Living like a mousie in the walls of the Koregoi Prize wasn’t any of those things. It wouldn’t take a ship’s cat with the wits of Mephistopheles to catch me. But it was a bit better than lying here like a sitting duck and waiting to be picked up, put in the bag, and made off with.
So. First step. Keep collecting supplies, and keep moving.
And figure out what the hell I was going to eat, too, and sooner rather than later.
I wrapped my salvaged storage-locker cloth strips and swaths into a makeshift bundle, and made shoulder straps for it. It made a halfway passable backpack. My boots, regretfully, I slid back on—wincing all the while, although I’d wrapped my afthands in strips of clean cloth. The strips were not particularly absorbent, because the materials were all what we Earth-types would call synthetic, which was also why they hadn’t rotted in however many millennians since the Prize was parked, but at least they were fluffy.
I would rather have left them bare—but trying to run around on my naked afthands, or even all fours, would have been worse in the long run than sucking it up and wearing the boots. I guessed I would just have to do what so many premodern soldiers had done, and get used to the pain of marching and try to heal the blisters while I kept right on marching, because there wasn’t any other choice.
Reasonable expectations, I realized—and not for the first time—had become a thing of the past. I might be the only soldier fighting this war, and it might be a war of two. But that didn’t stop what it was, and what I was doing here. Or the fact that the Synarche needed me.
On the move again, I risked reaching out very gently, very tentatively into the Koregoi senso webbing my body and my mind. I didn’t want to make contact with Farweather, but I was hoping to get a sense of where she was and maybe even what she was doing.
I didn’t get that. What I did feel was the textures and patterns of space-time slipping steadily around the Prize as white space peristalsed her down.
The Koregoi ship was moving.
We were under way.
I reeled a little. Farweather had gotten us moving, and I couldn’t tell you why I found that so startling and upsetting, but I did.
Okay, I take that back. I definitely knew why I found it upsetting—because I was alone in a ship I had no control over, heading into deep space after having been privateered by a Freeport pirate queen who’d infected me with, well, aliens. And that was, honestly, pretty startling on the face of it.
But I felt like I should have expected it. It was a bad thing, after all. You expected those and braced for them, so they couldn’t leave you gobsmacked, helpless with surprise.
Surprise is the kind of emotion that people like me—people with my upbringing who have left it, however many of us there are (a dozen or so?)—struggle to never, ever, ever get caught out by. We make sure we have plans in place. We consider options.
And here I was, surprised. Blindsided by grief.
Don’t worry about it now, Haimey.
Keep moving.
Small, attainable goals, and worry about the big goals when you have enough small goals lined up and accomplished to have any resources at all that you have a chance of working with.
I wondered where we were going.
CHAPTER 17
GOAL NUMBER THE FIRST: DON’T get caught.
Okay, then, what’s my plan of attack for that? Or the plan of evasion, more accurately. Step one, avoid contact with Farweather, either through senso or physically.
I didn’t have any illusions about my ability to take her in single combat. For one thing, while humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools. I belonged to a third group, equally usefuclass="underline" I was an engineer.
For another thing, I was pretty confident that Farweather hadn’t come to this alien environment unarmed. Unlike me. Because she was a fighter, every centimeter of her.
I could try to set a trap. But that was likely to fail and also likely to move me up on her priority list. Right now, I figured she probably had her work cut out for her in regard to exploring the Prize, mastering its systems, and getting where she wanted to be going, unexpected hitchhiker and all. If we got there, she’d probably have additional resources to throw at the problem of me, which meant that her best use of resources was to defend herself, defend the Koregoi ship’s key systems, and bide her time until she could meet me with overwhelming force. My earlier fears were realistic, but probably a little overblown, because if she decided to take the risk of coming out to get me it could result in potential failure of her mission objectives and possibly getting clobbered or killed herself.
She’d want to avoid that. I mean, I didn’t think I could take her, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t want to be cautious.
Sure, Haimey, I heard myself tell myself in Singer’s voice. Because caution has certainly been her watchword all along, and you have no evidence at all that she’s interested in capturing or subverting you for her own reasons, whatever the strategy behind those reasons may be.
I could try to ambush her. Probably, eventually, I would. But not todia. Because right now I needed an advantage.
So I had to assume that she would be defending herself, and I had to assume that she might, in fact, come after me. So while she was consolidating her control over the ship’s systems and setting up whatever defenses she was setting up, I needed to be learning the structures of the Prize like the warrens of the clade I grew up in. I needed to be a mouse in those warrens. A stainless steel rat in the walls.
Just as well to have something interesting to fill the standard hours with. All my book files were back on Singer. Without reading material, I needed something to occupy my time. Memorizing an alien spacecraft the size of a medium station would probably keep me busy. Unless it got me caught.
Or killed.
I hadn’t sat still while I was doing this thinking, either. In fact, I’d found something fascinating, which was that those organic-seeming corridors and the spaces they connected were webbed with service crawlways. Or service floatways, more precisely—because there was no gravity in those.
I pulled my awful boots off again, wrapped them through my makeshift backpack, and exulted in the comfort of having all four hands free to work as my ergonomics engineers had intended. Everything instantly seemed better when I wasn’t under g anymore, and even better than that when I sipped some reclaimed water and chewed a couple of yeast tablets. Your brain uses glucose to think, it turns out, and when you don’t have it, your decision-making and emotional regulation remains somewhat impaired, no matter how much you tune.
The playful teasing of my own interior voice reminded me of Singer, which was too much of a distraction, and I shut it down. My fox had been running the whole time, though—recording, memorizing as I moved through the ship. My meat memory might fail me, but I was going to use it anyway, because it was essentially bottomless. The machine memory could create a perfect three-dimensional map of the spaces I moved through. Once I had access to a shipmind again, and to more processing power than the tiny bit packed into my suit and skull, I would be able to use that map to generate the kind of plot that could reveal what I was missing and give me the shapes of spaces I hadn’t yet figured out how to reach. Spaces that might be solid-state, technology, hunks of computronium wedged in where they fit… or that might hide even stranger treasures.