What a pity you don’t have a gun.
Oh yeah. That is a problem.
Calm down, Dz. There’s only two people on this boat that could be screaming, and you’re pretty sure this one isn’t you.
It could be a decoy.
Of course it could. Or she could be in trouble, in which case—
In which case, I really don’t have to do anything about it, do I?
Yes, Haimey. You probably do. You still need her expertise.
A heavy sigh escaped me, the only external signifier of my interior argument. Briefly, I closed my eyes. There was still screaming, but it sounded tonally different—less surprised, and more furious and pained. I’d guessed right—the noise was close, and it was echoing through the maintenance tube as loudly if somebody had set up a speaker in here to boost it.
At least if she’s hurt, she’ll be easier to contain.
Assuming she’s not in need of massive medical attention I can’t provide.
Well, either way, she’s not getting any less injured while we wait.
That’ll just make her easier to control.
Dz.
Over the top, I said to myself, and triggered the access hatch.
Well, I didn’t think she was faking it.
Farweather lay curled on her side in a puddle of very bright red blood, clutching her right wrist with her left hand. She was mid-shout when I weaseled out of the access door, found my orientation in local gravity, and dropped lightly down.
I landed in a crouch. Farweather stopped screaming and peeled her blood-slimed fingers loose from her wrist to snatch at her weapon. Red spurted, and she gave up trying to get the gun and went back to applying pressure again.
My weapon didn’t require me to reach for anything except the (metaphorically speaking) goodwill of the ship. I felt it, felt it acquiesce to my desire, felt it tighten down on the already fallen pirate with the force of several Earth gravities—no joke even for somebody raised down a well. For a spacer like me, it would have been profoundly incapacitating. With a squeezed, breathy moan, she collapsed onto her back, just about managing to keep pressure on her wrist as both hands were pinned to her chest by their own weight.
“Rot in hell,” she groaned, glaring at me.
I stood a meter off, observing Farweather and the apparatus surrounding her. It looked like a spring had recoiled, sending a piece of metal across her lower arm with enough force that it had acted like a blade. She had an arterial bleed going on, though not too bad a one—as if there were anything such as an insignificant arterial injury—and she was managing to keep enough pressure on it that while she could probably bleed out pretty easily if left untreated, she wasn’t in immediate danger of dying.
I guess she had sensed me coming, after all. If she hadn’t tried to get tricky, and had just gotten the drop on me the old-fashioned way by electrocuting me with her bolt prod or putting a few holes in me with the airgun she had holstered on her thigh, I’d be dead or a captive by now. But she’d tried to set a trap. And apparently I had been right about being the better engineer.
What kind of a sophipath wore a projectile weapon in a pressure vessel?
Well, a pirate who would think nothing of murdering a whole crew of people, even if those people were monsters. Silly question. Moving on now.
I probably really should kill her. I’d be saving my own life, and a lot of other lives over the long term, if I did.
I probably really should. But for now, I managed to swallow down another bolus of rage, and remember that I needed her. I groped in my suit repair kit for a roll of pressure tape. Crouching down, I braced and counterbalanced myself, and reached cautiously into the high-gravity zone to lay the tape very gently on her sternum.
If she was a cat, she would have been spitting at me with flattened ears.
“Go ahead and tape up that wrist,” I said.
She did, using one hand and her teeth, managing not to lose too much more blood in the process. It took her about ninety seconds, and by the time she was done more fresh blood was smeared all over her, the deck, her face, and everything else within range—including splatters on my boots. The roll of tape was absolutely thick with gore. One more small, irreplaceable, useful item off the inventory.
I really wished I had access to a printer. You never realize how spoiled you get by not having to keep stuff around because you can just make it when you need it, until suddenly you discover that stuff is a finite resource and you can’t just automatically get more.
When she’d stopped her bleeding, the next thing she did was reach for her gun.
I was, of course, ready for that, and pinned her to the deck hard enough that her face pulled back against the bones and her breathing grew labored.
“Bad pirate,” I said. I was gambling that if she wasn’t actively bleeding, her Koregoi parasite could repair her the same way mine had repaired me. Otherwise, well, there wasn’t much I could do for her that wouldn’t result in gangrene.
“…enjoying this.”
Yeah, I was. I wish I could say I wasn’t proud of it—I knew I wouldn’t be proud of it when I quit being a temporary psychopath—but it wasn’t so easy to stop enjoying it, either.
“Leave your weapons in the holsters, unclip them, and give them to me,” I said.
“Fuck you,” she answered.
“I’ll crush you,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” she answered. Her breathing strained under the weight of her own flesh. Still she managed a pained smile.
I let the ship pull her down a little more. She moaned. My fingernails dug into my forepalms.
She should be squashed like the insect she was. She should be paying for all the lives she had ended. Everything awful she had chosen and done. I wanted to smear her all over the decking and walk away.
She turned her head so her cheek lay flat against the deck, still looking at me. Her neck muscles weren’t going to enjoy that tomorrow, if we both lived so long. I wondered if the pressure was blurring her vision yet.
“More weight,” she said.
It wasn’t really a standoff, of course. I was healthy—healthy-ish—and she’d lost a lot of blood. I just reached in again, bracing myself even more carefully, and relieved her of her visible armaments.
First I had to spend ten minutes talking myself out of murdering her in cold blood. And by the time I’d actually worked up my moral fiber enough that I could touch her without assassinating her, she’d passed out due to acceleration sickness, and I could pat her down for other dangerous items (two knives, a monofilament garrote that she was lucky she hadn’t incorporated into her death trap or she’d probably be missing that hand entirely, and a spare clip for the air pistol) and make sure that her wrists and ankles were taped together securely with the blood-fouled suit repair kit.
By then, I was feeling more like myself again, which seemed like a great loss, because I didn’t even get the chance to kick her in the head a couple of times while I was still disinhibited enough to do it.
I even made a point of being careful to make sure she was getting adequate blood flow to her extremities, which was definitely more than she deserved, and I found her first aid kit (she wasn’t getting anything else out of mine) and gave her a spray-hypo of a broad-spectrum antibiotic and antiviral to keep her from getting alien space gangrene or the deadly Koregoi herpes or whatever else might be floating around out here.