He shrugged. “Why didn’t you mention how you were feeling?”
“Because it’s feelings,” I said. “And feelings are terrible. Also I didn’t want to guilt-trip you.”
“Right,” he said. “Me either.” He looked out the window. “Feelings are terrible.”
But I could see the reflection of his smile in the glass.
We docked and lugged the cats on board the Koregoi ship, through the blasted gravity. All that gravity. I hadn’t missed it a bit. The cats objected pretty strenuously to the whole concept, and the complaints started as soon as we brought their carriers off the launch.
Well, in all honesty, they hadn’t exactly taken to the launch’s acceleration kindly, either.
When Mephistopheles and Bushyasta were safely ensconced in our makeshift control cabin slash throbbing nerve center of the salvaged ship, and crews of constables were busy bringing over supplies, Connla and I set out to learn where the controls for the artificial gravity were. And how to adjust them. If we couldn’t turn the gravity off, maybe we could at least turn it down to something a little more manageable. That seemed like a better option anyway, given that the Koregoi vessel was not optimized to be navigated in free fall.
Considering that we had two irritable felines attempting to impersonate tortillas on the deck, and a low-grav Goodlaw who couldn’t wait to join the crew—and considering that my cartilage had been compressing at an alarming rate and that I was already centimeters shorter than when I’d come on board, figuring the gravity out seemed like the most urgent use of our time.
Singer was an enormous help, once he and Connla finished up the inevitable tearful reunion. All right, in complete honesty, it wasn’t nearly as tearful as my reunion with Connla and the cats had been. But in my defense, Connla wasn’t recently deregulated. And he did show a lot of the tenderer emotions, for him at least.
Singer was still locked out of a bunch of the ship, which was both fantastic news and Farweather’s doing. And she seemed to be doing something to keep me from tracking her through the Koregoi senso. Possibly the same thing I was doing to keep her guessing about where I was.
The ship was big—confirmed!—but it wasn’t that large. We had a rough idea of where she might be, but that was based on a map of the places Singer could not access, and of course if she was really clever she’d block whatever places she could and then convince the ship’s sensors to ignore her and build a nest somewhere else. I didn’t know that she could do that. But I didn’t know she couldn’t, either. And finding one rogue human concealed in the kilometers of twisty tunnels and chambers and corridors and crawlways and closets and tubes that made up the Prize’s habitable interior spaces was beyond the immediate capabilities of any of us. Even the AI.
We resorted, at last, to setting constables to patrolling in pairs on a random pattern, while we ourselves searched for the source of the artificial gravity through the simple and somewhat ridiculous measure of having me walk through the ship waving my hands like a charlatan with a dowsing rod looking for gold or veins of oxygen. I was feeling for what I can only describe as gravity currents. The curious thing was that they were there, and that they were definitely noticeable.
I just followed them along until we got close to a source. It was like following the thumping of some unbalanced piece of machinery by tracing its vibrations in the bulkheads to their point of greatest intensity. And, from there, figuring out what in the Well was malfunctioning.
Except in this case nothing was malfunctioning, obviously. And once we found the source—a machine room, similar to a dozen other machine rooms I had located over the course of my explorations—we weren’t any closer to figuring out how any of it worked.
We were concerned with messing with it; the odds of squashing everybody on board or creating a tiny artificial black hole or some even less predictable outcome seemed pretty high if we just went in and started swapping wires around randomly. So we took a poll and decided to let Singer do it.
Fortunately, knowing the physics behind the thing was not terribly important—to this task, at least. All we needed right now was enough access for Singer to figure out how to operate the controls.
That took him about a standard dia, give or take a few hours. If it had been me… well, we would still be floating out there in space. If we weren’t smashed flat.
It was a blissful relief when he—without fanfare—turned the gravity down. Not off, for all the reasons I mentioned before regarding the design of the ship, and also because artificial gravity was what the Prize used in lieu of acceleration couches. (And don’t ask me how that worked. I’m just a simple engineer.) But he set it low enough to be comfortable for a pack of undermuscled space rats and their feline overlords, and also low enough to make Cheeirilaq’s continued existence possible.
While we were waiting for Singer to sort that out, and while Connla and I were making friends with the six constables who would be the body of the Prize crew (all right, he was already friends with all of them, but I’m terrible at making friends), that was when I made an even more interesting discovery.
We were playing a Banititlan card game called tmyglick with Sergeant Halbnovalk at the time. Halbnovalk was a medic, which made her instantly my favorite crewmate.
The game is played with a deck of 343 cards, since Banititlans have three opposable digits on one manipulator and four on the other, leaving them with the lopsided profile of a Terran lobster—and it involves aspects similar to concentration, war, and gin rummy. Anyway, I was losing badly (base seven is murder to calculate in and worse to convert from, and the senso only helps so much when you need to be building card strategies), and my mind started to wander. I was still sort of in the mode I had been in for the past dia or so, feeling after the gravitational patterns of the ship, and when I unfocused and found myself staring out the window in a meditative state of mind… I saw something. A kind of standing wave, or interference pattern, superimposed on the universe as if I were looking through two misaligned pieces of polarizing glass.
When the sky outside shifted in front of me, I yelped like a stepped-on kitten.
“Haimey?” Connla asked curiously. He, of course, was winning, because the universe hates me. The sergeant’s eyestalks lifted from their cards in polite or wary attention.
“I just saw a pattern,” I said. I laid my cards on the table—they were terrible anyway and my hand hurt from holding so many—and I walked toward the window. “No, that’s not quite right. It’s a break in a pattern.”
I sent what I was seeing to Connla and Halbnovalk, which was easier than answering their questions verbally. And then I leaned against the windows and stared.
Really, that’s all I did. I stared. At the way the universe had a pattern embossed on it. And eventually, I guess I stared at it long enough that it started to make sense, and I knew what it was.
Epiphanies are wonderful. I’m really grateful that our brains do so much processing outside the line of sight of our consciousnesses. Can you imagine how downright boring thinking would be if you had to go through all that stuff line by line?
“Singer,” I said. He was busy, so I waited for him to acknowledge me before continuing. “Did you ever get around to decoding that book code, if that’s what it is?”
“You still have to send me the number string.”
Of course I did. If you’ve never been unlucky enough to catch the business end of an electromagnetic pulse to the skull, let me tell you right now: brain damage is a lot less fun to deal with when you’re hundreds of thousands of light-ans from the nearest accredited neurological medicine facility.