Deluge

CHAPTER 3

BY THE TIME the Piaf docked at Gwinnet Incarceration Colony, the ship’s cat, Zuzu, and her mistress, Adrienne, had abandoned their attempts to have the cat act as morale officer for the Kanaka children trapped aboard the liner when the Company Corps impounded it.

Zuzu liked the children and did not like to hear them cry, but she wanted to cry too, seeing the soldiers’ heavy boots stomp past and hearing them bark orders at her friends. She spent much of her time huddled beneath whatever bunk or chair Adrienne chose.

When the ship docked and the soldiers clamped restraints on Adrienne’s hands and shackles on her feet before leading her and the other crew members away, Zuzu stayed huddled. A long time had passed without anyone returning before she crept out and slunk from one cabin to the next trying to find someone she knew.

Only the lounge seemed to be occupied. The children were there, but they were strangely quiet, where only a few minutes ago Zuzu had heard them screaming and crying for their mothers. None of the mothers were there, though three female soldiers stood among the small quiet bodies that lay on the bedding in the middle of the lounge, all breathing, Zuzu noticed, all apparently sleeping.

Zuzu slunk around the wall and the corner of the huge tank that had been used to hold first the sea turtles and then the sharks from Halau, where her crew had also rescued the children and their families. It was a good hiding place. She could watch without being seen, and felt safe enough to grab a quick nap before she heard the tramp of boots once more in the Piaf ’s corridors.

Where was the crew? Adrienne, Steve, Madame, no one was returning? Only the soldiers? Zuzu wanted to cry. She had been with Adrienne since she was a tiny kitten. Adrienne loved, fed, and protected her.

All of the crew were her friends, but Adrienne was her special friend, the closest to a mother she remembered. Like the children in the lounge, Zuzu was suddenly orphaned.

The Piaf had been her home most of her life too, but she could not stay here while the soldiers ran it.

Many of them smelled bad, spoke loudly and angrily, and stomped around so much she was glad she didn’t have a long flowing tail, like some cats.

Her tail was a tidy curl atop her rump, the legacy of ancestors who were Japanese bobtail cats, a very superior and elevated sort of feline. She had never met one, but Adrienne told her about them and assured her that hers was a distinguished lineage.

A little dark woman came aboard with the soldiers and marched from child to child, inspecting each one.

Then, with something in her voice that sounded like Zuzu felt when the food in her dish was not her favorite flavor, the woman said, “The transport is ready for these children. They may all go to the island.”

“Mama!” a kit barely old enough to say the word screamed, and hauled at the little dark woman’s trousers with his grubby fist.

“Be still, child,” the woman said. “Your mama is not coming back to the ship. If you want to see her again, you must follow the nice corporal and do exactly as she says. She will take you on a nice ride to somewhere that you can play while you wait.”

The female soldiers lined the children up and herded them out of the lounge. This time Zuzu followed, slinking, crouching, hiding behind things and under things until the last child and then the little dark woman were leaving the ship. Taking her life in her own paws, Zuzu whispered out behind them. She did not follow the children to the waiting flitter, however. It would not be going where their mothers were, and so it would not go where Adrienne and the crew were. She did not like the little dark woman, but the woman seemed to know things. She strode toward a building with two tiers of lights from the portholes and a great many more lights strobing the ground between the building and a high fence.

At a gate, the small dark woman showed a tag she wore around her neck to the guard, and he opened the gate, not noticing anything so small and stealthy as a brown-and-gray mottled cat who slipped in at ground level on the heels of the woman. “Welcome to Gwinnet, Dr. Mabo,” he said politely.

WHEN AISLING TOLD him that she had seen his kids swimming out into the river, Sean Shongili swam as fast as a seal possibly could, but he was not fast enough. The kids had a substantial head start on him, hours since the time Aisling had seen them and Sean awoke to notice that they were gone. It was a long swim out to the coast, and though he called them repeatedly, he received no answer.

An hour or so before he reached the coast, he was suddenly pushed back by a high tide of salt water. He felt the alarm of other sea creatures in the vicinity, as well as Nanook and Coaxtl. Surfacing, he saw the cats, colored lights washing over their fur, lift their whiskered faces to watch the city-vessel of the alien otters spinning upward, brightly lit, into the still-dark sky.

He did not need to ask anyone whether Ronan and Murel were on board the departing vessel. He knew they were, even though he had vetoed the idea when they brought it up. When they returned, he would have a serious talk with them. Just because they had been sent on one mission on behalf of the planet didn’t mean they were to rush off and try to solve every difficulty that arose without consulting their parents, particularly when their plan of action had already been disapproved.

Sean continued on to the coast, this time swimming in mid-channel, keeping in sight of Nanook and Coaxtl. Once there, he found Sky’s otter relatives and learned the details of the situation that his intuition had already outlined. At Sky’s request, the sea otters had gone to the deep sea otter den and asked them to come for the twins, who had enlisted the help of Petaybee’s long-established but newly discovered residents.

Why did the deep sea otters go along with it? Sean asked. Our family has already caused them quite a lot of bother, the children particularly so.

For home, the otters said. River seal children went for home. Deep sea otters went for home too.

Naturally, Sean replied, wondering why he’d been so dense. He still wasn’t thinking of Petaybee’s oldest residents as having the same connection with the world that the others did, but they would, wouldn’t they?

He turned and swam back upriver. There was nothing else to do about the kids now, except tell Yana, and he felt somehow she would already know by the time he returned.

Halfway back to the cave, he saw the company troop ship preparing to land. That was quick, but then this whole anti-Petaybean operation, including Marmion’s arrest, was actually a political maneuver and quite illegal. They would want to achieve their objectives quickly before their actions could be discovered, questioned, or countermanded. The people of Kilcoole were hidden and had a further escape route through the caves if need be. Folk in the more remote villages would not be so well prepared. Electronic communications could be intercepted, with the ship having landed. When the PTBs didn’t find the people they were seeking, they would not be above seeking other people to use as hostages.

An underground river system had guided him to outlying areas in the past. One entrance to it opened nearby.

Go to Clodagh, he told the cats. Let no one follow you or see you enter the caves. Tell Clodagh I am going to warn the other villages that the troops have landed. No one else need go overland and risk themselves.

You hide best of all men, Nanook agreed.

They would not leave him yet, however, and paced beside him as he swam upriver another hour and a half to the entrance to the cave. When he stuck his head out of the water long enough to say good-bye, Nanook was crouched on the bank as if ready to fish him out. Coaxtl sat on her haunches, looking up at a sky newly white with falling snow.

“The home hides us,” the snow leopard told him.

MARMION HAD SEEN only the presentable parts of the Gwinnet facility in the past. To the surprise of her escort, she had nevertheless been able to ask questions and make recommendations to better the lives of the souls incarcerated there. What only a very few trusted friends knew was that Marmion was not the stranger to prison they imagined.

Although her name was a venerable one, her father and mother had supported the wrong candidates in one of their world’s many violent and bitter political feuds. Her parents’ candidate had been murdered and all of his supporters killed, tortured, or imprisoned and their lands confiscated. The women’s section of Nouveau Bastille Moonbase had figured in some of Marmion’s earliest memories. She had lived there with her mother until she was seven years old. One day, a guard brought a man in the uniform of a fleet commander and his wife to her mother’s cell. This couple could not have children of their own, so they proposed to take Marmie from the prison and raise her as their daughter, since her own parents had proved to have such poor judgment that they could no longer provide a decent life for her.

Just like that, Marmion was taken from her mother. And though her mother cried and protested bitterly, she also told her daughter to be on her best behavior, do as she was told, and try to use the advantages that had been put in her path.

Although her heart ached for her mother’s embraces, and even for the kind of often-coarse attentions of the prostitutes, thieves, and murderers in adjacent cells, Marmion found it easy to give the appearance at least of being a good girl. Pere Jean, the commander, was usually on duty, and when he was home, showed little interest in the daughter he had adopted largely to please his wife, Dominique LeClerc.

Maman Dominique, as she wished to be called, at first liked to take her pretty little girl shopping and show her off at parties other wives gave for their children. The other mothers, however, were not deceived about Marmie’s origins, and some of the children were beastly enough to warrant a few of the self-defense moves her former cell mates had taught her. The party invitations stopped. After a while Maman Dominique began shopping alone, and the whispers among the servants were that what she was shopping for could not be purchased in the shops but certainly improved her temperament.

Once the novelty of her presence had worn off, then, Marmie’s care and education were provided by paid servants and employees. The girl found them easy to manipulate, and she was mostly able to do as she pleased.

Then one day, when she was not yet thirteen years old, that world changed for her too. Pere Jean came home after a year in space and saw not a daughter, but a blossoming young woman. He made a point of asking Marmie to do something with him alone-something intimate-but the girl’s time in prison among worldly women had made her wiser than her years or her wide, innocent eyes indicated. She told Maman Dominique about Pere Jean’s request. Maman Dominique went to speak to her husband herself, and when she returned, the couple had apparently decided it was time for Marmie to be sent to boarding school.

There, exercising the charm and charisma that came from her genuine interest in the people around her, she made many new friends and forged alliances that she cherished still.

While living with her adoptive parents, she had tried to bribe servants and tradespeople to take messages to her real parents and perhaps get some word of them in return, but the political coup and its bloody aftermath were too fresh in everyone’s minds. Once away from her second home, however, Marmie quickly found the connections she needed to let her mother and father know where she was and to tell them that she was well and had not forgotten about them. She eagerly awaited the first response from her messenger, but it was a sad one. Though her father still lived, her mother had died shortly after Marmion had been adopted.

For the first time since she left the prison, Marmie wept. Then, after a while, she set her grief aside in order to try to liberate her father. To that end, she strengthened her network with the prison, and in time was able to arrange to exchange messages with him almost weekly.

When her classmate Madelaine Algemeine invited her home for the holidays and Marmion met her handsome brother, Marmie’s soon-to-be beloved Gabriel, her life changed drastically once more.

Gabriel was heir to the Algemeine fortune, had inherited their business acumen, had a pragmatic attitude toward politics, and had many influential friends. On the other hand, he was enough of an idealist to find her tainted origins romantic, and made a personal quest of helping her free her father. Meanwhile he used family connections to buy the de Revers family properties, and on their wedding day, with Marmion’s frail father there to give her away, presented her with the family lands as a wedding present. Pere Jean was in space at the time, but Maman Dominique was invited, at her real father’s suggestion, to serve as mother of the bride.

Marmie’s protests that she did not wish to be disloyal were dismissed by her father. “You and I know who your mother was,” he told her.

“But when they took me, it broke her heart,” Marmie said. “She did not survive long afterward.”

“Perhaps, but your mother would have seen your adoption as your only hope to grow up in freedom and with some privilege. We both hated for you to be taken by strangers who were our enemies, but you have not fared badly. From all that you’ve told me, Madame LeClerc saw that you were cared for and when the time came, protected you in such a way that it led to your marriage to Gabriel. For this she deserves our thanks and respect.” When Marmion still looked doubtful, her father smiled a wry broken-toothed smile. “Also, ma cherie, one must consider that although your good fiance has freed me, I am still not a popular man with our leaders, and must depend upon the goodwill of my adversaries to remain alive and free to see my grandchildren.”

And so Dominique LeClerc and Marmion’s beloved father presided at her wedding. Madelaine Algemeine was the maid of honor; other classmates were bridesmaids. And the LeClerc servants and employees were all invited to the wedding feast. Also present, though less conspicuously, were the contacts, go-betweens, and messengers, including two prison guards, whom Marmie and Gabriel had used to free her father.

Oddly enough, her father and Gabriel’s passed away within weeks of each other, leaving Gabriel as the head of his family and its business concerns. Madelaine married his closest friend, who entered into the Algemeine family business as well.

With her respectability assured, Marmion often returned with baskets of food, toiletries, and books for the prisoners in both the men’s and women’s sections of the Bastille. She was careful to always bring similar dainties for the guards and prison employees, and asked after their health and their families. This was not because, as she let the prisoners old enough to remember her know, she was grateful for the care given her as a child, but so they would permit the prisoners to keep and use her gifts. Many of these people were no more criminal than her parents, and had in fact been friends and comrades of her parents, but were not fortunate enough to have someone to see to their release.

Oh, yes, she was familiar with prisons, with guards and matrons and inmates alike, but once her own business acumen and the enterprises she had inherited from her husband made her wealthier than anyone had ever imagined possible, those who spoke of her origins mentioned only the original luster of the de Revers name. She thought it unnecessary to disillusion them about the less-than-glamorous aspects of her past.

So, although Marmion dreaded going back into captivity, she did not experience the fear or the humiliation Colonel Zachariah Cally no doubt hoped she would. Her main concern was for her crew and passengers.

When they arrived at what was euphemistically referred to as the reception area of the prison, they were separated by gender, but the initial order was the same. “Shave ’em, strip ’em, hose ’em down, and suit ’em up.”

The Kanaka women accepted this mistreatment stoically, their misery showing only in their eyes, but some of Marmion’s women crew members tried to fight. “Tell them to cooperate,” Marmion whispered to Adrienne. “Accept it as the local style. The shave seems brutal now, but it’s that or involuntary dreadlocks and lice later. Don’t fight, no matter what. You cannot win, and they will do you real damage if you resist.”

“Shut up, you,” the nearest guard said, yanking Marmion’s head back by her flowing curls. “You’re no different than the rest of these sluts to us and you don’t give orders here.” She shoved her toward one of the chairs surrounded by piles of hair. “Take a load off, queenie.”

But a stern voice contradicted her. “Not her, not yet. Put her in uniform and give her one of our VIP suites. Make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.”

They led her down claustrophobic corridors between cold cell blocks to a tiny bare room with a hard slab for a bed and bench and a stinking hole in the floor to drain waste. The door had no bars, just a slot for food at the bottom. She was sure there would be cameras hidden somewhere in the ceiling or the door and that the door would have a one-way panel through which they could observe her without her being able to see them.

As the door closed and locked behind her, she heard other cell doors clanging shut.