Which would be great, I thought, if I could get it to do the same sorts of things when I asked.
No, Haimey. We don’t fantasize about spacing the pirate. Murder is still wrong. No matter how much somebody who murders pets and friends deserves to die.
I didn’t have control over my heart rate, not really. I mean, I could slow it with meditation and raise it with exercise. But I had a fox, and using that I could control my heart rate, and blood pressure, and adrenaline levels, and all sorts of things.
And if I could control the Prize’s pinpoint application of gravity, well. Gravity was a beautiful way to deal with Farweather, wasn’t it?
Gravity would make a most satisfactory trap.
? ? ?
Oh bugger. One more thing to practice.
On the other hand, one more thing to distract myself with. And I figured we were still at least two standard decians out from our destination, if I had it plotted right. Even at the speeds the Koregoi ship was moving at—not-moving at—even as quickly as the Koregoi ship was stitching space-time past itself, which was at a rate greater than I’d ever encountered or even heard was theoretically possible.
I wondered if we were in danger of running out of fuel.
Gravity. My enemy, my weapon.
I wondered if I could get good enough at using it to crush Farweather against the deck like a grape smashed by acceleration.
I knew I shouldn’t let myself hate her so much. I knew I shouldn’t. Hating people doesn’t accomplish anything except poisoning yourself. I should turn it off. I should let it go.
The thing was, first I had to want to let it go.
? ? ?
I kept waiting for Farweather to try to communicate with me. I kept waiting for her to reach out, to ask, to flirt. To get back to her gaslighting games, to get whatever she wanted from me.
Maybe now that I was a de facto captive, admittedly one with the run of most of the less immediately useful segments of this vast ship, she figured that she didn’t need any cooperation. She and her cronies would force it out of me when we landed.
Maybe she was hoping I would get desperate enough to come to her. To ask questions. To ask mercy? To ask for help.
Well, I would come to her. Come for her.
And I was planning on doing it just as soon as I’d had enough time to practice my control of the Prize’s artificial gravity. And how I was going to use it to quite literally pin her down and ask a few goddamned questions.
And not hurt her any more than you have to, right, Haimey?
I sighed. And not hurt her any more than I have to.
Yes.
? ? ?
Next tiny goal—was this number five? Five and a half? Something like that—develop superpowers, and learn to control the force of gravity. Artificial gravity, at least, as practiced by the Koregoi.
Odd thing was, it turned out I had a knack for it. It was fun; it was intuitive. Before long, I had fine-enough control that I could arrange the strength of the Prize’s artificial gravity in centimeter-wide bands, which I have to tell you felt really weird to step through.
That reminded me of what I’d sensed in the dark gravity, the subtle gradations of density that made up a kind of pattern, like an old-fashioned bar code or stick-letter alphabet. I was becoming more and more convinced that what I had discovered was a code. Possibly I was becoming more and more deranged in my isolation, making up the kind of conspiracy theory narratives that human brains under stress are prone to. I checked my chemical balance, and it seemed fine, but.
The limited processing capacity of my fox was inadequate to work on a problem like that. I needed the help of a shipmind.
A pang: a shipmind was the thing I had not got.
I went back to my current problem, then. Little goals: learning to use the Prize itself as a weapon.
CHAPTER 18
WELP. THERE’S DHARMA FOR YOU.
Two sleeps (I couldn’t really call them diar, because my schedule was nothing like twenty-four stanhours anymore) before I planned to debut my daring (and dare I say, brilliant) plan to sneak into Farweather’s strongholds through the service access, use my newfound gravity powers to pin her to the decking, and tie her up and make her hand over control of the Prize, that old saw about contact with the enemy came into play.
I could have run my plan sooner. It was ready; I was ready. But there was nothing to be gained by hurrying. And in all honesty, I was stalling a little because I was scared.
Scared of Farweather. Scared of whether or not my gravity trick was going to work if there was another living body in the way of it, or whether Farweather would have better control—or whether the ship itself would intervene with some kind of failsafe to protect her. And I was scared as well of what I might do if my plan worked and I actually did get the upper hand.
I was not, shall we say, that much farther along the road of releasing my attachment to wanting to slam her head into a bulkhead over and over and over again than I had been a standard decian or so previous. I didn’t think my self-control could be trusted, and so I didn’t want to test it.
On the other hand, we would be getting close to Freeport space, inasmuch as they were a they and capable of claiming and holding territory (all things are impermanent). The closer we were to Farweather’s allies, the more trouble I was in. I guessed she probably had some kind of escort close somewhere—the ship she had jumped from to flying-tackle the Prize, for example—and would her erstwhile allies just trust her to take off with something as utterly unique as an intact Koregoi vessel as its sole prize crew without some kind of supervision?
Furthermore, I could smell her roasting coffee in there occasionally, and after twenty diar of space nori three meals a dia, I probably would have launched a commando raid just for a pound of beans, even if I had to chew them and swallow my spit to get any good out of them. So there was honestly no chance of me waiting too long.
The mutineers on the Bounty had their strawberries. You know, people say all the time that they would kill somebody for a cup of coffee. It was literally starting to seem like a pretty good idea to me.
Well, not kill. I wasn’t going to murder anyone if I could possibly help it. I was willing to keep telling myself that until I convinced myself, too.
Not for coffee. Not for Singer. Not for Connla. Not for Bushyasta and Mephistopheles, and honestly I was maddest about the cats. They hadn’t had any choices or any options.
I told myself again that I wasn’t here to kill anybody todia.
Not if I could help it.
? ? ?
I was pulling on my boots—which I was finally used to—to go make it happen when the imp that installs perverse hardware and his sister, the imp of perverse coincidence, intervened. But let me go back a little, and tell it all in some sort of order.
I didn’t have the boots on already because I was moving through the maintenance access tubes—what I assumed, anyway, were maintenance access tubes, because I had no idea what the heck else they might be for. And as a human engineer playing archaeologist in a vast alien starship, I figured I was entitled to a little intellectual laziness.
I’d had—reluctantly—to bump twice to keep my anxiety levels manageable while I made my way through the tubes. It wasn’t their narrowness—I would have had to have any claustrophobia rightminded out a long time ago to keep being a tugboat engineer—it was the fact that I was trying to move through them in utter physical silence, floating along and directing myself with tiny touches. While also keeping my sensorium pulled in tight against my skin, not interacting with the ship at all, and hoping that in so doing I could hide my movements from Farweather, if she happened to be looking for me.
She had some kind of a trick that concealed her whereabouts pretty well, except when it didn’t. I just hoped I was reasonably approximating the manner in which she accomplished it. It turns out that sneaking is physically and emotionally exhausting, which maybe was why she didn’t do it all the time either.
Who would have guessed she might have human frailties and failings?
I’d mapped all of the parts that were outside of what I thought of as Farweather’s territory, and I both had them foxed in, and had developed the kind of intimate muscle memory that takes practice and exploration. When I drifted onto Farweather’s turf, though, it was like moving from a well-lit space to a dim and smoke-filled one. I had my theories and extrapolations to navigate by, and I had as far down the tubes as I could see with my own unaugmented eyes. I projected a skin of my theorized map onto the walls of the tubes as I spidered along, imagining myself some kind of formless sea creature wafting through pipes and down drains.