I tried to feel resigned. At least we would be safe from pirates soon.
That thought got me checking the senso again, seeing if I could feel Farweather or any of her folks around. Maybe I was getting paranoid. Would they really risk chasing us all the way into the Core? I mean, they had everything we had. And the Milk Chocolate Marauder. And it was patently too late to keep us from giving information to the Synarche.
There was no percentage for them in coming here. Just like there was no percentage for me in going there.
And I had much more immediate problems than a Sexy Pirate, anyway.
“Get me in here before they show up, would you?” I asked Singer plaintively.
“I’d like a stronger negotiating position too, you know. Ah, wait, look now.”
An aperture appeared before me.
I don’t mean the door irised, or an airlock hatch slid aside, or some bit of plating dropped into the gap behind it and moved off. I mean it appeared: One moment I was frowning through my faceplate at the unforgiving hull, wondering if the ancient astronauts went in for annoying logic riddles. And the next instant, the hull in front of my face was evaporating before my eyes, as fast and dry and completely as a liquid nitrogen spill. I braced for evacuating atmosphere to blow past me—or blow me off the ship—but there was no rush of escaping air and no sense of pressure whatsoever.
“Well,” Singer said in my ear. “That had no good reason to sublimate like that.”
I peered through the gap. The interior was lit, and it didn’t look like an airlock. I could see fairly far down what I assumed was a corridor before it curved out of sight. “Did you happen to get a spectrograph while it was doing that?”
“It’s not made of anything exotic. And it seems to have been precipitated back into the hull. Possibly that explains the roughened texture that you noted. Do you want to send in a probe?”
I felt brave. And impatient. Before Singer could tell me no, I extended my gloved hand and shoved it right through the gap.
“Haimey!”
“What?” I said. “It’s like a probe.”
Singer’s anger was as much scientific outrage as fear for my safety. “And you’ve just contaminated the interior of that alien ship with your skin cells and our atmosphere and an incalculable amount of cat dander.”
“Oh come on,” I answered. “You know most of that got blown off in the airlock. What’s going on in there?”
The glove had about as many sensors on the outside as a human forehand, and they relayed to my sensorium and from there to Singer and Connla. But I didn’t trust what I was feeling, because I was feeling . . . warmth.
“Singer? You said this thing was cold.”
“It was,” he said. “Up until that hatch evaporated. Maybe they’re expecting you.”
“How can it be warm inside if it’s exposed to space?”
“That is an excellent question. I can detect no barrier.”
“Do you have access to the system yet?”
“I’m trying to get the keys to the operating system. Failing that, I think I can probably write one, though it’ll be a hot mess to begin with. And I don’t exactly want to purge everything that’s in there so I can colonize it. I’d rather figure out how their architecture is intended to function.”
“So you can subvert it.”
“I am what I am,” Singer said. “Has it bitten your hand off yet?”
“You’re in my senso,” I answered. “You tell me.”
You know, going inside might seem even stupider than sticking my hand through a hole that hadn’t been there a second ago. But if the Koregoi ship, or whatever might be in the Koregoi ship, wanted to do me harm, I was far more vulnerable out here in the arms of the Enemy as I could ever be once I was inside her hull.
“Haimey,” Connla said, accurately reading my intentions. “Haven’t you actually learned anything from last time?”
“Probably not,” I said, moving already.
CHAPTER 15
I GLIDED THROUGH THE HATCHWAY, AND suddenly fell. I tucked, striking the deck with my shoulder. Rolling, I ended flat on my back, a staticky circle of haze tunneling my vision. My diaphragm cramped, bright and sharp, and I could only keep straining to exhale, long after any air had left my lungs.
I thought I would pass out, but the cramp eased after a few moments.
Well, this was fucking familiar.
“Flush it down the Well,” I swore. “I hate gravity.”
The vanishing hatch reconstituted itself in a solidifying swirl of vapor. Reverse sublimation: just a little more Koregoi magic. I was too overwhelmed—and too focused on my job and its dangers—to let myself feel overawed. I rolled on my side, still breathing shallowly because I was afraid of triggering the cramp once more.
The inside of the Koregoi ship was of a piece with the outside. The same materials, from a preliminary examination, and the same seemingly random visible light colors that gave way to detailed ultraviolet markings. Some of these were on a much finer scale, and I assumed they were probably use-instruction markings of some sort: the usual warnings and notifications and technical specifications that most sentients living amid the deferred catastrophe of space tend to print on their delicate traveling habitats because you don’t always have time to look such things up in the midst of an emergency.
The corridor I was in was sinuous and sinusoidal, roughly square but with rounded corners and slightly, varyingly convex walls. Light was provided by long, luminescent streaks embedded into the various surfaces, seemingly at random.
The corridor was about three times as big around as an access tube designed for a human would be. Those random patches of ochre and mossy colors banded it, like the segments of a Terran earthworm. It twisted in a way that made me think it ran, itself, around other spaces inside the hull of the ship, and very probably around blocks of machinery and hardware, too. Not in any kind of regular, regimented way that would seem normal to a human engineer. But probably in a manner that was very efficient for packing things into spaces, if you could control the horizontal and the vertical.
I rolled onto my hands and knees, orienting myself. It seemed as if I could stand up comfortably in the corridor or service tube or whatever it was, so I did, trying to make sense of how it twisted around at seeming random. I took a step forward, balancing on my afthands, thinking sadly of how bruised my fingers were going to be again. It was enough to make a girl start thinking of getting herself restored to baseline.
I jest.
Nothing was going to make me start thinking of getting myself restored to baseline.
I walked forward a little bit more, expecting to feel the corridor sloping under me where it twisted. Instead, what happened was that the corridor reoriented itself as if it were spinning, my inner ear insisting that I was walking on a perfectly level surface with no angle, twist, or incline at all. This did not agree with what my eyes were telling me, and as a result my stomach lurched.
Singer helped me tune down the nausea, and I leaned one hand on the wall and closed my eyes until the hull stopped spinning.
“Well, that’s a terrible design choice,” I said.
I opened my eyes again, tried a few more experimental steps. Nope, still awful.
“Make a note,” I said. “The Koregoi did not suffer vertigo.”
“Maybe you should come back,” Singer said.
“Maybe you should crawl,” suggested Connla.
“Maybe you should do something anatomically improbable,” I retorted. Maybe if I looked down at my afthands while I was moving, it would be okay. I could stop every few steps and glance around to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
I probably wouldn’t get eaten.
Right?
? ? ?
Well, it did work, sort of. I didn’t get sick again, and I made forward progress, but since I didn’t know what I was looking for or where I was going, even progress was something of a Pyrrhic victory. I might be walking away from the thing I needed.
I was, however, officially in possession of the Koregoi ship for salvage purposes, which would do a lot to improve our bargaining position. And Connla’s economic situation. If he wound up on his own in the not-too-distant future, at least he wouldn’t be in a pile of debt because of fines and so forth.
And if Singer and I ever got out of Synarche service, we’d be in a good position as well.