless to try to get forgiveness for this by explaining we’d left a good portion of the Earth in flames behind us, and a revolution brewing.

Eden had been colonized by refugees of a persecuted people, by people who never, ever, ever again would trust any authority. I’m not saying that Eden was paranoid, because worlds can’t be paranoid. But if Eden had been an individual, he’d live in a compound with motion-sensor-triggered burners at every entrance, and would fingerprint his own children twice a day to make sure no one had slipped ringers in on him.

So, three months after we left Earth, we hailed Eden on approach.

Kit has said you could land on the surface of the asteroid that contained Eden and never guess that there was a thriving civilization inside. I don’t know if that’s true. Never tried it. I don’t like to take his word for it. He could be wrong. But I did know we could not land
in
Eden unless they let us. Well, not intact. Kit had once threatened to ram his ship into the asteroid, and from the reaction, this was possible even if it would kill us. It was impossible to get into the landing tunnels—whose covers didn’t even show to radar—without someone inside letting us in. Whoever said
knock and it shall be opened
had Eden in mind.

We called on the link. Kit reached for my hand and squeezed it, hard, while his other hand pressed the comlink button. “Cat Christopher Bartolomeu Sinistra and Nav Athena Hera Sinistra, piloting the
Cathouse
on behalf of the Energy Board. I request permission to land.”

My heart beat somewhere between my esophagus and my mouth. And don’t tell me that’s a physiological impossibility. I know what I felt. Given just a little more nervousness, my heart would have jumped out of my mouth and flopped around the instrument panel like a landed fish.

There was a silence from the other side, long enough for my heart to almost stop. I took a deep breath or two and told myself that if Eden didn’t want us, we’d go back to Earth, or perhaps to Ultima or Proxima Thule, Eden’s two water-mining colonies.

Not only was I bluffing, I knew I was bluffing. To make it elsewhere we’d need food and fuel, and a world that rejected us wouldn’t be likely to hand over rations and powerpods. All that kept me from shaking was the impression of Kit’s mind, warm and amused.

We could mind-talk, an ability bioengineered into pilot and navigator couples in his world and engineered into me for a completely different purpose. Most often it was much like talking in voice, only we could do it privately or over a great distance. In extreme circumstances, we could connect at a deep, deep level, but that wasn’t sustainable. It didn’t help preserve sanity not knowing which body went with your mind. But sometimes, like now, there was just the impression of feelings. And the feelings Kit was giving off were reassurance and amusement. Which meant he was lying.

But it would be a pity to waste his effort, so I managed a half smile in his general direction, as the voice of Eden’s Dock Control crackled over the link: “The
Cathouse
is more than six weeks late. It has been entered in the roll of losses. Cat Christopher Sinistra and Nav Athena Sinistra are dead.”

I registered the little shock I always felt at hearing Kit called by my surname. It was Eden’s custom, though not mandatory, to have the husband take the wife’s name.

“Not really,” I cut in. I felt almost boneless with relief. I hate bureaucracy as much as anyone else, but not nearly as much as I hate exploding. That they were talking instead of burning us out of the sky was a very good sign. “Only late.”

“You cannot be late. You only had fuel for a four-month trip. Three weeks later you’d be out of reserves and dead. You—”

“We were down on Earth,” I said.

The silence didn’t last long, but it gave the impression of being a very large silence. The type of silence that could envelop and swallow a whole fleet of darkships. Then the answer came, sounding like a clap of thunder announcing the beginning of a storm. “What?” the Controller asked. “You were where?”

Kit cleared his throat. I could see him reflected in the almost completely dark screens in front of him: his eyes bioengineered for piloting in total darkness looked like cat eyes, glimmering green and very wide open, in worry. His calico-colored hair seemed vivid and garish against his suddenly colorless skin. It was an accidental mutation caused by the same virus that had given him the catlike eyes, superhuman coordination, and speed of movement. Without the modifications to his eyes and hair, Kit would have been a redhead, so his skin was normally that shade of pale that can turn unhealthy-looking at the slightest disturbance. Now he looked white and grey, like spoiled milk. Even if he continued to lie at me with an amused and calm mind-projection and his voice sounded firm and clear, his face gave him away. “Nav Sinistra had radiation poisoning and we stopped on Earth for regen treatment.”

“You
stopped
on Earth for
treatment
?”

I swallowed hard, to prevent having to grope for my heart somewhere on the control board. “Well, it wasn’t that simple, but yes,” Kit said, “I’ll be glad to tell you the whole story after we land.”

“You’d better,
Cat
.” He pronounced Kit’s professional title as an insult. The term “pilot” had long since become “cat” in Eden. “And you’d better make it convincing. This is most irregular.”

“Controller,” I said, thinking it was time to add another consideration to his decision, “we must land. Kit’s family is expecting us.” Kit’s birth family, the Denovos, were socially powerful in Eden. His sister Kath would have been a force to be reckoned with in any size society. It was a good thing she’d been born in Eden. If she had been on Earth, she’d probably now be sole supreme ruler of the whole world, a feat slightly more difficult to achieve on Eden, which had no rulers of any sort, much less supreme ones.

Another silence, and the Dock Controller’s voice sounded dour as it came back. “Navigator Sinistra, if you delayed your collection run for personal reasons, you have to know that the Energy Board will fine you for the delay in supply, and all the boards will want to interview you for potential breaches of security. Also—”

“I
know
, Controller. Now, could you give us a dock number, please? Before I go crazy and just give my Cat instructions to dash at Eden in the area of the landing control station. We Earthworms are
so
temperamental.”

Kit chuckled aloud, then stopped with an intake of breath. His mental impression wavered a little, allowing me to see some fear beneath the amusement.

“Dock fifty-five, but I want you to know that I shall have armed hushers ready and that you will be examined for any evidence of undue influence, and that—”

I flicked the comlink off. A sleevelike structure extruded from Eden and Kit piloted us into it, then leaned back as dock remote controls took over the navigation. His foot skimmed along the floor next to him, flicking up the lever that turned off our artificial gravity now that we were covered by Eden’s. Not that keeping it on would give us double the
g
s, but one could interfere with the other and cause some really interesting localized gravity effects.

It wasn’t until our ship settled into one of the landing bays that Kit released the seatbelt that crisscrossed his chest, and, without letting go of my hand, got up and said, “You know, you really shouldn’t have taunted the controller.”

I got up in turn. I knew. One of the first rules I’d been taught was never to pick on people. The second was probably to always be gracious.

I’d been born the only daughter of Good Man Milton Alexander Sinistra, one of fifty men who controlled the near-endless land and resources of Earth. My parents, my nannies, the heads of various boarding schools, the commanders of various military academies, and the psychological medtechs that ran several rest homes, sanatoriums, and mental institutions upon which Daddy Dearest had wished me, had all told me I had an aggression problem and must control my impulses.

If I had followed their instructions I wouldn’t be alive now. And neither would Kit. Something Kit knew very well, which was why he put his arm around me and smiled as he shook his head.

We walked like that through two air locks, then waited while the last door cycled open, letting us see that we were in one of the cavernous, circular bays that admitted ships to Eden. An out-of-use bay, because there were no powerpod-unloading machines nearby. Instead, a large group of young men, all armed, stood in front of our ship’s door, all aiming their burners directly at us.

To the left side and a little behind the young men stood two older men, a dark-haired one and a blond one.

The dark-haired one was the dock controller. He wore the grey uniform of the position, and he had that harassed, frustrated look of someone who was sure he’d been born to better things, but who found himself confined to an inglorious desk job.

The blond was something else altogether different. To begin with, he didn’t wear any uniform, but a well-cut black suit consisting of something much like an Elizabethan doublet and leg-outlining pants, tailored to make the wearer look good, whether he did so when naked or not. The fabric shimmered with the dull shine of real silk and conveyed an unavoidable sense of wealth and sensuousness. The face above the suit was sharp and vaguely threatening. He looked like a young Julius Caesar—or at least a Julius Caesar from a world where people didn’t lose their hair unless they chose to.

It was the blond man who spoke. His words had far more force than if they’d been spoken by a mere bureaucrat. “Cat Christopher Bartolomeu Sinistra,” he said, each syllable dropped in place like an essential part of exacting machinery, “you are under arrest for treason against Eden.”