So, I couldn’t control the ship. Not yet anyway. But I could break it. And probably kill myself and Farweather in the process—slowly, through starvation or environmental failure after we were stranded. But if we were lucky, death might come quickly and kindly. Oxygen starvation wasn’t a bad way to go. You just got sleepy and foggy, and eventually sat down for a nice nap that lasted longer than you anticipated.
Restful.
I didn’t want to nap without end. I wanted to find out what happened, going forward. I wanted to keep finding out for as long as I could. Maybe it was selfish, and maybe I didn’t deserve it, but I wanted it. I wanted to keep existing. There were future selves that I could envision, and in envisioning, want to become.
That surprised me, a little, everything considered: my culpability in what had happened on Ansara; my recent bereavement.
If giving that up was what it took to keep the Koregoi ship from falling into the hands of the pirates, though? If I had to destroy the ship to save it, I decided… I would.
I was living with enough guilt already. Becoming somebody like Farweather would mean that I had died. Died and been reinvented as somebody I did not recognize, and somebody I did not want to be.
So I had a plan, and though I didn’t really want to face Farweather, my options were somewhat limited overall. I was going to have to feed her eventually, and myself also. And since I’d given her most of my breakfast, my own hunger situation was progressing beyond where the yeast tablets could manage it for me.
I was thinking about maybe spending another stanhour tracing power lines and checking their connections, though I didn’t think it would help much. Everything seemed to be orderly and in perfect working order. There was no reason for the power drops. And the power drops didn’t seem to affect the drive, which made me think that maybe the drive was the source of the problem. If it was for some reason drawing power erratically, that might explain the dips, though I had no idea what could be causing that except a drive problem, and there was a terrifying idea. Or maybe it was the gravity generators, if that was a thing, because sure, why wouldn’t there be gravity generators making the artificial gravity in this millennians-old Koregoi starship I was stuck on, on a one-way trip to nowhere… .
Was the ship somehow using dark gravity for that? As the Ativahika did for travel?
You’re getting hysterical, Dz.
Man, times like these, I missed my regulator.
Anyway, I’d just made up my mind that I was going to head back in a stanhour or so, when the power dipped again, longer and harder this time. I grabbed a nearby housing and held on for dear life, half expecting the gravity to flicker off or the ship to abruptly change course or v and the inertial dampers that kept us all from dying to snap off and leave me slamming from deck plate to bulkhead.
Maybe I was getting a little paranoid. Maybe just a little.
In the darkness, I could have convinced myself that I felt a chill. I was being ridiculous, and I knew it. A body as large and well insulated as the Prize would take a long time to radiate its internal warmth away to a point that the inhabitants would find uncomfortable. Space is a terrible conductor of things like heat; there’s not a lot of there there for the energy to move through. So the heat has to escape in the old-fashioned way, straight radiation, and that’s inefficient and slow.
The lights stayed dim a long time, though. Long enough that I clipped my tools and gauges and headed through the various undoors as I went. I had another bad moment—it was a dia for bad moments—wondering what I would do if the hatches failed to operate, but either they had their own power sources (smart), or they had priority when it came to main power (less smart), or the little nanite fogs that I figured were probably what made them up were self-willed and self-powered and basically did their own thing, which was rejoice in sealing and unsealing hatchways anytime somebody wanted to walk through them.
I wasn’t taking any chances that it would continue working, though. I gritted my teeth against the anticipated ache in my afthands, eschewed the more comfortable but smaller and circuitous maintenance tunnels, and I ran.
When I burst back into our nest, Farweather was on her feet, turning and looking from side to side. She couldn’t really see anything, because she’d been in a room without any portholes, and I hadn’t bothered to move her. I’d just grown that permanent appurtenance from the bulkhead (sweet-talking those same utility fogs, maybe? man, I wish I knew) and unceremoniously chained her to the wall.
As soon as I bolted in and stopped short, I knew she wasn’t behind the ship’s misbehavior. Her frosty exterior was melting, her face lightly sheened with sweat. Her pulse raced in the shadow of the hollow of her jaw, and she was so razor-sharp with decians of short rations that I could see it there. I knew what her heart felt like, thundering in her chest, because mine was palpitating too.
She whirled on me. “What did you do?” she said, her voice breaking between a whine and a snarl.
“Nothing,” I said as the ship shuddered around us. My legs almost buckled as I came off the floor and then slammed back down. I didn’t go to my hands and knees, but that was as much luck as balance, and it had nothing to do with having been prepared. “It’s—happening on its own!”
She glared for a second, then decided to believe me. “Get the mattress.”
Not the one she was standing on, obviously. I snagged my own seating pad from across the cabin and humped it up on my back like a spongy, crackling turtle’s shell. For a second, I thought of ditching my utility belt—but loose tools ricocheting around the cabin would be worse than lumpy, bruising objects that were nevertheless firmly attached to my body and could not, therefore, build up enough v to be truly dangerous unless I was ricocheting around with them, in which case I would have bigger problems.
I hopped over to Farweather, the pads and packing material trailing behind me like a train. She grabbed me and dropped. I thought about banging her one in the solar plexus, but she didn’t bite or punch, so I went with her. We pressed ourselves together. I grabbed her pad and she grabbed mine, and she rolled so the packing material wound around us in a protective cocoon.
A protective shroud, the unhelpful part of my brain said.
“Choke up on my chain,” she said as the gravity cut out again and we went briefly into the air, thumping a bulkhead before we slammed again into the deck. “I’ve got the padding.”
I wished I had time to tie it in place.
Wait.
“Roll,” I said, and showed her. She helped, thrashing against me, thrusting with her shoulders and hips. She was so thin, and I was so thin, that her hip bones ground against mine. We wound the chain around our layers of padding. It was long enough to go two and a half times—and it did a good job of pinning them in place and limited our collective range of motion. I managed to work a wrench clipped to a carabiner off my belt despite the confined space and used it to secure two links of the chain to each other, effectively pinning the padding to our bodies and the cocoon of the two of us to the corner between deck and bulkhead.
Then we… lay there. And stared at each other. And waited for the next fluctuation, with no control over whether it would slam us into a deck or smash us against a bulkhead.
Nothing happened.