Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 20

I WASN’T GOING TO LET FARWEATHER see that she’d gotten to me. It was a white-knuckled couple of moments until the tuning really kicked in, however, and when it finally did I realized that I’d overdone it. I was, in fact, a little stoned on my own endorphins.

But I also wasn’t anxious, or reactive, or freaked right out, and I could think clearly—admittedly, through a haze of general goodwill and fondness for the universe intense enough that it even included murderous, amoral bad girl pirate rogues.

Why did it have to be bad girls? Moreover, why did they seem to have such a taste for me? I’d rendered myself more or less bulletproof. But they still seemed to be able to smell me coming. Even after all the rightminding and Recon.

I wondered if, in all the stuff she knew about me, Farweather knew about the time I’d spent out of my mind on deva. That probably would have bothered me if I were less chemically elevated. I almost laughed out loud when I realized how many of my precautions and anxieties about rightminding had to do with having been dependent on deva and never wanting to go back there.

What if she was right? I didn’t think Farweather was telling the truth; I didn’t think Farweather generally told the truth, unless it served her own very specific purposes. But I was also now able to think about her claims without anxiety or denial. It was an interesting perspective. I could see the reactivity and defensiveness rising up self-protectively inside my own brain, like an armored space marine ready to take on some kind of dangerous interstellar dragon.

The image made me giggle.

Farweather gave me an odd look from across the cabin.

I ignored her. Yep, if I was mixing my metaphors like that, I was definitely in an altered state. It felt good, though—like I was finally getting a chance to relax a little.

And I knew it would wear off soon. I didn’t want to tune back toward baseline, because I was enjoying actually feeling a little bit good for a change. But as generations of lazily plotted thrillers tell us, it’s rarely a good idea to get shit-faced while guarding a jail cell if you want your prisoner to be where you left them when you check later.

Once I knew she wasn’t under my skin anymore, it occurred to me that I could certainly use her expectation of being under my skin. Especially since I’d been quiet for so long.

I settled down on my mattress, cross-legged, back to the wall, easing my slightly sore afthands. I’d been going around without my boots a bunch, and my afthands were better acclimated than I would have thought possible, but it did stretch the tendons in funny ways. Also, I thought they kind of freaked Farweather out, based on her sidelong glances, and I was all for anything that might put her off her stride.

I said, “So since you know all about me and Niyara, why do you think she did it?” I probably didn’t quite succeed in not sounding hostile, but that probably made it seem more convincing that she had gotten to me.

Farweather gave me that are you an alien? stare, which I think was unfair, because I suspect most systers wouldn’t have been surprised or confused by my question.

“To get at the Synarche,” she said, as if it were patently obvious. “To protest their mind control practices. And some reasons of her own. You really are a babe in the woods, aren’t you?”

Her dismissal niggled at me. I wanted to say, as if to a child, How did she expect that to work out? I recognized the urge, identified it, and then held my breath until it passed.

Good modeling of rational behavior there, Dz.

While I was looking at Farweather, and Farweather was looking at me, the Koregoi ship’s lights and gravity fluttered briefly, never quite going off, but dimming (and lightening) significantly for a few seconds, in quick pulses. Well, that wasn’t unsettling at all. Especially when we were reliant on that power source for life support, and when it was, conservatively speaking, probably a few millennians old.

Well, okay, maybe less than that in its own timeframe, what with having been put on ice at the edge of a black hole, where the subjective passage of time might have been only a few decans. Or a few dozen decans. I wished bitterly that Singer were here to figure out the physics and do the math for me.

Grief is stupid and hard.

And a centad is still a damned long time to go without a lubricant change and an overhaul.

I looked away from Farweather and then looked back, on the off chance that she would be wearing a calm expression, indicating that she knew what was causing the fluctuation and everything was under control, thank you.

Unfortunately for my peace of mind, she was biting her lower lip and frowning.

She didn’t say anything, though, so I decided against giving her any information by implication about what I did or did not know about the status of the power systems on board the Koregoi prize, and instead just kept talking.

I said, “How do you think the Synarche feels about you?”

She did that shrugging thing I was learning to find so infuriating. “People just naturally hate things that are different from them.”

The way you, and Niyara, hate us. Because our existence—and functionality as a community—threatens your identity.

What I said was, “People just naturally get eaten by big cats or die of disease before their eighth solar, too, but nobody has ever felt like that was a good-enough reason not to take preventative measures against leopard attacks and tetanus, once they were technologically able to.”

“Synarche imperialism—”

“An argument that would hold more atmosphere if you could show me where the Synarche has done more to the Freeports than move against them when the burden of piracy got heavy enough to demand action. Hell, we don’t even rightmind pirates without their consent.”

“Coerced consent. If they don’t agree, you just lock them up forever.”

“That’s just self-defense,” I said cheerfully. “There’s nothing wrong with enforcing reasonable boundaries through the application of consequences.”

“You’re pretty smug for somebody who’s afraid to remember what she really did, and who she was before she got Reconned.”

“How do you know about the Recon?” I wish I hadn’t asked again. It was a vulnerability to care.

“You were interesting,” she said, as she had said before.

“Information is for sale, is that what you’re saying?”

She made a noncommittal noise. I guessed I would probably never actually know everything about this mess.

“You’re pretty certain of yourself.”

“Let me into your fox,” she said, “and I’ll show you who you were.”

“If I let you into my fox, you can show me anything,” I answered. “Machine memory is programmable. And unlike Justice, you don’t need my consent for any changes, and you don’t have any ethical guidelines.”

She just laughed. “Dark and cold, you’re naive.”

She did get under my skin that time. But the soothing brain chemicals were still working, and I looked at my irritation, inspected it. Then I decided to say exactly what I’d thought about saying when I was defensive and reactive, just with intent this time.

“You know,” I said lazily, “that’s just atavistic anxiety and fear behavior, and it’s pretty easy to regulate chemically. Then you can practice being afraid of things that might actually hurt you.”

I’d managed to derail her into arguing in circles for a change, I realized. It felt… pretty good.

Not the sort of good you want to get hooked on, however. Winning conversations is fine every once in a while, but getting in the habit of always having to win them is a hell of a way to run any relationship that isn’t already based on mutual antagonism. I told myself that I wanted Farweather off balance, and that it didn’t hurt if I could find ways to make her eager to impress me. I wished I knew more about neural programming and how to get people to do what you wanted without rightminding when you had to work on their preconceptions and patterned behaviors rather than more self-aware sets of motivations.

I mean, not that Farweather was entirely un-self-aware. She wasn’t childlike. She was just… self-justifying in funny ways.

Which made me wonder if I, too, was self-justifying in funny ways. Protecting my preconceptions. Defending my internal structures rather than being willing to challenge them.

Maybe I was a nice, safe little puppet of the Synarche, or Justice.

Or maybe I was a person who valued community and the well-being of the mass of sentient life over the individual right to be selfish. And I mean, that—by itself—was the one overarching and unifying belief that made the Synarche possible. I was free to be whoever I wanted, do whatever I wanted, as long as it wasn’t harmful to or exploitative of others, or profligate with resources. I would be assured livelihood and health and housing, and if my efforts benefitted the community, I would be allotted resources to pursue them.

But if I was needed to serve for a time, I was expected to serve for that time. And not everybody—for example Singer—came with that essential freedom installed; AIs were expected to serve first, and earn their freedom later.

That didn’t seem exactly right to me. But the resources to create them had to come from somewhere, didn’t they?

The resources to create me had come from somewhere, too. Which is why I owed the Synarche service if it needed me. But I didn’t have to pay off a debt just for existing… .

It was complicated. Maybe there are no really fair systems.

I don’t know.

I didn’t sleep well. Even when I tuned the anxiety out, my brain wouldn’t be quiet: I was too deep in problem-solving mode to stop myself from assessing, contemplating, nagging at the relentlessly uncrunchable data.

If only intractable, nuanced, convoluted problems had simple linear solutions with a right and wrong answer, amenable to a little logical consideration. Of course, if that were the case, the entire course of human history would be different. And we probably wouldn’t need a Synarche, because any idiot could figure out what to do in any given circumstance.

I could have made myself sleep, but honestly I felt that my brain needed the time to work, and if I slept, I wanted it to be the chemically uncomplicated sleep that would allow my subconscious to keep plugging away at the problems it was chewing on. I knew letting Farweather at my brain—at my machine memory—was a bad idea. A catastrophically bad idea.

But she’d gotten to me, after all.

Who was I? What had I done?

Who had I been, if I wasn’t who I thought I was?

Or was she completely full of lies, saying anything she thought of to get me to wander into range? That was the most likely explanation, quite frankly. Probably everything she was telling me was balderdash. She knew an awful lot about me, though. Enough that I still suspected that she’d known it for much longer than she was admitting.

We’d all been traveling nonstop since we encountered each other near the murdered Jothari ship, so there wasn’t time for her to have researched me unless the information was already easily available to her. Information takes a long time to get from place to place. Nearly as long as people do. All the evidence pointed to our presence there having been part of some complicated plan.

Maybe they’d fired to disable our ship rather than destroying it on purpose. If Singer hadn’t popped us into white space, it’s possible the next shot would have taken out our coils, and then we would have been at their mercy. We’d have had no choice except to surrender.

What would have happened to Singer then? The Freeporters hated artificial intelligences as abominations. Would they have just left him adrift in space? Would they have destroyed him once they’d retrieved me, or me and Connla?

Then I remembered that Singer and Connla were dead, and it hit me like a gravity whip again. Obviously, I was not doing a very good job of processing my grief. I needed time to mourn. What I had was… a lot of crazy ideas that sounded more than a little narcissistic to me when I stared at them for too long.

It made me feel like a nasty, suspicious, slightly off-kilter conspiracy theorist, but I couldn’t help but wonder again about that tip that had sent Connla and Singer and me out to the disabled Jothari ship to begin with. The timelines really didn’t make sense: Why hadn’t we gotten there to find the Jothari ship already claimed by the pirates and removed? That only made sense if we’d gotten our hot tip on the location of fresh salvage before Farweather had murdered the Jothari ship. Or if we’d gotten it after, but the pirates had waited for us to get there.

Could they have been waiting for their own salvage tug? It took specialized skills to retrieve a derelict from white space, but they had to have Freeport salvage operators, right? How else did they manage to pirate, for crying out loud? And if they’d wanted Singer to use as a tug, they wouldn’t have shot his damned boom off, would they?

Conspiracy theories are really attractive. Figuring out patterns is one of the things that gets your brain to give you a nice dose of chemical reward, the little ping of dopamine and whatever else that keeps you smiling. As a result, your brain is pretty good at finding patterns, and at disregarding information that doesn’t fit. Which means it’s also pretty good at finding false patterns, and at confirmation bias, and a bunch of other things that can be fatal. Our brains are also really good at making us the center of a narrative, because it’s what we evolved for.

So maybe I was making things all about me, to a ridiculous level. And yet. If they hadn’t needed salvage operators—specifically Synarche salvage operators—then I came back, again, to the idea that they’d been trying to get their hands on me. Which was not the most reassuring of conclusions, though it certainly did reinforce all my cherished beliefs about the depth of my own importance.

I wanted to know and I didn’t want to know, and I was having doubts about everything from who I was to my most basic memories. I didn’t think she was telling the truth—not all of it, anyway. But she might be telling enough of the truth that I would have something to gain—self-knowledge or something else—from taking it up with her.

It occurred to me that if I opened my fox to Farweather, she’d have to open hers to me. Assuming, of course, that she had one—but I couldn’t imagine anybody getting around in civilized space without some kind of access to senso. How would you open doors, for that matter? Talk to systers? Sure, you might be a humanocentric bigot, but you still needed to be able to talk to other ships and stationmasters (Habren, anyone?) if you were going to have anything to do with civilized space at all—and at least some Freeporters patently did so.

It also occurred to me that the answers to just about everything I wanted to know were probably sitting right out there in the open, shelved neatly in Farweather’s machine memory. Assuming she had machine memory.

This was a terrible idea. No justification I came up with was going to change that.

And yet, it was an idea that I kept having.

“How can I believe what you’re telling me?” I asked, sitting down on my own mattress, bleary-eyed. I felt terrible: sweaty, complicated, as if my skin were borrowed and also itched abominably. Farweather, despite being chained to the stanchion by one ankle, managed to look cool and tidy, except where her hair was tangled and greasy. Mine was growing out long—by my standards, anyway—and had started forming a wooly puff that tended to get flattened on one side from sleeping under gravity, when I didn’t go climb into my access tube and float free and comfortable.

She said, “Of all the things I am, I’m not a liar, Haimey.”

“I’m still collecting data on that, thank you.”

This is a terrible idea.

What would Connla do?

He’d tell you it was a terrible idea.

And then?

And then he’d probably decide to do it. Just to see what happened.

The still, small voice of my conscience was starting to sound rather a lot like Singer.

Right, I told myself. Just to see what happens, then.

“What kind of safeguards can you offer me, if we’re trading machine memories?”

“I didn’t say anything about trading,” she answered, too quickly.

“Well,” I said, “I’m not going to just let you have mine. There has to be some kind of quid pro quo.”

“I’ll help you get control of the ship.”

“Not good enough.” I was enjoying this. I reminded myself not to enjoy it too much, and that she was probably playing up her investment to make me think I had more control over the situation than I did.

“You’re an engineer,” she said, after studying her fingernails for a while. “You build the connectors. That way you can assure yourself that I won’t do anything untoward. You can just design it out.”

I considered it. Farweather seemed to have a more advanced opinion of my jury-rigging skill than I did.

Huh, who knows? Maybe she was right about that. In the very least, it was flattering.

Also probably her intention. But I was willing to take it where I could get it for the time being.

Was I willing to try to steal her memories without her consent?

It was a matter of life and death, wasn’t it?

Hell, I thought. I’m already a walking war crime. How much more ethically compromised can I get? But how much more ethically compromised did I want to get? There was Farweather, blinking me, as a perfect example of what moral relativism led to.

“Look,” she said. “I’m not a neuralistics expert. I know next to nothing about how rightminding works. What do you think I could do to you?”

“Then what good does it do you to get access to my fox?”

She smiled. “Well, I do happen to have the codes to unlock your Recon and see what’s under it. So I don’t actually need to be an expert. I just need to input a series of keys that will allow you to access the original memories. It’s unconstitutional for Justice to actually erase old memories; they have to just bury them.”

I knew enough about Recon and machine memory to know she was broadly accurate. Besides, changing and editing machine memories didn’t actually change meat memories. Time and exposure and the brain editing itself to remove conflicts between what the fox told it and what it remembered for itself handled that problem. Meat memories were notoriously unreliable.

I frowned down at my fingernails. They were a mess; the poor diet was having an effect on me. “You just… happen to have them.”

Bright-eyed, she shrugged. “Besides, if I harm you too badly, I’ll starve before help gets here.” She rattled her chain significantly.

“You could eat my corpse,” I said cheerfully.

“Won’t stay fresh long enough,” she answered, deadpan. “Besides, there’s still the problem of hydration.”

I’m an idiot.

I went for it.

It took me a couple of diar to take apart and reconstruct some of the equipment from her kit and my kit (including some of my helmet controls and com) to make a rig that I was pretty sure would let her read my senso without writing to it. She could give me the access codes and the encryption keys, and I would enter them. Then I’d share the senso-memory with her, which was the real reason we needed the rig; her tech and mine weren’t entirely compatible, though an AI probably could have navigated it, and we were both a little chary of just hooking up our alien parasites and letting them talk to each other.

This system also meant that I couldn’t just paralyze her with a virus and go rummaging around in in her machine memory, but I suppose it made me a better person not to be engaged in coercive control of somebody else’s fox in an attempt to steal access to their memories. More’s the pity.

Not that I would ever have anything so illegal in my possession as a bit of code that could bust into somebody’s fox. Especially after spending a couple of decians in the company of a pirate who wanted to own and control me, without much to do except stare at the walls, fail to get control of the ship, and think up projects to keep myself busy.

Perish the thought.

She didn’t like my conditions, but she agreed, which suggested to me that whatever might be hidden in my head—if anything was hidden in my head—was something that she and her pirate buddies expected to be very valuable.

And that meant I wanted to know it too.

I had her come to the very end of her chain, and turn around so her back was facing me. The leads on the primitive rig I’d knocked together weren’t long, and I certainly wasn’t going to come within range of her fists if I could help it. I suppose she could have stretched way out and pummeled me. But all I had to do was scramble away from her, and I would probably manage to escape without being harmed too badly or taken captive.

It would have been nice if we could have done it all passively, but the helmet receivers I’d salvaged needed to be right up against one’s skull to pick up signals from the fox, and I hadn’t figured out yet how to use our Koregoi symbiotes as antennae to broadcast from our foxes, as if we were dressing up as old-fashioned radio stations.

That was a joke. Of sorts.

I adhered two patches to the back of Farweather’s neck, right under the base of her skull, and felt them stick on snugly. The leads ran back to the machine, and while she sat there patiently I drew it as far back as they would allow, and then walked back another couple of steps before adhering the patches to the analogous place on my own body. The stickum was cold, and the receivers a little uncomfortable. Their edges weren’t as rounded as I would have liked; they were meant to be contained inside and padded by the lining of the helmet.

Still, they ought to work for what we needed. At least, when I flipped the toggles, the tiny lights on my jury-rigged electronics started dancing softly into brilliance, one by one by one.

I sat staring at her back, feeling… nothing, not even the prickle of a microcurrent across my scalp. If it hadn’t been for the pretty little flicker of those status lights, I probably would have thought the thing wasn’t getting any juice and reached out to check that I’d remembered to hit the power button.

Yes, it happens even to seasoned engineers.

Then I felt the shape of words forming inside my head, like the sound of my own thoughts.

Hello, Haimey.

The voice had a distinct sound to it, and it wasn’t very much like Farweather’s voice—it was deeper and more resonant—but the intonations were the same. Everybody’s voice sounds different in their own head.

Well, I answered. I guess that worked, then.

Are you ready for the codes?

I laughed. Not even… remotely.

There was a pause, and I felt her groan in disbelief and suffering. “That was terrible,” she said out loud.

It’s who I am, I answered.

I turned my attention to my internal interfaces, while keeping half my mind’s eye on Farweather. It was even trickier than it sounds, frankly, because I couldn’t safely let the attention I had on her waver, but I also needed to run through the monitors and find my way into their operating system, which was an intentionally complicated task. You didn’t want any random teenager mucking around with the inside of their own head. It had too much potential to end badly.

I wonder if I consented, I thought, and realized as I thought it that some part of my mind was taking for granted that Farweather was telling me the truth when she claimed that Judicial had reconstructed my machine memories, and thus allowed them to reshape the meat memories in their image.

I thought about those memories, tried consciously to call one up without accessing my fox for corroboration.

But it wasn’t memories of Niyara that rose to the surface. Instead, it was memories of a more literal surfacing. I thought of the Prize, rising out of the Saga-star’s accretion disk in mysterious response to my presence.

As I thought of it, I felt Farweather’s surprised, mocking delight. Oh, babes. You thought that was you?

What do you mean? I answered.

The ship. Emerging from the Well. You thought you had something to do with it? It came when you called because you’re so special?

I didn’t answer. My cheeks burned. My eyes smarted.

Of course I had.

How precious. Honey, I control this ship. I always have.

She hadn’t controlled the gravity when I slammed her against the deck, had she? I reached out to do it again, viciously, wanting to slap the glee out of her—

I stopped myself. Just in time.

That was not who I was.

Assuming I was anybody, I mean.

Then she asked, point-blank: Did Niyara ever tell you anything she said would be important later? Did she ever give you anything? An upload? Something physical?

I kept my face and mind as still as I could—not that she could see my face where she was sitting—which was probably as much of an answer as if I had gasped out loud.

I tried not to think of the little book, the only hard copy book I had ever held in my hands, and which I had for some reason hung on to all these ans. I thought instead about the feeling of Niyara’s blood on my hands as I tried to hold her wounds closed.

But what I saw—what I remembered, intrusively, compulsively—was Niyara giving me the small package. And me staring at her, without even really registering what she had put in my hands. The thermoplex wrapping dented in my hands. Whatever was inside was moderately flexible without being soft, and made a faint crinkling sound. “What is this?”

“A gift,” she said.

“A gift? A physical object?”

“So I’m old-fashioned,” she had said. “Go on and open it.”

That was old-fashioned. Wrapping paper, and something that wasn’t just printed and endlessly recyclable. Except it was something printed. The old kind of printed: text on paper. A book.

I turned a page. It felt fragile and yet somehow strangely substantial. It had, I realized, a faint aroma. Polymer.

“Keep that safe,” she had said. “It might be important to you somedia”

I had given the game away already. I said, She sure did. It was on Singer when your people murdered him.

A book, she said.

Then, after a pause, she said, Do these numbers mean anything to you?

They didn’t. There were a lot of them, and I allowed my feelings of blank confusion to fill my mind while I retreated back into what I had been doing when she distracted me. I would think about this new conundrum later. Right now, I was going to have one more crack at breaking into Farweather’s fox. I didn’t think it would work, and I was sure it was unethical. But I wasn’t exactly in a position where I could turn over what I knew to the Synarche and let them detail Judiciary to do a legal search. So I dropped that totally illegal bit of code I didn’t have and hadn’t written, and crossed my aftfingers in my boots.

The incompatibilities in our hardware and base code were just too much. I didn’t think she’d noticed—I didn’t get knocked back—but it was like throwing spaghetti at a frictionless surface. Maybe if I’d had the time to try a few iterations and adjustments, I could have worked around to something that might find a place to link in and siphon off some data. Possibly I should have tried harder to figure out a way to paralyze her. As it was, I was sure she’d yank the leads off if she got the tiniest inkling of what I was planning.

It didn’t pay off, and I didn’t have time to keep trying.

I wanted to use this time for my own purposes. I needed to pry into my own meat, rather than meta, memories of Niyara—and of what we had done. And see how much truth Farweather was telling me.

I memorized the numbers, though, against later need. You never knew.

I didn’t believe Farweather would be able to feel what I was thinking as I went deeper into my meat memories; I was intentionally blocking the interface machine and also my machine memories. So the ayatana wouldn’t influence what I recalled, and so nothing should show up in my senso feed.

I’d never intentionally blocked out my own ayatana before.

It was strange, like thinking about a story I’d heard of something that had happened to someone else. It had happened to someone else; I was briefly enmeshed in a memory that could only be Niyara’s, and it left me shivering. I had a vivid sense of a… bottle, an old-fashioned wine bottle made of the kind of glass that would break into umpteen tiny shards if struck solidly, and of wiping the screws on the neck very, very carefully before threading a bottle cap into place.

In the memory I knew that if I didn’t exercise profound diligence, the bottle would detonate. It was full of a highly reactive explosive and a handful of screws and washers to make shrapnel along with the shattering silica glass.

I wondered if I had read about what I was half experiencing in a court document, or if maybe a bit of Niyara’s senso had been played at the trial and I was recollecting its sensations now. The trial—and the terrorist attack—were both such a long time ago that even if my recollections hadn’t been edited for public safety, the meat ones wouldn’t have been reliable. Especially since I’d been in a state of shock when it happened, and a state of profound trauma afterward, for the inquest and the trial.

One of the best things about the fox is that it gives everybody unbiased memories of what actually happened on any given dia, or in any given interaction. I can’t imagine what dispute resolution must have been like in the bad old diar, when basically anybody could make any kind of claim about what happened, and unless somebody had had a recorder running, nobody ever could be sure of the truth. Eyewitness reports, they used to call them, and they were notoriously inaccurate and unprovable.

Those “eyewitness reports” were good records of what people thought they saw, and what they remembered they thought they saw. They were really good records of what confirmation bias led people to believe, and want to believe.

Trying to get a factual record out of that would be like… Like constantly dealing with Farweather, probably.

As if thinking of her had summoned her, she poked me in the attention. Are you on task, babes?

Looking for my meat memories didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. They were doubtless under so many layers of confabulation that I’d never be able to pick them out clearly anyway. Maybe I was just going to have to shut down my fox for a while and see what happened.

That meant getting to my own operating system, so to speak. And using Farweather’s codes.

I could feel her looking over my shoulder, virtually speaking, as I delved deeper in my mind. The temptation to pull up old ayatanas and wallow in the memories was as powerful as any time you’re going through your music collection and hit that cache of files you haven’t listened to since you were in school. But I managed, despite the pull of nostalgia and procrastination.

Having Farweather right there playing virtual voyeur helped to keep the urge suppressed.

Anyway, I was getting closer to the operating system. I poked around a bit more, and was pretty sure I had found it because I suddenly hit such a strong sense of aversion that if Farweather hadn’t been backstopping me, I would have been halfway across the room and totally jacked out of our jury-rigged sharing system before anybody could have said “boo.” As I reached for the contact pads at the base of my skull, though, she gave me such a boost of calm that I managed to stop my hands in mid-grab and return them slowly to my lap.

“Why do I think there’s more going on here than you’re telling me?” I said out loud.

She shrugged. “Quit now, and you’ll never get the chance to find out.”

I wanted to curse her, but if I randomly cursed out everybody who got on my nerves on a given dia, I never would have been able to exist on a tiny ship with Connla for a decans and a half. Instead, I reached out into the structure of the hull with the Koregoi senso. Make backups, Singer always said. I fiddled with a few things, and left it there.

Best I could do right now.

She said, “What if I told you I had Niyara.”

I stared at her, scoffed. “Niyara is dead. She died while bleeding all over me.”

After cheating all over me, I thought. She’d lied on so many fronts, in so many ways. About big things and little. I could have dealt with being a secondary relationship, if she hadn’t lied to me about not having a primary one. I… well, I probably wouldn’t have been okay with her being a terrorist.

Would I have been?

Farweather turned her head so I could see the corner of her smile. “I’ve got her ayatana. Up to the moment of her death, actually. Safely hidden, so don’t bother ratting through my stuff to find it.”

I probably would have made a derogative comment about the desirability of ratting through pirate bags. Except I’d been doing it for weeks, scavenging her food and equipment.

So I guess she had me there.

On the one hand, if there was any such recording, it would explain a lot about how Farweather knew so much about me. And how she knew about the book. On the other hand, if there wasn’t such a recording, her claim that she’d hidden it outside of her luggage meant I could never actually be sure if it existed or not.

I really had to stop underestimating her. It was going to get my head staved in. And maybe I should look into hiding some information where she wouldn’t find it, just in case the Synarche got their hands and tentacles and whatnot on the Prize and I… hadn’t made it.

“Then you probably know where she got the information you’re so desperate to get back from me,” I challenged.

“Oh, sure,” Farweather said. “She stole it.”

“It’d help if you told me what it was. I might be able to find it.”

“But you wouldn’t tell me what it is if you did know.” She still had her back to me, but she crossed her arms triumphantly.

“I might bargain,” I said. “After all, you have a lot of things that I want.”

She glanced over her shoulder to leer at me, and I rolled my eyes.

“Don’t be boring,” I said.

“Look who’s talking.” But she turned away again. “A Koregoi artifact. She lifted it, and your clademothers managed to decipher the markings.”

“My clademothers?” It burst out of me like I was an unregulated child.

Farweather was lying. She had to be lying.

She didn’t feel like she was lying.

I took a long, calming breath.

She continued, “It was a probe, probably. Small. White space capable. There were plates on it made of inert metal. Inscribed with symbols. Didn’t Terrans used to send out probes like that?”

“This wasn’t Terran, though, I take it?”

“Definitely old,” she answered. “It was spotted near the Core, and declared a heritage site, but the seekers and scientists hadn’t managed to decode it. Niyara and some other Freeporters managed to… liberate it. It turned out it was a marker—a buoy, basically—and what it was there to mark was this thing.” She tapped the deck under her hand. “That’s how we knew where to look for it.”

“You expect me to believe that my clademothers managed to read the message on an ancient artifact that the Core universities couldn’t decipher? And that they were working with pirates? I do not believe it.”

She shrugged. “They were pathological, but pretty good archaeologists, or so I hear. Possibly it’s something to do with being so atavistic their own selves.”

“Ooo, big word,” I said mockingly.

She took it in stride, with a grin and a little shake of her head.

“So if your people found this, and my people decoded it and shared the information with you, why are you so keen on what you think I know?”

Farweather made a grumpy noise, like a disturbed cat. “Because Niyara didn’t share everything with anybody, apparently. She spread her information around. And hid some of it.”

“Why would she do that if she was planning to die?”

Farweather answered me with a question. “Haven’t you always wondered what she was thinking?”

I didn’t answer. She cranked around to check my face, then batted her lashes at me while I resolutely did not move sideways to make eye contact. “Haven’t you ever wondered how she felt about you? If maybe she wanted to give you something of value, that you could bargain with? She’d have to hide something like that even from you, though—because she had to know there would be Recon, and she couldn’t have you handing it over to Judiciary, or to your clade.”

“You know what?” I said. “I really don’t want to know. In fact, I was an ass to let you talk me into this.”

I hadn’t managed to pick my way through her defenses and her unfamiliar tech to find out more about how she was piloting the Prize, if in fact she was piloting the Prize. I hadn’t figured out how much she actually knew about me, about Niyara, about what Niyara had given me or done. And suddenly, I didn’t care anymore at all.

All I had accomplished was giving her another avenue to get under my skin. My skin, which was marked with the stigmata of a murdered Ativahika.

I stripped the rig off and stood. This was a great time to make coffee. Farweather said a few more things at me, but she was talking to my shoulder. I had plenty to occupy my attention and my hands.

Rightminding is a wonderful technology.

I didn’t even think once about busting her nose.

Well, not that dia, anyway.

“The lights are dimming again,” Farweather said, after I gave her her coffee in silence and backed away to sip my own at a safe distance.

It had happened once or twice since the first time. We’d both largely been ignoring it, each of us pretending for the other that we had some idea of what was going on, I surmised—unless she was behind it all, but if she was, or if she wasn’t, I certainly wasn’t going to give away that I was completely flummoxed by asking her.

I wondered what new gambit this was. What strategy had changed her mind.

“Well,” I said, “my little box here isn’t drawing any power from any external system. What do you think might be causing it?”

She glanced over her shoulder at me, and I—having turned toward her a little as well—could just see the edge of her frown. We were like two cats spatting, each refusing to yield turf or acknowledge the existence of the other.

“I just don’t know,” she said.

Well, that was a terrible answer.

I finished the coffee. I turned around and came toward her, looked at her. She rose, and came to look at me. She studied my face; I felt the beginnings of a connection. Some comprehension. A bridge between us.

She said, “Maybe we could, after all, find common ground. Work together. Maybe we can team up.”

I said, “I need to go home, Farweather.”

She smirked bitterly. “So do I.”

“That didn’t sound like a decision, exactly.”

“No,” she said. “Nor loyalty.”

I wondered if she really was a human bomb. Like Niyara.

Niyara had chosen it, though.

I waited. We stood, facing each other. I knew I was too close; but I wanted to be there.

This is a bad idea, said the little voice in my head. My own internalized ghost of Singer. Haimey, step back.

She moved so fast I didn’t even see her, swinging with one straight arm, taking a single lunge step forward, and clapping her cupped left hand against my right temple with force and accuracy.

I fell to the floor. I felt the impact on my limbs and body, treacherous gravity. Treacherous gravity.

Treacherous gravity. My ally in this fight!

She’d—what had she done?

I tried to reach out into the parasite, to slam Farweather back against the wall, but all I got was a tickle of presence and then a crushing, incapacitating pain. Not from the fall; from my chest and my belly. From my heart.

I’m having a heart attack. She’s somehow triggered a heart attack. I am going to die right here.