Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 5

“SO,” I SAID, “I’M PRETTY sure it was sabotage.”

I was anchored by the galley, and Connla had fixed me an actual hot meal, which I was making myself eat slowly and enjoy. The yeast tablets had worn off with a vengeance, and I’d started shaking. I’d been too out of it even to notice that what was happening was a blood sugar crash and not a panic attack. I’d been perching a grab rail and trying to tune and bump my adrenals for five minutes before Connla had shoved the ringnet full of dinner into my hands and saliva had flooded my mouth instantly, even though I couldn’t smell a Well-sunk thing.

At least I was back in free fall. That all by itself was doing wonders for my sense of well-being. My microgravity adaptations are pretty significant—even the afthands aren’t just a graft; there’s tendon and joint modifications to make them work—and I’ve never been a dirtsider. Breathing is more tiring when you weigh seventy kilos than it is when you don’t.

The food was in tubes, because no utensil that went into the isolation film could come back out again. I pulled each tube from the net, plugged it into my film, and evacuated the contents into my mouth. It was all delicious, in a baby-food sort of way. When I was done, the film sealed off the dirty bit at the end, I put it back on the net, and the whole thing went into the recycler.

“The blow on the prize, you mean?” Connla asked.

Connla and Singer had sensoed my feed, downloaded the full experience from my fox, and re’d the ayatana of the spliced-in switches on the Milk Chocolate Marauder, and of what had happened when I toggled those switches. But that didn’t mean they had a window into my head.

I was just thinking out loud. And apparently assuming my thought process was transparent.

The toggle wouldn’t have worked if this monstrosity had a shipmind. And the fact that it was a monstrosity was why they didn’t have a shipmind. The Freeporters don’t have AIs. And I didn’t think any AI incepted under Synarche regulations would participate in something as… revolting… as harvesting asura.

“I don’t feel too bad about it,” I said. “But I do wonder why.”

“If we could afford the waste, I’d say leave the whole damn ship out here with its victim,” Connla said disgustedly. “Report it and the Synarche can turn it into a memorial.”

It’s nice when your partners share your ethics. And it turns out you don’t even have to clade up with them for that to happen. If you pick the right people in the first place.

“It’s evidence of a crime,” Singer pointed out. “Two crimes, if Haimey’s right about the sabotage. And while we could radio for help—”

I laughed. We could. A lot of use it would be.

Not everybody grew up in space, and not everybody knows that the distress signal, traveling at the speed of light, would take so long to reach anybody who could help us that I was too lazy even to do the calculations about how many centuries that would be. If we wanted the salvage credit, and we actually cared about the multiple murders done to a gang of professional murderers and also, their professional murder of the Ativahika, at that… well, we were towing the wastrel thing home. Because by the time we got back to the Core and reported it and turned Singer over to the authorities for his stint as a Designated Representative in the Congress of the Synarche, somebody else probably would have turned up and carted the damned thing off.

Of course, if he wasn’t such a political hobbyist, he could have gotten through his entire existence without being selected for service. Or that particular service, anyway.

I said, “What we all know, and none of us are saying, is that somebody sabotaged the prize for a reason.”

“I’m a little uncomfortable thinking of it as a prize,” Connla admitted, breaking the tension enough that I laughed. “But yes, the toggle was Earth-human manufacture, wasn’t it?”

“Marked in just English, too,” I said.

Connla looked at me. “I’m not an engineer. What does that mean?”

“Generally,” I said, “you’ll find standard equipment intended for general human use marked in Hindi, Spatois, English, Spanish, Chinese, Novoruss, and generally one or two others. Korean and Swahili are popular. Trade languages that a lot of people speak, on a lot of worlds.”

I looked down at my mismatched hands again, and forced myself to look away. The cobweb light show was like a magnet—a thing on my body that should not be there. I wanted to scratch at it, dig it out.

The film, at least, would keep that from happening.

“Freeporters operate exclusively in English,” Singer said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a kind of fetish with them. Dates back to some race-purity nonsense that didn’t make any sense two hundred ans ago and makes even less so now.”

Connla said, “So the saboteurs were pirates.”

“Or got their gear from pirates.”

He nodded slowly. “And if you were a pirate, you wouldn’t be wiring a kill switch into an abattoir ship out of altruism and a willingness to martyr yourself on behalf of the murdered Ativahikas.”

“No, you’d be planning to wait there until your friends showed up and take all that lovely asura and asura precursor and sell it for your own benefit, wouldn’t you?”

He groaned. “And since the means of sabotage was manually operated—right?”

“Right. As far as I could tell.”

“The saboteur might in fact still be somewhere on the prize.”

“Guiding their friends in,” Singer added.

“The ship that nearly hit us,” Connla said.

I nodded. “We should probably do whatever we’re doing really fast. And I hate to remind you of this, but we still don’t have the fly-by-wire operational, and I really don’t want to go back over to a ship that’s full of… the…” mutilated remains of a sentient.

Connla, for once in his life, didn’t grab the opportunity to take me down a peg. He just pursed his lips while he thought, then sighed.

I couldn’t go into a suit with the isolation film on, so it was Connla who went back over to the Milk Chocolate Marauder, and it was he who managed to finish the job of manually splicing their white drive into our controls, while I looked over his shoulder in senso and gave him a lot of instructions and advice. Some of it was probably useful. He even managed to accomplish this without contracting some alien plague, which as far as he was concerned gave him bragging rights over me until the end of eternity.

He found some further evidence of sabotage—more splices and disturbed panels—but nothing affecting the drive. And the drive, conveniently, was a pretty standard Saolara model that was cross-compatible with our command module. So Singer didn’t actually have to learn their language after all; he just flashed their bios with a Saolara kit we carried for basically that purpose, and he was in.

This was a good thing, because we could fit inside their field. They couldn’t fit inside ours, and theirs was too big even to manipulate with ours. So this was the only way we stood a chance of getting them home in several dozen human lifetimes.

We needed a rigid attachment to take them into white space with us—or to be swept along in their field, more precisely. Functionally, the two ships would become one, Singer acting like a command module to the much larger Milk Chocolate Marauder. It was a good thing nothing about anything that took place in the Big Sneeze—the Big Suck, as Connla called it—required aerodynamics. And most of it wouldn’t even need a lot of structural strength.

We encountered the dead Ativahika twice more while he worked and I supervised, after we managed to unfold the gravitational anomaly. The unnatural massive spot in the universe was gone, but Singer and the prize vessel were still the most massive things out here in the middle of the cold and the dark.

Singer said the Ativahika’s orbit was no longer stable, and once we towed the prize away, the corpse would drift off. I wished there were some way we could bring it back. It seemed terribly cold to leave it alone out here.

Maybe the Ativahikas would see it differently. They were generally recognized as intelligent—operating cooperatively and so on—but from what I’d heard nobody had ever managed to talk to one. Would the Ativahika’s family miss it? Would they mourn its absence and long for closure, as a human family would? Did they even have concepts for those things?

I hated looking at it, anyway, so every time it spun past, I concentrated on Singer and Connla and technical things. It didn’t matter anyway: once we left, it was going to be spending an eternity out here, alone. And Connla was out there spacewalking inside a white bubble with a laser welding torch, sacrificing our tow derrick in order to join two ships into one ungainly one.

It didn’t bear thinking on, and I was intentionally not thinking about it while Connla welded the penultimate connection and floated back on his safety cables to admire his craftsmanship. It looked like nice work, too, with a join like a ridged, raised welt.

He was planning on dropping one more weld—adding a little cross bracing, which would still be kind of minimal but at least give the derrick some lateral rigidity—but the progress so far was as solid as anything I could have done. I looked from the galaxy sprawled across the sky to the galaxy spreading through my skin, and felt an odd shimmer of proximity. You know that feeling like somebody is watching you? That awareness of another person in the room?

Right, Haimey, I told myself. The galaxy is totally staring right back at you.

Connla finished the last weld.

I was about to congratulate him on it, in my capacity as ship’s technical lead, in a totally nonpatronizing fashion of course, when every loud noise Singer was capable of—external and senso—happened at once. I flinched, filmed hands over filmed ears. You’d think that stuff would muffle horrible klaxons and the sensation of fingernails scraping up your nerves, but really all it does is make conversations hard to follow.

“I hear you!” I yelled, and silenced them. I managed to unflinch fast enough to see Connla recoil on his tether, then hit the emergency retract and come in toward the airlock hot. I was heading for the emergency override myself when Singer sprang it.

A moment later and I saw what all the shouting was about.

That mystery ship. The white one. It had just appeared, hanging off our starboard bow, dropping out of white space with a relative motionlessness I wouldn’t have imagined possible. Some nice flying, that: she was inside the prize vessel’s white coils, which meant that as long as we were conjoined, we couldn’t even pull a quick transition out of normal space to escape… without pulling her with us.

My admiration of the space jockey’s work was somewhat diluted when I noticed the blunt antennae of a half dozen mass-driver weapons projecting through flexports in the other ship’s hull in two groups of three.

They were tracking down on Singer.

Connla hurled himself across the space between the prize vessel and Singer. He knocked aside a glittering shower of frozen oxygen and water crystals that had been headed in the other direction—the result when an uncycled airlock was popped in an emergency. It was a much bigger waste of air than the little puff that had accompanied my exit—and a lot more dramatic.

My skin still shuddered from Singer’s klaxon. He has an overblown idea of what it takes to get a meatform’s attention.

I was keeping all of that on the port, screens, and senso now. The pale ship hung there, weapons trained. I felt like I was tumbling down their hollow barrels. I couldn’t tell if the vertigo was fear, or some strange side effect of the glitterweb crawling up my arm.

Like most people, I’d never had a gun pointed at me before. And like most people who had never had a gun pointed at them before, I froze.

And burned the scene into my mind.

I can pull it up in senso, of course—I’ve got the ayatana in my fox, and I’ve tuned myself way down and gone back and looked at it more than once. It gives me heart palpitations if I don’t bump before I take it on, so I guess it’s a traumatic memory. And that means that a subjective flashbulb memory of that blank hull, plain as if it just slid out the factory door, perfectly outlined against the black of space, makes it loom bigger and closer than it ever really approached, as planetary moons on the horizon appear to do when viewed from the ground.

“Pirates,” Singer said.

I felt… that thing again. The something. A presence. A weight. Like the prickle in the hairs on your neck when somebody is looking at you. “There’s somebody over there—”

A green flash streaked through the senso as Connla bolted through the airlock hatch and sealed the door.

I realized how crazy what I’d been about to say was, and changed tack. Besides, that sense of somebody just out of sight behind you? It’s just a trick your brain pulls. You can make people feel it with electrical stimulation of the correct chunk of brain-meat.

“If they haven’t hailed us,” I said, amazed by how calm I sounded, “why didn’t they just hit us with their bow wave and smear us all over intergalactic space?”

“Hard to hit us and not the prize,” Connla said, tumbling into the control cabin, trailing bits of the second-best space suit. He corralled them in a net bag, eyes on the screen as he stripped.

“Don’t you want to keep that on?” Singer asked.

“So I can float in space until I suffocate if they hole us? Thanks, I’ll take the quick way down.”

“There’s the hail,” Singer said. “Text only. ‘Cut her loose.’ ”

I looked at Connla.

Connla looked at the welding torch he was clipping to an equipment belay. He laughed bitterly.

“Yeah,” I said.

If we maneuvered, they’d shoot us. If we transitioned, they’d come too—and shoot us. If we stayed put… well, we couldn’t follow their instructions, so they were probably going to shoot us.

“I can cut the derrick loose. We can ditch the prize and run.” I kicked across the cabin toward a control panel, that damned heavy hand making me veer slightly off course. There were explosive pins, for dangerous cargo. We couldn’t afford the loss, but it was better than taking a ride on a rail-gun pellet. It had to be manually done, though; that was the sort of thing that came with a physical safety override. “You’ll have to buy me a minute.”

“Hailing,” Singer said, and I thought, Better you than me.

Hatch cover, emergency switch. Override code. I wasn’t looking anymore, but I swear I felt the guns tracking through the prickles on my scalp. Through the senso, definitely.

Somebody is staring at you.

Connla swore, and my head jerked around a second before I would have slapped the final release. The pirates were so close I didn’t see anything—the slugs would have ripped through Singer’s hull before I could have even realized what was happening, let alone reacted—but I didn’t feel an impact, either, and I was in contact with the hull. “Sitrep!”

“Warning shot,” Connla said.

I reached for the release again, and felt the whole ship shudder violently, the harsh metallic rip of tearing hull. Something—the bulkhead—struck me, and I caromed off a panel and lost all sense of up and down.

“Ranging shot,” Singer amended, senso cutting over the hot whistle of escaping atmosphere. As the ship spun wildly around me, I grabbed with all four hands for the nearest rail.

For anything at all.

The terrible shrieks continued—rending metal, and venting air. I couldn’t breathe, and thought we’d blown, but then I realized from the savage pain in my back that it was my diaphragm spasming from the force of the thump I’d taken. My film billowed from the pressure drop, snapping out around my head. I fetched up against a panel and managed to grab it, stabilized, then gritted my teeth and punched myself in the solar plexus to get my lungs started again.

My head spun when I glanced around the cabin, but that quick check plus senso told me Connla was alive, clinging frantically to a rail, and also that we were holed visibly, but it wasn’t big. My fingers ached from holding on to the panel; we were pulling significant force in the spin.

There’s a trick they teach you in flight school that you hope you’re never going to have to use. But I wasn’t going to worry about it just yet, because I could also see that the pirate ship, having knocked us loose from the prize, was rounding under power to take another swipe.

But we were free of the prize. “Singer! Duck!”

“On it,” shipmind answered—and just as it seemed the pirate was gathering herself, angle of her guns converging to fire for effect—she vanished, and was replaced by nauseating, gyrating smears of light.

“We’re still spinning!”

“On that too,” Singer said, too calmly.

“Did they shoot us?”

“If they’d shot us, we wouldn’t be here. They shot at us, and I ducked. But their mass driver tore off the derrick. We’re in white space now. Do you want to deal with the hole in my side?”

Sure, because it was the easiest thing in the world to get there when we were pulling two gs of centrifugal. Well, I supposed that was one way to deal with it.

It was time to use that flight school trick.

I nerved myself and let go of the panel and fell.

It was only a couple of meters, but a couple of meters at two g hurts. I slammed into the outside bulkhead on my hands and knees and hoped that pop I heard hadn’t been a knee or a wrist dislocating. My film held, at least—those things are damned tough. I had a rough idea through Singer’s senso of where the leak was, and I looked up to orient myself to the visible evidence of its exact location. I was just about to ask Singer to release tracer particles when I realized that I could feel the problem.

My fingers tingled with the knowledge, as if I could have traced the weight and mass of air currents with a gesture of my right hand. The hand didn’t feel heavy anymore; it just felt—felt at a distance.

“Spooky,” I whispered under my breath, and wondered if the last thing I ever said was going to be a not-very-funny physics joke.

I crept across the bulkheads, not needing the rails because our spin was keeping me pinned good and hard against the wall. It helped with the disorientation if I thought of it as a floor—a weird, bumpy floor full of obstacles, which I was crawling across on my hands and knees while two guys my own size sat on my hips and shoulders. I could see that Connla was also on his hands and knees, doing something at a panel, and I figured that he and Singer were working on damage control and trying to correct our spin.

I tried not to worry too much that we were in white space, and spinning wildly, and there was literally no way of telling which way in the universe we were going at how much faster than the speed of light. Where we would come out. If we’d be able to find our way home. That was their problem, right now. At least we could be pretty sure our white coils were intact, or Singer would have ripped us in half trying to duck. But we had ducked, and it had been a better gamble than staying to get shot, definitely.

My problem was making sure we still had some ox by the time they got us stabilized, and then we could all worry about how we were getting home.

I found the hole. A hull suture had buckled when the remains of the derrick ripped free, and all our life-giving oxygen and carbon dioxide and inert carrier gases were whistling away into darkness though a gap in the plating just a little bigger than your nostril. Such a small thing to be on the verge of killing us real dead forever.

There’s an old joke about plugging the hole with your butt, and I probably would have tried it if the damage had been a little, well, broader. Human posteriors are, in general, nice and malleable and squeeze into things pretty well, as anybody who’s ever sat in one of those Swiss cheese plastic chairs and stood up with a polka-dotted ass can tell you. But this one wasn’t big, and Singer would be printing me a patch as soon as he and Connla got our trajectory sorted—so I just slapped my right forehand over it and let the isolation film do the work.

It stretched, and I felt it constrict the webs between my fingers for a moment before it relaxed again. The whistle stopped, and I realized in the following silence how painful the sound had been. My head sagged in relief—though the gravity had something to do with it too. I looked down at my fingers flexing against the bulkhead, at the swirl of cobwebs or nebulae or whatever you wanted to call them that was throbbing and pulsing—and tugging, and pushing—up almost to my shoulder now. The sense of being able to feel the currents of escaping air faded—but it left behind another sense, that through my flat palm I could feel the curves and valleys of space-time beyond the hull as if I were stroking the back and flank of a cat with my hand.

“Oh waste it,” I said. “Singer, the cats.”

“They’re fine,” he said, and a knot that had abruptly tied itself in my chest just as abruptly released. “They were in Connla’s bunk when we got hit.”

So netted in, effectively. Relief allowed me to concentrate on the weird sensations again. At least out here in the big dark we were less likely to plow into a star. Even in white space, that would be a catastrophe; their enormous gravity wells didn’t warp space-time enough to reach into warp space, per se—but running a space-time fold through a star didn’t have great consequences for the structural stability of the star, if you take my meaning.

It’s a good thing there’s a lot of nothing out here. And a lot of dark gravity that doesn’t interact with anything at all, except when it comes to other gravity. Or its own.

I felt our spin slowing before I could see it. In addition to my strange new sense for forces, I could feel with perfectly normal senses that the gs were dropping incrementally as we came under control, and soon I was pressing my hand to the hole while hanging on to rails with my afthands and the other forehand for leverage. Pressure probably would have held me on, but who wants to take chances?

I wasn’t really looking out through the windows, anyway. I was watching the cobwebs move across my skin. A whole lot of nothing out here.

The patterns didn’t look like nebulae. Not really. What they looked like were the invisible, massive filaments of stuff that nebulae and galaxies and everything else traced and clung to: the webwork that held the universe together.

The thing picked out in iridescence on my skin looked like renderings of the intergalactic structure of dark gravity.

I thought about what I’d felt when the pirates dropped out of space, the sense of presence—the weight of an individual nearby, like another body in a hammock.

Maybe I had been feeling something after all.

“Are they coming after us?” I asked nervously.

“Really no way to tell,” said Connla. “But really no way for them to track us, is there?”

“Somebody out here obviously has tech we know nothing about,” I said. “And is using it to hunt Ativahikas. Maybe they can track us, too. The Synarche really needs to know that the pirates have gotten an upgrade.”

Singer sighed. “Getting us out of this alive is already my primary goal, Haimey.”

I nodded. My forehand was getting numb: pins and needles. “Add ‘Get a warning message back to the Core’ to that protocol, would you?”

We patched the hole in the hull. That work went smoothly once we were back in normal space, and once we got our trajectory and v under control we dropped back into normal space right away. The good news was, we were nowhere near the prize vessel, the dead Ativahika, or the pirates who had done their best—or worst—to murder us, and there was no reasonable way of which I was aware for them to track us. The bad news was that we were nowhere near the prize vessel, the dead Ativahika, or the pirates—and there was no reasonable way of which I was aware for us to track us, either.

Which left us low on fuel, in a damaged ship, located we weren’t exactly sure where—albeit with dead reckoning, star charts, and a pretty good telescope. Fortunately, the last three things meant that Singer could figure out the location thing pretty quick. By human standards. By AI standards, he might have been chewing on his slide rule while sweat rolled down his brow for hours. There are only so many processing cycles to be had on a boat this size.

So we knew where we were, when he was done. And we also knew we didn’t have the fuel to get home and to slow down, once we got there. You can do some neat tricks with the Alcubierre-White drive, don’t get me wrong, including piling up space behind you and stretching it out before you to brake as well as piling it up before you and stretching it out behind to accelerate, which is why we can get up to speed at a real acceleration that would pulp any sentient except an AI—because the perceived accel can be negligible.

But that all takes energy. And energy comes from somewhere. It’s not, unfortunately, limitless.

Mephistopheles floated over to me and was begging for my tube of spaghetti in sauce, which was funny because she had a cute cat-trick of hooking one claw through your shirtsleeve so she could hang close to your face and be available while you were eating. Suddenly, the trick wasn’t working out for her because her claw kept bouncing off my isolation film, and she couldn’t quite figure out why.

“Cute.” Connla claims I taught it to her, but I think it’s his fault, and let’s be honest here—I’m the one who taught them to use the zero-g litterbox, so I have moral superiority, as far as the cats are concerned, nearly forever. A cat who engages in litterbox terrorism on a space ship is not a good shipping companion.

We were relaxing, finally. Connla had pulled on a film of his own again, just in case—mostly at Singer’s insistence—and he watched me eat now while I mostly floated with my eyes half-closed, sucking spaghetti down. I was starving, and had told Singer not to let me exceed my calorie ration, in case we needed those molecules. I’m generally always hungry—could eat all dia—but I couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t a bit excessive, and didn’t have something to do with the sparkleweb that now covered my entire body, my scalp and the skin on my face included. At least my mucous membranes were free of sparkles. It’d be disconcerting if my nostrils and the inside of my eyelids started to glow.

Well, it wasn’t going to be easy to hide. And it was certainly going to make me memorable. Good thing we weren’t criminals.

In a minute, we were going to have to get up and do something about surviving, but thrashing is worse than not doing anything at all. So, for the moment, a break.

I was thinking about coffee for dessert when Connla stretched his long legs out, focused a very green pair of eyes on me, and said, “Waste this.”

“What?”

He laced his fingers behind his head and studied my face. I tried not to feel self-conscious about the sparkles floating under my skin. He said, “Fuck it. It’s a really long trip home, if we even make it home. We can try to maintain isolation, which is going to be a pain in the ass when there’s one head and one galley. Or we can just accept that if it’s virulent we’re all going to get it, and get on with our lives.”

His decision had obviously been made already, because as I watched he started stripping the film back from his chest, unsealing it and stretching it to make a hole big enough so he could wriggle out as if wiggling out of a shed, inside-out skin. A different sort of shed casing than the suit I’d left on the outside of the hull, I couldn’t help but thinking.

I said, “What about the cats?”

“If we die of space poison, Singer will get them home and take care of them somehow, I’m sure. And if they get space poison too, he’ll download himself out of the vessel and ditch it into the nearest sun. Right, Singer?”

Singer said, “You two are terribly irresponsible.”

“Primates,” Connla said with a shrug. “We are what we are. What are you going to do?”

“Wait,” I said. “I’m irresponsible? This is Connla’s idea.”

“Are you going to do it?” Singer asked.

I contemplated my half-eaten tube of spaghetti. Mephistopheles patted my shoulder again. She was chasing the sparkles as much as she was begging for sauce. “Do you think I shouldn’t?”

Singer made a wordless sound that was his equivalent of a shrug. “I am not equipped to assess the impact of biological inconveniences upon meatforms.”

He was definitely teasing.

Gently, I pushed the cat off. She went one way—toward a nice upholstered bulkhead because I’m not a monster—and I floated, in reaction, toward the forward port. The early astronauts had to argue to get windows, I’m told. Now I looked out of this one, frowning down at the long, barred spiral curve of the galaxy we needed to move toward the center of—a center that was much smaller and farther away than we had ever meant for it to be.

“I don’t want to die in a bubble,” I said.

Connla said, “We won’t do any transfusions.”

“Hah.” But it was decided, and he helped me peel off my isolation skin.

The closest port was likely to be a pirate outpost, which tended to be scattered in the trailing reaches of the galaxy. Off the beaten track, protected and concealed. That wouldn’t help us, because we didn’t know where it was, couldn’t find it, and didn’t have anything to trade once we got there. But there were fringe worlds and fringe stations, places where respectable people mingled with the galactic underbelly. Those wouldn’t be without Synarche oversight. Anyplace where we could get in contact with civilization, we could trade. We didn’t have a prize, but we had knowledge, and our information on pirate and harvester activity—and what little we had on the artificial gravity—would get us help and repairs.

We set our sights on Downthehatch, which we could probably just about reach. Maybe. It was a dodgy little place by reputation, but it was worth a try, given the alternatives. I was uneasy enough about it that I might have voted the other way if I hadn’t already known that Singer and Connla had their minds made up. I know gray markets will always exist, but I have an allergy to people who took from the commonwealth and who also sold it out to predators.

“You’re not trading my skin,” I said.

“We’ll tell anybody who asks that it’s a holotoo,” Connla promised. “Garlynoch work. I’ve seen some of their stuff. It could pass as a really nice one.”

Singer said, “Unless you decide you want a more rigorous medical intervention than I can provide.”

Once under way again, we didn’t have much to do. I read a few nineteenth-century novels in Russian, Japanese, and English. They’re great for space travel because they were designed for people with time on their hands. Middlemarch. Gorgeous, but it just goes on.

The early word-processor era around the turn of the Earth millennium is good for that too, but the quality of the prose in those generally isn’t as high. Some of those epics, though, run to ten or twenty volumes, and every volume in them is thirty hours of reading time.

I even own a paper book—a compact, ultralight, onionskin volume with real fiber pages. It dates from the last third of the twentieth, and it’s called Illuminatus! I keep it because it was a gift, and it’s not so much a keepsake as… a kind of reminder. Of a time when I was really dumb.

It’s the one book on hand I never read anymore.

Connla studied strategy games, those favored by Synarche syster species and even, when he could find them, those invented by other aliens. Fortunately, Singer liked them too, so I had never been forced to learn the ins and outs (literally) of a-akhn-an or three-dimensional Goishan go. Which looks to me more like Chinese checkers anyway.

Long-haul flyers need hobbies. I know one AI on a salvage vessel who took up writing 3D scripts and interactives. She did so well she quit the salvage business and went off to live in the AI equivalent of a luxe beach home, some computronium colony around a dwarf star in the Core, with all the company, low lag times, processing cycles, and lack of travel you could want.

She—or a sub, anyway—got back into salvage a few ans later. The story as I heard it goes that she couldn’t write anymore, with all that stimulation, so in order to maintain her lifestyle, she had to near-isolate a branch of herself to get some damned writing done.

Still, nice work if you can get it.

I was floating near a viewport with my screen and Jane Eyre. It’s kind of horrifying to think of an era when people were so constrained to and by gender, in which the externals you were born with were something you would be stuck with your whole life, could never alter, and it would determine your entire social role and your potential for emotional fulfillment and intellectual achievement. So I wasn’t really reading. I was thinking about social history (I grew up in a human-female isolationist clade, and since I left it’s given me a powerful aversion to species and gender absolutists) and watching the bands of lensed light ripple by, wondering if it was getting a little brighter out there. The folded sky could be hypnotizing.

I realized that I could feel those folds and lenses on my skin.

They felt like—like ripples in a wave tank, passing over me as I lay just under the surface. A sense of pressure, and then a sense of suction, behind. Not like a touch, exactly. More like something passing near your skin, close enough that the sensory hairs can feel it, but it doesn’t brush your body exactly. Or like when you’re tuned into somebody else’s senso and getting what they’re getting, only at a remove.

“Koregoi senso,” I muttered, making a fist with my right hand. It shimmered in response.

I concentrated, closing my eyes. Something under the lensing ripples, something shadowy and vast. Convoluted. Arcing, sliding, gliding—

Singer said flatly, “I made a mistake.”

It took me a few seconds to blink back into myself. In that time, Connla had pulled himself out of his study hood and floated over. “What kind of a mistake?”

“We don’t have the fuel to get to Downthehatch before you and the cats starve to death. Or rather, we do. But then we couldn’t brake. Even if we recycle and reprint every organic object on this ship, including the cats and your own bodily waste.”

“We’re not eating the cats,” Connla said.

“They’ll eat you,” Singer pointed out.

Connla and I both shrugged. Cats were predators. Once you stopped being warm, you were just a source of calories. That was their moral calculus.

I said, “How is this possible?”

“I don’t know. I’m running diagnostics now—” He cleared his nonexistent throat. “So it looks like one of the storage tanks was damaged when we were shot off the prize. Sensors were damaged. They didn’t register it, and didn’t register the leak. But there’s less fuel than there should be.”

“Not to get nitpicky,” I said, “but what if we ditched enough mass to compensate?”

“We don’t have enough ditchable mass to do that with. There’s not a lot of Singer going spare.”

This was true, and a drawback of the recycle-and-print model we were operating on. Connla and I looked at each other. I said, “Well. There’s no point in decelerating now. Let’s stop adding v and just keep going, and try to think of a solution before we become an ironic footnote to salvage tug history, shall we?”

We went to our separate corners to muse, and mope, and stare thoughtfully out the viewports. Keeping ourselves occupied.

In the face of the unthinkable, there wasn’t much else to do except think about it obsessively. And sometimes, staring out the window turned out to be effective, as I discovered when something finally tickled my awareness just long enough to be useful.

I looked up, and with my fingertips, turned myself around.

“I have a solution,” I announced. I put more conviction in it than I was really sure it deserved.

“It’s better than being part of the precipitate,” Connla replied, but it was habitual and his heart wasn’t in it. He gazed at me with the sort of interest one reserves for reprieves from the guillotine and similarly refocusing events. “Let’s hear it.”

I held my hands out into the light so the gently moving webwork would sparkle. My clademothers were going to have a fit if they ever saw me again. We had a doctrine against body modification even for noncosmetic health or professional reasons, and even when I’d broken with them, I’d never gone out of my way to mod up. Except the zero-g adaptations, of course.

Now here I was covered in rainbow holograms.

Oh well. I wasn’t about to go looking for them. And if we ran into each other by chance—the sort of thing that inevitably happened in the biggest of universes—maybe I would get lucky and they wouldn’t recognize me.

“Guys, I seem to be developing some new senses.”

They—or at least Connla—gaped at me, so I unlocked my fox and tuned them in to my senso to prove it.

We hung there together like three ships in formation while I projected them into the tactile map of what I was perceiving. Singer figured out what I was up to pretty fast and took over rendering the feelings into a visualization. His version came out rather more accurate than mine, and faster too, as he had the cycles to throw at it.

All around us, the swoops and spirals of a convoluted landscape shivered into being. Singer’s sense of humor being what it was—the opposite of vestigial, though you’d never get to me admit that in his hearing—he decorated the projection with the traditional lines and circles of gravmap wireframe. Because it was a gravmap, and I was feeling the curvature of space-time it indicated—at a distance—through my skin.

Of the things that bind the universe together, gravity is not a particularly strong force, as it happens. It just… never stops reaching. That always sort of made me feel good about gravity. It’s always looking for the next rock, always sliding something down a breaker in space-time, whipping something in a long, arcing curve around something else. Gravity doesn’t give up. It keeps on trucking.

I won’t get into any solemn metaphorical particulars about the human spirit here, but you see what I’m driving at. I just really like gravity as a concept. As much as I hate having to operate under its influence.

I could tell from the way Singer was studying the map that he was feeling pretty positive about gravity too, just now.

“We can take a shortcut,” he said, thinking out loud for our benefit.

“You mean, use the existing folds in space-time to work with the drive compression, rather than brute-forcing across it. The old gravity whip trick, except in white space.”

“Gravity’s water slide,” Connla said, with the sense of a grin.

“Technically, all water slides are gravity’s,” Singer said. “Yes, Haimey. This should be enough to get us home. Within your projected lifetimes, based on available resources. And without eating the cats.”