It turns out that ducking is an irresistible response when somebody is pointing a gun at you. It felt better than just floating there like a gaping fool, anyway. And when I rolled sideways, kicked clear of the plate I had been crouching on, and whipped my weapon out to return fire, she ducked too.
The jump turned out to be a terrible idea. I tried to kick the mirror disk at Farweather, and I made her duck. But when I pulled my trigger, the recoil sent me tumbling. Now how had she avoided that?
Right, folding space-time. Of course.
At least tumbling around like a clown made me harder to shoot, though it didn’t help with the “not getting sliced in half by mirror disks” portion of my agenda. What did help was that either I was improbably lucky, or the swarm of flying, solar-powered, razor-edged neurons now tumbling back into orbit around their sun were making an effort to avoid dicing me into one-centimeter cubes. The song in my mind had something of the Ativahika’s tones in it, and I wondered if the Baomind was aware that I was, in some peculiar fashion, their agent.
I wondered why the Baomind wasn’t going after Farweather directly. Then I decided that I was glad that a sentient solar system didn’t believe in direct Judicial intervention.
I wasn’t even scratched. I got a glimpse of Farweather leveling her weapon again as I tumbled, though.
Watching someone fire a chemical weapon in vacuum is surreal. There’s no sound; just a puff of particulate briefly illuminated as the oxidizer contained in the propellant cartridge fires. And if you weren’t braced, you got the humorous outcome I was currently experiencing.
I guessed I was right, and Farweather had braced herself, because I was pretty sure she’d fired again when a disk off to my left shattered into a thousand tiny knives, but I didn’t see her get knocked spinning. Well, if she could do it, I probably could too.
I folded space-time to stabilize. Gravity was my friend.
In so doing, I realized I had inadvertently hidden myself in the pocket I’d made. Like a kitten in a blanket, I was tucked away and would be invisible unless you bumped into me.
“So that’s how she’s been doing it,” I said. To myself. Because I was alone in my pocket universe and nobody else could hear me.
Well, now or never.
I couldn’t see her either. But I could feel her. She was large as life and out in the open.
Maybe that was the trade: Stay erased and still and quiet and be invisible and safe. Take an action, claim space, be noticed—and open yourself to attack by everyone and everything.
Well, it was probably time for that last.
I had dropped myself into . . . not quite white space. But something not unlike white space. Now I had to get myself out.
It was easier than I had feared. I just unfolded what I’d reflexively folded, and was back in my home line of space-time again.
And there was Farweather.
She stood at the dead center of one of the disks, facing away from me, her weapon in her hands, scanning. She looked invincible as she noticed my reappearance—eyes on the back of her head? Koregoi senso?—and began to swing to cover me.
But I could see what she couldn’t.
There was a sticky thread of wet silk adhered to the underside of her platform, its paleness vanishing into the darkness beyond the range of my ability to see it in this terrible frail light.
I wanted to throw something to distract Farweather. I didn’t have anything to throw. So I grav-slid up behind her while she was turning.
I kicked her in the face just as she brought the gun to bear.
She should have gone sailing, but her boots were locked to the disk—probably with a fold, because magnetism doesn’t work on silicates. The whole thing—pirate and perch—revolved in a lopsided orbit after I hit her, the center of gravity somewhere around her thighs. Her arms flung up; she lost the gun. I tumbled the other way, twisting to avoid the disk’s edge more by luck than by skill. My diaphragm spasmed; I couldn’t get a breath; I tasted blood. She must have gotten a piece of me, too, though I hadn’t felt it happen.
I made a grab for the fabric of the universe, and hauled myself into a stable orientation. Just in time to see Cheeirilaq abseil in with strands of webbing gripped in two of its manipulators. At a distance, two disks slammed together and splintered, yanked by the threads the Goodlaw was swinging on. I shrieked inside my helmet as it plummeted directly at the spinning disk with Farweather still riding it.
It was going to get its little feathery feet sliced off.
I still had my gun. And all I had to do was aim carefully enough not to hit Farweather . . . or Cheeirilaq.
Well, if I hit Farweather . . . honestly, she’d done enough to deserve it. Oh, I’d probably still feel bad about it. But she was lucky I was still trying not to.
I aimed and pulled the trigger.
The disk shattered. Under the momentum of the spin, pieces flung away like knives. I ducked, but I’d timed the shot right, and I didn’t get holed that I noticed. Neither did Cheeirilaq.
Farweather dragged herself to a halt facing me at an angle. She glared at the hand where her gun had been and, finding it still empty, began to move toward me with a grim determination to rend in her expression that I recognized from a bar fight or two on a couple of seedy portsides.
I raised my gun. She never got the chance to connect.
Cheeirilaq barreled into her back like a spiky green battering ram, its horrifying raptorial forearms scissoring so fiercely I expected to see Farweather float away in three large pieces. She stayed intact, though, even when the Goodlaw gave her a single savage shake—though she did flop limply after that. One of her hands was free, and it floated beside her like a trailing ribbon, utterly unguided.
Cheeirilaq tossed a loop of silk at another mirror and hauled itself—and its prize—over to stand on a flawless silver surface that swarmed with reflections. It looked down at the body in its raptorial forelimbs. Gotcha.
I guess we were close enough to communicate now.
Farweather lay limp in its grasp, unconscious or stunned. A thin mist of escaping air fogged the area around her. Cheeirilaq turned her in its manipulators like a toddler looking for the end of a carrot. Its tiny head with the enormous, faceted eyes rotated from side to side, glittering like an emerald-studded stickpin.
“Cheeirilaq?”
Forgive me, the Goodlaw said. This will be painful, but it is inevitable.
It pulled one razor-edged leg—the film of its suit must adhere to the carapace behind the razor edges of those blades—and plunged the hooked tip into Farweather’s torso, low, just above her pelvis, on the left.
“Cheeirilaq!”
A red mist of ice fountained. Farweather convulsed. Cheeirilaq steadied her with the other forelimb. When it pulled the impaling one back, it came dragging a mesh of gory wires and a mollusk-like segmented shell that curved in such a way I thought the concave side must have been intended to cradle bone.
An orange light flashed through the blood.
Cheeirilaq flipped the thing overhead, a long movement from a single joint like the lever arm of an atlatl. It sailed away, blinking softly, while the Koregoi mirrors flashed away from it like schools of geometric black fish.
It exploded there, harmlessly, soundlessly.
“She did have a bomb inside her.”
She did.
“How did you know?”
Cheeirilaq cocked its head. The case was hot.
Infrared.
“She’s leaking, Cheeirilaq,” I said.
What? Oh yes, I see. Its mandibles clicked inside its film; the suit mikes picked up the noise. It sounded hungry, but I thought that particular clatter was the mantid equivalent of a sigh. I suppose the civilized thing to do is to take her into custody and heal her wounds.
It used some reaction mass to drift over to me, towing the mirror with it.
“I suppose it is.” I launched myself to the plate next to Cheeirilaq and balanced there. I patted it lightly
with a suit glove on the wing covert. “Come on, old friend. Let’s go home.”
Friend Haimey, it said. You’re leaking, too.
I looked down. There was no pain, but a halo of frozen, rose-red particles of blood drifted near a gash in the side of my suit. The bullet had hit me, after all.
I hadn’t even felt it. As I watched, my heart beat, and another shower of crimson snowflakes joined the rest.
“Oh dear,” I said.
Hold still, the Goodlaw said. As I watched, it webbed the hole in Farweather’s suit closed. Then it turned to me. This is first aid only, you understand? it said. You are not to undertake anything strenuous.
I glanced over at the pirate and Jothari ships that were following us down toward the Baostar, gaining on us, slowly encircling the cluster of disks that sheltered us. It might have been kinder of Cheeirilaq to let me bleed out among the stars. But I was cold, and getting colder, and I didn’t want to die.
“Yes,” I said. I spread my arms, wondering why it didn’t hurt more than it did before I remembered that I’d turned all that off, and I was probably in shock. Shock, I told my fox. Do something about that.
It was already doing whatever it could.
The shock and the tuning didn’t help me when Cheeirilaq stuck two manipulators into my wound, found and pinched off the spurting artery, and tamponaded the whole mess shut with an enormous sticky ball of webbing. It managed me with half its appendages, while managing Farweather with the others, and then it swept me up with a raptorial forelimb as well.
The first Jothari vessel outpaced us, falling toward the occluded sun just a little faster than we were. It turned to bring its guns to bear.
I wondered if they would ask for a surrender.
Cheeirilaq carefully shifted its grip on me so I could see, but it wasn’t pressing on the wound.
You held on to your gun, it said. That is well.
CHAPTER 29
THE BAOMIND DID NOT SLOW. But neither did the flock increase its a. Perhaps it was already falling as fast as it was able. Perhaps it didn’t recognize the threat.
More ships overhauled us. We were englobed. I struggled for awareness, pushing against the fuzzy comfort of unconsciousness as if I were fighting the blear of an unwise drunk. “Something—” I murmured to Cheeirilaq. “Something is coming.”
It wasn’t Singer, though I wanted it to be. I would have felt Singer as a point, a heaviness moving through the folded sky. This was . . . a wave. A wall.
It seemed familiar. I could not say why. I was not entirely myself. I was dying. I knew it with a lucidity like stained glass with a light behind it.
With effort that hurt, I turned to look over at Farweather. Her eyes were open and focused. They tracked me. I felt terrible about that. She was horribly wounded and should be resting.
I was horribly wounded and should be resting too.
We slumped, cradled in the grip of a giant insect. Ever so gently, with the feathery tip of one manipulator arm, Cheeirilaq nudged my hand that still clutched the weapon into my lap, so it wasn’t floating free. I saw that it had webbed the gun to my glove, but left my hand free to move. I could fire the weapon if I had to.
I should not fire the weapon now.
I wasn’t defenseless, then. And I wouldn’t have to be captured. It is well that you held on to the gun.
So that was what it meant.
The gun was in my lap now. I wasn’t going to lose it.
♦ ♦ ♦
My com crackled. “Commander Farweather. This is Defiance hailing Commander Farweather. Please respond if you are able.”
Farweather’s eyes narrowed. I noticed, because it seemed like entirely too much effort to look away from her.
She turned her head. I could tell it was all the effort she could muster, but she looked up at the underside of Cheeirilaq’s mandibled face. I could have told her its brain wasn’t in that tiny head, but I suppose addressing yourself to the sensory equipment is polite across species.
“You saved me,” she said.
I saved us all.
“They . . . detonating.”
They were going to sacrifice you. Yes.
“This is Defiance hailing Commander Farweather. Commander Farweather. Please respond if you are able.”
Farweather nodded. Slowly, wincing. She touched a stud on her glove. The green light of the telltale inside her helmet reflected in her corneas.
“This . . . Commander Farweather,” she creaked. “Hey . . . Defiance. Fuck your mother.”
Well. That wasn’t going to get us picked up as potential friendlies, I guessed.
My fox. My fox was in halfway functioning order again. I could . . . I could use it. I was injured. Badly. But I wasn’t dying right this second, thanks to Cheeirilaq’s intervention.
There were emergency protocols.
Overrides. I could use them to juice myself with a nice, big jolt of adrenaline, for example.
Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.
♦ ♦ ♦
I sat up in Cheeirilaq’s arms.
It hurt. I mean, I guessed it hurt? But it didn’t hurt nearly enough. Nearly as much as it should have.
Friend Haimey. This is unwise.
“Necessary,” I told it.
Friend Haimey! This is unwise!
I hooked my left arm—the one without the gun it its hand—around the Goodlaw’s neck. A gross violation of its personal space. It didn’t seem to mind, and I needed the support.
I hoped they were listening hard on the suit frequency they were using.
I tuned my com to it. I took as deep a breath as I could manage, and I tried to think. All I had was the standard trade creole. Farweather spoke it like a native.
Maybe the Jothari knew how to translate from the human trade language, if it was something the Freeporters used.
I had to hope.
“Jothari ships!” I said. I tried to enunciate and speak slowly. I’m not sure I managed more than a mumble. “Jothari people. You do not have to live as outlaws. Listen to me. I am Haimey Dz, chief engineer of SGV I Rise From Ancestral Night, and I am a duly appointed representative of the Synarche of Worlds.” Stretching a point, but I was in Singer’s chain of command, and frankly there was no one else out here who could negotiate except for Cheeirilaq, who didn’t appear to have thought of it.
Silence fell into my hand.
I nerved myself. “The Synarche acknowledges that it has a debt to the Jothari species. That mistakes were made in contact, and that reparations are owed.”
Their crimes are terrible, Cheeirilaq said, but I thought it spoke only to me.
They have committed crimes. It’s likely that they owe reparations too. That is a matter someone with a higher diplomatic ranking can assess.
That would be . . .
Yes. Anyone. Hush.
I strained my ears, which was silly, because any answer would come over my suit radio and com.
Eventually, after what I could only assume were intense private negotiations, a metallic translated voice reached me. “Your Synarche destroyed us.”
By the Well. They were talking. They were talking.
Cheeirilaq’s tiny head pivoted on its narrow neck, its multifaceted main eyes regarding me. It did not speak.
“It was long ago and we were young,” I said. “Please. I know you cannot forgive us. Please accept that the Synarche acknowledges that a terrible wrong has been done and wishes for peace between us, and to make reparations.”
That wave, that wall, was still coming. It ached in my sinuses like dropping pressure. The pain was blinding.
Around it, I heard the Jothari—who had not given me a name or a rank—speak.
“Reparations.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll punish us.”
“We wronged you.”
“You will find it wrongful that we harvest the star-dragons.”
That was where it got sticky. “You would have to stop that, yes.” But you s
hould stop it anyway, because it’s wrong!
I kept my mouth shut. Sometimes a thing can be true, and not for immediate sharing. That was, Connla had assured me more than once, how diplomacy worked.
“You will punish us.”
“That is not for me to decide. The Ativahikas will probably want reparations from you, the same as you will, I expect, want reparations from us. I request only that you open diplomatic relations with the Synarche. You do not have to choose to accept our justice.”
Cheeirilaq twitched.
I tapped it with my heel.
“You will take our knowledge and harvest them yourselves.”
Cheeirilaq twitched again. This time I didn’t argue.
“If you talk to us, there can be peace. Negotiation. Trade. You could come out of hiding. We could find your people a world to settle on. A world of your own.”
“So you could own us. So we would have a vulnerable heart once more, just begging to be destroyed.”
“No—”
“So you could own us. That is not reparations. Synarche, we are not interested in your lies.”
The com connection died. I pushed my hand against my helmet because I couldn’t reach my aching forehead. It was the hand with the gun webbed to it, so I used the back.
“Bugger,” I said.
It took me a moment to identify the terrible bubbling sound coming over my com as Farweather laughing at me between swallows of blood. I resisted the urge to smash her fucking helmet in, but only barely.
“Guess . . . they don’t want . . . charity.”
“You shut up,” I said. It was our fault. It was our fault, or at least some of it was, and I wanted to fix it. But the immediate situation was her fault, as much as it was anyone’s. And I wanted somebody to blame.
I looked around. The Jothari vessels remained in position, interspersed with Freeport ships. The thing was, I was pretty sure we did owe them reparations. But getting the Synarche to agree might be easier than getting the Jothari to believe.
They had committed crimes; it was true. But they were driven to those crimes by our own crime of having destroyed them, even if it was indirectly. And accidentally.
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