Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

It blinked again, perhaps reviewing the data. Perhaps stalling for time.

Would you care to share why you require this information?

“I’ll be happy to.” My back was up. I sucked it up against my irrational objections and tuned my irritation back a little. But just a little. Possibly my instincts were telling me something important, and not merely xenophobic. I didn’t trust Habren. But I didn’t know for sure they were one of the bad guys either. “I’ll share it with the Goodlaw as soon as I can get an appointment with it.”

Perhaps it will be able to be more helpful, then. The translator made Habren sound inanely cheerful. Somehow, I doubted its actual expressions of emotion were so chipper. Now, on to the matter of resolving your debt… .

“Yes,” I said. “We have no prize.”

We are aware.

“But we do have a good deal of information on Freeport pirate activity off the galactic plane.” I left out the part where we could provide detailed descriptions of what appeared to be salvaged Koregoi tech that they seemed to be using—or stealing from renderers.

I also left out that we’d noticed the pirate ship docked on our way in. Just in case. “That ought to be worth something, right?”

Something, it agreed. I thought, reluctantly.

I pressed on. “And we’ve also found out some interesting information about renderers who are murdering Ativahikas and producing organic devashare in quantity. Traffickers. Including something about their hunting grounds, and the coordinates of one of their victims.”

I really wasn’t going to mention the Koregoi senso to this being, I decided. At the back of my head, I could hear Singer agreeing. We’d send a packet to the Core, just in case. If we could get one out clean, without having to go through Habren’s offices. Or if Singer thought the wheelmind could be trusted.

Could you corrupt a wheelmind?

You could probably convince one that maximum preservation of life required going along with some shady business practices.

The Ativahikas might be grateful for that information, they mused.

They might be. Who could tell? Who could manage to communicate it to them?

“Is that enough to justify our fuel and refit expenses?”

My senso translated the sound it made in reply as a wordless, noncommittal grunt.

There’s also the matter of your shipmind. We have received word that it is selected for service and is requested to be on the next packet Coreward.

The constriction of panic squeezed my lungs.

“I believe he is aware of this selection, and is filing for an extension as we speak. Our intention is to move Coreward as soon as our ship is spaceworthy again, which would actually get him there faster than if he went into service todia, given relative speeds of a direct route and a packet. Never mind the fuel savings.”

We will have to research whether fuel can be allotted. And other consumables, of course. You will no doubt require sustenance of various kinds for such a long journey.

The constriction eased a bit, but only a bit. The damned plant was dragging me. What did it want? A bribe of some kind? Or just to slow us down?

I tuned myself until I could say “That seems reasonable” and sound like I meant it. I thought to myself, Oh slightly corrupt stationmaster, what do you want? What is your motive for being pointlessly obstructionist?

And was I confused, or had the obstructionism kicked in when I started asking about the Mystery Systers from the Milk Chocolate Marauder?

What was going on with Habren, then?

Maybe they just hated being exiled to the ass-back of nowhere on this shitty station without enough resources to control it properly. Maybe they wanted out, or enough resources allotted to help them fight the pirates. Or maybe they themselves were beholden to pirates. They probably had no choice but to deal with them occasionally, so far from the might of the Core.

And either they did not wish to be so beholden, and were willing to bend rules for what seemed to them a good purpose—or they didn’t mind at all, because the pirates were paying.

Possibly I’d just given away a lot of useful information to the people who were hunting us.

It occurred to me that it was possible that the alien tech in my skin could by itself buy Habren an awful lot of goodwill and resources. Then it took all my willpower not to start picking self-consciously at the skin on my hand.

Calm down, Haimey.

Habren’s avenues of attack were limited, if they were in with the pirates, because they had to maintain some kind of deniability. Especially where Singer was concerned, with him suddenly a member of government and of significant interest to the Synarche.

So I felt like once we came to the agreement, we were in a better condition. Habren could pass word around to other stations that we were bad citizens, but coming from an outpost like this, and with our prior reputation for plain dealing, it wouldn’t do us too much harm. They could try to arrest us for reckless driving. They could take their own sweet time about deciding whether to fuel and supply us for the run home, and then about actually performing the fueling and supplying.

For now, though, we signed off on the preliminary deal—that Habren was going to research the logistics of allowing us to run Singer home—and I made sure a copy of the info went into the mail system before I left their office. Packet mail was an encoded, AI-protected, Synarche-run system. It could probably be hacked by somebody better than me, but I didn’t think it could be hacked tracelessly, and if the contract and the record that we had proposed bringing Singer in ourselves existed and reached the Core before we—presumably moving faster—did…

Well, with a little luck, they might come looking if we got lost.

It was possible that Habren could keep the mail from going through at all. That was a level of dysfunction that I sincerely hoped we wouldn’t have to contend with, though. We might just have already lost, if that were the case.

After the near tropicality of the stationmaster’s office, the Goodlaw’s office was absolutely delightful. I did not so much walk as float in, as the gravity this far upwheel was pretty slight, which made me a lot more comfortable. And I floated in not knowing what to expect, and found myself at once enchanted.

It’s considered polite, in varied-climate habitats such as stations and multispecies hospitals, to warn your guest if they might be entering an environment that could prove hazardous to their species. Ox breathers, in general, could manage each other’s habitats—at least in space, where the super-Earth life-forms made do with vastly undercompensating approximations of gravity, since the alternative would have been spinning stations so fast that they would be challenged not to fly to bits. Fortunately, high-gravity types tended to be pretty tough creatures, albeit with a tendency to succumb to the bends.

The station’s Goodlaw was the opposite of one of those: an ox breather, and one who liked a supersaturated environment by human standards. Senso told me when I walked in that ox was at 33% of the atmosphere, which explained why absolutely everything inside the office was nonflammable. The temperature was balmy, the air dryish, and the whole office suffused with a pleasant, indirect light.

Based on that, and how the walls were hung with broad nets meant to resemble interwoven vines, I was pretty sure that I was about to be confronted by a—

—two-meter praying mantis, more or less.

Many-faceted eyes poked out from behind a privacy curtain, followed closely by a slender protothorax and a pair of folded raptorial limbs, along with a pair of more delicate manipulators. It advanced a few delicate steps on its long, fragile legs—the homeworld of this syster species was low-gravity—and I clenched my fists in my pockets and tried very hard to control my atavistic terror. It wasn’t going to eat me, but my limbic system was certain of the opposite of that.