The voice in my own head was sounding more and more like Singer with every passing dia. I wondered if my personality was bifurcating. I’d read somewhere that that wasn’t a real thing, but it sure showed up enough in old novels.
“It’s your hypocrisy that bothers me,” Farweather said.
I blinked at her. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Well, you’ll give me a lot of pious nonsense about how rightminding is essential for overcoming our atavistic urges and living in a civilized society, and yet you are afraid of using it yourself.”
“I don’t consider it cheating,” I said. “I use it all the time.”
She stared at me. I refused to look down. We broke at the same instant, or gave up, or decided it wasn’t worth continuing. I heard myself sigh in relief, though, and caught the tiny smirk at the corners of her mouth before she controlled it.
“No, you don’t, babes. You let other people use it on you. Other… things. Artificials. Objects.”
“Singer is a people,” I snapped. And then felt terrible, because Singer had been a people, and now he was gone. And this… creature had helped kill him.
If anybody was an object around here…
“Keep his name out of your mouth,” I said, and then felt even stupider, because she hadn’t even said his name.
I was losing this round, and I needed to disengage without seeming like I was running away.
“Then why?” she asked, her voice low and intimate.
I didn’t answer. Because I don’t trust myself to make those decisions was not the sort of vulnerability you revealed to an enemy. And I am, and always have been, a terrible liar. Another side effect of growing up in a clade: you don’t get a lot of practice, because everybody around you generally knows what you’re thinking most of the time anyway.
“So you don’t think you’re a hypocrite?” she asked.
“No,” I answered. “No more so than most people.”
She snorted, her child, you are so tiresome sound. “This from somebody who doesn’t like rightminding for herself, just for everybody around her—”
“That’s not what I said—”
“—and who’s decided to have her damned sexuality turned off rather than go through the rehab and therapy to deal with her trauma.”
I stared at her for a minute. She stared back levelly.
“How did you know I had that turned off?”
She shrugged. “You told somebody on Downthehatch, didn’t you?”
I stared right at her and said, “The reason I turned it off is because I have lousy taste in women.”
She smiled, and I couldn’t tell if she was failing to take my meaning, or failing to take my meaning on purpose, or just didn’t consider it the insult I had intended it to be. Actually, she looked like she was taking it as a compliment, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
“You could get that fixed too,” she said, smiling smugly.
“A lot of work,” I answered, smiling smugly right back at her, “for so very little reward.”
“You know,” Farweather said, “it wasn’t us that killed your friends.”
She was giving herself a sponge bath, crouched down with a bowl of water between her knees and a folded-up wad of fiber. I stood guard, turned slightly away to offer her a scrap of privacy. I’d rearranged her chains so she had a little more freedom, and I was watching her carefully for the time being to make sure it hadn’t been too much freedom. She made a pretense of docility, but I had my fox tuned to keep reminding me that she wasn’t tame and I needed to be on my guard around her. It would be much too easy to relax.
On the other hand, I was as much her captive as she was mine. I might have her body under control—but she, in her own way, had mine. I was going where she wanted to go, where her friends were waiting for us. And okay, it might be a little embarrassing for her to explain how she wound up handcuffed to a stanchion, but she could probably spin that as part of her master plan to subvert me.
I kept working on the ship, working on my connection to the ship. I was learning interesting and useful things, refining my control over its internal spaces, and I was utterly failing to get any control over its trajectory or speed. I wasn’t going to quit trying. But to be honest I wasn’t feeling very hopeful.
Farweather hadn’t looked up, studiedly casual, as if she didn’t care if I rose to her bait.
It was probably worth it. “Oh, didn’t you?”
She pulled her suit up, fastened it, and tapped the bulkhead with one finger. The nail was getting pretty long and clicked quite satisfyingly. I wasn’t about to give her anything sharp enough to cut them with. “You must have gotten close enough to trigger this thing’s self-defense mechanisms.”
I sat down against the far wall.
She pushed the bowl of water and the washcloth out of her immediate orbit. I’d clean them up later.
“That seems likely,” I said. I was trying for neutral, but the dryness must have soaked through.
She fastened her collar tab and gave me a lopsided smile.
“You want me to believe the Koregoi ship just attacked Singer. When I know your ship has guns, and you fired on us previously. When you came out of white space just then in a hail of particles.”
“We knew it had defenses,” she said. “That’s why we planned the high-speed flyby, dropping out of white space just long enough for me to bail out, correct trajectory, and spacewalk over to the vessel. We didn’t shoot you, so it must have used those defenses on your shipmates.”
“And your high speed had nothing to do with the fact that there were a dozen Core vessels lined up for a piece of the Prize.”
She smiled. “Most of them don’t have guns.”
A few had, though. But the pirates had been and gone before any of them could have acquired a solution. Which made it seem like maybe Farweather might be telling the truth about not being behind the death of Singer and his crew. The pirate vessel would not have had a lot of time to acquire a solution either. Especially if it had been busy coming up with a launch trajectory for Farweather.
But the bow wave…
Hell, maybe it was an accident. On the other hand, Farweather seemed capable of lying about absolutely everything.
I said, “I haven’t seen any evidence of guns on this ship, either.”
“You used the artificial gravity to nail me to the deck,” she said. “What’s to say that the ship can’t use the same technology as a weapon?”
I pretended I hadn’t already thought of that myself.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me. Your people obviously know more about it than mine do.”
She sat down too, facing me. I got up and moved her washbasin away, dumped it, wiped it clean. Started water for coffee.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Really? You didn’t get onto a ship controlled by a famously xenophobic race like the Jothari by trading them artificial gravity for access to their vessel? By installing it for them, and also installing the overrides?”
Her head had fallen to the side. Her hair was getting long, too. She smiled at me and didn’t say anything.
“So where’d you get that technology?”
“Who’s to say we did?”
“Less intact Koregoi ships?” I asked. “Dead ones?”
She leaned back and closed her eyes.
I said, “That just leaves the question of why you needed to get on the Jothari ship. It can’t just have been a matter of wanting to steal a ship with the artificial gravity tech, not when you must have sold it to them and gone along to help install it and play technician.”