Darkship Renegades by Sarah A. Hoyt

. Avoid all the traps laid out for us, escape all their plotting and manage to do what the most powerful people in the world are intent on stopping us doing?
    He grinned. We got here despite the Good Men.
    Yes, but the Earth is larger…there’s more places to escape. Here…
    Here we have Doc and Zen to help.
    You trust them that much? And how will we communicate with them?
    I trust them that much, he said, and gave me a smile that said not to worry my pretty head about it. We’ll manage it, Thena.
    I didn’t like it. Look, my life had given me no reason at all to trust the judgment of others. In my experience, outside my own judgment and my own capacities, everyone was trying to pull one over on me.
    But Kit was still smiling at me with that expression like the canary that ate the cat. Or in this case, perhaps, the Cat that thinks he can win over the bureaucrat. I glowered at him. You are the most exasperating man. I don’t have the slightest idea why I love you.
    The smile curved and became wicked, in a way that made my heart skip a beat. No? Let me take a bath and I’ll remind you.

IN THE HOPPER

    Over the next few days, there was precious little time for Kit and me to indulge in his specialized memory-enhancing techniques.
    The very next day a call from the center sent Zenobia and myself down to inspect the ship they would allow us to use. The Hopper wasn’t so much a ship as a shell. What they told me was that the couple who had taken it out last had got badly radiation burned. Only one of them had survived the long trip home, and she had apparently decided to retire. The ship had been repossessed by the Energy Board and stripped almost to the hull to clean it. That hull had then been placed in a cavernous bay which was not used for anything else. And we were told where to find it.
    Before becoming Kit’s navigator, I had worked as a mechanic for the Energy Board for many months. I had repaired and reconditioned ships. I’d never seen one as bare as this. It was perfectly round, as most darkships were, and it was painted in the same dark, unreflective paint as the Cathouse .
    The resemblance stopped there. Part of this was good. The Cathouse was a ship of very old vintage, which had been designed as a training ship. It had been foisted on Kit, first, because he was a Cat flying missions alone, and therefore at higher risk of losing the ship. Also, alone, he’d only been able to bring in much lower harvests, which meant that he couldn’t afford to pay the fees for the rental of the better, more expensive ships.
    Even when I’d joined him, they didn’t trust us. I was an Earthworm, with questionable training for the job. For one, I’d never learned mechanics, or studied it consciously. It was as though I had an instinct for it. The first time our brooms, back on Earth, had needed repair, I’d studied the manual and known how to do it, and it had been the same with Eden’s ships. I’d discovered, just before leaving Earth that this, like the ability to communicate telepathically, had been bioengineered into the man who called himself my father—and therefore presumably into me. But it wasn’t like the Eden navigator ability, and we couldn’t convince the board I was as good. So, we’d been stuck with the Cathouse . I didn’t mind it so much, but the fact that it had been designed as a training ship, instead of a harvesting ship, presented some liabilities. The nodes for various circuitry, for instance, were easier to access for trainee navigator/mechanics than those in the more modern ships. But what made them accessible was their being on the outside of the ship—protruding out of the skin like pimples. This meant that a mishap in the powertree ring could destroy one of the nodes.
    Good Cats weren’t supposed to have mishaps of that nature, and the only one I knew of had happened while I was trying to strangle Kit during our star-crossed meeting. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t a greater