I scratched my wrist, leaving welts through the film. There was a dead sentient embedded under my skin. I couldn’t think about that now. Maybe I couldn’t think about it ever.
“She’s got the parasite, okay? She’s probably the person who was on the Marauder. The mass-murderer.” There was a moment of stunned silence. Connla looked over at me, and even Singer had no immediate response. If either of my shipmates had been about to speak after that, I cut them off by changing the subject. “She’s accelerating. Gaining on us . . . Transition?”
“There’s a lot of clutter this close to the station,” Connla said. “Don’t want to sweep up somebody’s lightsail in our bow wave and take them for a ride.” He wove us through a flotilla of tiny, glittering pleasure craft as he said it, then ducked us under the pushed-in muzzle of an insystem mining server towing a seemingly infinite strand of cargo pearls.
“She’s still coming.”
“We’re still leaving,” Connla said, and spun us onto a new trajectory.
The thing about the EM drive; it’s cheap, but it’s stately. We weren’t moving fast, exactly, and I could feel the pirate slinging herself down gravitational slopes and along flares of magnetic force like some kind of interplanetary traceuse.
So this was how the Ativahikas did it.
“What’s she going to do if she catches us?” Connla asked. “Punch through the hull?”
I thought about supermassive fists. “Maybe?”
Then I realized something.
What she could do—was doing—I could also do. Maybe.
The parasite tingled with awareness in my skin. What she was doing to space-time—why couldn’t I do it too?
But how? What was the procedure?
I’d tried talking to the parasite—of course I had, wouldn’t you?—and the parasite was notable in never actually talking back. It gave me sensory information, apparently, and that was all. I had no idea how I might get it to take and act on information from me. We’d used the map it generated to slingshot us around some strange gravity curves on the way here, but I hadn’t changed anything.
Except. When I’d first contracted it.
My hand had felt . . . really heavy.
“We’re not accelerating as well as we ought to be,” Connla said. “It’s like something is damping the drive, or like we’re hauling more mass than we should be.”
Oh, so she could do that too, could she? Less and less did I want to fight her.
“I’ll go get her,” I said tiredly. I reached to uncouple my harness. I had my film; maybe the parasite would protect me a little bit.
“And fistfight her? Yeah, I don’t think so,” Connla said. “New plan.”
She was less than a kilometer away now, a little figure shining silver in her suit as the primary’s rays limned her. We dodged around a ferry—Void, the fines—and she made up a few meters by adjusting to the hypotenuse of our maneuver.
But wait.
What if we were really massive, and being pulled in a particular direction by that mass? Down the slopes of space-time, like some kind of snowboarding dirtsider. They go in for all kinds of crazy sports down there.
The flying suits look like fun, I admit it. Especially on a dense-atmosphere low-grav world, like the homeworld Cheeirilaq’s species came from. Man, I bet they got a lot of tourism interest from extreme sports types.
I imagined myself, Singer, the whole lot of us—heavy. Pushed from behind by the expansion of space-time. Pulled from before by its compression. Exactly what the white drive did, only without the bubble. Sliding down a sudden and unexpected regional gravity well.
“This is going to fuck up orbital dynamics alllll over this system,” I said out loud as Singer leaped down the slope in space-time I had just constructed, and spun on a long arc away from the crowded environs of the wheel.
“It doesn’t when the Ativahikas do it,” Singer said, so I knew he was monitoring my senso. “Maybe the Koregoi knew a trick.”
“Do you think the Koregoi engineered the Ativahikas?”
“I think now is a lousy time to theorize!”
Staring out the forward port wasn’t helping me relax into guiding the tug. I closed my eyes and tried to extend myself into the world as you do when you meditate. Seeking the alpha state, concentrating on my breath, extending filaments into the universe as I tried to relax into a place of calm and comprehension. Sometimes the old-fashioned tricks are the best.
Meditation is supposed to be centering; focusing. It is not supposed to feel as if you have just dropped a huge stone down the well of your being. But as I reached out, something huge and nonexistent slammed itself into the center of my awareness. It felt like it splashed me up against the edges of myself—all the physical sensations of a shattering revelation without the actual epiphany. Hunger cramped my stomach; chills and aches filled my limbs. I shuddered and gasped.
But when I reached back, I realized that we were opening a lead on the pirate. I could feel her back there, her own little dimple in space-time dropping away from ours. When I reached back, I felt a kind of tickle, as if her attention reached out to me in return. My head snapped around; for a moment I would have sworn that somebody said my name.
I could also feel the swirl of the system, all its tangles of influences and shifting patterns of interaction. How does any system manage to find a stable pattern? It boggles the mind.
“Take us off the plane and punch out,” I told Connla, crawling back into my own awareness enough to make my mouth form sounds.
“On it,” he said, resuming control. We had as much v now as I could give us without knocking myself unconscious, which seemed like it would be poor foresight. I hoped there wasn’t a second pirate ship lurking up here—but I couldn’t feel one, and I thought with this new awareness a white bubble would have stood out like a hard nodule, a bead under the skin of space. That wouldn’t stop the one back on the station from coming after us, though.
I let my awareness collapse. I fell back in my couch, soaked in so much nervous and exertion sweat that the film was not keeping up with it. I turned my head with great effort and looked over at Connla. “Maybe turn down the psychopathy a little bit next time. Wow.”
“It got us out, didn’t it?” He gave me his charming rogue smile.
I swallowed sickness. “Would you really have done it? If Habren had been sophipathic enough to push the issue—”
“Connla wouldn’t have to,” Singer said. “He addressed his remark to the wheelmind. The AI would be forced to act to preserve as much life as possible.”
I said, “I guess we know why Habren had the wheelmind delaying us. They were stalling us until the pirates made up their minds what to do. Oh, we just racked up so much punitive obligation with those traffic violations.”
“I don’t mean to make you nervous,” Singer said, “but we’re going to have bigger problems than debt when we get back to civilization, unless we can prove something on that stationmaster. Criminal charges, my friends.”
“I hope it was the stationmaster,” I said. “I liked the Goodlaw.”
On the other hand, I wouldn’t feel betrayed, exactly, if it turned out that Cheeirilaq was in league with the pirates. I liked it, but that didn’t mean I trusted it.
And the pirate had been charismatic, but that didn’t mean I liked or trusted her, either. Connla and Singer get a bye, because I’ll never feel attracted to either one of them, but I think I mentioned I got all that endocrine stuff turned off. It’s better for me if I’m not attracted to people physically, because wanting people makes me want to trust them. I’ve never been able to nourish any desire to fuck people I don’t trust. And vulnerability? It’s just too fucking scary.
So why let yourself feel lonely when you already know that having a relationship won’t do anything except make you anxious about whatever terrible thing might happen next, and if you turn off the anxiousness, you’ll feel like an idiot when something bad inevitably happens?
“Well, they’re both suspect for now,” Connla said brutally, hands flying over his panels. “Everybody we interacted with is suspect.”
He was doing a lot of his flying through senso, but the ability to delegate functions to your reflexes and muscle memory is, so far, irreproducible. I can’t do the math in time to catch a softball if somebody tosses me one—but my body, sufficiently practiced, can just reach out and snag it out of the atmosphere.
Well, unless I’m under gravity. In which case my body has no clue what it’s doing.
We couldn’t, obviously, count on station guidance on the way out. So he was doing it all himself, and it was impressive to watch.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Connla, because we both knew the stationmaster and the Goodlaw weren’t the only people who were suspect. “You liked Pearl.”
He grunted. “I hope it was the stationmaster, too.”
“New problem,” Singer said, merciless. “Where exactly in the six thousand, three hundred, fifty-one systems; eight thousand, eight hundred, and seventy-three worlds; and tens of thousands of miscellaneous outposts—estimated from best available recent date—are we going now, oh my fugitive crew?”