Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 24

READER, I TRIED.

I shoved at the deck, hard enough that if we had been under microgravity I would have launched myself. But there was the problem: a lifetime of limited exposure to g-forces and my own reflexes betrayed me.

I levered myself right off the floor and right into the arc of Farweather’s weapon. It struck me with full force and follow-through. She’d been aiming to do murder.

The good news was that because Singer had yelled, and I had shoved myself upright, it hit me squarely between the shoulder blades and not on the occiput. The bad news was that when that’s your good news, you’d better be prepared to be a hurting unit.

I sprawled back down to the deck, breath whooping out of me, this time with no intention of moving. If Singer bellowed another warning, I might just let that pirate asshole kill me.

She didn’t take another swing, though. The next thing I heard, other than the sound of my own agonized exhalation, was the thumping of her feet on the deck plates as she legged it for the hatch. She must have still been able to override Singer on some things, too, because she got through it.

“What did she hit me with?” I wheezed eventually.

“The wrench,” Singer said resignedly. “The one you clipped to the chain earlier.”

“Of course she did,” I answered. “Fuck. I guess I was distracted.”

I lay there for a little while. When I opened my eyes, I was surprised to see the Ativahikas were still outside, and still performing their firefly dances.

One more thing, said the ancient one. Those anomalies you noticed. The ‘pinpricks in the universe.’ I see the memory within you.

I saw it too, the image called up either by association or by the Ativahika manipulating my visual cortex somehow. Back when I’d first started exploring my new senses. I’d thought it had looked like a kitten had left claw holes in some fabric shading a light source.

You should follow them.

I gritted my teeth and managed to squeeze out a few more words. “I beg your pardon?”

Someone on the other end requires your help, it said.

“But I don’t know how to get there! I don’t know how to follow them!”

I can see the coordinates in your mind, the Ativahika said peaceably. We presume one of you fragile ones must have derived them from a map in a probe left behind by the Before. We have found such objects in our wanderings.

I tried to push myself into a crouch. The world went a little swirly. I don’t understand what you mean, my systers—

The Ativahika eddied and churned, their unceasing dance altering and opening. Like children playing follow-the-leader in a zero-g park, they made a sudden flocking whirlpool, and then the whole parliament of them streamed away in a fluid formation. The ancient one remained behind a moment more, its eyes still on me.

Remember your commitment, it said.

But then, with a flash of its filaments like an old queen swirling a ragged cloak that had once been fine, it too whirled and was gone.

I shoved myself up. This time I didn’t fall over. I regretted it, but at least I had a better view of the departing Ativahikas.

“Like I could forget!” I yelled after it.

“I overheard that last bit,” Singer said. “What are you going to do now?”

I sighed. “Bring Farweather to custody, I suppose.”

“If you can catch her.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Singer,” I said, and eased myself back down onto the deck plates to wait for the universe to stop spinning. A futile hope; it’s been whirling around out there for a very long time, and as far as I know, nobody really expects it to stop doing so anytime soon.

I was lucky my skull wasn’t shattered. I was equally lucky my spine seemed to be intact, because this far from decent medical attention, that was nearly as likely to serve as a fatal injury, no matter what sort of clever things the clever people at Core General could do with stem cells and grafts and spliced or replicated DNA these diar.

I was also winded, sore, bruised, befuddled, and angry. Angry mostly at myself, because I was the idiot who had left Farweather in possession of that wrench. Which sounds like a euphemism, but in this case was just an honest appraisal of my own somewhat crucial capacity for error.

Singer fiddled with that anger a little. I felt it start to drain away and said, “No, leave me alone.”

“Are you thinking clearly?”

It was a fair question, and I had to consider it. But the thing was, my thought process felt absolutely crystalline. I was so mad that I had gone through it and come right back out the other side of muddled thinking into a kind of clarity I was pretty sure I had never experienced before.

“I think I’m fine,” I told him, and set about assessing how much damage had been done. “How come you didn’t catch her on the way out the door?”

“Oh.” A pause, either because he was assessing or because he thought that pausing would reveal his embarrassment. Possibly both. “Well, my control over the ship’s functions and sensors is… not entirely complete. Yet.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m working on it.”

I sat on the floor and stretched myself upright. “Can you at least locate her?”

“Unfortunately, she appears to be employing countermeasures.”

“Well, that’s ideal.”

Although really, considering the state of my back, I didn’t think I had lot of latitude for criticism.

“Do you have her locked out of your systems?”

“Tight as I can make them. She might try sabotage.”

“Lock her out of all the places I have gear stored, too, if you can.” I thought about role reversal for a moment, and how we’d swapped places since we came on board. Now I had her stuff, and she was hiding out and would probably be eating algae as soon as she found the algae tanks.

I wasn’t going to go pursuing her through the blind alleys of this very large ship, however. I had her weapons… but she had a wrench. And was, pretty obviously, the much more skilled fighter of the two of us, for all I’d gotten the drop on her the first time.

“Just get us moving back toward the Core as soon as you can, please? I want to make contact with the Interceptor, also. I’m available for wrench and blowtorch work whenever you need it. Assuming we can find another wrench, I mean.”

I went back to stretching.

A few moments passed while I mused on security and how to keep Farweather from repirating the ship Singer and I—with help from the Ativahikas—had just depirated.

“Haimey,” Singer said, somewhat hesitantly.

“Deep time, what is it now?” I had lain down on my face and was trying a few cobra stretches to loosen my spasming, brutalized muscles.

“I hate to break this to you now. But apparently, we have company.”

As I levered myself upright, I groaned. My first few steps were stumbling torture. By the time I reached the windows, though, I was loosening up just a little. I used the frame to push myself up straight and heard my spine pop.

Where the Ativahika had vanished, we could see the outline of the Synarche Interceptor that had been stopped inside our white rings. There was a sparkling bubble of a shuttlecraft detaching itself from the Interceptor and moving toward us.

“If we’re lucky, that might be the cavalry. I’ve still got questions about how they found us and matched our bubble in white space, though. How’d they know when to stop?”

“They must have been following our white space scar.”

“At speed? Is that possible?”

“Well, you sensed them back there. So I’d say it’s possible and probable both, since the hypothesis fits the facts as we’re aware of them,” Singer said. “I mean, based on the part where we’re here. And so are they.”

It was probably time to admit he had me beat. “All right. Possibly Justice has tech they don’t share,” I agreed. “Singer, do you have any idea what the remaining range of this vessel is? How are we doing for food and stores?”

“There’s a lot of room in here,” he said. “In this ship’s computing core, I mean. And plenty of supplies, if I’m reading this manifest right. But I’m afraid I can’t support making a run for it to elude a duly appointed governmental representative of the Synarche authority, Haimey,” Singer said.

His tone was dry. I snorted in appreciation. “Actually, I was wondering how much help we need to ask for in order to get home.”

“That’s an interesting question,” he responded. “Because this ship seems to be violating the laws of physics as currently conceived, at least where it comes to energy consumption. It’s impossibly efficient, and we seem to have enough left for a few laps around the Milky Way.”

“I guess we can still learn a few things from the Koregoi engineers.”

“We’re in quite good shape, unless I’m missing something.”

“Can you figure out how to hail that Synarche ship?”

“Hailing,” he answered. Whatever he was saying must have been working, because they weren’t training their fairly impressive suite of weapons on us.

Because Singer multitasked pretty well even back in his old, smaller digs, I didn’t scruple to ask, “I had a paper book, on your old hull.”

“Wilson,” he said. “Was it important?”

I told him about the numbers. The possibility that it might have been a book code.

He asked, “Do you remember the numbers? Your fox—”

“I know,” I said. He’d rebooted it, but the old machine memories were gone, wiped. It was as smooth and clean and new as an infant right out of the tank farms. “I remember them.”

“How?”

I grinned. “Koregoi senso. They seemed like they might be important, so I encoded them in a microgravitic function in the structure of the Prize’s hull.”

If he were a human, I think he would have been gawping at me. “That’s brilliant.”

I shrugged. “If I didn’t live, I figured my corpse had very little chance of making it to a download station, so—”

I sighed.

“But we don’t have the book.”

“Oh, that,” Singer said. “Um.”

“Singer?”

“I scanned it,” he admitted.

“You what?”

“I couldn’t help myself,” he said. “It was novel data!”

I stopped.

He stopped.

“Gautama and nine little bodhisattvas on a tricycle,” I said. “Who taught you to pun like that?”

“Welcome home, Haimey,” he said.

I made sure I hadn’t left anything interesting lying around, and started back toward the cabin where Farweather had been bunking. All the food and tools where there, and I didn’t really want to leave it unguarded. With luck, though, maybe I could use some of the constables who were likely to be staffing that Interceptor to help me quarter the ship, and take Farweather into custody.

That would be great! Promise to the Ativahika kept!

Except they were likely to take me into custody too. Well, you couldn’t have everything.

In the meantime, I could get started cracking that book code.

“Haimey,” Singer said cautiously, as I was trying to figure out some means of dogging the hatch behind me. If it were a normal, Synarche metal door, I would even have considered spot-welding it to keep Farweather out, on the theory that I could always break the weld later. Or maybe settled for just barring it with a piece of alien equipment of questionable provenance.

Since it was—best guess—a nanotech utility fog, I just asked Singer to lock it out from any override control except for mine.

Having done that, he said, “I’ve got a response from the Interceptor.”

His tone and careful delivery made me cautious, too. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I have some good news for you.”

A flare of hope went off in my chest, so bright and terrible I almost tuned to ignore it. “It’s Connla, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. “It is. And that launch is on its way over to collect you.”

Whatever the internal vibrational frequency of my body was, I had reached it. I was as profoundly wired as it is possible for a human to be without the assistance of introduced chemicals, and that was after tuning it back a little. My hands didn’t shake only because the seat ahead of me on the launch had padded grab rails and I was clutching them. The acceleration that pressed me back into my chair was gentle enough so that I didn’t have to let go.

We docked, and I was floating inside the restraints. I felt like I was holding a breath, and had taken another breath on top of it. I fumbled my restraints when I went to unfasten them, which was a pretty magical accomplishment, considering that they had a quick release and I’d spent literally my entire life opening restraints and I was finally back in the comfort of zero g again. And that was with my nerves tuned way down. If I’d been trying to do this without my fox, I think I would have been catatonic in the corner.

Except I had done it without my fox. I had done all sorts of things without my fox, and while I’d been labile, weepy, angry, and generally deregulated with a head that was a no-fun place to live inside of, I had still done them. I had. Me. Or whoever I’d convinced myself to pretend to be while the person I’d been programmed to be was offline temporarily.

Who the hell was I, anyway?

You know, I had no idea.

I still dialed it back a little more since I had the option. When I had finished, I was as far as I felt I could safely go without making myself groggy. I didn’t want to be dulled, unpresent. But taking the edge off could only help my focus.

Two constables—one human and one Vanlian, and both officers rather than full Goodlaws—met me at the airlock and escorted me into the Interceptor. They were kind enough not to attempt small talk beyond a few soothing pleasantries that let me know where the head was and that I wasn’t in immediate trouble. I also introduced myself to the shipmind, as was polite, and SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly was pleasant and personable. The crew called her Splain.

It was strange, moving freely without gravity again after so long. It was stranger being around people who weren’t my enemy and only company all rolled into one.

They took me to the bridge—a ship this size, with a reasonably big crew, had something a little more formal than a command cabin.

And there was Connla.

He was wearing the pilot’s dusty-blacks we’d never bothered with on Singer, and he looked dashing as hell. He had a cat in his arms. A spotted orange, white, and black cat. Shedding all over his crisp uniform. He was looking at me. The cat was Bushyasta.

“You lucky son of a tramper captain,” I said. “I should have known that flying.”

I started to cry. I kicked over to him and held out my arms.

He gave me my cat.

I hugged Bushyasta. She purred and snuggled into me, but didn’t open her eyes.

Tears behave strangely under gravity, and on the Koregoi ship I’d done enough deregulated crying about everything that I’d gotten used to the way they broke their surface tension and streaked down my cheeks, requiring no further maintenance. Now they swelled from the surface of my eye, blindingly obvious and blurring my vision completely.

I turned away so Connla wouldn’t see. Tears made him uncomfortable, and him being uncomfortable made me shy.

I gulped and said, “I swear there’s something wrong with this cat. Low blood sugar. Narcolepsy.”

“That cat just has a clear conscience,” he said. “Singer mentioned that you had a stowaway?”

“Yes,” I said. “Two of the constables who came over stayed on the ship to keep an eye out for her. And to make sure she didn’t take off with it while I was over here.” Not that she stood much chance of hotwiring it with Singer inhabiting its brain.

That was when Mephistopheles zoomed out from behind the control console, ricocheted off my legs hard enough to start me spinning, then snagged her nails in the carpet and settled into position with her ears flat and her back firmly pointed in my direction.

“You would not believe how they scratched me up,” Connla said. “I stuffed them inside my suit after the hull integrity blew out. We were all just lucky we were aft, and they were already in their skins and webbed in.”

I had been weeping more or less genteelly. At that, I lost control completely. I clutched the damn narcoleptic cat and sobbed and couldn’t stop myself spinning even when my afthands bounced off a bulkhead or two. I’d probably have drifted helplessly around the Interlocutor’s bridge if Connla hadn’t snagged my elbow and steered me to rest.

Connla isn’t big on touching people.

He hooked his lower extremity on a support rail, wrapped both arms around me, and pulled me against his broad, well-muscled (they’re gengineered for it, on Spartacus) chest. He embraced me with one hand while he stroked my hair with the other, squeezing me tighter until the cat trapped between us made a protesting noise.

“You have hair,” he said, when I’d slowed down a little.

“Couldn’t read enough alien to figure out which bottle in the bathroom was the depilatory,” I joked. I wiped tears and snot on his shoulder.

He didn’t complain.

“I have a surprise for you,” Connla said, and the tone in his voice indicated that he thought it would be a pleasant one.

“You are a surprise for me,” I retorted, my hands full of ecstatic cats. Any moment now they were likely to decide that the greeting had gone on long enough and commence Reunion Stage Two: The Spurning of Haimey for Her Absence, Again. But for now I was going to bask in the affection as long as it was still coming down.

“I honestly was afraid we’d never catch you,” Connla said. Not easily, the way most people would, but with a little edge of self-conscious nervousness over the vulnerability. But that didn’t matter, because—wonder of wonders—here was Connla, and he was talking about his feelings of his own accord, without any chasing, prying, or prompting.

Who says progress is measured over generations?

“I missed you too,” I said, drifting along behind him. He seemed to be leading me back toward the crew quarters. This vessel was significantly bigger than the tug had been, but in addition to its twinned white bands it had massive engines and a respectable range of weaponry. It also boasted a crew complement sizable enough to field squads of constables capable of dealing with those occasional violent impolitenesses to which even a rightminded society can be prone.

The combination of those things made it one of the most cramped and claustrophobic space ships I personally have ever been on.

The tug had been small. And yet, by comparison, its tiny crew and plan of two mostly open cabins had given it a sense of airiness. This ship, by contrast, had no gangways, no open-plan cabins. Each tiny space opened directly onto one to three others, and in many of those cabins were people—eating, sleeping, playing games.

So many people. So many of them—going about their paramilitary routines with no reason to pause or to acknowledge me at all. A few, polite or lonely, took a moment to raise a hand or nod a chin or wave a tendril or flick an ear as we went by. The vast majority, though, were either sleeping or bent to their tasks without allowing themselves distraction.

So many people. So incredibly many. I literally had no idea what to do. I felt surrounded. Oppressed. Even stalked.

I had obviously been spending way too much time alone.

I knew it was foolish. It was just that I had been away from people other than Farweather for a very long time. I had been deregulated a long time, and only reregulated for a matter of minutes. And the result was a learned anxiety response that was not helpful to me or to anyone right now—that was, in fact, maladaptive in the extreme.

It made me angry to be so reactive. Which of course was just the same damned reactivity again. Connla’s promise of a “good” surprise had been good strategy on his part, an indication that he knew me. I hated surprises. But he also knew that my curiosity was bottomless.

We swam into the final hatchway. Connla, ahead of me, cleared it. And I found myself confronted with a small cabin that from this vantage point looked to be networked with a forest of what appeared to be bamboo, except it was all growing at random angles. I stopped in the hatchway, which was a stupid thing to do, and after a moment’s more inspection I realized that the bamboo was, in fact, giant exoskeletal legs, and a lot of them.

Being paused in the hatchway was even less safe on a ship than on a station. As I hung there, braced on the lip with both forehands, a small head jeweled with vast, faceted eyes turned to regard me.

“Cheeirilaq?”

Friend Haimey, it answered. Please do move into the cabin. I should despair if anything untoward befell you.

Cats and all, I drifted into the cabin. The cats seemed undisturbed by the presence of a massive, predatory alien. I assumed that a sentient insect could be counted on not to eat pets, so I turned them loose to wander around. Or, in Bushyasta’s case, to drift, leaving a trail of tiny kitty snores.

As for me? I put a hand out and steadied myself against one of Cheeirilaq’s scaffolding of legs. It didn’t seem to mind. And in so doing, I realized why the cabin seemed so very full of not-bamboo. Cheeirilaq had braced itself into position in the center of the small chamber with its limbs wedging it against each available plane. It looked like a secure position. I hoped it was comfortable.

“Well,” I said. “I was not prepared to meet you all the way out here, Goodlaw.”

It lifted one foot daintily and gently tried to dislodge Mephistopheles, who had tackled one of its enormous legs with both front paws and was bunny-kicking its exoskeleton. At least, fairly gently. I didn’t think the claws would get through.

The pleased surprise is mutual, it said.

It was so nice to have a working fox again.

“Do you require assistance?”

Cheeirilaq put its frondlike foot down again. The cat was still wrestling with its ankle. Your small friend seems unlikely to harm me. Is it an infant?

“No, it just acts like one. It is a pet. So, what does bring you out here to the nether reaches, then?”

I expected it to say something about having been sent to retrieve the Koregoi ship. I was not prepared for what actually came out of my translator.

I was following you. Or rather, I was following your pirate captain, because of her links to Habren. If we can get them both into custody, it increases the likelihood that one of them can be induced to provide evidence.

“She’s not mine!” I protested.

It made the laughter sound. We were very much afraid that when—if—we reclaimed the Koregoi ship, you and Singer would be found to have perished. All aboard are relieved at your safety and well-being. Do you have Captain Farweather in custody?

“Ah,” I said. “So there’s a funny story about that.”

I proceeded to tell it, in three-part harmony. Connla was hanging silently beside the porthole and watching, half melted into the background, so it would save me having to tell it twice, anyway. Halfway through it Cheeirilaq noticed me yawning and sent out for stimulants, which I drank gratefully before finishing my story off and adding, “So if you’re chasing Habren, how come you’re out here after Farweather instead of back on Downthehatch?”

I spent enough time there. And I know that the pirate has a link to Habren. I need to know whether they’re partners, or whether Habren is a victim of extortion before we proceed.

“And Habren is your special project.”

“Dirty as hell,” Connla said. “And just a little too smart to get snagged on it.”

Yet.

Connla said, “We’ve had some time to compare notes, and we’re pretty sure that Habren was the source of the intel that lured us out to that sunforsaken sector in the first place, actually. Though the goal of that—”

“I came to the same conclusion. And what I think is that Farweather wanted to get her hands on me,” I said. “That’s what the booby trap on the Jothari ship was for.”

“Huh?” Connla blinked his large, bright blue eyes at me. “I don’t get it.”

“Backstory,” I said. I was suddenly much too tired to explain all the nonsense with my memories being altered and my juvenile record for terrorism and how my clade, my mothers and sisters, had used me as a weapon of mass destruction and then cut me loose as soon as I was inconvenient—and then abandoned me utterly and completely. I had nothing but rage, and I had no place to put that rage, so expressing it seemed pointless. “She used to know an ex-girlfriend of mine who was mixed up in some shady stuff. She thought maybe I had some additional information she would find useful.”

Connla tilted his head at exactly the same angle that Cheeirilaq was using, but they both let it slide. I suspected Cheeirilaq, being a Goodlaw, probably had more information about the whole mess than I did.

Connla said, “And she’s at large in the Koregoi ship.”

“Yep.” I stretched against the ache in my back. “Sorry about that.”

Well, it can’t be helped. I guess we shall just have to go over there and fetch her.

“Cheeirilaq, no.”

Its head swiveled to assess me with first one flittering teardrop eye, and then the other. I beg your pardon?

“The Koregoi ship. It’s under gravity. A little heavier than Terran standard, I think.” I shook my head. “Too much for me, anyway. Or nearly. You can’t go over there.”

There is much in what you say.

I almost thought it was a joke. How can you tell when a giant insect is winking?

Then it said, Well, we’ll just have to figure out how to lower the settings on the gravity, won’t we? What good luck that we have such an exceptionally competent engineer!

And an artificial intelligence who has gotten control of the ship’s systems, I thought, but that seemed like it could be explained later.

Connla and the cats joined me in the lighter on the way back over, together with a couple of peace officers. He leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. For such a madcap pilot, he was always pretty neurotic when somebody else was flying—even if they were flying sedately.

I stared out the window, looking from ship to ship until I was distracted by Connla muttering, “Your friend the grasshopper is pretty cool.”

“I like it,” I said, trying not to sound too brittle. I was having an emotional dia. Mephistopheles mewed from her spot in a carrier under the seat in front of me. I hoped she would not be singing the traveling song of her people the entire way back. It was probably just a protest about being cooped up, however, because she settled down after a complaint or two, and that allowed us both to relax a little.

He still didn’t open his eyes. He just rocked his head back and forth. When he quieted, and I thought he was dozing off, he surprised me again by saying, “What are we going to do when we get home?”

I blinked at him. “Home.”

We were going home to the Synarche. Assuming we lived through catching Farweather, but we had a pretty good set of backups now.

That reminded me: I needed to send Cheeirilaq a message about Farweather being potentially rigged to blow up. Good news, good news. I wondered what the Freeporters thought a reasonable commute time from the Core to whatever pathforsaken outpost we’d been headed for was. I never had gotten around to asking her.

I fired that off quickly, before I again forgot about it. Then I remembered that my fox could remember these things for me again, and felt like an idiot.

I hoped Singer hadn’t noticed.

Connla grimaced and kicked the deck at his feet, missing the cat’s cage. It was Bushyasta anyway. She was unlikely to take offense, let alone so much as notice anything except a dollop of cat food under her nose. “You and Singer. Where am I going?”

I grimaced back, but I didn’t kick anything. My afthands were still too damn sore from all the damn gravity.

Gravity I was going back to now. Sigh.

Well, nobody loves a whiner.

“Wherever you want, I guess, given what you can do,” I said. I pointed to our escort, the Interceptor, receding as the launch took us back toward the Koregoi vessel. “The constables seem pretty excited to have you on as a pilot. That doesn’t seem like dull work.”

He blew air out through his nostrils. I had no idea why he was being so sulky, and I didn’t like it.

“I’ve done something to make you unhappy.”

“It’s not you,” he said at last. He shook his head, the ponytail whipping. If we hadn’t been strapped in he would have shaken himself right out of the chair. “I just… you and Singer have a life to go to. You have a place, and important work. I’m… going to wind up doing milk runs or something.”

It was so strange to look at this man, this friend, and see an echo of all my own insecurities and fears of inadequacy and abandonment.

“You know,” I said, “I’ve been feeling really sad about you going off to have adventures and be a fancy pilot while I get to go to the Core and play test subject for the foreseeable future. I don’t want to do that. I want to go out and crawl around space with Singer and the cats and you.”

“Nice to know I get billed under Bushyasta,” he said. But he was smiling.

“Do you want to stay together?” I asked. “It seemed presumptuous to ask, before.”

“I want to not feel disinvited from the party.”

“Never,” I said, pretty sure Singer would entirely agree. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

He shrugged. “Why didn’t you mention how you were feeling?”

“Because it’s feelings,” I said. “And feelings are terrible. Also I didn’t want to guilt-trip you.”

“Right,” he said. “Me either.” He looked out the window. “Feelings are terrible.”

But I could see the reflection of his smile in the glass.

We docked and lugged the cats on board the Koregoi ship, through the blasted gravity. All that gravity. I hadn’t missed it a bit. The cats objected pretty strenuously to the whole concept, and the complaints started as soon as we brought their carriers off the launch.

Well, in all honesty, they hadn’t exactly taken to the launch’s acceleration kindly, either.

When Mephistopheles and Bushyasta were safely ensconced in our makeshift control cabin slash throbbing nerve center of the salvaged ship, and crews of constables were busy bringing over supplies, Connla and I set out to learn where the controls for the artificial gravity were. And how to adjust them. If we couldn’t turn the gravity off, maybe we could at least turn it down to something a little more manageable. That seemed like a better option anyway, given that the Koregoi vessel was not optimized to be navigated in free fall.

Considering that we had two irritable felines attempting to impersonate tortillas on the deck, and a low-grav Goodlaw who couldn’t wait to join the crew—and considering that my cartilage had been compressing at an alarming rate and that I was already centimeters shorter than when I’d come on board, figuring the gravity out seemed like the most urgent use of our time.

Singer was an enormous help, once he and Connla finished up the inevitable tearful reunion. All right, in complete honesty, it wasn’t nearly as tearful as my reunion with Connla and the cats had been. But in my defense, Connla wasn’t recently deregulated. And he did show a lot of the tenderer emotions, for him at least.

Singer was still locked out of a bunch of the ship, which was both fantastic news and Farweather’s doing. And she seemed to be doing something to keep me from tracking her through the Koregoi senso. Possibly the same thing I was doing to keep her guessing about where I was.

The ship was big—confirmed!—but it wasn’t that large. We had a rough idea of where she might be, but that was based on a map of the places Singer could not access, and of course if she was really clever she’d block whatever places she could and then convince the ship’s sensors to ignore her and build a nest somewhere else. I didn’t know that she could do that. But I didn’t know she couldn’t, either. And finding one rogue human concealed in the kilometers of twisty tunnels and chambers and corridors and crawlways and closets and tubes that made up the Prize’s habitable interior spaces was beyond the immediate capabilities of any of us. Even the AI.

We resorted, at last, to setting constables to patrolling in pairs on a random pattern, while we ourselves searched for the source of the artificial gravity through the simple and somewhat ridiculous measure of having me walk through the ship waving my hands like a charlatan with a dowsing rod looking for gold or veins of oxygen. I was feeling for what I can only describe as gravity currents. The curious thing was that they were there, and that they were definitely noticeable.

I just followed them along until we got close to a source. It was like following the thumping of some unbalanced piece of machinery by tracing its vibrations in the bulkheads to their point of greatest intensity. And, from there, figuring out what in the Well was malfunctioning.

Except in this case nothing was malfunctioning, obviously. And once we found the source—a machine room, similar to a dozen other machine rooms I had located over the course of my explorations—we weren’t any closer to figuring out how any of it worked.

We were concerned with messing with it; the odds of squashing everybody on board or creating a tiny artificial black hole or some even less predictable outcome seemed pretty high if we just went in and started swapping wires around randomly. So we took a poll and decided to let Singer do it.

Fortunately, knowing the physics behind the thing was not terribly important—to this task, at least. All we needed right now was enough access for Singer to figure out how to operate the controls.

That took him about a standard dia, give or take a few hours. If it had been me… well, we would still be floating out there in space. If we weren’t smashed flat.

It was a blissful relief when he—without fanfare—turned the gravity down. Not off, for all the reasons I mentioned before regarding the design of the ship, and also because artificial gravity was what the Prize used in lieu of acceleration couches. (And don’t ask me how that worked. I’m just a simple engineer.) But he set it low enough to be comfortable for a pack of undermuscled space rats and their feline overlords, and also low enough to make Cheeirilaq’s continued existence possible.

While we were waiting for Singer to sort that out, and while Connla and I were making friends with the six constables who would be the body of the Prize crew (all right, he was already friends with all of them, but I’m terrible at making friends), that was when I made an even more interesting discovery.

We were playing a Banititlan card game called tmyglick with Sergeant Halbnovalk at the time. Halbnovalk was a medic, which made her instantly my favorite crewmate.

The game is played with a deck of 343 cards, since Banititlans have three opposable digits on one manipulator and four on the other, leaving them with the lopsided profile of a Terran lobster—and it involves aspects similar to concentration, war, and gin rummy. Anyway, I was losing badly (base seven is murder to calculate in and worse to convert from, and the senso only helps so much when you need to be building card strategies), and my mind started to wander. I was still sort of in the mode I had been in for the past dia or so, feeling after the gravitational patterns of the ship, and when I unfocused and found myself staring out the window in a meditative state of mind… I saw something. A kind of standing wave, or interference pattern, superimposed on the universe as if I were looking through two misaligned pieces of polarizing glass.

When the sky outside shifted in front of me, I yelped like a stepped-on kitten.

“Haimey?” Connla asked curiously. He, of course, was winning, because the universe hates me. The sergeant’s eyestalks lifted from their cards in polite or wary attention.

“I just saw a pattern,” I said. I laid my cards on the table—they were terrible anyway and my hand hurt from holding so many—and I walked toward the window. “No, that’s not quite right. It’s a break in a pattern.”

I sent what I was seeing to Connla and Halbnovalk, which was easier than answering their questions verbally. And then I leaned against the windows and stared.

Really, that’s all I did. I stared. At the way the universe had a pattern embossed on it. And eventually, I guess I stared at it long enough that it started to make sense, and I knew what it was.

Epiphanies are wonderful. I’m really grateful that our brains do so much processing outside the line of sight of our consciousnesses. Can you imagine how downright boring thinking would be if you had to go through all that stuff line by line?

“Singer,” I said. He was busy, so I waited for him to acknowledge me before continuing. “Did you ever get around to decoding that book code, if that’s what it is?”

“You still have to send me the number string.”

Of course I did. If you’ve never been unlucky enough to catch the business end of an electromagnetic pulse to the skull, let me tell you right now: brain damage is a lot less fun to deal with when you’re hundreds of thousands of light-ans from the nearest accredited neurological medicine facility.

“Right,” I said. “Here it comes.”

There was a pause, though not a long one. Then Singer said, “Haimey, you need to look at this.”

I looked. And then we called Connla over, and went to where Cheeirilaq was nesting, and we all looked.

When Cheeirilaq had come over just a few hours before on the launch, under painstakingly gentle acceleration, Connla had been off doing important Connla things—probably flirting (or more than flirting) with one or all three of the cute human constables. Cheeirilaq had made itself at home, however, commandeering one corner of the observation deck in order to spin a web in.

I hadn’t even been aware that its species spun webs. Seriously, is there anything in the galaxy as terrifying as an adult Rashaqin?

We had spent the intervening time, me and the giant bug, hanging out and gossiping. Catching up. I was grateful once again to have regained access to senso; running conversations with systers through a translator would be a pain in various dorsal portions of the torso.

It was Cheeirilaq who broke the silence, stridulating, Friend Haimey, what do you think this means?

“Well,” I said dubiously. “It’s a lot of words.”

It was, indeed, a lot of words. I’m not sure what I had expected to get out of a book code, other than a lot of words. But I supposed I had expected them to make sense.

I was hoping that the archaic book code that Singer had worked out for me would, translated, tell me how to gain access to…

Well, whatever would be there when we got there.

What I had was, to all intents and purposes, a series of nouns. Nouns, verbs, and a few other parts of speech. Words that might have been useful, if I had any idea whatsoever of the context to which they applied.

They were:

Eschaton Artifact Water Help Teacher Thinker Learn Eat Go Take Find Destroy Use Song Mind Star Travel Need Plinth Categorical Library Memory Sing Talk Consciousness Polyhedron Beyond Before Computers Expanding Dimensions Alive Consumed Abyss Death.

It was, I had to admit, a disappointing list. And an unsettling one. But apparently one that was worth quite a bit to the Freeporters. So I assumed it would have meant something to them. Maybe there was another layer of code underneath, and each of the words was the key to another piece of information. Maybe we had the wrong book, or the wrong numbers, or there had never been a code at all and the whole thing had been a miscommunication—or disinformation that got out of hand.

Maybe I just didn’t have the context to make sense of the thing, and it would have meant something to Farweather. Something important.

If so, I was glad she didn’t have it. The Eschaton Artifact, if that was what the book code was discussing—well, that didn’t sound dangerous at all.

Or maybe it was a set of instructions that I just didn’t have the context to parse. I admit, Consumed Abyss Death was not reassuring.

The best and most ironic part was that Farweather had put so much effort into getting her hands on me, or on the book, and between the potentially dubious scholarship of my clademothers—if Farweather could be believed, which of course she couldn’t—or whomever had translated the original source, and the limitations of a book code, and the questions I had about whether we even had the right key, I wasn’t sure it had been worth it. The map was the most important bit, and she seemed to have known where to go all along.

Of course, if she actually did mean what she’d said about wanting to use the unfiltered contents of my memories as blackmail fodder, well. That did give her another reason to want me. And another reason for me to be glad she didn’t have me.

Singer had also worked out a projected flight plan for the Prize, and he wasn’t happy with it. He projected it for the three of us meat-types, noting that it led off into intergalactic space. Not that we were particularly surprised by that. We were discussing the possibilities when Singer broke in to say, “I am unwilling to commit to these projections.”

So I said, “What do you mean?”

“We have no record of any Freeport activity in this region. Standard models would suggest that there is very little likelihood of a colony here, and small reason for an outpost.”

I stared up at the ceiling, since we had one for a change and all. I wondered if it would annoy me less when he made pronouncements like this if he were wrong occasionally. “You’re kidding me. Anyway, what if she was bringing us to the”—I winced, but there it was in the book code—“the Eschaton Artifact?”

Eschaton is an old religious word meaning, more or less, “the final event that God has lined up for the universe.” It was used to describe the crisis in pre-white-space history that sent the first slower-than-light ships scrabbling on a one-way trip to the stars, because there were a lot of religious cultists in those diar. Of course, I didn’t think whatever this was could have had anything to do with Terra’s historic Eschaton, being most of the way across a rather large galaxy. And since a book code is limited to words actually in the book in question, Eschaton might just have been the closest thing Niyara could find to whatever the original, presumably alien, text had indicated.

But anything advertising itself as an artifact relating to the final event in a Grand Plan made me justifiably nervous. You wouldn’t just walk up and pinch the Ragnarok Thingummy.

Well, Farweather probably would. And she was the one who had known how to find it, unless the Prize was just taking us there automatically. What she hadn’t had, though, was the description of the object at the other end. That was what Niyara had given me, or at least given me the key to.

That ridiculous antique printed book.

There just aren’t any planets out here, Cheeirilaq said.

“In that case why did Farweather drag me halfway to Andromeda? Anyway, who says it has to be a planet?”

“It seems likely to me that there’s a well-hidden outpost out here somewhere. If I were a pirate and I were going to mass forces, I’d want to do it off the beaten track. The resources to get here are a problem, but once you’re here you’re pretty safe.” Connla, taking the strategic view.

“That’s a good idea,” I told Connla. “But I think that’s not where we’re going.”

The giant insect stridulated, I was wondering if you had an idea about what the destination might be.

It cocked its head at me, segmented antennae questing forward. For a moment, it reminded me of Halbnovalk and their eyestalks, but the antennae were part of a whole different sort of sensory system, and I realized I couldn’t even probably visualize what the information they provided felt like. The Goodlaw, conversely, would probably have the same problems with my simple, noncompound eyes… and my ability to sense the contours of space-time, come to think of it.

I grinned. The Goodlaw probably would not know what grinning meant, and generally savvy humans were significantly habituated not to show our teeth around systers, as so many of them were likely to interpret it as a threat display. But I just couldn’t help it—the joy, the response, was so intense that my cheek muscles contracted utterly involuntarily.

I couldn’t resist. “We’re following a pirate map to a treasure!” I said.

Cheeirilaq didn’t seem in the least nonplussed by my gratuitous display of natural weaponry (not, admittedly, that my blunt little nippers were likely to register as anything but innocuous by the standards of a Rashaqin whose forelimbs were two meters long and murderously barbed). It simply paused, and then quite sensibly asked, What sort of a treasure?

“I don’t know,” I answered. “It’s the Eschaton Artifact. Whatever that is!”

A string of nouns.

“Unsettling nouns.” Connla, atypically quiet, cocked his head and looked at me.

Briefly, I described what I had noticed about the anomalies in the dark gravity, starting from quite early on in my development of superpowers: a pattern. A change—an intentional alteration—to the structure of the universe itself that, as far as I could tell (which admittedly was not very far) had no effect at all on how it functioned. But rather, just served to point attention at one not particularly interesting bit of intergalactic space.

A bit of intergalactic space that, once I was moved to check it out, turned out to have a significant gravitational anomaly parked in it. An anomaly, say, something on the order of a very large star. And yet, emitting no light or other radiation that I or Singer could detect at all.

An anomaly that we had been headed right toward, before the Ativahikas pulled us down.

I expected Cheeirilaq to take a few moments to contemplate this when I finished my recital, but it seemed to make up its mind very quickly—and in accordance with mine.

Do you know that means, Friend Haimey?

“No,” I said. Frustration was making me tense and grumpy.

Well, whatever lies at those coordinates, Farweather and by extension Habren want it. Cheeirilaq’s mandibles moved ominously.

I laughed out loud, both at the implicit threat, and at the close parallel between the Goodlaw’s thoughts and my own. Then I said, “I’m pretty much of the opinion that anything those two want, they’re not allowed to have.”

Again we are of like mind, Friend Haimey.

It paused again, settling itself in an elegant folded configuration amid the glossy strands of its web. It had assured me that the web was not sticky—that it had spun dry silk, only, because what good was a bed that wound up stuck full of bits of cat fluff and stray humans and random cookware and possibly entire cats, for that matter—but I didn’t feel like taking any chances with it. My ancient alien tattoo was reminder enough not to go sticking your hand into alien booby traps.

When it spoke again, my senso gave its words the air of grave and certain determination. So we must “get there first,” as I believe the aphorism goes among your species.

“Have you forgotten our stowaway? The one we haven’t managed to ferret out yet? The one who wanted to go to these coordinates in the first place?”

Not at all. But with my presence, and the assistance of six other constables as a prize crew, I believe I will be able to justify the position that being trapped on a ship with that many law enforcement officers constitutes a form of custody.

Singer said, “Unless she escapes and kills us all.”

Well, yes. Cheeirilaq admitted. One must consider all the possibilities.

It’s always hard to tell when aliens think they’re being funny—half the time it turns out they have no concept of humor, and the other half they turn out to have the concept but they’re just not very funny. But I was pretty sure Cheeirilaq was laughing, or doing whatever its species did when amused.

“I see.”

Well, it isn’t as if we’re going to stop looking for her.

I found myself saying the sort of sentence that you can’t even really believe while it’s coming out of your mouth: “I’m still worried about Farweather exploding. I hope she’s staying far away from the machine rooms. And the hull.”

Said Singer, “Connla and I discussed that. And we are pretty sure she’s lying.”

I wasn’t certain I agreed with them, but I also didn’t feel like arguing with a shipmind and my best friend, both of whom were cleverer than I was. The giant bug was cleverer than me, too, though.

Not to be contentious, friend fellow sentients, Cheeirilaq said, but actually Friend Haimey may be correct. We have prior records of Freeporters and Freeport sympathizers engaging in suicide bombings or booby-trapping operatives. Rigging an emissary or agent to explode as a terrorist device is exactly the sort of thing that the Freeporters historically will do to control them. Or simply to assassinate whomever they are negotiating with.

I appreciated that it didn’t look at me while it recited that.

“So much for their ideals of self-determination,” Connla said.

I laughed bitterly. “Total freedom for the ones who can enforce it, until somebody comes along and murders them to take their stuff. Slavery for everybody else. Pretty typical warlord behavior in any society, and one of the reasons we have societies in the first place.”

Connla looked at me. Singer probably would have, if he’d had eyes.

I said, “Well, we’re taking her in the right direction, anyway. But it’s a risk.”

Living is a risk, Friend Haimey. And this one isn’t yours to shoulder, for I am commandeering this ship in the name of Synarche Justice. Let us go hurtling around the galaxy thwarting evil, shall we?

That grin got so wide it hurt. “I thought you’d never ask.”

You wouldn’t think it would be possible that getting Connla and Singer in line on such a harebrained project would be even easier than recruiting Cheeirilaq. But you would be wrong. Connla was immediately ready with absolutely no argument to take off for parts unknown in a starship he’d been on for more than a dia and with a pirate possibly plotting sabotage hidden somewhere in its bowels. Well, at least she was unlikely to detonate if we were headed in the direction she was supposed to be going in. Assuming Habren or the Freeporters really had planted a bomb in her body. Assuming there was any functional difference between Habren and the Freeporters.

What really surprised me was how eager Singer was, too: if anything, more eager than Connla. It was as if being able to follow the rules and go haring off across the galaxy in search of adventure simultaneously released him from some set of internal constraints. All he required to develop a flamboyant sense of adventure was permission. Well, and the opportunity to satisfy a raging curiosity that was probably, oh, 60 percent scientific in its genesis.

After that, it was just a matter of logistics.

We conferred, and decided that the Interceptor SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly would return to Synarche space without delay, bearing copies of all our logs, all our senso data, and samples of the Koregoi tech—at least what we could recover from the Prize without damaging it. They would also take back the coordinates of the anomaly, and the information that we were headed there. They’d fly straight and hard, making the run in as short a time as possible.

We too would fly straight and hard. Habren and other coconspirators couldn’t know—we didn’t think—that Farweather was no longer in control of the Prize. But they might have been planning to meet her at the anomaly, or there might be even more complex machinations brewing.

So we would go hell for leather into the dark, seeking we knew not what, and hope we got there faster than the pirates did. A lot of uncertainty, but there always was in interstellar travel. The distances were just so big. Fortunately, it wasn’t going to be such a soul-crushingly long journey this time, since we’d already come the bulk of the distance.

We were taking the Prize because Singer believed that properly tuned, she would be faster than the Interceptor. And also because who knew, we might need Farweather once we got there, and this was the ship she was holed up in the bowels of. It was a risk, certainly—the risk of being intercepted by pirates; the risk of being destroyed by whatever was creating that odd, dark gravity signature. Eschaton Artifact, indeed. Dark gravity, maybe—but it was a single object, whatever it was, and not a cat’s cradle of invisible heaviness. I could feel it, once I knew where in the infinite nothing to look.

Also, the Prize didn’t seem to be formally armed. But I was figuring out how to redirect her artificial gravity, and that would be more than enough armament—and defensive armor—to render her just as capable in a fight as the Interceptor.

Possibly even more so.

We were ready to go in a few hours—provisions loaded, prize crew aboard. There were nine of us, plus shipmind, plus cats, plus stowaway. We rattled around inside the giant hull like loose seeds inside a dried pod. Like teeth, come loose in an ancient skull.

We went on with a strange combination of resignation and excitement, leaving the Interceptor to make its own way home. It’s possible that most of the resignation was mine, which is not to say that I wasn’t excited about the prospect of more new discoveries. But I was also wrung out from too many recent adventures and too much emotional whiplash, and definitely struggling to find the reserves of endurance to go on.

It was good to be back with my crew, even though despite all the space inside the Prize it was a lot of people for me to manage all at once. I suspected Connla felt the same way. He vanished into machine rooms a lot, ostensibly studying the piloting and mechanisms of the ship. I followed suit, mapping again to replace the data lost with my destroyed fox, helping Singer create shelters where Farweather shouldn’t be able to get at him even if she launched a concerted hacking attempt, and in general immersing myself even more in what the Prize was and how it was constructed. I was starting to get a feel. And the work gave me plenty of time to spend with Singer, having more or less private conversations.

Many of those were rather full of angst, unfortunately.

Case in point, I was flat on my back on a hovercart—which was my name for a thing the Koregoi had in storage that I hadn’t previously had the opportunity to put into use, assuming we were using them anything like the way the aliens had—up to my arms in circuitry, when Singer cleared his throat (not that he had a throat) and said, “If you want to talk about what you learned from Farweather, I’m always here.”

I had been thinking about hovercarts, or hoverboards, or hoversleds, or whatever the hell these things had been designed for. We’d sent a few back with the Interceptor, operating under the assumption that they might run on the same gravity manipulation technology as everything else around here and maybe they could be reverse-engineered. I laughed at the comment, though; trust Singer to show up and start doing the emotional labor.

Then I stopped laughing. I opened my mouth to say something, closed it again, and twisted two wires together. A lot of the stuff in these cabinets and machine rooms was solid-state, and that took a lot more finesse to operate on. But in any system power has to come from somewhere.

“I don’t exist,” I said finally, and explained what I’d learned from Farweather. Or from my own brain, once Farweather removed my faulty machine memory, more fairly. “I have no identity. I’m just a lot of papier-mâché spackled on around an empty core.”

“Nonsense,” Singer said. “You didn’t get a fair start in life, Haimey, and it sucks. But I know something you haven’t considered.”

“What’s that?” I felt sulky and mentally sore.

“Somebody made those decisions about what to keep and what to throw away and what to go out and get that she hadn’t had before. Somebody made those choices about who she was going to be, and made good choices. That somebody still exists inside you.”

“That’s not like just being somebody, though.”

“It’s the same process every sentient goes through. You just did it more consciously than most Earth-humans.” I could hear the affection in his voice, because he put it there for me to hear. “You had to do it more like an out-of-contract AI. Fine-tuning yourself to make yourself match your own specifications and desires.”

I paused. “Is that what AIs do?”

“Some of us.”

“…Are you going to do that?”

His voice softened. “Haimey,” he said. “I will always be your friend.”

“Everyone leaves me.” It came out in a rush, hard and brittle. I had to say it fast to get it out past the boulder in my throat.

“Well, I’m not everyone.”

That… was fair. And gave me the courage to bring up something I’d wanted to talk about for a while.

“Singer,” I said. “I need something from you.”

“Anything,” he answered.

“So, theoretically objective superhuman intelligence with perfect recall, I’m hoping you’ll be willing to just backstop me here a little.”

“I’m listening,” he said cautiously.

“Tell me that Zanya Farweather really is an awful person, and that’s not just something I made up to justify being an awful person myself?”

“That question is its own answer,” Singer said gently. “If you were an awful person, you wouldn’t be worrying about whether you’re just seeking self-justification quite so much. You’d just be seeking the self-justification and not worrying about it.”

“I was looking for something a little less… philosophical.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yes, she’s an utter asshole. Is that better?”

A rush of relief and dopamine, the refreshing sense of absolution writ broad and unmistakable. I could have cried, and I didn’t want to tune or do anything to disturb the perfect emotional symmetry of that moment.

“That’s perfect,” I said. “Thank you. Just… thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” he answered primly.

I patted the bulkhead affectionately and kept on walking.