“They say that they have surgical facilities.”
I decided that if they wanted to risk it, it was their lookout.
Farweather had crossed the observation deck and was staring out the window away from me. I could see her reflection dimly in the window, superimposed over the scrolling bands of light and the rescue mission beyond. I assumed she could see my back, as well.
“We don’t have two working suits.”
“They can send a shuttle.”
I eyed the lightly built little ship, impressed. “They can get a shuttle in that thing?”
I must have spoken louder than I intended, because Farweather’s reflection glanced over her shoulder at me before going back to studying the view. I kept my back to her and pretended I had not seen.
I lowered my voice to its previous level and said, “What’s our bargaining position?”
“That depends, I should think, on what you intend to bargain for.”
I smiled at my own reflection. I was concerned about all sorts of things right now, to be certain. But it just felt so dizzyingly, giddily good to have Singer back. People whose neural pathways formed under clade intervention are not meant to navigate the universe alone.
“Let me rephrase. How much trouble are we in?”
“Oh,” Singer said, sounding as startled as if he hadn’t even registered the possibility that we might be in trouble. “Not much, I should think. I mean, they’ll want that pirate.”
“I want that pirate too.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed.”
I blushed hot and sharp. “Hurry up with that fox reboot, would you?”
“Working on it,” he said.
“Besides,” I said. “That wasn’t what I meant. I meant I want her safely back in custody, and . . . what are we going to tell them about disposing of the pirate?”
“She can’t get far without a suit,” he said pragmatically. “We should tell them to send a constable over and get her.”
I bit my lip.
“And they’ll want the Koregoi ship, obviously. And me. And you. But the only things that might really get us in trouble are already pretty well mitigated by the result. I don’t think they’re going to dun me for propagating when the alternative was destruction; even an AI gets some latitude in the matter of self-preservation. And as for you . . . well, kidnapped by pirates is a pretty good excuse.”
I laughed out loud, stifling it because of Farweather. She rolled her eyes at me. I wasn’t supposed to know. “It is at that.”
I stepped back from the window and turned around. Raising my voice, I said crisply, “Please, Singer. Take us home.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The Koregoi vessel did not so much as shiver now that Singer was firmly in control. I could tell that it was curving, because I could feel space bending around us. But Singer’s touch was sure and subtle, which was why—
When we fell out of white space, abruptly and without warning, it was as if we had hit a wall. A very soft wall, because there was no inertia. We didn’t go from moving to stopping. We just . . . weren’t bending the universe around us anymore.
The Interceptor, inside our massive coils, fell right out of space alongside us. Also stationary, thank the stars, because a collision hadn’t gotten any more appealing to me since the last time.
I am not sure I’ve ever been so happy about anything as I was at the outline of that souped-up Judiciary ship floating abeam the Prize.
Nothing moved. There was no sense of inertia. Space just unfolded around us . . . and we were back in the real world.
It was dark out here. Dark in ways that even our trip to the Milk Chocolate Marauder had not prepared me for. Space slid away like a waterfall of emptiness, bottomless and velvet in every direction. It seemed even darker because the bulk of the Koregoi vessel blocked the light of the Milky Way.
Certainly other galaxies floated out there in the dark, but they were so unimaginably distant that they hadn’t even yet begun to grow larger in perspective. They didn’t cast much light at all.
We were alone in a haunting emptiness, and I felt my heart thrum in my chest. It was terrifying out here—terrifying and beautiful and strange. This was alien country, a place not even my people, spacers born and bred, routinely went. We were far from help or any contact. This was the realm of unmanned probes and science teams and the sort of explorers and theorists and prospectors who probably needed their rightminding adjusted just a little bit.
But here we were. And home was really far away.
“Singer,” I said, trying not to sound too terrified. “What just happened?”
“I wish I knew.” A short pause. “No technical fault. No power interrupt. Our white bubble just . . . failed.”
Farweather hadn’t made any moves for the door, despite my turning away from her. It was a big-enough ship that she could get lost in it as easily as I had, if she managed to slip my watch, and the idea of playing cat-and-mouse through this damned ridiculous giant vessel with her again turned my stomach. Fortunately, she didn’t seem as if she wanted to brave her own weapons—in my hands now—or maybe it was Singer’s attention that was keeping her honest.
Now, under the circumstances, there was an infelicitous turn of phrase.
Void, but there was a lot of space out there.
I held my breath, awed by the infinity of darkness. A little terrified by the idea that our alien ship, which we didn’t understand, might be busted.
At least we had a Synarche ship with us now. We were not utterly alone. We could have lost them when the bubble collapsed.
The night spread out forever, empty and silent, utterly cold. Except not really empty, if you could sense what I could sense. Laced and knotted, instead, with a network of dark gravity stretchy and heavy and hauling the bright part of the universe unwittingly in line with its predeterminations.
As the conscious mind follows the density of trauma in the psyche, I thought, so the stars follow this reminder of the primal trauma and let it be their guide across the sky. And then I laughed at myself for being too pretentious, and reading too much George Eliot when I could.
I would have given a lot for a nice fat copy of The Mill on the Floss right about then, I tell you what.
I stretched my silver-limned forehand out to touch the material of the viewport, pressing my fingers against it so hard they tingled. My skin glowed in swirls and filaments, mycorrhizal, shifting emerald-metal webs. Uninsulated, without the shelter of my fox and its regulators, I felt . . .
I felt everything.
The whole universe was out there, as if it were laid on my skin. As if I were a part of it. Raw to it. Flayed, except it wasn’t painful, just painfully near. The night was huge, and I was a part of the night, so I was huge, too. Huge, and spread gaspingly diffuse.
So this was how Farweather did it. She was stripped off. Flensed. She let the universe get under her skin.
And so the universe showed her all sorts of things that were hidden from me.
I could begin to sense some of it: the weavings and twistings of the underlying structures, and some more of those strange gaps I had noticed on other occasions. The bits of the pattern that were too even, too repetitive. In a complicated sequence, just out of my reach, like . . . ones and zeros in binary code. Like letters in an alphabet. Like amino acids in a DNA code.
Profoundly complicated, but a pattern that could be made to make sense. I could sense it better than I had before, as if I were nearer to it, less mediated, now. Touching it with a bare hand instead of a gloved one. I strained after it, thinking that if I could just get . . . close enough . . . just resolve the meaning of the thing, suddenly so much would be made clear. It was so patently artificial. So patently something that had been imposed on the structure of the universe by an intelligence, as opposed to something occurring naturally. The iterations were just too tidy. Intentionally so, as if they had been set up to be noticed.
And between that intentionality, over
laid on it, I could feel, quite suddenly, an enormous swarm of fast-converging shapes.
“We have incoming,” Farweather said.
“There’s something out here,” I told Singer. “I really need that senso online now, so I can share it with you. I don’t care about the rightminding or the regulators.”
“I care about the regulators,” he said.
I grimaced, thinking about my erratic behavior. This wasn’t really the time to bring it up, though.
But I was spared answering, and probably humiliating myself further, because all that velvet night around us was abruptly full of ghosts.
The observation deck was restfully dim to limit internal reflections. And the windows seemed to be coated, or made of something nonreflective, as well. So if I hadn’t had my hand on the transparency, I would have felt that I was standing with no barrier at all between me and the gargantuan shapes of an uncountable number of Ativahikas, drifting out of the darkness, bioluminescing softly.
They were enormous, dark, but limned at the edges against the greater dark beyond. They writhed and lashed in their tattered finery, trailing ragged swaths of elongated skin like the trains of a gown. They shone in the darkness, wiping echoes and afterimages across my dark-adapted retinas.
There were . . . dozens of them. Too many to count, and anyway they were moving, swarming and swirling around us like a flock of mining vessels mobbing an asteroid. Except every single one of them was as long, or longer, than even the enormous Koregoi ship, and mining vessels are generally smaller than the average asteroid.
Singer recovered before I did. I stood transfixed. He said. “We’ve been seeing a lot of these guys.”
His words at least shook me partway out of my reverie. “What do you suppose they want?”
“It’s been a weird trip,” Singer replied.
I realized that the swarm was describing a complex pattern, a kind of dance with our ship at the center, unless that was just perspective fooling me. Off our flank, SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly hung, motionless (relatively speaking). Beyond our common ambit, the Ativahikas looped and spiraled around and over and under us and one another, weaving an intricate choreography. I stared, trying to work out the math behind it. Just as it seemed as if it might resolve itself, begin to make a peculiar sense—I thought of Terran honeybees dancing about honey—the pattern changed.
As chorus line dancers part like a sea in order to deliver up the star, the Ativahikas swirled and separated, forming a whirling ring around the gap in their pattern with a swath of night behind.
Through that gap sailed a single entity. An Ativahika that even to my human eyes and experience looked old.
Its bioluminescence stuttered and crawled over its hide in waves, brighter at the crests and dimmer in the troughs than what gleamed on the fringed flanks of the surrounding individuals. Its hide had paled from the rich, sheening algal teal of the others to a watery turquoise. Even the swags of its intricate drapes seemed sparse and ablated.
Children, it said, its voice internalized and reverberating through me, and not exactly words—more an impression of meanings. Why should we not destroy you, and this terrible thing you have done?
It wasn’t entirely unlike getting a senso translation from somebody like Habren. Communication was being intermediated by the parasites, I realized; the Ativahika was speaking to me through the sparkling little mites refined from the body of its dead species-mate.
No wonder it was mad.
I glanced over my shoulder. Farweather, looking stunned, was rotating slowly toward me. She was hearing it, too, and the expression on her face was that of a child suddenly confronted with consequences for a misdemeanor she had been sure she’d gotten away with.
She took a step back, a dark silhouette against the intricate moving patterns of the Ativahikas dancing in the night beyond. “How are they going to destroy us?” she scoffed, a bravado that I knew by now was her response to fear.
Easily, I thought. Where do you think your ability to manipulate dark gravity comes from? And that was without even considering their size and probable ability to just smash the Koregoi boat.
But saying that would have been pointless, arguing with her a waste of my energy when I needed to focus on the Ativahika and on not dying. And I had no idea how to communicate with the enormous creature who hung beyond the observation deck’s bank of windows, drifting so close I could see the plasticky, impermeable texture of its hide. An eye as big as an insystem skiff loomed over me, a vast elongated face wreathed in drifting tendrils.
It was huge. Inexpressibly huge, like being stared down by a space ship. I took a step forward and pressed my hands against the window once again. The enormous creature’s presence was magnetic. And it wasn’t as if running away would protect me from it, when all it had to do to deal with me was to disassemble the ship.
I guessed we’d just answered the question once and for all of exactly how sapient the Ativahikas were. And how they communicated. Which begged the question of exactly how I was going to communicate with it.
Well, it seemed to have no difficulty making itself understood to me. So I resolved that I would just . . . try to talk, and see what happened.
“I am deeply and profoundly sorry,” I said. “It was not by my choice, what happened. And I did not understand immediately what I had become infected with.”
You went to the ship of the murderers.
“I did,” I said. Honesty was pretty obviously the best policy here. Not just for ethical reasons, but because when you’re confronted with a superpowerful alien who is already in possession of rather a lot of inside information, it’s probably best not to get caught in a lie.
What was your purpose in going there, if you are not yourself a murderer?
“I went to salvage a derelict ship, so that its materials could be reused and so that, perhaps, the hulk could be rescued and repurposed. I did not realize until after I had entered the ship what its purpose was and what crimes the ship had been engaged in.”
And yet, you contain the symbiote.
“I contracted it by accident.” My palms were leaving mists of water vapor on the window where I leaned. I scrubbed them dry on my shirt.
That explanation left out Farweather, but honestly she was welcome to do her own explaining. The Ativahikas would have to crush the Koregoi ship anyway, to get to her, and let’s be even more honest, since we’re already neck-deep in honesty: they couldn’t do that without destroying me and quite possibly Singer as well.
So I was going to keep saying “I.” Assuming the Ativahikas even understood the difference between singular and plural pronouns, or how Terran humans tended to define the boundaries of self, I had no desire to get Singer or Connla (if Connla was even still alive) into trouble with the Ativahika.
Farweather was on her own, though. I wasn’t taking a fall for a mass murderer.
I expected the Ativahika’s next question to be something along the lines of “How do I know if you’re telling me the truth?” but it did not even appear to consider my lying as a possibility. I wondered if that meant it had some way of telling, or if the concept of being bullshitted was as alien to the Ativahika’s experience as the Ativahika itself was to me.
What it said instead was, How would you use this gift, if you were allowed to keep it?
Well, that stumped me. Or stunned me into silence, more precisely.
What had I planned to do, before I got derailed by being kidnapped by pirates?
“I’d use it for the good of the systers,” I said. “Under the direction of our Synarche. I’d use it to help people.”
I knew it was true as I said it. It had a sense of purpose to it that I liked. It made me feel like I was going somewhere, and maybe even knew where that somewhere was.
But you are fleeing the Synarche ship. And you are not going to the Core. You are going to a stronghold of the murderers.
“Yeah,” I said. “About that.”
Hoping Singer would
jump into the conversation, I looked around. But of course he could only hear my side of it, because he hadn’t rebooted and reconnected to my senso yet. Across the deck, Farweather didn’t seem to be having a conversation of her own. Instead, she drifted steadily closer to me, her mouth congealing into a thin line. She could obviously hear both sides of the conversation, unless the ancient Ativahika was saying something different to her.
What was the natural life expectancy of an Ativahika, anyway? How long did it take for one such as this to get old? Not merely old, I judged, looking at the creature again. But venerable. I wondered if it knew the lore of the Koregoi, and if it could share that information with the systers. And what we could possibly offer in exchange to induce it to do so.
It was conceivable—conceivable, and perhaps even plausible—that the very Ativahika to whom I was speaking right this very instant was old enough in its own person to remember our forerunners. I wished I had the opportunity to ask it and find out. But right now, somehow, didn’t seem to be the appropriate time for it.
Maybe some other occasion would present itself, when I wasn’t being interrogated on suspicion of capital crimes.
About that, the ancient one said.
Not words. Not colloquial language, such as I had used. But a sense of it echoing the sentiment I’d just expressed, and reinforcing it.
Please. Tell me more.
So.
I did.
I told it that we had followed ancient roadmarks to the mothballed vessel we were now in, and I told it that before its people had managed to drag us down out of white space, we had been out of control, on autopilot, and that the shipmind and I had been working to hack—or unhack!—the ship to regain control of her. I did not ask it how the hell it and its species-mates had managed to locate us in white space, of all the impossible tricks, nor how they had managed to contact, grapple, and stop us, hauling us back into the unfolded world. If that was what, indeed, had happened.
I did not tell it specifically that Farweather had been involved in the death of the Ativahika we’d found orbiting the Jothari factory ship, or that she’d murdered the Jothari crew. I did not tell it that she was responsible for our previous trajectory, because that would have resulted in physical problems for her, and perhaps physical and definitely ethical problems for me. I didn’t mention her at all.
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