Yet.
Connla said, “We’ve had some time to compare notes, and we’re pretty sure that Habren was the source of the intel that lured us out to that sunforsaken sector in the first place, actually. Though the goal of that—”
“I came to the same conclusion. And what I think is that Farweather wanted to get her hands on me,” I said. “That’s what the booby trap on the Jothari ship was for.”
“Huh?” Connla blinked his large, bright blue eyes at me. “I don’t get it.”
“Backstory,” I said. I was suddenly much too tired to explain all the nonsense with my memories being altered and my juvenile record for terrorism and how my clade, my mothers and sisters, had used me as a weapon of mass destruction and then cut me loose as soon as I was inconvenient—and then abandoned me utterly and completely. I had nothing but rage, and I had no place to put that rage, so expressing it seemed pointless. “She used to know an ex-girlfriend of mine who was mixed up in some shady stuff. She thought maybe I had some additional information she would find useful.”
Connla tilted his head at exactly the same angle that Cheeirilaq was using, but they both let it slide. I suspected Cheeirilaq, being a Goodlaw, probably had more information about the whole mess than I did.
Connla said, “And she’s at large in the Koregoi ship.”
“Yep.” I stretched against the ache in my back. “Sorry about that.”
Well, it can’t be helped. I guess we shall just have to go over there and fetch her.
“Cheeirilaq, no.”
Its head swiveled to assess me with first one flittering teardrop eye, and then the other. I beg your pardon?
“The Koregoi ship. It’s under gravity. A little heavier than Terran standard, I think.” I shook my head. “Too much for me, anyway. Or nearly. You can’t go over there.”
There is much in what you say.
I almost thought it was a joke. How can you tell when a giant insect is winking?
Then it said, Well, we’ll just have to figure out how to lower the settings on the gravity, won’t we? What good luck that we have such an exceptionally competent engineer!
And an artificial intelligence who has gotten control of the ship’s systems, I thought, but that seemed like it could be explained later.
? ? ?
Connla and the cats joined me in the lighter on the way back over, together with a couple of peace officers. He leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. For such a madcap pilot, he was always pretty neurotic when somebody else was flying—even if they were flying sedately.
I stared out the window, looking from ship to ship until I was distracted by Connla muttering, “Your friend the grasshopper is pretty cool.”
“I like it,” I said, trying not to sound too brittle. I was having an emotional dia. Mephistopheles mewed from her spot in a carrier under the seat in front of me. I hoped she would not be singing the traveling song of her people the entire way back. It was probably just a protest about being cooped up, however, because she settled down after a complaint or two, and that allowed us both to relax a little.
He still didn’t open his eyes. He just rocked his head back and forth. When he quieted, and I thought he was dozing off, he surprised me again by saying, “What are we going to do when we get home?”
I blinked at him. “Home.”
We were going home to the Synarche. Assuming we lived through catching Farweather, but we had a pretty good set of backups now.
That reminded me: I needed to send Cheeirilaq a message about Farweather being potentially rigged to blow up. Good news, good news. I wondered what the Freeporters thought a reasonable commute time from the Core to whatever pathforsaken outpost we’d been headed for was. I never had gotten around to asking her.
I fired that off quickly, before I again forgot about it. Then I remembered that my fox could remember these things for me again, and felt like an idiot.
I hoped Singer hadn’t noticed.
Connla grimaced and kicked the deck at his feet, missing the cat’s cage. It was Bushyasta anyway. She was unlikely to take offense, let alone so much as notice anything except a dollop of cat food under her nose. “You and Singer. Where am I going?”
I grimaced back, but I didn’t kick anything. My afthands were still too damn sore from all the damn gravity.
Gravity I was going back to now. Sigh.
Well, nobody loves a whiner.
“Wherever you want, I guess, given what you can do,” I said. I pointed to our escort, the Interceptor, receding as the launch took us back toward the Koregoi vessel. “The constables seem pretty excited to have you on as a pilot. That doesn’t seem like dull work.”
He blew air out through his nostrils. I had no idea why he was being so sulky, and I didn’t like it.
“I’ve done something to make you unhappy.”
“It’s not you,” he said at last. He shook his head, the ponytail whipping. If we hadn’t been strapped in he would have shaken himself right out of the chair. “I just . . . you and Singer have a life to go to. You have a place, and important work. I’m . . . going to wind up doing milk runs or something.”
It was so strange to look at this man, this friend, and see an echo of all my own insecurities and fears of inadequacy and abandonment.
“You know,” I said, “I’ve been feeling really sad about you going off to have adventures and be a fancy pilot while I get to go to the Core and play test subject for the foreseeable future. I don’t want to do that. I want to go out and crawl around space with Singer and the cats and you.”
“Nice to know I get billed under Bushyasta,” he said. But he was smiling.
“Do you want to stay together?” I asked. “It seemed presumptuous to ask, before.”
“I want to not feel disinvited from the party.”
“Never,” I said, pretty sure Singer would entirely agree. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”
He shrugged. “Why didn’t you mention how you were feeling?”
“Because it’s feelings,” I said. “And feelings are terrible. Also I didn’t want to guilt-trip you.”
“Right,” he said. “Me either.” He looked out the window. “Feelings are terrible.”
But I could see the reflection of his smile in the glass.
? ? ?
We docked and lugged the cats on board the Koregoi ship, through the blasted gravity. All that gravity. I hadn’t missed it a bit. The cats objected pretty strenuously to the whole concept, and the complaints started as soon as we brought their carriers off the launch.
Well, in all honesty, they hadn’t exactly taken to the launch’s acceleration kindly, either.
When Mephistopheles and Bushyasta were safely ensconced in our makeshift control cabin slash throbbing nerve center of the salvaged ship, and crews of constables were busy bringing over supplies, Connla and I set out to learn where the controls for the artificial gravity were. And how to adjust them. If we couldn’t turn the gravity off, maybe we could at least turn it down to something a little more manageable. That seemed like a better option anyway, given that the Koregoi vessel was not optimized to be navigated in free fall.
Considering that we had two irritable felines attempting to impersonate tortillas on the deck, and a low-grav Goodlaw who couldn’t wait to join the crew—and considering that my cartilage had been compressing at an alarming rate and that I was already centimeters shorter than when I’d come on board, figuring the gravity out seemed like the most urgent use of our time.
Singer was an enormous help, once he and Connla finished up the inevitable tearful reunion. All right, in complete honesty, it wasn’t nearly as tearful as my reunion with Connla and the cats had been. But in my defense, Connla wasn’t recently deregulated. And he did show a lot of the tenderer emotions, for him at least.
Singer was still locked out of a bunch of the ship, which was both fantastic news and Farweather’s doing. And she seemed to be doing something to keep me from tracking her through the Koregoi senso. Possibly the same thing I was doing to keep her guessing about where I was.