It was all smooth and organic, as if the damned bubble had grown there.
After a few minutes, I looked up, frustrated, to judge the position of the Synarche ships. I froze, horrified, as I realized that they were pulling away. There was no external sign of their trajectory—no flare of a chemical burn—as they were operating off the EM drive. But they were definitely backing off. Leaving me alone in here.
It made sense, of course. It was the safe and sensible thing to do. Something had just destroyed Si—destroyed the tug, destroyed the tug, dammit—and the smart money would have bet on the source of that aggressive action being the Koregoi vessel we’d just dragged up from the abyss of deep time.
The Synarche ships had approached cautiously. Now they were hightailing it back to a more respectful distance at maximum a, hanging v on their survey ships like garlands. I didn’t blame them; I just wished I was out there with them. Or better yet, that all of us were.
Stop thinking about Singer.
Half of a tug turned in space. Another piece had blown away, and I could not locate it now. It was conceivable that somebody had survived in there. In an airlock or a safety pod. If they were suited up already. It was conceivable.
Sure it was.
I shook my head in awe at how screwed I was, and started thinking about what I could do for food, once I tried the air and it didn’t kill me—which was going to be a little while yet, in any case. There was a lot of ship to explore, and the Synarche ships would be back. Staying alive . . . Well, you could go a long time without food. Water that I could be sure was safe, and oxygen, however—each need was orders of magnitudes more urgent than the one before.
I leaned my head back and blinked through another flush of tears. Then threw myself back away from the observation dome in a comically useless reflex as something swept through the tiny—in space terms—gap between Singer and the Koregoi ship.
You can’t see a ship in white space. In the normal course of events, you can just barely detect it with gravitometric sensors, though that becomes easier if it’s not moving. Or more precisely, not folding your region of space past its stationary location at a really incomprehensible rate of something that functionally mimics speed.
It turned out that I could sense a ship in white space pretty well now, though. Or at least, the Koregoi senso could. And my reflexes had opinions about large things moving extremely fast near the fragile soap-bubble of an observation dome.
A few moments after the gut-twisting blur of a ship in white space, I sensed something even more unnerving. A faint impact rang through the Koregoi ship—easy to sense because I happened to be in close contact with it, by which I mean sprawled flat and trying to catch my breath for the second time that dia.
Something—something not terribly big or extremely fast-moving, but with enough momentum to send a shiver through the vessel—had just struck the hull.
? ? ?
I froze for a moment, hunched in an ancient mammalian cringe posture—chin tucked, shoulders popped around my ears like epaulets, forehands half-raised. Waiting for the next explosion, the one I would hear and feel instead of seeing at a distance, in a position that would do absolutely nothing to protect me from it.
Won’t have to worry about starving to death, I thought.
And then I . . . didn’t die.
A few more moments went by, and I didn’t die some more.
I peeled myself out of my defensive crouch. Centimeter by centimeter, I straightened. I looked around, aware that if I had been on a station, I’d be a good candidate for that dia’s monitor follies programming right about now.
Isn’t it amazing how you can be embarrassed as anything even when nobody’s looking? If I were a cat, I would have been washing my ears. Except for the helmet being in the way, of course.
Not being dead, I tried to feel my way into the ship’s senso again. It felt . . . echoing, empty in there without Singer. But I persisted. Nothing like work to aid compartmentalization, right?
I let my awareness filter into the ship’s sensor network, like ink diluting into water. It was surprisingly easy—more a matter of relaxing my boundaries than pushing through a membrane. It seemed to work better, actually, when I let go of my intentionality and just let the Koregoi senso handle the transition itself. I had a sort of proprioception, as if the ship were an extension of my nervous system.
The ship was a great hollow shape, its drives quiescent but waiting, its spaces full of secrets I would have to explore if I wanted to have a chance of surviving until the Core ships decided it was safe to come back. If it was safe to come back.
Was it safe to come back?
I was paying more attention to my planning than to what I was feeling through the ship, so I was utterly blindsided when the quivering tendrils of my sensibility, so to speak, brushed up against an unexpected, and unexpectedly familiar, human presence. And not a welcome one. I snapped back into myself in shock and dismay. Well, additional dismay—I already had plenty, but now I had an even more immediate problem than possibly pathogenic atmosphere and a soon to be pressing need for hydration.
It was a greedy, grabbing awareness, and when I brushed it I recoiled as it snatched after me.
It was Farweather. And she was on the ship with me. And she knew I was here.
The projectile that struck the Koregoi hull had been a pirate.
My pirate. Or the pirate who wanted to collect me, which I suppose amounts to the same thing.
I froze as if under the shadow of a predator’s wings. I needed to escape. Viscerally, out of the kind of instinctive, atavistic sense of self-preservation that—if you don’t answer it—results in crippling anxiety or blind panic. My heart rate accelerated, and for a long moment I just stood listening to it, feeling my pulse tremble in my fingertips so hard they seemed to pulse against the inside of my suit. I was too terrified even to scream.
Do something, said a voice in my head that didn’t sound like my own. Do something, do something, do something—
Do what, though?
After what seemed like a half an, I realized who I was pleading with, and what I had been waiting for. And that Singer wasn’t coming to rescue me this time, or to tweak my brain just enough to make me functional again.
I was in the stage of panic where it’s hard to do anything. Hard to make decisions, because they all seem like they will end in catastrophe. What if I tuned wrong? What if I made myself too calm, and I didn’t react appropriately to the threat? My attitude jets were misaligned, and all I was succeeding in doing was burning fuel and just spinning myself in circles.
So that was the first thing to fix, if I wanted to live. Calm the hell down, Dz. Thinking the command to myself alone was enough to release me from the paralysis, and I managed to tune myself to something more like a functional state of hyperarousal and settle in. Tuning myself always made me nervous—too easy to check right out of reality, if you got too reliant on it, and never worry about whether your decisions were smart or ambitious, when you could just turn off feeling weird about them later.
That was how I justified letting—making—Singer do most of the work, and why I always made sure there were strict time limits on his interventions. But I didn’t have Singer now, and panic paralysis over that fact wasn’t helping me.
I turned down my grief, too. There would be time for it later, and I knew I would have to experience it, because even with rightminding, experiences repressed and unexperienced lead to a series of sophipathologies. Anxiety being one of them.
The last thing I really needed was more anxiety.
I reached back into my fox for the precise memories of what it had felt like when Farweather struck the hull. Could I use the sense of impact, possibly combined with that weird proprioception, to determine where she was? Where she might be gaining entry to the ship? Where she was now, in relation to me?
Could I hide, or fight, or set up an ambush?