Which, admittedly, was not such a bad idea.
Still, if I was floating through maintenance tubes I wasn’t talking to Farweather, and if I wasn’t talking to Farweather I stood half a chance of getting my head on straight eventually and even keeping it that way. Rightminding or no rightminding.
Okay, straighter.
I knew that my worrying about archinformists was a kind of denial. Because it had at its base the assumption that I would beat the odds and somehow manage to pry the ship out of Farweather’s control and fly it back to Synarche space. The conquering hero.
Which seemed . . . okay. Possibly like something I shouldn’t count on being able to pull off. But it was a nice life goal for the time being. And if I wound up kidnapped by space pirates . . . well, I wouldn’t be the first woman to have been.
Who knew? Maybe I could even thrive as a space pirate, if I played my cards right. I could reinvent myself again. Invent an entirely new identity. Again.
What did I have to take me back to the Synarche, anyway, now that Singer and Connla and the cats were gone?
Except I still thought the Synarche was right, and I still thought the Synarche was home. My affections were not alienated on that front. So I guessed whatever Farweather thought she was doing when she fried my fox, it wasn’t really working. Because what I wanted more than anything was to do the right thing.
I wished I had Singer with me to tell me what the right thing was. But I could make some guesses as to what he’d say. I’d known him pretty well. The right thing was to figure out how to get control of the Prize away from Farweather, turn it around, and begin the very, very, very long trip home. Fortunately, there was an entire inhabited galaxy between me and the Core, and the Prize was fast. But I would still be on short rations until I could find someplace to resupply.
So much algae.
Assuming she did not literally blow up, and take me and the Prize with her.
Well, if I had to toss her out an airlock to save the ship and myself . . .
. . . I’d span that void when I came to it. Especially since I had in fact been trying to wrest control of the ship and it just had not been working.
I wondered if she knew what kind of a time limit she was operating under. And if she did know how long she had, I also wondered if there was some way to leverage relativistic effects to keep her alive long enough to get her to a surgeon who might be able to remove the bomb (if there was a bomb).
The woman had blown up my head. Why was I even still considering what might be good for her?
At least in my avoidance I was learning a lot about the ship’s systems. In particular, I was learning a great deal about its electrical grid, which was less like a grid, frankly, and more like a circulatory system. Not in the sense of being alive, per se, but in having trunks that diverged and spread apart in a branching fashion—treelike, fractal—until they cycled and returned.
I’d managed to figure out how to get into the engine room, or what I thought of as main engineering, and I supposed if I really needed to I could just sabotage something. But the random power fluctuations were already scary enough. The Enemy was out there, vast and cold and full of not much at all except the occasional random particle, and we were sweeping those up into our white field as we went.
The engines were definitely alien, but they also made sense, and I was an engineer. And these were not my first set of alien engines, either, though they were the first ones I couldn’t just pull up a manual for, even if that manual was in badly translated Novoruss.
So, I couldn’t control the ship. Not yet anyway. But I could break it. And probably kill myself and Farweather in the process—slowly, through starvation or environmental failure after we were stranded. But if we were lucky, death might come quickly and kindly. Oxygen starvation wasn’t a bad way to go. You just got sleepy and foggy, and eventually sat down for a nice nap that lasted longer than you anticipated.
Restful.
I didn’t want to nap without end. I wanted to find out what happened, going forward. I wanted to keep finding out for as long as I could. Maybe it was selfish, and maybe I didn’t deserve it, but I wanted it. I wanted to keep existing. There were future selves that I could envision, and in envisioning, want to become.
That surprised me, a little, everything considered: my culpability in what had happened on Ansara; my recent bereavement.
If giving that up was what it took to keep the Koregoi ship from falling into the hands of the pirates, though? If I had to destroy the ship to save it, I decided . . . I would.
I was living with enough guilt already. Becoming somebody like Farweather would mean that I had died. Died and been reinvented as somebody I did not recognize, and somebody I did not want to be.
So I had a plan, and though I didn’t really want to face Farweather, my options were somewhat limited overall. I was going to have to feed her eventually, and myself also. And since I’d given her most of my breakfast, my own hunger situation was progressing beyond where the yeast tablets could manage it for me.
I was thinking about maybe spending another stanhour tracing power lines and checking their connections, though I didn’t think it would help much. Everything seemed to be orderly and in perfect working order. There was no reason for the power drops. And the power drops didn’t seem to affect the drive, which made me think that maybe the drive was the source of the problem. If it was for some reason drawing power erratically, that might explain the dips, though I had no idea what could be causing that except a drive problem, and there was a terrifying idea. Or maybe it was the gravity generators, if that was a thing, because sure, why wouldn’t there be gravity generators making the artificial gravity in this millennians-old Koregoi starship I was stuck on, on a one-way trip to nowhere. . . .
Was the ship somehow using dark gravity for that? As the Ativahika did for travel?
You’re getting hysterical, Dz.
Man, times like these, I missed my regulator.
Anyway, I’d just made up my mind that I was going to head back in a stanhour or so, when the power dipped again, longer and harder this time. I grabbed a nearby housing and held on for dear life, half expecting the gravity to flicker off or the ship to abruptly change course or v and the inertial dampers that kept us all from dying to snap off and leave me slamming from deck plate to bulkhead.
Maybe I was getting a little paranoid. Maybe just a little.
In the darkness, I could have convinced myself that I felt a chill. I was being ridiculous, and I knew it. A body as large and well insulated as the Prize would take a long time to radiate its internal warmth away to a point that the inhabitants would find uncomfortable. Space is a terrible conductor of things like heat; there’s not a lot of there there for the energy to move through. So the heat has to escape in the old-fashioned way, straight radiation, and that’s inefficient and slow.
The lights stayed dim a long time, though. Long enough that I clipped my tools and gauges and headed through the various undoors as I went. I had another bad moment—it was a dia for bad moments—wondering what I would do if the hatches failed to operate, but either they had their own power sources (smart), or they had priority when it came to main power (less smart), or the little nanite fogs that I figured were probably what made them up were self-willed and self-powered and basically did their own thing, which was rejoice in sealing and unsealing hatchways anytime somebody wanted to walk through them.
I wasn’t taking any chances that it would continue working, though. I gritted my teeth against the anticipated ache in my afthands, eschewed the more comfortable but smaller and circuitous maintenance tunnels, and I ran.
? ? ?
When I burst back into our nest, Farweather was on her feet, turning and looking from side to side. She couldn’t really see anything, because she’d been in a room without any portholes, and I hadn’t bothered to move her. I’d just grown that permanent appurtenance from the bulkhead (sweet-talking those same utility fogs, maybe? man, I wish I knew) and unceremoniously chained her to the wall.
As soon as I bolted in and stopped short, I knew she wasn’t behind the ship’s misbehavior. Her frosty exterior was melting, her face lightly sheened with sweat. Her pulse raced in the shadow of the hollow of her jaw, and she was so razor-sharp with decians of short rations that I could see it there. I knew what her heart felt like, thundering in her chest, because mine was palpitating too.
She whirled on me. “What did you do?” she said, her voice breaking between a whine and a snarl.
“Nothing,” I said as the ship shuddered around us. My legs almost buckled as I came off the floor and then slammed back down. I didn’t go to my hands and knees, but that was as much luck as balance, and it had nothing to do with having been prepared. “It’s—happening on its own!”