I let my awareness collapse. I fell back in my couch, soaked in so much nervous and exertion sweat that the film was not keeping up with it. I turned my head with great effort and looked over at Connla. “Maybe turn down the psychopathy a little bit next time. Wow.”
“It got us out, didn’t it?” He gave me his charming rogue smile.
I swallowed sickness. “Would you really have done it? If Habren had been sophipathic enough to push the issue—”
“Connla wouldn’t have to,” Singer said. “He addressed his remark to the wheelmind. The AI would be forced to act to preserve as much life as possible.”
I said, “I guess we know why Habren had the wheelmind delaying us. They were stalling us until the pirates made up their minds what to do. Oh, we just racked up so much punitive obligation with those traffic violations.”
“I don’t mean to make you nervous,” Singer said, “but we’re going to have bigger problems than debt when we get back to civilization, unless we can prove something on that stationmaster. Criminal charges, my friends.”
“I hope it was the stationmaster,” I said. “I liked the Goodlaw.”
On the other hand, I wouldn’t feel betrayed, exactly, if it turned out that Cheeirilaq was in league with the pirates. I liked it, but that didn’t mean I trusted it.
And the pirate had been charismatic, but that didn’t mean I liked or trusted her, either. Connla and Singer get a bye, because I’ll never feel attracted to either one of them, but I think I mentioned I got all that endocrine stuff turned off. It’s better for me if I’m not attracted to people physically, because wanting people makes me want to trust them. I’ve never been able to nourish any desire to fuck people I don’t trust. And vulnerability? It’s just too fucking scary.
So why let yourself feel lonely when you already know that having a relationship won’t do anything except make you anxious about whatever terrible thing might happen next, and if you turn off the anxiousness, you’ll feel like an idiot when something bad inevitably happens?
“Well, they’re both suspect for now,” Connla said brutally, hands flying over his panels. “Everybody we interacted with is suspect.”
He was doing a lot of his flying through senso, but the ability to delegate functions to your reflexes and muscle memory is, so far, irreproducible. I can’t do the math in time to catch a softball if somebody tosses me one—but my body, sufficiently practiced, can just reach out and snag it out of the atmosphere.
Well, unless I’m under gravity. In which case my body has no clue what it’s doing.
We couldn’t, obviously, count on station guidance on the way out. So he was doing it all himself, and it was impressive to watch.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Connla, because we both knew the stationmaster and the Goodlaw weren’t the only people who were suspect. “You liked Pearl.”
He grunted. “I hope it was the stationmaster, too.”
“New problem,” Singer said, merciless. “Where exactly in the six thousand, three hundred, fifty-one systems; eight thousand, eight hundred, and seventy-three worlds; and tens of thousands of miscellaneous outposts—estimated from best available recent date—are we going now, oh my fugitive crew?”
Singer always asked the best/worst questions. I stalled, because organic life-forms need a lot of boring time to think, not having as many parallel processing pathways as our AI brethren.
“Are there really that many inhabited worlds?”
“Counting moons, but not counting asteroid outposts,” he said. “Remember, some systems have multiple habitable worlds, especially when you start counting methane and chlorine and water breathers.”
Now that he mentioned it, I’d heard that Terra had come to arrangements with some systers about a colony on a moon of one of the gas giants there. Ox breathers like me don’t have much use for a nice, rich, frozen ball of methane, but somebody sure does.
More power to them, I say. There are benefits of having a friendly noncompetitive syster civilization next door. Somebody farther out in the system might be able to catch an inconvenient rock before it bumps into your homeworld, for example. And there’s exploration to consider as well. Much easier for somebody who’s at home in an environment to map it and science it up than somebody who needs a drone or a pressure suit to get there.
I thought of Cheeirilaq, and how logistics made it impossible for many of us to have any chance at all of visiting each other’s homeworlds except for virtually. I’d argue that that’s a strength of the space natives. We come from the same world, even if we breathe different things, and our perspectives overlap in ways people like Connla have to work much harder to appreciate.
We’re all little warm things in the bosom of the great Cold, after all. Well, okay. Except for those methane types. They’re generally not very warm at all. Though warmer than space, which is something.
“We could go join the Freeports,” Connla said, deadpan.
“I think they’re trying to eat us,” I replied. “I suspect any offers of assistance from that quarter come with fishhooks.”
“Piracy really isn’t my thing,” Singer agreed.
I couldn’t believe it was me who offered, “Head for the Core, explain what happened, turn ourselves in?”
“You’re full of interdicted tech without a good explanation for how it got there, and no way to get it back out again,” Connla said. “I’m sure your by-the-book Goodlaw friend is likely to mention that in the next packet.”
“If Habren lets it,” I said. I had a feeling about how free and clear communications going in and out of that station were. “Why are the pirates still after us?”
“How did they track us?” Connla countered.
“Oh, I think I know that.” I sighed. “Another way I’m a liability. Singer, I’m sorry, this isn’t making things easier for you, either.”
“They can’t have tracked you,” Singer said. “They were at the station when we arrived. They must be thinking that we tracked them.”
I knew that a Synarche service summons wasn’t the sort of thing you just… shrugged off. And I… didn’t have anywhere else to go.
“Posit,” Singer said. “The pirates are still after us because they want you, Haimey.”
“They were willing to blow me up pretty good along with the rest of us back at the factory ship.”
“Are we sure those are the pirates?” Connla asked.
“Well,” I cursed. “Don’t tell me there’s a third party running around with a dose of Koregoi-Ativahika nanobug parasites. I’m not sure I’m ready to incorporate that.”
Singer said, “There’s a possibility that they didn’t know you had the Koregoi senso on board, at that point. Or that you’d integrate it and be able and willing to use it. Also, they shot us free of the Jothari ship. They could have just blown us up.”
“Huh,” Connla said. “Right. So we presume for now that they are, in fact, pirates. Why do they want us now when they didn’t before?” He picked at his thumbnail thoughtfully.
“They reviewed the Milk Chocolate Marauder’s files and saw me get jabbed. Or Farweather just felt the stuff in me.” I shrugged.
I thought for a few moments about things that didn’t make sense. Like the pirates not destroying us outright, if that was their goal. Like Zanya Farweather knowing who I was, and at least a little bit about my history.