Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 9

I SLID INTO THE AIRLOCK UNMOLESTED but soaking in anxiety hormones to the point where Singer actually reached in through the senso and twiddled me down a notch for the second time in a few minutes. I was aggravated about it until the calm chemicals hit, and then I remembered that there was a reason why I’d let him talk me into giving him the keys. When I get really bad, I don’t always remember that the terrible, distracting atavism is something I can fix, or even that I ought to.

Singer never forgets.

He was living up to his name when I stepped inside, engaged in a four-part vocal round with himself that seemed to have something to do with the world’s largest Mexican restaurant, by which I deduced that it was an antique. Singer also has a thing about madrigals, which means that Connla and I know a lot of madrigals.

“Did you get all that?” I asked from the airlock.

“Enough of it,” Connla said dryly.

One of the reasons we picked out our tug was that Singer liked the acoustics.

He was singing softly enough that the cats weren’t hiding. I wriggled out of my station shoes and shooed the cats into their acceleration pods—well, I shooed Mephistopheles. Bushyasta, I just picked up, fitted her tiny little breathing mask, and plopped her in while she cracked one eye and purred at me; apparently doing anything else under quarter grav was entirely too much effort for anybody, and at this point I was inclined to agree. Connla was in the common cabin, finishing a set of pushups. I tossed him a towel and nearly missed because I’m terrible at arcs under gravity, but he snaked an arm out and caught it anyway.

Singer brought his round to a perfectly timed and elegant close.

Connla pulled a shirt on. “What does wheelmind say about debarkation?”

“No clearance yet.”

“We filed shifts ago. This begins to resemble intentional obstructionism.”

“Yep,” I agreed. “They’re keeping us here. But if so, why did they give us a full load of fuel and consumables?”

“We’re not the only crew who could use those,” Connla said ominously. “Singer, give me a direct patch to wheelmind? And to Colonel Habren, if they’re available. But the AI is what I really want.”

“You have it.”

Connla had long legs, and it only took him a couple of bounds to make it into the command cabin. I was a little behind him, and dropped into my acceleration couch without anybody having to mention it. Singer’d stretched a film across the gangway. We both had to walk through it to get from the aft end of the tug, so I had a little bit of breath protection. I looked through it at my painted hands as I settled my harness, and wondered if it would be enough. Not being able to see the webwork of the Koregoi senso on my skin seemed abruptly wrong and worrying.

Connla took a deep breath and put his most professional voice on. “Wheelmind Downthehatch, this is Salvage Tug Terran Registration number 657-2929-04 requesting immediate leave to depart.”

“Request pending,” the station AI said.

Connla started the EM drive. “Can you give me a reason for the delay, wheelmind?”

“Stationmaster Habren would like to speak with you before you depart.”

“Our exit flight plan has been filed for five shifts, wheelmind. Please advise if there is an error in it that requires correction?”

“No error,” the wheelmind replied. It had a typically musical AI voice, in a higher register that would cut through noise. I wondered what pronouns it liked.

“Definitely,” Singer said, just for the three of us, “being stalled.”

“Please stand by for transmission from Stationmaster Habren.”

This is being designate [Colonel][Habren]. Salvage tug 657-2929-04, please stand down engines. You are not cleared to depart.

“Reason?” Connla said, shortly.

Singer’s hull resounded with unexpected impact like a steel drum. I jumped against the restraints, a moment of panic confusing my reactions before it came under control and I identified the sound. Someone was hammering with heavy fists or some other resilient object on the stationside door of the airlock.

The deep voice of the symbiote-infected pirate, sonorous and trying not to sound irritated, boomed through the intercom. “Just hold up a min! I only want to talk to you!”

Connla glanced over at me.

I shook my head. “There’s your reason.”

Wheelmind’s voice broke in again. “Salvage Tug designation 657-2929-04, please be aware that you are incurring resource obligation by refusing to stand down. The air you are breathing belongs to somebody else.”

“Void and Well,” Connla cursed. The tug shivered as Singer increased the power to the EM drive.

We could try to pull ourselves loose using that, but would probably just wind up screwing up Downthehatch’s orbit in a lot of annoying ways that would be time-consuming and irresponsibly resource-expensive to fix and which we would incur obligation for. While staying, ourselves, stuck right to it. We could try to blow the docking bolts, but that risked damaging Singer’s airlock—and spaceworthiness.

Connla snapped, “Wheelmind, this is Salvage Tug Terran space ship registration number 657-2929-04, advising that if you do not withdraw the docking bolts, we will have no choice but to engage our white drive.”

I gaped. We might survive it, being safe… ish… inside our AW bubble. The station—

The loss of life would be extreme, as whatever bits of the station extended into Singer’s white bubble were suddenly dropped into the universe next door. We’d be stuck with a big chunk of space station attached to our docking ring. The wheel… would be stuck with a great, gaping hole.

I was still reeling with the enormity when Singer’s hull vibrated gently with the scrape of withdrawing docking bolts, and we drifted free. Vibration doesn’t carry in a vacuum, so the pounding cut off instantaneously, and in the immediate silence that followed, Connla said, “Can’t follow our filed flight plan. I’m going to have to live-stick this. Haimey, if your passenger notices any obstacles before I do, I’m sure we’d all appreciate a heads-up.”

A patter of light impacts rang through the hull—not dangerous, not high mass and not high velocity. The shower of particles and debris shot past us, streaking by the windscreen, glittering as they turned. I whipped my head around reflexively, which was ridiculous, but the lizard brain has its own protocols.

Senso and Singer pivoted my vision to the rear of the ship. Senso showed me a big human or close analogue standing framed in the open airlock door. The human had dumped the lock, blowing out into space after us whatever small supplies and bits of things we hadn’t yet loaded and stowed.

I hoped we hadn’t just been pelted with anything important.

The human figure was Farweather.

I didn’t know how I knew, because she was anonymous in a heavy-duty vacuum suit, but I knew it like I knew the back of my hand. Better, my own hands having become fairly alien to me of late.

Behind Farweather, the glossy orange-red of the decomp door showed brilliantly. She was silhouetted against it in the pale decomp suit. How she’d held her position against the outrush of air I couldn’t imagine.

Or rather, I couldn’t imagine—but I knew. Because my parasite felt the shift in mass, the way Farweather linked herself to the structure of the wheel, and the way the station’s rotation faltered and its orbit began to adjust to compensate. She was suddenly massive enough that the wheel just… stuck to her.

Its rotation was whipping her out of sight. I breathed a sigh of relief, imagining Farweather glowering through her face screen.

I said, “Punch it.”

“Punching,” Connla replied.

Just as something much larger than our little pile of abandoned consumables launched itself away from the vanishing airlock, directly at Singer’s stern.

“I should probably tell you guys—”

“Brace for evasion,” Singer said.

I yowled like one of the cats as he twisted us to the left and down. The projectile should have slipped past us comfortably after the course correction, except—

“It’s her,” I said.

“Her.”

“The—it must be the pirate. Farweather. I can feel her.”

“She jumped after us?” Connla yelped. “Of all the lunatic—”

Singer said, “Can you feel why I don’t detect any thrusters, even though her trajectory is altering to match ours?”

“Yes.” I could feel her bending space. Moving herself, by changing the shape of the universe. And in some peculiar way I could just… sense her presence. “She’s like me.”

“Like you.” Singer sounded dubious.

I scratched my wrist, leaving welts through the film. There was a dead sentient embedded under my skin. I couldn’t think about that now. Maybe I couldn’t think about it ever.

“She’s got the parasite, okay? She’s probably the person who was on the Marauder. The mass-murderer.” There was a moment of stunned silence. Connla looked over at me, and even Singer had no immediate response. If either of my shipmates had been about to speak after that, I cut them off by changing the subject. “She’s accelerating. Gaining on us… Transition?”

“There’s a lot of clutter this close to the station,” Connla said. “Don’t want to sweep up somebody’s lightsail in our bow wave and take them for a ride.” He wove us through a flotilla of tiny, glittering pleasure craft as he said it, then ducked us under the pushed-in muzzle of an insystem mining server towing a seemingly infinite strand of cargo pearls.

“She’s still coming.”

“We’re still leaving,” Connla said, and spun us onto a new trajectory.

The thing about the EM drive; it’s cheap, but it’s stately. We weren’t moving fast, exactly, and I could feel the pirate slinging herself down gravitational slopes and along flares of magnetic force like some kind of interplanetary traceuse.

So this was how the Ativahikas did it.

“What’s she going to do if she catches us?” Connla asked. “Punch through the hull?”

I thought about supermassive fists. “Maybe?”

Then I realized something.

What she could do—was doing—I could also do. Maybe.

The parasite tingled with awareness in my skin. What she was doing to space-time—why couldn’t I do it too?

But how? What was the procedure?

I’d tried talking to the parasite—of course I had, wouldn’t you?—and the parasite was notable in never actually talking back. It gave me sensory information, apparently, and that was all. I had no idea how I might get it to take and act on information from me. We’d used the map it generated to slingshot us around some strange gravity curves on the way here, but I hadn’t changed anything.

Except. When I’d first contracted it.

My hand had felt… really heavy.

“We’re not accelerating as well as we ought to be,” Connla said. “It’s like something is damping the drive, or like we’re hauling more mass than we should be.”

Oh, so she could do that too, could she? Less and less did I want to fight her.

“I’ll go get her,” I said tiredly. I reached to uncouple my harness. I had my film; maybe the parasite would protect me a little bit.

“And fistfight her? Yeah, I don’t think so,” Connla said. “New plan.”

She was less than a kilometer away now, a little figure shining silver in her suit as the primary’s rays limned her. We dodged around a ferry—Void, the fines—and she made up a few meters by adjusting to the hypotenuse of our maneuver.

But wait.

What if we were really massive, and being pulled in a particular direction by that mass? Down the slopes of space-time, like some kind of snowboarding dirtsider. They go in for all kinds of crazy sports down there.

The flying suits look like fun, I admit it. Especially on a dense-atmosphere low-grav world, like the homeworld Cheeirilaq’s species came from. Man, I bet they got a lot of tourism interest from extreme sports types.

I imagined myself, Singer, the whole lot of us—heavy. Pushed from behind by the expansion of space-time. Pulled from before by its compression. Exactly what the white drive did, only without the bubble. Sliding down a sudden and unexpected regional gravity well.

“This is going to fuck up orbital dynamics alllll over this system,” I said out loud as Singer leaped down the slope in space-time I had just constructed, and spun on a long arc away from the crowded environs of the wheel.

“It doesn’t when the Ativahikas do it,” Singer said, so I knew he was monitoring my senso. “Maybe the Koregoi knew a trick.”

“Do you think the Koregoi engineered the Ativahikas?”

“I think now is a lousy time to theorize!”

Staring out the forward port wasn’t helping me relax into guiding the tug. I closed my eyes and tried to extend myself into the world as you do when you meditate. Seeking the alpha state, concentrating on my breath, extending filaments into the universe as I tried to relax into a place of calm and comprehension. Sometimes the old-fashioned tricks are the best.

Meditation is supposed to be centering; focusing. It is not supposed to feel as if you have just dropped a huge stone down the well of your being. But as I reached out, something huge and nonexistent slammed itself into the center of my awareness. It felt like it splashed me up against the edges of myself—all the physical sensations of a shattering revelation without the actual epiphany. Hunger cramped my stomach; chills and aches filled my limbs. I shuddered and gasped.

But when I reached back, I realized that we were opening a lead on the pirate. I could feel her back there, her own little dimple in space-time dropping away from ours. When I reached back, I felt a kind of tickle, as if her attention reached out to me in return. My head snapped around; for a moment I would have sworn that somebody said my name.

I could also feel the swirl of the system, all its tangles of influences and shifting patterns of interaction. How does any system manage to find a stable pattern? It boggles the mind.

“Take us off the plane and punch out,” I told Connla, crawling back into my own awareness enough to make my mouth form sounds.

“On it,” he said, resuming control. We had as much v now as I could give us without knocking myself unconscious, which seemed like it would be poor foresight. I hoped there wasn’t a second pirate ship lurking up here—but I couldn’t feel one, and I thought with this new awareness a white bubble would have stood out like a hard nodule, a bead under the skin of space. That wouldn’t stop the one back on the station from coming after us, though.

I let my awareness collapse. I fell back in my couch, soaked in so much nervous and exertion sweat that the film was not keeping up with it. I turned my head with great effort and looked over at Connla. “Maybe turn down the psychopathy a little bit next time. Wow.”

“It got us out, didn’t it?” He gave me his charming rogue smile.

I swallowed sickness. “Would you really have done it? If Habren had been sophipathic enough to push the issue—”

“Connla wouldn’t have to,” Singer said. “He addressed his remark to the wheelmind. The AI would be forced to act to preserve as much life as possible.”

I said, “I guess we know why Habren had the wheelmind delaying us. They were stalling us until the pirates made up their minds what to do. Oh, we just racked up so much punitive obligation with those traffic violations.”

“I don’t mean to make you nervous,” Singer said, “but we’re going to have bigger problems than debt when we get back to civilization, unless we can prove something on that stationmaster. Criminal charges, my friends.”

“I hope it was the stationmaster,” I said. “I liked the Goodlaw.”

On the other hand, I wouldn’t feel betrayed, exactly, if it turned out that Cheeirilaq was in league with the pirates. I liked it, but that didn’t mean I trusted it.

And the pirate had been charismatic, but that didn’t mean I liked or trusted her, either. Connla and Singer get a bye, because I’ll never feel attracted to either one of them, but I think I mentioned I got all that endocrine stuff turned off. It’s better for me if I’m not attracted to people physically, because wanting people makes me want to trust them. I’ve never been able to nourish any desire to fuck people I don’t trust. And vulnerability? It’s just too fucking scary.

So why let yourself feel lonely when you already know that having a relationship won’t do anything except make you anxious about whatever terrible thing might happen next, and if you turn off the anxiousness, you’ll feel like an idiot when something bad inevitably happens?

“Well, they’re both suspect for now,” Connla said brutally, hands flying over his panels. “Everybody we interacted with is suspect.”

He was doing a lot of his flying through senso, but the ability to delegate functions to your reflexes and muscle memory is, so far, irreproducible. I can’t do the math in time to catch a softball if somebody tosses me one—but my body, sufficiently practiced, can just reach out and snag it out of the atmosphere.

Well, unless I’m under gravity. In which case my body has no clue what it’s doing.

We couldn’t, obviously, count on station guidance on the way out. So he was doing it all himself, and it was impressive to watch.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Connla, because we both knew the stationmaster and the Goodlaw weren’t the only people who were suspect. “You liked Pearl.”

He grunted. “I hope it was the stationmaster, too.”

“New problem,” Singer said, merciless. “Where exactly in the six thousand, three hundred, fifty-one systems; eight thousand, eight hundred, and seventy-three worlds; and tens of thousands of miscellaneous outposts—estimated from best available recent date—are we going now, oh my fugitive crew?”

Singer always asked the best/worst questions. I stalled, because organic life-forms need a lot of boring time to think, not having as many parallel processing pathways as our AI brethren.

“Are there really that many inhabited worlds?”

“Counting moons, but not counting asteroid outposts,” he said. “Remember, some systems have multiple habitable worlds, especially when you start counting methane and chlorine and water breathers.”

Now that he mentioned it, I’d heard that Terra had come to arrangements with some systers about a colony on a moon of one of the gas giants there. Ox breathers like me don’t have much use for a nice, rich, frozen ball of methane, but somebody sure does.

More power to them, I say. There are benefits of having a friendly noncompetitive syster civilization next door. Somebody farther out in the system might be able to catch an inconvenient rock before it bumps into your homeworld, for example. And there’s exploration to consider as well. Much easier for somebody who’s at home in an environment to map it and science it up than somebody who needs a drone or a pressure suit to get there.

I thought of Cheeirilaq, and how logistics made it impossible for many of us to have any chance at all of visiting each other’s homeworlds except for virtually. I’d argue that that’s a strength of the space natives. We come from the same world, even if we breathe different things, and our perspectives overlap in ways people like Connla have to work much harder to appreciate.

We’re all little warm things in the bosom of the great Cold, after all. Well, okay. Except for those methane types. They’re generally not very warm at all. Though warmer than space, which is something.

“We could go join the Freeports,” Connla said, deadpan.

“I think they’re trying to eat us,” I replied. “I suspect any offers of assistance from that quarter come with fishhooks.”

“Piracy really isn’t my thing,” Singer agreed.

I couldn’t believe it was me who offered, “Head for the Core, explain what happened, turn ourselves in?”

“You’re full of interdicted tech without a good explanation for how it got there, and no way to get it back out again,” Connla said. “I’m sure your by-the-book Goodlaw friend is likely to mention that in the next packet.”

“If Habren lets it,” I said. I had a feeling about how free and clear communications going in and out of that station were. “Why are the pirates still after us?”

“How did they track us?” Connla countered.

“Oh, I think I know that.” I sighed. “Another way I’m a liability. Singer, I’m sorry, this isn’t making things easier for you, either.”

“They can’t have tracked you,” Singer said. “They were at the station when we arrived. They must be thinking that we tracked them.”

I knew that a Synarche service summons wasn’t the sort of thing you just… shrugged off. And I… didn’t have anywhere else to go.

“Posit,” Singer said. “The pirates are still after us because they want you, Haimey.”

“They were willing to blow me up pretty good along with the rest of us back at the factory ship.”

“Are we sure those are the pirates?” Connla asked.

“Well,” I cursed. “Don’t tell me there’s a third party running around with a dose of Koregoi-Ativahika nanobug parasites. I’m not sure I’m ready to incorporate that.”

Singer said, “There’s a possibility that they didn’t know you had the Koregoi senso on board, at that point. Or that you’d integrate it and be able and willing to use it. Also, they shot us free of the Jothari ship. They could have just blown us up.”

“Huh,” Connla said. “Right. So we presume for now that they are, in fact, pirates. Why do they want us now when they didn’t before?” He picked at his thumbnail thoughtfully.

“They reviewed the Milk Chocolate Marauder’s files and saw me get jabbed. Or Farweather just felt the stuff in me.” I shrugged.

I thought for a few moments about things that didn’t make sense. Like the pirates not destroying us outright, if that was their goal. Like Zanya Farweather knowing who I was, and at least a little bit about my history.

“I bet the person who sold us that intel about the Jothari ship was working for Habren, or these pirates,” I said. “This Farweather person said a few things that made me think we were expected. I think we were brought out here on purpose.”

Singer said, “They think we have information. They wanted us—Haimey?—alive and possibly cooperative. And they wanted that before they knew Haimey had the Koregoi senso on board.”

“That’s not creepy,” Connla said.

“Okay,” I said. “So what do we know that we don’t know we know?”

“More to the point,” Connla said, “what does the parasite know?”