Little amber eyes met Toby’s. He reached out cautiously, and when it let him, he smoothed his hand between its ears. “Thanks … What’s his name?”
“Doesn’t have one,” said Jaysir. “Not yet.”
There were two more of the creatures in the boat. They wouldn’t have taken up much room except that they kept squirming around each other and the humans, running from side to side and looking all around with excited curiosity. “These guys, though,” added Jaysir. “Meet Rex and Shadoweye.”
Rex had paused to dramatically peer into the darkness off the bow of the boat. That prompted Toby to look out as well. Ahead was … nothing. Misty blackness. “Where are we going?”
“Just somewhere to lay low for a while,” said the girl. “Unless you want to go back?” He shook his head violently. She hmmphed.
“Well, this is great and all, Corva,” said Jaysir, “so when were you going to tell us you’d given this guy”—he nodded at the wet creature—“a depth charge?”
“I didn’t,” said the girl.
“Well, how did he blow that underwater window, then?”
“I did it,” croaked Toby.
“What?”
“I broke the window. They were coming for me, to do something … to neuroshackle me.”
Shylif muttered something and shook his head; Jaysir swore. Corva threw her shoulders back and stared the other two down. “Lucky we were here, then, wasn’t it?” she said. Jaysir shrugged and looked down.
“Jay, you should check him for trackers,” Shylif said. Jaysir jerked as if someone had given him an electrical shock and forgot about his death grip on the gunwale as he rummaged through a backpack at the stern of the boat. He brought out a long green rod that he waved around Toby.
“Yep, he’s hot. There’s a whole bunch of them, but nothing I haven’t seen before. Just give me one minute, and I’ll disable them.” He made some adjustments on the rod and waved it more slowly at various points around Toby’s torso. “Now, you may feel some little explosions in there…”
“He’s joking,” Shylif said hastily. In any case Toby felt nothing, and after a short time Jaysir grunted in satisfaction and returned his device to the pack. He said, “Nobody’s gonna track him now, except, oh, wait, we’re out in the open water, anybody who looks can just see us!”
“Patience, Jay,” muttered Shylif. The boat continued to pound through the waves.
There was silence for a while as they followed a circuitous route around down-drooping sections of ice ceiling, some of which touched the water. In places the ceiling rose, too, to become lost in misty darkness above. There were other boats in the water and lights below the surface.
Toby put a hand on his chest. “What did you mean earlier about me going into stasis? And what was that? The purring sound, me falling asleep like that…?”
Jaysir stared at him and laughed, shaking his head. Shylif said, “Give him a break, Jay, some of us didn’t grow up with hibernation implants in us.”
“Is that what—?”
“They’re artificial organs that help you go in and out of hibernation. They hadn’t been invented yet … where you come from.”
Toby shook his head, though Persea had told him about them. He supposed he hadn’t actually believed they were real.
He was still freezing, and spray kept sheeting up behind him, sometimes sprinkling across his head and neck. The thought of the bottomless ocean below them was making him queasy, too. But he sat up straighter when Shylif said, “The purring … well, that was this little guy.” He patted the animal that was sitting at Toby’s feet. It accepted the rough mashing of its ears without complaint. “He kept you from going under.”
Toby had no idea what to ask about that, so he moved on. “Why were you out here at all? And why’d you follow me from Lowdown?” He looked at Corva as he said this.
Corva shrugged. “We found out who you were, and we knew a little about the people who’d picked you up. It didn’t seem like a … healthy place for you to come back to us.”
Hypermafia, Jaysir had called them. Toby had to laugh at Corva’s understatement. But: “How did you find out about me? Nobody else in seventy thousand worlds did, apparently.” He tried to keep bitterness out of his voice. “And why should you care?”
Corva and Shylif exchanged glances. Toby was getting really tired of that kind of glance. Corva said, “As to why we care, it’s a shame you even have to ask. This one”—she patted the creature with the golden eyes—“had spotted you inside and said you were scared. I don’t know how you broke the window, but we saw you in the water, and … well, you’re important, and that means you’re valuable.”
“Ah,” said Toby. “Some honesty at last.”
“Well, I don’t know what those other people had planned, but we have no intention of keeping you against your will,” she said.
“Speak for yourself,” said Jaysir. “I think a little ransom might go a long way right about now.”
Shylif rolled his eyes but said, “It’s no mystery how we found you in the first place. We’re stowaways, after all.”
When Toby just stared at him, mystified, Corva said, “That means we wake up before everybody else, and we usually go into hibernation after everybody else has gone to sleep. So we were awake on the transport ship that had brought us to Lowdown when your people started filling the airwaves with chatter. We spotted them reeling in your little ship, and when the city’s net booted up later that week we matched up what we’d seen to the historical records. I was visiting the place they’d taken you for … my own reasons … and just as I was leaving you came running out of the building like an army was on your tail. I guessed who you must be, and I knew you’d be confused and all, but what was I to do? Take you and run? They’d have chased us down.”
The boat had been bobbing through dark, ill-defined spaces for a while now. Ahead were city lights but sparser than those in the metropolis they’d left behind. Shylif steered the boat in the direction of a run-down dock at the edge of an indistinct jumble of lights.
“Wait,” Toby said, “you hibernate illegally? On ships.”
It was Jaysir this time who gave a crooked grin and spread his arms, saying, “Welcome to the vagabond life! We don’t work—but then, neither do most people. We travel, but so does everybody else. The difference is we don’t let the government track us.”
“And we don’t let them tell us when we can go into hibernation and when we have to come out of it,” said Shylif.
“In other words, we’re free—or as free as you can be in a lockstep,” finished Corva.
“And what do you want from me?”
“There’re only two things anybody’s gonna want from you,” she said. “To help them continue the oppression and exploitation of seventy thousand worlds—or set those worlds free.”
They pulled up to the dock, which was built of water-worn plastics and carbon fiber. Toby had yet to see wood on this world. Jaysir tied up the boat and proceeded to strip off the garish survival suit. Underneath it he wore the orange leggings of a counterpressure suit and a thermal muscle shirt whose battery pack hung loosely from his belt. He was as scrawny as his face had suggested.
The ice ceiling dipped nearly to water level in this region, and sometimes past it. These squashed spaces were jammed with a great bewildering clutter of buildings—some above the surface, some glowing below it—joined by catwalks, pontoon roads, and tunnels melted through the turquoise ice.
“We’re camping out up here,” said Shylif, nodding to the complicated mess. “You’re welcome to join us for a meal … or you could always go back to the people who brought you here.”