Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 4

I FORGOT THE PAIN IN MY afthands for a moment, and was fiercely grateful for the intensity of the gravity pinning them to the corridor floor. Because I was leaned out precariously over the Empty, and my stomach felt like it was dropping into it. I leaned on the hatch, which also dragged me forward. My upper body was weightless, while my lower body was heavy—in the most peculiar, spine-stretching way. I stabilized the hatch door, relaxed my grip, and let the hand drift. Then slowly, with my core muscles, I reeled myself back in.

The beam of my headlamp vanished into blackness, revealing nothing. Beyond its light, though, I could discern what must be the vast bubble of emptiness at the heart of the alien ship—and that the far side of it was open to space. There, framed in darkness, was the shimmering platinum band of the white coils, and there were the streaked rings of lensed light: the twisted images of stars and the whole long arm of the Milky Way.

I turned off my headlamp. It didn’t illuminate anything, and the reflection off the hatch and the hatchway weren’t helping my adaptation to the darkness.

I waited for a few moments, staring into the darkest corner I could find, then turned back to the walls of the great open hold.

Now I could make out some shapes lining the bulkheads of the enormous blankness before me. There was nothing in the center of the emptiness, though I could dimly make out the irisation where petal-like covers would spiral in to close the hold. They were open now, and I had a sickening sensation I knew where the ship’s atmosphere had gone when she had blown.

Where the atmosphere had gone, and all her crew. And anything not nailed down inside the ship. And anything that might have been stored in here, as well. All sailed out through this cavernous cargo space, and the wide-open bay doors beyond.

I could feel Singer and Connla monitoring my senso, but neither spoke. None of us, I supposed, could find much to say in light of the awfulness I’d just discovered. How had it happened, though? Misadventure?

Sabotage?

Everything was gone. Except for whatever lined the edges of the hold, because that was fixed into place. Those were the shapes that had drawn my attention. Something reflective, perhaps transparent. Modules or egg-shapes, each about as big as a two-passenger ground vehicle, say. Cargo containers, probably. Their reflective surfaces caught the starlight and held it still.

I leaned out around the edge of the hatchway, and turned my headlamp on again.

Like endless strings of green glass beads, they arrayed the edges of the hull. There were hatchways, all closed, every ten meters or so, tesseracting the surface of the hold. Between them were those ranks and stacks of cargo containers. In some places they were stacked multiple modules deep. All identical, except for the swirls of indigo and emerald and teal that might have been markings indicating their contents… .

No.

The containers weren’t green, I realized. The malachite and indigo colors reflected through transparent modules from the cargo inside.

“I have to get off this ship,” I said, nausea rising in my gut for reasons that had nothing to do with vertigo. “I have to get off this ship now.”

Suddenly, I understood the mutilated Ativahika, in orbit around this small, artificial heavy spot in the universe; I understood why both things had been stuck out here in the middle of nowhere when something went terribly wrong; and I understood why the ship was so big, and so empty in the middle. I started backing away, leaving the hatch open, all my pity for the former crew replaced with horror and the raw, animal need to escape an abattoir.

“Haimey?” Connla said.

Singer was silent. I could feel his revulsion, too, procedurally generated but as real as mine. He’d figured it out as well.

“Haimey,” Connla repeated. “Your vital signs are very distressed. Do you require assistance, or can you self-extract?”

“Oh, I’m leaving,” I choked. I couldn’t turn my back on the things in the hold, so I kept backing away. I felt the next hatch behind me, groped through it. “You try to stop me.”

“All right.” Soothing voice.

He bumped me, remotely, or Singer did, and suddenly I felt my atavistic terror cool. The revulsion didn’t change in the slightest.

Connla said, “Be careful. Don’t hurt yourself extricating. What’s wrong?”

There are places in the wide galaxy where all sorts of exotic “luxuries” are considered indispensable despite—or perhaps because of—the simple fact that they are rare, or difficult to obtain, or ethically deranged. There are people who operate out of the Freeport bases and concealed colony worlds to meet those needs and drive that demand.

This wasn’t a pirate ship, exactly. Nor was it a smuggler, though it was a ship that doubtless operated out of a Republic of Pirates Freeport, because no one in the Synarche would give this kind of abomination home. And now I knew we had to bring it back to the Synarche.

Because it was a crime scene. The whole ship was a crime scene.

“It’s a factory ship,” I told him. “They killed that Ativahika, Connla. And they were rendering it down for asura.”

“Asura?” Connla asked. Spartacus didn’t have much of an illegal drug culture.

I got a breath, finally, a full one, though it tasted like vomit. “Devashare. They’re manufacturing devashare. The real stuff. That’s a hold full of illegal organohallucinogens out there.”

I felt a lot less bad for the dead crew of the Milk Chocolate Marauder as I made my way—hastily, but cautiously—toward the exit. And a lot more like they had gotten exactly what was coming to them. An uncharitable thought. But it’s been noted for generations that karma is a bitch.

I was moving quickly, and I was not checking for further evidence of misadventure as I had been on the way in, because I was feeling pretty satisfied with my deductions, even though we hadn’t figured out yet what caused the blow.

Connla and Singer had taken firm control of my chemistry, so I was calm. I knew I’d be angry later that they hadn’t asked, but right now, I was too full of my own natural anxiolytics to feel pissed. I hated it when somebody else told me what to feel.

Perhaps it was that bumped calmness that made me notice something I hadn’t seen before. Or perhaps it was just that I was looking at the cabin from the other direction; reversal of perspective can have stunning effects.

What I saw, tucked behind the superfluous ceiling hatch in the first corridor I passed through after I left the rendering hold behind, was a small device that looked entirely out of place on this particular ship. It was inside a panel on the ceiling that had been left open, but it had been concealed from me by the angle of the cover when I was going the other way. If the panel had been closed, it would have been completely hidden.

As soon as I spotted it, it stopped me cold.

It was a perfectly standard Terran-model relay switch, a miniaturized but not nanoscale piece of hardware you could pick up ringside at any dock. It was white, with a red rocker switch and a black rocker switch on it, and English lettering. And it was spliced, on either side, into a bit of wire that had been pulled through a raw-edged drilled hole in the bulkhead. It looked like a smudge of cookie filling and couple of candy sprinkles against all that chocolate.

I couldn’t reach it. But I could see that both of the switches were set to the same position. And if I went into the next chamber, I could undog a giant tuffet-type thing from its position in the corner and haul it in—it was inflated membrane, and supremely light—and climb up on it.

“Haimey, what are you doing?” Connla asked.

“You sound worried,” I said. “Maybe you better bump.”

Okay, maybe I was managing to feel a little angry.

“Haimey—”

“I’m just checking something.”

I reached up, and rocked both switches at once.

There was no air to evacuate, and that was what saved me, because when all the hatches popped open simultaneously and I floated unceremoniously off the cube—and the cube floated softly away from what had, a moment before, been the floor—there was no massive exhalation to blow me free of the prize’s hull and expel me out the open cargo bay, thumping off random objects and hatchway edges along the way. I just drifted, spinning a little from reactive force, and watched in vacuum silence while the rockers, about thirty seconds later, rocked back and reset themselves.

I hit the floor with a stunning blow as the gravity came back on and the hatches slammed shut. I was lucky there hadn’t been one in the once-and-future floor, or it would have cut something off me.

I barely thought about it until later, though, because I was watching a red, red bead of very human blood run down my space suit glove.

There was no drop in pressure; maybe the glove slackened for a second, but then it tightened up nice and awkward again. The pressure seal below my elbow didn’t even close.

Remember what I said about the micrometeorites? Well, the reason they don’t usually get you is that we’re good at suit punctures. I mean, if it holes you as well as the suit, you might drown in your own blood before you get inside, but it won’t be the hole in the suit that gets you.

I couldn’t tell if it hurt, because I still had pain turned off in my palms and fingertips. But it scared me enough that I felt my heart spike through the calm for a second before my adrenals comped.

Something on this cursed, haunted fucking ship had punctured my suit, and my skin.

I clipped back into my safety line and floated the meter from the alien factory ship to Singer with a sense of relief so intense it made my head feel light. And my hand, unsettlingly, felt heavy. Not that I could feel weight, exactly, once I was free of the artificial gravity of the Milk Chocolate Marauder. But my center of gravity was off, which was even more unsettling than the sense of weight and tight skin that could have been inflammation. I wobbled as I made contact with Singer’s hull, and my transition had been perfect.

I clung to the rail beside the airlock. I did not slap the open control.

I gulped. I hyperventilated. I knew what I had to do.

“I can’t come inside,” I told Singer. “There’s something in me.”

And those were the hardest words I ever had to say. Harder than telling my clademothers that their utopia was my hell, and I’d done that in a packet rather than to their faces. I waited, eyes closed, the fear sweat rolling down my face and between my shoulders in cold snail trails.

“Nonsense,” he said. “You can and will.”

“This is the setup to a space thriller,” I said.

Singer tched.

“Right about now the audience is screaming, ‘Don’t open the hatch! Don’t let her in! It will kill you all!’ into their VR rigs.”

“Zoonotic transmission between phylogenetically unrelated species is literally unheard-of,” said Singer, who never said literally unless he meant literally. “If you’ve caught an alien parasite, I’m going to be the first AI to win a Nobel Prize.”

Connla said, “Besides, we’re not going to open the hatch. You’re coming in through the hull.”

“Of course I am,” I said, and laughed hysterically.

“We’ve got another problem,” Connla said in my earbud.

I leaned my head back against the hull beside the airlock, my helmet pressing into the flesh over my occiput. I was so tired it actually felt comfortable, and at least there was no gravity murdering me. I heard the anchoring bolts slide home. I wasn’t going to bring my suit inside the habitat after this mission. It could sit out in space and get nice and irradiated until we got someplace with sterilization facilities.

I was a big-enough biohazard all by myself.

“Big or little?” I asked.

He sighed. “Singer’s been summoned to serve in the Synarche for the upcoming term. There was a sealed packet set to auto-open on the right date in our last mail pickup. It just deciphered itself. We have to surrender his core code by Core 27653.21.08. Which will give us just about enough time to secure this prize and make it back home. If we hustle.”

My eyes were already closed, so I couldn’t close them. “Oh bloody Well.”

The suit unseamed itself down my back, and I held my breath for a second until I was sure the seal of suit to hull had held. There was a gap behind me; and something filmy, clinging and cool; and beyond that the pressure of warm atmosphere. The suit pressurized a little to help me work my fingers free, and the clinging film behind me bellied out. I started the delicate process of wriggling from the suit’s embrace.

“It’s good news in some ways,” Singer said, though he didn’t sound happy. “When I finish my term, my inception debt is forgiven. I’m a free citizen.”

“The grav salvage would pay for that anyway,” Connla said.

“Yes,” Singer agreed. “But everybody has to serve if called, so I might as well get it out of the way and use that resource credit for something I want to do, after.”

“That’s great, but… what are we going to do for a third partner?” I felt selfish and ashamed of myself as soon as I said it. I couldn’t tell if that was clade baggage, or if I was actually being unreasonable, so I just shut up.

The ship basically was Singer, as far as I was concerned. I knew he was a collection of ones, zeros, and undefined states—your basic quantum software—that could be ported from hardware to hardware almost indefinitely, core personality modules intact. Only his capabilities and the parameters of his processing power and speed would change. Which, of course, would change him in some ways, because he would learn new tactics and ways of being while inhabiting a different space. Being inside the Milk Chocolate Marauder was going to change him… .

As a human being who kills a few brain cells every time she sips a little intoxicant, I can’t in good conscience claim that’s the kind of change that would make him Not Singer anymore. But it still made me uneasy. I told myself that we always worry a little when a friend is about to undertake a big life transition, and tried not to feel like a meat bigot.

“I can spawn a subroutine with all the protocols,” he said. “I’m not authorized to reproduce until my inception is paid. But you can hire a temp to assimilate the routines and run things until I get back.”

“A temp.” I tried not to sound either dubious or crushed. I felt dubious and crushed.

Would Singer even want to come back to the cramped confines of this little tugboat after he got a chance to stretch out and grow through the massive processing power of the Core? Stars and garter snakes, what kind of data would he have to cut off to fit back in?

“This is what you get for being a politics nerd,” Connla said without heat. “Didn’t I tell you that all that book learning would bring you no good?”

“Well,” I cursed. “I bloody hate politics.”

I continued backing out of my suit like an imago pulling itself millimeter by millimeter from the pupa. I got my arms free, and then my legs, and perched on the edge of the gap in the hull with my afthands to keep from floating around randomly. The film stretched against my back again, elastic and tough, sealing itself to me as the suit began to depressurize. The draft pulled me forward a little, but I was securely anchored, and held my position while the isolation film covered my whole body, molding itself to the crevices between fingers, the curves of my flanks, the folds of my armpits and groin.

I closed my eyes to keep from looking down at my forehands. The right one still felt… different.

Planet-born folk reliably hate isolation film with a passion. It makes them claustrophobic. For me, it brought to mind the safe, comforting pressure of a suit or a sleeping pod. The bit where it closes across my eyes and nose and mouth is still a little rough—though it only lasts for a second before the oxy supply kicks in and the film across your face billows out taut and invisible, crystal-perfect to see though.

And then it was sealed and I was free, and the gap in Singer’s hull where the suit was anchored to the outside closed itself up, and everything was sealed up safe away from the Empty.

I tapped the wall to turn myself around.

“All right.” Connla floated over oh-so-casually. He was wearing a film too, which made me feel both rejected and relieved. Nobody likes to feel like a pariah. But nobody really wants to infect their friends with an alien space plague, either. It’s all about the compromise.

And owning your own shit, I suppose.

“Let’s see what it looks like,” he said. He anchored himself and held his gloved forehands out for mine.

I forced myself to follow his gaze down naturally, mimicking what a natural human who wasn’t freaking out completely would naturally do. I lifted my forehands inside their transparent film sheaths and laid them gently over his.

The right one still felt strange. Heavy. Warm. Not painfully so, just… heavier than it should have been. Or, I should say, it had more inertia. My hand felt dense—but not big, not swollen. Just massive. Unbalancingly so.

He gave me a gentle squeeze, and my eyes focused. It’s rare for Connla to touch anybody, because it’s discouraged where he comes from, and he always seems to let out some kind of deep metaphorical sigh of relief when he finally finds an excuse to. Even if there’s two layers of sterilization in the middle.

Also, if he wasn’t afraid to touch me, then I could be not afraid to look.

It was both better than I had feared—and worse. The skin of my left hand looked unchanged—dark, normal, paler on the ventral surfaces, colored ochre in the creases of the palms. The skinned surfaces had already healed without a scar, which reminded me to make sure my ankle got fixed, as well. And freaked me out a little, because I had not had time to make repairs myself yet.

But on the right one, under the transparent top layers of epidermis, over the pigment of the dermis and the buried red of the blood, something moved and shone.

It looked like veils of minute glitter, gold dust maybe, strands and threads of tinsel, fiber optic, fishnet moonlight. It looked like streaks and clots of tiny stars swept up in the veils of iridescent nebulae. I couldn’t tell if it shone, whatever it was, because it was bright in the command cabin. But it definitely caught and reflected what light there was, as if my hand and forearm were gloved in a mesh of holographic wire spangled with faceted crystals, each too small for the eye to individually see. The overall effect was that of reflected white light, but every so often a single beam would catch a colored sparkle, and reflect it straight into my eye.

Get it out of me. I wanted to chew my own forehand off to make it go away. I wasn’t supposed to look like this. My body wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Then Singer said the most perfectly Singer thing he could have. “It looks like a slime mold growth pattern.”

My heart rate dropped. I took a breath and saw the nearly invisible film billow ever so slightly, rippling my field of vision. “A slime mold?”

“Sure,” he said. “The Synarche use them to map trade routes for effective resource delivery. It looks like that. Or like… cobwebs.”

If I was going to retreat from panic into Singer Land, I was going for the distraction with all four hands. “How does a cobweb differ from, like, a regular web? Like a neural web or whatever?”

Singer sighed. He sometimes forgets that the rest of us don’t have memory banks the size of a planet. Or the processing cycles to hold twenty conversations at once, navigate a starship, read up on fungi, and probably practice juggling in VR simulation simultaneously, for all I know. And then there’s the politics junkie aspect. These diar I don’t care about the government very much, as long as it gets its job done and stays out of my way. I used to have a girlfriend who was pretty radical, though, and after I realized how toxic some of her ideas were… well, it wasn’t a good breakup. I kind of unplugged from the idea that you might want to revolutionize a system that mostly works because it chafes you in one particular spot.

So sometimes our conversations are way over my head. But this time we were talking about something that had infected my body, so I actually could have used it if he were a little more engaged.

“So when we talk about webs,” he said, “we’re actually using a metaphor referring to an organic capture structure used by certain predatory Terran animals—

“Spiders!” Connla interrupted, delighted. A one-track entomologist.

“Among others. Anyway, anything that looked like a web got called a web.”

“Right,” I said, interested in the etymology and entomology lessons, but not so thoroughly I forgot my original question. I mean, I could have just hotsearched it, but what’s the point in living with an AI if you don’t use it as an excuse for laziness once in a while. “So you didn’t answer my question. What’s a cobweb?”

“I know this one,” Connla said. “If a sheltered place was left abandoned or uncleaned for a long time—someplace where weather couldn’t get inside to wash away the old webs—then spiders would just keep spinning more and more of them in place. They would collect dust and old insect parts and become almost like—draperies. Uneven. Stretched from point to point. Tattered. Looked kind of like trade routes, actually.”

I shuddered. Connla grew up on a planet. I was space-raised, and found the idea of anything as unpredictable, violent, and generally murderous as planetary weather frankly nerve-wracking.

“Do you know about the slime molds?”

I tried not to stare at my hands through the isolation film. I wanted to pick at my skin. Except the stuff felt pretty good, whatever it was. My skinned palms—healed completely—tingled. The sensations of waves of heaviness in my right forepalm made it feel as if it were being soothed and stretched. Almost like a massage.

And it was… weirdly… pretty.

Great. The parasite is affecting the host’s perceptions.

“Tell me about the slime molds, Singer.”

“So if you dot nutrition sources into a media in a particular pattern, then introduce slime mold spores, the mold will grow through the media in—generally—the most efficient manner to exploit those nutrition sources. The pattern winds up looking a lot like what’s on your hand, and it’s an effective model for how to develop efficient packet routes.”

I squinted at my arm, and shuddered again. I could see it, actually; the pale veils and filaments on my dark complexion did look a little like a two-dimensional map of a three-dimensional set of paths, stretched out between and connecting a number of nodes.

“So somebody put a route map in me?”

“It would be irresponsible to come to conclusions based on so little information,” Singer said primly. “However, one of the things it resembles is a route map.”

“All right,” Connla said. “I’m going to take a needle biopsy for Singer to analyze. You’ll feel a little stab, and the film will seal it, right?”

“Right.” He was doing doctorspeak, narrating his actions to help me anticipate and stay calm. I appreciated it, even though I knew this as well as he did and I was so hopped up on my own tuning that all the anxiety and even outright fear seemed light-ans away and on the wrong end of a telescope. Still there; just really hard to locate and get a concrete look at.

He bellied the film at the injury site—which had also healed completely—out a bit, and jabbed me. It was a big needle and it hurt, but when he pulled it out again, it didn’t leave behind a hole, or so much as a drop of blood.

“Wild,” he said.

“Did you get anything?”

He held it up so I could see the wormlike ribbon of aspirated flesh inside the tube. That made me think of intestinal parasites, too. Then he turned around, and put the whole syringe in a drawer that Singer extended to accept it. Singer would extract the sample and break the syringe down into components, ready to print a new one, or something else—a process that incidentally sterilized it, as very few viruses or bacteria could infect or reproduce after being reduced to their component atoms for more compact storage.

There was a whirring sound.

“Parasites on the brain,” I said.

“Well,” Singer said, “not literally. I mean, the good news is, it’s not a parasite. At least, I don’t think it’s a parasite. It seems to be made mostly of silica and some nonreactive metals. A little titanium. Some stuff that… well, it has mass. Your hand is heavier than it used to be. Other than that, I’m not sure what to tell you.”

“Am I going to die of heavy metal poisoning?”

“Extremely unlikely,” he replied. “And there’s nothing radioactive in there either. Actually, no apparent power source at all. So whatever it’s doing with the patterning thing, it’s probably deriving the energy for that directly from you.”

“So it is a parasite.”

“Well, it’s not an organic one.” There was a pause—a long pause by Singer standards. “If you want me to speculate, I’d suggest that it’s probably an interface technology of some kind. But what it’s supposed to interface with… is either back at the prize, or it’s lost in the mists of the eons.”

I looked at my hand. The webwork moved, sliding gracefully under my skin. As if I had dipped my hand in an aurora. It would probably, I realized, pass for a really nice piece of biolume or a holotoo.

It was still growing, slowly, up my arm. Exploratory strands of sparkles edged toward my elbow, which was space-scaly and needed moisturizing and the ash scrubbed off. Just the sort of stuff that doesn’t seem important to deal with right now when you’re busy, until you can’t get to your skin because you’re sealed inside an isolation film and it’s the only thing you can think about.

Were the sparkle filaments going to cover my entire body soon? That wouldn’t be easy to hide. I’d look like a galaxy.

“Koregoi senso, then.” If it was supertech with no identifiable source, then Koregoi wasn’t a bad bet. Unless the Republic of Pirates had suddenly taken some surprising technological leaps forward, which wasn’t usually the sort of thing pirates excelled at. You generally need at least a modicum of stability for people to have the time and resources to innovate and the will to make risky choices.

“Koregoi senso,” Singer answered. “Sure.”