Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

Cheeirilaq sighed. An enormous sigh, like a Terran dog. Its entire abdomen filled with air, swelling each of its breathing chambers until the brilliant red bands around its abdomen were wider than the green, and I could see that they were each edged in thin ribbons of black and a mustardy yellow. I gawped at it in surprise, though really, all sorts of creatures sigh. Oxing up is a sensible response to just about any situation or potential situation that doesn’t require immediately holding one’s breath. And if you’re going to have to hold your breath, well, you might as well be good and pink—or purple, or that nice blue color some critters use to hold oxygen, if that’s your thing—when you do so.

I might have to bring you in, it said, reluctantly admitting something we’d both known all along. It stridulated out loud again. I have sent a packet Coreward regarding our earlier conversation, but please understand that I am basically in exile here, and I find that many of my communications go missing.

I thought of my reliance on the packets for security and a chance of backup, and tuned my anxiety down a peg. It wasn’t helping.

“No hard feelings if you do,” I answered. “A bug’s gotta eat, after all.”

Also, it said, allowing me to sense reluctance, I know you have some embarrassing political secrets to keep.

That stunned me to silence for long seconds. I blinked, swallowed, tuned, nodded. I might have to run away, you understand.

That is the sensible thing to do when a larger predator is pursuing you. No hard feelings at all.

I was so deep in my head while bounding gently along the corridor back to Singer that it took most of the circumference of the station before I realized I was being followed. Followed pretty expertly, too—my shadow stayed far enough back in the curve that I never got a good look at them (bipedal and humanoid, but not much else), even when I ducked into a shop and came out reversing direction as if I’d spotted something back along the concourse that I wanted to go investigate.

That set my mind racing again, but in a different direction.

Habren wouldn’t need to shadow me, because nobody can hide on a station from the wheelmind and the stationmaster. Every centimeter of the interior is under some kind of surveillance, and while you could get lost in a crowd on one of the big ones, maybe, Downthehatch just wasn’t large enough. Habren might want to dust me, in which case an ambush was more likely than a stalker. If they wanted to send me down the well, they could just jump me when I went back to Singer.

Or a lift or airlock could be arranged to have a convenient accident. Theoretically there were safeguards against that kind of thing—above and beyond rightminding and AI oversight—but I was pretty sure by now that Habren’s rightminding was not as stable and maintained as you might like in somebody with a few tens of thousands of lives in their hands.

I got Singer on senso and filled him in, including a dump of everything Cheeirilaq and I had talked about. Some things, you want to make sure your teammates have access to if anything bad should happen to you.

My skin crawled. My palms were wet and cold. I tried to walk casually, as if I were engaged in one last idle wander through open spaces before returning to my departing ship.

Did we ever get our clearance?

I filed for it, Singer answered. And sent a reminder.

The pit of my stomach dropped, adding itself to the unsettling sensations. But there was something else, too—a prickling along my body, as if a soft wind were stirring my vellus hair. And a sense of… weight. Of gravity. Of something watching, just as I had felt out by the Jothari ship.

Oh, bloody Well, I said to Singer. I think the guy following me is one of the pirates. And I think they’re like me.

“Screw this,” I said out loud, and stopped in the middle of the corridor. It wasn’t entirely deserted—there were people here and there—and the adrenaline singing in my veins was longing for a confrontation. I could have tuned it down—probably should have—but it felt good, and I have not always had the best record when it comes to deciding to turn off harmful but thrilling emotions.

Haimey, Singer said, what are you doing?

Dealing with a problem.

Oh, for crying out loud. He didn’t think it at me, but I could feel his irritation, and also his recognition of the fact that meatforms did a lot of stupid things because of our meat, and the senseless clutter of our drunkard’s-walk evolutionary development didn’t help.

Sure, I said, responding to his emotion rather than any words, and trying to keep my tone light. There’s no pointless code clutter still floating around in you.

I do regular maintenance, he sniffed. But you wouldn’t be Haimey if you weren’t pugnacious.

I laughed out loud.

Conveniently, just as my stalker rounded the corner, and I got my first good look at them. At her .

I don’t go in for the sexy bad-girl thing anymore, but… damn. The Republican pirate was charismatic in a way that reached right past all the rightminding safeguards on my emotions and hormones and made me want to get to know her better and bond and be best friends with her forever. You can turn off sex, and you can turn off romantic love—but it’s really hard to turn off all the human emotional responses to a powerful individual without also turning off your humanity.

She looked like a planetary: not tall, but her body bulky with high-grav muscles, shoulders wide and sleeves of her coverall rolled up to show off sculptured forearms. She had a broad face with high, slanted cheekbones; coffee-dark eyes with a moderate fold; straight black hair cropped at the ear except for some longer locks, those dyed in fluttering streaks of red and gold.

Her light gold complexion was dusted in cobwebs of silver.

I gaped. She hesitated, but not as if she was surprised to see me. She glanced over her shoulder and then settled herself, arms folded, rubber-soled boots planted. Looked like she had gravity-style feet inside them, instead of afthands. I wondered if that meant she went planetside frequently.

She looked me up and down. My skin prickled with observation as she performed the same kind of assessment on me as I had on her. She cocked her head.

In a clear, light tone, she said, “I know who you are, Haimey Dz. You used to be a revolutionary.”

“Suddenly,” I said, “a lot of folks are very interested in my past misdeeds.”

“Misdeeds?” She shook her head sadly. “What happened to you?”

“Is that what they say about me where you’re from?” I asked. “The Legendary Haimey Dz?”

She laughed. “Not exactly.”

“I’m flattered to find out I’m a topic of conversation anywhere. I’m a tugboat engineer. And you have the advantage of me.”

It was a deliberate opening, to see what she would do. She surprised me.

She stroked her chin with a thumb and forefinger, making her cobwebs sparkle. No wonder people were staring; the effect was distracting. She said, “My name is Zanya Farweather, and I’m a representative of the Autonomous Collective Republic of Freeports.”

“You’re a pirate.”

“If you’re a fascist, sure.”

I am not entirely sure how I kept myself from rolling my eyes. God, she sounded like my first girlfriend. Only girlfriend, if I’m going to be honest. As if tyranny of the majority or a complete lack of social controls were somehow better than Synarchy.

But she also flaunted her galaxies openly, and I hid mine under a layer of paint. And she had to know where they came from.