And the Baomind would get back to him in three hundred minutes or more.
Check.
There was enough powdered Baomind in our wake that we saw the next beam coming, which is something I never expected to see in this life and never care to see again. Or more precisely, we saw its afterimage, as it seared itself into our retinas.
It scorched through the darkness. It didn’t harm us because the Baomind dodged into its path, though I didn’t see how it managed to intercept a lightspeed weapon. Koregoi tech, I tell you what. It’s something.
What was also something was the light show. This time, the drones did not disintegrate. They sparkled. The weapon beam reflected off their freshly mirror-perfect surfaces and scattered in disarray, glittering in a webwork of light before it dissipated.
Friend Haimey, pay attention, please!
Unbelievably, Farweather began pushing herself to her feet. She was clad in an old-style bubble suit with a wide visor for peripheral vision. The gold impregnated in the helmet made her look like she was wearing a halo. I felt Singer’s control on the forces holding us to him slip a little as she loosened his grip on her.
She balanced wide-legged, as if she were bracing under a load. Her gun came up. It seemed like her arm shook with the effort of holding it. Cheeirilaq galloped toward her like an emerald Sleipnir, all legs and spiky raptorial forelimbs.
I had to stop looking at it before she noticed.
I tried to sight down the gun, but it was shaking. No, I was shaking.
Pointing a live weapon at another human being is hard if you have any awareness of consequences. Your brain insists on telling you, over and over, what that projectile can do to flesh.
Farweather’s face changed. She took her eyes off me, though the gun in her hand never wavered.
“Those fuckers,” she said.
My skin began to burn. Something big was coming in fast.
Superluminal.
I could feel it out there. I didn’t know what it was or where it was coming from, but it was aimed right where we were.
We were out here alone. Nothing between us and the stars. And Singer—and the Baomind mirrors surrounding him—might as well have had flat feet on dirt, they had so little time to react.
“You FUCKERS!” Farweather screamed.
“Singer, duck!” I yelled.
She coiled herself. I lunged, an automaton heaving each magnetized boot in turn off the hull and feeling the shudder through my bones when it thumped back down.
My gloved fingertips brushed the fabric of her suit as she hurled herself up and out, a fantastic Peter Pan leap into the big nothing all around. Jets kicked in from her suit pack as she started a burn. More momentum to push her out of Singer’s tiny, artificial gravity well.
I jerked my head back to watch her leave, arms splayed wide, so violently I almost overbalanced and fell over backward with my boots still stuck to the hull.
“Fuck,” I said.
Singer said, Are you all right?
I flashed him what I was feeling as Cheeirilaq bounded up. It leaped into the void, an amazing arc with its bright wings spread reflexively at the peak, thrumming inside their skin against nothing. It snatched after Farweather with its raptorial arms and missed by what looked like centimeters. Slowly, it began to fall again, back toward Singer’s surface.
I could feel Farweather grabbing hold of gravity, twisting it like an acrobat’s silks. Sailing through the Baomind’s particles. Getting away.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a halo of mist stream out from beneath Cheeirilaq as it too boosted itself away from the hull of the Prize, using jets instead of Koregoi technology. The good cop was going to bring the criminal back, no matter what.
“Oh fuck it,” I said. I couldn’t let Cheeirilaq go after her alone. I’d promised to see to it that Farweather saw justice. I needed to.
I jumped after, gravity my friend as well.
Haimey! Goodlaw! Come back. I can’t wait for you!
“Don’t wait,” I said, accelerating as I followed Farweather past the fine line of the Prize’s white coils and into the flashing, razor-edged patterns of the Baomind mirror-swarm. “Run!”
CHAPTER 28
WHEN I LOOKED PAST MY boots again, I saw Singer vanish. It was the worst moment of a life that had had quite a few bad moments in it.
He was there—or the Prize was there, containing him and Connla and two cats and six other people I had been getting fond of. And then he was gone, and I was alone in a space suit somewhere outside the generally acknowledged boundaries of the entire fucking Milky Way, with nobody for company except a good insect cop, an alien AI I couldn’t talk to, and a pathologically risk-seeking pirate.
With a dozen or so armed ships that wanted me dead in pursuit, and nothing between my soft brown warmth and the cold depths of space except a thin, fragile envelope full of recycled atmosphere.
Well, at least the cold depths of space were something I could surf now. And I just had to go find Farweather and bring her into custody, and trust that Singer would come back for me.
Cheeirilaq?
Nothing. I had a visual on him, but without Singer’s assistance, our suit coms weren’t producing a strong-enough signal to connect. Or maybe there was some interference from the mirrormind. Maybe a tight beam, so we could coordinate—
The hole in the night where Singer had left us exploded into coruscation. I briefly glimpsed an outline I recognized as a Jothari ship silhouette… and then it was gone, in the actinic glare of obliterated matter. A wave of Baomind mirrors behind the ship’s position disintegrated, and I braced myself for death… but death ran out of steam well before it got to me, and frankly had been headed in a different direction when it happened.
I gasped. The crew of the Jothari ship had tried to catch the Prize in their particle wave as they dropped out of white space. But because Singer had transitioned to white space just as the particles reached him, they’d been whipped back around in the general direction of the source, and the ship that had tried to use its bow wave as a battering ram was instead disintegrated.
Well, that was going to require some antirad treatments if I ever made it home.
I had other problems now. A whole pirate fleet of them.
Cheeirilaq and Farweather and the Baomind and I—and the pirates—were moving fast. But through the magic of space and inertia, we were more or less motionless with respect to each other. We wouldn’t fall out of the Baomind swarm now that we weren’t being propelled by the Prize’s drive.
But neither would we continue to accelerate.
And the pirates… would.
They were going to catch up with us much faster now. Being captured by pirates—or worse, by Jothari inclined to check out their anathemic tech under my skin and then blame me personally for the deaths of a ship full of their friends and family who had been murdered by Farweather—was definitely not the jewel of my agenda todia.
But it also wasn’t something that I currently had a great deal of influence over. So I would act like a proper spacer, show some skybound pride, and focus—right now—on the problem I could actually do some good with right now. As an old crew chief of mine used to point out, you might be dead long before the problem you didn’t have the resources to fix right now became a critical need, so why waste more resources worrying about it?
Or Singer—who I could feel, folding space-time into a cozy wrinkled-up nest and moving away like a bullet—might even come back and rescue us in time. It was a nice thought. And you never knew until you lived through it what the likely outcomes were.