Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

Come on. Come on. Think of something. Come on.

I leaned my helmet against Cheeirilaq’s film-suited carapace. “I might be out of ideas, Friend Cheeirilaq.”

I am sorry, Friend Haimey. I also… may be out of ideas.

Exhaustion clawed me as I watched the enemy ships arrange themselves to clear their firing lines. I bumped my adrenals once more, wishing I believed I’d be around to pay the miserable price for it. The pirates didn’t need me for Niyara’s code anymore.

The friendly mirror disks of the Baomind swarmed around us, filling me with their encouraging song, a fragile, glittering shield. I felt a terrible sadness for them. How many of their neurons had been destroyed? Worse, did they have individual identities? How much damage had we and the pirates and Jothari already done to them? Not much, I hoped. Surely what had been destroyed was a negligible fraction of the incomprehensibly large number of disks still maintaining their sphere around the dying star.

Once we were gone, would the Freeporters resort to threats or force to control the Baomind? Would that even work? Or would they just refuse to rescue it, unless it agreed to be enslaved? They despised artificial intelligences, but surely they were capable of seeing that this was a resource too valuable to just destroy, even if they were incapable of seeing it as a person. Of regarding it as an intelligence worthy of protection and partnership.

I was wondering why they were bothering with the display of force when all they had to do was leave us here. I was wondering if, if they fired, I could wrap us all in a protective fold of space-time. I was wondering if it wouldn’t be better to just die under their barrage rather than putting it off the few minutes we had left. I was wondering, frankly, what kind of a pointless gesture I could make just so I wouldn’t feel like I was just dying passively. I had the handgun: no use at all against anything more armored than a human being in a space suit.

Thinking that made me realize Connla would be amused by how his culture’s memes had infected me, if he ever got the chance to know—

One of the pirate vessels began to ease toward us.

I reached across Cheeirilaq’s thorax and nudged Farweather. When she didn’t move, I balled up my cold, numb fingers and punched her in the arm. It probably hurt me at least as much as it did her. “Commander!”

Blood spattered the inside of her visor. She must have been coughing it up.

I sympathized.

“Can’t you let me die in peace?” Her eyes focused on me with an obvious effort. “Oh, it’s you. No, of course you can’t.”

“Zanya, what’s that ship?”

I pointed with my helmet in the time-honored fashion of spacers everywhere.

It wasn’t hers—the white one that had shot our boom off way back at the beginning of things. This one was a glossy black, a color with depth and reflections, fading to a burnished dried-blood highlight on its raised features. It reminded me of the prized urushi lacquer from the homeworld, an ancient art that still piqued interest throughout the worlds.

Connla and I had salvaged a ship whose cargo contained three urushi pieces once—two antique pens and a longsword. That trip had taken out a sizable portion of our obligation.

Farweather’s labored breaths were clear over the com as she struggled to follow. “Oh buttercakes,” she said, which would have made me laugh my arse off if I weren’t in insupportable pain just breathing.

“That’s the Defiance ,” she said. “That’s the Admiral.”

“There’s no such thing as the Admiral,” I said. “She’s a scary story.”

She laughed, one choked gasp. It sounded like it hurt. “Well, I guess you’d know.”

It looked like a pirate admiral’s ship, if anything did. And it was… coming to pick us up. Shouldering gently through the swarms of mirror disks, edging toward us. I wondered why they didn’t just send a launch. I wondered why they were coming to get us at all. What loyalty did they have to Farweather, who they’d been willing to remote-detonate if it came down to it?

“I don’t understand your people,” I told her. My own voice was getting a bit halting now. My head throbbed with that wall of pressure, like something coming in, but whatever it was couldn’t be bothered to make its presence known.

Maybe it was an artifact of my being in the process of bleeding to death.

I was still looking at her, so I saw her smile curve behind the blood. “We haven’t got the least idea what makes you people function, either.”

The Defiance was nearly on us, and still there was no sign of a launch, and no sign of an opening airlock hatch. It was just coming, easing up on us, matching relative velocities so that, in the vastness of intergalactic space, we seemed to be standing still.

“Maybe she just wants to look me in the eye while I’m dying,” Farweather said, with many pauses and great effort.

Oh, she doesn’t like you either?

I had gotten… really fond of Cheeirilaq.

Farweather bubbled faintly. “I want her job.”

Wanted, I thought, but didn’t say it.

The Defiance ’s white coils folded away inside its hull when it was in normal space. That was something I’d only heard of on military ships. It allowed them greater close maneuverability, and protected the fragile coils in combat. So it could edge up right next to our tiny little disk with its tiny little Goodlaw and two damaged women on it. And it did.

I craned my head to look along the looming wall of the hull as it crept past. The lacquer effect wasn’t quite as flawless close up. There were pits and scratches, the marks of use. But I could see now, even in the dim light, that the whole ship was dark red, not black at all. Layers and layers of translucent dark red coating, until it built up to the point where it seemed black, and then the places where it had been smoothed thinner gleamed red.

Nice ship.

I wondered where the Admiral had stolen it.

A ring of red lights outlined what I took to be an airlock, as it drew up before us. The Defiance matched velocities with us so we all seemed to hang perfectly still. In respect to one another, we were—which is as still as anything gets, in this great universe.

The airlock irised open, and I found myself staring into a space too brightly lit to see clearly.

If we go in there, Cheeirilaq said, we are never coming out again.

“But it’s our choice, isn’t it? Die here, or—”

“I’ll make them… drag me,” Farweather gasped.

Oppositional defiant disorder, definitely.

“Right,” I said. It was a small item of refusal, but it was an item, and it was what I had. I wasn’t going in that ship. I wasn’t going to give myself up to them. Even if it was futile. They’d find a use for me, I was sure. And it was not a use that I would approve of.

Defiance , indeed. Be careful what you name a thing.

I kept thinking that even as my gravity headache intensified, and our disk began to float toward the open hatch. The Baomind’s song shrilled, sounding alarmed to my human awareness, and I felt the shiver in our disk even through the intervening body of my insectile friend. Consciousness was at the end of a graying tunnel, and I could see only the brightness of that hatch like the proverbial light at the end of it. It bathed my face, my body, in a golden glow.

I felt myself falling into it.

Gravity tractor, Cheeirilaq said, tightening its grip on me. I presume they are making good use of their space-time manipulation technology.

I fought it, and I could feel the disk fighting it too. But we were clawing up an increasingly steep slope. There were more of them than there were of us. Or they were better practiced. And it seemed like Farweather had faded out again, so no assistance from that direction. And while the Baomind was making curious and agitated music now and might decide to come to our assistance, in three hundred standard minutes or so—I didn’t have time for it to make up its mind.