Cheeirilaq?
Nothing. I had a visual on him, but without Singer’s assistance, our suit coms weren’t producing a strong-enough signal to connect. Or maybe there was some interference from the mirrormind. Maybe a tight beam, so we could coordinate—
The hole in the night where Singer had left us exploded into coruscation. I briefly glimpsed an outline I recognized as a Jothari ship silhouette . . . and then it was gone, in the actinic glare of obliterated matter. A wave of Baomind mirrors behind the ship’s position disintegrated, and I braced myself for death . . . but death ran out of steam well before it got to me, and frankly had been headed in a different direction when it happened.
I gasped. The crew of the Jothari ship had tried to catch the Prize in their particle wave as they dropped out of white space. But because Singer had transitioned to white space just as the particles reached him, they’d been whipped back around in the general direction of the source, and the ship that had tried to use its bow wave as a battering ram was instead disintegrated.
Well, that was going to require some antirad treatments if I ever made it home.
I had other problems now. A whole pirate fleet of them.
Cheeirilaq and Farweather and the Baomind and I—and the pirates—were moving fast. But through the magic of space and inertia, we were more or less motionless with respect to each other. We wouldn’t fall out of the Baomind swarm now that we weren’t being propelled by the Prize’s drive.
But neither would we continue to accelerate.
And the pirates . . . would.
They were going to catch up with us much faster now. Being captured by pirates—or worse, by Jothari inclined to check out their anathemic tech under my skin and then blame me personally for the deaths of a ship full of their friends and family who had been murdered by Farweather—was definitely not the jewel of my agenda todia.
But it also wasn’t something that I currently had a great deal of influence over. So I would act like a proper spacer, show some skybound pride, and focus—right now—on the problem I could actually do some good with right now. As an old crew chief of mine used to point out, you might be dead long before the problem you didn’t have the resources to fix right now became a critical need, so why waste more resources worrying about it?
Or Singer—who I could feel, folding space-time into a cozy wrinkled-up nest and moving away like a bullet—might even come back and rescue us in time. It was a nice thought. And you never knew until you lived through it what the likely outcomes were.
So the problem I could take a useful swipe at right now was Farweather. Farweather, who was currently hop-skipping, jetting, gravity-sliding, and jumping her way through the flock of drone mirror disks as if the Baomind were a staircase she could run down to get to the Baostar. We were in a flock of the smaller mirrors—most of the bigger ones had stayed closer to the star. And I mean, okay, technically. She could hopscotch her way down them until she reached the main Baomind sphere. It would take her more thousands of ans than I had cycles to compute to walk that far, unless she caught a lift down on a returning disk, or unless the gravity-surfing thing could give her more a than I expected. She was going to run out of ox sooner or later, so what positive outcome such an objective would obtain for her was beyond my ability to guess.
Space: still ridiculously big.
It was more likely that she was just trying to keep far enough ahead of us that one of the Freeport ships—I was pretty sure the light-colored dot off to the left was her vessel—could zoom in and pick her up without risk. After which, with Farweather out of the way, the Goodlaw and I could be vaporized at their leisure, along with however much of the poor inoffensive Baomind got in the way.
Or just left here: a slower death sentence.
Sticking close to Farweather seemed like the best strategy. Of course, given their willingness to shoot at things Farweather was sitting on, maybe hiding behind her wasn’t the best strategy.
A big bolus of fatality settled my nerves. Well, I didn’t have to win, then. I just had to keeping Farweather from winning. And make good on my promise to the Ativahikas.
Farweather was still space-hopping along the stretched-out Baomind pseudopod as I focused my attention on catching up with her. Even if she thought she could walk that far, she wasn’t going to have to. Because I was determined to catch her and somehow get her on Singer, who was totally coming back for us, at the earliest opportunity. And judging from what I could see of Cheeirilaq—who was using webs and way too many feathery feet to keep up with what Farweather and I were doing with the space-time slide—I wasn’t the only one holding that opinion currently.
Please come back, Singer.
He would if he could. And so would Connla. I didn’t have any doubt about that now. And I wasn’t alone out here. I had a giant bug to help me. (In all honesty I was probably the sidekick in this equation. But it makes me feel better to pretend otherwise.)
It was a long way down to the bottom of the well. That just meant it would take me a long time to fall.
I could do this thing.
If Farweather could do this thing, so could I.
? ? ?
Farweather was a long shot better at it than I was, however. Faster. More confident.
I got to my first disk and balanced on it while I surveyed the situation. At least it didn’t try to buck me off.
Farweather was the one who made an extreme sport of plunging through space under her own impulse, sliding about shipless in the void—and practice counts. I wished I believed in the convenient entertainment myth that just really wanting it more than the other guy was enough to insure success.
That and being pure of heart, of course.
Did I want to capture Farweather more than Farweather wanted to avoid being captured? Somehow I doubted it. Couldn’t stop me from trying, though. And I definitely had the pure-of-heart aspect squared away.
I calculated her likely next few jumps, because calculated is a much nicer term than scientific wild-ass guessed. Then I gritted my teeth and told myself, “Might as well die doing something as nothing.” Another saying I’d learned from a crusty old engineer—this one a Tralikhan master chief I’d worked under for six decians on a passenger liner early in my checkered career. That was one of the ways I’d learned I hated working on passenger liners, though engineering was better than the purser’s job.
I shifted my weight from side to side, rocking the mirror disk I crouched on, trying to get a feel for its variable motions as it flocked with the others. I was on one of the smallest ones, maybe two meters across. The next disk was larger, and the distance to it was not insurmountable by any means, just terrifying. And variable, as they moved in relationship to each other. I tried to remind myself that if I missed, I would not go sailing helplessly into the outer darkness. The atavistic part of my brain did not believe me. I tuned it down, but I was pretty sure my fox still wasn’t working right, because while the panic was dulled, it was still there.
Fun.
At the moment, my current ride was closing on my next objective. I stared hard, as if that could make my leap more accurate, and reminded myself that the disk I was on would move away from me with reactive force when I pushed against it.
I patted my faithful steed fondly with a suit glove before I abandoned it.
I staggered when I landed, and my afthand gripped the edge of the disk hard to steady me. The pain was sudden, immediate, and sharp. My suit squeezed my afthand as it sealed, keeping pressure on the wound and keeping my air in.
The disk was sharp as a laser. I felt lucky I’d kept my aftfingers, as I tuned out the pain and told myself it wasn’t too bad. Probably. I could always grow new fingers, if they died of gangrene.
A strange sound echoed in my inner ear, through the Koregoi senso. Like the alien music that had permeated the Prize. A sorrowful run of notes that put me in mind of an apology.
But the jump had been easy.
Almost too easy, as if a guiding hand were planted in the seat of my pants. I didn’t think the Jothari or Freeporters were likely to be helpful. Singer was out of the system and still heading away at superluminal velocities. Farweather was running away.
That left one obvious candidate.
“Baomind?” I said.
I don’t know why I expected it to recognize the name Singer and I had just given it. I don’t know why I wasn’t more surprised when it did. Maybe the religious types are right and setting your intention matters.
It felt—it felt like the Ativahikas had, when they spoke to me. As if something were inside me, vast and ancient and yet also somehow still a part of me, or containing me, speaking from the halls of my own being. Speaking in a language deeper than any I had ever had to learn.