Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

“Oh waste it,” I said. “Singer, the cats.”

“They’re fine,” he said, and a knot that had abruptly tied itself in my chest just as abruptly released. “They were in Connla’s bunk when we got hit.”

So netted in, effectively. Relief allowed me to concentrate on the weird sensations again. At least out here in the big dark we were less likely to plow into a star. Even in white space, that would be a catastrophe; their enormous gravity wells didn’t warp space-time enough to reach into warp space, per se—but running a space-time fold through a star didn’t have great consequences for the structural stability of the star, if you take my meaning.

It’s a good thing there’s a lot of nothing out here. And a lot of dark gravity that doesn’t interact with anything at all, except when it comes to other gravity. Or its own.

I felt our spin slowing before I could see it. In addition to my strange new sense for forces, I could feel with perfectly normal senses that the gs were dropping incrementally as we came under control, and soon I was pressing my hand to the hole while hanging on to rails with my afthands and the other forehand for leverage. Pressure probably would have held me on, but who wants to take chances?

I wasn’t really looking out through the windows, anyway. I was watching the cobwebs move across my skin. A whole lot of nothing out here.

The patterns didn’t look like nebulae. Not really. What they looked like were the invisible, massive filaments of stuff that nebulae and galaxies and everything else traced and clung to: the webwork that held the universe together.

The thing picked out in iridescence on my skin looked like renderings of the intergalactic structure of dark gravity.

I thought about what I’d felt when the pirates dropped out of space, the sense of presence—the weight of an individual nearby, like another body in a hammock.

Maybe I had been feeling something after all.

“Are they coming after us?” I asked nervously.

“Really no way to tell,” said Connla. “But really no way for them to track us, is there?”

“Somebody out here obviously has tech we know nothing about,” I said. “And is using it to hunt Ativahikas. Maybe they can track us, too. The Synarche really needs to know that the pirates have gotten an upgrade.”

Singer sighed. “Getting us out of this alive is already my primary goal, Haimey.”

I nodded. My forehand was getting numb: pins and needles. “Add ‘Get a warning message back to the Core’ to that protocol, would you?”

We patched the hole in the hull. That work went smoothly once we were back in normal space, and once we got our trajectory and v under control we dropped back into normal space right away. The good news was, we were nowhere near the prize vessel, the dead Ativahika, or the pirates who had done their best—or worst—to murder us, and there was no reasonable way of which I was aware for them to track us. The bad news was that we were nowhere near the prize vessel, the dead Ativahika, or the pirates—and there was no reasonable way of which I was aware for us to track us , either.

Which left us low on fuel, in a damaged ship, located we weren’t exactly sure where—albeit with dead reckoning, star charts, and a pretty good telescope. Fortunately, the last three things meant that Singer could figure out the location thing pretty quick. By human standards. By AI standards, he might have been chewing on his slide rule while sweat rolled down his brow for hours. There are only so many processing cycles to be had on a boat this size.

So we knew where we were, when he was done. And we also knew we didn’t have the fuel to get home and to slow down, once we got there. You can do some neat tricks with the Alcubierre-White drive, don’t get me wrong, including piling up space behind you and stretching it out before you to brake as well as piling it up before you and stretching it out behind to accelerate, which is why we can get up to speed at a real acceleration that would pulp any sentient except an AI—because the perceived accel can be negligible.

But that all takes energy. And energy comes from somewhere. It’s not, unfortunately, limitless.

Mephistopheles floated over to me and was begging for my tube of spaghetti in sauce, which was funny because she had a cute cat-trick of hooking one claw through your shirtsleeve so she could hang close to your face and be available while you were eating. Suddenly, the trick wasn’t working out for her because her claw kept bouncing off my isolation film, and she couldn’t quite figure out why.

“Cute.” Connla claims I taught it to her, but I think it’s his fault, and let’s be honest here—I’m the one who taught them to use the zero-g litterbox, so I have moral superiority, as far as the cats are concerned, nearly forever. A cat who engages in litterbox terrorism on a space ship is not a good shipping companion.

We were relaxing, finally. Connla had pulled on a film of his own again, just in case—mostly at Singer’s insistence—and he watched me eat now while I mostly floated with my eyes half-closed, sucking spaghetti down. I was starving, and had told Singer not to let me exceed my calorie ration, in case we needed those molecules. I’m generally always hungry—could eat all dia—but I couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t a bit excessive, and didn’t have something to do with the sparkleweb that now covered my entire body, my scalp and the skin on my face included. At least my mucous membranes were free of sparkles. It’d be disconcerting if my nostrils and the inside of my eyelids started to glow.

Well, it wasn’t going to be easy to hide. And it was certainly going to make me memorable. Good thing we weren’t criminals.

In a minute, we were going to have to get up and do something about surviving, but thrashing is worse than not doing anything at all. So, for the moment, a break.

I was thinking about coffee for dessert when Connla stretched his long legs out, focused a very green pair of eyes on me, and said, “Waste this.”

“What?”

He laced his fingers behind his head and studied my face. I tried not to feel self-conscious about the sparkles floating under my skin. He said, “Fuck it. It’s a really long trip home, if we even make it home. We can try to maintain isolation, which is going to be a pain in the ass when there’s one head and one galley. Or we can just accept that if it’s virulent we’re all going to get it, and get on with our lives.”

His decision had obviously been made already, because as I watched he started stripping the film back from his chest, unsealing it and stretching it to make a hole big enough so he could wriggle out as if wiggling out of a shed, inside-out skin. A different sort of shed casing than the suit I’d left on the outside of the hull, I couldn’t help but thinking.

I said, “What about the cats?”

“If we die of space poison, Singer will get them home and take care of them somehow, I’m sure. And if they get space poison too, he’ll download himself out of the vessel and ditch it into the nearest sun. Right, Singer?”

Singer said, “You two are terribly irresponsible.”

“Primates,” Connla said with a shrug. “We are what we are. What are you going to do?”

“Wait,” I said. “I’m irresponsible? This is Connla’s idea.”

“Are you going to do it?” Singer asked.

I contemplated my half-eaten tube of spaghetti. Mephistopheles patted my shoulder again. She was chasing the sparkles as much as she was begging for sauce. “Do you think I shouldn’t?”

Singer made a wordless sound that was his equivalent of a shrug. “I am not equipped to assess the impact of biological inconveniences upon meatforms.”