? ? ?
She glared for a second, then decided to believe me. “Get the mattress.”
Not the one she was standing on, obviously. I snagged my own seating pad from across the cabin and humped it up on my back like a spongy, crackling turtle’s shell. For a second, I thought of ditching my utility belt—but loose tools ricocheting around the cabin would be worse than lumpy, bruising objects that were nevertheless firmly attached to my body and could not, therefore, build up enough v to be truly dangerous unless I was ricocheting around with them, in which case I would have bigger problems.
I hopped over to Farweather, the pads and packing material trailing behind me like a train. She grabbed me and dropped. I thought about banging her one in the solar plexus, but she didn’t bite or punch, so I went with her. We pressed ourselves together. I grabbed her pad and she grabbed mine, and she rolled so the packing material wound around us in a protective cocoon.
A protective shroud, the unhelpful part of my brain said.
“Choke up on my chain,” she said as the gravity cut out again and we went briefly into the air, thumping a bulkhead before we slammed again into the deck. “I’ve got the padding.”
I wished I had time to tie it in place.
Wait.
“Roll,” I said, and showed her. She helped, thrashing against me, thrusting with her shoulders and hips. She was so thin, and I was so thin, that her hip bones ground against mine. We wound the chain around our layers of padding. It was long enough to go two and a half times—and it did a good job of pinning them in place and limited our collective range of motion. I managed to work a wrench clipped to a carabiner off my belt despite the confined space and used it to secure two links of the chain to each other, effectively pinning the padding to our bodies and the cocoon of the two of us to the corner between deck and bulkhead.
Then we . . . lay there. And stared at each other. And waited for the next fluctuation, with no control over whether it would slam us into a deck or smash us against a bulkhead.
Nothing happened.
I watched sweat gather along the edge of her eye socket. Her breathing slowed; echoing mine, I realized, as I was regulating mine more out of habit than intent. I turned my head, because she was breathing on my face.
She ground her hips unsubtly against me, and I elbowed her in the ribs. “That’s assault.”
“Ow,” she said. “And what’s that?”
“Self-defense,” I answered. “Is it over? Do you think we should—”
We slammed sideways. Farweather cried out. I couldn’t answer, because the stanchion I’d sweet-talked the ship into growing—the one we were both now chained to—had slammed me in the ribs. The breath came out of me hard and sharp, and it wouldn’t go back in. She grabbed on to me, arms around me, and I wheezed against her shoulder and into the crook of her neck.
She smelled so good.
You’re not supposed to think of things like that when your life might be ending. On the other hand, that’s often when your body really, really wants to think about them.
We hit the deck. And then the wall, and then the deck again. We lay there gasping, clutching each other. She was on the bottom; then we bounced again and hit the end of the chain and we were side by side. Pain spiked through my elbow when she landed on it.
Her breath was hot against my throat. Breasts soft, hips sharp and painful. A pliers dug into my floating ribs. There wasn’t anything I could do to move it.
The lights shone through our translucent padding, and I looked into her transparent dark brown eyes, to the satin sheen and the patterns of veins and pigment at the back of them.
“This is a hell of a long way to go for a date,” she said, between breaths that sounded painful.
“Shut up,” I explained.
She kissed me, and I . . .
I let it happen.
And then I kissed her back.
? ? ?
Don’t get me wrong. I knew it was a terrible idea, even while it was happening. But I wanted it, and I wanted her, and I was terrified and she was there and—
Sometimes you do something that you’re not supposed to.
It was a very ill-advised kiss.
It happened anyway. And you know? I liked it.
And then we hit the stanchion again, right where the chain crossed our bodies, and snapped away from it one more time, and I—
—blacked out.
? ? ?
I woke up again pretty quickly once the gs were gone. Or returned to normal, I should say, because we weren’t floating, just lying on the deck in an uncomfortable bundle. The air around us was stale and smelled of sweat and a little urine. Farweather was staring at me speculatively—and a little bruisedly—from centimeters away, and everything around us seemed cool and peaceful.
“Is it safe?” I asked her.
“Is anything?”
Farweather managed to extricate one hand and struggled with the carabiner until it came loose. We rolled, unwinding the chain, and made little grunting sounds of unhappiness whenever weight or something unforgiving landed on a bruise. There were a lot of bruises. There was a lot of grunting. I figured I had at least two cracked ribs. Come on, Koregoi buggies, fix me up.
You know, it hadn’t occurred to me before just that minute that Farweather’s EM pulse had not disrupted the parasite, that I could tell. I hadn’t even thought about it. I guess I really was integrating those senses.
Neuroplasticity. It’s a hell of a thing.
Finally we unwound ourselves and got a little space between us. Superstitiously, neither one of us crawled out of our packing material yet. And neither one of us stood up, either.
Well, I say it was superstition. Maybe it was sense.
We lay there, side by side. I was panting and aching. I was only paying enough attention to Farweather to make sure she didn’t intend to brain me with that wrench.
The ship shuddered again, but the gravity remained intact this time. And now that I wasn’t distracted by being slammed against internal structures, I realized something.
Through the Koregoi senso, I could tell that we were . . . slowing. Gradually. Not falling out of white space all at once as the bubble collapsed, but instead . . . unfolding. The Koregoi ship’s drive was gradually smoothing the space around us, doing something impossible—allowing us to change vector and apparent velocity while in white space.
And through the Koregoi senso, I could also feel that there was another ship.
Another ship, in white space. Coming up on us fast, then—incredibly—matching pace with us. Falling into formation, which was something that I had heard military vessels could do, but I had never actually witnessed happening. Even in all of Connla’s fancy flying, merging bubbles and coaxing abandoned vessels out of folded space-time, I’d never seen anything like this.
Pirates.
“We’ve got company,” Farweather said unhappily, because of course she could feel everything that I could.
I looked at her in surprise. “Not yours?”
“That wasn’t the plan,” she said. “But I’ve been out of contact. Maybe the plan has changed.”
“Maybe they were following, and when the ship started acting weird they moved in?”
She gave me a sly look. If she gathered that it was a test, and I was fishing for knowledge of the Freeporters’ technological abilities, she didn’t let on.
She just shrugged. “I guess we’re going to find out.”
CHAPTER 23
THE LIGHTS DIMMED ONCE MORE, and the whole giant ship shuddered. I regretted unrolling ourselves from the padding, but the gravity stayed on and we didn’t suffer any sudden, unexpected vector changes that left us ricocheting off the walls.
I unlocked Farweather’s chain, and she gazed at me speculatively, rubbing her wrist. “If I’d known that all it would take was kissing you, I would have done that ages ago.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m going up to observation. This is your chance to come along.”
Also, if something terrible happened to the ship and I was incapacitated, I needed to know she had a fighting chance to survive, and I hadn’t left her welded to a bulkhead wall to starve.
“Observation, huh?”
“Shake a leg,” I said. “It’s pretty.”
We made it up slowly, limping and leaning on walls. She kept an elbow pressed to her side hard enough that I thought about offering to wrap her ribs for her, but she didn’t ask and if she didn’t ask I wasn’t going to offer. I was braced for her to try something, but she didn’t. Possibly she was counting me as a potential ally if it turned out that we had enemies in common.
In any case, I wasn’t going to turn my back on her. So I made her go first, and she didn’t complain. I was carrying her bolt prod, anyway—I’d retrieved it from my hiding spot before I turned her loose—so it probably would have been a bad idea for her to come after me unless she could get the drop somehow.