There were… dozens of them. Too many to count, and anyway they were moving, swarming and swirling around us like a flock of mining vessels mobbing an asteroid. Except every single one of them was as long, or longer, than even the enormous Koregoi ship, and mining vessels are generally smaller than the average asteroid.
Singer recovered before I did. I stood transfixed. He said. “We’ve been seeing a lot of these guys.”
His words at least shook me partway out of my reverie. “What do you suppose they want?”
“It’s been a weird trip,” Singer replied.
I realized that the swarm was describing a complex pattern, a kind of dance with our ship at the center, unless that was just perspective fooling me. Off our flank, SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly hung, motionless (relatively speaking). Beyond our common ambit, the Ativahikas looped and spiraled around and over and under us and one another, weaving an intricate choreography. I stared, trying to work out the math behind it. Just as it seemed as if it might resolve itself, begin to make a peculiar sense—I thought of Terran honeybees dancing about honey—the pattern changed.
As chorus line dancers part like a sea in order to deliver up the star, the Ativahikas swirled and separated, forming a whirling ring around the gap in their pattern with a swath of night behind.
Through that gap sailed a single entity. An Ativahika that even to my human eyes and experience looked old.
Its bioluminescence stuttered and crawled over its hide in waves, brighter at the crests and dimmer in the troughs than what gleamed on the fringed flanks of the surrounding individuals. Its hide had paled from the rich, sheening algal teal of the others to a watery turquoise. Even the swags of its intricate drapes seemed sparse and ablated.
Children, it said, its voice internalized and reverberating through me, and not exactly words—more an impression of meanings. Why should we not destroy you, and this terrible thing you have done?
It wasn’t entirely unlike getting a senso translation from somebody like Habren. Communication was being intermediated by the parasites, I realized; the Ativahika was speaking to me through the sparkling little mites refined from the body of its dead species-mate.
No wonder it was mad.
I glanced over my shoulder. Farweather, looking stunned, was rotating slowly toward me. She was hearing it, too, and the expression on her face was that of a child suddenly confronted with consequences for a misdemeanor she had been sure she’d gotten away with.
She took a step back, a dark silhouette against the intricate moving patterns of the Ativahikas dancing in the night beyond. “How are they going to destroy us?” she scoffed, a bravado that I knew by now was her response to fear.
Easily, I thought. Where do you think your ability to manipulate dark gravity comes from? And that was without even considering their size and probable ability to just smash the Koregoi boat.
But saying that would have been pointless, arguing with her a waste of my energy when I needed to focus on the Ativahika and on not dying. And I had no idea how to communicate with the enormous creature who hung beyond the observation deck’s bank of windows, drifting so close I could see the plasticky, impermeable texture of its hide. An eye as big as an insystem skiff loomed over me, a vast elongated face wreathed in drifting tendrils.
It was huge. Inexpressibly huge, like being stared down by a space ship. I took a step forward and pressed my hands against the window once again. The enormous creature’s presence was magnetic. And it wasn’t as if running away would protect me from it, when all it had to do to deal with me was to disassemble the ship.
I guessed we’d just answered the question once and for all of exactly how sapient the Ativahikas were. And how they communicated. Which begged the question of exactly how I was going to communicate with it.
Well, it seemed to have no difficulty making itself understood to me. So I resolved that I would just… try to talk, and see what happened.
“I am deeply and profoundly sorry,” I said. “It was not by my choice, what happened. And I did not understand immediately what I had become infected with.”
You went to the ship of the murderers.
“I did,” I said. Honesty was pretty obviously the best policy here. Not just for ethical reasons, but because when you’re confronted with a superpowerful alien who is already in possession of rather a lot of inside information, it’s probably best not to get caught in a lie.
What was your purpose in going there, if you are not yourself a murderer?
“I went to salvage a derelict ship, so that its materials could be reused and so that, perhaps, the hulk could be rescued and repurposed. I did not realize until after I had entered the ship what its purpose was and what crimes the ship had been engaged in.”
And yet, you contain the symbiote.
“I contracted it by accident.” My palms were leaving mists of water vapor on the window where I leaned. I scrubbed them dry on my shirt.
That explanation left out Farweather, but honestly she was welcome to do her own explaining. The Ativahikas would have to crush the Koregoi ship anyway, to get to her, and let’s be even more honest, since we’re already neck-deep in honesty: they couldn’t do that without destroying me and quite possibly Singer as well.
So I was going to keep saying “I.” Assuming the Ativahikas even understood the difference between singular and plural pronouns, or how Terran humans tended to define the boundaries of self, I had no desire to get Singer or Connla (if Connla was even still alive) into trouble with the Ativahika.
Farweather was on her own, though. I wasn’t taking a fall for a mass murderer.
I expected the Ativahika’s next question to be something along the lines of “How do I know if you’re telling me the truth?” but it did not even appear to consider my lying as a possibility. I wondered if that meant it had some way of telling, or if the concept of being bullshitted was as alien to the Ativahika’s experience as the Ativahika itself was to me.
What it said instead was, How would you use this gift, if you were allowed to keep it?
Well, that stumped me. Or stunned me into silence, more precisely.
What had I planned to do, before I got derailed by being kidnapped by pirates?
“I’d use it for the good of the systers,” I said. “Under the direction of our Synarche. I’d use it to help people.”
I knew it was true as I said it. It had a sense of purpose to it that I liked. It made me feel like I was going somewhere, and maybe even knew where that somewhere was.
But you are fleeing the Synarche ship. And you are not going to the Core. You are going to a stronghold of the murderers.
“Yeah,” I said. “About that.”
Hoping Singer would jump into the conversation, I looked around. But of course he could only hear my side of it, because he hadn’t rebooted and reconnected to my senso yet. Across the deck, Farweather didn’t seem to be having a conversation of her own. Instead, she drifted steadily closer to me, her mouth congealing into a thin line. She could obviously hear both sides of the conversation, unless the ancient Ativahika was saying something different to her.
What was the natural life expectancy of an Ativahika, anyway? How long did it take for one such as this to get old? Not merely old, I judged, looking at the creature again. But venerable. I wondered if it knew the lore of the Koregoi, and if it could share that information with the systers. And what we could possibly offer in exchange to induce it to do so.