? ? ?
Being inbound rather than surfing the periphery had advantages as well as disadvantages. One of the advantages was that as we entered more inhabited spaces, we had the aid of navigational buoys, which were full of newsy information packets. In the ordinary course of events, these packets would have automatically downloaded into Singer’s storage whenever we dropped out of white space near one, while any unduplicated packets from elsewhere that he was carrying would be uploaded to the buoy.
Thus was data propagated around the Synarche in the most efficient means possible given lightspeed limitations on transmission.
This was a great system, unless you were a fugitive.
We could have faked up a false origin packet, between Singer and me, but tampering with the mail was an offense that would get us into more trouble and obligation than breaking some traffic regulations on our way out of a slightly seedy space station—and since tampering with the mail was one of the things we were concerned might have happened to our earlier packet and hoped to report if so, it would probably behoove us not to commit the same crime ourselves.
The pirates could probably follow or at least locate us even while we were in white space, which nobody else could manage. So they had better ways to track us than by trying to hack the interstellar mail tracelessly (that last word is key)—which even Singer wasn’t sure he could manage, as the minds that ran it were big and old and wise in the ways of logistics and treachery, as well as having abundant cycles to play with. There was the possibility that we needed to dodge Goodlaw Cheeirilaq, who would be using things like packet transfers to follow us.
I really didn’t want Cheeirilaq to be in with the pirates. Maybe I had a kind of intellectual crush on the old bug. It’s easier for me to form connections in contexts where I can’t really feel emotionally vulnerable.
But I also didn’t want to operate under the assumption that it wasn’t tracking us just because I liked it. And it could have been tracking us because we’d basically torn up the system on our way out of Downthehatch. We could have just shut down our transponder (also illegal), or we could have faked a malfunction (illegal, but only if you got caught).
The complication lay in the fact that we also needed the information we could get from the packets—we had to stay updated about traffic patterns, hazards, and whether there were any developments in current affairs we needed to be aware of. Such as, for example, a BOLO on a salvage tug answering Singer’s description and registration number.
So what Singer decided he would do was to mark our packets as confidential and highest priority, addressed to the Synarche Grand Council, and he loaded them with every bit of information we’d gleaned about the pirates and about Downthehatch.
“I’ll want to include the data on your parasite,” he told me while I was staring over the top of my screen instead of reading for the third or twelfth time about how Clarissa Harlowe, whose virtue was arguable but whose lack of ability to learn from her mistakes was manifest, was tricked back into the brothel by the dastardly Lovelace.
Why are people named Lovelace always villains when they appear in questionable literature? The only more certain moral doom lies in being named Raffles.
“Excuse me?” I said. I wasn’t holding the screen, just letting it float before me. It dimmed when my eye drifted off it. I glanced down at my hand, frowning at the silvery cobwebs.
“We need to drop out and dump our bow wave anyway,” Singer said. “The particle field is getting pretty thick up front. I think, when we check in with a beacon, we ought to include the data we’ve collected on your parasite.”
“Making me even more of a target.”
“For science,” he said. “And so the navy knows what they’re dealing with if they decide to go after the pirates.”
I felt a pang at the thought of Farweather in a navy brig.
“Your acquaintance is a criminal,” Singer reminded me.
“She’s not a friend,” I told him. “I know that. And I don’t usually go in for the sexy bad-girl thing.”
“Since when?” Connla shot across the cabin. I hadn’t heard him drift in. “You know I’m not the greatest fan of authority, but I feel like we need to share information. In case something does happen to us, and for our own protection.”
That was hard to argue with. It just . . . felt like my privacy was being invaded. It was another step toward the inevitable gateway leading me into Synarche service, my freedom curtailed, surrounded—again—by people who had nothing but my best interests at heart. They could even tune me not to mind it so much, which I wasn’t sure I could stand.
“I need to think about it,” I said.
? ? ?
Some time passed, and I didn’t do much except stare unreadingly at Clarissa. I could feel Singer watching me. It wasn’t creepy; it was like the sense you get when a family member is in the room, doing something nearby without interacting with or even acknowledging you. But it didn’t bother me the way it would have if it were a family member.
I’ll be the first to admit, I probably don’t respond to family members the way most people do.
“What is it?” Singer asked finally.
I sighed. “Clade flashbacks,” I said.
“You say that a lot,” Singer said. “But it’s an answer that’s scientifically designed to sound like an answer without actually containing a lot of information.”
“I have too damned much self-knowledge,” I said bitterly. I glanced around. Connla was on his sleep shift, and as I didn’t see either cat, I assumed they were using him for his immobile body heat while they had the opportunity. If they could, cats would invent full-time full-sensorium VR for all humans everywhere so they could sleep on our immobile bodies eternally. And probably eat our extremities, too.
“You have some other trauma,” Singer said kindly, and I knew he wasn’t just guessing. His question couched in the form of a statement precipitated such a burst of tremendous rage that if it were anybody else not-asking, I might have punched them. It’s hard to punch a free-floating shipvoice, though, and whaling a bulkhead would look silly, send me spinning across the cabin, and hurt me more than it hurt Singer.
So I gritted my teeth and—over my own objections—dialed my amygdala back down to a dull roar. Post-traumatic distress is basically a fight-or-flight response gone haywire, and when there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s so fucking boring.
“Oh, you know the story.” I stuffed my screen into a handy net—spacer’s habit, even when you’re moving in the same straight line you’ve been moving in for weeks, and no chance of a change in vector or v in sight—and kicked across the command cabin to make some busywork for myself restowing a harness that was already perfectly well folded and stowed.
“Actually,” said Singer, “I don’t.”
“I left my clade,” I recited, “because I took my mandated an outside it, and discovered that I liked being an individual. So I left, and they weren’t very happy with me.”
“That,” said Singer gently, “is not a story. It’s a deflection.”
“A deflection, huh?” I tightened the straps very gently and carefully.
“One that doesn’t explain the PTSD.”
“Oh,” I said. “That.” I shrugged. “You know that story too.”
“I know a version of it. One that’s pretty similar in its gross outlines to the leaving-the-clade story. That you had somebody you loved, and they betrayed you and turned out to be a criminal. That they harmed some others, and you were absolved of complicity in the crimes.”
“See? You do know everything. The Synarche turned me loose again; I can’t have done anything too terrible.”
“I didn’t think you had,” he answered softly.
I dropped the conversational thread, hoping wearily that he wouldn’t pursue it if I looked like I was reading again. Still. I turned a page to make it convincing.
“I’m not concerned about any terrible things you might have done,” he said quietly. “I’m concerned about the terrible things that happened to you.”
CHAPTER 11
THERE WAS A GIRL. THERE’S always a girl, they say, and in this case it was true. Her name was Niyara, and she had green eyes, and she said she loved me. She said she was my best friend, that I was family to her. She said a lot of things.
She was a walking time bomb.
In more ways than one.