Ancestral Night

Home > Other > Ancestral Night > Page 26
Ancestral Night Page 26

by Elizabeth Bear


  Hey, I’d found an option that was even less appealing than starving to death! Let’s hear it for human ingenuity!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I didn’t have a plan. I followed my instincts, mouselike, into the tunnels of the Koregoi ship—or, as I was starting to think of it, the Prize. I tried not to think about it too much, remembering that my link to the ship had seemed to work better when I wasn’t trying to guide things consciously. That, in fact, the less I tried to control and second-guess my connection with the Koregoi senso, the better it had seemed to work.

  So I just ran, and followed my instincts. And tried not to choke.

  The Prize was gigantic. It seemed to have endless miles of corridors, all twisty and disorienting. I hit on a trick that helped with the vertigo, at least: fixing my gaze on a spot as far ahead as I could make out, and not letting it waver from that spot until I had to switch it—snap—to a new spot. Drishti, yogis called the tactic. Spotting, if you were a dancer.

  I visualized myself small as I ran. I didn’t know if it would help, but I was pretty confident that Farweather had noticed her sensorium contacting mine, and I was additionally pretty sure that reaching out to check her location was as likely to give her new information on me as it was to reassure me about her whereabouts. If I could see her, she could probably see me. If she was looking, and maybe even if she wasn’t. And I expected her to be looking.

  Still, not peeking was hard—one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

  I had no real plan except hide, go to ground, bide my time. I wondered if Farweather had come alone. If she’d expected the Prize to be empty.

  If she’d brought supplies.

  If I could steal those supplies.

  My flight led me through twisting companionways and chambers vast and tiny and in between, whose purposes were indeterminate because I did not stop to investigate. Many of them were full of stuff, and the purposes of that stuff were also indeterminate, because of all those same reasons.

  I dialed up my endorphins, and still my afthands were killing me.

  I didn’t think too hard about anything, which, being me, was one of the most unnatural things I have ever done.

  I ran.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I went to ground, finally, in a storage locker. It seemed as good a place as any to hole up. Being at the conjunction of three different corridors, it offered a number of escape routes, and whatever the purpose of the material in it was, the stuff was soft and made decent padding. I propped the cover open and built myself a crude little nest by pulling the clothlike substance into a pile.

  Having found a place to stretch out, I made the next—and potentially stupid—executive decision. My boots had to come off. I needed to see if the moisture pooling against my skin was sweat, or if it was lymph and blood.

  And if the boots came off, the whole suit might as well come off. There was no integrity to the seal after that.

  I stripped down to my skinsuit and didn’t die immediately, which was a relief and a little bit of a surprise. I knew the ox levels were okay; we’d checked that before—we’d checked that. There were alien ecosystems to which humans responded with instant and fatal anaphylaxis, and I had no guarantee that whatever was still floating around in the ship from the Koregoi era wasn’t fatal.

  All I could promise myself was that anaphylaxis would be faster than either gas gangrene or starvation. Which was, quite frankly, a win the way things were going currently.

  My nether extremities looked better than anticipated. Or better than feared, anyway. Some blisters, two of them popped. A few abrasions. Some swelling, and a tendon that might be strained or just sore. Mostly what I was feeling, I thought, was muscle soreness from unfamiliar use—though don’t get me wrong, that hurt quite enough.

  At least it would all heal fast. Thank you, ancient aliens.

  I tuned again, and reminded myself not to use the lack of ongoing pain as an excuse to hurt myself worse. I rationed myself some water and some yeast concentrate from my suit stores, and consumed it as slowly as I could manage, and when I relieved myself I made sure to use the recycler built into my suit. In a survival situation, save everything you can.

  Then I had time to think, and to put a few things in perspective.

  One of those things was the question of just what had happened to Singer. And Connla. And the cats.

  I no longer thought the Prize or its defenses, even automatic ones, were responsible. Instead, it seemed likely that what had happened was that Singer’s tug had been caught in the edge of a nearly superluminal particle blast, the bow wave of Farweather’s pirate ship dropping out of white space for a few seconds so that she could make the completely unbelievably risky jump across empty space from it to the Prize before it accelerated again.

  I already knew the pirate pilots were hotdoggers; we’d established that out by the Milk Chocolate Marauder where they’d nearly killed themselves and us with close flying. I couldn’t say we were lucky this time—my ship, my shipmates—but honestly, the Koregoi ship or the remains of Singer or even one of the Core ships could have gotten snagged up in a fold of space-time when the Freeport ship lobbed itself back into white space, and that that hadn’t happened . . . Well, it was good flying, a miracle, or both.

  What was Farweather doing on the Prize right now? Now that she had it, I didn’t expect Farweather to leave the Prize just parked in the middle of the Synarche fleet. Did her derring-do indicate that she knew how to get it moving? Or had it just been a sophipathological gamble?

  One in a series of same, if so.

  Well, we could be moving now, for all I knew. It’s not like there would be a sense of acceleration in white space, or for that matter inside a ship with controlled artificial gravity under any circumstances. I thought about that for a moment—the implications of it, the effect on maneuverability. If you could control for forces with technology, you could pull the kind of g and a in a crewed ship that you could in a drone, without worrying about converting ship’s complement and cats into a fine protein paste all over the inside of the hull.

  No wonder the pirates wanted this tech.

  . . . The pirates had this tech, didn’t they? They would have gotten it from the factory ship, if they hadn’t had it already. A nice cargo of devashare was one thing, but surely the reason Farweather would have infiltrated the ship and killed everybody on board it was their shiny, newly installed gravity.

  I wondered if she’d brought the Koregoi senso with her, or if that had been something else she’d stolen.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I lay down in that storage locker, and I slept like I’d pricked my finger on a spindle and fallen under a spell. I should have set traps, alarms, protections—I didn’t do any of those things. All I did was try to squish my senso down into a tiny, smooth, reflective ball that I could hide inside and pretend I was invisible. Honestly, it was as much a visualization exercise as anything that had any science behind it. Synarche senso could be activated by targeted visualization, because it was Synarche senso, and because it was designed to integrate seamlessly with the neurology and physiology of as many different sentients as possible.

  In the case of alien superscience . . . well. I was pretty sure it was magical thinking, but in all honesty I was too tired to care. There is only so much clarity one can obtain from chemical support before the sheer biological necessity of rest overwhelms even the most aggressive program of bumps, as most people discover the hard way in their school ans.

  I never put myself in the infirmary, but at least two of my clademates did, and one of them needed extensive neuroreconstruction afterward. Probably even more extensive than my Judicial Recon, after Niyara. I didn’t have extensive organic damage, after all. Just psychological. Well, and the organic remodeling that follows trauma.

  I think the nightmares were what at least partially got me over my clade-bred resistance to tuning.

  Magical thinking or not, Farweather didn’t find me and kill me in my
sleep. Karma shelters the fool, and I woke up still alone in my storage locker. Still alone in my head, too. Which was better than I’d dared to hope for when the lights went out.

  When the lights figuratively went out. The Prize’s veins of ambient illumination were still glowing softly in the surfaces, and I had no way to instruct the ship to shut them off. I’d wrapped a fold of cloth across my eyes instead. They did seem to have dimmed, though—normally I’d expect to awaken to be dazzled by lights that had seemed of normal brightness when I lay down, but these were dim and soothing.

  I sat up, shrugging out of my cocoon of soft-woven synthetics, and the locker around me brightened gradually, stopping at a comfortable level.

  Well, that answered that. The Koregoi ship was definitely cooperating with me.

  I wondered if it was cooperating with Farweather too, given that she also had the parasite. And was far more experienced in how to use it. Childishly, I hoped the Prize liked me better.

  I reached out—not much of a reach in a space so narrow—and patted the wall of the storage locker just in case the ship wanted an affirmation that I appreciated its nurturing behavior.

  I wish I could say I felt rested and clear of thought, but the fact of the matter is that I was stiff from lying still, and groggy and maze-headed and overslept. If I’d dreamed, I didn’t remember it, but I had that sense of oneiric hangover that sometimes follows on having navigated a particularly difficult and convoluted map of dreams. Maybe my tuning was holding up, and keeping the nightmares at bay. I made a point of pushing back the time limit on that, while I was thinking about it.

  I stretched myself as silently as I could manage, wondering if there was a way to convince the ship to dim my interior lights again. It seemed to have accepted me bunking in this storage bin, but I could imagine the beams of light streaming out through every tiny crevice and crack and ventilation hole in the thing, never mind that open cover, and exactly how inobvious that wouldn’t be from the outside.

  Also, it would be safest not to reside in any fixed abode. I couldn’t just avoid Farweather forever. We were on a finite ship, even if it was a ship as big as some stations, and she no doubt had some plans for how that might play out over time.

  Which meant I needed plans too: a plan to protect myself from her, a plan to get control of the ship away from her, and a plan to get her under my control before she captured or got rid of me.

  Living like a mousie in the walls of the Koregoi Prize wasn’t any of those things. It wouldn’t take a ship’s cat with the wits of Mephistopheles to catch me. But it was a bit better than lying here like a sitting duck and waiting to be picked up, put in the bag, and made off with.

  So. First step. Keep collecting supplies, and keep moving.

  And figure out what the hell I was going to eat, too, and sooner rather than later.

  I wrapped my salvaged storage-locker cloth strips and swaths into a makeshift bundle, and made shoulder straps for it. It made a halfway passable backpack. My boots, regretfully, I slid back on—wincing all the while, although I’d wrapped my afthands in strips of clean cloth. The strips were not particularly absorbent, because the materials were all what we Earth-types would call synthetic, which was also why they hadn’t rotted in however many millennians since the Prize was parked, but at least they were fluffy.

  I would rather have left them bare—but trying to run around on my naked afthands, or even all fours, would have been worse in the long run than sucking it up and wearing the boots. I guessed I would just have to do what so many premodern soldiers had done, and get used to the pain of marching and try to heal the blisters while I kept right on marching, because there wasn’t any other choice.

  Reasonable expectations, I realized—and not for the first time—had become a thing of the past. I might be the only soldier fighting this war, and it might be a war of two. But that didn’t stop what it was, and what I was doing here. Or the fact that the Synarche needed me.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  On the move again, I risked reaching out very gently, very tentatively into the Koregoi senso webbing my body and my mind. I didn’t want to make contact with Farweather, but I was hoping to get a sense of where she was and maybe even what she was doing.

  I didn’t get that. What I did feel was the textures and patterns of space-time slipping steadily around the Prize as white space peristalsed her down.

  The Koregoi ship was moving.

  We were under way.

  I reeled a little. Farweather had gotten us moving, and I couldn’t tell you why I found that so startling and upsetting, but I did.

  Okay, I take that back. I definitely knew why I found it upsetting—because I was alone in a ship I had no control over, heading into deep space after having been privateered by a Freeport pirate queen who’d infected me with, well, aliens. And that was, honestly, pretty startling on the face of it.

  But I felt like I should have expected it. It was a bad thing, after all. You expected those and braced for them, so they couldn’t leave you gobsmacked, helpless with surprise.

  Surprise is the kind of emotion that people like me—people with my upbringing who have left it, however many of us there are (a dozen or so?)—struggle to never, ever, ever get caught out by. We make sure we have plans in place. We consider options.

  And here I was, surprised. Blindsided by grief.

  Don’t worry about it now, Haimey.

  Keep moving.

  Small, attainable goals, and worry about the big goals when you have enough small goals lined up and accomplished to have any resources at all that you have a chance of working with.

  I wondered where we were going.

  CHAPTER 17

  GOAL NUMBER THE FIRST: DON’T get caught.

  Okay, then, what’s my plan of attack for that? Or the plan of evasion, more accurately. Step one, avoid contact with Farweather, either through senso or physically.

  I didn’t have any illusions about my ability to take her in single combat. For one thing, while humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools. I belonged to a third group, equally useful: I was an engineer.

  For another thing, I was pretty confident that Farweather hadn’t come to this alien environment unarmed. Unlike me. Because she was a fighter, every centimeter of her.

  I could try to set a trap. But that was likely to fail and also likely to move me up on her priority list. Right now, I figured she probably had her work cut out for her in regard to exploring the Prize, mastering its systems, and getting where she wanted to be going, unexpected hitchhiker and all. If we got there, she’d probably have additional resources to throw at the problem of me, which meant that her best use of resources was to defend herself, defend the Koregoi ship’s key systems, and bide her time until she could meet me with overwhelming force. My earlier fears were realistic, but probably a little overblown, because if she decided to take the risk of coming out to get me it could result in potential failure of her mission objectives and possibly getting clobbered or killed herself.

  She’d want to avoid that. I mean, I didn’t think I could take her, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t want to be cautious.

  Sure, Haimey, I heard myself tell myself in Singer’s voice. Because caution has certainly been her watchword all along, and you have no evidence at all that she’s interested in capturing or subverting you for her own reasons, whatever the strategy behind those reasons may be.

  I could try to ambush her. Probably, eventually, I would. But not todia. Because right now I needed an advantage.

  So I had to assume that she would be defending herself, and I had to assume that she might, in fact, come after me. So while she was consolidating her control over the ship’s systems and setting up whatever defenses she was setting up, I needed to be learning the structures of the Prize like the warrens of the clade I grew up in. I needed to be a mouse in those warrens
. A stainless steel rat in the walls.

  Just as well to have something interesting to fill the standard hours with. All my book files were back on Singer. Without reading material, I needed something to occupy my time. Memorizing an alien spacecraft the size of a medium station would probably keep me busy. Unless it got me caught.

  Or killed.

  I hadn’t sat still while I was doing this thinking, either. In fact, I’d found something fascinating, which was that those organic-seeming corridors and the spaces they connected were webbed with service crawlways. Or service floatways, more precisely—because there was no gravity in those.

  I pulled my awful boots off again, wrapped them through my makeshift backpack, and exulted in the comfort of having all four hands free to work as my ergonomics engineers had intended. Everything instantly seemed better when I wasn’t under g anymore, and even better than that when I sipped some reclaimed water and chewed a couple of yeast tablets. Your brain uses glucose to think, it turns out, and when you don’t have it, your decision-making and emotional regulation remains somewhat impaired, no matter how much you tune.

  The playful teasing of my own interior voice reminded me of Singer, which was too much of a distraction, and I shut it down. My fox had been running the whole time, though—recording, memorizing as I moved through the ship. My meat memory might fail me, but I was going to use it anyway, because it was essentially bottomless. The machine memory could create a perfect three-dimensional map of the spaces I moved through. Once I had access to a shipmind again, and to more processing power than the tiny bit packed into my suit and skull, I would be able to use that map to generate the kind of plot that could reveal what I was missing and give me the shapes of spaces I hadn’t yet figured out how to reach. Spaces that might be solid-state, technology, hunks of computronium wedged in where they fit . . . or that might hide even stranger treasures.

 

‹ Prev