DarkShip Thieves by Sarah A. Hoyt

ancestors that had all been Patricians of Syracuse Seacity stretching back to the twenty first century might have been replaced. True I'd never seen him in a fight, and I'd never seen him fix anything, so there was no telling whether he had mechanical ability or super speed. And mother . . . I knew next to nothing about mother, only that she must have been sane, because she left about when I was six. And no sane woman could have endured any longer with Father. "And what would super speed have to do with it? You said that's not a nav thing. And anyway, didn't you say that the . . . ELFING costs money and needs to be introduced via a virus in gestation?"
    He shrugged and frowned, the expression of a man deep in thought. "Yeah," he said at last. "It doesn't make a lot of sense, but there have been cases—rare—where ELFing passes on a generation. Or some characteristics of ELFing. And particularly your ability to mind-talk with me, since the Cat and Nav telepathy is of a specific type, and normally has to be trained between a couple, makes me think that—"
    I jumped, suddenly, in a perfect leap, which is difficult when you start from a standing position, but which was good enough for me to hit first his left knee, then as I fell, the right.
    His eyes widened, then he grimaced and went down on his knees. I smiled. I hadn't hit him hard enough to break his kneecaps—not only was that nearly impossible from a stand, so that if I had truly been in a fight with him, I'd have needed to now hit him, quickly, with something heavy, like one of the barbells that went with the exercise machine, but also I had no intention of permanently maiming him and then having to spend I didn't know how long in there with him, before we got to his home where, unless I were very wrong, I was going to need his indulgence and good will.
    He knelt and folded over, and then fell on his behind, and stretched his legs, rubbing at the knees. "Very funny," he said. His expression was closed and grave, even though his voice came lightly.
    "You said there were more than one sensitive zones on a male," I said. "Although I'd like to point out that it's not as effective as hitting you where it mainly hurts. Because that would disable you longer."
    He gave me a look, part guarded part considering. "Somehow, princess, I suspect if you had it hit me on the knees as hard as you could, it would have done for me fairly effectively too. I suspect your hitting where you normally do is psychological."
    I set my hands on either side of my waist. "Freudianism was a discredited religion that led to—"
    "Uh. And that's all you ever heard of psychology, is it?" He said getting up. He made a show of flexing his leg, that I expected was exactly that, show. "Remind me to give you a couple of data gems later."
    And that was par for the course and again confirmation that he was a completely normal human male. In the times when I wasn't causing instructors and trainers at various academies to hide in fear, I was earning their respect trust and good will by allowing them to lecture me. It must be something set deep in the human male from the time the first one of them crawled out of the cave. Doubtless the first thing a man did after learning to speak was to explain to the nearest woman that Ooog was not the same as Ooooog.
    I'd learned the darkship thief was only very much human in that he delighted in giving me history gems and music gems and literature gems.
    The music gems hadn't been a surprise, or not exactly. At my social level, I was expected to have a decent, classical education, no matter how many schools were left torched, in my path. I had learned all the classical composers, though I can't say I mastered the passion with which he spoke of Hayden and Listz. History and literature and even science seemed completely different from what I'd learned. And not in the obvious way. You'd expect them to speak of the time of Mules as a golden age, of course, a time when