Free DarkShip Thieves by Sarah A. Hoyt Page B

a while, he set a cup of broth in front of me. It tasted odd. Very odd. It was like . . . chicken broth, with an odd hint of fish. "Fish?" I asked.
    He looked surprised. "Most of the protein in Ed—At home is fish. Not much space for cows." He smiled as he got himself a bowl of the broth, then handed me a spoon and took one for himself from some receptacle beside the cooker. "If you don't like it, I can program other flavors."
    But the broth, strange flavor and all, calmed my hunger pangs, and did a sort of flat bread filled with what appeared to be a nut paste. He ate also while staring at me. When I was almost done, he said, "I have moved my clothes to one of the storage rooms," he said, quietly. "You may have my room."
    Well, I thought, that figured. It was probably the most secure place in the ship. I wouldn't put it past him to have put some sort of alarm on the door too. "And where will you sleep?" I asked, wondering if after all this was some form of backwards seduction—if he intended to share the bed with me.
    He shrugged. "Probably the virtus. It's where I sleep most nights." He sipped his broth. "That or the exercise room. I'll show you where that is, later. I don't know how long the trip will take, but it will take more than a few days, and probably more than a month. I don't want you to feel uncomfortable."
    It was, of course, much too late for that.
     

Eleven
    "Aim higher," my captor said, mercilessly, as he grabbed my ankle, halfway through my jump, and caused me to fall on my back, with a nerve-jarring thud. "There are more than one vulnerable zones on a male."
    Fortunately for my hard head, considering the number of times he did this any given day, we were in the exercise room and I had a heavily padded mat beneath me.
    "Had enough?" he asked, stepping back as I rose, trying to get my bearings.
    "I still don't understand how you can move that fast," I said.
    "It's part of the elfing," he said. "To maneuver in tight spaces. More to the point is how you can move that fast. Almost as fast as I do."
    "Oh," I said. "I always have."
    He raised his eyebrows at me. "I wonder," he said. "If one of ours, a nav, went missing on Earth . . ."
    I picked up a small towel from the pile on the complicated exercise machine next to the padded area on which we stood. I didn't need it. Oh, the exercise had been violent, but the ambient temperature was low and I was not sweating, at least not as such. However, making a show of wiping my forehead provided me with time to think. "What do you mean one of yours? A nav?"
    "An ELF," he said.
    "Bio improved?" I asked. "The navigators? They're ELFed?"
    "Oh, of course," he said.
    "Of course?"
    "Well," he shrugged. "The ELFing is less costly than for a Cat, so more likely to happen if a family is strapped for cash, but . . ."
    "But they too are improved?"
    He'd explained to me that the designation for his function had started out as pilot but had over the centuries changed to Cat because people couldn't overlook the eyes.
    "Oh yes."
    "But . . . no eyes, no . . ."
    "No. For sense of direction. Ability with mechanics, and the . . . "
    "Speed?"
    "Not normally." He frowned. "Cats are. But I can see a Nav passing on Earth, never a cat. Which is part of what confuses me about your speed. But Navigators usually have very good visual memory and even better spacial reasoning. It allows them to remember cul de sacs if their pilot gets blinded. In that way they're invaluable backup. On person, alone in a ship is dangerous. A pair with the same abilities—they'd both be incapacitated at the same time. So the navigator is a . . . redundant system to the cat, with some . . . modifications."
    "I see," I said. "But how could I have inherited my abilities from my parents? Even if my parents were . . . a nav or something?" I couldn't imagine how it could possibly be, since Patrician lines were fairly well guarded and certified. I couldn't imagine how Father, with his line of