Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  Right, Haimey, I told myself. The galaxy is totally staring right back at you.

  Connla finished the last weld.

  I was about to congratulate him on it, in my capacity as ship’s technical lead, in a totally nonpatronizing fashion of course, when every loud noise Singer was capable of—external and senso—happened at once. I flinched, filmed hands over filmed ears. You’d think that stuff would muffle horrible klaxons and the sensation of fingernails scraping up your nerves, but really all it does is make conversations hard to follow.

  “I hear you!” I yelled, and silenced them. I managed to unflinch fast enough to see Connla recoil on his tether, then hit the emergency retract and come in toward the airlock hot. I was heading for the emergency override myself when Singer sprang it.

  A moment later and I saw what all the shouting was about.

  That mystery ship. The white one. It had just appeared, hanging off our starboard bow, dropping out of white space with a relative motionlessness I wouldn’t have imagined possible. Some nice flying, that: she was inside the prize vessel’s white coils, which meant that as long as we were conjoined, we couldn’t even pull a quick transition out of normal space to escape . . . without pulling her with us.

  My admiration of the space jockey’s work was somewhat diluted when I noticed the blunt antennae of a half dozen mass-driver weapons projecting through flexports in the other ship’s hull in two groups of three.

  They were tracking down on Singer.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Connla hurled himself across the space between the prize vessel and Singer. He knocked aside a glittering shower of frozen oxygen and water crystals that had been headed in the other direction—the result when an uncycled airlock was popped in an emergency. It was a much bigger waste of air than the little puff that had accompanied my exit—and a lot more dramatic.

  My skin still shuddered from Singer’s klaxon. He has an overblown idea of what it takes to get a meatform’s attention.

  I was keeping all of that on the port, screens, and senso now. The pale ship hung there, weapons trained. I felt like I was tumbling down their hollow barrels. I couldn’t tell if the vertigo was fear, or some strange side effect of the glitterweb crawling up my arm.

  Like most people, I’d never had a gun pointed at me before. And like most people who had never had a gun pointed at them before, I froze.

  And burned the scene into my mind.

  I can pull it up in senso, of course—I’ve got the ayatana in my fox, and I’ve tuned myself way down and gone back and looked at it more than once. It gives me heart palpitations if I don’t bump before I take it on, so I guess it’s a traumatic memory. And that means that a subjective flashbulb memory of that blank hull, plain as if it just slid out the factory door, perfectly outlined against the black of space, makes it loom bigger and closer than it ever really approached, as planetary moons on the horizon appear to do when viewed from the ground.

  “Pirates,” Singer said.

  I felt . . . that thing again. The something. A presence. A weight. Like the prickle in the hairs on your neck when somebody is looking at you. “There’s somebody over there—”

  A green flash streaked through the senso as Connla bolted through the airlock hatch and sealed the door.

  I realized how crazy what I’d been about to say was, and changed tack. Besides, that sense of somebody just out of sight behind you? It’s just a trick your brain pulls. You can make people feel it with electrical stimulation of the correct chunk of brain-meat.

  “If they haven’t hailed us,” I said, amazed by how calm I sounded, “why didn’t they just hit us with their bow wave and smear us all over intergalactic space?”

  “Hard to hit us and not the prize,” Connla said, tumbling into the control cabin, trailing bits of the second-best space suit. He corralled them in a net bag, eyes on the screen as he stripped.

  “Don’t you want to keep that on?” Singer asked.

  “So I can float in space until I suffocate if they hole us? Thanks, I’ll take the quick way down.”

  “There’s the hail,” Singer said. “Text only. ‘Cut her loose.’ ”

  I looked at Connla.

  Connla looked at the welding torch he was clipping to an equipment belay. He laughed bitterly.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  If we maneuvered, they’d shoot us. If we transitioned, they’d come too—and shoot us. If we stayed put . . . well, we couldn’t follow their instructions, so they were probably going to shoot us.

  “I can cut the derrick loose. We can ditch the prize and run.” I kicked across the cabin toward a control panel, that damned heavy hand making me veer slightly off course. There were explosive pins, for dangerous cargo. We couldn’t afford the loss, but it was better than taking a ride on a rail-gun pellet. It had to be manually done, though; that was the sort of thing that came with a physical safety override. “You’ll have to buy me a minute.”

  “Hailing,” Singer said, and I thought, Better you than me.

  Hatch cover, emergency switch. Override code. I wasn’t looking anymore, but I swear I felt the guns tracking through the prickles on my scalp. Through the senso, definitely.

  Somebody is staring at you.

  Connla swore, and my head jerked around a second before I would have slapped the final release. The pirates were so close I didn’t see anything—the slugs would have ripped through Singer’s hull before I could have even realized what was happening, let alone reacted—but I didn’t feel an impact, either, and I was in contact with the hull. “Sitrep!”

  “Warning shot,” Connla said.

  I reached for the release again, and felt the whole ship shudder violently, the harsh metallic rip of tearing hull. Something—the bulkhead—struck me, and I caromed off a panel and lost all sense of up and down.

  “Ranging shot,” Singer amended, senso cutting over the hot whistle of escaping atmosphere. As the ship spun wildly around me, I grabbed with all four hands for the nearest rail.

  For anything at all.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The terrible shrieks continued—rending metal, and venting air. I couldn’t breathe, and thought we’d blown, but then I realized from the savage pain in my back that it was my diaphragm spasming from the force of the thump I’d taken. My film billowed from the pressure drop, snapping out around my head. I fetched up against a panel and managed to grab it, stabilized, then gritted my teeth and punched myself in the solar plexus to get my lungs started again.

  My head spun when I glanced around the cabin, but that quick check plus senso told me Connla was alive, clinging frantically to a rail, and also that we were holed visibly, but it wasn’t big. My fingers ached from holding on to the panel; we were pulling significant force in the spin.

  There’s a trick they teach you in flight school that you hope you’re never going to have to use. But I wasn’t going to worry about it just yet, because I could also see that the pirate ship, having knocked us loose from the prize, was rounding under power to take another swipe.

  But we were free of the prize. “Singer! Duck!”

  “On it,” shipmind answered—and just as it seemed the pirate was gathering herself, angle of her guns converging to fire for effect—she vanished, and was replaced by nauseating, gyrating smears of light.

  “We’re still spinning!”

  “On that too,” Singer said, too calmly.

  “Did they shoot us?”

  “If they’d shot us, we wouldn’t be here. They shot at us, and I ducked. But their mass driver tore off the derrick. We’re in white space now. Do you want to deal with the hole in my side?”

  Sure, because it was the easiest thing in the world to get there when we were pulling two gs of centrifugal. Well, I supposed that was one way to deal with it.

  It was time to use that flight school trick.

  I nerved myself and let go of the panel and fell.

  It was only a couple of meters, but a couple of meters at two g hur
ts. I slammed into the outside bulkhead on my hands and knees and hoped that pop I heard hadn’t been a knee or a wrist dislocating. My film held, at least—those things are damned tough. I had a rough idea through Singer’s senso of where the leak was, and I looked up to orient myself to the visible evidence of its exact location. I was just about to ask Singer to release tracer particles when I realized that I could feel the problem.

  My fingers tingled with the knowledge, as if I could have traced the weight and mass of air currents with a gesture of my right hand. The hand didn’t feel heavy anymore; it just felt—felt at a distance.

  “Spooky,” I whispered under my breath, and wondered if the last thing I ever said was going to be a not-very-funny physics joke.

  I crept across the bulkheads, not needing the rails because our spin was keeping me pinned good and hard against the wall. It helped with the disorientation if I thought of it as a floor—a weird, bumpy floor full of obstacles, which I was crawling across on my hands and knees while two guys my own size sat on my hips and shoulders. I could see that Connla was also on his hands and knees, doing something at a panel, and I figured that he and Singer were working on damage control and trying to correct our spin.

  I tried not to worry too much that we were in white space, and spinning wildly, and there was literally no way of telling which way in the universe we were going at how much faster than the speed of light. Where we would come out. If we’d be able to find our way home. That was their problem, right now. At least we could be pretty sure our white coils were intact, or Singer would have ripped us in half trying to duck. But we had ducked, and it had been a better gamble than staying to get shot, definitely.

  My problem was making sure we still had some ox by the time they got us stabilized, and then we could all worry about how we were getting home.

  I found the hole. A hull suture had buckled when the remains of the derrick ripped free, and all our life-giving oxygen and carbon dioxide and inert carrier gases were whistling away into darkness though a gap in the plating just a little bigger than your nostril. Such a small thing to be on the verge of killing us real dead forever.

  There’s an old joke about plugging the hole with your butt, and I probably would have tried it if the damage had been a little, well, broader. Human posteriors are, in general, nice and malleable and squeeze into things pretty well, as anybody who’s ever sat in one of those Swiss cheese plastic chairs and stood up with a polka-dotted ass can tell you. But this one wasn’t big, and Singer would be printing me a patch as soon as he and Connla got our trajectory sorted—so I just slapped my right forehand over it and let the isolation film do the work.

  It stretched, and I felt it constrict the webs between my fingers for a moment before it relaxed again. The whistle stopped, and I realized in the following silence how painful the sound had been. My head sagged in relief—though the gravity had something to do with it too. I looked down at my fingers flexing against the bulkhead, at the swirl of cobwebs or nebulae or whatever you wanted to call them that was throbbing and pulsing—and tugging, and pushing—up almost to my shoulder now. The sense of being able to feel the currents of escaping air faded—but it left behind another sense, that through my flat palm I could feel the curves and valleys of space-time beyond the hull as if I were stroking the back and flank of a cat with my hand.

  “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.