Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

Ships. Still far enough away that I could only make out their details because Singer had magnified the image.

There were some dozen of them. Some bristling with weaponry and some variegated hulls decorated in all the shades of chocolate brown.

Jothari vessels. Some so enormous they had to be factory ships. Others smaller, more nimble.

Every one of them armed, if the objects run out of the uncovered portals in their hulls were weapons.

God in a well.

“Course correction!” Connla called to Singer. “Fifteen degrees insystem. And punch it; we need to get ahead of these guys.”

I held my gun on Farweather. “Aren’t they mad at you?”

She held her gun on me. “Why would they be? We liberated their ship from the Synarche, salvaged it, and returned it to them in good working order with the cargo intact.”

Nausea burned my throat at the memory of that cargo. “You killed their whole crew!”

She shrugged. “There’s no evidence of that on board the returned ship. No evidence of how the disaster happened at all, actually. Just a complete lack of any crew members, Jothari or human. Obviously, the crew must be in Synarche custody. If they’re even still alive.”

There was a pause, during which my jaw worked and I didn’t say anything.

She continued blithely, “The Jothari don’t even know that anybody survived the wreck. And since they’re pretty bad at telling Earth-humans apart, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention it to them, if you happen to run into any. Or get taken prisoner by them, say. And on that note—”

That was when Zanya Farweather blew me a kiss.

And dropped through the floor like a ghost.

“How the hell did she learn to do that?” I asked the air, and realized that the shriek of decompression and the song of the aliens had both stopped. The silence rang.

We ran before the pirate armada like a photosphere before the shock wave of an exploding star. I could feel them, now, when I hadn’t been able to, before. Or hadn’t been skilled enough to pick them out from the background noise.

Singer said, “I’d guess she got the idea from watching you manipulate the bulkheads into restraints.”

Of course she had. Of course she’d spent the whole time I had her chained up thinking about how to work that. I was just lucky she hadn’t figured it out soon enough to crush my skull in my sleep when we were alone here.

“What the— Is this whole damned ship just nanites holding hands?”

“Pretty much,” Singer said.

Connla grunted. He walked over and kicked at the deck that Farweather had dropped through like a magician. It had healed without a scar. “I wish I could adequately express how insecure that makes me feel.”

I said, “Singer, you’re talking to the Koregoi constructs right now? Really? Or were you using psychology on her?”

“I am talking to the constructs right now and I was using psychology on her.”

“You could have mentioned it.”

“You were busy. Besides, I was saving it for a big reveal.”

“Are they going to eat us?”

“Haimey. Haimey. It’s talking to me. It’s huge and it’s old and it’s full of questions. It likes problems. It sings. Sometimes it sings solar flares out of its star’s corona because they are pretty and it likes to look at them.”

“Sings solar flares out of—”

May I remind you that we’re also being pursued, Grrrs said, jerking its antennae at the window.

At least we’re not decompressing anymore. Cheeirilaq waved a leg, demonstrating the hull patch it had made with webbing. Although perhaps it would be most structurally sound for Singer to seal that shut with his hull material?

“Already happening,” Singer said.

“Singer,” Connla said. “ Pirates! ”

SAID PIRATES WERE STILL OUTSIDEthe swarming shell of Koregoi mirrors, still far enough away that we had a little time to plan. But they didn’t look happy, and while we were getting as much a as we could, we weren’t exactly gaining.

I guess what I’m insinuating is that we had a lot of concurrent problems to plan around. And I hate to say it, but our most immediate problem was that our AI was not paying attention.

Our AI was in love.

Perhaps it would be better to term it hero worship, but whatever it was, he would not shut up about how wonderful the Koregoi construct was, and how much its design and structure delighted him.

“You have to realize, what we’re dealing with here is a style of computational decision-making I’ve never encountered before. Its thought processes are an emergent property of its structure!”

While he was telling me this, I was physically upside down in an access tube with my legs sticking out into gravity and my upper half floating free, and let me tell you if you’re a downsider you have no idea how weird the whole concept and sensation of upside down is to somebody who grew up without it.

I was trying to find the correct ancient alien microcircuitry to pull or circumvent or correct in some manner in order to manually override whatever Farweather was doing or had done in order to hide herself from us. If she was hiding outside the ship, then I might be able to tune a few of our exterior sensors on the hull rather than away from it, and repurpose some of the Prize’s maintenance drones as roving eyes. With those assets in place, Singer should be able to locate any anomalies.

The problem was, the Koregoi apparently hadn’t planned for the possibility of having to remove space leeches. So I was having to do it the hard way. At least it didn’t need an EVA. I wasn’t sure I had the stones to EVA into what was likely to become a live-fire situation.

Singer was still raving about the brilliant qualities of his new friend.

Actually… okay. I was a little jealous. But I wasn’t a million-an-old engineered hive mind, so I knew I couldn’t really compete for cool points.

There’s only so much you can expect of any mortal sentience.

I was aware of the bustle of combat preparation throughout Ops, despite having my upper body shoved inside a wall. Suit boots moved past in fits and groups, and sometimes they were joined by the click and scuff of Cheeirilaq’s feathery feet on the end of chitinous legs.

“Please,” I intoned, pulling another crystalline plug that was probably some kind of holographic memory, if Singer and my guesses were right. “Tell me more.”

“It’s old,” Singer said, deaf to irony. “But it’s a mind. And it thinks very slowly. Or rather, it thinks at lightspeed, but over vast distances. It might take it three hundred standard minutes to pass an idea around its sphere once, crossing and recrossing itself, overlapping in waves that can alter every time they interact. Every time one of the nodes kicks up a slightly different version of the idea, or makes an adjustment or responds to an alteration, that joins the ripples passing around the sphere. The metaphorical wave pattern changes and is changed.

“Eventually, consensus is reached—think of it as the waves falling into a standing wave. Out of chaos, agreement emerges.”

“That seems very impractical,” I said, wishing I had an autogrip. My tool kit was so many particles, slowly sliding into the accretion disk of the Saga-star. You made do.

You made do.

“The star was smaller when it was built,” Singer said. “And it wasn’t designed to make decisions in a hurry.”

I came close to saying something sarcastic and Connla-like, but bit my tongue, thinking of my own history with hasty decision-making.