Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

There was a whirring sound.

“Parasites on the brain,” I said.

“Well,” Singer said, “not literally. I mean, the good news is, it’s not a parasite. At least, I don’t think it’s a parasite. It seems to be made mostly of silica and some nonreactive metals. A little titanium. Some stuff that… well, it has mass. Your hand is heavier than it used to be. Other than that, I’m not sure what to tell you.”

“Am I going to die of heavy metal poisoning?”

“Extremely unlikely,” he replied. “And there’s nothing radioactive in there either. Actually, no apparent power source at all. So whatever it’s doing with the patterning thing, it’s probably deriving the energy for that directly from you.”

“So it is a parasite.”

“Well, it’s not an organic one.” There was a pause—a long pause by Singer standards. “If you want me to speculate, I’d suggest that it’s probably an interface technology of some kind. But what it’s supposed to interface with… is either back at the prize, or it’s lost in the mists of the eons.”

I looked at my hand. The webwork moved, sliding gracefully under my skin. As if I had dipped my hand in an aurora. It would probably, I realized, pass for a really nice piece of biolume or a holotoo.

It was still growing, slowly, up my arm. Exploratory strands of sparkles edged toward my elbow, which was space-scaly and needed moisturizing and the ash scrubbed off. Just the sort of stuff that doesn’t seem important to deal with right now when you’re busy, until you can’t get to your skin because you’re sealed inside an isolation film and it’s the only thing you can think about.

Were the sparkle filaments going to cover my entire body soon? That wouldn’t be easy to hide. I’d look like a galaxy.

“Koregoi senso, then.” If it was supertech with no identifiable source, then Koregoi wasn’t a bad bet. Unless the Republic of Pirates had suddenly taken some surprising technological leaps forward, which wasn’t usually the sort of thing pirates excelled at. You generally need at least a modicum of stability for people to have the time and resources to innovate and the will to make risky choices.

“Koregoi senso,” Singer answered. “Sure.”

“SO,” I SAID, “I’M PRETTYsure it was sabotage.”

I was anchored by the galley, and Connla had fixed me an actual hot meal, which I was making myself eat slowly and enjoy. The yeast tablets had worn off with a vengeance, and I’d started shaking. I’d been too out of it even to notice that what was happening was a blood sugar crash and not a panic attack. I’d been perching a grab rail and trying to tune and bump my adrenals for five minutes before Connla had shoved the ringnet full of dinner into my hands and saliva had flooded my mouth instantly, even though I couldn’t smell a Well-sunk thing.

At least I was back in free fall. That all by itself was doing wonders for my sense of well-being. My microgravity adaptations are pretty significant—even the afthands aren’t just a graft; there’s tendon and joint modifications to make them work—and I’ve never been a dirtsider. Breathing is more tiring when you weigh seventy kilos than it is when you don’t.

The food was in tubes, because no utensil that went into the isolation film could come back out again. I pulled each tube from the net, plugged it into my film, and evacuated the contents into my mouth. It was all delicious, in a baby-food sort of way. When I was done, the film sealed off the dirty bit at the end, I put it back on the net, and the whole thing went into the recycler.

“The blow on the prize, you mean?” Connla asked.

Connla and Singer had sensoed my feed, downloaded the full experience from my fox, and re’d the ayatana of the spliced-in switches on the Milk Chocolate Marauder , and of what had happened when I toggled those switches. But that didn’t mean they had a window into my head.

I was just thinking out loud. And apparently assuming my thought process was transparent.

The toggle wouldn’t have worked if this monstrosity had a shipmind. And the fact that it was a monstrosity was why they didn’t have a shipmind. The Freeporters don’t have AIs. And I didn’t think any AI incepted under Synarche regulations would participate in something as… revolting… as harvesting asura.

“I don’t feel too bad about it,” I said. “But I do wonder why .”

“If we could afford the waste, I’d say leave the whole damn ship out here with its victim,” Connla said disgustedly. “Report it and the Synarche can turn it into a memorial.”

It’s nice when your partners share your ethics. And it turns out you don’t even have to clade up with them for that to happen. If you pick the right people in the first place.

“It’s evidence of a crime,” Singer pointed out. “Two crimes, if Haimey’s right about the sabotage. And while we could radio for help—”

I laughed. We could. A lot of use it would be.

Not everybody grew up in space, and not everybody knows that the distress signal, traveling at the speed of light, would take so long to reach anybody who could help us that I was too lazy even to do the calculations about how many centuries that would be. If we wanted the salvage credit, and we actually cared about the multiple murders done to a gang of professional murderers and also, their professional murder of the Ativahika, at that… well, we were towing the wastrel thing home. Because by the time we got back to the Core and reported it and turned Singer over to the authorities for his stint as a Designated Representative in the Congress of the Synarche, somebody else probably would have turned up and carted the damned thing off.

Of course, if he wasn’t such a political hobbyist, he could have gotten through his entire existence without being selected for service. Or that particular service, anyway.

I said, “What we all know, and none of us are saying, is that somebody sabotaged the prize for a reason.”

“I’m a little uncomfortable thinking of it as a prize,” Connla admitted, breaking the tension enough that I laughed. “But yes, the toggle was Earth-human manufacture, wasn’t it?”

“Marked in just English, too,” I said.

Connla looked at me. “I’m not an engineer. What does that mean?”

“Generally,” I said, “you’ll find standard equipment intended for general human use marked in Hindi, Spatois, English, Spanish, Chinese, Novoruss, and generally one or two others. Korean and Swahili are popular. Trade languages that a lot of people speak, on a lot of worlds.”

I looked down at my mismatched hands again, and forced myself to look away. The cobweb light show was like a magnet—a thing on my body that should not be there. I wanted to scratch at it, dig it out.

The film, at least, would keep that from happening.

“Freeporters operate exclusively in English,” Singer said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a kind of fetish with them. Dates back to some race-purity nonsense that didn’t make any sense two hundred ans ago and makes even less so now.”

Connla said, “So the saboteurs were pirates.”

“Or got their gear from pirates.”

He nodded slowly. “And if you were a pirate, you wouldn’t be wiring a kill switch into an abattoir ship out of altruism and a willingness to martyr yourself on behalf of the murdered Ativahikas.”

“No, you’d be planning to wait there until your friends showed up and take all that lovely asura and asura precursor and sell it for your own benefit, wouldn’t you?”

He groaned. “And since the means of sabotage was manually operated—right?”