Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 16

I CHOKED IN DISBELIEF, AND CLUTCHED my throat—or my suit, over where it felt like my throat was closing. The sparks spread, dying quickly as they ran out of oxidant, already beginning to fall into orbit as they felt the powerful draw of the Well. A cloud of vapor puffed into void and froze, sparkling as the flakes of oxygen and carbon dioxide and nitrogen and water vapor turned, expanding and tumbling with the momentum of decompression.

Larger chunks of what had been a ship broke apart, trailing cables and linkages and sparkling sprays of debris. I saw a big piece of the aft hull—identifiable by the stump of a derrick—blown off at a high rate of speed, tumbling end over end.

“Singer!” I choked on it, but I got it out.

No answer.

Singer. Connla.

The cats.

Ice spiked through me, a moment of sheer panic, and then my own body clarified the adrenaline rush and settled me into a perfect, terrible calm. No tuning needed; this was the atavistic survival response in a situation for which it had evolved, through millions of ans of trial and error where the errors got you eaten.

“Connla?”

Reaching out into the senso toward where he should have been felt like trying to grab a rope with an amputated hand. I had no coms, and access only to the fox in my wetware; no uplink at all. And looking at the sky overhead, I didn’t think there would be an answer.

I had a pretty good view of what remained of Singer… and it wasn’t promising. A sparking hulk turned in space, white coils snapped into an arc and unraveling like a sliced, fraying segment of hose. The tug was dark except for the silent sizzle of electricity, already fading. There would be electron beams I couldn’t see, invisible because they were bridging gaps in vacuum, in addition to the blue and green and yellow arcs formed where there was something made of atoms for the electricity to excite.

The other Synarche ships were there. Within sight now. I could try to reach them. I had to try to reach them, although with nothing but my naked suit com, broadcasting from inside the Koregoi prize…

Let’s just say I didn’t fancy my chances.

But other than those Synarche vessels, I was completely alone, and I had no idea if Singer had informed them that he had crew aboard the salvaged vessel before he… before the explosion.

What had happened to Singer? What the Well could have gone so terribly wrong? There had been no sign that the Koregoi ship was taking any automated action. I hadn’t felt any tremor though the hull, as if a mass driver had been activated, and there had been no visible trace of energy weapon. A ship built by people who could manipulate gravity at a whim might have other weapons, though—weapons out of fantasy, repulsor rays and rattlers.

I realized that I wasn’t lying down anymore. That somehow, without realizing it, I had rolled upright and run to the arched dome of the observation pod.

I leaned on the transparent shell and looked around for something that I could jury-rig to in order to make an antenna. That simple tech; a pre-space juvenile could build one with a bit of wire. I just needed something conductive that extended into the outside, or that connected to something else conductive that likewise extended.

The adrenaline was wearing off, and behind it came the grief and horror I didn’t have time to feel, slicking up my palms and eyes. I shut it down, tuned harder than was possibly safe, knowing that if I pushed myself as hard as I needed to it was likely to destabilize my brain chemistry for diar unless I spent a long, careful time coming down off the bump I was giving myself. Dumping a lot of brain chemicals into yourself abruptly tends to send the system into wild spins. And I wasn’t as good at tuning this stuff as…

…as some people.

I got myself together with a couple of deep breaths and didn’t look at my air gauge. There was plenty of atmosphere in the Koregoi ship if the option became breathing it, or suffocating. Then I began quartering the edge of the dome, looking for something I could use to boost a signal.

It was all smooth and organic, as if the damned bubble had grown there.

After a few minutes, I looked up, frustrated, to judge the position of the Synarche ships. I froze, horrified, as I realized that they were pulling away. There was no external sign of their trajectory—no flare of a chemical burn—as they were operating off the EM drive. But they were definitely backing off. Leaving me alone in here.

It made sense, of course. It was the safe and sensible thing to do. Something had just destroyed Si—destroyed the tug, destroyed the tug, dammit—and the smart money would have bet on the source of that aggressive action being the Koregoi vessel we’d just dragged up from the abyss of deep time.

The Synarche ships had approached cautiously. Now they were hightailing it back to a more respectful distance at maximum a, hanging v on their survey ships like garlands. I didn’t blame them; I just wished I was out there with them. Or better yet, that all of us were.

Stop thinking about Singer.

Half of a tug turned in space. Another piece had blown away, and I could not locate it now. It was conceivable that somebody had survived in there. In an airlock or a safety pod. If they were suited up already. It was conceivable.

Sure it was.

I shook my head in awe at how screwed I was, and started thinking about what I could do for food, once I tried the air and it didn’t kill me—which was going to be a little while yet, in any case. There was a lot of ship to explore, and the Synarche ships would be back. Staying alive… Well, you could go a long time without food. Water that I could be sure was safe, and oxygen, however—each need was orders of magnitudes more urgent than the one before.

I leaned my head back and blinked through another flush of tears. Then threw myself back away from the observation dome in a comically useless reflex as something swept through the tiny—in space terms—gap between Singer and the Koregoi ship.

You can’t see a ship in white space. In the normal course of events, you can just barely detect it with gravitometric sensors, though that becomes easier if it’s not moving. Or more precisely, not folding your region of space past its stationary location at a really incomprehensible rate of something that functionally mimics speed.

It turned out that I could sense a ship in white space pretty well now, though. Or at least, the Koregoi senso could. And my reflexes had opinions about large things moving extremely fast near the fragile soap-bubble of an observation dome.

A few moments after the gut-twisting blur of a ship in white space, I sensed something even more unnerving. A faint impact rang through the Koregoi ship—easy to sense because I happened to be in close contact with it, by which I mean sprawled flat and trying to catch my breath for the second time that dia.

Something—something not terribly big or extremely fast-moving, but with enough momentum to send a shiver through the vessel—had just struck the hull.

I froze for a moment, hunched in an ancient mammalian cringe posture—chin tucked, shoulders popped around my ears like epaulets, forehands half-raised. Waiting for the next explosion, the one I would hear and feel instead of seeing at a distance, in a position that would do absolutely nothing to protect me from it.

Won’t have to worry about starving to death, I thought.

And then I… didn’t die.

A few more moments went by, and I didn’t die some more.

I peeled myself out of my defensive crouch. Centimeter by centimeter, I straightened. I looked around, aware that if I had been on a station, I’d be a good candidate for that dia’s monitor follies programming right about now.

Isn’t it amazing how you can be embarrassed as anything even when nobody’s looking? If I were a cat, I would have been washing my ears. Except for the helmet being in the way, of course.

Not being dead, I tried to feel my way into the ship’s senso again. It felt… echoing, empty in there without Singer. But I persisted. Nothing like work to aid compartmentalization, right?

I let my awareness filter into the ship’s sensor network, like ink diluting into water. It was surprisingly easy—more a matter of relaxing my boundaries than pushing through a membrane. It seemed to work better, actually, when I let go of my intentionality and just let the Koregoi senso handle the transition itself. I had a sort of proprioception, as if the ship were an extension of my nervous system.

The ship was a great hollow shape, its drives quiescent but waiting, its spaces full of secrets I would have to explore if I wanted to have a chance of surviving until the Core ships decided it was safe to come back. If it was safe to come back.

Was it safe to come back?

I was paying more attention to my planning than to what I was feeling through the ship, so I was utterly blindsided when the quivering tendrils of my sensibility, so to speak, brushed up against an unexpected, and unexpectedly familiar, human presence. And not a welcome one. I snapped back into myself in shock and dismay. Well, additional dismay—I already had plenty, but now I had an even more immediate problem than possibly pathogenic atmosphere and a soon to be pressing need for hydration.

It was a greedy, grabbing awareness, and when I brushed it I recoiled as it snatched after me.

It was Farweather. And she was on the ship with me. And she knew I was here.

The projectile that struck the Koregoi hull had been a pirate.

My pirate. Or the pirate who wanted to collect me, which I suppose amounts to the same thing.

I froze as if under the shadow of a predator’s wings. I needed to escape. Viscerally, out of the kind of instinctive, atavistic sense of self-preservation that—if you don’t answer it—results in crippling anxiety or blind panic. My heart rate accelerated, and for a long moment I just stood listening to it, feeling my pulse tremble in my fingertips so hard they seemed to pulse against the inside of my suit. I was too terrified even to scream.

Do something, said a voice in my head that didn’t sound like my own. Do something, do something, do something—

Do what, though?

After what seemed like a half an, I realized who I was pleading with, and what I had been waiting for. And that Singer wasn’t coming to rescue me this time, or to tweak my brain just enough to make me functional again.

I was in the stage of panic where it’s hard to do anything. Hard to make decisions, because they all seem like they will end in catastrophe. What if I tuned wrong? What if I made myself too calm, and I didn’t react appropriately to the threat? My attitude jets were misaligned, and all I was succeeding in doing was burning fuel and just spinning myself in circles.

So that was the first thing to fix, if I wanted to live. Calm the hell down, Dz. Thinking the command to myself alone was enough to release me from the paralysis, and I managed to tune myself to something more like a functional state of hyperarousal and settle in. Tuning myself always made me nervous—too easy to check right out of reality, if you got too reliant on it, and never worry about whether your decisions were smart or ambitious, when you could just turn off feeling weird about them later.

That was how I justified letting—making—Singer do most of the work, and why I always made sure there were strict time limits on his interventions. But I didn’t have Singer now, and panic paralysis over that fact wasn’t helping me.

I turned down my grief, too. There would be time for it later, and I knew I would have to experience it, because even with rightminding, experiences repressed and unexperienced lead to a series of sophipathologies. Anxiety being one of them.

The last thing I really needed was more anxiety.

I reached back into my fox for the precise memories of what it had felt like when Farweather struck the hull. Could I use the sense of impact, possibly combined with that weird proprioception, to determine where she was? Where she might be gaining entry to the ship? Where she was now, in relation to me?

Could I hide, or fight, or set up an ambush?

Probably, I thought. Yes, probably. I didn’t touch her awareness again, but I reached out gently, trying to sense her weight in space without actually making contact with her. I was pretty sure that if she had a sense of my whereabouts, she would be heading for me. Was she able to feel me taking up space in the universe, the same way I could sometimes feel her? Could I hide myself somehow? It was a big, labyrinthine ship. If I could make it so that she couldn’t feel me, did she stand much of a chance of fighting me?

Well, who knew what technology the Freeporters had, or had stolen. She might have a really good infrared imager, for all I knew. I thought about the chances for an ambush. I didn’t know the ship well—at all, really—which was a major drawback. Also the fact that Farweather and I shared a weird alien kind of senso did seem to make it unlikely that I could hide myself from her with any accuracy. Although, honestly, it was hard to guess what she could or couldn’t do. If it was possible to hide ourselves from each other very well—

Well, wouldn’t she be doing it?

Maybe. Or she might be trying to stampede me. It was impossible to know.

Right. So I needed to be on the move, and I needed to be on the move in whatever direction she was neither coming from, nor heading. And I needed to conceal myself from her, if that was possible, or alternately I needed to make it too risky or dangerous for her to come after me.

I was, I realized, afraid of her. Not just in the adversary sense. Not just in the sense that here was a person who was stalking me. No, I was afraid of Zanya Farweather, pirate, in and of her own self.

Why?

Well, she was kind of a badass, for one thing.

And then, she reminded me of my ex.

Not physically. But in a sense of presence, and something—a rogue something, an edgy something that might be just a disdain for social norms—that my unrightminded self found ineluctably compelling.

She was trouble. And I liked trouble.

That’s my problem. I always have.

I imagined Singer saying Your bad girl problem is a problem, girl. It broke my heart a little, but this time thinking about Singer got me moving. Paying attention a little more. Going forward.

I was walking, and I was headed for the door. Companionway. Whatever.

When I realized that I’d actually managed to start moving, I kicked up my adrenaline a notch and gave myself a fuel boost and began to run. It hurt my afthands (sooo not designed for this), but I shut the pain off as an inconvenience. Either I’d survive this, in which case I could look into fixing anything I’d busted, or they’d wind up infected inside my suit and I’d probably die of gas gangrene.

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.