Ah, the glamourous life of a writer — the joy, the glory, the adoring fans…
Yes, okay. Some other writer. Not this writer per se.
This writer spent yesterday attempting to write while being nibbled to death by ducks. The ducks ranged from schedule conflicts with younger kid and husband to a cat with a… digestive issue. Oh, yeah, and someone tipping our trashcan over, so I had to pick trash from the middle of the street. Such fun.
Nothing bad — thank heavens — just endless small frustrations. As a result I made very little headway. I hope today goes better.
Meanwhile, here is the opening of Darkship Renegades, to keep you happy. (I have posted the first and second chapters in both the private FB group “diner” and in the Baen Bar Diner because membership hath its previledges.)
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 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.
I knew we were in trouble as soon as I
got my answer from Eden. It’s entirely possible that Kit knew
it before. Eden is his native world. He knows its
quirks, its traditions and its habits in a way I couldn’t after living
there close to a year. In a way I probably wouldn’t if I
lived there fifty years.
We’d called out as soon as we came
within link distance. It had to be done. Eden is a
hollowed out asteroid. Humans live on the inside.
More, it is an asteroid colonized by a persecuted people who wanted to
make their existence this close to Earth as inconspicuous as possible.
Kit has said you could land
on the surface of the asteroid that contained Eden and not know that
there was a thriving civilization inside. I don’t know if
it’s true. Never tried it and I learned long ago not to take
anyone’s word for anything. Even a trustworthy person can be
mistaken. But I was fairly sure that unless the people inside
extended a landing tube to us, we would never be able to get
in. Whatever sealed the entrances to the landing areas didn’t
even show to visual or radar scanning, so I doubted we could hop around
in our space suits and pry the tunnels open.
Which was good. It made Eden
very safe. And bad. Because in the circumstances we
found ourselves in, it meant we had to convince Eden to let us in, or
we’d be left on the outside with only the resources of the Cathouse to
survive on. And though the Cathouse was a great ship, or at
least a great ship for its age and mechanical condition, we didn’t have
enough food to see us back to Earth or to the water-mining colonies of
Proxima and Ultima Thule. We certainly didn’t have enough to
live on indefinitely. So, no matter how much trouble we were
in, and even though Eden might shoot us out of the sky, we had to tell
them we were here. And we had to ask permission to land.
My heart was beating somewhere between
my esophagus and my mouth as we did the final approach to
Eden. And don’t tell me that’s a physiological
impossibility. I know what I felt. Given just a
little more nervousness, my heart would jump out of my mouth and flop
around the instrument panel like a fish.
But I looked composed and calm because
there was no point disquieting Kit, whose fingers danced on the
keyboard with the practice of the many years he’d been trained to and
flown in and out of Eden.
I took a deep breath and told myself
that these were not the last moments of my life, and Kit reached for my
hand and squeezed it, hard, while his other hand pressed the com link
start. “Cat Christopher Bartolomeu Sinistra and Nav Athena
Hera Sinistra, piloting the Cathouse on behalf of the energy
board. I request permission to land.”
There was a silence from the other side,
long enough for my heart to almost stop. Eden didn’t have to
let us in. As a world Eden was so paranoid that if it had
been a single person it would have been living in a compound with
secure entrances, keeping multiple weapons trained on each entrance,
and have an option all arranged so that if all else failed and his
enemies got in, he could blow himself and them to kingdom
come. Only, Eden was not pathological. Paranoia is
a perfectly well adapted reaction to everyone being out to get you.
I swallowed hard and told myself that if
Eden didn’t want us, we’d find our way elsewhere. Even then I
knew I was bluffing. And all that kept me from shaking was
the impression of Kit’s mind, warm and amused.
Not words. We could mind-talk,
an ability bio engineered into pilot and navigator couples in his world
and engineered into me for a completely different purpose.
But when there were no words, there was occasionally a feeling, and
sometimes a feeling was all you needed. Whether the feeling
was real or projected, I didn’t know.
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.”
“Not really,” I told him, while my heart
hammered wildly and 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 bombing us
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 and
grinned, a grin he couldn’t see but might just sense from the tone of
my voice. The grin was half to reassure myself.
For three centuries, before my arrival
here, Eden had managed to hide its existence from Earth so well that,
despite a few hundred trips each month to steal powerpods from the
biological solar energy collectors orbiting the Earth, they had become
mythical down there: the Darkship Thieves, like fairies and elves and
gnomes were talked about but never glimpsed. For all those
centuries, the instructions had been for any ship captured by Earth to
destroy itself. We’d not only not destroyed ourselves but Kit
had surrendered to Earth in order to save my life. I
understood, since I’d been in his mind at the time, that it was the
only thing he could do. I also understood how Eden would view
it.
“What?” the Controller asked.
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 callico-colored hair, a mutation caused by the same virus that had
given him the eyes, super-human coordination and speed of movement,
contrasted with his normally pale skin, which had gone yet
paler. Without his modifications Kit would have been a
redhead, so his skin was normally that shade of pale that can turn
unealthy-looking at the slightest disturbance. Now he looked
white and grey, like spoiled milk. It was the only sign of
fear, or even worry, he gave. His voice sounded firm and
clear, “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 from 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 rank as an insult. The term “pilot” had long
since become “cat” in Eden, due to the modifications of pilots of
darkships making them look feline. “ And you’d better make it
convincing. This is most irregular.”
“Controller,” I said. “We must
land. Kit’s family is expecting us.” Kit’s birth
family, the DeNovos were socially influential and powerful in the very
limited community of Eden. And his sister Kath would probably
have been a force to be reckoned with in any size society. It
was a good thing she’d been born in Eden, because if it had been on
Earth, she’d probably now be sole supreme ruler of the whole
world. This was 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 tend to be so
temperamental”
Kit chuckled aloud, then stopped with an
intake of breath. The impression from him was amused, but
also scared, the amused trying to cover and hide the scared and not
quite managing it.
“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
sleeve-like structure extruded from Eden and Kit piloted us into it,
then leaned back as dock 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 gs,
but I understood one could interfere with the other and cause some
really interesting effects.
It wasn’t until our ship was settling
into one of the landing bays, that he 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.”
According To Hoyt 
I enjoyed.
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