“Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed.”
I blushed hot and sharp. “Hurry up with that fox reboot, would you?”
“Working on it,” he said.
“Besides,” I said. “That wasn’t what I meant. I meant I want her safely back in custody, and… what are we going to tell them about disposing of the pirate?”
“She can’t get far without a suit,” he said pragmatically. “We should tell them to send a constable over and get her.”
I bit my lip.
“And they’ll want the Koregoi ship, obviously. And me. And you. But the only things that might really get us in trouble are already pretty well mitigated by the result. I don’t think they’re going to dun me for propagating when the alternative was destruction; even an AI gets some latitude in the matter of self-preservation. And as for you… well, kidnapped by pirates is a pretty good excuse.”
I laughed out loud, stifling it because of Farweather. She rolled her eyes at me. I wasn’t supposed to know. “It is at that.”
I stepped back from the window and turned around. Raising my voice, I said crisply, “Please, Singer. Take us home.”
The Koregoi vessel did not so much as shiver now that Singer was firmly in control. I could tell that it was curving, because I could feel space bending around us. But Singer’s touch was sure and subtle, which was why—
When we fell out of white space, abruptly and without warning, it was as if we had hit a wall. A very soft wall, because there was no inertia. We didn’t go from moving to stopping. We just… weren’t bending the universe around us anymore.
The Interceptor, inside our massive coils, fell right out of space alongside us. Also stationary, thank the stars, because a collision hadn’t gotten any more appealing to me since the last time.
I am not sure I’ve ever been so happy about anything as I was at the outline of that souped-up Judiciary ship floating abeam the Prize.
Nothing moved. There was no sense of inertia. Space just unfolded around us… and we were back in the real world.
It was dark out here. Dark in ways that even our trip to the Milk Chocolate Marauder had not prepared me for. Space slid away like a waterfall of emptiness, bottomless and velvet in every direction. It seemed even darker because the bulk of the Koregoi vessel blocked the light of the Milky Way.
Certainly other galaxies floated out there in the dark, but they were so unimaginably distant that they hadn’t even yet begun to grow larger in perspective. They didn’t cast much light at all.
We were alone in a haunting emptiness, and I felt my heart thrum in my chest. It was terrifying out here—terrifying and beautiful and strange. This was alien country, a place not even my people, spacers born and bred, routinely went. We were far from help or any contact. This was the realm of unmanned probes and science teams and the sort of explorers and theorists and prospectors who probably needed their rightminding adjusted just a little bit.
But here we were. And home was really far away.
“Singer,” I said, trying not to sound too terrified. “What just happened?”
“I wish I knew.” A short pause. “No technical fault. No power interrupt. Our white bubble just… failed.”
Farweather hadn’t made any moves for the door, despite my turning away from her. It was a big-enough ship that she could get lost in it as easily as I had, if she managed to slip my watch, and the idea of playing cat-and-mouse through this damned ridiculous giant vessel with her again turned my stomach. Fortunately, she didn’t seem as if she wanted to brave her own weapons—in my hands now—or maybe it was Singer’s attention that was keeping her honest.
Now, under the circumstances, there was an infelicitous turn of phrase.
Void, but there was a lot of space out there.
I held my breath, awed by the infinity of darkness. A little terrified by the idea that our alien ship, which we didn’t understand, might be busted.
At least we had a Synarche ship with us now. We were not utterly alone. We could have lost them when the bubble collapsed.
The night spread out forever, empty and silent, utterly cold. Except not really empty, if you could sense what I could sense. Laced and knotted, instead, with a network of dark gravity stretchy and heavy and hauling the bright part of the universe unwittingly in line with its predeterminations.
As the conscious mind follows the density of trauma in the psyche, I thought, so the stars follow this reminder of the primal trauma and let it be their guide across the sky. And then I laughed at myself for being too pretentious, and reading too much George Eliot when I could.
I would have given a lot for a nice fat copy of The Mill on the Floss right about then, I tell you what.
I stretched my silver-limned forehand out to touch the material of the viewport, pressing my fingers against it so hard they tingled. My skin glowed in swirls and filaments, mycorrhizal, shifting emerald-metal webs. Uninsulated, without the shelter of my fox and its regulators, I felt…
I felt everything.
The whole universe was out there, as if it were laid on my skin. As if I were a part of it. Raw to it. Flayed, except it wasn’t painful, just painfully near. The night was huge, and I was a part of the night, so I was huge, too. Huge, and spread gaspingly diffuse.
So this was how Farweather did it. She was stripped off. Flensed. She let the universe get under her skin.
And so the universe showed her all sorts of things that were hidden from me.
I could begin to sense some of it: the weavings and twistings of the underlying structures, and some more of those strange gaps I had noticed on other occasions. The bits of the pattern that were too even, too repetitive. In a complicated sequence, just out of my reach, like… ones and zeros in binary code. Like letters in an alphabet. Like amino acids in a DNA code.
Profoundly complicated, but a pattern that could be made to make sense. I could sense it better than I had before, as if I were nearer to it, less mediated, now. Touching it with a bare hand instead of a gloved one. I strained after it, thinking that if I could just get… close enough… just resolve the meaning of the thing, suddenly so much would be made clear. It was so patently artificial. So patently something that had been imposed on the structure of the universe by an intelligence, as opposed to something occurring naturally. The iterations were just too tidy. Intentionally so, as if they had been set up to be noticed.
And between that intentionality, overlaid on it, I could feel, quite suddenly, an enormous swarm of fast-converging shapes.
“We have incoming,” Farweather said.
“There’s something out here,” I told Singer. “I really need that senso online now, so I can share it with you. I don’t care about the rightminding or the regulators.”
“I care about the regulators,” he said.
I grimaced, thinking about my erratic behavior. This wasn’t really the time to bring it up, though.
But I was spared answering, and probably humiliating myself further, because all that velvet night around us was abruptly full of ghosts.
The observation deck was restfully dim to limit internal reflections. And the windows seemed to be coated, or made of something nonreflective, as well. So if I hadn’t had my hand on the transparency, I would have felt that I was standing with no barrier at all between me and the gargantuan shapes of an uncountable number of Ativahikas, drifting out of the darkness, bioluminescing softly.
They were enormous, dark, but limned at the edges against the greater dark beyond. They writhed and lashed in their tattered finery, trailing ragged swaths of elongated skin like the trains of a gown. They shone in the darkness, wiping echoes and afterimages across my dark-adapted retinas.