Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 17

GOAL NUMBER THE FIRST: DON’T get caught.

Okay, then, what’s my plan of attack for that? Or the plan of evasion, more accurately. Step one, avoid contact with Farweather, either through senso or physically.

I didn’t have any illusions about my ability to take her in single combat. For one thing, while humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools. I belonged to a third group, equally useful: I was an engineer.

For another thing, I was pretty confident that Farweather hadn’t come to this alien environment unarmed. Unlike me. Because she was a fighter, every centimeter of her.

I could try to set a trap. But that was likely to fail and also likely to move me up on her priority list. Right now, I figured she probably had her work cut out for her in regard to exploring the Prize, mastering its systems, and getting where she wanted to be going, unexpected hitchhiker and all. If we got there, she’d probably have additional resources to throw at the problem of me, which meant that her best use of resources was to defend herself, defend the Koregoi ship’s key systems, and bide her time until she could meet me with overwhelming force. My earlier fears were realistic, but probably a little overblown, because if she decided to take the risk of coming out to get me it could result in potential failure of her mission objectives and possibly getting clobbered or killed herself.

She’d want to avoid that. I mean, I didn’t think I could take her, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t want to be cautious.

Sure, Haimey, I heard myself tell myself in Singer’s voice. Because caution has certainly been her watchword all along, and you have no evidence at all that she’s interested in capturing or subverting you for her own reasons, whatever the strategy behind those reasons may be.

I could try to ambush her. Probably, eventually, I would. But not todia. Because right now I needed an advantage.

So I had to assume that she would be defending herself, and I had to assume that she might, in fact, come after me. So while she was consolidating her control over the ship’s systems and setting up whatever defenses she was setting up, I needed to be learning the structures of the Prize like the warrens of the clade I grew up in. I needed to be a mouse in those warrens. A stainless steel rat in the walls.

Just as well to have something interesting to fill the standard hours with. All my book files were back on Singer. Without reading material, I needed something to occupy my time. Memorizing an alien spacecraft the size of a medium station would probably keep me busy. Unless it got me caught.

Or killed.

I hadn’t sat still while I was doing this thinking, either. In fact, I’d found something fascinating, which was that those organic-seeming corridors and the spaces they connected were webbed with service crawlways. Or service floatways, more precisely—because there was no gravity in those.

I pulled my awful boots off again, wrapped them through my makeshift backpack, and exulted in the comfort of having all four hands free to work as my ergonomics engineers had intended. Everything instantly seemed better when I wasn’t under g anymore, and even better than that when I sipped some reclaimed water and chewed a couple of yeast tablets. Your brain uses glucose to think, it turns out, and when you don’t have it, your decision-making and emotional regulation remains somewhat impaired, no matter how much you tune.

The playful teasing of my own interior voice reminded me of Singer, which was too much of a distraction, and I shut it down. My fox had been running the whole time, though—recording, memorizing as I moved through the ship. My meat memory might fail me, but I was going to use it anyway, because it was essentially bottomless. The machine memory could create a perfect three-dimensional map of the spaces I moved through. Once I had access to a shipmind again, and to more processing power than the tiny bit packed into my suit and skull, I would be able to use that map to generate the kind of plot that could reveal what I was missing and give me the shapes of spaces I hadn’t yet figured out how to reach. Spaces that might be solid-state, technology, hunks of computronium wedged in where they fit… or that might hide even stranger treasures.

Like snacks, for example.

Pity that wasn’t available to me now, because I could have used it.

As I swung through narrow spaces, I wondered: the Koregoi parasite seemed so happy in my body, and had certainly revved my metabolism well beyond the usual bounds. We drank the same solvents. Breathed the same oxidant. If my biochemistry matched up that well with theirs, did that mean I could eat their food without harming myself? Were we biologically similar enough to process the same nutrients?

I really hoped so. A lot.

I decided to gamble that my attempt to hide myself had worked. I needed intel badly. Using my Koregoi-extended proprioception—or rather, letting it use me—I tracked where Farweather was as I moved through the ship mapping and exploring. I was pretty sure that I’d been right about her plan, because while I was drunkard-walking all over the place, making largely random choices in order to get a vague plan of as much of the ship as possible, Farweather was moving in a tight spiral out from a central core, a planned and cautious exploration.

She didn’t seem to be hiding herself, either. Maybe she didn’t know how. Maybe I only thought I was invisible, or somewhat less noticeable anyway, and she knew exactly where I was at all times and was laughing at my completely random stagger through the Prize’s byways.

It didn’t matter. Well, it did matter. But I couldn’t affect it either way, so I needed to not concern myself with it. It didn’t matter because it was out of my control, and my energy needed to go to things that I could control, or at least hope to affect the outcome of. See above, item one, Haimey Dz survival plan for being marooned on an alien starship while trying to hide from a sexy pirate.

I really, really wished I had along a copy of Robinson Crusoe.

I crawled and mapped, floated and mapped, avoided Farweather’s territory. I slept in corners and access tunnels and stowage bays, never the same one twice, and tried to leave behind no evidence of my passage. And tried also not to notice how hungry I was getting, as the first couple of diar went by.

Goal number two: find something to eat, somewhere.

Between what I put out, and the atmospheric moisture, my suit was reclaiming enough water that I wasn’t in danger of dehydrating, and I’d rigged up a small evaporation still to make sure I was getting uncontaminated water with which I could replenish. Who knew what might be in H₂O that has been sitting in the pipes for a few hundred ans? I had a pretty good handle on the schematics of the Prize, including—I hoped—a number of things Farweather didn’t know, because she didn’t often venture out of her fortified bubble. I’d spied on her a little, and she’d filled the access tubes near her little domain with insulating foam that would have to be clawed or gouged out by hand, and she’d laced the corridors with cameras and the occasional dart trap. Fortunately, having been on the Milk Chocolate Marauder, I had a pretty fair idea of what her jury-rigging skills were like. I also thought that mine were better, and her dart traps were easy to spot. (Unless she was smart enough to hide her true level of skill and conceal a few better, which was possible. It was reasonable caution to act like that might be the case, but if I really started to believe it I would have to admit that I was probably psyching myself.)

So I stayed off her marked turf so as not to let her know her dart traps were silly. And she didn’t venture out of her secured corridors and cabins either, which was a nicer vote of confidence in my skill and dangerousness than I had been expecting from her. Or, you know, maybe she was a homebody.

I didn’t really think she was a homebody.

My suit, by this point, had actually snugged down to the limit of its elasticity and was starting to hang a little loose on me. The yeast tablets were not a subsistence diet; they were a snack. And I only had a few of them left. Even rationing doesn’t make a resource last forever if you can’t figure out how to renew it.

Second priority: food was starting to seem even more violently important.

I hoped it wouldn’t mean raiding Farweather’s supplies, because that would put goal number two in direct contravention with goal number one—explore, avoid, reconnoiter—and it was a little early in the proceedings to be running up against strategic conflict already. Especially when I was the only commander and all the troops and noncoms, also.

Well, if I were food on an alien colony ship, where would I be? I’d probably be long decomposed, honestly—decayed into crumbling sawdust, hydroponics dead, organics of all sorts hopelessly degraded. There was no ecosystem on this ship anymore—even the kind of incomplete oxygen-and-water cycle that we’d maintained on Singer, with our algae tanks and living walls in order to process fresh oxygen and produce fresh greens.

If I had to kill and eat Farweather, I was starting to think I might be willing to try it, though I didn’t have anything to butcher her with. She, however, did have supplies.

I could tell because she wasn’t dying.

I could probably steal them from her.

That was a terrible idea.

Wait, where was the oxygen coming from? It didn’t smell like tanks, and it didn’t smell like catalysts or electrolysis. The alien ship didn’t carry the faint tang of ozone. In fact, it smelled fresh. Green. Growing.

Did the Koregoi have something like blue-green algae on this thing as part of their life-support processing, or was their atmosphere synthesis just good enough, technologically speaking, that they didn’t have to make everything they reconstituted smell like the inside of a tin can that had been floating around in space, unaired, for a thousand ans or so?

If there were edible plants of some sort on this thing, eating them would be a simpler solution than trying to catch Farweather. Also less socially taboo. Which I guess matters.

And who would bring plants that you couldn’t also eat to space, up here where weight and space were at a premium? Especially if you had a big city-ship full of hungry mouths to feed, and you might be taking them to a planet where you needed to have some kind of horticulture, too. And I’d actually found part of a hydroponics operation.

Those hydroponics tanks were not currently functional… but there might be seed banks. And a way to turn them back on.

Remembering the hydroponics made me think of Connla, and thinking of Connla made me sad, so I thought about something else. Plans. I thought about plans. Plants and plans.

There might be an oxygen-processing center somewhere with tanks.

Okay so. Where were the tanks? I’d been all over the ship, I thought, and had some idea of where the blank bits might be, though a reliable map would have to wait for access to rendering software and processing power. Or an AI, which amounted to the same thing.

For now, I stretched out in a side corridor—one of the freefall ones—and thought about it. Plenty of blank space, and they probably wouldn’t need direct access. I mean, you could send a diver in to clean if you needed, but probably if they got contaminated or needed cleaning, or you wanted to harvest a crop and get the next crop in… wouldn’t you just pump the stuff out, dry it in sheets (vacuum freeze-drying! why not?) and then wash the tank out with a nice hot rinse and start over with a new batch immediately? Nobody should ever need to go in there except if it needed repairs.

Well, that said to me that I should look in the dead spaces. Or in the areas around the dead spaces, for the controls.

I had a plan. With a hungry sigh, I wedged my bundle of sleeping rags behind some pipes, fetched the space suit helmet and ox supply I hadn’t been bothering with, and I went in search of sustenance.

And maybe a shower too while I was at it.

Six hours later I was happily munching my way through a stack of space nori as thick as a Gutenberg Bible. It could have used a little salt and some wasabi, but it hadn’t killed me yet, and on the off chance it never did, I was already in the process of making more.

Who knew if it was nutritionally complete, or what amino acids and sugars the Koregoi used to build and fuel their bodies? And if those had any overlap at all with the ones I used?

Well, malnutrition was a slower way to die than starvation. Give it a check in the plus column and move on.

I probably contaminated the hell out of the tank with my Earth microbes while I was in there, and in memory of Singer I felt pretty bad about that, but there honestly wasn’t much I could have done to prevent it, and I was breathing commensals and microbiota all over the alien micro-ecosystem in here anyway.

In any case, my increased level of alertness and energy told me that there was something in there that I could metabolize, and my physiology got right on that, with a vengeance.

Other parts of my GI system weren’t as pleased with the radically unfamiliar food source, unfortunately.

Oh well. At least my suit handled the cleanup. And reclaimed the water. Though that wasn’t as critical now that I’d found giant tanks full of perfectly bog-standard (that was a joke) H₂O.

Well, I thought it was funny, anyway. It kept me laughing to myself all the way back to my improvised dehydrator, where I planned to pack up a new crop of algae biscuits and then find a crevice to mouse myself into for a good long rest.

Laughing made me think of my shipmates. Thinking of my shipmates made me so sad about not having Singer and Connla around to impugn my sense of humor that I could barely stand it. I could almost imagine Singer’s presence sometimes, if I closed my eyes and held very still. I knew it was just my neurology sensing people who weren’t there—I’m pretty sure nobody outside of a com serial has ever been haunted by the ghost of a destroyed AI—but that didn’t remove the creepiness of being able to sense him back there.

If he’d been real, though, he would have brought books. So I could tell myself with a high confidence that I was kidding myself. Or that my neurons were kidding me, more precisely. And nobody was standing over my shoulder, observing me.

Unless this was my backbrain’s method of telling my conscious mind that Farweather had found me and was stealth-piggybacking on my Koregoi senso.

That sent a chill through me. I stopped, a flake of space nori in my hand, and looked at the webwork of glittering coppery particles swirling and washing beneath my skin. Sometime over the past couple of decians, they’d integrated into my body image and I’d stopped even consciously noticing them unless they caught my eye, or something made me think of them.

They were still pretty. And I decided that if Farweather was camped in my blind spot, well, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Singer could have chased her out, probably. I was helpless in this circumstance.

Dammit, Singer, I miss you. And not just for providing me with com security services.

Maybe I was haunted, because I swear I felt a fleeting sense of contact then, like the brush of immaterial fingers on my hair.

Goal number three: figure out where we were headed.

Subgoal: find a way to get that information to somebody who could help.

By this time, I had a really good mental map of the ship—both machine memories and schematics courtesy of my fox, and the more intuitive sense that came with my meat memory and the good old-fashioned senses of direction, travel time, and so forth that had kept my primate ancestors from (mostly) getting lost and eaten by leopards before they could reproduce, thereby leading us inevitably and inexorably to the stars and our rightful place amid the society of the systers.

Or, you know, blind luck and occasionally jumping really high at the right time and screaming for your friends to run away, if you don’t care to subscribe to some kind of neoimperialist Manifest Destiny for humanity. Which is one of the maladapted bits of evolutionary baggage I’m very glad we’ve mostly trained out of ourselves, now that we have the tools.

Well, the Synarche has trained out of ourselves. The Freeporters… still haven’t figured out the whole “sharing resources equitably” thing.

So. Back to the problem at hand: navigation. I had no access to a shipmind, or a shipmind’s database of star charts. I had no access to the controls of the Prize, and no idea how to fly it if I did other than what I’d done before, which amounted to standing in one place and whistling here kitty kitty. A tactic, to be sure. Not a tactic I thought I should attempt while standing inside it.

What I did have was the Koregoi senso. So over the next couple of diar, as my body slowly adapted to a diet of space nori biscuits, I made myself a series of bolt-holes and hiding places through the vast—and now thoroughly mapped—interior. I even felt like I had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the turf Farweather had claimed as her own.

I armed myself with a couple of flasks of water—I’d found the flasks in one of the hydroponics rooms and filled them with what I filtered from the algae tanks—and a pile of my nori cakes. Some of the nori cakes were flavored with alien shrimp bits now, which was exciting and also hadn’t killed me, and probably provided some protein. Whether it was protein my body could use or not… well, insert a big theatrical shrug right here.

I tried not to think about the fact that I was eating living animals and not tank-grown meat. It was a survival situation, my ancestors (barbarians) had done it for millions of generations, and anyway they probably had like three ganglia to rub together. The shrimps, not my ancestors.

And if I told myself that often enough, I could convince myself that they were basically little blue-green plants that just moved really quickly, and manage to get them down without having to adjust my neurochemistry too much to stop feeling like a monster.

The worst part was that they were actually pretty tasty. I would have felt less awful if I hated their flavor overall and was just choking them down to stay functional.

Then I holed up in one of the dens I’d located around the ship and was using as caches. I picked the one I felt most secure in: it was reasonably far from what I thought of as Farweather’s territory, and in a well-shielded forward section of the ship. Also, there was some sort of device or object in a big, sealed cargo space between it and the area where the Freeporter stayed, and that device seemed to interfere with the Koregoi senso. So while I could feel forward and off to the sides just fine, I couldn’t feel aft, toward Farweather. And I figured she couldn’t feel forward, toward me.

This was as good a spot to try a little meditation on the shape of the universe as I was likely to find, so I settled in, loosened up my suit a bit, and made myself comfortable. Then I opened my mind to the Koregoi senso, and waited to see what might arise.

The biggest question in my mind was Where am I, and right after that was Who’s following us and Where is the rendezvous, and what Freeport assets are waiting there? But just asking this persnickety peripheral that had infected my body for a direct answer never seemed to work. (Of course not.) So instead, I sat with it, thinking about my breathing, letting whatever thoughts wanted to arise or descend do their thing.

Mostly they were thoughts of grief. At first, anyway. I leaned back against a bulkhead and let the sorrow rise as I imagined Connla cuddling the cats to him as space opened up all around them. Maybe fate had been merciful, and all three of them had been caught in the initial particle blast. The emotions came with tears, and a pain that hitched my breathing, and I didn’t tune to lessen it. Pain still had to be processed eventually. You could use rightminding to manage it, and to manage the sequelae of trauma. But you couldn’t just make those things go away.

Not and expect people to have healthy brains and healthy psyches afterward. It was the equivalent of putting somebody with high blood pressure on rectifiers and not addressing the physical causes of the problem at a systemic and maintenance level as well.

I would have given anything to find Bushyasta sleeping in the beverage heater and have to pick fur out of the little cubby before making myself a beverage that didn’t taste like cat dander. If we had a beverage heater, I would have killed for a cup of cat-dander tea. If we had any tea.

I was cautious. So cautious. I didn’t reach out. I just… sat still. Held to myself. And let the universe come to me.

The idea is to breathe, and not actually think about anything complicated with intention. Think about the breath, sure. Think about the blood carrying the oxygen through your body. Picture the pathways of your arteries and veins.

Other thoughts will arise. Some of those thoughts will be sorrow. Some will be anger. Sometimes, there will be a flare of white rage directed at somebody close, somebody whose actions have harmed you or those you loved. Sometimes that fury might subside into grief. Sometimes it might flare into a craving for vengeance.

The thing was, a lot of people—people in the clade I grew up in, for example—have the idea that when you seek no-mind, or what the Wake-Seekers and those who follow the Path of the Unfinished Work call waiting awareness, you are not conscious, somehow. But that is not the case. What you are doing is trying to accept what you think and feel as simply events that are occurring, rather than as intrinsic parts of who you are, demanding immediate action. You experience the emotion or thought, and you choose not to judge it or yourself, or your relationship to that emotion or thought. And when it’s done, you experience the next emotion.

Your self-ness is defined as something different from what you feel or think at the moment—something that can be made serene and thoughtful, careful of yourself and others, respectful of community. This is not dissimilar from rightminding, to be frank, and in a more religious time, after the Eschaton that left humanity so shattered and vulnerable and nearly destroyed us, it was a philosophy that many of my ancestors adopted, which led eventually to our acceptance of—and membership in—the Synarche.

There is an ancient concept of dharma, which means, essentially, right behavior. It includes such seemingly basic concepts as not taking more than you need, not deceiving or stealing, contributing to the well-being of other people, and not harming others in any other way as well. A number of religions and philosophies have grown up surrounding it, but I realized a long time ago that those mostly do not concern me. I’m not a religious person, though I dabbled for a while.

When I left the clade and after I was done burning myself up on synthetic deva, though, I realized that the world was a lonely place, and that it helped to have a philosophy, if nothing else, to help with the task of finding an identity.

Bloody vengeance, unfortunately, was not dharma. So when that showed up—with annoying regularity—I needed to let it go, and work on more socially beneficial tasks. Such as coming up with that set of directions.

I didn’t want to let the fury go, though. Not yet. I didn’t want to imagine ever letting it go, just yet. That rage, that loss—they had become integral to my identity. Letting go of them would be letting go of a piece of me, because that rage and grief… that rage and grief were my family, and all I had left of that family.

All the irony of unfinished business. I’d been so afraid of losing them because life is change, and the tide was drawing us apart. And now they were gone permanently, and I was still here, and I hadn’t just lost the future I had planned for and gotten invested in (a future that had never, of course, been real, but only what seemed to me the most desirable of likely outcomes).

The authentic experience is an illusion. Safety is an illusion too.

So some of my fury was selfish: the fury of having been robbed of my family. The fury of being made to experience this grief, this pain, by someone else’s carelessness.

I reminded myself that pain and grief did not have to be suffering. That loss could just be that, loss, and experienced as such, and released because the world was change and you could not hold on.

The distinction seemed pretty academic to me just then.

I knew I needed to let go.

I was not ready to let go now.

I was not ready to release my strong attachment to my friends.

But maybe I could be ready to put the rage and sorrow away for a little while, so that I could get some work done.

Once I had first experienced them for a little while. And by experienced, I do mean “wallowed.”

Eventually, with a lot of practice, I did calm my mind, and fill it with the sound and sensation of my breathing and the tiny sounds rattling through the Prize’s hull. I still didn’t reach out—it was probably ridiculous, but I was concerned that the more aggressive I was in seeking information, the more likely it was that Farweather might notice me, or be able to pick up on what I was doing. The Koregoi senso sometimes fed me information about her. It was only reasonable to suppose that, likewise, it fed her information about me.

And she was better at using the stuff than I was. Still.

When I had finally managed to bore my persistent, argumentative brain into silence, though, what filled it was not a sense of Farweather’s presence, or even echoes of her intentions or her own senso ghosts. What I felt was, instead, what a stone might feel if dropped into a cool and limpid pool.

I seemed to drift, and there were currents all around me. I could perceive them, and moreover I could see through them. I again had that sense that I had had earlier of being able to feel the shape of the galaxy, of the universe, as if I were stretched out on a hammock, the fabric conforming to the outlines of my body—if my body were infinite, and extended to the very edges of everything. And if my capacity to sense detail were likewise infinite, and extended to the very edges of everything.

Our ship was a heavy place in the sky, one of many. Where we had been, the weight of the Well far outstripped it. And where we were going—

Farweather, or the ship, was taking us no place very interesting, I realized—partly in relief and partly in disappointment. We were headed for a Freeport—we had to be, because there was nothing Synarche in this corner of the galaxy—which was bad for me. There would not be very many opportunities to bust out if we were surrounded by pirates and occupied by more pirates.

Well, at least that encouraged me to act sooner rather than later.

Strangely, though, the flooding of information into my receptive state was not limited to vectors and directions and potential destinations and clusters of atoms and dark gravity and other things that bent the world. There was something else out there, something I was noticing now rather than previously because… Well, I could come up with a lot of theories. Because I was in an extraordinarily receptive state of mind. Because the Koregoi ship was feeding me data subconsciously. Because using the Koregoi senso while sitting inside the Koregoi ship caused a lensing property.

All kinds of explanations, as I said. But the fact of the matter was that I did not know why I was seeing what I was seeing—which was a grossly but not exactly repeating pattern of variations encoded in the dark gravity structure of the universe, on (in absolute terms) a very tiny scale.

“Dharma in the Well, Singer,” I said under my breath. “That looks like somebody has been scratching crib notes on the cosmos. I don’t suppose you can read them, can you?”

There was no answer, of course.

If it was some kind of encoding, there was no way I would ever crack it without at least a shipmind to help, and better yet some attention from the massed minds and architecture of the Core. If it was just noise…

…I didn’t think it was just noise.

Well, I wasn’t headed anyplace where I could plan on looking for help. I guessed it was just as well I hadn’t expected to find any.

Which brought me to goal number the fourth: get the hell off this ship, or get control of it away from Farweather, before I wound up completely kidnapped by pirates, for real. (As opposed to the sort of fractional and incomplete pirate-kidnapping I was currently enjoying.)

Get The Hell Off The Ship would have been my preference, for obvious reasons, but a pretty thorough exploration of my options didn’t fill me with confidence on that front. Jumping out of a vessel in white space wasn’t the best of ideas unless your goal was a pretty spectacular suicide. While the space-time folds, once constructed, maintained themselves without additional input—and while everything inside the white coils was, technically speaking, motionless, so you wouldn’t be left behind—in practical terms the ship was folding space-time around itself, so if you stayed in the white bubble you’d just wind up going wherever the ship was going along with it. And if you drifted out of the white bubble, you’d be folded, spindled, and mutilated as you crossed the boundary into normal space.

A lot of larger human and syster ships—colony ships and transports—carried escape vessels with their own small white drives, so that if something noncatastrophic but disabling happened to the main vessel, crew and passengers could be evacuated by the reverse of the procedure we’d used with Singer to retrieve vessels trapped or abandoned in white space. The Prize didn’t seem equipped with anything like that, although honestly how would I know if it did? Given the external airlock technology, it seemed completely within reason that sections of the Koregoi ship itself might just be capable of peeling off and flying away on their own.

That left… steal the stolen Koregoi ship back from Farweather, in a massively hubristic act of reverse piracy. With no tools, no weapons, no pirating skills, and no support from a shipmind or crew. Set a trap? Set a series of traps? Knock her on the back of the head?

Hell of a way to run a mutiny.

On the other hand, I was an engineer.

Well, Haimey Dz, you always wanted to make a legend for yourself. Here’s your chance at becoming a really spectacular example of a cautionary tale!

That was a lie. Well, not the second half. But I never had wanted to be famous. Or infamous, which I honestly seemed to have more of a talent for. I hadn’t wanted it: not after Niyara, and not now.

Infamy would keep finding me, however.

Some people just aren’t born to be anonymous, Singer said.

Even if they’re born as one of faceless dozens, safe and secure, into a clade?

Then: Wait, what?

Singer?

Singer, are you real?

No answer, no tickle in my senso. Had he even been there? Even been real?

I’d heard rumors of senso-echoes, burn-in, pathways that got deep-chained in fox and synapses both. If I heard Singer where there was no Singer, that was my brain expecting what it had become accustomed to. Just as if I put a bit of cake in my mouth and expected sweetness, whether the morsel had sugar in it or not.

I’d been alone, living as a fugitive in the belly of an alien ship and eating oxygen tank scrapings, for almost a decian now. Who the hell knew what my unsupervised brain was doing in there without Singer keeping tabs on it for me? Losing touch with reality, in all probability. Reverting to old, bad habits deeply ingrained in my neural pathways by a childhood that did not encourage the development of critical thinking skills.

Great. Now I was hallucinating dead friends.

And I still didn’t have a firm plan.

Except for traps.

Okay, so how did I lay traps for an enemy who was holed up in a tiny, fortified section of the ship, and who had already laid more than her share of traps to keep me out if I should venture there? And how did I manage to catch her without harming her? Maybe I was too well socialized, but I did, in fact, still stick at murder.

Besides, she was the one who seemed to know how to control the ship. Unless she was just along for the ride as well, though that seemed unlikely.

I could try to lure her out—either with bait, or by destroying something she wouldn’t want to see sacrificed. But if she wasn’t willing to come out even to try to contain or neutralize me—I flattered myself that I was probably her most immediate threat—then she was unlikely to leave her bolt-hole at all. Maybe, having locked me out of the areas she needed to control the Prize, she considered me already adequately neutralized.

My own presumed inutility and ineffectuality were a cheerful perspective, so I thought about something else.

I’d been floating in the safe harbor of one of the service tubes and thought a change of scene might help me think. I weaseled out of it, groped my afthands into my hated boots (I had acclimated, honestly, and was getting better at walking for longer periods without excruciating pain, even under gravity that was slightly heavier than Earth-normal), and went for a walk.

The best thing about giant alien starships full of endlessly twisting corridors was that you could go for really long walks. Like, station walks. Hours and hours. I was even getting to the point where the constantly perspective-shifting, Escheresque corridors no longer made me nauseated.

I was on my second lap around what I thought of as the Promenade, a spiraling Möbius strip of a loop that took me through that same observation bubble I’d first watched Singer destroyed from. Every time I passed through it, I stopped to observe my little ritual of memory. If you are a planetsider, you probably visit a grave or memorial to pay respects to a loved one. I just stopped for a moment each time I passed through this space, tilted my head back, and gazed up at the twisting bands of white space.

In abstract emotional response rather than out of any physical problem, I ached. My palms hurt. My eyes hurt.

Dammit, I missed my cats.

I stood there for a few minutes, aching too much to get myself moving again, becoming increasingly uncomfortable as my body noticed a lack of inputs. This had been an increasing problem as I practiced meditating my way into the Koregoi ship’s outputs. I was getting better at it, and I was realizing that the control systems for the Koregoi vessel were set up to interface seamlessly and perhaps even on a subconscious level (assuming that Koregoi had anything like human levels of conscious awareness, which was dangerous turf to be on) with the desires of its crew. Which implied that the ship had or at one time had had something like a shipmind, even if I couldn’t figure out how to access or communicate with it. It must have some kind of discriminatory process, at least—so that the interlocking desires of a few thousand crew members wouldn’t cause the thing to tear itself apart. It must have.

Mustn’t it? An autonomous regulatory system, at the very least.

Maybe it functioned like the Synarche ideally should: a series of expert algorithms generating a consensus model based on weighted averages.

But lately, my attempts at Zen starship maintenance had been mired in constant physical and senso-based distractions. As if somebody somewhere were playing a badly tuned radio in a space where I was attempting to concentrate.

And now, here it was when I was standing up, just looking at the folded light of distant stars. My sensorium itched, metaphorically speaking. It was as if I were feeling a crackle of static, some kind of senso synesthesia. As if being so profoundly disconnected from all outside inputs that didn’t come from my own senses and the Koregoi parasite was causing my brain to fill up the empty spaces.

Have you ever looked at real darkness? Darkness with absolutely no light in it? After a little while, your eyes begin to invent things. Sparkles. Outlines. Little shimmers and glimpses of movement. None of it is real, of course. It’s just bored neurons making work for themselves.

I suspected that that was what I was feeling, or the machine-meat interface equivalent.

Phantom pain.

Sigh.

My feet were starting to ache, and without thinking about it, I lightened the gravity to something that felt much more comfortable to my space-adapted body. I had been spending enough time in the weightless access tubes that my bones weren’t in danger of decaying under the constant pressure of my own weight, but I was frankly just sick and tired of being heavy.

I stretched in relief, feeling my spine crack. Then, a moment later, I realized what I’d done, reflexively, without thinking about it or really trying. Or what the ship had done, in response to my unexpressed need.

I’d just effortlessly controlled an aspect of the ship. Without so much as thinking about it. As if it were my own body. Or an autonomic process thereof. It had just kind of… done it for me.

Which would be great, I thought, if I could get it to do the same sorts of things when I asked.

No, Haimey. We don’t fantasize about spacing the pirate. Murder is still wrong. No matter how much somebody who murders pets and friends deserves to die.

I didn’t have control over my heart rate, not really. I mean, I could slow it with meditation and raise it with exercise. But I had a fox, and using that I could control my heart rate, and blood pressure, and adrenaline levels, and all sorts of things.

And if I could control the Prize’s pinpoint application of gravity, well. Gravity was a beautiful way to deal with Farweather, wasn’t it?

Gravity would make a most satisfactory trap.

Oh bugger. One more thing to practice.

On the other hand, one more thing to distract myself with. And I figured we were still at least two standard decians out from our destination, if I had it plotted right. Even at the speeds the Koregoi ship was moving at—not-moving at—even as quickly as the Koregoi ship was stitching space-time past itself, which was at a rate greater than I’d ever encountered or even heard was theoretically possible.

I wondered if we were in danger of running out of fuel.

Gravity. My enemy, my weapon.

I wondered if I could get good enough at using it to crush Farweather against the deck like a grape smashed by acceleration.

I knew I shouldn’t let myself hate her so much. I knew I shouldn’t. Hating people doesn’t accomplish anything except poisoning yourself. I should turn it off. I should let it go.

The thing was, first I had to want to let it go.

I kept waiting for Farweather to try to communicate with me. I kept waiting for her to reach out, to ask, to flirt. To get back to her gaslighting games, to get whatever she wanted from me.

Maybe now that I was a de facto captive, admittedly one with the run of most of the less immediately useful segments of this vast ship, she figured that she didn’t need any cooperation. She and her cronies would force it out of me when we landed.

Maybe she was hoping I would get desperate enough to come to her. To ask questions. To ask mercy? To ask for help.

Well, I would come to her. Come for her.

And I was planning on doing it just as soon as I’d had enough time to practice my control of the Prize’s artificial gravity. And how I was going to use it to quite literally pin her down and ask a few goddamned questions.

And not hurt her any more than you have to, right, Haimey?

I sighed. And not hurt her any more than I have to.

Yes.

Next tiny goal—was this number five? Five and a half? Something like that—develop superpowers, and learn to control the force of gravity. Artificial gravity, at least, as practiced by the Koregoi.

Odd thing was, it turned out I had a knack for it. It was fun; it was intuitive. Before long, I had fine-enough control that I could arrange the strength of the Prize’s artificial gravity in centimeter-wide bands, which I have to tell you felt really weird to step through.

That reminded me of what I’d sensed in the dark gravity, the subtle gradations of density that made up a kind of pattern, like an old-fashioned bar code or stick-letter alphabet. I was becoming more and more convinced that what I had discovered was a code. Possibly I was becoming more and more deranged in my isolation, making up the kind of conspiracy theory narratives that human brains under stress are prone to. I checked my chemical balance, and it seemed fine, but.

The limited processing capacity of my fox was inadequate to work on a problem like that. I needed the help of a shipmind.

A pang: a shipmind was the thing I had not got.

I went back to my current problem, then. Little goals: learning to use the Prize itself as a weapon.