? ? ?
I couldn’t go into a suit with the isolation film on, so it was Connla who went back over to the Milk Chocolate Marauder, and it was he who managed to finish the job of manually splicing their white drive into our controls, while I looked over his shoulder in senso and gave him a lot of instructions and advice. Some of it was probably useful. He even managed to accomplish this without contracting some alien plague, which as far as he was concerned gave him bragging rights over me until the end of eternity.
He found some further evidence of sabotage—more splices and disturbed panels—but nothing affecting the drive. And the drive, conveniently, was a pretty standard Saolara model that was cross-compatible with our command module. So Singer didn’t actually have to learn their language after all; he just flashed their bios with a Saolara kit we carried for basically that purpose, and he was in.
This was a good thing, because we could fit inside their field. They couldn’t fit inside ours, and theirs was too big even to manipulate with ours. So this was the only way we stood a chance of getting them home in several dozen human lifetimes.
We needed a rigid attachment to take them into white space with us—or to be swept along in their field, more precisely. Functionally, the two ships would become one, Singer acting like a command module to the much larger Milk Chocolate Marauder. It was a good thing nothing about anything that took place in the Big Sneeze—the Big Suck, as Connla called it—required aerodynamics. And most of it wouldn’t even need a lot of structural strength.
We encountered the dead Ativahika twice more while he worked and I supervised, after we managed to unfold the gravitational anomaly. The unnatural massive spot in the universe was gone, but Singer and the prize vessel were still the most massive things out here in the middle of the cold and the dark.
Singer said the Ativahika’s orbit was no longer stable, and once we towed the prize away, the corpse would drift off. I wished there were some way we could bring it back. It seemed terribly cold to leave it alone out here.
Maybe the Ativahikas would see it differently. They were generally recognized as intelligent—operating cooperatively and so on—but from what I’d heard nobody had ever managed to talk to one. Would the Ativahika’s family miss it? Would they mourn its absence and long for closure, as a human family would? Did they even have concepts for those things?
I hated looking at it, anyway, so every time it spun past, I concentrated on Singer and Connla and technical things. It didn’t matter anyway: once we left, it was going to be spending an eternity out here, alone. And Connla was out there spacewalking inside a white bubble with a laser welding torch, sacrificing our tow derrick in order to join two ships into one ungainly one.
It didn’t bear thinking on, and I was intentionally not thinking about it while Connla welded the penultimate connection and floated back on his safety cables to admire his craftsmanship. It looked like nice work, too, with a join like a ridged, raised welt.
He was planning on dropping one more weld—adding a little cross bracing, which would still be kind of minimal but at least give the derrick some lateral rigidity—but the progress so far was as solid as anything I could have done. I looked from the galaxy sprawled across the sky to the galaxy spreading through my skin, and felt an odd shimmer of proximity. You know that feeling like somebody is watching you? That awareness of another person in the room?
Right, Haimey, I told myself. The galaxy is totally staring right back at you.
Connla finished the last weld.
I was about to congratulate him on it, in my capacity as ship’s technical lead, in a totally nonpatronizing fashion of course, when every loud noise Singer was capable of—external and senso—happened at once. I flinched, filmed hands over filmed ears. You’d think that stuff would muffle horrible klaxons and the sensation of fingernails scraping up your nerves, but really all it does is make conversations hard to follow.
“I hear you!” I yelled, and silenced them. I managed to unflinch fast enough to see Connla recoil on his tether, then hit the emergency retract and come in toward the airlock hot. I was heading for the emergency override myself when Singer sprang it.
A moment later and I saw what all the shouting was about.
That mystery ship. The white one. It had just appeared, hanging off our starboard bow, dropping out of white space with a relative motionlessness I wouldn’t have imagined possible. Some nice flying, that: she was inside the prize vessel’s white coils, which meant that as long as we were conjoined, we couldn’t even pull a quick transition out of normal space to escape . . . without pulling her with us.
My admiration of the space jockey’s work was somewhat diluted when I noticed the blunt antennae of a half dozen mass-driver weapons projecting through flexports in the other ship’s hull in two groups of three.
They were tracking down on Singer.
? ? ?
Connla hurled himself across the space between the prize vessel and Singer. He knocked aside a glittering shower of frozen oxygen and water crystals that had been headed in the other direction—the result when an uncycled airlock was popped in an emergency. It was a much bigger waste of air than the little puff that had accompanied my exit—and a lot more dramatic.
My skin still shuddered from Singer’s klaxon. He has an overblown idea of what it takes to get a meatform’s attention.
I was keeping all of that on the port, screens, and senso now. The pale ship hung there, weapons trained. I felt like I was tumbling down their hollow barrels. I couldn’t tell if the vertigo was fear, or some strange side effect of the glitterweb crawling up my arm.
Like most people, I’d never had a gun pointed at me before. And like most people who had never had a gun pointed at them before, I froze.
And burned the scene into my mind.
I can pull it up in senso, of course—I’ve got the ayatana in my fox, and I’ve tuned myself way down and gone back and looked at it more than once. It gives me heart palpitations if I don’t bump before I take it on, so I guess it’s a traumatic memory. And that means that a subjective flashbulb memory of that blank hull, plain as if it just slid out the factory door, perfectly outlined against the black of space, makes it loom bigger and closer than it ever really approached, as planetary moons on the horizon appear to do when viewed from the ground.
“Pirates,” Singer said.
I felt . . . that thing again. The something. A presence. A weight. Like the prickle in the hairs on your neck when somebody is looking at you. “There’s somebody over there—”
A green flash streaked through the senso as Connla bolted through the airlock hatch and sealed the door.
I realized how crazy what I’d been about to say was, and changed tack. Besides, that sense of somebody just out of sight behind you? It’s just a trick your brain pulls. You can make people feel it with electrical stimulation of the correct chunk of brain-meat.
“If they haven’t hailed us,” I said, amazed by how calm I sounded, “why didn’t they just hit us with their bow wave and smear us all over intergalactic space?”
“Hard to hit us and not the prize,” Connla said, tumbling into the control cabin, trailing bits of the second-best space suit. He corralled them in a net bag, eyes on the screen as he stripped.
“Don’t you want to keep that on?” Singer asked.
“So I can float in space until I suffocate if they hole us? Thanks, I’ll take the quick way down.”
“There’s the hail,” Singer said. “Text only. ‘Cut her loose.’?”
I looked at Connla.
Connla looked at the welding torch he was clipping to an equipment belay. He laughed bitterly.
“Yeah,” I said.
If we maneuvered, they’d shoot us. If we transitioned, they’d come too—and shoot us. If we stayed put . . . well, we couldn’t follow their instructions, so they were probably going to shoot us.
“I can cut the derrick loose. We can ditch the prize and run.” I kicked across the cabin toward a control panel, that damned heavy hand making me veer slightly off course. There were explosive pins, for dangerous cargo. We couldn’t afford the loss, but it was better than taking a ride on a rail-gun pellet. It had to be manually done, though; that was the sort of thing that came with a physical safety override. “You’ll have to buy me a minute.”
“Hailing,” Singer said, and I thought, Better you than me.
Hatch cover, emergency switch. Override code. I wasn’t looking anymore, but I swear I felt the guns tracking through the prickles on my scalp. Through the senso, definitely.