I frowned. I looked at Farweather. It occurred to me that she was, in fact, under my skin. That my own Stockholmification was proceeding apace.
And that I had been letting some critical pieces of knowledge slide, because it was easier not to think about them when it was just her and me, and we needed each other for sanity and survival.
“That’s right, Zanya,” I said. “Didn’t you have some theory about what happened to the tug?”
“. . . About that.”
I turned on her. I didn’t say anything, but my hand was on the butt of her shock prod. I hated her, at that moment, more than I knew I could hate a human being. My hope had made me vulnerable, and the need to defend that vulnerability was making me angry now.
She froze.
I said, “Whatever you’re about to say, you might as well say it. But don’t lie to me again.”
“We didn’t think it would be manned,” she said. “We assumed the whole crew would be over on the Prize.”
“Why off Earth . . .” But I knew. Assuming she was telling the truth—and why would she?—I knew. Of course, that’s how the pirates would have done it—each one determined to defend their stake in the prize vessel because nobody else would do it for them. And we hadn’t gotten a proximity warning before the destruction commenced. So the only explanation was that they’d used the particle burst caught up in their bow wave to take out the tug.
Those reckless assholes.
It was only the sheerest luck that they hadn’t taken out the Koregoi ship and me in addition to the tug. Well, luck. And probably Zanya’s advanced relationship with her symbiote. And some fancy flying, though it pained me to admit it.
At least Zanya hadn’t been the pilot. . . . So I had two casual mass murderers to contend with.
I turned my back on Zanya. It was absolutely a stupid thing to do, and I did it anyway because if I didn’t I was going to electrocute her with her own weapon.
Singer would watch my back, anyway.
“Singer, what’s that ship out there?” I asked, moving away from Farweather. She didn’t follow; I heard her steps as she withdrew toward the windows at the rim of the observation deck.
I went toward the other side.
“It’s an Interceptor-class interdiction cruiser,” he said helpfully.
“Tell me something I don’t already know.” I leaned my forehands on the transparent material of the viewport.
“This particular vessel is the Synarche Justice Vessel I’ll Explain It To You Slowly. I’m afraid I do not have access to its current crew or mission assignments. My database accesses are a little limited right now.”
“You have databases at all?”
“The Koregoi ship has a great deal of fossil information aboard, and I’ve had some success in beginning to decrypt it. A lot of it is star charts and translation protocols, as you might expect. None of it is current. But I’ve managed to determine from the drift in the star charts since they were last accessed that the ship was in mothballs for approximately thirty thousand ans.”
He said it so casually. And it fell like a stone.
I gaped. I turned around and looked at Farweather, because I needed to share my incredulity with somebody, even if it was somebody I hated.
She looked back at me mildly.
“But everything works.”
“So it does,” he said.
“My species wasn’t even really a species yet.”
“Technically speaking, untrue,” he said. “By a factor of ten, more or less. But I understand the spirit in which you speak.”
“Holy crap,” I said. “You found the Rosetta Stone.”
“Technically speaking,” he repeated, “I am the Rosetta Stone.”
This was so much more than I had been expecting.
Lowering my voice, I said, “Singer, can you reboot my fox from there?”
Resonances changed as he localized his voice to me. “I need to generate a wireless signal and run a diagnostic. That will take a moment. The I’ll Explain It To You Slowly is hailing us, however. Shall I answer?”
“Please do.” A Synarche ship, hanging abeam us, out here in the middle of nowhere. A Synarche ship.
Hope.
Home.
Maybe I wouldn’t be dying forgotten in a pirate outpost somewhere on the edge of the Great Big Empty after all.
? ? ?
“I’ve accessed your fox,” Singer said, moments later. “I can’t be entirely sure if there’s physical damage, because I can’t run a diagnostic until it’s operating, but I should have the option of rebooting it. And don’t worry; I’m talking with the Synarche craft right now. We’ll be dropping into normal space momentarily.”
“Are they coming over?”
“They want you to bring the prisoner to them.”
I lowered my voice to a bare whisper. “She’ll put up a fight. She doesn’t want to die out here. She’s a sophipath. All about her own needs. Also, she’s at risk of exploding, if what she told me can be believed.”
“What?”
“She’s a human bomb,” I told him, and explained briefly. “Unless she was lying to me.”
“Or the other Freeporters were lying to her.” He paused long enough that I imagined he was communicating with the Interceptor.
I said, “Have you made them aware that the prisoner might blow up?”
“They say that they have surgical facilities.”
I decided that if they wanted to risk it, it was their lookout.
Farweather had crossed the observation deck and was staring out the window away from me. I could see her reflection dimly in the window, superimposed over the scrolling bands of light and the rescue mission beyond. I assumed she could see my back, as well.
“We don’t have two working suits.”
“They can send a shuttle.”
I eyed the lightly built little ship, impressed. “They can get a shuttle in that thing?”
I must have spoken louder than I intended, because Farweather’s reflection glanced over her shoulder at me before going back to studying the view. I kept my back to her and pretended I had not seen.
I lowered my voice to its previous level and said, “What’s our bargaining position?”
“That depends, I should think, on what you intend to bargain for.”
I smiled at my own reflection. I was concerned about all sorts of things right now, to be certain. But it just felt so dizzyingly, giddily good to have Singer back. People whose neural pathways formed under clade intervention are not meant to navigate the universe alone.
“Let me rephrase. How much trouble are we in?”
“Oh,” Singer said, sounding as startled as if he hadn’t even registered the possibility that we might be in trouble. “Not much, I should think. I mean, they’ll want that pirate.”
“I want that pirate too.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed.”
I blushed hot and sharp. “Hurry up with that fox reboot, would you?”
“Working on it,” he said.
“Besides,” I said. “That wasn’t what I meant. I meant I want her safely back in custody, and . . . what are we going to tell them about disposing of the pirate?”
“She can’t get far without a suit,” he said pragmatically. “We should tell them to send a constable over and get her.”
I bit my lip.
“And they’ll want the Koregoi ship, obviously. And me. And you. But the only things that might really get us in trouble are already pretty well mitigated by the result. I don’t think they’re going to dun me for propagating when the alternative was destruction; even an AI gets some latitude in the matter of self-preservation. And as for you . . . well, kidnapped by pirates is a pretty good excuse.”
I laughed out loud, stifling it because of Farweather. She rolled her eyes at me. I wasn’t supposed to know. “It is at that.”
I stepped back from the window and turned around. Raising my voice, I said crisply, “Please, Singer. Take us home.”
? ? ?
The Koregoi vessel did not so much as shiver now that Singer was firmly in control. I could tell that it was curving, because I could feel space bending around us. But Singer’s touch was sure and subtle, which was why—
When we fell out of white space, abruptly and without warning, it was as if we had hit a wall. A very soft wall, because there was no inertia. We didn’t go from moving to stopping. We just . . . weren’t bending the universe around us anymore.
The Interceptor, inside our massive coils, fell right out of space alongside us. Also stationary, thank the stars, because a collision hadn’t gotten any more appealing to me since the last time.
I am not sure I’ve ever been so happy about anything as I was at the outline of that souped-up Judiciary ship floating abeam the Prize.
Nothing moved. There was no sense of inertia. Space just unfolded around us . . . and we were back in the real world.
It was dark out here. Dark in ways that even our trip to the Milk Chocolate Marauder had not prepared me for. Space slid away like a waterfall of emptiness, bottomless and velvet in every direction. It seemed even darker because the bulk of the Koregoi vessel blocked the light of the Milky Way.