Fast Ships, Black Sails; 18 Original Tales About Pirates

by Anne VanderMeer; Naomi Novik; Garth Nix; Elizabeth Bear; Kage Baker; Michael Moorcock; Jeff Vandermeer

And then,

  “You want to help me?” Black Alice squeaked. A strong pulse, and the heads-up said,

  “That’s really sweet of you, but I’m honestly not sure there’s anything you can do. I mean, it doesn’t look like the Mi-Go are mad at you, and I really want to keep it that way.”

  said the Lavinia Whateley. Black Alice came within a millimeter of taking her own fingers off with the cutting laser. “um, Vinnie, that’s um… well, I guess it’s better than being a brain in a jar.” or suffocating to death in her suit if she went cometary and the Mi-Go didn’t come after her.

  The double-pulse again, but Black Alice didn’t see what she could have missed. As communications went, EAT ALICE was pretty fucking unambiguous.

  the Lavinia Whateley insisted. Black Alice leaned in close, unsplicing the last of the governor’s circuits from the Boojum’s nervous system.

 

  “By eating me? look, I know what happens to things you eat, and it’s not…”

  She bit her tongue. Because she did know what happened to things the Lavinia Whateley ate. Absorbed. Filtered. Recycled. “Vinnie… are you saying you can save me from the Mi-Go?”

  A pulse of agreement.

  “By eating me?” Black Alice pursued, needing to be sure she understood. Another pulse of agreement.

  Black Alice thought about the Lavinia Whateley’s teeth. “How much me are we talking about here?”

  1 • ElIzABETH BEAR & SARAH MoNETTE

  said the Lavinia Whateley, and then the last fiber optic cable parted, and Black Alice, her hands shaking, detached her patch cable and flung the whole mess of it as hard as she could straight up. Maybe it would find a planet with atmosphere and be some little alien kid’s shooting star. And now she had to decide what to do.

  She figured she had two choices, really. one, walk back down the Lavinia Whate- ley and find out if the Mi-Go believed in surrender. Two, walk around the Lavinia Whateley and into her toothy mouth.

  Black Alice didn’t think the Mi-Go believed in surrender. She tilted her head back for one last clear look at the shining black infinity of space. Really, there wasn’t any choice at all. Because even if she’d misunderstood what Vinnie seemed to be trying to tell her, the worst she’d end up was dead, and that was light-years better than what the Mi-Go had on offer. Black Alice Bradley loved her ship.

  She turned to her left and started walking, and the Lavinia Whateley’s bioluminescence followed her courteously all the way, vanes swaying out of her path. Black Alice skirted each of Vinnie’s eyes as she came to them, and each of them blinked at her. And then she reached Vinnie’s mouth and that magnificent panoply of teeth.

  “Make it quick, Vinnie, okay?” said Black Alice, and walked into her leviathan’s maw.

  Picking her way delicately between razor-sharp teeth, Black Alice had plenty of time to consider the ridiculousness of worrying about a hole in her suit. Vinnie’s mouth was more like a crystal cave, once you were inside it; there was no tongue, no palate. Just polished, macerating stones. Which did not close on Black Alice, to her surprise. If anything, she got the feeling the Vinnie was holding her… breath. or what passed for it.

  The Boojum was lit inside, as well—or was making herself lit, for Black Alice’s benefit. And as Black Alice clambered inward, the teeth got smaller, and fewer, and the tunnel narrowed. Her throat, Alice thought. I’m inside her. And the walls closed down, and she was swallowed.

  like a pill, enclosed in the tight sarcophagus of her space suit, she felt rippling pressure as peristalsis pushed her along. And then greater pressure, suffocating, savage. one sharp pain. The pop of her ribs as her lungs crushed. Screaming inside a space suit was contraindicated, too. And with collapsed lungs, she couldn’t even do it properly.

  alice.

  She floated. In warm darkness. A womb, a bath. She was comfortable. An itchy soreness between her shoulderblades felt like a very mild radiation burn.

  alice.

  A voice she thought she should know. She tried to speak; her mouth gnashed, her teeth ground.

  BooJuM • 1

  alice. talk here.

  She tried again. Not with her mouth, this time.

  Talk… here?

  The buoyant warmth flickered past her. She was… drifting. No, swimming. She could feel currents on her skin. Her vision was confused. She blinked and blinked, and things were shattered.

  There was nothing to see anyway, but stars.

  alice talk here.

  Where am I?

  eat alice.

  Vinnie. Vinnie’s voice, but not in the flatness of the heads-up display anymore. Vinnie’s voice alive with emotion and nuance and the vastness of her self.

  You ate me, she said, and understood abruptly that the numbness she felt was not shock. It was the boundaries of her body erased and redrawn.

  !

  Agreement. Relief.

  I’m… in you, Vinnie?

  =/=

  Not a “no.” More like, this thing is not the same, does not compare, to this other thing. Black Alice felt the warmth of space so near a generous star slipping by her. She felt the swift currents of its gravity, and the gravity of its satellites, and bent them, and tasted them, and surfed them faster and faster away.

  I am you.

  !

  Ecstatic comprehension, which Black Alice echoed with passionate relief. Not dead. Not dead after all. Just, transformed. Accepted. Embraced by her ship, whom she embraced in return.

  Vinnie. Where are we going?

  out, Vinnie answered. And in her, Black Alice read the whole great naked wonder of space, approaching faster and faster as Vinnie accelerated, reaching for the first great skip that would hurl them into the interstellar darkness of the Big Empty. They were going somewhere.

  Out, Black Alice agreed and told herself not to grieve. Not to go mad. This sure beat swampy Hell out of being a brain in a jar.

  And it occurred to her, as Vinnie jumped, the brainless bodies of her crew already digesting inside her, that it wouldn’t be long before the loss of the Lavinia Whateley was a tale told to frighten spacers, too.