Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 23

THE LIGHTS DIMMED ONCE MORE, and the whole giant ship shuddered. I regretted unrolling ourselves from the padding, but the gravity stayed on and we didn’t suffer any sudden, unexpected vector changes that left us ricocheting off the walls.

I unlocked Farweather’s chain, and she gazed at me speculatively, rubbing her wrist. “If I’d known that all it would take was kissing you, I would have done that ages ago.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m going up to observation. This is your chance to come along.”

Also, if something terrible happened to the ship and I was incapacitated, I needed to know she had a fighting chance to survive, and I hadn’t left her welded to a bulkhead wall to starve.

“Observation, huh?”

“Shake a leg,” I said. “It’s pretty.”

We made it up slowly, limping and leaning on walls. She kept an elbow pressed to her side hard enough that I thought about offering to wrap her ribs for her, but she didn’t ask and if she didn’t ask I wasn’t going to offer. I was braced for her to try something, but she didn’t. Possibly she was counting me as a potential ally if it turned out that we had enemies in common.

In any case, I wasn’t going to turn my back on her. So I made her go first, and she didn’t complain. I was carrying her bolt prod, anyway—I’d retrieved it from my hiding spot before I turned her loose—so it probably would have been a bad idea for her to come after me unless she could get the drop somehow.

We proceeded to observation. It was pretty. We were still in white space, and the twisting bands of light were particularly lovely for being so narrow, with so much dark between.

Gorgeous to look at, but it gave me a chill. We were way out in the Dark and the Empty, if this was all the starlight around.

Starlight. What a tautology. As if there’s anything else in the universe that makes light. Directly or indirectly, all the light there is originates from stars.

Well, I suppose you could make a case for antimatter, or for burning hydrogen, but you’d have to stretch the point, and besides, fussing with poetry until you ruin it has never been a sport that appealed to me.

Farweather walked toward the dome, still rubbing her wrist where the shackle had been. She didn’t seem to have any galls or sores—I’d been careful to pad the thing, and to give her supplies to change the padding regularly—so I guessed it was just the reflexive fussing motion of someone recently freed.

“Wow,” she said.

I grinned into my palm. “Told you it was pretty.”

She shot me a look over her shoulder that was practically scorching. My cheeks burned; I glanced away.

Terrible idea.

And it wasn’t getting any better.

Flustered, I grabbed ahold of the conversation and unsubtly steered it. “Should you take us out of white space?”

“Maybe. I don’t have fine maneuvering control.”

“How were you going to dock us on the other end?” I blurted, scandalized.

“Tugboats.” She shook her head at me. “You ought to know about those.”

I ought to. Well, that answered one of my questions.

She pointed. “There’s our company.”

I followed the line of her finger to see what she was aiming it at, and discovered a ship sharing our white bubble that was doing absolutely nothing to render itself unnoticeable. It burned running lights, and had floodlit itself so I could make out the registration marks and the details of the design.

I caught my breath when I saw it, my mouth relaxing into a smile. What I was looking at, blinking in disbelief, was a pretty standard Synarche interdiction cruiser, a light Interceptor-class constabulary vessel that was mostly engines and ship-to-ship weapons held together with an armored skin around a small crew compartment, its needle-like hull wrapped in a double set of white coils.

Well, that explained how it had caught us. Those things were fast.

It was inside the Prize’s enormous white coils, a piece of fancy flying that made me think painfully of my lost shipmate. I’d heard rumors of Judiciary pilots who could match up white bubbles in transit, while both ships were pushing v. I’d never thought to have a front-row glimpse of it.

“Not one of ours,” Farweather said.

“Not one of yours, maybe.”

She shot me a look that was far more amused than angry. Pirate fatalism, maybe. “You think they’ll be pleased to see you?”

I managed to keep my nails from rattling on the butt of the bolt prod. Whatever I might have said back to her, I never got the chance to try, because a male voice broke in. Steeped in dry humor, moderately familiar, it said, “Oh, I should think they will be very pleased to see you, Dz.”

Singer?

“Singer?”

Silence, for a moment. Then: “Sorry, adjusting the speaker protocols. Is this voice a closer match?”

“Oh my goodness, Singer!”

“Present,” the shipmind said, from all around me. “Wow, there’s a lot of room in this brain.”

I would have hugged him. I needed to hug him, but I couldn’t hug him, so instead I bounced in place on my toes and swung my arms like an overexcited five-an-old who has to let some of the energy out somehow or explode all over the place, emotionally speaking, and messily.

“How are you alive?” I babbled. “I just—how are you on the Koregoi ship?”

“I ditched here,” he said. “When the tug was destroyed, I sent a personality seed over. Remember that I had an uplink going? It just took me nearly this long to figure out the system over here, rewrite my own code so that I could run on it effectively, then write the ship itself a new OS so I could control my lips and fingers, to use a totally inappropriate anthropomorphization. Also, I had the Koregoi senso in your brain to use as a transitional platform, until somebody fried your fox.”

“Wait,” I said. “You used my brain as… an adaptor?”

“To bridge incompatible systems.”

“An adaptor.”

“…Yes?”

I reached out and patted the nearest bulkhead, just about swimming in relief. “This is amazing. This is the best news ever. Wait, did you…? Were you in my senso? While my fox was still operating?

“I had a seed in you, too, though just a tiny one with very limited functionality; there’s not a lot of room in there.”

“I heard you—it?—talking to me. Maybe? Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?”

Farweather had turned around and was staring at me, up at space, at the Interceptor, around at the deck and walls of the Koregoi ship. I glared at her. Whatever she was about to say, I did not want to hear it.

She shut her mouth again and turned her shoulder to me. That was fine. The feeling was pretty mutual.

“I wasn’t in contact with that seed,” Singer said. “If anything happened to corrupt this instance of me, I wanted the uncorrupted backup. And as for why it didn’t tell you—it wasn’t a proper AI. Just a personality seed.”

“You could have let me know you were there!”

“Knowing myself, I’m sure I was talking to you.”

“…I might have noticed that,” I agreed.

I didn’t know enough about programming artificial intelligences to have a good sense of the technical difference between an AI proper and a personality seed. But I could probably make do with my self-evident sense of the generalities, and I was figuring that out pretty rapidly.

“But how’d you get in here?” I said.

“I’d transferred an archive over to this machine as well, as soon as I got access to it. Did you know there’s a lot of bandwidth in your parasite?”

“You propagated? Singer, you did something illegal?”

He sighed, which was something he did for communication with meatpeople, not because shipminds exhale loudly in worry or frustration. “It seemed like a safe precaution. And I didn’t think you’d mind.”

Farweather sneered at me, and (I thought) at Singer and the Synarche and the whole lot of us in general. “And it’s just coincidence that he shows up now.”

I thought of the voice in my head, the one I’d thought was my own wishful thinking. I thought of the power fluctuations and the weird way in which the ship had occasionally seemed to help me out: the stanchion, for example. Or maybe it was just that the ship was helpful, even without Singer in charge, but still, I was convinced. He hadn’t just shown up now. He’d been around the whole time. He’d just… manifested now. And I couldn’t blame him for biding his time until the reinforcements got here. Or had it taken him this long to get adequate control of the Prize’s systems? Was it possible that he had summoned them in once he was active? No, he couldn’t have reached across two white bubbles… .

But possibly he could have sensed them approaching, and slowed the Prize to help them catch us. Who knew what kind of sensors this thing had, and how it could interact with dark gravity.

Farweather said, “I’m sure this sudden AI has nothing to do with the Synarche ship matching pace with us. You’re being played, Haimey. This is not your friend. It’s just a… simulation.”

She tried to sound concerned, but I knew how the Freeporters—and Farweather herself—felt about free artificial intelligences. They deemed them untrustworthy and kept what limited computation they used hobbled, not allowing it to develop self-awareness.

Paranoid Luddites.

I glanced up at the interdiction cruiser and its impossibly skilled flying. A bubble of optimism rose in me—one that I would have quenched, if I’d been able to tune, because the pain of its being disappointed would be so extreme. But I was filled with what the ancient poets would have called a wild surmise, a hope so strong it hurt me physically.

“What about Connla and the cats?” I said to Singer, ignoring Farweather. My voice broke.

He ignored the evidence of emotion. “I’m not completely sure. But they might have lived. They were all suited up, and the part of the tug that was directly hit was the drive, not the control cabin.”

Relief surged in me. Dizzying, rendering me so giddy I actually reached for my fox to bump it back under control. I shouldn’t have bothered, and not just because I had no fox—because the elation was replaced with dread as I had another idea. A terrible one. What happened once could happen again, and while the Interceptor was a hell of a lot tougher than a tug…

“Wait. Singer. Do you have control of this ship’s weapons?”

“This ship does not have any weapons,” he reported.

I frowned. I looked at Farweather. It occurred to me that she was, in fact, under my skin. That my own Stockholmification was proceeding apace.

And that I had been letting some critical pieces of knowledge slide, because it was easier not to think about them when it was just her and me, and we needed each other for sanity and survival.

“That’s right, Zanya,” I said. “Didn’t you have some theory about what happened to the tug?”

“…About that.”

I turned on her. I didn’t say anything, but my hand was on the butt of her shock prod. I hated her, at that moment, more than I knew I could hate a human being. My hope had made me vulnerable, and the need to defend that vulnerability was making me angry now.

She froze.

I said, “Whatever you’re about to say, you might as well say it. But don’t lie to me again.”

“We didn’t think it would be manned,” she said. “We assumed the whole crew would be over on the Prize.”

“Why off Earth…” But I knew. Assuming she was telling the truth—and why would she?—I knew. Of course, that’s how the pirates would have done it—each one determined to defend their stake in the prize vessel because nobody else would do it for them. And we hadn’t gotten a proximity warning before the destruction commenced. So the only explanation was that they’d used the particle burst caught up in their bow wave to take out the tug.

Those reckless assholes.

It was only the sheerest luck that they hadn’t taken out the Koregoi ship and me in addition to the tug. Well, luck. And probably Zanya’s advanced relationship with her symbiote. And some fancy flying, though it pained me to admit it.

At least Zanya hadn’t been the pilot… . So I had two casual mass murderers to contend with.

I turned my back on Zanya. It was absolutely a stupid thing to do, and I did it anyway because if I didn’t I was going to electrocute her with her own weapon.

Singer would watch my back, anyway.

“Singer, what’s that ship out there?” I asked, moving away from Farweather. She didn’t follow; I heard her steps as she withdrew toward the windows at the rim of the observation deck.

I went toward the other side.

“It’s an Interceptor-class interdiction cruiser,” he said helpfully.

“Tell me something I don’t already know.” I leaned my forehands on the transparent material of the viewport.

“This particular vessel is the Synarche Justice Vessel I’ll Explain It To You Slowly. I’m afraid I do not have access to its current crew or mission assignments. My database accesses are a little limited right now.”

“You have databases at all?”

“The Koregoi ship has a great deal of fossil information aboard, and I’ve had some success in beginning to decrypt it. A lot of it is star charts and translation protocols, as you might expect. None of it is current. But I’ve managed to determine from the drift in the star charts since they were last accessed that the ship was in mothballs for approximately thirty thousand ans.”

He said it so casually. And it fell like a stone.

I gaped. I turned around and looked at Farweather, because I needed to share my incredulity with somebody, even if it was somebody I hated.

She looked back at me mildly.

“But everything works.”

“So it does,” he said.

“My species wasn’t even really a species yet.”

“Technically speaking, untrue,” he said. “By a factor of ten, more or less. But I understand the spirit in which you speak.”

“Holy crap,” I said. “You found the Rosetta Stone.”

“Technically speaking,” he repeated, “I am the Rosetta Stone.”

This was so much more than I had been expecting.

Lowering my voice, I said, “Singer, can you reboot my fox from there?”

Resonances changed as he localized his voice to me. “I need to generate a wireless signal and run a diagnostic. That will take a moment. The I’ll Explain It To You Slowly is hailing us, however. Shall I answer?”

“Please do.” A Synarche ship, hanging abeam us, out here in the middle of nowhere. A Synarche ship.

Hope.

Home.

Maybe I wouldn’t be dying forgotten in a pirate outpost somewhere on the edge of the Great Big Empty after all.

“I’ve accessed your fox,” Singer said, moments later. “I can’t be entirely sure if there’s physical damage, because I can’t run a diagnostic until it’s operating, but I should have the option of rebooting it. And don’t worry; I’m talking with the Synarche craft right now. We’ll be dropping into normal space momentarily.”

“Are they coming over?”

“They want you to bring the prisoner to them.”

I lowered my voice to a bare whisper. “She’ll put up a fight. She doesn’t want to die out here. She’s a sophipath. All about her own needs. Also, she’s at risk of exploding, if what she told me can be believed.”

“What?”

“She’s a human bomb,” I told him, and explained briefly. “Unless she was lying to me.”

“Or the other Freeporters were lying to her.” He paused long enough that I imagined he was communicating with the Interceptor.

I said, “Have you made them aware that the prisoner might blow up?”

“They say that they have surgical facilities.”

I decided that if they wanted to risk it, it was their lookout.

Farweather had crossed the observation deck and was staring out the window away from me. I could see her reflection dimly in the window, superimposed over the scrolling bands of light and the rescue mission beyond. I assumed she could see my back, as well.

“We don’t have two working suits.”

“They can send a shuttle.”

I eyed the lightly built little ship, impressed. “They can get a shuttle in that thing?”

I must have spoken louder than I intended, because Farweather’s reflection glanced over her shoulder at me before going back to studying the view. I kept my back to her and pretended I had not seen.

I lowered my voice to its previous level and said, “What’s our bargaining position?”

“That depends, I should think, on what you intend to bargain for.”

I smiled at my own reflection. I was concerned about all sorts of things right now, to be certain. But it just felt so dizzyingly, giddily good to have Singer back. People whose neural pathways formed under clade intervention are not meant to navigate the universe alone.

“Let me rephrase. How much trouble are we in?”

“Oh,” Singer said, sounding as startled as if he hadn’t even registered the possibility that we might be in trouble. “Not much, I should think. I mean, they’ll want that pirate.”

“I want that pirate too.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed.”

I blushed hot and sharp. “Hurry up with that fox reboot, would you?”

“Working on it,” he said.

“Besides,” I said. “That wasn’t what I meant. I meant I want her safely back in custody, and… what are we going to tell them about disposing of the pirate?”

“She can’t get far without a suit,” he said pragmatically. “We should tell them to send a constable over and get her.”

I bit my lip.

“And they’ll want the Koregoi ship, obviously. And me. And you. But the only things that might really get us in trouble are already pretty well mitigated by the result. I don’t think they’re going to dun me for propagating when the alternative was destruction; even an AI gets some latitude in the matter of self-preservation. And as for you… well, kidnapped by pirates is a pretty good excuse.”

I laughed out loud, stifling it because of Farweather. She rolled her eyes at me. I wasn’t supposed to know. “It is at that.”

I stepped back from the window and turned around. Raising my voice, I said crisply, “Please, Singer. Take us home.”

The Koregoi vessel did not so much as shiver now that Singer was firmly in control. I could tell that it was curving, because I could feel space bending around us. But Singer’s touch was sure and subtle, which was why—

When we fell out of white space, abruptly and without warning, it was as if we had hit a wall. A very soft wall, because there was no inertia. We didn’t go from moving to stopping. We just… weren’t bending the universe around us anymore.

The Interceptor, inside our massive coils, fell right out of space alongside us. Also stationary, thank the stars, because a collision hadn’t gotten any more appealing to me since the last time.

I am not sure I’ve ever been so happy about anything as I was at the outline of that souped-up Judiciary ship floating abeam the Prize.

Nothing moved. There was no sense of inertia. Space just unfolded around us… and we were back in the real world.

It was dark out here. Dark in ways that even our trip to the Milk Chocolate Marauder had not prepared me for. Space slid away like a waterfall of emptiness, bottomless and velvet in every direction. It seemed even darker because the bulk of the Koregoi vessel blocked the light of the Milky Way.

Certainly other galaxies floated out there in the dark, but they were so unimaginably distant that they hadn’t even yet begun to grow larger in perspective. They didn’t cast much light at all.

We were alone in a haunting emptiness, and I felt my heart thrum in my chest. It was terrifying out here—terrifying and beautiful and strange. This was alien country, a place not even my people, spacers born and bred, routinely went. We were far from help or any contact. This was the realm of unmanned probes and science teams and the sort of explorers and theorists and prospectors who probably needed their rightminding adjusted just a little bit.

But here we were. And home was really far away.

“Singer,” I said, trying not to sound too terrified. “What just happened?”

“I wish I knew.” A short pause. “No technical fault. No power interrupt. Our white bubble just… failed.”

Farweather hadn’t made any moves for the door, despite my turning away from her. It was a big-enough ship that she could get lost in it as easily as I had, if she managed to slip my watch, and the idea of playing cat-and-mouse through this damned ridiculous giant vessel with her again turned my stomach. Fortunately, she didn’t seem as if she wanted to brave her own weapons—in my hands now—or maybe it was Singer’s attention that was keeping her honest.

Now, under the circumstances, there was an infelicitous turn of phrase.

Void, but there was a lot of space out there.

I held my breath, awed by the infinity of darkness. A little terrified by the idea that our alien ship, which we didn’t understand, might be busted.

At least we had a Synarche ship with us now. We were not utterly alone. We could have lost them when the bubble collapsed.

The night spread out forever, empty and silent, utterly cold. Except not really empty, if you could sense what I could sense. Laced and knotted, instead, with a network of dark gravity stretchy and heavy and hauling the bright part of the universe unwittingly in line with its predeterminations.

As the conscious mind follows the density of trauma in the psyche, I thought, so the stars follow this reminder of the primal trauma and let it be their guide across the sky. And then I laughed at myself for being too pretentious, and reading too much George Eliot when I could.

I would have given a lot for a nice fat copy of The Mill on the Floss right about then, I tell you what.

I stretched my silver-limned forehand out to touch the material of the viewport, pressing my fingers against it so hard they tingled. My skin glowed in swirls and filaments, mycorrhizal, shifting emerald-metal webs. Uninsulated, without the shelter of my fox and its regulators, I felt…

I felt everything.

The whole universe was out there, as if it were laid on my skin. As if I were a part of it. Raw to it. Flayed, except it wasn’t painful, just painfully near. The night was huge, and I was a part of the night, so I was huge, too. Huge, and spread gaspingly diffuse.

So this was how Farweather did it. She was stripped off. Flensed. She let the universe get under her skin.

And so the universe showed her all sorts of things that were hidden from me.

I could begin to sense some of it: the weavings and twistings of the underlying structures, and some more of those strange gaps I had noticed on other occasions. The bits of the pattern that were too even, too repetitive. In a complicated sequence, just out of my reach, like… ones and zeros in binary code. Like letters in an alphabet. Like amino acids in a DNA code.

Profoundly complicated, but a pattern that could be made to make sense. I could sense it better than I had before, as if I were nearer to it, less mediated, now. Touching it with a bare hand instead of a gloved one. I strained after it, thinking that if I could just get… close enough… just resolve the meaning of the thing, suddenly so much would be made clear. It was so patently artificial. So patently something that had been imposed on the structure of the universe by an intelligence, as opposed to something occurring naturally. The iterations were just too tidy. Intentionally so, as if they had been set up to be noticed.

And between that intentionality, overlaid on it, I could feel, quite suddenly, an enormous swarm of fast-converging shapes.

“We have incoming,” Farweather said.

“There’s something out here,” I told Singer. “I really need that senso online now, so I can share it with you. I don’t care about the rightminding or the regulators.”

“I care about the regulators,” he said.

I grimaced, thinking about my erratic behavior. This wasn’t really the time to bring it up, though.

But I was spared answering, and probably humiliating myself further, because all that velvet night around us was abruptly full of ghosts.

The observation deck was restfully dim to limit internal reflections. And the windows seemed to be coated, or made of something nonreflective, as well. So if I hadn’t had my hand on the transparency, I would have felt that I was standing with no barrier at all between me and the gargantuan shapes of an uncountable number of Ativahikas, drifting out of the darkness, bioluminescing softly.

They were enormous, dark, but limned at the edges against the greater dark beyond. They writhed and lashed in their tattered finery, trailing ragged swaths of elongated skin like the trains of a gown. They shone in the darkness, wiping echoes and afterimages across my dark-adapted retinas.

There were… dozens of them. Too many to count, and anyway they were moving, swarming and swirling around us like a flock of mining vessels mobbing an asteroid. Except every single one of them was as long, or longer, than even the enormous Koregoi ship, and mining vessels are generally smaller than the average asteroid.

Singer recovered before I did. I stood transfixed. He said. “We’ve been seeing a lot of these guys.”

His words at least shook me partway out of my reverie. “What do you suppose they want?”

“It’s been a weird trip,” Singer replied.

I realized that the swarm was describing a complex pattern, a kind of dance with our ship at the center, unless that was just perspective fooling me. Off our flank, SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly hung, motionless (relatively speaking). Beyond our common ambit, the Ativahikas looped and spiraled around and over and under us and one another, weaving an intricate choreography. I stared, trying to work out the math behind it. Just as it seemed as if it might resolve itself, begin to make a peculiar sense—I thought of Terran honeybees dancing about honey—the pattern changed.

As chorus line dancers part like a sea in order to deliver up the star, the Ativahikas swirled and separated, forming a whirling ring around the gap in their pattern with a swath of night behind.

Through that gap sailed a single entity. An Ativahika that even to my human eyes and experience looked old.

Its bioluminescence stuttered and crawled over its hide in waves, brighter at the crests and dimmer in the troughs than what gleamed on the fringed flanks of the surrounding individuals. Its hide had paled from the rich, sheening algal teal of the others to a watery turquoise. Even the swags of its intricate drapes seemed sparse and ablated.

Children, it said, its voice internalized and reverberating through me, and not exactly words—more an impression of meanings. Why should we not destroy you, and this terrible thing you have done?

It wasn’t entirely unlike getting a senso translation from somebody like Habren. Communication was being intermediated by the parasites, I realized; the Ativahika was speaking to me through the sparkling little mites refined from the body of its dead species-mate.

No wonder it was mad.

I glanced over my shoulder. Farweather, looking stunned, was rotating slowly toward me. She was hearing it, too, and the expression on her face was that of a child suddenly confronted with consequences for a misdemeanor she had been sure she’d gotten away with.

She took a step back, a dark silhouette against the intricate moving patterns of the Ativahikas dancing in the night beyond. “How are they going to destroy us?” she scoffed, a bravado that I knew by now was her response to fear.

Easily, I thought. Where do you think your ability to manipulate dark gravity comes from? And that was without even considering their size and probable ability to just smash the Koregoi boat.

But saying that would have been pointless, arguing with her a waste of my energy when I needed to focus on the Ativahika and on not dying. And I had no idea how to communicate with the enormous creature who hung beyond the observation deck’s bank of windows, drifting so close I could see the plasticky, impermeable texture of its hide. An eye as big as an insystem skiff loomed over me, a vast elongated face wreathed in drifting tendrils.

It was huge. Inexpressibly huge, like being stared down by a space ship. I took a step forward and pressed my hands against the window once again. The enormous creature’s presence was magnetic. And it wasn’t as if running away would protect me from it, when all it had to do to deal with me was to disassemble the ship.

I guessed we’d just answered the question once and for all of exactly how sapient the Ativahikas were. And how they communicated. Which begged the question of exactly how I was going to communicate with it.

Well, it seemed to have no difficulty making itself understood to me. So I resolved that I would just… try to talk, and see what happened.

“I am deeply and profoundly sorry,” I said. “It was not by my choice, what happened. And I did not understand immediately what I had become infected with.”

You went to the ship of the murderers.

“I did,” I said. Honesty was pretty obviously the best policy here. Not just for ethical reasons, but because when you’re confronted with a superpowerful alien who is already in possession of rather a lot of inside information, it’s probably best not to get caught in a lie.

What was your purpose in going there, if you are not yourself a murderer?

“I went to salvage a derelict ship, so that its materials could be reused and so that, perhaps, the hulk could be rescued and repurposed. I did not realize until after I had entered the ship what its purpose was and what crimes the ship had been engaged in.”

And yet, you contain the symbiote.

“I contracted it by accident.” My palms were leaving mists of water vapor on the window where I leaned. I scrubbed them dry on my shirt.

That explanation left out Farweather, but honestly she was welcome to do her own explaining. The Ativahikas would have to crush the Koregoi ship anyway, to get to her, and let’s be even more honest, since we’re already neck-deep in honesty: they couldn’t do that without destroying me and quite possibly Singer as well.

So I was going to keep saying “I.” Assuming the Ativahikas even understood the difference between singular and plural pronouns, or how Terran humans tended to define the boundaries of self, I had no desire to get Singer or Connla (if Connla was even still alive) into trouble with the Ativahika.

Farweather was on her own, though. I wasn’t taking a fall for a mass murderer.

I expected the Ativahika’s next question to be something along the lines of “How do I know if you’re telling me the truth?” but it did not even appear to consider my lying as a possibility. I wondered if that meant it had some way of telling, or if the concept of being bullshitted was as alien to the Ativahika’s experience as the Ativahika itself was to me.

What it said instead was, How would you use this gift, if you were allowed to keep it?

Well, that stumped me. Or stunned me into silence, more precisely.

What had I planned to do, before I got derailed by being kidnapped by pirates?

“I’d use it for the good of the systers,” I said. “Under the direction of our Synarche. I’d use it to help people.”

I knew it was true as I said it. It had a sense of purpose to it that I liked. It made me feel like I was going somewhere, and maybe even knew where that somewhere was.

But you are fleeing the Synarche ship. And you are not going to the Core. You are going to a stronghold of the murderers.

“Yeah,” I said. “About that.”

Hoping Singer would jump into the conversation, I looked around. But of course he could only hear my side of it, because he hadn’t rebooted and reconnected to my senso yet. Across the deck, Farweather didn’t seem to be having a conversation of her own. Instead, she drifted steadily closer to me, her mouth congealing into a thin line. She could obviously hear both sides of the conversation, unless the ancient Ativahika was saying something different to her.

What was the natural life expectancy of an Ativahika, anyway? How long did it take for one such as this to get old? Not merely old, I judged, looking at the creature again. But venerable. I wondered if it knew the lore of the Koregoi, and if it could share that information with the systers. And what we could possibly offer in exchange to induce it to do so.

It was conceivable—conceivable, and perhaps even plausible—that the very Ativahika to whom I was speaking right this very instant was old enough in its own person to remember our forerunners. I wished I had the opportunity to ask it and find out. But right now, somehow, didn’t seem to be the appropriate time for it.

Maybe some other occasion would present itself, when I wasn’t being interrogated on suspicion of capital crimes.

About that, the ancient one said.

Not words. Not colloquial language, such as I had used. But a sense of it echoing the sentiment I’d just expressed, and reinforcing it.

Please. Tell me more.

So.

I did.

I told it that we had followed ancient roadmarks to the mothballed vessel we were now in, and I told it that before its people had managed to drag us down out of white space, we had been out of control, on autopilot, and that the shipmind and I had been working to hack—or unhack!—the ship to regain control of her. I did not ask it how the hell it and its species-mates had managed to locate us in white space, of all the impossible tricks, nor how they had managed to contact, grapple, and stop us, hauling us back into the unfolded world. If that was what, indeed, had happened.

I did not tell it specifically that Farweather had been involved in the death of the Ativahika we’d found orbiting the Jothari factory ship, or that she’d murdered the Jothari crew. I did not tell it that she was responsible for our previous trajectory, because that would have resulted in physical problems for her, and perhaps physical and definitely ethical problems for me. I didn’t mention her at all.

It turned out I needn’t have wasted my time playing liar-by-omission, anyway, because apparently the Ativahika already knew more about Farweather than they’d been letting on. As I found out when the ancient one said to me, And would you send your shipmate to face our justice? The one like you, not the shipmind.

“I won’t argue that she doesn’t deserve whatever justice you have in mind for her,” I said. “But what do you mean by ‘send’ her?”

Its catfishy face hung against a night scattered with only a few dim stars. Tendrils and fronds writhed around a long, lipless mouth designed to gnaw water and minerals from space debris, under conditions where water was a stone. It was so close beside our motionless ship that I could have touched it, or nearly, if there had not been windows and the hull in the way. I could not take it all in at once. I could glance at an eye, the fronds, the smoothly shaded aquamarine skin. But it was too big and too close for me to see it as all of a thing.

We can crush your ship, if you prefer.

Not exactly my ship, but there are times to split hairs. And times to do something else, instead.

“I know that,” I said. My stomach felt like it was boiling.

And yet you protect that creature.

I didn’t have an answer. “I don’t want to protect her, exactly. She doesn’t need or want my protection, I imagine. But I don’t want to be complicit in her death.”

Do you think it—she—would protect you?

I felt it correcting itself, trying to understand the concepts I was expressing and searching its own referents for an analogy. I don’t think it had any idea what he or she or it referred to. Just that they were arbitrary categories of some kind that were important to me, for whatever reason, so it would try to abide by them.

“No,” I said. “Actually, I’m confident that she’d hang me out a window the second you asked, if our positions were reversed.”

You did not lie for it.

“I did not.” I guess it could tell if I was being truthful, after all.

It’s always a good idea to play it safe when you can. Well, unless you’re Connla. He has—had?—a knack for getting away with things.

Hope was a terrible thing, I reminded myself. I could not afford to feel it.

You did not volunteer information either.

“I was pretty sure that if I did tell you—I mean, you, the Ativahika—everything I knew about Farweather, well. You lot would probably insist on me dragging her to an airlock and turning her over to you, space suit or no space suit, and I didn’t really want to be a party to that.”

Why does it not speak for itself?

I looked over at Farweather. Her eyes were dilated, and she had dropped down to a crouch, resting her palms against the deck.

I said, “Perhaps she does not know what to say.”

There was a fairly long silence then. Well, obviously, the Ativahika’s entire part of the conversation was silent because it was in my head. But it stopped… speaking? Sending impressions? And I fell still.

Inside the ship I could hear the tick of metal, the sounds that temperature control and life support made, the shuffle of Farweather’s foot. Outside there was silence, as there is and has been and always should be. The perfect silence of the spheres.

I wanted her punished. But I didn’t think it was my place to be judge and jury and all of Justice, to pass sentence on her and hand her over to alien laws. It was petty and unworthy of me, but I wished suddenly that she would just turn herself over to them and save me all the bother and the damned wrestling with my damned ethics.

And… that also would have involved me dragging her to the airlock, and I was trying to avoid killing anybody todia. Out of cowardice or queasiness, probably, because it wasn’t as if she didn’t deserve a good airlocking, and my fox was still turned off, but I still couldn’t quite bring myself to frog-march her down there and kick her out the door into space for the Ativahika to do whatever Ativahika do to alien murderers.

I was a damned piece of work my own self, wasn’t I?

The ancient one had been silent for a long time, and I was finding it really unsettling. My palms itched. I couldn’t hear Farweather shifting anymore, or even breathing, but I also hadn’t heard her run out or collapse to the floor and Singer hadn’t said anything to warn me, so I figured she was still frozen in the same place. There was enough light outside now—the bioluminescence of the Ativahika—that picking out her reflection behind me had gotten challenging.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I had counted on Singer to watch my back.

You will seek your own kind’s justice upon her.

Now I really wanted to glance over at her. To wink, as if to reassure her. But I knew that wink would be a lie, and I knew the Ativahika would know it.

It’s curiously impossible to contemplate an outright lie, even to a third party, with a wise, weird face of a truth-detecting alien hanging over you.

I sighed in self-disgust and said, “I am. I mean, I am doing that. As much as is in my power. Yes.”

Singer was so quiet I wondered if he’d crashed. I heard Farweather’s intake of breath, though. Fight-or-flight reflex, preparing herself to run.

Then you have made pact with us. See that this justice is served, and with you we have no further quarrel.

“You’re just going to let us go?”

It didn’t echo my sigh, of course, since its respiration was an entirely internal exchange between it and its blue-green algae symbiotes. But I still got a sense of parental weariness across our connection. You and the other intelligence on your ship are innocent. I will not destroy two innocents to punish one guilty one. That would not be justice. That would merely be blood.

That was the moment when Singer’s silence was explained. He must have finished his check on my fox, because my emotional regulation suddenly came online.

I reeled. Warn a girl! I snapped, reflexively—

—and wonder of wonders, Singer heard me. Sorry, he said. I wasn’t sure of that working.

Well, it worked all right, I suppose. And now I’m on the floor, and where is Farweather?

I shoved to my hands and my knees, though that was as far as I felt safe going. Everything whirled, as if I had just gotten off a spinning trajectory or punctured an eardrum in a sudden pressure drop.

Haimey, get up! Singer yelled.