If it was some kind of encoding, there was no way I would ever crack it without at least a shipmind to help, and better yet some attention from the massed minds and architecture of the Core. If it was just noise . . .
. . . I didn’t think it was just noise.
? ? ?
Well, I wasn’t headed anyplace where I could plan on looking for help. I guessed it was just as well I hadn’t expected to find any.
Which brought me to goal number the fourth: get the hell off this ship, or get control of it away from Farweather, before I wound up completely kidnapped by pirates, for real. (As opposed to the sort of fractional and incomplete pirate-kidnapping I was currently enjoying.)
Get The Hell Off The Ship would have been my preference, for obvious reasons, but a pretty thorough exploration of my options didn’t fill me with confidence on that front. Jumping out of a vessel in white space wasn’t the best of ideas unless your goal was a pretty spectacular suicide. While the space-time folds, once constructed, maintained themselves without additional input—and while everything inside the white coils was, technically speaking, motionless, so you wouldn’t be left behind—in practical terms the ship was folding space-time around itself, so if you stayed in the white bubble you’d just wind up going wherever the ship was going along with it. And if you drifted out of the white bubble, you’d be folded, spindled, and mutilated as you crossed the boundary into normal space.
A lot of larger human and syster ships—colony ships and transports—carried escape vessels with their own small white drives, so that if something noncatastrophic but disabling happened to the main vessel, crew and passengers could be evacuated by the reverse of the procedure we’d used with Singer to retrieve vessels trapped or abandoned in white space. The Prize didn’t seem equipped with anything like that, although honestly how would I know if it did? Given the external airlock technology, it seemed completely within reason that sections of the Koregoi ship itself might just be capable of peeling off and flying away on their own.
That left . . . steal the stolen Koregoi ship back from Farweather, in a massively hubristic act of reverse piracy. With no tools, no weapons, no pirating skills, and no support from a shipmind or crew. Set a trap? Set a series of traps? Knock her on the back of the head?
Hell of a way to run a mutiny.
On the other hand, I was an engineer.
Well, Haimey Dz, you always wanted to make a legend for yourself. Here’s your chance at becoming a really spectacular example of a cautionary tale!
That was a lie. Well, not the second half. But I never had wanted to be famous. Or infamous, which I honestly seemed to have more of a talent for. I hadn’t wanted it: not after Niyara, and not now.
Infamy would keep finding me, however.
Some people just aren’t born to be anonymous, Singer said.
Even if they’re born as one of faceless dozens, safe and secure, into a clade?
Then: Wait, what?
Singer?
Singer, are you real?
No answer, no tickle in my senso. Had he even been there? Even been real?
I’d heard rumors of senso-echoes, burn-in, pathways that got deep-chained in fox and synapses both. If I heard Singer where there was no Singer, that was my brain expecting what it had become accustomed to. Just as if I put a bit of cake in my mouth and expected sweetness, whether the morsel had sugar in it or not.
I’d been alone, living as a fugitive in the belly of an alien ship and eating oxygen tank scrapings, for almost a decian now. Who the hell knew what my unsupervised brain was doing in there without Singer keeping tabs on it for me? Losing touch with reality, in all probability. Reverting to old, bad habits deeply ingrained in my neural pathways by a childhood that did not encourage the development of critical thinking skills.
Great. Now I was hallucinating dead friends.
And I still didn’t have a firm plan.
Except for traps.
Okay, so how did I lay traps for an enemy who was holed up in a tiny, fortified section of the ship, and who had already laid more than her share of traps to keep me out if I should venture there? And how did I manage to catch her without harming her? Maybe I was too well socialized, but I did, in fact, still stick at murder.
Besides, she was the one who seemed to know how to control the ship. Unless she was just along for the ride as well, though that seemed unlikely.
I could try to lure her out—either with bait, or by destroying something she wouldn’t want to see sacrificed. But if she wasn’t willing to come out even to try to contain or neutralize me—I flattered myself that I was probably her most immediate threat—then she was unlikely to leave her bolt-hole at all. Maybe, having locked me out of the areas she needed to control the Prize, she considered me already adequately neutralized.
My own presumed inutility and ineffectuality were a cheerful perspective, so I thought about something else.
I’d been floating in the safe harbor of one of the service tubes and thought a change of scene might help me think. I weaseled out of it, groped my afthands into my hated boots (I had acclimated, honestly, and was getting better at walking for longer periods without excruciating pain, even under gravity that was slightly heavier than Earth-normal), and went for a walk.
The best thing about giant alien starships full of endlessly twisting corridors was that you could go for really long walks. Like, station walks. Hours and hours. I was even getting to the point where the constantly perspective-shifting, Escheresque corridors no longer made me nauseated.
I was on my second lap around what I thought of as the Promenade, a spiraling M?bius strip of a loop that took me through that same observation bubble I’d first watched Singer destroyed from. Every time I passed through it, I stopped to observe my little ritual of memory. If you are a planetsider, you probably visit a grave or memorial to pay respects to a loved one. I just stopped for a moment each time I passed through this space, tilted my head back, and gazed up at the twisting bands of white space.
In abstract emotional response rather than out of any physical problem, I ached. My palms hurt. My eyes hurt.
Dammit, I missed my cats.
? ? ?
I stood there for a few minutes, aching too much to get myself moving again, becoming increasingly uncomfortable as my body noticed a lack of inputs. This had been an increasing problem as I practiced meditating my way into the Koregoi ship’s outputs. I was getting better at it, and I was realizing that the control systems for the Koregoi vessel were set up to interface seamlessly and perhaps even on a subconscious level (assuming that Koregoi had anything like human levels of conscious awareness, which was dangerous turf to be on) with the desires of its crew. Which implied that the ship had or at one time had had something like a shipmind, even if I couldn’t figure out how to access or communicate with it. It must have some kind of discriminatory process, at least—so that the interlocking desires of a few thousand crew members wouldn’t cause the thing to tear itself apart. It must have.
Mustn’t it? An autonomous regulatory system, at the very least.
Maybe it functioned like the Synarche ideally should: a series of expert algorithms generating a consensus model based on weighted averages.
But lately, my attempts at Zen starship maintenance had been mired in constant physical and senso-based distractions. As if somebody somewhere were playing a badly tuned radio in a space where I was attempting to concentrate.
And now, here it was when I was standing up, just looking at the folded light of distant stars. My sensorium itched, metaphorically speaking. It was as if I were feeling a crackle of static, some kind of senso synesthesia. As if being so profoundly disconnected from all outside inputs that didn’t come from my own senses and the Koregoi parasite was causing my brain to fill up the empty spaces.
Have you ever looked at real darkness? Darkness with absolutely no light in it? After a little while, your eyes begin to invent things. Sparkles. Outlines. Little shimmers and glimpses of movement. None of it is real, of course. It’s just bored neurons making work for themselves.
I suspected that that was what I was feeling, or the machine-meat interface equivalent.
Phantom pain.
Sigh.
My feet were starting to ache, and without thinking about it, I lightened the gravity to something that felt much more comfortable to my space-adapted body. I had been spending enough time in the weightless access tubes that my bones weren’t in danger of decaying under the constant pressure of my own weight, but I was frankly just sick and tired of being heavy.
I stretched in relief, feeling my spine crack. Then, a moment later, I realized what I’d done, reflexively, without thinking about it or really trying. Or what the ship had done, in response to my unexpressed need.
I’d just effortlessly controlled an aspect of the ship. Without so much as thinking about it. As if it were my own body. Or an autonomic process thereof. It had just kind of . . . done it for me.