“You know,” Farweather said, “it wasn’t us that killed your friends.”
She was giving herself a sponge bath, crouched down with a bowl of water between her knees and a folded-up wad of fiber. I stood guard, turned slightly away to offer her a scrap of privacy. I’d rearranged her chains so she had a little more freedom, and I was watching her carefully for the time being to make sure it hadn’t been too much freedom. She made a pretense of docility, but I had my fox tuned to keep reminding me that she wasn’t tame and I needed to be on my guard around her. It would be much too easy to relax.
On the other hand, I was as much her captive as she was mine. I might have her body under control—but she, in her own way, had mine. I was going where she wanted to go, where her friends were waiting for us. And okay, it might be a little embarrassing for her to explain how she wound up handcuffed to a stanchion, but she could probably spin that as part of her master plan to subvert me.
I kept working on the ship, working on my connection to the ship. I was learning interesting and useful things, refining my control over its internal spaces, and I was utterly failing to get any control over its trajectory or speed. I wasn’t going to quit trying. But to be honest I wasn’t feeling very hopeful.
Farweather hadn’t looked up, studiedly casual, as if she didn’t care if I rose to her bait.
It was probably worth it. “Oh, didn’t you?”
She pulled her suit up, fastened it, and tapped the bulkhead with one finger. The nail was getting pretty long and clicked quite satisfyingly. I wasn’t about to give her anything sharp enough to cut them with. “You must have gotten close enough to trigger this thing’s self-defense mechanisms.”
I sat down against the far wall.
She pushed the bowl of water and the washcloth out of her immediate orbit. I’d clean them up later.
“That seems likely,” I said. I was trying for neutral, but the dryness must have soaked through.
She fastened her collar tab and gave me a lopsided smile.
“You want me to believe the Koregoi ship just attacked Singer. When I know your ship has guns, and you fired on us previously. When you came out of white space just then in a hail of particles.”
“We knew it had defenses,” she said. “That’s why we planned the high-speed flyby, dropping out of white space just long enough for me to bail out, correct trajectory, and spacewalk over to the vessel. We didn’t shoot you, so it must have used those defenses on your shipmates.”
“And your high speed had nothing to do with the fact that there were a dozen Core vessels lined up for a piece of the Prize.”
She smiled. “Most of them don’t have guns.”
A few had, though. But the pirates had been and gone before any of them could have acquired a solution. Which made it seem like maybe Farweather might be telling the truth about not being behind the death of Singer and his crew. The pirate vessel would not have had a lot of time to acquire a solution either. Especially if it had been busy coming up with a launch trajectory for Farweather.
But the bow wave . . .
Hell, maybe it was an accident. On the other hand, Farweather seemed capable of lying about absolutely everything.
I said, “I haven’t seen any evidence of guns on this ship, either.”
“You used the artificial gravity to nail me to the deck,” she said. “What’s to say that the ship can’t use the same technology as a weapon?”
I pretended I hadn’t already thought of that myself.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me. Your people obviously know more about it than mine do.”
She sat down too, facing me. I got up and moved her washbasin away, dumped it, wiped it clean. Started water for coffee.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Really? You didn’t get onto a ship controlled by a famously xenophobic race like the Jothari by trading them artificial gravity for access to their vessel? By installing it for them, and also installing the overrides?”
Her head had fallen to the side. Her hair was getting long, too. She smiled at me and didn’t say anything.
“So where’d you get that technology?”
“Who’s to say we did?”
“Less intact Koregoi ships?” I asked. “Dead ones?”
She leaned back and closed her eyes.
I said, “That just leaves the question of why you needed to get on the Jothari ship. It can’t just have been a matter of wanting to steal a ship with the artificial gravity tech, not when you must have sold it to them and gone along to help install it and play technician.”
“That’s an interesting theory.”
I left her coffee where she could just reach it with her fingertips if she stretched, and retreated.
I said, “I think I figured out why you needed to be on the Jothari ship. And why you didn’t load the Koregoi senso until you were ready to blow the Jothari ship.”
“Oh?” she said companionably.
“Because you needed to manufacture it. You needed to refine the senso parasite from devashare, right? Or from the cadaver byproducts, or something. You needed a dead Ativahika.”
“See?” she said. “You’re pretty bright when you allow yourself to be.”
God, you disgust me.
I didn’t say it, though. I bit my lip, and remembered that I needed her, and that the clock was ticking and time was running out on me.
What I said was, “That’s some real audacity. And your coffee is getting cold, Zanya.”
? ? ?
“Let me into your fox,” she said.
“Are you high?” I said.
“Let me in,” she said, “and I’ll teach you how to control the ship.”
“I don’t trust you,” I said.
She held up her hand. The bandages were long off the wrist it was attached to. She crooked a little finger at me.
“Pinkie swear,” the pirate said.
I laughed in her face and went back to constructing a kind of couch or sofa out of rolled and tied bolsters of soft fiber I’d scavenged from various places around the ship. Better than a pile of packing material, maybe. I should move into a different cabin, and figure out how to lock her into this one. But I didn’t trust her unless I had my eyes on her.
I was sleeping elsewhere, anyway. And if I spent too much time away from her, I found that I got unbearably lonely.
? ? ?
“Show me how to change our course,” I said, “and if you can explain why you want to get into my fox, I just might let you do it. After I chain you up so you’ll starve in your own waste products if you kill or incapacitate me.”
“That’s the kind of trust that bespeaks a successful long partnership.”
“It’s the kind of trust you’ve earned.”
She sighed. “I can’t change our course.”
“Won’t.”
“Can’t,” she said. Then she paused as if to consider. “Well, in the sense that I am absolutely unwilling to suffer the repercussions of carrying out your request, yes, won’t.”
“Repercussions.”
“If I don’t report on time, the biomine wired into my central nervous system will explode, and that’ll be it for me, you, and this lovely piece of functional archaeology.” She patted the deck of the Prize with what looked like affection.
I blinked but managed not to glance at her, surprised as always to be reminded she was human. And stunned, as well, by what she’d just revealed.
Of course, whether I could trust her or not was an open question. She’d lie like she was in the plane of a planetary formation disk if it suited her, and never bat a transplant-augmented eyelash either.
I folded my hands over my arms. “Where’s my lecture on how the Republic of Pirates is the last guardian of human freedom?”
“Freedom includes the freedom to be an asshole,” she said, and shrugged.
“Asshole and criminal are different things.” Despite myself, I was outraged. Not at her; on her behalf.
She stretched, shrugged. Bent down and touched her toes and hung there, stretching her spine and thighs. I imagine she was still working on getting the kinks out from the time that I’d had her more closely chained.
She had a good two meters of range of motion, now. And I’d carefully marked a caution circle on the deck in the same yellow grease pencil I used for marking up repairs while I was planning them, because I had no intention of straying inside her range.
“So,” I said. “My best course of action seems to be to toss you out an airlock, then. And try to figure out how to divert this thing with you safely elsewhere.”
“Good thing for me you’re not a murderer.”
I smiled. “I could learn.”
? ? ?
“Let me into your fox,” she said, “and I’ll restore your memories.”
“My memories are just fine.”
She laughed curtly. “Babes, if you say so.”
Her mattress rustled as she stretched out and folded her hands behind her head. I turned around to look at her. Within instants, she was snoring.
? ? ?
“What did you mean?”
She poked around in her bowl of noodles, looking for the dehydrated green onion scraps. “Sorry?”
“What did you mean about restoring my memories?”