Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

We were out here alone. Nothing between us and the stars. And Singer—and the Baomind mirrors surrounding him—might as well have had flat feet on dirt, they had so little time to react.

“ You FUCKERS! ” Farweather screamed.

“ Singer, duck!” I yelled.

She coiled herself. I lunged, an automaton heaving each magnetized boot in turn off the hull and feeling the shudder through my bones when it thumped back down.

My gloved fingertips brushed the fabric of her suit as she hurled herself up and out, a fantastic Peter Pan leap into the big nothing all around. Jets kicked in from her suit pack as she started a burn. More momentum to push her out of Singer’s tiny, artificial gravity well.

I jerked my head back to watch her leave, arms splayed wide, so violently I almost overbalanced and fell over backward with my boots still stuck to the hull.

“Fuck,” I said.

Singer said, Are you all right?

I flashed him what I was feeling as Cheeirilaq bounded up. It leaped into the void, an amazing arc with its bright wings spread reflexively at the peak, thrumming inside their skin against nothing. It snatched after Farweather with its raptorial arms and missed by what looked like centimeters. Slowly, it began to fall again, back toward Singer’s surface.

I could feel Farweather grabbing hold of gravity, twisting it like an acrobat’s silks. Sailing through the Baomind’s particles. Getting away.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a halo of mist stream out from beneath Cheeirilaq as it too boosted itself away from the hull of the Prize, using jets instead of Koregoi technology. The good cop was going to bring the criminal back, no matter what.

“Oh fuck it,” I said. I couldn’t let Cheeirilaq go after her alone. I’d promised to see to it that Farweather saw justice. I needed to.

I jumped after, gravity my friend as well.

Haimey! Goodlaw! Come back. I can’t wait for you!

“Don’t wait,” I said, accelerating as I followed Farweather past the fine line of the Prize’s white coils and into the flashing, razor-edged patterns of the Baomind mirror-swarm. “Run!”

WHEN I LOOKED PAST MYboots again, I saw Singer vanish. It was the worst moment of a life that had had quite a few bad moments in it.

He was there—or the Prize was there, containing him and Connla and two cats and six other people I had been getting fond of. And then he was gone, and I was alone in a space suit somewhere outside the generally acknowledged boundaries of the entire fucking Milky Way , with nobody for company except a good insect cop, an alien AI I couldn’t talk to, and a pathologically risk-seeking pirate.

With a dozen or so armed ships that wanted me dead in pursuit, and nothing between my soft brown warmth and the cold depths of space except a thin, fragile envelope full of recycled atmosphere.

Well, at least the cold depths of space were something I could surf now. And I just had to go find Farweather and bring her into custody, and trust that Singer would come back for me.

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.