? ? ?
I lay down in that storage locker, and I slept like I’d pricked my finger on a spindle and fallen under a spell. I should have set traps, alarms, protections—I didn’t do any of those things. All I did was try to squish my senso down into a tiny, smooth, reflective ball that I could hide inside and pretend I was invisible. Honestly, it was as much a visualization exercise as anything that had any science behind it. Synarche senso could be activated by targeted visualization, because it was Synarche senso, and because it was designed to integrate seamlessly with the neurology and physiology of as many different sentients as possible.
In the case of alien superscience . . . well. I was pretty sure it was magical thinking, but in all honesty I was too tired to care. There is only so much clarity one can obtain from chemical support before the sheer biological necessity of rest overwhelms even the most aggressive program of bumps, as most people discover the hard way in their school ans.
I never put myself in the infirmary, but at least two of my clademates did, and one of them needed extensive neuroreconstruction afterward. Probably even more extensive than my Judicial Recon, after Niyara. I didn’t have extensive organic damage, after all. Just psychological. Well, and the organic remodeling that follows trauma.
I think the nightmares were what at least partially got me over my clade-bred resistance to tuning.
Magical thinking or not, Farweather didn’t find me and kill me in my sleep. Karma shelters the fool, and I woke up still alone in my storage locker. Still alone in my head, too. Which was better than I’d dared to hope for when the lights went out.
When the lights figuratively went out. The Prize’s veins of ambient illumination were still glowing softly in the surfaces, and I had no way to instruct the ship to shut them off. I’d wrapped a fold of cloth across my eyes instead. They did seem to have dimmed, though—normally I’d expect to awaken to be dazzled by lights that had seemed of normal brightness when I lay down, but these were dim and soothing.
I sat up, shrugging out of my cocoon of soft-woven synthetics, and the locker around me brightened gradually, stopping at a comfortable level.
Well, that answered that. The Koregoi ship was definitely cooperating with me.
I wondered if it was cooperating with Farweather too, given that she also had the parasite. And was far more experienced in how to use it. Childishly, I hoped the Prize liked me better.
I reached out—not much of a reach in a space so narrow—and patted the wall of the storage locker just in case the ship wanted an affirmation that I appreciated its nurturing behavior.
I wish I could say I felt rested and clear of thought, but the fact of the matter is that I was stiff from lying still, and groggy and maze-headed and overslept. If I’d dreamed, I didn’t remember it, but I had that sense of oneiric hangover that sometimes follows on having navigated a particularly difficult and convoluted map of dreams. Maybe my tuning was holding up, and keeping the nightmares at bay. I made a point of pushing back the time limit on that, while I was thinking about it.
I stretched myself as silently as I could manage, wondering if there was a way to convince the ship to dim my interior lights again. It seemed to have accepted me bunking in this storage bin, but I could imagine the beams of light streaming out through every tiny crevice and crack and ventilation hole in the thing, never mind that open cover, and exactly how inobvious that wouldn’t be from the outside.
Also, it would be safest not to reside in any fixed abode. I couldn’t just avoid Farweather forever. We were on a finite ship, even if it was a ship as big as some stations, and she no doubt had some plans for how that might play out over time.
Which meant I needed plans too: a plan to protect myself from her, a plan to get control of the ship away from her, and a plan to get her under my control before she captured or got rid of me.
Living like a mousie in the walls of the Koregoi Prize wasn’t any of those things. It wouldn’t take a ship’s cat with the wits of Mephistopheles to catch me. But it was a bit better than lying here like a sitting duck and waiting to be picked up, put in the bag, and made off with.
So. First step. Keep collecting supplies, and keep moving.
And figure out what the hell I was going to eat, too, and sooner rather than later.
I wrapped my salvaged storage-locker cloth strips and swaths into a makeshift bundle, and made shoulder straps for it. It made a halfway passable backpack. My boots, regretfully, I slid back on—wincing all the while, although I’d wrapped my afthands in strips of clean cloth. The strips were not particularly absorbent, because the materials were all what we Earth-types would call synthetic, which was also why they hadn’t rotted in however many millennians since the Prize was parked, but at least they were fluffy.
I would rather have left them bare—but trying to run around on my naked afthands, or even all fours, would have been worse in the long run than sucking it up and wearing the boots. I guessed I would just have to do what so many premodern soldiers had done, and get used to the pain of marching and try to heal the blisters while I kept right on marching, because there wasn’t any other choice.
Reasonable expectations, I realized—and not for the first time—had become a thing of the past. I might be the only soldier fighting this war, and it might be a war of two. But that didn’t stop what it was, and what I was doing here. Or the fact that the Synarche needed me.
? ? ?
On the move again, I risked reaching out very gently, very tentatively into the Koregoi senso webbing my body and my mind. I didn’t want to make contact with Farweather, but I was hoping to get a sense of where she was and maybe even what she was doing.
I didn’t get that. What I did feel was the textures and patterns of space-time slipping steadily around the Prize as white space peristalsed her down.
The Koregoi ship was moving.
We were under way.
I reeled a little. Farweather had gotten us moving, and I couldn’t tell you why I found that so startling and upsetting, but I did.
Okay, I take that back. I definitely knew why I found it upsetting—because I was alone in a ship I had no control over, heading into deep space after having been privateered by a Freeport pirate queen who’d infected me with, well, aliens. And that was, honestly, pretty startling on the face of it.
But I felt like I should have expected it. It was a bad thing, after all. You expected those and braced for them, so they couldn’t leave you gobsmacked, helpless with surprise.
Surprise is the kind of emotion that people like me—people with my upbringing who have left it, however many of us there are (a dozen or so?)—struggle to never, ever, ever get caught out by. We make sure we have plans in place. We consider options.
And here I was, surprised. Blindsided by grief.
Don’t worry about it now, Haimey.
Keep moving.
Small, attainable goals, and worry about the big goals when you have enough small goals lined up and accomplished to have any resources at all that you have a chance of working with.
I wondered where we were going.
CHAPTER 17
GOAL NUMBER THE FIRST: DON’T get caught.
Okay, then, what’s my plan of attack for that? Or the plan of evasion, more accurately. Step one, avoid contact with Farweather, either through senso or physically.
I didn’t have any illusions about my ability to take her in single combat. For one thing, while humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools. I belonged to a third group, equally useful: I was an engineer.
For another thing, I was pretty confident that Farweather hadn’t come to this alien environment unarmed. Unlike me. Because she was a fighter, every centimeter of her.
I could try to set a trap. But that was likely to fail and also likely to move me up on her priority list. Right now, I figured she probably had her work cut out for her in regard to exploring the Prize, mastering its systems, and getting where she wanted to be going, unexpected hitchhiker and all. If we got there, she’d probably have additional resources to throw at the problem of me, which meant that her best use of resources was to defend herself, defend the Koregoi ship’s key systems, and bide her time until she could meet me with overwhelming force. My earlier fears were realistic, but probably a little overblown, because if she decided to take the risk of coming out to get me it could result in potential failure of her mission objectives and possibly getting clobbered or killed herself.