What had happened to Singer? What the Well could have gone so terribly wrong? There had been no sign that the Koregoi ship was taking any automated action. I hadn’t felt any tremor though the hull, as if a mass driver had been activated, and there had been no visible trace of energy weapon. A ship built by people who could manipulate gravity at a whim might have other weapons, though—weapons out of fantasy, repulsor rays and rattlers.
I realized that I wasn’t lying down anymore. That somehow, without realizing it, I had rolled upright and run to the arched dome of the observation pod.
I leaned on the transparent shell and looked around for something that I could jury-rig to in order to make an antenna. That simple tech; a pre-space juvenile could build one with a bit of wire. I just needed something conductive that extended into the outside, or that connected to something else conductive that likewise extended.
The adrenaline was wearing off, and behind it came the grief and horror I didn’t have time to feel, slicking up my palms and eyes. I shut it down, tuned harder than was possibly safe, knowing that if I pushed myself as hard as I needed to it was likely to destabilize my brain chemistry for diar unless I spent a long, careful time coming down off the bump I was giving myself. Dumping a lot of brain chemicals into yourself abruptly tends to send the system into wild spins. And I wasn’t as good at tuning this stuff as…
…as some people.
I got myself together with a couple of deep breaths and didn’t look at my air gauge. There was plenty of atmosphere in the Koregoi ship if the option became breathing it, or suffocating. Then I began quartering the edge of the dome, looking for something I could use to boost a signal.
It was all smooth and organic, as if the damned bubble had grown there.
After a few minutes, I looked up, frustrated, to judge the position of the Synarche ships. I froze, horrified, as I realized that they were pulling away. There was no external sign of their trajectory—no flare of a chemical burn—as they were operating off the EM drive. But they were definitely backing off. Leaving me alone in here.
It made sense, of course. It was the safe and sensible thing to do. Something had just destroyed Si—destroyed the tug, destroyed the tug, dammit—and the smart money would have bet on the source of that aggressive action being the Koregoi vessel we’d just dragged up from the abyss of deep time.
The Synarche ships had approached cautiously. Now they were hightailing it back to a more respectful distance at maximum a, hanging v on their survey ships like garlands. I didn’t blame them; I just wished I was out there with them. Or better yet, that all of us were.
Stop thinking about Singer.
Half of a tug turned in space. Another piece had blown away, and I could not locate it now. It was conceivable that somebody had survived in there. In an airlock or a safety pod. If they were suited up already. It was conceivable.
Sure it was.
I shook my head in awe at how screwed I was, and started thinking about what I could do for food, once I tried the air and it didn’t kill me—which was going to be a little while yet, in any case. There was a lot of ship to explore, and the Synarche ships would be back. Staying alive… Well, you could go a long time without food. Water that I could be sure was safe, and oxygen, however—each need was orders of magnitudes more urgent than the one before.
I leaned my head back and blinked through another flush of tears. Then threw myself back away from the observation dome in a comically useless reflex as something swept through the tiny—in space terms—gap between Singer and the Koregoi ship.
You can’t see a ship in white space. In the normal course of events, you can just barely detect it with gravitometric sensors, though that becomes easier if it’s not moving. Or more precisely, not folding your region of space past its stationary location at a really incomprehensible rate of something that functionally mimics speed.
It turned out that I could sense a ship in white space pretty well now, though. Or at least, the Koregoi senso could. And my reflexes had opinions about large things moving extremely fast near the fragile soap-bubble of an observation dome.
A few moments after the gut-twisting blur of a ship in white space, I sensed something even more unnerving. A faint impact rang through the Koregoi ship—easy to sense because I happened to be in close contact with it, by which I mean sprawled flat and trying to catch my breath for the second time that dia.
Something—something not terribly big or extremely fast-moving, but with enough momentum to send a shiver through the vessel—had just struck the hull.
I froze for a moment, hunched in an ancient mammalian cringe posture—chin tucked, shoulders popped around my ears like epaulets, forehands half-raised. Waiting for the next explosion, the one I would hear and feel instead of seeing at a distance, in a position that would do absolutely nothing to protect me from it.
Won’t have to worry about starving to death, I thought.
And then I… didn’t die.
A few more moments went by, and I didn’t die some more.
I peeled myself out of my defensive crouch. Centimeter by centimeter, I straightened. I looked around, aware that if I had been on a station, I’d be a good candidate for that dia’s monitor follies programming right about now.
Isn’t it amazing how you can be embarrassed as anything even when nobody’s looking? If I were a cat, I would have been washing my ears. Except for the helmet being in the way, of course.
Not being dead, I tried to feel my way into the ship’s senso again. It felt… echoing, empty in there without Singer. But I persisted. Nothing like work to aid compartmentalization, right?
I let my awareness filter into the ship’s sensor network, like ink diluting into water. It was surprisingly easy—more a matter of relaxing my boundaries than pushing through a membrane. It seemed to work better, actually, when I let go of my intentionality and just let the Koregoi senso handle the transition itself. I had a sort of proprioception, as if the ship were an extension of my nervous system.
The ship was a great hollow shape, its drives quiescent but waiting, its spaces full of secrets I would have to explore if I wanted to have a chance of surviving until the Core ships decided it was safe to come back. If it was safe to come back.
Was it safe to come back?
I was paying more attention to my planning than to what I was feeling through the ship, so I was utterly blindsided when the quivering tendrils of my sensibility, so to speak, brushed up against an unexpected, and unexpectedly familiar, human presence. And not a welcome one. I snapped back into myself in shock and dismay. Well, additional dismay—I already had plenty, but now I had an even more immediate problem than possibly pathogenic atmosphere and a soon to be pressing need for hydration.
It was a greedy, grabbing awareness, and when I brushed it I recoiled as it snatched after me.
It was Farweather. And she was on the ship with me. And she knew I was here.
The projectile that struck the Koregoi hull had been a pirate.
My pirate. Or the pirate who wanted to collect me, which I suppose amounts to the same thing.
I froze as if under the shadow of a predator’s wings. I needed to escape. Viscerally, out of the kind of instinctive, atavistic sense of self-preservation that—if you don’t answer it—results in crippling anxiety or blind panic. My heart rate accelerated, and for a long moment I just stood listening to it, feeling my pulse tremble in my fingertips so hard they seemed to pulse against the inside of my suit. I was too terrified even to scream.