Furthermore, I could smell her roasting coffee in there occasionally, and after twenty diar of space nori three meals a dia, I probably would have launched a commando raid just for a pound of beans, even if I had to chew them and swallow my spit to get any good out of them. So there was honestly no chance of me waiting too long.
The mutineers on the Bounty had their strawberries. You know, people say all the time that they would kill somebody for a cup of coffee. It was literally starting to seem like a pretty good idea to me.
Well, not kill. I wasn’t going to murder anyone if I could possibly help it. I was willing to keep telling myself that until I convinced myself, too.
Not for coffee. Not for Singer. Not for Connla. Not for Bushyasta and Mephistopheles, and honestly I was maddest about the cats. They hadn’t had any choices or any options.
I told myself again that I wasn’t here to kill anybody todia.
Not if I could help it.
I was pulling on my boots—which I was finally used to—to go make it happen when the imp that installs perverse hardware and his sister, the imp of perverse coincidence, intervened. But let me go back a little, and tell it all in some sort of order.
I didn’t have the boots on already because I was moving through the maintenance access tubes—what I assumed, anyway, were maintenance access tubes, because I had no idea what the heck else they might be for. And as a human engineer playing archaeologist in a vast alien starship, I figured I was entitled to a little intellectual laziness.
I’d had—reluctantly—to bump twice to keep my anxiety levels manageable while I made my way through the tubes. It wasn’t their narrowness—I would have had to have any claustrophobia rightminded out a long time ago to keep being a tugboat engineer—it was the fact that I was trying to move through them in utter physical silence, floating along and directing myself with tiny touches. While also keeping my sensorium pulled in tight against my skin, not interacting with the ship at all, and hoping that in so doing I could hide my movements from Farweather, if she happened to be looking for me.
She had some kind of a trick that concealed her whereabouts pretty well, except when it didn’t. I just hoped I was reasonably approximating the manner in which she accomplished it. It turns out that sneaking is physically and emotionally exhausting, which maybe was why she didn’t do it all the time either.
Who would have guessed she might have human frailties and failings?
I’d mapped all of the parts that were outside of what I thought of as Farweather’s territory, and I both had them foxed in, and had developed the kind of intimate muscle memory that takes practice and exploration. When I drifted onto Farweather’s turf, though, it was like moving from a well-lit space to a dim and smoke-filled one. I had my theories and extrapolations to navigate by, and I had as far down the tubes as I could see with my own unaugmented eyes. I projected a skin of my theorized map onto the walls of the tubes as I spidered along, imagining myself some kind of formless sea creature wafting through pipes and down drains.
I always was a little too creative for my own good.
The anxiety was bad. The sense of all the ways things could go wrong loomed intensely over me, congealed into a breathless knot behind my sternum. And I kept coming up with new ones. I could mess up the gravity and get squished. I could get sealed in and spend the rest of my objectively quite short but subjectively probably very long and unhappy existence like a jellyfish in the tubes, drifting along, unable to get out. And both of those seemed preferable in my head to the idea that I was going to have to climb out of this accessway and go get into a physical confrontation with somebody who was armed and didn’t mind conflict in the slightest.
Clades… are not big on training people how to maintain boundaries and manage necessary conflict. We all just get along. No matter what. Whether it suits our personal needs or not. Personal needs are a privileged affectation.
I didn’t really have an option of getting along with the pirate. Not unless I wanted to wind up trapped in some Freeport outpost fixing stolen ships as an indentured servant or something similar.
Turn it off.
Dammit, I tried!
I had tuned the anxiety out, but the fear of the situation was enough that it kept breaking through. Deep, visceral programming: avoid the fight. It was paralyzing.
Don’t choke, I told myself, and then rolled my eyes at myself. I had probably just ensured that I would be choking.
After three minutes clinging to a coil of piping, forcing my limbic system to stop hyperventilating through blunt and hard-core endocrine control, I thought of Connla’s flying trick of bumping his sophipathology up enough so you didn’t worry too much about consequences.
It seemed like a terrible idea.
After two more minutes, I decided I needed to try it, or Farweather was going to figure out where I was, poke a bolt prod in through a convenient access hatch, and electrocute me in my burrow like a particularly large and smelly ship rat.
I bumped, got a little magnetism in there to turn off the inconvenient brain bits for an hour or so, and set a timer lockout so I couldn’t do it again until after the first dose had worn off. That last part is pretty essential if you’re doing this sort of thing alone, because once you turn off your common sense and ability to assess consequences, it turns out almost nobody wants them back again.
After that, everything was easy and I couldn’t figure out what I’d been so apprehensive about. I felt confident, loose. I knew what I was doing, and I wasn’t going to have any problem handling one little pirate. This was my domain—space was my domain—and if nothing else I could just get the Prize to shut down gravity entirely and be six times as capable in free fall as she was.
Hell, Farweather didn’t even have afthands. Whereas I could anchor myself, eat spaghetti, turn a screwdriver, and pick my nose simultaneously. And without even getting the spaghetti anyplace biologically inappropriate.
It took me only a little bit of exploratory back-and-forth to check the location of the access hatches. I’d gotten pretty expert at identifying their nubby bits and the pressure points that made them smoke up and vanish when you wanted to go through. Confident I’d gotten as close to her command center as I was likely to, I located an access hatch I could use to get out into the corridors. I unslung my boots from over my shoulder and started working them on my afthands, as previously mentioned. Once I had them seated, I’d reach out into the Koregoi senso, try to feel where Farweather was before she noticed me (assuming she hadn’t spotted me already and also assuming she wasn’t lying in wait) so I could pop out, slam the gravity down around her, and give her the thumping she so richly deserved.
That was when I heard the screaming.
Reflexively—and when had using the alien technology that had infected my body without my consent become reflexive?—I reached out into the Koregoi senso. It unfolded like releasing cramped wings, and I felt instantly less anxious—as if my inner ear had been affected, or my hands bound behind my back, and I’d been trying to walk a balance beam. The relief was profound.
So profound it almost made up for the screaming.
Actually, the noise didn’t bother me at all, except as noise. It was really irritating, like a crèche full of three-an-olds not getting their own way.
If I just shot her, the noise would probably stop, wouldn’t it?