A language I had always known.
The thing that welled up inside me wasn’t words, exactly. It was . . . notes, music. A pattern of sounds, or perhaps it would be more accurate to liken it to the recalled memory of sounds, arranged into a pleasing and harmonious whole. As Singer had described it—a song.
I was not in any respect a musician. But I accepted the sound as an attempt to communicate, and attempted to sort out the sense of it. Unfortunately, I just did not have the skill to unpack it, and Singer wasn’t there to help.
It was glorious. But it had layers and depths and was basically a textured wall of sound, like listening to an entire party of people talking all at once. It was beyond me to interpret.
Well, all right then.
Unable to hear words, I listened for tone. You can tell if a song is sad or happy even if you don’t know the language it’s being sung in, generally. Of course it was the basest ethnocentrism to assume that my human experience of emotion and music were anything like a syster’s experience of same. And this wasn’t even a syster. This was a sentient artifact left behind by a long-lost alien civilization. Or civilizations: we still didn’t have a very good idea of what—who—the Koregoi had been. Their artifacts were scattered around, but more than that—they had left hints for us, bits of knowledge, the remains of a strange sort of library, perhaps. Woven into the very fabric of the dark gravity that held the universe together.
Literally.
I was starting to realize that we, all of us—Synarche, pirates, Jothari, even the Ativahikas—were living in the ruins of the Koregoi’s enormous and shadowy house.
Hell, they might still be out there somewhere. They might just be living in white space, or some similar gap between the fibers of the conventional universe. They might have translated themselves to a state where they could interact with whatever caused the dark gravity directly. They might have advanced to the point where they were carrying on a limitless multidimensional existence where distances had as little meaning for them across galaxies as they did for us on a planetary scale.
I should have asked Singer how the Baomind sang, I realized now, in the soundless depths of space. Now I knew; it sang inside its own mind.
Well, at least it sounded friendly. And Farweather was getting farther away as I dithered. Cheeirilaq, too, who was racing along the disks, leaping from one to another with astounding insectile bounds, leaving a shimmering trail of web behind it as a safety line.
I wondered about the design of the valve on its suit that let its webbing out. Even while chasing Farweather.
You don’t just stop being an engineer.
? ? ?
I needed to get my head in the game, and so I tuned and bumped with abandon. I didn’t go sociopath: I didn’t trust my wonky fox to put me back again. But I went far past anywhere I normally would have, and sent myself into a state of confidence and hyperfocus called hypomania.
It was bliss. Calm happiness and confidence centered me, along with a cheerful determination to get the job done. I wasn’t tired anymore. I wasn’t sore. I wasn’t limping on a damaged limb. I knew, somewhere distantly, that I ought to be scared, but I wasn’t scared. I was warmly confident that I could get every bit of this done.
If I could have, I would have stayed in this state forever. If for nothing else, for the amazing sense of calm and confidence that suffused me, the feeling that I was competent and wise enough to do whatever it took to get what I needed.
For the sense of existing. Taking up space and being real.
Alas, there were drawbacks. And I still didn’t trust my fox.
I couldn’t even set a timer on it, because I didn’t know how long we’d be stuck out here—how long I would need to feel superhuman. And I probably wouldn’t survive the inevitable despair hangover if it happened while we were still stranded.
You won’t be stranded, said the part of my brain that was still riding on the endocrine cocktail and the Baomind’s internal music. The part of my brain that had abruptly lost the ability to plan for consequences. Singer will come back in the nick of time. Everything is going to be fine.
I nodded to myself and thought, You have to do this because there’s nobody else here to handle it.
I ran. Or bounded, hopscotched, and scrabbled, rather. Precariously, my balance always in question I kicked and scrambled and gravity-sledded my way down the column of mirrors. Farweather still had the lead on me, but with the Baomind’s assistance, I was cutting the distance.
I’d lost sight of Cheeirilaq. I guessed it was trying to cut around Farweather somehow and flank her, but I had no idea how it planned to accomplish that. I saw a trailing silk thread as I hurtled past, headed for the center of the swarm.
I thought about the razor edges on all the silicon drone disks, and I prayed a little, though I wasn’t usually the sort to leave offerings. I prayed to Kwan-yin, because why not. And I prayed to Bao Zheng.
What the heck, right? We’d dedicated this whole star system to him. And the reason we were out here was . . . something like research.
Farweather must have felt me coming. She hadn’t put her gun away. I had holstered my borrowed one because I needed both forehands for this game, but she didn’t point hers at me. She just glanced over her shoulder and kept running.
The weird loping gait I was forced to assume was taking a toll on me. Avoiding the disk edges was tricky. But I was strong—stronger than I had ever been in my life, after decians under grav. My muscles strained and stretched. My cut-up afthand had switched from the startling pain of immediate injury to a more warning soreness and ache, except when I banged it on something. So, just about every stride.
Between atheist prayers, I added a few curses for my damned, damaged fox, which was still not functioning well enough to block the pain completely. I just . . .
Well, I suppose I was ungrateful. It was working better than it had any right to, considering what it had been through. I was just used to effortless perfection.
I also wasn’t hardened off to enduring pain.
It hurt. It hurt, and yet I persisted.
I filtered down, closing my awareness to anything that was not Farweather and the path toward her. I wanted to get my hands on her. I wanted vengeance, and the atavism of my fury terrified me.
But I could use it. It loaned me strength, agility, and a rage of speed. I must have stopped overthinking what I was doing about then. The disks fled by under my hands. I bounded from one to the next, sliding when I could, accelerating. Farweather glanced back under her arm as she ricocheted off a mirror so hard she shattered it. I was already in motion, and there was little I could do to avoid the glass-sharp shards. Except—I could make them avoid me.
A little fold in space-time; just the smallest slope to pull them away from me. I barreled through the middle of their disintegrating formation unscathed, so close to Farweather I tried a snatch at her boot.
I missed. But I was so close the palms of all four hands itched with the desire to get ahold of her. I lunged again, a feral creature threatened. Soon I would have her—
She whipped her gun around just as it was occurring to me that I ought to unholster mine. I groped behind my back for the holster as she fired.
It turns out that ducking is an irresistible response when somebody is pointing a gun at you. It felt better than just floating there like a gaping fool, anyway. And when I rolled sideways, kicked clear of the plate I had been crouching on, and whipped my weapon out to return fire, she ducked too.
The jump turned out to be a terrible idea. I tried to kick the mirror disk at Farweather, and I made her duck. But when I pulled my trigger, the recoil sent me tumbling. Now how had she avoided that?
Right, folding space-time. Of course.
At least tumbling around like a clown made me harder to shoot, though it didn’t help with the “not getting sliced in half by mirror disks” portion of my agenda. What did help was that either I was improbably lucky, or the swarm of flying, solar-powered, razor-edged neurons now tumbling back into orbit around their sun were making an effort to avoid dicing me into one-centimeter cubes. The song in my mind had something of the Ativahika’s tones in it, and I wondered if the Baomind was aware that I was, in some peculiar fashion, their agent.
I wondered why the Baomind wasn’t going after Farweather directly. Then I decided that I was glad that a sentient solar system didn’t believe in direct Judicial intervention.
I wasn’t even scratched. I got a glimpse of Farweather leveling her weapon again as I tumbled, though.