Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

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.

Watching someone fire a chemical weapon in vacuum is surreal. There’s no sound; just a puff of particulate briefly illuminated as the oxidizer contained in the propellant cartridge fires. And if you weren’t braced, you got the humorous outcome I was currently experiencing.

I guessed I was right, and Farweather had braced herself, because I was pretty sure she’d fired again when a disk off to my left shattered into a thousand tiny knives, but I didn’t see her get knocked spinning. Well, if she could do it, I probably could too.

I folded space-time to stabilize. Gravity was my friend.

In so doing, I realized I had inadvertently hidden myself in the pocket I’d made. Like a kitten in a blanket, I was tucked away and would be invisible unless you bumped into me.

“So that’s how she’s been doing it,” I said. To myself. Because I was alone in my pocket universe and nobody else could hear me.

Well, now or never.

I couldn’t see her either. But I could feel her. She was large as life and out in the open.

Maybe that was the trade: Stay erased and still and quiet and be invisible and safe. Take an action, claim space, be noticed—and open yourself to attack by everyone and everything.

Well, it was probably time for that last.

I had dropped myself into… not quite white space. But something not unlike white space. Now I had to get myself out.

It was easier than I had feared. I just unfolded what I’d reflexively folded, and was back in my home line of space-time again.

And there was Farweather.

She stood at the dead center of one of the disks, facing away from me, her weapon in her hands, scanning. She looked invincible as she noticed my reappearance—eyes on the back of her head? Koregoi senso?—and began to swing to cover me.

But I could see what she couldn’t.

There was a sticky thread of wet silk adhered to the underside of her platform, its paleness vanishing into the darkness beyond the range of my ability to see it in this terrible frail light.

I wanted to throw something to distract Farweather. I didn’t have anything to throw. So I grav-slid up behind her while she was turning.

I kicked her in the face just as she brought the gun to bear.

She should have gone sailing, but her boots were locked to the disk—probably with a fold, because magnetism doesn’t work on silicates. The whole thing—pirate and perch—revolved in a lopsided orbit after I hit her, the center of gravity somewhere around her thighs. Her arms flung up; she lost the gun. I tumbled the other way, twisting to avoid the disk’s edge more by luck than by skill. My diaphragm spasmed; I couldn’t get a breath; I tasted blood. She must have gotten a piece of me, too, though I hadn’t felt it happen.