I stripped down to my skinsuit and didn’t die immediately, which was a relief and a little bit of a surprise. I knew the ox levels were okay; we’d checked that before—we’d checked that. There were alien ecosystems to which humans responded with instant and fatal anaphylaxis, and I had no guarantee that whatever was still floating around in the ship from the Koregoi era wasn’t fatal.
All I could promise myself was that anaphylaxis would be faster than either gas gangrene or starvation. Which was, quite frankly, a win the way things were going currently.
My nether extremities looked better than anticipated. Or better than feared, anyway. Some blisters, two of them popped. A few abrasions. Some swelling, and a tendon that might be strained or just sore. Mostly what I was feeling, I thought, was muscle soreness from unfamiliar use—though don’t get me wrong, that hurt quite enough.
At least it would all heal fast. Thank you, ancient aliens.
I tuned again, and reminded myself not to use the lack of ongoing pain as an excuse to hurt myself worse. I rationed myself some water and some yeast concentrate from my suit stores, and consumed it as slowly as I could manage, and when I relieved myself I made sure to use the recycler built into my suit. In a survival situation, save everything you can.
Then I had time to think, and to put a few things in perspective.
One of those things was the question of just what had happened to Singer. And Connla. And the cats.
I no longer thought the Prize or its defenses, even automatic ones, were responsible. Instead, it seemed likely that what had happened was that Singer’s tug had been caught in the edge of a nearly superluminal particle blast, the bow wave of Farweather’s pirate ship dropping out of white space for a few seconds so that she could make the completely unbelievably risky jump across empty space from it to the Prize before it accelerated again.
I already knew the pirate pilots were hotdoggers; we’d established that out by the Milk Chocolate Marauder where they’d nearly killed themselves and us with close flying. I couldn’t say we were lucky this time—my ship, my shipmates—but honestly, the Koregoi ship or the remains of Singer or even one of the Core ships could have gotten snagged up in a fold of space-time when the Freeport ship lobbed itself back into white space, and that that hadn’t happened… Well, it was good flying, a miracle, or both.
What was Farweather doing on the Prize right now? Now that she had it, I didn’t expect Farweather to leave the Prize just parked in the middle of the Synarche fleet. Did her derring-do indicate that she knew how to get it moving? Or had it just been a sophipathological gamble?
One in a series of same, if so.
Well, we could be moving now, for all I knew. It’s not like there would be a sense of acceleration in white space, or for that matter inside a ship with controlled artificial gravity under any circumstances. I thought about that for a moment—the implications of it, the effect on maneuverability. If you could control for forces with technology, you could pull the kind of g and a in a crewed ship that you could in a drone, without worrying about converting ship’s complement and cats into a fine protein paste all over the inside of the hull.
No wonder the pirates wanted this tech.
…The pirates had this tech, didn’t they? They would have gotten it from the factory ship, if they hadn’t had it already. A nice cargo of devashare was one thing, but surely the reason Farweather would have infiltrated the ship and killed everybody on board it was their shiny, newly installed gravity.
I wondered if she’d brought the Koregoi senso with her, or if that had been something else she’d stolen.
I lay down in that storage locker, and I slept like I’d pricked my finger on a spindle and fallen under a spell. I should have set traps, alarms, protections—I didn’t do any of those things. All I did was try to squish my senso down into a tiny, smooth, reflective ball that I could hide inside and pretend I was invisible. Honestly, it was as much a visualization exercise as anything that had any science behind it. Synarche senso could be activated by targeted visualization, because it was Synarche senso, and because it was designed to integrate seamlessly with the neurology and physiology of as many different sentients as possible.
In the case of alien superscience… well. I was pretty sure it was magical thinking, but in all honesty I was too tired to care. There is only so much clarity one can obtain from chemical support before the sheer biological necessity of rest overwhelms even the most aggressive program of bumps, as most people discover the hard way in their school ans.
I never put myself in the infirmary, but at least two of my clademates did, and one of them needed extensive neuroreconstruction afterward. Probably even more extensive than my Judicial Recon, after Niyara. I didn’t have extensive organic damage, after all. Just psychological. Well, and the organic remodeling that follows trauma.
I think the nightmares were what at least partially got me over my clade-bred resistance to tuning.
Magical thinking or not, Farweather didn’t find me and kill me in my sleep. Karma shelters the fool, and I woke up still alone in my storage locker. Still alone in my head, too. Which was better than I’d dared to hope for when the lights went out.
When the lights figuratively went out. The Prize’s veins of ambient illumination were still glowing softly in the surfaces, and I had no way to instruct the ship to shut them off. I’d wrapped a fold of cloth across my eyes instead. They did seem to have dimmed, though—normally I’d expect to awaken to be dazzled by lights that had seemed of normal brightness when I lay down, but these were dim and soothing.
I sat up, shrugging out of my cocoon of soft-woven synthetics, and the locker around me brightened gradually, stopping at a comfortable level.
Well, that answered that. The Koregoi ship was definitely cooperating with me.
I wondered if it was cooperating with Farweather too, given that she also had the parasite. And was far more experienced in how to use it. Childishly, I hoped the Prize liked me better.
I reached out—not much of a reach in a space so narrow—and patted the wall of the storage locker just in case the ship wanted an affirmation that I appreciated its nurturing behavior.
I wish I could say I felt rested and clear of thought, but the fact of the matter is that I was stiff from lying still, and groggy and maze-headed and overslept. If I’d dreamed, I didn’t remember it, but I had that sense of oneiric hangover that sometimes follows on having navigated a particularly difficult and convoluted map of dreams. Maybe my tuning was holding up, and keeping the nightmares at bay. I made a point of pushing back the time limit on that, while I was thinking about it.
I stretched myself as silently as I could manage, wondering if there was a way to convince the ship to dim my interior lights again. It seemed to have accepted me bunking in this storage bin, but I could imagine the beams of light streaming out through every tiny crevice and crack and ventilation hole in the thing, never mind that open cover, and exactly how inobvious that wouldn’t be from the outside.
Also, it would be safest not to reside in any fixed abode. I couldn’t just avoid Farweather forever. We were on a finite ship, even if it was a ship as big as some stations, and she no doubt had some plans for how that might play out over time.
Which meant I needed plans too: a plan to protect myself from her, a plan to get control of the ship away from her, and a plan to get her under my control before she captured or got rid of me.