I always was a little too creative for my own good.
The anxiety was bad. The sense of all the ways things could go wrong loomed intensely over me, congealed into a breathless knot behind my sternum. And I kept coming up with new ones. I could mess up the gravity and get squished. I could get sealed in and spend the rest of my objectively quite short but subjectively probably very long and unhappy existence like a jellyfish in the tubes, drifting along, unable to get out. And both of those seemed preferable in my head to the idea that I was going to have to climb out of this accessway and go get into a physical confrontation with somebody who was armed and didn’t mind conflict in the slightest.
Clades . . . are not big on training people how to maintain boundaries and manage necessary conflict. We all just get along. No matter what. Whether it suits our personal needs or not. Personal needs are a privileged affectation.
I didn’t really have an option of getting along with the pirate. Not unless I wanted to wind up trapped in some Freeport outpost fixing stolen ships as an indentured servant or something similar.
Turn it off.
Dammit, I tried!
I had tuned the anxiety out, but the fear of the situation was enough that it kept breaking through. Deep, visceral programming: avoid the fight. It was paralyzing.
Don’t choke, I told myself, and then rolled my eyes at myself. I had probably just ensured that I would be choking.
After three minutes clinging to a coil of piping, forcing my limbic system to stop hyperventilating through blunt and hard-core endocrine control, I thought of Connla’s flying trick of bumping his sophipathology up enough so you didn’t worry too much about consequences.
It seemed like a terrible idea.
After two more minutes, I decided I needed to try it, or Farweather was going to figure out where I was, poke a bolt prod in through a convenient access hatch, and electrocute me in my burrow like a particularly large and smelly ship rat.
I bumped, got a little magnetism in there to turn off the inconvenient brain bits for an hour or so, and set a timer lockout so I couldn’t do it again until after the first dose had worn off. That last part is pretty essential if you’re doing this sort of thing alone, because once you turn off your common sense and ability to assess consequences, it turns out almost nobody wants them back again.
After that, everything was easy and I couldn’t figure out what I’d been so apprehensive about. I felt confident, loose. I knew what I was doing, and I wasn’t going to have any problem handling one little pirate. This was my domain—space was my domain—and if nothing else I could just get the Prize to shut down gravity entirely and be six times as capable in free fall as she was.
Hell, Farweather didn’t even have afthands. Whereas I could anchor myself, eat spaghetti, turn a screwdriver, and pick my nose simultaneously. And without even getting the spaghetti anyplace biologically inappropriate.
It took me only a little bit of exploratory back-and-forth to check the location of the access hatches. I’d gotten pretty expert at identifying their nubby bits and the pressure points that made them smoke up and vanish when you wanted to go through. Confident I’d gotten as close to her command center as I was likely to, I located an access hatch I could use to get out into the corridors. I unslung my boots from over my shoulder and started working them on my afthands, as previously mentioned. Once I had them seated, I’d reach out into the Koregoi senso, try to feel where Farweather was before she noticed me (assuming she hadn’t spotted me already and also assuming she wasn’t lying in wait) so I could pop out, slam the gravity down around her, and give her the thumping she so richly deserved.
That was when I heard the screaming.
Reflexively—and when had using the alien technology that had infected my body without my consent become reflexive?—I reached out into the Koregoi senso. It unfolded like releasing cramped wings, and I felt instantly less anxious—as if my inner ear had been affected, or my hands bound behind my back, and I’d been trying to walk a balance beam. The relief was profound.
So profound it almost made up for the screaming.
Actually, the noise didn’t bother me at all, except as noise. It was really irritating, like a crèche full of three-an-olds not getting their own way.
If I just shot her, the noise would probably stop, wouldn’t it?
What a pity you don’t have a gun.
Oh yeah. That is a problem.
Calm down, Dz. There’s only two people on this boat that could be screaming, and you’re pretty sure this one isn’t you.
It could be a decoy.
Of course it could. Or she could be in trouble, in which case—
In which case, I really don’t have to do anything about it, do I?
Yes, Haimey. You probably do. You still need her expertise.
A heavy sigh escaped me, the only external signifier of my interior argument. Briefly, I closed my eyes. There was still screaming, but it sounded tonally different—less surprised, and more furious and pained. I’d guessed right—the noise was close, and it was echoing through the maintenance tube as loudly if somebody had set up a speaker in here to boost it.
At least if she’s hurt, she’ll be easier to contain.
Assuming she’s not in need of massive medical attention I can’t provide.
Well, either way, she’s not getting any less injured while we wait.
That’ll just make her easier to control.
Dz.
Over the top, I said to myself, and triggered the access hatch.
? ? ?
Well, I didn’t think she was faking it.
Farweather lay curled on her side in a puddle of very bright red blood, clutching her right wrist with her left hand. She was mid-shout when I weaseled out of the access door, found my orientation in local gravity, and dropped lightly down.
I landed in a crouch. Farweather stopped screaming and peeled her blood-slimed fingers loose from her wrist to snatch at her weapon. Red spurted, and she gave up trying to get the gun and went back to applying pressure again.
My weapon didn’t require me to reach for anything except the (metaphorically speaking) goodwill of the ship. I felt it, felt it acquiesce to my desire, felt it tighten down on the already fallen pirate with the force of several Earth gravities—no joke even for somebody raised down a well. For a spacer like me, it would have been profoundly incapacitating. With a squeezed, breathy moan, she collapsed onto her back, just about managing to keep pressure on her wrist as both hands were pinned to her chest by their own weight.
“Rot in hell,” she groaned, glaring at me.
I stood a meter off, observing Farweather and the apparatus surrounding her. It looked like a spring had recoiled, sending a piece of metal across her lower arm with enough force that it had acted like a blade. She had an arterial bleed going on, though not too bad a one—as if there were anything such as an insignificant arterial injury—and she was managing to keep enough pressure on it that while she could probably bleed out pretty easily if left untreated, she wasn’t in immediate danger of dying.
I guess she had sensed me coming, after all. If she hadn’t tried to get tricky, and had just gotten the drop on me the old-fashioned way by electrocuting me with her bolt prod or putting a few holes in me with the airgun she had holstered on her thigh, I’d be dead or a captive by now. But she’d tried to set a trap. And apparently I had been right about being the better engineer.
What kind of a sophipath wore a projectile weapon in a pressure vessel?
Well, a pirate who would think nothing of murdering a whole crew of people, even if those people were monsters. Silly question. Moving on now.
I probably really should kill her. I’d be saving my own life, and a lot of other lives over the long term, if I did.
I probably really should. But for now, I managed to swallow down another bolus of rage, and remember that I needed her. I groped in my suit repair kit for a roll of pressure tape. Crouching down, I braced and counterbalanced myself, and reached cautiously into the high-gravity zone to lay the tape very gently on her sternum.
If she was a cat, she would have been spitting at me with flattened ears.
“Go ahead and tape up that wrist,” I said.
She did, using one hand and her teeth, managing not to lose too much more blood in the process. It took her about ninety seconds, and by the time she was done more fresh blood was smeared all over her, the deck, her face, and everything else within range—including splatters on my boots. The roll of tape was absolutely thick with gore. One more small, irreplaceable, useful item off the inventory.
I really wished I had access to a printer. You never realize how spoiled you get by not having to keep stuff around because you can just make it when you need it, until suddenly you discover that stuff is a finite resource and you can’t just automatically get more.