When she’d stopped her bleeding, the next thing she did was reach for her gun.
I was, of course, ready for that, and pinned her to the deck hard enough that her face pulled back against the bones and her breathing grew labored.
“Bad pirate,” I said. I was gambling that if she wasn’t actively bleeding, her Koregoi parasite could repair her the same way mine had repaired me. Otherwise, well, there wasn’t much I could do for her that wouldn’t result in gangrene.
“. . . enjoying this.”
Yeah, I was. I wish I could say I wasn’t proud of it—I knew I wouldn’t be proud of it when I quit being a temporary psychopath—but it wasn’t so easy to stop enjoying it, either.
“Leave your weapons in the holsters, unclip them, and give them to me,” I said.
“Fuck you,” she answered.
“I’ll crush you,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” she answered. Her breathing strained under the weight of her own flesh. Still she managed a pained smile.
I let the ship pull her down a little more. She moaned. My fingernails dug into my forepalms.
She should be squashed like the insect she was. She should be paying for all the lives she had ended. Everything awful she had chosen and done. I wanted to smear her all over the decking and walk away.
She turned her head so her cheek lay flat against the deck, still looking at me. Her neck muscles weren’t going to enjoy that tomorrow, if we both lived so long. I wondered if the pressure was blurring her vision yet.
“More weight,” she said.
? ? ?
It wasn’t really a standoff, of course. I was healthy—healthy-ish—and she’d lost a lot of blood. I just reached in again, bracing myself even more carefully, and relieved her of her visible armaments.
First I had to spend ten minutes talking myself out of murdering her in cold blood. And by the time I’d actually worked up my moral fiber enough that I could touch her without assassinating her, she’d passed out due to acceleration sickness, and I could pat her down for other dangerous items (two knives, a monofilament garrote that she was lucky she hadn’t incorporated into her death trap or she’d probably be missing that hand entirely, and a spare clip for the air pistol) and make sure that her wrists and ankles were taped together securely with the blood-fouled suit repair kit.
By then, I was feeling more like myself again, which seemed like a great loss, because I didn’t even get the chance to kick her in the head a couple of times while I was still disinhibited enough to do it.
I even made a point of being careful to make sure she was getting adequate blood flow to her extremities, which was definitely more than she deserved, and I found her first aid kit (she wasn’t getting anything else out of mine) and gave her a spray-hypo of a broad-spectrum antibiotic and antiviral to keep her from getting alien space gangrene or the deadly Koregoi herpes or whatever else might be floating around out here.
The odds of cross-species infection were slim. But if I made the conscious decision to invest in some kind of caretaking behavior where she was concerned, I figured I was psychologically less likely to shove her out the nearest airlock.
Sunk cost fallacy. Make it work for you.
Why that seemed important to me at the time, I’m not really sure. Something about maintaining my humaneness and self-respect in the face of adversity. Or doing things the hard way. Or some side effect of my social conscience reasserting itself after its nice little nap.
Farweather didn’t see it that way. She woke up while I was going through her kit, and though she didn’t say anything, she lay quietly and watched me give her the antibiotic and antiviral hypo. I tucked her in with a couple of reflective blankets and gave her some fluids and glucose from her own first aid setup to ward off shock, which I guess baseline humans are more vulnerable to than I am.
“That’s not going to make me think better of you,” she said mildly, when I’d backed away.
I shrugged. “What you think of me is immaterial.”
“So you don’t need anything from me?”
She said it in a flirting tone that might have been more effective if she weren’t covered in her own blood from trying to kill me. Oh, and if I hadn’t had all that nonsense turned off. And I was very glad I had, because Farweather—mass murderer or no—was just the sort of bad girl I knew could get under my skin if I let her.
Clade upbringings fuck you up on so many levels, when you finally let the oppressive rightminding go and try to exist as an independent human being with things like judgment and will.
“Sure,” I said dryly. I rummaged through her supplies and found the coffee. There was a little probe for heating water, and a vacuum extractor to draw it through the beans.
“Sweet eternity,” I said reverently.
“Bitch, you’d better share,” said she.
I smiled sweetly at her over my shoulder. “Teach me how to access the ship’s drive functions, and how to navigate her, and we can have a conversation about it then.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
So I made myself an exceptionally good cup of coffee, and set about trying to figure it out for myself.
? ? ?
It turns out that caffeine is a highly addictive substance with really unpleasant physical withdrawal symptoms, if you’re not bumping your brain chemistry to compensate, and that one of those withdrawal symptoms is an evil, splitting headache. Which Farweather told me all about, in excruciating detail, except when she was sleeping, or just curled up suffering on the floor.
I had no idea there were that many filthy insults available to the average speaker of Galactic Standard. Well, learn something new every dia; that’s what my clademothers used to tell me. Which was more productive advice on the whole than most of what I was getting from the pirate.
So I learned a lot about my theoretical sexual, spiritual, and menu habits—all of it revolting. What Farweather didn’t tell me about in detail, sadly, was how she’d been operating the Koregoi ship, even when I offered her coffee and a headache pill if she shared.
I’m not sure if I consider this a relief or a disappointment, but it either pleases or saddens me to report that it turns out I’m too well rightminded or just too socially aware to make much of a torturer. I pushed the issue as much as I could, but I have to be honest: it didn’t get me anywhere, and I thought if I pushed her harder, she’d probably just lie to me. Not that lying to me would work for long: I could tell just as well as she could where we were in the universe, and which way we were going. So I’d know if she’d actually taught me how to steer the Prize or not almost immediately.
This isn’t how it works on the holoserials.
And so we sailed on into the darkness, me trying to come up with a plan in case I didn’t manage to divert us before we got to the Freeports, and going through her stuff—carefully, in case of booby traps. I found and disabled two, which left me with a good opinion of my own engineering skill. There were a lot of useful things in her luggage: I organized them neatly while I took an inventory. She filled her time with a robust suite of hobbies that included cursing, whining about her headache and shaky extremities, and napping extensively.
It was a long, long flight from the Core to the Republic of Pirates. Even at the relative-v the Prize reached and maintained, it would probably take us at least a third of an an or more to get there.
So I passed the time coding the projectile weapon to me, then taking it apart and hiding all the bits in various places where they wouldn’t be speedy for her to reassemble, and trying to figure out how to get her on my side. That seemed the most productive use of her as a resource, since I hadn’t had the intestinal fortitude just to murder her.
Maybe that was why she didn’t take me seriously, come to think of it. On the other hand, it was hard to imagine how I would have gotten any information out of her if I had just up and slaughtered her.
? ? ?
Farweather slept a lot for the first couple of diar, in part definitely because I dosed her with a sedative every time I needed to rest, for safety’s sake, and in part probably because of the caffeine withdrawal, and in part probably because she was making up lost blood volume. Which she could do, because I (grudgingly) fed her, and made sure she was adequately hydrated. She wasn’t wearing a full suit the way I was, so—expiation for any wrong I’ve ever done, I swear it, and some karmic debt paid forward—I even helped her hop to the head and use it, though I made her figure out how to deal with her own hygiene, taped hands or no taped hands.
I was glad I’d figured out what the waste disposal closets looked like already. After my own experience with adapting to the space nori diet, I’d made a small study of how the Koregoi handled waste disposal. A toilet was a toilet was a toilet, it turned out, whether it was a zero-g litterbox or just a vacuum tube.