Darkship Renegades Read Online Free Page B

was attentive to his surroundings and to his family and always sure of the course to follow. I’d been shocked when Kit had first told me that Jean had raised most of the children on his own, while his wife did water runs to Proxima and Ultima Thule. Most , because I understood that early on they’d simply taken Anne on their runs for powerpods. It was only after they had retired that Jean had decided to stay behind and make a stable home for the children and grandchildren while his wife preferred to make the long lonely-but-lucrative runs for the Water Board, after her vision had aged enough to make powerpod collecting runs to Earth orbit dangerous.
    In retrospect, it was silly to be surprised that a man chose to or could be the care taker for his children. The biowombs had freed men too, because when women could do whatever they wanted to, so could men. Most women still raised their children, but no stigma attached to the husband choosing to do it.
    Tania, Kit’s mother, would have made an awful care-taking parent. She loved her children, even Kit, the non-biological one. But I suspected her attempts at keeping house and organizing family would have fallen apart between boredom with her task and finding something more interesting to do.
    That she looked subdued and worried right then was a bad sign. That all the Denovos were at home was another very bad sign. In a household of Cats and Navs, who traveled for a living, this was a very rare occurrence, made more ominous as Waldron, Kath’s eldest, came from the inner room, bringing his wife, Jennie, with him. If even the younger generation was home, something was wrong, beyond what had just happened to Kit.
    I stared around myself at a circle of eyes, half of them normal, the other half feline-looking. They all shimmered with tears.
    Suddenly Anne grabbed my arm and hugged me. Next thing I knew I was being hugged by the entire family.
    I started to explain that this was all my fault. It would never have occurred to Kit to ask for Earth help, if I hadn’t got myself stupidly burned. It would never have occurred to anyone in the Energy Board to arrest him if he hadn’t stopped on Earth to get me help. So the trouble Kit was in was all my fault, and I hadn’t even managed to prevent his being arrested.
    “Shush, now,” Jean said. “That’s nonsense, and I suspect you know it as well as we do. First of all, I think they have…other motives, and could have found another excuse, or done the thing in a way that would have been far more…permanent. As it is, they’ve practically played into our hands. Judicial murder is the most difficult form of murder on Eden. It has constraints, while other forms of murder don’t.”
    I looked around at a circle of nodding people, and started to wonder if insanity ran in my family-in-law.

MORE THAN ONE WAY
TO SQUEEZE A BUG

    Serious talk waited until we finished dinner. I didn’t notice what we ate. We sat in the living room, on the biocarpet, and the little turtle robots were going around picking up our plates and silverware. The chit-chat that had accompanied dinner fell silent.
    Jennie, Waldron’s wife, took all the children to the back and left them there.
    Then everyone scooted closer, until we were all drawn up in a circle. In the year I’d known Kit’s family, I’d never seen them do this. Of course, it was completely possible they had done this behind my back and away from me while I was still a relative stranger.
    They seemed to be waiting for me to speak, so I did. I told them about landing and what had happened. Eyebrows went up here and there through the narrative and when I finished with, “I have no idea what Kit meant by saying he would be safer if I left him there. We could be on our way to Earth right now. We could—”
    “No.” It was Jean and he was final. Not loud. Just definite. “You couldn’t have taken off again after landing. They would have shot you out of the sky. In fact, I suspect the docking