QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES?
QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES?
“What?” Kit said. The guns in the hands of the young men holding them swung to point more accurately at him.
The man did not repeat himself. He smiled, urbanely. “If you’d please step down.”
Kit didn’t move, except to brace himself, his feet slightly farther apart, his shoulders pulled back, as if he expected a physical impact. “You can’t arrest me,” he said. His voice sounded more puzzled than outraged. “I’m a free citizen of Eden.”
Eden, in addition to being paranoid, hated authority. It had no rules and no laws. Most of the things that police handled back on Earth were handled on Eden by custom, tradition and public opinion, or by a short blast from a burner. If they’d shot Kit—not that I wanted them to—it wouldn’t have been surprising. Arresting him, on the other hand, should have been impossible.
But I grew up with Daddy Dearest. I knew one never argued with a loaded burner.
I clenched my hands. I’d get out of this alive. Or at least I’d try to make sure that Kit would.
“Ah,” the blond man said, and managed to convey the sort of smiling concession that a person makes, on the way to doing exactly what he always wanted to do. “Indeed. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say you are taken in custody by the Energy Board, pending the resolution of charges of treason, willful endangerment of Eden’s technologies and location, and leading your ward into similar crimes.” He man smiled. There were teeth in that smile. The better to eat you with.
“My ward?” Kit said. “Do you mean Thena?”
When I’d first arrived in Eden, a stowaway in Kit’s ship, the only way the Energy Board would allow me in was for Kit to become my guardian. Because in Eden, the only way to control or punish an individual was to make them pay blood money or reparation for violations of public peace and safety. Since blood geld obligations often extended to family and close associates, this meant that your nearest and dearest watched you and made sure you didn’t get in trouble.
But back then I had no nearest or dearest in Eden—or, at the time, anywhere, really. I could only be controlled by making Kit and Kit’s family responsible for me.
Now that I was married to him, and had the same relatives, surely I was no longer his ward? Only we’d never got around to cancelling the document. Which meant they could now use my action to make Kit’s punishment more severe. Perhaps severe enough to kill him if I overreacted. Which meant, I couldn’t react. At all. I could barely breathe. Kit and I had saved each other from near death more than once. I couldn’t imagine life without him.
The blond man didn’t even bother to answer the question, just inclined his head and cast me a look. I held myself so immobile my muscles hurt.
I kept quiet, too. If there had been only one gun pointed at me, I could have tried to make a grab for it. I’m genetically enhanced. When needed, I can move faster and more accurately than any natural human. One gun I could evade. I could overpower the bearer before he knew what hit him.
But forty armed men and some of them Cats by engineering? No. I could only take out one or two before the rest of them brought me down or worse, brought Kit down.
Besides, the forty young men holding the guns looked different from Eden’s normal hushers. Hushers were an all-volunteer force, and most of Eden’s young men served a few months or a year in it. Kit, himself, had at fourteen or fifteen. Most of them viewed it as a not-too-exacting social activity, which got rewarded with social approval for their willingness to defend Eden from an invasion that never came. Normally they looked like children at play.
Not these hushers.
Straggly and young, dressed in what could be called a uniform only because everyone wore blue, though there was no uniformity in cut or design, wearing all manner of hairstyles and adornment, they still managed to look like a military force.
It was obvious they would shoot at the least pretext. Or the least excuse. I looked into their gazes and realized they wanted to kill us, and I wondered what had been going on in Eden in our absence to change the young in that way.
I tightened my fists till my nails bit into my palms. I couldn’t get any mind-words from Kit, only a sense of wariness.
“If you believe I’m a traitor—” he told the blond man and stopped.
The blond man smiled wolfishly. “Indeed. We should have eliminated you. But we had to decide quickly. Your com contact was a surprise. We thought you dead. We certainly didn’t imagine you’d landed on Earth. We’ve not had the time to look through all possible implications of your actions and, frankly, your being who you are complicates things. You have relatives amid our most respected and prominent citizens, who might take offense and make trouble if we had shot you out of orbit.”
“But—” Kit started.
“So we’ll decide it now,” the blond man said. “And execute you with due formality, if it’s warranted. So no one can doubt it’s proper.”
Kit opened his mouth. Closed it. Mentally, he told me, Don’t question anything I do.
I wondered what he meant to do. I trusted him implicitly. Kit knew the customs of the land, and was good at strategy. I prepared to follow his lead. With his speed and reflexes he could overpower any number of his accusers.
And he said, “I’m surrendering to the authority of the Energy Board,” Kit said.
I had heard wrong. Either that or there was some deep planning involved. Kit didn’t surrender to the authority of anyone. Then I thought I saw it. He’d get out of the ship, approach Blondie and, as the man let down his guard, take his burner. Then Kit could point the burner at Blondie’s head, hold him hostage and demand a fair hearing.
I could visualize all this, as Kit came down from the ship, hands in view, held some distance from his body. It was hard stepping down from the ship like that, because the steps—two—were just a little too long for any normal legs.
Before Kit could recover, Blondie lifted his hand.
It must have been a prearranged signal. Four young men with Cat eyes detached from the ranks of Hushers and jumped Kit.
They did it so fast—what Kit called Cat speed—that to me it looked like they disappeared, only to materialize again, holding Kit down on the ground and handcuffing him behind his back.
I had the impression of movement, too fast for the eye to fully capture, an impression of Kit falling under the impact of four bodies, of his head hitting the floor. His exclamation of surprise, pain, and rage hung in the air, as though the sound hadn’t had time to dissipate in the echoes of the vast room.
And then all hell broke loose. Something tugged at me, as if the feeling between Kit and me were a taut rope, binding us heart to heart.
I never thought about it. Never made a decision to attack anyone. Never even made a decision to move. Yet as soon as Kit hit the floor, I was flying through the air.
My father, in his attempts to subdue me, or perhaps to give me an outlet for that pent-up aggression that worried everyone so much, had enrolled me in various academies which taught self-defense or martial arts. When I escaped Daddy’s authority I’d learned hand-to-hand dirty fighting.
But for my money, the most useful fighting moves I ever learned came from a ballet camp in Switzerland to which Dad had sent me, apparently under the delusion that dance would tame the savage beast.
I caught myself mid-air, leaping, in graceful ballet-style, over Kit and his huddled captors and straight at the blond man. The tip of my extended foot hit him mid-chest, and took him down as I landed, I grabbed the burner from his hand before he could react. I pointed it at his head.
Confusion reigned. In the middle of my beautiful leap, several hushers fired at me, and various others tried to follow me down with burner fire to my destination, only stopping short when they realized that killing me would risk killing their leader also.
None hit me.
Like Kit, I had been bioengineered for speed, and while I wasn’t quite as fast as he was—while I couldn’t give the impression of moving so fast I disappeared from one place and materialized in the other—I could and did move too fast for normal human eyes. And Blondie had taken the only four cats in the group—the only four people who were faster than I—and used them to neutralize Kit.
But that many burners going off in an enclosed space will hit something. I could smell acrid smoke.
I didn’t look to see where it was coming from. Hushers ran. I heard fabric beating against hard surfaces, and feet stomping and fire retardant spraying. I didn’t turn.
I stared down at Blondie’s eyes and saw fear and confusion. Whatever he had planned, I’d just made his plan go horribly awry. My late, unlamented father would have told him that I did that to plans.
“Nav Sinistra—” he started.
“Stop,” I said. And no, I didn’t care if he was right by the book. He didn’t get to hurt Kit. Right be damned. Kit was mine to love and protect, the same way I was his. Besides, no one absolutely sure of his legal ground would have hurried to grab Kit without warning. I resisted a temptation to hit Blondie on the side of the head with my burner.
“Stop. I don’t want to hear it.” I barely looked up, keeping most of my attention trained on Blondie, but managing to convey that I was speaking to the four young Cats also. “You, let Cat Sinistra go. Now. Now, or I’ll shoot this man.” I pressed the burner harder against Blondie’s temple as I straddled him, keeping him still.
“Dear lady,” my captive said. His gaze was calm, his voice composed. “You don’t mean that. You can’t mean that. I know the amount of money your husband owes for the repairs to the ship you damaged last year. If you shoot me, you’ll never be out of debt for the blood geld.”
He’d just told the young Cats both that he was not afraid and that I was unlikely to shoot. The dirty rotten scoundrel. I’d bet he cheated at chess.
I swallowed hard. “Right,” I said. “How about I shoot your feet off, then? Then your ankles. Then your knees. I’ll set the burner on high so it cauterizes. No risk of dying and you can regen it. But you won’t get anywhere near a medtech until you let my husband go.”
I set my foot on his trachea. I could tell from his look that he knew very well I could crush it with just a little downward pressure. Then I pointed my burner at his feet. His eyes showed worry, but he didn’t give an inch. “Dear lady,” he said, still in that soft tone, “what will you do then? Go back into space in the Cathouse? Surely there are easier ways to commit suicide.”
And I realized we weren’t on Earth. Fine, I knew that. But I hadn’t realized how the differences between the two worlds and their populations changed my calculations. Was it possible to run and hide in Eden? Sure it was. For a while. But unlike on Earth, you could not hide forever.
Earth is much vaster and has a much larger population. People can move from one place to the other unremarked. No one would even care about their pasts in some places.
But on Eden there were a limited number of families and everyone seemed at times to be an amateur genealogist.
And then there was the limited physical space. You couldn’t move that far away.
Kit and I couldn’t just run and hide.
We couldn’t assume different names and claim to be from elsewhere altogether. After a while our isolation would stick out. Besides, both of us were famous: Kit because of his first wife’s death, myself for being the only Earther to come to Eden in three hundred years. Someone would spot us within a week. I could feel my jaw setting into what dad called my mulish look—possibly because the old bastard had a sense of humor. “Fine,” I said. “Let my husband go, and replenish the ship, so we can leave.”
Where we’d go, I didn’t have the slightest idea. Earth, probably. Now there was a planet you could get lost in.
Blondie looked chagrined and sighed. “Do as she says,” he said. But weirdly, there was an odd gleam of smug triumph in his eyes.
“No,” Kit said, sitting up. “No.” And then, hurriedly, “I submit to the judgment of Eden.”
He must have hit his head much harder than I thought. I started to open my mouth to say so, but he was in my mind. Drop it, Thena, he mind-spoke, perfectly clear and far more forcefully than normal.
I closed my mouth, but managed the mental protest, But—
You’re playing into their hands, he said. Here they have to keep up appearances. They can’t murder us. If they get us to take off, they can shoot us out of the sky. They’ll be protecting Eden from suspected spies. No one will protest.
You mean to let them arrest you? I asked, in disbelief. I can’t let them—
No. I’ll allow them to detain me. They can’t arrest me. They don’t have governmental powers. They don’t have legal powers. They don’t even have traditional powers to do this. I don’t like this any more than you do, Thena, but trust me. My way is the best course.