Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 18

WELP. THERE’S DHARMA FOR YOU.

Two sleeps (I couldn’t really call them diar, because my schedule was nothing like twenty-four stanhours anymore) before I planned to debut my daring (and dare I say, brilliant) plan to sneak into Farweather’s strongholds through the service access, use my newfound gravity powers to pin her to the decking, and tie her up and make her hand over control of the Prize, that old saw about contact with the enemy came into play.

I could have run my plan sooner. It was ready; I was ready. But there was nothing to be gained by hurrying. And in all honesty, I was stalling a little because I was scared.

Scared of Farweather. Scared of whether or not my gravity trick was going to work if there was another living body in the way of it, or whether Farweather would have better control—or whether the ship itself would intervene with some kind of failsafe to protect her. And I was scared as well of what I might do if my plan worked and I actually did get the upper hand.

I was not, shall we say, that much farther along the road of releasing my attachment to wanting to slam her head into a bulkhead over and over and over again than I had been a standard decian or so previous. I didn’t think my self-control could be trusted, and so I didn’t want to test it.

On the other hand, we would be getting close to Freeport space, inasmuch as they were a they and capable of claiming and holding territory (all things are impermanent). The closer we were to Farweather’s allies, the more trouble I was in. I guessed she probably had some kind of escort close somewhere—the ship she had jumped from to flying-tackle the Prize, for example—and would her erstwhile allies just trust her to take off with something as utterly unique as an intact Koregoi vessel as its sole prize crew without some kind of supervision?

Furthermore, I could smell her roasting coffee in there occasionally, and after twenty diar of space nori three meals a dia, I probably would have launched a commando raid just for a pound of beans, even if I had to chew them and swallow my spit to get any good out of them. So there was honestly no chance of me waiting too long.

The mutineers on the Bounty had their strawberries. You know, people say all the time that they would kill somebody for a cup of coffee. It was literally starting to seem like a pretty good idea to me.

Well, not kill. I wasn’t going to murder anyone if I could possibly help it. I was willing to keep telling myself that until I convinced myself, too.

Not for coffee. Not for Singer. Not for Connla. Not for Bushyasta and Mephistopheles, and honestly I was maddest about the cats. They hadn’t had any choices or any options.

I told myself again that I wasn’t here to kill anybody todia.

Not if I could help it.

I was pulling on my boots—which I was finally used to—to go make it happen when the imp that installs perverse hardware and his sister, the imp of perverse coincidence, intervened. But let me go back a little, and tell it all in some sort of order.

I didn’t have the boots on already because I was moving through the maintenance access tubes—what I assumed, anyway, were maintenance access tubes, because I had no idea what the heck else they might be for. And as a human engineer playing archaeologist in a vast alien starship, I figured I was entitled to a little intellectual laziness.

I’d had—reluctantly—to bump twice to keep my anxiety levels manageable while I made my way through the tubes. It wasn’t their narrowness—I would have had to have any claustrophobia rightminded out a long time ago to keep being a tugboat engineer—it was the fact that I was trying to move through them in utter physical silence, floating along and directing myself with tiny touches. While also keeping my sensorium pulled in tight against my skin, not interacting with the ship at all, and hoping that in so doing I could hide my movements from Farweather, if she happened to be looking for me.

She had some kind of a trick that concealed her whereabouts pretty well, except when it didn’t. I just hoped I was reasonably approximating the manner in which she accomplished it. It turns out that sneaking is physically and emotionally exhausting, which maybe was why she didn’t do it all the time either.

Who would have guessed she might have human frailties and failings?

I’d mapped all of the parts that were outside of what I thought of as Farweather’s territory, and I both had them foxed in, and had developed the kind of intimate muscle memory that takes practice and exploration. When I drifted onto Farweather’s turf, though, it was like moving from a well-lit space to a dim and smoke-filled one. I had my theories and extrapolations to navigate by, and I had as far down the tubes as I could see with my own unaugmented eyes. I projected a skin of my theorized map onto the walls of the tubes as I spidered along, imagining myself some kind of formless sea creature wafting through pipes and down drains.

I always was a little too creative for my own good.

The anxiety was bad. The sense of all the ways things could go wrong loomed intensely over me, congealed into a breathless knot behind my sternum. And I kept coming up with new ones. I could mess up the gravity and get squished. I could get sealed in and spend the rest of my objectively quite short but subjectively probably very long and unhappy existence like a jellyfish in the tubes, drifting along, unable to get out. And both of those seemed preferable in my head to the idea that I was going to have to climb out of this accessway and go get into a physical confrontation with somebody who was armed and didn’t mind conflict in the slightest.

Clades… are not big on training people how to maintain boundaries and manage necessary conflict. We all just get along. No matter what. Whether it suits our personal needs or not. Personal needs are a privileged affectation.

I didn’t really have an option of getting along with the pirate. Not unless I wanted to wind up trapped in some Freeport outpost fixing stolen ships as an indentured servant or something similar.

Turn it off.

Dammit, I tried!

I had tuned the anxiety out, but the fear of the situation was enough that it kept breaking through. Deep, visceral programming: avoid the fight. It was paralyzing.

Don’t choke, I told myself, and then rolled my eyes at myself. I had probably just ensured that I would be choking.

After three minutes clinging to a coil of piping, forcing my limbic system to stop hyperventilating through blunt and hard-core endocrine control, I thought of Connla’s flying trick of bumping his sophipathology up enough so you didn’t worry too much about consequences.

It seemed like a terrible idea.

After two more minutes, I decided I needed to try it, or Farweather was going to figure out where I was, poke a bolt prod in through a convenient access hatch, and electrocute me in my burrow like a particularly large and smelly ship rat.

I bumped, got a little magnetism in there to turn off the inconvenient brain bits for an hour or so, and set a timer lockout so I couldn’t do it again until after the first dose had worn off. That last part is pretty essential if you’re doing this sort of thing alone, because once you turn off your common sense and ability to assess consequences, it turns out almost nobody wants them back again.

After that, everything was easy and I couldn’t figure out what I’d been so apprehensive about. I felt confident, loose. I knew what I was doing, and I wasn’t going to have any problem handling one little pirate. This was my domain—space was my domain—and if nothing else I could just get the Prize to shut down gravity entirely and be six times as capable in free fall as she was.

Hell, Farweather didn’t even have afthands. Whereas I could anchor myself, eat spaghetti, turn a screwdriver, and pick my nose simultaneously. And without even getting the spaghetti anyplace biologically inappropriate.

It took me only a little bit of exploratory back-and-forth to check the location of the access hatches. I’d gotten pretty expert at identifying their nubby bits and the pressure points that made them smoke up and vanish when you wanted to go through. Confident I’d gotten as close to her command center as I was likely to, I located an access hatch I could use to get out into the corridors. I unslung my boots from over my shoulder and started working them on my afthands, as previously mentioned. Once I had them seated, I’d reach out into the Koregoi senso, try to feel where Farweather was before she noticed me (assuming she hadn’t spotted me already and also assuming she wasn’t lying in wait) so I could pop out, slam the gravity down around her, and give her the thumping she so richly deserved.

That was when I heard the screaming.

Reflexively—and when had using the alien technology that had infected my body without my consent become reflexive?—I reached out into the Koregoi senso. It unfolded like releasing cramped wings, and I felt instantly less anxious—as if my inner ear had been affected, or my hands bound behind my back, and I’d been trying to walk a balance beam. The relief was profound.

So profound it almost made up for the screaming.

Actually, the noise didn’t bother me at all, except as noise. It was really irritating, like a crèche full of three-an-olds not getting their own way.

If I just shot her, the noise would probably stop, wouldn’t it?

What a pity you don’t have a gun.

Oh yeah. That is a problem.

Calm down, Dz. There’s only two people on this boat that could be screaming, and you’re pretty sure this one isn’t you.

It could be a decoy.

Of course it could. Or she could be in trouble, in which case—

In which case, I really don’t have to do anything about it, do I?

Yes, Haimey. You probably do. You still need her expertise.

A heavy sigh escaped me, the only external signifier of my interior argument. Briefly, I closed my eyes. There was still screaming, but it sounded tonally different—less surprised, and more furious and pained. I’d guessed right—the noise was close, and it was echoing through the maintenance tube as loudly if somebody had set up a speaker in here to boost it.

At least if she’s hurt, she’ll be easier to contain.

Assuming she’s not in need of massive medical attention I can’t provide.

Well, either way, she’s not getting any less injured while we wait.

That’ll just make her easier to control.

Dz.

Over the top, I said to myself, and triggered the access hatch.

Well, I didn’t think she was faking it.

Farweather lay curled on her side in a puddle of very bright red blood, clutching her right wrist with her left hand. She was mid-shout when I weaseled out of the access door, found my orientation in local gravity, and dropped lightly down.

I landed in a crouch. Farweather stopped screaming and peeled her blood-slimed fingers loose from her wrist to snatch at her weapon. Red spurted, and she gave up trying to get the gun and went back to applying pressure again.

My weapon didn’t require me to reach for anything except the (metaphorically speaking) goodwill of the ship. I felt it, felt it acquiesce to my desire, felt it tighten down on the already fallen pirate with the force of several Earth gravities—no joke even for somebody raised down a well. For a spacer like me, it would have been profoundly incapacitating. With a squeezed, breathy moan, she collapsed onto her back, just about managing to keep pressure on her wrist as both hands were pinned to her chest by their own weight.

“Rot in hell,” she groaned, glaring at me.

I stood a meter off, observing Farweather and the apparatus surrounding her. It looked like a spring had recoiled, sending a piece of metal across her lower arm with enough force that it had acted like a blade. She had an arterial bleed going on, though not too bad a one—as if there were anything such as an insignificant arterial injury—and she was managing to keep enough pressure on it that while she could probably bleed out pretty easily if left untreated, she wasn’t in immediate danger of dying.

I guess she had sensed me coming, after all. If she hadn’t tried to get tricky, and had just gotten the drop on me the old-fashioned way by electrocuting me with her bolt prod or putting a few holes in me with the airgun she had holstered on her thigh, I’d be dead or a captive by now. But she’d tried to set a trap. And apparently I had been right about being the better engineer.

What kind of a sophipath wore a projectile weapon in a pressure vessel?

Well, a pirate who would think nothing of murdering a whole crew of people, even if those people were monsters. Silly question. Moving on now.

I probably really should kill her. I’d be saving my own life, and a lot of other lives over the long term, if I did.

I probably really should. But for now, I managed to swallow down another bolus of rage, and remember that I needed her. I groped in my suit repair kit for a roll of pressure tape. Crouching down, I braced and counterbalanced myself, and reached cautiously into the high-gravity zone to lay the tape very gently on her sternum.

If she was a cat, she would have been spitting at me with flattened ears.

“Go ahead and tape up that wrist,” I said.

She did, using one hand and her teeth, managing not to lose too much more blood in the process. It took her about ninety seconds, and by the time she was done more fresh blood was smeared all over her, the deck, her face, and everything else within range—including splatters on my boots. The roll of tape was absolutely thick with gore. One more small, irreplaceable, useful item off the inventory.

I really wished I had access to a printer. You never realize how spoiled you get by not having to keep stuff around because you can just make it when you need it, until suddenly you discover that stuff is a finite resource and you can’t just automatically get more.

When she’d stopped her bleeding, the next thing she did was reach for her gun.

I was, of course, ready for that, and pinned her to the deck hard enough that her face pulled back against the bones and her breathing grew labored.

“Bad pirate,” I said. I was gambling that if she wasn’t actively bleeding, her Koregoi parasite could repair her the same way mine had repaired me. Otherwise, well, there wasn’t much I could do for her that wouldn’t result in gangrene.

“…enjoying this.”

Yeah, I was. I wish I could say I wasn’t proud of it—I knew I wouldn’t be proud of it when I quit being a temporary psychopath—but it wasn’t so easy to stop enjoying it, either.

“Leave your weapons in the holsters, unclip them, and give them to me,” I said.

“Fuck you,” she answered.

“I’ll crush you,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” she answered. Her breathing strained under the weight of her own flesh. Still she managed a pained smile.

I let the ship pull her down a little more. She moaned. My fingernails dug into my forepalms.

She should be squashed like the insect she was. She should be paying for all the lives she had ended. Everything awful she had chosen and done. I wanted to smear her all over the decking and walk away.

She turned her head so her cheek lay flat against the deck, still looking at me. Her neck muscles weren’t going to enjoy that tomorrow, if we both lived so long. I wondered if the pressure was blurring her vision yet.

“More weight,” she said.

It wasn’t really a standoff, of course. I was healthy—healthy-ish—and she’d lost a lot of blood. I just reached in again, bracing myself even more carefully, and relieved her of her visible armaments.

First I had to spend ten minutes talking myself out of murdering her in cold blood. And by the time I’d actually worked up my moral fiber enough that I could touch her without assassinating her, she’d passed out due to acceleration sickness, and I could pat her down for other dangerous items (two knives, a monofilament garrote that she was lucky she hadn’t incorporated into her death trap or she’d probably be missing that hand entirely, and a spare clip for the air pistol) and make sure that her wrists and ankles were taped together securely with the blood-fouled suit repair kit.

By then, I was feeling more like myself again, which seemed like a great loss, because I didn’t even get the chance to kick her in the head a couple of times while I was still disinhibited enough to do it.

I even made a point of being careful to make sure she was getting adequate blood flow to her extremities, which was definitely more than she deserved, and I found her first aid kit (she wasn’t getting anything else out of mine) and gave her a spray-hypo of a broad-spectrum antibiotic and antiviral to keep her from getting alien space gangrene or the deadly Koregoi herpes or whatever else might be floating around out here.

The odds of cross-species infection were slim. But if I made the conscious decision to invest in some kind of caretaking behavior where she was concerned, I figured I was psychologically less likely to shove her out the nearest airlock.

Sunk cost fallacy. Make it work for you.

Why that seemed important to me at the time, I’m not really sure. Something about maintaining my humaneness and self-respect in the face of adversity. Or doing things the hard way. Or some side effect of my social conscience reasserting itself after its nice little nap.

Farweather didn’t see it that way. She woke up while I was going through her kit, and though she didn’t say anything, she lay quietly and watched me give her the antibiotic and antiviral hypo. I tucked her in with a couple of reflective blankets and gave her some fluids and glucose from her own first aid setup to ward off shock, which I guess baseline humans are more vulnerable to than I am.

“That’s not going to make me think better of you,” she said mildly, when I’d backed away.

I shrugged. “What you think of me is immaterial.”

“So you don’t need anything from me?”

She said it in a flirting tone that might have been more effective if she weren’t covered in her own blood from trying to kill me. Oh, and if I hadn’t had all that nonsense turned off. And I was very glad I had, because Farweather—mass murderer or no—was just the sort of bad girl I knew could get under my skin if I let her.

Clade upbringings fuck you up on so many levels, when you finally let the oppressive rightminding go and try to exist as an independent human being with things like judgment and will.

“Sure,” I said dryly. I rummaged through her supplies and found the coffee. There was a little probe for heating water, and a vacuum extractor to draw it through the beans.

“Sweet eternity,” I said reverently.

“Bitch, you’d better share,” said she.

I smiled sweetly at her over my shoulder. “Teach me how to access the ship’s drive functions, and how to navigate her, and we can have a conversation about it then.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

So I made myself an exceptionally good cup of coffee, and set about trying to figure it out for myself.

It turns out that caffeine is a highly addictive substance with really unpleasant physical withdrawal symptoms, if you’re not bumping your brain chemistry to compensate, and that one of those withdrawal symptoms is an evil, splitting headache. Which Farweather told me all about, in excruciating detail, except when she was sleeping, or just curled up suffering on the floor.

I had no idea there were that many filthy insults available to the average speaker of Galactic Standard. Well, learn something new every dia; that’s what my clademothers used to tell me. Which was more productive advice on the whole than most of what I was getting from the pirate.

So I learned a lot about my theoretical sexual, spiritual, and menu habits—all of it revolting. What Farweather didn’t tell me about in detail, sadly, was how she’d been operating the Koregoi ship, even when I offered her coffee and a headache pill if she shared.

I’m not sure if I consider this a relief or a disappointment, but it either pleases or saddens me to report that it turns out I’m too well rightminded or just too socially aware to make much of a torturer. I pushed the issue as much as I could, but I have to be honest: it didn’t get me anywhere, and I thought if I pushed her harder, she’d probably just lie to me. Not that lying to me would work for long: I could tell just as well as she could where we were in the universe, and which way we were going. So I’d know if she’d actually taught me how to steer the Prize or not almost immediately.

This isn’t how it works on the holoserials.

And so we sailed on into the darkness, me trying to come up with a plan in case I didn’t manage to divert us before we got to the Freeports, and going through her stuff—carefully, in case of booby traps. I found and disabled two, which left me with a good opinion of my own engineering skill. There were a lot of useful things in her luggage: I organized them neatly while I took an inventory. She filled her time with a robust suite of hobbies that included cursing, whining about her headache and shaky extremities, and napping extensively.

It was a long, long flight from the Core to the Republic of Pirates. Even at the relative-v the Prize reached and maintained, it would probably take us at least a third of an an or more to get there.

So I passed the time coding the projectile weapon to me, then taking it apart and hiding all the bits in various places where they wouldn’t be speedy for her to reassemble, and trying to figure out how to get her on my side. That seemed the most productive use of her as a resource, since I hadn’t had the intestinal fortitude just to murder her.

Maybe that was why she didn’t take me seriously, come to think of it. On the other hand, it was hard to imagine how I would have gotten any information out of her if I had just up and slaughtered her.

Farweather slept a lot for the first couple of diar, in part definitely because I dosed her with a sedative every time I needed to rest, for safety’s sake, and in part probably because of the caffeine withdrawal, and in part probably because she was making up lost blood volume. Which she could do, because I (grudgingly) fed her, and made sure she was adequately hydrated. She wasn’t wearing a full suit the way I was, so—expiation for any wrong I’ve ever done, I swear it, and some karmic debt paid forward—I even helped her hop to the head and use it, though I made her figure out how to deal with her own hygiene, taped hands or no taped hands.

I was glad I’d figured out what the waste disposal closets looked like already. After my own experience with adapting to the space nori diet, I’d made a small study of how the Koregoi handled waste disposal. A toilet was a toilet was a toilet, it turned out, whether it was a zero-g litterbox or just a vacuum tube.

Everybody really does poop, no matter what their species is. Well, except for the plant people. They just outgas a lot of oxygen and water vapor.

Surprisingly, she didn’t seem particularly grateful.

After a few diar, she was a little more functional. I had used the time to up my guard and create various precautions, and I’d figured out how to use her bolt prod. It wasn’t biometrically coded to her, which was a—pardon me, ha ha—shocking oversight.

I hung it on my own belt. I could almost hear the scraping of her eyes in their sockets as she followed it around with her gaze, thinking about how to get control of it and the situation. I may have neglected to mention in there anywhere that while she was unconscious I’d built a lock for it that I coded to my own pheromones and DNA signature.

I’d also been continuing to try to meditate my way into the ship’s control systems. Now that I had the run of the place, I’d used it, and I’d determined that there was nothing of the sort that we human types would consider a bridge, or a control room. Apparently the blasted Koregoi just navigated their ships by Zen. Or maybe turned them over to shipminds, vast and curious, but if that was the case then it seemed really likely that any shipmind once inhabiting this vessel was long corrupted, quiescent, or purged.

I still had time to come up with some kind of solution to the Kidnapped By Pirates problem, if I thought fast. And I still didn’t have any books. I could access Farweather’s stuff, because Freeporters didn’t run to foxes and senso, so all her VR was in an external. But Farweather’s taste in entertainment leaned to the kind of immersive sandbox VR exploration games with a lot of gun- or swordplay that left me cold. Connla had been a fan of that sort of thing, and even more so of large-scale military tactics simulators. Maybe he should have been the sole survivor. He’d have been less bored.

I pulled Farweather’s compact VR rig off my head, tossed it in a corner, and walked away while she yelled at me about how I was treating her stuff with disrespect and I hadn’t even asked her if I could use it.

Honestly, that was probably the closest she came to dying that whole trip, and I’m pretty sure she never even knew.

I waited until my hands organically stopped shaking with fury before I came back, walking and walking in random loops through the ship because I was, frankly, too attached to my atavistic barbarian rage to tune it down. I hadn’t disassembled Farweather’s perimeter, in case I needed it myself later to repel boarders, but I had opened it up, and I walked for the better part of a standard hour before I stopped fuming enough to trust myself, and to want to not be angry.

I made myself safe and headed back to our little base camp. Farweather was where I’d left her, chained to a stanchion that I’d managed to coax the Koregoi ship to grow by meditating at it. It hadn’t grown me the chains, and anyway I was hesitant, because Farweather could probably unwitch anything I could witch together that way. Instead, I’d used chains I’d welded up myself out of her own oxygen tanks.

Technically speaking, I hadn’t had to do it. There had been a set of restraints in her gear, probably intended for me, if she caught me. But I wasn’t going to use those on her: there was too much chance she had some sort of biocode on them that would allow her to override the locks.

Thus: the spare ox tanks. If we had to do any spacewalking, well. Zanya Farweather was shit out of luck.

Her own fault, really.

When I got back within sight of her, I stopped and folded my arms, leaning against the corridor wall at a cockeyed angle to her until she noticed I was there and shuffled around awkwardly to face me. The shimmer of copper-gold stardust in tendrils across her features had at some point stopped being unnerving, I noticed from the distance of my rage. Now it was just part of her face.

The only human face I’d seen in standard weeks. Because human brains are weird, I felt a little bit of affection for her at that moment. Disfigured like me; infested, like me. We were poisoned together.

I loathed her and I despised her and I thought I probably would have completely lost touch with myself by now if she had not been there. And somewhere on my long, furious walk, I had figured out what I needed to do, I thought, to try to get her to give me what I needed.

Well, if I didn’t have anything else to keep myself occupied with, I supposed there were worse hobbies than conversational salons with monsters. Even if I couldn’t think of any right now.

I was going to need all the supportive brain chemicals and electrical tuning that I could get.

Farweather watched me carefully as I walked over and sat down. Not next to her; I wasn’t stupid. But across the corridor against the wall, and diagonally a meter away or so. Where she could see me comfortably, but not under any circumstances reach. I had a flask of carbonated water in my hand, and I sipped it, considering her.

She studied me right back. “Ooo, something pissed off the good little clade girl.”

She was lucky I was tuned. I gave myself an extra bump of GABA and took three deep breaths anyway.

I drank more water and didn’t answer.

“Are you enjoying being angry?” she asked me, cocking her head. Her hair had gotten long, and she tossed it out of her eyes. The tape residue was slowly wearing off her uninjured wrist, but the chain connecting her feet to her hands was short enough that she still could only reach her face if she was sitting or crouched down.

She was trying to get my goat. Okay then. Apparently my letting my tuning slip a little had made her think that she could gain an advantage over me by continuing to push that.

Well, that was my tactic too, then. It was like wrestling: one of us would eventually get the upper hand, but we both had to offer openings to encourage the other to grapple, or we’d just wind up circling each other forever. And when it came to self-control, I had the advantage of my rightminding.

How could I lose?

I stretched my legs out more comfortably. “What if I turned you over to the Jothari?”

Her eyes narrowed a little. Where did you learn that name? But she didn’t say it—didn’t say anything, just frowned, by which I presumed she was thinking.

I decided to make her think harder. “I admit, I wondered how a human managed to get onto the crew of such a famously xenophobic species.”

“The Synarche left them with good reasons to hate it,” she said. “That’s not xenophobia.”

“Still.”

She shrugged, chain rattling. “Lots of people don’t like the Synarche. You’d be amazed at what you can come up to talk about with somebody when you discover you’ve got an enemy in common.”

“Well.” I sighed, and as if discovering that I had a sudden taste for it, got slowly to my feet to collect the coffee makings. “You’re a Jothari mass murderer, Zanya. Are you telling me that an extralegal species that murders and disassembles sentients for profit wouldn’t have a nice, rich price on the head of a treacherous alien crew member?”

“You’d have to find them,” she scoffed.

I shrugged. “I bet if I put the word out they’d find me.”

“Ativahikas have never been proved to be sentient,” she said, which was as nice an avoidance of a subject as I’d ever seen.

I gave her my second-best pitying look. She couldn’t have the best one, because I had honed it on Connla. “Whatever lets you sleep at night.”

“I sleep fine at night,” she spat back. “And I don’t need to get my brain fiddled to do it.”

The rich smell of the brewing coffee arose around the probe. I saw her lean back and close her eyes, inhaling deeply.

“You want some of this?”

She cracked an eye. “You know I do.”

It did smell amazing. It occurred to me that if I could get her to start cooperating in small things, and reward that cooperation, then eventually I’d find it easier to get her to cooperate in larger things as well. Just like training a cat.

Unrightminded humans basically weren’t that different from cats, were they?

Right? Maybe?

Maybe, in fact, I could get a psychological dependency going, and then she’d want to tell me what I needed to know: how to turn this Well-caught ship around.

It was probably my best chance of spending my retirement someplace more interesting than interment in a Freeport. And now that the options were a little clearer in my mind, it turned out that I would really much rather accept some semivoluntary service to the Synarche for a few ans, rather than be press-ganged by pirates who probably wanted me more for the stuff in my skin than my engineering skill anyway. I couldn’t imagine myself very happy with a life of using my alien parasite to hunt down and raid unsuspecting ships and their crews.

“Ask nicely,” I said, as if I were tired of arguing about it and looking for an excuse to say yes.

I was surprised that she managed to master the anger I saw bubbling up in her. Apparently unrightminded humans can in fact manage a little bit of self-control, though honestly you wouldn’t know that from the plots of those antique books I’m always reading. There’s not two of those imaginary ancient people with any forebrain activation between them.

Though I guess if they did have any, the plots would be pretty boring.

She chewed her lower lip for a moment. Then she said, “Please may I have some coffee?”

I gave her the coffee I was already working on, once it was strained and ready. I half expected her to throw the scalding fluid in my face, and was ready with the gravity if I saw her arm go back. But I guess she realized that even if she burned me, she’d still be chained to a stanchion, and she probably wanted that coffee a lot more than she wanted an empty gesture.

I mean, I know I would have.

There was a name for what I was trying to do to her, I was pretty sure. I wished Singer were here to remind me what it was.

Imprinting?

No, Stockholmification.

Right. From an ancient city name, back on Earth. Funny how words like that got into the language and never left. Stentorian. Colossal. Stockholmify.

All I had to do was make sure I didn’t accidentally Stockholmify myself.

Or let her do it to me.