I watched sweat gather along the edge of her eye socket. Her breathing slowed; echoing mine, I realized, as I was regulating mine more out of habit than intent. I turned my head, because she was breathing on my face.
She ground her hips unsubtly against me, and I elbowed her in the ribs. “That’s assault.”
“Ow,” she said. “And what’s that?”
“Self-defense,” I answered. “Is it over? Do you think we should—”
We slammed sideways. Farweather cried out. I couldn’t answer, because the stanchion I’d sweet-talked the ship into growing—the one we were both now chained to—had slammed me in the ribs. The breath came out of me hard and sharp, and it wouldn’t go back in. She grabbed on to me, arms around me, and I wheezed against her shoulder and into the crook of her neck.
She smelled so good.
You’re not supposed to think of things like that when your life might be ending. On the other hand, that’s often when your body really, really wants to think about them.
We hit the deck. And then the wall, and then the deck again. We lay there gasping, clutching each other. She was on the bottom; then we bounced again and hit the end of the chain and we were side by side. Pain spiked through my elbow when she landed on it.
Her breath was hot against my throat. Breasts soft, hips sharp and painful. A pliers dug into my floating ribs. There wasn’t anything I could do to move it.
The lights shone through our translucent padding, and I looked into her transparent dark brown eyes, to the satin sheen and the patterns of veins and pigment at the back of them.
“This is a hell of a long way to go for a date,” she said, between breaths that sounded painful.
“Shut up,” I explained.
She kissed me, and I…
I let it happen.
And then I kissed her back.
Don’t get me wrong. I knew it was a terrible idea, even while it was happening. But I wanted it, and I wanted her, and I was terrified and she was there and—
Sometimes you do something that you’re not supposed to.
It was a very ill-advised kiss.
It happened anyway. And you know? I liked it.
And then we hit the stanchion again, right where the chain crossed our bodies, and snapped away from it one more time, and I—
—blacked out.
I woke up again pretty quickly once the gs were gone. Or returned to normal, I should say, because we weren’t floating, just lying on the deck in an uncomfortable bundle. The air around us was stale and smelled of sweat and a little urine. Farweather was staring at me speculatively—and a little bruisedly—from centimeters away, and everything around us seemed cool and peaceful.
“Is it safe?” I asked her.
“Is anything?”
Farweather managed to extricate one hand and struggled with the carabiner until it came loose. We rolled, unwinding the chain, and made little grunting sounds of unhappiness whenever weight or something unforgiving landed on a bruise. There were a lot of bruises. There was a lot of grunting. I figured I had at least two cracked ribs. Come on, Koregoi buggies, fix me up.
You know, it hadn’t occurred to me before just that minute that Farweather’s EM pulse had not disrupted the parasite, that I could tell. I hadn’t even thought about it. I guess I really was integrating those senses.
Neuroplasticity. It’s a hell of a thing.
Finally we unwound ourselves and got a little space between us. Superstitiously, neither one of us crawled out of our packing material yet. And neither one of us stood up, either.
Well, I say it was superstition. Maybe it was sense.
We lay there, side by side. I was panting and aching. I was only paying enough attention to Farweather to make sure she didn’t intend to brain me with that wrench.
The ship shuddered again, but the gravity remained intact this time. And now that I wasn’t distracted by being slammed against internal structures, I realized something.
Through the Koregoi senso, I could tell that we were… slowing. Gradually. Not falling out of white space all at once as the bubble collapsed, but instead… unfolding. The Koregoi ship’s drive was gradually smoothing the space around us, doing something impossible—allowing us to change vector and apparent velocity while in white space.
And through the Koregoi senso, I could also feel that there was another ship.
Another ship, in white space. Coming up on us fast, then—incredibly—matching pace with us. Falling into formation, which was something that I had heard military vessels could do, but I had never actually witnessed happening. Even in all of Connla’s fancy flying, merging bubbles and coaxing abandoned vessels out of folded space-time, I’d never seen anything like this.
Pirates.
“We’ve got company,” Farweather said unhappily, because of course she could feel everything that I could.
I looked at her in surprise. “Not yours?”
“That wasn’t the plan,” she said. “But I’ve been out of contact. Maybe the plan has changed.”
“Maybe they were following, and when the ship started acting weird they moved in?”
She gave me a sly look. If she gathered that it was a test, and I was fishing for knowledge of the Freeporters’ technological abilities, she didn’t let on.
She just shrugged. “I guess we’re going to find out.”
CHAPTER 23
THE LIGHTS DIMMED ONCE MORE, and the whole giant ship shuddered. I regretted unrolling ourselves from the padding, but the gravity stayed on and we didn’t suffer any sudden, unexpected vector changes that left us ricocheting off the walls.
I unlocked Farweather’s chain, and she gazed at me speculatively, rubbing her wrist. “If I’d known that all it would take was kissing you, I would have done that ages ago.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m going up to observation. This is your chance to come along.”
Also, if something terrible happened to the ship and I was incapacitated, I needed to know she had a fighting chance to survive, and I hadn’t left her welded to a bulkhead wall to starve.
“Observation, huh?”
“Shake a leg,” I said. “It’s pretty.”
We made it up slowly, limping and leaning on walls. She kept an elbow pressed to her side hard enough that I thought about offering to wrap her ribs for her, but she didn’t ask and if she didn’t ask I wasn’t going to offer. I was braced for her to try something, but she didn’t. Possibly she was counting me as a potential ally if it turned out that we had enemies in common.
In any case, I wasn’t going to turn my back on her. So I made her go first, and she didn’t complain. I was carrying her bolt prod, anyway—I’d retrieved it from my hiding spot before I turned her loose—so it probably would have been a bad idea for her to come after me unless she could get the drop somehow.
We proceeded to observation. It was pretty. We were still in white space, and the twisting bands of light were particularly lovely for being so narrow, with so much dark between.
Gorgeous to look at, but it gave me a chill. We were way out in the Dark and the Empty, if this was all the starlight around.
Starlight. What a tautology. As if there’s anything else in the universe that makes light. Directly or indirectly, all the light there is originates from stars.
Well, I suppose you could make a case for antimatter, or for burning hydrogen, but you’d have to stretch the point, and besides, fussing with poetry until you ruin it has never been a sport that appealed to me.
Farweather walked toward the dome, still rubbing her wrist where the shackle had been. She didn’t seem to have any galls or sores—I’d been careful to pad the thing, and to give her supplies to change the padding regularly—so I guessed it was just the reflexive fussing motion of someone recently freed.