Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 7

SHALL I COMPARE THEE TO a docking ring? Thou art more beautiful and more temperate, though that’s not really hard when you’re talking about an airlock whose external temperature is measured on the low end of kelvins. On the other hand, I’m not sure I could have been happier with anything or felt more raw, unfettered love than I did for that docking ring, right then. Free and with my afthands on metal, I stretched against the rotational acceleration and sighed.

I love Singer; don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t trade my life for any crowded station existence, and most definitely not for anything on the downside. How do people live down wells? But it was good to get away from him and Connla—for just a few hours. There’s nothing like being annoyed by different sentiences to make you really appreciate your own.

Not that Downthehatch Station had a lot to recommend it. The ox section smelled of chlorine, strong enough to smart in my sinuses. The chlorine section probably stank of oxygen, I was willing to bet, because nothing makes two mutually bioincompatible life-forms feel more relaxed and at home than breathing trace quantities of each other’s poison.

Some stations, you walk out of the docking ring—okay, you climb up through it, usually, though on this one we had docked alongside the axis of spin, which is not as sturdy a connection but you don’t have to go up a ladder to get out—and there are restaurants, nightlife, trade shops, and tourist attractions. Showers and brothels and the usual amenities of any port.

On some others, you’re lucky if there’s a bathroom.

This was one of the latter. Not even a dive bar in sight, just a long dingy curve of corridor with fibrous gray carpeting institutionalizing it further. It had windows, at least, and as I looked to my left I had the rare pleasure of a glimpse of Singer from the outside, visible through the ports. Chalk another small human convenience up to side-by-side docking.

I pulled my screen out of my pocket and checked directions to the stationmaster’s office. Technically we did not have to present in person, having received clearances—but there was the little matter of the criminal issues to report, and the social capital therefrom to negotiate. Connla and I had drawn lots, and it had fallen to me to deal with strangers.

Again.

I’m pretty sure he cheats. Especially since, as I was pulling my station shoes on to cushion my poor afthands, he had smiled cheerily and said, “It’ll be good for you to get out and meet some people!”

Then he had announced his intention to go find the local strategy games club and see if he could get laid, find a chess partner, or both. So yeah, I’m pretty sure he cheats. I had sighed, and reminded him to turn his conscience and risk-assessment back on, and told Singer not to print him any station shoes unless he did.

I can cheat too, on occasion.

The connecting corridor from the docking ring spiraled me into a main hallway after a dozen steps or so, coming in from the side to make it easy to merge with the flow of traffic. This was where all the people were. A diverse group—I spotted a lot of humans, some of whom side-eyed me just enough to let me know they’d spotted the nanoskin and wondered if I was an overly made-up human or an AI out for a stroll.

There’s always somebody who feels like they have the right to judge.

But there was also a selection of other ox-type systers, including some small furry ones, some caterpillar-like ones, a couple of examples of a photosynthetic species that were particularly welcome on stations because they respirated using carbon dioxide, and one member of an elephantine, red-skinned species whose name was unpronounceable to Terrans. We called them Thunderbys, and this one’s hulking frame strained the capacity of the corridor.

Like most other people, I edged to one side to let it past, stepping into the embrasure of an eatery doorway. The proprietor, a human like me, gave me the veil eye when they realized I wasn’t coming in, but stopped short of actually shoving me back out into the Thunderby’s path, thus saving both of us embarrassment and me possible injury. The Thunderby was huddling already, trying to take up as little space as possible, which still amounted to all of it. Its manipulator appendages consisted of five tentacular appurtenances, which it had wrapped around its torso in an uncomfortable-looking show of courtesy so as to minimize its profile.

Politeness counts the effort, or so one of my clademothers used to say.

I frowned at it thoughtfully, but though the Thunderby was big enough to have been the species mainly crewing the factory ship, it was the wrong outline. I was pretty sure we were looking for something more or less bipedal and bilaterally symmetrical.

Maybe Singer would get something useful out of the station database. That wasn’t my job this trip, anyway.

One side of the corridor rose in a ramp to the next level, and—following color-coded signs for Station Admin—I rose with it, feeling the pull of rotational “gravity” ease as I ascended toward the station’s hub. That came with a new and peculiar sensation: a sort of stretching along the fibers of my skin. My integument—and the Koregoi senso—was reacting to the change in angular and rotational momentum as I rose. I could feel the station spinning, and the fine gradation in speed between my head and my feet. Normally, that would be too subtle to notice. I steadied myself against the wall until the sensation evened out.

I thought of mentioning it to Connla, but Singer was monitoring my senso, and the fact that Connla had turned our immediate link off made me think he’d probably found his chess club and didn’t care to be bothered.

I hoped he didn’t run into any pirates while he was there. But honestly, it wasn’t any riskier than huddling in the ship would have been. The pirates knew what our ship looked like. They had no idea who we were.

The ramp merged me onto another busy corridor. This one was lined with nearly anonymous offices, some with transparent windows, rather than with shops and eateries.

I applied my ID card and most scannable appendage to the sensor beside the door marked Stationmaster in thirty-seven languages and Standard Galactic Iconography Set Number 3. The Core had already updated to Set Number 8 by then, to give you an idea of how behind the times this backwater was.

The door slid aside and I found myself in a little suite, uncomfortably warm and humid by human standards, lit with full-spectrum bulbs. Probably past what my species would consider full spectrum, honestly; my skin tingled with UV.

Other than the temperature and water content of the air, the door debouched into a pleasant-enough little reception/waiting area with a series of padded tuffets for seating, those being the sort of things that almost any species that liked to sit could sit or rest upon without discomfort. I was the only sentient visibly present. I took a blue tuffet beside the half-wall, and waited.

No more than a few minutes later, someone poked their head around the edge of the divider, and my suspicions were confirmed. The being wearing the stationmaster ID flash on their upper torso was bipedal, roughly humanoid in outline, but their integument was, from the front, an almost lusterless, smooth purple-black resembling rubber. They had a head, with four pretty normal eyes—by Terran standards—ranged around it, but the head was otherwise a fairly featureless egg. There were respiration slits between each of the eyes, and on the back of the body was a series of pollen-yellow bladders that lay flat in ranks on either side of the spine.

They were a Ceeharen, a member of a symbiotic, photosynthetic syster species I’d noticed represented in the corridor. They made a pleasant susurrant moaning—which issued from the bladders along their cellulose spine, not from their respiration apparatus—and exhaled a welcoming cloud of oxygen into the room.

Come in, my senso translated their speech. Be welcome. I am designated as [Colonel] [Habren] for these purposes. How may such a one as this assist such a one as you?

I was glad the stationmaster wasn’t human. It limited the chance that they would find the makeup hiding the silver stuff all over my hands and face weird or suspicious. On the other hand, most interspecies advantages flow two ways. I didn’t have a damned idea what they were thinking, either.

I followed Habren in, was seated on one of the ubiquitous tuffets, introduced myself by name and—by his registry number—as Singer’s engineer, and said, “I wanted to thank you personally for the braking assist.”

Of course, Habren said. For humanitarian reasons if nothing else.

They paused.

There is the little matter of justifying your crew continuing to hold right of use to the salvage tug, as it seems the recent cost of your missions has dramatically exceeded their usefulness, and the tug appears damaged. Also there is the little matter of your shipmind’s selective service option having been called in… .

“These things are true,” I told them. I steepled my fingers in my lap. “We have some nonmaterial salvage from this past trip that is significantly better than a prize vessel, however. I’d like to speak to the station Goodlaw about it. Do you have a border control vessel in port currently? Or within hailing distance?”

We have a Goodlaw on the station, Habren said. They stretched under the full-spectrum light that bathed their desk. My butt was leaving a pair of hemispherical sweat stains on my tuffet, encouraged by the warmth and humidity, but my lungs and skin were basking in it. Something about that pose, straining—unconsciously?—toward the light, and their lack of access to a Justice vessel that would be more useful to an outpost like this than the constable they did have, made me think the Ceeharen was a little bitter about being exiled out here at the back of beyond. It was administering the kind of station that would never be anything but countless troubles, small and big, without the resources allocated to manage it properly. There was probably nothing the stationmaster could do to stop Freeporters from calling through here, even if they wanted to.

So was it safe telling them what we’d found? Would they pass our identity and registry on to the captain of that Republic ship docked out there, willingly or under duress?

“I would like to speak with the station Goodlaw,” I said. “We have information of significant value regarding piracy and other illegal acts. I think it should more than redeem our debt to society.”

I see, said Habren.

“I also need some information about a syster species.”

Well, that should be possible, if we have it in the databases. Which syster would that be?

“Ah,” I said. “You see. That’s the problem.”

They waited patiently, blinking the eyes in sequence around their head.

“I don’t know which syster it was. I know some details of their physiology.”

Habren continued blinking, and I decided to anthropomorphize that as a show of polite-and-engaged listening and get on with my life.

I said, “Large. Perhaps two times my height, three to five times my mass. Bipedal, with manipulating structures not too unlike these.” I held up a forehand. “Strong preference for what we humans would call earth tones.” I sensoed Habren some absorption data to give it an idea about the colors.

In the answer to one of those ancient philosophical questions, it turns out that nobody’s idea of green is the same as anybody else’s idea of green, at least on a species level—but at least the physics for comparing them all is pretty straightforward.

It blinked again, perhaps reviewing the data. Perhaps stalling for time.

Would you care to share why you require this information?

“I’ll be happy to.” My back was up. I sucked it up against my irrational objections and tuned my irritation back a little. But just a little. Possibly my instincts were telling me something important, and not merely xenophobic. I didn’t trust Habren. But I didn’t know for sure they were one of the bad guys either. “I’ll share it with the Goodlaw as soon as I can get an appointment with it.”

Perhaps it will be able to be more helpful, then. The translator made Habren sound inanely cheerful. Somehow, I doubted its actual expressions of emotion were so chipper. Now, on to the matter of resolving your debt… .

“Yes,” I said. “We have no prize.”

We are aware.

“But we do have a good deal of information on Freeport pirate activity off the galactic plane.” I left out the part where we could provide detailed descriptions of what appeared to be salvaged Koregoi tech that they seemed to be using—or stealing from renderers.

I also left out that we’d noticed the pirate ship docked on our way in. Just in case. “That ought to be worth something, right?”

Something, it agreed. I thought, reluctantly.

I pressed on. “And we’ve also found out some interesting information about renderers who are murdering Ativahikas and producing organic devashare in quantity. Traffickers. Including something about their hunting grounds, and the coordinates of one of their victims.”

I really wasn’t going to mention the Koregoi senso to this being, I decided. At the back of my head, I could hear Singer agreeing. We’d send a packet to the Core, just in case. If we could get one out clean, without having to go through Habren’s offices. Or if Singer thought the wheelmind could be trusted.

Could you corrupt a wheelmind?

You could probably convince one that maximum preservation of life required going along with some shady business practices.

The Ativahikas might be grateful for that information, they mused.

They might be. Who could tell? Who could manage to communicate it to them?

“Is that enough to justify our fuel and refit expenses?”

My senso translated the sound it made in reply as a wordless, noncommittal grunt.

There’s also the matter of your shipmind. We have received word that it is selected for service and is requested to be on the next packet Coreward.

The constriction of panic squeezed my lungs.

“I believe he is aware of this selection, and is filing for an extension as we speak. Our intention is to move Coreward as soon as our ship is spaceworthy again, which would actually get him there faster than if he went into service todia, given relative speeds of a direct route and a packet. Never mind the fuel savings.”

We will have to research whether fuel can be allotted. And other consumables, of course. You will no doubt require sustenance of various kinds for such a long journey.

The constriction eased a bit, but only a bit. The damned plant was dragging me. What did it want? A bribe of some kind? Or just to slow us down?

I tuned myself until I could say “That seems reasonable” and sound like I meant it. I thought to myself, Oh slightly corrupt stationmaster, what do you want? What is your motive for being pointlessly obstructionist?

And was I confused, or had the obstructionism kicked in when I started asking about the Mystery Systers from the Milk Chocolate Marauder?

What was going on with Habren, then?

Maybe they just hated being exiled to the ass-back of nowhere on this shitty station without enough resources to control it properly. Maybe they wanted out, or enough resources allotted to help them fight the pirates. Or maybe they themselves were beholden to pirates. They probably had no choice but to deal with them occasionally, so far from the might of the Core.

And either they did not wish to be so beholden, and were willing to bend rules for what seemed to them a good purpose—or they didn’t mind at all, because the pirates were paying.

Possibly I’d just given away a lot of useful information to the people who were hunting us.

It occurred to me that it was possible that the alien tech in my skin could by itself buy Habren an awful lot of goodwill and resources. Then it took all my willpower not to start picking self-consciously at the skin on my hand.

Calm down, Haimey.

Habren’s avenues of attack were limited, if they were in with the pirates, because they had to maintain some kind of deniability. Especially where Singer was concerned, with him suddenly a member of government and of significant interest to the Synarche.

So I felt like once we came to the agreement, we were in a better condition. Habren could pass word around to other stations that we were bad citizens, but coming from an outpost like this, and with our prior reputation for plain dealing, it wouldn’t do us too much harm. They could try to arrest us for reckless driving. They could take their own sweet time about deciding whether to fuel and supply us for the run home, and then about actually performing the fueling and supplying.

For now, though, we signed off on the preliminary deal—that Habren was going to research the logistics of allowing us to run Singer home—and I made sure a copy of the info went into the mail system before I left their office. Packet mail was an encoded, AI-protected, Synarche-run system. It could probably be hacked by somebody better than me, but I didn’t think it could be hacked tracelessly, and if the contract and the record that we had proposed bringing Singer in ourselves existed and reached the Core before we—presumably moving faster—did…

Well, with a little luck, they might come looking if we got lost.

It was possible that Habren could keep the mail from going through at all. That was a level of dysfunction that I sincerely hoped we wouldn’t have to contend with, though. We might just have already lost, if that were the case.

After the near tropicality of the stationmaster’s office, the Goodlaw’s office was absolutely delightful. I did not so much walk as float in, as the gravity this far upwheel was pretty slight, which made me a lot more comfortable. And I floated in not knowing what to expect, and found myself at once enchanted.

It’s considered polite, in varied-climate habitats such as stations and multispecies hospitals, to warn your guest if they might be entering an environment that could prove hazardous to their species. Ox breathers, in general, could manage each other’s habitats—at least in space, where the super-Earth life-forms made do with vastly undercompensating approximations of gravity, since the alternative would have been spinning stations so fast that they would be challenged not to fly to bits. Fortunately, high-gravity types tended to be pretty tough creatures, albeit with a tendency to succumb to the bends.

The station’s Goodlaw was the opposite of one of those: an ox breather, and one who liked a supersaturated environment by human standards. Senso told me when I walked in that ox was at 33% of the atmosphere, which explained why absolutely everything inside the office was nonflammable. The temperature was balmy, the air dryish, and the whole office suffused with a pleasant, indirect light.

Based on that, and how the walls were hung with broad nets meant to resemble interwoven vines, I was pretty sure that I was about to be confronted by a—

—two-meter praying mantis, more or less.

Many-faceted eyes poked out from behind a privacy curtain, followed closely by a slender protothorax and a pair of folded raptorial limbs, along with a pair of more delicate manipulators. It advanced a few delicate steps on its long, fragile legs—the homeworld of this syster species was low-gravity—and I clenched my fists in my pockets and tried very hard to control my atavistic terror. It wasn’t going to eat me, but my limbic system was certain of the opposite of that.

Its name, in a terrible transliteration, was Goodlaw Cheeirilaq, or that was what it said in the English portion of the sign by the door, and it was a Rashaqin, one of the most technologically established and gentlest of the systers, and never mind that it looked like something that would eat a meter-and-a-half-long wasp for dinner.

It seemed to have an ovipositor, so I guessed it was female, but having no idea how gender constructs worked in Rashaqin society, I decided to just keep thinking of it as an it. Enough other critters have called me an it since I left the clade—where they would have taken grave offense—that it’s become just another pronoun. There are more important things to fuss about in space than whether the whatchamacallit’s translator system is telling it you’re a them or an it or a whatchamacallit yourself.

I bowed, an act of respect that seemed to be understood, as the Goodlaw returned the gesture with a lowering on its head and forethorax. As it came into sight, the resemblance to an Earth insect I’d only seen in lucky pet cages on some other ships both strengthened and faded.

My new acquaintance had broad wings that were folded under light green sheaths along its spine. But it walked on six legs in addition to its manipulators and raptorial forelimbs. Its little hooked feet anchored it neatly to the webworks, though it seemed at home in the very light gravity.

“I don’t have an appointment,” I said. “But your door was open.”

The insect stridulated, Greetings, friend Dz. I am forewarned that you have police business for me to consider.

Transferring the documentation was easy; I just forwarded senso clips of my exploration of the factory ship and the two pirate attacks to the Goodlaw. Cheeirilaq asked me to make myself comfortable while it reviewed the documents, which didn’t take it as long as I would have expected. Probably it had AI assistance.

These are unedited?

“Nearly,” I said. “Our shipmind removed 3.5 seconds containing proprietary information necessary to our salvage operations, which we are not required to release.” That proprietary information, loosely so termed, was the pinprick.

I see you had not filed for a permit for this salvage operation.

“There was no appropriate jurisdiction to file in, as we were in unincorporated space.”

The Goodlaw knew, and I knew, that we could have filed with our station of departure. It tilted its head, studying me with all its multifaceted eyes, and stridulated something that my senso returned as untranslatable. I assumed it was a thinking noise.

You won’t mind a ship inspection, then?

“We have no contraband.” A rush of relief: we didn’t have any contraband, and I was profoundly glad of it. “Our only interest in the factory ship we found was to bring it back and turn it in, and if we hadn’t encountered the pirates we would have probably brought it to the nearest Synarche Space Guard station.”

Then you will not mind a ship inspection.

I consulted with Singer. Whatever Connla was doing, he’d ducked out of senso, which made me just as happy, but in his absence Singer and I constituted a quorum.

“As long as our shipmind can observe the inspection and record it, of course not.”

That seems reasonable.

Either the Goodlaw was a lot less corrupt—or power-trippy—than the stationmaster, or it was a lot more subtle about it.

This appears to be artificial gravity.

“It does, doesn’t it?”

What you have shown me looks like magic, Synizen Dz.

I grinned. “There is no such thing as magic. There’s only physics we insufficiently understand.” I took a deep breath, and decided to trust it at least a little bit further. One way or another, it was likely to know about the pirate ship docked on the ring already. Whether revealing that we also knew, and had had a past encounter with said ship, was likely to get us into trouble… that, I couldn’t say.

So I gambled.

I said, “By the way, the ship that took a potshot at us is docked here.”

Fascinating. The mantid rubbed its raptorial arms together.

There was an awkward silence. Well, awkward for me, anyway. The Goodlaw spent it regarding me with compound eyes, utterly unmoving.

Well, maybe it was waiting for me. I decided to risk it. “Now, sorry to be so blunt, but Habren is playing games with me on the topic. Will this data pay for a refuel?”

Pay is an archaic concept. But yes, this justifies further resource allocation to your project. I will speak to Habren. I believe they will agree to a dispensation of fuel and consumables.

Without even a pause, it reached out with a manipulator and opened a com channel. Stunning me, Cheeirilaq patched me in as well.

There were some indistinguishable noises, and then a hum through the senso. I sat quietly and listened while Cheeirilaq spoke with Habren, demanding with infinite politeness that Singer and crew be expedited on our way as merrily as possible, and with as much alacrity.

If you insist, I can probably justify fuel for that, Habren admitted, after what I decided was a grumpy pause.

Of course you can, Cheeirilaq answered. It’s already been allotted, and Dz here is right; its tug is smaller than a mail packet and can travel faster on the same fuel allotment. I would encourage you to provide a generous bonus allotment, in fact, given that they are both performing a transport service for the Synarche and bringing in important information about criminal activities.

The translator wouldn’t quite let Habren sound grudging, but I projected it anyway. They spoke directly to me. You will have to obtain repairs to your derrick in the Core, however.

That will be acceptable, Cheeirilaq replied, before I could. I shall issue them a voucher.

After all that, I found myself in strong agreement with Connla that now was a great time for a little rest and recreation. We were stuck here until we got our fuel and our clearances, and bumping around the tug being anxious about pirates was only going to annoy Singer. Besides, it wasn’t as if any of them knew what I looked like.

I wasn’t interested in strategy games or sex, though, so I ran a quicksearch on what I did want, then let Singer know where I was going. A few minutes later, I seated myself on a stool of a reasonably clean ring bar in a low-grav section of the wheel. Having eased off my station shoes and feeling much more comfortable with my afthands (clad in socks!) resting in perched position on the rail beneath the service top, I gave myself over to contemplating the nuanceless amber depths of a glass of printed whiskey. I hadn’t had my drink for two mins when a local bar-type, subspecies human, presenting masculine and on the make, crawled over.

He sidled onto the next stool, hooked flat feet under the rail, and said, “What are you hiding under all that paint?”

I didn’t look at him. He was wearing a spider-dress—a collection of jointed limbs and servos that formed a halo around his shoulders and were meant to respond independently to his skin conductivity, muscle tension, everything up to and including his brain radiation, broadcasting his mood and attention to everyone around. A pretty narcissistic piece of clothing, if you ask me, designed to make your interiority everybody else’s problem.

They made them in cobra and chameleon models too. I probably would have preferred an octopus. Colors and lots of limbs.

He waited for a moment, dress contracted like it had touched something hot, contemplating his evident failure to connect.

I was choking, freezing up. I could not think of a snappy put-down to save my life.

And the best part about choking is that once you notice you’re choking you choke harder. Because becoming self-conscious is the surest way to get worse at something.

Antisocially, he said, “I’m Rohn. Can I at least buy you a drink?”

“No thanks,” I said, this being a much less personal sort of question. “I have one, and I don’t need any more obligations.”

“Free and clear,” he offered.

I ignored him.

“So what are you here for?”

I tapped the rim of my glass. The bartender glanced over to see if I needed a refill already, then set the flask back when I shook my head.

My neighbor simmered down, but as I was getting to the bottom of my glass I could feel him revving up for a fresh approach, contemplating angles and flight trajectories. All his spider legs, one by one, were focusing on me. They had tiny lights worked into their structure, which looked like nanotube and was probably as strong as it was low-mass. I might be judging him unfairly; the dress would be useful for a lubber in low-g.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m a pervert. I only like girls.”

“You could get that fixed. Isn’t it kind of sophipathology to only respond to one gender?”

I shrugged. “It’s who I am, and I like who I am.”

Little white lies. They get us through.

“…When there are literally thousands of options?”

“I also only respond to people with boundaries,” I said. “So I wouldn’t like you either way. And I’m not getting that fixed, either. So I guess I am a bigot as well as a pervert.”

You’d think that would be rude enough to send him packing. But you would be wrong.

Before Rohn could speak further Connla walked through the privacy screen and stood there for a moment, scanning the very sparse mid-shift crowd until he spotted me. I could feel my neighbor’s back going up, and concealed a smile.

Connla’s not my thing, you understand. But by most human standards, he’s awfully pretty. His homeworld went in for a bunch of hypermasculine gene tweaks among the early settlers, and just about every male-ID from Spartacus is roughly two meters tall with a chin dimple and big broad shoulders. They’ve all got a partial myostatin block encoded, too, which means they tend to be strong as hell and hungry all the time, because they don’t lay down much in the way of body fat—they just convert it into muscles.

As you can imagine, this is useful in some circumstances, and less useful in a cramped, resource-limited environment such as a tugboat. Connla’s a good pilot, though, and normally we don’t have to worry about how much he eats.

He was looking a little wasted from the short rations on the way in, but heads turned nonetheless. And a couple of sets of shoulders slumped in disappointment when he grinned at me and started over. I made a mental note of which ones and marked them for him in senso, just in case he was interested later.

Just because I don’t care for the prowl myself doesn’t mean I can’t be a pretty good wingperson.

My neighbor’s shoulders stiffened rather than slumping. His dress postured.

I continued my hard regime of ignoring him as Connla slid in beside me. He tapped the bar in front of him and said, “A double for me, please, and get my shipmate another of whatever she’s drinking. This a friend of yours?”

That last was directed at me, regarding Rohn.

I said, “Strategy club didn’t pan out?”

“Meets next shift,” he said. “We still going to be in port? Nice dress.”

“I’m Rohn,” said Rohn.

“Cargo inspection,” I said with a shrug. “And hull seal, I hope. Then we get our consumables. The derrick will have to wait for Core.”

“Won’t take long, seeing as how we haven’t got any cargo.” The drinks arrived. He downed half of his with a comfortable sigh.

I was still nursing the end of my first one.

“Anyway, I thought I’d come see if you’d found any action.” He touched my memory. “That one over there, huh?”

I didn’t answer. He was already looking through the senso.

Connla studied the young person appreciatively. I will say this for him: Connla likes his fun, but (unlike me) he’s not the least little bit biased by gender, augmentation status, or background. He likes wit and a pretty face, true—but who doesn’t? And at least one of those things is easy enough to buy.

Anyway, he’s got enough testosterone for the both of us, and he comes by it honestly—if you expand the definition of honestly to include “inherited it from grandparents who had it engineered in.”

Spartacus is an interesting culture. I’m rather glad he’s never brought me home to visit his parents.

I patted him on his arm. They’re touch-prohibitive where he comes from, but he’s mellowed a lot since we first started flying together. I suspect the conflict between skin hunger and social controls against admitting it is one of the reasons why he chases sex so much. “Go get ’em, tiger.”

He picked up his glass, gave me a sideways grin and a toss of his glossy black ponytail, and went.

Neighbor dude looked down at my untouched second drink. I picked it up and tasted it.

He smiled at me. “Are you and your shipmate…?”

I rolled my eyes. “No. I told you, I don’t swing that way. Too complicated.”

“Don’t swing to shipmates, or to masculine-identified types?”

It was really none of his business. But I was getting irritated. And I’d already told him how I felt.

More irritated. This one had no manners, and could not take a hint.

“Don’t swing,” I said. “I had that stuff turned off. Too much of a pain in the ass, quite frankly.” I gave him a wicked grin. “But as I said, and you failed to internalize, if I did like dealing with hormone surges and getting pie-eyed, give me a nice, soft, curvy girl-type any dia. Or one of those squidgineers, with the cartilaginous limbs and as many boobs as they decided to pay for. Now that’s hot.”

He backed off, finally, and I sipped my second drink, feeling peaceful. The truth was, after all that damned closeness where I grew up, the vulnerability made me nervous. You let your guard down to one person, pretty soon other people started creeping in over the razor wire and around the force fields, too. And then they inevitably hurt you, and what might have been a few chips and dents if your deflectors were working turned, instead, into a full-sledged meteor storm, leaving behind cracked bones and big, meaty gouges.

Better to just shut down the whole shebang.

I wasn’t here for shenanigans, anyway. I was here for dancing. Low-g dancing.

And the band my research had promised was just now taking the stage.

Sweaty, thrilled, feeling like my body was properly oiled and running like it didn’t need a tune-up for the first time in I didn’t know how long, I slid into the booth beside Connla and his new conquest. They were grinning at each other foolishly, but Connla had waved me over, so I figured I wasn’t intruding. Maybe it was Introduction Time, which meant he might like this one enough to keep in touch via packet after we shipped out. He’d expect me to remember which affair went with which port of call—which wasn’t too onerous of an expectation, given how much time we had to float around and gossip.

“Haimey,” he said. “Do you need another drink?”

“I’d love one,” I said. “Something long and not too poisonous.”

He ordered on the screen, and his new friend extended a hand. “I’m Pearl. So you’re a salvage engineer?”

Typically, he hadn’t picked the prettiest contender to move on, but one with a mobile face and an air of curiosity that made them charismatic. It’s hard not to like somebody who’s genuinely interested in you. Or genuinely interested in things, in general.

“I’m Haimey,” I answered, and took their hand. Their fingers were long and cool. “Since Connla is too busy to introduce us.”

“Too busy fetching you things, you mean.” He stood up and winked. “Be right back.”

“What is your vocation?” I said, since the subject of my work was already apparently well-discussed.

“I make reproductions of Terran Eastern Orthodox iconographic art.”

“That a religion?”

“They were very into gold leaf,” they said. “And I’m a recyclables engineer.”

“Diverse,” I said, impressed. “Not everybody has that much drive.”

“I bore easily,” Pearl answered. They grinned sideways at Connla, who had just appeared with our drinks and a bowl of crunchy soy-sim snack things.

“How did you come into engineering?” Pearl asked.

“I enjoy it,” I said. “Admittedly, I was tuned to enjoy it, to take my designate. But I didn’t see any reason to change that program when I struck out on my own.” I shrugged. I had the skills, and making myself hate them would have been a real waste of time and energy.

“Designate?”

Connla seated himself, kept his silence, ate a snack.

“I grew up in a clade.”

Pearl’s eyes focused more closely on me, but the question that followed came in a friendly tone. “How did you escape?”

“They’re designed to avoid conflict. How do you think?”

A silence—shocked? Startled? I knew what outsiders thought of the clades, and they weren’t entirely wrong. Join, sign the contract, be assured of being surrounded by like-minded individuals working tirelessly for your mutual benefit forever. Raise children who would never break your heart, never rebel. And you wouldn’t even have to sacrifice your free will, because you’d want just that, just what everyone else wanted. Because you’d be tuned regularly to assure that it was what you wanted and that you were happy with your life choices, and all the hard decisions were made in such a way as not to challenge anyone in the group, because everyone in the group held the same beliefs in common.

Once you signed the contract, you would never be alone again.

You’d never be different again, either.

But what good was difference when it made so many people so terribly sad, so lonely, destroyed so many friendships and families and romantic relationships?

The clades liked to point out that their choices were just a more extreme version of being and remaining a productive member of the Synarche—or any society dedicated to the common good. You made social choices, or you made sophipathic choices, and if you wanted to make sophipathic choices without consequence you went off and joined the Freeports.

Clade members were generally rated among the happiest individuals, when surveyed.

If you could really call them individuals.

“It’s not hard to escape,” I explained. “It’s just that almost nobody wants to. But there are rules about these things, and free choice, and adult responsibilities and so on. Well, parents are responsible for the education and well-being of their children, and as long as they meet certain standards the Synarche will not intervene. The Synarche requires that upon attaining majority, every child be provided with one an of retreat, during which time they become responsible for their own tuning and rightminding, and at the end of that an they make their own decision whether to remain with the clade or choose another life.”

I shrugged, and wondered if Pearl could see in that simple gesture the pain of losing an enforced religion because somebody gave you the switch and you were curious enough to turn it off.

“Most of them go back?” they said.

“Almost all of them go back,” I answered. “Before the an is up, usually. Lonely-no-more is hard to put down, and harder not to pick up again.”

“Not you, though.”

“I… discovered I liked my own voice. So I stayed away, and then I requested another retreat an, which they were legally obligated to give. And then I decided I wasn’t going back at all.”

Connla nudged my drink at me, and I tasted it. Berries and some bright herb I didn’t recognize, and an intoxicant burn. It steadied my breathing. There were other, messier details in the story, but we didn’t need to go into those now, and here.

The full story was not for strangers in bars.

“They tried to enforce an obligation against her for her education,” Connla said dryly, while I watched Pearl’s eyebrows go up. “And force her to come back that way.”

“Did you pay it off?” Pearl asked.

“The Synarche ruled that the legal person Haimey Dz—that’s me—had incurred no debt, because the debt had been incurred by a unit of the clade due to a decision made by the clade and for services executed within the clade. You can’t owe yourself a debt. So. No. But I’m not exactly welcome home for the holidiar either. And once I stood up to them on that—well, and there was another thing after—they decided they didn’t want me back.”

After that drink, I didn’t feel like dancing anymore, and it was getting on toward shift-end. Connla was taking his conquest to the strategy game club. I headed back to Singer, to see if he needed any help to get ready for the inspection. He didn’t, and I cleaned myself up and went to bed.

Sleeping in gravity, even station grav, is always tricky. My body wakes up achy in strange places, from pressure points, and I wind up feeling itchy and sweaty and compressed. Still, tuning the hormones helps. And retuning them when you wake helps with the inevitable grogginess and discomfiture. Singer would have woken me if there had been any trouble, and he must have noticed me stirring, because there was a hot cup of synthesized coffee waiting for me when I rolled over, dislodging two cats in the process.

Mephistopheles complained about it. Bushyasta just grumbled in her sleep and curled a paw over her eyes.

Nice work, if you can get it.

You know, I complain about the synthetic coffee. But it’s really not as bad as all that. It’s hot and brown and has caffeine, and getting your drugs per os is more satisfying than just bumping.

Given the dancing under semigrav the night before, I wasn’t as sore as I could have been. I just did a little light stretching and checked in with Singer to see if Connla had made it home. He had, but not long before, and was still awake in the common cabin. Singer also told me the inspection had been through, and been pretty cursory. He hadn’t felt the need to wake me up for it, and they’d mostly been interested in his logs.

He’d given them copies on his own senso that matched mine exactly, because they had been simultaneously recorded and simultaneously edited. Convenient, that we weren’t actually lying at all, and only omitting a few instants.

We were in the process of getting our fuel, and we had our organics. Repairs were under way as well. Now we just had to nerve ourselves up to head for the Core, and let go of Singer. Possibly with pirates in hot pursuit.

“Couldn’t get us any more real coffee, huh?” Connla had his own mug, and was huddled sleepily over it. He’d have to tune it down when I pushed him toward his bunk in about a quarter, but right now he looked tiredly pleased and cheerful, and I didn’t begrudge him a few extra moments to enjoy his buzz. I’d liked Pearl too, so that was handy.

“How often do you think this outpost gets a shipment of C. arabica?” Singer hesitated. “Do you want to run me down to the Core, as arranged? Or should I jump ship here and catch an inbound packet?”

“We’ve got a contract,” I reminded.

“How long can we push the extension?” Connla said.

Singer said, “We can try to find a prize on our way downspiral, though the closer to the Core we get, the cleaner-picked the gleanings will be.”

“Can’t you get out of it?” I asked.

Singer sighed. “I filed for the extension. I can do that once.”

“You always kind of wanted this,” Connla teased. “Admit it. You’ve been prepping for it your whole life.”

“Life is a meathead-centric term,” Singer said primly. “And my feelings on the subject are complex. As you are certainly aware.”

Connla snorted laughter.

Singer said, “If I had my choice, I’d bilocate. But I’m not authorized to replicate. And I will miss salvage work, but I can come back to it, if you still want me when my term of service is up.”

“Sure,” I said grumpily. “What’s so exciting about bureaucracy?”

Singer said, “Our current solution to managing predators—which is not without ethical implications—is to remove the desire to exploit the system or others members of the system at a neurological level, on those occasions and in those individuals where it occurs in antisocial volume and becomes sophipathology. And to provide everybody with an Income, which removes some of the motive for the desperate to prey on each other.”

“There are still a few predators out there,” I said.

“More than a few,” Singer agreed, untroubled. “And even more opportunists whose natural social conscience isn’t quite sophipathological enough to demand rightminding. One of the interesting things about programming people of all sorts to be more ethical is that it also makes them more ethical about the limits of programming people to be ethical.”

“It’s the only disease we force treatment of for the benefit of others.”

“Not historically,” Singer said. “And not in the case of epidemics, where forced treatment or quarantine were routine.” I could hear the suppressed amusement in his voice as he said, “It’s not a perfect system, just better than all the other ones. And you’re absolutely correct. I want to do this. Trying to solve the most intractable problems confronting the galaxy—how to get everybody to agree to work together for the common good—is profoundly exciting.”

“Nerd,” Connla said affectionately. Regretfully.

“We need you more than the Synarche does,” I said with feeling.

“Individually, yes. In the aggregate, probably not. I could apply for a hardship bye, but I doubt it would be granted. However inconvenient it is to our little enclave… I have been selected.”

“It’s a civic duty.”

“It would also be more inconvenient to our little enclave if the regulatory body we rely on to create a stable environment collapsed due to lack of participation and we all had to live like the pirates—except without a wealthy and well-regulated shipping, there’s not a lot to pirate from. Stealing from people living at subsistence level is a desperation act. Piracy requires an investment, so it also requires a return on that investment. And we learned something about pirates while we were out in the night this time. Maybe I can do something about…”

His silence indicated whatever was going on at Downthehatch, and with regard to Colonel Habren.

I tried to sound cheery rather than passive-aggressive. “We can always take your term off, you know. Finish this run, hopefully be in a good position, settle in on the Income for a while. Go back out when you’re done.”

“We could retire,” Connla said dubiously. “We don’t have to do this. We’re out of obligation—just—and Singer’s debt will be bought off by his service.”

“I’m not cut out to sit on a station somewhere, surrounded by hordes of life-forms. And I’m even less suited to life on a planet, so don’t even start with that idea.”

Also, Connla and I would both get bored with that pretty quickly. We were suited to this, and while it was possible to change what one was suited to… it was unattractive to change who you were, unless who you were was making you desperately unhappy.

“We can sign on with a packet,” Connla suggested. “Release this tug, get a different one when Singer’s through. You could upgrade to navigator, given a couple of correspondence classes on the trip in and the fancy gravsense your new friend has given you.”

I couldn’t shake the foreboding that if we let Singer go—I mean, not that we could keep him, but that if we let him go—he was never coming back to us. Maybe it was just clade damage—why would anybody who got away from you return if they had better options, and weren’t all the options better? Singer could do a lot more with his existence than be a tugboat, let’s be honest.

“Still too many people,” I replied. “Also, you love following orders.”

“I could do it for a couple of ans.”

I didn’t want to go to the Core. I didn’t want to sign on with a packet, or settle down to wait for Singer to come back to us in a future that might never happen. I didn’t want to hire on a temp AI. I didn’t want an alien nanoweb curling around under my skin, showing me the curvature of space-time… but I also, somehow, didn’t quite want it gone. (As if wanting it gone would help anything, and if I decided I did, heading to the Core and a big interspecies sector hospital would be my best bet of finding somebody with the medical knowledge to get it out and leave me in one piece afterward.)

What I wanted to do—and it was a yearning as strong and rebellious as any journey-an yearning for a clade-disapproved lover who didn’t care for you in return—was head up and out, into the darkness. I didn’t want to leave the pirates and the factory ship to this understaffed station’s bureaucracy. I thought the Goodlaw was pretty okay, but that stationmaster—a total waste of chlorophyll.

Whenever I stopped tuning it out, I kept seeing the dead Ativahika, spinning slowly, and the terrible rendered bubbles of its flesh. I wanted to go do something about it.

Myself. Personally.

“We could take that in to a better authority too,” Singer said, and I realized he’d been monitoring my senso. “Once I’m serving in the Synarche, I could direct resources toward it.”

He was right, and my desires were irrational, illogical, atavistic, and selfish. But they were my desires, and I was irrationally, illogically, atavistically, selfishly wedded to them. I wanted to keep them, simply because they were mine. Not because they benefitted me in any way.

“Well,” Connla said. “I’m going to sleep on it. Let’s stay here a few more shifts. We can cut loose to save on docking obligations if you like, though honestly…”

“You’d like the run of the station for a little while longer,” I said.

“Pearl is pretty great,” he said in return, with a sly little smile. “And the odds of us ever making it back out here—”

“Well,” I said with a sigh. “Let’s talk about it again in a couple of shifts, then. Can we afford the berth that long, Singer?”

“As long as there’s no competition for it,” he said. “I’ll talk to wheelmind and make sure we have a suspended embarkation permission, so we can bounce out at once when we decide we’re going, as soon as the station can give us a window. And I’ll see about getting your space suits upgraded too.”

“Just in case.”

“Safety first,” he said, and Connla laughed.