Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

“If they haven’t hailed us,” I said, amazed by how calm I sounded, “why didn’t they just hit us with their bow wave and smear us all over intergalactic space?”

“Hard to hit us and not the prize,” Connla said, tumbling into the control cabin, trailing bits of the second-best space suit. He corralled them in a net bag, eyes on the screen as he stripped.

“Don’t you want to keep that on?” Singer asked.

“So I can float in space until I suffocate if they hole us? Thanks, I’ll take the quick way down.”

“There’s the hail,” Singer said. “Text only. ‘Cut her loose.’ ”

I looked at Connla.

Connla looked at the welding torch he was clipping to an equipment belay. He laughed bitterly.

“Yeah,” I said.

If we maneuvered, they’d shoot us. If we transitioned, they’d come too—and shoot us. If we stayed put… well, we couldn’t follow their instructions, so they were probably going to shoot us.

“I can cut the derrick loose. We can ditch the prize and run.” I kicked across the cabin toward a control panel, that damned heavy hand making me veer slightly off course. There were explosive pins, for dangerous cargo. We couldn’t afford the loss, but it was better than taking a ride on a rail-gun pellet. It had to be manually done, though; that was the sort of thing that came with a physical safety override. “You’ll have to buy me a minute.”

“Hailing,” Singer said, and I thought, Better you than me.

Hatch cover, emergency switch. Override code. I wasn’t looking anymore, but I swear I felt the guns tracking through the prickles on my scalp. Through the senso, definitely.

Somebody is staring at you.

Connla swore, and my head jerked around a second before I would have slapped the final release. The pirates were so close I didn’t see anything—the slugs would have ripped through Singer’s hull before I could have even realized what was happening, let alone reacted—but I didn’t feel an impact, either, and I was in contact with the hull. “Sitrep!”

“Warning shot,” Connla said.

I reached for the release again, and felt the whole ship shudder violently, the harsh metallic rip of tearing hull. Something—the bulkhead—struck me, and I caromed off a panel and lost all sense of up and down.

“ Ranging shot,” Singer amended, senso cutting over the hot whistle of escaping atmosphere. As the ship spun wildly around me, I grabbed with all four hands for the nearest rail.

For anything at all.

The terrible shrieks continued—rending metal, and venting air. I couldn’t breathe, and thought we’d blown, but then I realized from the savage pain in my back that it was my diaphragm spasming from the force of the thump I’d taken. My film billowed from the pressure drop, snapping out around my head. I fetched up against a panel and managed to grab it, stabilized, then gritted my teeth and punched myself in the solar plexus to get my lungs started again.

My head spun when I glanced around the cabin, but that quick check plus senso told me Connla was alive, clinging frantically to a rail, and also that we were holed visibly, but it wasn’t big. My fingers ached from holding on to the panel; we were pulling significant force in the spin.

There’s a trick they teach you in flight school that you hope you’re never going to have to use. But I wasn’t going to worry about it just yet, because I could also see that the pirate ship, having knocked us loose from the prize, was rounding under power to take another swipe.

But we were free of the prize. “Singer! Duck!”

“On it,” shipmind answered—and just as it seemed the pirate was gathering herself, angle of her guns converging to fire for effect—she vanished, and was replaced by nauseating, gyrating smears of light.

“We’re still spinning!”

“On that too,” Singer said, too calmly.

“Did they shoot us?”

“If they’d shot us, we wouldn’t be here. They shot at us, and I ducked. But their mass driver tore off the derrick. We’re in white space now. Do you want to deal with the hole in my side?”

Sure, because it was the easiest thing in the world to get there when we were pulling two gs of centrifugal. Well, I supposed that was one way to deal with it.

It was time to use that flight school trick.

I nerved myself and let go of the panel and fell.

It was only a couple of meters, but a couple of meters at two g hurts. I slammed into the outside bulkhead on my hands and knees and hoped that pop I heard hadn’t been a knee or a wrist dislocating. My film held, at least—those things are damned tough. I had a rough idea through Singer’s senso of where the leak was, and I looked up to orient myself to the visible evidence of its exact location. I was just about to ask Singer to release tracer particles when I realized that I could feel the problem.

My fingers tingled with the knowledge, as if I could have traced the weight and mass of air currents with a gesture of my right hand. The hand didn’t feel heavy anymore; it just felt —felt at a distance.

“Spooky,” I whispered under my breath, and wondered if the last thing I ever said was going to be a not-very-funny physics joke.

I crept across the bulkheads, not needing the rails because our spin was keeping me pinned good and hard against the wall. It helped with the disorientation if I thought of it as a floor—a weird, bumpy floor full of obstacles, which I was crawling across on my hands and knees while two guys my own size sat on my hips and shoulders. I could see that Connla was also on his hands and knees, doing something at a panel, and I figured that he and Singer were working on damage control and trying to correct our spin.

I tried not to worry too much that we were in white space, and spinning wildly, and there was literally no way of telling which way in the universe we were going at how much faster than the speed of light. Where we would come out. If we’d be able to find our way home. That was their problem, right now. At least we could be pretty sure our white coils were intact, or Singer would have ripped us in half trying to duck. But we had ducked, and it had been a better gamble than staying to get shot, definitely.

My problem was making sure we still had some ox by the time they got us stabilized, and then we could all worry about how we were getting home.

I found the hole. A hull suture had buckled when the remains of the derrick ripped free, and all our life-giving oxygen and carbon dioxide and inert carrier gases were whistling away into darkness though a gap in the plating just a little bigger than your nostril. Such a small thing to be on the verge of killing us real dead forever.

There’s an old joke about plugging the hole with your butt, and I probably would have tried it if the damage had been a little, well, broader. Human posteriors are, in general, nice and malleable and squeeze into things pretty well, as anybody who’s ever sat in one of those Swiss cheese plastic chairs and stood up with a polka-dotted ass can tell you. But this one wasn’t big, and Singer would be printing me a patch as soon as he and Connla got our trajectory sorted—so I just slapped my right forehand over it and let the isolation film do the work.

It stretched, and I felt it constrict the webs between my fingers for a moment before it relaxed again. The whistle stopped, and I realized in the following silence how painful the sound had been. My head sagged in relief—though the gravity had something to do with it too. I looked down at my fingers flexing against the bulkhead, at the swirl of cobwebs or nebulae or whatever you wanted to call them that was throbbing and pulsing—and tugging , and pushing —up almost to my shoulder now. The sense of being able to feel the currents of escaping air faded—but it left behind another sense, that through my flat palm I could feel the curves and valleys of space-time beyond the hull as if I were stroking the back and flank of a cat with my hand.