Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

We couldn’t, obviously, count on station guidance on the way out. So he was doing it all himself, and it was impressive to watch.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Connla, because we both knew the stationmaster and the Goodlaw weren’t the only people who were suspect. “You liked Pearl.”

He grunted. “I hope it was the stationmaster, too.”

“New problem,” Singer said, merciless. “Where exactly in the six thousand, three hundred, fifty-one systems; eight thousand, eight hundred, and seventy-three worlds; and tens of thousands of miscellaneous outposts—estimated from best available recent date—are we going now, oh my fugitive crew?”

Singer always asked the best/worst questions. I stalled, because organic life-forms need a lot of boring time to think, not having as many parallel processing pathways as our AI brethren.

“Are there really that many inhabited worlds?”

“Counting moons, but not counting asteroid outposts,” he said. “Remember, some systems have multiple habitable worlds, especially when you start counting methane and chlorine and water breathers.”

Now that he mentioned it, I’d heard that Terra had come to arrangements with some systers about a colony on a moon of one of the gas giants there. Ox breathers like me don’t have much use for a nice, rich, frozen ball of methane, but somebody sure does.

More power to them, I say. There are benefits of having a friendly noncompetitive syster civilization next door. Somebody farther out in the system might be able to catch an inconvenient rock before it bumps into your homeworld, for example. And there’s exploration to consider as well. Much easier for somebody who’s at home in an environment to map it and science it up than somebody who needs a drone or a pressure suit to get there.

I thought of Cheeirilaq, and how logistics made it impossible for many of us to have any chance at all of visiting each other’s homeworlds except for virtually. I’d argue that that’s a strength of the space natives. We come from the same world, even if we breathe different things, and our perspectives overlap in ways people like Connla have to work much harder to appreciate.

We’re all little warm things in the bosom of the great Cold, after all. Well, okay. Except for those methane types. They’re generally not very warm at all. Though warmer than space, which is something.

“We could go join the Freeports,” Connla said, deadpan.

“I think they’re trying to eat us,” I replied. “I suspect any offers of assistance from that quarter come with fishhooks.”

“Piracy really isn’t my thing,” Singer agreed.

I couldn’t believe it was me who offered, “Head for the Core, explain what happened, turn ourselves in?”

“You’re full of interdicted tech without a good explanation for how it got there, and no way to get it back out again,” Connla said. “I’m sure your by-the-book Goodlaw friend is likely to mention that in the next packet.”

“If Habren lets it,” I said. I had a feeling about how free and clear communications going in and out of that station were. “Why are the pirates still after us?”

“How did they track us?” Connla countered.

“Oh, I think I know that.” I sighed. “Another way I’m a liability. Singer, I’m sorry, this isn’t making things easier for you, either.”

“They can’t have tracked you,” Singer said. “They were at the station when we arrived. They must be thinking that we tracked them.”

I knew that a Synarche service summons wasn’t the sort of thing you just… shrugged off. And I… didn’t have anywhere else to go.

“Posit,” Singer said. “The pirates are still after us because they want you, Haimey.”

“They were willing to blow me up pretty good along with the rest of us back at the factory ship.”

“Are we sure those are the pirates?” Connla asked.

“Well,” I cursed. “Don’t tell me there’s a third party running around with a dose of Koregoi-Ativahika nanobug parasites. I’m not sure I’m ready to incorporate that.”

Singer said, “There’s a possibility that they didn’t know you had the Koregoi senso on board, at that point. Or that you’d integrate it and be able and willing to use it. Also, they shot us free of the Jothari ship. They could have just blown us up.”

“Huh,” Connla said. “Right. So we presume for now that they are, in fact, pirates. Why do they want us now when they didn’t before?” He picked at his thumbnail thoughtfully.

“They reviewed the Milk Chocolate Marauder ’s files and saw me get jabbed. Or Farweather just felt the stuff in me.” I shrugged.

I thought for a few moments about things that didn’t make sense. Like the pirates not destroying us outright, if that was their goal. Like Zanya Farweather knowing who I was, and at least a little bit about my history.

“I bet the person who sold us that intel about the Jothari ship was working for Habren, or these pirates,” I said. “This Farweather person said a few things that made me think we were expected. I think we were brought out here on purpose.”

Singer said, “They think we have information. They wanted us—Haimey?—alive and possibly cooperative. And they wanted that before they knew Haimey had the Koregoi senso on board.”

“That’s not creepy,” Connla said.

“Okay,” I said. “So what do we know that we don’t know we know?”

“More to the point,” Connla said, “what does the parasite know?”

IT’S NOT LIKE THE DAMNEDthing speaks English!” I fumed, the third time Connla looked over at me worriedly. I understood—I got it! The pirates could—somehow—track us. Probably through the parasite, because it was the only superscience we had floating around, and I didn’t know of any more conventional means by which it could have been accomplished. More to the point, Singer didn’t know about any, and he had better data banks than I did.

But I couldn’t seem to track the pirates in return. Not over this distance. And not to put too fine a point on it, but we didn’t know where we were going or what to do next. And until we figured it out, we had the choice of burning irreplaceable fuel going in what might turn out to be a wrong direction; trying to outrun the news that we’d gone rogue that was no doubt even now propagating, packet by packet, across the galaxy; or throwing in the towel, heading for the Core, turning ourselves in, and trying to explain away the illegal and dangerous actions we’d taken by convincing the Synarche that their local government at Downthehatch was a corrupted sector. We couldn’t drop out of white space and wait until we came up with a plan, despite our very adequate stock of consumables, because there was that chance that the pirates could track us, and if we stood still there was the chance they might catch us.

Well. Meditating worked the last time.

What the hell, it might work again.

I don’t want to get all woo about it, because it didn’t feel like that at all. And I’ve never been big into the Eightfold Path or any of that religious stuff—Connla dabbled with it for a while, but I think that was mostly a reaction to where he grew up, and he eventually dropped all the Buddha and went for “loveable” rogue, instead.

Honestly, Right Speech and its prohibition on filling the air with needless chattering would probably be the hardest one for me. Also, I like the occasional curse word. But putting yourself into a meditative state, that’s useful, and it turns out that even before tuning and rightminding, people knew a little bit about how to hack their neurochemistry.