Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 28

WHEN I LOOKED PAST MY boots again, I saw Singer vanish. It was the worst moment of a life that had had quite a few bad moments in it.

He was there—or the Prize was there, containing him and Connla and two cats and six other people I had been getting fond of. And then he was gone, and I was alone in a space suit somewhere outside the generally acknowledged boundaries of the entire fucking Milky Way, with nobody for company except a good insect cop, an alien AI I couldn’t talk to, and a pathologically risk-seeking pirate.

With a dozen or so armed ships that wanted me dead in pursuit, and nothing between my soft brown warmth and the cold depths of space except a thin, fragile envelope full of recycled atmosphere.

Well, at least the cold depths of space were something I could surf now. And I just had to go find Farweather and bring her into custody, and trust that Singer would come back for me.

Cheeirilaq?

Nothing. I had a visual on him, but without Singer’s assistance, our suit coms weren’t producing a strong-enough signal to connect. Or maybe there was some interference from the mirrormind. Maybe a tight beam, so we could coordinate—

The hole in the night where Singer had left us exploded into coruscation. I briefly glimpsed an outline I recognized as a Jothari ship silhouette… and then it was gone, in the actinic glare of obliterated matter. A wave of Baomind mirrors behind the ship’s position disintegrated, and I braced myself for death… but death ran out of steam well before it got to me, and frankly had been headed in a different direction when it happened.

I gasped. The crew of the Jothari ship had tried to catch the Prize in their particle wave as they dropped out of white space. But because Singer had transitioned to white space just as the particles reached him, they’d been whipped back around in the general direction of the source, and the ship that had tried to use its bow wave as a battering ram was instead disintegrated.

Well, that was going to require some antirad treatments if I ever made it home.

I had other problems now. A whole pirate fleet of them.

Cheeirilaq and Farweather and the Baomind and I—and the pirates—were moving fast. But through the magic of space and inertia, we were more or less motionless with respect to each other. We wouldn’t fall out of the Baomind swarm now that we weren’t being propelled by the Prize’s drive.

But neither would we continue to accelerate.

And the pirates… would.

They were going to catch up with us much faster now. Being captured by pirates—or worse, by Jothari inclined to check out their anathemic tech under my skin and then blame me personally for the deaths of a ship full of their friends and family who had been murdered by Farweather—was definitely not the jewel of my agenda todia.

But it also wasn’t something that I currently had a great deal of influence over. So I would act like a proper spacer, show some skybound pride, and focus—right now—on the problem I could actually do some good with right now. As an old crew chief of mine used to point out, you might be dead long before the problem you didn’t have the resources to fix right now became a critical need, so why waste more resources worrying about it?

Or Singer—who I could feel, folding space-time into a cozy wrinkled-up nest and moving away like a bullet—might even come back and rescue us in time. It was a nice thought. And you never knew until you lived through it what the likely outcomes were.

So the problem I could take a useful swipe at right now was Farweather. Farweather, who was currently hop-skipping, jetting, gravity-sliding, and jumping her way through the flock of drone mirror disks as if the Baomind were a staircase she could run down to get to the Baostar. We were in a flock of the smaller mirrors—most of the bigger ones had stayed closer to the star. And I mean, okay, technically. She could hopscotch her way down them until she reached the main Baomind sphere. It would take her more thousands of ans than I had cycles to compute to walk that far, unless she caught a lift down on a returning disk, or unless the gravity-surfing thing could give her more a than I expected. She was going to run out of ox sooner or later, so what positive outcome such an objective would obtain for her was beyond my ability to guess.

Space: still ridiculously big.

It was more likely that she was just trying to keep far enough ahead of us that one of the Freeport ships—I was pretty sure the light-colored dot off to the left was her vessel—could zoom in and pick her up without risk. After which, with Farweather out of the way, the Goodlaw and I could be vaporized at their leisure, along with however much of the poor inoffensive Baomind got in the way.

Or just left here: a slower death sentence.

Sticking close to Farweather seemed like the best strategy. Of course, given their willingness to shoot at things Farweather was sitting on, maybe hiding behind her wasn’t the best strategy.

A big bolus of fatality settled my nerves. Well, I didn’t have to win, then. I just had to keeping Farweather from winning. And make good on my promise to the Ativahikas.

Farweather was still space-hopping along the stretched-out Baomind pseudopod as I focused my attention on catching up with her. Even if she thought she could walk that far, she wasn’t going to have to. Because I was determined to catch her and somehow get her on Singer, who was totally coming back for us, at the earliest opportunity. And judging from what I could see of Cheeirilaq—who was using webs and way too many feathery feet to keep up with what Farweather and I were doing with the space-time slide—I wasn’t the only one holding that opinion currently.

Please come back, Singer.

He would if he could. And so would Connla. I didn’t have any doubt about that now. And I wasn’t alone out here. I had a giant bug to help me. (In all honesty I was probably the sidekick in this equation. But it makes me feel better to pretend otherwise.)

It was a long way down to the bottom of the well. That just meant it would take me a long time to fall.

I could do this thing.

If Farweather could do this thing, so could I.

Farweather was a long shot better at it than I was, however. Faster. More confident.

I got to my first disk and balanced on it while I surveyed the situation. At least it didn’t try to buck me off.

Farweather was the one who made an extreme sport of plunging through space under her own impulse, sliding about shipless in the void—and practice counts. I wished I believed in the convenient entertainment myth that just really wanting it more than the other guy was enough to insure success.

That and being pure of heart, of course.

Did I want to capture Farweather more than Farweather wanted to avoid being captured? Somehow I doubted it. Couldn’t stop me from trying, though. And I definitely had the pure-of-heart aspect squared away.

I calculated her likely next few jumps, because calculated is a much nicer term than scientific wild-ass guessed. Then I gritted my teeth and told myself, “Might as well die doing something as nothing.” Another saying I’d learned from a crusty old engineer—this one a Tralikhan master chief I’d worked under for six decians on a passenger liner early in my checkered career. That was one of the ways I’d learned I hated working on passenger liners, though engineering was better than the purser’s job.

I shifted my weight from side to side, rocking the mirror disk I crouched on, trying to get a feel for its variable motions as it flocked with the others. I was on one of the smallest ones, maybe two meters across. The next disk was larger, and the distance to it was not insurmountable by any means, just terrifying. And variable, as they moved in relationship to each other. I tried to remind myself that if I missed, I would not go sailing helplessly into the outer darkness. The atavistic part of my brain did not believe me. I tuned it down, but I was pretty sure my fox still wasn’t working right, because while the panic was dulled, it was still there.

Fun.

At the moment, my current ride was closing on my next objective. I stared hard, as if that could make my leap more accurate, and reminded myself that the disk I was on would move away from me with reactive force when I pushed against it.

I patted my faithful steed fondly with a suit glove before I abandoned it.

I staggered when I landed, and my afthand gripped the edge of the disk hard to steady me. The pain was sudden, immediate, and sharp. My suit squeezed my afthand as it sealed, keeping pressure on the wound and keeping my air in.

The disk was sharp as a laser. I felt lucky I’d kept my aftfingers, as I tuned out the pain and told myself it wasn’t too bad. Probably. I could always grow new fingers, if they died of gangrene.

A strange sound echoed in my inner ear, through the Koregoi senso. Like the alien music that had permeated the Prize. A sorrowful run of notes that put me in mind of an apology.

But the jump had been easy.

Almost too easy, as if a guiding hand were planted in the seat of my pants. I didn’t think the Jothari or Freeporters were likely to be helpful. Singer was out of the system and still heading away at superluminal velocities. Farweather was running away.

That left one obvious candidate.

“Baomind?” I said.

I don’t know why I expected it to recognize the name Singer and I had just given it. I don’t know why I wasn’t more surprised when it did. Maybe the religious types are right and setting your intention matters.

It felt—it felt like the Ativahikas had, when they spoke to me. As if something were inside me, vast and ancient and yet also somehow still a part of me, or containing me, speaking from the halls of my own being. Speaking in a language deeper than any I had ever had to learn.

A language I had always known.

The thing that welled up inside me wasn’t words, exactly. It was… notes, music. A pattern of sounds, or perhaps it would be more accurate to liken it to the recalled memory of sounds, arranged into a pleasing and harmonious whole. As Singer had described it—a song.

I was not in any respect a musician. But I accepted the sound as an attempt to communicate, and attempted to sort out the sense of it. Unfortunately, I just did not have the skill to unpack it, and Singer wasn’t there to help.

It was glorious. But it had layers and depths and was basically a textured wall of sound, like listening to an entire party of people talking all at once. It was beyond me to interpret.

Well, all right then.

Unable to hear words, I listened for tone. You can tell if a song is sad or happy even if you don’t know the language it’s being sung in, generally. Of course it was the basest ethnocentrism to assume that my human experience of emotion and music were anything like a syster’s experience of same. And this wasn’t even a syster. This was a sentient artifact left behind by a long-lost alien civilization. Or civilizations: we still didn’t have a very good idea of what—who—the Koregoi had been. Their artifacts were scattered around, but more than that—they had left hints for us, bits of knowledge, the remains of a strange sort of library, perhaps. Woven into the very fabric of the dark gravity that held the universe together.

Literally.

I was starting to realize that we, all of us—Synarche, pirates, Jothari, even the Ativahikas—were living in the ruins of the Koregoi’s enormous and shadowy house.

Hell, they might still be out there somewhere. They might just be living in white space, or some similar gap between the fibers of the conventional universe. They might have translated themselves to a state where they could interact with whatever caused the dark gravity directly. They might have advanced to the point where they were carrying on a limitless multidimensional existence where distances had as little meaning for them across galaxies as they did for us on a planetary scale.

I should have asked Singer how the Baomind sang, I realized now, in the soundless depths of space. Now I knew; it sang inside its own mind.

Well, at least it sounded friendly. And Farweather was getting farther away as I dithered. Cheeirilaq, too, who was racing along the disks, leaping from one to another with astounding insectile bounds, leaving a shimmering trail of web behind it as a safety line.

I wondered about the design of the valve on its suit that let its webbing out. Even while chasing Farweather.

You don’t just stop being an engineer.

I needed to get my head in the game, and so I tuned and bumped with abandon. I didn’t go sociopath: I didn’t trust my wonky fox to put me back again. But I went far past anywhere I normally would have, and sent myself into a state of confidence and hyperfocus called hypomania.

It was bliss. Calm happiness and confidence centered me, along with a cheerful determination to get the job done. I wasn’t tired anymore. I wasn’t sore. I wasn’t limping on a damaged limb. I knew, somewhere distantly, that I ought to be scared, but I wasn’t scared. I was warmly confident that I could get every bit of this done.

If I could have, I would have stayed in this state forever. If for nothing else, for the amazing sense of calm and confidence that suffused me, the feeling that I was competent and wise enough to do whatever it took to get what I needed.

For the sense of existing. Taking up space and being real.

Alas, there were drawbacks. And I still didn’t trust my fox.

I couldn’t even set a timer on it, because I didn’t know how long we’d be stuck out here—how long I would need to feel superhuman. And I probably wouldn’t survive the inevitable despair hangover if it happened while we were still stranded.

You won’t be stranded, said the part of my brain that was still riding on the endocrine cocktail and the Baomind’s internal music. The part of my brain that had abruptly lost the ability to plan for consequences. Singer will come back in the nick of time. Everything is going to be fine.

I nodded to myself and thought, You have to do this because there’s nobody else here to handle it.

I ran. Or bounded, hopscotched, and scrabbled, rather. Precariously, my balance always in question I kicked and scrambled and gravity-sledded my way down the column of mirrors. Farweather still had the lead on me, but with the Baomind’s assistance, I was cutting the distance.

I’d lost sight of Cheeirilaq. I guessed it was trying to cut around Farweather somehow and flank her, but I had no idea how it planned to accomplish that. I saw a trailing silk thread as I hurtled past, headed for the center of the swarm.

I thought about the razor edges on all the silicon drone disks, and I prayed a little, though I wasn’t usually the sort to leave offerings. I prayed to Kwan-yin, because why not. And I prayed to Bao Zheng.

What the heck, right? We’d dedicated this whole star system to him. And the reason we were out here was… something like research.

Farweather must have felt me coming. She hadn’t put her gun away. I had holstered my borrowed one because I needed both forehands for this game, but she didn’t point hers at me. She just glanced over her shoulder and kept running.

The weird loping gait I was forced to assume was taking a toll on me. Avoiding the disk edges was tricky. But I was strong—stronger than I had ever been in my life, after decians under grav. My muscles strained and stretched. My cut-up afthand had switched from the startling pain of immediate injury to a more warning soreness and ache, except when I banged it on something. So, just about every stride.

Between atheist prayers, I added a few curses for my damned, damaged fox, which was still not functioning well enough to block the pain completely. I just…

Well, I suppose I was ungrateful. It was working better than it had any right to, considering what it had been through. I was just used to effortless perfection.

I also wasn’t hardened off to enduring pain.

It hurt. It hurt, and yet I persisted.

I filtered down, closing my awareness to anything that was not Farweather and the path toward her. I wanted to get my hands on her. I wanted vengeance, and the atavism of my fury terrified me.

But I could use it. It loaned me strength, agility, and a rage of speed. I must have stopped overthinking what I was doing about then. The disks fled by under my hands. I bounded from one to the next, sliding when I could, accelerating. Farweather glanced back under her arm as she ricocheted off a mirror so hard she shattered it. I was already in motion, and there was little I could do to avoid the glass-sharp shards. Except—I could make them avoid me.

A little fold in space-time; just the smallest slope to pull them away from me. I barreled through the middle of their disintegrating formation unscathed, so close to Farweather I tried a snatch at her boot.

I missed. But I was so close the palms of all four hands itched with the desire to get ahold of her. I lunged again, a feral creature threatened. Soon I would have her—

She whipped her gun around just as it was occurring to me that I ought to unholster mine. I groped behind my back for the holster as she fired.

It turns out that ducking is an irresistible response when somebody is pointing a gun at you. It felt better than just floating there like a gaping fool, anyway. And when I rolled sideways, kicked clear of the plate I had been crouching on, and whipped my weapon out to return fire, she ducked too.

The jump turned out to be a terrible idea. I tried to kick the mirror disk at Farweather, and I made her duck. But when I pulled my trigger, the recoil sent me tumbling. Now how had she avoided that?

Right, folding space-time. Of course.

At least tumbling around like a clown made me harder to shoot, though it didn’t help with the “not getting sliced in half by mirror disks” portion of my agenda. What did help was that either I was improbably lucky, or the swarm of flying, solar-powered, razor-edged neurons now tumbling back into orbit around their sun were making an effort to avoid dicing me into one-centimeter cubes. The song in my mind had something of the Ativahika’s tones in it, and I wondered if the Baomind was aware that I was, in some peculiar fashion, their agent.

I wondered why the Baomind wasn’t going after Farweather directly. Then I decided that I was glad that a sentient solar system didn’t believe in direct Judicial intervention.

I wasn’t even scratched. I got a glimpse of Farweather leveling her weapon again as I tumbled, though.

Watching someone fire a chemical weapon in vacuum is surreal. There’s no sound; just a puff of particulate briefly illuminated as the oxidizer contained in the propellant cartridge fires. And if you weren’t braced, you got the humorous outcome I was currently experiencing.

I guessed I was right, and Farweather had braced herself, because I was pretty sure she’d fired again when a disk off to my left shattered into a thousand tiny knives, but I didn’t see her get knocked spinning. Well, if she could do it, I probably could too.

I folded space-time to stabilize. Gravity was my friend.

In so doing, I realized I had inadvertently hidden myself in the pocket I’d made. Like a kitten in a blanket, I was tucked away and would be invisible unless you bumped into me.

“So that’s how she’s been doing it,” I said. To myself. Because I was alone in my pocket universe and nobody else could hear me.

Well, now or never.

I couldn’t see her either. But I could feel her. She was large as life and out in the open.

Maybe that was the trade: Stay erased and still and quiet and be invisible and safe. Take an action, claim space, be noticed—and open yourself to attack by everyone and everything.

Well, it was probably time for that last.

I had dropped myself into… not quite white space. But something not unlike white space. Now I had to get myself out.

It was easier than I had feared. I just unfolded what I’d reflexively folded, and was back in my home line of space-time again.

And there was Farweather.

She stood at the dead center of one of the disks, facing away from me, her weapon in her hands, scanning. She looked invincible as she noticed my reappearance—eyes on the back of her head? Koregoi senso?—and began to swing to cover me.

But I could see what she couldn’t.

There was a sticky thread of wet silk adhered to the underside of her platform, its paleness vanishing into the darkness beyond the range of my ability to see it in this terrible frail light.

I wanted to throw something to distract Farweather. I didn’t have anything to throw. So I grav-slid up behind her while she was turning.

I kicked her in the face just as she brought the gun to bear.

She should have gone sailing, but her boots were locked to the disk—probably with a fold, because magnetism doesn’t work on silicates. The whole thing—pirate and perch—revolved in a lopsided orbit after I hit her, the center of gravity somewhere around her thighs. Her arms flung up; she lost the gun. I tumbled the other way, twisting to avoid the disk’s edge more by luck than by skill. My diaphragm spasmed; I couldn’t get a breath; I tasted blood. She must have gotten a piece of me, too, though I hadn’t felt it happen.

I made a grab for the fabric of the universe, and hauled myself into a stable orientation. Just in time to see Cheeirilaq abseil in with strands of webbing gripped in two of its manipulators. At a distance, two disks slammed together and splintered, yanked by the threads the Goodlaw was swinging on. I shrieked inside my helmet as it plummeted directly at the spinning disk with Farweather still riding it.

It was going to get its little feathery feet sliced off.

I still had my gun. And all I had to do was aim carefully enough not to hit Farweather… or Cheeirilaq.

Well, if I hit Farweather… honestly, she’d done enough to deserve it. Oh, I’d probably still feel bad about it. But she was lucky I was still trying not to.

I aimed and pulled the trigger.

The disk shattered. Under the momentum of the spin, pieces flung away like knives. I ducked, but I’d timed the shot right, and I didn’t get holed that I noticed. Neither did Cheeirilaq.

Farweather dragged herself to a halt facing me at an angle. She glared at the hand where her gun had been and, finding it still empty, began to move toward me with a grim determination to rend in her expression that I recognized from a bar fight or two on a couple of seedy portsides.

I raised my gun. She never got the chance to connect.

Cheeirilaq barreled into her back like a spiky green battering ram, its horrifying raptorial forearms scissoring so fiercely I expected to see Farweather float away in three large pieces. She stayed intact, though, even when the Goodlaw gave her a single savage shake—though she did flop limply after that. One of her hands was free, and it floated beside her like a trailing ribbon, utterly unguided.

Cheeirilaq tossed a loop of silk at another mirror and hauled itself—and its prize—over to stand on a flawless silver surface that swarmed with reflections. It looked down at the body in its raptorial forelimbs. Gotcha.

I guess we were close enough to communicate now.

Farweather lay limp in its grasp, unconscious or stunned. A thin mist of escaping air fogged the area around her. Cheeirilaq turned her in its manipulators like a toddler looking for the end of a carrot. Its tiny head with the enormous, faceted eyes rotated from side to side, glittering like an emerald-studded stickpin.

“Cheeirilaq?”

Forgive me, the Goodlaw said. This will be painful, but it is inevitable.

It pulled one razor-edged leg—the film of its suit must adhere to the carapace behind the razor edges of those blades—and plunged the hooked tip into Farweather’s torso, low, just above her pelvis, on the left.

“Cheeirilaq!”

A red mist of ice fountained. Farweather convulsed. Cheeirilaq steadied her with the other forelimb. When it pulled the impaling one back, it came dragging a mesh of gory wires and a mollusk-like segmented shell that curved in such a way I thought the concave side must have been intended to cradle bone.

An orange light flashed through the blood.

Cheeirilaq flipped the thing overhead, a long movement from a single joint like the lever arm of an atlatl. It sailed away, blinking softly, while the Koregoi mirrors flashed away from it like schools of geometric black fish.

It exploded there, harmlessly, soundlessly.

“She did have a bomb inside her.”

She did.

“How did you know?”

Cheeirilaq cocked its head. The case was hot.

Infrared.

“She’s leaking, Cheeirilaq,” I said.

What? Oh yes, I see. Its mandibles clicked inside its film; the suit mikes picked up the noise. It sounded hungry, but I thought that particular clatter was the mantid equivalent of a sigh. I suppose the civilized thing to do is to take her into custody and heal her wounds.

It used some reaction mass to drift over to me, towing the mirror with it.

“I suppose it is.” I launched myself to the plate next to Cheeirilaq and balanced there. I patted it lightly with a suit glove on the wing covert. “Come on, old friend. Let’s go home.”

Friend Haimey, it said. You’re leaking, too.

I looked down. There was no pain, but a halo of frozen, rose-red particles of blood drifted near a gash in the side of my suit. The bullet had hit me, after all.

I hadn’t even felt it. As I watched, my heart beat, and another shower of crimson snowflakes joined the rest.

“Oh dear,” I said.

Hold still, the Goodlaw said. As I watched, it webbed the hole in Farweather’s suit closed. Then it turned to me. This is first aid only, you understand? it said. You are not to undertake anything strenuous.

I glanced over at the pirate and Jothari ships that were following us down toward the Baostar, gaining on us, slowly encircling the cluster of disks that sheltered us. It might have been kinder of Cheeirilaq to let me bleed out among the stars. But I was cold, and getting colder, and I didn’t want to die.

“Yes,” I said. I spread my arms, wondering why it didn’t hurt more than it did before I remembered that I’d turned all that off, and I was probably in shock. Shock, I told my fox. Do something about that.

It was already doing whatever it could.

The shock and the tuning didn’t help me when Cheeirilaq stuck two manipulators into my wound, found and pinched off the spurting artery, and tamponaded the whole mess shut with an enormous sticky ball of webbing. It managed me with half its appendages, while managing Farweather with the others, and then it swept me up with a raptorial forelimb as well.

The first Jothari vessel outpaced us, falling toward the occluded sun just a little faster than we were. It turned to bring its guns to bear.

I wondered if they would ask for a surrender.

Cheeirilaq carefully shifted its grip on me so I could see, but it wasn’t pressing on the wound.

You held on to your gun, it said. That is well.