She’d want to avoid that. I mean, I didn’t think I could take her, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t want to be cautious.
Sure, Haimey, I heard myself tell myself in Singer’s voice. Because caution has certainly been her watchword all along, and you have no evidence at all that she’s interested in capturing or subverting you for her own reasons, whatever the strategy behind those reasons may be.
I could try to ambush her. Probably, eventually, I would. But not todia. Because right now I needed an advantage.
So I had to assume that she would be defending herself, and I had to assume that she might, in fact, come after me. So while she was consolidating her control over the ship’s systems and setting up whatever defenses she was setting up, I needed to be learning the structures of the Prize like the warrens of the clade I grew up in. I needed to be a mouse in those warrens. A stainless steel rat in the walls.
Just as well to have something interesting to fill the standard hours with. All my book files were back on Singer. Without reading material, I needed something to occupy my time. Memorizing an alien spacecraft the size of a medium station would probably keep me busy. Unless it got me caught.
Or killed.
I hadn’t sat still while I was doing this thinking, either. In fact, I’d found something fascinating, which was that those organic-seeming corridors and the spaces they connected were webbed with service crawlways. Or service floatways, more precisely—because there was no gravity in those.
I pulled my awful boots off again, wrapped them through my makeshift backpack, and exulted in the comfort of having all four hands free to work as my ergonomics engineers had intended. Everything instantly seemed better when I wasn’t under g anymore, and even better than that when I sipped some reclaimed water and chewed a couple of yeast tablets. Your brain uses glucose to think, it turns out, and when you don’t have it, your decision-making and emotional regulation remains somewhat impaired, no matter how much you tune.
The playful teasing of my own interior voice reminded me of Singer, which was too much of a distraction, and I shut it down. My fox had been running the whole time, though—recording, memorizing as I moved through the ship. My meat memory might fail me, but I was going to use it anyway, because it was essentially bottomless. The machine memory could create a perfect three-dimensional map of the spaces I moved through. Once I had access to a shipmind again, and to more processing power than the tiny bit packed into my suit and skull, I would be able to use that map to generate the kind of plot that could reveal what I was missing and give me the shapes of spaces I hadn’t yet figured out how to reach. Spaces that might be solid-state, technology, hunks of computronium wedged in where they fit . . . or that might hide even stranger treasures.
Like snacks, for example.
Pity that wasn’t available to me now, because I could have used it.
As I swung through narrow spaces, I wondered: the Koregoi parasite seemed so happy in my body, and had certainly revved my metabolism well beyond the usual bounds. We drank the same solvents. Breathed the same oxidant. If my biochemistry matched up that well with theirs, did that mean I could eat their food without harming myself? Were we biologically similar enough to process the same nutrients?
I really hoped so. A lot.
I decided to gamble that my attempt to hide myself had worked. I needed intel badly. Using my Koregoi-extended proprioception—or rather, letting it use me—I tracked where Farweather was as I moved through the ship mapping and exploring. I was pretty sure that I’d been right about her plan, because while I was drunkard-walking all over the place, making largely random choices in order to get a vague plan of as much of the ship as possible, Farweather was moving in a tight spiral out from a central core, a planned and cautious exploration.
She didn’t seem to be hiding herself, either. Maybe she didn’t know how. Maybe I only thought I was invisible, or somewhat less noticeable anyway, and she knew exactly where I was at all times and was laughing at my completely random stagger through the Prize’s byways.
It didn’t matter. Well, it did matter. But I couldn’t affect it either way, so I needed to not concern myself with it. It didn’t matter because it was out of my control, and my energy needed to go to things that I could control, or at least hope to affect the outcome of. See above, item one, Haimey Dz survival plan for being marooned on an alien starship while trying to hide from a sexy pirate.
I really, really wished I had along a copy of Robinson Crusoe.
I crawled and mapped, floated and mapped, avoided Farweather’s territory. I slept in corners and access tunnels and stowage bays, never the same one twice, and tried to leave behind no evidence of my passage. And tried also not to notice how hungry I was getting, as the first couple of diar went by.
? ? ?
Goal number two: find something to eat, somewhere.
Between what I put out, and the atmospheric moisture, my suit was reclaiming enough water that I wasn’t in danger of dehydrating, and I’d rigged up a small evaporation still to make sure I was getting uncontaminated water with which I could replenish. Who knew what might be in H2O that has been sitting in the pipes for a few hundred ans? I had a pretty good handle on the schematics of the Prize, including—I hoped—a number of things Farweather didn’t know, because she didn’t often venture out of her fortified bubble. I’d spied on her a little, and she’d filled the access tubes near her little domain with insulating foam that would have to be clawed or gouged out by hand, and she’d laced the corridors with cameras and the occasional dart trap. Fortunately, having been on the Milk Chocolate Marauder, I had a pretty fair idea of what her jury-rigging skills were like. I also thought that mine were better, and her dart traps were easy to spot. (Unless she was smart enough to hide her true level of skill and conceal a few better, which was possible. It was reasonable caution to act like that might be the case, but if I really started to believe it I would have to admit that I was probably psyching myself.)
So I stayed off her marked turf so as not to let her know her dart traps were silly. And she didn’t venture out of her secured corridors and cabins either, which was a nicer vote of confidence in my skill and dangerousness than I had been expecting from her. Or, you know, maybe she was a homebody.
I didn’t really think she was a homebody.
My suit, by this point, had actually snugged down to the limit of its elasticity and was starting to hang a little loose on me. The yeast tablets were not a subsistence diet; they were a snack. And I only had a few of them left. Even rationing doesn’t make a resource last forever if you can’t figure out how to renew it.
Second priority: food was starting to seem even more violently important.
I hoped it wouldn’t mean raiding Farweather’s supplies, because that would put goal number two in direct contravention with goal number one—explore, avoid, reconnoiter—and it was a little early in the proceedings to be running up against strategic conflict already. Especially when I was the only commander and all the troops and noncoms, also.
Well, if I were food on an alien colony ship, where would I be? I’d probably be long decomposed, honestly—decayed into crumbling sawdust, hydroponics dead, organics of all sorts hopelessly degraded. There was no ecosystem on this ship anymore—even the kind of incomplete oxygen-and-water cycle that we’d maintained on Singer, with our algae tanks and living walls in order to process fresh oxygen and produce fresh greens.
If I had to kill and eat Farweather, I was starting to think I might be willing to try it, though I didn’t have anything to butcher her with. She, however, did have supplies.
I could tell because she wasn’t dying.
I could probably steal them from her.
That was a terrible idea.
? ? ?
Wait, where was the oxygen coming from? It didn’t smell like tanks, and it didn’t smell like catalysts or electrolysis. The alien ship didn’t carry the faint tang of ozone. In fact, it smelled fresh. Green. Growing.
Did the Koregoi have something like blue-green algae on this thing as part of their life-support processing, or was their atmosphere synthesis just good enough, technologically speaking, that they didn’t have to make everything they reconstituted smell like the inside of a tin can that had been floating around in space, unaired, for a thousand ans or so?
If there were edible plants of some sort on this thing, eating them would be a simpler solution than trying to catch Farweather. Also less socially taboo. Which I guess matters.