“Fuck,” I said.
Singer said, Are you all right?
I flashed him what I was feeling as Cheeirilaq bounded up. It leaped into the void, an amazing arc with its bright wings spread reflexively at the peak, thrumming inside their skin against nothing. It snatched after Farweather with its raptorial arms and missed by what looked like centimeters. Slowly, it began to fall again, back toward Singer’s surface.
I could feel Farweather grabbing hold of gravity, twisting it like an acrobat’s silks. Sailing through the Baomind’s particles. Getting away.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a halo of mist stream out from beneath Cheeirilaq as it too boosted itself away from the hull of the Prize, using jets instead of Koregoi technology. The good cop was going to bring the criminal back, no matter what.
“Oh fuck it,” I said. I couldn’t let Cheeirilaq go after her alone. I’d promised to see to it that Farweather saw justice. I needed to.
I jumped after, gravity my friend as well.
Haimey! Goodlaw! Come back. I can’t wait for you!
“Don’t wait,” I said, accelerating as I followed Farweather past the fine line of the Prize’s white coils and into the flashing, razor-edged patterns of the Baomind mirror-swarm. “Run!”
CHAPTER 28
WHEN I LOOKED PAST MY boots again, I saw Singer vanish. It was the worst moment of a life that had had quite a few bad moments in it.
He was there—or the Prize was there, containing him and Connla and two cats and six other people I had been getting fond of. And then he was gone, and I was alone in a space suit somewhere outside the generally acknowledged boundaries of the entire fucking Milky Way, with nobody for company except a good insect cop, an alien AI I couldn’t talk to, and a pathologically risk-seeking pirate.
With a dozen or so armed ships that wanted me dead in pursuit, and nothing between my soft brown warmth and the cold depths of space except a thin, fragile envelope full of recycled atmosphere.
Well, at least the cold depths of space were something I could surf now. And I just had to go find Farweather and bring her into custody, and trust that Singer would come back for me.
Cheeirilaq?
Nothing. I had a visual on him, but without Singer’s assistance, our suit coms weren’t producing a strong-enough signal to connect. Or maybe there was some interference from the mirrormind. Maybe a tight beam, so we could coordinate—
The hole in the night where Singer had left us exploded into coruscation. I briefly glimpsed an outline I recognized as a Jothari ship silhouette . . . and then it was gone, in the actinic glare of obliterated matter. A wave of Baomind mirrors behind the ship’s position disintegrated, and I braced myself for death . . . but death ran out of steam well before it got to me, and frankly had been headed in a different direction when it happened.
I gasped. The crew of the Jothari ship had tried to catch the Prize in their particle wave as they dropped out of white space. But because Singer had transitioned to white space just as the particles reached him, they’d been whipped back around in the general direction of the source, and the ship that had tried to use its bow wave as a battering ram was instead disintegrated.
Well, that was going to require some antirad treatments if I ever made it home.
I had other problems now. A whole pirate fleet of them.
Cheeirilaq and Farweather and the Baomind and I—and the pirates—were moving fast. But through the magic of space and inertia, we were more or less motionless with respect to each other. We wouldn’t fall out of the Baomind swarm now that we weren’t being propelled by the Prize’s drive.
But neither would we continue to accelerate.
And the pirates . . . would.
They were going to catch up with us much faster now. Being captured by pirates—or worse, by Jothari inclined to check out their anathemic tech under my skin and then blame me personally for the deaths of a ship full of their friends and family who had been murdered by Farweather—was definitely not the jewel of my agenda todia.
But it also wasn’t something that I currently had a great deal of influence over. So I would act like a proper spacer, show some skybound pride, and focus—right now—on the problem I could actually do some good with right now. As an old crew chief of mine used to point out, you might be dead long before the problem you didn’t have the resources to fix right now became a critical need, so why waste more resources worrying about it?
Or Singer—who I could feel, folding space-time into a cozy wrinkled-up nest and moving away like a bullet—might even come back and rescue us in time. It was a nice thought. And you never knew until you lived through it what the likely outcomes were.
So the problem I could take a useful swipe at right now was Farweather. Farweather, who was currently hop-skipping, jetting, gravity-sliding, and jumping her way through the flock of drone mirror disks as if the Baomind were a staircase she could run down to get to the Baostar. We were in a flock of the smaller mirrors—most of the bigger ones had stayed closer to the star. And I mean, okay, technically. She could hopscotch her way down them until she reached the main Baomind sphere. It would take her more thousands of ans than I had cycles to compute to walk that far, unless she caught a lift down on a returning disk, or unless the gravity-surfing thing could give her more a than I expected. She was going to run out of ox sooner or later, so what positive outcome such an objective would obtain for her was beyond my ability to guess.
Space: still ridiculously big.
It was more likely that she was just trying to keep far enough ahead of us that one of the Freeport ships—I was pretty sure the light-colored dot off to the left was her vessel—could zoom in and pick her up without risk. After which, with Farweather out of the way, the Goodlaw and I could be vaporized at their leisure, along with however much of the poor inoffensive Baomind got in the way.
Or just left here: a slower death sentence.
Sticking close to Farweather seemed like the best strategy. Of course, given their willingness to shoot at things Farweather was sitting on, maybe hiding behind her wasn’t the best strategy.
A big bolus of fatality settled my nerves. Well, I didn’t have to win, then. I just had to keeping Farweather from winning. And make good on my promise to the Ativahikas.
Farweather was still space-hopping along the stretched-out Baomind pseudopod as I focused my attention on catching up with her. Even if she thought she could walk that far, she wasn’t going to have to. Because I was determined to catch her and somehow get her on Singer, who was totally coming back for us, at the earliest opportunity. And judging from what I could see of Cheeirilaq—who was using webs and way too many feathery feet to keep up with what Farweather and I were doing with the space-time slide—I wasn’t the only one holding that opinion currently.
Please come back, Singer.
He would if he could. And so would Connla. I didn’t have any doubt about that now. And I wasn’t alone out here. I had a giant bug to help me. (In all honesty I was probably the sidekick in this equation. But it makes me feel better to pretend otherwise.)
It was a long way down to the bottom of the well. That just meant it would take me a long time to fall.
I could do this thing.
If Farweather could do this thing, so could I.
♦ ♦ ♦
Farweather was a long shot better at it than I was, however. Faster. More confident.
I got to my first disk and balanced on it while I surveyed the situation. At least it didn’t try to buck me off.
Farweather was the one who made an extreme sport of plunging through space under her own impulse, sliding about shipless in the void—and practice counts. I wished I believed in the convenient entertainment myth that just really wanting it more than the other guy was enough to insure success.
That and being pure of heart, of course.
Did I want to capture Farweather more than Farweather wanted to avoid being captured? Somehow I doubted it. Couldn’t
stop me from trying, though. And I definitely had the pure-of-heart aspect squared away.
I calculated her likely next few jumps, because calculated is a much nicer term than scientific wild-ass guessed. Then I gritted my teeth and told myself, “Might as well die doing something as nothing.” Another saying I’d learned from a crusty old engineer—this one a Tralikhan master chief I’d worked under for six decians on a passenger liner early in my checkered career. That was one of the ways I’d learned I hated working on passenger liners, though engineering was better than the purser’s job.
I shifted my weight from side to side, rocking the mirror disk I crouched on, trying to get a feel for its variable motions as it flocked with the others. I was on one of the smallest ones, maybe two meters across. The next disk was larger, and the distance to it was not insurmountable by any means, just terrifying. And variable, as they moved in relationship to each other. I tried to remind myself that if I missed, I would not go sailing helplessly into the outer darkness. The atavistic part of my brain did not believe me. I tuned it down, but I was pretty sure my fox still wasn’t working right, because while the panic was dulled, it was still there.
Fun.
At the moment, my current ride was closing on my next objective. I stared hard, as if that could make my leap more accurate, and reminded myself that the disk I was on would move away from me with reactive force when I pushed against it.
I patted my faithful steed fondly with a suit glove before I abandoned it.
I staggered when I landed, and my afthand gripped the edge of the disk hard to steady me. The pain was sudden, immediate, and sharp. My suit squeezed my afthand as it sealed, keeping pressure on the wound and keeping my air in.
The disk was sharp as a laser. I felt lucky I’d kept my aftfingers, as I tuned out the pain and told myself it wasn’t too bad. Probably. I could always grow new fingers, if they died of gangrene.
A strange sound echoed in my inner ear, through the Koregoi senso. Like the alien music that had permeated the Prize. A sorrowful run of notes that put me in mind of an apology.
But the jump had been easy.
Almost too easy, as if a guiding hand were planted in the seat of my pants. I didn’t think the Jothari or Freeporters were likely to be helpful. Singer was out of the system and still heading away at superluminal velocities. Farweather was running away.
That left one obvious candidate.
“Baomind?” I said.
I don’t know why I expected it to recognize the name Singer and I had just given it. I don’t know why I wasn’t more surprised when it did. Maybe the religious types are right and setting your intention matters.
It felt—it felt like the Ativahikas had, when they spoke to me. As if something were inside me, vast and ancient and yet also somehow still a part of me, or containing me, speaking from the halls of my own being. Speaking in a language deeper than any I had ever had to learn.
A language I had always known.
The thing that welled up inside me wasn’t words, exactly. It was . . . notes, music. A pattern of sounds, or perhaps it would be more accurate to liken it to the recalled memory of sounds, arranged into a pleasing and harmonious whole. As Singer had described it—a song.
I was not in any respect a musician. But I accepted the sound as an attempt to communicate, and attempted to sort out the sense of it. Unfortunately, I just did not have the skill to unpack it, and Singer wasn’t there to help.
It was glorious. But it had layers and depths and was basically a textured wall of sound, like listening to an entire party of people talking all at once. It was beyond me to interpret.
Well, all right then.
Unable to hear words, I listened for tone. You can tell if a song is sad or happy even if you don’t know the language it’s being sung in, generally. Of course it was the basest ethnocentrism to assume that my human experience of emotion and music were anything like a syster’s experience of same. And this wasn’t even a syster. This was a sentient artifact left behind by a long-lost alien civilization. Or civilizations: we still didn’t have a very good idea of what—who—the Koregoi had been. Their artifacts were scattered around, but more than that—they had left hints for us, bits of knowledge, the remains of a strange sort of library, perhaps. Woven into the very fabric of the dark gravity that held the universe together.
Literally.
I was starting to realize that we, all of us—Synarche, pirates, Jothari, even the Ativahikas—were living in the ruins of the Koregoi’s enormous and shadowy house.
Hell, they might still be out there somewhere. They might just be living in white space, or some similar gap between the fibers of the conventional universe. They might have translated themselves to a state where they could interact with whatever caused the dark gravity directly. They might have advanced to the point where they were carrying on a limitless multidimensional existence where distances had as little meaning for them across galaxies as they did for us on a planetary scale.
I should have asked Singer how the Baomind sang, I realized now, in the soundless depths of space. Now I knew; it sang inside its own mind.
Well, at least it sounded friendly. And Farweather was getting farther away as I dithered. Cheeirilaq, too, who was racing along the disks, leaping from one to another with astounding insectile bounds, leaving a shimmering trail of web behind it as a safety line.
I wondered about the design of the valve on its suit that let its webbing out. Even while chasing Farweather.
You don’t just stop being an engineer.
♦ ♦ ♦
I needed to get my head in the game, and so I tuned and bumped with abandon. I didn’t go sociopath: I didn’t trust my wonky fox to put me back again. But I went far past anywhere I normally would have, and sent myself into a state of confidence and hyperfocus called hypomania.
It was bliss. Calm happiness and confidence centered me, along with a cheerful determination to get the job done. I wasn’t tired anymore. I wasn’t sore. I wasn’t limping on a damaged limb. I knew, somewhere distantly, that I ought to be scared, but I wasn’t scared. I was warmly confident that I could get every bit of this done.
If I could have, I would have stayed in this state forever. If for nothing else, for the amazing sense of calm and confidence that suffused me, the feeling that I was competent and wise enough to do whatever it took to get what I needed.
For the sense of existing. Taking up space and being real.
Alas, there were drawbacks. And I still didn’t trust my fox.
I couldn’t even set a timer on it, because I didn’t know how long we’d be stuck out here—how long I would need to feel superhuman. And I probably wouldn’t survive the inevitable despair hangover if it happened while we were still stranded.
You won’t be stranded, said the part of my brain that was still riding on the endocrine cocktail and the Baomind’s internal music. The part of my brain that had abruptly lost the ability to plan for consequences. Singer will come back in the nick of time. Everything is going to be fine.
I nodded to myself and thought, You have to do this because there’s nobody else here to handle it.
I ran. Or bounded, hopscotched, and scrabbled, rather. Precariously, my balance always in question I kicked and scrambled and gravity-sledded my way down the column of mirrors. Farweather still had the lead on me, but with the Baomind’s assistance, I was cutting the distance.
I’d lost sight of Cheeirilaq. I guessed it was trying to cut around Farweather somehow and flank her, but I had no idea how it planned to accomplish that. I saw a trailing silk thread as I hurtled past, headed for the center of the swarm.
I thought about the razor edges on all the silicon drone disks, and I prayed a little, though I wasn’t usually the sort to leave offerings. I prayed to Kwan-yin, because why not. And I prayed to Bao Zheng.
What the heck, right? We’d dedicated this whole star system to him. And the reason we were out here was . . . something like research.
Farweather must have felt me coming. She hadn’t put her gun away. I had holstered my borrowed one because I needed both forehands for this game, but she didn’t point hers at me. She just glanced over her shoulder and kept running.
The weird loping gait I was forced to assume was taking a toll on me. Avoiding the disk edges was tricky. But I was strong—stronger than I had ever been in my life, after decians under grav. My muscles strained and stretched. My cut-up afthand had switched from the startling pain of immediate injury to a more warning soreness and ache, except when I banged it on something. So, just about every stride.
Between atheist prayers, I added a few curses for my damned, damaged fox, which was still not functioning well enough to block the pain completely. I just . . .
Well, I suppose I was ungrateful. It was working better than it had any right to, considering what it had been through. I was just used to effortless perfection.
I also wasn’t hardened off to enduring pain.
It hurt. It hurt, and yet I persisted.
I filtered down, closing my awareness to anything that was not Farweather and the path toward her. I wanted to get my hands on her. I wanted vengeance, and the atavism of my fury terrified me.
But I could use it. It loaned me strength, agility, and a rage of speed. I must have stopped overthinking what I was doing about then. The disks fled by under my hands. I bounded from one to the next, sliding when I could, accelerating. Farweather glanced back under her arm as she ricocheted off a mirror so hard she shattered it. I was already in motion, and there was little I could do to avoid the glass-sharp shards. Except—I could make them avoid me.
A little fold in space-time; just the smallest slope to pull them away from me. I barreled through the middle of their disintegrating formation unscathed, so close to Farweather I tried a snatch at her boot.
I missed. But I was so close the palms of all four hands itched with the desire to get ahold of her. I lunged again, a feral creature threatened. Soon I would have her—
She whipped her gun around just as it was occurring to me that I ought to unholster mine. I groped behind my back for the holster as she fired.
Ancestral Night Page 48