Darkship Renegades by Sarah A. Hoyt Page A

risk.
    This ship didn’t have that liability. It was just a large ball, perfectly smooth, completely black, unreflective. It was in fact a ball that projected the idea that it wasn’t there at all.
    I walked around it slowly, while Zenobia walked purposely up to it and stuck her finger in the genlock. The door opened, which I supposed made perfect sense, as it would be keyed for us. The way the hatch doors opened on the darkships always made them look a little like they had an open mouth and were carnivorous. Normally this impression was dispelled by the exit area itself which was painted some cheerful color, and faced onto another inner lock, normally open whenever the outer door opened.
    This one wasn’t painted any color, but the bare, unreflective black ceramite of the inside of darkships before they were finished. It looked like a dark mouth, or a vortex of ill omen, waiting to swallow us.
    Zenobia climbed up the stairs that had extended when the door opened and into the airlock space. She touched the walls, gently, as if to reassure herself of their solidity and looked incredibly out of place, with her red hair and pale skin in that almost aggressively dark space. “I guess they stripped it to its barest shell before cleaning it, then reapplied the ceramite coating,” she said.
    I had a feeling she was talking to herself and not to me. I said, “Maybe it was never finished,” and she whirled around, to look at me, her expression surprised.
    “What? Oh. No.” She shrugged. “It used to be golden. Len said we really couldn’t afford much, but we could at least make the entrance look like going into a palace.” She stopped immediately, but she had said too much. I felt my heart sink somewhere to the vicinity of my shoes.
    She was a navigator whose Cat had died. She’d limped home with her ship. Her ship. They’d given us her ship. I cleared my throat. “The Hopper was your ship?”
    She nodded and cleared her throat, then pushed to open the membrane separating us from the inner areas.
    I’ll say this for the Energy Board. They might be sending us to space in a coffin, but at least it was a completely stripped, scrubbed and really clean coffin. Nothing in it could possibly remind Zenobia of when she had shared with her late husband. Except it obviously did. From the bare entrance hall, she wandered the corridors, touching here and feeling there, looking like a child lost in a house she’d once known, looking for something that should be there but wasn’t.
    I thought up some really interesting swear words, but didn’t say anything. Instead, I set about inspecting the interior in a completely different way.
    The navigation computers had been removed. It didn’t worry me, or not too much. I—and I presumed Zenobia, who had been trained in the more normal way of Eden—could calculate a path to Earth. But some navigational computers would be needed, I thought, or one or the other of the pilots—either Kit or Doc Bartolomeu—would need to be on duty the whole time. And shift on/shift off with just two people would be exhausting.
    Since Eden was on a highly eccentric orbit, it could be as much as four months or as little as two away from Earth. Usually the trip there and back took six months because what you lost on one leg, you made up on the other.
    They’d told us to make lists of what we’d need, and they’d furnish it, and they’d given us weight and mass guidelines beyond which we couldn’t go. I’d started making a list on a disposable electronic memo pad when Zenobia came in to the inner area.
    I was once more taken aback by her resemblance to Botticelli’s painting. Don’t misunderstand me. There was nothing exact to this resemblance. I’m sure if I had the painting handy, I’d find her features were all wrong, and I was sure her hair was darker red than the woman’s in the painting. But her green eyes had the same expression as that of Venus in the painting—the distant look of staring