“Vinnie?” she whispered, when she thought she had a connection. “Vinnie, can you hear me?”
The bioluminescence under Black Alice’s boots pulsed once.
Gods and little fishes, she thought. And then she drew out her laser cutting torch, and started slicing open the case on the console that Wasabi had called the governor. Wasabi was probably dead by now, or dying. Wasabi, and Dogcollar, and… well, not dead. If they were lucky, they were dead.
Because the opposite of lucky was those canisters the Mi-Go were carrying.
She hoped Dogcollar was lucky.
“You wanna go out, right?” she whispered to the Lavinia Whateley. “Out into the Big Empty.”
She’d never been sure how much Vinnie understood of what people said, but the light pulsed again.
“And this thing won’t let you.” It wasn’t a question. She had it open now, and she could see that was what it did. Ugly fucking thing. Vinnie shivered underneath her, and there was a sudden pulse of noise in her helmet speakers: screaming. People screaming.
“I know,” Black Alice said. “They’ll come get me in a minute, I guess.” She swallowed hard against the sudden lurch of her stomach. “I’m gonna get this thing off you, though. And when they go, you can go, okay? And I’m sorry. I didn’t know we were keeping you from…” She had to quit talking, or she really was going to puke. Grimly, she fumbled for the tools she needed to disentangle the abomination from Vinnie’s nervous system.
Another pulse of sound, a voice, not a person: flat and buzzing and horrible. “We do not bargain with thieves.” And the scream that time—she’d never heard Captain Song scream before. Black Alice flinched and started counting to slow her breathing. Puking in a suit was the number one badness, but hyperventilating in a suit was a really close second.
Her heads-up display was low-res, and slightly miscalibrated, so that everything had a faint shadow-double. But the thing that flashed up against her own view of her hands was unmistakable: a question mark.
<?>
“Vinnie?”
Another pulse of screaming, and the question mark again.
<?>
“Holy shit, Vinnie!… Never mind, never mind. They, um, they collect people’s brains. In canisters. Like the canisters in the third subhold.”
The bioluminescence pulsed once. Black Alice kept working.
Her heads-up pinged again: <ALICE> A pause. <?>
“Um, yeah. I figure that’s what they’ll do with me, too. It looked like they had plenty of canisters to go around.”
Vinnie pulsed, and there was a longer pause while Black Alice doggedly severed connections and loosened bolts.
<WANT> said the Lavinia Whateley. <?>
“Want? Do I want…?” Her laughter sounded bad. “Um, no. No, I don’t want to be a brain in a jar. But I’m not seeing a lot of choices here. Even if I went cometary, they could catch me. And it kind of sounds like they’re mad enough to do it, too.”
She’d cleared out all the moorings around the edge of the governor; the case lifted off with a shove and went sailing into the dark. Black Alice winced. But then the processor under the cover drifted away from Vinnie’s hide, and there was just the monofilament tethers and the fat cluster of fiber optic and superconductors to go.
<HELP>
“I’m doing my best here, Vinnie,” Black Alice said through her teeth.
That got her a fast double-pulse, and the Lavinia Whateley said, <HELP>
And then, <ALICE>
“You want to help me?” Black Alice squeaked.
A strong pulse, and the heads-up said, <HELP ALICE>
“That’s really sweet of you, but I’m honestly not sure there’s anything you can do. I mean, it doesn’t look like the Mi-Go are mad at you, and I really want to keep it that way.”
<EAT ALICE> said the Lavinia Whateley.
Black Alice came within a millimeter of taking her own fingers off with the cutting laser. “Um, Vinnie, that’s um… well, I guess it’s better than being a brain in a jar.” Or suffocating to death in her suit if she went cometary and the Mi-Go didn’t come after her.
The double-pulse again, but Black Alice didn’t see what she could have missed. As communications went, EAT ALICE was pretty fucking unambiguous.
<HELP ALICE> the Lavinia Whateley insisted. Black Alice leaned in close, unsplicing the last of the governor’s circuits from the Boojum’s nervous system. <SAVE ALICE>
“By eating me? Look, I know what happens to things you eat, and it’s not…” She bit her tongue. Because she did know what happened to things the Lavinia Whateley ate. Absorbed. Filtered. Recycled. “Vinnie… are you saying you can save me from the Mi-Go?”
A pulse of agreement.
“By eating me?” Black Alice pursued, needing to be sure she understood.
Another pulse of agreement.
Black Alice thought about the Lavinia Whateley’s teeth. “How much me are we talking about here?”
<ALICE> said the Lavinia Whateley, and then the last fiber optic cable parted, and Black Alice, her hands shaking, detached her patch cable and flung the whole mess of it as hard as she could straight up. Maybe it would find a planet with atmosphere and be some little alien kid’s shooting star.
And now she had to decide what to do.
She figured she had two choices, really. One, walk back down the Lavinia Whateley and find out if the Mi-Go believed in surrender. Two, walk around the Lavinia Whateley and into her toothy mouth.
Black Alice didn’t think the Mi-Go believed in surrender.
She tilted her head back for one last clear look at the shining black infinity of space. Really, there wasn’t any choice at all. Because even if she’d misunderstood what Vinnie seemed to be trying to tell her, the worst she’d end up was dead, and that was light-years better than what the Mi-Go had on offer.
Black Alice Bradley loved her ship.
She turned to her left and started walking, and the Lavinia Whateley’s bioluminescence followed her courteously all the way, vanes swaying out of her path. Black Alice skirted each of Vinnie’s eyes as she came to them, and each of them blinked at her. And then she reached Vinnie’s mouth and that magnificent panoply of teeth.
“Make it quick, Vinnie, okay?” said Black Alice, and walked into her leviathan’s maw.
* * *
Picking her way delicately between razor-sharp teeth, Black Alice had plenty of time to consider the ridiculousness of worrying about a hole in her suit. Vinnie’s mouth was more like a crystal cave, once you were inside it; there was no tongue, no palate. Just polished, macerating stones. Which did not close on Black Alice, to her surprise. If anything, she got the feeling the Vinnie was holding her… breath. Or what passed for it.
The Boojum was lit inside, as well—or was making herself lit, for Black Alice’s benefit. And as Black Alice clambered inward, the teeth got smaller, and fewer, and the tunnel narrowed. Her throat, Alice thought. I’m inside her.
And the walls closed down, and she was swallowed.
Like a pill, enclosed in the tight sarcophagus of her space suit, she felt rippling pressure as peristalsis pushed her along. And then greater pressure, suffocating, savage. One sharp pain. The pop of her ribs as her lungs crushed.
Screaming inside a space suit was contraindicated, too. And with collapsed lungs, she couldn’t even do it properly.
* * *
alice.
She floated. In warm darkness. A womb, a bath. She was comfortable. An itchy soreness between her shoulderblades felt like a very mild radiation burn.