Probably, I thought. Yes, probably. I didn’t touch her awareness again, but I reached out gently, trying to sense her weight in space without actually making contact with her. I was pretty sure that if she had a sense of my whereabouts, she would be heading for me. Was she able to feel me taking up space in the universe, the same way I could sometimes feel her? Could I hide myself somehow? It was a big, labyrinthine ship. If I could make it so that she couldn’t feel me, did she stand much of a chance of fighting me?
Well, who knew what technology the Freeporters had, or had stolen. She might have a really good infrared imager, for all I knew. I thought about the chances for an ambush. I didn’t know the ship well—at all, really—which was a major drawback. Also the fact that Farweather and I shared a weird alien kind of senso did seem to make it unlikely that I could hide myself from her with any accuracy. Although, honestly, it was hard to guess what she could or couldn’t do. If it was possible to hide ourselves from each other very well—
Well, wouldn’t she be doing it?
Maybe. Or she might be trying to stampede me. It was impossible to know.
Right. So I needed to be on the move, and I needed to be on the move in whatever direction she was neither coming from, nor heading. And I needed to conceal myself from her, if that was possible, or alternately I needed to make it too risky or dangerous for her to come after me.
I was, I realized, afraid of her. Not just in the adversary sense. Not just in the sense that here was a person who was stalking me. No, I was afraid of Zanya Farweather, pirate, in and of her own self.
Why?
Well, she was kind of a badass, for one thing.
And then, she reminded me of my ex.
Not physically. But in a sense of presence, and something—a rogue something, an edgy something that might be just a disdain for social norms—that my unrightminded self found ineluctably compelling.
She was trouble. And I liked trouble.
That’s my problem. I always have.
I imagined Singer saying Your bad girl problem is a problem, girl. It broke my heart a little, but this time thinking about Singer got me moving. Paying attention a little more. Going forward.
I was walking, and I was headed for the door. Companionway. Whatever.
When I realized that I’d actually managed to start moving, I kicked up my adrenaline a notch and gave myself a fuel boost and began to run. It hurt my afthands (sooo not designed for this), but I shut the pain off as an inconvenience. Either I’d survive this, in which case I could look into fixing anything I’d busted, or they’d wind up infected inside my suit and I’d probably die of gas gangrene.
Hey, I’d found an option that was even less appealing than starving to death! Let’s hear it for human ingenuity!
? ? ?
I didn’t have a plan. I followed my instincts, mouselike, into the tunnels of the Koregoi ship—or, as I was starting to think of it, the Prize. I tried not to think about it too much, remembering that my link to the ship had seemed to work better when I wasn’t trying to guide things consciously. That, in fact, the less I tried to control and second-guess my connection with the Koregoi senso, the better it had seemed to work.
So I just ran, and followed my instincts. And tried not to choke.
The Prize was gigantic. It seemed to have endless miles of corridors, all twisty and disorienting. I hit on a trick that helped with the vertigo, at least: fixing my gaze on a spot as far ahead as I could make out, and not letting it waver from that spot until I had to switch it—snap—to a new spot. Drishti, yogis called the tactic. Spotting, if you were a dancer.
I visualized myself small as I ran. I didn’t know if it would help, but I was pretty confident that Farweather had noticed her sensorium contacting mine, and I was additionally pretty sure that reaching out to check her location was as likely to give her new information on me as it was to reassure me about her whereabouts. If I could see her, she could probably see me. If she was looking, and maybe even if she wasn’t. And I expected her to be looking.
Still, not peeking was hard—one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
I had no real plan except hide, go to ground, bide my time. I wondered if Farweather had come alone. If she’d expected the Prize to be empty.
If she’d brought supplies.
If I could steal those supplies.
My flight led me through twisting companionways and chambers vast and tiny and in between, whose purposes were indeterminate because I did not stop to investigate. Many of them were full of stuff, and the purposes of that stuff were also indeterminate, because of all those same reasons.
I dialed up my endorphins, and still my afthands were killing me.
I didn’t think too hard about anything, which, being me, was one of the most unnatural things I have ever done.
I ran.
? ? ?
I went to ground, finally, in a storage locker. It seemed as good a place as any to hole up. Being at the conjunction of three different corridors, it offered a number of escape routes, and whatever the purpose of the material in it was, the stuff was soft and made decent padding. I propped the cover open and built myself a crude little nest by pulling the clothlike substance into a pile.
Having found a place to stretch out, I made the next—and potentially stupid—executive decision. My boots had to come off. I needed to see if the moisture pooling against my skin was sweat, or if it was lymph and blood.
And if the boots came off, the whole suit might as well come off. There was no integrity to the seal after that.
I stripped down to my skinsuit and didn’t die immediately, which was a relief and a little bit of a surprise. I knew the ox levels were okay; we’d checked that before—we’d checked that. There were alien ecosystems to which humans responded with instant and fatal anaphylaxis, and I had no guarantee that whatever was still floating around in the ship from the Koregoi era wasn’t fatal.
All I could promise myself was that anaphylaxis would be faster than either gas gangrene or starvation. Which was, quite frankly, a win the way things were going currently.
My nether extremities looked better than anticipated. Or better than feared, anyway. Some blisters, two of them popped. A few abrasions. Some swelling, and a tendon that might be strained or just sore. Mostly what I was feeling, I thought, was muscle soreness from unfamiliar use—though don’t get me wrong, that hurt quite enough.
At least it would all heal fast. Thank you, ancient aliens.
I tuned again, and reminded myself not to use the lack of ongoing pain as an excuse to hurt myself worse. I rationed myself some water and some yeast concentrate from my suit stores, and consumed it as slowly as I could manage, and when I relieved myself I made sure to use the recycler built into my suit. In a survival situation, save everything you can.
Then I had time to think, and to put a few things in perspective.
One of those things was the question of just what had happened to Singer. And Connla. And the cats.
I no longer thought the Prize or its defenses, even automatic ones, were responsible. Instead, it seemed likely that what had happened was that Singer’s tug had been caught in the edge of a nearly superluminal particle blast, the bow wave of Farweather’s pirate ship dropping out of white space for a few seconds so that she could make the completely unbelievably risky jump across empty space from it to the Prize before it accelerated again.
I already knew the pirate pilots were hotdoggers; we’d established that out by the Milk Chocolate Marauder where they’d nearly killed themselves and us with close flying. I couldn’t say we were lucky this time—my ship, my shipmates—but honestly, the Koregoi ship or the remains of Singer or even one of the Core ships could have gotten snagged up in a fold of space-time when the Freeport ship lobbed itself back into white space, and that that hadn’t happened . . . Well, it was good flying, a miracle, or both.
What was Farweather doing on the Prize right now? Now that she had it, I didn’t expect Farweather to leave the Prize just parked in the middle of the Synarche fleet. Did her derring-do indicate that she knew how to get it moving? Or had it just been a sophipathological gamble?
One in a series of same, if so.
Well, we could be moving now, for all I knew. It’s not like there would be a sense of acceleration in white space, or for that matter inside a ship with controlled artificial gravity under any circumstances. I thought about that for a moment—the implications of it, the effect on maneuverability. If you could control for forces with technology, you could pull the kind of g and a in a crewed ship that you could in a drone, without worrying about converting ship’s complement and cats into a fine protein paste all over the inside of the hull.
No wonder the pirates wanted this tech.
. . . The pirates had this tech, didn’t they? They would have gotten it from the factory ship, if they hadn’t had it already. A nice cargo of devashare was one thing, but surely the reason Farweather would have infiltrated the ship and killed everybody on board it was their shiny, newly installed gravity.
I wondered if she’d brought the Koregoi senso with her, or if that had been something else she’d stolen.