We proceeded to observation. It was pretty. We were still in white space, and the twisting bands of light were particularly lovely for being so narrow, with so much dark between.
Gorgeous to look at, but it gave me a chill. We were way out in the Dark and the Empty, if this was all the starlight around.
Starlight. What a tautology. As if there’s anything else in the universe that makes light. Directly or indirectly, all the light there is originates from stars.
Well, I suppose you could make a case for antimatter, or for burning hydrogen, but you’d have to stretch the point, and besides, fussing with poetry until you ruin it has never been a sport that appealed to me.
Farweather walked toward the dome, still rubbing her wrist where the shackle had been. She didn’t seem to have any galls or sores—I’d been careful to pad the thing, and to give her supplies to change the padding regularly—so I guessed it was just the reflexive fussing motion of someone recently freed.
“Wow,” she said.
I grinned into my palm. “Told you it was pretty.”
She shot me a look over her shoulder that was practically scorching. My cheeks burned; I glanced away.
Terrible idea.
And it wasn’t getting any better.
Flustered, I grabbed ahold of the conversation and unsubtly steered it. “Should you take us out of white space?”
“Maybe. I don’t have fine maneuvering control.”
“How were you going to dock us on the other end?” I blurted, scandalized.
“Tugboats.” She shook her head at me. “You ought to know about those.”
I ought to. Well, that answered one of my questions.
She pointed. “There’s our company.”
I followed the line of her finger to see what she was aiming it at, and discovered a ship sharing our white bubble that was doing absolutely nothing to render itself unnoticeable. It burned running lights, and had floodlit itself so I could make out the registration marks and the details of the design.
I caught my breath when I saw it, my mouth relaxing into a smile. What I was looking at, blinking in disbelief, was a pretty standard Synarche interdiction cruiser, a light Interceptor-class constabulary vessel that was mostly engines and ship-to-ship weapons held together with an armored skin around a small crew compartment, its needle-like hull wrapped in a double set of white coils.
Well, that explained how it had caught us. Those things were fast.
It was inside the Prize’s enormous white coils, a piece of fancy flying that made me think painfully of my lost shipmate. I’d heard rumors of Judiciary pilots who could match up white bubbles in transit, while both ships were pushing v. I’d never thought to have a front-row glimpse of it.
“Not one of ours,” Farweather said.
“Not one of yours, maybe.”
She shot me a look that was far more amused than angry. Pirate fatalism, maybe. “You think they’ll be pleased to see you?”
I managed to keep my nails from rattling on the butt of the bolt prod. Whatever I might have said back to her, I never got the chance to try, because a male voice broke in. Steeped in dry humor, moderately familiar, it said, “Oh, I should think they will be very pleased to see you, Dz.”
Singer?
“Singer?”
Silence, for a moment. Then: “Sorry, adjusting the speaker protocols. Is this voice a closer match?”
“Oh my goodness, Singer!”
“Present,” the shipmind said, from all around me. “Wow, there’s a lot of room in this brain.”
I would have hugged him. I needed to hug him, but I couldn’t hug him, so instead I bounced in place on my toes and swung my arms like an overexcited five-an-old who has to let some of the energy out somehow or explode all over the place, emotionally speaking, and messily.
“How are you alive?” I babbled. “I just—how are you on the Koregoi ship?”
“I ditched here,” he said. “When the tug was destroyed, I sent a personality seed over. Remember that I had an uplink going? It just took me nearly this long to figure out the system over here, rewrite my own code so that I could run on it effectively, then write the ship itself a new OS so I could control my lips and fingers, to use a totally inappropriate anthropomorphization. Also, I had the Koregoi senso in your brain to use as a transitional platform, until somebody fried your fox.”
“Wait,” I said. “You used my brain as . . . an adaptor?”
“To bridge incompatible systems.”
“An adaptor.”
“. . . Yes?”
I reached out and patted the nearest bulkhead, just about swimming in relief. “This is amazing. This is the best news ever. Wait, did you . . . ? Were you in my senso? While my fox was still operating?
“I had a seed in you, too, though just a tiny one with very limited functionality; there’s not a lot of room in there.”
“I heard you—it?—talking to me. Maybe? Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?”
Farweather had turned around and was staring at me, up at space, at the Interceptor, around at the deck and walls of the Koregoi ship. I glared at her. Whatever she was about to say, I did not want to hear it.
She shut her mouth again and turned her shoulder to me. That was fine. The feeling was pretty mutual.
“I wasn’t in contact with that seed,” Singer said. “If anything happened to corrupt this instance of me, I wanted the uncorrupted backup. And as for why it didn’t tell you—it wasn’t a proper AI. Just a personality seed.”
“You could have let me know you were there!”
“Knowing myself, I’m sure I was talking to you.”
“. . . I might have noticed that,” I agreed.
I didn’t know enough about programming artificial intelligences to have a good sense of the technical difference between an AI proper and a personality seed. But I could probably make do with my self-evident sense of the generalities, and I was figuring that out pretty rapidly.
“But how’d you get in here?” I said.
“I’d transferred an archive over to this machine as well, as soon as I got access to it. Did you know there’s a lot of bandwidth in your parasite?”
“You propagated? Singer, you did something illegal?”
He sighed, which was something he did for communication with meatpeople, not because shipminds exhale loudly in worry or frustration. “It seemed like a safe precaution. And I didn’t think you’d mind.”
Farweather sneered at me, and (I thought) at Singer and the Synarche and the whole lot of us in general. “And it’s just coincidence that he shows up now.”
I thought of the voice in my head, the one I’d thought was my own wishful thinking. I thought of the power fluctuations and the weird way in which the ship had occasionally seemed to help me out: the stanchion, for example. Or maybe it was just that the ship was helpful, even without Singer in charge, but still, I was convinced. He hadn’t just shown up now. He’d been around the whole time. He’d just . . . manifested now. And I couldn’t blame him for biding his time until the reinforcements got here. Or had it taken him this long to get adequate control of the Prize’s systems? Was it possible that he had summoned them in once he was active? No, he couldn’t have reached across two white bubbles. . . .
But possibly he could have sensed them approaching, and slowed the Prize to help them catch us. Who knew what kind of sensors this thing had, and how it could interact with dark gravity.
Farweather said, “I’m sure this sudden AI has nothing to do with the Synarche ship matching pace with us. You’re being played, Haimey. This is not your friend. It’s just a . . . simulation.”
She tried to sound concerned, but I knew how the Freeporters—and Farweather herself—felt about free artificial intelligences. They deemed them untrustworthy and kept what limited computation they used hobbled, not allowing it to develop self-awareness.
Paranoid Luddites.
I glanced up at the interdiction cruiser and its impossibly skilled flying. A bubble of optimism rose in me—one that I would have quenched, if I’d been able to tune, because the pain of its being disappointed would be so extreme. But I was filled with what the ancient poets would have called a wild surmise, a hope so strong it hurt me physically.
“What about Connla and the cats?” I said to Singer, ignoring Farweather. My voice broke.
He ignored the evidence of emotion. “I’m not completely sure. But they might have lived. They were all suited up, and the part of the tug that was directly hit was the drive, not the control cabin.”
Relief surged in me. Dizzying, rendering me so giddy I actually reached for my fox to bump it back under control. I shouldn’t have bothered, and not just because I had no fox—because the elation was replaced with dread as I had another idea. A terrible one. What happened once could happen again, and while the Interceptor was a hell of a lot tougher than a tug . . .
“Wait. Singer. Do you have control of this ship’s weapons?”
“This ship does not have any weapons,” he reported.